Stefan Georgi

“Sign of the Elephant Guarantee”

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Right now, the top seller in the competitive “manifestation” niche on Clickbank is an offer called the BioEnergy Code.

The VSL for this offer tells the story of Angela Carter, a woman on a journey to find wealth, health, and a feeling of connectedness… by following the golden thread of the elephant.

Elephant?

Yes, elephant.

First, Angela walks into a bookstore in her home town. She closes her eyes and prays for guidance. And she spots a travel guide with an elephant on it.

Next thing you know, Angela’s traveled to Nepal. A boy on the street tugs on her shirt. “Go see the elephants,” he says, and he points across the street.

This leads Angela to a guru who tells her the secret of manifesting anything she wants.

She manifests a new and amazing life for herself. She’s ready to head back home. And she wants to make the guru’s secret public, so others could benefit also. But the guru balks.

“This knowledge stays in Nepal!”

But our hero is prepared. “What if we contribute a portion of each sale to a save-the-elephants charity?”

The guru mulls this over for a second. “Deal!”

This explains why you can now buy the BioEnergy Code for $37 on Clickbank. Pretty standard stuff and not particularly inventive. But this next part is.

When it’s time to close the sale on the set of guided meditation mp3s and chakra-release PDFs, Angela makes the following guarantee:

I call it the “Sign of the Elephant Guarantee”.

Here’s how it works.

Within 24 hours of saying “yes” to The BioEnergy Code…

I guarantee you’ll receive an unmistakable “sign” that you’re on the right path.

It’ll feel like something just got unblocked so you can see your path more clearly than ever.

It may not be an “elephant” like it was for me in Barnes & Noble and the tea shop in Kathmandu…

But it WILL be so clear and so unmistakable, it will be the “Elephant in the Room” – a sign that your fields of BioEnergy are about to be cleared and unleashed.

All I ask is that you give your source 24 hours to manifest this elephant in the room sign.

And if you don’t experience this elephant size sign, simply email me and I’ll promptly refund every penny.

I thought this was genuinely clever. This short bit of copy does so much.

I sat down, and off the top of my head, I wrote 7 good things that come out of this guarantee. I was going to highlight the most valuable of these 7 things in this email, but I realized they are all too important.

So I will make you an offer with a 100% no-questions-asked money-back guarantee… for a full 24 hours.

I call it the “Sign of Clickbank Insight.”

Here’s how it works:

Within 24 hours of reading this email, I guarantee you will receive an unmistakable sign having to do with Clickbank.

Oh, it might not be a big Clickbank logo on a sales page that you visit. But it will be there if you watch for it.

It might be some email newsletter mentioning Clickbank… or it might be an online run-in with a copywriter or marketer, such as Stefan Georgi or Ian Stanley or Chris Haddad, who has been closely tied to Clickbank in the past.

Once you see the sign, you will feel a clear and unmistakable lightbulb moment. “Aha! So this is what that Bejakovic guy was talking about!”

I guarantee this will happen. All I ask is that you give the universe 24 hours to organize this moment of insight for you.

And when it happens, then sign up to my email newsletter.

Reply to my welcome email and tell me about the sign that you saw… and I will spell out the 7 chakras of the “Sign of the Elephant guarantee.”

I mean, I will tell you what I thought was so good about this guarantee… and how you can use this in your own marketing and copy to one day make it to the top of your own Clickbank category.

Or… your money back.

Exciting copywriting breakthrough from an unlikely source

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A few days ago, I had an absolute breakthrough.

It started when an unpromising-looking email landed in my inbox. It was the newsletter of a copywriter whose emails I’ve tried reading in the past, unsuccessfully.

It didn’t look like this email would change things. It had a preachy subject line — and I lingered over the delete button for a moment.

“Uff, it’s your job,” I said to myself. “Just read the damn thing. The guy is obviously successful at what he does. Maybe he will surprise you.”

So I clicked to open the email.

And a kind of warm light descended upon me.

Pieces of copywriting knowledge, which had floated around in my head for years, without meaning or purpose… finally snapped together to form one magnificent Voltron-like insight.

Suddenly, the most elusive and profitable kind of front-end marketing — selling premium-priced supplements to cold Facebook traffic — became clear and simple.

I’m not sure why I had to wait for this email to have this insight. After all, I myself have had success writing front-end copy for cold Facebook traffic, including for supplements.

Perhaps it was this guy’s authority on the topic.

Right now, he has the respect, attention, and endorsement of the best of the best in this field.

​​I’m talking about the most successful copywriters out there, like Craig Clemons (who cofounded the billion-dollar Golden Hippo family of brands, and who even gulled Joe Rogan into sharing a VSL as a real documentary)…

… ​​and Dan Ferrari (who had a string of controls for the Motley Fool and Agora Financial, and who I got copy coaching from a few years back).

So maybe it’s authority.

Or maybe it was the way this email phrased it. Sometimes, a few words can make all the difference. And really, it was just one five-word sentence in that email that set off the breakthrough in my mind.

So what was the sentence? And will it set off a similar breakthrough in your mind?

Well, if you’d like to find out, then I’ll tell you that the copywriter in question is Stefan Georgi.

If you subscribe to my newsletter, odds are good you also subscribe to Stefan’s. So if you want to attempt your own copywriting breakthrough… just search your emails for “greens powder,” and Stefan’s December 2 email will pop up. The five-word sentence that I mentioned is the heading to point 2 in that email.

And if you’re not subscribed to Stefan’s list, you’ve got two options:

Option one is to simply read over my email today a little more carefully. Because I’ve got a habit of implementing good marketing ideas in my own emails, and today is no exception.

Option two is to go to Stefan’s site, jump through a few hoops, and get on his list.

After all, the guy is one of the most successful direct marketers and copywriters out there right now. It only makes sense to keep tabs on him.

Plus, it seems like he’s genuinely helpful, and if you ask him for a copy of his December 2 email, I imagine he would oblige. If you want to give it a try, here’s where to get started:

https://www.stefanpaulgeorgi.com/about/

Evergreen “wireless” fears

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Did you ever hear of “radio face”? It was a curious affliction that swept through households in England in 1925.

​​The background:

Radio had started to spread in the early 1920s. It became more and more popular to have one at home. As a result, radio programming started to explode like corn over a fire.

By 1925, many people found themselves leaning in to the loud speaker… straining to hear each crackling word of the news or the radio drama.

Finally, a companion who was ready to entertain all day long!

Radio seemed perfect. Until, that is, some of the female listeners noticed a worrisome thing. From an article I read:

“The strain of trying to catch every word of wireless broadcast constantly puckers the lines around a woman’s forehead, and draws more lines around the sides of her mouth.”

As a result, many women in England started to live in fear of “wireless wrinkles.”

“Concentration at the Earphones Brings Wrinkles to the Brow.”

Who knows, maybe they were right?

In any case, this made me think how evergreen the fear of “wireless” has been. You could use it in 1925… and also in 2021.

For example, over the past couple of years, I’ve written a lot of copy for a team of ecommerce guys.

One of the longest-running front-end advertorials that we’ve had going is about the fear of “wireless pickpockets.” The offer is an RFID blocking card you put in your wallet, to keep these wireless pickpockets from swiping your money… and giving you wrinkles from all the frowning you would do afterwards.

A few years ago, Stefan Georgi and Justin Goff ran a webinar, offering to critique copy. I submitted the “wireless pickpockets” advertorial.

Stefan and Justin looked at the advertorial tweaking the copy wouldn’t produce much improvement… but Justin had some tested-and-proven advice about the rest of the funnel:

* Add a lot of reason why copy for the first upsell — even though it was just more of the same RFID card.

I passed that golden info on to my clients. But as far as I know, they never implemented it. So maybe it will be useful to you instead, in case you or your clients also run some kind of ecommerce offer.

Anyways, Justin and Stefan put out two more webinars over the past few weeks. If you haven’t watched them yet, I might write more about them in the coming days… and tell you about any golden info that I find inside.

Meanwhile, I want to tell you about a cool newsletter. It’s called The Pessimists Archive. It’s where I found the above story about radio face and wireless wrinkles.

The whole newsletter is really just interesting newspaper cutouts from decades past. It shows you how many things never change… how many fears and appeals stay the same… how predictable human reactions can be, even century after century.

And you know what? This can be valuable if you are the type to track trends and profit from them.

​​So in case you want to check out news from the past that’s still news, here’s the link to the Pessimists Archive:

https://pessimistsarchive.substack.com/

5 (+ five) easy ecommerce pieces

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See if you can spot the one green “5” in the picture below:

Wasn’t hard, was it?

But if I asked you how many 5’s there are in the above picture, that wouldn’t be as easy. In fact it might be a pain in the ass, and you might give up rather than count.

Counting doesn’t come natural to us. Our eyes and brain have to work at it.

Not so with contrast.

We’re kind of like that T-Rex in the original Jurassic Park. “Don’t move… it can’t see us if we don’t move.” In other words, create enough contrast, and your prospect immediately sees the message you want him to see.

Of course, marketers have long known about this. And they have long used it to make more sales. As Rich Schefren likes to say, different is better than better.

Anyways, that was my little intro to try to sell you on watching the video below. It’s a recording of a presentation Stefan Georgi gave a few weeks ago. And it’s all about split tests he always recommends performing in ecommerce funnels.

I’ve done a lot of work on the direct response side of ecommerce. And I knew some of Stefan’s split tests. But most were new to me.

And while it’s not guaranteed that any of these split tests will win for any specific funnel, all of them sound reasonable. Because all of them are based on fundamentals.

Stuff like contrast… or reason why… or guiding your prospect’s attention… or cutting down his confusion.

So if you’d like to see all of Stefan’s split tests, along with his breakneck explanations for what exactly to test and why, you can find it at the YouTube video below.

But be careful. Because the first two-thirds of Stefan’s presentation are all about these split tests. But then Stefan shifts gear.

​​And he gives a soft pitch for the Copy Accelerator live event that’s happening in Scottsdale at the end of this month.

I say be careful because you can get sucked into Stefan’s pitch. For example, it happened to me.

After watching Stefan’s presentation yesterday and hearing his pitch, I found myself excited abuot going to the Copy Accelerator event. Even though I’d have to fly halfway around the world to do it (what a contrast and a pain)… and even though I’d have to laboriously count out a bunch of simoleons for plane tickets, hotel rooms, and for the event admission itself.

We will see how that ends up. ​​

In the meantime, if you’re already planning on going to Stefan’s event, let me know. So far, I’ve only met 2 people in real life who read my email newsletter. I’d like to maybe bring that up to 3, and meeting you there might sway me to go.

(Whaat? You’re not signed up to my email newsletter? You can fix that here.)

And if you’re not going to Copy Accelerator (yet), or if you just want to see Stefan’s ecommerce optimizations, here’s the money-making video:

This 9-figure copywriter just made the sales letter discovery of a lifetime…

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Dear friend,

Normally, I don’t write about these kinds of off-limits “insider strategies” of rich and famous copywriters.

But these aren’t normal times…

And the discovery that came out of this top-secret research…

Is simply too important, and has too much money-making potential, to be ignored.

Now in the rest of this email, I’m going to be sharing exactly what this discovery is…

The science behind why it works…

And how you can begin using it TODAY to write killer copy, to make yourself more sales in less time.

Also, in just a few moments from now…

I’ll show you how a tiny mistake in your sales letter lead could be costing you 80% of your sales…

Plus you will discover the “super fun” tactic one elite copywriter, whose sales will soon hit the billion-dollar mark, has found to make his prospects keep reading… and ultimately BUY.

***

All right. Let me emerge from modeling the lead of Stefan Georgi’s Gluco Secure sales letter. (And yes, Stefan is the 9-figure copywriter I referenced in the subject line.)

I’ve been writing my own sales letter lately, to promote the official launch of my bullets course. And in the top-secret research for that, I discovered the following:

Stefan Georgi says one of the biggest jumps he made as a copywriter came by mastering bullets.

“They make great headlines,” says Stefan, “plus they are super fun to write.” But that’s not all.

Stefan says that many copywriters forget to fascinate in the lead of their sales letter.

​​The lead. You know — the part that determines 80% of your overall sales.

​​Stefan doesn’t like the chance that he’s going to lose 80% of his readers right up front. So he adds camouflaged bullets at the end of his leads. (Like I did right before those asterisks above.)

​​​​These lead bullets are a kind of sales insurance to intrigue readers and pull them deeper into your copy. ​Stefan explains:

“Because even if my lead is a bit off, or if my big idea isn’t hitting as hard as I thought it would, throwing in those intriguing bullets at the end drastically increases the chances of the prospect sticking with me. And, the longer they stick with me, the more invested they become, and the more likely they are to ultimately buy.”

“Ultimately buy.”

Ultimately, I don’t have anything to offer you to buy today. But I will soon.

It will be my bullets course. That’s where, if you like, you can learn how to write A-list bullets that go at the end of your sales letter lead… or in your headline… or anywhere else you want to get your reader’s attention and interest.

But not today. Today, if you want to read Stefan’s thoughts on bullets, or discover the other big mistakes he sees in sales letter leads, here’s where to go:

https://www.stefanpaulgeorgi.com/blog/big-lead-mistake-5-forgetting-to-fascinate/

The “2-sentence persuasion secret” that A-list copywriters know and you don’t

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I’ve got a “2-sentence persuasion” secret I’d like to tell you, which I extracted straight from the head of John Carlton, and which will help you write killer sales copy, for more sales in less time.

Interested?

If you say yes, then I say… I’m not surprised. Hear me out.

I took my own advice from a few days ago. And I looked at the top three guys in the “copywriting course” space. I wanted to see how they sell their stuff.

And by the top three, I mean Stefan Georgi with his RMBC course… Ben Settle with his Copy Slacker course… and Derek Johanson with his Copy Hour course.

(If your blood pressure just shot up because you believe these three are NOT the top guys in the “copywriting course” market… fine. You’re probably right. I just feel that, for people who might be potential customers for my bullets course — name still TBD — the above three are my top competitors.)

Anyways:

I looked at their sales pages. And I told my brain to search for commonalities. Here’s what it came back with:

1. Mechanism. All three sales letters prominently feature a mechanism — it’s actually the name of all three courses.

2. Authority. Beyond mechanism, all three rely on authority to wow you. Stefan’s page is all about his own authority and the massive sales he’s made… while Ben and Derek defer to A-list copywriters for their implied or direct endorsement of the mechanism.

3. The promise. Both Stefan and Ben basically say, “More sales in less time.” Derek’s promise is more vague — killer sales copy, and ultimate success. Perhaps he’s just targeting a slightly different audience than Ben and Stefan.

So my point for you is:

This kind of research is something you too can do… and it might prove valuable in helping you define your promise and your positioning.

Or it might not.

I’m not sure if I will really go with “2-sentence persuasion” and all that other stuff when promoting my bullets course. Because even though Ben, Stefan, and Derek are all successful in selling their courses… I bet the copy is not a major part of why those courses sell.

Instead, I think it’s about the relationships those guys have with their lists… their reputation in the market… their word-of-mouth endorsements.

That’s why you can’t really trust most online copy. Sure, it can give you good ideas. But it’s worth testing anything you find, and making sure it actually works for you.

By the way, if you are interested in killer copy and more sales and less time, and you’re curious about my 2-sentence persuasion approach… then sign up for my newsletter. That’s where I will send out announcements once this offer becomes available.

Tempting your prospect into adultery

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I just read an Atlantic article about why people cheat, even in seemingly happy relationships.

The article describes the case of one Priya, a dutiful woman married to her “dream guy” but cheating with a tattooed truck driver. Priya is torn and miserable about how she is risking it all and how horrified her husband would be if he found out. But she can’t let the affair go.

It seems to me the real reason why people cheat is unknowable, even to those doing the cheating. ​​My theory is that people do these kinds of things from layers upon layers of deep and hidden motivations, which are usually plastered over by a story the cheater tells him or herself (“There’s no more passion in my marriage,” “It just happened”).

But enough about sex. Let’s talk marketing.

Specifically, let’s talk adultery, but within the context of getting people to start cheating on their current solution, and having an affair with your offer instead.

Fact is, if somebody is in a given market, then they have problems and deep motivations that are not being satisfied by the current solution they are using. That’s by definition. If they were perfectly satisfied, they wouldn’t be in your target market.

And there’s a clever way to tell your prospects a story that gets their minds and wallets a-wandering. It’s a combination of something I heard from marketers Stefan Georgi and Rich Schefren. And it’s something I’m writing up in a little book I’m putting together just now.

That book will be out in the next few weeks. If you’d like to get notified when it’s out, so you can read about this little adultery-causing technique, you can sign up for my daily email newsletter.

Copywriting playboys get treated like a piece of meat

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A while back, when there was still such a thing as professional sports, I noticed that the top three or four men’s tennis players all had one unusual thing in common:

They were all in settled, long-term relationships, often with the same girl they had started dating while they were still teenagers.

Further down the rankings, you had tennis players who were known to be playboys. Regardless of their natural talent, these playboys hovered around the top 20, but could never break into the very peak of the sport.

Coincidence?

Probably. But maybe not. Maybe a stable relationship really is crucial for massive success.

Don’t worry. I’m not telling you to go in search of a ball and chain to lock around your ankle. My point is simply this:

When I look at top copywriters — meaning people who get paid millions of dollars a year, with schedules booked up months in advance — they all fall into one of two categories.

One is guys like Chris Haddad or Jon Benson, who got successful promoting their own offers. The other is guys like Dan Ferrari and Stefan Georgi, who worked in-house at a direct response publisher for long enough to get a pile of successes in their knapsacks.

What you don’t see are playboys who came up by bouncing around from client to client. Maybe this promiscuous lifestyle worked many winters ago. But I don’t see it happening today.

Not to say you can’t make good money as a copywriting playboy. It’s what I’ve done in my career. I now make more money for less work than at any job I could have ever held.

But if you want to make it to the top… or if you want to be perceived as more than a commodity service provider… then jumping from client to client is unlikely to get you there. ​​If you want clients to stop seeing you as a piece of meat, you will have to get hitched — either to your own business, or to somebody else’s.

That’s something I’m working on as well right now. If you want to follow how I’m doing that, click here and subscribe to my email newsletter.

Major anti-aging breakthrough = great new lead?

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In one of these posts last September, I talked about a new piece anti-aging research. It was something I’d read about in a blog post by Josh Mitteldorf.

Josh’s post described a new study performed at UCLA. Scientists there reversed the epigenetic aging clock — also known as the “death clock.” It was a limited study, but very encouraging.

Well today, Josh Mitteldorf has a new article. It covers something much bigger and more exciting.

A second team of scientists changed a bunch of old rats into younger rats. How much younger? From rat age 80 to rat age 20. And they did it by using just four injections, containing stuff from younger rats’ blood.

Josh Mitteldorf, who is a very smart and measured guy, says this is a major breakthrough that could scale to humans. He’s staking his reputation on it.

If this bubbling spring does turn out to be the fountain of youth, it’s gonna have big consequences. But either way, it’s likely to have some little consequences, too. Such as for example, being a great lead for a direct marketing promotion.

Maybe you think I’m grasping at straws. So let me refer to the current control for Genesis, Green Valley’s telomere supplement. That promo was written by Stefan Georgi and came out last September. It’s still running. And it uses the “death clock” research as its hook.

In other words, this anti-aging research is worth keeping an eye on. So if you want to read Josh Mitteldorf’s post, for yourself or for your copywriting, here’s the link:

https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2020/05/11/age-reduction-breakthrough/

The neverending quandry of direct response ethics

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“‘Children who made fun of me?’ Bastian repeated. ‘I don’t know of any children — and I’m sure no child would have dared to make fun of me.'”

One of my favorite books when I was a kid was The Neverending Story, which the above quote is from.

They made a movie out of the book, but the movie leaves out most of the important stuff. Such as the fact that Bastian (the boy reading the book inside the book) gets sucked into the storyland he’s reading about.

Once there, Bastian, who was fat, clumsy, and unpopular in real life, is transformed into a handsome prince. Even better, anything he wishes for becomes reality.

Bastian goes on like this for a while. He enjoys his new powers, and goes around the world of make-believe, telling fantastical stories.

But then the side-effects of all this wishing become obvious. Each time Bastian makes a wish, he loses a memory. By the end, he can’t remember who he is, what he wants, or how to get back home.

I always thought this is a metaphor for how direct marketing is supposed to work.

First, you massage your reader’s insecurities so he gets uncomfortable without knowing why. Then you get him hot and bothered with a giant promise that fulfills his deepest desires. Finally, you hit him with fantastical success stories, from the 0.1% of people who had the best results using your offer.

At this point, your reader pretty much can’t remember who he is or what he wanted in life prior to seeing your sales page. You can now give him all the legal disclaimers — “results not typical; you’ll have to work hard.” But it won’t matter, because he won’t be able to think logically any more. Any logical thinking will just support his desire to buy your product.

Of course, it doesn’t always work like this. But if it does work, then it seems to me like a pretty sleazy, shady, manipulative way to deal with people.

That’s something I think about on occasion. It doesn’t bother me too much, but it does bother me a bit. And if it bothers you a bit too, then I want to tell you another story:

It’s about copywriter and marketer Stefan Georgi. Stefan recently told an anecdote about one of his successful diabetes businesses.

Now, if you’ve ever read Stefan’s copy, you’ll know it fits the model I laid out above. It’s filled with dramatic life-or-death stories. It pushes emotional buttons hard. It’s over the top.

Anyways, Stefan said that for some reason, he decided to handle the support calls for this business one weekend. In other words, potential customers who were still undecided would call in, and Stefan would answer their questions.

And here’s the kicker:

These potential prospects would call and say things like, “Well, your sales letter sure was pretty over the top… but I found it entertaining. But can you tell me now for real… do you think this supplement really can help me?”

So people fully knew what they were in for. They weren’t really being manipulated… they were being entertained. This echoes something I heard Dan Ferrari say:

“Direct response is a hobby, not just as practitioners but for the buyers as well. The more you play that game, the more fun they have.”

Maybe you buy this. Maybe you don’t. But if you ever find yourself questioning what it is you’re doing with your life, then tell yourself you’re basically providing entertainment for people. And, of course, getting paid well for it.