Gene Schwartz

Woody Allen and Mark Ford walk into a library together…

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“I don’t enjoy reading,” Woody Allen said once in an interview. “But it’s necessary for a writer, so I have to do it.”

Preach, Woody.

I’ve always found reading is one of those things I do out of responsibility, not enjoyment.

But do you really have to read to be a successful writer? Or at least a successful copywriter?

I don’t know. But I heard two expert copywriters talking today. And their opinion seems to be yes.

The two copywriters in question were John Forde and Mark Ford. You might know them as the two guys who wrote the book Great Leads, which is up there with Cialdini’s Influence and Gene Schwartz’s Breakthrough Advertising as elementary education for a copywriter.

So John asked Mark, where do you get your big ideas from?

Reading, said Mark.

Not by swiping what worked before. Not by intuition. Not by some magic spark of creativity.

Instead, Mark reads. And when something makes him excited and interested, he takes note, and he uses that idea, in some form, in his own writing.

Which might sound pretty simple. Or even cheap. But hold on. Because here’s a second tip from the same interview:

Mark says Googled reading won’t lead you to a big idea. You’ve got to read books.

Yes, it’s work. Maybe even unenjoyable work. But so what? Read lots of books, carefully, and you can make lots of money as a result. And as Woody Allen will tell you:

“Money is not everything, but it is better than having one’s health.”

But here’s what not to do:

Don’t read my daily email newsletter. It won’t lead to your next big idea. And it’s not enjoyable.

If you don’t believe me, or you want to judge for yourself what my daily emails are like, then click here.

Jab, jab, right hook — for sales copy

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Gary Vaynerchuck has this famed marketing idea of “jab, jab, jab, right hook.”

The idea is to give value a bunch of times (the jabs) before making any kind of ask from your audience (the right hook).

I don’t subscribe to this way of splitting up value and sales.

But I do think this “jab, jab, right hook” approach can make sense in straight-up sales copy.

Fact is, when you get in the ring with your prospect, his defenses will be strong. If you try to hit him right on the nose with your most powerful claim right away, he’s just going to duck and weave and keep his guard up.

So what do you do instead?

Well, this ties into the discussion of gradualization from my post yesterday.

In a peanutshell, you jab your prospect first with a bunch of softer, less powerful, but more believable claims. Let me give you an example:

“How Doctors Stay Well While Treating Sick People All Day Long”

That was the headline of a successful magalog written by Parris Lampropoulos.

What do you think this headline is about?

Odds are, you think of clever ways that doctors avoid getting the common cold.

And that’s pretty much how the copy leads off. Here’s a breakdown of the beliefs and claims that Parris cycles through in a few paragraphs:

1. The official line is that doctors don’t get sick because they wash their hands all the time

2. But it’s not true! Studies show that three out of four doctors don’t wash their hands between patients, and over 2 million patients get sick in doctors’ offices

3. The truth is that doctors actually rely on herbs, folk remedies, and non-standard cures to keep from catching infections

5. And doctors also use these “forbidden treatments” to lower their cholesterol, get rid of pains, and prevent cancer and Alzheimer’s

Whoa! Did you catch that?

We started out talking about clever ways doctors use to keep from getting the common cold. Now we’re talking about preventing cancer and Alzheimer’s.

And over the next couple pages, it gets more extreme.

Parris shows you how there are proven but non-standard treatments, not just to prevent cancer and Alzheimer’s, but actually to cure these killer diseases.

For this audience, that’s the right hook. It takes an A-list copywriter like Parris to hold off on this knockout punch long enough that he can be sure to land it, plum on the nose.

In the words of Gene Schwartz, who first wrote about this process:

“This fact — that your most powerful claim does not always make your most powerful headline — is a paradox that many copy writers still cannot accept. Mail order advertisers, however, have a simple way of proving it. When a power-claim headline doesn’t work — for reasons either of Awareness or Sophistication — they immediately split it against a second head, with far fewer claims but far more likely to be believed. Then they build a belief bridge from this second headline, to the same exact claims they featured in the first, but now anticipated by careful preparation every step of the way.”

Screenwriting & copywriting: “If the structure is unsound, forget it”

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One of my favorite screenwriters of all time is William Goldman, the guy behind The Princess Bride and Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid.

Writing about his craft, Goldman made the claim that “screenplays are structure.” He explained in more detail:

“Yes, nifty dialog helps one hell of a lot; sure, it’s nice if you can bring your characters to life. But you can have terrific characters spouting just swell talk to each other, and if the structure is unsound, forget it.”

Same thing in copywriting.

You can have all the nifty dialog and terrific characters you want, but if your arguments are out of order, or if you introduce a claim that doesn’t belong, you’re a dead duck.

Maybe you think I’m exaggerating. So here’s a relevant quote from one of the great A-list copywriters of the last century:

“If you violate your prospect’s established beliefs in the slightest degree — either in content or direction — then nothing you promise him, no matter how appealing, can save your ad.”

Ahe A-list copywriter behind this thought is Gene Schwartz. In his book Breakthrough Advertising, Gene wrote that the structure of your ad should be a bridge of belief between the facts your prospect currently accepts, and the final facts you want him to accept. Gene called this process of bridge building “gradualization.”

So how does this look in practice?

Well, in Breakthrough Advertising, Gene gave a line-by-line breakdown of gradualization in a famous ad (“Why haven’t TV owners been told these facts?”).

But that ad is kind of old. So I’ll give you a more recent example.

Except, it’s getting late. It’s time for me to quickly re-watch the swordfighting scene from The Princess Bride, and then get to bed. I’ll share that gradualization example with you, and all its structural wonder, in my email tomorrow.

What, you don’t get my email newsletter but you want tomorrow’s email? No problem. Sign up here.

Baby Internet turning into the Matrix

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Fair warning:

Today’s long post isn’t about persuasion or copywriting. It’s just a kooky and perhaps embarrassing prediction I want to make. Read on at your own risk.

In case you’re still here, I first want to point out a few facts.

Fact one is that some complex systems are made up of simple parts.

Bee hives. Ant colonies. Human brains.

Take a bunch of simple nodes. Bring millions or billions of them together. Allow them to communicate and react to each other.

What you can get is complex behaviors. They are unpredictable, adaptable, and often display something you can call intelligence.

Second thing I want to point out is that the Internet fits this mold.

Like the human brain, the internet is made out of billions of (relatively) simple parts.

All these laptops and servers… and cell phones and routers… and smart toasters and data centers… link together in uncountable ways. They constantly communicate among themselves. They stimulate different patterns of activity. They are always changing and yet they maintain an underlying structure.

In other words, the Internet has the features needed for complex, emergent behavior. It might even have features needed for intelligence. Not a human-like intelligence, but an intelligence nonetheless.

Fact three is that more and more people are claiming the corona situation is a large-scale conspiracy.

I don’t personally believe this. Partly because conspiracy theories are often a dumb answer to complex questions. Partly because I can’t imagine any country or Illuminati-like organization coming out ahead of the current mess.

But I do think the Internet as a whole will profit.

It will get more nodes added to it… more synapses and connections built inside it… more energy and money fed into it. As an organism, it will get more powerful.

Now here’s a fourth and final thing, which I’m not sure qualifies as fact:

The whole corona situation would not have been possible without the Internet as it is today. And by “corona situation,” I mean the pandemic plus the economic and political reaction.

30 or 40 years ago, people got one dose of news a day, and it tended to concern local things more than today. Plus, those news were somewhat filtered. News outlets still paid lip service to “decency” or “professionalism” or “public responsibility.”

Thanks to the Internet, all that’s gone. People get constant news updates, all day long. And the news has become more provocative, shocking, and global.

This meant an unprecedented level of public attention and concern about corona. Long before anybody had any direct experience with the actual virus.

Combine this with the fact that today, everybody’s got a global voice (again, thanks to the Internet). The upshot was a new level of pressure on politicians to do something. So they covered their rumps by making decisive yet short-sighted decisions. And here we are, working from home, communicating by Zoom, and shopping online.

Summing it all up:

The Internet has all the preconditions for a kind of real intelligence.

The Internet played an active part in the development of the corona situation.

The Internet stands to profit from the same.

So you can see why I said this post is kooky and potentially embarrassing.

I’m not 100% saying the Internet is an intelligent entity that consciously fanned the flames of corona for its own benefit…

But my prediction is that it’s gonna get there, some time soon.

I compare it to a newborn baby, crying because it’s hungry. It does this instinctively, but the response is nourishment and growth.

Soon enough though, the baby stops crying and learns how to speak. A few years later, it grows up and turns into the Matrix.

Are you still with me? I’m impressed by your perseverance.

If I didn’t manage to convince you with my sci-fi scenario above, well, then it’s my fault.

But if I did manage to (somewhat) convince you, then I want to point out a persuasion lesson after all. It’s Gene Schwartz’s idea of gradualization. In Gene’s words:

Every claim, every image, every proof in your ad has two separate sources of strength:

1. The content of that statement itself; and

2. The preparation you have mode for that statement — either by recognizing that preparation as already existing in your prospect’s mind, or by deliberately laying the groundwork for that statement in the preceding portion of the ad itself.

If you’re still reading, you might be interested in knowing I write a daily email newsletter. (Working together, you and I can help the Internet become stronger.) If you’d like to sign up for it, click here.

Why 30 minutes is better than 2 minutes

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How do you get a penthouse on New York’s Park Avenue, a world famous art collection, and an all-around very good life?

Ask copywriter Gene Schwartz, because he had all three.

Gene paid for it all with his direct mail copywriting, both for clients and for his own publishing business.

Gene’s secret to success?

Hard work.

How hard?

“I work three hours a day,” Gene said, “every single day for five days a week. That’s all I work.”

I don’t know about you, but I feel three hours a day is something even I could manage.

But enough chop licking.

The real reason I bring up Gene Schwartz is because I re-watched an old presentation he gave at Rodale Press.

The presentation was interesting through and through. But what really caught my eye was one of the questions asked at the end.

​​It was very much connected to an issue I’m seeing with the ecommerce emails I write a lot of. I’ll talk about that another time. For now, here’s the question Gene faced:

Back in the 90s when this all happened, Rodale was running 2-minute TV commercials to sell its books. People bought these books in good numbers. But they didn’t buy very many books after, which is where all the profits are made in direct response.

So the question to Gene was, why do these TV customers not continue to buy as well as those who get one of Gene’s monster direct mail packages?

Gene responded:

“Think of what the person has committed who buys your book. If I send them this monster [holds up one direct mail package] or this monster [holds up another], well, this person really and honestly spends 15 minutes to a half hour on this thing. He really devotes a great deal of time to it. So what he’s not doing is just sending you a check for $29. He’s sending you 30 minutes. When you get a person who gets two minutes, he’s not doing anything like that.”

Gene summed it up by saying, “Different type of person. Different type of commitment.”

Here’s what I get out of this:

One of the most common questions by marketing normies is, “Why are those sales letters so long? Nobody will read that.”

The typical answer is that some people do in fact read it, and that’s how long it takes to convince 2% of them to buy.

That’s part of the answer, but it’s obviously not the whole answer. After all, Rodale sold the same books through 2-minute TV ads and 25-page direct mail pieces.

The other part is there in Gene’s response. Different marketing selects different groups of people as your customers. And it actually changes the psychology of those customers, not just in the moment when they order your product, but for the future as well.

You’re not just pushing benefits. You’re training people to be better customers. So if anybody asks you why you write those ridiculously long sales letters (or all those stupid email) that nobody ever reads, tell them the truth:

Because it’s the only way to pay for a Park Avenue penthouse, working just 3 hours a day.

Speaking of stupid emails — I write a daily email newsletter. Since you’ve just spent two minutes reading something I’ve written, you might be committed enough to get on it. If that’s the case, here’s where to go.

New neuromarketing insights from 1966

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I wasted an hour today researching “neuromarketing.” If you like, I’ll tell you what I found.

This is a new field. It’s based on insights and techniques from neuroscience. Its goal is to make people buy more.

Let me give you an example. Scientists put people inside an fMRI machine and showed them Coke and Pepsi. It turned out the two brands created different reactions in the brain.

This seemed like a pretty stupid result. There must be more to it, right? So I listened to talks by a couple of neuromarketing experts.

They made suggestions such as: make your advertising me-focused… use simple language… appeal to emotions. This was all backed by the latest science. Never mind that you could find it all — and much more — in a copy of Breakthrough Advertising. Which Gene Schwartz wrote in 1966.

But speaking of Gene, I think neuromarketing is good for one thing. It illustrates a concept Gene first talked about, which helps you sell in a crowded market. In Gene’s own words:

“If your market is at a stage where they’ve heard all the claims, in all their extremes, then mere repetition or exaggeration won’t work any longer. What this market needs now is a new device to make all these old claims become fresh and believable to them again. In other words, A NEW MECHANISM — a new way to making the old promise work. A different process — a fresh chance — a brand-new possibility of success where only disappointment has resulted before.”

By the way, even though neuromarketing is a disappointment so far, that might soon change.

Google and Facebook both started neuromarketing teams. These companies have such massive resources. Maybe they’ll get more out of neuromarketing than everybody else has gotten so far.

But if they do, don’t count on them to share what they discover. Instead, better grab a hardback copy of Breakthrough Advertising… and start reading and underlining. And if you want more recommendations for books to get you started in marketing, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/copywriters-hero/

The $3.9-billion argument for soft, believable persuasion

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Michael Burry, the first guy to figure out how to make money from the subprime mortgage crisis, lost out in a way.

Burry saw the crisis coming. He realized he could make money from it by buying something called a credit default swap. This would pay out big time once crappy mortgage bonds failed.

Burry ran a hedge fund. He invested much of the money in his control in these credit default swaps. But this was a massive opportunity. Burry wanted to invest more. So he tried to raise money for a new fund, which would buy more credit default swaps.

Trouble was, Burry was an awkward guy, and not great at persuading. He shocked people with his predictions of catastrophe. Nobody gave him more money to invest.

Fast forward nine months. Burry’s ideas had spread around the industry. So another investor, John Paulson, attempted the exact same thing Burry had tried to do. From The Big Short:

“Paulson succeeded, by presenting it to investors not as a catastrophe almost certain to happen but as a cheap hedge against the remote possibility of catastrophe.”

This brings up a fundamental rule of persuasion. It’s perhaps the most important rule of them all:

Only tell people something that they are ready to accept.

In some situations, this can mean you don’t start with your biggest promise, your strongest proof, or your most shocking prediction. In the words of Gene Schwartz, the best thinker on this topic:

“The effectiveness of your headline is as much determined by the willingness of your audience to believe what it says, as it is by the promises it makes.”

So did Michael Burry lose out? Depends on your perspective. When it was time to cash in, Burry walked away with an estimated $100 million. John Paulson? $4 billion.

Want more billion-dollar persuasion ideas? Click here and sign up for my email newsletter.

How to blend SEO and daily emails

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For the past yea​r and a half, after writing a daily email to my list, I’ve been going on this site and pasting up the email content as a blog post. ​​There are over 420 such posts by now.

These posts don’t have much value to me. Google doesn’t send truckloads of traffic to them… and the readers who do stumble in are very particular (mostly, they wanna read about Tom Selleck and his non-existent boner pill, as advertised in Newsmax, which I wrote about last February).

So from now on, I will try something different:

It’s a combination of what I was doing until now (pasting up emails as blog posts) and standard SEO (writing 2k-word articles and kowtowing to Google, which I don’t have the time or drive to do).

​​If you’re curious about how this will look, just sit tight. I’ll have the first of these “new SEO” posts ready in a couple of days, and I’ll share it with you then.

In the meantime…

My point is not just to announce that my website will soon look different (you probably don’t care). But I think this merger of SEO/daily emails is an illustration about something you might find valuable.

I’m talking about a fundamental insight about how to come up with new ideas, approaches, and solutions. You might call this creativity — but a better word might be connectivity. It’s a simple, light, almost mechanical process that a monkey can do. Here’s legendary copywriter Gene Schwartz on the topic:

“What is creation? Creation is a lousy word. It’s a lousy word that confuses what you really do to perform a simple little procedure. Creation means create something out of nothing. In the beginning, God created Heaven and Earth. Okay, only God can do that. We can’t do that: We’re human.

“​​So let’s throw creation out, and let’s talk about connectivity. What you are trying to do is connect things together. You’re trying to practice connectivity. You’re trying to get two ideas that were separate in your mind and culture before, and you are trying to put them together so they are now one thought. You want something new to come out, but new doesn’t mean it never existed before, it means never joined before. New – in every of discipline – means never joined before.”

BTW, all this means I won’t be pasting my daily emails on this site any more. But I will continue writing them and sending them to my newsletter subscribers. If you want to read these emails, you can subscribe for free here:

https://bejakovic.com/copywriters-hero/

A copywriting revelation from today’s Uber ride

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I took an Uber today and in my best Gene Schwartz moment, I decided to chat with the driver.

We talked for a few minutes about casual topics. Suddenly, he shifted to his interest in theology and his deep Catholic faith.

He spoke enthusiastically for a minute. And then, sensing my lack of religious conviction, he launched into a persuasive argument. These were the key points:

1. Perhaps you think God doesn’t care about you?
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2. Of course he does. Why else would he make you in his own image?

​3. You’ve got reason… You’ve got memory… You’ve got free will. These are all aspects of God. He gave them to you because he cares.

​4. You should look into this more… it will give you the meaning you haven’t been able to find so far in life.

Here’s why I bring this up:

A few days ago, I watched an excerpt from the Agora copy camp (or whatever it was called). This is a video training recorded at Agora Financial offices where they locked a bunch of newbie copywriters in a dungeon, and over the course of a week or two, taught them the Agora way of writing copy.

The excerpt I watched showed Joe Schriefer, the copy chief at Agora, explaining how to structure your sales letters.

The first step is to brainstorm a giant list of objections…

Then pick out the most important ones, and put them in a logical order — the order in which they will appear to your reader.

The next step is to convert each objection into a sexy subhead.

And the final step, the actual writing, is to expand each subheadlined section in a 4-part structure, which my Uber driver adopted instinctively:

1. Objection
2. Claim
3. Proof
4. Benefit

If you write sales copy, you should look into this structure. It will give you the kind of writing speed and persuasive power you haven’t been able to develop with more heathen copywriting methods. Why else would Joe Schriefer share it with you?

How is your vagal tone?

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“Well I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do you?”
– Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah

Gary Halbert once wrote that if you’re in the marketing business, you always have to do two things:

1) Keep the fundamentals in mind
2) Keep an eye out for what’s working right now

Well, right now, one specific health offer seems to be working like crazy. I’m assuming this because I’ve gotten dozens of emails promoting this offer over the past two months.

Many of these emails came from various Agora health brands (the offer in question also seems to come from an Agora brand). Others came from 3rd party newsletters that I suppose are affiliates. And I’ve even seen email drops in Newsmax promoting this offer.

I’m listening to the VSL right now, and two things stick out as possible reasons why this offer is doing so well at the moment.

First, it has a unique “problem mechanism” (that’s a term that I first heard from top-flight copywriter Stefan Georgi). In this case, the problem mechanism is “low vagal tone,” which as the VSL will tell you, will do everything from shriveling your nuts to corroding your cells and even burning out your brain. Do you have a health problem right now? Maybe it’s time to get your vagal tone checked.

But how do you check your vagal tone? Well, the VSL has an answer for you. It’s even got a solution in case you find that your vagal tone is low.

And that’s the second possible reason why this VSL seems to be killing it right now. The “solution mechanism” (your run of the mill, Gene Schwartz mechanism) is not a pill, not a supplement, and not even a newsletter. instead, it’s a special sound, or as the VSL says, a “healing frequency discovered between 85-255 Hz.”

Maybe that’s the secret chord that David played to increase the vagal tone. Anyways, if you’re in the marketing business, and you’d like to see this offer that’s working so well right now, here’s the link:

https://pro.donovanhealth.com/p/OV6SSSPKG1I/EOV6VB48/