What 44 percent of all Russian mystics wish you knew about the easiest way to bring them to an explosive death every time! (It’s news to a lot of marketers… see inside)

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The man was was not easy to kill. A mystic, prophet, and natural-born hypnotist who appeared at the court of the last Russian czar, and who, in just a short while, gained enormous influence:

Grigori Rasputin.

After a few years of growing nonsense at the court — nonsense caused by Rasputin’s influence — a faction of the Russian royal family had had enough. They schemed and plotted, and decided in secret to have Rasputin killed.

So on December 30, 1916, Rasputin was served poisoned wine and pastries laced with potassium cyanide. He swallowed glass after glass of the wine and wolfed down the pastries.

He groaned a little, but it wasn’t enough to kill the hearty Russian peasant.

Prince Felix Yusupov then emerged from behind a curtain and shot Rasputin with a pistol. More groaning but the beast still seemed to live.

So Rasputin was then stabbed repeatedly, and eventually dragged to the icy Neva river and drowned there. This finally did the job.

Of course, most people don’t put up so much resistance. I believe even one cyanide-laced chocolate chip cookie would be enough to do me in. But for more resistant, stubborn souls, other options exist.

I bring up the grisly story of Rasputin’s death because I’m about to make an inelegant comparison.

For the next few days, I will be promoting my Copy Riddles course. Copy Riddles teaches you copywriting, or really, effective communication, via the mechanism of teaching you sales bullets.

The reason sales bullets are so good for learning copywriting is that they have to pack an entire sales presentation in just a sentence or two. If you happen to write in the most competitive, sophisticated, stubborn, and resistant markets, this produces miracles/monsters of persuasion such as this:

“What 44 percent of all women wish you knew about the easiest way to bring her to an explosive climax every time! (It’s news to a lot of men… see pages 89-93.)”

That’s a bullet by A-list copywriter John Carlton. Carlton wrote this and dozens of bullets like it to promote a boring book about sexual health for direct response publisher Rodale, whose main business was selling how-to guides about tomato gardening.

Result? from Carlton’s files:

===

I had to fight tooth and nail to get this piece mailed. At one point I was screaming at upper level veeps. I wish someone had taken a video of that meeting: there’s all these honchos sitting around the conference table, stunned, and there’s my voice hollering from the little speakerphone. (I never travel to client meetings, and have never met any of these people face-to-face.) Priceless.

It took me nearly a month to convince them to mail the piece as I wrote it. I caused such a fuss that I was actually blacklisted — until the results came in. I slaughtered the control. In fact, I’d hit a nerve in the public, and this piece mailed for over 5 years, despite frequent attempts by other top writers to knock it off. Ka-ching.

===

Maybe you have no stomach for screaming at your clients or customers, or for writing explosive sales copy that slaughters the control in the easiest way possible every time. That’s fine. Not everybody is competing on the national stage, like Carlton was, or against other top writers.

On more modest stages, it’s enough to reach for just one or two of Carlton’s deadly persuasion weapons — instead of doing the equivalent of poisoning, shooting, stabbing, and then drowning your poor reader.

I told you it’s an inelegant analogy. But what to do — we’re talking about bullets. And as marketer Ken McCarthy put it once, bullets wound.

In any case, if you want access to the entire secret closet of persuasion poisons, knives, pistols, blunderbusses, mace, shuriken, anvils-on-a-frayed-rope, halberds, and brass knuckles, so you can choose a persuasion weapon or two for your particular purpose, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Serves me right for soliciting wishes

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Last month, I sent out an email about a training I want to put together, on how copywriters can create their own offers. I’m still planning to put that training together, and I will have it out later this month.

Anyways, in that email, I asked for input. What’s your current situation… what’s holding you back from creating your own offer… what questions would you wish that I answer if I put this training together.

I got some good responses. But one reader got greedy. He decided to treat me like the genie of the lamp, and he wished the forbidden wish:

“Tell me how to create an offer that’s guaranteed to be irresistible!”

Upon hearing this, I bounced around like an angry djinn, exploding into a million little exasperated stars. “That’s like wishing for more wishes! ‘Guaranteed’? ‘Irresistible’? It cannot be done!”

But then I rematerialized into my human form. I scratched my blue genie head, pulled on my genie beard, and thought for a moment. I reached back into my ancient genie memory, spanning thousands of years, thousands of copywriting books, and thousands of sales campaigns.

I realized there is a way that’s almost guaranteed to produce irresistible offers.

​​At least, I found there’s a common element to all the offers I’ve created which ended up successful. On the flip side, I also found this element was lacking in all the offers which fizzled.

I won’t spell out what this magical element is — not here. It’s something I will reserve for my Mystical Cave of Secrets, aka that training about offers I will put on later this month.

But I can give you an idea of what this element is, using my most successful offer to date, Copy Riddles. If you pay close attention to what I’m about to say, you can figure out what I have in mind.

Here goes:

Copy Riddles is built around a simple bit of advice by the legendary, multimillionaire copywriter Gary Halbert.

Gary’s bit of advice has been endorsed by A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos. Parris said that if you follow Gary’s bit of advice, you’ll learn to write copy and make lots of money. And Parris should know — because he himself followed Gary’s advice, applied it, and made lots of money.

Parris isn’t the only one. Marketer Ben Settle also admitted that he followed Gary’s advice and profited as a result.

And another Gary — Gary Bencivenga, who has been called America’s greatest living copywriter, said he managed to beat a control by Gene Schwartz as a result of following this same approach that Gary Halbert advised, though he arrived at it independently of Gary Halbert.

And what is that bit of advice?

It’s​​ simply to look at sales bullets from successful sales letters, and to compare those bullets to the source in the book or the course or whatever that the sales letter was selling. That’s how you can spot the “twists” that top copywriters use to turn sand into glass, water into wine, lead into gold.

So that’s what I did.

I tracked down both the source material, and the bullets that sold that source material. But not just any bullets. Bullets written by A-list copywriters — including the two Gary’s, including Parris, including many more like David Deutsch and John Carlton — who were all competing against each other in the biggest big-money arenas of sales copywriting and direct marketing.

And then, rather than just creating a how-to course based on the tricks and tactics that I saw these A-list copywriters using in their sales bullets, I created a fun, immersive, exercise-based experience that I summed up in the title of the course, Copy Riddles.

Result? Here’s marketer Chew Zhi Wei, who went through Copy Riddles a while back:

===

By the way just wanted to thank you for such an amazing course. This might be one of the most valuable courses that I have ever have the privilege to attend. So much so that I even feel that you’re underselling how much value you’re actually gifting away. Thank you so very very much.

===

Is it clear now how to make an almost irresistible offer? I hope it is. And if not, you can find it discussed in more detail in rounds 6-12 of Copy Riddles, with round 11 being particularly relevant.

If you’re curious about all that, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

My Most Valuable Email trick leaks out all over the Internet

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This year, I set myself the task to do something “paid” each month to grow this newsletter, as well as something “free” — something I don’t have to pay for, except in my time, thought, and effort.

The free thing for February was writing up a guest newsletter issue for the Formats Unpacked people. Formats Unpacked is a Substack newsletter that looks at the underlying structure of interesting podcasts, newsletters, YouTube Channels, computer games, pop songs, subscription boxes, physical puzzles.

The format of Formats Unpacked itself is to briefly describe the format of the thing under examination, and then then to focus on “the magic that makes it special.”

I decided to unpack the format of the Brain Software podcast, by hypnotists Mike Mandel and Chris Thompson. I’ve written about Brain Software many times in this newsletter, because it’s one of only two podcasts that I listen to regularly.

The format of Brain Software is a cross between Car Talk, absurd late-night sketch TV, and a standup show.

But while writing that Formats Unpacked analysis, I realized that the magic that makes Brain Software special might just be that Mike and Chris use what I call the Most Valuable Email trick.

So maybe I should call it the Most Valuable Podcast trick.

Or maybe the Most Valuable YouTube Channel trick.

Or maybe the Most Valuable Book trick.

Because over just the past few weeks, I’ve noticed the MVE trick in action in Brain Software (hypnosis podcast), in a top YouTube channel about learning Spanish (Español con Juan), and in a cult book about negotiation (Jim Camp’s Start With No).

And then there’s a message I got a few days ago, from career coach Tom Grundy. Tom knows the Most Valuable Email trick, and he had this to say:

===

Hi John,

I bought MVE a couple of weeks back – despite your warning a few months ago that it might not be best suited! And I love it.

I can see lots of ways to use the trick in my career advice/personal development emails. Mainly related to Topic 4 (positioning/attitude) but also general “life advice” (e.g. “there’s no such thing as perfection”) and self-promotion/self-marketing (some overlaps with direct marketing). I’m sure there’s other ways I could use the trick too which I haven’t figured out yet.

Looking forward to the second Book Club call. I’m a big magic fan so I was excited to see the book choice for round 2.

===

The warning Tom is referring to is right there on top of the MVE sales page:

“If you are NOT primarily a marketer or copywriter, or you do not write about those topics, then I advise you NOT to buy this training. The Most Valuable Email trick will not work for all niches, markets, or topics.”

I stand by that — even though the MVE trick can be used effectively to write about hypnosis, language learning, negotiation, and like Tom says above, personal development and career advice.

But maybe you are a daredevil. Maybe you don’t heed any warnings, including mine. ​In that case, I can’t stop you from buying Most Valuable Email and even profiting from it. To find out more about MVE:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

How to become in-demand in your niche even if you have no contacts, portfolio, or good sense

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A long while ago, in the days when elephants still roamed the Earth, I came across the following question:

===

Say I wanted my copywriting niche to be SaaS, but have no contacts or portfolio, what are the steps I’ll need to take to become in-demand for my niche?

===

Here are the exact steps I would suggest:

Step 1: Go to Silicon Valley.

Step 2: Get in front of somebody famous in the startup space, like Elon Musk or Marc Andreessen or Peter Thiel. ​​Get creative if you have to — stalk them at a coffee shop they are known to go to, pay to go to a conference where they will appear, or maybe just write them an email and ask if they will meet you because you’re such a big fan.

Step 3: Take a selfie of yourself next to the famous nerd in Step 2.

Step 4: Put that selfie up on your site, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on TikTok, on Tinder, along with an article like, “10 surprising copywriting lessons from my meeting with Marc Andreessen.”

Step 5: In your article, mention several times that you are a SaaS copywriter, and link to a “Free Consultation” page.

Step 6: Repeat Steps 1-5 with additional famous nerds, as needed.

Result: Almost instant status and authority, and very probably, serious demand for your services.

You might think I’m being flippant. But I’m being 100% serious.

Yesterday, I promised to tell you the big secret of peak status.

The thing is, you might not want to hear it. Or you might not want to believe it.

Because the secret is that status can be manufactured, and very quickly.

In the same way that quality is only a minor part of the influence that your content is likely to have, your resume is only a minor part of the the status you are likely to achieve. And all the other, more important stuff, can be accomplished in two weeks’ time, if you are willing to really hustle.

Maybe you get what I’m saying.

But maybe you feel exasperated. Maybe you are sure I am either 100% wrong. Or maybe you suspect I am right, but you just find it impossible to really hustle to create status for yourself.

In that case, my advice is not to hustle. Take it slowly. Better slowly than never.

My added advice is that, if you are a marketer or copywriter in search of status, then take a look at my Most Valuable Email.

Sure, MVE will show you a new way to create quality content, but that’s not why I recommend it. Instead, the real status-building value of MVE is that it can get you gradually more comfortable with all those content-adjacent status-building practices which really make the difference.

I imagine that sounds very vague and abstract. I can’t make it more specific without giving away the Most Valuable Email trick. If you’d like to find out what that trick is, and even start practicing it today, head on over here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

BIG secret about peak emailing

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Three days ago, direct response copywriter Stefan Georgi sent out an email, “Big Secret About Peak Productivity.”

I like big secrets and I cannot lie. Besides, according to Stefan’s website, the man has sold over $700 million via his sales copy. So maybe he really does have some big secret? I opened the email to find out. This was it:

And yesterday was one of my most productive days in a long-while (like I CRUSHED the day).

Alright, so why am I sharing all of this?

Because there’s a stupidly simple lesson here:

When you feel tired, burned out, or like you just don’t want to work…

Then you should take a break.

After I read this, I shrugged, smiled at my own gullibility, and closed down Stefan’s email.

​​I didn’t feel enlightened. I didn’t have an a-ha moment. I didn’t learn anything new or really even anything useful. And yet, the next time Stefan Georgi sends out an email, I will still open it and at least skim it.

And even if it’s another bland breakthrough like the one above, I will still stay on Stefan’s list, and still give him the benefit of the doubt with the email after that and then some.

So here’s my BIG secret about peak emailing:

Your status is more important than your content.

​​Sure, if your content is truly atrocious all the time, you will drive people away. I remember some years ago signing up to Dan Kennedy’s “email newsletter” which was clearly not written by Dan, and which was just an autoresponder on repeat to let you know about various GKIC subscriptions and offers and lead magnets. I opened a few of those emails, and then unsubscribed.

On the other hand, if you’ve built yourself up as somebody important and successful, like Stefan has done, then you can allow yourself a lot of slack.

​​One email in three, one email in four, five, has to deliver something — something. The rest can be “big secrets” about taking a break when you’re tired… or about the importance of hard work… or about doing the right thing. And people will still read.

Actually I have something more to say about this, the BIG secret about peak status. But I feel I’ve shared enough big secrets with you in today’s email, so I will save that big secret for tomorrow.

Meanwhile, if you have no status yet, or you have status but for your own stubborn reasons you refuse to exploit it, then you might find some big secrets to help you inside my Most Valuable Email training.

Like I say on the sales page for that monster:

Most Valuable Emails never required I have any status or authority. Instead, they’ve helped me build up immediate and unquestionable authority — even when I had no standing in this industry. These emails make it 100% clear I know what I’m talking about, even when I don’t harp on about the great results I’ve had for clients or the testimonials or endorsements I’ve gotten.

So what’s the big secret of Most Valuable Emails? You can find that out here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Plan Horse brings in a surprising number of sales and a satisfying Matrix analogy

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My email yesterday about “Plan Horse” brought in more sales of Most Valuable Email than any email since the official launch of this course closed, last September. I asked myself why.

Maybe it was just the weather — hurricane winds over the Mediterranean have been blasting Barcelona for the past 14 hours. They almost carried off the potted olive tree that lives on my balcony. Maybe they also forced in extra offshore sales.

But maybe it was something in the email itself. I have an idea what that could be, and I’ll be writing about that in the future.

In any case, some of those new buyers have already gone through MVE – it only takes an hour. One of them, copywriter Anthony La Tour, wrote in this morning to say:

===

Whoa…

Just finished your MVE course. 

Meta-level stuff. 

I feel like I’ve just been unplugged from the Matrix.

I’m gonna go through it a few more times.

===

I never thought of the Matrix analogy for Most Valuable Email. But I like it, and I’ll be using it going forward. It’s a rich mapping, and it therefore feels satisfying. That’s something to keep in mind if you yourself use analogies to make your point. Here’s what I mean:

Like Anthony says, MVE shows you the Matrix, the underlying reality — what’s going on beneath the surface in some of my most effective emails.

But it goes beyond that.

Because in the Matrix cineverse, once you’re unplugged, you can go back inside and upload new skills into your head — and that’s how applying the Most Valuable Email trick feels to me. Like at the start of the first Matrix movie, after Neo has just been unplugged, and is now beginning his training, Tank sits him down in the jack-in chair and says:

===

We’re supposed to start with these operation programs first. That’s major boring shit. Let’s do something a little more fun. How about… combat training?

===

Neo sits there in the chair while the upload runs. A moment later, his eyes open wide and he gasps. “I know kung fu,” he says.

Well, uploading skills via Most valuable Email is not as push-button as the process in the Matrix. MVE takes some personal effort. And it takes more than a second or two to write one of these Most Valuable Emails.

But over time, this process uploads new skills into your head — including skills which you might have felt you could never learn to do well. At least it’s been that way for me.

If you’re willing to keep pressing the “Upload New Skill” button, then MVE might be as valuable to you. To get started with it today:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Plan Horse: Text-based opportunities

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News item one:

A few days ago, I got a text message that said, “You’re off the waitlist! You can now download Artifact.” So I did.

As you might know:

Artifact is a new service built by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, who founded Instagram before selling it to Facebook for $715 million. Their new project, Artifact, is something like TikTok, except not with video, but with text content.

News item two:

Just this morning I read that Meta, aka Mark Zuckerberg, is developing a new decentralized social network. Details are scarce, but what is known is that the new network will also be text-based.

Not-a-news item:​​

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for more than a few days, then you know I am wary of late-breaking internet opportunities. I like to get my late-breaking opportunities from books, preferably books that have been aged and cured for at least a few hundred years.

At the same time, even I find it undeniable that tectonic plates have been shifting for the past few years, with surface effects becoming visible maybe today, and for sure tomorrow.

Facebook is aging. Google search is terrible. AI now produces filler content better than 90% of professional content writers.

That’s what’s been rumbling underground for years. What will the surface effects be?

“Sovereign Man” Simon Black has this concept of a “Plan B” — a strategy for when shit hits the fan, which also benefits you if things just keep inching along as they always have.

I’d like to suggest to you a kind of inverse of Simon Black’s Plan B. We can call it Bejakovic’s “Plan Horse.”

Plan Horse is to find a new opportunity to latch onto, but in a way that you will come out ahead whether the opportunity drops dead or delivers as hoped.

Because you will eventually get to the inn if you just keep taking step after step along the highway. But you will get to the inn much faster and easier if somewhere along the way, while you’re walking, you “find yourself a horse to ride,” as Jack Ries and Al Trout put it in their book Positioning.

So keep reading this newsletter, because if I come across any interesting text-based opportunities, I might let you know about them.

Meanwhile, I continue to promote my Most Valuable Email. This course is really about taking those step-by-steps along the highway, while keeping an eye out for the galloping horse you can jump on the back of, Legolas-style.

Most Valuable Email is based on a fundamental of human communication and persuasion, one that’s been around for millennia. And yet, to many people in the Internet world, Most Valuable Email is a revelation. As freelance copywriter Van Chow said after going through MVE:

===

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.

===

For a persuasion technique that will work both today and tomorrow, check out MVE here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

This offer is improper — unless you’re a grown-up

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I checked the fridge this morning and I found I was fresh out of emails ideas. So I ran down to the corner shop and grabbed the latest glossy issue of “On Today’s Date.” I brought it back home, jumped on the couch, and greedily opened it to the first page. That’s how I discovered that the most significant historical event ever to happen on March 9th was:

The first appearance of the Barbie doll. It happened on March 9, 1959, at the American International Toy Fair, in New York City.

I put my head in my hands. “Who cares about Barbie dolls?” I said. “I need email ideas!”

But after a few moments of quiet despair, I happened to glance back at that Barbie article.

And in that brief moment, in the very first paragraph, I spotted something new to me — why we’re still talking about Barbie dolls today, and why you and I and probably all the other 8 billion people on the planet have heard of Barbie.

Ruth Handler, co-founder of Mattel, created Barbie after watching her own daughter. Handler’s little girl kept ignoring her closetful of baby dolls. Instead, she played make-believe with paper dolls of adult women.

Handler put 2 and 3 together, and realized there was an open niche here, a unique position to be filled:

A toy doll with adult features, adult outfits, and enormous adult breasts.

Barbie was an instant hit. Mattel sold around 350,000 Barbies in the very first year of production. They sold almost $1.5 billion worth of Barbie plastic last year.

So what’s my point?

Simple. People want to be grown up, or at least play make-believe at it. If ya don’t believe me, here’s a second example:

Tobacco company Lorillard once put out a covert ad campaign targeted at kids. The ad was supposedly designed to keep kids from smoking. But the devious message in that Lorillard campaign was:

“Tobacco is whacko — if you’re a teen.”

A later statistical study found that each exposure to this ad increased the intention of middleschoolers to try cigarettes by 3%. In other words, if your kid sees this ad 30 times, his or her odds of trying a cigarette double.

You might say this only applies to kids and middle schoolers, but I don’t think so. I think it applies to all of us, just in more subtle ways.

​​In any case, enough history.

Instead, I have an offer for you, which is entirely improper — unless you’re a grown-up copywriter or marketer.

​​The offer is my Most Valuable Email course. That course will only work for you if you already have an email list, or are willing to create one, and write to it regularly. Like I said, grown-ups.

But on second thought, maybe it’s better if you don’t get Most Valuable Email even if you’re a grown up. As one marketer, Kyle Weston, wrote me after going through this course:

===

I love how the course is short and to the point, yet still packs in all the powerful info we need. And then the tools you give us at the end are brilliant. The MVE Swipes pdf alone is worth way more than a measly $100. Anyone involved in marketing or copywriting at any level will want to check this out. Then again, maybe its better for me if less people know about this tactic — makes it easier for me to beat out the competition muhuhahaha!

===

If that doesn’t deter you, you can get Most Valuable Email here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

I’m either a cold-traffic wizard, or a warm-traffic chucklehead

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It was the best of responses, it was the worst of responses. I’ll share the numbers with you below. But if numbers aren’t your thing, then I just want you to spot the puzzling contrast between these two sales events:

Earlier this week, I made 21 sales of my Copy Zone offer during 24 hours, to a coldish audience of about 460 people.

That’s roughly a 4.6% conversion rate, at $100 per sale.

So you can either argue that I’m a wizard at cold sales, since the standard conversion rate on cold traffic is 2%, or you can argue that this was not entirely cold traffic, since these folks came from my ad in Daniel Throssell’s newsletter, which ran with Daniel’s endorsement.

Still, most people who bought from me had never even heard of me minutes before they decided to send me money, and had never before heard of Copy Zone. And yet, 4.6% take rate among these people, at $100.

On the other hand, take a less inspiring example:

At the end of Influential Emails, a training I put on in late 2021, I made a 24-hour-only offer for people to pre-order Copy Zone for $50.

Result:

I had one taker out of around 50 people.

These were highly engaged, current customers who had paid $237 for this Influential Emails training. They had spent hours on the training with me, listening to me talk, and interacting with me. Most of them had also bought other other products from me.

So… that’s a 2% conversion rate, at $50, to a warm or even hot audience.

You can say this is an apples to pineapples comparison. Different sizes of audience… pre-selling versus actually selling… and maybe other intangible, untouchable, and impalpable factors.

But I believe I know exactly what the difference comes down to. And unlike in many situations, I don’t believe it’s a matter of offer, of list, of price point, of selling environment, of prestige.

Instead, it’s a rare instance where it’s really about sales copy, about copywriting technique.

I spent a couple weeks in February going for my morning walk while listening, for the third time, to a course by the “21.7 Billion Dollar Man,” Jay Abraham.

This course sums up Jay’s entire marketing and business approach, from getting more customers and clients, to getting more out of your current customers and clients, to enjoying the process more.

Jay talks about salesmanship throughout, and towards the end, he also talks about copywriting.

There’s one commandment Jay keeps repeating over and over. He then illustrates it with a fanciful example of trying to sell a $100,000 Ferrari with a custom paint job.

Jay’s commandment is not new, and it’s really not a secret. But it was ringing in my ears while I was writing the copy to sell Copy Zone a few days ago.

And it made all the difference, at least if you ask me, between a 4.6% conversion rate to coldish traffic and a 2% conversion rate to warm or even hot traffic. The commandment is simply this:

“Layers upon layers of comparable value, of contrast, of measurable ways you could see the benefit, the intrinsic value, and the worth it had to you.”

Jay uses his characteristic “tripled-up” way of making his point above. For me, the first six words are what really matter and what kept ringing in my head:

“Layers upon layers of comparable value.”

Like I say, that’s not new. It’s not a secret. And everybody should really know it, at least if they pretend to call themselves a marketer or a copywriter.

And yet, you have the fact I didn’t “know” it, not so long ago. Even after I had made millions in sales for my clients, even after I had spent tens of thousands on copywriting trainings and courses, and even after I was billed by others, who should have known better, as an A-list copywriter.

It comes down to the difference between having heard something and really knowing it. You can hear a thing once, twice, 10 times. But it doesn’t mean you really know it.

So now I have a recommendation for you. My Most Valuable Email training.

This training is valuable because of what it can do for you — endorsements and authority and even sales. In fact, by applying the Most Valuable Email trick just once at the end of January, I got a completely unnecessary and unexpected windfall of about $2,900 in sales, with zero work. But that’s a story for another time.

For now, I just want to say that the Most Valuable Email is most valuable because of what it does to you. And that’s to inch you closer to mastery, to really knowing, with each email you write using the Most Valuable email trick.

In case you’re interested:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Well, that was a total disaster

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I was lying in bed last night by the open window, enjoying the spring breeze, listening to the radio. Suddenly, the music on the radio stopped and an urgent news announcement came on—

Two tectonic plates had just shifted somewhere off the coast of Western Australia.

As a consequence, a tsunami, a massive wave hundreds of meters high, was headed towards my little beach barrio of Poblenou, Barcelona, Spain.

I immediately jumped out of bed, threw on my Tommy Bahama shirt, and rushed to find Hector Campana, the main civil engineer in Poblenou. ​​”I have to warn Hector,” I said breathlessly, “we have to somehow survive this massive wave.”

I stormed inside Hector’s offices in an old colonial building by the waterfront. But he wasn’t there. One of his unshaven and red-eyed employees looked up at me.

​​”Hector?” he scoffed. “Go check the bar.”

“It’s a matter of life and death!” I said, and I ran to the bar on the corner.

Sure enough, Hector was there, slumped on a bench against the back wall, eyes closed, five empty bottles on the table in front of him.

I yelled at him to get up and get to work. He didn’t respond.

I grabbed him by the shoulders and tried to shake him awake. But he just slumped over even more, all the way off the bench, and down to the floor.

I took a quick look around to make sure nobody was watching, and I gave Hector a healthy kick in the ribs. This finally seemed to wake the brute up.

He opened his eyes a little, grumbled, and said in a drunken drawl:

“Engineers have detected multiple services degraded. At this time, delays in processing and intermittent errors may continue to be experienced until full resolution is declared. Mar 06 2023, 14:21 CST.”

That’s pretty much exactly how it went down last night.

​​The full story is that Daniel Throssell, somewhere off or on the coast of Western Australia, sent out an email to his list. This email had my ad inside, which I had paid Daniel $1,000 for.

As a result, a traffic wave, many hundreds of visitors high, hit my little online barrio.

But Hector Campana — aka ActiveCampaign, my email service provider — was drinking on the job, completely unable to deal with the incoming wave.

For the better part of yesterday’s afternoon, evening, and night, ActiveCampaign was passed out and unresponsive.

​​Broadcast emails took hours to go out. Autoresponder emails weren’t working at all. Neither were automations — and I had set up an automation to actually deliver the promised lead magnet to people who responded to my ad.

I spent about three hours last night fixing what I could by hand, and sending emails to people who had taken me up on the paid offer on the Thank You page.

​​During the night, ActiveCampaign gradually sobered up and emails finally started going out. Even so, I still had an hour or two of cleanup this morning.

So all in all, it was a total disaster. Really, the only salvageable thing was this:

Even though ActiveCampaign was passed out last night, it was at least registering (most) people who opted in. So as of right now, a little more than 14 hours after Daniel’s email went out, I have some 410 new subscribers thanks to my ad.

More importantly, I’ve also made 37 sales of the $100 offer I was making on the optin Thank You page.

25 of those sales came from people who were already subscribed to my list, and who opted in again via the ad to get the free bonuses I promised.

But I’ve also made 12 sales of the same $100 offer to entirely new subscribers.

Which means that — twelve times one hundred, carry the four — my ad in Daniel’s newsletter has already paid for itself. In fact, it paid for itself in just 3 hours and 9 minutes — that’s how long it took for the 10th purchase from a new subscriber to come in.

So a total disaster looked at from one angle… or looked at from another angle, an unqualified success.

Meanwhile, back in Poblenou:

Later today, I will organize an emergency Town Hall meeting to discuss the firing and possible lynching of Hector Campana.

Also later today, at 3:31pm EST to be exact, I will take down the paid offer I am currently making on that Thank You page.

While I promised Daniel that my lead magnet would only be available through the ad in his newsletter, this paid offer on the Thank You page isn’t part of that promise.

So whether you just got onto my list, or whether you’ve been on my list for a while, you can take me up on this offer. But you do have to be on my list. To get on there, click here and fill out the form that appears.