Sexy firefighters running around for nobody’s entertainment

It’s 8:45am as I start writing this email. Right now, off my balcony, I can see a tremendous show.

I live next door to a fire station, and the firemen are doing a public demonstration on the street in front of the station.

​​They are dressed up in their sexiest firefighting suits and they are running around two smashed up cars, one of which is burned to a crisp. The cars were placed there earlier in the morning, inside of a fenced-in area, so the firemen could show how they cut a car open and rescue somebody inside.

Like I say, it’s a tremendous show. Spectacular. My 6-year-old self would have given up a year of eating KitKats in order to see it.

And yet, as I watch this show off my balcony, there’s a total audience of about a dozen adults gathered on the street.

I mean, it’s 8:45am. People are either at home or on their way to work or stuck in the prison of school. Besides, it’s not a busy street. And as far as I know, this demonstration was not advertised anywhere — again, I live right next door.

You’ve probably heard the words of the godfather of modern advertising, Claude Hopkins. Hopkins said, “No argument in the world can ever compare with one dramatic demonstration.”

True, but:

The most famous example of a dramatic demonstration was Elisha Otis. Otis changed the landscape of American cities when he demonstrated his crash-proof elevator — to the masses milling about the New York Crystal Palace Exposition, which attracted 1.1 million visitors.

When Claude Hopkins himself created the world’s largest cake to promote Cotosuet, a kind of early margarine, he made a deal with a giant new department store which had just opened in Chicago.

​​The cake would go smack dab in the middle of the grocery department on the fifth floor. ​​Hopkins then ran big ads in all the Chicago newspapers to advertise the fact.

​​Over the course of a week, 105,000 people climbed the four flights of stairs to see that cake.

And when master showman Harry Houdini did his straitjacket escapes, while hanging upside 150 feet in the air, with only his feet tied to a pulley on the roof of some building, he made sure to hang off the building of the town’s main newspaper, guaranteeing a front page story the day before his show. Houdini did all these public escapes at exactly 12 noon, when lunchtime crowds could assemble.

Point being, as Gary Halbert might put it:

Advertise your advertising.

But maybe you say, “Yeah yeah but how? How exactly do I advertise my advertising?”

I gave you three examples right above. If that ain’t enough, here’s a fourth:

The waiting list for my future group coaching program on email copywriting. The waiting list serves as a waiting list, for sure. But it also serves as advertising for the actual advertising I will do when I do make that group coaching available. Very meta.

If you are interested in writing emails that people actually like reading and that they actually buy from, then you might be a good fit for my future group coaching. Or you might not. ​​In case you’d like to find out more about it, the first step is to get on my daily email list. Click here to do that.

Discipline in print

Last night, I got a 4-word reply to my email about how quickly memory fails. A reader with a pseudonymous email address replied with just the following aimless question:

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John How r u?

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I got out my 3-ring binder of previous reader replies. I flipped through the pages in search of this reader’s email address. Sure enough, at the bottom of page 22, I found it. This reader had written me before. On January 24 of this year, in response to an email about teaching people to value your offer, this reader had written me to say:

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Who the fuck do you think you are?

===

Now I remembered. I even wrote an email about that reply back in January.

Back then, I decided to keep this guy or gal on my list because 1) I don’t get many abusive replies from readers, and I’m more amused than bothered when it does happen and 2) I thought this reader might provide me fodder for an email in the future. That’s just what happened.

I proactively unsubscribed my “How r u” reader last night. Again, not because I was annoyed or bothered by the pointless reply.

“How r u” reader simply became a noble sacrifice to demonstrate an immensely important and fundamental point about all marketing, and in particular, about email marketing.

I honestly cannot overstate the importance of the following point. Even more so if you’re somebody like me — far from a born marketer, salesman, or promoter, and coming from a rather permissive and lax family background.

The point is this:

A key to all marketing, and perhaps the key to email marketing, is to train your audience.

Once upon a time, when I was very naive, I thought marketing was simply about getting the word out about what you have. “Whole frozen turkey, 16 lbs., $25.91. Walmart.”

Later, I figured out that marketing actually changes people — creates new desires, habits, beliefs. “Welcome to Marlboro country.”

But for some reason — again, I’m far from a born marketer or salesman – it took me a long, long while to connect the fact that 1) if you are creating marketing and 2) since marketing changes people then 3) you should consciously create marketing that changes people in a way that suits you.

This is what I mean when I say, train your audience. Tell ’em what to do. Reward those who do it. Punish those who don’t. And make an example of ’em.

100 years ago, John E. Kennedy said marketing is salesmanship in print.

Today, John E. Bejakovic is telling you, marketing is discipline in print.

Of course, maybe you don’t agree with me. Maybe you think I’m saying something offensive or crude or just wrong. In that case, I invite you to write in and tell me so. I promise to read what you write me, and to reply as politely and thoughtfully as I know how. Perhaps publicly.

In any case, let’s get on to the discipline:

For the past couple days, I’ve been talking about a group coaching program I’m planning for the future. The goal of this coaching program is to get people writing daily emails, regularly and well.

Right now, if you’re interested, you can get on the waiting list for that program. The waiting list is the only place I will make this program available.

And as I say on the optin page for the waiting list:

If you do sign up to the waiting list, you will get automated email from me with a few questions. Answering those questions will take all of two minutes, but it will give me valuable information to see whether this group coaching could actually be right for you. Please reply to that email within 24 hours with your answers. I will take anyone who doesn’t do this off the waiting list.

So far, a good number have signed up for the waiting list and have written me in reply to that automated email. I wrote back to each of them individually to say thanks.

​But a few people have signed up to the waiting list, and then failed to reply to the automated email within 24 hours.

Maybe they changed their minds about the coaching. Maybe they simply forgot. Maybe they were testing me.

Whatever the reason may be, I took them off the waiting list, and I prevented them from getting back on. They might be fine people, but they are clearly not good prospects for a strict coaching program, which is what I intend for this program to be.

If you’re interested in this coaching program, then the first step is to get on my email list. Click here to do so.

I bet you already knew what I’ll write about in this email

Last night I went to see Air, the new Ben Affleck movie about how Nike signed Michael Jordan.

Air is a typical rousing Hollywood stuff — a scrappy underdog does what it takes to win. It was fun to watch, but as the movie neared its emotional climax, I started to feel a kind of gnawing in my stomach.

I kept thinking, “This is it? This is what life is all about?”

A bunch of overworked, overweight, aging people in an office, hollering and high-fiving each other and gazing knowingly into each others’ eyes after their one triumph — getting a 21-year-old basketball player to agree to wear one kind of shoe instead of another kind of shoe?

But the movie is set in the 1980s. Maybe it reflects the corporate ideals of that era.

Anyways, let’s get back on track:

At the start of the movie, a convenience store clerk chats with the main character, played by Matt Damon. The clerk obviously knows a lot about basketball, and is sure Jordan won’t turn into anything big. The Matt Damon character is the only one who believes.

By the end of the movie, thanks to Matt Damon’s dogged believing, Nike signs Jordan in spite of impossible odds. Jordan immediately becomes a huge star. Nike goes on to sell a hundred million pairs of Air Jordans in the first year alone.

Matt Damon goes back to the convenience store and chats up the clerk again. The clerk nods his head. “I always knew Jordan would be a big thing,” he says.

“We all knew,” the Matt Damon character chuckles as he walks out the store.

As I’m sure you already knew, human memory is fallible. We forget, misremember, and flat-out make up stuff if it suits us and matches our sense of self.

You might think this only happens over the span of months or years, like it did with that convenience store clerk in Air.

But maybe you saw — and failed to remember — a new scientific study that went viral earlier this month. Scientists managed to show that people misremember stuff that happened as recently as half a second ago. And if the scientists stretched it out just a bit longer before asking — two seconds, three seconds — people’s memory became still worse and more inaccurate.

So my point for you, specifically for how you deal with yourself, is to write stuff down. Because you sure as hell won’t remember it.

And my point for you, specifically for how you deal with your prospects, is to keep reminding them, nudging them, and telling them the same thing you told them a million times before.

You rarely have people’s full attention. And even when you do have their full attention, they forget. Even if you just told them a second ago.

The only way your prospects are sure not to forget, and to maybe do what you want, is if you remind them today, tomorrow, the day after, and so on, hundreds of millions of Air Jordans into the future.

Which brings me to the group coaching I am planning. I first wrote about it yesterday. Now that I mention it, I’m sure you remember.

This planned group coaching is about email copywriting for daily emails — so you can remind your prospects of your offer over and over, in a way that they actually enjoy.

If you’re interested in this coaching, the first step is to get onto my email list. Click here to do that.

What everybody should know about this fixing problems business

Going back to the imposter phenomenon article I wrote about a couple days ago:

Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes are two psychologists who first coined, defined, and publicized the idea of imposter phenomenon, which later grew in the public mind into imposter syndrome.

What can you do if you want to get rid of those feelings of being a fake? The Internet is full of advice. Here’s what Clance and Imes themselves found to work in their clinical practices:

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Clance has seen clients healed not by success but by the kind of resonance she found with Imes. Bolstered and sustained by group therapy with other women — it’s easier to believe other women aren’t impostors — they can then bring this recognition of others’ delusion back to themselves.

===

In other words, if you feel like a fake, and you don’t want to feel like a fake no more, then the answer is not to push on even harder. The answer is— well, let me get into the marketing and business advice now.

Last week, I went to a meetup in Seville hosted by Sean D’Souza. The meetup lasted for three hours and lots of ideas came up. At the end of it all, I decided to take just four of those many ideas and remember them. One of those four is exactly that Clance and Imes realization, but applied to your business.

If you have a problem in your business, says Sean, don’t work on fixing it. Instead, work on fixing somebody else’s business.

This isn’t a matter of being altruistic, or of “serving” others as a means to getting what you want.

It’s simply a fact of human psychology: There are different pathways in our brains that go into thinking about ourselves and what belongs to us, and thinking about others and their stuff. We know this because some unlucky bastard in 19th-century America got a metal stake driven through his eye socket, taking out a large chunk of his brain. He lived on without seeming harm. But he became terrible at making decisions in his own life — all while still being able to give perfectly sane advice to others.

It also works without the metal stake in your eye socket.

Like Clance and Imes found, so has Sean D’Souza found – it’s easier to see what other businesses could do better — and then bring this recognition of others’ opportunities back to your own business.

So try that.

And now, since I’ve already referred to two topics I’ve written about over the past week, let me end with a third such topic:

Three days ago, I ran a little poll in this newsletter. I asked readers which of three group coaching/workshops they might be most interested in.

The results are in. And the winner, both in terms of the total number of votes, and in terms of being most in line with what I want to do with this newsletter, is a group coaching/workshop on email copywriting.

I’m not offering this group coaching/workshop yet. I also haven’t decided when I will.

But if this is something you are interested in, then the only way to get in, once I do offer it, is to be on my email list. To do that, click here and sign up.

How to spot a lie

Four days ago, I sent out an email inviting readers to reply with one truth and one lie about themselves. It turned out to be both fun and informative.

I got hobuncha responses.

Inevitably, a few people didn’t follow the instructions I gave. Not much I can do there.

Others followed the instructions perfectly but then went one further, and told me which of their statements was the lie and which was the truth. That’s my fault. I forgot you can never be too specific in your CTA.

But the vast majority of people played the game as intended. As a result, I found out some interesting and true stuff about my readers. A curated selection of the most intriguing:

“In a small town in Thailand, a monkey on top of a tree threw a stump which hit my forehead and crushed part of my teeth.”

“Last April I appeared on the UK TV quiz show Countdown, 24 years after first applying as a 12-year-old and being told to wait for my vocabulary to develop.”

“I was almost bitten alive by a poorly-anesthetized tiger in an animal photoshoot session in Thailand when I was just a high-school student.”

“As a senior in high school, at a small, private day school in Harrisburg, PA, I set 2 school records in basketball. At 5’7”, I scored 44 points in one game and 309 points for the season.

So how did I do? Could I distinguish the true statements like the ones above, and separate them from the lies, like the following:

“I met Kevin Costner at the premiere of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and he was quite rude.”

“My daughter packed her own school lunch today and it was only waffles and syrup.”

“I got hit over the head with a stray chair at a pro wrestling show, and got to go backstage afterwards to meet the roster.”

I will tell you honestly, I dug myself into a hole at the start. I made a lot of wrong guesses. But I slowly realized two things kept happening over and over:

#1. When one statement was hyper-specific and the other was vague, it was more likely that the vague statement was true and the hyper-specific was false

#2. When one statement was outrageous and the other was bland, it was more likely that the outrageous statement was true and the bland statement was false

The common element to both of these realizations is “persuasion knowledge.” It’s kind of like the battle of wits between the Dread Pirate Roberts and Vizzini the Sicilian in the Princess Bride.

Bejacco the Croatian: “Only a great fool would not look to specific details to verify a statement. But I am not a great fool, and you know that I am not a great fool, therefore I can clearly not choose the hyper-specific statement in front of me!”

Spoiler alert:

In The Princess Bride, the Dread Pirate Roberts wins the battle of wits because he has developed immunity to iocaine powder, a deadly, odorless, tasteless poison that he puts into both cups, the one in front of him, and the one in front of Vizzini.

Likewise, over the course of playing this truth/lie game, I developed immunity to the persuasion knowledge of my readers. I then went on a tear, guessing almost all of the last two dozen truths/lies right, using the two realizations above and a few more like them. In spite of the bad start, I eventually ended up in the black, with more right guesses than not.

My ultimate point for you is a fundamental truth, something I heard a very great copywriter say once.

As a marketer, you have no power. Your only power is anticipation — knowing how your prospects are likely to think and behave, and adjusting for that.

And with that, let me end this email with a tease. I won’t tell you which great copywriter said the above. But I will tell you it is one of the A-list copywriters I built my little 10 Commandments book around.

​​If you haven’t gotten that yet, and you would like to see who is inside, and maybe unravel the riddle of who said that anticipation is the only power marketers have, you can find the book below:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandment

My diagnosis is that you’re trying to normalize rather than pathologize

I first wrote about Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in this newsletter in August 2021. Clance and Imes are the two psychologists who, back in 1978, wrote a paper in which they defined something called imposter phenomenon.

The interesting thing is they called it imposter phenomenon, not imposter syndrome. From a recent article in The New Yorker:

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Every time Imes hears the phrase “impostor syndrome,” she told me, it lodges in her gut. It’s technically incorrect, and conceptually misleading. As Clance explained, the phenomenon is “an experience rather than a pathology,” and their aim was always to normalize this experience rather than to pathologize it.

===

It might seem like a trivial difference, phenomenon rather than syndrome. It’s not trivial. Like Clance says in that quote, their goal was just to point out, normalize, say, “it’s okay that you feel like a faker, because others do too.”

But that’s not what the public wanted.

The public wanted a concrete disease, a disorder, or at least a syndrome — something unique and special they can point to and explain why they feel uncertain or uncomfortable or why their life is not how they imagine it. The pathological imposter syndrome does that, the wishy-washy, normal, everyday imposter phenomenon does not.

So the public took Clance and Imes’s idea, and they made it their own. Imposter syndrome.

But my real point for you is not the word choice of phenomenon vs syndrome. Sure, it is important, but it’s also the only part that Clance and Imes didn’t get right in their original paper, at least from a persuasion perspective.

My point for you is that difference between concrete vs. wishy washy, unique vs. everyday, pathological vs. normal, all of which Clance and Imes, whether they wanted to or not, definitely did get right in their paper.

People are looking for answers. They want to know to why their life is the way it is, and now the way they want it to be.

If, like Clance and Imes, you give people a satisfying answer to that eternal question, it can literally make you a star in your field, and can have your ideas spread on their own, like fire among dry brush that hasn’t seen water for years.

Maybe this entire email speaks little or not at all to you.

In that case, my diagnosis is that you’re being too nice, and you’re trying to normalize your prospects’ experiences, to give them small incremental improvements and understandings, rather than a total change in perspective in how they view their world.

My prognosis in that case is that you will struggle to be heard, and struggle to make sales. It could even be fatal to your business.

If you want a fix for that unfortunate and dangerous condition, then there’s a pill you can take. I even named it for you above.

But enough of playing doctor.

Back in my own house, the fact remains that I’m still in the process of spring cleaning. I’m throwing out old furniture and old courses, dusting off wardrobes and sales letters, and planning out how to redecorate my living room and my newsletter.

While that’s going on, I will just point you to my only book that’s currently available for sale, and also the only offer I have that doesn’t cost $100 or more. If you’re curious:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Why good customers hate going to museums

I was reading an article a few days ago about the oldest living aristocratic widow. Just my kind of material:

Lady Anne Glenconner is 90 years old. She served as maid of honor at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, and was lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret, Queen Elizabeth’s sister. She was also wife of Colin Tennant, 3rd Baron Glenconner, who seems to have been a rich, eccentric, and volatile man.

This insight from Lady Anne about her husband caught my eye — it might be interesting if you are ever trying to sell yerself, or something you created:

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“He couldn’t bear to be static,” Glenconner told me. “He always wanted to be rushing around changing things, buying things. We had thirty Lucian Freuds at one point, and he sold them all. I once said to him, in a rather pathetic way, ‘You don’t seem to mind making these collections and then selling them. I like the things I have collected.’ And he said, ‘Oh, no! Once I’ve had them, and the opportunity to look at them, I want to be on to something else.’ “Tennant “hated going to museums,” Glenconner added. “Do you know why? Nothing’s for sale.”

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I think the point is clear, so I won’t insult you by spelling it out all over the place. Instead, let me tell you something personal:

I have nothing for sale today. It’s worse than a museum around here.

I’m changing, revamping, restructuring, and repositioning what I do with this newsletter.

Notice I don’t say, “with this business.” As I’ve said many times, and will continue to say, I’ve never looked at this newsletter as a business first, even though it’s gotten to a place of making me a neat and tidy source of income.

Today, I closed off my Copy Riddles program. I made more money with it over the past 24 hours than in any 24-hour span since I launched it. That’s because it’s never coming back as a standalone course.

So nothing for sale today. But I do have an offer. And it’s to get onto my email newsletter. Yes, it’s a little like a museum on there right now. But I will have new things for sale again one day soon, and my email newsletter will be the only place where you can get that. If you’d like to be in the right place at the right time, sign up now for my newsletter.

Last day ever to buy Copy Riddles

Today is the last day ever to buy Copy Riddles. At 2:31 EST tomorrow, Tuesday April 18, I will turn off the shopping cart for Copy Riddles and stop making this program available for purchase.

In the future, depending on interest, I will from time to time offer 2-month group coaching around the content inside Copy Riddles, the way I did for a small number of people last year.

The price for that future group coaching, if it does happen, will be at least $1,000 higher than the price for current self-study Copy Riddles course. This coaching will also only be only available to a few people at a time when it is available at all, since my personal time and attention will be required.

All that’s to say, if you’ve already gone through Copy Riddles, or you never had any interest in doing so, then unfortunately I have nothing for sale to offer you in this email. I promise to do better in the future.

On the other hand, if you have been thinking about Copy Riddles but you’ve been on the fence — an uncomfortable and jagged place — then today is the last day to buy Copy Riddles as a standalone, self-study course.

And if you somehow managed to miss the dozens of emails I’ve sent about Copy Riddles over the past days, months, and years, and you’re wondering what this program is really about, you can read the full details, including the experience of many people who have gone through Copy Riddles already, at the link below:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

A very likely-sounding story

This morning, right before starting work on this email, I checked WhatsApp on my laptop. I saw a text from last night that a friend had sent me:

“Kuki [the friend’s cat] broke your glass after all! And was joyfully playing with the glass pieces..”

The background is that last night this friend and I met up to go for a walk. My friend was late – getting her hair done, because she’s traveling today for some business thing — so I walked up the road to meet her.

​​We walked for a while, and I told her about my experiences at the Sean D’Souza Seville meetup a few days ago.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” my friend said. “How about we stop by my place?” We were right next to her house, which is close to the Arc de Triomf in downtown Barcelona.

So we went to her place. Bathroom finished, we sat around in the kitchen for a moment having a glass of water.

My friend has a cat, from what I can tell a Siamese cat, which is deaf and doesn’t have good motor control and which has some other deficits, which I forget — maybe it’s that it can’t read or write.

​​In spite of these handicaps, the cat still maintains some usual endearing cat behaviors. For example, the little bastard kept walking around the kitchen counter, repeatedly nudging my empty water glass towards the edge. “Oh sweetheart,” I said to the cat with menace in my voice, “that’s not okay.” My friend looked at the cat lovingly.

Anyways, eventually we left the cat alone and went outside to finish our walk. Actually, we also stopped to get food.

Even though the first place we stopped at was entirely empty, they told us that without a reservation we couldn’t get a table. So we wound up at some “Argentinian” place, which really just turned out to be the standard tapas fare you get anywhere in Barcelona.

Dinner in stomach, I walked my friend back to her place, wished her a good trip, and then walked home myself. And then this morning I got that text from her about the cat breaking the glass after all. “Actually just as I entered the house,” my friend wrote, “in time for me to witness it.”

So what do you think of my story? Pretty pointless, I know, but does it at least ring true?

It should. I won’t tell you whether the story is actually true or not, but I will tell you that I worked actively to make it sound more credible.

And you can do the same.

I’m not telling you to go all psychopath, and simply study the elements of truthful stories so you can embellish lies and make them sound true.

But — if you do have a true story, and nobody cares, or nobody believes you, then massaging your true story to make it sound more credible — well, maybe there’s money or influence to be gained in that.

In any case, you can study my pointless but likely-sounding story above and try to figure out what I did to make it sound more true.

Or you can take me up on my offer, which is just to sign up to my daily email newsletter. It won’t help you figure out what I did in the story above, but maybe, tomorrow or the day after, I will write more about this topic.

Invest in your 1000 true high-paying fans

On February 1st, I got an email with the subject line, “Invest in your newsletter.”

“I sure like the sound of investing,” I said to myself. “And I do have a newsletter.”

The background is this:

I had recently signed up for Beehiiv, which is something like Substack, only you have to pay a monthly fee for it.

Beehiiv was created by Tyler Denk, who was an early employee at Morning Brew. Morning Brew is now a $75+ million business, based around a daily email that covers the day’s business news.

I signed up for Beehiiv because I’ve started a Morning Brew-like newsletter. It has nothing to do with marketing or copywriting, and it’s in a different format than what you are currently reading.

So that’s the background. Now that we’re caught up, let’s get back to that February 1st “Invest in your newsletter” email.

Tyler of Beehiiv was writing me that email to give me the opportunity to pay him $499 for his course on starting a newsletter.

So I did.

​​I sent Tyler $499 and I got access to this course, called Newsletter XP. And I got to listen to a bunch of big people in the newsletter space, including Morning Brew’s founder and CEO, share their ideas experiences on content strategy and growth and newsletter monetization.

People in this “newsletter operator” space don’t seem to be as miserly as people in the direct marketing space about sharing ideas that are normally behind a paywall. In fact, Tyler encouraged people to tweet the most valuable ideas they got from his Newsletter XP course.

I don’t tweet, so let me email you the most valuable idea I got from this course.

This most valuable idea came in the next-to-last session. One of the guests in that session was Codie Sanchez.

​​Codie runs Contrarian Thinking, a newsletter with some 250,000 subscribers, about buying and selling businesses. She’s built an eight-figure info business off the back of that newsletter, plus maybe several other 7-figure businesses also, plus I guess even the newsletter itself pays her well since she can promote relevant money-related offers.

And maybe most impressive of all, Codie has done all this since corona started.

Anyways, here’s what Codie said that I found most valuable:

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I sort of believe your 1000 true fans — Kevin Kelly talks about this — they’re actually the fans you should charge the most to. Because they are your biggest fans. And where most people screw up when they do paid products is they launch their first product for $10 a month. Their 1000 true fans buy it for 10 bucks. They have cultivated this group of people who buy too low priced of products, which doesn’t allow you to create a real business which can further serve them.

===

That’s it. That’s the most valuable idea that stuck with me from the first time going through Newsletter XP.

I’m thinking about it as I work on building up, and monetizing my other newsletter.

Maybe it’s something you too can think about if you are creating an audience, a list, a newsletter, whatever. Maybe you can think of it as the difference between salting the soil in your garden, just because salt is cheap and easy to get, or investing a bit of time to plant a walnut tree that actually takes root and provides shade and fruit for you and yours for years to come.

But enough of the Magic of Channeling Warren Buffett.

Unrelated to the core of this email, if you want to invest in copywriting skills, which can help if you are building up an audience or an email newsletter, I have a quick, compact, exercise-based course on that. For more info on it:

https://bejakovic.com/cr