High-quality content is a bad investment for most businesses

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In a recent newsletter, media watcher Simon Owens wrote that high-end, narrative podcasts are a bad investment for most businesses. Cheap, conversational podcasts are a much smarter bet. This made my long and I believe quite attractive ears perk up.

Why is producing high-production-value, valuable content such a bad idea? Simon shares his own experience:

But here we are just two years later, and most of the narrative shows are gone from my own podcast feed. The transition occurred gradually. I’d find myself looking forward to new episodes of the conversational podcasts, whereas listening to the scripted ones just felt like homework. My mind would drift during crucial plot points, which meant skipping back several minutes so I could regain my narrative foothold. In many cases, the narrative series I listened to died off after a single season, and I just didn’t have the energy to try out new ones. Today, only four out of the 23 shows I regularly listen to hinge on a storytelling structure.

Simon says, of course there is still some space for fancy narrative podcasts like Serial, and there will always be some audience. But for most businesses, investing in this kind of content is a losing game.

Like I said, my ears were very perky after reading this.

“What if it’s not just podcasts?” I said to myself. The question is not about complex storytelling versus unscripted conversations. The question is whether your content feels like homework or not.

Or maybe the question is really this:

Is the high production value you put into your content helping your case — or actually hurting it? This might be something to think about if you have a podcast, or a YouTube channel, or — an email newsletter.

But here’s something else to think about:

People don’t just sign up to conversational podcasts. Not just like that. Nobody sets out looking for a random and unknown person to listen to.

No, people initially start listening to conversational podcast because the podcast is recommended by somebody… or because a snippet of it is surprising or fun… or, most likely, because the podcaster has some kind of standing, authority, or status.

Which brings me to my Most Valuable Email training.

It’s about an email copywriting trick. This trick produces surprising content. Content which gets recommended and shared by readers to other potential readers. And which builds up your perceived standing, authority, and status, by you doing nothing more than writing valuable emails regularly… which don’t feel like homework to read.

In case you have an email newsletter around marketing or copywriting, or want to start one, this Most Valuable Email training might be a good investment. To find out more about it:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

This email is fresh and I can prove it, but if it weren’t…

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Today is October 4, which marks the 139th anniversary of the first trip of the Orient Express, on October 4, 1883. I’m telling you this for two reasons:

Reason one is that there is something magical about the name Orient Express. It captured the dreams and imagination of the world for the better part of a century.

The mystery train from Paris to Istanbul, stopping at exotic locations like Vienna, Budapest, and the Black Sea port of Varna, featured in Bram Stoker’s Dracula… the James Bond book and film From Russia, With Love… and most famously, in Agatha Christie’s Murder On The Orient Express.

So it might be worth thinking a bit about what it was about that name, and the train that bore it, that made it so impactful and sticky.

Reason two is that I want to prove to you, as well as I can, that I’m actually writing this email today, October 4 2022. It’s valuable for readers to feel your content is fresh. But I will make you a little confession:

I don’t always write fresh content. Sometimes, when I am too rushed, uninspired, or simply hung over, I will go and reuse an old email. It’s one of the benefits of having written 1,300+ of them for this newsletter alone.

Whenever I do that, I will select an old email that I still like reading a year or two later. And then I’ll update it. Rewrite it slightly to take out the no longer relevant, and to add in the now relevant.

Whenever I do this, I find I get lots of engagement and positive reactions from readers. And I’ve never once had anybody point out that I’m rewarming last year’s supper.

It turns out I’m not the first to hit upon this idea. Back in 2015, the people at Vox did an experiment. As Matt Yglesias, then editor at Vox, wrote:

“For one week, we asked our writers and editors to update and republish a number of articles — one each day — that were first posted more than two months ago. This is hardly a brand-new idea in digital journalism. But we did it a little differently. Rather than putting the old article back up again unchanged, or adding a little apologetic introductory text to explain why it was coming back and was possibly outdated in parts, we just told people to make the copy as good as it could be.”

Result?

Over 500,000 readers for those rewarmed articles… engagement and exposure to good content that had previously gone unnoticed… and not a single reader writing in to say that Vox was reusing content.

That’s something else to think about, at least if you have a stockpile of old content. Don’t apologize for reusing it. Instead, make the old content as good as you can, today, on October 4, 2022, and then serve that up to your audience.

All right, my mystery train is about to leave the station, so let me say:

This email you just read does not use my Most Valuable Email trick. If you know the trick already, you will see why the content you just read would be 100% incompatible with trick teach in the Most Valuable Email. And if you don’t know the trick yet, and you’re curious to find out more about it, you can do that on the following exotic and mysterious page:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Post-mortem of my MVE launch

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As I write this, it’s 11:47am in Spain, which means that some 2 hours and 47 minutes ago, I ended my Most Valuable Email launch.

Whenever I complete a project, I like to force myself to look at the dead hulk, lying there on the ground, and ask myself what I see. Sometimes this triggers insights in my little head which I can use on future projects.

So here are 10 curious things I saw during my MVE launch. Maybe one of them will give you an insight you too can use on a future project:

1. 72.5% of my buyers during this launch had signed up for my free Most Valuable Email presentation back in June. I’m not sure how many watched that free presentation. But there’s a good chance that many who bought this MVE training actually knew my MVE trick ahead of time.

2. 68% of people who bought my Most Valuable Email Swipes offer back in June bought the full MVE course now. (As I wrote earlier, I made these folks a special offer as a way of saying thanks.)

2. Around 4.7% of my entire list bought the MVE training. Is that a good number? A bad number? Does it mean anything? I wish somebody could tell me.

3. I won’t spell out the exact money I earned from this launch. But I will tell you it took me more than two years working as a freelance copywriter to make this much money in a month. And it took me three years working as freelance copywriter before I made this much money regularly each month.

4. While the money I made from this MVE launch was nothing to cough, sniffle, or sneeze at, it was still significantly less than each time I have had a Copy Riddles launch, even with drastically fewer buyers. The reasons are obvious. The MVE training is at a lower price point and has no upsell right now. Maybe there’s a lesson there.

5. For the first time ever, sales came more or less evenly throughout the launch period, and weren’t all bunched up right before the deadline. I’m not sure what that’s about.

6. I saw a spike in sales after each email I sent, even in the middle of the 9-email launch sequence. Which tells me I should have sent more emails.

7. The vast majority of people who bought MVE bought something from me previously (Copy Riddles, Influential Emails, Most Valuable Postcard). I don’t have an easy way to see the exact number, but I would say around 80%.

8. Around 1.1% of my list unsubscribed during the 4-day, 9-email launch. For reference, I had the same number of unsubscribes over the 10 days prior to the launch, so you could say my unsubscribe rate was roughly double the usual. The email that got the most unsubscribes was “Brutally discriminatory practices surrounding my Most Valuable Email launch.”

10. I ended the launch with more email subscribers than I started with. In spite of increased unsubscribes, I also saw a spike in new subscribers, on top of the usual optins.

And the really curious part starts:

Because the whole reason I created this Most Valuable Email was that I wanted evergreen offers I can end my daily emails with.

So while my launch is over, the Most Valuable Email offer continues to be available, without the launch discount.

I can tell you price will never decrease from this point, only possibly increase.

So if you didn’t buy the Most Valuable Email training during the launch period, and you’re curious what it’s about, you can find out here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Dr. Bejako the sadistic dentist goes to work on the “mystery box” bonus

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Long-time readers of this newsletter might know I’m a big fan of screenwriter William Goldman. Goldman won two screenwriting Oscars, one for Butch Cassidy and another for All The President’s Men.

​​He also wrote The Princess Bride.

​​And of course, Goldman wrote Marathon Man, which starred Sir Laurence Olivier in the role of the sadistic dentist Dr. Szell (“Is it safe?”).

I thought of Dr. Szell because I’ve never before been compared to a dentist, but it finally happened today.

​​Author and copywriter Angie Archer, who not only took me up on my Most Valuable Email offer, but was one of the first to take me up on the free but valuable, time-limited offer included inside MVE, wrote me to say:

This feels like a trip to the dentist.

I know it’ll be good for me, but…

Here, before I talk myself out of it, is [Angie taking me up on my ‘mystery box’ offer].

You might not know what a “mystery box” offer is.

It’s an idea I got from marketer Rich Schefren. Rich once offered a “mystery box” upsell for $29. He didn’t say what was in the box, only that the buyer should trust him, and his claim that the box is worth at least 10x the asking price.

Rich’s “mystery box” upsell converted at a crazy 78% — 2x or 3x what a typical upsell will do. What’s more, Rich says the offer got zero negative chargebacks, and ended up forming a segment of his best customers.

So a mystery box might be worth experimenting with in your own marketing. You just gotta be firm, and not give in, and not tell people what’s inside the box.

That’s what I won’t tell you what my MVE “mystery box” offer is. I will just say it is very valuable, more so than the price of this course, and that it’s something I probably won’t keep up for very long.

So if you are interested in taking me up on the Most Valuable Email and the free but valuable, time-limited mystery box offer it contains, it might make sense to act now.

​​The launch period is coming to an end in a few hours time, at 12 midnight PST tonight. After that deadline, the price will go up. If you’d like to get in before then:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

My storytelling advice to a “storytelling coach”

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Yesterday, I got an email from a well-known copywriter. The subject line read, “It’s story time for your business.”

This email was obviously a solo ad – somebody paid to send an advertisement to the copywriter’s list. The advertised offer was a free training held by a “story coach” who happens to be “one of the world’s top storytelling experts.”

I was intrigued. What might I learn from a top storytelling expert?

The suspicious thing was, the story coach’s email was itself not written as a story.

“Maybe she’s trying to tease me,” I thought. “I must see what kind of wondrous Harry Potter-like yarn a story coach can weave.”

So I went to the website of the story coach herself.

There were no stories anywhere on the front page. But there was a promo video. I watched a few minutes of it. No stories in there either.

The teasing was starting to get a little annoying.

So I went to the about page. Still nothing! All I found was how important stories are, and how life is too short not to share your true story, and how storytelling can help you make more money.

But then finally, at the bottom of the about page, I found it. The story coach’s story. It was there, under the heading, “The Story.” It went like this:

ONCE UPON A TIME, the story coach was born in a country far, far away
She then moved to another country for university
She then worked at some NGOs and got married
She then realized her “passion for adult learning”
She then started working as a corporate trainer
She then specialized as a story coach
She then became, and today still remains, “honored and delighted to empower people and businesses world-wide”
THE END

Maybe, maybe, this story coach has some valuable advice to give to her students.

If so, then she clearly forgets to apply her advice to her own business. Because the above “story” is so un-riveting that it immediately sabotages the claim she is a storytelling expert.

The way I see it:

if you want to sell with a personal story today, you better make sure your personal story is remarkable. Barring that, you better make sure you are a remarkable storyteller.

The trouble is the vast majority of people — most copywriters and “story coaches” included — do not have any remarkable personal stories and are not all that remarkable as storytellers.

So does that mean most people in business should stay away from telling stories?

Well, if I were coaching the story coach, I would advise her, for two good reasons, to pony up $75 and get my Most Valuable Email training before the price goes up on Sunday at midnight PST.

Reason one is that Most Valuable Emails are perfect for anybody who sells services or info products about topics like marketing, copywriting, or writing. If you write about those topics, then the Most Valuable Email trick is immediate and instant to use.

Reason two is that each time you write a Most Valuable Email, it makes you a tiny but significant bit better at whatever it is you are writing about.

So ​​If you are a marketer writing about marketing topics, it makes you a better marketer.

​​If you are a copywriter writing about sales copy, it makes you a better copywriter.

​​And if you are a so-called storytelling expert, then writing Most Valuable Emails at first make you decent and then maybe even good at telling stories.

So that’s my advice. In case you want to find out more about the Most Valuable Email training, take a look at the following, non-storified, sales page:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

My superior MVE guarantee that trumps Gary Halbert and John Carlton

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In my email from two days ago, I shared John Carlton’s “Notorious ’20 Clicks’ Report’. This report collected, in shorthand format, 20 of Gary Halbert’s “first-choice” marketing tactics.

​​In that email, I said this report is potentially the most valuable thing I will ever share in this newsletter.

Most valuable, yes. But not necessarily new.

For example, “Click 20” in the report is pretty standard marketing advice you’ve probably heard a thousand and one times:

“Reverse the risk — you shoulder all the risk, so buyer is ‘covered'”

Gary H. advised his clients to offer longer guarantee periods… 30-day holds on checks… even double-your-money-back guarantees.

Bah, I say. That’s kids’ stuff. It pales in comparison to how much risk I am willing to shoulder with my Most Valuable Email offer. It goes like this:

1. If you like my emails, find them insightful, and want to write something similar…

2. If you already have or are willing to start an email list about marketing or copywriting…

3. If you have read or at least skimmed my sales page, or what there is of it, so you have a clear understanding of what my offer is, what the price is, and what my promises to you are at that price…

… if and only if all three of these are true… then I guarantee the Most Valuable Email is for you. You will find it both fun and valuable.

On the other hand:

If you don’t fulfil any of the above three conditions… or you don’t know me too well… or you don’t trust me too much… or you have general vague doubts or uneasy feelings about taking me up on my MVE offer… or you want to “test drive” the content to see if it’s right for you… or, best of all, if you have been studying copy for years and have seen it all and are determined that unless I show you something new within the first 2 minutes then you will demand a refund…

Then I 100% guarantee the Most Valuable Email training is NOT for you. Don’t buy it, and save yourself, and even more importantly, save me, a bit of headache and frustration.

How’s that for shouldering risk?

After all, Gary H. and John C. were willing to take on all the risk — up to but not including risking the actual sale.

On the other hand, I am willing to risk you will not buy at all from me if this offer is not right for you.

Maybe that seems silly, or counter to the basic principles of greed-gland marketing. That’s okay. I feel it will serve me well in the long run.

Anyways, now you know what I guarantee when it comes to the Most Valuable Email.

And if you meet criteria 1 and 2 above, and you are interested in this training, then all that’s left for you is to read or at least skim my sales page so you can meet criterion 3.

If you want to do that now, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Announcing MVE 2: Judgment Day

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Today I am opening the cage and unleashing upon the world my Most Valuable Email training.

I expect this beast to set things on fire, crush kids’ bikes, and maybe have the SWAT Team called in against it.

I will have more to say about this training over the past few days. Such as, for example, answering the question:

“But Bejako, didn’t you already release something like this Most Valuable Email? It sounds familiar.”

It should soound familiar. I will deal with that question in more detail soon. For now, you can think of this training as the impossibly shiny, hyper-intelligent, and unstoppable T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgment Day, compared to the dumb and brutish T-800 from the first Terminator film.

Also, here are a few organic facts you might like to know:

1. I will be promoting the Most Valuable Email until this Sunday, October 2

2. Well, really, I will be promoting it pretty regularly even after this Sunday, but—

3. If you do decide to buy this training before the clock chimes at 12 midnight PST on Sunday, you will get a 25% discount off the not-too-expensive, not-too-cheap regular price which will kick in on Monday

4. You can get a bit more detail about this offer at the page below, but—

5. This sales page is incomplete.

Yep, it’s incomplete. I will be filling it out over the coming days.

Still, if you trust me and you already know you want this training… or if you’re curious what an incomplete sales page looks like, and want to spy on how I will develop it it over the next few days… then you have one reasonable course of action. Take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

FREE REPORT BY RENO AD WIZARD REVEALS 20 AMAZING SECRETS THAT CAN MAKE YOUR BUSINESS GROW LIKE CRAZY ALMOST OVERNIGHT!

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A couple days ago, I sent out an email about the “Man on Wire” sales technique. Even though I saw that technique in a movie, I remembered reading about it in one of Gary Bencivenga’s Marketing Bullets. I searched online, and found that bullet.

But I also remembered reading about this sales technique in a drug- and sex-filled tabloid, or tabloid-like publication, which formed my first shock exposure to direct marketing about 10 years ago.

I searched online, but I couldn’t find the relevant issue.

No matter. Because as part of this search, I did find something else. It’s potentially the most valuable thing I will ever share in this newsletter.

Here’s a fact you might or might not know:

“The REAL money in most projects comes from the strategy… and not just from clever copy.”

That comes from a Reno, NV ad wizard who is best know as a high-octane, A-list copywriter. But as he will be the first to admit, “The best copywriters remain in demand and at the top of the ‘A List’ because they are also savvy marketers.”

So today I want to share with you a 15-page free report by this Reno ad wizard. This free report can make your business – or your client’s business — grow like crazy almost overnight.

Ignore this report and suffer.

On the other hand, read it and apply it and — well, here’s the deal:

If you want this free report, then sign up to my daily email newsletter. And when my welcome email gets to you, hit reply and tell me you want the report. I will then send you the link. Here’s where to get started.

Feelings of entitlement may signal copywriting potential

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Today I read a viral pop-science article that made my head spin. The article reported research from Stanford University. The research consisted of two parts.

In the first part, the scientists tested a bunch of people to see whether those people were prone to feelings of guilt.

In the second part, the scientists had those same people interact in group settings, like planning a marketing campaign.

And get this:

The scientists found that the people who tested the most guilt-prone… were also voted as being the most leader-like. That’s according to the other participants in the study.

The underlying message of this research was clear:

If you yourself get burdened with deep guilt from time to time, there might be hope for you yet. In fact, it might be a sign that you secret talents – maybe even a purpose, a mission — that you just aren’t aware of yet.

Inspiring, right? No wonder this article went viral, with billions of upvotes and trillions of comments.

Aye, but here’s the rubbety rub:

The Stanford scientists didn’t just test whether subjects were guilt-prone or not. Instead, they actually tested whether subjects were more prone to either guilt… or to shame.

Guilt? Shame?

Maybe you’re not sure what distinction there is between those two. I wasn’t sure. But the Stanford scientists have their own definitions of the two terms.

Guilt is proactive: You feel bad about something you did, and you want to make amends.

Shame is passive: You feel bad about something you did, and you want to hide and not be seen.

Aaahhh…

So it turns out this inspiring Stanford study was really a bit of clever categorization and reframing. The article I read was titled, “Feelings of Guilt May Signal Leadership Potential.” But really, it could have been more honestly titled, “Proactive Behaviors May Signal Leadership Potential.”

But whatever. This article cannot in any way help us with persuasion and influence. So let’s just drop it.

And in entirely unrelated news, let me pay off today’s subject line:

Perhaps you sometimes catch a sneaking sense of entitlement coming over you.

​​Perhaps you get angry when you cannot get what you want… or you feel you are special and should not have to accept normal constraints… or you cannot discipline yourself to complete boring or routine tasks… or you become easily frustrated… or you have trouble giving up immediate gratification to reach a long-term goal.

All those might sound like very negative behaviors and thought patterns, ones that are destined to keep you from success.

But what if I told you that feelings of entitlement might actually signal copywriting potential?

The missing thing you might not have realized is that there are two related but actually distinct states.

One is entitlement. Entitlement is thinking you are better than others, and is rooted in a sensitivity to outside stimula, to social cues and responses, as well as to your own internal states and your place in the world.

The other is arrogance. Arrogance is thinking you are better than others, but is based in dullness and a lack of sensitivity, both to outside and inner sensations.

And that’s why arrogant people cannot make for good copywriters. They are not interested enough in observing the world, in how others behave and react, in what it all means.

On the other hand, entitled people, well, their sensitivity actually predisposes them to become immensely successful as copywriters.

I won’t name names here, but when I look at some of the most successful people in the direct response industry, both now and in the past, I suspect they felt a strong, even dominant sense of entitlement. Even if they appeared to be modest, self-effacing, humble people.

All right, let’s wrap up this pop science article.

Final words:​​

In case you are trying to make it as a copywriter, and you’re wondering where to start, then here’s a resource that may help you make the most of your latent copywriting potential:

​​https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

The sales secret of Man on Wire

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Last night, in a desperate hunt for a movie to watch, I turned to the Rotten Tomatoes 100% Club. That’s a list of some 370 movies that have had uniformly positive reviews — a perfect 100% Rotten Tomatoes score.

This led me to Man On Wire, a 2008 documentary about a man named Philippe Petit. In case you haven’t seen this movie, the gist is:

Petit was a tightrope walker. And obsessive.

Back in 1968, when he was just 18 years old, Petit hit upon the idea of walking on a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center.

Problem:

The towers hadn’t been built yet. So Petit spent the next six years scheming, practicing, and waiting in preparation for his audacious August 7, 1974 walk between The South and North Towers, which lasted 45 minutes.

But here’s a question that maybe immediately pops into your head, as it did into mine when I heard about this stunt:

How exactly do you stretch a wire across the two towers? The wire weighed 200 kilograms, or about 450 lbs. Petit was doing his setup clandestinely, in the middle of the night, while hiding from security guards, so helicopters and cranes were out of the question.

So what the hell do you do?
​​
​​You can’t just hoist the wire up from the ground — it’s a 400 meter drop (over 1,300 feet). You can’t just toss the heavy wire across the 40 meters (130 feet) that separate the corners of the two towers.

A hint comes early in the movie.

You see a silhouette of a man packing things into a bag. It’s supposed to represent Petit.

Along with other unrecognizable equipment, the silhouette gives away something familiar — an arrow.

The fact is, one of Petit’s henchmen shot an arrow with a bow from one tower to the another. And that arrow had a fishing line attached to the end of it.

They used that first fishing line to pull across a slightly sturdier string.

Then they used that string to pull across a strong rope.

And finally, they used the rope to pull across the actual wire, which like I said, weighed as much as an adult melon-headed whale.

Maybe see where I’m going with this.

Because when I saw this in the movie, a lightbulb went off in my head.

“I know this technique!” I shouted in the darkness.

But not from tightrope walking. I know this technique from sales. I first read about it in one of Gary Bencivenga’s Marketing Bullets. Gary called it one of the “the most powerful master strategies I ever learned.”

You can find the explanation of this sales technique below. But not just that.

You can also find lots of inspiring personal stuff about Gary at the page below. Such as for example, that for a long time, Gary was such a bad copywriter that he considered giving up and becoming a mailman. He even went to the post office to pick up a job application.

The only reason Gary stuck with copywriting, the only reason he persevered and eventually became so successful, the only reason we know of him today, was that he was told at the post office that they are not hiring at the moment, and when they do start hiring again, thousands of prior applicants will be ahead of Gary in line.

So Gary stuck with copywriting and marketing.
​​
And one of the biggest things that Gary learned in the years that followed, and used in all his copy and marketing, from his sales letters to his olive oil business, was this “Man On Wire” sales technique. In case you are interested:

http://marketingbullets.com/bullet-15/