Once upon a time, I had a habit of focusing on one aspect of writing daily emails for a week at a time. The next week, I’d pick something else, and so on, until I got really good at writing emails.
At some point, I dropped the habit. That’s a shame. Recently, I had the idea to pick it up again, and so I made a list of 10 things to focus on in my daily emails, one thing per week, in order to make your emails much more fun, sticky, and effective in terms of sales and influence.
In case you’re curious or would like to do something similar, here’s 10 ideas for writing better daily emails in 10 weeks:
1. Be narcissistic, or give undue importance to yourself or things associated with you.
(This can be done earnestly or tongue-in-cheek. For example, I once wrote an email about how I had drafted a patent application to protect my Most Valuable Email trick, because it is too valuable not to protect, and because it satisfies the three criteria required by the U.S. Patent Office, namely novelty, non-obviousness, and concrete and practical application.)
2. Push-pull, near misses, teasing.
3. Fun vibe.
4. DHV = demonstrations of higher value.
Another term for this is status building, such as for example, when I tell you that I am currently running the only private, invite-only group of email marketers and course creators in the email marketing niche, which brings together pretty much everybody you have heard of in this space.
5. Clarity.
6. Personal frame. Meaning, every email should really be about you, or should have a frame of “you,” even if the picture inside the frame is, say, a scene from a Batman movie.
7. Being black-and-white, dogmatic.
8. Teasing or building up upcoming things (push-pull on a longer scale).
9. Transparency, Skeleton Protocol.
10. Reason why.
If some of the terms above — “push pull,” “near misses,” “Skeleton Protocol” — are unfamiliar to you, that’s because you have not read my new 10 Commandments book.
It took me several years of research, thinking, and paring down my ideas to the most valuable ones to be able to write this book.
This book is not a replacement for Bob Cialdini’s bestselling Influence, but a complement to it. As Rob Marsh, founder of the Copywriter Club, wrote after he read my new 10 Commandments book:
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In addition to Cialdini’s well known 6 principles of influence (urgency, scarcity, consistency and so on), it’s time to add Bejakovic’s 10 commandments of persuasion. This book will make you a better writer and a better sales person. But more than that, you can use John’s commandments to be more persuasive, more engaging and more interesting in everything you do.
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Imagine if you had been one of the first few thousand people who had read Cialdini’s Influence, back in 1984.
Entire multi-million dollar info businesses have been built up in the ensuing years by simply repackaging and selling the ideas in this book.
And many much bigger businesses have been built up by taking the ideas in Cialdini’s book, including the many nuances in there beyond just the chapter headings, and applying those ideas to sales and influence systems.
Would I be bold or arrogant enough to claim my new 10 Commandments book offers a similar opportunity today, in 2025?
Clearly I would. So in case you haven’t read it yet, you have only one option: