John Bejakovic

“Way too biz oppy”

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For the past few days, I’ve been promoting a webinar in which a guy named Josh Rosenberg — previously a big-time ClickBank seller, then a fractional CMO for direct response businesses — lays out his new offer, “AI Super Agent,” which builds out entire info product funnels, all the research, production creation, and copy included.

Lots of people have clicked through to Josh’s offer. A fair number have signed up for the webinar. Some have bought the “AI Super Agent.”

But a good number of people are also skeptical. Here’s a comment I got from a reader:

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Yeah I had the same reaction to his offer. Sounds way too biz oppy. Like every other offer in the “AI gold rush” … seems like only the shovel sellers are making any money.

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There’s no doubt that Josh’s “AI Super Agent” is presented as a business opportunity, starting with the fact it’s sold via webinar, and then continuing to how it’s positioned, argumented, and priced.

Maybe you’ve been burned by a biz opp before, and have simply decided that anything that looks like that is not for you. Fair enough, and I certainly won’t try to change your mind if that’s the case.

If you’re a little less decided, I can repeat what I wrote in an email back in May.

On the one hand, jumping from biz opp to biz opp, in a chase after “passive income” or “almost passive income,” is a sure recipe for staying broke, stressed, and working too hard.

On the other hand, legitimate business opportunities do exist. You won’t know one for sure until you try it and succeed with it.

I’ve personally been sold on biz opps like copywriting, revshare deals with clients, and starting and writing an email list. Each one has ended up making me lots of money and making my life significantly more free.

How to decide if a biz opp has a chance to win you money and freedom, or is likely to keep you further away from them?

In that email back in May, I gave three questions to help you evaluate business opportunities. Let me repeat those now with Josh’s “AI Super Agent” in mind:

#1. “Is this a 5-month plan or are you ok if it turns into a 5-year plan?”

#2. “Are you building up some kind of asset regardless?”

#3. “What happens if the opportunity disappears?”

The only of those questions I can answer for you is #2.

Josh’s gizmo definitely builds up assets for you as long as you keep using it. It gives you info products you can sell that in smart ways, by partnering with clients or audience owners, the way I’ve been talking about the last few days.

But even if you don’t do that, you can sell these info products by running ads to them, or simply publishing them on Amazon and seeing which ones sell on their own.

As for the other two questions, they are yours to decide on.

Will info products as a business opportunity disappear?

Weirder things have happened, and the very tech (AI) that’s making this biz opp possible might in the end also kill it.

(My personal feeling is that people will still be paying for information for at least a few years to come.)

But even if info products do stick around for years, are you ok sticking around info products for years?

Do topics like email lists and sales pages and traffic interest you, or are you hoping to run away from them as soon as possible so you can jump into another biz opp, or into something else entirely?

I cannot answer that for you.

But if you believe that info products have a future, and if you decide it’s a future you are interested in being part of, then Josh’s thing is worth a look, in spite of its “gold rush” biz opp marketing style. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/aisuperagent

Endless traffic partners for an “info product” funnel factory

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Yesterday, I promised to tell you how I would find endless traffic partners for your “info product” funnel factory, starting from nothing.

But before you spend time reading this long and lionhearted email, let me warn you:

What I’m about to share is speculative rather than proven.

It’s what I would do, but the fact is, the one and only time I tried anything like this, it didn’t produce any results.

I’m guessing that’s because I gave up after just one outreach message… because I prolly picked a bad person to reach out to… plus, my offer wasn’t as tempting as I would know to make it now.

I do still think this process has lots of promise, whether or not you’re starting from nothing. That’s why I’m sharing it with you.

Still with me? If you are, let me open up:

Last year, I read a post inside the Royalty Ronin community with the title:

“I will BRIBE you to do this deal!”

The “deal” was:

Go on YouTube… find people with big audiences in hobby niches like dogs or woodworking… and offer to produce a newsletter for them for free.

The guy making this post was James Foster, one of the more active and successful people inside the Royalty Ronin. James was so confident this would produce good results that, as a joke incentive to get people to try this out, he offered a $2 Dogecoin bill to people who actually put the idea into to action.

James’s reasoning:

1. Most YouTubers live and die with the popularity and reach of their next video

2. Of course, most YouTubers don’t have a newsletter, and depend entirely on the whims of YouTube algorithm

3. You can offer to create a newsletter for such people for them, for free.

The offer is, the YouTube Channel owner drives their viewers to the newsletter, and in turn, you produce emails that drive their own viewers back to their new videos (something that YouTube won’t reliably do).

You profit by also using the newsletter to promote other relevant stuff. (You can even offer to split the profits with the YouTube owner, or you don’t have to.)

I am a bit of a monkey-see-monkey-do kind of monkey. Plus I liked the idea of getting rewarded for running a little experiment.

So when I read James’s idea, I decided to give it a go.

I went on YouTube and, after a bit of snooping, found a YouTube channel with Qigong videos, delivering vague instructions over B-roll footage of mountains.

The channel had hundreds of videos, over a million followers, and of course no newsletter.

Sidebar:

In the past, I’ve experimented with cold outreach. And I’ve learned that cold outreach is drastically more likely to get a response if I put in the work up front to do something for people… instead of simply offering to do so only after gotten a green light from them.

So what to do here?

I set up a new free Beehiiv account… branded it with the branding from the YouTube channel… created an email to simulate how a regular weekly email would look, with a screenshot of their latest video… and signed up the owner of the YouTube account to my newsletter.

All this took like 20-30 minutes, because really I just repurposed stuff from their YouTube channel.

I then wrote the owner a separate email, to explain what’s going on and to make my partner proposition.

And like I said… I never heard back from the guy.

I never followed up or pursued this further, the $2 Dogecoin bill be damned.

The reason is, I had other things that are already bubbling on the stove for me, and this idea, cool and tempting though it sounded, failed to produce an immediate win for me.

That might be because the person I was writing to was a 16-year old Chinese boy who didn’t speak English who was just playing with AI (I don’t know this for a fact, but it is quite possible, based on the email address on the YouTube channel).

Or maybe it was that my offer, no risk and all reward though I tried to make it, still seemed confusing and unattractive. My reasoning:

If you read my emails, you’re likely to know that an email newsletter is immensely valuable. But the majority of the world has never heard of email marketing and cannot believe it is as effective as it actually is.

And so explaining to YouTube channel owners how they will drive traffic to a newsletter I create… and I will drive their viewers back to them… and how this is good for you and for them — that’s already complicated and not clear. And not-clear offers often don’t get takers.

That’s why I think a much better, much clearer offer would be to create NOT a custom newsletter, but a custom info product, along with a sales page, branded with the YouTube channel’s identity, on some topic that their audience already has shown to care about.

I speculate this kind of offer would be much easier for YouTube channel owners to be interested in and to say yes to partnering on. “I made this product that your people want, send them here and we split the profits.” Much clearer, no?

Plus, the nice thing in this case is, you’re still building an email list, except an email list of info product buyers, instead of just random newsletter subs.

So that’s my idea for finding endless traffic partners for all the info product funnels you could stomach to create.

Of course, creating an info product and a surrounding funnel is nowhere as trivial as signing up for Beehiiv and creating a welcome email.

Except… it can be, thanks to the “AI Super Agent” I’ve been talking about the past couple days. This “AI Super Agent” does market research to figure out which info product ideas are likely to be a hit… it creates the product based on the winningest ideas… plus it generates all the sales copy.

I wouldn’t use this “AI Super Agent” for creating info products for personality-based list like my own.

But for partnering with people who already have large audiences… in hobby niches where much of the info is already out there, but just needs to be synthesized and pacakaged up… I think this AI gizmo could be very a very useful and lucrative tool.

If you wanna find out more about this “AI Super Agent,” then the guy who created it has a webinar in which he demoes it and explains how it works:

https://bejakovic.com/aisuperagent

Info product niches you never would believe

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Yesterday, I wrote an email promoting Josh Rosenberg’s “AI Super Agent”, which researches and builds out an entire info product funnel for you in minutes, including the product to sell and all the copy to sell it. To which, an interested reader wrote in reply:

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I had a quick look and couldn’t find any examples of Josh Rosenberg’s system in action, but I am very interested in what kind of results other people are getting from this kind of approach.

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I’m guessing you won’t find many results of Josh’s customers online yet, because this offer is new.

Josh does have case studies inside the webinar I linked to and am linking to today as well.

But also I talked to Josh before I decided to promote this gizmo. I asked him, what have people actually done with his thing? He sent me back a sample list of what people are doing. Some of these info product niches are familiar, but others, specifically the trees, you might never believe:

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One user is creating a course on vibe coding for their site https://www.lindy.ai/.

Another created funnels for copywriting/branding for startups and another for SMEs.

Someone else created funnels for prophylactic trimming of large, wind-damage prone trees and a social media posting guide.

Someone else is working on a funnel for local dentists.

Another user is creating offers for the survival niche.

Someone else is creating a funnel to help people start their own trucking company.

Someone else created multiple funnels for car salesmen.

Someone else is doing a funnel on pay per call affiliate marketing.

And someone created funnels for pickleball, real estate agents, parenting and Adobe creative cloud. This person got the agency license, so they are probably doing this for their clients.

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(For the record, a big part of what Josh’s “AI Super Agent” does is market research. It comes up with a score predicting the likely success of various info product ideas. I’m guessing that means that “prophylactic trimming of large, wind-damage prone trees,” bizarre though it sounds, is actually a promising info product niche.)

As for that agency license Josh mentions:

Apparently, about 50% of people buying his “AI Super Agent” are taking the agency license. I don’t know the exact details of how that license works, but the broad picture is it allows you to make unlimited info product funnels, for as many different clients as you want, as opposed to just doing ones your own businesses or for one client you’re working with.

On that note, tomorrow I’ll tell you how I would find endless partners for such an “info product funnel” agency, even if you have no clients yet that you’re working with right now.

Meanwhile, if you’re interested in Josh’s “AI Super Agent,” and if you want to see if it could be a good fit for your current biz or clients, Josh has prepared a webinar where he demos and explains how it works:

https://bejakovic.com/aisuperagent

How I’d transform existing ecom clients into my own info business(es)

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A couple days ago, I wrote email about how I’d eat ecom copywriters’ lunch… with some fava beans, and a nice chianti.

That email was based on my own experience from a few years back, writing lots and lots of advertorials and revshare emails for ecom clients.

Today, I got another idea for you along the same lines, an idea I was very excited about at the time. This idea could have made me a profitable info publishing business on day 0, but it never happened, because I committed a classic persuasion blunder.

First a bit o’ background:

Like I wrote on Monday, I got ecom clients by writing advertorials. Then, I offered those same clients to write emails on a revshare basis, which made me much more than working as a per-hour copywriter.

But there was one ongoing problem, and that was a lack of good offers to promote in those daily emails.

The clients I worked with had a half-dozen or so live dropshipping offers. Some worked great, some ok.

Ideally, I’d promote each of those offers only twice every month, because otherwise I noticed the response dropped off.

What to promote all those other days?

There were affiliate networks that specialized in “viral” ecom products like the ones my clients were selling. But no matter how supposedly “viral” these offers were, my tests showed that only a handful were worth promoting, and even those underperformed our in-house offers.

Beyond the affiliate ecom products, there were a few ClickBank info products that we could sell to our audience. But since our audience (dog owners and kitchen and household gadgets buyers) was outside the popular and cutthroat ClickBank niches like dating and weight loss, the only ClickBank offers I could find had awful marketing and sold poorly.

So I had an idea.

What if I were to simply create custom info products to sell to my clients’ list?

I had a good sense of what offers could sell well based on my emails, plus I could research what’s selling on Amazon, what’s getting views on YouTube, searches on Google.

I could create some ebooks, simple sales pages for those ebooks, maybe some upsells. It didn’t need to be perfect, just attractive and quality enough to put confidently in front of our list, and to complement the physical products we were selling.

I pitched the idea to my clients. I said I will do ALL THE WORK and split the money with them.

They liked the idea, and said they would talk about it at “the partners next meeting.” Aaand… they came back a few days later, with the results of their partner deliberations:

“We discussed it extensively last meeting and decided it’s not exactly the direction we want to go (although we do see the huge potential there).”

… in other words, they said no because my “no work and no-risk offer” still sounded like some work, some risk, or at least some uncertainty or obligation.

That’s the classic persuasion blunder I told you about at the start. It goes back to the old Dean Jackson “Would you like a cookie” analogy.

Says Dean, imagine you have a guest at your house, and you know she loves oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.

You could sit there with your guest in the living room and then suddenly jump up and say, “Hey how about I go in the kitchen and bake you up a tray of those cookies you love? It won’t take a minute, really!”

Do this, and odds are great your guest will think, frown, and say, “Oh no, don’t worry about it.” She might even look at you a bit weird for offering to go out of your way like that.

But what if you preemptively bake those cookies?

And then, when your guest settles in on the couch, what if you come out of the kitchen with a trayful and say, “Would you like a cookie? It’s one of those chocolate chip oatmeal ones I know you love.”

… in this case, odds are excellent your guest will wolf down the whole trayful.

Same thing here.

I could have done the work ahead of time. Created an ebook, a sales page, and even some upsells.

That done, I could have simply told my clients that I have a custom new info product offer I’ve special-made for our audience.

If they’re ok with it, I will send out a day’s email to it to test it out. I’ll also set up an affiliate account for them so they can track the sales, and give them 50% (or whatever) of the sales. If it works well, I can keep promoting it and keep splitting the profits with them.

Had I done this, there’s an excellent chance they would have said, “Sure go ahead.” After all, I was testing out new offers all the time. Many turned out to be duds, while a rare few turned out ok and became regular sellers.

Of course, I never did this. You can probably guess why.

Creating an info product, even a generic one like a dog-training ebook, takes time.

Creating a sales funnel for said ebook, even a basic one, takes time.

Creating upsells? Time.

Plus, there’s still a chance it won’t work, even though my intuition said it would.

Which brings me to my offer for you for today.

Everything I’ve just told you about happened back in 2021. The world has changed a tad since then.

If I were doing this today, well — take a look at the link below.

It’s a webinar. it demos an “AI Super Agent” that does everything I just talked about — the market research, the product creation, and the funnel building. It does it in a matter of minutes, instead of a matter of weeks/never that it would have taken me.

The guy behind this AI gizmo is Josh Rosenberg. A couple decades ago, Josh used to be a copywriter. Then a decade ago, he became a big ClickBank seller in the “teach you a guitar” and “sex & dating” spaces. Then towards the end of the 2010s, he went on to work behind-the-scenes CMO for a bunch of big direct response clients, to the tune of over $150M in sales.

A couple years ago, Josh started focusing aggressively on creating AI tools for direct response businesses.

He says he’s taken his knowledge and expertise from the various stages of his career, and baked them into this “AI Super Agent,” so it does 95% of the work of creating an effective info product funnel for you.

I haven’t used the thing myself, and so I cannot vouch for it. The reason for this is I don’t think this “AI Super Agent” is a fit for the kind of personality-based, “let me tell you something new” approach that I offer via this newsletter.

But I think this “AI Super Agent” can be very tempting if you’re in a situation like I was back in 2021. In case you’re interested in spinning up and testing out a new info business in a few clicks and taps, this might be worth a watch:

https://bejakovic.com/aisuperagent

1-Person Advertorial Agency: Sold out after two emails

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I got an email this morning:

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Hey John,

I just want to confirm whether the link failed or if the workshop is full.

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That’s in reference to the 1-Person Advertorial Agency workshop, which I started promoting yesterday and stopped promoting yesterday, because it filled up faster than reservations at Les Grands Buffets, when they open up once a season.

In other words, the workshop registration is now closed. You cannot pay to get into this training any more, though considering the interest, it’s possible that Thom and Sam (the guys behind this workshop) will offer something like it again in the future. Here is some of that interest demonstrated in emails I got from people who signed up:

#1: “Of everything you’ve promoted for other people since I’ve known you, this is the first one that got my attention. Here’s why…”

#2: “This looks sick. Just purchased. Looking forward to it.”

#3: “I’ve known for years advertorials are a gold mine but until now I didn’t have AI to help me crank them out. You gave me the kickstart I needed.”

I’m telling you all this — well, why am I telling you all this?

This email isn’t the place to talk about it, but you can read all about it, if you haven’t yet, in Commandment IV of my new 10 Commandments book.

I wasn’t planning on promoting that book today, but I’m left without an offer to promote, due to the success of my own promotion yesterday.

If you have dreams of managing to sell your own offer to the brim, and quickly, almost as soon as you open up your shopping cart, then Commandment IV will tell you the underlying psychology of how to do so. Here’s where you can find that:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

How I would eat ecom copywriters’ lunch… with some fava beans, and a nice chianti

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Over the past year, I have had an ungodly number of people sign up to my list who bill themselves as ecom copywriters.

Typically, the main service these folks offer is email marketing for ecom brands.

Makes sense to me.

Even though I am currently promoting an offer titled 1-Person Advertorial Agency, and though in the past I made good money writing advertorials for ecom clients, that money pales in comparison to the money I made writing emails, for those same clients, on a profit-share basis.

The thing is, I only got a chance to write those profit-share emails because I was already writing advertorials for these clients, and because their entire customer flow, and the success of their future offers and funnels, depended on the front-end copy I was writing.

Which brings me to the following 7-step plan that I would follow today, blindly and with 100% commitment, if I were bent on eating the lunch of all those email-writing ecom copywriters:

1. I’d find ecom businesses that are running paid traffic (easy enough with Facebook ad library, but more below on how to do this in a smart way). I’d look for a business that’s sending traffic straight from their ads to the product page.

2. I’d write an advertorial (or three) for such a business, and I’d do it for absolutely free. (Why not? It’s an investment of a couple hours that could pay back literally hundreds of thousands of dollars over time.)

3. I’d put the advertorial in a Google Doc, and format it nicely so it can function as a live piece of copy. I’d send this to the biz owner. I’d tell them it’s theirs to use, and there’s nothing to do but simply clone the Google Doc (to make sure I don’t mess with it) and redirect a bit of traffic to it to see how it performs against their base funnel.

4. I’d follow up until I get either a “Leave me alone” or a “Damn this worked great, can you write more like this?”

5. If it’s a “Can you write more like this,” I’d say sure. And then I’d make the business owner the following sociopath offer:

“I will write advertorials for you ongoing, for FREE (bear with me here), IF you will let me write emails for you, for FREE also. Just pay me a share of the profits I generate for you on the back end, after the money’s already in your Stripe account.”

6. If I get the objection that they already pay an ecom copywriter to write their emails, I’d politely say, “Fire them. I will do it for free, for just for a share of the profits I make you, unlike those people who charge you whether you make money or not. Plus, I’ll help you scale your ad spend with my advertorials, so we both profit.”

7. If they’re already working with an ecom copywriter who’s getting paid on a profit-share basis, I’d say, “Fire them, because they aren’t writing advertorials for you for free. I will, plus I’ve already proven that I can write copy that sells your offers on cold traffic, which is way harder than email.”

… and to make all this manageable in just a few hours of work a week, I’d use the AI Advertorial Toaster that Thom Benny and his protege Sam are giving away on their 1-Person Advertorial Agency workshop, which happens this Wednesday.

For reference:

It used to take me 4-5 days to write an advertorial.

Sam’s AI Advertorial Toaster pops up a near-good-enough advertorial waffle pretty much instantly. It’s why Sam can bake up and serve an advertorial, one which will convert on cold traffic, in under an hour now, instead of the 4-5 days it took me back when I worked with clients.

It’s also the reason why Sam has been able to write 20+ such advertorials per month, and why he’s pulled in over $50M for clients over the past year alone.

Last point:

Also on the 1-Person Advertorial Agency training, Sam is giving away his Ad Reanimator process, for identifying and contacting clients who are a perfect fit for advertorials — ecom businesses who had a long-running ads that recently died. (Advertorials make those ads come back to life.)

If you are an ecom copywriter already, and if your livelihood is writing emails for clients, maybe a cold chill passed down your back just now. After all, I’m advertising a recipe for someone to come and take your livelihood away, potentially by the end of this week.

The only thing I can tell you is, if you’re currently not offering advertorials to your email clients, there’s nothing stopping you from doing so, using Sam’s Toaster and the instruction manual he provides for it.

Not only will you protect yourself against competition sneaking in and taking your email clients away from you, but you have a chance to make a lot more money, whether you simply want to charge your clients for your advertorials, or do a revshare deal like I lay out above (again, it’s how I made most of my money).

And if you’re not an “ecom copywriter” yet, it is a legit opportunity right now, even if you have little experience to speak of.

In either case, Thom and Sam’s workshop is happening this Wednesday. For more info, or to sign up before it’s too late:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorial-agency

Announcing: 1-Person Advertorial Agency

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This Wednesday, Thom Benny and his protege Sam will hold a workshop titled 1-Person Advertorial Agency.

As you might know, Thom is an ex-Agora copywriter who now co-runs a fintech company and coaches copywriters on the side. And as for Sam, he is a copywriter who:

1. Drove $50M worth of sales with advertorials he has written for ecom clients, on cold traffic, over the past year alone

2. Takes less than an hour to write one of these suckers, and can churn out 20+ of ’em a month, because he’s getting AI to do much of the work

3. Is finding it easy to get good new clients, because he makes them an offer to reanimate their once-performing, recently dead ads.

And that entire system, everything that makes this possible, is what Sam will be sharing on this workshop:

The AI setup… how to tweak what the AI gives you so it actually converts on cold traffic… plus how to get clients who see the benefit of such advertorials and are happy to pay you generously. (Says Thom, “$5,000-$10,000 per project, delivering in just days, not weeks”).

For reference, Thom wasn’t gonna promote this workshop via affiliates. I insisted and nudged and insisted some more until he said ok.

In case you’re wondering why I’m eager to promote Thom and Sam’s workshop, it’s because advertorials are a kind of copy that I used to write a lot of for clients.

I know the effects advertorials can have on an ecom funnel. One client I worked for dropped in one of my advertorials into his existing funnel, and could immediately scale ads from $2k a day to $12k a day.

I also know the demand for such work. I recently had an ex-client write me to ask if I’d write advertorials for his new business. Another client, the CEO of an ecom brand, once paid me $2k to give him a brain dump of how I write advertorials.

That’s why I’m promoting this workshop to you in the short time that remains.

I was gonna offer bonuses because that’s what you do when you promote somebody else’s offer.

But frankly, Sam gives you everything you need on this workshop, including how to get clients, how to produce advertorials, and how to make them convert so clients keep hiring you and paying you.

And the deal on this workshop is frankly ridiculous.

This “1-Person Advertorial Agency” is a legit business-in-a-box. You don’t come across those so often. When you do, it’s the kind of thing that typically sells for $5k or $50k upfront, plus often sort of unpleasant monthly licensing fee.

For whatever reason, perhaps because selling trainings is not their main business, or because the opportunity is so big and so live, Sam and Thom are not stretching this out into a weeks-long course, but are delivering a one-day workshop that lasts a couple hours, and still gives you everything you need.

What’s more, they are not selling this workshop for $5k or $50k, plus monthly fees, but for $199, one time.

For the full info on this workshop, or to sign up before this business-in-a-box disappears:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorial-agency

Madoff’s secret of member management

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I was listening to a podcast yesterday about con men, and I heard the following interesting titbit:

Bernie Madoff, the hedge fund manager/operator of the largest Ponzi scheme in history, would threaten to kick out investors from his funds if they expressed doubts or asked too many questions.

(Podcasts are in general a trash source of information, so I did a bit of due diligence myself. I found a WSJ article from 2008 that corroborates this exact statement.)

Perhaps the significance of this titbit is not really clear to you. So consider for contrast how most people would handle that same situation.

Imagine that you have, say, a club or a membership or some kind of in-or-out thing that people have to pay to be on the inside of.

If a member asked you questions or expressed doubts about the value of what they are getting, what would be your natural reaction?

Think about it for a moment.

I can’t speak for you might do, but I can tell you what I might do.

I imagine my natural reaction would be answer those questions or address those doubts to the best of my ability, and maybe even to ask the member how I could make my thing better and more valuable. In effect, my reaction would be to do the best job I could selling and reselling my offer to that doubting or questioning member.

That is clearly not what Madoff did.

In fact he did the exact opposite. His approach was to appear to want to break up the sale, and kick the doubting investor out of the fund.

The result of this, as the WSJ article put it, was that “Mr. Madoff shifted investors’ fears from the risk that they might lose money to the risk they might lose out on making money.”

That’s something to ponder on, even if you are not a con man, and even if everything you do is completely ethical and above board.

In fact, I found this bit of Bernie Madoff trivia interesting because it is yet another illustration of the apocryphal 11th Commandment of con men, pick up artists, magicians, door-to-door salesmen, etc.

I give that 11th Commandment away via a link at the end of my new 10 Commandments book. In that bonus 11th Commandment, I summarize much of the book, including the underlying principle of what Madoff was doing above, in just three words of powerful influence strategy.

And like Madoff’s strategy above, my new 10 Commandments book, including that apocryphal 11th Commandment, is not only relevant to you if you have criminal tendencies. Here’s a very nice review I got about that from a new reader by the name of Joe Vigliano:

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Life changing?

Yeah, it is. Despite its unfortunate title 🙂 I almost passed on it since I don’t consider myself a con man, pick up artist, magician, etc. Can’t tell you how glad I am that I clicked Buy Now. The information John shares is invaluable for both your personal life and your professional life…especially if that professional life involves influencing others. I’m a kinesthetic reader–i do a lot of highlighting. This book is almost an entire highlight, it’s that good. The information is solid gold and it’s written in an absolutely engaging, entertaining way. If you have the paperback, the pages will be dog-eared from use. Not sure what that looks like on my Kindle. Either way, this is a book to spend time with. Lots of time.

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But you know what?

I’ve been promoting this book for a long while. I’ve been giving you testimonials and curious stories from the book. I’ve been linking to it on Amazon, over and over in my emails, for months now.

If you still haven’t gotten my book, then there’s no sense in me trying to persuade you any more. I officially throw up my hands. This book, life changing or not, is not for you.

So don’t get it. It’s too late. And if I catch you getting it, say, if I catch you signing up for that bonus 11th Commandment, then you’re OUT, off my list, for good.

When 4.9 is bigger than 5

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It finally happened — I got my first 4-star review for my new 10 Commandments book.

Part of me is of course annoyed — “How dare you” — but a part of me is also relieved. The book has had 26 reviews so far, all of them 5 star.

My average ranking has now tanked from a perfect 5.0 to a more reasonable 4.9.

This brought to mind a Gary Halbert bullet:

* Almost foolproof contraception: It’s over 99% effective but… so new… most people have never even heard about it!

Unless you’ve been through my Copy Riddles program, you might wonder what this new and unheard-of form of contraception is. That depends, like Bill Clinton said, on what the meaning of “is” is. But I will tell you this:

The secret Gary is talking about is actually 100% effective.

The question then becomes, if Gary’s “almost foolproof contraception” is actually 100% effective, why did Gary knock it down to “99%”?

I mean, isn’t 100% better than “over 99%”?

Isn’t “foolproof” more attractive to the foolish, which includes all of us, than “almost foolproof”?

The answer is no, not in the strange way the human brain works, which master copywriters like Gary intuitively understood and additionally proved by experience.

It’s another one of those bits of elite copywriting you would never pick up on by looking at the finished copy alone.

In order to figure out that Gary’s “over 99% effective” is not an ordinary fact, but a bit of A-list wizardry, you need to peek behind the curtain.

That’s the basis of my Copy Riddles program.

And about that, here’s a quote from copywriter Kevin Orellana, who is going through Copy Riddles now for I believe the fourth time, and who won last week’s Copy Riddles bullets contest:

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Being a Copy Riddles customer has been one of the best decisions I’ve made!

I’ve actually been going through Copy Riddles since 2021 and till this day, I still get new insights from it.

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If Copy Riddles had a rating, it would be over 4.99. For more info on this program:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

The foundation that personal positioning is built on

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Back when I was researching my new 10 Commandments book, about con men, pick up artists, and among others, door-to-door salesmen, I came across a 10-minute documentary titled, “The Bronzer.”

The Bronzer is about a door-to-door salesman named Stu Larkin, who has been selling bronzed baby shoes his whole life.

(The movie came out 10+ years ago, but Larkin is still at it as far as I know.)

There weren’t any useful door-to-door selling techniques in this documentary. But there was a kind of wake-up call.

Bronzed baby shoes are nice. I guess they sell for $50 a pair? or $100? or $200? In any case, Larkin had this to say:

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The thing about selling that I’m kind of disturbed about, because I know that I’m so good at what I do, is that I think I missed my calling in something else. That I could have made millions and millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars selling something else. Like someone would be going, “We know that guy. He’s the most renowned salesman in the world.”

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There are good techniques for positioning yourself at the top end of your market, and I want to write my next book about those.

But those good techniques are like the blueprints for building a skyscraper. The foundation of that skyscraper, without which even the most sound blueprints will result in a janky leaning tower that nobody wants to live in, is choosing which market you will be in to begin with.

Fact one:

It takes as much skill to sell to people who aren’t interested in buying or who have no money… as to sell to people who both are eager to buy and who have the money to do so. Often, it takes more skill and more work, far more, to sell to the first group.

Fact two:

If you’re selling something right now, then there’s sure to be another market where your exact skills, and maybe even your exact offers, could sell for 5x or 10x or 100x of what you’re selling for now.

Of course, it’s not an easy or light decision to switch markets and to basically set sail in an unfamiliar and possibly shark-infested sea. But it’s worth thinking about, or at least that’s what I tell myself, as I’ve been thinking about it too.

I’ll leave you with that seed for today.

Meanwhile, as that seed germinates, if you wanna see what valuable techniques of door-to-door salesman I did find, and how those tie into related fields like copywriting, standup comedy, and con games:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments