Gary Halbert

All experience hath shewn

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For the past year, I’ve been memorizing, one line a day, various famous poems and speeches and passages.

At some point, I memorized the preamble to the Declaration of Independence.

You probably know the “all men are created equal” and the “life, liberty, and the pursuit of hamburgers” bits.

But have you ever noticed the following piece of psychological insight in the nation’s founding document?

“All experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

In short, that passage says that people prefer the status quo to just about anything else, regardless of how bad the status quo is.

That might seem like a trivial observation.

It is not. It reminded me of an issue of the Gary Halbert Letter (another founding document of the great American experiment), in which Gary asks what the three following situations, all very different from each other, all have in common:

1. “A guy buys a beer joint that’s doing a good business in a blue collar neighborhood. His first move is to decorate the joint and give it a little class and to lower his prices.” Result: He loses most of his customers.

2. “A guy who has never broken 100 is shooting a round of golf. After the first 9 holes, he notices he’s doing exceptionally well and has only used up 36 strokes. And, if he keeps this up for the next 9 holes, he’ll shoot par for the first time in his life.” He finishes the course with 103 strokes.

3. A wealthy Cuban businessman has all his wealth confiscated by the Castro regime. He moves to Miami with nothing. Within a short time, he’s rich again.

Says Gary, what these situations all have in common is a primary human driver, even more powerful than sex, greed, and curiosity. That primary human driver is the need to stick with the status quo.

I don’t know about you, but I personally cling to the status quo while also fighting against it daily. It’s hard work, but what else is there?

Anyways, my point today was just to share that line from the Declaration of Independence of you, because it is great, and because it’s been playing in my head for the past year.

It speaks to a fundamental human truth, as relevant today as it was then, as prevalent in politics as it is in business.

Speaking of business… business needs to be done now.

I am currently promoting Lawrence Bernstein’s Lead Gen Legend, a giant swipe file of massively successful lead gen copy, with examples from right now all the way back to revolutionary times (ok, maybe not, but pretty close).

If you need a way to tie Lead Gen Legend into the topic of today’s email, go back to the status quo thing.

We all have our own routine and limited ideas for writing copy and making sales appeals. But status quo inputs beget status quo results.

It takes an outside impetus to push us out of that status quo, and to open up new vistas of conversion and profit. A curated swipe file of winning ads can be just the thing. Gary Halbert would agree.

If you are mildly convinced by that argument, I will warm you up a bit more by including several bonuses with Lead Gen Legend, if you get it before tomorrow, Sunday, July 5 at 12 midnight PST.

The ones I’ve announced so far:

FREE BONUS #1. Emails that did well

I’ll give you access to my “Emails that did well” document, now and in perpetuity. You can see which of my past emails did well and why. And as I update the document, you will see which future emails have done well. In a way, it’s a swipe file of outstanding email copy, from, as former Agora Financial copy chief Joe Schriefer has said, “one of the best email writers out there.”

FREE BONUS #2. Core Promise Workshop and Q&A call recording

I recently sold this workshop recording for $97, along with some bonuses. It’s yours free (minus the bonuses) if you get Lawrence’s Lead Gen Legend.

FREE BONUS #3. “Perfect Lead Gen Offer”

Not my idea. Also not a specific offer template you can swipe. Rather, a simple but counterintuitive process for figuring out what offer to make in your lead gen ads to maximize lifetime value and minimize ad costs.

Again, my bonuses are good only until tomorrow, Sunday, at 12 midnight PST.

Lawrence has also generously agreed to lower the price of Lead Gen Legend during this promo by $300 from its usual $379 price, so it is now a very attractive $79.

If you’d like to get it before it becomes necessary for me to dissolve this offer:

https://bejakovic.com/leadgen

Two kinds of starving crowd

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Around age 15, a short time after I had learned to read, I started going through the books of Henry Miller because his books were 1) banned upon publication in the U.S. and 2) had sex in them, and those two things are all the endorsement a 15-year-old boy needs.

Anyways, in one Henry Miller book, I forget which, Henry Miller, who was a kind of joyous social parasite, furiously writes about some cousins of his, who (it being the Great Depression) are starving.

The part that made Miller furious was his cousins’ patiently accepting their fate and subsisting on a leaf of cabbage a day, because, from I can remember, they are too proud or too feckless to ask for help in their starvation.

Henry Miller, who was living in Paris at the time, and was surviving on borrowed food, drinking borrowed wine, and sleeping in borrowed beds, couldn’t understand this.

Whenever he was starving, he would simply beat down his friends’ and enemies’ doors and beg and scream and complain until they fed him.

You’ve probably heard of direct marketing legend Gary Halbert. Halbert used to give talks in which he’d play the “hot dog stand” game with his audience.

“You and I have competing hot dog stands,” Halbert would say. “I’ll give you every advantage you want. I’ll just ask for one thing. Take whatever you want, give me this one thing, and my hot dog stand will whoop yours.”

Halbert’s one thing was a “starving crowd.”

Except, I’d like to suggest to you today there are two kinds of starving crowd.

There’s the “Henry Miller” starving crowd, people who cannot and will not accept their starvation, and who demand that the problem be fixed, and now.

And then there’s the “Cabbage Cousins” starving crowd.

Whether through pride, weakness resulting from starvation, or simply the fact that there’s a pound of bacon stashed somewhere in their house, which they secretly reach for late at night, the “Cabbage Cousins” starving crow accepts what to everybody else looks like unbearable starvation.

And if you wanna play the “hot dog stand” game with me, I’ll give you as big of a starving crowd as you like, provided that it’s the “Cabbage Cousins” kind.

Just give me a few Henry Millers instead, and I bet you I’ll push more hot dogs than you.

(You know what I mean. Don’t give me Henry Miller the broke social parasite. But do give me people who have some money, and a problem, and have shown that they are intent on getting that problem solved, and now.)

Anyways, I’m not sure if this was illuminating. But it is a distinction I had to draw for myself, and I figured it might be useful to you as well.

Maybe you’re wondering how you can know that somebody is intent on getting a problem solved, so you can distinguish the Henry Millers from the Cabbage Cousins in real life.

Fortunately, Gary Halbert has written up the answer for you. In case you’re curious:

https://thegaryhalbertletter.com/newsletters/direct_marketing_to_a_starving_crowd.htm

Direct mail interest rising

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A bit of behind-the-scenes of my newsletter:

Last Wednesday, a guy signed up to my email list.

As they always do, my minions went to work, figuring out who this guy is.

Turns out he has an interesting business and a book I could relate to. I sent him a 1-1 email to connect more personally.

He replied.

We got into a bit of an email conversation about what we’re each working on. We got on the topic of auctions, which I’m offering to run for people who have offers and an audience.

It turns out this guy has an email list of 99,000 living souls, mostly buyers, and a proven $10k offer he has been selling to that list.

He was interested in the idea of having me run an auction with his audience and offer.

He sent me a Loom with his questions about auction stuff. And at the end of it, he added:

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I’m wondering if you would be open to running this as a direct mail campaign as well.

Cause I’ve got 99,000 people on the list and they’re hit with emails, but direct mail is something I haven’t done yet to them.

===

My eyes lit up. Direct mail is a separate topic from auctions, but it’s one I’m very, very interested in.

I tend to glamorize direct mail because its golden days happened before I came onto the scene.

All the legends of the direct response biz, from Halbert to Bencivenga to Schwartz to Caples to Collier, worked in direct mail, honed their chops on direct mail, and praised direct mail as the most reliable, most profitable, most practical medium of salesmanship multiplied.

“Come on Bejako,” I hear you say, “that was centuries ago, back in the time of Margaret Thatcher and Bill Shakespeare. Ancient history!”

No, not really. The fact is, while direct marketing definitely moved online over the past 20 years, direct mail never went away.

Some businesses continued to rely on it…

… and now, like my new reader’s comment shows, interest in direct mail is bubbling up again, among savvy business owners who might never have considered direct mail 10 years ago.

Interest in direct mail is not bubbling up because these business owners glamorize direct mail the way I do.

It’s bubbling up because direct mail today is a great investment. How great? I’ve heard one smart marketer say that for every $100 he spends on direct mail, to a highly targeted list of buyers, with a proven high-ticket offer… he makes 3 grand in return.

Those are the kinds of numbers that should make your furry ears perk up with interest.

I’m putting this idea out there so you start seeing mention of direct mail, and maybe get curious about this opportunity.

I’m also doing it as an information gathering mission.

Have you done direct mail campaigns in your own biz? Have you done direct direct mail for a client? Or do you have interest in having direct mail campaigns run for you… or learning how to do them for others?

Last call for 1-Person Advertorial Agency & my bonuses

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It’s 10:32 pm on Saturday night as I write this. I’m having my chamomile tea. I’m eyeing my Kindle longingly. Frankly I had been hoping to skip writing this final email BUT—

Every time I’ve sent an email this week about the 1-Person Advertorial Agency, I’ve made multiple sales.

People want this offer.

And so, in respect to the spirit of Gary Halbert, who said you keep mailing an offer for as long as it keeps making money…

… in due deference to my own pocket book, which is always hungry for a little more cash…

… and also with your best interest in mind, in case this offer could be useful to you, but you haven’t given it proper consideration until now…

… let me say this is your last call.

The deadline to get 1-Person Advertorial Agency + my bonuses is tonight at 12 midnight PST, a short 5 hours from the time this email, scheduled as it soon will be, will go out.

This is the last email I will send about it. (Even if it ends up driving in multiple sales. Sorry Gary!)

All week long, I’ve been saying 1-Person Advertorial Agency is the hottest opportunity for copywriters in 2026.

You can get the full details about this offer at the sales page below.

If you act before the deadline, I am also offering the following bonuses:

#1 Horror Advertorial Swipe File, which you can feed to the AI beast so it produces better, or rather, more horrifying advertorials

#2. 26 Rules of Client Management for Copywriters, taken from my Copy Zone guide to the business side of copywriting

#3. Most Valuable Postcard #1: Nota Rapida, which digs into the topic of building long-term relationships with copywriting clients much more deeply

#4. Ghostbuster, Nick Bandy’s 5-stage sequence for reactivating (reanimating?) dead clients or prospective clients

If you want to get in in the little time that remains, before the church bells toll, the wolves start howling, and the gates shut you out:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorial-agency

Once upon a time in Ohio

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Lean in so I can tell you a story I myself only heard today:

This story features a cowboy named Gary Halbert, who, as you might know, was one of the legendariest direct marketers to ever terrorize the Wild West.

The story actually takes place before Gary got into direct marketing and copywriting. I’m guessing it happened in the 1960s, in Gary’s home state of Ohio.

In those ancient days, Gary was a salesman, selling postage machines.

The company Gary worked for, Pitney Bowes, divvied up the sales area so that each salesman got to handle a certain number of zip codes.

Whenever the company hired an additional salesman, they would shrink the area of sales that each existing salesman had, in order to give the new guy a few zip codes, and to keep everyone balanced.

Each time this happened, four or five separate times, the existing salesmen bitched and moaned and felt like they’ve lost something in having their area of sales reduced.

In reality, says Gary, each time the salesmen had one of their zip codes taken away, the salesmen actually did BETTER, not worse. They made more sales BECAUSE their area of sales was reduced.

How is this possible?

Stuff like… The salesmen spent less driving and more time selling. They gained better knowledge of local conditions. They developed better relationships with prospects there. They followed up more instead of reaching out to new leads. And so on.

The lesson is clear enough, except… it could never apply to you and what you’re doing, right?

In my Daily Email House community, I heard tell of different folks who are looking to start credible-sounding new businesses:

A direct mail agency. New shopping cart software. A personal trainer business.

Each of those is credible-sounding in the sense that it can succeed, as evidenced by many other such businesses on the market.

At the same time, each of those is much more likely to succeed, or at least to survive the first year, if you narrow down and get more specific about the market you will be working in.

You can slice and dice your market in lots of ways. You might wonder how and which tiny and specific segment to choose?

My answer is to go all the way down to a single prospect. Pick somebody you feel sure you can help… and who you are therefore most likely to sell because of your conviction.

After all, if you cannot sell a specific customer on your proposed solution, and if you cannot solve a particular and definite problem that customer has, then with all due respect, what hope do you have of selling and solving problems for a bigger, more complex, more nebulous group?

I’ll have more to say about this because in 2026, in fact in January, I will be helping folks create and sell their first $1k+ offer.

For now, lemme just tell you I heard that Gary Halbert story earlier today, in a podcast by Dean Jackson and Joe Polish.

As you might know, Joe runs the biggest and (according to him) most successful mastermind for direct response entrepreneurs. (He heard the story above from Gary Halbert directly.)

As for Dean, he’s a legend in the direct marketing space, particularly online.

If you’re doing Internet marketing today in any form, odds are you are using ideas and techniques Dean invented, which have been percolating down through a series of gurus who learned from Dean or from people that Dean taught.

In the podcast I listened to today, Dean and Joe talk about 8 “Profit Activators” that all successful DR businesses are ultimately built on. (The topic of today’s email is Profit Activator #1).

Highly recommended listening:

https://www.morecheeselesswhiskers.com/podcast/268

How I conceived and delivered my first online course

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Four score and six months ago, I brought forth on the Internet a new offer, conceived in Columbia but delivered back in Europe, for what I called my “bullets course.”

I sold this new offer to a group of about 20 “beta-testers” who came via my email list. These beta-testers were willing to pay me for up front for this course, based simply on the info I shared in an email, without a sales page, sight unseen.

That’s just as well, because the course didn’t exist at that point yet. I only had the idea for it.

Since I managed to get the number of beta-testers I was looking for, I delivered the course over the next 8 or so weeks — via an email each workday, which I was writing day-for-day.

This way of creating a course turned out to be very low pressure and yet very productive for me. Meanwhile, it also provided accountability and a cohort feeling for the participants.

During those 8 weeks, I got feedback, corrections, and testimonials from that first group of students. I collected all that, integrated it into the second iteration of the course, which was largely the same, except it now had a higher price tag, and a new name, Copy Riddles.

I have been selling Copy Riddles ever since and have made — well, I won’t say exactly how much, but enough to buy several metric tons of glazed donuts.

That in a nutshell, is how you create value out of thin air.

If the way I told that story makes me sound like some kind of agile and entrepreneurial wizard, that’s not my intent.

The fact is, the only reason Copy Riddles was a success was that pretty much nothing I did was my original idea.

As I’ve written many times, the core idea for Copy Riddles content came from direct marketer Gary Halbert, and was drilled into my head via a training I had heard from A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos.

As for the structure of Copy Riddles — the fact I presold it and then delivered it via email, one day at a time — that came from me spying on course creator Derek Johanson, specifically, the way Derek created and delivered his CopyHour course.

I’m telling you this because Derek is currently launching a course, delivered daily by email, that gets you to launch, sell, and deliver a course that people want to pay for, in 30 days, all via email.

Derek’s course is creatively called “Email Delivered Courses” and it gets you to do what Derek did with CopyHour.

You certainly don’t need to buy Email Delivered Courses to launch your own email delivered course. Derek lays out the high-level process on his EDC sales page, which I’ve conveniently linked to below. And like I wrote already, I reverse-engineered and hacked many of the details myself, and that’s how I did Copy Riddles.

I’m still telling you about Email Delivered Courses for two reasons:

1. Maybe you don’t wanna do what I did, and spend weeks stalking Derek and reverse-engineering what he does. Instead, maybe you are happy to pay Derek to simply tell you what to do each day, so you come out 30 days from now with your own completed, desirable, and sales-validated course.

2. The real question is not whether you could figure out what Derek did, but whether you actually will do so, and whether you will then put it into practice in the next 30 days, and have an asset that you can sell ongoing, and buy yourself many metric tons of glazed donuts.

Derek’s launch for Email Delivered Courses closes at the end of this week. If you’d like more info, or to join before the doors close:

https://bejakovic.com/edc

When 4.9 is bigger than 5

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It finally happened — I got my first 4-star review for my new 10 Commandments book.

Part of me is of course annoyed — “How dare you” — but a part of me is also relieved. The book has had 26 reviews so far, all of them 5 star.

My average ranking has now tanked from a perfect 5.0 to a more reasonable 4.9.

This brought to mind a Gary Halbert bullet:

* Almost foolproof contraception: It’s over 99% effective but… so new… most people have never even heard about it!

Unless you’ve been through my Copy Riddles program, you might wonder what this new and unheard-of form of contraception is. That depends, like Bill Clinton said, on what the meaning of “is” is. But I will tell you this:

The secret Gary is talking about is actually 100% effective.

The question then becomes, if Gary’s “almost foolproof contraception” is actually 100% effective, why did Gary knock it down to “99%”?

I mean, isn’t 100% better than “over 99%”?

Isn’t “foolproof” more attractive to the foolish, which includes all of us, than “almost foolproof”?

The answer is no, not in the strange way the human brain works, which master copywriters like Gary intuitively understood and additionally proved by experience.

It’s another one of those bits of elite copywriting you would never pick up on by looking at the finished copy alone.

In order to figure out that Gary’s “over 99% effective” is not an ordinary fact, but a bit of A-list wizardry, you need to peek behind the curtain.

That’s the basis of my Copy Riddles program.

And about that, here’s a quote from copywriter Kevin Orellana, who is going through Copy Riddles now for I believe the fourth time, and who won last week’s Copy Riddles bullets contest:

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Being a Copy Riddles customer has been one of the best decisions I’ve made!

I’ve actually been going through Copy Riddles since 2021 and till this day, I still get new insights from it.

===

If Copy Riddles had a rating, it would be over 4.99. For more info on this program:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

How I write emails and create offers using Ad Money Machine

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Yesterday I got an email from Robin Timmers, the “largest copywriter in the Netherlands”. Robin just got Copy Riddles during the current “Unannounced Bonus” promo, which comes with a lifetime subscription to Lawrence Bernstein’s Ad Money machine (normally $997). About that, Robin wrote:

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Hey John,

I got the offer, and I was wondering…

(I’ll start after finishing up CopyHour, which is +-3 weeks left.)

How do you (both in general and specifically you) use the Ad Money Machine?

===

Well, it’s about time somebody asked.

I’ll tell ya, and it will be relevant whether or not you get Copy Riddles or Ad Money Machine.

It will be just as relevant if you want to do all the endless and tiring legwork yourself that Lawrence has done on your behalf, and masochistically spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of hours to find out what best direct response marketers across industries are doing.

Here are four ways I personally use Ad Money Machine:

#1. Subject lines and email hooks

Nobody has called me out on it, but all the subject lines I have so far used during this promo have come from ads and sales letters in Ad Money Machine:

* Copy Riddles customers hit jackpot with “Unannounced Bonus” scheme (“U.S. residents hit Jackpot with ‘Old Vegas’ Casino Rolls”)

* Over $1M ($1,000,000) and 20 years of loving labor went into this brilliant Unannounced Bonus (“£125,000 ($300,000) and 2 years of loving labour went into this sumptuous Centennial Edition of THE COMPLETE WORKS OF DICKENS”)

* Exposed: Gary Bencivenga’s “100x its price” marketing investment (“Exposed: Warren Buffett’s $39 Billion Black Gold Bonanza”)

* The magnificent obsession that produces A-list copywriting skills (“The Magnificent Obsession That Produced The Coffee Favored By Kings”)

* Dead for 34 months — now alive again (“Outlawed For 41 Years — Now Legal Again”)

* Copy Riddles is expensive… or maybe not (“Life is short… or maybe not.”)

* How I write emails and create offers using Ad Money Machine (“How I Make $327 Per Hour Practicing Real Estate”)

The bigger point is that good hooks, and good ways of crystalizing those hooks in words, are eternal. It makes sense to be a student of your market, and other markets, and reuse what’s worked.

#2. Marketing ideas I can port from one industry to another

Just one example: Gary Halbert’s 4 steps for turning $39.95… into $289… into $4,046.

Yes, Lawrence has the front-end ad that Gary Halbert ran in the WSJ, selling a Halley’s Comet commemorative silver coin for $39.95.

But the ad copy was not the story.

The story, which Lawrence got direct from Gary himself, is how those $39.95 front-end orders were turned into $289 sales, and how those $289 sales were turned into $4,046 sales, in 4 simple steps.

In spite of this being Gary Halbert, this 4-step process is perfectly legal and even ethical. It also applies to any field, including info products like courses and memberships. It’s something I have been using in part and will be using much more going forward with the offers I create.

#3. Uncovering core appeals in an industry

Until last year, I ran an email newsletter on the topic of longevity. I regularly went into the Ad Money Machine “Beauty and Anti-Aging” category (~100 winning direct response ads) to search out what appeals sell (“Look 10 years younger in 10 hours”), what words and phrases people respond to (“thinning hair”), and what hooks to use (the French).

#4. Curiosity, entertainment, and inspiration

Like I keep saying, Ad Money Machine is not simply a huge collection of winning direct response ads, with a new ad popping up each day.

What makes me keep going back over and over is Lawrence’s commentary, knowledge, and experience, which put these ads in their fascinating (at least to me) context.

If you’re actually interested in copywriting and marketing… if you’re intrigued by the history of the field…if you are amused by or have at least heard of some of the characters who made it what it is… then Lawrence’s site is addictive.

As just one example:

Last Sunday, I went on Ad Money Machine, looking for a headline I could repurpose for a subject line.

I came across that “U.S. residents hit Jackpot” ad.

But then I started reading Lawrence’s commentary, where he casually mentions that Vic Schwab (author of “How To Write An Advertisement,” one of the best books in the field, and the copywriter behind Dale Carnegie’s “How To Win Friends And Influence People”) helped start a gold and silver coin company.

Lawrence had a post on that as well. So I got sucked in, clicked through, and started reading that instead of writing my email. That’s ok. Not only was it fun and interesting and inspiring, but I learned something (going back to point 2 above) that I will use in the future.

The deadline to get Copy Riddles along with the “Unannounced Bonus” of Ad Money Machine is this Sunday, just two short days away.

As a reminder, I also will be running a live cohort for Copy Riddles, one last time, never to be repeated, as part of the offer for this promo, to help you actually go through the program so you benefit from it and start owning those A-list copywriting skills.

Plus, there’s a payment plan if you want to take out some of the sting of paying in one lump sum. That also goes away on Sunday.

To take advantage of all that before the deadline makes it disappear forever:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

The curiosity mistake

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Yesterday, I wrote an email about a course I bought via the “dark marketplace” for courses.

There was some valuable and potentially profitable point in that email, but it didn’t matter much.

Because almost all the responses I got, and I got a hobuncha, said something like the following:

===

I’m sure you’re getting plenty of replies like mine, but I can’t help it… what’s the course??

Not planning to buy it, just plain ol’ curiosity. It’s so weird thinking in 2025 that there’s still info that can’t be accessed immediately with just 2-3 clicks…

===

I didn’t share the name of the course yesterday and I won’t share it today.

Like I wrote in my email yesterday, I bought the course without knowing anything about it, based on a recommendation alone.

I can’t recommend it to others since I haven’t received it or gone through it yet. In fact, I can’t say anything more about it other than what I have, aside from its name. But what are you gonna do with that?

Legend says that near the end of his career, direct marketer Gary Halbert quizzed a protege. Halbert asked, “The best way to get a prospect’s attention is to appeal to…”

The protege thought for a moment. “Their sense of self-interest,” he said.

“No!” said Halbert, and he whacked the protege on the wrist with a large wooden ruler. “The right answer is, their sense of curiosity.”

True true.

Now here’s the valuable and potentially profitable point of this email:

Another legendary marketer, John Caples, found that pure curiosity headlines always and dramatically underperform pure benefit headlines in terms of sales.

Sure, curiosity headlines got the attention, just like Halbert said. But Caples found that benefit headlines got the money. The best performing of all were headlines with both a benefit and an element of curiosity.

All that’s to say, idle curiosity isn’t worth much, not unless you can channel it into something else.

I’m telling you this if you’re trying to sell, and I’m telling you also in case you are not.

But on to sales, specifically of my new 10 Commandments book.

I’ve tried to make this book intriguing and curiosity-baiting up to 11. I mean, that was the whole idea behind talking about con men and pickup artists and such. But as I say at the close of the book:

“Of course, the real question is, what are you going to do with this stuff? Learning new techniques is nice, as is getting an a-ha moment, a new insight into something profound about yourself. But none of it matters much unless you put it to use and somehow apply it in your life. Will you do that?”

I hope you will. The book contains simple but powerful ideas to make you more effective in communicating, whether you want to sell, negotiate, or even seduce. If you’re curious, and if you’re looking to benefit, here’s where you can find out more:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

A tabloidy factoid about Dan Ferrari and Ning Li

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A few weeks ago, copywriter Tom Baines wrote me to say:

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Anyway, I’m excited for your new book, and here’s an interesting tabloidy factoid you may already be aware of: Dan Ferarri and Ning Li have both talked openly about how they first connected in a pickup artist subreddit, where Dan initially mentored Ning as a pick-up artist before eventually bringing him over into copywriting and helping him build his career here… I think it’s a fun little overlap.

===

I’m sharing this as a bit of gossip in case you have connections to the copywriting industry. Ning and Dan are both well-known figures there. I never knew the background of how they met, even though I was in Dan’s small and intimate coaching program 5+ years ago.

Beyond gossip, anything worthwhile here?

I heard direct marketing legend Dan Kennedy say on multiple occasions how the top copywriters he knows all have years of “nose to nose, toes to toes” sales experience. And if you look at the famousest copywriters, from Claude Hopkins to Gary Halbert on down to Dan Kennedy himself, all started out in direct or door-to-door sales.

But I think today the “nose to nose, toes to toes” connection has weakened, in large part because door-to-door sales has become a much rarer endeavor.

On the other hand, I know more successful copywriters who have experience with pickup than I can count on my two hands and 10 sticky fingers.

In part, that’s because equivalent social shifts — things like the Internet — which caused d2d selling to drop have also made info about pickup and seduction available to a large pool of eager men.

But it’s more than that.

There are ideas, skills, and attitudes that translate from pickup to copywriting, and vice versa, same as from copy to d2d sales, and vice versa.

All to say:

1. You might have valuable skills and experiences you are not aware of right now.

2. If you want to find out some of the connections between copywriting and d2d sales and pickup, and also seemingly unrelated but deeply connected fields like hypnosis and stage magic and standup comedy, then you might like:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments