Gene Schwartz

Breakthrough con artistry

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If you start sniffing around the copywriting cafeteria, you will soon discover that many top copywriting chefs revere one specific book. ​​It’s an old book, originally published 53 years ago. It wasn’t republished for many years, so resourceful people stole this book from public libraries, while less resourceful people bought used copies on eBay. This eventually drove the price for a single copy up to $600 or more.

It must be pretty amazing to be worth so much money, right?

Well, once you start reading this book, odds are good you will soon be frustrated. That’s because the book, while written by a top-level copywriter who knew how to write simply and clearly in sales letters, is complex and complicated and hard to read and contains new and unfamiliar ideas. But this last bit is why so many expert copywriters revere this one particular book.

The book in question was written by the great Eugene Schwartz, and is called Breakthrough Advertising. The reason it’s so revered is that, in the first 3 chapters alone, it gives an unrivaled explanation of how marketing evolves in different markets, and how businesses, marketers, and copywriters can use this to their profit.

The gist is that you always want to differentiate yourself. Of course, that summary is a little too general to be useful. If you want more detail, you have two options.

Option one is to get a copy of Breakthrough Advertising yourself and to push through it, or through the first three chapters at least. The book is available now for the ridiculously low price of $125, and if you really do read it and apply what it teaches, it will be well worth your money and brain power.

Option two is free and will only take 3 minutes and 4 seconds of your life. It might even make you laugh. I’m talking about a new Key & Peele video that a friend just sent me, titled (entitled?) “You Can’t Con a Con Artist If You’re Also a Con Artist.”

​​This short sketch is not nearly as detailed of a guide as Breakthrough Advertising, but it presents many of the same ideas, in a condensed, entertaining package. If you want to give it a looksee, and try to unravel the marketing messages hidden within, here is the link:

Copywriting for cavemen

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A while back, some scientists at Cambridge University studied a bunch of hunter gatherer tribes, and they came up with an inspiring conclusion:

Hunter gatherers do not work very hard.

In fact, when you add up all the hunting and gathering they do in a typical week, it adds up to about 20 hours.

Compare that to the typical work week of a human being in agricultural society (30 hours) or in an industrial society (40+ hours).

The point being that maybe we’re not evolved to be all gung-ho about non-stop sweat and toil.

And so if you feel a little lazy sometimes, blame it on tens of thousands of years of evolution that our ancestors spent hanging around caves and watching the caveman equivalent of Netflix.

Now, here’s a bit of good news.

If you aren’t all that crazy about long work—weeks, then copywriting might be a good career choice for you.

Some of the top copywriters out there — including Gene Schwartz, Gary Bencivenga, and Parris Lampropoulos — have stated that a good day for them consists of three hours of solid writing.

Pretty cavemannish schedule.

Plus it gets better.

If you’re easily distracted on top of being a little lazy, you’ve got an additional leg up (three legs down?) on all those other monkeys who want to write successful copy.

Because much of copywriting — 60% according to top copywriting coach David Garfinkel — often goes to research.

Ie. reading.

Following random links.

Kicking rocks around.

And looking for that great idea that will help you sell this weeks copy assignment.

So maybe you’re wondering where I’m going with this.

And it’s simply to give you a bit of encouragement in case you’re wondering whether you have what it takes to be a copywriter.

Odds are good that even the things that you might blame yourself for — such as apparent laziness and distractability — might help you in your journey to get to that top level of marketing and writing copy, if you know how to use them.

Of course, there are lots of other things you’ll need as well.

So if you have questions about succeeding as a copywriter, and if you want my opinion on the steps you need to take besides not working very hard and clicking on lots of seductive links, here’s where to go:
https://bejakovic.com/upwork-book-notification-list/

Why it pays to be a four-legged whale

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Earlier this year, paleontologists working in Peru discovered the fossil of a prehistoric four-legged whale.

This beast lived around 40 million years ago. It was about 15 feet long, looked something like a giant otter, and could both walk on land and swim in water.

While I was meditating on this prehistoric monster, I realized it’s a good metaphor for a real problem that many marketers, copywriters, and entrepreneurs face.

In fact, I heard a very famous and successful marketer, copywriter, and entrepreneur talk about this very issue.

The man I have in mind is the late and great Gene Schwartz. And the problem Gene was discussing was this:

As you become more successful, you lose touch with your customers — and that’s terrible.

Becoming successful requires certain things — discipline, hard work, optimism. It also brings certain things — money, freedom, a sense of achievement.

The thing is, unless you’re specifically catering to other successful entrepreneurs… then these are not characteristics that your market will share.

And as you become more successful, it will become harder and harder for you to connect with people in your market, to understand them, and to get them to buy whatever you’re selling.

In other words, you will become a sleek, powerful, self-contented whale, swimming gracefully under water and gorging on tons of freely available plankton each day…

While all your monkey and squirrel customers still live in fear, anger, and scarcity on dry land.

So what’s the fix for this?

Well, Gene advised immersing yourself in trash pop culture and constantly talking to your prospects.

I’d personally take it a step further.

I’d advise growing a set of hairy whale legs and using them to crawl around on land every now and then.

So for example…

Allowing yourself to waste time…

Wallowing in controlled negativity…

Making an occasional impulsive decision…

Or blaming others for your problems instead of taking responsibility for yourself.

Of course, these aren’t good behaviors. They will not in themselves lead you to success.

But indulged carefully and sporadically, they can help you understand how most people live, what they want, and how you can give it to them.

At least that’s how I justify my own whale legs.

And if you want to take advantage of all of the time I spend reading trash pop culture and making impulsive decisions — so you can have more effective marketing for your successful business — then you might like the following offer:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

Lethal Webinar 2

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The camera zooms in through a window of a high-rise apartment and onto the bed.

On the bed, there’s a topless blonde woman. She’s wearing white stockings and a negligee, and writhing in drug-fueled lust.

The next thing you know, she gets up.

She stumbles over to the balcony.

She climbs onto the railing.

And then she takes a dive, falling some 30 floors down, onto the roof of a parked car.

So begins the original Lethal Weapon movie.

I bring this up because Gene Schwartz, one of the greatest copywriters of all time, called this movie “the greatest training for any merchandiser in the world, especially copy people.”

He advised copywriters to see it at least three times, preferably in the same day.

Why? What could possibly be so great about Lethal Weapon?

In Gene’s own words:

“You’ve got to pick up the rhythm, and you’ve got to see how Silver, who is an absolute genius — Spielberg and Silver are the two communication geniuses of our country at this moment — every timing, every three minutes he throws another blast at you. There’s another head being smashed against a windshield. There’s another fifty people being blown out of an airplane. And then there’s a few minutes of dialogue which means nothing.”

This is the same structure that Gene advised for sales letters as well.

Explosion… Fight… 3 minutes of conversation… Another explosion…

Headline… Cautionary tale… 3 sentences of explanation… Another shocking story…

You might think this structure is just for hyped-up sales copy.

I don’t agree.

At a fundamental level, this is how humans prefer to communicate, or at least how they prefer to consume information.

This same structure works for everything from hard-core sales letters to technical webinars.

Of course, you have to adapt to your market.

For example, if you are in fact doing a technical webinar (as a friend of mine might be doing soon), you wouldn’t start with a coked-up topless hooker jumping to her death.

But you would want to shock and startle your audience a bit — in the appropriate dose. So you could start off the webinar with a dramatic case study, or a cautionary tale from one of your existing customers.

The key is to shake up and disturb your audience a bit, before you get to the more reasoned, serious, and boring content.

At least that’s my opinion.

Of course, technical webinars are not my forte. However, sales emails are. And if you want sales emails that shake up and disturb your audience, then Riggs, here’s what to do:

Click on the link below. And see whether you want to sign up for a free copy of my upcoming book on email marketing, specifically for the health space. Here’s where to point your lethal weapon:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/

5 marketing lessons from the most boring writer who ever lived

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I advise you not to read this post.

It’s long, and it deals with a very boring topic. And that’s the poet Kenneth Goldsmith.

Goldsmith practices something called “uncreative writing.”

For example, he’s written a book called “Day.” This is a typed-out edition of the New York Times from September 1, 2000. “Day” is 836 pages long, and it took Goldsmith a year to type.

Goldsmith then wrote “Weather,” a transcript of a year’s worth of weather reports from a New York City local radio station.

After that, “Traffic” followed. And then “Sports.” You get the idea.

So is Goldsmith just a boring crank?

Maybe so.

But he’s definitely a successful, well-paid crank.

He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. He read to Obama at the White House. He gets paid $500 for 30-minute readings of his works. And in 2013, he became the first poet laureate of the Museum of Modern Art.

But who cares about all that?

Instead, it turns out there are a bunch of instructive parallels between what Goldsmith does and what marketers and copywriters should do. Let me tell you about the top 5:

#1 Format rules

Speaking of his book “Day,” Goldsmith wrote:

“When you take a newspaper and reframe it as a book, you get pathos and tragedy and stories of love.”

Very true, in poetry as in direct-response copy. That’s because changing the format of your sales message — a sales letter vs. a video vs. a book — tends to have a much bigger impact on conversions than changing your headline, your offer, or any other aspect of your copy.

#2 Repulsion marketing

Goldsmith calls himself “the most boring writer who ever lived.”

He honed his boring chops working as a disk jockey for a radio show called Unpopular Music. That’s where he learned that challenging someone not to listen (or read) makes the person pay closer attention. And then your content either drives them away, or drives them more closely towards you.

Nothing new, you might say. This is a well-honed positioning strategy in the marketing world as well — email marketing guru Ben Settle being one well-known proponent.

#3 Branding done right

Goldsmith makes a personal spectacle out of himself. He wears paisley-patterned suits, sometimes with a long flowing skirt over his pants. “Every time I’m in public, I’m a persona, and people really hate that.”

Mind you, this isn’t traditional branding.

But exaggerating his natural tastes makes Goldsmith noticeable and memorable, and it’s something anybody (including internet entrepreneurs) can use as well.

#4 Troll management

The article I read about Goldsmith was full of comments by detractors, who were complaining about various aspects of his work.

Meantime, Goldsmith was off somewhere, busily devising the agenda for his upcoming projects — which will no doubt draw more criticism and negative reactions.

And there’s more.

When he was widely condemned of misappropriating racially sensitive material (the autopsy report of Michael Brown) for one of his readings, Goldsmith responded with his own thoughts — but didn’t apologize.

What better way to deal with online trolls as well?

#5 Moving information

Goldsmith says about his work:

“Moving information is a literary act, in and of itself […] How I make my way through this thicket of information — how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize it and distribute it — is what distinguishes my writing from yours.”

Well, moving information is a sales act as well. In fact, Goldsmith’s attitude above echoes something copywriting genius Gene Schwartz said:

“Copy is not written. Copy is assembled.”

In essence, Gene was saying that sales copy is simply a collection of good sales arguments. And those sales arguments don’t come from introspection. Instead, they come from research, deep into your market. In other words, much of your copy can come straight from forum posts, Facebook comments, and testimonials written by your target audience.

And on that note, I’m signing off from today’s episode of Unpopular Copywriting.

If you want more unpopular ideas, sign up for my newsletter by using the page below. I’ll even send you a link to a free promo of my upcoming Upwork book (ETA 1 week):

https://bejakovic.com/upwork-book-notification-list/

 

The worst aromatherapy book Broadway has ever seen

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“Tonight, essential oils. Tomorrow…”

The Producers — a brave and brilliant comedy from back in 1968.

The basic plot goes as follows:

A Broadway producer named Max Bialystock meets an accountant named Leo Bloom.

Together, they realize that a play that flops could earn more money than a big hit.

So they set out to produce the worst play in the history of Broadway. It’s titled:

“Springtime for Hitler”

It’s shocking, it’s campy, it’s offensive, and it’s guaranteed to fail. Except, against all odds, it becomes a hit.

Well, I am currently having my “Springtime for Hitler” moment.

You see, once upon a time, I got into the aromatherapy niche. This was mostly a marketing exercise, and the main reason I chose aromatherapy was the big interest I saw among Amazon best selling books on the topic.

In other words, I expected it to be a quick cash grab or more likely a flop.

Fast forward a few years, and I am genuinely interested in essential oils (I use them myself), I’ve spent hours upon hours researching and writing about the topic, and I’ve even become a low-level expert on the matter.

And now, I have my very own book to prove it.

As of today, my first book about essential oils, Essential Oil Quick Start Guide, is live for sale.

And while it’s not a Broadway hit yet, I do have my first sales trickling in.

Anyways, you can see the sales page at the link below.

If you have zero interest in reading about essential oils, it probably won’t make you buy. Still, it might be worth looking at just to see how I weave in valuable information (suggestion: Gary Bencivenga) with a non-stop barrage of bullets (suggestion: Gene Schwartz). Here’s the link:

http://www.unusualhealth.com/quick-start-guide/

The parable of the marketing apprentice

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Do you know the parable of the sorceror’s apprentice?

The sorcerer leaves the tower for a bit, and his apprentice uses what magic he’s learned to get the broom to come alive and start fetching pails of water. Except the stupid broom, once it has gotten the command, won’t stop. The apprentice hasn’t learned this magic incantation yet.

So more and more water keeps being sloshed into the tower. The apprentice starts to panic and decides to chop the broom in half. Not smart. His problems are now doubled — two brooms are bringing twice the water.

This is akin to what happens when people start learning about marketing and copywriting. For example, the very first bit of marketing advice you’ll hear is to focus on how your offer benefits the prospect.

“Don’t make it about you, make it about them!”

It’s a solid piece of advice. And it should be used, when and where it’s needed. But is it the only incantation a marketer needs to know?

I thought of this a few months back when I got a promotional email from a health coach named Ari Whitten. Ari runs a very popular online course called the Energy Blueprint, and he was sending an email to his list to promote his new book. The subject line? “My New Book is HERE!”

Who cares, right? Where’s the benefit? What’s in it for me, Ari?

Well, apparently, much of Ari’s list cares. Through motivating his own loyal followers — and probably with a lot of affiliate help — Ari’s book shot up to the #2 spot in the health category on Amazon, and within the top 40 of all books on Amazon.

In a way, this is reminiscent of what Gene Schwartz calls the “most aware” state of customer awareness. From Gene’s Breakthrough Advertising:

The customer knows of your product — knows what it does — knows he wants it. At this point, he just hasn’t gotten around to buying it yet. Your headline — in fact, your entire ad — need state little more except the name of your product and a bargain price.

At the same time, this isn’t really about awareness of the product. Instead, the awareness is about Ari himself. People know him and want what he has to offer, without taking too much care of what his offer actually is.

But let’s tie this back to the sorcerer’s apprentice.

Wouldn’t Ari have been more successful if he had pitched the benefits of his new book right in the subject line? Maybe, at least for selling this one book. That’s like telling your broom to go fetch the water.

However, for the long term, always shouting benefits might not be the best strategy. If you keep writing to the same people, and all you do is talk benefits, without doing other things to build a bond with your readers (like entertaining them, teasing them with curiosity, or relating to them on a personal level), then you eventually lose their attention and you make your job harder — or impossible — for the long term.

That’s when you try chopping the axe in two. In the marketing world, that usually means making more and more extreme promises and claims. When that doesn’t seem to work, you chop again and again, making still more extreme claims.

That is, until the sorcerer comes back from his afternoon walk. He surveys the mess, throws the sleeves of his robe back, and  finally casts the magic spell (called “relationship”) to drive all these marketing problems away.

“My new book is HERE!”

The only way to evaluate copy

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Three wise men doing a copy critique

Professor Skridlov: Father Giovanni, how can you stay here instead of returning to Italy and giving the people there something of the faith which you are now inspiring in me?

Father Giovanni: Ah Professor. You do not understand man’s psyche as well as you know archeology. Faith cannot be given to men. Faith is not the result of thinking. It comes from direct knowledge.

I started re-reading Gene Schwartz’s Breakthrough Advertising. And right on the first page, he offers this warning:

“Copy cannot create desire for a product. It can only take the hopes, dreams, fears and desires in the hearts of millions of people, and focus those already-existing desires on a particular product.”

And here’s another related quote, this from Gary Halbert:

“You know, I’m sick to death of people who can’t be bothered with the little nitty-gritty details of “hands on” experience. Of people who believe that somehow they can know a thing without experiencing it. Listen: It is possible to be “conversant” with something and really not have any kind of “gut understanding” of it at all. I’m sorry, but no matter what your Mommy and Daddy told you, men can never really understand the pain of childbirth, priests cannot comprehend the joys of sex, “normies” can never understand alcoholics, and not one speck of true advertising wisdom has ever been written by a PhD.”

And finally, a bit from a recent Ben Settle email:

“This is, btw, why I don’t do critiques anymore. (Besides the fact I hate doing copywriting critiques) As Doug D’Anna put it in the same interview: ‘How can I offer somebody a copywriting critique on a piece of sales copy for a product or a prospect that I am 100 percent unfamiliar with?'”

Here’s how this ties together in my head.

Nobody can really judge good copy unless they are a prospect and ready to buy. Nice-sounding copy can bomb. Awful copy can sell.

So how do you write good copy? Research is important. So is experience. So is intuition. Then there’s feedback from other experts.

All that stuff is great, but ultimately, none of it is conclusive.

Fortunately, direct response copywriting is one area where we don’t have to agree to disagree. We can know which appeal is best. Even if we cannot see inside people’s hearts, and even though we cannot have their problems (or faith). And that’s simply through sales.

How to sell probiotics with a lesson from Lucky Strike cigarettes

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There’s a scene in the TV show Mad Men where the main character, Don Draper, hits on a moment of advertising brilliance.

Don has been tasked with coming up with a new ad campaign for Lucky Strike cigarettes.

But he hasn’t come up with anything.

And so he’s sitting in the meeting with the client, and it’s going terribly. Since he hasn’t come up with anything, he has to hand over the reins to a junior copywriter who pitches an angle that flops.

The frustrated and disappointed clients get up to leave.

And in that moment, Don hits on his inspired idea:

“We’ve got 6 identical companies selling 6 identical products. We can say anything we want. How do you make your cigarettes?”

The owner of Lucky Strikes shrugs. “We grow it, cure it, toast it.”

“There you go,” Don says. And he writes the new (and now age-old) Lucky Strike slogan down on the board:

“It’s toasted”

Now, if you know something about direct response marketing, this might seem like a typical example of useless branding copy.

Where’s the benefit, after all?

Well, sometimes you don’t need to scream benefits, even in direct response copy.

I thought of this today while I was working on a sales page for a probiotic.

Probiotics are a huge market right now.

And many people are already aware of what probiotics do (gut health, immune system, etc).

The problem for many people at this stage is not, “How can I fix my awful bloating/indigestion/gas?”

Instead, the problem now is “How can I choose from this sea of probiotic products which all claim to reduce my awful bloating/indigestion/gas?”

It’s something that the copywriting great Gene Schwartz called the 3rd stage of market sophistication. From Gene’s book Breakthrough Advertising:

“If your market is at the stage where they’ve heard all 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 those old claims become fresh and believable to them again. In other words, A NEW MECHANISM — a new way to make the old promise work. A different process — a fresh chance — a brand-new possibility of success where only disappointment has resulted before.”

For the probiotic sales page that I’m working on, that mechanism is clear: the specific strains in the product have clinical studies showing they actually work. This sets the product apart from just about any competitor on the market right now. Applying the Lucky Strike lesson, we could sum up the sales message as:

“It’s clinically proven”

Now, in the Mad Men episode, Don winds up giving an inspiring speech about how advertising is all about happiness.

The fact is, it’s more about hope — the hope that our problems can be solved.

And if your customers are a bit confused or jaded because of other similar products on the market, then you have to give them hope that your product really is better or different than anything they’ve seen before.

John Bejakovic

P.S. If you need copywriting in the health space that can either wow with benefits or cajole with mechanisms, then you can get in touch with me here:

https://bejakovic.com/contact