Email copy secrets that turned $27k in sales to $540k

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Two years ago, I got up on stage to give a talk at Rob Marsh’s “The Copywriter Club IRL” event in London.

I gave a GREAT talk.

I know, because I was there, and I was glowing with self-satisfaction afterwards.

There was just one problem. Another speaker clearly outshone me.

He was more dynamic (the guy’s a former stage mentalist and comedian).

Plus, while my talk was about my usual psychology & influence waffle, his talk was about how he changed up his email copywriting strategy and went from selling $27k of his flagship info product to selling $540k of that same product, to the same audience.

I myself was sucked in. I mean, I can imagine selling $27k of a single info product to my list because I’ve done it with multiple products. But there’s a big gap from that to $540k. How could email copy possibly make such a difference?

I took furious notes during this talk, 8 pages’ worth.

Of course, I never did anything with the notes, but that’s really on me. I don’t use autoresponder sequences with my list, and specific, archetype-targeting autoresponder sequences were the mechanism that Kennedy, for that is the name of the mentalist-turned-marketer I’m talking about, used to go from selling $27k to selling $544k.

I recently connected with Kennedy in an online mixer group.

We reminisced a bit about London.

And then, Kennedy offered to put on the same training again, online instead of from the stage, for people on my list.

I said, absolutely.

You can sign up for this training for free below, if you like.

It will be live and will happen next Monday, September 22, 2025, at 9pm CET/3pm EST/12 noon PST.

There will not be a replay.

And yes, inevitably, there will be something for sale at the end.

You can choose to buy that offer, when it is made, if it makes sense for you… or you can just choose to come for Kennedy’s high-energy, valuable training, which others paid $450 to hear in London.

If you’d like to sign up, and if you’d like to attend when the time comes:

https://bejakovic.com/kennedy

Free “marketing personality” quiz (turns out I am a big-idea brain)

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Today I got a free quiz for you. A personality quiz. A marketing personality quiz.

In my case at least, it’s proven to be flattering and even insightful.

The background:

Earlier this year, career coach Shaina Keren took the initiative to put me in touch with Michal Eisik, who runs the CopyTribe program.

Shaina wrote that she’d been subscribed to my Daily Email Habit service and found it useful… maybe Michal would like to promote it to her CopyTribe crowd?

It’s taken a while — rivers flow slowly in JV land — but Michal and I finally agreed to do a cross-promo.

She would let her people know about my Daily Email Habit. In turn, she asked, would I be willing to let people on my list know about her free marketing personality quiz?

I unthinkingly said sure, but then I kind of bit my lip.

The fact is, I don’t like to promote stuff I can’t vouch for myself, even if it’s a free lead magnet.

And a “marketing personality” quiz?

As long-term readers of this newsletter might know, I had an addiction in my youth to personality tests. It took me a number of years of self-denial to wean myself off this addiction, and afterwards, I took a holier-than-thou attitude to all kinds of systems that categorize people based on a series of multiple choice questions.

But what to do? I realized my only way out of this situation was to risk unleashing my personality test addiction once again, and to take Michal’s quiz myself.

So that’s what I done. My impressions/results:

1. Michal’s quiz consists of 12 questions, which is more in depth than I had expected. What’s more, I had to sit and think about my answers to each question, because these are not simple BuzzFeed B.S. choices. As a result, the very act of taking the quiz was somehow insightful.

2. Inevitably, there were some choices that felt forced or arbitrary. (Eg. am I more “intuitive” or “visual” or “generative”? I feel I am all three. But I ended up choosing “intuitive,” because, well, it felt right intuitively.)

3. My result came back and it turned out I am a “Big-Idea Brain.” I liked the sound of that because, if you drop the “idea” part, then my marketing type sounds like it’s just “Big Brain,” and frankly, I’ve always suffered from the need to feel smarter than I am. So that part was flattering.

But the quiz results also told me true stuff about myself that I hadn’t shared in my answers (“you need a notepad (or twelve) just to keep up with yourself”).

And they even pointed out a few things — I won’t share those here, because according to other personality tests, I am an “I” — that maybe others can see about me, but that I don’t see myself, but that rang true, and made me think.

Anyways, Michal’s quiz is worth taking — worth a couple minutes of calm and collected time.

Maybe your result will just be fun and flattering. Or maybe you will also learn something useful about yourself, which you can then use in a profitable way towards your marketing or copywriting career.

To take Michal’s marketing personality quiz:

https://bejakovic.com/quiz

How to stop making your job “five times more difficult”

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Yesterday, I was listening to a podcast by Joe Polish and Dean Jackson — not one of their “I Love Marketing” podcasts, but a new one that Dean recorded for his More Cheese Less Whiskers brand.

By the way, if you don’t know Joe and Dean, both are direct marketers with decades of experience, who have taught and brought up generations of other marketers, including some famous names.

For example, yesterday on the podcast, Joe and Dean reminisced about a podcast guest they’d had on a long time ago, a young man named Tim Ferriss, and how after the interview, they spent 40 minutes trying to convince Tim to start his own podcast.

Tim in the end became convinced. As a result, he now has over 1 billion podcast downloads, and 800 interviews with people like Jerry Seinfeld, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Anyways, Joe and Dean were talking yesterday about events, as in, promotional events, but also specific physical events, with chairs and a podium and dessert:

How to make such events work… how to make them good so people get what they paid for and more… how to get people to actually buy tickets.

Joe talked about the first event he ever put on, about mindset, and the following lesson learned, which he has applied to every event since:

===

What I learned is it is a lot easier to run an event where people perceive it’s gonna teach them how to make more money and build their business than it is how to fix their head. This one was about mindset. It was about psychology. And it was an amazing event! It was really transformative to everyone there. But it was five times more difficult to put people in the room than it was if you’re selling “money at a discount,” as they call it.

===

The key thing here is where Joe says “where people perceive.”

Fact is, mindset matters for making more money, and making more money content often talks about mindset. The two aren’t entirely interchangeable, but there’s a lot of overlap.

But how do you present such a shifting and moving bundle of information, products, or services? What single aspect of it do you trumpet for all the world to hear… and what do you quietly deliver in addition, without any fanfare, just because you are trying to do right for your customers or clients?

Getting that right or wrong means the difference between regular work, on the one hand, and making your job “five times more difficult,” on the other.

And on that note, I would like to remind you of the offer I shared yesterday, Justin Blackman’s Different On Purpose. This is an 8-week cohort to spread into the world new and different positioning for your service- or client-based businesses, if you happen to be a copywriter, coach, or agency owner.

Justin doesn’t have big income claims on his sales page for this offer. That’s because it’s the first time he’s running Different On Purpose, and big income claims are hard to make credibly before you have had the first batch of people go through the program and report on their results.

But if you are selling something woolly like “copywriting services” or “coaching” or “consulting,” there’s no doubt that a different client perception of what you do could help you work drastically less and yet make drastically more money.

If you’re curious about Justin’s Different On Purpose, I wrote up a summary of the offer yesterday, including why you might want to join now, in this very first-ever cohort. If you’d like to read that:

https://bejakovic.com/announcing-live-personal-positioning-cohort/

Announcing: Live personal positioning cohort

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Yesterday, inside a small group of list owners that I have set up to help with affiliate deals, marketer Justin Blackman posted, as a kind of afterthought, that he has an exciting and cool new offer, that, by the way, it’s live now, and, oh, that it’s only available until the end of this week, or maybe not even that long.

The offer is called Different On Purpose.

You can find the full details of it at the sales page below. But in the interest of getting you to click through to that sales page, here are some intriguing facts about Justin’s “now you see me, now you don’t” new offer:

# Who it’s for

Freelancers, coaches, and service-based business owners who feel they’ve lost their mojo — thanks to AI, competition, and simply stuff that used to work not working any more.

(No judgment here, by the way. As Justin says on sales page, he himself has been wrestling with these issues for the past year and a half.)

# What it is

A live cohort that runs from September 25 – November 19. Small groups that Justin will be heading, with frankly a crazy list of 15 guest trainers to add in unique expertise, including Todd Herman, Daniel Throssell, and Chris Orzechowski.

Deliverables and outcomes are both new and different personal positioning… plus assets to support and communicate that… and, thanks to the guest trainers, strategy to get those assets and message out into the world, so as to regain that lost mojo.

# Why you might wanna sign up now

Two reasons:

First is that this is the first time Justin is offering Different On Purpose, and his strategy is to underprice it and overdeliver on it. (See the complete list of 15 guest trainers if you don’t believe the “overdeliver” bit.)

Second is that, this being a live cohort which Justin will head, it’s limited to 30 people.

I don’t know how many of those spots are already taken.

I do know Justin is promoting Different On Purpose to his list… I’m guessing at least some of the guest speakers who have lists totaling hundreds of thousands of names will promote it as well to their lists… and maybe others in that group I set up will promote it too.

All that’s to say, if you worry about where your service or client business is going… if you feel like your personal positioning is taking on the nice ochre color of a brick in the wall… and if you wanna do something about it now rather than in 2035… then Different On Purpose is something to consider.

To find out more about it, before those 30 spots are filled and the decision is no longer yours:

https://bejakovic.com/different

Why I’ve shuttered my online community

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Yesterday, I shuttered up Daily Email House, the community I had set up back in December ’24 on the back of my Daily Email Habit service.

The concept for Daily Email House was a “members-only club for business owners and marketers who write (more or less) daily emails.”

I made it clear from the start to all members that this was an experiment.

I didn’t want to have a specific promise behind Daily Email House.

I also didn’t want to be constantly in there, stirring up discussion and sharing new content.

If the community could live without me and still be useful, great. If not, that’s okay.

Daily Email House lived on for a while and served some use. Yesterday, on the post in which I announced I will be closing down the group, a couple of the active members wrote that “signing up was the best decision I made in 2025” and that the group had a “profound effect on me and my business.”

But my laissez-faire vision for this group didn’t have legs, and that’s why Daily Email House is coming to an end.

But, groups, groups, groups…

I am still sold on the promise and opportunity of having and running a group, and it’s something I want to get good at. In fact, I will tell you a secret:

Back in 2013 or so, when I first got addicted to Internet Marketing via the Tim Ferriss gateway drug, I was lucky enough to get convinced that email is where it’s at, and will be at, for a long time to come.

It’s a hunch that’s served me well.

My secret for you is that I have the same hunch about groups/communities.

Clearly, neither email nor online communities are anything new. Plus, communities have in fact been having their moment in the sun over the past couple years.

That’s fine.

Neither email nor communities will be going anywhere any time soon, at least that’s my bet.

My bet is also that, as with email, so with communities.

Most people (such as me above) are not doing a good job with their communities.

The people who do a good job running communities will have the same advantage that, say, a business that emails its customers regularly with interesting emails and desirable offers has over a business that emails stupid coupons at holiday time with nothing else in between, except maybe a ChatGPT-generated listicle.

But I’m running off on a tangent. My real point is that I got a deal for you.

I am looking to set up a new group/community. One that will be based on solving a problem… and one in which I will be more actively involved.

I don’t know yet what that group would be about. But you can influence that, and maybe you can help create a useful and valuable resource for yourself in the process.

Here’s my deal for you:

Hit reply and tell me what problems or frustrations you have — with your email list, with your business, or with your laundry. Anything goes.

I will read all responses, I might reply to you directly, and I will certainly consider what you write me as I work on my next community. And who knows, maybe I will see you inside the resulting group, and maybe one day, you too will say it had a profound effect on you and your business.

Will AI replace writing?

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I saw a news headline this morning that read, “Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?”

I didn’t bother clicking on the link because I knew the answer. The answer is no.

As per Betteridge’s Law, whenever you see a headline that makes a claim and then hedges it with a question mark, the answer is no, because if there were conclusive evidence for a yes, the author would just say so.

My corollary to Betteridge’s Law is that if a headline hedges twice, by making a claim, then the opposite claim, and then a question mark, you know it’s such a murky area that it’s really not worth reading about.

This headline still did some good, because in my mind it tied into a podcast that I listened to recently. The podcast was an interview with an honest-to-goodness presidential speechwriter.

At the end of the interview, the speechwriter was asked about AI and how it’s going to affect his field. He replied:

“I think if you think of writing as a burden, then I get the desire for shortcuts. If you think of writing as an opportunity, as a valuable process that clarifies what you think, that helps you discover new connections, and connect different dots, and challenge your assumptions, and force you to be precise in how you articulate your ideas… why would you want to skip that step?”

Which brings me to my Daily Email Habit service. Daily Email Habit involves a daily prompt to write a daily email, like this one.

The underlying assumption for Daily Email Habit is that there is value in writing, which you cannot get by relying on templates, AI, or even a copywriter who will write in your stead.

So why a prompt?

A prompt reduces the infinite space of possible things to write about into something more manageable. It removes the stress of “What should I write about today?” It focuses the mind and acts as a creative constraint, which is useful even if you’re a creative person.

That’s why some of the testimonials I have on the Daily Email Habit sales page below come from:

– A published novelist and poet (hello James) who certainly has no trouble writing or coming up with ideas
– A game store owner (hello Neil) who hasn’t missed an email in over 730 days (and doesn’t want to, so he subscribes to Daily Email Habit as a kind of insurance)
– The head of partnerships at the Write with AI newsletter, which, ironically, teaches you how to write with AI (hello Zack)

If you’d like to find out exactly what Daily Email Habit looks like, and why the folks above subscribe to it, and if it might be right for you:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

12 sticky disciples to get your message out into the world

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If I ever launch my AIDA University, a 4-year, overpriced curriculum teaching people how to persuade, the mandatory reading for the first semester will include the book Made To Stick.

In that book, authors Chip and Dan Heath tell you how to create a message that sticks.

Basically, they say that you should turn your message into a simple, unusual, concrete, and emotional story.

Which is all good and fine but— are simple, dramatic stories really the only kinds of sticky messages?

Clearly no. I imagine that, in the interest of making their own message sticky, that is, simple and concrete, the Heath brothers decided to stick to teaching just one sticky format.

But I’ve been keeping track of different kinds of sticky messages. Today, I’d like to share them with you.

If you have an idea you want to go out into the world, then here are 12 ways, 12 little disciples, that can preach your message from the housetops:

1. Story, particularly drama

Well ok, yes, this is familiar enough, and it’s what Chip and Dan Heath talk about as well. (Bear with me. I have different ones after this one.)

2. High stakes

Classic example: Stansberry’s “The End of America” video sales letter, which was one of the two or three biggest direct response campaigns of all time, bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars through a single VSL.

3. Visuals

Here’s one that made Rich Schefren’s Internet Business Manifesto stick:

Rich Schefren's Internet Manifesto | Tyrone Shum | Flickr

4. Exercises

The first thing that comes to my mind is the following old chestnut, used as a sticky message to illustrate lateral thinking or the absence of it:

Say we have a pen and a piece of paper with 9 evenly spaced dots (as shown). How do we draw 4 straight lines through the 9 dots, without ever lifting our

5. Quizzes

Is your “fat loss type” an I, G, C, or T? What’s your Myers-Briggs? Are you a Pisces or a killer whale? Take our quiz to find out what this says about you as a marketer.

6. Metonyms

A metonym, as I learned once but keep forgetting, is “a figure of speech in which one word or phrase is substituted for another with which it is closely associated, as in the use of Washington for the United States government.”

A great pop culture example of using a metonym to get the point across and to persuade the other side comes from the movie Ford v. Ferrari.

In that movie, Matt Damon, playing car designer Carroll Shelby, is explaining to Henry Ford III why Ford’s sports driving team sucks.

Damon points to a little red folder that one of Ford’s underlings is currently thumbing through (the folder is the metonym, albeit nonverbal) and says:

“As I sat out there in your lovely waiting room, I watched that little red folder, right there, go through four pairs of hands before it got to you. Course that doesn’t include the 22 or so other Ford employees who probably poked at it before it made its way up to the 19th floor. All due respect, sir, you can’t win a race by committee.”

7. Parallel case studies

… which are a subset of dramatic stories, but which occur often enough and are successful often enough compared to regular stories, that they warrant including.

A famous example is the Wall Street Journal “Two Young Men” sales letter, though wise marketers (eg. Andre Chaperon) have been using the same format online as well.

8. Authority (scientific research)

Scientists from MIT report that this kind of message is very sticky, in fact 38% stickier than the average.

9. Demonstration

“It slices, it dices, it makes julienne fries.” Good if you get to see the demonstration on TV… better yet if you see it live… best if you can actually experience it directly on yourself.

10. Outrage/saying the “wrong” thing/playing against type

This is what a huge chunk of classic direct response headline complexes are about. Think “Lies Lies Lies” by Gary Bencivenga… “What THEY Don’t Want You To Know” by Eric Betuel… or “Why Haven’t TV Owners Been Told These Facts” by Gene Schwartz.

11. Rhyme, alliteration, or co-opting phrases that already exist in the mind

This is a broad category but it all comes down to wordplay of one sort or another that our brains seem to enjoy:

– “If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit”

– The “Big Black Book” series of big Boardroom blockbusters

– “The Plague of the Black Debt,” which along with the End of America above, is another of the two or three biggest direct response campaigns of all time

12. Metaphor or analogy

An analogy is like a listicle, in that it organizes under one umbrella a number of related points, some of which are strong, and others, which can be disguised and hidden among the stronger ones.

If you have other good categories of sticky messages, write in and let me know. I am putting together a new book in which this kind of stuff will feature. I will appreciate your help, and maybe what you send me will wind up in the book.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t done so yet, you might enjoy my most recent book,

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

In that book, you can find lots of simple, unusual, concrete, and emotional stories.

But you can also find demonstrations (check out the very first sentence of the intro)… outrage (that’s the whole point of featuring con men and pickup artists in the title)… co-opting phrases that already exist in the mind (“10 Commandments”)… authority… quizzes… high stakes… and even visuals, at least such as can be done with words (specifically, the opening of Commandment V).

For all that, and more:
​
https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Tired of experimenting?

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Last year, I started snooping on people.

Specifically, I started snooping on 3-4 online business owners, who have businesses that are doing well, and who I was frankly jealous of, because I wanted something similar.

I won’t tell you all the folks I snooped on, but I will tell you one was a guy named Olly Richards.

I’m not here to hype up Olly — if you wanna find out more about the guy, the Internet’s your friend.

I simply want to share a testimonial I saw on Olly’s site, or rather a video confessional, by one of Olly’s coaching students.

This coaching student runs a 6-figure online education business. In other words, he has an audience. He’s making good money. He’s unlikely to respond to typical promises made in the “creator” economy.

So why did this student decide to work with Olly, and pay Olly tens of thousands of dollars? From the video, in the student’s words:

“You can do things by experimenting and doing things yourself. You learn that way. That is one way of doing things. But in my opinion, I’ve just found it’s extremely exhausting after a certain point. I’m really tired of experimenting. Just give it to me. Just tell me what to do, tell me what not to do.”

At the time, as part of the research for my new 10 Commandments book, I was reading the book I’m OK — You’re OK by Thomas Harris. In that book, Harris writes:

“Structure hunger is an outgrowth of recognition hunger, which grew from the initial stroking hunger.”

That sounded profound to me when I read it, and seemed tightly connected with that testimonial for Olly Richards.

Now, after a year has passed, it seems less tightly connected and less profound, but it does describe the core process that people like Olly’s student go through:

1. They start out by just wanting to feel OK, ie. better about themselves and their place in the world.

2. To do that, they seek out recognition — via work, achievement, and the fruits thereof.

3. Getting recognition, and worse yet, keeping recognition, is tiring, and so people start looking for help, shortcuts, and “structure” eg. simply being told what to do.

Maybe you think I’m telling you something super obvious, and that there’s no need to flog such a poor and common horse.

Fine. In that case, let me just share a few simple takeaways:

1. People like Olly’s student, who have already achieved recognition, make for better customers than people who have not, simply by virtue of having money to spend (on your help) and resources (list, offers, team) to profit from your help quickly and effectively.

2. If you want to appeal to such people, try the “Tired of experimenting?” line, because it comes directly from the mouth of a member of that market.

3. If you yourself are personally tired of experimenting, then take a look at the community below.

It’s a place where business owners, marketers, and copywriters follow proven recipes to get more value out of their existing skills and assets, often while working dramatically less, and having a more fun time of it, than they are doing now:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

“The best cold email ever”

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I hate cold emailing at scale, but here’s an idea that works even if you don’t cold email at scale:

Back in 2017, a company called Ramp sent out 50k cold emails.

They were pitching their “print you a custom tshirt” service to 50k small businesses.

The results of this campaign, according to the Ramp blog:

Open rate: 50%

Click through rate: 25% and above

Total revenue: “Tens of thousands of pounds, dollars and euros!” … which sounds actually kind of miserable, but maybe that’s what you get for printing custom tshirts as a business.

If the revenue numbers don’t turn you off too badly, then here’s the cold email that Ramp sen—

Actually, the copy in the email was pretty irrelevant.

The big idea, “the scheme behind it,” was what mattered.

And the scheme behind it was to include an image in the email, featuring Ramp’s CEO, smiling and wearing a custom tshirt that had the logo of the recepient’s company printed on it.

(As you might suspect, it wasn’t really a real tshirt with a custom logo printed on it. It was just a bit of automated photoshopping magic, but it looked perfectly real.)

Along with the “tens of thousands” in revenue, this email got tons of engagement, positive replies, and free publicity for Ramp as recipients tweeted their custom thsirt images and called Ramp’s campaign “best cold email ever.”

So.

It worked for Ramp.

It can work for you too, even if you don’t print custom tshirts as a business, and even if you’re not trying to cold email 50k or so strangers.

Maybe it’s obvious enough what the underlying psychology here is, what principle made Ramp’s cold email a success.

If so, you can run with it and use it to open up new conversations that can lead to deals and business partnerships.

If it’s not 100% clear, or you simply want me to go into the topic in more detail, then I have a little guide on this that I prepared and sold only once before, last year, called Secret of the Magi.

Secret of The Magi covers just one thing — the biggest lesson I’ve learned about opening up conversations that can lead to business partnerships.

The “secret” inside this guide is simple, but very versatile, and most importantly, it gets results. If you want to find out what it is, you can get it below:

https://bejakovic.com/secret-of-the-magi

If you wanna meet interesting people… charge them

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A while back, read an interesting article by a guy named Phil Eaton.

Eaton is a software developer who also runs a popular blog. He started blogging in 2017, in part with the goal of meeting cool, likeminded people.

Even after his blog and Twitter account took off, and although he made his email publicly available, Eaton found nobody ever reached out to him to talk.

So he got devious. He announced he is now charging $100 for people to talk to him.

Result?

You most likely guessed it. Suddenly there were lots of people, each willing to pay $100, and getting on a call with him.

Eaton’s goal was to connect, and he ended up doing so — with VCs, university professors, and startup founders.

He gave away the money to a charity, and made it publicly known that he is doing so.

The fact was doing this for entirely nice guy reasons made him willing to be much more pushy and promotional about his “$100 to talk to me” offer than he might have been otherwise.

So if you too are trying to build up a network of interesting people, and nobody is responding, then put a price tag on it and watch what happens.

“Yea all right,” I hear you say. “I guess that’s kind of interesting. But my time is valuable, my life is short, and I don’t want to simply open up my calendar to strangers for $100.”

Fine. then here’s a variant that I myself can recommend based on personal experience:

Rather than allowing anybody to pay to talk to you, talk to people who have already paid you. Or at least some of them.

I have a habit — not so strict, and I gotta be more diligent with it — of reaching out to people who have bought offers I’ve made.

I set aside an hour of time, usually on Sundays, to talk to one such person each week.

This has resulted in marketing insights, obviously, but it’s also connected me with some smart, successful, and surprising people — people I never would have guessed to be buying my offers, for reasons I never would have guessed.

In turn, I always make it clear that I’m happy to answer questions, give feeedback and my opinion, or generally offer help, within reason, to make the call worthwhile for the other person as well.

I happen to know that some people have taken the advice I’ve given and run with it to implement in their offers or in their client-getting efforts.

So do you wanna talk to me? Or connect with me? Or get my input or help?

No promises, but your best bet is to take me up on one of my offers.

For example, my most popular course, Simple Money Emails, which shows you how to write simple emails, like this one, to make sales today and readers reading tomorrow. For more info on Simple Money Emails:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/