A secret only elite master persuaders know

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This past January, I wrote an email about my “5-year rule.” Before starting any new project, I simply ask myself:

“Would I be ok working on this for the next five years?”

If my answer is, “No way!” or “Really, I want to do this for a year or max two and get out,” then I don’t allow myself to even start.

To which, I got the following response from a reader:

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Where were you two years ago with this advice John?! Really – you’re late to my party!!!

Seriously, thanks for this. I remember your earlier email about this and it made sense then, and it makes just as much sense now.

Is it ridiculous to say that I still don’t really know what I would like to be doing in five years? Sigh.

===

Like I told this reader, I wouldn’t stress about it — I feel most folks, myself included, don’t really know what they want. But we do know pretty well what we don’t want.

That’s why massively successful opportunity offers are so often really not about the promise, but about implied escape:

* Lazy Man’s Way to Riches [DON’T WANNA WORK, EVEN IF IT’S TO GET RICH]

* Four Hour Workweek [DON’T WANNA WORK]

* 7 Steps To Freedom [REALLY JUST DON’T WANNA WORK OR HAVE PEOPLE TELL ME WHAT TO DO]

So there you go. If you’re searching for your prospects’ deepest desire, maybe it’s just to escape. If so, it makes sense to call it out, or even put it in your product name.

But maybe escape is not your prospects’ deepest desire. Maybe it’s something else. In which case, I got some good news, some bad news for you.

The bad news is, as with escape above, your prospects are rarely ever going to tell you their deepest desires straight out. The fact is, they probably don’t know themselves. At least not consciously. And if they do know, they won’t admit it when you ask them.

The good news is, there aren’t all that many of these fundamental desires to go around. So you can just make a list of them, and then test them out against each other with your audience, and see which one gets a best response. For example, by putting different ones in your subject line.

If you want a list of deepest desires I myself assembled, you can find that in round 19 of my Copy Riddles program. I call this list the Dirty Dozen.

I didn’t pull this list out of thin air or my deep understanding of human nature — my understanding ain’t that deep.

Instead, I pulled the Dirty Dozen together by looking at what top copywriters were really doing in their copy — beyond just selling the main promise and showing the proof for it. Sometimes — not always, but often — there were other, hidden, emotional appeals in there. Deep stuff, dark stuff, dirty stuff, which I ended up putting into that list.

Anyways, maybe I’ll go ahead and take my own advice. And if you’d like to do the same, you can find the Dirty Dozen, and much more stuff that nobody’s ever told you about, inside my Copy Riddles program here:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

One more day

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I had today’s email 90% written this morning before I went to for the meetup organized by Sean D’Souza. ​​Now, after the meetup, my head is swimming so I decided to put finishing that email on hold. Instead, let me share just one surprising idea I heard today.

“When are you traveling back to Barcelona?” Sean asked me. I told him, tomorrow night.

Sean explained. “The value of a meet up or conference is in the plane ride home. There are always people who leave right after the event and I always tell them it’s such a waste. Better to take an extra day, stay in that place, walk around.”

Sean’s point is that when you go to a conference or a meetup or an in-person course, you get exposed to dozens or hundreds of ideas.

It’s possible you knew many of these ideas before, but somehow they have more impact now. They are presented in a new setting, when you’re out of your routine, when you’re paying more attention, when you’re more able and willing to be influenced.

But which one or two of the hundreds of new ideas should you focus on? And how to make them relevant in what you specifically are doing?

That’s work for your brain to figure out, while you enjoy and relax and sight-see and keep yourself out of your routine for one more day.

And then, on the plane ride home, something emerges, like Excalibur in the hand of the Lady of the Lake, rising above the surface that separates your conscious awareness from all the dark and deep brain processes underneath.

So that’s what I’m gonna do. Maybe tomorrow, on my flight home, I will experience some sort of breakthrough or moment of insight. Or maybe not. In any case, Seville is very cute, almost unbelievably so. I’m going to go enjoy it today.

Meanwhile, if by chance you need or want copywriting skills, you might be interested in what I offer inside my Copy Riddles course. For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

I fly to Sevilla to meet Sean D’Souza

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I’m on the plane as I write this, wedged into the middle seat, surrounded by dozens of conversations in Catalan and Spanish, waiting for the plane to take off. ​​I’m flying from Barcelona to Sevilla. The occasion is a meet-up organized by Sean D’Souza.

Sean is literally a legend in my world. Because Sean is an online marketer, and because he was already successful back when I was just getting started and knew nothing about nothing — except that there are successful people like Sean.

But even now that I know something more, Sean is still worth looking to and learning from. Because he does things differently from everybody else.

I remember a talk Sean gave for Ken McCarthy’s System Club. Over the course of an hour, Sean laid out his counterintuitive but effective, consumption-over-conversion way to run his info publishing business.

At the end of the presentation, somebody in the audience raised his hand. “This all sounds great Sean,” the audience member said. “But do you have any numbers to show your consumption-first approach works better than what we are all doing already?”

Without any bluster, Sean said, “I’m not trying to prove anything to you. If you find this consumption idea works for you, use it. If it doesn’t work for you, no problem.”

By the way, I’ve found that to be a great attitude to take whenever people ask me to explain myself. It doesn’t have to be confrontational, and it doesn’t have to be stated explicitly. ​​But anyways, let me get back on track:

I’ve largely taken Sean’s consumption-first message to heart.

​​It informs how I write this newsletter and how I run my own little info publishing business.

​​And it’s part of the reason why today, some five years after I first heard Sean’s System Club talk, I am willing to get on a plane and fly to another city, just because I like the idea of having coffee with Sean and having a person-to-person conversation with him.

Maybe, like that guy in Sean’s audience, you say that sounds great — for me. But maybe you prefer hard conversion rates and sales numbers and certainty that what you are doing is the proven way to success in marketing.

In that case, let me point you to my Copy Riddles program. It’s all about proven sales numbers and hard conversion rates.

Copy Riddles is the pinnacle of the Darwinian evolution of direct response copywriting, reached through millions of dollars in tested advertising, and boiled down to improbable but highly potent combinations of just a few dozen words, also known as bullets.

If you feel like running a numbers-based, conversion-first marketing business, Copy Riddles can quickly get key copywriting skills into your head.

On the other hand, if you like running a fuzzy, numbers-optional, consumption-first marketing business, it also make good senses to get those key copywriting skills into your head, and early.

It’s what I’ve done, and it’s what Sean did also. If you read his his blog or his paid products, you will see frequent reference to and use of copywriting principles and ideas, taken from A-list copywriters and marketers.

In any case, I’m not here to prove anything to you. But if are interested in Copy Riddles and in getting copywriting skills into your head, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Old reader asks new question about copywriting self-challenge

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Last week, I wrote an email about how during the month of March, I got some surprising sales of existing offers, like Copy Riddles and Most Valuable Email.

​​​​Many of those sales came from long-standing readers, who had heard the pitch for these courses dozens of times before, but somehow only decided to buy now.

To which I got a reply from reader Christian Calderan, who’s been on my list for going on two years:

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I was one of those people who finally bought Copy Riddles (Been wanting to pull the trigger on it for ages), and it just finally clicked.

Speaking of which, it’s a fantastic course! I’m absolutely loving it and the breakdown of each technique when you reveal it is freakin’ awesome. I’m definitely the type of person who needs to repeat things over and over, but I’m genuinely looking forward to doing this course again.

===

Christian and I exchanged a few more followup emails. He asked in addition:

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If you’ve got a product and the sales letter in hand, would you recommend trying to break down bullets and then rewrite them yourself as your own “extra” riddles?

I’ve got a few of Ben Settle’s books and his sales letters are 98% bullets. It would be challenging, but I think it’d be kinda fun.

Surely someone’s asked you this before? 😅

===

The fact is, no one’s ever asked me this before. Perhaps other Copy Riddles members have done it on their own without writing me to ask.

​​Or perhaps Copy Riddles is just so comprehensive that nobody ever felt the need to go beyond it.

​​Or perhaps, people pay for convenience, clarity, and a sense of comradeship. Copy Riddles gives them that, and the extra return on following the Copy Riddles process on their own doesn’t pay for itself.

If you create offers, of you’re thinking of it, that past paragraph might have something valuable to marinate upon.

But maybe you’re not thinking offers at the moment. Maybe you’re thinking copywriting skills.

In that case:

If you currently only have lint and a few breadcrumbs in your pockets, and you have no prospect of making money — nothing you can sell, or nobody to sell it to — then you can still follow the Copy Riddles process. Christian describes it above. I describe it even more on the Copy Riddles sales page.

​​You will just have to do all the work yourself, instead of having me package it up for you. But it will be free, except for the time you put in.

On the other hand, if you have some money, or the prospect of making money — potential customers or clients willing to pay you something, at least if you do a good job making your case with your copy — then Copy Riddles might be worth much more to you than the money I ask for it.

​​Y​​ou might even get value from going through it, like Christian says above, over and over again.

If you’d like to find out more about Copy Riddles or the process behind it:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Fully patented Most Valuable Email

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I’d like to announce I have just drafted and am about to submit US patent application 16/573921.

​​My patent application only states the proven and the incontestable, which is that my Most Valuable trick fulfills the three main criteria for a patentable invention. Namely, my Most Valuable Email trick is:

Patent Criterion #1: Novel

​​While the underlying persuasion idea I write about in Most Valuable Email is as old as magic, my use of this idea in daily emails is novel. As copywriter Van Chow wrote after going through Most Valuable Email:

“I love this course, I bet some money to see if it still talks about boring stuff like AIDA or PAS. But I was surprised, I had never heard of this concept before.”

Patent Criterion #2: Non-obvious

​​I have used the Most Valuable Email trick hundreds of times in my newsletter and yet it continues to surprise. For example, copywriter Cindy Suzuki wrote after learning the Most Valuable Email trick:

“You know that moment people get epiphanies and the entire world looks different? I’m feeling that way about your writing now. You’ve helped me unlock something I didn’t know existed. So incredible.”

Patent Criterion #3: Has a concrete, practical application

​​The Most Valuable Email trick produces interesting emails, but it also produces more concrete, practical results, such as money. In the experience of copywriter Ivan Orange, who went through Most Valuable Email:

“I want to take the opportunity to tell you that the day after I read MVE, I sent my list a first [MVE trick] email, using an idea from one of your swipe file emails. That day I sold one of my courses, which made me make 5 times more the investment in MVE, so I’m looking forward to keep improving in this technique and make many more sales.”

As soon as my $900 application fee is accepted and my patent application is approved, I plan to vigorously prosecute any and all copywriters, marketers, or small business owners infringing on my Most Valuable Email patent and writing Most Valuable Emails without a license.

​​Fortunately, I will have the full force of U.S. government and their thousands of patent lawyers on my side in that fight.

Of course, my goal is not to stop the spread of the Most Valuable Email trick. Most Valuable Email is most valuable for a reason, and it’s not only most valuable for me.

​​At the same time, I do want to control the spread of this powerful and novel idea, and I want to be rewarded properly for this invention. That’s the reason for my imminent patent application.
​​
​​Anybody can buy a license to learn to safely and legally use the Most Valuable Email trick, and the license fee is very reasonable, $100.

If you would like to buy a Most Valuable Email license, you can do so at the page below.

​​I also have a special offer, good for 24 hours only. Buy a Most Valuable Email license and also reply to this email, and I will tell you how this email relates to the Most Valuable Email trick, beyond just promoting my Most Valuable Email course.

You have until Tue, Apr 11, 2:31 EST to do so.

​​If you’ve bought a Most Valuable Email license already, of course this offer applies to you as well. But you do have to write me and ask, and before the deadline.

To get your own Most Valuable Email license:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

I feel bad today and so I’m very eager to write this email

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I’m on the couch under a blanket as I write this. It’s only 7:53am on Easter morning but I’m grateful to be up and awake because I spent an ugly night in bed, fighting feverish dreams.

My tongue feels burned. I’m a little tired and achy. I’m shivering even though it’s not cold in the room.

Two years ago, what I have right now would almost certainly have been diagnosed as corona. Today, it’s simply a bad cold or some unidentified viral infection.

All of which is to say, I’m very eager to write this email. Because if I’m eager to write when I feel good, and even more eager when I feel bad, then what army can resist me?

For the past few years I’ve been reading about famous Greeks and Romans. One of these was Marcus Claudius Marcellus, a Roman general and statesman. Marcellus was the first to give a check to Hannibal’s massive army as it was rampaging undefeated through Italy. This gave the Romans hope.

Other times, Marcellus lost to Hannibal. But he still kept harassing Hannibal’s army and frustrating Hannibal, one of the greatest military commanders in history. After months of unending skirmishes with Marcellus, Hannibal put his head in his hands and said:

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What can one do with a man who knows not how to bear either good or bad fortune? This is the only general who, when victorious allows his foe no rest, and when defeated takes none himself. We shall always, it seems, have to be fighting this man, who is equally excited to attack by his confidence when victor, and his shame when vanquished.

===

Point being, you can find motivation in lots of things. Glory and confidence in times of success, shame and fury in times of failure.

Maybe it comes naturally to you to be motivated, like it seemed to come to Marcellus. But even if not, then with a bit of thinking, you can often create a conscious reframe of a bad situation. Not only will this produce superior results in time, but it can make you feel better when you’re feeling lousy.

And now, let me tell you about my Most Valuable Email course.

As I’ve written before, if I had to choose just one email copywriting approach for the rest of time, from here to eternity, I wouldn’t choose stories or personal reveals or pop culture illustrations or checklists or testimonials or hard-core how to or shock and controversy.

Instead, I would choose the Most Valuable Email trick.

For one thing, because of the results it produces — interesting and novel emails, which people love to read, and which teach me a thing or two also.

But there’s also the motivation issue. Most Valuable Emails are so valuable because I personally find them the most enjoyable to write. Going back to this type of email over and over has helped me stick with daily emailing for the long term, when I’m feeling good and when I’m feeling lousy, when things are working and when they’re not.

For more info on Most Valuable Email:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

The disciplined, professional, hard-working beggar

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On my way to the gym, there’s a Mercadona, a local Spanish supermarket. In front of the entrance to the Mercadona, kneeling on the ground, looking serious and professional, there is almost always one specific beggar.

This man is large and strong. He has a neatly trimmed mustache. I guess he’s around 45 years old.

He usually wears a button-down shirt. He also has a little sponge down on the ground so he can kneel more comfortably. Sometimes, he has a drink next to him — from what I can tell, ice coffee.

When old women go inside Mercadona, this man will kneel and hold on to their dogs while they do their shopping. When the old women come out, they give him their loose change. One time, an old woman gave him a whole packaged chicken.

This man shows up early. When I go for my morning walk before work, he’s already on a bench next to Mercadona, waiting for the store to open up. He also seems to have a little part-time job setting up the chairs, tables, and parasols of the bar next to the Mercadona.

If you’re wondering how it is I know so much about this man, it’s because he is there most days, and for many hours a day. If I ever walk outside my house and around the corner to the Rambla del Poblenou, I inevitably see this man and what he is up to — which is usually waiting stoically for somebody to give him money, and for the workday to end.

I don’t know this guy’s history. I also don’t know how much loose change or raw chicken he manages to pull in a given week. I guess he’s doing okay since he keeps showing up. Still, I can’t believe he’s doing GRRRREAT.

And if you need some sort of takeaway from that, then let me come back to a fundamental point I’ve already made, over and over, year after year in this newsletter. And that’s the fact that you can pretty much do the same work, and get paid drastically different amounts of money for it.

The Mercadona beggar is disciplined and professional. He puts in the hours. He provides a real service to people — an opportunity for charity, plus the bonus of dog-sitting. He even hustles a little. He’s not satisfied simply coasting on his knees, ice coffee in hand, so he’s struck some sort of deal for extra work with the bar next door.

You might think I’m joking. I’m really not.

​​This guy works as hard and as long as most office workers. And many office workers work as hard and as long as most self-employed service providers. And many self-employed service providers work as hard and as long as most business owners.

And yet, there’s a vast difference between what people in each of those groups tend to earn. And vice versa. There’s a vast difference between what you can earn if you cater to people in each of those groups.

Maybe this makes no sense to you, or maybe you think it’s entirely impractical.

In that case, you will almost certainly not be interested in my offer today, which is my Most Valuable Email training. This training is only right for you if:

1. You’re willing to write an email to your list most days, preferably every day

2. You are interested in writing about marketing and copywriting

And by the way, just because Most Valuable Email requires that you write about marketing or copywriting, it in no way requires that you write to people who primarily define themselves as marketers or copywriters. In fact, it might be better to think of another group that you could write those same emails to, and get paid much more money as a result.

In any case, if you are interested in Most Valuable Email, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

6 weeks of Times New Roman

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6 weeks ago, I switched over the font for my newsletter from some web-optimized sans serif font to ugly, old-school Times New Roman. So far, I’ve had two people write in and complain.

One reader said Times New Roman hurts his eyes when he reads my emails in dark mode. Another reader said my newsletter now reminds him of long, factual 2000s websites and the font change made him scroll to the end without really taking anything in.

Has Times New Roman hurt my newsletter?

Like I’ve written recently, I had a record month last month, so it doesn’t seem to have hurt sales. More softly, I keep getting thoughtful and courteous replies from readers, even if it’s sometimes just to say that they’re not fans of the new font.

And the point?

If you read emails from marketers who write daily emails, it’s common to read messages that effectively say, “Heh, it works for me, you can either like it or leave.”

So rather than ending my email with another “Heh it works for me” message, let me tell you the two reasons why I decided to change my newsletter to Times New Roman in the first place. This might be genuinely useful to you, beyond just the satisfaction of agreeing or disagreeing with my attitudes and my personal font choices.

Reason one I switched fonts was that I had a phrase by marketer Dan Kennedy echoing in my head. Dan was softly croaking into my ear, and saying how you want to create a sense of place for your audience, a door that they walk through, which separates your little and unique world from everything else outside.

You might think this is just another way to say, be unique, have a brand, different is better than better.

And sure, that’s a part of it. But a key part of what Dan is saying is that this sense of place should be consistent with the kind of influence you want to have on your audience, and that it should permeate everything you do, beyond just fonts, beyond logos, beyond color choices.

Still, this might sound vague and fluffy to you. You might wonder whether this kind of “sense of place” stuff has a role in the hard world of results-based marketing.

That’s for you to decide.

I’m just putting the idea out there for you, because it influenced me. If you really want an argument for it, then I can only refer you to the authority of Dan Kennedy himself, who helped guide and build up Guthy-Renker, the billion-dollar infomercial company, and who influenced and educated more direct marketers and copywriters than probably anybody else in history, and who was himself responsible for hundreds of direct marketing campaigns and many, many millions in direct sales.

So that’s reason one for the font change.

Reason two is that switching my font to Times New Roman was an instance of my Most Valuable Email trick in action. Yes, this little trick goes beyond just email copy, all the way to font choice, in the right context. If you’d like to make more sense of that, you can find out all about my Most Valuable Email course on the following page:

🦓

https://bejakovic.com/mve

The case against reading books

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One of the first-ever emails I wrote for this newsletter, back in August 2018, was about magician Ricky Jay. Jay was widely considered one of the best sleight-of-hand artists in the world.

Why write about a magician in a marketing and copywriting newsletter?

My feeling is that magic, as practiced by top performers like Ricky Jay, is about controlling the audience’s attention, about painting mental pictures, about entertaining, about building curiosity, all the while guiding people to a tightly controlled desired outcome — the magician’s desired outcome.

​​With some small tweaks, that also sounds like the job of a copywriter, or more broadly, any persuader.

Back in August 2018, Ricky Jay was still alive. He died a few months later. He left behind an enormous collection of magic artifacts — posters, books, handbills, paintings, personal letters — from some of the most bizarre, mystical, and skilled magicians, jugglers, acrobats, learned animals, con men, and sideshow freaks of all time.

After Ricky Jay died, his collection was broken up into four parts. Just the first part, auctioned off in 2021, brought in $3.8 million.

Today, I came across a little video of Ricky Jay talking about the books in his collection. And he had this to say:

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There are probably more books written about magic than any other art form. Literally thousands and thousands of books. And I’ve collected thousands of books in my life about magic technique.

But I believe that the real key to learning is personally. It’s almost like the sensei master relationship in the martial arts. That the way you want to learn is by someone that you respect showing you something.

There’s a level of transmission and a level of appreciation that’s never completely attainable just through the written word.

===

I agree. If you can find somebody you respect, and you can get them to agree to teach you personally, you will learn things, and at a level of depth that you could never learn otherwise.

So go find a  sensei. But—

What if you can’t find one?

Or worse, what if you find a sensei, and, in spite of your best pleading and cajoling and stubbornly hanging around, he just says no? What if he’s too busy, too cranky, too secretive?

In that case I suggest being your own sensei.

Because books are great. I’ve read two or three of them, so I know. But there’s a level of understanding that’s never completely attainable through the written word.

Anyways, that’s my entire message for you for today. Except, if you want some help becoming your own sensei, take a look at my Most Valuable Email course.

​​Yes, Most Valuable Email is a bit of a how-to guide to a specific technique of email copywriting. But more than that, it’s a framework, a magical one in my experience, for becoming your own sensei. More info here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

10 of my email ideas you are free to use

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I’ve spent the past hour preparing and attempting to write this email. Here are some of the ideas I approached and then discarded:

1. The strange, 100-year-old, menage-a-trois history that inspired Wonder Woman

2. How even classic comic books like Superman had woke politics behind them

3. A demonstration of an idea I heard during a Dan Kennedy seminar, that the opening of your writing should set the emotional tenor even if everything else is discarded

4. An email in which I pretend to promote the Brent Charleton offer that’s currently being promoted by Ian Stanley, Dan Ferrari, and Justin Goff, but then I come clean that I am in fact not promoting it (there was a point there, really)

5. Something like in the movie Fight Club, where they splice in a frame from a porn movie, but where I would do something similar but in an email? (I have no idea how)

6. Running a lottery within the actual email, with money bets and money prizes (I realized this is probably illegal)

7. Kicking off a P.T. Barnum-like hoax

8. Telling a personal story about myself and purposefully holding back key information

9. Writing up an email using the FREE framework I devised during my Age of Insight training (FREE is my alternative to the AIDA framework)

10. Thinking up some way to illustrate the following quote by legendary music producer Rick Rubin, who said, “Never judge an idea based on the description of the idea, show it to me”

I played around with all 10 of these ideas. Somehow, they didn’t come together. Maybe they will in the future. But even if they don’t, that’s fine, because at least I have my email for today.

The point I want to make to you today is something I read in John Cleese’s book Creativity.

​​Cleese, as you might know, was one of the members of comedy sketch troupe Monty Python. Later he had one of the most successful British sitcoms of all time, Fawlty Towers. He also made some very funny movies, including A Fish Called Wanda.

All that’s to say, Cleese is a creative guy. And in his book Creativity, about creativity, Cleese writes:

“You can’t have a new idea until you’ve gotten rid of an old one.”

That might seem obvious, but maybe seeing my discarded ideas above will make it stick in your head better. And the next time you are struggling to come up with one good idea, maybe will remember to quickly discard 10 bad ideas first, so you don’t end up taking an hour+ to write an email like I just did.

Anyways, all this was really just a build up to a little promotional plug I am about to make.

It’s for my Most Valuable Email course. What might not be obvious is that each of those 10 discarded ideas above was my unsuccessful attempt to put the Most Valuable Email trick in action.

It normally doesn’t take that long. But even if it does, it’s almost always worth it, at least in my experience.

In any case, if you would like to find out Most Valuable Email trick, and even start putting it in action (you can use any of my 10 ideas above if they work for you), here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/mve