Steve Andreas

I will attempt to make you salivate with this email

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Some time ago, I sent an email with the nonsense subject line:

“The real secret to how I survive the biggest mistake you are making the fastest way”

That was in response to a message I got from a mysterious reader. He sent me an email with no body, with just a file attached. The file had seven “tested and proven” subject line templates, which I mashed together to produce that monster above.

A bit of fun to prove a point. I thought that would be the end of it.

Except, a few days ago, my mysterious “won’t even say hello” correspondent popped up again. Another empty-bodied email. Another file attached.

This file promised to teach me “How to Make Your Reader Salivate Over Your Offer.”

The file described a sales technique. I won’t repeat it here. While it’s solid sales advice, it really won’t make anyone anywhere salivate.

I mean, really.

​​Have you ever found yourself literally salivating at a bit of sales copy? Staring at the screen, your lips parted, your tongue lolling around your mouth, having to swallow hard every few seconds?

Of course not. That kind of physical reaction is impossible to produce with words alone. Right?

Right. Or maybe not right. ​Because here’s a passage that this “make your reader salivate” stuff brought to my mind:

​For instance, just think of the word lemon, or get a quick image of a lemon and notice your response.

​​Now see a richly yellow 3-D image of the same lemon, and imagine slicing it in half with a sharp knife. Listen to the sound the knife makes as it slices through, and watch some of the juice squirt out, and small the lemon scent released.

​​Now reach out to pick up one of the lemon halves and bring it slowly to your mouth to taste it. Listen to the sound that your teeth make as hey bite into the juicy pulp, and feel the sour juice run into your mouth. Again, notice your response. Are you salivating a bit more than you did when you just had a word or a brief image of a lemon?

This passage comes from a self-help book. It’s in a chapter on getting motivated. It describes a technique that’s supposed to make you want an outcome more. Because as Seth Godin wrote a while ago:

Humans are unique in their ability to willingly change. We can change our attitude, our appearance and our skillset.

But only when we want to.

The hard part, then, isn’t the changing it.

It’s the wanting it.

I don’t know if the lemon technique above works in making you want to change. At least for the long term. But it doesn’t matter much.

My point is not how to achieve real change in yourself… but how to achieve the feeling of possible change in other people.

Because if you are in the business of direct response marketing… then much of your work consists of spiking up people’s feelings just long enough that they step out of the warm bathtub of their usual inactivity.

And that’s why popular self-help books might have a lot to offer you.

Which brings me to an offer that will almost certainly not make you salivate. In fact, this offer will probably not interest you or tempt you in the least.

Because my offer to you is the book from which I took that lemon passage above.

​​I already promoted that book extensively in this newsletter. It’s called NLP, and it was written by Steve Andreas and Charles Faulkner.

I promoted this book previously as a self-help book.

The value of this book as such is dubious, as is the value of all self-help books.

But the value of this book as a guide on how to stimulate the feeling of change and progress… of motivation and inspiration… in yourself and other people — that value is certain.

And for any marketer or copywriter who is willing and able to read the book as such, the book will be delicious. Maybe even mouthwatering. Figuratively speaking of course. In case you want it:

https://bejakovic.com/nlp

Things “worthy of compliment” in 12 of my competitors

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I recently finished reading a book called NLP about NLP by two NLP experts, Steve Andreas and Charles Faulkner.

I’m interested in somehow patching a few Y2K-sized bugs in my own brain software, and so this kind of neural programming stuff is right up my alley and then through a little door.

Anyways, at one point in the book, Andreas and Faulkner advise the following:

“Find what’s worthy of compliment in your competition. Since you have been encouraging yourself to be complimentary to others, your senses have been opened and relaxed. You will have undoubtedly found yourself acquiring the skills of others without directly concentrating on them.”

Too easy? Who knows. I decided to try it out.

But then right at the start, I hit a snag. I had trouble coming up with my “competition.”

There’s nobody I really think of in that way. That’s the whole point of writing daily emails and creating unique offers like Copy Riddles.

But ok — ultimately, I am competing for people’s attention, for space in their inbox, for their hearts and minds, and possibly for their learning and growth dollars.

So I made a list of 12 such competitors. They all either write daily emails or have something to do with direct marketing.

For each competitor, I listed the first thing that came to mind — stuff they do, which I admire.

​​It turned out to be a surprisingly fun and eye-opening exercise. I suggest it to you — whether you’re a business owner, marketer, or freelancer.

Perhaps you’re curious about my list. You can find it below, with the names stripped out. After all, my goal today isn’t to name drop in bulk or to call people out.

But perhaps you can still guess who I have in mind — all are people I’ve mentioned previously in my newsletter. And here’s what’s worthy of compliment in each:

1. Willingness to get on camera regularly in spite of having the charisma of a typical copywriter
2. Community management
​3. High-priced offers
​4. A business built around a single core product that’s been running for years
​5. Emotional copy in spite of being very emotionally flat as a person
​6. Personality-based emails
​7. Writing fast
8. Surprising historical anecdotes
9. List building
10. Self-aggrandizement
11. A deep trove of personal experience and interests
​12. A really unique viewpoint

If you’re in the marketing and copywriting space, all these people will probably be familiar to you.

​​Except perhaps #8. He is well-known, but is not in the marketing space.

A​nd #12. He was once a direct marketer, but is today something… not quite definable. If you’re curious, I’ll tell you more about him, including his name, in my email tomorrow. You can sign up here to read that.

How Gary Bencivenga transforms his counterexamples

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A-list copywriter Gary Bencivenga once wrote an ad for an agency he worked for. The ad ran in the Wall Street Journal, and the headline read,

“Announcing a direct response advertising agency that will guarantee to outpull your best ad.”

As you might expect from Gary, this ad was packed with all kinds of proof. In fact, a quarter of the ad consisted of eight case studies of previous clients that hired Gary’s agency.

​​Seven of the clients got tremendous results. One did not, and they didn’t pay anything, as per the guarantee in the headline.

I thought of this ad today because of a book I just finished reading, called Transforming Your Self, by Steve Andreas. The book is about our self-concept — how we think about ourselves — and how to change that.

Right now I’ll only share one bit of this valuable book with you. It’s about the raw meat that your self-concept, at least according to Andreas.

​​(And bear with me me for just a bit. Because this does tie into Gary Bencivenga and sales and marketing.)

So say you think of yourself as “smart.” How do you know that? How do you know you’re smart?

Andreas’s answer is that you have a set of mental images, each representing an experience, which back up your claim to being “smart.”

Perhaps you see your parents praising you when you were 7… or some workplace triumph… or getting through a dense book and really grokking it.

Whatever. The point is you have examples that back up your claim to being smart. Probably lots of them.

But what about the counterexamples? What about that time the intimidating college professor asked you a question… and you just sat there squirming, like a sweaty turnip?

That’s the interesting bit.

According to Andreas, your self-concept becomes stronger when you include counterexamples in your mental database.

A counterexample makes your claim to a quality more real and believable. (I’ve tried it out personally… and I believe it.)

And by the way, that’s exactly what’s happening in Gary’s ad above. That one counterexample makes the ad more real and believable.

But what if you have more than one counterexample? What if they start to pile up? What if they rival, or even outnumber your good examples?

That’s what the rest of Andreas’s book is about.

But Gary, master psychologist that he is, figured it out intuitively. And if you read Gary’s ad, you can find the answer, both in the headline and in the offer itself. In case you want to crack the code, here is Gary’s original ad:

https://bejakovic.com/bencivenga-agency-ad