AI bros make $4.20, I make $0.36, it’s still a win

by

A couple weeks ago, I read a mostly mindboggling email from Scott Oldford, who has been buying up newsletters and newsletter-related services.

Scott’s email was all about about an AI newsletter he bought recently for some undisclosed sum.

The acquired newsletter has 22,000 subscribers. Its creators have been running Facebook ads to get new readers, and paying $1.40 per new reader.

So far, so grim. But please pay attention to the next fact, because it’s remarkable:

That AI newsletter was making 3x that ad spend right at signup time, right when people opted in, without selling anything.

Did that last line make you pull down your glasses to the tip of your nose, and look at me with suspicion? It should have.

Direct response logic says that if you can acquire a customer at breakeven or slight loss, you’re doing well.

Granted, these newsletter subscribers aren’t necessarily customers, but they are a list of people who are potential customers, and they are certainly valuable as an audience in other ways.

Now let me repeat the rather shocking point again:

These AI bros are building that list of subscribers, not at a slight loss, not at cost, but actually getting paid 3x what they put in to acquire each new reader.

What tricky flamingos. How are they doing it?

Well, that’s my offer for you today. It’s called Sparkloop. It’s basically a network of coregistration partners.

If you’ve ever signed up for a Substack newsletter, you’ve seen this approach in action. Once you opt in, a window of newsletter recommendations pops up. “Would you like some more, sir?” it says. And there on the plate are 3 or 4 or 20 different other newsletters, which you can opt into with just a click o’ the button.

That’s what Sparkloop does as well, except it’s not limited to Substack newsletters only, but it can be integrated on almost any platform.

That’s how those AI bros were making 3x their ad spend right at optin time, without selling anything. They had Sparkloop installed, and they were recommending a bunch of other Sparkloop-network newsletters.

Now a word of disclosure:

I have been using Sparkloop myself. Its little window pops up when somebody signs up to my new health newsletter. I have made money from Sparkloop. But it’s nowhere close to what this AI newsletter is making.

The fact is, I’m not making $4.20 per new subscriber… but more like $0.36, at least on day 0.

Still, money is money, and Sparkloop is helping me offset the cost of ads I’ve been running.

Plus, Sparkloop allows you to promote newsletters inside your newsletter as well, which means that if you email regularly and promote other newsletters each time you email, you can hope to make a buck or two more per subscriber in the very first month.

So there you go. If you have a newsletter, and have nothing great to promote yet… or you’re simply looking for other ways to monetize your email list… then try out Sparkloop. I’ve done it, it works, and I’m happy to recommend it to others.

You can sign up for Sparkloop at the link below. Yes, that’s an affiliate link. Yes, I will get paid if you sign up. No, you don’t have to use this link, and no, I won’t ever know if you circumvent my link and go straight to Sparkloop and sign up there. But in case you don’t want to do that:

https://bejakovic.com/sparkloop

“So where are we all supposed to go now?”

by

A couple days ago, an article on The Verge by David Pierce picked up steam and then really started chugging along, tearing through any obstacles in its path, and demanding the attention and concern even of slack-jawed layabouts who were minding their own business just moments earlier. The title of Pierce’s article:

“So where are we all supposed to go now?”

Pierce was writing about how social media — first Facebook, then Twitter, now Reddit — are dying. And what, he wanted to know, will be next?

I know all about this because I’m a painfully contrary person. After about 20 years of resisting social media, I am now getting on social media full on.

First, I got on Twitter a couple months ago (under a pseudonym). That’s how I came across that runaway Verge article. And I will also most probably get on LinkedIn in the next few days (under my own name).

I figure what others, smarter than I am, have already figured out:

Maybe social media is a cesspool, and maybe it’s now dying to boot. But there are still billions of people on there. I only need a small and select fraction of those people to do very well.

My ultimate goal — as you can probably guess — is to get these people onto my email lists, either this one that you’re reading now, or my new health newsletter. That’s how I can write to them regularly, with something interesting or valuable, and build a relationship, and even do business and exchange money for my offers.

So what will come after Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit? Where are we all supposed to go now?

I don’t know, and I don’t particularly care. Because I use a mental shortcut known as the Lindy Law, which says that you can expect technology to survive on average as long as it’s already been around.

Email has been around for 52 years, longer than the Internet as we know it.

Will email still be around 52 years from now? Who knows. I figure its odds are better than any new technology that comes out today or tomorrow.

But you probably knew all this before. What you might not know — something that surprised me yesterday — is that there’s an email platform called Beehiiv.

I promoted Beehiiv in my email yesterday, and I gave people a bit of a carrot-and-stick to sign up for a free account on Beehiiv using my affiliate link.

I got lots of people taking me up on the offer, and I got lots of people thanking me for cluing them in to Beehiiv. That’s the part that was surprising to me — so many people had not heard of Beehiiv before.

I personally use Beehiiv, I’m very happy with it, and that’s why I’m happy to recommend it. As for why you might want to try it for your new newsletter or project, here’s my best case for that:

===

Beehiiv is slick and it has a buncha tools that other email providers don’t have. Like a nice-looking website, straight out of the box, that doubles as your email archive. A referral program. Recommendations from and to other newsletters. An ad network if you want to monetize your newsletter that way.

Just as important:

More than any other email platform I’ve directly used or indirectly heard about, Beehiiv is stable and reliable. It doesn’t crash. It doesn’t lock up. It doesn’t fail to send out emails you meant to send and it doesn’t sneakily send out emails you didn’t mean to send.

But really, try it out for yourself and see. Maybe it’s not for you. Or maybe you will love it.

There’s no risk either way. Because Beehiiv is free to start using and to continue using indefinitely — for sending emails and for the website.

You only have to pay something if you wanna upgrade to some of the fancier growth and monetization tools — which I’ve done, because it’s well-worth the money for me, and because I’ve decided to stick with Beehiiv for the long term.

So like I said, I encourage you to give it a try. But—

I know that encouragement, and good arguments, and lists of shiny features, are often not enough to get people to move.

So I’ll give you a bit of a carrot-and-stick too.

Over the past two months, I’ve grown my new newsletter from 73 subscribers to 1,109 subscribers.

And if you try out Beehiiv using my affiliate link, I will send you a recording in which I talk about all the stuff I’ve done to grow that newsletter — what’s worked, what hasn’t, what I plan to do going forward. (I’ll even tell you some stuff I’m planning to do to grow this daily marketing newsletter that you’re reading right now.)

Also, here’s another thing I promise to give you:

I had some deliverability problems early on with my new newsletter. It turned out not to be Beehiiv’s fault. Rather it was that I had failed to set up my DNS right. I fixed that, and my deliverability problems got fixed. But I went one further.

I also came up with a little trick to increase my deliverability going forward and even to increase my open rates.

This trick has nothing to do with DMARC or DKIM records. It has nothing to do with trying to game Gmail. It’s just plain old marketing and psychology. And it’s allowed me to actually increase my open rates while my list has grown quickly and sizeably.

This trick is not complicated — it takes all of five minutes to implement.

And if you take me up on my offer and try out Beehiiv, I will send you a quick writeup of exactly what I did, and how you can do it too, to have the kinds of deliverability and reader engagement that other newsletters can only wonder at.

So that’s the carrot. The stick, or the threat of it, is that there’s a deadline, 24 hours from now, at 8:31pm CET on Thursday, July 6.

If you’re interested, here’s what to do:

1. Head to Beehiiv using this link: https://bejakovic.com/beehiiv

2. Sign up for a free account. You don’t have to sign up for anything paid. I am counting on Beehiiv’s quality and service to convince you to do that over time.

3. Once you’ve signed up, forward me the confirmation email you get from Beehiiv — and I will reply to you with 1) the recording listing all the things I’ve done and will be doing to grow my new newsletter and 2) a write up of my little deliverability and email open trick. Do it before the deadline — 8:31pm CET on Thursday, July 6 — and you get the carrot, and not the stick. ​​

What I’m doing to grow my new newsletter

by

I’ve mentioned on a few occasions that I’ve started a new newsletter in the health space.

I’ve had several readers of my daily marketing emails write me to say they want to sign up to my new health newsletter. I turned them away, at least for the moment.

Why do I need a buncha marketers checking out what I do?

Maybe I’m paranoid, but I’ve decided to keep my new project under wraps at least until I dig an 18-foot-deep moat around it, and fill that moat with murky and cold water, and populate the water with several thousand piranhas and two silent and very large crocodiles.

But I will tell you a few things about my new newsletter that might interest you.

First, I’m using Beehiiv as an email platform. I’m so happy with Beehiiv that I’ve decided to promote it. You can find my affiliate link below.

If you’re looking for new email platform for a new project or an existing newsletter, I encourage you to give Beehiiv a try.

It’s slick and it has a buncha tools that other email providers don’t have. Like a nice-looking website, straight out of the box, that doubles as your email archive. A referral program. Recommendations from and to other newsletters. An ad network if you want to monetize your newsletter that way.

Just as important:

More than any other email platform I’ve directly used or indirectly heard about, Beehiiv is stable and reliable. It doesn’t crash. It doesn’t lock up. It doesn’t fail to send out emails you meant to send and it doesn’t sneakily send out emails you didn’t mean to send.

But really, try it out for yourself and see. Maybe it’s not for you. Or maybe you will love it.

There’s no risk either way. Because Beehiiv is free to start using and to continue using indefinitely — for sending emails and for the website.

You only have to pay something if you wanna upgrade to some of the fancier growth and monetization tools — which I’ve done, because it’s well-worth the money for me, and because I’ve decided to stick with Beehiiv for the long term.

So like I said, I encourage you to give it a try. But—

I know that encouragement, and good arguments, and lists of shiny features, are often not enough to get people to move.

So I’ll give you a bit of a carrot-and-stick too.

Here’s the second thing I’ll tell you about my new newsletter.

Over the past two months, I’ve grown my new newsletter from 73 subscribers to 1,109 subscribers.

​​And if you try out Beehiiv using my affiliate link, I will send you a recording in which I talk about all the stuff I’ve done to grow that newsletter — what’s worked, what hasn’t, what I plan to do going forward. (I’ll even tell you some stuff I’m planning to do to grow this daily marketing newsletter that you’re reading right now.)

Also, here’s a third thing:

I had some deliverability problems early on with my new newsletter. It turned out not to be Beehiiv’s fault. Rather it was that I had failed to set up my DNS right. I fixed that, and my deliverability problems got fixed. But I went one further.

I also came up with a little trick to increase my deliverability going forward and even to increase my open rates.

This trick has nothing to do with DMARC or DKIM records. It has nothing to do with trying to game Gmail. It’s just plain old marketing and psychology. And it’s allowed me to actually increase my open rates while my list has grown quickly and sizeably.

This trick is not complicated — it takes all of five minutes to implement.

​​And if you take me up on my offer and try out Beehiiv, I will send you a quick writeup of exactly what I did, and how you can do it too, to have the kinds of deliverability and reader engagement that other newsletters can only wonder at.

So that’s the carrot. The stick, or the threat of it, is that there’s a deadline, 48 hours from now, at 8:31pm CET on Thursday, July 6.

If you’re interested, here’s what to do:

1. Head to Beehiiv using this link: https://bejakovic.com/beehiiv

2. Sign up for a free account. You don’t have to sign up for anything paid. I am counting on Beehiiv’s quality and service to convince you to do that over time.

3. Once you’ve signed up, forward me the confirmation email you get from Beehiiv — and I will reply to you with 1) the recording listing all the things I’ve done and will be doing to grow my new newsletter and 2) a write up of my little deliverability and email open trick. Do it before the deadline — 8:31pm CET on Thursday, July 6 — and you get the carrot, and not the stick.

I saw a funambulist yesterday and I suspect I can do what he does

by

Yesterday, I found myself in the middle of a hushed crowd. Everyone was looking up.

Then the crowd collectively gasped, started clapping, and cheered. My girlfriend turned around and started to jokingly shush the people closest to her. “Let the man concentrate!”

Yesterday, a funambulist — a tightrope walker — made his way some 200 meters from one corner of Plaça de Catalunya, the central square in Barcelona, across Passeig de Gracia, the main shopping street in Barcelona.

Halfway across, about 120 feet in the air, the man stopped. He sat down cross-legged on the tight-rope. After a few moments of what looked like comfortable meditation, with the his shirt rippling in the wind, he stood up and kept walking.

Instead of stopping at the end, he turned around and decided to walk back to the start. The crowd underneath was following him like a shadow on the ground.

The funambulist came back to the midpoint of the tight-rope. Slowly and carefully, he lay down on his back on the rope, his arms out to the sides.

This lying down, and the bit of cross-legged sitting before it, looked kind of tricky.

The rest of the time though, the guy was just walking.

He didn’t have one of those balancing poles. Instead, he just kept his arms up and used them to balance. He steadily put one bare foot in front of the other, occasionally shifting his weight a bit, moving his arms a little. That’s it.

I wouldn’t like to be up that high in the air. But really, this tight-rope walking, which I’ve never attempted in my life, looks pretty easy.

Of course, that’s because I know nothing about it. Odds are, if I ever tried to walk on a tight-rope slung two feet off the ground between two trees, I would find it very hard to pull off, very tiring, requiring enormous balance. I would probably find myself falling off over and over, after just a step or two.

Still, it looks easy.

In my email yesterday, I made an unusual offer. I’m trying to get rid of my Copy Riddles course. I’m no longer selling it myself, so I’m looking to find a person who would like to take it from me, along with all the rights to it, and sell it, change it, do whatever with it.

Copy Riddles ties into that tightrope walker’s act. A-list level sales copy looks easy. A bit of intrigue, balanced with a benefit or two, steadily marching towards the order form.

If, like me when I first started writing copy, you think you can do what A-list copywriters do, then you should try to do it yourself.

That’s what Copy Riddles is all about. You get to write copy, starting from the same prompt that A-list copywriters started from. And you find out very quickly how much skill and effort and tricks are involved in producing what they produce.

Surprisingly, I got multiple serious responses to my offer yesterday. I got back to everyone. We will see if any of these negotiations bear fruit.

But I’ve found that, whenever I get several responses to a new offer with just one email, there are inevitably people who didn’t see that email, or meant to reply but didn’t get to it. Plus, since this is an unusual sale, the final details of it are likely to be fluid — depending on who the eventual buyer is and what his or her goals and current situation are.

For all those reasons, I’m writing you again with the same offer. If you are interested in owning the rights to Copy Riddles, so you can sell it and profit from it, then write me, and we can start talking about how that might work.

Would you like to take Copy Riddles off my hands?

by

A couple months ago, I stopped selling my flagship course, Copy Riddles.

​​Copy Riddles was based on a Gary Halbert’s advice for how to learn to write bullets — look at the bullets written by the best copywriters, look at the book or course those bullets were selling, and see how the copywriter did his alchemy to transmute lead into gold.

I had various reasons for retiring Copy Riddles. I wrote about one of them in an earlier email. But even if I had no good reasons initially, the fact that I’ve publicly announced that I’m retiring the course means I won’t bring it back.

Frank Sinatra retired in 1971. “I have sung my last song for the public,” he said with a sigh. Fans were shocked. But then, 2 years later, Frank came back with a TV special, Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back, and he started touring again.

Ol’ Blue Eyes could get away with that, but you won’t see Ol’ Bejako doing it, in spite of several people writing to tell me that not selling Copy Riddles is a crime. I’ve simply found it easier to keep my word as a general life policy.

At the same time, I’m genuinely proud of Copy Riddles as a course, and there are people who say there is significant tonnage to what they’ve learned about copywriting from it.

So a few days ago, while I should have been washing myself but was instead just standing in the shower and thinking, I had an idea.

Could I sell the rights to Copy Riddles to somebody else?

Like I said, I don’t want to be the one selling it to the public any more.

But there’s clearly demand for the course, even with my absolute lack of promotion of the thing. Maybe somebody else would like to own the rights to Copy Riddles and sell it himself or herself.

With the tiniest bit of work, you could get affiliates lined up — for example, I’ve had Derek Johanson of CopyHour promote Copy Riddles in the past. I’ve had Bob Bly agree to promote it right before I decided to retire it. And Daniel Throssell asked to promote it right after I retired it.

If you’ve already got a list of people interested in copywriting, you could sell Copy Riddles to your list directly — the thing regularly brought in 5-figure paydays for me when I re-launched it every few months, and that’s with my small list that had seen the offer a lot.

Plus, maybe you could even run cold traffic straight to the sales page. I can’t say with any certainty it would be a winner, but I did talk to A-list copywriter Lorrie Morgan recently, and she was telling me what a good sales letter I’d written for Copy Riddles. Plus, I wrote it in an impersonal way, to be convincing to somebody who doesn’t know anything about me personally and who hasn’t read any of my emails.

All these are just ideas.

​​I don’t know if anybody is interested in taking Copy Riddles off my hands, or really how this would work. But I am intrigued by the potential.

​​If you are intrigued as well, and if you are serious about the idea of buying the rights for Copy Riddles from me, write me to say so, and we can start a conversation around it.

How the mosquito built Rome

by

In my email yesterday, I wrote about my home town’s curious plan to stop the coming mosquito hordes by importing a hundred thousand sterile mosquito males. To which I got a mosquito-themed reply from an Insights & More member named Jordan (not sure he wants me to share his last name):

===

The talk about mosquitoes and books reminds me of the… mosquito book.

The Mosquito – Timothy Winegard

It’s actually very very interesting and showcases:

How the mosquito Built Rome
How the mosquito bested one of the greatest conquerors
How the mosquito ended slavery

(hows that for bullet point build out)

===

I found this intriguing so I looked it up and yes — it turns out there’s a credible case to be made for the mosquito having built Rome.

​​In its early days, Rome was surrounded by hundreds of square miles of wetland, called the Pontine Marshes. Perfect for mosquitos. Perfect for malaria. Perfect for dying. Says Winegard:

“Armies coming to attack Rome — beginning with Hannibal and the Carthaginians, and then the Visigoths, Attila and his Huns, and the Vandals — couldn’t essentially either take or hold Rome because of this malarial shield.”

Based on a quick search, it seems Winegard’s Mosquito book gives you:

1. Lots of surprising or even contrary ideas like the one above

2. A credible, well-researched reinterpretation of history

3. A new context for familiar things

… all of which means it might make a perfect choice for the Insights & More Book Club in the future.

Speaking of, the same Jordan who wrote me about the Mosquito book earlier wrote me about the last Insights & More book, the one we just finished. He said:

===

The book was mind blowing (even thought I havent finished it yet)

Can’t wait for my first call experience and the next book

===

It’s unfortunately too late to join for the next round of the Insights & More Book Club, because the doors have closed. But if you’d like to have the chance to join in the future, get on my email list. It’s the only place where I actually advertise and open up my book club.

1 mosquito summer lover ~ 3-4 books

by

Yesterday, I was at the gym in my home town of Zagreb, Croatia — and for a brief moment, I was amused.

The gym is the daily break in my monk-like life, where I make a bit of contact with the outside world and find out what’s going on.

And so it was yesterday. The radio was blasting. In between the parade of 80s hits — Duran Duran, Guns N’ Roses — a newswoman came on the radio with the following announcement:

“NEWSFLASH: The city of Zagreb will be importing 100,000 mosquitos this summer. From Italy. All males. And all sterile.”

Apparently this is the best idea the local authorities have to control the rampant mosquito population in this crowded, marshy city.

And it’s not such a crazy idea:

The males mate several times throughout the season. The females mate only once. If a female happens to mate with a sterile male, she will still lay her evil mosquito eggs, but those won’t develop into buzzing, bloodsucking, sleep-destroying future monsters. Checkmate, mosquito bitches.

I remember a similar story some twenty years ago, after Neil Strauss published his book The Game.

The Game brought the secret world of pick up artists out of dark and sticky Internet bulletin boards and exposed it to the light of the mainstream.

I remember the outrage that many women expressed upon finding out that there’s a population of men who are gaming the signals of social status and sexual attractiveness.

And who can blame these women?

If you invest in something, and invest big, you want to make sure that investment will be fertile.

That applies to mates, human and mosquito… to business partners… to clients… to employers… to employees… and to teachers your learn from.

Maybe you see where I’m going with this.

I personally believe books are the best teachers in the world. Unfortunately, as James Altucher once calculated, we each have at most 1,000 books left to us for the rest of our lives.

Some of us, like me, read very slowly, and our number is significantly less than 1,000. That translates to 3-4 books each summer.

So you better make sure that each of those 3-4 interactions counts, and each of those learning opportunities is fertile, rather than sterile.

Which brings me to my Insights & More Book Club. The doors are currently open. They will close tomorrow at 12 midnight PST.

The promise of the Insights & More Book Club is top-quality books, filled with surprising ideas. As for all the other details, well, you will have to sign up to my daily email newsletter to find those out. You can do so here.

Insights & More Book Club now open to new members looking for a new perspective

by

Tonight being the last Thursday… of a month that’s divisible by 2… with the moon’s phase being waxing gibbous… it can only mean one thing:

It’s time for the bimonthly bonfire meeting in the middle of a dark pine forest, also known as the Insights & More Book Club call.

I’ve been running this book club since the start of the year. So far, the other Insights & More members and I have read three books:

1. A cranky philosopher’s 100-year-old prediction of how the world will evolve (prediction turned out pretty much spot on)

2. A biography of a showman, packed full of practical how-to advice

3. A cultural history that attempts to explain all the world’s civilizations as a quest for one thing, which I won’t trouble you with here

Those three books might all sound very different from each other. But in some ways, they are also quite similar. For example, they all non-fiction books, written in the past 100 years, by men.

To change that somewhat, the fourth book of the Insights & More book club will be a novel, written by a woman.

And that’s my point for you for today:

Computer genius Alan Kay famously said that a change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

The whole point of the Insights & More Book Club is to read things that can give you that change in perspective.

But the change in perspective won’t come on its own, or at least not often enough. It’s something you have to force and press and cultivate consciously.

So if you’ve been reading just nonfiction books, read some fiction. If you’ve been reading only books published since 2020, read something old. If you find you only read books by men, read something by a woman.

Or just come and join the Insights & More Book Club, and have me do the worrying work of book selection for you.

I only open the doors to the Insights & More Book Club every two months, as we finish one book and start another. It doesn’t make sense to have people join midway.

The doors are currently open. They will close this Sunday July 2, at 12 midnight PST.

In case you’re curious about this club, you will have to be on my email list first. Click here to sign up for that.

How to use LinkedIn to win friends and influence clients within three months

by

Many years ago, while I was still on Upwork, I created a short-lived LinkedIn profile.

​​I thought LinkedIn could be a way to get high-quality leads for my copywriting services. So I created a profile and started aimlessly “connecting” with people who could be potential clients or contacts to help me get clients.

This lasted all about three days. I hated the experience, and it produced nothin’. I felt stupid and frankly humiliated, groping, and needy.

In a fit of rage, I deleted my LinkedIn profile, raced up to the tower of my moss-covered castle, slammed the large oaken doors behind me, and vowed that the cruel world would never see me “connecting” with anyone ever again.

And yet, ever since, I continue to hear stories of people getting clients, customers, and, yes, valuable connections through LinkedIn.

Even though I refuse to come down from the tower of my moss-covered castle, I have to admit my beastly ears always do perk up at these stories.

And so they did a few days ago, when I got an email from reader Carlo Gargiulo, who works as a copywriter at an info publishing business in Switzerland.

​​Carlo wrote me to say he has been applying some ideas I’ve shared, specifically inside my Most Valuable Email training, to writing LinkedIn posts. The results have been impressive.

Like I said, I couldn’t keep my beastly ears in place. I let out a soft growl. And I wrote back to Carlo, to ask exactly what he was doing on LinkedIn. He wrote me to say:

===

About three months ago I decided to start writing posts on LinkedIn about copywriting and direct response marketing.

I started doing this because I noticed that very few Italian copywriters were talking about copy on LinkedIn.

So, every Monday morning I publish a post.

The goal is to create some authority for myself and to get some clients among the entrepreneurs who follow my page.

For the past 2 weeks or so I have been reaping the first fruits.

There are entrepreneurs I had met in the past who have contacted me privately to ask how much it costs to consult with me and how much money I charge in exchange for writing marketing materials.

Specifically, they want posts similar to the ones I write on LinkedIn and email sequences.

The other result I have achieved is about the growth of authority in the company where I work as a copywriter.

Many colleagues started following me, and since I’m not very popular (since I’m very private), those posts were a hook to showcase my knowledge, and now I end up with a queue of people who want to talk to me about anything related to copy and direct response marketing.

As I told you, I’m very private, I lead a quiet lifestyle (books, TV series, magazines, running, walks at the lake) and I don’t like to show off.

===

Carlo’s message went on. He listed the specific marketing and copywriting ideas from the MVE swipe file, included with the MVE training, that he has been using in his LinkedIn posts.

I won’t repeat those here. ​​But I think you get the bigger point:

A way to use LinkedIn not to feel humiliated and out of place, but to get clients warmed up, reaching out, and asking to work with you… and even maybe to get a kind word or a smile of appreciation from your coworkers and colleagues.

Of course, that’s all assuming that you can write something that lights up people’s brains a bit, and that they feel interested in reading more of.

There are different ways to do that.

​​But as Carlo found, and as I found before him, using the MVE trick, and specific ideas in the MVE swipe file, is one effective way to go about it. If you’d like to get started with that today, so you can reap the benefits within a few months’ time:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/​​

The power of preparation for perplexing performances

by

“Tell me Sir, was this real… or was it humbug?”

Houdini was shocked at the power of his own show. He couldn’t believe that the man standing across from him — respected, intelligent, worldly — could be asking him such a question.

“No Colonel,” Houdini said with a shake of his head. “It was hocus pocus.”

The year was 1914. The place was the Imperator, a ship on the Hamburg-New York line, sailing west across the Atlantic. Houdini was traveling on the ship as a passenger, but he agreed to perform a seance act for the large and rich ship’s company.

Houdini walked around the audience, giving out pieces of paper and envelopes, telling people to write down a question, seal it in the envelope, and then put it in a hat that Houdini passed around.

But one of the audience members was particularly distinguished and highly reputable — Colonel Teddy Roosevelt, former President of the United States, traveling back from the UK. Roosevelt had just finished promotion of his new book about an adventure trip he had taken to Brazil the year previous.

“I am sure there will be no objection if we use the Colonel’s question,” Houdini said during the seance, tentatively walking towards Roosevelt. The audience murmured assent.

Then Houdini took out two little slate tablets, which were blank. After appropriate buildup and mystery, he asked Roosevelt to place his envelope, with the question inside, between the two tablets.

“Can you please tell the audience what your question was?” Houdini asked.

“Where was I last Christmas?” Roosevelt said.

Houdini opened up the slate tablets. They were no longer blank. Instead, they now showed a colored chalk map of Brazil, with the River of Doubt highlighted, where Roosevelt had spent the Christmas prior.

The effect of this on the crowd, and on Teddy Roosevelt himself, was immense. Roosevelt jumped up, and started laughing so hard and slapping his legs until tears ran down his face.

And then, the very next day, Roosevelt buttonholed Houdini on the deck of the ship. Roosevelt asked, in a hushed voice, whether Houdini truly had connections to the spirit world.

Houdini did not. It was hocus pocus, and he was ready to admit it.

So what lay behind his spectacular performance?

I won’t tell you the exact details. Like all tricks, it’s underwhelming when you find out the truth. But I will tell you the powerful underlying principle, in a single word:

Preparation.

An immense amount of quiet background work… research… setup… as well as thinking up and making plans for all possible contingencies.

Like I wrote a few weeks ago, I’ve decided to put together a new book. Working title — and maybe final title — is “10 Commandments of Hypnotists, Pick Up Artists, Comedians, Copywriters, Con Men, Door-To-Door Salesmen, Professional Negotiators, Storytellers, Spirit Mediums, and Stage Magicians.”

Some of the commandments I have in mind are clever techniques. Others… well, they’re stuff like this. Research. Preparation.

Few wanna do it. Few take it seriously. But the ones who do are eventually seen as having supernatural powers, while everybody else — ah, it’s not too bad, but I could do the same.

I already have a lot of this book ready, thanks to emails like this that I’ve already written. But it’s still gonna take me a while to pull everything together and get the book published.

Meanwhile, if you want a similar book, with a similar mix of stories and often unsexy but extremely powerful ideas, take a look at my other 10 Commandments book:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments