John Bejakovic

I stand accused of pulling the prat-out on a reader

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A few months ago, I wrote an email about the “prat out,” a technique used by con men to get their marks salivating and eager for larceny.

​​I sent that email out and then also put it on my bare-bones, zero-images, black-and-white website. And I forgot all about it.

Until this morning that is, when I got the following message from a new reader, who wrote:

===

Im now about six years into designing and developing websites.

Your website just fucked my mind.

I was reading a book by Iceberg Slim, he talked about the prat out.

I had no idea wtf that was and found your article.

After reading, i realized that you just pulled the prat-out on me and I’m now much more ready to give you my money. You sneaky fucker.

But i forgive you because you just taught me how much can be done with just words.

I haven’t left your website for an hour. I’m fascinated by what you do with just words. Nothing else is needed. The words create the colors, images and shapes in my head.

As a designer, its blowing my mind how much can be done with words alone and it has opened my mind to all kinds of new possibilities.

Thank you man.

===

No, thank you, kind anonymous reader who wrote in with a testimonial.

I bring this up 1) to feature a flattering testimonial and to encourage more of the same from other readers, and 2) to explain why I have not really been selling much of anything over the past couple weeks.

There are multiple reasons actually.

One is that I made enough money for my modest standards very early this month, thanks to the affiliate promo that Kieran Drew did of my Simple Money Emails course, and the new readers who came in the wake of that promo.

Another reason is that I have found that most of my sales do come via promotion events, whether that be a new launch, or me promoting an affiliate offer for a limited time, or somebody else promoting my offers for a limited time.

So one lesson I’ve learned is to regularly have such events if I hope to keep paying for rent and my daily supply of lentils and canned sardines.

At the same time, I’ve learned to cut myself some slack, and not force myself to shoehorn every daily email into a promotion of one of my existing offers.

​​Linking to something like an Amazon book (yesterday) or simply inviting a response (Sunday) keeps more of my readers reading to the end, and makes it more interesting for me since I can write about a broader set of stuff.

So in case you were curious why I’m linking to random stuff recently, now you know.

That said, it is important to remind readers of my offers from time to time so they can’t use the excuse, “Oh I didn’t even know!” to not buy.

And today, following a testimonial in which a reader says I pulled the prat-out on him, is a particularly good time to remind you of my best selling course, in terms of copies sold at least.

In case you’re curious, you can find out all about it here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Do you know the flip side of this famous historical anecdote?

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Everybody and his monkey knows the story of how, back in 1903, some smug realist at the New York Times wrote that heavier-than-air flight won’t be possible for another “one million to ten million years.”

And then, several weeks later, the Wright brothers took off and flew for the first time.

Like I say, you probably know that.

But what you might not know is the flip side of this story, how little anybody cared about that first flight, or the second flight, or the third, then or for years afterwards.

​​Here’s an excerpt from a book I just finished reading:

===

Several years went by before the public grasped what the Wrights were doing; people were so convinced that flying was impossible that most of those who saw them flying at Dayton in 1905 decided that what they had seen must be some trick without significance — somewhat as most people today would regard a demonstration of, say, telepathy. It was not until May, 1908 — nearly four and a half years after the Wright’s first flight — that experienced reporters were sent to observe what they were doing, experienced editors gave full credence to these reporters’ excited dispatches, and the world at last woke up to the fact that human flight had been successfully accomplished.

===

That’s an interesting historical anecdote.

I had never heard it before.

It can be saved and used effectively in lots of different contexts. I would like to pass it on to you if you write and need lots of sticky messages to make your points more effectively.

I also want to clue you in to a resource that’s full of such sticky messages.

​​I already wrote about it in a recent email.

I’m talking about Morgan Housel’s Psychology of Money. I finished reading it a few days ago. It’s where I got the passage above, even though Housel didn’t write it — he’s just citing yet another book in his own book.

The Psychology of Money was published just over three years ago. And yet, it has over 30,000 5-star reviews on Amazon.

That’s not because the advice in the book is so new or so inspiring (“Save more”).

Rather, Housel’s Psychology of Money is so popular because it’s so effectively written, using lots of historical illustrations and novel metaphors and personal stories.

If you want to see how to write a book that keeps selling itself based on its content alone, then The Psychology of Money is worth a skim, read, or even some careful reverse engineering. To get your own copy:

https://bejakovic.com/housel

Chargeback inspiration

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In my email yesterday, I wrote about a chargeback I’d gotten earlier in the day. I asked for advice.

And I got it.

I got advice about possible ways to handle the current chargeback better.

I got good advice on how to prevent it in the future.

I got personal stories and experiences and consolation from others who have been there before me.

I can say I’m honestly grateful to everyone who wrote in. I can also say it’s reminder of something important:

People start email lists to do marketing. To sell stuff. Perhaps to become seen as an authority at whatever it is they do.

But if you do it right, it ends up going way beyond that.

I heard Codie Sanchez talking on a podcast a few days ago. As you might know, Codie runs Contrarian Thinking, a newsletter with some 250,000 subscribers, about buying and selling businesses. She’s built an eight-figure info business off the back of that newsletter, plus maybe several other 7-figure businesses also.

But it goes way beyond that. Codie said that via her newsletter, she’s automatically and without any extra effort also gotten:

– Unique business opportunities
– Financing
– Business partners
– Employees
– Advice and guidance
– Access and connections

My experience has been similar.

I’ve had direct job offers from people reading my newsletter. I’ve had business partnership offers.

People have shared their personal stories with me. I’ve gotten good business advice, from people who are qualified to give it.

I’ve hired people via my list, and I’ve been hired by people on my list.

I’ve gotten insider tips and tricks from people at the very top of the game.

I’ve met some of my readers in real life. We’ve gone to conferences together. I’ve even gotten nice stuff in my physical mail box from people who read these emails.

All of that fell out automatically, as a side-effect of relentlessly, mercilessly, unfailingly writing a 400-500-word email every day, and sharing something I have learned, or something unnerving that happened to me, or a bit of inspiration, or a bit of frustration, like I did yesterday.

I guess you see where this is going. But since this is a marketing newsletter, I will force myself to spell it out:

Start an email list.

Write to it regularly.

Preferably daily.

Good things will happen as a result. And if bad things happen also, you will have a powerful resource in your email list to deal with it.

I have a course about how to relentlessly, mercilessly, unfailingly write a 400-500-word email every day, and to make it interesting for yourself and valuable for your readers. If that’s something you’d like to do:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

Chargeback

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I woke up this morning to find a Sunday-morning email that read:

===

CAPITAL ONE, NATIONAL ASSOCIAT ION has initiated a $297 USD dispute.

A $297 USD payment for Desert Kite is being disputed by CAPITAL ONE, NATIONAL ASSOCIAT ION because your customer says they didn’t initiate this purchase (this is known as a fraudulent transaction).”

===

In other words, somebody bought my Most Valuable Email course a few days ago.

​​And now somebody — either the person who bought, or the actual credit card owner in case in case they had their credit card details fleeced — was contesting the charge.

I shrugged my shoulders and clicked to archive the email and get it out of my sight.

I had had something like this happen once already, back in September. Somebody bought my Copy Riddles course. A week later, I got the same Capital One chargeback notice, saying that the credit card owner wants to contest the charge.

Back in September, I went to check the account on my site associated with this purchase. I saw that they had logged in, gone through all the 40+ pages of the course in quick order, and now were claiming they had nothing to do with it.

I submitted whatever proof I could gather to contest the chargeback, and to show that this was a legitimate order, and that all the pages of my course were accessed. It probably took a half hour to an hour of my life.

Still, a few weeks later I got a notice that the chargeback had gone through anyhow. There’s no appeal process and that decision is final.

So the reason I shrugged my shoulders today is not that I accept that chargebacks are simply a part of doing business online, but rather that I don’t see that there’s anything I can do about it.

​​And if there’s nothing I can do, I don’t want to give it any more time out or emotion out of my day.

Except of course, I remembered that I do have the wonderful resource of this email list.

So not only can I get a daily email out of this event, but maybe I can even learn something from you, either to deal with the current chargeback request or to prevent others like it coming up in future.

So if you have any info for me, hit reply, and write away. I’ll be grateful to you.

Magic trick vs. miracle in email copywriting

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I’m reading a book about magic and showmanship. One part explains the difference between a magic trick and a miracle:

A ham-and-cheese sandwich, appearing in your shirt pocket, where there was nothing before, is a magic trick.

A ham-and-cheese sandwich, appearing in your shirt pocket, where there was nothing before, when you are starving, is a miracle.

This isn’t just for magicians, of course.

It’s also a key idea for email copywriting. It’s super important to hold on to. That’s why I put the above idea, in my own words, as the core tenet of my Simple Money Emails course, and why I repeat it from page 2 of the course until the end.

So if:

* You have an email list but you are not writing emails and therefore are not making any money from your list, while your subscribers forget who you are and why they signed up in the first place

* You are writing emails but nobody is buying from you, meaning that your newsletter is really just a hobby and not a marketing channel

* You futz and fiddle for hours just to write one stupid email, instead of producing something interesting and effective in just 20 minutes…

… then my Simple Money Emails course could appear in your life like a hand-and-cheese sandwich in a time of great famine.

​​For more information about this miraculous course:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

Take your likes to the bank

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A couple days ago, I sent an email about an email trick to get more engagement. To which, I got a response — an engagement!

The response came from Jakub Červenka, who runs an info publishing business in the men’s sexual health niche.

First, Jakub just replied to tell me he liked that email about engagement. Then we got into a bit of an email conversation. Then he told me about the trouble he was having with his Facebook ad agency.

And then he wrote:

===

So I learnt I am decent marketer and cannot let go of this part in my company.

Also, started writing daily emails again recently and looking at the mails I am writing now and I did year ago… it is as if 2 different people wrote them and that makes me happy.

And this is the main reason I am writing this to you, John, I think me improving so much is lot thanks to you. Yours is the only newsletter that I read almost daily and is amongst the 3 that survived my brutal opt-out-from everything. I don’t mean this to sound bad, I bought your Copy Riddles, Most Valuable email, your 2 pump-postcard newsletter and your latest Sales emails training.

I like all your courses, a lot, probably best spend money in copywriting courses, but still I think I learn most from your daily emails – probably due to the fact that it does not seem like I am working, I enjoy reading your stuff and it is small bites daily.

Keep up the good work,

Your grateful student and zealous reader,

Jakub

===

I once had a reader write in to tell me he always skips the quoted parts of my emails, the parts in italics that start with ===.

In case you also skipped what Jakub wrote, I can tell you it was a testimonial, with good things to say about my courses and in particularly about these emails.

And here’s something I’ve noticed about getting nice testimonials like this:

It rarely happens that somebody writes in just because they want to tell me how great they think one of my courses is, or how great I am.

Yes, it does happen from time to time. But it’s kind of like finding a Black Lotus in hundreds and hundreds of packs of Magic The Gathering cards — valuable yes, but also rare.

A little more common is when I explicitly ask for feedback on a course or training, and offer an incentive to reply.

People then reply in a pack. But even then, it’s not an overwhelming number of responses, and not everything I get is a great testimonial I can feature.

Really, the bulk of the good testimonials I’ve gotten, and that I’ve featured in emails and on sales pages, came like Jakub’s message above.

They came as an “oh by the way” that people tacked on when replying to one of my emails that had to do with an entirely unrelated matter. It’s been a steady drip-drip over the years that’s eventually filled up several buckets.

It’s popular to say in the direct response world that only sales mean anything, and that you can’t take your likes to the bank.

Except you kind of can.

True, a great testimonial like Jakub’s above is not cash. I can’t go and buy cans of beans and bags of rice with it today.

But a good testimonial is like a check, and eventually it will clear. Somebody somewhere will eventually be converted into a new and loyal customer because of testimonials like Jakub’s above. We all look to others when making our own decisions.

So my point is, if you work to increase engagement with your emails, you will get more testimonials, and you will be able to take those to the bank, in time.

Of course, for that to happen you do have to feature your testimonials so people can see them.

Sales pages are one place.

But really, emails are the main place, because emails are kind of the headlines for your sales pages.

Which brings me to the my latest Sales emails training, as Jakub put it, aka my Simple Money Emails course.

I’m probably giving away too much in these emails and I’m probably killing some sales for my courses like Simple Money Emails.

Maybe I will fix that in time.

For now, if you want to see how I’ve used emails to make (up to) tens of thousands of dollars in sales per day, and still kept readers coming back tomorrow, then Simple Money Emails will show you, and will show you how you can do it too. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

Curious George creates a course

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It’s been three days since I wrote an email about the 40th anniversary of the first broadcast of The Day After, which happened on November 20 1983.

​​A reader wrote in to ask about that:

===

Beautiful story…but where do you find this kind of story?

Do you google the events for this day or something else? I’m really curious.

===

The short answer is that, like Curious George, I’m a good little monkey, and always curious.

In the particular case of The Day After email, the sequence of events was as follows:

1. A few months ago, I was reading an email by Lawrence Bernstein. Lawrence was talking about how he managed to delete his entire email list. As he put it, “Sunday morning felt like one of my favorite dark films from 1983, ‘The Day After.'”

2. I had never heard of The Day After so I made a note of it in a list of “movies to watch” that I have been keeping for years.

3. Some time later, I watched The Day After, without knowing anything about it except that Lawrence likes it.

4. After watching the movie, I was curious to find out more. So I read up on it. I was impressed to find out all the stuff connecting The Day After to Ronald Reagan and the Soviets and nuclear war averted.

5. A few days later, the thought popped into my mind to check when exactly The Day After was first broadcast. It turned out the 40th anniversary was coming up in a few weeks’ time. I thought it might be cool to write about it on the actual anniversary. So I made a calendar entry telling me to write an email about it on the day of.

6. The calendar notification fired a few days ago. So I wrote down an outline of what I remembered about the movie. I plumped it up with some details taken from Wikipedia and ¡tachán!

The particulars of how I wrote that email are probably completely useless to you.

But there are a few underlying principles which you might profit from. Such as for example:

​​Keeping extensive notes and having lists of everything you might care about…

​Digging in when you come across an unfamiliar reference from somebody you respect…

O​​r using your calendar app to make your life easier and to make sure stuff gets done when it should.

Over the past few years, I’ve come up with a handful of such processes to make sure I never forget a good idea, never fail to draw a valuable connection, never miss out on a profitable opportunity.

Of course, it doesn’t work all the time. Or even much of the time.

​​Even so, these processes have been incredibly valuable to to me for daily email writing, previously for client work, futurely for new projects I am starting up.

This stuff has become such an integral part of how I work that I created a course, Insight Exposed, all about how I keep notes, and write journals, and process all of the ideas and information coming at me so I can turn them into something productive and profitable.

I released Insight Exposed back in February for a few days. But I haven’t been selling it since.

I will release it again soon, after I’ve polished it a bit. But more about that in its own email.

For now, let me just share something valuable that I’ve kept track of thanks to my Insight Exposed system.

It’s an article I came upon back in September. It was published in the lying New York Time, but in the opinion section, so maybe it’s true.

In any case, I found it insightful, so much so that i took note of it, processed the note, and put it into long-term storage, so I could share it with you today. In case you’re curious:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/17/opinion/sports-zen-mental-subtraction.html

I was wrong yesterday, and I will do it again

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Yesterday, I talked to the self-proclaimed dinosaur of direct marketing, Brian Kurtz, about doing a presentation to his Titans XL mastermind.

Brian and I agreed that I’d give a talk to his group some time early next year. The topic will be… email, of course, but more specifically, engagement in email.

(I’ve been told by various people that I should take all the different tricks I use to tease out and engage my readers and put them together into a training. So that’s what I will do in front of Brian’s group.)

This morning, as I was standing in the shower, pretty much the entire presentation came together in my head.

I carefully stepped out of the shower, toweled myself off not very well, and tiptoed to a notebook to write all the ideas down.

I won’t share the whole thing here — you’ll have to be there in Brian’s Titans group when I give it live.

But I will tell you one way I spark and kindle engagement.

It’s something you can do today. It’s something that might not come naturally to you, but that you can force in the interest of creating more interesting content.

And that’s to be wrong.

The more often you are wrong, the more engagement you will get.

For example, yesterday I wrote an email about “The most famous copywriter, real or fictional.”

I did so knowing that, whoever I named, I would be certain to omit others. And I got replies telling me so:

#1: “The world famous rapper Lil Dicky (Dave Burd) was also working as a copywriter before he became a rapper. He even has an episode about it in his HBO show Dave.”

#2: “Elmore Leonard also has copywriting background. His novels are amazing.”

#3: “Salman Rushdie – 8.34 million results :)”

#4: “Did you know that Chandler also becomes a copywriter in season 9 of Friends?”

I did not know. Any of that. But now I know.

You might say these replies aren’t pointing out that I’m wrong. And you might be right.

The replies above are all helpful, playful, looking to complete my incomplete message from yesterday.

But I still say the same underlying psychology of correcting somebody who’s wrong applies.

​​In fact, I insist on it.

And if you don’t agree with me, then you can always hit reply and tell me so.

Meanwhile, you might like my Most Valuable Email course. Why? Because it’s most valuable.

I know a thing or two thousand about writing daily emails. That’s one of the reasons I can go in front of an experienced group like Brian’s Titans mastermind and still tell them something new.

And one thing I know is that my Most Valuable Email tricks produces emails that I personally find most fun to write. And maybe most fun for readers to read.

​​​If that turns you on, here’s how you can start writing your own Most Fun Emails in an hour from now:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

The most famous copywriter, real or fictional

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On Dan Heath’s new podcast, “What It’s Like To Be,” I heard Dan asking a TV meteorologist, a criminal defense lawyer, a forensic accountant, all the same question:

“Who’s the most famous meteorologist/criminal defense lawyer/forensic accountant, real or fictional?”

This got me wondering who the most famous copywriter might be, real or fictional.

I had a gut feeling. I double-checked via simple Google search, by looking at the total number of results.

As far as real copywriters go, there’s really only one possible option for a copywriter that a rando off the street might know.

​​That’s David Ogilvy.

There’s something about the pipe, the smart suits, the English disdain, the French castle.

Sure enough, Ogilvy was the only real copywriter who has more than 1M indexed Google results about him.

As for fictional copywriters, it depends on who you consider a copywriter.

Don Draper, the creative art director from the TV show Mad Men, clocks in at over 2M Google results.

But was he really a copywriter or more of an idea man? I’ll let you decide.

Meanwhile, the most famous, fictional, 100% copywriter that I’ve been able to find is Peggy Olson, also a character on Mad Men, who only gets around 220k Google results.

Should we stop there? Oh no.

It turns out several celebs out there have a copywriting background… but are not today known as copywriters.

One of these is novelist James Patterson. Before Patterson set out to write 200 books (and counting), he was a copywriter and later the CEO of J. Walter Thompson, one of the biggest and oldest ad agencies in the world.

Patterson has 6M+ Google results to attest to his fame.

And if we’re already going with celebrities who have copywriting in their history, and maybe their blood, then we get to the most famous copywriter of all time, real or fictional, live or dead, even though nobody nowhere would identify him as a copywriter.

I’m talking about F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald worked for a time as a copywriter before becoming the author of the quintessential great American novel, The Great Gatsby, and later a topic of almost 13M Google results.

So there. Now you know. And now you might ask yourself, “What did I just read? Did I really need this in my life? How did I wind up at the bottom of this email?”

If any of those questions is flitting through your head, let me point out that interest in famous people seems to be hardwired into our brains.

Tabloid writers and sales copywriters know this fact well, and they use it over and over and over. Because it works to draw attention and get people reading, day after day.

That’s a free lesson in copywriting.

For more such lessons, including ones that you might not be able to shrug off by saying, “I guess I knew that,” you will have to buy my Copy Riddles course.

The whole big idea behind Copy Riddles is the appeal of famous people — at least famous in the small niche of direct response copywriting.

I mean, on the sales page, in place of a subheadline, what I have is a picture featuring Gary Halbert, Gary Bencivenga, Stefan Georgi, and Ben Settle, all of them celebrities in the micro world of direct response, all of them paid off on that page as being integral to the course.

If you’d like to buy Copy Riddles, or if you simply want to read some gossip about famous copywriters, then head here and get ready to be amazed and shocked:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

The Day After 40 years later

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Today being November 20, 2023, it is the 40th anniversary of the airing of the most influential movie you have never heard of.

The movie is called The Day After. It aired on ABC on November 20, 1983.

A few unusual things about this movie:

1. It was direct to TV, and never shown in theaters

2. It was depressing

3. It helped prevent nuclear war

The plot in a nutshell follows several different people around Kansas City and small surrounding towns. They go about their idyllic Midwestern lives, while in the background the radio reports increasing tensions between the US and USSR over some dispute in East Germany.

People stop to listen to the news, but shrug it off and say it won’t come to anything.

That afternoon, they see ICBMs launched from underground missile silos around Kansas City. A short while later, several nuclear bombs are detonated over Kansas City itself.

What follows is “the day after”:

A few survivors huddle together among ruins and charred corpses, while their hair falls out and their skin peels off, the result of rotting from inside, courtesy of the high levels of radiation in the air.

Things go from bad to worse, and then the movie ends. ​​I told you it was depressing.

When The Day After aired on ABC, it was watched by over 100 million people. At the time, it was the most-watched TV movie in history.

Before The Day After was shown to the public, it was screened for President Ronald Reagan and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

After the movie finished, the generals sat there petrified, without saying anything.

​​After Reagan saw it, he supposedly said, “not on my watch.” In his memoirs, he drew a direct line between watching The Day After and signing a nuclear disarmament treaty with the USSR.

The incredible thing was that this piece of American Propaganda was so effective that it was shown in the Soviet Union as well.

​​The producers of the movie insisted the movie be shown in the USSR in its original form, without any changes or commentary. The Soviets agreed.

​​The Day After aired there in 1987. While it’s not known exactly how many millions watched it, it can be presumed that they all ended up depressed.

I’m telling you about this movie because it’s culturally and historically significant. But if you must have your persuasion and influence takeaway, then consider the most obvious and most powerful one.

Look at the impact on Reagan and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

​​Imagine them sitting in a darkened room, staring mutely at images of rubble where Kansas City used to stand, as the final message rolled across the screen:

“The catastrophic events you have just witnessed are, in all likelihood, less severe than the destruction that would actually occur in a full-scale nuclear war. It is our hope that the images of this film will inspire the nations of this earth, their peoples and leaders, to find the means to avert that fateful day.”

Was the stuff in this movie any kind of news to them?​​

If anybody should have known what nuclear war would really mean in terms of actual impact and human cost, you would think that top Army brass and the President of the United States would be it.

And maybe they did know, on an intellectual level. But didn’t really see it, didn’t really feel it.

It took a dramatic, visual presentation to get it into their heads, and to change their attitudes.

And maybe that’s why I had to tell you about this depressing movie from 40 years ago, instead of simply repeating, “We are wired for story” or “You gotta a paint a picture in people’s minds.”

That’s all for today.

If you’re curious, here’s the TV trailer for The Day After. It lasts all of a minute and 32 seconds. Watch it, shudder, and when you think of it in the future, think of what I told you today: