Patrick Winston

Front runner emerges in my poll from yesterday

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As I write this it is 8:46am, exactly 11 hours and 56 mins after my email yesterday went out.

In that email, I gave you a choice of three possible presentations (plus one decoy) I was thinking of creating, and asked which one you would like the best.

It’s still salad days for that poll, and voting is close, but a clear front runner has emerged:

The insight marketing presentation.

Now, maybe that’s all due to the awesome interestingness of the topic. After all, how do you get people to experience an epiphany, a shift in thinking?

People are more stubborn than mules. That why the typical advice from smart marketers it not to even try to change people’s minds. It’s supposed to be the hardest thing to do in daily life, and it should be even harder in writing, or remotely, online… and harder still in a selling context.

And yet, it does happen, and it’s quite possible to do it on purpose.

So maybe it is the topic that’s inherently interesting.

But maybe the front runner status of insight has nothing to do with the topic. Maybe it’s all about a simple statistic that’s publicly visible on my website:

I have written 38 emails so far that ended up in the insight marketing category.

On the other hand, I’ve only written 17 emails about advertorials, and just 10 about natural authority (the other two presentation ideas I introduced yesterday.)

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about How to Speak, a slow and sexy presentation given by Patrick Winston, an MIT professor, about giving effective talks.

One of Winston’s bits of insight, gleaned from years of studying effective talks, is that people in general want to be inspired.

There are different ways to brush that dog.

But one reliable way to inspire is to have passion or enthusiasm.

So maybe that’s the real explanation for why the insight presentation is leading the voting right now.

As the numbers above show, it’s simply a topic I am enthusiastic about. And some of that enthusiasm gets reflected back at me by my readers.

“That’s all fine and good,” I hear a copywriter somewhere yelling, “but how do you get enthusiastic on demand? I have to write about a bunch of offers that are not my own, that I would never buy myself, that are dry and underwhelming.”

If you are a copywriter, that is a real problem. There are tricks I’ve used to get enthusiastic on demand, some obvious, some less so. But that’s a topic for a different email.

For now, I just want to say that, if you are a copywriter, and you want to inspire potential clients to hire you, you might want to write about things you yourself are stimulated by. And the problem of enthusiasm will be instantly solved.

Which is one more reason, probably reason #1738, why writing your own email newsletter, about topics you choose to write about, is a borderline brilliant idea if you are looking to sell your services.

This brings me to my Most Valuable Email presentation. It’s coming up on Wednesday.

And it’s about the single most effective, valuable, and personally interesting (to me) email I regularly send out in this newsletter. No, it’s not about the topic of insight, though it is connected to it in some deep and mysterious way.

If you are looking to sell your services, particularly copywriting services, then this type of email might be equally as valuable to you.

So if you’d like to join this presentation live, or if you’d like to at least have a chance to watch the recording during the 7-day replay window, then get on my email newsletter and watch out for my first email.

🧿

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Yesterday I was sitting at a restaurant on the side of the Barcelona cathedral, trying to learn to enjoy a vermouth, a popular drink here.

In front of me, a steady procession of tourists walked alongside the cathedral, some 40 yards away.

I was staring at them idly between the bittersweet sips of vermouth, when I saw him:

A pasty white man, somewhere between ages 30 and 50, with red hair, wearing Teva sandals, cargo shorts, and… a Wu-Tang t-shirt.

The fact is, the Wu-Tang symbol was what drew my eye first, even though I was sitting far away, and though the man was walking in a crowd.

​​The symbol made me instantly predisposed to like the guy and feel an affinity towards him. All the other unpromising details I noticed only later.

Just in case you don’t know the Wu-Tang Clan:

They are a hip hop group from the 90s that borrowed ideas and imagery from old kung fu movies. Their symbol is a large irregular W, split in two, with the words Wu-Tang in the middle of it.

Even if you’ve never seen the Wu-Tang symbol until now, now that I’ve told you about it, you’re likely to see it, on t-shirts and sweatshirts, as graffiti, or even as a tattoo.

Last week, I sent out an email about How To Speak by Patrick Winston. Winston was an MIT who for 40 years gave a talk on the essence of good communication, taken from his own methodical study of what works.

At one point, Winston presents the Winston star, a rather satanic symbol that encapsulates five characteristics of the most successful communication. All the five characteristics start with an “s”. And one of them, as you can probably guess, you clever sausage, is “symbol.”

And if Winston and his MIT credentials aren’t enough to convince you of the value and influential ability of symbols, then just think of every world religion, every influential brand, or hell, think of my Wu-Tang guy at the Barcelona cathedral.

And then, start thinking about how you could integrate a symbol into what you do.

I can’t give you much more advice than that. I’m not sure what makes for an effective symbol vs. an ineffective one, except the obvious things which apply to all good communication:

Your symbol should be simple. It should be distinct. ​​It should be recognizable, even from a distance of 40 yards away.

As an example, I picked a nazar, a design for an amulet to ward off the evil eye, for the symbol in my subject line today.

Oh and one more thing:

Your symbol should be repeated, over and over, everywhere, until it gets conditioned into people’s heads as the image that somehow represents your thing.

So for example, if I decided to use the nazar symbol above to represent my email audit offer (“ward off the evil lurking around your lukewarm daily emails and underperforming autoresponders…”), then I should also put the nazar on the consulting form I use to get new people to sign up.

Which is just what I’ve done.

​​In case you want to see it, or in case you have an email list and want my help warding off evil from it, you can do so here:

https://bejakovic.com/consulting

The top 3 factors to your success in life, ranked

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This morning, following a walk down to the beach, I rushed back to my apartment, jumped onto the couch, and started clapping my hands in excitement.

It was a close call, but I made it in time!

The next episode of my favorite new show was about to start. I wouldn’t want to miss it for the world.

The show is soooo good. You should definitely check it out. It’s called “How to Speak” and it stars a very funny and charming guy named Patrick Winston.

“How to Speak” was recorded in 2018. And really, it consists of only one episode, or maybe episode is the wrong term.

“How to Speak” is really the recording of a talk, given by Winston, at MIT, the university where he was a professor for over 40 years. For most of those 40+ years, Winston gave his “How to Speak” talk, each year to bigger and more enthusiastic crowds.

So fine. You got me. The only “true” bit of my story above is that I keep watching “How to Speak” over and over, like a favorite new TV show.

I watched it once already… now I’m on episode 2, I mean, the second rewatch… and I will probably keep bingeing on it until nausea sets it.

Why watch some MIT professor like he’s Seinfeld?

Well, Winston gives you a good reason right at the start of his talk. Your success in life, he says, will be determined by:

1. How well you speak…
2. How well you write…
3. The quality of your ideas…

… in that order. This “in that order” part is super important.

Yesterday, I talked about Stefan Georgi and a recent email he sent out about a $500k project he just finished.

The point that stuck out to me was that, here was Stefan, one of the best copywriters in the world, full of relevant samples and industry status… repeatedly writing unanswered emails to a business owner he had never met, trying to follow up and close a copywriting project.

Crickets. No response.

And then there was Stefan again, some time later, running into the same business owner at a conference, and instantly, deal gets closed, and for much more money than before.

In my mind, this is part of what Winston is saying above with that “Speaking, writing, ideas — in that order” stuff.

Of course, Stefan wasn’t at that conference to give a job talk, or to present his new research paper on “The Unreasonable Effectiveness Of The Unique Problem Mechanism.”

But the story still shows the power of personal, high-definition, warm interactions over even the most effective “cold” marketing and networking techniques.

That’s something to keep in mind, whether you are looking for success in your own product business… or as a copywriter working with clients.

All right, I gotta get back to bingeing on my cool new show. So my offer for you today is simple.

A few days ago, I sent out the first Most Valuable Postcard to my first 20 subscribers.

The premise of MVP that it’s an un-newsletter. Rather than telling you sexy secrets that sell for a lot but aren’t really worth much… MVP is all about fundamental factors to your success, which need to be regularly practiced, but which are guaranteed to produce big results.

The Most Valuable Postcard is not open to new subscribers right now. And given the amount of work it took me to produce the first one, I’m not sure it ever will be reopened.

But in case I do reopen it, and you would like to be notified, you can sign up to my email newsletter. The next episode of that particular show airs tonight.