Gary Halbert

A peek behind the curtain of my “mesmerizing” Copy Riddles sales letter

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It’s strange times around the Bejako household. There’s a Copy Riddles promotion going on, but I’m not the one furiously typing it up.

Instead, I’m looking on as Daniel Throssell sends out email after email to sell Copy Riddles. I’m watching the resulting sales coming in. And I’m feeling a little guilty that I’m not somehow supporting the effort.

So let me share a third-party opinion on Copy Riddles that might help change some minds.

This opinion comes from Carlo Gargiulo, an Italian-language copywriter. Carlo is a star copywriter at Metodo Merenda, a Switzerland-based info publishing business. He also has his own list where he writes to entrepreneurial dentists and doctors and marketers, and he is a bit of an LinkedIn influencer in the Italian copy space.

Carlo had the following to say about Copy Riddles:

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Copy Riddles is the best copy course of all time.

I have spent a lot of money studying and learning so much useful information from copywriter courses such as Stefan Georgi, John Carlton, David Deutsch, etc. (all great courses that I have enjoyed), but I feel that Copy Riddles was the COURSE that allowed me to become a good copywriter.

I hope you will create courses similar to Copy Riddles in the future.

My dream is a course of yours on writing sales letter-landing pages (Your writing style is completely different from that of most copywriters I see around.). Indeed, Copy Riddles’ landing page is the only one I have read in its entirety over and over again. You literally mesmerized me with that landing page.

Anyway, congratulations and thanks again for creating and making Copy Riddles available.

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Here’s a quick copywriting lesson, specifically about how I structured the multi-page Copy Riddles sales letter, which Carlo says he found mesmerizing.

Each of the three pages of that sales letter is designed to get you to believe one and only one thing, specifically:

Page 1’s belief is that bullets are one of the most valuable copywriting skills you can ever own.

To do that, I refer to authorities such as John Carlton, Gary Halbert, Gary Bencivenga, Parris Lampropoulos, David Deutsch, Stefan Georgi, and Ben Settle, all of whom have gone on record to say that — yes, bullets are one of the most valuable copywriting skills you can ever own, and maybe the most valuable.

Page 2’s belief is that the best way to own bullets is to follow what Gary Halbert once recommended in his newsletter — and what people like Gary Bencivenga, Parris Lampropoulos, and Ben Settle have put in practice — namely, to look in parallel at both the source material and the finished bullet.

Page 3’s belief is that Copy Riddles is a fun and effective way to implement that Gary Halbert process…

… without spending months of your time and hundreds of hours of your mental effort to do what I’ve already done for you, which is to track down a bunch of winning sales letters… buy or borrow or steal the books or courses they were selling… and go bullet by bullet, comparing the source to the finished product, figuring out how exactly the A-list copywriters turned lead into gold.

And that’s pretty much the entire sales letter.

If I manage to convince the reader of all three of those points, then making the sale is easy, which is why I don’t have a big and dramatic scarcity-based close for the Copy Riddles sales page.

Of course, it does help that I have a bunch of great testimonials, like Carlo’s, right before the final “Buy now” button.

Maybe you would like to see how this mesmerizing sales letter looks in reality.

I won’t link to it directly in this email. Instead, I will remind you that Daniel Throssell is promoting Copy Riddles right now.

Daniel has gotten me to offer a one-time, sizable discount from the current Copy Riddles price, exclusively to people who come via his list.

So if you’re curious what my mesmerizing Copy Riddles sales page looks like, check out Daniel’s next email, because it will have a link to that page at the end.

And if you’re at all interested in buying, then act before tomorrow, Wednesday at 12 noon PST, because that’s when Daniel and I agreed to end this special offer, which will never be repeated again.

In case you’re not yet on Daniel’s list, here’s where to go:

https://persuasivepage.com/

Start and grow a “tiny book” publishing business

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I read an article yesterday about a new title for an old book.

​​The old book was written by Aristotle around 350 BC. It has been known for the roughly 2,372 years since as The Nichomachean Ethics.

​​But a new edition of the book has just been put out by Princeton University Press. The new title is, “How to Flourish: An Ancient Guide to Living Well.” ​​From that article I read yesterday:

“The volume is part of a series of new translations of ancient texts. Aristotle’s Poetics, for instance, is now ‘How to Tell a Story: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Storytelling for Writers and Readers,’ and Thucydides’ ‘History of the Peloponnesian War’ is now ‘How to Think About War: An Ancient Guide to Foreign Policy.'”

This reminded me of E. Haldeman-Julius. A hundred years ago, Haldeman-Julius had a publishing business that sold literally hundreds of millions of copies of what were known as little blue books — tiny paperback editions of both new how-to books and reissues of fiction classics.

As part of his publishing business, Haldeman-Julius operated what he called The Hospital, where he would operate on books that were ailing and not making sales.

The Hospital involved several possible procedures. The most extreme was a type of frontal lobotomy, in which Haldeman-Julius would do just like those Aristotle publishers did — lop off the book’s original, opaque, unsexy title, and replace it with something new and clear and exciting. Results:

“The mystery of the iron mask” => “The mystery of the man in the iron mask”: 277% jump in sales

“Ten o’clock” => “What art should mean to you”: 450% jump in sales

“Fleece of gold” => “The quest for a blonde mistress”: 833% jump in sales

Haldeman-Julius wrote up a book about his experiences publishing the little blue books. In a typical move, he didn’t apply what he knew so well to his own personal marketing. So he titled his book, The First Hundred Million.

The title “The First Hundred Million” doesn’t exactly scream READ ME! A much better title would have been something like, “Start and grow a ‘tiny book’ publishing business.”

As it was, The First 100 Million first went out of print, and then became obscure. You had to be a real student of the human psyche, and of the info publishing biz, to get yourself a copy. Somebody truly obsessive, possibly maniacal.

Somebody like legendary copywriter Gary Halbert, who once wrote in his newsletter:

“Indeed, The First Hundred Million is a book that contains a precise and valid statistical measurement of America’s inner most needs and greeds. So why didn’t I mention it in last month’s newsletter when I listed the greatest marketing books of all time? Simply because I didn’t have a copy of it and I wasn’t sure it was obtainable.”

Thanks to his unique connections, Gary did manage to find himself a used copy back in the 90s.

Fortunately, we live in a much more connected era, where even out-of-print books can be tracked down easily for a price.

For example, you can now get a paperback of The First 100 Million on Amazon for $19.95.

Carl Galletti also sells copies on his site for $29.97 (original) or $49.97 (expanded).

Or if you like, you can get The First Hundred Million for free.

​​I’ve tracked it down for you, via the University of Illinois library, at the link below.

I’ve already read this book once. I plan to reread it again next month. ​​Why? Why, to start and grow a “tiny book” publishing business.

​​In case you’d like to do something similar:

https://bejakovic.com/100million

Would you like to take Copy Riddles off my hands?

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A couple months ago, I stopped selling my flagship course, Copy Riddles.

​​Copy Riddles was based on a Gary Halbert’s advice for how to learn to write bullets — look at the bullets written by the best copywriters, look at the book or course those bullets were selling, and see how the copywriter did his alchemy to transmute lead into gold.

I had various reasons for retiring Copy Riddles. I wrote about one of them in an earlier email. But even if I had no good reasons initially, the fact that I’ve publicly announced that I’m retiring the course means I won’t bring it back.

Frank Sinatra retired in 1971. “I have sung my last song for the public,” he said with a sigh. Fans were shocked. But then, 2 years later, Frank came back with a TV special, Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back, and he started touring again.

Ol’ Blue Eyes could get away with that, but you won’t see Ol’ Bejako doing it, in spite of several people writing to tell me that not selling Copy Riddles is a crime. I’ve simply found it easier to keep my word as a general life policy.

At the same time, I’m genuinely proud of Copy Riddles as a course, and there are people who say there is significant tonnage to what they’ve learned about copywriting from it.

So a few days ago, while I should have been washing myself but was instead just standing in the shower and thinking, I had an idea.

Could I sell the rights to Copy Riddles to somebody else?

Like I said, I don’t want to be the one selling it to the public any more.

But there’s clearly demand for the course, even with my absolute lack of promotion of the thing. Maybe somebody else would like to own the rights to Copy Riddles and sell it himself or herself.

With the tiniest bit of work, you could get affiliates lined up — for example, I’ve had Derek Johanson of CopyHour promote Copy Riddles in the past. I’ve had Bob Bly agree to promote it right before I decided to retire it. And Daniel Throssell asked to promote it right after I retired it.

If you’ve already got a list of people interested in copywriting, you could sell Copy Riddles to your list directly — the thing regularly brought in 5-figure paydays for me when I re-launched it every few months, and that’s with my small list that had seen the offer a lot.

Plus, maybe you could even run cold traffic straight to the sales page. I can’t say with any certainty it would be a winner, but I did talk to A-list copywriter Lorrie Morgan recently, and she was telling me what a good sales letter I’d written for Copy Riddles. Plus, I wrote it in an impersonal way, to be convincing to somebody who doesn’t know anything about me personally and who hasn’t read any of my emails.

All these are just ideas.

​​I don’t know if anybody is interested in taking Copy Riddles off my hands, or really how this would work. But I am intrigued by the potential.

​​If you are intrigued as well, and if you are serious about the idea of buying the rights for Copy Riddles from me, write me to say so, and we can start a conversation around it.

“The one thing all my mentors have in common”

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This past Sunday, Novak Djokovic won the French Open and his 23 Grand Slam title — a big deal in the tennis world.

​​On Monday, in an off moment, I decided to check if there were any interesting news or interviews with Djokovic following the French Open.

I automatically headed to the r/tennis subreddit on Reddit. But in place of the usual page with tennis links and videos, I was hit with a blank page and the following notice:

“r/tennis is joining the Reddit blackout from June 12th to 14th, to protest the planned API changes that will kill 3rd party apps”

Perhaps you’ve heard:

Reddit the company, which is basically thousands of different news boards, is experiencing a kind of strike. Special Reddit users — mods — who control the different news boards are protesting Reddit’s proposed policy changes. As a result, they’ve basically made the site unusable for hundreds of millions of users.

I haven’t been following the drama. But apparently, as of yesterday, Reddit’s CEO said he plans to go ahead with the policy changes. To which many mods decided to extend the strike from 2-3 days, as originally planned, to indefinite.

All this reminded me of email conversation I recently had with Glenn Osborn.
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​Glenn is a curious creature. Once upon a time, Glenn attended 15 of Jay Abraham’s $15k marketing seminars by bartering his way in.

​​He also went to one of Gary Halbert’s copywriting seminars in Key West, and watched Gary go up on stage with that “Clients Suck” hat.

​​These days, Glenn writes an email newsletter called “Billionaire Idea Testing Club” about influence tricks he spots from people like Taylor Swift and James Patterson and J.K. Rowling.

For reasons of his own, Glenn likes to reply to my emails on occasion and send me valuable ideas. A few weeks ago, Glenn wrote me with some things he had learned directly and indirectly from Clayton Makepeace and Gary Halbert and Jay Abraham.

​​Good stuff. But then, in a PS, Glenn added the following:

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P.S. -For Consulting Clients I Do ALL THE Work F-O-R them – MYSELF and thru staffers.

CONTROL is the one thing all my Mentors Have in Common. If You Don’t CONTROL what you do You Cannot Make Munny.

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That last idea definitely stood out to me.

There are so many ways to be successful in any field. And contradicting strategies will often produce equally good results.

But a very few things are non-negotiable. You could call those the rules of the system. Perhaps CONTROL is one of them.

At this point I would normally refer you to Glenn’s newsletter in case you want to read it yourself. ​​But as Glenn himself says, “My ARCHIVE Is By-Referral-Only – Too ADVANCED to Toss Strangers into.”

If you are determined, then a bit of Googling, based on what I’ve told you above, will lead you to Glenn’s optin page and his unusual but valuable newsletter.

And in case you yourself want to want to write an unusual but valuable newsletter, the following can help:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

We’re in the fiction business

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I was surprised—

Yesterday I polled readers as to what books they are reading right now.

The responses came flooding in. Lots of business books. Lots of marketing books. Lots of self-help books.

What surprised me is that out of the several dozen responses I got, fewer than five came from people who said they are reading fiction.

A few days ago, I mentioned how I’ve watched lots of Dan Kennedy seminars about marketing and copywriting, and how Dan will often poll the room about who reads fiction.

​​A few hands go up, most stay down.

“You gotta read fiction,” says Dan. “Many people make the mistake of thinking we’re in the non-fiction business. Big mistake. We’re in the fiction business.”

So read fiction. Even better, write fiction. Dan did it – a mystery novel. John Carlton did it, too — sci-fi. I guess even Gary Halbert did it, maybe romance.

You don’t have to write a novel or even a short story. An email can be it.

​​I’ve done it before in this newsletter. Sometimes I was serious about it. Lots of times it was a parody. In every case, it was valuable.

​​To read the adventures of Bond Jebakovic, secret agent, go here:

https://bejakovic.com/once-upon-a-time/

Clicks of the dial

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Another day, another Airbnb.

​​Today I am in Warsaw, Poland because it was one of the few places in central Europe that won’t be raining for the next five days. And five days is how much time I have until I go to Gdansk for my first-ever live event to do with marketing and copywriting.

This morning, I woke up, carefully stepped down the circular staircase from the second floor of the apartment to the ground floor, located the inevitable Nespresso machine, popped in a capsule, and made myself a coffee.

And you see where this is going, don’t you?

If you have anything to do with marketing, you should. It’s a basic topic, so basic that I in fact wrote about it in the first month of this newsletter, back in September 2018.

The same marketing model is shared by Nespresso, by King Gillette’s safety razors-and-blades empire, and by info publishers like Agora and Ben Settle. They all promise you almost-irresistible sign-up premiums in order to get you paying for a continuity offer.

You almost certainly know this. Many people have talked about the same. It’s obvious. I won’t belabor the point.

Yesterday, I promised to tell the bigger point behind such models — models which might seem obvious, when somebody else points them out to you.

There’s a document floating around the Internet, legendary marketer Gary Halbert’s “Clicks of the Dial.”

It’s a collection of Gary’s “Most Treasured ‘First-Choice’ Marketing Tactics.”

I read this document once. I even shared a link to it in this newsletter last year.

But I never really got much out of Gary’s “Clicks of the Dial” list. I doubt the hundreds or thousands of my readers who downloaded Gary’s “Clicks of the Dial” got much out of it either.

That’s because there’s a big difference between, on the one hand, reading, nodding your head, and saying “hmm good idea”… and, on the other hand, observing, thinking a bit, and writing down your own conclusions.

So my point to you today is to open a new text file on your hard drive. Title it “Clicks of the Dial.” Break it up into three columns to start.

Name one column “traffic.” Name the second “conversion.” Name the third “consumption.”

And then, each time you go for a coffee, or a bagel, or a haircut, observe an obvious business or marketing practice you’re exposed to. Odds are, it’s been proven in hundreds or thousands of different situations. “Chunk up” that practice to make a model out of it. And write it down in your list in the appropriate column.

Gary Halbert’s entire “Clicks of the Dial” list was something like 20 items.

In other words, it won’t take you long to fill up your own “Clicks of the Dial” document to full.

​​Very soon, you can have a list of core business and marketing strategies, that you can cycle through, and solve pretty much any marketing problem by clicking the dial.

​​And since you put this list together yourself, based on your own experiences, it will actually mean something to you. Eventually, you might even appear to others to be a marketing jeenius like Gary himself.

As for me, it’s time to go get a brownie. I have a long list of food recommendations for what to eat in Warsaw, but only a limited amount of time and stomach space to do so.

Meanwhile, if you have no more interest in reading anything from me, because you’ve determined to learn all of marketing and copywriting by observation and thinking, there is nothing more I can tell you, except farewell and good luck. On the other hand, if you do want to hear from me every day, with more ideas and occasional inspiration, you can sign up for my daily email newsletter here.

Sexy firefighters running around for nobody’s entertainment

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It’s 8:45am as I start writing this email. Right now, off my balcony, I can see a tremendous show.

I live next door to a fire station, and the firemen are doing a public demonstration on the street in front of the station.

​​They are dressed up in their sexiest firefighting suits and they are running around two smashed up cars, one of which is burned to a crisp. The cars were placed there earlier in the morning, inside of a fenced-in area, so the firemen could show how they cut a car open and rescue somebody inside.

Like I say, it’s a tremendous show. Spectacular. My 6-year-old self would have given up a year of eating KitKats in order to see it.

And yet, as I watch this show off my balcony, there’s a total audience of about a dozen adults gathered on the street.

I mean, it’s 8:45am. People are either at home or on their way to work or stuck in the prison of school. Besides, it’s not a busy street. And as far as I know, this demonstration was not advertised anywhere — again, I live right next door.

You’ve probably heard the words of the godfather of modern advertising, Claude Hopkins. Hopkins said, “No argument in the world can ever compare with one dramatic demonstration.”

True, but:

The most famous example of a dramatic demonstration was Elisha Otis. Otis changed the landscape of American cities when he demonstrated his crash-proof elevator — to the masses milling about the New York Crystal Palace Exposition, which attracted 1.1 million visitors.

When Claude Hopkins himself created the world’s largest cake to promote Cotosuet, a kind of early margarine, he made a deal with a giant new department store which had just opened in Chicago.

​​The cake would go smack dab in the middle of the grocery department on the fifth floor. ​​Hopkins then ran big ads in all the Chicago newspapers to advertise the fact.

​​Over the course of a week, 105,000 people climbed the four flights of stairs to see that cake.

And when master showman Harry Houdini did his straitjacket escapes, while hanging upside 150 feet in the air, with only his feet tied to a pulley on the roof of some building, he made sure to hang off the building of the town’s main newspaper, guaranteeing a front page story the day before his show. Houdini did all these public escapes at exactly 12 noon, when lunchtime crowds could assemble.

Point being, as Gary Halbert might put it:

Advertise your advertising.

But maybe you say, “Yeah yeah but how? How exactly do I advertise my advertising?”

I gave you three examples right above. If that ain’t enough, here’s a fourth:

The waiting list for my future group coaching program on email copywriting. The waiting list serves as a waiting list, for sure. But it also serves as advertising for the actual advertising I will do when I do make that group coaching available. Very meta.

If you are interested in writing emails that people actually like reading and that they actually buy from, then you might be a good fit for my future group coaching. Or you might not. ​​In case you’d like to find out more about it, the first step is to get on my daily email list. Click here to do that.

Serves me right for soliciting wishes

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Last month, I sent out an email about a training I want to put together, on how copywriters can create their own offers. I’m still planning to put that training together, and I will have it out later this month.

Anyways, in that email, I asked for input. What’s your current situation… what’s holding you back from creating your own offer… what questions would you wish that I answer if I put this training together.

I got some good responses. But one reader got greedy. He decided to treat me like the genie of the lamp, and he wished the forbidden wish:

“Tell me how to create an offer that’s guaranteed to be irresistible!”

Upon hearing this, I bounced around like an angry djinn, exploding into a million little exasperated stars. “That’s like wishing for more wishes! ‘Guaranteed’? ‘Irresistible’? It cannot be done!”

But then I rematerialized into my human form. I scratched my blue genie head, pulled on my genie beard, and thought for a moment. I reached back into my ancient genie memory, spanning thousands of years, thousands of copywriting books, and thousands of sales campaigns.

I realized there is a way that’s almost guaranteed to produce irresistible offers.

​​At least, I found there’s a common element to all the offers I’ve created which ended up successful. On the flip side, I also found this element was lacking in all the offers which fizzled.

I won’t spell out what this magical element is — not here. It’s something I will reserve for my Mystical Cave of Secrets, aka that training about offers I will put on later this month.

But I can give you an idea of what this element is, using my most successful offer to date, Copy Riddles. If you pay close attention to what I’m about to say, you can figure out what I have in mind.

Here goes:

Copy Riddles is built around a simple bit of advice by the legendary, multimillionaire copywriter Gary Halbert.

Gary’s bit of advice has been endorsed by A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos. Parris said that if you follow Gary’s bit of advice, you’ll learn to write copy and make lots of money. And Parris should know — because he himself followed Gary’s advice, applied it, and made lots of money.

Parris isn’t the only one. Marketer Ben Settle also admitted that he followed Gary’s advice and profited as a result.

And another Gary — Gary Bencivenga, who has been called America’s greatest living copywriter, said he managed to beat a control by Gene Schwartz as a result of following this same approach that Gary Halbert advised, though he arrived at it independently of Gary Halbert.

And what is that bit of advice?

It’s​​ simply to look at sales bullets from successful sales letters, and to compare those bullets to the source in the book or the course or whatever that the sales letter was selling. That’s how you can spot the “twists” that top copywriters use to turn sand into glass, water into wine, lead into gold.

So that’s what I did.

I tracked down both the source material, and the bullets that sold that source material. But not just any bullets. Bullets written by A-list copywriters — including the two Gary’s, including Parris, including many more like David Deutsch and John Carlton — who were all competing against each other in the biggest big-money arenas of sales copywriting and direct marketing.

And then, rather than just creating a how-to course based on the tricks and tactics that I saw these A-list copywriters using in their sales bullets, I created a fun, immersive, exercise-based experience that I summed up in the title of the course, Copy Riddles.

Result? Here’s marketer Chew Zhi Wei, who went through Copy Riddles a while back:

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By the way just wanted to thank you for such an amazing course. This might be one of the most valuable courses that I have ever have the privilege to attend. So much so that I even feel that you’re underselling how much value you’re actually gifting away. Thank you so very very much.

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Is it clear now how to make an almost irresistible offer? I hope it is. And if not, you can find it discussed in more detail in rounds 6-12 of Copy Riddles, with round 11 being particularly relevant.

If you’re curious about all that, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

If this email makes me any money, I still won’t really get it

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I read a story a while back about a man named John Clauser.

Clauser studied physics but he struggled with it. That resonated with me, not because I studied physics, but because I studied math, and I struggled with that.

Anyways, Clauser had to take a grad-level course in quantum mechanics.

He failed. Twice. Eventually he managed to pass but he never really “got” it.

Some time later, Clauser decided to design an experiment to disprove quantum mechanics. His advisors told him not to do it. Clauser insisted. Maybe his ego was on the line.

Clauser carried out his experiment, which was meant to falsify a key prediction of quantum mechanics. Instead, to his disappointment, Clauser demonstrated quantum entanglement, just as the theory predicted.

Last year, Clauser won the Nobel Prize in physics for his work. He said, “I confess even to this day that I still don’t understand quantum mechanics.”

In his book Breakthrough Advertising, Gene Schwartz compared copywriters to atomic scientists. Gene argued that both copywriters and atomic scientists work with primal forces of nature. They cannot create those forces, but they can harness them and use them.

I’d like to extend Gene’s analogy. It’s not just that we can’t create those primal forces. We can’t even understand them, not really, not using our everyday human intuition.

Nobel-winning physicists still don’t understand quantum mechanics. ​​A-list copywriters still don’t understand human desire multiplied.

A few decades into his career, Gary Halbert put a lot of money into a weight loss product with a great proof element — a high school student who lost almost 600 lbs. “Without hunger! Without pills! Without low energy! Without giving up good food!”

Gary flew down to interview and record the guy. He created the product. He wrote and ran the ads. He put in dramatic before-and-after pictures and a money-back guarantee.

The ads bombed.

Nobody wanted this thing. Why? Nobody knows. You would think that a weight loss offer with a strong proof element and copy written by Gary Halbert would be a sure shot.

As screenwriter William Goldman once said — about those other people who cater to human desire, the Hollywood crowd — “Nobody knows anything.”

My point is not to depress you, by the way. Gary Halbert made millions of dollars and lived in Key West and fished all day long. William Goldman won a couple of Oscars. John Clauser got his Nobel prize. All that, in spite of not understanding how the damn thing works on a basic level.

The key of course is to keep generating ideas, to keep working, to keep taking a new step every day. And the day after, and so on until you drop dead. Great things can get accomplished in this way, and small things, and everything in between.

All right. I hope I haven’t inspired you too much.

I now have my Most Valuable Email training to pitch to you. I doubt you will be interested. You have probably heard me talk about this training before, and you have probably decided already it’s not for you.

That’s fine. But in case you want to find out more about Most Valuable Email, and how it can help you keep writing a new valuable email each day — and maybe even make money with it, God knows how — then take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Newsflash: Gary Bencivenga endorses the Copy Riddles approach

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I went for my morning walk just now, and I was listening to the Gary Bencivenga seminar on my headphones.

If you don’t know Gary, he is an A-list copywriter whose star shines brightest on the Copywriters Walk of Fame.

Gary’s sales letters mailed out tens of millions of times. They made him and his clients millions of dollars.

Before he retired, Gary was better at this than anyone.

An executive at Rodale Press, a big direct response publisher, said that Gary never lost a split-run test when going up against other top copywriters. An executive at Phillips publishing, another major direct response company, said that Gary had more winners than anybody else.

When Gary decided to retire, he put on a $5k/person farewell seminar where he shared all his best secrets. I’ve listened to the recordings of this seminar from beginning to end three times so far.

And yet, the following amazing story never managed to pierce that ball of lead that sits on my shoulders. Not until today.

Gary was talking about the first time he had to compete against the legendary copywriter Gene Schwartz, and try to beat a control that Gene had written for Rodale.

“I didn’t want to be overly influenced or depressed,” said Gary. So he didn’t look at Gene’s copy before starting his own.

After Gary finished his first draft, he decided to finally take a look at Gene’s stuff.

“I was so depressed,” Gary said. Gene’s copy was so much stronger.

But remember what that Rodale exec said? Gary never lost a split-run test for Rodale, not even against the great Gene Schwartz.

Here’s what Gary ended up doing:

I said, the only way I’m going to have a way of competing with Gene is if I figure out what he’s done to get these bullets.

​​So wherever his bullets came from, I would read the same page. I would learn from him just by mimicking what he had done.

So I said, “This bullet that he came up with came from chapter 3, page 4. What is the original source of this?”

And he taught me so much, just by studying his copy and by looking at the product itself.

I was able to beat him, but it was really his package too in a way, because I learned the technique.

Here’s a confession that’s not secret:

​​This approach to learning the technique of copywriting is what lies at the heart of my Copy Riddles program. I got the idea for that from another legendary copywriter, Gary Halbert.

And now, that same Copy Riddles approach has been endorsed by three big names — Gary Bencivenga, Parris Lampropoulos, and Ben Settle — all of whom have said publicly that this is the way they learned copywriting technique.

You can follow this approach yourself, right now, for free. Just like Gary did.

First, find a collection of winning sales letters written by a-list copywriters.

Second, get the product they were selling. You might have to stalk Amazon, eBay, used book sites, and online repositories.

Third, when you get both the sales letter and the out-of-print book in your possession, go bullet by bullet, and tease out how the A-list copywriter turned lead into gold.

Of course, you can also take a shortcut. You can take advantage of the fact that I’ve already done all this work for you, and that I’ve packaged it up in a fast, fun, mostly-done-for-you ride I’ve called Copy Riddles. To find out more about that:

https://bejakovic.com/cr-3/