A budding email copywriter makes me an offer I can refuse, and in 10 different ways

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A couple months ago, I got the following unattractive proposition in my inbox (edited down for length):

I’m into email Copywriting(been studying it for a good year now) and would love to get my foot in the door as soon as possible.

I want to make you an offer that would

1. Benefit you(hopefully)

2. Benefit me(most definitely)

So here it is

Would you be open to me writting you a bunch of subject lines daily and also writing copy for you whenever you want?

This would make great practice for me and save you a lot of time coming up with subject lines

I should mention I studied the infotainment aspect of email Copywriting so my subject lines and copy are all entertaining and educational mixed in one awesome bundle

Would really love to hear your feedback on this

My feedback, the short version, was no.

My longer, more detailed feedback is no, repeated over and over, in many different languages, with many different supporting reasons.

In fact, for my own benefit, I sat down and wrote down 10 impregnable reasons why I would never accept this offer.

Some of the reasons you can probably guess:

Like the total impracticality of it. How would this guy possibly write my subject lines? It’s an integral part of the email copy. Would we get on a Zoom call each day where we would hash it out? Would we get on another Zoom call on the rare (but certainly possible) days when I found that all his subject lines were trash?

So that’s one easy reason. Another, more complex reason, is:

The fact that most of the value in an email is the personal voice. Even in newsletters like mine, where I make almost zero effort at having a unique voice, and where I instead work hard to dig up something new to say to you each day. Even so, the personal element is still the most important part. And like Dan Kennedy says, why would you outsource the most important part of your business?

So that’s reason two. But here’s a third and really most important reason:

There is value to me in writing these daily email besides just getting them out. I learn stuff. I become a more valuable marketer and copywriter. I get exposed to interesting new ideas and approaches and techniques, because I write about them for you. Writing these emails is an investment in the future.

Which is why I called my recent course the Most Valuable Email. What makes it so valuable is not the nice external things it brings. It’s not the list growth, the endorsements, the perceived authority, the free stuff, or the cool job offers I’ve gotten as a result of using the trick I describe inside this course.

Instead, it’s that that each time that I write any of my daily emails, and specifically, each time I use this MVE trick, it makes me more valuable.

So to any budding email copywriter out there, looking to practice or to get their foot in the door, my advice is:

Start your own email newsletter. Keep it up for a few months. And there you go. An opportunity to practice. And your foot will be jammed tightly in between the door and the wall.

And if by some strange magic you want to find out more about my Most Valuable Email trick, you can do that at the sales page below.

The sales page is still criminally short. And yet many people bought through it. That’s because I write my own daily emails, and people read those, and so they trust me.

If you want to do something similar:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

The ring of truth

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Here’s a quiz question for the criminal mastermind in you:

How might you sneak into Buckingham Palace?

How might you make your way over the castle-like walls and fences, past the hundreds of armed guards, the thousands of staff, the sensors, the alarms, and the vicious and bloodthirsty packs of attack corgis?

​​How might you get make your way to the heart of the labyrinth-like structure, all the way to the queen’s bedroom, so you can breathe on her, while she’s asleep in her own bed?

Think about that for a moment, but only for a moment. Because really, it’s quite easy to do. Here’s how, in just five steps:

1. First, climb up the 14-foot wall and over the barbed wire and rotating spikes.

2. Then, shimmy up the side of the palace. If you need help shimmying, use a drain pipe or something.

3. Then, find an open window. There’s sure to be one.

4. When you get into the palace, then walk around aimlessly. Don’t worry about the staff and the guards, because they will arrange themselves in just such a way that not one of them will notice you.

5. Finally, stumble upon the queen’s bedroom. The door will be unlocked. Open it, enter, approach the bed, pull back the curtain, and start your heavy breathing.

Does that sound like it would work? Does that sound like a credible plan?

Well, credible-sounding or not, it actually happened. At around 7am on July 9 1982, a certain Michael Fagan did just what I told you.

Fagan, an unemployed and not very mentally stable English man, climbed over the walls of Buckingham Palace and into palace itself, then rambled around, unnoticed by all the guards, staff, and corgis, making it all the way to the sleeping queen’s bed.

This is a true story, a slice of real history.

And if you found it interesting or surprising, then that’s kind of my point.

In order for the above story to have any worth at all, you have to believe that it’s real, that it’s documented history. You have to believe that it really happened, and you have to believe that you can go and check the details yourself if you want to.

On the other hand, imagine if instead of being a historical incident, this unlikely “story” were part of a Disney cartoon or an Ocean’s 11-type heist film.

“So stupid,” would be the only reaction that the audience would have as they walked out of the movie theater. “The corgis would have smelled him a mile away. Couldn’t the writers have thought up something a little more life-like? A little more believable? Something with at least the ring of truth to it?”

So that’s actually my point for today.

Truth isn’t where it’s at. But having the ring of truth — now that’s a different story.

And as in cartoons and heist films, so in sales letters.

A couple days ago, I did a copy critique for a business owner of an ecommerce brand.

He had written an advertorial telling his own true story.

Only problem was, his story, dramatic and true though it was, sounded unbelievable. The tears… the sleepless nights… the worried looks from his wife…

I mean, this guy’s business is selling dog food. Literally.

So it didn’t matter much if his dramatic story was true, which it was. It didn’t ring true. And so my advice to him was to tamp down his true story, or to swap it out altogether, and find some other stories, which, true or not, at least have the ring of truth to them.

And now, you might think I will transition into an offer for consulting or copy critiques, where I point out obvious but damaging flaws in your advertising.

That won’t happen.

I had those offers, consulting and critiques, during this past summer. But I closed them down as of today.

Because I now have a regular offer to promote at the end of each of my daily emails. It’s my Most Valuable Email course. And I’ll tell you the following curious fact:

While the core MVE training is about a clever email copywriting trick, the course also comes with a Most Valuable Email swipe file. This file collects some of the most effective Most Valuable Emails I have personally written.

Each of those emails contains a valuable marketing or copywriting idea.

And MVE swipe emails #17, #18, #19, #20, and #22 contain five valuable ideas about how to write formulaic stories. Stories that sound like other stories that people have heard a million times before. Stories that, because of their familiarity, ring true to your audience.

So if you are trying to figure out how to shape your own personal history into something that your prospects won’t reject as A) boring or B) a manipulative lie, then these specific Most Valuable Emails might be worth a look.
​
They are available inside the complete MVE training. ​​

In case you want to get your mastermind paws on them, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

I’ve done my best to hide a valuable lesson inside today’s email

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“I was in hell. I knew all the salesman’s tricks. Why wasn’t I rich? Why wasn’t I successful? I opened the Bible, and I read the 18th Psalm. ‘The Lord is my rock and my fortress.’”

That’s from the “Christ in Commerce” sermon in Elmer Gantry, a 1960 film that I believe should be required viewing for anybody interested in copywriting, marketing, and influence.

Elmer Gantry should be required because fun should be required. And Elmer Gantry is a fun, loud, and entertaining film starring Burt Lancaster, possibly the most manly man of all time.

But Elmer Gantry should also be required because it’s about a huckster, a scammer, a traveling salesman turned revivalist preacher, once he figures out that preaching pays better than selling electric toasters.

Elmer Gantry tells of a time in US history that also gave birth to direct response advertising.

In fact, the Elmer Gantry type of big-tent sermonizing was a cousin discipline to direct response marketing.

​​It continues to be so to this day. Just think of people like Dan Kennedy and Tony Robbins — and the thousands of marketers who have learned from them — speaking in front of an audience of ten thousand, while a hungry sales team waits near the exits.

All right, that’s it for my email today. In case you’d like to learn how to write emails like this, you can find that inside my Most Valuable Email training. The link to that is below.

“Whoa there,” I hear you saying. “Why in the Elmer Gantry would I want to learn to write emails like this? Just something from an old movie? Where’s the cleverness or the conceit in that? Where’s the valuable marketing idea? What exactly did I learn here?”

I promise there’s a valuable idea in this email, and it’s not just that Elmer Gantry is a fun film.

Perhaps you can figure out this idea on your own.

In any case, you can find it explicitly explained in MVE #14 in the Most Valuable Email Swipes, which is something you get with core MVE training. In case you’re curious:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Wanted: Competent human to do some monkey work

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Today, I have a job offer for you. Before you get excited, here are a couple of negative striplines to start:

First, this is not copywriting work.

Second, this not an ongoing, or even very large-scale job.

The job is this:

I have a course, Copy Riddles, which was previously delivered entirely by email. I am now converting that course, Copy Riddles, to be delivered entirely inside a members-only area of my website.

So the job involves taking the content of Copy Riddles, delivered in 45 very long-form emails, and making and properly and nicely formatting 45 WordPress pages out of it.

This is time-consuming, monkey work. That doesn’t mean I’m looking for a monkey. I’m looking for a competent human being.

I want this job done well, with minimal management or later fixing from me.

At the start of this job, I will provide detailed guidance on the technical stuff of what there is to do. I have also gone through the monkey work of converting one of these 45 pages the way I want it done, to serve as a reference.

Using these two resources, and a bit of God-given intelligence and reason, a competent person who has the minimal requirements below should be able to complete this job the way I myself would do it.
​
As for those minimal requirements, they include:

1. Experience with WordPress. Knowing how to create a page, and use the built-in editor.

2. Knowledge of basic HTML and CSS. Knowing what a div is, and how to add a class to it.

3. Patience. There are 45 pages to do, and each page involves multiple rote, repetitive, and sometimes finicky formatting tasks.

So far, I have tried to make this job sound as unattractive as it is, and maybe more so.

So now the question becomes, why might you want to take on this monkey work? I can offer you two and a half good reasons:

1. Money. Name your own price, or your own hourly rate. I estimate this job would take me 6-8 hours of mind-numbing work to complete. You might be faster or you might be slower than me. If you can convince me you will do the job well, and if I think your price is fair for the work involved, I will hire you and pay you what you ask.

2. Copy Riddles. I guess that’s obvious since you will be working with the actual content of the course. But I will also give you free access to the course when it is complete, including the bonuses you won’t see otherwise. The last price I sold Copy Riddles for was $350, and that’s the lowest price I will be selling it for going forward. If you are interested in copywriting — and if you are on my list, I imagine you are — then Copy Riddles might be very valuable to you, and more so than the $350 I would charge you for it otherwise.

2 1/2. Access and connection to me. The reason I am not going on Fiverr or Upwork to hire a VA to do this job is that ideally, I would love to find a competent and trustworthy person who also has the ability to write. I’m not making any promises, but there is the odd chance that if you do a good job on this, there will be other tasks, including writing tasks, that I might hire you for, and in the near future.

So if you are interested in this job offer, then:

1. Write me an email
​
2. Tell me why I should believe that you have the minimal requirements 1-3 above, and that you would do this job well

​3. Name your price

When I get your email, I will write back to confirm I have gotten it. No need to follow up with me after that. Once I make a decision and go with somebody, I will also send out an email to everyone who applied so you’re not left hanging.

That’s it. Thanks for reading to the end. Let the Battle Royale begin.

Last chance to send $100…

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Legend says that, once upon a time, in various Midwestern states, an enterprising carny pitchman took out ads in local newspapers that read:

LAST CHANCE TO SEND $1
to PO Box 210, 60611 Chicago, IL

There was no reason given why the reader should send in $1 or whether he would get anything for it.

And yet, the ad supposedly drew in many dollar bills before the postal service guys caught on and put a stop to it.

In other news:

Yesterday, copywriter Van Chow, who bought my Most Valuable Email course, wrote me to say:

Hey John,

I love this course, I bet some money to see if it still talks about boring stuff like AIDA or PAS.

But I was surprised, I had never heard of this concept before.

I think this would help my journey and I’ll practice more of it.

Btw, do I still have a chance to get the bonus?

The answer is yes, there is still time to get the “mystery box” bonus offer that’s inside the MVE training. But time is running out.

In fact, today is your last chance to send me $100… and to get my Most Valuable Email course, and to still get the “mystery box” bonus.

Tomorrow, the Most Valuable Email course will keep being available. But as of 9am CET tomorrow, Friday Oct 7, the bonus offer will go away.

I won’t give you reasons why you might want this mystery bonus offer, or what’s inside it.

But if you want to see what else you get for your $100 — no AIDA or PAS — you can do that at the link below. And if the core MVE offer sounds attractive to you, then it might make sense to get it before the “mystery box” bonus disappears.

​​In any case, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

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