John Bejakovic

I teased, promised, and threatened, and yet it’s not here

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I woke up this morning, confused about where I am and what time it might be.

It’s day one of my U.S. trip. I’m only just beginning the adjustment to the time zone change from Europe. I expect the adjustment to continue until it’s time for me to fly back to Barcelona.

In my confusion this morning, I checked my inbox and saw the many dozens of emails that had accumulated since yesterday. One email stood out.

“Uh-oh,” I said to myself. “That’s a problem.”

Because yesterday, I teased, promised, and threatened that today I would start promoting an exciting and legit business opportunity for working copywriters.

Well, as that email informed me, this promo has now been postponed.

As with most legit business opportunities, you gotta get on a call before you can buy. And as I found out this morning, the guy who does these calls is “taking a step back for urgent personal reasons.”

So I will not be promoting this exciting and legit business opportunity in my email today. Instead, my teasing of this business opportunity continues, and I will be promoting it in the future.

Meanwhile, since I had to adapt my plan for today, I’d like to share the following quote with you. It’s from one of the most successful direct marketers of all time, Joe Sugarman, of BluBlockers fame.

​​Joe was talking about a glaring objection in a product he was selling once. And he wrote:

“I recognized this as a problem that had to be addressed in our copy. And since I look at problems as opportunities, I wondered, ‘Where is the opportunity in this serious and rapidly growing problem?'”

I read this in the early days of my business and marketing education. And that “problems as opportunities” bit has stuck with me ever since.

Here’s a second quote I read only yesterday. It comes from Brad Jacobs, who started 7 billion-dollar companies so far in his life, and who recently published a book about his experiences, titled How to Make a Few Billion Dollars. Jacobs writes:

“Embrace everything that comes your way, the good and especially the bad. And don’t just accept adversity — figure out how to capitalize on it.”

So there you go. My tip for you for today, via Joe Sugarman and Brad Jacobs:

Train yourself. Change your mind. And the next time you come across a problem — big or small — tell yourself to look at it as an opportunity. In time, this attitude may lead you to a few billion dollars.

In my case, the fact that my planned affiliate offer for today fell through is an opportunity to promote something of my own.

So let me remind you of my Simple Money Emails course. It’s all about writing easy and fast emails that you can use day after day to adapt to problems and opportunities in your business, and even to use them to build credibility and trust with your audience.

For more information on Simple Money Emails:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

Darkness at 1pm

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It’s 1:34pm as I write this but it’s dark.

​​I’m inside a freezing Boeing 777 somewhere above the Atlantic ocean, flying from Barcelona to New York.

Lunch is over and now the crew has walked down the cabin, telling us to put the blinds down. I can only guess that this is an attempt to reduce future jet lag. Like kindergartners, it seems we passengers have to get our afternoon nap.

Lots of things happened to me on the way to the plane today.

And lots of things happened in my business over the past 24 hours.

I thought of different ways to try to fit the most important and interesting of these events into my email today.

Fortunately, I remembered all the student emails I’ve critiqued over the past few weeks as part of my little Write & Profit coaching program.

One thing I’ve been repeating often to the folks in that group is that they are trying to do too much in their emails… to say too much… that what they have is really two or three or even nine emails’ worth of content.

So let me stop myself and leave you with this advice for today:

If your email isn’t clicking, you are probably trying to say too much.

Now that I’ve told you that I’ll go back to sitting in the dark, or maybe I’ll take that kindergartner nap.

I want to be in shape for tomorrow so I can get to the last of the affiliate promotions I’ll be doing for the foreseeable future, and tell you about an exciting and legit business opportunity for working copywriters.

The lucrative opportunity of Twitter ghostwriting

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I recently found out about the shadowy world of Twitter ghostwriting. In the shell of a nut:

People will write on your behalf on Twitter, if you pay them well. They will pretend to be you, so you can grow your audience and business and status.

I was actually considering hiring somebody to do this for me. Not for this newsletter, but for my health newsletter.

I asked around how much it would cost.

The answer came back:

$5k-$6k per month, if you want somebody to genuinely tweet newish content on your behalf day in and day out.

I also had a business owner who employs copywriters in other capacities quote me (“at cost,” he said) $500 a week just to take my existing newsletter content and repurpose it into 10 pieces of Twitter and LinkedIn fodder.

Quite the racket, I think. ​But it wouldn’t exist if somebody wasn’t getting value out of it on the other end.

​​In fact, Alex Lieberman of Morning Brew, who I wrote a lot about last week, feels so confident about this Twitter ghostwriting opportunity that he recently started an agency providing just this as a service.

But back to work:

You can pay somebody $5k per month to pretend to be you on Twitter. Or you can pay Kieran Drew just $297, one time, to learn how to be yourself on Twitter, or something close to yourself, and to have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people follow you, listen to you, and ultimately buy from you.

Kieran should know about this. He’s succeed at it himself, and he’s taught and coached a small country’s worth of other people to succeed at it as well.

But the opportunity is disappearing.

Not because Kieran has spilled his secrets on social media writing. There’s enough audience out there for all of us, because only 1 out of approximately 714 people will ever write a single line of online content.

But the opportunity is disappearing. Because later tonight, specifically at 12 midnight PST, Kieran’s High Impact Writing is going back in its secret silo, somewhere in the north of England where Kieran has his lair.

If you’d like to get Kieran’s High Impact Writing while it’s still available, and while the price is still an attractive $297 rather than the explosively higher price it will be in the future, then I suggest you act now.

I also suggest you act now if you want to get the recordings of my Age of Insight training, which sold for $297 when I put this show on a little over a year ago.

Age of Insight shows you how to write in an insightful-sounding way, even if you have nothing very insightful to say.

I’m offering these recordings for free as a bonus to Kieran’s High Impact Writing. But that’s only if you act before the deadline.

If you’re interested, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/hiw

10 minutes to get big Twitter accounts to follow you

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Once every 24 hours or so, I get asked a variant of the following question:

“How did you build up an email list without being on social media?”

My answer is always the same. I did it by being stubborn and stupid, by sending daily emails into the void, without anybody reading what I was writing. I did this for years before things slowly started to turn around.

The problem, by the way, was not that I was not on social media.

The problem was that I was and continue to be unsociable. Even in the world of email newsletters, even among people whose emails I read every day, I never thought to speak up, get introduced, put myself on the radar or sonar of a person with an audience bigger than mine.

Until the end of today, I am promoting Kieran Drew’s High Impact Writing. That’s Kieran’s course to teach you how to write for influence and growth on Twitter and LinkedIn.

But here’s the truth:

As with email, you can write for years on social media without anyone taking notice. The shortcut to success on social media, the royal road, is the same as in the world of email.

You gotta start making connections. You gotta start engaging with people who are more successful than you are. And you gotta do it in a way where they actually take notice and respond.

People often reply to my emails and write things like,

“Loved it!”

“😍”

“Great email!”

While I appreciate any and all reader feedback, there’s really nothing for me to reply to here. There’s nothing for me to grab onto, nothing to get curious about, nothing to make the reader stand out.

So what to do instead?

Back to Kieran’s High Impact Writing. Sure, he teaches you writing for social media. But he also teaches you the other stuff, the connecting and network building in a way that actually works.

In the one of the bonus modules (Social Media Made Simple), Kieran gives you an example of a twitter DM that got him to start following a smaller account. And then he gives you a step-by-step template that he’s since used to get his favorite accounts to start following him.

It takes all about 10 minutes to do this.

And I can tell you, it works in the world of email as well. I know, because people have written me similar things, and I’ve taken notice and then got on their list. (I still remain unsociable and I rarely reach out to anyone, even in email. And I’m paying a price for it. I don’t encourage anyone to do like I do.)

High Impact Writing goes offline today at 12 midnight PST. After that, when it does come back, the price will be explosively higher.

Also, if you act now and get High Impact Writing before the deadline via my affiliate link below, you get the recordings of my Age of Insight.

Age of Insight was a training I put on about a year ago and sold for $297. It shows you how to write in an insightful sounding way, even if you have nothing very insightful to say. Simply forward me your invoice for High Impact Writing and I will get you the recordings of Age of Insight.

Assuming, that is, that you decide High Impact Writing is right for you, and that you act before the deadline. In case you’re intrigued, go here for more details:

https://bejakovic.com/hiw

When orcs were real

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Three years ago, I read a viral, trending article titled, “When Orcs Were Real.” And three years in, I’m still thinking about it.

The article starts like this:

All cultures have stories of creatures that are like humans but more beastly, frightening, strong, and cruel than us, and that live by night instead of day.

Gotta scare the kids with something, right?

The question is why this story in particular is scary.

According to the argument in that article, it’s because this story taps into some kind of genetic memory in us.

There was a time, says the article, when orcs were real.

The orcs were bigger than us. Stronger than us. More brutish than us. They were the night to our day.

We, the race of men, were at war with the orc.

For a long time, the orcs’ strength and size meant they were winning. In fact, the orcs came to a rusty scimitar’s distance of wiping out mankind.

But for reasons we can only guess at today, the tide shifted. Men started to win the battles with the orcs. And then we won the war and wiped them entirely, to the point where now they only exist in our nightmares and on our Netflix viewing history.

Now here’s the kicker. This isn’t just some kind of evolutionary psychology handwaving to explain scary bedtime stories.

The orcs were real, and this is backed by the latest archeology and genetics research.

There was in fact an orc race that lived in the shadows, alongside men, for tens of thousands of years.

From what we know of them by their remains, they were like us but bigger. According to their skeletons, they were packed with muscle, and were several times stronger than the strongest of us.

Based on the shapes of their throats and mouths, it seems they couldn’t speak the way we can, but they could communicate in grunts and snorts.

They had a snout-like nose, large teeth, powerful jaws. Going by the size of their eye sockets, they had enormous eyes, meaning they lived by night. Most probably, they were covered in thick fur.

From their dwelling places, we know these orcs were experts in the use of short- and long-range weapons. They fed mostly on raw meat. They were deadly even to the most deadly animals — mammoths, wolves, cave lions.

They were also cannibals. And along with eating their own filthy kind, they hunted and ate men.

Who were these monsters? Today, we know them as the Neanderthals.

When I read that article and I got to the part about the Neanderthals, I said, “Whoa! Never knew that! Or never thought about it that way!”

The little that I knew about Neanderthals before, and what I learned about them through this article, suddenly snapped together into a new consistent picture, which fit what I had experienced first hand — which was about 10 hours of Lord of the Rings movies and a few months’ of reading Tolkien books when I was a teenager.

“So that’s why it’s so intriguing and dramatic,” I thought to myself.

When Orcs Were Real is an example of what I call insightful writing.

​​The article produced that feeling of insight in me — and not only me. That’s why the article went viral online, getting hundreds of likes, reshares, comments, and even YouTube videos being made after it.

I had this article in mind when gave the Age of Insight presentation a little over a year ago.

In fact, call 2 of that training (there were three calls in total) was all about the how-to of writing for insight using the underlying technique that’s there in the Orcs Were Real article.

That technique is the same technique that you can find in the “American Parasite” video sales letter by Craig Clemens, which went so viral that Joe Rogan tweeted it, not realizing he’s pushing a 40-minute ad to his audience.

The same technique is also there in the End of America VSL, which brought in something like 500,000 new premium subscribers and doubled Stansberry Research’s revenue.

But let’s talk turkey.

Until tomorrow, specifically until Monday, March 4, 2024, at 12 midnight PST, I’m promoting Kieran Drew’s High Impact Writing.

​​High Impact Writing shows you how to write on LinkedIn in and Twitter to build an audience and grow your business.

As a free bonus to High Impact Writing, I’m also offering the recordings of Age of Insight.

​​Age of Insight shows you how to have something insightful-sounding to say when you do get on Twitter or LinkedIn.

High Impact Writing sells for $297 until tomorrow night. Age of Insight sold for $297 the one and only time I offered it before.

So you buy one, you get one free. But more importantly, with these two trainings together, you get influence skills and techniques that can change the trajectory of your life and your business for life.

For the full info on High Impact Writing:

https://bejakovic.com/hiw

Awkward in real life, funny in print

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I just watched a short, very awkward clip of Silicon valley multimillionaire Bryan Johnson, being interviewed by comedian Andrew Schulz.

Johnson has made a lot of headlines over the past year. He’s spending a couple million of his own money on his anti-aging regimen. He has done a great job publicizing that on his social media, and so people have taken notice.

Schulz, on the other hand, is a white dude whose shtick is talking about race in a way that white people aren’t supposed to. He opens the interview like this:

“First question. Do black people age better?”

Johnson lets out a little gasp that he modulates into a nervous chuckle. He looks around for help. And then he retreats to the saferoom deep inside his mind, and he replies,

“There’s data showing that different people, in different circumstances, in different environments, have different clocks.”

Andrew Schulz nods in understanding. “The one time black people are slower,” he explains to the audience. To which Johnson nervously guffaws again.

Here’s why I thought this was notable.

I follow Bryan Johnson on Twitter. He gets a lot of hate and mockery there for his rejuvenation quest.

And yet, his tweets are uniformly funny and crisp. He agrees-and-amplifies like a master. He diffuses attacks. And he works trolls to his own advantage, all with a smirk that you can somehow feel in those 180 characters.

On the other hand, whenever I’ve listened to Johnson speak, he sounds exactly like he did while talking to Andrew Schulz. Abstract. Humorless. Pedantic.

I don’t know whether Bryan Johnson manages his own social media. Maybe he has somebody else write for him. It would explain a lot.

But whether or not he writes his propaganda himself, the following point still stands:

You can be an entirely different person in your writing. You can be smarter, better, funnier than you ever could be in real life.

And like Bryan Johnson’s case shows, you can build up a large audience this way, and create a lot of influence, and have your ideas and your offers reach millions of people, who you could never reach otherwise.

And on that note:

Until this Monday, I’m promoting something to help you get there yourself. It’s Kieran Drew’s High Impact Writing.

High Impact Writing is a course that takes you by the hand from what you are now — no judgment — and turns you into an inspiring, funny, influential presence on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Kieran, by the way, has some authority when he teaches this. He has succeeded in building up his own presence on social media to an audience of over 200,000. He’s built a million dollar-personal brand as a result, with course launches that bring in $100k-$200k over a few days (like right now).

Also, if you buy Kieran’s High Impact Writing via my affiliate link below, I’ll give you a free bonus. It’s the recordings of my Age of Insight training, which sold for $297 when I actually gave this training live.

Age of Insight shows you how to write in an insightful way, even if you’re not very insightful and you have nothing particularly insightful to say.

I, by the way, have some authority when I teach this. People regularly tell me my emails sound insightful. And yet, in all honesty, I think of myself as rather shallow-minded in real life, very pedantic and very formulaic. Again, you can be somebody entirely different in print.

The cart for High Impact Writing closes this Monday at midnight 12 PST. The next time Kieran offers HIW, the price will explode to never-before-seen levels.

If you’d like to get it before then, and grab my Age of Insight training as a free bonus, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/hiw

Cart open for High Impact Writing + my free bonus

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Starting today, and ending next Monday, I am promoting Kieran Drew’s High Impact Writing.

As you might know, Kieran is a bit of a star in the online entrepreneur space. He has over 200,000 followers on Twitter. He has a big and growing email newsletter, with over 30,000 readers. He has had several 6-figure launches and has built up a million-dollar personal brand.

Even more impressively, Kieran only got started with all this 3 years ago. Before that, he was a dentist. He started with an audience of zero.

Even most impressively, Kieran built up his audience and his business via writing alone.

No ads. No fly-by-night growth hacking strategies. No manipulating social media algorithms.

Just writing.

How exactly?

Well, that’s inside High Impact Writing. That’s Kieran’s course on social media writing. It’s for entrepreneurs who want to grow their brand and their business.

I’ve been going through High Impact Writing myself. I only have positive things to say about it. I’ll save those for my emails over the coming days.

For today, let me just say I endorse High Impact Writing 100%.

I also have a free bonus if you get High Impact Writing via my affiliate link below.

The free bonus is the recordings of my Age of Insight trainings, which I gave a little over a year ago.

These trainings consisted of three evening-long calls. Each of the calls focused on one of three “insightful writing” techniques.

The writing techniques I talk about in Age of Insight were at the heart of massively successful pieces of content, which used a feeling of insight to cut through the noise… to get into people’s heads… and to build marketshare and mindshare.

I sold Age of Insight for $297 at the time. Kieran is selling High Impact Writing for $297 right. So from whichever side you look at it, you buy one, you get one free.

Also, Kieran will be raising the price of High Impact Writing after this promo, which ends next Monday at 12 midnight PST. I don’t know by how much he’s increasing the price, but it will be a significant price bump.

If you have doubts or questions about High Impact Writing, then I will have more to say about it over the next three days.

But if you already know you want it, you can get it at the link below. Once you buy, forward me your email confirmation, and I will get you access to Age of Insight as well.

Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/hiw

Meet me in New York/Baltimore/Palm Beach?

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Last weekend, I ran the first in-real-life meetup of my readers in Barcelona, where I live. That meetup went great. It definitely made me want to do one again.

Over the next few weeks, I will be traveling to the U.S. for the first time in 5 years.

So maybe you would like to meet me somewhere along the way?

I’ll be in New York City between March 5th and 10th… in Baltimore between March 10th and 14th… in Palm Beach between March 14th and and 17th. If you will be around any of those places on those dates, write me a note and we can see about meeting up.

In other news, thank you in case you used my link to sign up to Dan Kennedy’s free “Shutdown Livestream” yesterday.

A buncha people wrote me, some asking for the free trifle with their name on it that I promised as a bonus… others just to wish me good luck in the affiliate contest, which has seized my body and mind like a low-grade fever.

There’s no public leaderboard for the affiliate contest behind this marketing campaign, so I cannot say how I am doing after yesterday’s push. But I will keep you posted when I find out.

And in case you didn’t sign up or you don’t know what’s up:

The free livestream will happen tomorrow, Fri March 1st. It will feature marketing legend Dan Kennedy, being interviewed in his basement, where he works, by Russel Brunson of ClickFunnnels. The topic will be why Dan has decided to cut off new signups to his No B.S. Letter “for the foreseeable future.”

It’s sure to be entertaining — Dan does a very good curmudgeon act.

​​More importantly, this livestream is sure to be valuable. Dan knows more about direct marketing, personal promotion, and influential writing than probably anybody else on the planet.

If would like to sign up to this free livestream before it disappears into the night:

https://bejakovic.com/no-bs-scarcity

Exciting update about my No B.S scarcity emails

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Three weeks ago, I wrote three emails making fun of Dan Kennedy’s ongoing, scarcity-mongering “Shutdown livestream” campaign.

At the end of those emails, I included an affiliate link for you to sign up to that campaign.

In part, I did this because the campaign had been effective on me (I signed up both to the livestream and to Dan’s newsletter).

In part, I also did it because I’ve learned a ton from Dan Kennedy, and I would promote his stuff for free, and I have in the past.

But let’s get back to the present.

I sent out those three emails three weeks ago. I had a good chuckle with readers who wrote me back about Dan’s scarcity tactics. And then, I forgot all about it.

Until last night.

Because last night, I got an email with the subject line, “Exciting Update: NO BS Shutdown Campaign Leaderboard Revealed!”

The inside of that exciting email said:

===

Now let’s dive into the current top 5 on our Leaderboard:

1. Tim Hewitt
2. Travis Lee
3. John Bejavoic
4. Frank Buddenbrock
5. Frank Andrews

===

I don’t know if there’s a French-Canadian marketer out there named John Bejavoic. I’m guessing not. Instead, I reckon this is only time #64,171 in my life that somebody’s mangled my last name.

No matter. Because it means that, for the first time in my life, and in spite of my absolute lack of effort and my three tongue-in-cheek emails, I am now in the running of an affiliate competition.

The email described the prizes for the top 3 affiliates:

* Third place is a 6 months free of Dan Kennedy’s newsletter
* Second prize is a box of Dan Kennedy faxes
* First is a ticket to the No B.S. Superconference in May

The first two prizes I don’t need. The third prize I don’t want (who wants to travel around the world from Barcelona to Dallas TX).

And yet…

As I read through this “Exciting update” email last night, I found myself paranoid, spinning around, and looking over my shoulder.

Would somebody swoop in and take my 3rd place position?

I was like a dragon, guarding my wealth, suspicious somebody will take it away from me, and slyly thinking how I could increase my gold stash — even though I don’t really want the gold.

It brought to mind the following passage by another master of direct response marketing, Claude Hopkins. Hopkins wrote a hundred years ago:

===

Many send out small gifts, like memorandum books, to customers and prospects. They get very small results. One man sent out a letter to the effect that he had a leather-covered book with a man’s name on it. It was waiting for him and would be sent on request. The form of request was enclosed, and it also asked for certain information. That information indicated lines on which a man might be sold.

Nearly all men, it was found, filled out that request and supplied the information. When a man knows that something belongs to him – something with his name on it – he will make the effort to get it, even though the thing is a trifle.

===

So now I’d like to invite you once again to sign up to Dan Kennedy’s free livestream campaign.

The livestream will happen March 1st, two days from now. It will feature Dan Kennedy, being interviewed in his basement, where he works, by Russell Brunson of ClickFunnnels. The topic will be why Dan has decided to cut off new signups to his No B.S. Letter “for the foreseeable future.”

I’d like to invite you to sign up for this livestream for three reasons:

First, because like I said already, I have learned a ton from Dan Kennedy. Odds are good that you too will learn something valuable, if only you sign up, and even more so if you actually watch the free livestream.

Second reason is that you would help me do better in this stupid affiliate contest, which I am participating in against my better judgment, simply out of loss aversion and blind greed.

Third, because I have a trifle with your name on it.

It really is a trifle. But it’s yours.

​​It has your name on it.

And you can claim it, if only you sign up to the Dan Kennedy free livestream campaign, forward me your confirmation email, and tell me a physical address where I can mail your trifle.

And in the spirit of this entire No B.S. scarcity campaign, I have to mention this named trifle is only for the first 15 people who take me up on this offer.

To get started, here’s the first step, where you can sign up for Dan’s free livestream:

https://bejakovic.com/no-bs-scarcity

The uncertain result of my Newsletter XP promo

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Yesterday, ex-Agora copywriter Thom Benny, who I met up with in Barcelona last month, texted me and asked,

“How is the Newsletter XP promo doing?”

I threw up my arms at this. “How am I supposed to know? There’s a deep fog around the Bejako household, and I can’t see past my own nose.”

The Beehiiv people don’t normally do affiliate deals for this course. I had to ask them over and over to let me promote it.

When they finally agreed, it was a bit of a technical kludge to make it happen. So there’s no affiliate portal. There’s no direct way for me to know how many sales I’ve made.

I saw a buncha clicks. Two people wrote me to say they bought. I wrote my contact at Beehiiv now to ask what the final result was.

But if I had to bet, I would bet I made 3x-4x the money for writing these 7 emails than I ever made for any equivalent campaign I wrote back in my freelance copywriting days.

So let me repeat the core idea I was selling during this whole promo, even though I won’t get paid anything for it now. It’s this:

Start a newsletter. Or start growing a list. Or find another little asset that you can invest into regularly.

It might bear no fruit today. But keep watering it. And you will be pleased and surprised one day soon.

This concludes the first of three affiliate promotions I promised to do over the next few weeks.

The next affiliate promo I will do involves a writing course for business owners who want to build an audience on social media.

I’m going through this course myself right now. And I find myself repeatedly surprised by how well-done and insightful it is.

To make this offer even sweeter, I will add in my own free bonus. It will be equal in price to the actual course I am promoting.

This bonus is a rare training I once put on, after years of research. Several people told me this training has influenced their own writing a lot. But more about all that soon.