Hall & Oates

Your kiss is on my list

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I have this quirk of the brain where if I’ve heard a song some time in the past few days, I will often wake up in the middle of the night with that song playing on full blast in my head.

Last night, around 3am, I woke up. What I clearly heard in the darkness was the refrain to Hall and Oats’s Kiss On My List:

“Because your kiss is on my list… of the best things in liiiiiiiiife…”

The reason Kiss On My List played in my head is that I recently listened to a lot of 80s hits. And that’s because I used several 80s hits to illustrate parts of the presentation I gave to Brian Kurtz’s Titans XL group this past Thursday.

Overall, the presentation went very well. This was a surprise to me, because I was a bit desperate in the lead-up to it.

I had tried running through the presentation a couple times before the actual call. ​It seemed like a disaster each time — “these stupid songs, what was I thinking?” But apparently, I managed to pull it off at the last minute because lots of people who watched have written me to say how much they liked it.

But!

What I want to share with you today is not a bit from my presentation.

Instead, what I want to share with you is a bit that came from the other presentation inside Thursday’s Titans call. That presentation was by a guy named Charley Mann. Charley runs a coaching business for law firm owners.

I’m not sure Charley wants me to share publicly how much money he’s making. But on the call, he shared his numbers. He’s doing very well, and he will do even better soon.

Anyways, towards end of his presentation, Charley said:

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One last thing I’ll say real quick, which is the idea of making money — trying to make it boring for myself.

I have plenty of things that I love in the rest of my life. I love building the business. But fundamentally, I want the fundamentals. And so that’s the way I think about the business. The fundamentals executed in a really sound, even spectacular way, over time.

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That felt like a gentlemanly slap across the face to me. Because it made me realize I do get my kicks, or at least some fun and expression, via my work — via doing things like creating an 80s-music-themed business presentation, which refuses to come together until the very last minute.

The trouble is, such creative experiments 1) rarely make for optimal business solutions and 2) demand much more time and work than simply focusing on the proven fundamentals and performing those very well.

I’m sharing this in case you too might be like me.

If you are, then maybe it’s time to consider taking up skydiving or high-stakes roulette or perhaps drag racing as a way to get your kicks in the real world, outside your business. Or at the very least, perhaps it’s time to consider, like Charley says, focusing on just the fundamentals, and executing those very well over time.

And now, if you want the fundamentals of email copywriting, then I have a course for you.

I’m not sure I would ever have been able to prepare such a course had I only ever written emails for this newsletter, where I feel compelled to say something new and creative every day to get my small kick of excitement.

Fortunately, I’ve also worked extensively with clients, including a few clients where I had to write multiple daily emails every day for years at a time, along with tons of other copy, and where real money was on the line – $4k-$5k of actual sales coming in with each email.

If you want to learn what I learned while writing all those emails and pulling in all those sales, and if you want to implement something similar in your business, then here you go:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Use the Force to avoid copy that’s too long

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A long, long time ago, in a galaxy that’s pretty much the one we live in, I was wasting time doing “research” (ie. not writing when I should have been). But at least I discovered the following curious fact:

George Lucas’s early drafts for the Star Wars script talked about “the Force of Others.”

These early drafts gave detailed explanations of what the Force of Others was, how it tied into a “Kyber crystal,” and how there was a “Bogan” side and an “Ashla” side of it.

Following his better instincts, Lucas stripped out all the explaining in the final draft. He got rid of the crystal and the Bogan nonsense, and dropped “the Others” and simply called it “the Force.” Star Wars went on to become a pretty, pretty big hit.

There’s a copywriting lesson here. But first, here’s another illustration:

Back in 1982, Darryl Hall was writing the prototype of a song called Maneater. He was stumbling on the last line of the chorus. “Oh here she comes… She’s a maneater and a …”

Hall can’t remember the original final line, because his girlfriend told him to “drop that shit at the end.” So he did. Maneater went to the top of the charts ​and stayed there longer than any other Hall & Oates song. Hall said that cutting down the last line made all the difference.

Conventional direct response wisdom says that longer copy outperforms shorter copy. It’s been proven over and over in many tests.

Copywriter Victor Schwab, who wrote How to Write a Good Advertisement, definitely supported the use of longer copy. But Schwab also wrote the following:

“Some ads don’t need much factual under-pinning… The copy about some products can soar successfully — without ‘coming a cropper.’ An abundance of factual material merely inhibits its flight. If too explicit about the “why” and “hows,” such copy pulls the reader’s imagination up short.” ​​

I can’t give you a recipe for when you should take out the “whys” and “hows” of your copy. I think it’s a matter of having a good feel for your market and your product, and knowing what they need to hear — and what not — in order to make the sale.

In other words, trust your intuition. Or use the Force. The Bogan Force. Of Others. And stop yourself if you say too much.

I should have stopped there. But I have one final thing to say. I write a daily email newsletter. If you’d like to get my emails, much like what you just read, you can sign up here.

A crazy and messed up way to end an email

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Some time in 1981, future “Songwriters Hall of Fame” member Darryl Hall was sitting at the piano in his Greenwich Village apartment.

His girlfriend Sara was in the kitchen peeling a hard-boiled egg.

Hall had a pencil in his mouth. He played a chord on the piano. He took the pencil and scribbled down a few words on a piece of paper.

Oh here she comes… She’s a maneater… and a commitmentphobe.

“Terrible!” Hall said. He crumpled up the paper and threw it on the floor.

Sara walked into the living room. She swallowed the first half of her hard-boiled egg. “What’s up?” she asked.

“So frustrating,” Hall said. “This new Maneater thing. I have the intro. ‘She’s sitting with you but her eyes are on the door.’ Right? A little story. Everybody can picture that.”

Sara stuffed the other half of the egg in her mouth. She raised her eyebrows to indicate to Hall to keep going.

“But then I get to the chorus,” Hall said. “It’s really the payload of the song. It’s what I want the listener to take away. But I can’t find a good way to wrap it up. ‘She’s a maneater and a… dirty nasty bitch? A cruel seductive girl? A womanhater?’ I can’t figure out how to end it with something people haven’t heard before.”

Sara finished chewing the egg and swallowed. She walked to the crumpled-up paper, picked it up off the floor, and looked over the lyrics.

“Drop that shit at the end,” she said. “Go, ‘She’s a maneater.’ And stop.”

Hall frowned. Then he really frowned. “You’re crazy.” he said. “That’s messed up.”

Sara rolled her eyes and walked back to the kitchen. Hall stared at the piano. He closed his eyes. He played a few notes. And he started to nod his head.

In the end, Darryl Hall dropped the shit at the end, as per his girlfriend’s advice. Hall & Oates recorded the song a few days later.

Maneater became a number one hit on the Billboard Hot 100 chart on December 18, 1982. Out of the five number one hits that Hall & Oates had in their career, Maneater became the one that stayed at no. 1 the longest. Going by the 172 million views the song has on YouTube, it remains their biggest hit today.

“I thought about it,” Hall said once when speaking about Maneater and about his girlfriend’s suggestion. “I realized she was right. And it made all the difference.”

Use the Force to avoid copy that’s too long

by

George Lucas’s early drafts for the Star Wars script talked about “the Force of Others.”

These early drafts gave detailed explanations of what the Force of Others was, how it tied into a “Kyber crystal,” and how there was a “Bogan” side and an “Ashla” side of it.

Following his better instincts, Lucas stripped out all the explaining in the final draft. He got rid of the crystal and the Bogan nonsense, and dropped “the Others” and simply called it “the Force.” Star Wars went on to become a pretty, pretty big hit.

There’s a copywriting lesson here. But first, here’s another illustration:

Back in 1982, Darryl Hall was writing the prototype of a song called Maneater. He was stumbling on the last line of the chorus. “Oh here she comes… She’s a maneater and a …”

Hall can’t remember the original final line, because his girlfriend told him to “drop that shit at the end.” So he did. Maneater went to the top of the charts ​and stayed there longer than any other Hall & Oates song. Hall said that cutting down the last line made all the difference.

Conventional direct response wisdom says that longer copy outperforms shorter copy. It’s been proven over and over in many tests.

Copywriter Victor Schwab, who wrote How to Write a Good Advertisement, definitely supported the use of longer copy. But Schwab also wrote the following:

“Some ads don’t need much factual under-pinning… The copy about some products can soar successfully — without ‘coming a cropper.’ An abundance of factual material merely inhibits its flight. If too explicit about the “why” and “hows,” such copy pulls the reader’s imagination up short.” ​​

I can’t give you a recipe for when you should take out the “whys” and “hows” of your copy. I think it’s a matter of having a good feel for your market and your product, and knowing what they need to hear — and what not — in order to make the sale.

In other words, trust your intuition. Or use the Force. The Bogan Force. Of Others. And stop yourself if you say too much.

I should have stopped there. But I have one final thing to say. I write a daily email newsletter. If you’d like to get my emails, much like what you just read, you can sign up here.