Jason Leister

Blessed are the proud

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“No man succeeds in everything he undertakes. In that sense we are all failures. The great point is not to fail in ordering and sustaining the effort of our life. In this matter vanity is what leads us astray. It hurries us into situations from which we must come out damaged; whereas pride is our safeguard, by the reserve it imposes on the choice of our endeavour as much by the virtue of its sustaining power.”
— Joseph Conrad, The Duellists

Here’s one thing that’s kept me interested in direct response copywriting for so long:

The best sales letters are not really selling what they seem to be selling on the surface. So they are not really about 100x stock gains… or getting your ex back… or ways to travel free on luxury cruise ships.

Rather, they are about being a man of vision… or being a man with a hole that nothing can fill… or being a man who knows others are always plotting behind his back.

That’s why the seven deadly sins and their offshoots are so powerful to think about when you write copy.

And even though I’ve thought about this quite a bit, I always thought that the two most powerful human failings — vanity and pride — are overlapping or even synonymous.

The passage I quoted above was the first time I heard anyone make a distinction between vanity and pride. The passage even puts them in opposition.

This made me think what the difference between pride and vanity might be. After some thinking, here’s what I’ve come up with:

Pride – the internal belief in your own worth or superiority

Vanity – the desire for others to acknowledge your worth or superiority

So for example:

If, as in the Conrad story above, an old soldier enters a woods with two loaded pistols, with the intent to kill or be killed by his opponent, according to the norms of civilized, honor-bound men…

Then pride is doing it to prove to himself his courage and his greater skill than the opponent. It doesn’t matter at all if nobody else will see it or know it.

But vanity is doing it so others will witness and acknowledge his courage and his greater skill. The audience is the whole point. If nobody sees it, the victory itself means nothing, or is worse than that — a wasted opportunity.

So pride and vanity are really two fundamentally different human drives, and I suspect, motivate different types of people.

At least that’s my interpretation. It might be relevant to you for two reasons:

One are those pesky hidden motives that underlie so many purchasing decisions. Again, it’s not really about the stock returns, the toxin-free pots and pans, or the better golf score.

Instead, it’s about vain status-seeking and wounded self-respect. Understanding these things, and having a good name to attach to them, can help you when it’s time to write breakthrough copy.

The other thing is something I’m personally curious about:

Why we put so much emphasis as a society, at least historically, on the evils of pride. Pride is even supposed to be the head of all the deadly sins, from which all the others spring.

Which brings me to one of my “competitors” I mentioned yesterday.

He might have something to tell you about why our society says pride is so bad.

The man’s name is Jason Leister. He started out as a direct response copywriter. He then wrote daily emails for years about clients and why they suck and how copywriters can cope with that fact.

But gradually, Jason drifted off into new and uncharted waters.

He now lives somewhere off the grid with his wife and ten kids.

And he’s stopped writing about copywriting and clients.

Instead, he writes about… well, check it out at the link below. That’s where you can sign up to get on Jason’s email newsletter and get Jason’s lead magnet, “How the World System Was Constructed to Make You a Slave and What You Can Do About It.”

You might find Jason’s ideas repulsive, conspiratorial, or like me, intriguing and sometimes enlightening. If you want to check them out, here’s the link:

https://sovereignbusiness.org/

A warning about success from an anti-establishment Jeremiah

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Andy Warhol said, “Always leave them wanting less.”

In that spirit, today I want to share a long quote with you. It comes from Jason Leister, who is a copywriter and used to write about dealing with freelancing clients… but has now become an anti-establishment Jeremiah, all the way down to renouncing his American citizenship.

Anyways, the following quote from Jason felt like a warning to me. I want to pass on the warning to you too, in case you deal with clients or customers, or you expect to one day:

There’s the “success” that leads to more work for more money.

Then there’s the “success” that leads to less work for more money.

If your business is currently structured so that more “success” simply leads to more work, then ask yourself if that’s the right direction for you. If it’s not, figure out a way to change that sooner than later.

Does that leave you wanting less? Or more?

If more, then you might like to subscribe to my email newsletter. It arrives every day and many people find it overwhelming.

 

Plagiarizing on the shoulders of giants

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Nobody called me out on it.

For the past four days, I’ve been sending out plagiarized emails. I would have kept going too, but I ran out of source material to abuse.

So on Saturday, I sent out the email “What I learned from copywriting.” That was plagiarized from James Altucher’s “What I learned from chess.”

On Sunday, I sent out “Stop caring what people think.” That was plagiarized from Jason Leister’s “Just tell me what to do.”

Monday was “Why I didn’t collect my $10.5 million.” That was plagiarized from Mark Ford’s “Why I wasn’t loyal to my broker.”

And yesterday I sent “How to create a selling style people love to read.” That was actually Ben Settle’s “How to create a writing style people love to buy from.”

If you are compulsively curious, track down the originals and then take a look at my plagiarized copies.

Because it’s not just subject line I plagiarized.

I plagiarized the content too. Especially the structure. Even entire sentences.

(By the way, I picked these four writers to plagiarize because 1) they send out more or less daily emails… and 2) they are the only people whose emails I more or less read each day.)

But here’s my point, and perhaps something that will benefit you:

I’ve spent a hundred hours or more hand-copying successful sales letters. I think this practice had some value. It forced me to slow down and actually read the damn things. But I don’t buy into the whole magic of “neural imprinting,” which is supposed to happen when you copy stuff by hand.

Instead, I’ve found plagiarizing to be much more useful.

Plagiarizing does double duty. It first forces me to look at copy critically, and ask, “What is this guy really doing here?”

For example, for the Jason Leister email, I came up with the following skeleton underlying the flesh of his writing:

* where I was before
* how that benefited others, why that was, all the wrong places I was looking
* realization of what will happen if I continue this same way
* what I do now
* what that does NOT mean
* bring it around to you
* analogy to reinforce
* diagnostic question you can ask yourself
* exposing all the reasons and assumptions that kept me where I was
* bigger consequences, or bigger context of this single issue
* inspirational takeaway if you do, and uninspirational takeaway if you don’t

I find this is much more effective than hand copying ads for learning. It seems to sink into my memory better, and it impacts how I write copy weeks and months later.

But that’s only half the exercise.

Because once you “chunk up,” you then have to “chunk down.” You actually write a new piece of copy with the same skeleton.

And that’s what I mean by double duty. Not only does this exercise help me learn… but it also produces a serviceable piece of copy. Often, it produces something better than what I would have written on my own.

With plagiarizing, I’m earning while I’m learning. Which is why, if you’re looking to get better at copywriting, I recommend shameless plagiarism to you too.

You can plagiarize my stuff if you want. Here’s the optin for my daily email newsletter.

Huruhuru secrets of writing advertorials

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Earlier this month, news broke that a beer company in Canada accidentally named itself “pubic hair.”

Actually what they did is they nam​​ed their brewing company Huruhuru, which they believed means “feather” in Maori and which they thought sounded cooler than a kiwi egg sandwich. But it turns out no.

​A man named Te Hamua Nikora, who looks somewhat like a Maori Rodney Dangerfield, explained on Facebook that huruhuru actually means pubic hair in his language. He also added, “Some people call it appreciation, I call it appropriation.”

What to say?

This is the kind of spanking you can get when you get too clever and want something new and never-heard-before.

I bring this up because I was asked a related question yesterday. I was giving a consult call about my style of writing advertorials (a first for me) and one of the people on the call asked:

“Any online resources or people we should follow that are really sharp on the advertorial side of things?”

I’m sure there are people out there, probably somebody like me looking to make a name for himself, who will tell you all kinds of tips and tricks and best practices for writing advertorials.

But the fact is, advertorials are a long-form piece of copy, intended to sell to cold traffic. Almost everything about how to do this this was figured out over 50 years ago. In other words, rather than looking for huruhuru secrets of advertorials, just go back and read all the standards of the direct response canon.

That’s not to say there is never anything new under the sun. It might really be true, as Incomparable Expert Jason Leister has written, that the direct marketing industry was a historical anomaly, “a period of arbitrage where trust was JUST high enough and information distribution was JUST new enough that things worked.”

What I mean is that a lot of profitable copywriting today isn’t going out to cold traffic any more, but to warm. And that kind of copywriting is a genuinely different beast, with different rules and best practices. But that’s a different kaupapa, for a different wā.

Are you warming up to me? If you’d like to hear from me more regularly, and see how I write to a warm audience, then sign up for my daily email newsletter.

How to get rich selling socks to foot fetishists

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I just read that Will Singleterry is selling Reformed Roasters.

Never heard of either Will or Reformed Roasters? Here’s the pitch from the Reformed Roasters site:

“Ultra-Premium Coffee, Masterfully Roasted to the Glory of the One Most High”

From what I can tell, Reformed Roasters is Will’s ecommerce store selling coffee to Reformed Christians, which is some particular sect or segment of the larger faith. The company features blends like “Limited Atonement” and “Total Depravity.”

Altogether, it sounds like an unlikely business. But Will was apparently able to bring Reformed Roasters to $40k/month, within 2 months of starting.

And to that, all I can is HOSANNAH.

It shows just how crazy powerful it is to simply pick a dedicated group of people, create a relationship with them (Will would send them daily emails about religious doctrine, and sign off by saying “and if you want some caffeinated glory…”), and then sell them a consumable product.

In a way, this is the same thing that Alex Jones did with conspiracy theorists and supplements. And I’m sure many other small niche businesses are out there, under my radar, but raking in cash hand over hoof by doing the same thing.

So why can’t you do some version of this? Maybe you could try selling…

Socks to foot fetishists (“Andalusian Spree Muffs”)…

Toothpaste to Deadheads (“Dire Wolf Dentifrice”)…

Or hair gel to Twilight fans (“Solid Fanpire”).

It doesn’t really seem to matter what you sell. As long as you first take some kind of strong stand, or pick the right rabid subculture. Because as Jason Leister recently wrote:

“Why is it so effective to ‘stand for something?’ It’s effective because it helps your listeners/readers/subscribers make an easier decision about whether or not you belong in their life.”

Unfortunately, I don’t stand for anything yet. But I’m working on it.

​​In the meantime, if you’d like some copywriting glory, specifically in the advertorial format, then check out the following:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorials/

An important reminder for clingy copywriters

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A few days ago, I got carried away.

A potential new client contacted me. “Would you like to write daily emails for us?” he asked.

“Sure I would,” I said. “And I’d like to do more than that for you.”

Then I threw in a kitchen-sinkful of copywriting and marketing services I could provide along with the daily emails. The problem was that at this early stage, I didn’t really know what this client’s actual needs are. In other words, I was pitching instead of selling, as Ben Settle puts it.

Normally, I don’t get this needy or clingy.

But sometimes, it gets away from me.

A few days after this happened, I read something related by direct response copywriter Jason Leister.

I think it’s an important reminder for all copywriters, including myself, who can get carried away when a great new opportunity appears on the horizon. Jason writes:

“Over the years, I’ve come to hire clients very slowly. If you work with clients, consider hiring them SLOWLY. (You are hiring them, remember that. You’re in the driver’s seat of your business, not anyone else. They’ve got the “money” but you have the thing for which they are willing to part with that money. Money is everywhere, YOU are not.)”

Jason then describes what this means practically in his business.

I think it’s worthwhile reading for all freelance copywriters.

If you want to read Jason’s complete email including the practical bits, simply write me and I can forward it to you. Or you can head over to Jason’s site, where he publishes his daily emails with a few days’ delay. Here’s the link:

https://incomparableexpert.org/dailyjournal/