Motley Fool

How CopyHour changed my life (no joke)

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This week, until Thursday at 8:31pm CET, I am promoting Derek Johanson’s CopyHour program. I’ve never gone through CopyHour myself. And yet it changed my life.

By the time I found out about CopyHour, around 2017, I had already been handcopying successful ads and sales letters on my own.

That’s what CopyHour is about, and it’s a worthwhile exercise.

Maybe I can say more about hand copying ads in a future email. But not now, because that’s not how CopyHour changed my life.

Back in 2017, there was not the the glut of copywriting courses and education that there is now. So I eagerly joined the CopyHour group Facebook group to see if I could maybe learn something on the sly.

Back then, the Facebook group was where Derek delivered the trainings that go with the handcopying work. I could see Derek was legit, had experience and expertise, and had put in time and effort to make CopyHour a really great program.

For example, this group was where I first got exposed to the book Great Leads. It’s a valuable book. But more importantly, it turned on some light in my dim brain and turned me on to the idea that maybe I should find some classic books about copywriting and read those.

This led me down a deep rabbit hole of reading and research which helped make me a drastically better copywriter in time.

But that still not how CopyHour changed my life.

How CopyHour changed my life is that I got on Derek’s email list.

During the next launch of CopyHour, Derek sent a bunch of emails to promote the program. One of those emails was actually not written by him but by a copywriter named Dan Ferrari.

At the time, Dan was a star copywriter at financial publisher Motley Fool. Dan’s story is classic bizopp rags to riches — from subsisting on four teaspoon of olive oil for breakfast because that’s all he could afford, to writing a control with his second sales letter at Motley Fool and soon pulling in millions of dollars in copywriting royalties.

“Hm,” I said, “maybe I should see if this dude has his own email list.”

I found Dan’s site. I signed up to his list. And what followed was… nothing. No emails. Not for almost two years.

Long story even longer, one day in 2019, Dan finally sent out an email asking his list if anyone was in the Baltimore-Washington area at the moment. As luck would have it, I was there at the time.

That email led to me joining Dan’s small coaching group a few months later… learning directly from Dan… hitching my wagon in part to Dan’s rising star… and making, as a direct consequence of a few words of Dan’s advice inside that coaching program, some hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But let’s wrap this story up:

The program that Dan credits for taking him from the olive oil subsistence breakfast to being a control-beating star copywriter at Motely Fool is — CopyHour.

The reason I found Dan and ended up learning copywriting from him is — CopyHour.

That’s my story.

Yours, I don’t know? Maybe it can start today.

Derek has opened the doors to CopyHour today. He will close them on Sunday because CopyHour is a real-time program.

But while Derek’s doors will stay open until Sunday, I will give you a reason to act now. If you join CopyHour before this Thursday at 8:31pm CET, and you do so using my affiliate link below, I will give you the following five free bonuses:

#1. Copy Zone (price last sold at: $100). My 175-page, A-Z guide on the business side of copywriting, from getting started with no experience or portfolio, all the way to becoming an A-list copywriter. Only ever sold once before, during a flash 24-hour offer in March 2023.

#2. Most Valuable Postcard #2: Ferrari Monster (price last sold at: $100). A deep dive into a single fascinating topic — code named Ferrari Monster — which I claim is the essence of all copywriting and marketing. Get the Ferrari Monster right, and almost everything else falls into place.

#3. Copy Riddles Lite (price last sold at $99). A slice of my Copy Riddles program, proportionately priced. Try yourself against legendary A-list copywriters like Gene Schwartz, David Deutsch, and Clayton Makepeace — and in the process, implant new copywriting skills into your brain.

#4. Horror Advertorial Swipe File (price last sold at: $100). A zip file with 25 PDFs, featuring the original copy for 25 of my horror advertorials. These advertorials pulled in millions of dollars on cold Facebook and YouTube traffic, and sold everything from fake diamonds and dog seat belts, to stick-on bras and kids’ vitamins.

#5. 9 Deadly Email Sins (price last sold at: $100). 9 lessons distilled from my expensive and exclusive one-on-one coaching sessions with successful business owners and marketers.

In the past, I’ve sold each of these trainings at the prices listed. When you add all those prices up, you get a total of $499 in free bonuses. This happens to be more than CopyHour currently sells for.

That said, don’t join CopyHour just to get my free bonuses. Join because you decide that you will do the work involved in CopyHour, and that you will benefit from it.

For more info on that, take a look at Derek’s writeup of how CopyHour works:

https://bejakovic.com/copyhour

I shuddered when I got the email from the Motley Fool… but when the Kindle sales started rolling in!—

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In May 2014, I quit my secure, full-time IT office job and I started spending my mornings writing stock analysis articles for the Motley Fool.

It was great. I was working from home. I was working for myself and doing work I didn’t dislike. I could organize my own schedule, my rates were quickly increasing, and the future was looking bright.

Then in July 2014, just a couple months after my new barefoot writer lifestyle had begun, I got the following email from the managing editor at the Motley Fool:

it is disheartening for us to say that effective today, we will not be able to continue our writing relationship and further this mission together.

This is no fault of your own; it is the simple result of our business model and the corresponding structure we’ve built. It has been our pleasure to work with you, and we hope you consider yourself a Fool for life. We certainly do.

“Well, shit,” I said to myself. “Fool for life, indeed.”

I wrote to the MF editor I had been in touch with. I asked if there was any chance I might be kept on — while hundreds of other writers were being let go. I never heard back.

I wrote to my friend, who was also writing for the MF and who got me this gig. “It sucks,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but it’s not looking good.”

So there I was. I had no job, and I needed money. I had rent to pay, food to buy, plus I had a cat at the time, and maintaining those things in life is not exactly free.

What to do?

Getting an office job again was inconceivable. For one thing, I wasn’t sure anyone would hire me — certainly not the people at my old job. For another, it was just a matter of pride, plus the fact I had always been a bad match for office work.

I looked at my arm, and briefly considered sawing it off. But I soon realized that’s another story, although with the same structure. In any case, losing the arm wouldn’t help.

So I took a deep breath. I gritted my teeth. And I did what I always do:

I made a list of ideas. In this case the list was titled, “10 ways I could make money by the end of this month.”

#6 on that list, between #5 (stealing) and #7 (begging) was “Write and publish some Kindle books.” And that was my start as a Kindle publishing magnate.

I’ve written about this history before. But the gist of it is:

That first month, I wrote three short Kindle ebooks, on three related niche topics. The total word count was around 15,000, and 10,000 of that was reused among the three ebooks.

I sold $285 worth of books in that first month.

The next month, I wrote 3 new tiny books. And then some more. Within a few months, I had a stable of a dozen titles, and I was making a steady income that was getting close to what i was making at my IT job just a few months earlier.

Ta-da! Who needs the Motley Fool? Who needs a stupid office job?

​​I had a found a way to survive and even thrive, working for myself, on my own terms, with “up” as the only direction to go.

​​The end. Well, almost.

Yesterday, I told you about the riches-to-rags story type, which can be represented by \. The day before that, I told you about rags-to-riches, represented by /.

Combine those two, and you get \/ aka the “man in a hole” story type.

“Man in a hole” is a common format for complete stories — like that of Aron Ralston, who sawed off his own arm to survive after being pinned down by a boulder.

“Man in a hole” is an even more common plot element of bigger stories — think James Bond losing $14.5 million in a poker game in Montenegro, because he’s been suckered by the fake tell of the main villain.

Which brings up the following storywriting rule:

It matters where you cut you your story off.

For example, after those first few glorious months, my Kindle sales cratered. It turns out I wasn’t going to make a living selling $2.99 ebooks. So I got into writing sales copy for other business… then a few years later, I got back into Kindle publishing but with a different approach… then I met this guy who told me about crypto and we went to London for a conference…

You know what that’s called? That’s called rambling. It’s definitely not called storytelling.

Human brains want neatly tied-up episodes, and they want the satisfaction of having story elements fit and click.

One powerful mechanism you have to make things fit and click is the stop button. So think of the effect you want to have, and use that to decide where to cut your story off. Speaking of which—

Sign up to my email newsletter. That’s been the point of this entire email. To show you I have something interesting to say about writing and persuasion more broadly, and that I can even be entertaining about it. Are you convinced? If you are, here’s where to go.