John Bejakovic

The crazy things my readers buy

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Over the past few weeks, I’ve been running Amazon ads for my new 10 Commandments book.

One ad campaign is “automatic targeting,” where Amazon simply tries to put my book in front of shoppers on its other pages. The ad reporting shows me which of these other pages resulted in clicks and sales for my book.

I’ve also been heavily promoting my new 10 Commandments book to my own list. Since I’m using an Amazon affiliate link (this is apparently against Amazon policies, but I love to live dangerous), I can see some of the other stuff that people who clicked on my affiliate link also bought.

If you just felt a chill rush up your back, as though you’ve been stripped naked in public, calm down. I cannot tell who specifically is buying anything, only that some people who bought my new 10 Commandments book (hundreds so far) or who clicked on my affiliate link (thousands) were also in the market for other things.

As you can guess, people who ended up buying my book were also in the market for dozens of ordinary, everyday purchases such as computer cables and supplement gummies and of course a “4.4 inch fixed-blade SEAX knife with a sheepsfoot blade.”

My readers were also in the market for a bunch of books that are in some way related to my own book, such as Jim Camp’s Start With No and Henning Nelms’s Magic and Showmanship — both of which I reference in my book — as well as Made to Stick, which is one of my go-to books for effective communication.

So far, so milquetoast. But then, my readers bought some quirky things I would not have expected or even known about had I not done this Amazon sleuthing. The top 3:

#1: How To Be The Jerk Women Love — a 1991 guide to picking up women by acting the jerk, written by “F.J. Shark.” A 5-star Amazon review by a shopper who goes by “The King of Jerks”:

“Some women made fun of me for praising this book. The laugh is on them. It ended up they were dumped by bigger jerks than me. What goes around comes around.”

#2: What is Wrong with Men — a feminist social critique, I guess written in reaction to F.J. Shark’s book and its positive reviews. “What is Wrong with Men” was only published a few days ago and doesn’t have any positive Amazon reviews yet, but the NY Times called it a “kind of road map for the current masculinity crisis. Reeled me in, like Absolut and cranberry. What a pairing!”

#3, and most intriguingly: Grade 23 Titanium Externally Threaded Nipple Bar Barbell Rings. For those who are too busy living life to worry either about acting the jerk or the jerks in their lives.

I’m telling you all this as a little hack so you can safely, legally, and ethically peek into the private shopping carts of your customers.

Amazon is the world’s biggest online marketplace. An estimated 64,000 metric tons of stuff pass through their warehouses every day. I just gave you a couple of ways to see what some of that stuff is, so you can adjust what and how you sell to your audience.

If you’d like to contribute to that data (don’t worry, it’s all anonymized), or more importantly, if you’d like to read my new 10 Commandments book — about effective communication, and magic and showmanship, and one secret negotiating trick of Jim Camp that he did not reveal in Start With No — then here is my Amazon affiliate link, ready to serve you:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

How I ended up paying an inconcievable price for coaching

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The date was July 17, 2019. I remember exactly where I was, walking in the old 18th century part of my home town of Zagreb, Croatia, where I was living at the time.

I pulled out my phone and saw that I had a new email from Dan Ferrrari.

In case you don’t know, Dan is an A-list copywriter. I profiled him in Commandment IV of my first 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters, because he has string of winning sales letters that few if any copywriters over the past 10 years can match. As just one example, Dan once wrote a sales letter that tripled sales over the previous control and sold out the entire stock of a longevity supplement.

In July 2019, my connection to Dan was extremely tenuous and unlikely.

I had gotten on his email list years earlier, but he never sent any emails.

Then, in the spring of 2019, while I was on a short trip to visit a friend in Baltimore — my first trip back to the U.S. in over five years — Dan finally sent an email to his list. Is anybody in the Baltimore/Washington area who wants to meet?

I replied yes. I don’t know exactly why or what I was hoping for. I just had a sense I was stuck with copywriting as a career. I had only heard stellar things about Dan. I thought if I met him in person maybe it would lead to something.

Aaaand… it turned out no. Our schedules didn’t fit, and we never ended up meeting in Baltimore.

I went back to Croatia, and Dan went back to his non-emailing.

And then, a few weeks later, Dan wrote me to ask whether I might be interested in his coaching program? I said yes.

To which, Dan replied with nothing. No response, first for a few days, then a week, then a month.

I forgot about Dan, and started fishing around for a different copywriting coach. But crazy as it might seem today, nobody in 2019 was offering coaching for copywriting.

And then, over a month after our last email exchange, Dan did reply. We got on a call to discuss his coaching program. I asked about everything but the price because I didn’t want that to cloud my judgment. The coaching sounded like the exact thing I had been looking for. I told Dan I’m in, and I figured I’d make the price work for me somehow.

The day after the call, Dan sent me an email with a PayPal payment link and the actual per month price for the coaching.

That was the email I got while walking around the old town in Zagreb. The reason I remember exactly where I was is that the price took my breath away.

I expected the coaching to be expensive. But not this expensive. I won’t say exactly how expensive it turned out to be. I’ll just say it was as high as my total income on many months at the time.

Still, I had some savings. I decided that, as long as I had some money in the bank, I was willing to give it a go. I mean, everything seemed to be building up to here — my stagnation with copywriting as a career, the near misses I’d had in meeting with Dan, the constant drum beating of “get a mentor” that was popular at the time.

So I took a deep breath, PayPaled Dan the money, and the coaching started.

I’ve written before about the actual coaching I got from Dan. I won’t repeat that here. Here I just want to focus on the price of the coaching, which, as I said, took my breath away when I first saw it.

Had anybody sat me down a few days prior and asked me whether I would pay, each month, what I ended up paying Dan, I would have just stared at them bug-eyed. “Absolutely not” would be my answer, and I would have meant it 100%.

Here’s the fundamental dilemma of setting prices:

Nobody knows what anything is truly worth. You don’t know what your offer is truly worth to your customers. They don’t know either. You can ask them, but they cannot and will not tell you the truth. The only way to know is to put an offer in front of them and see if they will buy.

I ended up buying Dan’s coaching at a price that would have been inconceivable to me only days earlier. Your customers or clients might end up buying your offers at prices that seem inconceivable to you now.

The only way to know is to put your offer in front of them, and see if they will buy.

That said, you can be a little more strategic about your price than simply throwing darts at a dartboard now and then. And on that note, I’d like to remind you of a mini-course I released yesterday, called Modified Depoorter Pricing.

This mini-course is about a pricing strategy I’ve used in the past to sell both services (back when I was working as a sales copywriter) and, later, my own courses.

This pricing strategy was elegant and worked very well when I used it.

My one regret is, I haven’t been consistent enough or thorough enough about using this pricing strategy. So I’ve created a mini-course outlining this pricing strategy, both for your benefit and for mine.

This is a “mini-course,” because I didn’t fill it with a lot of fluff or infotainment. You can consume it in 10 minutes if you so choose.

As such, I still don’t have a sales page for it. But if you’d like to get it nonetheless, you can do so at the link below.

The reason you might want to act now is that I will soon use the Modified Depoorter Pricing strategy to increase the price of this mini-course from its current modest level. To get it before then:

https://bejakovic.com/depoorter

Modified Depoorter Pricing

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I recently came across a clever pricing strategy for an online product.

I realized this pricing strategy is something I had used in the past to sell both services (back when I was working as a sales copywriter) and, later, my own courses.

This pricing strategy was elegant and worked very well when I used it.

The only problem was, I wasn’t consistent enough or thorough enough about using this pricing strategy.

So I’ve created a mini-course outlining this pricing strategy, both for your benefit and for mine. I’m calling this mini-course Modified Depoorter Pricing.

It’s a mini-course, because I didn’t fill it with a lot of fluff or infotainment.

It’s simply the core idea spelled out — Depoorter Pricing — plus a few key distinctions to help you apply it well to your particular situation — hence Modified Depoorter Pricing.

At this point, I don’t have a sales page for this mini-course. Everything I’ve just told you is all I have to tell you today. Maybe that will change in the future.

For now, the only added sales appeal I have to share is that I’m making a very special price available for the first 10 people who buy Modified Depoorter Pricing. If that’s enough for you:

https://bejakovic.com/depoorter

When not to use stories in your emails

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Stories in emails are great, except when they’re not. Here are five situations when not to use stories in your emails:

#1. If you’re in a marketplace of one (as far as your prospects are concerned), or in a marketplace where nobody else is sending regular, conversational emails.

It might seem like there are no such marketplaces any more, but there are plenty, particularly in various local service businesses — think lawyers, doctors, morticians.

In such marketplaces, no need to go nuclear by telling stories in emails, and it might even seem tryhard or unprofessional. (“Why is my lawyer writing me about his grandfather again? Why is he not working on my divorce settlement?”)

#2. If you’re in a marketplace that’s driven by current news. For example, if you are selling anything to do with finance or investing.

#3. If you’re selling done-for-you vs done-with-you or do-it-yourself.

Stories, particularly personal stories, are really there to allow the reader to identify with you and align with you, so you can congruently tell them what to do and how to live their lives.

But if you are providing a DFY solution and you aren’t asking people to change who they are, then you have better options than telling stories — and so you shouldn’t use stories as your go-to.

#4. If you have a hot new offer or some other important message and you don’t want to bury it under a drawn-out story that most people will not read.

#5. The inverse of #1 above: if you are in a crowded marketplace where everybody else is telling stories, where storytelling has become the norm, and where your audience is likely to be hearing from a bunch of your competitors.

In such a marketplace, you end up in an arms race of storytelling. Your stories have to be more vulnerable, more shocking, more engagingly told. And yet, readers are glutted and paying less and less attention, and they’re looking for the signal among the storytelling noise. As I wrote in an email a couple months ago:

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I’ve noticed I practically never read the infotainment part in the newsletters subscribe to any more. Instead, I just scroll down to see the practical takeaway, and maybe the offer.

Granted, I’m a rather “sophisticated” consumer of email newsletters (meaning, I’ve been exposed to a ton of them, particularly in the copywriting and marketing space, over the past 10+ years of working in this field). Still, that just makes me a kind of owl-eyed canary in a coalmine, and maybe points to a bigger trend that will be obvious to others soon.

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All that’s to say, story emails are bett, but other kinds of emails can be even better.

And for that, may I remind you of my Daily Email Habit service, which sometimes prompts you to send a story email, but most days (like today), it does not.

For more information on Daily Email Habit:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Conditioning vs. shaping

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Robin Timmers, “the largest copywriter in the Netherlands,” writes in to say:

“I do wanna say I really enjoyed your new book, while reading it on holiday. (Left you a review on Amazon.)”

… and sure enuff, Robin’s review is now showing up on the Amazon page for my new 10 Commandments book (“Great lil’ book with lots of funny, weird and most of all valuable principles of persuasion”).

Robin’s is the 10th 5-star review my new book has gotten in the couple of weeks since being published. It’s important to me to mark and celebrate the occasion.

But what about you? I make a habit of including some tidbit in each email which is either fun or valuable, whether you choose to buy or not.

So let me tell you something interesting but entirely unrelated, which might be valuable to you.

I’m reading a book about neuroplasticity called The Brain That Changes Itself. One story in that book is of a scientist named Edward Taub, who experimented on monkeys to simulate the effects of stroke.

The long and short of it is, Taub worked to get monkeys that were effectively paralyzed in say, their left arm, to regain use of that arm.

Taub tried giving the monkeys rewards for performing regular monkey actions with their left arm, such as reaching for food. Behaviorists call this approach conditioning. Conditioning didn’t work. Paralyzed monkeys stayed paralyzed.

But then Taub started a different approach known as shaping, which involved rewarding the monkeys for even very small steps along the way to the big movement. (I’m guessing here, but imagine rewarding the monkey for just wiggling his left pinky finger at first.)

The effect of shaping was the monkeys eventually regained full function of their previously paralyzed arms.

On the one hand, this is kind of Obvious Adams — of course you want to break up a big task into component pieces and master the component pieces one by one.

On the other hand, people have been having strokes for thousands of years, and many have been paralyzed for life as a result.

Taub translated this monkey shaping research into a simple and structured program for humans, which relies on no fancy modern equipment, that has allowed stroke victims to regain use of paralyzed limbs, often years after their stroke.

Obvious yes, but somehow nobody else thought to follow this basic idea to this powerful conclusion, for thousands of years, until a few decades ago.

This distinction of conditioning vs shaping is something to keep in mind whether you’re in the business of teaching people stuff, or encouraging behavior (eg. buying and consumption), or simply trying to manage the primate known as yourself better, so you can get yourself to accomplish stuff you cannot accomplish now.

Break up the big action into tiny component pieces, often so tiny as to seem useless or irrelevant to task at hand. Master each of those tiny components. Reward yourself for doing so.

And that, in a way, does tie into the top of my email, about celebrating my 10th testimonial. And now, if you haven’t yet read my “funny, weird, and most of all valuable” new book, you can find it here:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

rsvp

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Do you have a scalable offer that’s selling for $500 or more?

By scalable I mean a course, mastermind, group coaching, software, etc.

In case you do, hit reply. I have something you might like. And no, it’s not email marketing.

A tabloidy factoid about Dan Ferrari and Ning Li

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A few weeks ago, copywriter Tom Baines wrote me to say:

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Anyway, I’m excited for your new book, and here’s an interesting tabloidy factoid you may already be aware of: Dan Ferarri and Ning Li have both talked openly about how they first connected in a pickup artist subreddit, where Dan initially mentored Ning as a pick-up artist before eventually bringing him over into copywriting and helping him build his career here… I think it’s a fun little overlap.

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I’m sharing this as a bit of gossip in case you have connections to the copywriting industry. Ning and Dan are both well-known figures there. I never knew the background of how they met, even though I was in Dan’s small and intimate coaching program 5+ years ago.

Beyond gossip, anything worthwhile here?

I heard direct marketing legend Dan Kennedy say on multiple occasions how the top copywriters he knows all have years of “nose to nose, toes to toes” sales experience. And if you look at the famousest copywriters, from Claude Hopkins to Gary Halbert on down to Dan Kennedy himself, all started out in direct or door-to-door sales.

But I think today the “nose to nose, toes to toes” connection has weakened, in large part because door-to-door sales has become a much rarer endeavor.

On the other hand, I know more successful copywriters who have experience with pickup than I can count on my two hands and 10 sticky fingers.

In part, that’s because equivalent social shifts — things like the Internet — which caused d2d selling to drop have also made info about pickup and seduction available to a large pool of eager men.

But it’s more than that.

There are ideas, skills, and attitudes that translate from pickup to copywriting, and vice versa, same as from copy to d2d sales, and vice versa.

All to say:

1. You might have valuable skills and experiences you are not aware of right now.

2. If you want to find out some of the connections between copywriting and d2d sales and pickup, and also seemingly unrelated but deeply connected fields like hypnosis and stage magic and standup comedy, then you might like:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Best way to market your newest book

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A couple weeks ago I got a message from copywriter Andrew Harkin, who gave my new 10 Commandments a nice 5-star review on Amazon (“brilliant little book”). Andrew then wrote me to say:

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Hi John

As promised, just left a review on Amazon UK

Sorry it was a bit later than I intended, but better late than never as they say

I loved it, but then I’m almost obsessed with the craziness of the human mind, psychology etc..

Have you started writing your next one yet? 😉

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It took me two years to write this new 10 Commandments book, which is criminal, considering it’s only 33,000 words in total.

But in answer to Andrew’s question, just today, I’ve started work on my next book. I will aim to get it out much more quickly than the new 10 Commandments one.

It might seem foolish to be starting work on a new book only a few weeks after publishing the last one, before I’ve done any kind of thorough job promoting that.

But this entire book project got started with an inspiring blog post by James Altucher from 2020. James advised writing a short book, not overthinking it, getting it done quickly, self-publishing it.

And when you self publish, then what? Says James:

“The best way to market your first book? Write your next book.”

… so that’s what I’m doing. That said, I haven’t given up on promoting my new 10 Commandments book. To do so, I have two offers for you today:

1. Do you have a podcast, a Facebook group, or a newsletter? If so, we can do an exclusive interview that gives value to your audience. ( I’ve already agreed to do this with a couple of community and list owners.)

I have lots of stories and conclusions from writing this book, some of which are in the book, many which are not. If you have an audience and want some unique and interesting content just for your audience, hit reply and we can talk.

2. If you haven’t read my “brilliant little book” yet, Andrew in his 5-star review promises that if you do, “your financial & mental investment will reap dividends.”

Do you like the sound of dividends? And for just a $4.99 investment? If you do, here’s where you can get a copy of my (currently) newest book:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

“I’m not the kind of person who” vs. “I hate this”

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It’s 11:07am as I write this.

I’ve just come back from the gym down the road form the Airbnb in which I’m staying.

I’ve gone to the gym today even though I’m traveling — I packed my gym clothes and found a local place to go.

I’ve been going to the gym regularly, 3-4 times a week, sometimes more, for the past 15 years, without break or faltering. It’s become one of the most important things I do for my health and sanity and of course my striking good looks.

And yet, for the first few decades of my life, I knew for a fact that I’m not a gym person, that I only like “real” physical activity such as playing tennis or going for a swim, rather than a contrived workout like deadlifts and squats.

“Gym? Pff. Thank you. That’s not me.”

A long time ago, I read a book called Stumbling On Happiness by a Harvard psychologist named Daniel Gilbert. I don’t remember a lot from the book except the central thread of it.

We are terrible at remembering the past, says Gilbert. As an example, ask people who they voted for the in the last election, and a lot of people will actually, honestly claim that they voted for the winning party, even if they didn’t.

It’s not that these people are lying. Like George Costanza, they fully believe what they’re saying.

You might think it’s just some particularly weak-willed people who fool themselves and others like this. But this is something we all do all every day, to some degree, and are never aware of.

But wait, there’s more.

As bad as we are at remembering the past, says Gilbert, we are even worse at imagining the future.

Ask people how they will feel and what they will do if, say, they win the lottery or if their now-happy marriage ends in bitter divorce, and people will tell you lots of stuff, again honestly. Trouble is, it’s wrong, spectacularly wrong, and it has nothing to do with how they will actually feel or what they will do. And yet, this is how we live our lives all the time.

But back to the gym and to the idea of “I’m not the kind of person who…”

Says Gilbert, if you want to find out what something is like, say raising a child, then don’t ask people who have raised a kid 10 or 20 years ago. They will remember wrong, and they will effectively tell you lies, even though they don’t mean to.

Also, don’t ask people who haven’t raised a kid but who are either looking forward to it or dreading it — their predictions mean nothing.

The only kind of person you can ask if you want to get an honest sense of what raising a kid is like is somebody who is doing it right now. Somebody who is not hallucinating about the future, or making up a fairy tale about the past.

And that, I would like to suggest to you, is something that holds even if the person you are asking for advice and opinions is yourself.

Over and over I’ve asked myself, “Will I like this? Can I do this? Am I the kind of person who can be successful here?”

Over and over I’ve told myself, no no no.

Over and over I’ve tried doing the thing nonetheless.

Sometimes it really turned out I wasn’t successful even after putting in a good try. More importantly, sometimes it really turned out I hated the thing, and how it made me feel.

Other times, though, it was just like the gym. The thing became an important part of my life, a part of my identity, something I stuck with for years or even decades, even though I previously knew for a fact it would never be for me.

In the end, I’ve summed it up for myself by saying, “I’m not the kind of person who ever tells himself, ‘I’m not the kind of person who…'” The only way to know how you look and feel with a mohawk is to shave your head and walk around town like that for a few weeks.

And now let me remind you of my new 10 Commandments book, about con men and door-to-door salesemen and pickup artists.

This entire email has been grooming you in a way, in case the mention of those disciplines makes the hackles on the back of your neck stand up.

I’m not suggesting — it would be foolish to do so — that you go against your own deeply held moral values.

But if a part of you says, “I’m not the kind of person who can sell, seduce, confidently and smoothly persuade,” well, you might surprise yourself.

And if you want some tips and pointers on how to do sell, seduce, and persuade, as well as some psychology to help you make the identity leap easier, then take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Ideas are cheap, here’s how to sell them for good money

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A couple days ago I got a message from Alex Popov, who works as a copywriter (he had a couple controls for an Agora affiliate) and as an NLP trainer. Alex read my new 10 Commandments book and wrote me with some qualified praise:

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Hey Bejako!

Your new book is quite simply fascinating.

I know most, not all, of the big persuasion ideas inside, yet I’m learning them in all new mind-expanding ways.

Your book is changing my thinking about these persuasion principles for the better.

Thanks!

Only one, negative, though. The price is ridiculously low. So low in fact, I almost didn’t buy it.

Anyway, I’m glad I did.

Real thanks and use this if you like.

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I’ve been saying it for a long time:

Ideas are cheap. Even good, profitable, proven ideas.

The real value lies not in sharing an idea. Odds are excellent people have heard it all before, even if you feel you thought it up yourself. (You may have, but others have thought it up before you.)

Instead, the real value lies in:

1. Presenting an idea in a way that has a chance to penetrate the defenses your reader’s mind is sure to throw up (“I don’t get it,” “I’ve heard this before,” “I’m busy,” “I could never do this”)

2. Presenting an idea in a memorable way so that it sticks with your reader long after he’s finished reading

3. All the surrounding stuff besides the idea or even its presentation — all the encouraging, taunting, goading, shaming, motivating your reader to actually do something with the idea you’re sharing other than just squirrel it away

And that’s what you can find in my new 10 Commandments book:

Grifters, suckers, the “World’s Youngest Hypnotist,” an openly racist “comic’s comic,” a couple of tophat-wearing magicians, a pickup artist who describes himself as “average, with a serious tilt towards ugly,” the “world’s most feared negotiator,” the last Russian Tsar, the first black mayor of a major U.S. city, Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams, Ronald Reagan, and much, much more.

They are all in the book so you see the underlying ideas in a new light in case you know them already, so you remember them in case you don’t, and so you put them to work in your business and personal lives, and profit from them.

As for the ridiculously low price, it’s there for a reason, which has nothing to do with the value of what’s inside. Don’t let it dissuade you:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments