Jon Benson

Copywriting playboys get treated like a piece of meat

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A while back, when there was still such a thing as professional sports, I noticed that the top three or four men’s tennis players all had one unusual thing in common:

They were all in settled, long-term relationships, often with the same girl they had started dating while they were still teenagers.

Further down the rankings, you had tennis players who were known to be playboys. Regardless of their natural talent, these playboys hovered around the top 20, but could never break into the very peak of the sport.

Coincidence?

Probably. But maybe not. Maybe a stable relationship really is crucial for massive success.

Don’t worry. I’m not telling you to go in search of a ball and chain to lock around your ankle. My point is simply this:

When I look at top copywriters — meaning people who get paid millions of dollars a year, with schedules booked up months in advance — they all fall into one of two categories.

One is guys like Chris Haddad or Jon Benson, who got successful promoting their own offers. The other is guys like Dan Ferrari and Stefan Georgi, who worked in-house at a direct response publisher for long enough to get a pile of successes in their knapsacks.

What you don’t see are playboys who came up by bouncing around from client to client. Maybe this promiscuous lifestyle worked many winters ago. But I don’t see it happening today.

Not to say you can’t make good money as a copywriting playboy. It’s what I’ve done in my career. I now make more money for less work than at any job I could have ever held.

But if you want to make it to the top… or if you want to be perceived as more than a commodity service provider… then jumping from client to client is unlikely to get you there. ​​If you want clients to stop seeing you as a piece of meat, you will have to get hitched — either to your own business, or to somebody else’s.

That’s something I’m working on as well right now. If you want to follow how I’m doing that, click here and subscribe to my email newsletter.

The story behind my first successful sales letter

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A couple of years after I started copywriting, I got the chance to write my first full-blown video sales letter.

This was for a product called The Kidney Disease Solution.

At that time, The Kidney Disease Solution had already been available on Clickbank for around 10 years, and it was a top-50 Clickbank product. My job was to rewrite the front-end VSL to make it less hypey — and yet to increase sales.

An impossible order?

Not at all. In fact, it was fairly straightforward. The VSL I wrote increased sales by 30% while removing all the typical “Clickbanky” hype. It only took two ingredients:

1) An emphasis on proof

2) A solid, proven structure for the sales letter itself

The first ingredient wasn’t hard to come by. Duncan Capicchiano, the guy behind The Kidney Disease Solution, had hundreds of almost-miraculous success stories from people who had followed his program. Plus, he had a legit background as a practicing naturopath, and he had done everything he could to make the program itself useful and complete.

But what about the structure?

I was still fairly green as a copywriter, so I reached for the most successful VSL I knew of:

Mike Geary’s Truth About Abs, written by Jon Benson.

I knew this VSL well because I had copied it out by hand several months earlier. I did this while following along on the sidelines with a course called CopyHour.

Derek Johanson, the guy who runs CopyHour, finds successful sales letter (like the Truth About Abs VSL).

He then sends the copy to you to actually copy out by hand, one sales letter each day, for 60 days.

And then he gets on a video call to explain all the fine points of what you just copied, and why it works.

It’s a solid (and proven) way to get much better at writing copy, and to do so quickly.

The thing is, you can’t join CopyHour most of the time. Because of the “live” nature of the course, Derek only opens it up for enrollment a few times a year.

Right now is one of those times. So in case you’re new to copywriting and you want to get better quickly, CopyHour might be worth a  look while enrollment is open. If you’re interested, here’s the link:

http://copyhour.com/

A swiped skeleton for solutions to chronic problems

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A while ago, I listened to an interview with Harlan Kilstein, a big copywriter in the health space.

One thing Harlan talked about how he swipes ideas from other marketers.

“The key,” Harlan said, “is to swipe across industries.”

In other words, don’t copy weight loss promotions if you’re selling weight loss. But do look to weight loss promotions if you’re selling, say, a kidney disease book. Which is exactly what I did a couple of years ago.

I was supposed to write a new version of the VSL for The Kidney Disease Solution. At the time, this was a top-50 Clickbank product.

Look, I thought to myself, kidney disease is a chronic condition.

So is weight loss.

Why don’t I look at what the best weight loss promotions are doing?

And so I took the skeleton of possibly the biggest weight loss VSL of all time, Mike Geary’s Truth about Abs. It was written by Jon Benson, I believe. And it goes roughly as follows:

1. Opening story — feeling LOUSY
2. Statement of the problem
3. Success story — feeling GREAT
4. Debunking myths and disqualifying the competition
5. Introducing the product, etc.

Like I said, I applied this Truth about Abs skeleton to The Kidney Disease Solution VSL.

And the result was a 30% boost in conversion.

But that’s not all.

I believe this simple formula — basically a before-and-after story lead — works more broadly for chronic conditions.

I’ve just used it to write about an upper back brace used to improve poor posture. I could also imagine it being used for selling dating products, memory supplements, probiotics — in short, any solution to an ongoing, throbbing pain, rather than a sharp, momentary pain.

Of course, the devil is in the details.

How do you choose the right stories for the before and after?

Which myths do you debunk so that you simultaneously build up your own offer?

Well, that’s simply a matter of jog-trotty legwork.

In other words, trying out different ideas, and seeing what seems to sparkle, based on your research and your knowledge of the market you’re writing for.

Anyways, on to a completely different topic:

The chronic problem of not having enough copywriting clients.

And my solution to it.

That is, my Upwork book. It won’t teach you about the craft of copy, or even the boring legwork that’s sometimes required to come up with a thunderbolt of a VSL. Instead, it will only cover the business of copywriting. Specifically, how to get good clients through the online platform Upwork.

If this is something that interests you, then sign up below, and I’ll send you an email when I finish this book and put it up for sale:

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