Joe Sugarman

I teased, promised, and threatened, and yet it’s not here

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I woke up this morning, confused about where I am and what time it might be.

It’s day one of my U.S. trip. I’m only just beginning the adjustment to the time zone change from Europe. I expect the adjustment to continue until it’s time for me to fly back to Barcelona.

In my confusion this morning, I checked my inbox and saw the many dozens of emails that had accumulated since yesterday. One email stood out.

“Uh-oh,” I said to myself. “That’s a problem.”

Because yesterday, I teased, promised, and threatened that today I would start promoting an exciting and legit business opportunity for working copywriters.

Well, as that email informed me, this promo has now been postponed.

As with most legit business opportunities, you gotta get on a call before you can buy. And as I found out this morning, the guy who does these calls is “taking a step back for urgent personal reasons.”

So I will not be promoting this exciting and legit business opportunity in my email today. Instead, my teasing of this business opportunity continues, and I will be promoting it in the future.

Meanwhile, since I had to adapt my plan for today, I’d like to share the following quote with you. It’s from one of the most successful direct marketers of all time, Joe Sugarman, of BluBlockers fame.

​​Joe was talking about a glaring objection in a product he was selling once. And he wrote:

“I recognized this as a problem that had to be addressed in our copy. And since I look at problems as opportunities, I wondered, ‘Where is the opportunity in this serious and rapidly growing problem?'”

I read this in the early days of my business and marketing education. And that “problems as opportunities” bit has stuck with me ever since.

Here’s a second quote I read only yesterday. It comes from Brad Jacobs, who started 7 billion-dollar companies so far in his life, and who recently published a book about his experiences, titled How to Make a Few Billion Dollars. Jacobs writes:

“Embrace everything that comes your way, the good and especially the bad. And don’t just accept adversity — figure out how to capitalize on it.”

So there you go. My tip for you for today, via Joe Sugarman and Brad Jacobs:

Train yourself. Change your mind. And the next time you come across a problem — big or small — tell yourself to look at it as an opportunity. In time, this attitude may lead you to a few billion dollars.

In my case, the fact that my planned affiliate offer for today fell through is an opportunity to promote something of my own.

So let me remind you of my Simple Money Emails course. It’s all about writing easy and fast emails that you can use day after day to adapt to problems and opportunities in your business, and even to use them to build credibility and trust with your audience.

For more information on Simple Money Emails:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

“No-fooling” secret to writing opening lines that get read and copied

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Yeah, I bet you want the secret. I’ll tell you, but it won’t make sense unless you read the following first.

Last Friday, I sent an email about a photo I found on Twitter of a guy hand-copying my emails. To which I got a reply from an online entrepreneur with a 200k-strong audience, Kieran Drew. Kieran wrote me:

===

Guilty confession: I handcopied a fair few emails from your bonus doc in SME.

When I write my emails, I always go back to my inbox to see how you started your last few too. I still find the opening lines hard and I’m yet to see anyone do them as well as you do.

===

I heard something similar about my opening lines from a friend who runs a successful niche magazine (hi Radu). He told me he keeps my emails for their opening lines, as inspiration for openers when he needs to write something.

I never thought writing an opening line was some special superpower of mine. But like they say, once is an accident, twice is a positioning statement.

So I thought about what I do with the opening line of each of my emails. Really, it’s the millennia-old advice from legendary direct marketer Joe Sugarman:

“The purpose of the first sentence is to get you to read the second sentence. Nothing more, nothing less.”

You probably knew Joe Sugarman’s advice. You probably even follow it, and think you do it well. And maybe you really do it well. But maybe you don’t, not as well as you could. The trouble is, it’s easy to fool yourself.

I thought a bit more about my opening lines.

The only other secret that came to mind, besides the Joe Sugarman advice, is that I’ve spent a good amount of time learning to write sales bullets.

​​I’ve analyzed how A-list copywriters start with factual and dull source material… give away the relevant parts of it in their bullets… but leave out just the right thing to make you pull your hair out from wanting to know the secret.

It’s transformed how I write. Because it means there’s a way to learn to write copy in a way that you cannot fool yourself:

You start with the same source material A-list copywriters used to write their own bullets… write your own bullet… compare it to theirs… and see just how much tighter, more specific, and more intriguing theirs is.

The good news is, you don’t have to despair for long. Repeat this process, and soon enough, the A-listers tricks and tactics and skills start to seep into your own head, and people start saving what you write as examples of intriguing and specific and tight copy.

And on that note, I will remind you of my ongoing offer for Copy Riddles Lite.

The full Copy Riddles program teaches you how to write sales bullets, using the no-fooling process I described above.

Copy Riddles Lite is a tiny slice of the full Copy Riddles program, proportionately priced.

Copy Riddles Lite gives you a taste of this process, and gives you an opportunity to try yourself against legendary A-list copywriters like Gene Schwartz, David Deutsch, and Clayton Makepeace. That’s a valuable experience whether or not you choose to upgrade to the full Copy Riddles program.

I’m making Copy Riddles Lite available until tomorrow, Thursday, at 8:31pm CET. If you’d like to get it, it’s available here (no sales page, just an order form):

https://bejakovic.com/crl

My first 1-star Amazon review

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It finally happened. I finally got my first 1-star Amazon review.

I wrote back in May about how I had gotten a 1-star review of my “10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters” on Goodreads, a book review platform.

That review was in Serbian, a language that I understand. The gist of the review was an attack on direct response copywriting. “Outdated!” “Cringe!” My poor book, which has the word “copywriters” in the title, apparently attracted somebody who loves to read about a topic they hate.

That’s okay. Because I wrote an email about that review and I profited from it.

But I’m not sure I can profit from my first 1-star Amazon review. Because a while back, Amazon started allowing reviews that don’t say anything, but simply just pick a number of stars.

What precise and profound comment did my reader mean to express by choosing a single star for my book?

Perhaps the reader had some genuine gripe or even a legitimate critique of the actual content.

But perhaps he or she read the book and thought it was great, and wanted to reward me for writing it: “This book is so good it reminds of my home state of Texas! Here’s a lone star fer ya.”

Or perhaps this reader thought the book was too valuable to share, and wanted to discourage others from reading it and getting good ideas from it also.

Unfortunately, we will never know.

Instead, in order to profit from this zero-content review, let me tie it up with something more substantive. And that’s a message I got last week from Kieran Drew.

As you might know, Kieran is a bit of a star in the creative entrepreneur space. He has close to 200k followers on Twitter. He also has a big and growing email newsletter, with over 25k readers.

Earlier this year, Kieran launched a course about writing, High Impact Writing. Over the course of two 5-day launches, he sold over $300,000 worth of this course to his audience.

But back to the message Kieran sent me last week.

​​It simply said, “hope you’re well mate, continuing to spread the good word.”

​​Beneath that was a screenshot of a tweet that Kieran wrote earlier that day:

===

Copywriting is the most important skill for any creator.

My 5 favorite books (if you’re a beginner, read in this order):

1. Adweek Copywriting Handbook
2. Great Leads
3. Cashvertising
4. 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters
5. Breakthrough Advertising

===

I’ve never read Cashvertising. But the others I have read, and multiple times each. It kind of tickles me to be included on a top-5 copywriting list along with Joe Sugarman and Mark Ford John Forde and Gene Schwartz.

I’ve been pushing my 10 Commandments book pretty hard over the past few days.

Today is last day will be pushing it for a while.

Of course, you can choose to buy it today or you can choose not to. There’s no urgency, beyond the fact that people who care about writing and know about online business success think that what’s inside this book is valuable.

It might be so for you too. If you’d like to stake $5 on it to find out:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

I made a lot of mistakes in my copywriting career, for example:

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1. In my early days, I worked with OH, who loved meetings, pushing me around like his secretary, and telling me how it’s going to be, to the point where I had trouble falling asleep because I was so insulted and angry

2. In my late days, I worked with SA on a commission-only job, which involved a ton of preparation, the frustration of writing daily emails in his voice, and which paid me nothing, in spite of promises of a huge profit share from his million-name-plus email list

3. I wrote cold emails for any business that would pay me, until I figured out no amount of copywriting hacks will compensate for the fact that a generic offer targeted at uninterested leads will not sell

4. I wrote a weak lead for RealDose’s probiotics sales letter, they rightly dragged their feet on it, and it never ran

5. I started a daily email newsletter twice before, and I stopped and deleted all the archives twice before finally starting writing daily emails for good, which you are reading now

6. I spent the first six months of my professional copywriting career thinking I had learned all there is to learn about copywriting, since I had read Joe Sugarman’s Adweek book and Gary Halbert’s Boron Letters. During that time, I didn’t crack open a single copywriting book or listen to a single training, and I made a bunch of screaming mistakes as a result

7. I didn’t formally collect endorsements, testimonials, or client success case studies

8. I worked with WT, who thought the answer to every copywriting and marketing problem is to apply the AIDA formula, and who exploded in anger when I suggested otherwise, and who translated my innocent comment about not having to fit everything into AIDA into an attack on the value of his MBA education (no joke)

9. I wrote a seventh and final batch of emails for a real estate investing fund out of Chicago. They had paid me for all the previous emails, and on time. They never paid me for this final batch. To date, they are the only client who has ever shafted me for anything

10. I did not take a moment every three months to ask myself, “What have I learned to do pretty well over the past three months?” and then package up that new expertise into a presentation or a mini-course or a little report I could sell, both to make a bit of money, and to build up a lot of status

There are many more mistakes I made. No matter. I learned, quickly or eventually.

I stopped working with clients who didn’t suit me. I became obsessive about studying and improving my skills. In time, I even started thinking about how I present myself, and now just what I can do.

All of which is to say, I don’t really regret making any of the mistakes above, or any of the countless other mistakes I made in my freelance copywriting career.

Except one.

There’s one mistake I regret it because I persisted in it for so long.

I regret it because it cost me so much, both in terms of the kinds of work I missed out on, and the piles of money that blew off in the wind.

And really, I regret it because it would have been so easy to fix, had I only kept one thing in mind.

That one thing is the topic of my Most Valuable Postcard #1, which is available for purchase right now.

But I am only making this offer to people who are currently signed up to my email newsletter. To get on my newsletter, so you can take advantage of this offer, click here and fill out the form that appears.

The secret reason I still stick with copywriting after all these years

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Here’s a confession:

I’m not in this field because of the money or supposed freedom that copywriting brings.

Sure, that’s why I got into it in the first place. And I guess if I didn’t make any money, or if the work conditions sucked, I might move on to something else.

But the real thing that keeps me going in copywriting, that sucks me in and fascinates me, is learning more about myself and about other people.

Because it turns out that direct response marketing is an incredible lens to allow you to see inside people’s psyches, and what they really respond to.

Case in point:

Joe Sugarman of BluBlockers fame once told a story about his cousin, who was a psychiatrist. The cousin was hired by the San Diego Chargers, an American football team.

The Chargers wanted to find out what separated football superstars from the rank-and-file of all the others players. After some MK-Ultra type research, Joe’s cousin figured out there were two personality types who became superstars. They were either:

A. Egomaniacs

or

B. Deeply religious

“And when you really think about it,” Joe said, “what did they have in common? A very strong belief in either themselves or in a higher power.”

I’m not here to tell you to believe in yourself, or in a higher power.

I’m just here to point out am important fact in case you ever want to sell something:

If the thing that sets superstars apart is that they believe, either in themselves or in God, then what does that say about everybody else? What does it say about the 99.9% of people in any field who are not superstars?

They don’t believe. Or at least they don’t have anything focused to believe in.

And mercenary thought it might sound, smart marketers have been taking advantage of this lack of belief to sell trillions of dollars worth of stuff.

Because smart marketers give prospects something to believe in. An external thing… and yet, a thing that doesn’t require religious feeling or faith in the supernatural.

That thing is called the mechanism.

The mechanism is usually described as “how the solution works.” And it is that. But it’s really much more. It’s hope and belief in something outside yourself.

Of course, after a century-plus of creative mechanisms — cold showers and hyperventilation, buttered coffee, adaptogenic mushrooms — you can’t just hold up a bag of rocks and say, “Here, believe in this.”

You gotta come up with a mechanism that threads the thin line between exciting and exotic and believable and achievable.

I got a mechanism for you. It’s called “The John Bejakovic Letter” and it’s been called the most insightful newsletter about copywriting, marketing, and influence. In case you’d like to sign up for it, click here and follow the instructions.

Promiscious upgrading is a very bad plan indeed

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A Copy Riddles member named Paul writes in:

Hello John,

I purchased Copy Riddles some months ago.

Will you give me (and all previous buyers) access to the member’s area now that the program is delivered on a website?

The answer is yes and no.

I definitely gave Paul access to the members-only area of my site where Copy Riddles is now hosted.

Hence the yes part in the “yes and no” above.

But I won’t do the same for all previous buyers — not unless they write me and ask. ​​Hence the no.

The reason I am not giving access automatically to all previous buyers is that I have to do it manually, and that takes some time and effort. And why go to that expense for someone who might not appreciate it? ​​In the words of the godfather of modern advertising, Claude Hopkins:

I consider promiscuous sampling a very bad plan indeed. Products handed out without asking or thrown on the doorstep lose respect. It is different when you force people to make an effort.

As it was for bars of soap a hundred years ago, so it is for the new Copy Riddles today.

If you have gone through Copy Riddles previously, in its old, email-based form, and you’d like me to upgrade you to the new, web-based form, just write me and ask. I will do it, as Joe Sugarman used to say, promptly and courteously.

And if you haven’t yet gone through Copy Riddles yet in any form, here’s what Paul (same Paul as above) had to say after I upgraded him to the new Copy Riddles:

What you offer in the “Copy Riddles Course” is a very clever and powerful way to improve our copywriting skills. It’s based on the work of the greatest copywriters. But it’s the kind of practical value you wouldn’t generally find in the books they wrote. In fact, I think there are very few copywriting courses that offer this level of practical value. Best of all, yours is very affordable. Thanks again John. Oh, and by the way, my mother tongue is French and I find that everything you present is clear and well explained, even though I am not a native English speaker.

In case you’d like to join Copy Riddles before the price goes up:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Cool-o & Sexy-o: I kill a bad joke even more dead for your benefit

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In my email yesterday, I wrote about a tricky anti-tobacco campaign, “Tobacco is whacko.” ​​​I played on that phrase and explained how you can make your appeals “cool-o” and “sexy-o”. To which a friend lovingly wrote me:

“Cool-o. Sexy-o. This is the corniest email you’ve ever sent. You old man. Watching too many Joe Biden speeches?”

Let me take a Joe-like ramble and say:

Marketers and copywriters are often told to study only the successful advertising. The controls. The winners.

But I have personally found a lot of value by looking at stuff that flopped. Particularly if it was done by somebody who should have known better.

In my view, flops shine more light on valuable techniques than situations when everything goes perfectly.

So for example:

Maybe — though I admit nothing — the jokes in my email yesterday were lame-o and corny-o.

And yet, if you look at what exactly I was doing, you will be able to identify a powerful email copywriting technique I use all the time. Often to very good effect.

Rather than killing a bad joke even more dead by explaining what exactly I have in mind, let me just get to today’s point:

Read more bad advertising.

I’m not joking.

Ads that flopped might turn out to be the cheapest, though corniest, education in effective writing and marketing techniques you can get.

Of course, not all bad advertising is created equal.

Like I said, you want to look at stuff that flopped, but was written by somebody with sufficient other success. Somebody who was reaching for a technique that works in general, but for whatever reason, didn’t come out right-o that particular time-o.

If you want an example of that, pull out your copy of Joe Sugarman’s Adweek book.

Joe was great copywriter. He sold hundreds of millions’ worth of stuff with his infomercials, catalogs, and magazine ads.

But not every piece of Joe’s copy was a success. And his Adweek book includes a bunch of failures, where Joe’s copywriting techniques, including some he doesn’t highlight explicitly in the book, become obvious.

And if you still don’t have a copy of Joe’s book… well, what are you waiting for? Get it here, daddy-o:

https://bejakovic.com/adweek

A $2,000 idea

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Yesterday, I met the owners of an apartment I am trying to rent in Barcelona. They are a married couple, very elegant and stylish, a few years older than me. We met at a cafe.

I sat down across from them and I leaned back in my chair. “So what do you have for me,” I said.

The husband smiled at me. “Would you like to drink a coffee first?”

I smirked, stared him in the eye, and said nothing.

“Oh okay,” he said, clearly browbeaten. “So you’ve had a chance to look at the apartment? You liked it?”

“The apartment is fine,” I said. “But let’s talk turkey. How much do you want for it?”

The man paused for a moment. He and his wife looked at each other in confusion.

“What do you mean?” the wife said. “The rent is right there on the listing.” And she repeated the number. It was a round figure, divisible by one hundred, ending in two zeros.

I laughed with contempt.

“A round figure?” I said, barely controlling myself. “You haven’t done one minute of work on this, have you? You just pulled that number out of your ear, without checking comparables and without putting in any effort to calculate a fair price. No! I don’t trust your round figure. And I don’t like being disrespected like this. I’m not interested in renting your apartment any more. Goodbye!”

I got up and left the cafe. The husband ran after me, begging me to reconsider, offering to make the price more specific and jagged. But it was too late.

In case this sounds like a slightly fantastical scenario… well, that’s because it is.

What actually happened yesterday was that I did meet the owners.

I smiled at them and I put on my best and most responsible face.

Using subtle sub-communication, I made it clear that if they let me rent their apartment, I would not adopt a pitbull… I would not host any drug-driven orgies… and I would not take up drumming as a new hobby.

After a few minutes of this renter mating dance, the owners were satisfied. They agreed to let me have their beautiful apartment, and I agreed to take it, at a perfectly round monthly rent, neatly ending in two zeros.

If you’re wondering why I’m telling you this, then, like my fantasy owners above, you clearly didn’t read my email yesterday.

That email was all about the power of specificity. Specifically, the power of specific numbers. Recently proven by some fancy scientific research, but suspected by smart marketers for decades and probably centuries.

Except…

There are times where your numbers don’t have to be specific.

My rent situation above was clearly one.

I accepted the nice and round price. Doing anything else would have been foolish, bordering on very foolish. The rental market in Barcelona is insane. There are only a few available apartments and thousands of hungry renters swooping down on each one.

But you might say, “Sure, you can get away with a round price sometimes. That doesn’t mean that a specific, jagged price wouldn’t work just as well or better.”

Maybe. Or maybe not.

There are situations where a round price is not only acceptable, but actually better. Where a round price sub-communicates high status, a lack of neediness, and a position of power.

Take for example the curious case of one Joe Sugarman. Joe was a multimillionaire marketer who created the BluBlocker sunglasses empire.

Joe sold each of his BluBlockers for $69.95.

But when Joe ran an ad to advertise his legendary copywriting and marketing seminar, he didn’t promise to reveal “7-figure funnel secrets,” or offer a *9.99 price.

​​Instead, Joe said, “Come study with me,” right in the headline. And then in the subhead, he told you how much it would cost, — $2,000, with three round zeroes at the end.

So take time and ponder on that. I’ll leave you today with a bit from Joe’s ad:

There are two types of successful people. Those that are successful and those that are super successful.

To be successful you must learn the rules, know them cold, and follow them. To be super successful, you must learn the rules, know them cold, and break them.

For more marketing ideas, some worth $9.99 and others worth $15,000, come and read my email newsletter. You can sign up for it here.

The bad news opportunity

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“It’s easy to give lip service to, as well as to try to be entertaining about it… but it’s really a very serious point. And the people I’ve been around, who really have the Midas touch when it comes to money, they’re really very good at this.”
— Dan Kennedy, Wealth Attraction for Entrepreneurs seminar

The ancient Greeks believed in a goddess named Nemesis. Her role was to punish people who’ve had an excessive run of unbroken good luck.

The Greeks knew, just the same as every other people in history has known. Just the same as you know right now:

You can’t have an infinite run of good luck.

Maybe. Not unless you make your own.

I talked a couple of times in the past week about Joe Sugarman. And I’ll keep talking about Joe, because there’s a lot more to the guy than just the hundreds of millions of dollars he made with his orange-tinted BluBlockers sunglasses.

One thing was that Joe saw every problem as an opportunity.

For example, one time when he ran an ad in the WSJ, selling a calculator, Joe screwed up. The price in his ad was cheaper than retail. The manufacturer was furious.

“I have dealers all over the country calling me and complaining,” the manufacturer screamed at Joe.

“Don’t worry,” Joe said, “I’ll fix it.”

So he ran a second, smaller ad announcing the mistake, raising the price, and giving consumers just a few days to respond at the old price. The new ad outpulled the original ad.

That’s what Dan Kennedy is talking about above.​​ People who have a skill for making money — like Joe — have really quick recovery when something bad happens.

​​After all, everything can ultimately be some kind of opportunity, they figure, and looked at in the long-enough term, all news is good news of some sort. Might as well see that sooner rather than later.

Sounds impossible?​​

Last year, I decided to try this idea out for a week.

“Have quick recovery,” I told myself. “All news is good news.”

As I made that decision and wrote it down in my journal, I felt an unpleasant sensation, like I got hit by a big wave. Something was wrong with me physically, and I felt like I might suddenly pass out. I have no idea what happened, and it was gone the next moment.

Normally, if something like this happened to me, I would get concerned, maybe hesitant, maybe look for signs something else bad is about to happen.

Instead, this time, I just shrugged my shoulders, smiled, and got curious. “What good is going to come of this?” I wondered.

Try it yourself. It’s liberating. Plus you might have good ideas come from it. You might even make some money that you wouldn’t have made otherwise.

Make the decision, right now, that for the next week, whenever something seemingly bad happens, you will remind yourself that something good will come of this. You might not see it yet. But what are some ways it could happen?

Maybe it will happen by you signing up to my email newsletter. Or maybe not. Only one way to find out.

Sub-format trumps copy

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The point of today’s email may be very obvious to you. But it wasn’t obvious to me, not for a good many years. And yet it’s very valuable — the numbers don’t lie. See if you agree:

​​I recently wrote about Joe Sugarman’s BluBlockers infomercial. It had a candid camera feel – Joe going up to people on the street, giving them a pair of BluBlockers to try, and recording them as they look around in wonder and say, “Wow, it’s so much sharper! Brighter, too!”

What I didn’t write about recently, but found interesting nonetheless, was a presentation given by top copywriter Evaldo Albuquerque. Evaldo was talking about tips and tricks to make an interview-style VSL a big success.

And then, there was an email I wrote a couple years ago about video ads my clients at the time were running on Facebook. The ads were very successful, and more successful than any other we had tried. They were modeled after BBC science videos — using stock footage, with overlaid subtitles that told an intriguing and dramatic story.

A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos likes to say, “Repeat after me: FORMAT TRUMPS COPY.”

The thing is, it’s easy to be shortsighted about what format means. Text sales letter? VSL? Podcast? Magalog?

The three examples I gave you above – Joe’s candid camera infomercial, interview-style financial VSLs, BBC-style stock footage ads — all three are formally video ads. But each is really a unique sub-format of video ads, which makes all the difference in their final effectiveness.

So repeat after me: Sub-format trumps copy. ​​

This brings me to a cool resource I’d like to share with you. It’s a steady source of analysis of some of the most persuasive, interesting, and influential sub-formats coming out today.

I’ll share this resource in exchange for something you can do for me:

Tell me about a unique format you enjoy.

For example, I’ve written recently about the YouTube channel Soft White Underbelly. It has a unique, consistent format across each episode, which I’ve grown to like.

I’ve also written about the Axios email newsletter about world news. It has another consistent format that I like.

So take a moment. Think about about a source of news, entertainment, education, inspiration — whatever — that you enjoy regularly and that has a strong, consistent format that you’ve grown to rely on and appreciate.

Then get on my newsletter if you’re not already on it. And when you get my welcome email, hit reply and let me know what this thing is, and if you want, tell me in a few words why you like its format.

In exchange, I’ll share with you the cool resource I mentioned above, all about interesting and emerging new formats. This resource might be enlightening and even very profitable for you, if you write or invent new DR advertising.