John Bejakovic

Budapest, Hopkins, cold outreach

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Three mildly connected things for you today, to pick and choose from as you like:

#1. Budapest

I’m just finishing my visit to my former home town, Budapest, where I spent 11 years of my life. I reconnected with friends I’ve known for decades. The weather was perfect. The city was more beautiful than ever. All in all it was a great trip.

One thing that stood out during this trip:

Hungary, of which Budapest is the capital and by far the biggest town, had a big change of government earlier this year. The political party that had ruled for 16 years, and that had become infamous for corruption and undemocratic consolidation of power, finally lost the elections.

Ever since, foreign investment that had been frozen and kept out of the country has started flowing back in… Hungarians who had moved abroad, because they found the local situation hopeless, have been moving back… and the locals here just look optimistic and happy (ok, as happy as Hungarians can ever look).

This brings me to…

#2. Claude Hopkins

Claude Hopkins, author of Scientific Advertising, which is a sort of Bible in the field of direct advertising, once wrote:

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“People are like sheep. They cannot judge values, nor can you and I. We judge things largely by others’ impressions, by popular favor. We go with the crowd. So the most effective thing I have ever found in advertising is the trend of the crowd. That is a factor not to be overlooked. People follow styles and preferences. We rarely decide for ourselves, because we don’t know the facts. But when we see the crowds taking any certain direction, we are much inclined to go with them.”

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Hopkins was talking about advertising, about picking and choosing products to sell and copy to run based on the trend of the crowd. Sure. But the idea applies more broadly.

The most effective thing in business, and maybe in life, is the trend of the crowd.

Yes, it’s possible to get rich and be happy during depressions and wars.

But a much more effective way to get rich and be happy is to work in industries and live in places that are going through periods of growth or rebirth of expansion. I thought of this during this trip to Budapest.

I hadn’t seriously considered moving back here ever since I had moved away almost 8 years ago. I’ve been thinking about it for the past few days, because of the trend of the crowd. I feel like this will be a place of excitement and growth over the coming years.

#3. Cold outreach

Yesterday I sent out an email to my list, asking folks if they’ve tried getting clients via cold outreach.

I got two classes of responses. Class 1:

1A. “Yes, I hate it. I hired an agency multiple times and every time I hated it.”

1B. “So far, 17 days in, 70 prospects approached, 0 clients, countless menty b’s.”

1C. “No, and wouldn’t ;)”

Then there’s class 2:

2A. “That is my primary method for getting clients.”

2B. “Yes, John. Works very well for me. No fancy cold email stack. Just a 3-liner email with a very relevant problem that they’d wanna get rid of. Brings me every month $12K to $18K!”

2C. “I’m using cold outreach to get clients, and I’m doing very well with it. Personally, one of the best methods, especially if we are talking about cold email outreach.”

Quite the difference between Class 1 and Class 2.

I started a discussion about this in my Daily Email House community.

If cold outreach is not something you hate or are fundamentally opposed to, you can join in the discussion below.

It’s an opportunity to share your experiences, and maybe learn from the experiences of some people who have been very successful with cold outreach. Here’s the link:

https://www.skool.com/daily-email-house/cold-outreach

Why yes, that would be a dumb idea

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I got an email yesterday from someone I don’t know, with the subject line, “Copy Riddles.”

Copy Riddles is the name of my highest-ticket info product.

Ok, attention engaged. I opened the email to read:

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John,

A daily newsletter peers call the most underrated list in copywriting, built up around Copy Riddles, is a base worth working with.

My hunch is there’s a five figure opportunity in readers who’ve never been pointed at Copy Riddles outside of a launch window.

I fund and run that kind of campaign myself. I do the work, you spend nothing upfront, and I only earn a share of what converts.

Would it be a dumb idea to grab 15 minutes and see if there’s a test worth running there?

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Why yes, that would be a dumb idea, and a waste of a perfectly good 15 minutes.

Ignore for the moment the strange English in this cold email, which makes me doubt this person can write in a way that would get people to buy.

The reason it would be a dumb idea is that I already regularly promote Copy Riddles “outside of a launch window,” and I have been for years.

I do it both inside one-off daily emails like this one, and during promos where I create a special offer around Copy Riddles, attach it to a deadline, and make a bit of a spectacle to reap all the demand that my daily emails may have sown.

Two minutes of research could have told my cold emailer all that.

Oh well. This guy’s dumb idea did serve two purposes:

1. To allow me to remind you to keep promoting your products regularly via daily emails, so you can create demand, and to run regular promos, so you can cash in on that demand, and

2. To allow me to point you to my Copy Riddles program, which is the best thing I sell.

For more information on Copy Riddles:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Why I won’t promote your paid community

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Yesterday, I promoted Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin, a paid community. A reader who also has a paid community wrote in to ask:

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Ronin is $111/mo. Mine is [a similar price]. If I invite you to be a lifetime member and provided you like what I’ve built inside, would you consider promoting it?

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I appreciate the offer, and the answer is, I would not consider promoting this dude’s paid community, or really, anybody else’s paid community.

The fact is, it’s close to impossible to promote somebody else’s paid community with any success. Because of this, the promise of money isn’t much of a promise at all. I only keep promoting Travis’s thing because I’m a true believer, because I’m in the community myself and get a lot out of it.

If I did promote somebody else’s paid community primarily because I was hoping to get paid, I would do it the way Travis is preparing to auction off a recurring affiliate offer now inside Royalty Ronin.

Travis will be offering people a “Hero Package,” which provides a sexy outcome and overcomes all or most of the objections people might have when they are promised that outcome.

He’s gonna sell that Hero Package, rather than the continuity offer. He will make the continuity offer simply the condition for getting what people really want.

Of course, this model is well-known.

The magic is the way that Travis puts together his Hero Packages so that people are willing to pay 5x, 10x, 20x of whatever the underlying subscription might cost.

If you would like to observe Travis in action as he does this, and learn something you can use to promote recurring offers, whether your own or from affiliates:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

Creating value out of things that others would never think of

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I’m at the airport as I write this, on my way to Budapest, my former home, for a reunion with friends I had when I lived there a long time ago.

Right now, I’m sitting on a tiny stool at an airport restaurant, about to bite into a refrigerated airport sandwich, crowded on the one side by a pushy French couple and on the other by cleaning woman with a large broom.

That’s the good part of my current trip.

The bad part is that I just spent 25 minutes waiting in line for the privilege of paying 48 euro to get my boarding pass.

I’m flying low-cost, and I didn’t check in online before the three-hours deadline mandated by this low-cost airline. When I tried to check in online a few hours ago, I was told I would have to do it at the airport, and pay.

It’s annoying when this happens on a low-cost flight, and yet it is instructive.

The fact is, all kinds of things can be turned into value that normally aren’t.

It feels petty when low-cost airlines do it, but it can be done in ways that don’t feel petty, but in fact feel the opposite — generous, exciting, convenient.

Imagine you’re buying a house.

Nominally, you’re paying for the keys and the right to move in.

You can buy a “low-cost” house, which gives you the keys and the right to move in, but which doesn’t have lightbulbs, windows, or running water, and you have to pay extra for those.

Conversely, can buy a “premium” house, which gives you not just the bare keys and the right to move in, but which has been furnished by an interior designer, comes with a concierged security service, and has a fridge stocked with food from Whole Foods.

Ultimately, it’s the same business practice, the only difference is the positioning of your business as upmarket or downmarket.

Maybe you’re munching on your own refrigerated sandwich right now and mumbling, “Right right…”

… but maybe you don’t see how this idea from real estate and the airline industry can apply to what you do, specifically to creating offers that you can sell to your audience.

For that, I’d like to invite you to sign up for a trial to my perennial recommendation, the Royalty Ronin community.

Travis Sago, the guy who runs Ronin, is the best person I have ever seen at creating value out of things that others would never think of.

Right now, Travis is preparing to auction off a year of a SaaS, which he is promoting as an affiliate.

In other words, Travis will ask people how much they would pay… to have him pay their bill for a year of this software service.

How do you possibly auction off something not unique, with a known and fixed value? And how do you auction it off for 5x, 10x, 20x of what it is currently selling for on the website of the SaaS company?

For that, I invite you to sign up to Ronin, and to follow along as Travis proceeds to build up his premium offer, out of elements that might seem like air to you right now:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

Father devastated by 9yo son’s lack of monetization

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Have you heard the latest news about the “devastated father who says his 9-year-old son spent $118k on YouTube ads?”

The story broke yesterday. The events apparently happened over the past month. The background:

1. Last year, the kid started a YouTube channel streaming himself playing Minecraft, called Mighty Mike Plays.

2. Ever since, Mighty Mike uploaded a bunch of videos, but he wasn’t getting any views. He complained to dad.

3. Dad had a bright idea, and guided his son through a small $20 ad campaign to get some YouTube views.

4. Dad used his company card to fund this (it’s hard to tell if the dad is a moron or a criminal, and the article I read doesn’t say).

5. A few days ago, dad got called into his boss’s office. “What is this series of charges on the company card, totaling $118k?”

6. Turns out the Mighty Mike had kept running ads on YouTube, using dad’s company card, to the tune of $118k.

7. Two days ago, Mighty Mike posted on YouTube, “I’m in big trouble.”

8. Yesterday, Mike’s dad posted a video on the Mighty Mike Plays channel, explaining how it all went down. He also says it is yet not sure if he will be able to will keep his job or if he will have to repay the money. (Like I said, it’s not clear if he’s a moron or a criminal.)

Assuming that this isn’t just all made up by AI or by clickfarming scammers in some far-off land, it’s a wild story.

The best part is that I went to check the Mighty Mike Plays channel.

It currently stands at 39k subs, meaning that Mike apparently paid about $3 per YouTube subscriber.

I also checked the channel’s videos. The the top few videos are in the 200k views range, and the rest steeply drop off.

Adding it all up, I figure that Mighty Mike’s Minecraft streams didn’t get more than 1M views in total.

I’m not sure if Mike could monetize his channel (I’m guessing not, since he’s a minor, but I don’t know YouTube).

If he could, then according to my AI monkey’s best estimates, his 1M YouTube views, resulting from his $118k ad spend, would have netted him between $2k and $5k.

My takeaway for you is simply, if you think a bigger audience will solve all your problems, it won’t.

That’s not to say that you don’t need a certain size of audience to make a certain amount of money.

But you also need ways to monetize that audience.

Earlier today, I prepared a list of 10 ways to better monetize an email list of 3k+ subscribers. This list is based on things I’ve personally done to monetize my list, and the work I’ve done with consulting clients who I’ve helped to make more money from their email list.

This list won’t be useful to you if you don’t have a list of at least 3k subscribers. If you do, and if you’d like the list, hit reply and I’ll get it to you.

Readers kick my stupid analogy to the curb

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In my email yesterday, I asked for my readers’ help for a sticky way to illustrate the distinction between a “predictable income biz” and an “uncertain cash grab biz.”

My best idea was “Rolls-Royce business” vs “DeLorean business.” I thought it was clever. The people who replied almost uniformly thought it was unclear and ineffective.

Fine. Have it your way.

Fortunately, I also got some good suggestions from readers about better analogies than the the unlucky Rolls-Royce/DeLorean thing. A few of my favorites:

A vase of cut flowers versus a potted plant that keeps blooming…

… a deli business (which just has a bunch of expenses on the first of the month) versus the water company (which has a bunch of income on the first of the month)…

… and foraging for food in the wild versus picking fruit in your orchard.

I got other kindsa help, too.

One reader (not sure he wants me to share his name), wrote in to challenge the very premise I was writing about yesterday.

He wrote me a reasoned argument why continuity offers, which provide predictable income for a business, are overrated. He focused on paid newsletters and raised the following points:

1. Paid newsletters have to keep delivering a lot of value or people will unsubscribe, defeating the point of the continuity offer

2. People are more reluctant to sign up for a subscription like a paid newsletter, and are unwilling to pay as high of a price as they might for a one-time purchase

3. It takes a good amount of work to produce a decent paid newsletter every month, and you can’t take any month off

I agree with this, particularly part 3.

Yes, some people make paid newsletters work. But many people, including myself in the past (I had a paid newsletter that I killed after 2 months), fail or give up on them because a lot of work or simply the ongoing commitment gets grating.

BUT—

Paid newsletters — or really personal access to you in whatever form — is not the only kind of recurring/subscription/continuity offer you can make.

They are certainly not the only way to have the equivalent of your own orchard you can pick a ripe peach in whenever you like… instead of having to head out into the dark forest with a little basket, in search of wild turnips and maybe a rutabaga.

But I’m not sure if this is of interest to you?

Maybe you can tell me. I’ve got a little poll below. If you like, tell me your attitudes and experience with continuity recurring offers:

#1. Recurring is a major part of what I do and the money I make each month

#2. I tried selling recurring offers but people on my list don’t want ’em

#3. I am reluctant to promote recurring offers because I don’t want to commit to delivering month after month

#4. I prefer the thrill of going to the woods to forage for roots and tubers rather than picking fruit from my orchard

If you can spare the energy to hit three keys — reply, your choice above, and send — you can tell me whether it’s worth me talking more about continuity income that requires ZERO ONGOING DELIVERY from you.

Of course, if you wanna elaborate on your answer in more words, that’s very welcome also. Thanks in advance.

help

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Maybe you can help me?

All day long, I’ve been trying to come up with a sticky way to think about the difference between:

1. A business built on predictable income, where 60% or more of your desired income each month is covered with near certainty on the first of the month, by things like continuity and subscription offers, retainers, regular work with long-term clients, or payments on payment plans, and

2. A business completely lacking predictable income, where close to 0% of your monthly income is certain in advance, and each month is a series of scores or cash grabs, whether that’s launches, promos, or one-off work with new clients.

I’ve been thinking and thinking, pondering and pondering, summer autumn winter spring.

How to present this distinction in a more succinct, immediately understandable way?

My best idea so far is an analogy to two famous makes of car.

I thought to call the first type of business, the business built on predictable income, a “Rolls-Royce business.” That’s coming the famous David Ogilvy headline:

“At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock”

In other words, even at high speed income, there’s not a lot of noise, stress, or smoke in a Rolls-Royce business. It’s very efficient, comfortable, and even conservative. It’s likely to stick around for a long time, just like Rolls-Royce the company, which has been in business for 120+ years.

The other kind of business, completely lacking in predictable income, I though to call a “DeLorean business.”

DeLorean, you might or might not know. was an 80s sports car, which was only produced for two years. Today it’s only really known because it was used in the “Back to the Future” movies.

DeLorean was flashy with its gull-wing doors and low profile. It was also unreliable, uncomfortable, and ultimately led the company to bankruptcy. As Car and Driver magazine put it:

“Hopping, darting, and corkscrewing motions are not the stuff of confidence.”

I don’t know though.

What do you think of this analogy?

Does it carry the emotional impact I want it to have, if I’m trying to promote the stable and comfortable Rolls-Royce biz at the expense of the flashy and unstable DeLorean biz? Or are the gull-wing doors and the Back to the Future association too positive, and does a DeLorean biz sound too cool to give up?

Please hit reply and let me know what you think. Or let me know if you have a better sticky way to present the difference between a “predictable income biz” and an “uncertain cash grab biz.”

Thanks in advance.

Last call and then it’s gone

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Today is the last day to sign up for Mike Samuels’s ABP cohort. As I wrote yesterday, this is a certification program to turn you into a “scheme man” — a marketing consultant who devises new ways for companies to sell their old stuff.

Maybe you read my email yesterday, and while you enjoyed learning that the term “scheme man” has a long, illustrious history — famous copywriters like Claude Hopkins and Robert Collier were primarily scheme men — maybe you don’t see how this would actually work today. So lemme tell you.

This is the second time Mike is running the ABP cohort. The last time, one student:

1. Reached out to client he had written some ads for, 8 months prior. The outreach message took all of 20 seconds to write.

2. He then followed up with a single 5-minute Loom video, putting to work some of the behavioral psychology insights that Mike covers in ABP and applying them to the client’s business.

3. Result: A 7,500 GBP contract to help the client find more such opportunities in the business over 90 days. The plan after that is a 2500 GBP/month consulting retainer, just for providing diagnostics.

At 1297 GBP — over $1,700 — ABP is neither cheap nor expensive, considering the results it can get you.

If the price is not something you can swing right now, regardless of the results you can get, then Mike offers a 3-month payment plan as well. I’m telling you about that because of the following bit from Mike’s sales page:

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By the time your final payment leaves your account, most people on this programme have already had their first paid client conversation. Some have already signed one.

Which means ABP has a habit of paying for itself before you’ve finished paying for it.

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If you’re a copywriter and you wanna get paid more, and you wanna do more interesting work, then ABP might be your ticket to ride.

Again, today is the last day to sign up for the current cohort.

It’s not clear when or if Mike will run this program again. What is clear is that if he does run it again, the price will be higher, and the current bonuses, which deal with finding clients, will be gone.

If you wanna at least check out Mike’s offer, before the deadline takes the choice out of your hands:

https://bejakovic.com/scheme

Get expert training in Scheming, raise your income

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I once read a book called The Man Who Sold America and in it I came across the term “scheme man.”

Once upon a time, a scheme man was a legitimate and even highly coveted and paid profession.

Scheme men were basically marketing consultants who could devise new selling “schemes” — ideas, concepts, breakthroughs. As master direct marketer Robert Collier put it, “It’s not the copy so much as the scheme back of it.”

Claude Hopkins, often thought to be the first A-list copywriter, was the premier scheme man (he was the one discussed in that book I read).

Hopkins didn’t really use clever copywriting to turn his clients and himself into billionaires (in today’s money).

Instead, he did it by devising new selling schemes.

As an example, Hopkins’s first big marketing job was to sell “carpet sweepers.” His innovative scheme was to start offering these carpet sweepers in a dozen different fancy wood casings, rather than the single drab choice available previously.

Stupid, right? Who cares about the casing?

This was a completely impractical and unnecessary new development. And yet, it resulted in 250,000 carpet sweepers being sold in 3 weeks.

After that, some of Hopkins’s schemes involved the “world’s biggest cake” (100,000 people came to see it)… the “paid free sample” scheme for Liquozone (which took the company from bankruptcy to making $60 million in profit the next year)… and the “engraved with your name” pen that doubled response when added as a bonus to an ordinary offer.

Point being:

Become a skilled Scheme Man, then or now, and your future is settled.

If you can devise new ways for a company to sell what they’ve already got, your services will ALWAYS be in demand, and you will get paid BIG MONEY IN BIG CHUNKS. Plus, the work can be exciting and challenging and even fun.

Except how? How do you become a skilled Scheme Man, today, in 2026?

For that I’d like to point you to Mike Samuels, and his 6-week ABP cohort.

Mike’s cohort is currently open for signups. The signup window closes tomorrow. After that, you won’t be able to get in, and also the bonuses disappear, and if this program is ever opened again, the price will go up.

Like I said, Mike’s cohort program is called ABP, which stands for Action Based Psychology. I don’t think that name does justice to what Mike is offering here.

What Mike is offering is a full-on certification program for Scheme Men, though he calls them “ABP Consultants.”

Mike’s program first gets you trained on the relevant underlying psychology and translates that into specific marketing techniques, so you can own these ideas yourself and turn them into new selling schemes for specific businesses.

Mike then gives you “audits” so you don’t have to count on remembering all these ideas and schemes, but can simply refer to the audits when the time comes.

And then finally, there’s a client-getting section so you can actually turn your new Scheming skills into profits for clients and income for yourself.

Like I said, the signup for this cohort closes tomorrow. If you’re interested in the full details before this opportunity goes away:

https://bejakovic.com/scheme