Lawrence Bernstein

Curious George creates a course

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It’s been three days since I wrote an email about the 40th anniversary of the first broadcast of The Day After, which happened on November 20 1983.

​​A reader wrote in to ask about that:

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Beautiful story…but where do you find this kind of story?

Do you google the events for this day or something else? I’m really curious.

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The short answer is that, like Curious George, I’m a good little monkey, and always curious.

In the particular case of The Day After email, the sequence of events was as follows:

1. A few months ago, I was reading an email by Lawrence Bernstein. Lawrence was talking about how he managed to delete his entire email list. As he put it, “Sunday morning felt like one of my favorite dark films from 1983, ‘The Day After.'”

2. I had never heard of The Day After so I made a note of it in a list of “movies to watch” that I have been keeping for years.

3. Some time later, I watched The Day After, without knowing anything about it except that Lawrence likes it.

4. After watching the movie, I was curious to find out more. So I read up on it. I was impressed to find out all the stuff connecting The Day After to Ronald Reagan and the Soviets and nuclear war averted.

5. A few days later, the thought popped into my mind to check when exactly The Day After was first broadcast. It turned out the 40th anniversary was coming up in a few weeks’ time. I thought it might be cool to write about it on the actual anniversary. So I made a calendar entry telling me to write an email about it on the day of.

6. The calendar notification fired a few days ago. So I wrote down an outline of what I remembered about the movie. I plumped it up with some details taken from Wikipedia and ¡tachán!

The particulars of how I wrote that email are probably completely useless to you.

But there are a few underlying principles which you might profit from. Such as for example:

​​Keeping extensive notes and having lists of everything you might care about…

​Digging in when you come across an unfamiliar reference from somebody you respect…

O​​r using your calendar app to make your life easier and to make sure stuff gets done when it should.

Over the past few years, I’ve come up with a handful of such processes to make sure I never forget a good idea, never fail to draw a valuable connection, never miss out on a profitable opportunity.

Of course, it doesn’t work all the time. Or even much of the time.

​​Even so, these processes have been incredibly valuable to to me for daily email writing, previously for client work, futurely for new projects I am starting up.

This stuff has become such an integral part of how I work that I created a course, Insight Exposed, all about how I keep notes, and write journals, and process all of the ideas and information coming at me so I can turn them into something productive and profitable.

I released Insight Exposed back in February for a few days. But I haven’t been selling it since.

I will release it again soon, after I’ve polished it a bit. But more about that in its own email.

For now, let me just share something valuable that I’ve kept track of thanks to my Insight Exposed system.

It’s an article I came upon back in September. It was published in the lying New York Time, but in the opinion section, so maybe it’s true.

In any case, I found it insightful, so much so that i took note of it, processed the note, and put it into long-term storage, so I could share it with you today. In case you’re curious:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/17/opinion/sports-zen-mental-subtraction.html

$90k upsell to a $39 magazine subscription

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I found the following via Lawrence Bernstein’s Ad Money Machine site. You gotta pay for that site, and I happily do. It clues me in to wonders like the following:

For the past dozen or more years, select subscribers to National Geographic magazine (one-year print subscription: $39) have been getting a unique sales letter in the mail.

The sales letter, which comes with an attractive brochure, is making a pitch for a $90k upsell — and apparently selling out the offer year after year.

I bet you’re curious what this $90k upsell could be. I mean, it’s quite a leap from $39. ​​What could possibly be worth it?

I’ll tell you.

The offer is called “Africa by Private Jet.” It involves:

* 20 days
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* 7 different countries

​* A private Boeing 757, refitted to accommodate just 51 expert travelers instead of the standard 233 budget sardines

​* Visits to the best big game, big ape, and big culture locations across Africa

​* Professional scientists as tour guides, an on-staff physician, and an expedition chef

​* An inaugural dinner with Jane Goodall in London (first stop of the trip) and a farewell dinner in Rome (last stop)

​* A safe, fascinating, hassle-free adventure; a feeling of importance and superiority; interesting dinner party stories for a lifetime; all backed by the good name of National Geographic Society

The sales letter made me want to go.

And it reminded me of Ken McCarthy’s Advanced Copywriting for Serious Info Marketers seminar.

One of Ken’s many messages in that seminar was that if you think a bit, you will find higher-ticket offers — which cost 2x, 10x, 100x, even 2,307x of what your front-end costs — and your best or very best customers will still happily buy.

There’s no shortcut to that bit of thinking.

But perhaps a good starting point is to conjure up an absolutely incredible experience or transformation you yourself would like to enjoy — and then just take others along with you on that trip.

Anyways, my offer today has little to do with the above National Geographic story, except the following:

Before he got to talking about upsells, Ken McCarthy spent the majority of that Advanced Copywriting seminar teaching what he believes to be the “most important, do-or-die copywriting skill.”

He first teased people in the seminar, and had them guess what they thought this skill might be. People guessed:

Stirring up curiosity?

Coming up with a big idea?

Sounding believable?

Nope. Ken had a mechanical skill in mind. And he said this one mechanical skill covers 90% of what it takes to be a copywriter. If you’d like to find out more:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

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

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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/

Selling drugs to kids

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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/