Announcing: Attentive human vending machine

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In Hangzhou, China, there’s a vending machine that sells live crabs. The machine has a 3x-your-crabs guarantee — if it ever spits out a dead crab, you will be compensated with three live ones.

Significantly higher up the prestige totem pole, there is the gold bullion vending machine in Dubai. It holds up to 520kg of gold, and prices are updated every 10 minutes via an Internet feed.

And then, higher still, all the way at the top, with diamond-level prestige, there is the attentive human vending machine.

That’s what I want to talk to you about today.

The attentive human vending machine takes in $10-$15 in coins or credit, and dispenses 10-15 attentive humans.

More specifically, it dispenses 10-15 readers for your email list.

You can then email these new readers, so they read whan you wrote… recommend you to other attentive humans… and buy from you when you choose to sell them something.

And if you like, you can go back to the attentive human vending machine whenever you like, even every day, and put in more coins and get more attentive humans out.

As you can probably guess, the attentive human vending machine is paid traffic. Ads. A system that takes in money, and gives you readers in return.

I’ve started a new list and I will start building it up via ads.

I will be following the how-to blueprint of a master list builder and media buyer I’ve had the good fortune to come across.

If you like, you can join me. You can build up your own list using the same process I will be following, and get my copywriting feedback and marketing input while you put your attentive human vending machine together.

I can tell you right now that the investment for this offer is $497.

That happens to be the price of the blueprint I mentioned above, the course that lays out the how-to of the master list builder.

Depending on your perspective, that means you can either invest $497 to tap into my ~10 years of professional copywriting experience, and get my help with your ad copy and landing pages, and get the how-to blueprint for free…

Or you can pay $497 for the blueprint, and get to work alongside me, and see how I do it, and get my help and advice, for free.

In either case, the way forward is to reply to this email and express your interest.

I’ll send you more details about how this project work. You can then decide if you want to join me… or if you’d rather go spend your money on a bunch of possibly dead crabs.

Everything is copy

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I woke up this morning to see an email from one of my most dedicated readers, copywriter Carlo Gargiulo, who wrote:

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Hi John,

Are you ok?

I didn’t get your email yesterday!

I hope you are okay and it is just a technical problem.

===

I appreciate the concern. I am indeed okay. As for my non-email yesterday:

In the 5+ years of this daily email newsletter, I’ve missed sending an email only two times, yesterday being one.

On both occasions, my email service provider, ActiveCampaign, wasn’t working properly, and their support team didn’t fix the problem in time or even get back to me.

But like Nora Ephron’s mother used to coldly say whenever little Nora came home, crying about some injury or insult:

“Someday this will be funny, and you will write about it. Everything is copy.”

I’m still not finding the situation funny, but it has actually become copy.

The good news is that my non-email yesterday forced me to do something I had been planning to do for years, and had still planned to put off for a couple of weeks — and that’s to move out of the dingy and leaky-roofed hotel Olivia Campo, aka ActiveCampaign.

And so, I’m writing you today from my comfortable new email home on Convert Kit Lane. I’m still moving in and so it’s a mess around here, but at least I have a place to sleep.

As for my email yesterday, the one that will never be sent, it announced that today I will actually be starting a new promotion.

It’s for the “work alongside me” offer to build up your list via ads, with my feedback and help. I revealed a bunch of details about that offer in my non-email yesterday, but I will save that now for the official announcement later today at the usual time.

Thanks for reading. And now, I’ll go do some more unpacking.

Using pendulum swings to predict opportunities

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I read today that SpaceHey just reached 1 million users. In case you don’t know, as I didn’t —

​​SpaceHey is an ugly and basic social media network that’s meant to recall the web of the early 2000s.

SpaceHey was started four years ago by a German 18-year-old with no budget. Last week, SpaceHey reached 1 million users. It still has no budget, except occasional donations from users who love the service.

Point being:

In pop culture as in politics, there are pendulum swings. A big part of how we humans define ourselves is in opposition to what came before, or in opposition to what’s here now that we don’t like.

The result of this are pendulum swings, from polished to rough, crowded to sparse, materialistic to spiritual, conservative to liberal.

It makes sense to keep an eye on what the pendulum is doing. It can give you clues about what’s coming in the future, and where opportunities might lie.

And on that note, I would like to announce that starting tomorrow, I will be promoting a $497 course called myPeeps, put together by Travis Speegle.

Travis is an expert list builder and media buyer, who has built up email lists totaling some 7.5 million subscribers for big brands (BowFlex, Thrive Market, Truth About Cancer) as well as for big non-profits (Surfrider Foundation and Well.org).

Travis’s myPeeps course lays out his how-to of buying ads to grow an email list. It’s based on Travis’s experience and philosophy, which is to keep things simple, fast, and effective.

I’ve gone through Travis’s myPeeps myself. I’m planning to follow it to the letter to grow a new list I have started.

And if you like, you can work alongside me, follow Travis’s process also, and build up your own list with my help and feedback.

I’ll have more info on how this “work alongside me” component will look. For now, I’ll just say this will be a free bonus I’ll be offering to encourage you to buy myPeeps through my affiliate link.

And in case you’re wondering, Why? Why this? Why now?

It’s because I’m feeling a pendulum swing away from Twitter and social and free means of list building in general.

I’m feeling it in myself. I’m feeling it in the people I talk to.

This includes some people who have actually been successful in the past in growing a free audience on social. In spite of their success, they are feeling fed up. And they are looking for an alternative that costs less time, that’s more reliable, and that doesn’t require them to build their house on a platform that could be pulled out from under them on a whim.

But more about all that tomorrow. Meanwhile, if you want to know what the future looks like:

https://spacehey.com/

Just suck it up

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HER: “Are you upset with me?”

ME: “No, I’m just in a bad mood.”

HER: “What’s wrong?”

ME: “I really don’t want to talk about it.”

HER: “Ok… but is it something I did?”

ME: “No, but I really don’t want to discuss it.”

HER: “I see… but maybe I can help? If you would just tell me what’s wrong…”

This is the kind of conversation I’ve had a thousand and one times with various girlfriends.

Whenever I’m feeling upset, bad, uncertain, miserable, the last thing I want to do is discuss it.

In my experience, bad moods tend to pass — sleep fixes almost anything.

​​But when I try to give a form to my bad moods, when I crystalize the dark clouds in my head into little droplets called words, then somehow all that negativity becomes real and permanent. And if I go one step beyond, and share those words with somebody else, it becomes doubly real and permanent.

HER: “Are you still feeling bad about X?”

ME: No. [thinking to myself, no, I wasn’t, until now.]

This is not to put the blame on any of my ex gfs. I know they were just trying to help. I also know I’m the odd one out, and that most people actually feel better when they discuss what’s bothering them.

BUT!

I was still pleased to come across a study a while back, published in the prestigious journal Science, that pretty much backed me up.

Two cognitive scientists at Cambridge had a hypothesis that suppressing negative thoughts not only would not harm mental health… but would actually improve it.

They set up an experiment where they trained some 120 people, across 6 countries, in the techniques of sucking it up. The result was just as they predicted:

– no paradoxical increase in negative thoughts
– less frequent, less vivid, and less anxiety-producing negative thoughts

So there you go — just suck it up.

Or don’t.

It’s likely that this Cambridge study is just a swing of the pendulum. We’ve been told for so long that it’s important to express what you feel, it was inevitable somebody somewhere would try to say otherwise.

And I’m sure that if you like to talk things out when you feel bad, there are plenty of studies to back you up also.

Maybe it’s just like Walker Percy said, that modern science cannot say anything about you specifically as an individual.

That’s my bit of inspiration for you for this Sunday.

​​If you want some more, you can find it in my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

Most of those commandments have to do with copywriting and marketing. But a few have to do with thinking and living. As you can imagine, those are the most valuable ones. If you’re interested:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Do you make this mistake with your customer database?

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Back in the early 1990s, the New Jersey Nets — the NBA team that’s now the Brooklyn Nets — had a rather clever way of cutting costs:

Each season, they saved on hard drive space by deleting the names of the previous season’s ticket holders.

After all, who’s got space for all those names, addresses, and phone numbers of people who had paid thousands of dollars for season tickets?

Besides, if anybody had not renewed their season ticket this year, then what was the point of keeping their contact data? The Nets could just go out and run TV ads or radio ads or maybe go knock door-to-door to fill any unfilled seats.

Maybe my tone is not sarcastic enough, so let me make it clear:

If you do a good job selling to a cold audience — to people who have never bought from you before — you can hope for about a 2% conversion rate.

In other words, 1 out of every 50 strangers might decide to give you some money, carefully, guardedly.

On the other hand, if you do a modest job selling to a warm audience — to people who have bought from you before — you can hope for about 20% to 50% conversion rate.

In other words, 1 out of 5 people might decide to give you more money, or it might be as high as 1 in 2. Plus, the selling tends to be easier, and the price more flexible.

All that’s to say, the Nets’ habit of regularly deleting customer records was an act of criminal negligence. It probably cost the organization millions of dollars in profits over the years.

Of course, it’s not much less negligent to save customer records and never do anything with them.

One ecommerce client I worked with had a database of about 150,000 buyers. It just sat there inside Shopify, while the client worked furiously to optimize Facebook ads and bring in more new customers.

But you see where I’m going with this, so let me wrap it up:

Step one is to stop wiping your hard drive clean and throwing customer records away.

Step two is to start selling those customers.

If you want to get it done for you, write me and maybe I can help. Or if you want to get it done yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

A dirty rotten scoundrel’s secret to making a living online

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I recently watched a dirty little movie called Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is set on the French riviera. It stars Michael Caine as Lawrence, a dapper English scammer who charms rich and corrupt women for large sums of money… and Steve Martin as Freddie, a classless American jackass who milks the pity of any woman for tiny bits of money.

It’s been a few days since I saw the movie. The following monologue by Caine’s dapper scammer is what’s stuck in my mind:

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Freddie, as a younger man, I was a sculptor, and a painter, and a musician.

There was just one problem. I wasn’t very good. As a matter of fact, I was dreadful.

I finally came to the frustrating conclusion that I had taste and style, but not talent.

Fortunately, I discovered that taste and style are commodities that people desire.

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Like I said, this stuck with me. Maybe it will stick with you too.

You don’t have to scam anybody — that’s not what this is about.

But what Caine says about taste and style is true. They are commodities that people will pay for.

The amazing thing is that whatever your taste and style — ahem, obscure and campy 80s comedies — there are people out there who will appreciate it. And thanks to the miracle of the Internet, it’s easy and affordable to find such people.

I rely heavily on this, simply curating ideas, articles, movie scenes that I find interesting or funny or outrageous.

You can do the same. You can use your own taste and style, and simply share ideas that somehow impressed you or stuck with you.

That’s all you need to do, and you can be successful.

But if you want to do something a little bit extra with those ideas that impressed you or stuck with you, you can apply what I call the Most Valuable Email trick.

The result will be something that goes beyond what most other people will ever do.

In case you’re curious:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

“What just happened?”

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I woke up last night at 2:30am in what felt like a fever.

​​My forehead was wet and my body was burning. “Why is it so hot…” I mumbled as I threw the covers off me.

Turns out I didn’t have a fever. But my A/C did die.

Some time after I’d gone to bed (11pm, nice and cool), the A/C stopped doing its job. Immediately, the Barcelona heat, along with my nighttime panting, brought the temperature in my bedroom up to about 990 degrees.

I promise to get to the marketing moral of this email very soon. But before I get there, I have to share one more personal detail:

I’m kind of done with traveling. The packing, discomfort, displacement — I’m getting more and more resistant to it. I can’t be bothered to take even a half-hour trip out of town.

And yet:

Last night, around 4:30am, as I sat wide awake in my sauna of an apartment, in a mild panic that this is how my life will be until the A/C gets fixed (and who knows when that will be — last year it took two weeks), I started fantasizing about traveling.

Somewhere… anywhere, as long as it was cool, or at least had A/C.

And that’s the marketing moral I promised you. Imagine if in that moment, or really even now, because it’s still very hot, I had come across an ad that said:

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Did your A/C just die?

Get away from the heat with our special “while your A/C gets fixed” hotel package!

Beautiful getaway in the cool Pyrenees mountains, only two hours’ drive from Barcelona. And yes, we do have A/C in all our rooms, just in case!

To book now, call 1-800-HELLA-HOT

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… had I seen this ad, I can tell you, I would have called. In fact, I might even go to the trouble of researching such a hotel and calling it now, even without the ad.

The bigger point:

Nothing ever gets done without a deadline, right?

Right.

That’s why marketers have invented a million tricks and tactics for amping up the fear of missing out — countdown timers, 10+ emails on the final day of promos, disappearing bonuses, etc.

All that stuff’s necessary when you’re trying to motivate people who are not internally motivated at that moment.

But there are people who are internally motivated at that moment. And the way you find them is by asking yourself, or better yet, by asking your buyers,

“What just happened? Why did you buy, now?”

Often, it won’t have anything to do with your specific offer (continental breakfast, stylish wood paneling, friendly staff).

Instead, it will have to do with your buyers, and their life circumstances. The A/C that died in their apartment the night before, and the three hours of sleep they got as a result.

Useful info. Because once you know it, you can use it to pick these people out easily from among a huge crowd… to make them a premium offer… and to do them a huge service.

That’s my free advice for today.

But if you’d like to contribute to the Bejako “while the A/C gets fixed” fund, and learn techniques used by A-list copywriters to rope in just the buyers from among a huge audience, you can find that in my Copy Riddles program.

​​For more information on that:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

**HUGE ANNOUNCEMENT**

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Alex Hormozi, the bearded, trucker-hatted, nasal-stripped author of the book $100MM Offers, has been aggressively running Facebook ads that open with:

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**HUGE ANNOUNCEMENT**

I’ve never publicly endorsed anything until now. And that’s because I’ve built my reputation on giving amazing value.

Anything I endorse has to live up to that. Nothing has, until now.

For many of you who want to start a business online, this is the fastest, easiest, most fun way I’ve found.

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The ad goes on, but the gist is that the fastest, easiest, most funnest way that Alex is endorsing is… Skool.

You might know Skool — it’s an online community platform, much like Facebook groups, but without all the stigma that anything connected to Facebook has today.

I don’t know the deal that Hormozi has struck with Skool. But even at the most plebeian level, Skool offers 40% to affiliates, lifetime, each month, for anybody who comes in and creates a group (creating a Skool group costs $99/month).

So maybe Alex Hormozi is wrong?

Maybe Skool is not the fastest, easiest, most fun way to start a business online?

Maybe promoting Skool is? Or if not Skool, maybe some other software-as-a-service?

This got me wondering about what other worthwhile SaaS platforms have generous lifetime affiliate programs.

I know that many email marketing and web hosting companies do. But what else?

Software for design? For sales? Practice management? Inventory management? Pet store management?

If you know of a good software product that offers recurring affiliate payouts, write in and let me know. I’m curious. And in return, I’ll reply and tell you about a super-clever way I’ve seen one affiliate promoting a SaaS company, and apparently making a killing right now.

The myth of mindfulness for the overworked and overstressed

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True story:

Before my mom retired, she was a pediatrician.

​​The small pediatric hospital where she worked kept piling on more and more patients, year after year, while not increasing the number of doctors.

My mom, and all the other doctors at the hospital, had to work longer and longer hours, hurry more and stress more, sleep less and think less.

Eventually, a kind of doctors’ mutiny formed. The doctors pushed back against the administration, saying that this was irresponsible, that they cannot handle the load any more, that patient care was suffering.

The administrators listened and nodded with understanding. “You’re absolutely right,” they said. “Something has to change.”

And so next week, the administration brought in a mindfulness coach to conduct a mindfulness training, and teach the overworked and overstressed doctors to breathe in more deeply, express their gratitude more freely, and work more efficiently during their 13-hour shifts.

I’m telling you this because maybe you’re telling yourself, “I’m not getting enough done. I’m too slow.”

And maybe you are — God knows I am.

But maybe you are just working too much. If so, no amount of productivity and efficiency training will help, and the only real solution is simply to work less.

This isn’t about mindfulness, but a change in how you make money… the kinds of clients or customers you work with… how much you charge them… and where you draw the line about what’s acceptable and what’s not.

Those are big questions. I won’t pretend I have all the answers for you, or a push-button Jack-in-the-box that will give you those answers.

But since this is a newsletter about marketing, let me point out some relevant facts:

– It’s easier to have time if you can sell to hundreds or thousands of people in parallel

– It’s easier to charge more if you have a captive pocket of people who look to you as an authority

– It’s easier to draw the line if you know for certain you’re not beholden to any one customer or client, because there’s more of them out there, and you know how to get at them

There are different ways to take advantage of these facts, and to make them work for you.

My personal choice is to have a small online audience, in the form of an email list, and to write them daily emails, and to make offers to them on occasion.

I’ll have an offer about building up an email list soon. Meanwhile, if you want to know how I write emails, and make offers inside them, and how you can do the same:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

The final straw that broke this email camel’s hump

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Yesterday, when I got ready to schedule my daily email in ActiveCampaign, I got hit with an ugly yellow banner that read:

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You are approaching the limit of emails sent per month.

You currently have sent 87.45% of your available emails to send per month. You may want to upgrade your plan to allow sending more emails.

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I had no idea what this is about, so I looked it up. It turns out ActiveCampaign doesn’t just have subscriber limits to its various pricing plans. There are also monthly email send limits, set at 10x the limit of subscribers.

I don’t know if this is a new invention, or if I simply never noticed it before.

In any case, it’s the final straw that broke this email camel’s hump, and that will force said camel to move off ActiveCampaign for good, some time in the next month, even though I expect the move to be a mess.

But that’s not what this email is about. This email is simply to highlight how crazy, stupid, or simply out of touch the ActiveCampaign policy is.

10 emails per subscriber each month?

It reminded me of Bill Gates’s infamous statement, back in 1981, about how nobody will need more than 640Kb of computer memory. (Gates denies he ever said this, but that’s neither here nor there.)

I know I’m probably preaching to the converted here. But the more often you email your list, the more money you make. It’s a very simple calculus.

I’ve never personally sent 10 emails to my newsletter subscribers in one day. But I could imagine it could be lucrative, particularly if I have an offer that’s doing well, and a deadline is nearing, and people need a push.

Short of that, sending an email each day of the month, and sometimes multiple times a day when there’s reason for it, is the smart thing to do.

It’s not a matter of burning out your list for the sake of short-term profit. It’s a matter of staying visible, of continuing to nurture a relationship, and yes, of making sales when sales are there to be made, because it’s in both sides’ interest to make the exchange.

Again, you probably know all this. But if you don’t yet send daily emails because don’t have time or energy, hit reply and get in touch.

I might be able to find an email copywriter for you who will write daily emails for you on commission only.

​​Just make sure you’re not using ActiveCampaign if it does happen.