Parris Lampropoulos

The core idea in this email is not new but that’s exactly the point

by

As I sit down to write you this email, an old pop song, the Smiths’ How Soon is Now, is playing loudly in my head.

That’s because earlier this morning, I read about a new AI project, called Stable Attribution.

The point of Stable Attribution is to try to figure out which human-created images were used to train which AI-generated images.

The motivation, according to the Stable Attribution site, is that artists deserve to “be assigned credit when their works are used, and to be compensated for their work.”

That’s a waste of time, if you ask me, and a focus on totally the wrong thing.

A few days ago, a friend sent me an article about guitarist Johnny Marr.

Marr took a few different songs and sounds — most notably Bo Didley and a rap song called You’ve Gotta Believe – and co-opted them. The result was How Soon is Now, which became the most unique and enduring of Smiths’ songs.

Michael Jackson once ran into Darryl Hall in a recording studio. Jackson admitted that, years earlier, he had swiped the famous bass line for Billie Jean from Hall & Oates’s I Can’t Go For That.

Hall shrugged. He told Jackson that he himself had lifted that bass line from another song, and that it was “something we all do.”

Artists and songwriters co-opt and plagiarize all the time. It’s only in exceptional cases that we find out about it.

But this isn’t a newsletter about drawings or pop songs. It’s a newsletter about business, and marketing, and copywriting.

So let me tell you I once heard A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos on the David Garfinkel podcast.

Parris pointed out how a subhead from one of his million-dollar sales letters was the headline of an earlier control sales letter he didn’t write. That earlier headline worked, and Parris knew that. So he co-opted it, or if you like, plagiarized.

Marketer Dan Kennedy once talked about Bill Phillips, the body builder and fitness coach who built an info product empire.

Dan said Phillips is a pack rat who can pull out fitness ads and promos going back a hundred years. Knowing the history of his industry — and co-opting or plagiarizing it regularly — was a big part of the success Phillips had.

Even the core idea of my email today, of plagiarizing for long-term business success, isn’t new. I got it from James Altucher, who got it from Steven Pressfield. Who knows where Pressfield first heard it.

Fortunately, there is no Stable Attribution for human work. Nor should there be.

So my advice for you is to go back. Study what came before you, and what worked. Integrate it into your own work.

Give attribution if you like, or don’t.

Either way, it’s sure to make you more creative, and more successful at what you do.

And if your work happens to be copywriting, selling, or more broadly persuasive communication, then take a look at my Copy Riddles program.

Copy Riddles will show you the work of some of the most successful copywriters in history, Parris Lampropoulos above among them. But not only that.

Copy Riddles will get you practicing the same, so you can co-opt the skills of these effective communicators and make them your own.

Maybe you’re curious about how that might work. If so, you can read more about Copy Riddles, and buy the program if you like, at the link below:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

How to get access to the most elite opportunities and most exclusive clubs

by

In case you’re the type who wants access to the most elite opportunities and most exclusive clubs, here’s an instructive story:

Carter Burwell is an American film composer. He has scored dozens of big-budget Hollywood movies, including The Big Lebowski, Being John Malkovich, No Country For Old Men, and Twilight.

But Burwell is not just a film composer. He has has a very colorful history.

Even before the age of 20, Burwell was already a trained animator, a would-be rock star, a factory worker, a would-be architect, and a self-taught computer programmer.

And then one day, after seeing a help-wanted ad in the New York Times, Burwell got hired as chief computer scientist at Cold Spring Harbor Lab, working for Nobel prize winner James Watson, codiscoverer of the structure of DNA.

How did Burwell get inside this elite and exclusive club? From an article about Burwell I just read:

“Burwell wrote a jokey letter in which he said that, although he had none of the required skills, he would cost less to employ than someone with a Ph.D. would. Surprisingly, the letter got him the job, and he spent two years as the chief computer scientist on a protein-cataloguing project funded by a grant from the Muscular Dystrophy Association.”

My point is not to write jokey application letters or cold emails.

It’s certainly not to compete on being cheaper than other options.

My point is simply to be immensely lucky, the way Burwell obviously is.

And in case you’re shocked and possibly outraged by that point, then let me rephrase it in a more how-to way:

Figure out how to weigh the odds so heavily in your favor… that you can be sure you’ve won, long before the coin has been tossed in the air.

That’s an idea from A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos.

It’s a bit of personal philosophy that Parris practices. It’s how he keeps getting access to the most elite copywriting opportunities, and working with the most exclusive clients.

Maybe you want some examples of what this means in practice.

You can find those in my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters, specifically chapter two, which is all about Parris’s “stack the odds” idea above. That chapter also ties in nicely to the Carter Burwell story above. Si te interesa:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Free info on free reports

by

Copy Riddles member Andrew Townley takes advantage of the Copy Oracle privilege to ask:

I was listening to a Dan Kennedy program today that got me thinking about all those direct mail “free reports.” I was wondering if you had a source of any guidance on how to build one. I remember Parris describing the process somewhere on a podcast or something, but I can’t find it now.

The background, as you might know, is this:

A-list copywriters like Dan Kennedy and Parris Lampropoulos are experts at selling newsletters. Newsletters are a direct marketing staple because they are great for the publisher. Money comes in like clockwork, on your own schedule, without any added selling of your vague and broad and cheap-to-produce subscription offer.

For those same reasons, newsletters are a suspect deal for the subscriber. Many potential subscribers instinctively feel repulsed at the thought of paying good money, every month, for a “cat in the bag” piece of content, whether they are eager to consume it or not.

Enter free reports. Free reports are one effective strategy that guys like Dan and Parris use to overcome the resistance of skeptical newsletter buyers. The recipe is simple:

1. Go through your past content (newsletter or really anything else)
​
2. Find the sexiest stuff. It can either be a single bit of info, or a small number of related items you bundle together.

​3. Put that sexy stuff in its own little package.

​4. Give that package a sexy and mysterious new name.

​5. Repeat as many times as your stamina will allow. I believe one Boardroom promo offered 99 free reports along with a newsletter subscription.

When you think about it, this is really just the same work that a copywriter would do normally. Look at what he has to sell… figure out the sexiest parts of that… highlight it in the sales material, and of course, make it sound as sexy and as mysterious as possible.

And now for the pitch that probably won’t convince you:

I write a daily email newsletter about copywriting, marketing, and persuasion.

But like I said, that probably won’t convince you to sign up.

So let me take my own advice, and offer you a free report when you sign up:

“Become a Repositioning Specialist”

This report shows you how to start a profitable repositioning business, with your own home as headquarters. In case, you want this report, follow these steps:

  1. Click here and sign up to my free daily email newsletter
  2. When you get my welcome email, hit reply and tell me you want the free report

A new way to acquire copywriting skills while reducing emissions by over 80%

by

Today I have a new pasta recipe for you:

Boil the water, throw in the pasta, cook as usual for two minutes. Then turn off the stove. Put a lid on your pasta and keep it in the hot-but-no-longer boiling water until the usual cooking time.

It’s called passive cooking and apparently it works just as well as your usual “stove’s on” way of cooking pasta, while reducing emissions by 80%.

Whatever. I’m just sharing this recipe with you because 1) it’s trending on the Internet, and I’m a trendy guy and 2) because I went to the page that explained this pasta cooking recipe and saw something interesting.

The passive cooking page is on the Barilla site. Barilla is a brand of pasta. And yet, on that page of the Barilla site, it says the following:

DOES IT WORK ONLY WITH PASTA BARILLA?

Of course not! We chose to study the process, adapt it to our classic product range and provide all the information to adopt this method. But helping the planet goes beyond our brand. So, with a few tweaks, you can try Passive Cooking even if you choose products from other brands.

This is interesting — and smart. It goes back to something I heard once from A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos.

Parris said how many sales letters go from problem => my offer and why it’s just what you need!

“How convenient,” says the reader after reading this. “All this time, while you were pretending to be talking about me and my problem, you were just leading me by the nose until you could start hawking your stupid brand of tortiglioni.”

A much better way to do it, says Parris, is to go from problem => broad category of solution => why your specific solution is a great or really the best choice within that category.

“It works with any brand of pasta! Of course, you might have to tweak a few things, do a bit of light multivariate calculus, and risk a beating from your hungry spouse — but really, any brand will work! Or of course you can just go with Barilla because we’ve done all the work for you.”

Which brings me to my Copy Riddles program:

IS COPY RIDDLES THE ONLY WAY TO TRANSFORM YOUR COPYWRITING SKILLS?

Of course not! I chose to study actual, million-dollar copy of A-list copywriters, present it to you in fun bite-sized pieces, and provide you all the information so you can practice each A-list copywriting technique yourself.

But effective copywriting goes beyond Copy Riddles. So, with a few tweaks, along with a few thousand hours of effort and a few tens of thousands of dollars of investment in books, courses, and coaching, you can try to acquire the same copywriting skills in different ways also.

Or you can just get Copy Riddles.

In case the pot’s boiling, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

“sold out”

by

Yesterday, marketer Justin Goff sent out an email with the subject line “sold out”. The body copy immediately explained what was sold out:

Just a heads up, nearly half of the 250 swipe files that are available in the special sale going on today have already been taken…

So they will be sold out soon.

Here are a few things I, and probably many other people who are on Justin’s list, know after this email:

1. Justin has been promoting this affiliate offer for a few days.

2. So have several other marketers with large lists, including some with the largest lists in the copywriting/IM niche.

3. After several days of steady emailing by all those marketers, going out to tens of thousands of people in total, fewer than 125 sales of the affiliate offer have been made. That probably translates to a less than 0.1% conversion rate — and maybe as low as 0.025%.

I don’t know how many sales, and more importantly, how much money, Justin made with this “sold out” email. Maybe he did great. And maybe I will look like a fool for sticking my nose into things that I don’t know anything about.

With that in mind, let me say that Justin’s email is a violation of a fundamental rule of copywriting.

Perhaps the most fundamental rule of them all.

It’s a rule I was exposed to in the mythical webinar training that A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos put on back in 2018. Parris repeated this rule, over and over, while talking about how he evaluates his own copy, and while critiquing many pieces of student-submitted copy. The rule is this:

“Does it help your case, hurt your case, or is it neutral? Only keep it in if it helps your case.”

This rule might seem blindingly obvious. But as Justin’s email above shows, even smart and successful marketers will break this rule — because they get rushed, careless, or greedy.

When I read Justin’s email, my first impression was, “Fewer than 125 copies sold? This must not be a very attractive offer.” My second impression was, “Even if it’s a fine offer, I’ve got plenty of time to get it, since at this rate it won’t sell out soon — in spite of Justin’s alarmist subject line.”

Again, I might be sticking my hoof in my snout by talking about a promotion where I don’t know the actual sales numbers, and one which is still going on.

But the bigger point stands. Does it help your case, hurt your case, or is it neutral?

Anyways, on to my own promotion:

Nearly half of the infinity+ digital copies of my Most Valuable Email course have already been sold.

The remaining infinity+ copies are sure to sell out soon. So starting tomorrow, I will turn my great eye elsewhere, and start promoting my twice-born Copy Riddles program.

That means you might not hear from me about my Most Valuable Email program for a while, even though it will continue to be available for sale.

But hold on—

Is this any kind of way to do urgency? Should the fact that I won’t be pitching MVE for a while make you want to buy it today?

No. Not unless you’re the type to get activated by “sold out” subject lines and other transparent scarcity tactics.

On the other hand, if you like the basic promise of Most Valuable Email — “turn ordinary and rather boring emails into something clever and cool” — then today is as good a day as any to start down that path. ​​And maybe even better than any later day — because if you get going now, you will start seeing the benefits of this little trick in action sooner.

Whatever the case, if you are interested, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Isla de Muerta positioning

by

I recently rewatched the original Pirates of the Carribean movie, and I was reminded of the dreaded Isla de Muerta.

It’s a mystery island, maybe just a legend, where Captain Barbossa docks his ghostly Black Pearl, and where he keeps the cursed treasure of Hernan Cortes.

But don’t bother searching for Isla de Muerta on a map. Don’t make the foolish mistake of ever trying to sail to it yourself.

Only those who already know where the island is can ever find it.

That’s just like the positioning that A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos has.

​​I listened to Parris on a recent episode of the Chris Haddad podcast. I have stopped listening to marketing and copy podcasts. But whenever Parris makes a new public appearance, once every few decades, I make sure to listen, and probably multiple times.

Because Parris is the one person in this industry that I have learned from the most and that I have modeled the most.

I’ve learned copywriting tricks and tactics from Parris.

I’ve learned mindset and attitude and work practices.

And I’ve learned business of copy strategies.

Which brings us back to Parris’s positioning. Here’s how Parris explains his positioning, including why he gives talks so rarely:

“No website, no business card, not on social media, unlisted number, gotta know somebody who knows somebody to get to me and then maybe I’ll work with you. If I give all these talks it goes against my positioning. It looks like I’m trawling for work.”

In other words, if any ambitious business owner wants the marketing treasures hidden inside Parris’s head… well, that business owner has to have worked with Parris before, or at least know somebody who has.

This kind of positioning might seem entirely impractical to you right now.

And Parris himself admits he hasn’t had this positioning in the early days.

In fact, he kicked off his freelance career by going to Kinko’s, printing out hundreds of copies of a sales letter selling his own services, and then standing outside of a direct marketing convention, trembling with fear and handing out his sales letter to anyone who would take one. That landed him his first five clients.

Still, if you are interested in learning from the most successful people, then there’s no denying Parris is among them in the direct response industry.

And his “mystery, maybe just a legend” positioning might be worth using as a bearing to take you where you want go eventually go. The same way that Captain Jack Sparrow uses his crooked compass, which won’t point north, to track down Isla de Muerta.

Anyways, on to my Most Valuable Email offer.

Parris once, and only once, held a paid and public training. It included a bunch of super valuable bonuses, including a document titled, “A technique for improving your writing overnight.”

Parris advised his copy cubs, and anybody who paid for his training, to copy this document by hand three times.

Why?

Reason one — or so I suspect — was that the document laid out some important writing advice.

Reason two was that this document used my Most Valuable Email trick.

Like I’ve written before, I haven’t invented this trick. A few very smart and successful marketers have long used it in non-email media.

But nobody has used it in emails as often, and with such good results as I have.

If you are curious to learn this mysterious, maybe legendary trick yourself, then get out your broken compass, jam your tricorn hat onto your head, and set sail for this horizon:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Hot opportunity inside

by

Today’s email will:

1. Amuse you
2. Tell you something personal and possibly shocking about me
3. Give you a valuable marketing idea you can use right now
4. Outrage you and give you a chance to feel superior
5. Share some saucy gossip about people you might know, at least online
6. Clue you in to a hot opportunity
7. Remind you of something valuable that you probably know but aren’t doing
8. Allow you to feel like you are making progress simply by reading
9. Give you a chance to think differently
10. Provide you with an experience of insight

Confession: Today I had absolutely no clue what to write. So I went back to a big list of good marketing ideas I’ve been collecting for years, and I found the following:

“Shortcut: Write out all the benefits you can think of before seeing the product. Then keep the ones that the product can satisfy.”

That’s from Milt Pierce, who according to according to A-list copywriter Bob Bly, was “the greatest copywriter you never heard of.”

Bob says that Milt was also one of the greatest copywriting teachers of the 20th century, which might be why I’ve heard versions of the above idea from a bunch of other A-list copywriters, including Parris Lampropoulos, Ted Nicholas, and John Carlton.

So for today’s email, I took Milt’s idea, came up with 10 possible benefits, and kept the four I could possibly deliver on.

But you might be wondering how I’ve delivered on #6, “Clue you in to a hot opportunity.”

The fact is, I heard Milt share the above advice in a special program, the “Gene Schwartz Graduate Course on Marketing.” This “Graduate Course” was more like a seminar of top copywriters and marketers, including Parris, Jay Abraham, and Ken McCarthy, going back and forth on the topic of Gene Schwartz and the marketing and copywriting lessons they squeezed out of the man.

The “Gene Schwartz Graduate Course” used to sell for hundreds of dollars. Then for many years, you couldn’t even get it at any price. But today, it’s yours free — well, “free” as in you gotta buy something, for $12.69, but then you get the Gene Schwartz course as a free bonus.

So what do you gotta buy?

If you check my list above, you won’t find “Charm you with a sales pitch” among today’s benefits. So for that, and for the full info on this hot opportunity, take a look below:

https://overdeliverbook.com/

Copy Zone thesis #89

by

If there were a church near me, I’d go and nail an announcement to the door that says:

I’m nearing the end of Copy Zone, my guide to the business side of copywriting. Managing clients… getting them if you don’t got ’em… upleveling to as high as you want to go, that kind of thing.

Copy Zone consists of 114 points, rules, or maybe theses, to keep going with the religious theme I have set up my offers.

I’ve finished all but a handful of these 114 theses. And for those that remain, I have notes and clear plans for what I want to say.

But here’s the puzzling and conflicting thing to my troubled mind:

I started working on Copy Zone over 3 months ago. This final result, soon to be finished, will be 85% what I initially wrote up for myself in a batch of notetaking in the first couple weeks, when I started working on this.

And yet it’s taken me over three months, and will take a bit more time, to actually get to the end.

That’s not because the actual writing has been so hard or has taken so long.

Instead, it’s because I had doubts about the overall structure… the presentation I was making… the emphasis I wanted readers to rememeber and walk away with.

So I ended up rearranging, making tweaks, changing the structure multiple times… while keeping much of the content the same.

Will it be worth it?

​​And even if the current version really turns out to be a 100, wouldn’t it have been better to put out something that was an 85, but to do so three months ago?

Who knows. It’s a fair question. and maybe It’s a lesson I will draw for myself in the future.

For now, I just want to share a different point with you:

Don’t get desperate if your copy, or anything else that you’re writing, sucks.

Don’t go all Nikolai Gogol on your half-finished sales letter and set it on fire, or delete it on your hard drive.

It might be tempting. I know I’ve felt the urge. But the fact is, even if what you’ve written looks awful right now, 85% of it can be salvaged.

So take a bit of time — or worst case, take three months — and rewrite what you’ve got. There are sure to be good ideas in there. Your entire package just needs to be sharpened, polished, molded or otherwise physically transformed. But the substance is there.

A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos once talked about how he writes a sales letter. After the first draft’s done, Parris said, he always thinks he’s lost it. People will find out he’s a fraud.

Then he rewrites the bullets he’s written. They’re still bad. But Parris squints a bit, tilts his head, and thinks to himself, maybe, maybe I can get away with this?

Third and fourth rewrite, the bullets are starting to look pretty damn good.

And the next thing you know, Parris has got himself a new control sales letter, which ends up paying him hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in royalties.

Ok, on to business:

Do you want to get notified when Copy Zone is out? You can keep waiting for that announcement on the church door. Or just sign up to my email newsletter.

Sub-format trumps copy

by

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.

Two copywriting cowboys and a first draft

by

This morning, I found myself, frown on my face, jaw clenched, staring out the window. I was actually stroking my chin, that’s how deep in unpleasant thought I was.

I was trying to come up with a way to start this email.

Finally, disgust swept over me. “Let me just write something, anything,” I said to myself. “In the worst case, it will be terrible. And I will just have to rewrite it.”

In case you’re starting to get a little nervous about where this email is going, let me ease your mind:

This isn’t me cowboy hollering at you to to git ‘er done.

Instead, I just want to remind you — and really, myself — of something I heard in an interview with Parris Lampropoulos.

Parris is one of the most successful copywriters working over the past few decades. He has something like an 80% success rate at defeating control sales letters. And he makes millions of dollars while working on only three or four projects a year.

Even so, Parris doesn’t produce winning copy straight out the gate.

In that interview, Parris said something like:

“When I first sit down and write the bullets for a promotion, I always think I’ve lost it. They’re terrible. Everybody will find out I’m a fraud. Then I rewrite the bullets once, and I think, maybe I will be able to get away with it. Third and fourth rewrite, they’re starting to look pretty damn good.”

So if somebody as successful, proven, established, revered, and experienced as P-Lamp still gets feelings of horror and doubt when he looks at his first draft… then maybe it’s okay if you and I also feel the same.

Or in the words of another A-list copywriter, Clayton Makepeace:

“Don’t compare YOUR first draft with MY 16th draft.”

“Thanks John,” you might say, “but I really don’t need encouragement to keep fiddling with my copy. I do that aplenty already.”

I feel you. I can revise my copy endlessly, moving a single word from place A to place B, and back again, over and over, a dozen times. There’s obviously a point at which it stops paying for itself.

But it’s good to still remind yourself that other people work the same way, including some of the best of the best. It can help you stay sane.

And just as important:

Reminding yourself of the power of rewrites can help you get going in the first place. Like what happened with me with this email you’re reading now.

So that’s all the cowboy hollering I have for you today. And now on to business:

I bring up both Parris and Clayton since they feature many times inside Copy Riddles.

That’s because both Parris and Clayton were a couple of the slowest — but most deadly — gunmen in the Wild West of sales copy. Here’s one of Parris’s bullets that wound:

“How to use an ordinary hairbrush to quit smoking.”

I discovered the secret to this (and many similar) brain-teasers by looking at Parris’s bullet… as well as the actual book he was selling.

The trick Parris used to write this bullet is simple. You can discover it in round 17 of Copy Riddles. Once you know it, you too can write intriguing stuff like this “hair brush” promise, on demand.

And then you can rewrite it… and rewrite it… and rewrite it some more. And slowly, it will start to look pretty damn good.

Anyways, enrollment for Copy Riddles closes tomorrow. So if you’ve got a hankering for some A-list copywriting skills, then pardner, head over here:

https://bejakovic.com/cr