I’m three years behind where I should be

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A reader writes in reply to my announcement yesterday, about the price increase for my Daily Email Habit service:

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Hi,

I’m just starting my business and don’t have an email list yet. Does this make sense for me?

Thanks

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I don’t know this reader’s business or her circumstances or goals.

I can only tell you my personal experience, and how I wish it were different.

I started writing daily emails in 2018. At that point I had been working as a freelance copywriter for 3 full years.

I had tried and failed with various side projects.

I eventually started writing daily emails as a sandbox to practice ideas and possibly attract prospective clients, and show them that I can do what I claim I can do.

Three big questions now:

1. Would I be better off today had I started this daily email newsletter 3 years earlier?

2. Would I have been better off in 2018 had I already been writing this newsletter for 3 years?

3. Would I have been better off back in 2015, when I had nothing, knew nothing, and had done nothing, had I started writing a daily email newsletter in addition to trying to get copywriting clients?

Yes, to all three. There’s no doubt about it. Consider:

1. I would have been writing for three extra years

That would have translated into expertise, both in performing my job, and in selling myself to clients.

It also would mean three extra years of content — about 500,000 words — that I could repurpose into books, courses, trainings, talks given from the stage, lead magnets, bonuses.

2. I would have built my authority and status sooner and to higher levels

People treat you differently if you have a platform, even if it’s a platform anybody can create and assemble for free like an email newsletter.

The very fact of having something to say, and saying it publicly, gives you greater standing, status, and respect.

3. I would have had a side hustle to balance out ups and downs of client work

This would have made me less needy, more comfortable negotiating, and would have allowed me to turn away projects that I knew shouldn’t work on.

4. I would have organized my own experiences and thoughts about my business, the way I did only in 2021, and only because I had been writing daily emails

I made a lot of mistakes while working as a freelancer, including some that I estimate cost me hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of dollars.

Writing regularly, about what I am doing and learning, might have saved me from making some of those mistakes.

5. Writing to a dedicated audience would have eventually provided income

This would have balanced out what I was making with freelance work, and it only would have compounded in time.

6. Finally, I would have been building my list for an extra 3 years

For much of my time writing this email newsletter, the only thing I did to grow my list was to write my daily email and to post it on my website as a blog post.

It’s an incredibly inefficient and slow way to grow an email list. And yet, in time it still produced results and got me some subscribers, including people who then went on to promote me in various ways and who sped up the growth of my list.

In other words, just the very act of writing and making it available for people to find, is enough to build me the kernels of a list, which in turn became this “business,” though I still don’t even think of what I do as a business.

For all these reasons and more, I wish I had started my email list three years earlier.

It would have made the early days of my freelance career easier and faster.

It would have made the mid term of my copywriting career, around 2018, more profitable and more exciting.

And it would have made me richer and even more famous and beloved than I already am today (hard to believe, I know).

Again, this is all unique to me.

I don’t know your circumstances. I won’t try to persuade you that what makes perfect sense for me makes perfect sense for you.

If you wanna focus on the fact that I worked as freelance copywriter who specialized in writing sales emails… and therefore it was particularly beneficial to me to start writing sales emails for myself every day… you can focus on that.

But you can also focus on the other things I wrote above, which are relevant whether you’re a service provider doing something other than copywriting… or you sell courses or coaching… or you have handmade dog toys you want to get out into the world.

Whatever you decide to focus on:

The price for Daily Email Habit is going up this Thursday at 12 midnight PST, from a modest $30/month to the Martin Shkreli-like $50/month.

Daily Email Habit helps you start and stick with consistent daily emailing, and gives you, in a very condensed daily drip, a practical way to apply what I’ve learned over the past 8 years of writing this daily email newsletter.

I only wish I had started with it earlier.

If you wanna get started today, and take advantage of the still-reasonable monthly price:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Announcing: Martin Shkreli-like price increase for Daily Email Habit

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This Thursday, at 12 midnight PST, I will be increasing the price of my Daily Email Habit service to an unheard-of $50/month.

Daily Email Habit puts an email “puzzle” in your inbox each day, to help you start and stick with sending daily emails.

Daily Email Habit currently sells for $30/month, which means you can get a daily email prompt and ongoing education in how to expand that prompt into a fun and valuable email for just $1/day.

On Thursday, I’ll be increasing the price of Daily Email Habit to $50/month because my accountant, warehouse manager, and mother-in-law have all been beating me over the head and yelling at me to do it for days now.

Apparently the price of digital paper and digital ink have risen dramatically over the past few years, as have the labor costs of the little elves we use deliver Daily Email Habit puzzles to inboxes worldwide.

The fact remains that the price of Daily Email Habit, old or new, is a tiny fraction of what you can make regularly, each month, if you do start and stick with the habit of daily emailing.

Maybe a higher price will lead to higher commitment, at least in some people (a lower price certainly won’t). And ultimately, more commitment and more consistency is the goal of this entire service.

If you are currently signed up to Daily Email Habit, of course you will not be impacted by this dramatic and shameless price increase. You will keep being grandfathered in at whatever price you signed up at.

And if you are not yet signed up to Daily Email Habit, the same is true for you if you sign up today. The price goes up on Thursday for others… but you only have to pay the current rate, and the same in the future, whenever I decide to hike up the price again (say, in case the elves unionize).

If you want the full details on Daily Email Habit — including a sample of the fine printing job we do, which explains why we are so sensitive to rising digital paper and digital ink costs — so you can decide whether you want to join before price goes up:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Info publishing lesson from A24 Films

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I like to look at creative industries — where people are churning out and packaging up ideas and turning them into real world value. Maybe they can teach me something about the info publishing world as well.

Today, I wanna tell you about the movie industry, or rather, a different perspective that’s emerged in the movie industry over the past decade.

As you might know, the classic 20th century Hollywood movie studio is a home-run business.

A movie studio experiences lots and lots of strikeouts, which are offset and then some by one big hit, which can gross $100M or $1B or $100B (ok, maybe not $100B, not yet).

But there’s a subtle cost to this way of doing business, as you’ve probably seen at the local theater:

All Hollywood movies eventually become comic book movies.

The reason is both that comic book franchises already have proven stories and characters, with a built-in fan base that can be sold to…

… and that comic book movies make low demands on the viewer, and therefore have mass-market potential (this comes from someone who has spent 6 hours of his past 2 evenings rewatching two of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies).

But there’s another way to make movies.

Perhaps you have heard of A24 Films. A24 is a film and TV production company that got started in 2012. They are best known for making arty, creative movies, often with very small budgets. Some A24 movies have become hits. Some barely managed to recoup their small budgets. But all are cool, unique, and beloved by fans and critics alike.

I read an article about A24 recently. A top executive was quoted in the article with something that struck me:

“To use a baseball metaphor, we hit singles and doubles. And when you set up movies to hit singles and doubles you can let your partner—in the best version of this—really take creative risks. We don’t need to gross a hundred million dollars. We don’t need to gross forty million dollars to actually have a successful financial outcome.”

Here’s how I interpret this translates into the info publishing world:

If you’re only creating a few offers a year, each needs to be a big hit if you’re gonna be a long-term successful as a business.

And that means that over time, you will experience “audience capture” the way that Hollywood has experienced with comic book movies. In other words, you will find that you’re forced to create stuff because the mass mind of your audience dictates it, whether you genuinely believe in it or not, whether you enjoy creating it or not.

This can be fine — you might care about other things in life and get your kicks there.

But if creating cool stuff you’re proud of is something that matters to you, then there’s a lesson in what that A24 exec says. That lesson is to work on hitting lots of doubles and singles, both to cover your nut, and to give you the freedom to keep doing what you want, how you want, when you want.

So much for cross-pollination.

Now I’d like to remind you of my Daily Email Habit service, which gives you a daily email “puzzle” to help you start and stick with sending daily emails.

Daily Email Habit currently sells for $30/month, which means you can get a daily email prompt and ongoing education in how to expand that prompt into a fun and valuable email for just $1/day.

In a few days, I will be jacking up the price of Daily Email Habit to Martin Shkreli levels. If you want to get in before the price increases, or better yet, if you simply want to start writing your own daily email habit today, so you can start hitting singles and doubles regularly:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

I couldn’t give this new reviewer one star

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Last week, I wrote an email about an Amazon customer who wrote the first 4-star review of my new 10 Commandments book (all the other reviews were 5-star up to then).

The review was to the effect of, “the book is really 5 stars, but nothing’s perfect.”

I took a joking tone and gave that reviewer a “4-star review” in an email I sent to my whole list.

Well, the universe must have liked that because it’s now thrown a similar though entirely flipped opportunity in my path.

Here’s my most recent, 2-star review from Amazon customer LouisXIV, who didn’t even want to give my book those two stars:

“I couldn’t give it one star…had to give it two because it at compelled me to buy. This book is a magic trick from a (former?) pick up artist. It’s a bunch of stories loosely strung together. To be fair, I was familiar with a lot of these concepts already so someone may get more out of their introduction. Throwing it the garbage but kudos to the author for getting me to buy! 🤣”

I cannot give this new reviewer five stars, because nobody’s perfect. But I certainly cannot give him one star either. Not only is he helping me write this email and make some sales, but everything he says is true. Namely:

“This book is a magic trick…”

Why thank you.

“… from a (former?) pick up artist.”

… you’re making me blush but ok…

“It’s a bunch of stories loosely strung together.”

Yes, and it took a lot of work to get it so. The whole concept of the book is 10 commonalities among 10 seemingly unconnected disciplines:

“10 Commandments of Con Men, Pickup Artists, Magicians, Door-to-Door Salesmen, Hypnotists, Copywriters, Professional Negotiators, Political Propagandists, Stand Up Comedians, and Oscar-Winning Screenwriters”

It took a few years of research and a lot of fiddling to string together the stories that illustrate 10 common techniques used in these fields, as well as the underlying psychology and neurology common to all human beings, which you can then apply to your own life, even if you’re not, say, a pickup artist or a magician.

As for the techniques and principles themselves, they might not all be new to you, but you won’t find any of them in Cialdini’s Influence. Again, that’s by intention and design. For example, take Commandment VI:

“The best way to respond when someone accuses, mocks, or criticizes you. A trick used by pickup artists, which works on men as well as women. (Politicians obey this commandment too, too, from Andrew Jackson in 1828, to Ross Perot in 1990, all the way to Donald Trump in 2016.)”

If you’re as knowledgeable as LouisXIV seems to be, you might already know what this is. You might even have spotted me using it, right in this very email.

But if you’re not 100% sure, or you simply want to hear me go into this in more detail, via several stories that I’ve managed to string together in the most delicate and loose way, you can find it all in my book.

Maybe you’ll even give me kudos for getting you to buy it. In case you’re curious:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

2 facts about throwing good email parties

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Yesterday, I announced a new campaign inside my Daily Email House community. My goal is to get existing members to promote the group and help me grow it.

I appreciate all referrals.

At the same time, I’m not letting just anyone join.

To help me vet people, I have a few sphinx-like riddles set up at the front door.

I look at a potential new member’s profile and history on Skool.

I use my intuition to decide if he or she has something to get from and contribute to the group beyond trolling or whining.

Many I’ve allowed in. Some I have not.

Unfortunately, I only started keeping record last week of the colorful reasons why some people have found the doors to Daily Email House closed. Here are a few from the past week:

#1. In answer to “What’s your #1 goal right now?”: [entered his email address]

#2. In answer “What’s your #1 goal right now?”: “learn em”

#3. Bio: “sfd sfsfsf”

#4. In answer to “What’s your #1 goal right now?”: “邮件太多不知如何使用?” [ChatGPT translates this as “Too many emails and don’t know how to use them?” which would not pass muster even if it were written in English]

I recently read an article titled “21 Facts About Throwing Good Parties.” Fact #1:

“1) Prioritize your ease of being over any other consideration: parties are like babies, if you’re stressed while holding them they’ll get stressed too. Every other decision is downstream of your serenity: e.g. it’s better to have mediocre pizza from a happy host than fabulous hors d’oeuvres from a frazzled one.”

… and fact #20:

“20) Let me repeat that: Parties are a public service, you’re doing people a favor by throwing them. Someone might meet their new best friend or future lover at your gathering. In the short term, lovely people may feel less lonely, and that’s thanks to you. In the long term, whole new children may ultimately exist in the world because you bothered to throw a party. Throwing parties is stressful for most people, but a great kindness to the community, so genuinely pat yourself on the back for doing this.”

An online community should feel and work like something like a house party… as should an email newsletter. It should deliver value. It should be fun and the people participating — the members or readers — should feel like they can participate and express themselves more or less freely.

At the same time, you are still the one whose house it is, and you set the tone and the rules, and the #1 rule, and the #20 rule, is to make it convenient and fun for yourself first and foremost…

… and if that means not allowing people inside just because their vibe strikes you as off, then that’s ok.

So much for the long-term mindset.

If you want more practical, day-to-day advice on how to make your email list feel like an online party, you can find that inside my Daily Email Habit service.

Daily Email Habit currently sells for $30/month, which means you can get a daily email prompt and ongoing education in how to expand that prompt into a fun and valuable email for just $1/day.

In a few days, I will be jacking up the price of Daily Email Habit to Martin Shkreli levels. If you want to get in before the price increases, or better yet, if you simply want to start writing your own daily email habit today, so you can reap the benefits tomorrow:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Affiliate contests suck, so here’s an alternative

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I sat down just now and tried to write a list of 10 reasons why affiliate contests suck.

(Affiliate contest = Person X is selling an offer during a time-limited launch. Persons Y, Z, and Q are promoting it as affiliates. Whoever sells the most gets bragging rights and additional prizes, beyond just the affiliate commissions.)

I feel internally that affiliate contests suck, and so I was sure that I could come up with 10 good reasons to back up my feeling.

So I started writing and… I realized that my arguments were not really arguments against affiliate contests, but about mass launches with a bunch of affiliates who promote the same offer.

Mass affiliate launches devalue the core offer… they force each affiliate to come up with a new and unique offer (bonuses or bundles or whatever) if they hope to sell anything, which to me defeats the main point of promoting affiliate offers… they cut into sales since people on your list are likely to be on 5 other lists that are promoting the same.

I realized affiliate contests are actually a way of getting around all these negatives of mass affiliate launches.

List owners (persons Y, Z, and Q above) know that promoting an offer at the same time as a dozen other people sucks… and offer owners (Person X above) try to draw them back by promising additional prizes for the best performers, above and beyond the affiliate commissions.

Does it work?

People do affiliate contests all the time, so I’m guessing it works, at least for somebody out there.

At the same time, I can speak from personal experience that I avoid affiliate contests like I avoid the metro at rush hour on an August afternoon, both because I don’t like being in a sweaty crowd, and because I don’t like directly competing against people for one of a few available seats.

I imagine there are others who are like me, who are in fact turned off by the competitive aspect of winner-takes-most contests.

I’m telling you all this because today I announced a new campaign inside my Daily Email House.

The goal of the campaign is to grow the community.

I’m asking existing members to help me do so. Beyond the altruistic reasons of helping me out or building a more thriving community, I’ve also announced prizes:

Prize #1: For anyone who refers anyone to the group, whether this referred person ends up getting inside or not (I’m picky, and I don’t let just anyone inside)

Prize #2: for anyone who refers 10 people who end up getting inside

Prize #3: For the entire group, once we reach the magic number of new members I’ve set as the target for this campaign

It’s a different kind of incentive scheme to overcome the problem of multiple people promoting. Rather than an “affiliate contest,” this is an “affiliate challenge.”

In the affiliate challenge, people are not competing with each other (or are competing directly to a much smaller extent). They are primarily competing with themselves.

They are not falling behind each other, and not giving up because they feel it’s hopeless to win, or even refusing to engage altogether.

They are encouraged to participate and to achieve a manageable goal.

And at the end of it, the group benefits, and is hopefully stronger, rather than divided or deflated.

Maybe an “affiliate challenge” is something you can consider as an alternative to an affiliate contest, when running an offer or a promo or a launch where you’re hoping to get a bunch of referrals or affiliate sales from different people.

“Yeah but does this work?” I hear you ask.

Fair enough. I have no idea. I’m just testing out this campaign, and it’s likely that there will be hiccups or missteps along the way.

If you’d like to find out how it does, or participate to get yourself one of the prizes I’m offering, or you simply want to join a community with the shared goal of using your email list to pay for a house, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/house

How to make the coming tax season 11x more exciting

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A couple weeks ago, I wrote about attending my first ever pro football game.

I don’t really care about football.

And after the first 20 or so minutes of the game, when the novelty of being in a big stadium and seeing billion of dollars’ worth of talent running around on the pitch, I thought to myself, “This is nice, but I could imagine going home at half time.”

And yet, I didn’t leave, and the rest of the game proved endlessly exciting and fascinating.

After the game, I asked myself what did it.

In part, it was the game itself — an underdog versus an overdog, lots of attacking and good chances, a last-minute goal.

But I’m not sure I would have cared about any of that had my friends and I not decided to also make a 1 euro bet on the outcome of the game. I think the bet, small and stupid though it was, suddenly sucked me into what was happening in a way that simple sports never could.

The fact is, betting makes anything more exciting.

I heard once that a person who bets any amount of money on a game is 11x more likely to watch the game.

I’ve been thinking about how to take advantage of that instinct to make betting a sales mechanism, or useful for sales. While I figure that out, betting is useful to me today for the sake of simple content.

For the past couple days, I’ve been promoting Jeanne Willson and Kirsten Graham’s free “Taxes for solopreneurs” masterclass. I got a reply to my email about that yesterday from a reader who wrote:

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I have to be totally honest: given the state of US politics and the IRS as an institution, not only do I not think that’s true, but I’m also pretty confident that no one is getting audited until another administration comes in. They’re just too understaffed.

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I don’t know if that’s true, but I figure betting on it is a sure way to make the coming tax season 11x more exciting.

Of course, in this context, this will not be any positive kind of excitement. Bet that the IRS is too understaffed to single you out is likely to turn 11x otherwise good moments into moments of worrying, fretting, and taking out mental time that could be used to more productive or profitable uses.

If that’s not the kind of excitement you want or need in your life, I would refer you to Thursday’s training by Jeanne and Kirsten.

Jeanne and Kirsten will share a plan to take care of the looming cloud of a tax audit, without paying the $200-$500 per month that you would pay to your local CPA.

And yes, there will be a done-for-you service for sale at the end of Thursday’s training to make your tax worries disappear.

And yes, I will get paid something as an affiliate if you take Jeanne and Kirsten up on this offer.

But I’m not getting paid anything to plug Jeanne and Kirsten’s training on Thursday, which will be valuable and instructive on its own, whether you choose to buy the offer at the end.

If you would like to sign up for this free training, and reclaim the part of your brain that’s worried about taxes:

https://lessmathmoremoney.com

Others get audited for their travel and entertainment deductions… YOU deduct TWICE as much, yet get no flack from the IRS

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This week I’m promoting Jeanne Willson and Kirsten Graham’s free training on how solopreneurs can offload their bookkeeping without paying CPA prices.

Unfortunately, I know very little about the world of taxes or bookkeeping.

Fortunately, I know something about copywriting, and the world of direct marketing. That’s how I know of a sales bullet, written by A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos, in a blockbuster sales letter from 1996:

“Others get audited for their travel and entertainment deductions. You deduct TWICE as much, yet get no flack from the IRS. The secret is on page 18.”

In case you’re curious about the secret to not getting audited while others do, it’s this, from page 18 of the book Parris was promoting (I’m summarizing):

Submit documentation and proof along with your tax return. The IRS officially discourages attached proof and evidence. Even so, it’s a proven recipe to reducing your chances of an audit, because while audits are triggered automatically, they are reviewed by a live human, and a human might look at your attached proof and decide your claims are legit.

This info, which supposedly comes from a well-connected IRS insider, is from the 1990s.

Is it still true today?

I cannot say. If you’re really worried about getting audited, I would refer you to Thursday’s training by Jeanne and Kirsten.

Jeanne and Kirsten will share a plan to take care of the looming cloud of a tax audit, without paying the $200-$500 per month that you would pay to your local CPA.

And yes, there will be a done-for-you service for sale at the end of Thursday’s training to make your tax worries disappear.

And yes, I will get paid something as an affiliate if you take Jeanne and Kirsten up on this offer.

But I’m not getting paid anything to plug Jeanne and Kirsten’s training on Thursday, which will be valuable and instructive on its own, whether you choose to buy the offer at the end.

If you would like to sign up for this free training, and reclaim the part of your brain that’s worried about taxes:

https://lessmathmoremoney.com/

You can laugh at tax worries — if you follow this simple plan

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Next Thursday, November 6, at 2pm EST/11am PST, Jeanne Willson and Kirsten Graham will put on a free training about the sexy and exciting topic of taxes. The full title:

“How Online Business Owners Can Get Their Books Organized Before April 15, 2026 (Without Paying CPA Prices)”

I met Jeanne and Kirsten earlier this year within a small paid community I’m a member of.

The two of them partner together in several businesses that support solopreneurs, or as they put it, “business owners who need help the most.”

Jeanne and Kirsten’s training will be about how you can offload bookkeeping from your head if you are doing it yourself currently… or finally get it done if you are (gulp) not doing anything about your taxes at the moment, and are simply hoping this problem will somehow fix itself before tax day comes.

Jeanne and Kirsten will share a plan to take care of this looming cloud without paying the $200-$500 per month that you would pay to your local CPA.

And yes, there will be a done-for-you service for sale at the end of Thursday’s training to make your tax worries disappear.

And yes, I will get paid something as an affiliate if you take Jeanne and Kirsten up on this offer.

But I’m not getting paid anything to plug Jeanne and Kirsten’s training on Thursday, which will be valuable and instructive on its own, whether you choose to buy the offer at the end.

If you would like to sign up for this free training, and reclaim the part of your brain that’s worried about taxes:

https://lessmathmoremoney.com/

Pricing quiz

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See if you can spot the pattern among three of my recent culinary purchases:

1. Last week I bought a bag of roasted chestnuts from a seller on the street. The smallest bag was 4 euro, the middle 7 euro, the biggest 14 euro.

I got the 7 euro bag, and was thinking how expensive everything has gotten when a middle-sized bag of chestnuts costs that much.

But when I got the bag — about the size of a futsal football — I couldn’t even be mad.

2. A few days ago, I sat down with my friend Sam for a beer on the Rambla de Catalunya, Barcelona’s most touristy street.

The beers arrived and each was the size of a fishbowl, I’m guessing 1 liter of beer or more.

I was wondering how much we’d get ripped off for this. I was pleasantly surprised when the bill arrived that the huge beers were only 9 euro each.

3. Today I had lunch beneath Montserrat, a mountain close to Barcelona.

The lunch was a fixed menu including appetizers, a main course, and dessert. The price was 30 euro, which frankly is outrageous for the kind of countryside restaurant this is.

The way they justified it — again, I couldn’t even be mad — was that along with the single main course and the single dessert, each menu included not one but five separate appetizers.

So can you see the pattern?

If you’re not 100% sure, or you simply want to hear me pontificate on a Sunday afternoon:

Marketing guru Jay Abraham, also known as the “$75 billion man,” for that’s as much business growth the man has supposedly created, likes to say there are only three ways to grow a business.

The first is more customers, which is what everybody focuses on, until they get it, and realize that it’s not what they really want.

The second is to increase the frequency of purchase, and its logical conclusion, continuity offers. This sounds like the dream, and is no doubt good for some people, but comes with issues of its own.

The third is the least discussed, and it’s to increase the transaction size. There are various ways to do increase transaction size, but a simple way is simply to sell a barrel rather than a bucketful, a giant bag instead of a normal bag, a fishbowl of beer rather than a glass, 5 appetizers instead of one.

That’s something to consider if you too sell things and are looking to increase your prices and grow your business.

I’m considering it because today marks the end of the first week of my revived Daily Email House group, where the core promise still remains, “Use your email list to pay for a house.”

It’s hard to pay for a house with an email list selling $27 offers.

It’s fairly easy to do if you’re selling $2,700 offers.

It’s an afterthought if you’re selling $27,000 offers.

I had something to say about this inside Daily Email House, and I’ll have more to say, and hopefully some of it will help some of the folks inside the group. If you want to join them:

https://bejakovic.com/house