John Bejakovic

I help The Copy Nerd pay for his house

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A few weeks ago, I ran a promo for a new offer by Vasilis Apostolou, who styles himself online as The Copy Nerd. I wrote a lot about Vasilis in those emails, but in a nutshell, the man is:

* A former Agora copywriter

* Now an in-house copywriter at Advanced Bionutritionals, a big direct-response supplement company

* In a small and exclusive group of “copy cubs” that gets to be directly mentored by the reclusive A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos, somebody I have personally learned the most from, both directly and indirectly, when it comes to copywriting

* Himself mentoring a small group of younger copywriters

Anyway, Vasilis put together an offer based on a part of his own working process, which he called Million Dollar Hook Machine. I gave Vasilis some tips and advice about positioning and pricing this offer. I then promoted it to my list.

It went well.

After the promo was over, Vasilis wrote up the the details of how well it went, along with his conclusions, in a post in my Daily Email House community, under the headline, “John helps pay for my house.”

I am reproducing Vasilis’s post as-is below, both because it is flattering to me, and because it might be genuinely useful to you too. Says Vasilis:

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Less than two months ago, I started my email list.

And less than two weeks ago, I released my first offer.

I promoted it to my list, and John promoted it to his list as an affiliate.

In case you read John’s email from the other day, we sold about $7.5k worth of courses through his promotion.

Half goes to John. Half goes to my (wife’s) pocket.

I also sold about $2.5k directly to my own list, which had only 70-something people on it.

So in total, I made about $6k.

Not bad for something I’m doing part time. (Daily emails take less than 10 hours per week. Putting together the offer took about 20 hours over a few weeks.)

By the way, $6k is enough to pay my rent for a few months.

Which means the promise of the “Daily Email House” is true.

At least for the next few months.

And it’ll probably stay true for as long as I keep emailing my list and making offers, which I plan to do.

I’m writing this post to thank John for a few things, on top of being my first and only affiliate.

1. He convinced me to start my list

It was John’s insistence, through his daily emails, that finally made me start one.

And already, that tiny list has paid my rent for a few months.

It also got me a job offer.

(I said no because I’m not interested in getting a job, but it’s still proof that daily emails create opportunities you wouldn’t have otherwise.)

And I’m pretty sure that when I have time to offer consulting and mentoring again, I’ll have people interested in those too.

2. He made me charge more

Initially, I wanted to sell my offer for $47 or less.

This was despite people who had seen it telling me it was worth thousands of dollars.

And John insisted I should charge more.

Eventually, I settled on $297, which I think is a sweet spot for courses/tools.

Had I sold my offer for $47, the launch would have made me a fraction of what it did.

3. He gave me an affiliate case study

After this launch, I can now approach other potential affiliates and say:

“John Bejakovic promoted this offer to his list and generated $7.5k in sales.”

That’s a hell of a lot stronger than “wanna promote my course?”

So thank you, John.

For the affiliate sales, obviously.

But even more for repeatedly telling people to start a list, email it every day, make offers, and charge enough for what they sell.

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A few things I’d like to highlight:

1. Vasilis has a list of 70 people, and yet he made $2.5k from his list directly during this launch. That’s $35 per subscriber. Those numbers won’t stay that high as his list grows but… damn.

2. He hadn’t been mailing for years before making this offer, but less than two months.

3. He basically packaged up a bit of his own daily work process, put that into a shiny box, slapped a sexy name on it, and sold it.

If you have an email list of marketers or copywriters and you want to promote Vasilis’s offer, you can write him at vasilis@thecopynerd.com. He says he’s planning to relaunch his Million Dollar Hook Machine sometime this month.

And if you have valuable skills and a work process that you could package up into an offer, and a list, however small, then write me at john@bejakovic.com. I’d like to help you have a dramatically more successful offer launch, and maybe even promote your offer myself to my list.

I’m affordable = I wanna steal your money

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I read a “serves you right” story yesterday:

News broke a few days ago that the Ledger X, a specific and popular make of crypto wallet, a physical device meant to store your bitcoins, memecoins, and shitcoins, was compromised somewhere along the supply chain.

The wallets were tampered with and a little mechanism was added, which transmits your crypto secrets to somebody out there in this dark world and wide, and drains all the crypto that you were foolish enough to store in the Ledger X.

I say foolish enough because, according to the article I read:

“Tampered devices were available for nearly half the price of the original hardware.”

Point being, you don’t want to buy for cheap, because you get what you pay for.

Likewise, you don’t want to sell for cheap, because savvy customers, the one you want to have for the long term, know you get what you pay for, and will therefore avoid cheap.

And before you come at me with your counterexamples of things that were cheap but good, or pricey but bad — yes. This rule of thumb of thumb might not be 100% accurate. But in the words of Travis Sago, it is 100% useful.

I’m telling you all this because in my Daily Email House community, Community Shogun Chris Dyson asked, “What’s the ONE part of your process your customers seem to struggle with the most?”

I made a list of four different things that I think my customers struggle. #2 on my list was, “They are reluctant to raise their prices and frequently undercharge.”

Like I said, you don’t want to sell for cheap. Ideally, that means you raise your prices, up to and even including being the most expensive in your niche.

However, if you are reluctant to do that yet, then at least stop selling yourself as being cheap.

Yes, you can charge less than the going rate if you must. But give it another reason than “because I’m affordable” — otherwise smart customers will suspect you are actually trying to steal their money in some secret way, like the half-price crypto wallet did and does.

Good news is, there are dozens of possible justifications you can give for charging a lower rate than the rest of the market. If you wanna see some of them:

https://www.skool.com/daily-email-house/100-contest-reasons-to-be-cheap

3 good reasons to insult your readers

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Last night I organized a direct response dinner in a restaurant in Barcelona’s Eixample neighborhood. I invited 7 people, all of whom either own direct response businesses or work in direct marketing. The agenda was communicating with like-minded primates, and food.

One of the people who joined was a Canadian girl who works in ecom and is also starting a Substack.

She was sharing her plans for the Substack. Eventually she said something like, “I gotta figure out how to engage readers.”

I’d had a couple of glasses of wine by this point.

They say that in wine there is truth.

So I blurted out, “You gotta insult people.”

The girl and the guy next to her, an executive coach who refused to eat anything because he is on the Gundry anti-lectin diet, both stopped and stared at me.

“Insult them? No, come on…”

“Yep, insult them.”

And then, using my best debating skills, I laid out my case.

First, insulting people can demonstrate higher status — not always, but when done in the right way. And there are no influence tricks that can match the persuasive power of having higher status.

Second, insulting people can be a game that you play with people, with them being in on it.

I once heard Nick Krauser, the world’s best pickup artist, say, “attraction is bullshit.” That’s what this kind of insulting is — bullshit, banter, fooling around.

Note that this is exactly the opposite situation of the previous, “higher status” kind of insult, though some people will try to sneak in a “higher status” insult as banter. (“It was all in good fun!” they’ll say, to try to cover up for themselves. Weak, if you ask me. If you’re going to insult people because you’re after higher status, then own the insult.)

The third reason to insult your readers is that nice is boring. And in the words of A-list copywriter Jim Rutz:

“The #1 sin in ad mail is being boring, and over half of it richly deserves its quick death by wastebasket.”

This applies not just to ad mail, but to daily emails… to ads, advertorials, sales letters… to Substack newsletters, books, movie scripts, political pamphlets, and cereal box copy.

Maybe you don’t agree with me about insulting people.

You donkey.

One day, I’ll write a book about this topic, which I call “natural authority.”

Meanwhile, I’ll just point you to my most recent book, “10 Commandments of Con Men, Pickup Artists, Magicians, Door-to-Door Salesmen, Hypnotists, Copywriters, Negotiators, Political Propagandists, Stand Up Comedians, and Oscar-Winning Screenwriters.”

You still haven’t read that book? What are you waiting for? Here’s the link, you muppet:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Groundhog Day book club?

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Ok campers, rise and shine! And don’t forget your booties cause it’s COOOLD out there today. It’s cold out there every day.

I just watched the behind the scenes of my favorite movies of all time, Groundhog Day.

Turns out, I’m not special in liking Groundhog Day.

Over the years, yogis, Hasidic Jews, and psychotherapists, along with many others, have all latched on to Groundhog Day and used the film to mean something for them, at that exact moment.

Groundhog Day director Harold Ramis put it this way:

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Films are really interesting because of the fact that they’re frozen.

It’s not like going to see the same play over and over where the actor may change his performance. The film is the film. It’s done.

It’s like Jews reading the Torah every year. The Torah doesn’t change. We change.

So every time people come to Groundhog Day, they are coming to it at a different age and time of life, their circumstances may have changed and they may find something different in it.

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That’s always been my argument for rereading books. I change, and find something new in the book that simply didn’t see before. That’s why rereading a few particularly valuable books, year after year, has been a very valuable habit for me.

I realized this morning that it’s been years since I’ve picked up one of the copywriting classics that I used to read and reread regularly.

I feel my life and my emails are suffering for it.

I’m gonna get back into rereading some classic copywriting and marketing books… but I was thinking, maybe turn it into some kind of group activity? A book club? A naked book club? A naked book club in a bathtub?

I have no idea. Maybe you can tell me if you are currently or have previously been in a book club? If so, what did you like and what did you not like?

A “reserve” daily email to pull out whenever your brain-dead or time-strapped

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Trouble in paradise:

It’s about 2pm as I write this, which means it’s really time for a nice afternoon nap. But my cleaning woman has taken control of my house, so I am at a cafe next door, waiting another hour or so for her to leave.

I’ve spent this morning and my time in this cafe working intensely on my cold traffic funnel (almost done, will probably launch tomorrow), and on planning out the monetization group coaching I hinted at last week.

That few hours of intense work taxed my little brain. And now that it’s time to write my daily email, I find I am not feeling very inspired or creative.

What’s worse, I haven’t read, heard, or watched anything fascinating over the past few days that I’d love to share.

What’s worst, I don’t have an exciting new offer to promote (those always make things easier), and so instead I will promote my familiar Daily Email Habit service.

Fortunately, I know a trick for what exactly to do in these kinds of situations, a kind of “reserve” daily email you can still pull off even you’re feeling brain-dead or time-strapped.

This “reserve” daily email has saved me on many occasions by helping me keep daily email streak going. It has made me sales at times as well. Most of all, it has done a great job building a relationship with my readers, better than a lot of other emails I’ve sent.

If you’re already subscribed to Daily Email Habit, I’m writing to you today to remind you of this “reserve” type of daily email. Look up the welcome email I sent you when you signed up for Daily Email Habit, and you will find the 5-point recipe for this “reserve” email.

If you’re not yet signed up to Daily Email Habit, I’m writing to you today to encourage you to give it a try for a month, for $50, which is what the service costs.

I believe the various pieces of daily email advice I give out in the welcome email alone, and specifically, this little bit about how to write a reserve email, when you’re brain-dead or time strapped, are themselves worth $50. I say that based on how valuable this simple trick has been to me.

If you’d like to learn my “reserve email” trick for $50, plus get a bonus 30 daily email prompts for those days when feel like writing more:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

They trust you and your process… so WHY don’t they buy?

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If you sell proven advice in the form of courses or coaching, but you’re finding it hard to convince people to buy, and even harder to get them to actually do what you say, then read on:

Chris Dyson has 25 years of 1-1 sales experience, including over email and DM.

For reasons that are beyond me (because Chris makes a lot of money doing sales), right now he is also teaching a few folks how to do what he does. Except, how do you teach people to make sales and actually get results? Because as Chris put it:

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Let’s be honest, doing something new is uncomfortable. You have to go through that awkward stage where you’re rubbish at something before you get any good at it (thanks dunning Kruger)

And if your process involves putting yourself out there, talking to strangers or risking rejection?

Good luck 😂

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Turns out, Chris has cracked the code (metaphorically speaking, because there was no encryption involved here), for getting people to actually implement and own the skills of 1-1 sales, which so many people feel fear and even aversion to.

And just so we’re clear:

This isn’t about teaching people sales. This is about getting customers and clients results, and getting them onboard for the process of getting results.

Chris wrote up a detailed post about how he’s done it in my Daily Email House community, under the title, “They trust you and your process… so WHY don’t they buy?”.

If you sell information or do coaching, but people are not implementing what you teach and therefore are not getting results, even with all the templates and checklists and video lessons and AI tools you might have given them..

… or better yet, if they are not even buying from you to begin with, even though they trust you and believe in your process, because they are one step ahead and know that they won’t implement and won’t get results if they do buy…

… then reading Chris’s case study, and thinking about how you might do something similar in structure, could make all the difference you need to both make sales now and in the future, thanks to all the amazing results your customers will be getting.

If you’re curious, here’s where to go:

https://www.skool.com/daily-email-house/they-trust-you-and-your-process-so-why-dont-they-buy

Advice I’ve given people

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Yesterday, I got on two coaching-like calls.

These calls were coaching-like because they are a mix of coaching and partnerships. I have agreements with both of the folks I talked to yesterday to help them reach an outcome, and I have an incentive in doing so.

These are not weekly calls, but on demand.

I don’t have to whip the guys, or shame them, or beg them to take action.

Instead, I give them my suggestions, they go off and do, and at some point in the future we reconvene and talk next steps. The guys are making progress with a minimum of wasted time and effort for either side. It’s a wonderful system.

Anyway, I have long taken to heart Sean D’Souza’s idea that, if you wanna solve your own problems, go solve somebody else’s. Meaning, we all give other people better advice than we can give ourselves.

So give other people advice, write it down, and then think about how to apply the same yourself.

Here’s some of the advice I gave my two coaching/partnership guys yesterday:

* Feed the recordings of your intensives/coaching calls to an LLM, extract all the advice you’ve given, and turn it into a lead magnet, ebook, or sellable course. This can also become a partnership asset you give to someone who already has the attention of your ideal audience so they send you more such clients.

* Stop trying to help people get started. People who haven’t started, haven’t started for a reason.

* Copy the proven group-coaching model: recorded training (videos + Google Docs), a Skool group for questions, weekly or biweekly hot seats that double as new content. Clean up your existing call transcripts into SOPs/how-to docs as the course content. Price it at $3k/$5k/$8k per year instead of as a monthly subscription.

This is advice I will be applying myself.

One of the guys I talked to yesterday has a sizeable email list. At the start of this year, he was only making about 30 cents per subscriber each month.

I have been coaching/partnering with him for the past 7 or so months, and each of the past three months he has made $1/subscriber or more.

So I will take the advice I’ve given him to get him that result and package that advice up, or rather, get Claude to package it up. I will then put it in front of my list… in front of other people’s lists… in front of the entire Wall Street Journal readership (well maybe not, but I will probably run cold traffic to it).

I’m also thinking of creating a group-coaching layer to my Skool group, like I advised the other guy yesterday. This group coaching would be there to help folks who have email lists monetize their list better, if for any reason it’s not a fit for us to do the kind of 1-1 partnership/coaching I am doing with the guys I talked to yesterday.

And finally, I’ve learned, but I have to keep relearning, to stop trying to help people get started.

People who haven’t started have their own reasons for not starting — whether that’s the timing is bad, or it’s a conflict with their identity, or they simply have better options and don’t want to put in the effort it would take.

Clearly, I’m not saying that everybody who hasn’t started will never get started. Saying that would be kind of… dumb. But people get started for their own reasons, in their own time.

If you haven’t yet gotten started sending daily emails and building a little personal brand online, which can support you through thick and thicker, then get started, in your own time.

Maybe that’s today, or maybe not.

Like I’ve written recently, it takes several ingredients to make a little daily email business work, among them a small audience, good offers you can promote, and of course the emails themselves.

If you’re just getting started today, then my advice is to start with the emails.

I say that because it’s the way I did it and I know it to work, and also because writing emails can get you a lot of the way to creating an offer, and it can even slowly but steadily build your list, via word-of-mouth or search traffic if you have a public email archive.

If you wanna get started today building your own little personal empire, here’s my stream of daily advice on what to put in your daily email to keep it both interesting for your readers and valuable for you:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Why haven’t course creators been told these facts?

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Have you tried to sell at least one course since 1947? Then here is the full, uncensored story of what it takes to make $100,000-$1,000,000+ in course sales… how you can avoid the pitfalls that swallow up and trap 86% of course creators… and live the 4-hour workweek you’ve dreamed of, in a hammock, by the beach, a piña colada with a little umbrella in your hand!

Today, while attempting to write you an entirely different email, I came across an article, written by Claude, and published earlier this year by the people at Kajabi.

Kajabi, as you might know, is a platform for hosting your courses, along with a shopping cart, and a bunch of other integrated tools for course creators.

Several people I know and have mentioned repeatedly in this newsletter are using Kajabi, among them Kieran Drew, Parker Worth, and Travis Sago.

Kajabi is in a unique position because 1) appeals to course creators 2) has info on the sales those course creators make.

Kajabi has been in business since 2010, and according to the article I read, its users have made more than $11.7 billion selling their knowledge and expertise.

Am I getting you a little warm here? A little curious?

Because, without revealing any private info, Kajabi crunched the numbers on their customers and found the truth about course creators, which Big Course has been hiding from you. Here are the vast, drear, naked facts:

* RAMPANT INEQUALITY: The top 1% of course creators collect 44.3% of everything ever earned on Kajabi. (That’s $5.18 billion.)

* COURSE CREATING MILLIONAIRES: Among those course creators who manage to sell even one copy of their course, 1 out of 40 managed to sell $1 million dollars’ worth or more.

* ONGOING EXPLOITATION: 53.8% of all course creator earnings arrived on a customer’s second purchase from a course creator, or their third, or their tenth.

Based on such facts, Kajabi gives the following recommendations to those course creators who want to succeed, and even become millionaires:

“The gap between the typical expert [lifetime earnings: $3,653] and the six-figure expert [14% of those who manage to sell anything at all] comes down to three measurable behaviors: customers who buy again, a catalog deeper than one offer, and enough months in the game for both to compound.”

In less Claude-y language, more offers… more followup with previous buyers… and time, blessed time.

You’ve already got time passing. No need to do anything there.

More followup with previous buyers is what daily emails are for. If you want my help there, you can find it here: https://bejakovic.com/deh

And as for offers:

I’m thinking about running a small workshop, limited to a few people, to help you create more offers, including $1k+ offers, without having to create entirely new suites of products or services.

If such a workshop is something you’d be interested in, then reply to this email, because your interest (or disinterest) will determine whether this workshop happens, or whether my offer-creation secrets go back to the attic, among my collection of dusty puppets and that one skeleton I keep meaning to get rid of.

DFY offer: Luxury handbag

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I will get to my DFY luxury handbag offer in a second. But first, let me share three fascinating things that happened to me over the past 24 hours, which led me to entering the done-for-you luxury handbag business:

#1. Yesterday, I went for a private muay thai training with my friend Matthias. After the training, we sat down for a drink.

Matthias runs a business like mine, sending daily emails and pumping out new offers.

But as he told me, he can’t pump out as many new offers as his list would buy each month… and there aren’t all that many great affiliate offers for him to promote.

The result is there are entire weeks each month when it’s slow going with sales.

I asked Matthias, “Why don’t you run promos around your existing products, so you don’t have to create something completely new for each promo?”

Matthias said he tried it before, but he couldn’t make it work.

I looked over my shoulder a few times. There was nobody there to overhear us. And then, in hushed tones, I explained to Matthias how he could make it work.

#2. I sent out an email yesterday asking my readers what offer they would be sure to buy from me if I were smart enough to offer it. One long-time reader replied:

“Trust you completely, purchases are about if I think I could successfully implement”

… which made me think I should sell more done-for-you stuff.

#3. Today, in my Daily Email House community, star copywriter and new offer owner Vasilis Apostolou asked:

“Btw, can you create an ’email your way to a luxury handbag for your wife’ offer or something?”

With this, the three fascinating things that happened to me over the past 24 hours all clicked and fused together.

And that’s how I’ve got a new DFY luxury handbag offer, available now.

If you’d like the full details on this offer, or to take me up on it:

https://www.skool.com/daily-email-house/dfy-turn-your-email-list-into-a-luxury-handbag