Gary Halbert

Serves me right for soliciting wishes

by

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:

===

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.

===

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

by

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

by

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/

I made a lot of mistakes in my copywriting career, for example:

by

1. In my early days, I worked with OH, who loved meetings, pushing me around like his secretary, and telling me how it’s going to be, to the point where I had trouble falling asleep because I was so insulted and angry

2. In my late days, I worked with SA on a commission-only job, which involved a ton of preparation, the frustration of writing daily emails in his voice, and which paid me nothing, in spite of promises of a huge profit share from his million-name-plus email list

3. I wrote cold emails for any business that would pay me, until I figured out no amount of copywriting hacks will compensate for the fact that a generic offer targeted at uninterested leads will not sell

4. I wrote a weak lead for RealDose’s probiotics sales letter, they rightly dragged their feet on it, and it never ran

5. I started a daily email newsletter twice before, and I stopped and deleted all the archives twice before finally starting writing daily emails for good, which you are reading now

6. I spent the first six months of my professional copywriting career thinking I had learned all there is to learn about copywriting, since I had read Joe Sugarman’s Adweek book and Gary Halbert’s Boron Letters. During that time, I didn’t crack open a single copywriting book or listen to a single training, and I made a bunch of screaming mistakes as a result

7. I didn’t formally collect endorsements, testimonials, or client success case studies

8. I worked with WT, who thought the answer to every copywriting and marketing problem is to apply the AIDA formula, and who exploded in anger when I suggested otherwise, and who translated my innocent comment about not having to fit everything into AIDA into an attack on the value of his MBA education (no joke)

9. I wrote a seventh and final batch of emails for a real estate investing fund out of Chicago. They had paid me for all the previous emails, and on time. They never paid me for this final batch. To date, they are the only client who has ever shafted me for anything

10. I did not take a moment every three months to ask myself, “What have I learned to do pretty well over the past three months?” and then package up that new expertise into a presentation or a mini-course or a little report I could sell, both to make a bit of money, and to build up a lot of status

There are many more mistakes I made. No matter. I learned, quickly or eventually.

I stopped working with clients who didn’t suit me. I became obsessive about studying and improving my skills. In time, I even started thinking about how I present myself, and now just what I can do.

All of which is to say, I don’t really regret making any of the mistakes above, or any of the countless other mistakes I made in my freelance copywriting career.

Except one.

There’s one mistake I regret it because I persisted in it for so long.

I regret it because it cost me so much, both in terms of the kinds of work I missed out on, and the piles of money that blew off in the wind.

And really, I regret it because it would have been so easy to fix, had I only kept one thing in mind.

That one thing is the topic of my Most Valuable Postcard #1, which is available for purchase right now.

But I am only making this offer to people who are currently signed up to my email newsletter. To get on my newsletter, so you can take advantage of this offer, click here and fill out the form that appears.

Business advice I wish somebody had given me seven years ago

by

Last year, while writing the sales page for my Copy Riddles program, there came a time in the copy when I had to talk about myself.

I shifted in my seat, coughed a little, and shrugged my shoulders.

“What exactly would you like to know?” I said to the blinking cursor. “I’ve been working as a copywriter for several years now. Each year, it’s been getting better and better. And that’s pretty much it.”

If I ever had a copywriting client tell me something like this, I would get angry. ​​​”Tell me some specific accomplishments,” I would say. “Something soundbite-worthy. You don’t have to have saved the sea cows. It just has to sound good.”

In the end, on that Copy Riddles sales page, I managed to weasel my way out without saying anything about myself — the course is not really about my authority, after all.

I’m not trying to sell you Copy Riddles right here. I’m just trying to share a bit of advice that I wish somebody had shared with me seven years ago, or really, any time before this year. The advice is this:

1. Start a new Google Doc right now

2. Name it “[your last name] – status”

3. Whenever anything even remotely impressive happens to you business-wise, add it to this document right away

And that’s it. But maybe an example will help.

This entire week, I’ve been promoting my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

And it’s been working. The book has sold a few extra copies each day.

As a result, it’s been climbing from its usual place on the Amazon best seller lists. It peaked at one point yesterday, while being ranked higher than both Gary Halbert’s Boron Letters and Dan Kennedy’s Magnetic Marketing.

So this is what I added yesterday to my “BEJ status” document:

“My 10 commandments book has been ranked higher among Amazon bestsellers than Gary Halbert’s Boron Letters and Dan Kennedy’s Magnetic Marketing.”

You might think this is cheap. You might think it’s transparent. You might think it’s shady.

To which, all I can do is shift in my seat, cough a little, and shrug my shoulders.

The fact is, you might not think you have any accomplishments. But if you make sure you write down every even marginally status-building thing that happens to you, pretty soon you will have a whole encyclopedia of little soundbites that you can feed to clients and customers and prospects.

And who knows, when you look over your growing collection of marginal accomplishments, maybe you will even start to impress yourself.

As for me, I’m gonna keep promoting my 10 Commandments book for a couple more days. Because yesterday, a long-time reader and customer named Gregory wrote me to say:

Okay. I finally bought it. This email got through to me. Not sure why since you’ve mentioned it so many times but there you have it…
Thanks John!

Looking forward to digging into it this week.

Maybe there is still some untapped demand in my list.

And who knows. With your help, maybe I can reach new heights on the Amazon bestseller list — for example, selling better than that clown Malcolm Gladwell, with his stupid Tipping Point. At least for an hour.

In case you wanna help me get there:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Remembering David Ogilvy

by

Today is November 29th, which is neither the birthday nor the deathday of David Ogilvy. Still, I thought it might be a good idea to take a moment and remember the great man.

Because, as with another copywriting legend, Gary Halbert, the greatest promotion that David Ogilvy ever did was in promoting himself.

Today, more than 50 years after his heyday, Ogilvy remains the most famous ad man in history, and is really the only copywriter that a normie off the street might have heard of.

Why is that?

What lies behind Ogilvy’s enduring fame?

The way I figure, it comes down to three things.

​​Some part of it secret personal charisma.

Some part of it is luck.

And some part is the actual work Ogilvy produced.

Charisma and luck cannot be taught. Well, they can, but this is not that kind of newsletter. This is a newsletter which focuses on work — and how to make the work that you do more impactful, influential, long-lasting.

So what exactly did Ogilvy do? When I think of the man’s work, three snapshots come to mind:

1. The Rolls-Royce ad, “At 60 miles an hour…” That campaign shows you the value of being associated with a top-tier product, which largely writes its own advertising.

2. The man in the Hathaway shirt. The eyepatch. That shows you the power of creating a spectacle, of being instantly perceived as unique.

3. A 7-word soundbite Ogilvy wrote once, which I will not quote here, but which I bet you have heard before.

I bet you’ve heard it because I’ve quoted it before in this newsletter, and so have 99% of people who write about advertising, whether they knew it came from Ogilvy or not.

There’s some magic to this soundbite that makes it stick in people’s minds and that makes them want to repeat it — even though Ogilvy wrote it as just a throwaway in the middle of a 12,000-word ad.

Maybe you know the 7-word soundbite I have in mind.

Maybe you even know the magic that makes it stick in people’s minds beyond the millions of other words that Ogilvy wrote in his 50-year career.

And if you don’t know, but you think it might be in your interest to know, then you can find out all about it during the third call of my upcoming Age of Insight live training.

Registration for Age of Insight closes tomorrow, Wednesday, at 12 midnight PST. But I am only making this training available to people who are on my email newsletter. If you want to get in on the training, then hurry to get on my newsletter and pray that you are in time.

The post mortem of my “wanted” ad

by

Gary Halbert advised all would-be marketing millionaires to take out a classified ad that reads:

“Housewives wanted to address envelopes at home. You must have a typewriter or good handwriting. Call 000-0000.”

That’s good advice still, whether you are a DM marketer, looking for that first-person experience of what getting sprayed by a firehose of response feels like… or a freelancer searching for insights on what the world is like on the other side of the looking glass, when you send in your own job application.

Last Friday, I sent out an email with the subject line,

“Wanted: Competent human to do some monkey work”

In that email, I made a job offer.

In spite of trying to make the job sound as unattractive as I could, I got two dozen applications, mostly from people who were clearly overqualified, but who applied nonetheless.

After looking over all the applications, I ended up hiring somebody yesterday. And I can tell you this:

The content of this guy’s application was largely irrelevant.

The price he quoted me was more relevant, but still secondary.

What really made me hire him is that I had interacted with him a hundred times before. He has bought a bunch of my offers — Most Valuable Email, Most Valuable Postcard, Copy Riddles, which he has gone through twice. He has participated in QA calls, contests, and masterminds I put on, and has given me testimonials before.

In other words, I already knew this guy well, as well as I know anybody from my list.

My point isn’t that you should buy any and all offers I put out, though you certainly should do that.

My point is simply that my brain, and from what I’ve seen, everybody else’s brain, is constantly looking for shortcuts.

The fact is, I don’t know that guy I hired will 100% do a perfect job, or a better job than the dozen or so people who offered to do the same job for less money.

It doesn’t matter.

I had to make a decision. And I was looking for easy ways to do that. You could say I was clutching at straws.

And that’s how most people make most decisions — largely irrationally, just trying to put the unpleasant task behind them. Which can work in your favor — if you put a bit of thought into how to give your prospects mental shortcuts, and how to make their decision process easier and less unpleasant.

Anyways, getting back to Gary Halbert. Gary advised people to take out that classified job ad because “Spectators Can Never Understand What It Is To Be A Player!” Gary explained in more detail:

“You know what the hardest thing it is for a caring teacher like me to do? I’ll tell you… it’s not to explain something to my audience. That’s relatively easy. No, my friend, the real challenge is to make my message real to that audience.”

Which fittingly enough is one of the core ideas behind my Most Valuable Email training. The MVE trick is all about making your email real to your audience — and to yourself.

In case you’d like to get the Most Valuable Email, and maybe interact with me in some way over it, then take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

My superior MVE guarantee that trumps Gary Halbert and John Carlton

by

In my email from two days ago, I shared John Carlton’s “Notorious ’20 Clicks’ Report’. This report collected, in shorthand format, 20 of Gary Halbert’s “first-choice” marketing tactics.

​​In that email, I said this report is potentially the most valuable thing I will ever share in this newsletter.

Most valuable, yes. But not necessarily new.

For example, “Click 20” in the report is pretty standard marketing advice you’ve probably heard a thousand and one times:

“Reverse the risk — you shoulder all the risk, so buyer is ‘covered'”

Gary H. advised his clients to offer longer guarantee periods… 30-day holds on checks… even double-your-money-back guarantees.

Bah, I say. That’s kids’ stuff. It pales in comparison to how much risk I am willing to shoulder with my Most Valuable Email offer. It goes like this:

1. If you like my emails, find them insightful, and want to write something similar…

2. If you already have or are willing to start an email list about marketing or copywriting…

3. If you have read or at least skimmed my sales page, or what there is of it, so you have a clear understanding of what my offer is, what the price is, and what my promises to you are at that price…

… if and only if all three of these are true… then I guarantee the Most Valuable Email is for you. You will find it both fun and valuable.

On the other hand:

If you don’t fulfil any of the above three conditions… or you don’t know me too well… or you don’t trust me too much… or you have general vague doubts or uneasy feelings about taking me up on my MVE offer… or you want to “test drive” the content to see if it’s right for you… or, best of all, if you have been studying copy for years and have seen it all and are determined that unless I show you something new within the first 2 minutes then you will demand a refund…

Then I 100% guarantee the Most Valuable Email training is NOT for you. Don’t buy it, and save yourself, and even more importantly, save me, a bit of headache and frustration.

How’s that for shouldering risk?

After all, Gary H. and John C. were willing to take on all the risk — up to but not including risking the actual sale.

On the other hand, I am willing to risk you will not buy at all from me if this offer is not right for you.

Maybe that seems silly, or counter to the basic principles of greed-gland marketing. That’s okay. I feel it will serve me well in the long run.

Anyways, now you know what I guarantee when it comes to the Most Valuable Email.

And if you meet criteria 1 and 2 above, and you are interested in this training, then all that’s left for you is to read or at least skim my sales page so you can meet criterion 3.

If you want to do that now, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

The next “greatest living copywriter”

by

In response to my “Long-form copy is finally dead” email yesterday, a reader named David wrote in:

So Gary is the Greatest “Living” Copywriter rn. And that’s great. I agree with you.

But I couldn’t help but wonder, if he dies (and I’m not wishing that he does), who’s going to become the Greatest?

I’m thinking top contenders are Stefan, Evaldo, Ferrari and Haddad.

But I have no clue what the metrics are for choosing these kind of things. It’s just a thought that ran across my mind.

Anyhow thank you for your emails. I enjoy my time reading them.

Rather than who will be the next greatest, I can think of a more interesting and useful question:

Why would any person not named Brian Kurtz possibly think that Gary Bencivenga is the “greatest living copywriter?”

After all, it’s not there in the copy. There’s no way to rank “copywriting greatness” by staring at a bunch of sales letters.

It’s also not about results. Again, unless you are Brian Kurtz, who had a chance to compare the sales made by Gary’s copy to that of some other copywriters, you have no direct knowledge of Gary’s results.

So what is it?​​

Well, if you’re anything like me, and I imagine David above, you believe Gary is so great…

Because you’ve heard people like Brian Kurtz say so…

… because you’ve heard of Gary’s farewell seminar, which cost something $5k to attend and which brought together 100 successful DR marketers and copywriters, people like Gary Halbert and John Carlton, to sit and listen to Gary for three days…

… because thanks to email newsletters like this one, you’ve heard Gary’s name mentioned a million times, often with the attached tag line, “greatest living copywriter.”

And if I had to speculate on the rather fruitless question of who the next greatest copywriter will be, I think it will be something similar. Just as something similar applies to you.

Whether you’re a copywriter or a marketer who sells on authority and personality… whether you’re self-employed or under somebody else’s thumb… whether you’re new at the game or been at it for a while…

Your positioning and ultimately your success are much less about any metrics you can point to, and much more about the legend that emerges around you, or that you create for yourself.

That might be something that’s worth thinking about.

I’ve done some thinking about it myself. And I’ve concluded that, at least for the moment, I’m not in the “being a legend” business.

That’s why I’m happy to contribute to Gary’s legend instead of building up my own.

As befitting Gary’s legend as “greatest living copywriter,” I put him first in my 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters book.

​​If by some chance managed to miss or resist my continued attempts to sell you that $4.99 book, here’s where you can find it, along with Gary’s irresistible commandment:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments​​

The IOU theory of copywriting

by

I read once (in a book) that credit, aka debt, came way before money. In other words, an IOU — a little slip of clay tablet commemorating the three sheep you gave to me — is a more powerful economic idea than gold coins.

I also read once (in an email) that copywriter Gary Halbert said the most powerful human motivating force is not self-interest… but curiosity.

Is there a connection between these two powerful facts?

Clearly. Because I personally think of curiosity as an IOU.

You give a couple of IOUs to your reader right in your headline. “I promise to pay you some valuable information,” each IOU says, “just give me a bit of time.”

As long as you’re in the reader’s debt, as long as he’s holding one of your IOUs, he sticks around. He wants to get paid.

The good thing is that you can give your reader a new IOU before paying off an old one. That way you can keep him around. But be careful.

If you start handing out too many IOUs… if the debt you’re incurring is too outrageous… if the repayment period is too long… then your reader is likely to get frustrated.

“This guy is never gonna pay up,” he will say. “This is just worthless paper.” He will throw away all your IOUs into the river, and along with them, your sale.

In other words, don’t overdo your debt of curiosity. But do do it.

And if you want some technical pointers on how to do curiosity in your sales copy, why, I’ve got just the thing.

It’s hidden right there inside Commandment III of my book on A-list copywriter commandments.

In case you haven’t checked this book out yet, but are a bit curious, here’s the link:

https://www.bejakovic.com/10commandments