Parris Lampropoulos

A copy riddle with a swipe file prize

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Here’s a copy riddle for you:

Gary Halbert called it the only reason that people buy from an ad, for the most part…

While Ben Settle said that copywriting is all about this one thing.

Parris Lampropoulos credits his success to it. And drilling this one thing is how he spends 80% of his time with his copy cubs.

David Deutsch said it’s the “key to the kingdom”…

And John Carlton believes it makes the difference between a sale made and a sale lost.

So my riddle for you is, what is this one thing?

I gave this riddle to people on my email newsletter. And the people who got it right got a prize.

The prize was a link to the best publicly available swipe file I have ever found. And no, it’s not swiped.co.

In my opinion, the swipe file I have in mind is about 100x better, based on the quality and quantity of ads you can find inside… many of which are only available today as bonuses to expensive copywriting and marketing courses.

Sometimes, I run little contests and challenges like this, as a way to keep my newsletter fun and profitable. If you’d like to try out my newsletter, both to see whether you like the content, and so you can participate in the next little riddle challenge, then click here and fill out the form.

You, your own copywriting secret weapon?

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Here are two flexible factoids, and a suggestion you might find valuable:

1. A-list copywriter Gary Halbert said curiosity is the most powerful human motivating force.

2. Another A-list copywriter, Parris Lampropoulos, keeps a “Didn’t know that!” file. This is where Parris puts new and interesting facts he comes across during research for copywriting projects.

​​But Parris has spent hundreds of hours doing research on dozens of big projects… so when he comes across something new and interesting to him, you can bet it will be new and interesting to his audience.

So I’d like to suggest you do something similar.

Invest $3 in a notebook… or invest two seconds to create a file on your computer desktop. Write “Hm, I didn’t know that, or, that’s interesting” across the top.

​​And you’re pretty much done. From then on, as you come across something that fits that heading, you just add it to your notebook or file.

The longer your list grows, the more interesting and valuable it will become, by process of elimination.

Eventually, you will have a list of things that stimulate curiosity for almost everyone in your audience. And if Gary H. is right, you will have the most powerful tool in motivating people to action.

​​In effect, you make your own curiosity and capacity to be surprised into your copywriting secret weapon.

I do this exact same thing, and it’s been valuable to me. In fact, it’s how I write these emails each day. Which brings me to my self-serving reason for telling you about this:

A reader named Glenn wrote in to challenge me on some sloppy self-promotion I committed recently.

Glenn pointed out that in the email I sent out announcing my bullets course… I didn’t feature a single Gary Halbert-style bullet.

Fair point.

My answer to this is that emails like the one you’re reading are basically the modern version of sales bullets. The only difference is you’re not restricted by space (like in a sales letter or print ad)… or by having only one shot to make the sale (like when paying for cold traffic).

Other than that, bullets and sales emails are the same.

​​You find some information that your audience might want. You condense it and sexy it up.

​​If it’s really cool and interesting information, you can choose to give it away in your copy… or if it’s meh information, then you might choose to tease it endlessly in your email or bullet, and hide the payoff in your product for sale.

In other words, if you can learn how to write sexy sales bullets… you will be a long way to being able to write emails people will want to read day after day. Particularly if you add in something new and interesting to tell your reader, which is what your “Hm, I didn’t know that” list is all about.

Anyways, that’s part of my pitch for joining my bullet writing course, which kicks off this Monday. If you’re interested in joining, then the first step is signing up for my email newsletter, which you can find here.

Cheapest way to get an A-list copywriting education (only good until Thursday)

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Say you’d like to get a bunch of A-list copywriters to sit around and share insights and advice with you. I’m talking the biggest names in the direct response industry… people like Gary Bencivenga and Parris Lampropoulos and David Deutsch. Copywriters who have sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stuff with just their magic, fascinating words.

How much would you be willing to pay for such an opportunity, if it lasted, say, an entire afternoon?

$5k?

Too much?

How about $1k?

Still too much?

Maybe only $500?

Well, I’ll tell you how to get it for free.

This Thursday at 1pm EST, a bunch of the most successful copywriters of all time are getting together in virtual space, somewhere in east Zoom. The occasion is the one-year anniversary of the death of Clayton Makepeace, himself a famous A-list copywriter, and a mentor to many of the people who will be speaking on this call.

Here are few things that might interest you about this event:

1. It will last for 3 hours.

2. So far, about a dozen A-list copywriters and other direct marketing veterans are confirmed to be participating.

3. I have no idea what these people people will talk about. But even if there are zero headline tips and even fewer magic sales letter closes being shared… I suspect the call will still be very valuable.

4. Since this is organized in Clayton’s honor, and based on the profile of the people who will join, I imagine it won’t just be a 3-hour-long tease-fest that’s designed to sell something else. But I could be wrong.

5. I don’t know if there will be any recordings of the call, and if there are, how they will be made available and to whom.

5. This event is free to attend, but you do gotta register.

So if an A-list education sounds good to you… and if free is a price you can afford to pay… then here’s where to go:

https://members.carlinecole.com/clayton

A simple 3-hour “trick” which 100% makes your bullets better

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Today is the last day of the bullets course I’ve been running. We will wrap it up with an important lesson. Let’s start with a bullet by David Deutsch:

“Restore night vision — with a berry. See page 76.”

Which berry? Here’s what it says of page 76 of the book David was selling:

Night Vision

* Eat blueberries when they’re in season. They can help restore night vision.

* You know the old joke about carrots being good for your eyes? Well you’ve never seen a rabbit wearing glasses. Eat two or three carrots a day (raw or cooked) and/or drink a glass of fresh carrot juice. It’s excellent for alleviating night blindness.

* Eat more watercress in salads and/or drink watercress tea.

David’s bullet is an example of the teaser mechanism I wrote about yesterday. But that’s not the point I want to make today.

Instead, look at all that other stuff in the source material.

Why did David choose to focus on the berry? Why didn’t he highlight the proven “Bugs Bunny cure” for night blindness instead? And why didn’t the bullet read,

“Restore night vision — with this delicious tea. See page 76.”

Who the hell knows. But I can take a guess. Let me set up my guess with two facts about two other expert copywriters. First, here’s Gary Bencivenga, writing in the royal “we”:

“When it comes to strong copy, we’ve seen again and again that the most persuasive ads arise from thorough research. We’ve established this general rule — accumulate seven times more information about the product than we can use.”

Second, there’s Parris Lampropoulos. I heard him say in an interview how he also follows Gary’s 7x research rule above. But from what I understand, Parris takes it one step further.

Parris will also write 7x the bullets he can use in his copy. This means that for a magalog with a 100 bullets, Parris will write up to 700 bullets.

So now we get back to those night-vision blueberries.

It’s very possible that David did write up bullet with a “Bugs Bunny cure,” or something like it. But when comparing it with the berry mechanism, he simply thought the berry sounded better.

The fact is, in any decent book or course or other info product, there will be a bunch of problems that are addressed… a bunch of solutions offered… and a bunch of factoids you can twist and highlight about each of these solutions. Each of those can make a new bullet.

You don’t really know which combination will sound the best until you try it out. And you also don’t know which one will work the best once you have it in the actual promo, surrounded by other bullets. Which leads to today’s bullet lesson:

Lesson 11: “Write many more bullets than you need.”

How many more?

That’s up to you. David and Gary and Parris wrote copy where millions of dollars were on the line. In that case, it makes sense they put in 7x extra work.

But what if you’re just starting out? Well, it might make sense even in that case. Here’s a quote by another master of bullets, Gene Schwartz:

“This is what makes success. There’s nothing else in the world that makes success as much as this. I will take the best copywriter in the world who is sloppy and careless, and match him against a good copy cub, and two out of three times, the sloppiness of the great person will be beaten by the carefulness of the other person. […] The person who is the best prepared and the most knowledgeable makes the most money. It’s so simple!”

I can tell you this personal tidbit:

For my lesson yesterday on teaser mechanisms, I wanted to feature three examples. And so I took my own advice, and I dug up 21 examples of teaser bullets, and the source material behind each of them. It took me about three hours of work to do all the research and analysis.

So was it worth it?

I think so. It’s how I could see the (now obvious) lessons I found yesterday.

But like I said, today’s is the end of this bullets course.

This doesn’t mean there are no more bullets lessons out there… or that I’ve stopped researching and writing them up. Quite the opposite.

The fact is, I want to create a new version of this course, which actually gets you practicing these lessons instead of just reading what I write. This new course won’t be free and it might be expensive… well, at least when you compare it to free.

Anyways, I’ll write up an offer page for this in a few days. And I’ll send it out in an email so you can see for yourself — assuming you’ve been eating your carrots — whether it’s something you’re interested in or not.

And if you want to get that email when I send it out, you can subscribe here to my amazing email sending service.

A-list teaser bullets

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Here are three workhorse teaser bullets, written by three A-list copywriters:

“Best exercise to improve your potency. Just 3 or 4 minutes, twice a day. Page 150.”

“Put an end to cold feet — with an old skiers’ trick that makes one pair of socks feel like two. Page 86.”

“How to increase the power of the beneficial bacteria in your gut without yogurt or probiotic supplements. The secret is this delicious drink. Page 247.”

The first of these was written by Arthur Johnson… the second by David Deutsch… and the third by Parris Lampropoulos.

I tracked down the original source material from which these A-listers wrote these bullets. And thanks to this, I managed to extract three lessons, or rather three ingredients, that anybody, A-list or not, could use to write more powerful bullets.

What are these three ingredients?

That’s something I reserved for people who are signed up to my free bullets course, which is going on right now. For more information, and less teasing, go here:

https://bejakovic.com/bullets-signup/

The hidden structure of the best bullets. 2 parts needed. Here’s how you could have gotten both

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Over the past few weeks, while looking over dozens of bullets written by A-list copywriters, I realized the best bullets have a hidden 2-part structure.

I think being aware of this can help anyone write more powerful bullets… and become a top-tier copywriter in general.

For example, one bullet by Parris Lampropoulos that had this structure was so powerful it became the headline for Parris’s entire promotion. And the promotion went on to beat the control.

I covered both parts of this hidden structure in today’s lesson of my bullets course. You could have gotten that lesson for free, had you been signed up.

But it’s still not too late. Because I’ll be covering other bullet topics in the coming days… including special cases of both of those “hidden structure” parts.

In case you’d like more info about my bullet course, or even to sign up, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/bullets-signup/

Bullets course

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Two days ago, I wrote a post about a copywriting lesson milked from a Parris Lampropoulos bullet.

After writing up a few more of those lessons based on a few more bullets, I realized this stuff is too valuable to just cast out into the ether, to people who might not value it.

Don’t worry. I’m still willing to share these lessons with you.

But I’ve decided to create a little mini course around them. The course is free if you sign up for it now.

How it works is you will get an email from me every day.

Each email will talk about a copywriting lessons I’ve figured out by comparing the flour, eggs, and milk in the source material (the book or course for sale) to the crisp and shiny pastries that are the finished bullets in the sales copy.

The course will kick off tomorrow, and will run for 7-14 days, or however long it takes me to get tired of it.

If you want to opt in, you just have to fill out the form at the link below. But a warning to ye:

This course is going out live. In other words, it won’t be on autoresponder.

You can join it whenever you like, including later, and you will still get any remaining lessons I haven’t sent out.

But I won’t send you any bullet lessons you’ve missed. Because the idea is to take all this and package it up into a book or a course down the line. So if you don’t like to get it for free now, perhaps you will like to support me later.

Again, we start tomorrow, with what you should never, omit from your bullet. Never. Here’s the link in case you want it:

https://bejakovic.com/bullets-signup

Surprise! How to make your copy more appealing by saying less

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Back in the 90s, A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos wrote a control for a Boardroom book called Tax Loopholes. One of the bullets in that control read:

“Surprise! Choosing the wrong private school for your child can cost you a bundle in tax breaks. What to do on page 90.”

I found the actual Tax Loopholes book online. And here’s what it says on page 90:

“If you send your child to a special school for psychological reasons, be sure to choose the right school. Otherwise your medical deduction could be disallowed. Recent case: A psychiatrist recommended that a child attend a boarding school. The IRS refused to allow the parent to take a medical deduction because the school was not a “special” school, and the curriculum didn’t deal with the child’s problem in any way.”

So how did Parris get from the source material (boring, unsexy) to the bullet (intriguing, sexy)?

Let’s take it step by step. If I had to summarize what it says in the book, I might say something like:

“The trouble is you can send your kid to a boarding school for a medical reason thinking you can get a tax break, but it ends up disallowed because it’s not the right kind of school”

There’s one big problem with this. And that’s that very few people are thinking of sending their kids to a boarding school for a medical reason.

So now the clever thing that Parris did becomes obvious.

Because if your appeal is very specific and limited, you can broaden it simply by generalizing and omitting stuff.

That’s how a boarding school (specific and fairly rare) becomes a private school (general and pretty common)…and that’s how the mention of the medical deduction simply disappears. Now our basic-bitch summary becomes:

“You can send your kid to a private school thinking you can get a tax break, but it ends up disallowed because it’s not the right kind of school.”​​

(This is already pretty close to what Parris’s bullet says. Beyond this one insight, it’s mostly a matter of tightening up the copy.)

Now here’s why this trick is so valuable:

This generalization/omission sleight-of-hand doesn’t just apply to writing bullets. It’s something you can do in all your copy if your initial appeal is too narrow. As Parris said once (I’m quoting from memory):

“Ask yourself, does it help my case, does it hurt my case, or is it neutral? If it hurts your case or it’s neutral, take it out. Only keep it in if it helps your case.”

By the way, I’ll be going through more bullets and source material like this, to figure out how great bullet writers do their business.

If this is something that interests you, you can sign up for my email newsletter here, because that way you’re sure to get my new research as soon as it comes out.

How to turn good copy into great copy

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For the past several weeks I’ve been milking content ideas from a recent interview I heard with A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos. And I ain’t done yet. Here’s another valuable story from the same:

Once upon a time, while Parris was still getting his copy sea legs, he apprenticed under Clayton Makepeace.

Parris would write some copy. He’d submit it to Clayton. Clayton would fix it up, and the submit it to the client.

The clever thing Parris did was to ask Clayton for the final drafts. He’d go through and compare what Clayton had changed to the original he (Parris) had submitted.

As Parris got better and better through this process, there were fewer and fewer changes.

Until one time, there was only one change.

It was in a bit of copy that Parris had written about part-time jobs for people during retirement. One of these jobs was to be a mystery shopper. And it could earn you as much as $50,000 a year.

Pretty good, right?

Yes. Good. But then Clayton made it great, by adding a few words along the lines of:

“Imagine, $50,000 a year — just for going shopping!”

Parris said that Clayton was a natural-born persuader. And one powerful thing he did instinctively was help people “grasp the advantage.”

That’s a term from Vic Schwab’s book, How to Write a Good Advertisement. Schwab said you first show people an advantage… them you prove it… and then you help them grasp it.

You can do this grasping part in a bunch of different ways.

Clayton’s example above is of the form, “You’re doing X anyways, so why not get Y benefit?”

But there are many others. I spelled out a few of them to my email subscribers.

What? You’re not subscribed to my email newsletter? But you’re reading my stuff anyways, so why not get the full story, with all the lessons laid out on a platter for you? Here’s where to subscribe.

Can this A-list advice replace your customer avatar?

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You’ve probably heard the ancient advice to write your sales copy to a customer avatar.

In other words, rather than thinking of your market as a gassy cloud, without substance or a face… you come up with a real person to represent your ideal customer.

So you have their name… a little blurb of who they are and what they want and what their problems are… and maybe even a photo you can look at.

And the advice is to write to this one person. Because instead of writing something vague and unbelievable… you will write something specific and real.

Sounds good. Except:

Your target audience might not be one single type of person. It might be two or three or more. For example, this daily newsletter I write? It goes out to business owners, marketers, established copywriters, and newbie copywriters.

Also, even though a customer avatar should be based on research… I find that in practice, it’s often an invention of the marketer’s mind. Because of this, a customer avatar can be misleading rather than helpful.

And as a third problem, a customer avatar might focus on the wrong things. Demographic info is often not relevant to making your sale. On the other hand, an avatar might miss crucial information to making the sale that is relevant. Two people standing shoulder by shoulder in the same market can be very different from each other.

So should you take your avatar and set it on fire, like the “Año Viejo” doll that Colombians burn on New Year’s Eve?

I’m not saying that. But there is an alternative to a customer avatar for you to consider.

It’s something I heard during a recent binge of listening to interviews with A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos.

Parris said to find the top 3 psychographic characteristics of your list. For example, for the Boardroom offers Parris often wrote for, these three characteristics were:

1. Paranoid (typical angles: What your bank doesn’t want you to know, 12 smiling swindlers)

2. Looking for an “angle” (a secret, a loophole, a way to get over)

3. Like to brag about how smart they are

When you figure out these top 3 psychographic characteristics, you can use them to inform your offers, your headlines, and your body copy. Take a look at any Boardroom control ever, and you will see it in practice. Something like, “Money-saving secrets your CPA is too dumb to know about.”

But your market might be different. Maybe they are gullible rather than skeptical. Maybe they need more proof than promises. Maybe they want a push-button solution, or maybe they have been trained to believe only hard work produces good results.

You can find all this out. Just look at what they’ve bought before… the copy that worked to sell them… and the copy that bombed.

Odds are, you will see patterns, unique insights, which might be different from standard copywriting dogma about what buttons you should push.

Write to these characteristics instead of to a made-up customer avatar… and you might develop magical persuasion powers, by tapping in to your prospect’s deep and unconscious triggers.

And for more information like this:

I have an email un-newsletter, full of age-old wisdom like what you just read. If you’d like to subscribe, click here and follow the simple instructions.