Info Marketing Blog Archives

I started a new daily habit a few weeks ago. It’s called the one-a-day marketing vitamin.

This habit was recommended by the man most insiders call the greatest living copywriter, Gary Bencivenga.

Gary’s advice was to read a good ad each day… figure out what made it good… and ask yourself how you might possibly make it still better.

To get my daily marketing vitamin, I find myself going back over and over to a specific “swipe file.”

This swipe file is more than just a collection of random old ads, the way many people are peddling now.

It has information I have never found anywhere else.

It features ads for a variety of offers, products, businesses — rather than being just a cultish selection of ads written by familiar copywriters who for whatever reason reached star status in this little industry.

This swipe file features actual controls — winning ads that ran repeatedly, year after year, with dozens of different placements in different magazines or newsletters.

And best of all, this swipe file has not just ads, but interesting stories of the people behind the ads and business, and expert insights into what made the ads work.

This particular swipe file, or rather the person who keeps curating it, was endorsed by Gary Bencivenga himself, on the last day of his famous farewell seminar, which cost $5k to attend, and brought together the greatest collection of direct marketing talent ever assembled in one room.

Two days ago, I reached into said swipe file and pulled up an ad. It was an advertorial, from the 1980s, selling some kind of anti-aging skin offer. The headline ran:

“HOLLYWOOD SCANDAL ERUPTS AS… Former Dynasty Make-up Artist Reveals TV’s Best Kept Beauty Secret!”

I’ve written dozens of advertorials that scaled on cold traffic. I’ve also managed a couple of large email lists where we regularly promoted dozens of other offers sold via advertorials.

That’s to say, I’ve been exposed to lots of advertorials that work, and even more that don’t work.

In fact, I can tell you that most advertorials don’t work. In large part, that’s because they are really a combination of ad + boring article. Because they don’t follow the basics of direct response advertising as evident in that swipe file headline above:

Hollywood… scandal… beauty… secret.

That’s not really an advertorial. It’s not advertisement + editorial. It’s really an advertabloid, at least as far as the headline goes.

But back to that Gary Bencivenga-endorsed swipe file, and the man behind it.

The guy’s name is Lawrence Bernstein, and he runs, among his other ventures, a website called Info Marketing Blog.

Lawrence’s services were a secret weapon for top direct response marketers before Lawrence got endorsed by Gary Bencivenga. They were even more in demand after… and they continue to be in demand today.

I happen to know this because I got on a call with Lawrence a few days ago, and he told me a bit of his story.

And though Lawrence didn’t say it, I bet his long-running clients wince and maybe even curse a bit when they see Lawrence highlight some ad on his blog which was until now their private and profitable inside knowledge.

So that’s my public service announcement for today:

If you want to get better at marketing, and maybe even want to repurpose time-tested appeals into your copy today, then start the one-a-day marketing vitamin habit.

And in my opinion, there’s no better place to get your vitamin fix than Lawrence’s Info Marketing Blog. You can find it easily via a service called Google.

But this is a commercial newsletter, and so I must also advert to the fact that the deadline for my current offer, 9 Deadly Email Sins, is approaching with terrifying speed.

This offer will close down tomorrow, Sunday August 6, at 8:31 CET.

Disclaimer:

This 9 Deadly Email Sins training has practically nothing to do with the content of today’s email. In particular, Sin #4 will not be a more detailed treatment of the core point I shared with you today… nor will it include multiple examples of offending emails I have reviewed in the past… nor will it be an opportunity to reveal my simple, congruent, and non-sensationalist ways to introduce drama or intrigue into any email, even in the most conservative and sales-averse markets.

That said, you might still want to attend the 9 Deadly Email Sins presentation, for reasons of your own. In case you’d like to get in before the doors close:

https://bejakovic.com/sme-classified-ty/

IN ONLY SIX MONTHS, that formerly desperate man bought a $385,000 house with half down, and became a millionaire in less than a year. He also bought a vacation house, put away enough to cover his kids’ college educations, easily stopped his bad habits, and attained complete personal and financial freedom… all accomplished automatically, without effort or willpower!

That’s the back envelope copy from a direct mail sales letter written by one Jeff Paul.

Jeff was a student and protege of Dan Kennedy, and this sales letter is actually selling Dan’s Psycho Cybernetics program.

I’m sharing this copy with you for two reasons:

First, because I want to point you to Info Marketing Blog. It’s got a few decades’ worth of brilliant direct response ads, and smart and interesting commentary. And if you need proof of that, the guy who runs Info Marketing Blog, Lawrence Bernstein, was called out as a valuable resource during Gary Bencivenga’s farewell seminar by Gary Bencivenga himself.

Second, there’s a masterful marketing and copywriting lesson in those two sentences of copy above. It’s right there at the end:

“… automatically, without effort or willpower!”

When I look outside at the people I know… and when I look inside, at my own feelings and frustrations… I find this is what we all really really want, deep down.

Peace. No effort. Definitely no struggle, and no demands on our willpower. No opportunity for it to go wrong. Instead, all done automatically, by some mechanism outside of us.

That’s why smart marketers like Dan Kennedy and Jeff Paul, and millions of others like them, make those promises.

And if you want to sell, in big numbers, at high prices, you should make these promises too.

Only be careful those desires you stimulate in your sales copy don’t seep into your own subconscious.

Because in my experience, life is all about effort, about exerting your willpower, about getting things done yourself instead of sitting around and wishing they could be done automatically.

How exactly do you reconcile selling something to people that you wouldn’t consume yourself? It seems a little like going down to the elementary school each day to sell drugs to kids, while being religious about never allowing that filth near your own family.

I don’t have a good way to reconcile these things for you. But facts are facts. And if you want to see some market-tested facts, here’s Jeff Paul’s complete sales letter. It’s worth reading. So much so that I’ll even talk about it tomorrow.

Sign up for my email newsletter if you want to read that when it comes out. And here’s the link to the sales letter if you want to get a head start.

https://infomarketingblog.com/wordpress/jeff-pauls-greatest-story-selling-ad/

Direct marketing scandal erupts as… Gary Bencivenga-endorsed swipe file spills out onto the Internet

Selling drugs to kids