Thom Benny

3-step plan to create “Electrical Socket Offers” out of thin air

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Last week I did a presentation inside Thom Benny’s Copyjitsu coaching group. Thom coaches 6 guys, all with good copy chops already, and he invited me, John Bejakovic, to come and pontificate on how to write emails.

One of the guys in Thom’s group asked me the following:

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I have this thing where I’m writing daily emails. I’m getting in reps. I wouldn’t be writing all this stuff if I didn’t believe I could help somebody.

But also, I don’t have any sales pages or digital products. All this that I’m offering, every day, is still consulting.

Do you have any way to think about that, when you’re at that stage, don’t have digital products, but you’re just pitching consulting?

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This is a great question. I bring it up now because earlier today, I asked what objections people had to buying MyPEEPS, a course I’m promoting until Sunday, on building up your email list with paid traffic.

Along with the usual objections — don’t need it, can’t afford it, already bought it — I got some surprises. For example, a few people wrote to say, “What can I do with an email list when I ain’t got no offers!”

So let me address that now.

If you got no offers, you can always decide to offer… consulting.

That’s Step 1 of my “Electrical Socket Offers” plan.

The problem is, “consulting” is a horrible, horrible offer. I say that without restraint because I’ve been guilty of offering “consulting” myself. I’ve also been guilty of making other horrible offers, like “coaching,” or “copywriting services.”

These offers are all horrible because they put the burden on the prospect. They say, “How am I supposed to know what I can help you with? I do have some knowledge and skill… but you tell me how you can use them.”

So Step 2 of my “Electrical Socket Offers” plan is to take the burden off the shoulders of your prospects.

You take the burden off by figuring out what problems your prospects have.

This is much easier to do than you might think. You simply ask. You can do it by digging around online. You can do it via email. Or, if you have the stomach for it, you can even do it over the phone.

Ask your prospects where they’re at… where they hope to go… what’s keeping them from getting there. Do this a few times, until you find a specific problem you can actually suggest a solution to.

BLAM!!

Suddenly, you’ve taken your horrible, horrible “consulting” offer, and you’ve transformed it into something wonderful and valuable — a solution to a specific problem that your prospects have.

Because really, when my laptop is running out of battery, I look for an electrical socket.

Once I find an electrical socket, I don’t stop and ask, “What manner of electricity does this socket supply? Was it electricity generated by a windmill? A hydroelectric dam? Solar?”

I really don’t care. I just want my laptop charged. Any socket I can plug into will do.

Same thing with people and their problems. People don’t care if you solve their problem via a digital course, consulting, or even a done-for-you service. Really, what they are after is a solution to their specific problem. They’re looking for a socket to plug into.

Step 3 of my plan is optional but highly valuable.

It’s to give your consulting offer a name, such as, for example, “Electrical Socket Offers.”

Because there is magic in giving things a name. It relieves any remaining burden on your prospects, and gives them just a simple, light word or three to hold in their mind.

So that’s the 3-step plan to create “Electric Socket Offers” out of thin air.

I imagine few people will take the above advice seriously.

I imagine even fewer will actually choose to implement it.

But if by chance, you’ve had the the light come on in your head… and you’ve realized that there is in fact nothing stopping you from selling attractive offers, starting today… then maybe it makes sense to build up an email list? You know, so you have people to sell your attractive offer to?

You decide. And if you decide that the answer is yes, then maybe take a look at the MyPEEPS offer I’m promoting. It comes with my free “Shotgun Messenger” bonus, which is live until this Sunday at 12 midnight PST. For the full details on this offer:

​https://bejakovic.com/shotgun​

Great headlines and subheads, great openers and closers, great subject lines and postscripts

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At the start of this year, I got a message from Matt Cascarino. Matt is the chief creative officer at FARM, a marketing agency that’s had among its clients the American Cancer Society, the SPCA, New Era (the company that makes Major League Baseball’s official caps), and Kelley Blue Book.

Matt had been going through my Copy Riddles program. And he wrote to say:

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Hey, John…

Bluntly, Copy Riddles is kicking my ass. But in a good way.

Despite my bullets missing the mark in the first nine rounds, I’m learning a ton and referring back to the material to craft sneaky-good bullets for my own communications.

It wasn’t until Round 10B that things began to click. See my three bullets below and the A-listers’ efforts after that. I laid an egg by overthinking #3, but I’m pretty happy with my first two.

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Below this message, Matt had pasted three of his sales bullets that he had written recently.

I took a look.

His bullets were great. Whatever he was doing to learn how to write bullets — hmm, I wonder what that could be — it was working.

For a while now, I’ve been beating on my tin pot and saying to anyone who would listen that sales bullets are the essence of effective sales copy. I’ve also been saying that bullets are as relevant today as they were when Gary Halbert and John Carlton wrote entire sales letters that were really just a pileup of sexy, bizarre, fascinating bullets.

But you might be skeptical when I promote the idea of learning to write bullets, since I sell a program on writing great bullets.

Fortunately, just yesterday (thanks to Thom Benny) I came upon a relevant passage from a well-known guy in this field, Eddie Shleyner of Very Good Copy. Eddie wrote:

“If you can write great bullets, you can also write great headlines and subheads, great openers and closers, great subject lines and postscripts.”

So there you go. Learn to write great bullets, and most other copywriting skills simply fall out as a side-effect.

As for how to write great bullets:

Copy Riddles is in all immodesty the best program to learn to write great sales bullets.

That’s not because I created Copy Riddles.

It’s because Copy Riddles doesn’t just tell you stuff.

Instead, Copy Riddles can do to you what it did to Matt. Get you practicing in a safe and controlled environment… correct you when you are not doing well enough… and within a matter of a few weeks, have you writing bullets that Halbert himself would be proud of.

For more info on Copy Riddles:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

The uncertain result of my Newsletter XP promo

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Yesterday, ex-Agora copywriter Thom Benny, who I met up with in Barcelona last month, texted me and asked,

“How is the Newsletter XP promo doing?”

I threw up my arms at this. “How am I supposed to know? There’s a deep fog around the Bejako household, and I can’t see past my own nose.”

The Beehiiv people don’t normally do affiliate deals for this course. I had to ask them over and over to let me promote it.

When they finally agreed, it was a bit of a technical kludge to make it happen. So there’s no affiliate portal. There’s no direct way for me to know how many sales I’ve made.

I saw a buncha clicks. Two people wrote me to say they bought. I wrote my contact at Beehiiv now to ask what the final result was.

But if I had to bet, I would bet I made 3x-4x the money for writing these 7 emails than I ever made for any equivalent campaign I wrote back in my freelance copywriting days.

So let me repeat the core idea I was selling during this whole promo, even though I won’t get paid anything for it now. It’s this:

Start a newsletter. Or start growing a list. Or find another little asset that you can invest into regularly.

It might bear no fruit today. But keep watering it. And you will be pleased and surprised one day soon.

This concludes the first of three affiliate promotions I promised to do over the next few weeks.

The next affiliate promo I will do involves a writing course for business owners who want to build an audience on social media.

I’m going through this course myself right now. And I find myself repeatedly surprised by how well-done and insightful it is.

To make this offer even sweeter, I will add in my own free bonus. It will be equal in price to the actual course I am promoting.

This bonus is a rare training I once put on, after years of research. Several people told me this training has influenced their own writing a lot. But more about all that soon.