Two tracks, client and student

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A couple weeks ago I talked to a dude, a successful marketer.

On the one hoof, he sells courses and coaching via his email list. On the other, he does bespoke done-for-you work for clients.

I asked him how he gets his done-for-you clients. Are these people who are part of his audience, and just kept ascending from course buyer to coaching student to DFY client?

Turns out no. In the dude’s words:

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It’s funny because the bespoke clients that I’ve worked for or have on retainer, they always come by referral.

They always have. I’ve been in business since 2010 and the big whale clients, they come by way of some sort of referral.

Whether that’s a past client of mine referred them, a vendor referred them, a colleague, somebody like that.

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I’m telling you this because I’m finishing up my first-ever Most Valuable Offer cohort.

I’ve been helping nine people plan, market, and deliver a paid live workshop.

As the first step, I asked them, what’s the next step? In other words, who do they want to attract to this workshop, and what do they want to sell to them afterwards?

One of the participants replied:

“Get more high-quality DTC clients who will implement the work I do for them.”

Well, about that. I’d like to suggest to you, going back to the experience of the successful marketer above, that there are two separate tracks:

A client track and a student track.

Like I said, the two tracks are separate.

At the same time, that doesn’t mean that they are independent.

The two tracks are mutually reinforcing, the same way that train tracks have those wooden sleepers in between them to keep each one in place by connecting it to the other.

Here’s how that works:

DFY client work gives you content, expertise, and standing and with your student audience.

It makes it easier to sell to students and gives you something worthwhile to sell.

The teaching you do via courses and coaching, in turn, gives you reach (including referrals), star glow, and non-neediness when dealing with clients.

It makes it easier to have clients find you instead of you having to prospect… to work with better clients, ones that you like… and to charge more with zero pushback on your rates.

My back-of-the-napkin math is that by having both a client and a student track, you get 500% of the benefit for 75% of the work, compared to having each one alone.

At the moment, I still haven’t finished the current Most Valuable Offer cohort. I am not sure when I will be running the next one.

If you’re interested in creating a Most Valuable Offer yourself, both to monetize your current audience and to make your client work easier, then reply to this email and I’ll put you on the priority list.

At the moment, I’m also not doing any client work.

If you are interested in having me completely handle some projects for you — whether that’s handling daily emails or a weekly newsletter for your business, or advertorials for your cold traffic funnel, or something else you need but I’m not thinking of — then reply to this email and we can talk.

Daily Email Open House

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This Thursday at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST, I’ll get on Zoom for a bit of Daily Email Open House:

To hang out, maybe have a beer, and answer questions about sending daily emails… making a $1k+ offer… and using your list to pay for a house.

If you’d like to join me or get your questions answered live, here’s where you can sign up:

https://www.skool.com/daily-email-house/daily-email-house-live-qa-call

Daily Money Vitamin

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A-list copywriter Gary Bencivenga once prescribed an “Ad-A-Day Vitamin”:

Every day, no matter what, read a great ad.

Gary said this was a recipe to get 1% better every week.

Which is nice except it doesn’t work. Because reading alone won’t make you better, or cause any kind of a lasting change in you or your life.

(I speak here from personal experience, as a person who has read things in the past, often with great interest.)

Instead, I have something different for you.

Something that creates lasting change, not only in you but in your life, business, and bank account.

It’s the Daily Money Vitamin:

Every day, no matter what, implement one great idea.

Put the idea into action, Apply it. Don’t just read about it, don’t just nod at it, don’t just savor it like a connoisseur.

Instead, think about what the idea is telling you to do, and then do that.

Within a week you will be 1% richer. Within a year, you’ll be 67.8% richer. Within two years, you will be 2.81 times richer. After that, it really begins to compound.

Excellent. Except where do you find great ideas to implement?

Ultimately, great ideas are everywhere. In conversations with people you trust… in old books… in expensive courses… in free email newsletters like this one (ahem, I shared one with you just a few lines above, the Daily Email Vitamin).

If you start keeping track of great ideas like this today, within a year, you’re likely to have hundreds of them.

I myself have been keeping such an archive for years. At last count, it was 937 great ideas long. Here’s a very small sample:

* “To build fascination and rapport, keep asking deeper, more enthusiastic questions” (from James Altucher via his podcast)

* “Use the same link text as the subject line to get clicks” (something Ian Stanley said somewhere)

* “Trialibility is the no. 1 factor affecting adoption of an innovation” (from Jonah Berger’s Catalyst)

I once created a collection of all these great ideas which I called The Shangri La Library Of Rare And Priceless Ideas.

If you want to stock your own library of great ideas, and if you want to taking your Daily Money Vitamin today rather than never, then I’ll make you a deal.

For the next 24 hours, until tomorrow, Tuesday Apr 28 2026, at 8:31pm CET, you can get your little claws on The Shangri La Library Of Rare And Priceless Ideas, for free, if you get my Most Valuable Email program.

For more information on Most Valuable Email before the day runs out:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Fire sale auction

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After my first and very successful “I endorse YOU” auction back in December, I haven’t had much luck coming up with an auction offer that really excited my audience. A few of the flops:

#1. An A-Z system for growing your list via newsletter ads, from finding the right newsletters, to getting the lowest rates, to making ~$10 for every new subscriber

#2. The behind-the-scenes info of auctions I’ve been running with partners, plus info on how I’ve gotten each such partner

#3. A penny auction to find out what marketing book I’ve been reading repeatedly this whole year and keeping hidden, because it’s simply too valuable to share publicly

Auction archwizard Travis Sago says that one of the easiest things to auction off is licensing rights to a course, at least if you got a course, and if you got an audience of marketers who want to make money.

Is that right?

I don’t know. My gut feeling is against it but my gut’s failed me many times before. I am willing to put it to the test and find out.

A few days ago, I listened to a podcast about the realities of the book publishing business:

1. Publishers publish a bunch of books, then sell the books to bookstores.

2. If the bookstores cannot sell all the books they bought, they send the books back to the publisher and ask for their money back.

3. In case the publisher is left holding a bunch of books no bookstores wants, they try to recoup at least some of the value. They auction off the books in a kind of fire sale auction to whoever is willing to pay for the lot (or any fraction of the lot).

4. The rest of the books, the ones that cannot be sold via the fire sale auction, are fed into a shredder, chopped up, and then turned into pulp, to recoup at least a few cents on the dollar of value.

With that preamble, lemme ask you:

Would you participate in my fire sale auction?

The offer on auction is the licensing and resell rights my Copy Riddles course, which currently retails for $997.

Would you bid $1 for the right to sell Copy Riddles yourself, forever, and keep every cent of the $997, or whatever you choose to sell it for?

Copy Riddles is the best thing I’ve created. Out of all my courses, books, and trainings, it’s likely to be useful to the greatest number of people. If anything I’ve created outlasts this newsletter, it will be Copy Riddles.

And yet, I haven’t been really selling it.

In part, it’s because I’ve gotten out of the “teach you copywriting” business.

In part, it’s because my list is growing so slowly and the price point of Copy Riddles is so high that it makes little sense for me to promote Copy Riddles regularly, since I have largely tapped out easy demand in my own list.

That said, Copy Riddles has still has brought in ~20k/year over the past few years, which I’ve made by running a creative and exciting promo for just a few days, once a year.

Would you want to sell Copy Riddles yourself? To your own audience or to other people’s audiences?

You’d be free to reposition it, free to repackage it, free to transform it into another format or AI tool or live workshop or audio book, or to break it up into pieces and sell it that way.

Of course, if I were to run this fire sale auction, I’d throw in some bonuses to make the auction offer more unique and exciting and FIRE.

But really, the core offer is Copy Riddles, and your right to sell it in perpetuity and keep all the money.

Would you bid $1 for that?

If you would, hit reply and let me know. Otherwise I’ll start priming my shredder and wood pulper, and try to reclaim at least a few cents of the $997 value.

I predict you will have your birthday in May

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Three things for you today:

#1. Experts make predictions

From Alan Weiss’s book, Million Dollar Consulting:

“Experts make predictions. They don’t fret about whether they’ll be right, they don’t keep score, and then have no regrets. If you’re afraid to make a prediction because you may be wrong, then you’re no expert.”

#2. The best 9-word email

Yesterday I was listening to examples of business owners using variants of Dean Jackson’s 9-word email (“Are you still interested in buying a house in Georgetown”).

All business owners had good results by sending out a 9-word email to their lists. But who had the best result?

A trainer/education provider for dental hygienists in Canada, because…

Apparently dental hygienists in Canada are supposed to have continuing medical education, and they get audited to make sure they are complying with this.

CRUCIAL: The audits all go out on the same day.

The trainer/education provider for dental hygienists simply sent out her 9-word (actually 6-word) email the day after the audits went out. The 6 words were:

“Are you being audited this year?”

Replies (and business) came fast and furious after that.

#3. I predict you will have your birthday in May

And if I am proven right, what better time to clean up all the latent demand from people on your list who have built a relationship with you, and have been meaning to give you money to get your help, but who haven’t gotten around to it?

Your birthday gives you a good “reason why” for creating a unique offer and running an email promo around it.

For bonus points, you can design your offer so it’s not just tied into a unique occasion in your life but tied into a unique occasion in your prospects lives, so they are doubly likely to take you up on your offer and to pay you good money.

Related to that, I have a special offer for you today:

It’s to get my help coming up with a birthday offer and promo for your list next month.

If you’re interested, hit reply and tell me which day in May your birthday is, and we can take it from there.

Want high-quality copywriting clients?

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The best-kept secrets of rich and well-connected copywriters

For years, they’ve privileges, perks, and pleasures beyond the reach of most people in the industry. Now you can too

I’m helping Svet Dimitrov with an offer he’s making available by auction.

Svet, as you might know, is a direct response copywriter who’s currently working as a copy chief for a 7-figure brand. (He worked as a copy chief with a different brand before.) He’s also got a side gig where he mentors copywriters and business owners with their copy.

Svet got his current copy chief role by networking in a hidden, secret, little known online hangout he calls the Golden Group.

Why haven’t copywriters been told about this group?

The Golden Group is a place where DR marketers and business owners hang out. It’s got fewer than 500 members. But to hear Svet tell it, the Golden Group is wildly engaged, and made up of business owners and preposterously high-quality marketers.

(Since Svet he got his copy chief role there by sending a few DMs in the Golden Group, who am I to question the quality of the people inside.)

Right now, Svet is offering to bring you into the Golden Group with him, and to help you get a copywriting client there.

He’s planning to make this offer via auction, with bidding starting at $1.

Specifically, Svet is offering to:

1. Get you into the Golden Group

2. Guide you, down to the behind-the-scenes DM, so you get connections leading to a direct response copywriting client out of the group

3. Copy chief you on the work you deliver for this client, so the client makes money from your copy and so they want to work with you and paying you, month after month after month

4. Guarantee your results — Svet will keep working with you, guiding you, and copy chiefing you, until you make back the entire winning auction bid

Discover the hidden secret to getting fast cash for your copywriting skills

Considering what Svet is really offering here, which is a way to very possibly make tens of thousands of dollars in the next few months, and hundreds of thousands of dollars down the line… and that he’s guaranteeing you will make your money back before he’s done with you… it would be reasonable for him to charge $10k-$15k for this offer up front.

But again, he’s making this available via auction.

Is a high-quality copywriting client something you’d bid $1 for?

How to create a conversation when people just reply “yes”

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Today, I had an exchange with a coaching client who I’d advised to send out some handraiser emails to his list.

(Handraiser email = email that invites people to reply with a “yes” if they are interested in learning more, or if they fit a certain profile.)

My dude sent out his handraiser email. He got a bunch of replies that said “yes.” He followed up with those people but then, like a pigeon with two broken wings, response fell off a cliff. Almost nobody replied.

My dude wrote me to say:

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What I’m coming up against is a sense that I really don’t know how to create a conversation with next-to-no interest from the other person. If the other person gives almost nothing in the form of effort or interest (which fits when I ask them a yes/no question) I’m struggling to manufacture that interest without being manipulative.

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There’s a “glib” and a “responsible” way of dealing with this problem.

The “glib” way is a marketing and business practice I call factoring out.

For my math nerds out there, factoring out goes back to the heady and self-conscious days of 7th-grade algebra:

If you have an expression like 2x + 2y, in algebra they teach you that you can turn that into 2(x + y). You can factor out the 2 so that your inside expression (x + y) remains blessedly free of 2.

Simple enough, right? I hope it’s simple enough to use as an analogy even for the non-math nerds.

In any case, here’s what factoring out translates to your marketing and business:

Rather than hoping that your prospects will do action X at some point down the line, you can force them to take action X as a condition for engaging with you at all.

So for example, rather than hoping for people to reply to your followup question, make answering your followup question a condition to even replying to your email in the first place.

Instead of saying, “Reply to this email and say MORE INFO NOW”… tell people, “Reply to this email and tell me a little bit about your current situation.”

In other words, the factoring out solution to the problem of creating a conversation when people just reply “yes”… is to stop having people reply with just “yes.”

It’s a super effective and practical technique that goes way beyond handraiser campaigns. But maybe it’s a little too glib for you in the present situation.

Like I said, there’s also the “responsible” way of dealing with this problem.

That’s about having a structured way of engaging people who reply with just a “yes,” and guiding them in a proven fashion from that curt reply all the way to an actual sale, even a high-ticket sale, all over email.

Is this something you want more info on?

I have a resource to point you to.

It tells you exactly what to say over 1-1 emails to get people to engage with you in a way that leads to a sale.

It’s not free or even cheap.

If that doesn’t deter you, reply to this email and tell me a bit about your situation when it comes to selling over email.

How to promote yourself with as much energy and enthusiasm as you promote other people

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I was talking to a dude today. He’s a very established, skilled, and successful copywriter who works with big clients. He also has his own personal email list and quality offers that genuinely help people.

At one point, the dude complained that, when he promotes other people’s offers, whether for clients or affiliate offers to his list, he can make his pitches for these offer amazing, incredible, stupendous.

“Why can’t I write this way about the my stuff?” he said.

It’s a legit problem, and one I’ve had in the past.

It’s not just a matter of being coy, of not wanting to brag about your own stuff.

A part of the problem is that we’re all simply too close to our own offers, and we take them for granted, or we even focus on the deficiencies, limitations, and problematic corner cases. Beyond that, there are even neurological reasons why it’s dramatically harder to promote yourself with as much energy and enthusiasm as you can muster to promote somebody else.

Well… until now.

(Get ready. I’m about to make you a pitch.)

I have a way out of this predicament, a mechanism, a “Light Bulb Mental Switch.”

It allows you to promote your own offers with the same persuasive energy that you can summon when you promote others’ offers.

It also doubles as a litmus test, a way to double-check your marketing after it’s written to make sure it passes the test. It tells you how to tweak it in order to transform it, if it doesn’t immediately pass.

This Light Bulb Mental Switch is magical, mysterious, and multifaceted.

It helps you promote your own offers the way you promote others. It also helps you promote others even more effectively than you can now.

And now, the deal:

A 24-hour disappearing bonus.

I will reveal to you this Light Bulb Mental Switch if you get my Most Valuable Email training.

Do so and you will learn my Most Valuable Email trick, which I still stand by as being most valuable, all these years after I first hit upon it, and thousands of emails later.

The Most Valuable Email trick is not stupid stories, not predictable personal reveals, and not rehashed references to Batman movies or Game of Thrones episodes.

The Most Valuable Email trick is something entirely new different, much like my Light Bulb Mental Switch.

Get Most Valuable Email, write me before tomorrow at 8:31pm CET, and ask to have the Light Bulb Mental Switch, and I will reply to you and share it with you.

(Don’t write me after the deadline. This is a 24-hour-only deal.)

24 hours from now, you can be nothing but one day older — or you can be on your way to getting rich by promoting yourself the way you really deserve. You decide.

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

My overly optimistic book-writing plans

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A few days ago, I sent an email in which I collected 10 old emails I’d written with personal stories inside. A reader replied to that to say:

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I really loved reading the story about your mystical experience and how it translated into customer insights. Honestly it was one of the best emails I’ve gotten from you all year.

I’m super curious do you have more stuff like this coming up in your emails?

Also, where are you at with writing that Insight Marketing Bible?

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Huh? Insight Marketing Bible? I had to check the email in question to remind myself of what this could possibly be.

Turns out Insight Marketing Bible was my early title for a book I have been working on for the past 6 years, on the topic of creating insight in readers’ minds.

If you’ve been waiting with bated breath for that, don’t worry. It will come next year. I promise.

This year though, my overly optimistic plan is to write and publish a different book, The Art of Charging More. Just this morning, I sat down and restarted work on this new book by writing up v4 of outline. I really feel like this might be the one.

Point being, writing and finishing a book is a giant pain in the ass, at least if you’re someone like me and you care about doing a good job and telling people something new and valuable.

And yet I keep writing books, or trying to, and I keep justifying to myself that the long-term payoff is worth it. And no doubt that books open doors that nothing else can, plus they have a host of other knock on benefits, plus I guess some part of me enjoys the frustration.

Anyways.

Today, I would like to turn you onto a new report published by Kieran Drew, which shows you “4 steps to build your business through writing online.”

As you might know, Kieran is a former dentist turned online creator, who has built up a $500k/year business and an audience of over 250k people, and who’s done it all by writing.

Kieran boils down what he did and shows you in a straightforward way how you might do the same.

Except, just last week, I wrote an email in which I highlighted Kieran’s latest public earnings report, in which he honestly and transparently says he was actually in the red for the month of March.

(Kieran’s response to my email: “I feel assaulted by your hungover words.”)

The fact is, Kieran has been writing a book of his own and prioritizing it over other things like creating new products or promoting old ones.

That’s cost him short-term time and money, but it’s in the service of a greater business good to come.

In any case, Kieran is coming out of his book-writing cave, and he has been plans for the coming weeks and months. If you want to see what those plans are first-hand, or if you want to learn about writing online and profiting from your writing from somebody who’s done it quickly and at a very high level, then here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/4-steps