Ronin case study: What break-even marketing funnels really look like

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Yesterday I wrote that inside the Royalty Ronin community, which I’m promoting these days, there are 300+ success stories.

Today, I decided to leaf through some of them.

I found one from 11 days ago that got me juiced, so I want to share it with you.

The case study runs for 8 pages in a Google doc. I won’t retell the whole thing. Here, with all the dogmatism of brevity, are 9 highlights from this case study:

1. A business owner is running $1k a day in ads, and is breaking even on day 0. Great, right?

2. Not so great. Cash flow is tiiiight. The business owner is juggling money between accounts. Any sudden new expense could sink the business. Business owner says:

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Over the last six months though, we significantly depleted our cash reserves [dialing in the sales funnel to break even], and we were at the stage where it’s like, every dollar we spend on advertising was like having our back against the wall with no buffer. If I mess this up, I stop buying ads for a while.

===

3. A Ronin knocks on the business owner’s door and makes a Ronin proposition*:

“Let me make you look good to your audience, do all the work, and maybe make you some money. If I make you money, you can give me a cut.”

4. Business owner agrees. “There was no real downside for me,” he says later. “Like, if it didn’t work, it didn’t work.”

5. Ronin creates a new $1k offer* out of the business owner’s existing assets. Business owner says about it:

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And you came up with this offer, which was the same offer I sell for $200 with a couple of extra bonuses, bundled in with a couple of other things, and an onboarding call.

It’s more than our low ticket offer, but not much more.

And you’re selling it for $1,000.

I looked at this $1,000 offer you came up with, and thought, Wow, that’s a great deal.

But it’s the same thing we sell for $200. But it was $1,000. But it still sounded like a great deal because you’re good at creating blockbuster offers.

===

6. Ronin writes copy for emails* and FB posts* (I’m guessing again repurposing existing content). There are no sales calls* for the business owners to handler, even though it’s a $1k offer. There’s no sales page* either. All the sales are handled by the Ronin via email* and DMs*.

7. 9-day email promo*. 49 sales at $1k. $49k in revenue.

8. The $49k in revenue is split between the business owner and the Ronin, negotiated the easy way*.

9. Business owner says at the end:

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The result was magic. That is a whole month’s worth of revenue in a week.

Can we do it again? And how quickly can we do it again? If we can do this again in three months, I’m right on with it. It was a great experience right the way through.

This has been one of the easiest, best, and smoothest business transactions.

I never knew [Ronin] before this offer but I have a lot of respect for the man.

I wish him the best and would love for him to get a lot of business out of it because he’s done the right thing for us.

===

If you wanna read the full details of this case study, you can find it inside the Royalty Ronin Skool group. Just search for “[Case Study] The One That Started It All (BEAMER).”

And if you want to do something similar, either in your own business, or for a partner, including one who doesn’t even know you today, then:

All the bits above I marked by * are things that are taught inside Royalty Ronin…

… both inside the actual community via case studies like these…

… and also inside the bonus trainings offered, such as Phoneless Sales Machine (no sales calls or even sales pages for big-ticket sales)… BEAMER (finding and negotiating partnerships like above)… Big Ticket Email Mojo (err, about emails and promos for big-ticket sales)… and Passive Cash Flow Mojo (for coming up with great offers).

That’s where the Ronin above learned these skills.

That’s where you too can learn them, and apply them, and help other people with them, and make money for yourself as well.

If you’d like to get started today, Royalty Ronin has a free one-week trial, which you can take advantage of here:

​https://bejakovic.com/ronin​

P.S. If you’ve already signed up for a trial of Royalty Ronin via my link above, forward me the welcome email — the one with “Vroom” in the subject line.

I have a small but growing bundle of bonuses, including my Heart of Hearts and my Inspiration & Engagement trainings, which are waiting for you as a way of saying thanks for taking me up on my recommendation.

7 legit reasons against Royalty Ronin

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A couple days ago, I asked for feedback in my Daily Email House community about my ongoing promotion of Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin.

I wanted to hear from people who had signed up for the free trial… from people who were on the fence… and from people who were 100% certain they would never-ever sign up.

I’ve been writing copy for 10+ years now.

I have some sense of what’s going on in people’s heads, what objections and hesitations they might have.

Maybe my sense is better than it was when I got started. But it’s still plenty wrong, or simply incomplete.

And so it was this time. So I’d like to present to you 7 reasons I heard for for not signing up for Royalty Ronin:

1.”Don’t want to take the free trial because I don’t really intend to sign up.”

My comment: Legit and a fair way to deal with the offer.

2. “Don’t want to take the free trial because I will likely forget about it and I don’t want to get charged $300.”

My comment: Legit. I can’t schedule an email properly, and I almost showed up for my flight a day early last week. If you are forgetful and easily distracted, I’m right there with you.

3. “Already suffering from information overload.”

My comment: Legit. Nothing more needs to be said.

4. “Not a fit for the kind of business I want to run.”

My comment: Legit. Travis is basically an old-school direct response guy. Not everyone is down with that.

5. “Don’t know Travis.”

My comment: Legit. I stalked him online for 5 years before I gave him any money.

6. “$300 per month is expensive.”

My comment: Legit, if you end up doing nothing with the info, the connections, or the resources inside Ronin (going back to reasons 3 and 4).

7. “There’s a ton of content inside Ronin, much of it hours-long video, without transcripts.”

My comment: Legit. There’s so much stuff inside that I even thought it’s an opportunity to go to Travis and propose either to make easily consumable and searchable text courses out of his existing courses… or better yet, to create some kind of DFY tools out of them, and to partner on the sales.

All in all… 7 totally legit reasons against Royalty Ronin.

But there was also one other reason that came up when I asked for feedback. It was the following:

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Also, my ‘business’ doesn’t have the necessary structure to benefit from right now.

– I don’t have a structured and consistent way for outreach (yet)

– I don’t have a meaningful email list (yet)

– I don’t have any products (yet)

===

Those reasons are just… wrong.

I’m not trying to put the blame on this Daily Email House member.

The blame is down to my marketing of Travis’s Royalty Ronin, and possibly to Travis’s own presentation of it.

Let me try to right things a little right now:

There’s no doubt that everything Travis teaches will be easier and quicker to profit from if you already have a large and engaged list, a stable of proven products, and solid connections in your chosen industry.

That said, there’s also no doubt that all those things are not necessary.

Travis is a kind of tinkerer. Over the years, he has adapted and tweaked everything he does and teaches to remove pretty much all requirements — list, offers, authority.

There are 300+ success stories inside Royalty Ronin, many of them from people who had no product, or no list, or who followed Travis’s process for reaching out to possible partners that they had no previous connection to.

So if no list/no product/no connections are the reason you’re not taking up the free trial of Royalty Ronin… they’re lousy reasons.

The fact is, you can get a ton of value out of Ronin, and make all your investment back and then some, even if you have nothing much going on yet.

And if you have something going on, the same goes for you too.

In either case, if you are not entirely overwhelmed by marketing info that actually makes you money… if you can set an alarm to remind yourself to cancel the free trial before the 7 days runs out… and if you’re not going in for the trial knowing 100% that you will cancel it within 7 days… then here’s where to give Royalty Ronin a try:

​https://bejakovic.com/ronin​

P.S. If you’ve already signed up for a trial of Royalty Ronin via my link above, forward me Travis’s welcome email — the one with “Vroom” in the subject line.

I have a small but growing bundle of bonuses, including my Heart of Hearts and my Inspiration & Engagement trainings, which are waiting for you as a way of saying thanks for taking me up on my recommendation.

Bejako Brand Guidelines 2025

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Bejako Brand Guidelines 2025

Our voice, our vision, our visual identity

Brand Mission/Purpose/Vision/Values

Here at Bejako, our primary mission and purpose is to turn cool marketing ideas into reality. We aim to transform over-thinkers into over-doers. Our goal is not just to help readers understand how influence works but to prove to themselves they can do it too.

Typography

Times New Roman, size 20px, in columns of 80 characters. The font is undeniably ugly and hearkens back to mandatory 5-page high school essays on the Scarlet Letter or Crime And Punishment. Nonetheless, our internal research has found this ugly font and blocky paragraphs increase reader engagement by 258%.

These typography guidelines must be used throughout the website and in all emails.

Logo

A horned quadruped, presumably a mouflon, walking between two walls that are narrowing to a point. Beyond that point is a round corral. There is a man at the corral, waiting for the horned quadruped.

This logo represents a desert kite, an ancient trapping/domestication mechanism.

As with all images, this logo should be used sparingly — yes on the website masthead, never inside emails.

Color palette

Black and white, which symbolizes the take-it-or-leave it nature of the Bejako brand. This palette also invites readers who choose to “take it” to supply their own preferred colors via imagination and visualization.

Voice and tone

At Bejako, we rely heavily on text to communicate with readers. Voice and tone are therefore paramount. Bejako voice and tone can be summarized in the following three adjectives:

“Surprising”

Via novel facts, boiled down. In the words of copywriting legend John Caples, “Overwriting is the key. If you need a thousand words, write two thousand. Trim vigorously. Fact-packed messages carry a wallop.” Via new interpretations or points of view, preferably analogy. As computer visionary Alan Kay put it, “A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.”

“Inspiring”

Bejako is not simply about inviting readers to observe and admire, but to inspire them to do and create. (Refer to brand mission/purpose/vision at the top.)

“Angsty”

Is it the worst time to be alive? Or the best time to be alive? At Bejako, we are still trying to figure this out, and we communicate accordingly.

Links

Each piece of communication must end with a link, underlined and in blue (#045FB4). The link should lead to an offer, preferably a paid offer, though occasional free offers are acceptable. A reason why should be given for clicking through. Example:

If you’re looking for a different philosophy of modern marketing, which works even if you don’t have your own audience or offer, and works even better if you do, then take a look here:

​https://bejakovic.com/ronin​

Punishing previous buyers

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Last night, I got back to Barcelona after a few days in Rome.

As I found out in Rome, 2025 is apparently a jubilee year, which in the Catholic church is a special year of mercy, forgiveness, giving etc.

Jubilee years happen every 25 years. Each one has a special theme. The theme of Jubilee 2025 is “Pilgrims of Hope.”

I was staying a block away from the Vatican during my Rome trip.

Even though I’m not Catholic or even Christian, it was inspiring and impressive to see a slow-moving processions of thousands of ordinary people, every day, who have been walking for who knows how long, from who knows where, all passing through the enormous colonnade at St. Peter’s square and finally approaching their destination at St. Peter’s Basilica.

Really, that has nothing to do with what I’m about to tell you, but I thought it was worth sharing. You might still want to read on, or you might not.

A couple days ago, I got from Yosi Anderson, who is a medical doctor turned personal productivity strategist.

Yosi has been on my list for a hot minute. Last year, she took me up on my recommendation to sign up for Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin, which I promoted without getting paid for it, simply because I thought it’s such a valuable resource.

I’m now promoting Royalty Ronin as an affiliate, with a bundle of bonuses for those who sign up for a week’s free trial. And about that, Yosi wrote in to ask:

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Hi John,

Does this bonus apply to people like me who already joined Royalty Ronin when you wrote about it last year?

===

And my Jubilee 2025 answer to Yosi’s question is… of course not. The current bonuses don’t apply to previous buyers. The bonuses are there to get new people to sign up and help me make an affiliate cut. I’m running a business here, people. If you were foolish enough to take me up on my recommendation before, that’s too bad.

Err…

Actually no, let me try that again.

The fact is, Jubilee year or not, I always make new bonuses available to all previous buyers. That applies here too, for two reasons.

Reason one is simple and obvious, and a core part of my philosophy for how I run this little info publishing online biz.

I want to treat current and previous customers well, and reward them for taking me up on my offers when I make them, even if those offers didn’t pay me any money. I never want to put any doubts into my readers’ minds that now is the best moment to take me up on an offer I’m making.

Reason two I cannot tell you here, because it’s connected to a marketing tactic inside one of Travis’s paid trainings, called Shogun Traffic Method.

At the risk of sounding hypey:

This marketing tactic is one that Travis found so valuable that he didn’t share it for a decade or more, and kept just for himself. And when he did first share it, he delivered it via a mailed package because he wanted to restrict how many people would find out about it.

Times have changed. Jubilee 2025 is here. Travis’s tactic is now available inside an online course. That doesn’t change the fact it remains super valuable and in fact super underused, even if it’s available more broadly.

This marketing tactic is not something you will spot simply by looking at what Travis is doing, or what I’m writing about in these emails.

But this tactic is something you can find out today, and apply and profit from today, if you sign up for a free trial of Royalty Ronin, and then head inside Shogun Traffic Method, and look at the bonus lesson right before the one titled, “Unannounced BONUS: Bugatti Traffic.”

And yes:

There won’t be a better moment than now to sign up for this free trial of Royalty Ronin.

That’s because, if you sign up now, you’ll get any future bonuses I might offer. The reverse doesn’t hold — in the future, I will take away some of the current bonuses I am offering.

Plus, while I have no idea what Travis’s plans are, it’s conceivable he might at some point do away with the free trial, either because it’s worked well and done its job, or because it’s not working as well as he’d hoped.

If you don’t want to miss the opportunity while it’s here:

​https://bejakovic.com/ronin​

P.S. If you have signed up for the free trial of Royalty Ronin, or if you already signed up as a member even before I was promoting it as an affiliate, forward me your confirmation email from Travis, the one with “Vroom” in the subject line.

If you do that, I’ll give you access to my bonus bundle as my way of saying thanks for taking me up on my recommendation.

My Royalty Ronin money breakdown

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In my experience, if you promote a new offer diligently for a few days, questions start to arrive from the heavens that make the promo easier and more effective.

For example, the following bit of manna landed in my inbox yesterday:

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John — you said a lot about the Royalty Ronin, except how or if it made you money?

May I ask — aside from affiliate fees — how did this membership make you money?

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The background is that I’ve been doing an affiliate promotion for Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin for the past few days.

The first day of the promo, I recorded a video and actually talked inside that about money that being inside Ronin myself has made me over the past year.

But I understand not everyone will have watched that video. So lemme give you the gist.

I directly attribute about $60k of income over the past year to being inside Royalty Ronin. That breaks out like this:

#1. Last autumn, I ran two two-day promos — the White Monday campaign for Copy Riddles, and the Shangri-La event for Most Valuable Email.

The core idea for both of those promos came from Travis’s teachings that come as bonuses for being inside Royalty Ronin — specifically, an idea he shares in his Millionaire Math training (inside his Phoneless Sales Machine program).

In total, those two promos made me a little over $30k.

#2. Last summer, I started going through Travis’s Passive Cash Flow Mojo course (another course that used to cost a few thousand dollars, but is now free as a bonus if you sign up to Royalty Ronin).

I went through PCFM a couple of times and followed it pretty much to the “T” (short for Travis) when coming up with the idea for, launching, and then marketing my Daily Email Habit offer.

I haven’t checked the numbers this month yet, but that offer has definitely made me over $25k in the few months it’s been running.

#3. Via lurking in Travis’s Royalty Ronin Skool community, I got clued into an under-the-radar media buyer named Travis Speegle, who is also inside Ronin and is also a Travis Sago acolyte.

Travis Speegle has a course on media buying for growing your email list called MyPeeps, which at some point was being promoted in Ronin.

I bought MyPeeps, went through it, saw it was a great course.

I then reached out to Travis (Speegle) via DM on Skool and proposed I promote his course to my list. He agreed. We did the promo last September.

The result was about $25k in sales, and my cut was somewhere between $10k and $12k (it wasn’t an even 50%, because Travis created the course with Ryan Lee, and I guess has to pay out Ryan some residuals for each new sale).

Add all up all three of the above — and you get over $60k I attribute directly either to ideas I got from Travis, or through being inside the Royalty Ronin community, however mole-like my behavior there might be.

Would I have made some of this money in other ways had I not been in Travis’s world?

Sure. But there’s no doubt in my mind that I have made much more as a result of being in Travis’s Royalty Ronin, and of having gone through his courses — some several times — than the amounts I’ve paid Travis for that access. In fact, I’ve made many times more. Probably 10x, if not 20x.

And that’s why I keep promoting Royalty Ronin to my list.

In fact, that’s why I promoted it to my list last year as well, even before there was an affiliate program — when I had no self-interest in promoting it, other than being the first to clue in my readers to a valuable resource.

And now for your money breakdown, or the lack of it:

Over the past year, I paid Travis Sago $3k for access to Ronin and the associated high-ticket courses. A few weeks ago, I paid him another $1k to renew my access for another year, early.

You, on the other hand, don’t have to make any such dramatic leap. That’s because of two changes that Travis introduced recently to how he charges for access to Royalty Ronin.

The first change is that Travis has started offering the option to sign up to Ronin monthly for $300, instead of yearly for $3k.

$300 is still very expensive if you don’t do anything with the info, or the connections, or with the inspiration available inside Ronin.

On the other hand, if you do apply it, it can be an investment that pays for itself — and quick.

But there’s also the second thing:

To make the decision even easier, and actually entirely risk-free, there’s now a week’s free trial if you’d like to join Ronin, look inside, and see if it’s for you.

If you think of Royalty Ronin like a fancy gym — where the equipment is world-class and trainers are very knowledgeable, but the real value is in the connections you make and motivation you get — then you can think of this week’s free trial as a guest pass you can take advantage of, thanks to my being a member already.

If you’d like to take advantage of your guest pass:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

P.S. If you’ve already signed up for a trial of Royalty Ronin via my link above, forward me Travis’s welcome email — the one with “Vroom” in the subject line. I have a small but growing bundle of bonuses that’s waiting for you as a way of saying thanks for taking me up on my recommendation.

If you’re struggling to sell continuity…

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This morning, I got a DM on Skool from a business owner in Australia, who wrote:

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Hey John, I saw you promoting Ronin, how’s the signups going on your side? I’ve sent a couple of emails but only 50 odd clicks which is pretty low. I’m finding it a challenge to convey the real value of what Travis teaches without sounding like a scammy hypester!

===

The background is that the past few days, I’ve been promoting Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin membership program. It’s a membership I’m personally signed up to, as is the business owner from Australia above who wrote me this morning.

So far, I’ve sent 4 emails to promote Ronin. I’ve had a few hundred people click through, but I have only had a handful of people sign up for the free trial.

I’m not bothered by that result.

Travis’s community is after all built around Travis, and selling my audience into a paid community built around a person they don’t really know is a tough ask.

Plus, Royalty Ronin is very expensive, and I figure people are wary of signing up for a $300/month subscription, even if they get a week’s free trial to make up their minds.

I keep cheerfully promoting the free trial of Royalty Ronin because 1) every day, I’m still getting more people to opt in, and 2) even if a few folks decide to stay signed up past the trial, it’s going to be long-term good for me and good for them.

That said, I thought it was actually a curious choice from Travis Sago to start selling Royalty Ronin as a per-month subscription (something he only started now, as far as I know).

That’s because I remember one training of his, and the question of continuity programs came up. Travis explicitly shared his philosophy, which was “Don’t sell continuity.”

That doesn’t mean you can’t get paid recurring month-to-month. It simply means how you price and position your existing offer (yes, the one you’re selling via continuity) in the audience’s mind.

Travis had a small, counterintuitive twist for making recurring sales, which gets you a bunch of money up front as well as more people to pay you month-to-month than if you just offer a monthly subscription.

If you yourself have a continuity program that’s not making as many sales as you like, this info could be gold for you. Or it might be something you choose to ignore, the way Travis seems to be doing now, for reasons of his own.

In any case, if you’re already signed up for a trial of Royalty Ronin, you can find this recurring-income-without-continuity tweak inside the “$1k a Day in 1 Hour a Day” training in the Ronin course area.

And in case you haven’t already signed up for trial of Ronin, but you would like to see what it’s about, and whether it’s worth your time and attention, then here’s more info on the membership from Travis himself:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

P.S. If you’ve already signed up for trial of Royalty Ronin via my link above, forward me Travis’s welcome email, the one with “Vroom” in the subject line. I have a small but growing bundle of bonuses that’s waiting for you as a way of saying thanks for taking me up on my recommendation.

Inspire readers to take action using what you’ve already got

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A bit of background:

I once had a copywriting client who was a real estate investing guru in Australia.

The guy was dyslexic or illiterate, I don’t know which. Whenever he wrote me an email to communicate something about the project to be done, the email was borderline illegible, with weird grammar mistakes, terrible spelling, and just a general aura of “this was written by a not very precocious four-year-old.”

And yet, the REI guru was an incredible speaker.

In front of crowds of hundreds, he was fluent and dramatic. He hypnotized his audience and moved them to change their lives and get that financial freedom they had been lusting after, which meant working with him and paying him thousands of dollars for his REI knowledge. He had thousands of customers and clients.

That’s the background.

The story starts when I got one of those misspelled and misgrammared emails from that REI guru. This was about 2–3 years into my copywriting freelance career.

He wanted me to rewrite a sales letter. He thought the previous copywriter had made it too factual and bland, and he wanted me to make it more “inspiring.”

Now I’m a factual and bland person by nature, and because of that, I was 100% certain I could not inspire, hype up, or goose anybody, in print or in words.

So I wrote the REI guru an email, perfectly proofread and 100% grammatically correct, to say I appreciate the offer, but that inspirational copy is really not my strong suit, and therefore I will have to turn the job down.

The end? Almost.

I was ready to live out the rest of my life as a bland and uninspiring entity.

But I happened to listen to a podcast back in 2019 by a certain marketer, a guy I had never heard of before.

This guy was making about $3M a year, taking a cheap and widely available resource — copywriters like me — and turning that resource into a “back-end agency,” where he’d help existing businesses promote their existing offers in new ways via email marketing.

Now here’s the point of this email, the takeaway to the long story and background above:

This very successful marketer said that if you can inspire people, the world is really yours. And here’s the crucial part — he said that there are 1,001 ways to inspire people.

He then gave just one example: “Show people that they already have the resources needed to succeed.” He gave a few examples, I think something to do with mommy bloggers, and how their experience running a family and household would translate into the online business world.

This blew my mind.

For one thing, I had always thought of inspirational copy as the equivalent of a Tony Robbins event — lots of hand clapping and yelling and jumping up and down.

For another, I hadn’t ever occurred to me that a logical argument — “Let me show you how you already have the resources you need to succeed” — could be inspiring.

This changed everything.

Because after this simple realization, I started keeping track of copy that I personally found inspiring.

And now that I had the realization that there might be a structure to it, I started looking out for what it was that had inspired me.

After identifying such inspiration structures, I started using them in my own copy.

The first few times, it came a little ham-handedly, but then more naturally and unselfconsciously.

Today, I also find that inspirational copy is some of the most effective copy that I write — both for getting sales today and for keeping people reading tomorrow.

I’ve even baked it into my public image a bit — people will often reply to my emails to tell me how they loved or were inspired by a particular story I shared.

All that’s to say, you too can inspire, even if you are as bland and factual by nature as I am.

The fact is, there’s a structure to inspiration, just as there is a structure to desire. And now that you know that, you can look out for that structure, and copy it and mimic it, and make it your own.

By the way, the marketer who first turned me on to the structure behind inspiration, the guy in that podcast who was making $3M a year running a back-end agency, was Travis Sago.

I’ve been promoting Travis’s Royalty Ronin community for the past few days, because I myself have been inside this community for more than a year now, and have renewed my subscription for an extra year just a few weeks ago.

And even though I am promoting Royalty Ronin as an affiliate now, I actually promoted it last year as well, for free, simply because I think it’s of genuine interest to you, in case you find my own emails interesting and valuable.

Travis is now running a 7-day free trial for Royalty Ronin, which gives you full access to both the community and to several of his biggest and most expensive courses (including BEAMER, the one on running a back-end agency).

If you’d like to try out Ronin risk-free for a week, take a look here:

​https://bejakovic.com/ronin​

P.S. If you’ve signed up for RR before, I’ve just added a new bonus into your Ronin bonus bundle in the members-only area of my site. This new bonus is a presentation I gave last year inside Brian Kurtz’s Titans XL mastermind, all about various inspiration structures I’ve identified over the years, along with examples from my own copy and from the copy of several copywriters I admire.

And if you haven’t gotten access to the Ronin bonus bundle but you’ve taken me up on the Ronin trial, forward me your confirmation email from Travis, the one with “Vroom” in the subject line. I’ll get you access to the Ronin bundle with the inspiration training above and a few other goodies as a way of saying thanks that you took me up on my recommendation.

The joy and food-poisoning risk of exploring and experimenting

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I’m in Rome for a few days. My dad and his wife were coming for a trip here and asked if I would like to tag along. I said yes.

We arrived yesterday. And after visiting four churches, three fountains, and one set of famous stairs, it was time to sit down and eat something.

“Where will we eat?” I’d asked my dad’s wife before we arrived. They had been here a few times before, and I figured they might have favorite places.

“Oh, we’ll just sit down somewhere,” she said. “All the food is great there.” Right as she said that, thunder started rumbling off on the horizon.

So yesterday, we just sat down somewhere. The first course of pasta came. It looked unimpressive and yet had an off smell.

I ate it – I was very hungry. “This must be some unique ingredient they use in Rome,” I said to myself, as I tried to ignore the unpleasantness of it.

But by the time the second course came, it was undeniable. The meat was tough, the potatoes were in a state between undercooked and raw, and the two pieces of seafood were communicating in various ways that they had been bought a week or more ago, and caught who knows when.

I put my knife and fork down, figuring that it’s best to lose this single battle rather than the entire Rome campaign.

My bit of wisdom for you today is that there can be joy in exploring and experimenting, and occasionally discovering something really great and new.

In fact, that’s how I like to live much of my life. And that’s why I can say with a lot of confidence that exploring and experimenting does largely result in failure, and occasionally will lead to food poisoning.

The other option is to get recommendations, to follow in somebody’s tracks who’s been there before, whose experience and integrity you trust.

I’m no longer just talking about restaurants in Rome. I’m talking about other things in life as well, such as for example, the topic of this newsletter, which is effective communication, marketing, and online business.

And with that, I would like to remind you of Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin free trial offer, which I’m recommending as an affiliate these days.

Travis is somebody I personally have learned a ton from, whose experience and integrity I trust. The man has made tens of millions of dollars selling his own offers, in various niches. Plus he’s worked as a kind of JV marketing partner for a bunch of other online businesses, and made tens of millions of dollars for their businesses too.

Now, Travis has built a community of like-minded marketers and business owners around him. Plus, he’s sharing a lot of wisdom that he’s collected over the years, in the form of various high-ticket courses, which he makes available as free bonuses in this community.

And like I said, Travis is now offering a week’s free trial to this, so you can look inside, and discover something really great and new, without risking anything, including food poisoning.

If you’re curious to find out more about Royalty Ronin, or even take Travis up on his risk-free 7-day offer, take a look here:

​https://bejakovic.com/ronin​

P.S. If you already signed up for a trial of Royalty Ronin via my link above, then send me the confirmation email you got from Travis, the one with “Vroom” in the subject line.

In turn, I’ll send you my Heart of Hearts training, about how to discover what the people in your market really want, so you can better know what to offer them and how to present it, as a way of saying thanks for taking me up on my recommendation.

Why I shouldn’t be allowed near a toaster

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A couple days ago, I started promoting a free trial of a Skool group as an affiliate… or so I thought.

At first, I figured Skool doesn’t let me see who had signed up via my affiliate link, since it’s a free-trial offer.

It turns out Skool is happy to show me this information. The problem was that I didn’t use the affiliate link when linking to this offer. Instead, I used the bare link.

Strike one.

A few days before that, I wrote an email and scheduled it for my usual sending time between 8 and 9 o’clock.

Except it only turned out the next morning, after several dedicated readers wrote to ask me where my email is, that I realized I had scheduled my email for the wrong day, and for “am” instead of the usual “pm.”

Strike two.

A few days before that, I did a list swap with Jason Resnick.

I gave Jason a link for the lead magnet I was offering… and then a day later, I airheadedly used the same URL, as a redirect on my site, to link to Jason’s landing page from my own email.

If that URL chicanery doesn’t make any sense to you, don’t worry. It takes a special kind of genius to understand.

The end result of all that genius was that a bunch of Jason’s readers, who clicked on the link in Jason’s email in order to get my lead magnet, were redirected to Jason’s optin page instead.

That meant that not only did I miss out on a bunch of new subscribers, but I created a hassle and a headache for my JV partner.

Strike three.

The honest-to-woodheadedness truth is that I really should not be allowed anywhere near a computer, smart TV, or toaster.

Because if there’s a chance to harebrain some setting, to forget to push some button or to push the wrong button that shouldn’t be pushed, and to cause the toast to burn as a result, then I am sure to find that button.

And yet, I keep living. In fact, I keep living quite well. Which brings me to an idea I’d like to share with you.

That idea is the Casino of Life.

Unlike in a normal casino, when you play inside the Casino of Life, you don’t need to have a winning hand to win.

Because in the Casino of Life, you can walk around all the tables, see which hands other people have, and you can bet on their hands. And not only that.

In the Casino of Life, if you yourself happen to have just one good card, for example, the Ace of Copy, or the Queen of Traffic, or maybe the King of Offers, you can find somebody who is missing just your trump card to form a royal flush, and to win a bunch of gold doubloons, which you can then split.

The Casino of Life is a reframe I got a long while ago from Internet marketer Travis Sago.

Not very coincidentally, the Skool group I am promoting as an affiliate is Travis’s Royalty Ronin, which I myself happily pay for, and have done for the past year.

In fact, the reason I screwed up the affiliate link in the first place was that I promoted Royalty Ronin some time last year, for free, before Travis had an affiliate program for it. I simply thought Royalty Ronin would be interesting and valuable for people on my list.

I still think so.

Because Royalty Ronin isn’t just about getting access to a bunch of Travis’s unique and powerful marketing ideas (including via a suite of Travis’s $3k-$6k courses, which come as bonuses for Royalty Ronin).

It’s also about steady exposure to Travis’s brain-shifting insights and inspiration, like the Casino of Life idea, which have made all the difference for me at the right moments.

Plus, Royalty Ronin is also about joining a community of 500+ motivated, skilled, and yet imperfect people, all of whom are holding unique hands, some of them very powerful, and some missing exactly the card you may be holding.

I’m not much of a networker. I haven’t been taking much advantage of the community aspect of Royalty Ronin. Altogether I’ve connected with fewer than 5 people there.

Even so, just one connections I made in Ronin last year, with media buyer Travis Speegle, paid for yearly subscription for Royalty Ronin for the next few years.

I bet that in the next year, I will make at least one more connection which will pay for a few more years.

Like I said, Travis is now offering a week’s free trial to Royalty Ronin.

If you’d like to check out this unique casino, see who else is inside, or even form a connection or two that can pay for many years of being a member, maybe in just the next week:

​​https://bejakovic.com/ronin​ (yes, the link has been fixed)

P.S. If you already signed up for a trial of Royalty Ronin via the link above, even though it wasn’t my affiliate link until now, then send me the confirmation email you got from Travis, the one with “Vroom” in the subject line.

I’ll honor my end of the deal, and send you my Heart of Hearts training, about how to discover what the people in your market really want, so you can better know what to offer them and how to present it, as a way of saying thanks for taking me up on my recommendation.

Why discounting fails to drive sales, even when it’s by a lot

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A while back, I talked to a business coach, somebody who has a lot of experience with online marketing.

She told me about how she launched a new membership… how she offered a launch discount… how she even ended up increasing the discount over what she had initially planned.

Result:

One person ended up signing up.

Does this mean this new membership offer clearly sucks, since only one person bought even at a double-discounted launch price?

I told this business coach something that took me too long to internalize:

Discounting only works if people already value the thing you’re selling at the full price you’re selling it for.

In short, 20% off nothing is still nothing. So is 50% off.

The long term fix for this is your ongoing presence in your audience’s minds… trust and credibility built up by days and weeks and months of advertising yourself… sharing case studies of people who bought your offers and got value from them… and repeatedly driving home the fact that your offers sell for the price you are claiming for them, and that they’re worth every penny and in fact much more.

That’s how you convince people that, say, your membership is actually worth $300, and is even a steal at that price.

Good news:

There’s also a short-term fix. You can sell your offer at full price, and have people buy it, even if they don’t yet value the thing you’re selling at the price you’re selling it for.

This short-term fix is an obvious idea, but again, it took me too long to really internalize.

It finally clicked for me last year, via a little-known resource I was turned onto by marketer Travis Sago.

Travis is a very clever and very creative guy when it comes to Internet marketing… but he’s also a very thorough student of marketing and copywriting classics.

One of the things I have gotten via first stalking Travis online, and eventually paying him a lot of money for his marketing education and ideas, is simply exposure to really great, simple, often very old marketing ideas, which have made me much more money than the large sums I have paid Travis.

Speaking of which:

Yesterday, I started promoting Travis’s Royalty Ronin community as an affiliate.

I paid Travis $3k over the past year for access to Royalty Ronin and for a suite of his courses, which he makes available for members of Royalty Ronin.

I also recently renewed my membership to Royalty Ronin, ahead of schedule, for another year, in one lump sum payment of $1k.

Good news, part 2:

If you like, you can now get inside Royalty Ronin for a little less than the $3k I paid over the past year… and less even than the $1k I paid in a lump sum a few weeks ago to renew.

Specifically, you can get inside Royalty Ronin for free, because Travis has started offering a 7-day free trial.

Like I wrote/said yesterday, there aren’t many affiliate offers I’m wiling to promote. That’s because most are simply not good enough… because most aren’t a good fit for my audience… because I’m simply not enthusiastic about most of them.

On the other hand, I’m 110% enthusiastic to promote Travis’s Royalty Ronin, and all the multi-thousand dollar courses that come as bonuses, because I’ve so thoroughly benefited from them, and because I continue to benefit from them.

If you’d like to test out, look around, and even profit from Royalty Ronin, for free, for a week, you can do so here:

​https://bejakovic.com/ronin​

P.S. If you already signed up for a trial of Royalty Ronin via my affiliate link above, send me an email to let me know. Skool doesn’t let me see who has signed up, so the only way I know is if you write me.

And if you do write me to let me know, I’ll send you a recording of my Heart of Hearts training, about how to discover what the people in your market really want, so you can better know what to offer them and how to present it.

I previously planned to sell Heart of Hearts for $300, along with a few bonuses. I even had a few people pay me $300 for it, before I changed my mind, pulled the offer, and refunded their money. (I simply didn’t have time or desire to create the promised bonuses.)

Good news, part 3, is that Heart of Hearts is yours free, because you’ve taken me up on this trial of Royalty Ronin.

Plus, as an extra bonus when you write me, I’ll tie up this email, and I’ll tell you the short-term fix I mentioned above, for getting people to buy your offer at the full price even if they don’t value it yet. I’ll even tell you the little known resource, which I was clued into via Travis Sago, that finally made this click in my own head.