The career-ending consequences of working with bad prospects

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In an email a few months ago, I recommended illusionist Derren Brown’s book Tricks of the Mind. That’s because the book gives you 90%-of-what-you-need-to-know summaries of persuasion topics like magic, cold reading, hypnosis, and NLP.

But there’s more to this book.

For example, there’s one scary but instructive story in Brown’s book that sticks out in my mind. It’s not really about any of those persuasion topics, but about dealing with prospects, particularly bad prospects.

The story starts out back in the day, when Derrren Brown used to perform stage hypnosis at universities.

Brown is English and he performed in England. So it’s little wonder that during one show, a very drunk university girl stumbled to the stage to take part in Brown’s hypnosis act.

Brown quickly realized the girl is sloshed. He told her to go back to her seat, because he knew drunk people make poor hypnosis subjects. The girl grumbled and cursed but did as she was told.

Later, Brown was called over the PA. The girl was found unconscious somewhere. An ambulance had been called.

Even though Brown had in no way hypnotized the girl, he was told by university staff to try to awaken her as if she had been in a trance.

Brown gave it his best shot, putting on an act to appease the people around him. Unsurprisingly, his dehypnosis had no effect on the unconscious girl.

The girl was loaded into the ambulance and taken to the hospital. There she had her stomach pumped. She almost died.

Of course, she had had way much too much to drink, and that’s why she had passed out.

Now here’s the scary question that Brown ponders in Tricks of the Mind:

Had the girl really died, would Brown and his stage hypnosis be blamed? After all, when the girl was found unconscious, it was assumed Brown’s dark arts might have had something to do with it.

And if that’s the case, then how much worse would things be if Brown had allowed the drunk girl to actually participate in the stage show?

Would he have had to deal with police inquiries… with bitter lawsuits from the girl’s family… with denunciations in the press? Would his act, his career, and maybe his name be ruined, possibly forever?

I think the point stands whether you do stage hypnosis, or hawk info products, or just sell yourself and your services.

And the point is to know which characteristics make a bad prospect — or subject — for whatever it is you do. And when you spot a prospect with any such characteristics, the point is to tell this guy or gal, without regret or malice, to go back to their seat, and to get far away from you.

Of course you don’t have to take my advice. And you don’t have to learn anything from the Derren Brown story above.

You can learn from your own experiences if you want to.

As for me, I’ve long ago decided on strict criteria for prospective clients, customers, and even prospects. If you’d like to see some of those criteria, you can get started by signing up for my daily email newsletter.

“What will cause your death — and when?”

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Serious students of direct response advertising will know the following famous and shocking headline:

“READ THIS OR DIE”

This headline appeared on a Phillips Publishing bookalog back in the early 2000s. It supposedly got Phillips more than 100k new subscribers at $39 a year.

The payoff for the shocking headline starts right in the subhead:

“Today you have a 95 percent chance of dying from a disease or condition for which there is already a known cure somewhere on the planet.”

The rest of the copy continues in this vein, using a bunch of statistics and facts to prove to you that most deadly diseases are now curable or preventable.

“Read this or die” was written by Jim Rutz. Rutz himself was a serious student of direct response advertising.

So is it possible that Rutz, though he was famous for being off-the-wall, creative, and unique-sounding, actually swiped his famous ad?

I would say it’s certainly possible.

Because I am yet another serious student of direct response advertising. And today I found an old ad, from 1926, which reads exactly like Rutz’s “Read this or die” ad. The headline of that 1926 ad runs:

“What will cause your death — and when?”

The payoff for the shocking headline starts right in the subhead:

“If you value your health and life here are some facts that will shock you into thinking more about your body. it is almost beyond belief, yet true, that eight hundred thousand people die in the United States every year of preventable disease.”

The rest of the copy continues in this vein, using a bunch of statistics and facts to prove to you that most deadly diseases are now curable or preventable.

The offer at the end of this ad was the Encyclopedia of Physical Culture, a massive book in six volumes, which sold for $600 in today’s money.

The Encyclopedia was sold with many different ads, but I only found one instance of “What will cause your death — and when?” online.

Maybe the ad ran in many places, but only one of these is archived online.

It’s also possible that the ad only ran once in this exact form.

In any case, a few things are sure:

1. The Encyclopedia of Physical Culture sold out at least 8 editions between 1911 and 1928…

2, ​​Bernarr MacFadden, the author of the Encyclopedia, was worth $30 million as a result of his publishing activities (around half a billion in today’s money)…

3. ​The Encyclopedia was read broadly by generations of impressionable young men, and ended up a huge influence on America’s ongoing obsession with diet, health, and fitness.

All of which is to say:

That “What will cause your death” ad might be worth reading. Assuming, that is, that you’ve got an ongoing obsession with seeing what makes people tick… what they want to become… and what they are willing to pay for, at least when it comes to their health.

In case you are interested, you can see the entire ad at the link below. Before you click away, you might want to sign up to my newsletter here. Now here’s the ad:

https://bejakovic.com/what-will-cause-your-death

The biggest egos in the world

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One morning in 1985, actor Val Kilmer staggered to his bathroom and got ready to shave. He squinted because of how sleepy he still was. But then he spotted something in the mirror that shocked him awake.

In the middle of Kilmer’s chest a perfectly round bruise, the size of a 50-cent piece.

“I didn’t drink,” Kilmer said to himself. “I didn’t fall during the night. What could stab me like this in the chest?”

After a moment, the realization hit him.

The night prior, Kilmer had gone out partying with a bunch of Navy pilots. He was about to start shooting Top Gun, and he was trying to get into the role of Iceman.

The real Navy fighter pilots liked Kilmer a lot.

“You’re the actor that we’re most like,” they kept yelling the whole night. “You got good hair!”

And each time the fighter pilots said this, they emphasized their point by stabbing their fingers into the middle of Kilmer’s chest. That’s how he got the bruise.

Kilmer later said,

“The only egos bigger than actors are rock stars. And the only people beyond that are fighter pilots. They have the biggest egos on the planet.”

My point being, in spite of how it might look in the insular direct response world, email copywriters do not have the biggest egos in the world. Likewise, copywriting and marketing newsletters, podcasts, and books are not the most valuable things to read and study if you want valuable ideas, stories, and inspiration.

I recently made a list of 10 sources where I get ideas for my daily emails.

Most of these sources were predictable, or I had written about them already in emails prior.

But there was one source that I haven’t really talked about much.

And that’s analyses, documentaries, and original material about entertainment I love. Analyses and background info on Looney Tunes cartoons… William Goldman screenplays… Farside comics… and of course, Top Gun. For example, The Val Kilmer story above came from Danger Zone, a feature-length documentary about making of Top Gun.

So that’s my advice for you for today:

Think about your favorite movies, books, TV shows. Read about how they were made, or track down a documentary that saves you from reading.

You will get great ideas you can apply to your business, and in the most enjoyable format, since you will be digging into something you love.

And if you happen to love Top Gun:

I can’t recommend that Danger Zone documentary enough. It’s fascinating, and not just if you are a die-hard Top Gun fan. The documentary shows how complex it is to produce an hour and a half of seamless entertainment… how many specialists are involved… how much thinking lies behind seemingly simple decisions… how many layers of persuasion go into even a jockish, commercial, fantasy flick like Top Gun.

In case you are interested, you can find Danger Zone on YouTube in two parts. Here’s part 1:

The trouble with selling prostitute interviews you gave away for free

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About six months ago, I wrote an email about a prurient new obsession I had developed with the YouTube channel Soft White Underbelly.

Soft White Underbelly features thousands of in-depth interviews with people on the outside of mainstream society:

Drug addicts… homeless people… prostitutes… escorts… child abuse victims… inbred Appalachian families… gang members… a high-level mob boss… a strychnine-drinking Pentecostal preacher… a conman who ran real-estate frauds totaling in the tens of millions of dollars.

Then, a couple days ago, I read that YouTube had demonetized Soft White Underbelly.

​​SFU videos are still available to watch on YouTube. But they won’t come with any ads, and so they won’t make any money for Mark Laita, the photographer behind the Soft White Underbelly channel.

I tried to do some back-of-the-envelope math for how much money that actually was.

Over the past 30 days, Soft White Underbelly had a bit more than 12M views. Using the low-end rate of $3/1k YouTube views, that comes out to $36,000 over those 30 days, or about $430k per year.

That’s a sizeable chunk of cash to disappear from one day to the next.

My point?

I guess I could tell you the same old story, one you’ve probably heard a million times before:

Don’t rely on anybody else’s platform. Have your own platform — such as an email list — which you control.

The trouble is, Mark Laita already has that. He has his own site, where you can subscribe for $8/month to get all that stuff that’s on YouTube, plus some “exclusive content” in the form of more videos exactly like the stuff that’s on YouTube.

The welcome video to the SFU YouTube channel invites you to subscribe on the paid site. And in that video about being demonetized, Mark also tells people who can afford to do so to get the paid subscription.

Will that replace the income from YouTube?

I have my doubts, for several reasons. The most important reason is this:

It’s hard to sell the exact same thing you’re giving away for free. It’s even harder to sell it there’s a bunch of your free stuff still lying around.

That’s just human nature.

Laziness. Entitlement. Plus, a bit of common sense. If there are already thousands of prurient Soft White Underbelly videos on YouTube, most of which I haven’t watched, why should I pay to get a few more each month?

But here’s what I would tell Mark Laita, and maybe you, if you’re in a similar situation:

This is not really a big problem.

Because it’s easy to sell a slightly different thing to what you’re giving away for free. You can even sell almost the exact same thing, only renamed and repackaged in a sexy way.

So for example, Mark Laita has thousands of video interviews. Instead of selling more of the same, he could repackage some of that content in a different ways:

* He could sell a coffee table book of photography — stills from his videos. (He already has these photos in the videos themselves.)

* He could sell transcripts, packaged up as fancy printed books, or low-end kindle ebooks.

* He could create “themed documentaries” which are really his different videos pasted together. The effect of absentee fathers… the drug scene in east LA… massage parlor confessions.

Of course, there are also many other things Mark could sell congruently on the back end of his YouTube Channel. The above are just a few ideas for things he could sell with practically no additional thought or work.

So like I said, that’s my advice for you too, in case you create a lot of content, which isn’t making you money direct now.

Take that free content, repacakge it, rename it, and stick a (preferably large) price tag on it.

People will buy it, and get value out of it, even if you gave it away for free before.

Of course, maybe you are too close to your own content to see how it could be repackaged or renamed in the most sexy and profitable way. You might be able to find some good ideas on that in my free daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up for it.

What I learned from copywriting

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Copywriting pays for my food, my rent, and my collection of black t-shirts.

Copywriting allows me to work on a Saturday, if I so choose, and skip Monday through Wednesday.

Copywriting has put me in touch with multimillionaires and even one billionaire.

It’s exposed me to strange new worlds, such as beekeping, billboard wholesaling, and penis enlargement.

But all that is kids’ stuff. Where copywriting really impacted me, where it changed me in ways I didn’t expect, is the following:

A. It taught me to read.

David Deutsch said, “If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t read 50 books one time each; I would read 10 books five times each.”

Other famous copywriters say the same.

So I reread books now. And I find mucho stuff in there that I didn’t see before. My brain changed in the meantime.

Also when I read, I’m much more careful. I keep stopping to ask myself, “Is this interesting? New? Useful? Could it be useful if I combined it with something else I’d read?” It’s slow and it’s work. But it’s a better use of my time than flying through text and not getting anything out of it.

B. It gave me a real acceptance of the moist robot hypothesis.

Scott Adams says we are all “moist robots”:

“Humans are wet robots that respond to programming. If you aren’t intentionally programming yourself, the environment and other people are doing it for you.”

This sounded outlandish when I first heard it… then amusing… then interesting… then believable… then obvious. Copywriting provided me with plenty of real-life examples. There might be something more inside of us, some capacity for experience and reflection… but most of what we do is moist robot.

C. It exposed me to the Gene Schwartz sophistication/awareness models.

This is so valuable whether you’re writing copy or doing any other kind of communicating. It can be summed up with the idea of starting where your reader/prospect/adversary is… But how do you do that? Schwartz’s models tell you exactly.

D. It taught me the low value of secrets.

And also the low value of supplements. And the low value of opportunities. In general, through copywriting, I’ve developed a suspicion of anything new being advertised for sale.

E. It taught me the enduring power of listicles.

For getting attention. Not necessarily valuable attention. Which is why I used the headline “What I learned from copywriting” instead of “5 things I learned from copywriting.” As Mark Ford said recently:

“If you want to get cheap readership, listicles are great. But they don’t do a good job selling anything, or getting serious attention, or creating a fan out of the reader, especially at higher price points.”

F. It taught me how to get rich.

I’m not sure if I ever will be rich. But I might.

Through copywriting, I’ve had an amazing business education. I’ve gotten to look behind the curtain at dozens of successful enterprises. I’ve found out exactly how they get their customers… what they sell to these customers… and how they keep selling more.

Maybe one day, I’ll turn that knowledge into actual success. Speaking of which, let me repeat something I wrote a few months back:

​​”Perhaps success is simply about choosing a field where you don’t mind getting better. Where the daily work is something you find enjoyable enough — or at least, not too repulsive — so you can continue to get better at it day after day.”

Copywriting is not my passion. I don’t have any passions.

But I don’t mind the daily work, and sometimes I even find it enjoyable. And that’s something I never thought would happen.

Maybe you’d like more articles like this. In that case, you can sign up for my daily email newsletter.

Do you have an email list in the health space?

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If you have an email list in the health space, then I’d like to talk to you.

I’m starting a new project/email list, something to do with health. I’m looking to get people onto that list, and relatively fast.

So yesterday, I made a list of 10 ideas to do just that.

I got through the first 9 ideas pretty easy, just by thinking about assets I already have or paid traffic channels I would be interested in trying.

But then I paused for a moment. And I thought, “What about my marketing and copywriting list? How could they help me with this project?”

This really should have been my #1 idea. But as we non-native English speakers like to say, better to late than never to happen.

So if you have a health list, then I would like to talk to you and maybe strike some sort of deal.

My offer isn’t fully formed, but some of the options include:

1. You promote my new list for free because you love me so much. (Just kidding. I wouldn’t expect that, nor would I want it.)

2. I pay you for a solo ad or a mention in your newsletter or something like a classified ad.

3. I run a promo to your list where I sell something and I give you all the money I earn, and I just keep the names. (I saw Bob Bly promoting this idea once.)

4. We do some kind of barter. I give you consulting, coaching, or even (gulp) copywriting in exchange for traffic from your list.

5. I give you an IOU. Say you agree to drive people to my list now. In exchange, we could agree that I drive people to your list when I get to 5k people on my list, and then again when I get to 10k or 20k names.

Or really, I’m open to other arrangements if you have something in mind. It will depend on how big and engaged your list is, how you would be willing to help me promote, and how good of a fit I imagine it would be for the project I am starting.

But what about urgency? You gotta have urgency, right? Why should you act now?

I don’t have any urgency for you.

This health project is something I am invested in mentally right now. If anything, it’s urgent for me and not for you.

Maybe you can take advantage of that.

Because the fact is, I will stay open to these kind of deals as long as I continue this health newsletter project. But I might get more selective about who it makes sense for me to do these kinds of deals with, and on what terms.

But that’s all in the future. Right now, I am very, very open to any kind of suggestion or proposal.

So if you have a health list, and you are curious whether we could do some kind of deal together, then write me an email and we can start a conversation.

How to infect customers with the desire to do what you want

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Envy the killifish.

Normally a shy and reserved animal, the killifish is always a bit nervous. It’s always looking left and right, trying to avoid danger and trouble.

It’s not a great way to live.

But for a few days of its life, everything changes for the killifish. It’s suddenly filled with energy and passion. Its fears melt away and it finds itself enjoying the wonder and joy that was always there, surrounding it.

In its new-found optimism, the killifish swims up to surface of the water, splashes in the sun, and even turns its scaly belly to the sky for the pure pleasure of it.

And then, a seagull or some other predatory bird, spotting the shiny belly of the killifish glistening at the surface of the water, swoops down, snatches the killifish, and swallows it whole.

Turns out the killifish had actually gotten infected by the Euhaplorchis californiensis parasite.

​​The E. californiensis gets into the brain of the killifish. It messes with its serotonin and dopamine levels. In this way, it makes the normally wary fish action-oriented and fearless.

And here’s the key point:

The parasite does this not out of spite, and not out of random destructiveness.

Instead, the parasite does it because getting the killifish eaten by the seagull is crucial to completing the parasite’s own complex lifecycle (a bizarre story, one that’s worth looking up).

A couple days ago, I wrote an email about tying in your marketing emails to news items.

I wrote something about princes Harry and William, and about “unity.” Then I stumbled onwards, towards my point and sales pitch.

Honestly, that email was nonsense. It was something I did just to demonstrate the point I was talking about. I would never write an email like that if I were trying to really sell something. I wouldn’t ramble on about a random news item and then milk it for some kind of aimless point.

Because here’s something I’ve learned from the best marketers out there:

The best marketers don’t just tell vulnerable personal stories, or just share interesting news items, or just make mind-expanding analogies.

In other words, they don’t just share ideas or provide changes of perspective for the sake of being helpful, friendly, or educational.

Instead, they do everything — story, news, change of perspective — for the sake of furthering the sale.

Perhaps that’s super obvious to you. In that case, you’re smarter than I am, because it took me some time to realize. When I did realize it, it was a huge mental shift that changed both how I consume marketing and how I produce marketing.

Now, it’s popular in the marketing world to say your marketing should be all about your prospect, and not about you.

And maybe that’s true.

But what’s not true is that your marketing should be about who your prospects are, what they want to become or achieve, and how your product or service can help them get there.

Instead, here’s the key point, once again:

Your marketing should be about what you want your prospects to do, and the beliefs they need to have in order to move in the direction you want them to go.

Maybe that sounds mercenary or even parasitical.

Maybe it is. ​​

And maybe it raises the question, if what you are reading right now is marketing, then what is it I want you to do, and what do I want you to believe?

I’ll leave the question of beliefs hanging for now.

As for what I want you to do, I just have an offer, my free daily email newsletter. It’s for you to decide whether you are action-oriented enough to take me up on this offer. In case you feel that you are, here’s where to go to sign up.

Don’t read this email

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I bought an ugly pair of Patagonia swim trunks once. That’s why this morning, I felt emotionally invested in reading an article about Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, and how he has just given away his entire $3 billion company to a climate-change nonprofit.

Chouinard was a early-generation rock climber, a bum who lived in his car and ate cat food to support his rock-climbing habit.

Later, Chouinard started Patagonia. After the company started selling millions and then billions of dollars of ugly swim trunks and other stuff, success never sat right with him.

Chouinard’s final solution was, like I told you above, to give away his entire company.

But even before that, Patagonia seemed to do strange and self-defeating things.

For example, back in 2011, on Black Friday, Patagonia ran a full-page ad in the New York Times. The headline of the ad ran:

“DON’T BUY THIS JACKET”

Below that was a picture of the R2 jacket, one of Patagonia’s best-selling items. The body copy of the ad explained in detail the environmental cost of producing each such jacket. “As is true of all things we can make and you can buy, this jacket comes with an environmental cost higher than its price.”

The direct result of this ad?

I have no idea. This was not your usual direct response ad. And if there were any measurable consequences of this ad, I couldn’t find any info about them online.

So rather than speculating whether DON’T BUY THIS JACKET is effective marketing, I will focus on one specific, certain thing about that Patagonia ad.

The body copy of that ad ended by advising New York Times readers,

“Don’t buy what you don’t need. Think twice before you buy anything.”

“Why the provocative headline,” Patagonia marketers wrote later on the company blog, “if we’re only asking people to buy less and buy more thoughtfully?” Answer:

​​”To call attention to the issue in a strong, clear way.”

A couple weeks ago, I stayed in an Airbnb and I found a copy of Paul Arden’s book, “It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be.”

Arden was the creative director at Saatchi and Saatchi, one of the biggest brand advertising agencies in the world.

Arden’s book was mostly terrible. But the following idea, which ties up today’s email, makes the entire book more than worthwhile:

Find out what’s right about your product or service and then dramatize it, like a cartoonist exaggerates an action.

For example, you know a horse can jump a ditch, therefore you accept that it can jump the Grand Canyon.

This realization accelerated my career faster than anything I have learned since.

So yeah. Don’t read what you don’t need. Think twice before you open any email, particularly a marketing email. And take a moment before you click on any links that could suck you in or sell you stuff against your better interests.

On that note, if you enjoyed this email or even found it more valuable than anything else you have ever read, if you think today’s idea might even save your life one day, then here’s something else you might enjoy:

https://bejakovic.com/dont-listen-to-me-im-just-some-guy/

What we can all learn from princes William and Harry

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A few hours after I write this, the Queen’s coffin will be placed on a gun carriage and will lead a procession down a packed Mall, along Whitehall and then into Parliament Square before entering the Palace of Westminster.

Walking in the procession behind the Queen will be her son, the new king, Charles III.

But perhaps more remarkable, Charles’s two sons, William and Harry, will also be walking in the procession.

That’s remarkable because for the two princes, this act will bring back painful memories of when they, aged 15 and 12, walked behind the coffin of their mother Princess Diana in 1997.

What makes this act still more remarkable is that princes Harry and William are embroiled in a bitter personal feud with each other. (I don’t know the details of the feud, and the Daily Mail article I just read didn’t elaborate. So I guess I never will know.)

Whatever the case may be, I think this all just highlight the importance of unity.

Unity of family… unity in moments of crisis… unity when different, individual, tiny elements come together to form a bigger and more powerful whole.

Because after all, isn’t unity really the essence we all strive for, in life in general, and in email marketing in particular?

In particular, I have just read about the first ever email marketer, a man named Mr. Pease.

Mr. Pease sold a product called “Pease’s Horehound Candy,” a kind of cough drop. And since he lived in the first half of the 19th century, he clearly didn’t use email, not the way we know it today.

But Mr. Pease’s remarkable marketing was the essence of what email is about. It would work today as well as it did in early America.

So what did Mr. Pease do to advertise his cough drops? ​​From chapter 8 of P.T. Barnum’s book, Humbugs of the World:

Mr. Pease’s plan was to seize upon the most prominent topic of interest and general conversation, and discourse eloquently upon that topic in fifty to a hundred lines of a newspaper-column, then glide off gradually into a panegyric of “Pease’s Horehound Candy.” The consequence was, every reader was misled by the caption and commencement of his article, and thousands of persons had “Pease’s Horehound Candy” in their mouths long before they had seen it! In fact, it was next to impossible to take up a newspaper and attempt to read the legitimate news of the day without stumbling upon a package of “Pease’s Horehound Candy.”

Mr. Pease got very rich selling his horehound candy with his humbug news item advertisements.

And that’s what I hope will happen for you as well, if you only follow his very smart, very durable, very unified marketing approach.

The good news is, in many ways you have it easier than Pease did. For example, Pease had to pay for advertising space each time he wanted to get his message out. But email today is pretty much free.

Of course, Pease did have some advantages that you today do not have.

Such as, for example, a ready-made and large audience of newspaper readers.

Or the fact that those newspaper readers read their newspaper with a curious and trusting mind, rather than with skepticism and disinterest.

Or the fact that those readers didn’t have Twitter, where they could start campaigns to mock or even shut down Pease’s company because of its misleading advertising.

But fear not!

Because there are simple, quick, and quite specific methods to overcome those problems in your email marketing today.

And if you have a business, and more specifically an email list, and you would like to make like Mr. Pease and market your way to great wealth, then may I advise you take a look at the fine offer below.

What, you want me to tie this offer into the topic of unity, or to princess William and Harry?

Not today. That’s not what I learned from Mr. Pease.

But if you do want potentially business-changing guidance with your email marketing, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/audit

Too bad! You did not win today, try again tomorrow

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This morning, I went down to the lobby of my building. I glanced at my mailbox and gritted my teeth.

My feet were ready to take me to the mailbox so I could open it and check the mail.

​​But with the last bit of dignity left to me, I asked myself, “What are the chances that the mailman came between 9pm last night, when I last checked the mail, and now, at 8am?”

Low.

With a strong exercise of willpower, I stopped myself from checking the mail. It would only end in disappointment.

On the other hand, you can be sure I will check the mailbox in a few hours’ time. And if it happens to be empty again, I will probably check it once or twice more during the rest of the day.

Last month, I subscribed to the New Yorker. The New Yorker is a fine magazine, but hardly anything to be addicted over.

Aye, but here’s the rub:

Since I live in Spain, mail from abroad arrives inconsistently. The New Yorker is a weekly magazine, but it doesn’t arrive to my mailbox on any kind of weekly schedule. Sometimes, two issues will come a day apart. Sometimes, like now, a few weeks will pass and still no New Yorker.

Result?

Well, I told you already. Addiction. Independent of the addicting qualities of the product itself. It just comes down to how you deliver it.

“Great,” you might say. “So you’re telling me to become a flake? To make my daily emails sometimes non-daily, and sometimes multi-daily? To deliver my subscription products, sometimes a day early, sometimes a month late?”

That’s certainly one option. But there’s a bigger point here. Let me explain.

If you check today’s subject line, you will see you did not win today. I don’t mean that glibly. I’m 100% serious.

Because what I did today was actually write two and send versions of this email, each to 50% of my list.

One version is for the people who won. In that version, I explained the bigger point I had in mind, and I ended with a link to a valuable resource.

Version two is what you’re reading right now, since you did not win. This version doesn’t have the explanation or the link.

The good news is, the resource I shared with the winners is so valuable that I will probably write about it again. And I will probably share it again. Maybe even tomorrow. And maybe tomorrow, you will have better luck than today. There is always hope!

But I have to end today’s email with some kind of offer.

So I will tell you about a fine offer. Sometimes, I will promote this offer day after day. Sometimes, like now, weeks will pass before I promote this offer again. In case you want to grab it now, while it’s still fresh on your mind, click here and sign up to my sometimes daily, sometimes multidaily email newsletter.