Mandatory vacation day

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This morning at 9am Barcelona time, I concluded the White Tuesday event that promoted my almost 4-year-old Copy Riddles program.

I ended up making 20 sales of Copy Riddles over 6 emails and 36 hours.

I offered a payment plan as a key part of the White Tuesday promo, which means I collected $2,848 so far (one person paid in full) and will be getting another $17,056 over the next 10 months as the payments roll in, for a grand total of $19,940.

In my small, modest world, with my small, modest list, this counts as a good result — $9,970 per day, $3,323 per email, when all the money is in.

This, by the way, is not any kind of “HOT: Work Just 2 days A Month!” bizopp pitch. In fact, it’s the opposite.

I always do a review for myself of a completed promo and list 10 conclusions. I did the same this morning.

My key conclusion was about the reason why this promo was a success, and that’s because of perceived real value.

Copy Riddles sells for $997. The $2k Advertorial Consult I gave away as a free bonus I really got paid $2k for.

Except, for either of those to really matter, to feel real, it took constant work over months and years leading up to this promo. Selling and promoting Copy Riddles… selling and promoting and delivering my other offers… doing consulting and coaching and client work (back when I still did)… featuring testimonials… talking about case studies… going on podcasts… dripping out my experiences writing advertorials… writing these daily emails, from home, from airports, and at train stations.

A couple days ago, Kieran Drew wrote the following in a review of his own successful promo:

“Sure, courses have little-to-no fulfillment cost. But I now have over 3,000 customers and let me tell you, there is no free lunch. Products are not ‘true’ passive income—especially if you send thank you videos to every customer and reply to every email (I recommend both).”

Not “true passive income” is not a problem for me any more.

Five years ago, I published my 10 Commandments Of A-list Copywriters book. Commandment VI I got from Claude Hopkins, who wrote that love of work can be cultivated, and that for him work and play are interchangeable.

I put that in the book as an interesting and possibly useful idea. At the time, it definitely was not a belief I had managed to adopt. But over the years, maybe because I wrote it down then, it’s gradually taken hold in my head.

Today I work, don’t mind working, and in fact have slowly turned work into a kind of game that I can actually enjoy.

Except even games need a break now and then — body and brain need to rest and recover.

And so I’m taking a mandatory vacation day today. This email is the only thing I will do, besides replying to previous Copy Riddles buyers who asked for the bonuses I offered as part of the White Tuesday promo.

Meanwhile, I can only recommend you read or reread my 10 Commandments book. Looking back over it after 5 years, all the commandments are still supremely valuable. In fact, I only wish I myself would follow them more regularly. Maybe you too can benefit from reading them or being reminded of them? For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Introducing the world’s slowest copywriter

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No, not me, though I am a worthy contender. The honor goes to:

“Mel Martin was the world’s slowest copywriter. It would take him three to four months to write a direct mail package. He could get stuck for a month on a letter opening.”

That’s from a sales letter written by Lawrence Bernstein, “the world’s most obsessed ad archivist.” Lawrence’s wrote that sales letter a couple months ago, to sell a collection of ads that Mel Martin had written back in the 1970s and 80s.

Who cares about old ads from decades past? Well, people who care about making sales via writing today. Because, as Lawrence says:

“Mel Martin, the ‘father of fascinations,’ almost singlehandedly catapulted Boardroom Reports to $125 million through the power of his pen and captivating copywriting fascinations.”

When I recommended Lawrence’s collection of Mel Martin ads a couple months ago to my list, more than 150 people ended up buying.

If you were one of those people, and if you had a chance to look over some of Mel Martin’s ads in the meantime, I wonder what you thought?

If you’re anything like me, you might look at Martin’s bullets and think, “Pff, I can do the same. So simple, so basic. Just promises and how-to’s.”

Except, there was clearly something magical and mysterious going on during those months that Mel Martin was agonizing over his copy. That’s why his sales letters pulled in millions of dollars year after year, and that’s why he beat out all competing copywriters he was pitted against.

Maybe you can see the skill and thought in Mel Martin’s finished work.

But if you cannot, then there’s the Copy Riddles approach.

Don’t just look at the finished product… but look at the starting material as well. Try to write your own bullets based on that starting material… and then compare what you did to what Mel Martin did.

In fact, that’s what the first couple of rounds of Copy Riddles are all about — trying to sell the same products as Mel Martin, and comparing your bullets to his.

Do this, and you very quickly realize how much skill went into Mel Martin’s bullets. Fortunately, you also very quickly manage to leech some of that skill from Mel Martin, without spending the months and years of agony it took him.

I’m running a special event today to promote Copy Riddles, which I’m calling the White Tuesday event. It ends later tonight at 12pm PST. The core of the offer for this event is Copy Riddles, plus there are three time-limited free bonuses, which total $2,300 in real-world value:

1. White Tuesday Storytelling Bundle

2. Make The Lights Come On

3. $2k Advertorial Consult

… along with the White Tuesday payment plan, which allows you to get started with Copy Riddles for just $97 today.

To find out the full details of this White Tuesday event while it’s still live:

https://bejakovic.com/announcing-white-tuesday-copy-riddles-event

P.S. If you are already a Copy Riddles member, the White Tuesday bonuses are of course available to you too. To find out what they are and how to claim them, take a look at the page above and act before the deadline.

How I write sexy bullets without writing

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Last month, I ran a promo for a couple of days to sell my Most Valuable Email course. Part the offer for that event was a bonus called Shangri-La Disappearing Secrets.

I teased some of those disappearing secrets in my emails with a few sales bullets…

… and thanks to those bullets, I made a buncha sales of MVE during that Shangri-La event. I also got people commenting on the bullets themselves. Here’s a sample:

#1. “Those are some sexy bullets.”

#2. “But although I’ve considered buying your MVE before, I was reading your bullets and thinking I need to buy your bullets course cause you were reeling me in with those.”

… and the winner of the “Odd Place To Go” prize:

#3. “Damn. These are some sexy bullets man! Soo sexy in fact they can even make even a gay copywriter straight. (I’m not gay but these bullets are just 🔥🔥🔥)”

I’ll tell you the secret of my sexy, sexual-orientation-flipping bullets:

I didn’t write any of them.

Well, I didn’t write any of them for that Shangri-La promo. Instead, they all came from previous emails that I had written months or years earlier.

I simply took the sexiest one or two sentences from those old emails, stitched them together, and those turned them into bullets that could make a covid skeptic vax up (I’m trying to keep a joke running here).

It goes the other way too. In fact, I feel there’s a 1-to-1 correspondence between sales bullets and sales emails.

When I first launched my Copy Riddles program, one successful marketer took me to task for not using any bullets in my emails that were selling a course about bullets.

My response was that a sales email is effectively a sales bullet, just expanded and adapted for the medium of email marketing.

So if you want to write sexy emails, my advice is to learn to write sexy bullets… and then simply fluff up those bullets from 50-80 words to 300-word emails, with a bit of personal context or a little story.

And if you don’t yet know how to write sexy bullets, or you simply want to write sexier emails, so sexy that virtue signalers will lobby to have them cancelled (give me a break, I’m trying), then consider my Copy Riddles program, and consider it now.

Because I’m running a special White Tuesday event right now to promote Copy Riddles right. My time-limited, special White Tuesday offer is Copy Riddles at the core, plus three time-limited free bonuses, which total $2,300 in real-world value:

1. White Tuesday Storytelling Bundle

2. Make The Lights Come On

3. $2k Advertorial Consult

… along with the White Tuesday payment plan, which allows you to get started with Copy Riddles for just $97 today.

To find out the full details of this White Tuesday event while it’s still live:

https://bejakovic.com/announcing-white-tuesday-copy-riddles-event/

P.S. If you are already a Copy Riddles member, the White Tuesday bonuses are of course available to you too. To find out what they are and how to claim them, take a look at the page above.

How I get customers to buy when I launch a new product

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Yesterday, I kicked off my White Tuesday event to promote my Copy Riddles program. I got a bunch of messages about it so far, including one from Logan Hobson, a long-time reader and Copy Riddles member. Logan wrote:

===

Every time you do a Copy Riddles promotion, I get excited because it means that I get a new free bonus or two.

I appreciate the way you treat previous customers, makes me feel like buying something from you the first time you promote it is a no-brainer.

I’m interested in the $2k Advertorial Consult as well.

===

I’m doing a podcast later today and one question that the podcast host wants to cover is,

“What’s one golden nugget of advice you’d give any writer who wants to make a living from their words?”

At first, I thought this question is so broad as to be impossible to answer.

But then I realized I have the same golden nugget to offer that I’ve already offered a million times over. That being:

It’s much easier and more profitable to make a sale to somebody familiar who has already paid you, than to some stranger you have to go out and hunt down, who doesn’t know you, who has never trusted you enough to give you money.

Maybe that’s obvious. But how many people act upon it?

The default question for most people, including writers who want to make a living from their words, is “How do I get new readers/customers/clients?”

My golden nugget is a different question, “How do I get existing readers/customers/clients to buy something new from me?”

And if that means giving good stuff away on occasion, to keep existing readers/customers/clients reading… and engaged… and eager to do business with me the next time I launch a new product… then so be it.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you cannot and should not ever try to win over new customers.

You can do both at once — win over new customers, and deepen the custom with existing customers.

Which brings me back to my White Tuesday event.

I’ve tried to make this White Tuesday offer one that’s easy to say yes to. In a nutshell, my White Tuesday offer is Copy Riddles plus three time-limited free bonuses, which total $2,300 in real-world value:

1. White Tuesday Storytelling Bundle

2. Make The Lights Come On

3. $2k Advertorial Consult

… along with the White Tuesday payment plan, which allows you to get started with Copy Riddles for just $97 today.

To find out the full details of this White Tuesday event while it’s still live:

​https://bejakovic.com/announcing-white-tuesday-copy-riddles-event/​

P.S. If you are already a Copy Riddles member, the White Tuesday bonuses are of course available to you too. To find out what they are and how to claim them, take a look at the page above.

Announcing: “White Tuesday” Copy Riddles event

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It’s a bright and sunny day outside, I’m in a good mood, and there are still many weeks left until dark and depressing Black Friday.

That’s why I’ve decided to put on a special and time-limited event, which I’m calling White Tuesday, starting today and running through tomorrow (Tuesday), to promote my Copy Riddles program.

I tried to make this White Tuesday offer easy to say yes to. Here’s what’s inside:

#1. White Tuesday Storytelling Secrets

This storytelling bundle has two parts.

The first is a training called Storytelling For Sales, in which I show some of my go-to tricks for using stories in sales copy. I previously sold this training for $200, but it’s yours free for White Tuesday.

The second part of this storytelling bundle is a training called, “Next-level storytelling tricks for emails that sell (no hero’s journey, thank you).”

This was a special presentation I did last year as bonus when Kieran Drew promoted my Simple Money Emails program.

I haven’t made this training available in any way since, and the only way to get it previously was to pay for Simple Money Emails, which sells for $197. It’s also yours free for White Tuesday.

#2. Make The Lights Come On: How Multimillionaire Marketers Use The FREE Formula To Create a “Lightbulb Moment” In Their Prospects

I’ve never sold this before and I’m not sure I will in the future, so I won’t put an arbitrary made-up value on it.

I will say this training has my analysis of the common structure — the “FREE Formula” — I’ve identified in the copy of a few multimillionaire marketers.

These marketers use change in perspective as their main way of selling, rather than big sweaty promises. They do very well for themselves as a result. For example:

One such marketer wrote a “lightbulb moment” 40-page PDF that sold $960,000 worth of coaching services in 2 hours…

… another such marketer wrote an 1,791-word email that made the light come on for me personally, and made me spend a few thousand dollars on this marketer’s offers as a result…

… a third such “lightbulb moment” marketer uses the FREE Formula to convert up to 20% of his (large and woolly) email list.

I figure if you can get even a fraction of these results, this Make The Lights Come On training could be the most valuable of all the bonuses I’m offering (with the possible exception of the next bonus).

But once again, Make The Lights Come On is yours free as part of the White Tuesday event.

(NB. I will deliver Make The Lights Come On as a live email course at the beginning of December.)

#3. $2k Advertorial Consult: 100% nothing-held-back training on how I write advertorials

Over the years of my copywriting career, I’ve written dozens of front-end “horror advertorials” — basically mini sales letters. By my estimate, these horror advertorials have made upwards of 10 million dollars’ worth of sales from cold traffic, mostly Facebook and now YouTube.

I’ve hinted at my process before and and given some examples of finished horror advertorials.

But I’ve never done a full reveal of my process, including the research… my own templates and checklists… the writing… the layout, etc.

Well, never, except once. I agreed to do it once, with one private consulting client, an ecommerce store owner.

I got on a call with this ecommerce store owner… shared all my advertorial-writing assets and secrets… and walked him through my process.

He paid me $2k for that info. All that info — the recording of the call, all the checklists and templates I shared — are yours free as part of the White Tuesday deal.

And by the way, this $2k Advertorial Consult can be relevant whether you are writing advertorials, or if you’re working on just about any other serious copy project that has to convert on cold traffic.

(Also, as part of this advertorials info-bundle, I’ll throw in my Horror Advertorial Swipe File. This is a zip file with 25 PDFs, featuring the original copy for 25 of my horror advertorials, which pulled in millions of dollars on cold Facebook and YouTube traffic. I’ve previously sold this swipe file for $100.)

Putting together elements 1-3 above, you have a real-world value of $2,300, based on just what these programs and trainings have sold for before. Plus you get the “Next-level storytelling tricks” training and Make The Lights Come on for extra sauce.

And there’s one one more element to the White Tuesday event:

#4. The one-time White Tuesday payment plan

You can get started with Copy Riddles, and get the White Tuesday bonus bundle of $2,300 of real-world value, for just $97 today, and then 9 more monthly payments of $100.

This payment plan is there to make it psychologically easier to get started — in my experience, people take up payment plans not because they cannot afford to pay in full, but simply because it feels like a smaller commitment.

But if you need a stronger justification for using the payment plan, then just take one or two ideas from Copy Riddles or associated free bonuses… apply them once a month… and make $100 wouldn’t have made otherwise.

Do this, and the entire White Tuesday Bundle will effectively be free. You will probably even make some extra money to boot. And you will have learned a bunch of valuable stuff that will last you your whole marketing life.

Final point:

I will never be making this White Tuesday Copy Riddles offer again, and I will likely not be doing any kind of Copy Riddles promo for a long time.

If you have been thinking about getting Copy Riddles, but putting it off, I can only tell you to take advantage of this offer now.

I make a point of treating my previous customers well. That means I will only ever move the price up rather than down in the future.

And if ever offer any future bonuses or incentives, all previous customers will be grandfathered in, you among them if you join today.

On the other hand, if you miss this White Tuesday offer, you miss it forever.

All that’s to say, there won’t ever be a better time. If you want to get the full info on Copy Riddles to see if it’s right for you, or to take advantage of this White Tuesday deal:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

P.S. If you are already a Copy Riddles member, the White Tuesday bonuses are of course available to you too.

The storytelling bundle will go into the course area automatically. I’ll invite you to join Make The Lights Come On for free when I open it up. And as for the $2k Advertorial Consult, it’s yours as well — if you write me and say you want it, while this White Tuesday event is live.

 

How to use an involvement device to win customers for the long term

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Yesterday, I got on three calls with three people who expressed interest in my new daily email prompts service.

The last of these three calls was with a media buyer named Sean (not sure he wants me to share his last name), who works at an agency in Colorado.

Sean has bought pretty much every training and course I’ve put out, starting with Copy Riddles back in 2021.

As were getting started with the call, Sean explained how it started:

===

What I really liked about Copy Riddles was that little involvement piece where you have to read the source material and come up with your own bullet that’s close to what the copywriter came up with.

And that involvement advice kept me going through the entire course. It’s probably the coolest course that I’ve done in terms of copywriting. I’ve been dabbling in the copywriting space for 20 years, since I was 15.

===

You can do something like this as well.

Instead of just giving people information, add in an involvement device. In other words, give your customers some sort of safe opportunity to actively practice, not just consume.

The reason to go to this trouble is because your customers will end up going through what you sell them, and will get more out of it as a result.

That’s good for them, and it’s good for you. By my entirely made-up math, an involvement device makes it an estimated 13.471x times more likely customers will buy something from you again. And I think Sean’s custom with my little online business is a good example of that.

If you have Copy Riddles, you know how the involvement device in that program works. And if you don’t have Copy Riddles yet:

I’ve never done a Black Friday promotion, and I won’t be changing that this year.

But I will have a “White Tuesday” special offer on Copy Riddles, starting tomorrow and lasting through Tuesday November 12.

Why White Tuesday?

I just thought it was a funny-sounding zag to everybody’s constant zigging with “Black Friday.”

I did try to find some kind of historical event to tie White Tuesday into… but I only came upon a decree from November 12, 1938, in Nazi Germany, excluding Jews from participating in the economy.

This is most definitely NOT the kind of White Tuesday I have in mind.

Instead, I just mean this event to be a fun, little, completely Nazi-free promo, hopefully with an irresistible offer to get you to try Copy Riddles if have been curious about it but have not jumped in yet. But more on all that tomorrow.

My go-to source of market research

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Comes a question from a reader in followup to my email yesterday, about what I’m reading now:

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Hi John.

Thanks for sharing this.

I have another question for you, something I wanted to ask from you for some time now.

What are your go-to sources/websites/forums to do market research whenever you’re working on a sales copy related project?

If this is something you teach in one of your paid offers, feel free to dismiss this.

===

I don’t mind sharing the fact that I don’t go to no scrubby forums or websites to do market research.

Instead, I get on a real, live, anxiety-inducing call.

In fact, I have three calls lined up today to do research for the daily email prompts service I’m launching.

Last week, I asked for a show of hands from people who are interested in this service. A few dozen people replied.

I reached out to some of them yesterday to see if they would get on a call with me today.

We managed to schedule a time with a few of them.

And so, later today, we’ll get on Zoom. I’ll listen, ask followup questions, and then think about what I heard.

In my experience, reaching out and talking to people is the fastest way to get information. It reveals stuff that might take forever to find out otherwise.

That’s why it’s my go to way to quickly test out an offer, see if it has legs, and gauge the primary sales appeals.

By the way, if the idea of a daily email prompt service sounds useful to you, then hit reply and tell me what you like about this idea (do tell me why, because simply replying and saying “yes” or “reply” won’t do it). If you do that, I will add you to the priority list, so you have a chance to test this service out sooner rather than later.

6 things I’m reading now

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Comes a question from long-time reader Illya Shapovalov, on the trail of my email yesterday:

===

Hey John,

Slightly off topic:

You always find some curious and interesting things to share in your emails. Can I ask you what publications do you read or are subscribed to? I really struggle finding just interesting things to read on the Internet, something that’s not sensationalistic or opinionated like most news outlets.

===

The only non-work publication I’m subscribed to is the New Yorker. It’s a print magazine that arrives to my physical mailbox with the frequency of a baby panda birth in captivity.

As for interesting things to read on the Internet, I find most of those via Hacker News.

That’s a kind of bulletin- or news-board, curated by lots of smart people and moderated by a few, specifically to not be sensationalistic or opinionated. Much of what’s on Hacker News is tech news and articles that I frankly don’t care about, but there’s other interesting stuff always.

But why limit yourself to things on the Internet?

In my experience, books are the greatest repository of human insight and funny stories, better than courses, better than coaching programs or communities, and certainly better than blogs or websites.

Nobody asked about my book reading habits. But I’ll tell ya.

I read books in four categories, one book at a time in each category:

1. “Something from a previous century.” Currently, I’m finishing up the fourth and final volume of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, which I started back in December 2021, almost three years ago.

2. “Religion.” This can be about actual religion, or about the human mind, or the nature of reality. I just started A Life of One’s Own, by Marion Milner.

3. “Fiction.” I’m reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.

4. “Work.” (Copywriting, marketing, psychology, etc.) I’m reading I’m Okay, You’re Okay by Thomas Harris, since it’s one of the upstream sources of both David Sandler’s sales system and Jim Camp’s Start With No.

Bigger point:

You can combine the enjoyable and the useful.

I read these things because I find them interesting… but also because they can provide fodder for these emails and for other projects I’m working on.

Combine the two, enjoyable and useful, and you can have something you can stick with for the long term.

Smaller point:

There are lots of places to get possible ideas for daily emails.

I personally feel it’s more important to have a way to decide among those many ideas, a litmus test to help you decide if an idea is a good topic for your email today.

If you’d like to find out what my personal litmus test is, the test I recommend to coaching students who have paid me thousands of dollars for the advice, and to hundreds of people who have bought my courses, you can find that inside my Simple Money Emails program. For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

Smug, yet falsely modest

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I plopped onto my couch this morning and ripped open the latest New Yorker. I skipped the first few pages by instinct — after all, they’re just ads. “Except,” I said to myself, “that’s kind of my job?”

So I flipped back to page one.

What I saw was a two-page ad for AI company Anthropic, which makes Claude, a ChatGPT competitor.

The Claude logo took up the entire left page.

On the right page, the headline read, “Late bloomer” (including the quotes).

The body copy then went on to say that Claude might not be the first AI chatbot to market. But this was by design, the ad explained, so Claude could be so good, and so safe, and so useful as it happens to be. “We build AI you can trust,” concluded the copy

In a way, this kinda sounded like the famous Avis ad, “Avis is only No. 2,” which turned being second in a market into an advantage.

Or maybe it kinda sounded like the famous Volkswagen “Lemon” ad, which flipped quality concerns into a demonstration of higher standards.

The Anthropic ad kinda sounded like that… but it failed.

Because those headlines — “Avis is only No.2,” “Lemon” — really were objections that people were throwing at Avis and Volkswagen.

Whoever wrote this ad for Anthropic could have gone that same route by saying something like “Also-ran” in the headline.

Instead, they went the board-pleasing “Late bloomer” route, which is not any kind of insult or objection, but in fact a kind of smug self-compliment.

I can’t say whether this Anthropic ad will prove to be effective in any way, and neither can Anthropic. Because this ad is a typical “tombstone ad,” with no mechanism to track response.

All I can tell you is that this headline + body copy violate a kind of core rule of effective communication.

That rule is contrast.

If you say about a person that he is smug yet effective, then there is some tension and power in that description, because of the contrast. Plus, you get bonus points for transparency.

On the other hand, if you describe someone as “smug, yet falsely modest,” then at best you’ll confuse your audience based on what they were expecting. At worst, you’ll sound repetitive, mealy-mouthed, or self-serving, which is what I felt about this Anthropic ad.

So use contrast for power. Avoid contrast for blandness.

Also, if you haven’t done so yet, consider reading my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters. It doesn’t have anything to do with this email, and so I won’t pretend otherwise. The only thing I will say in favor of this book is that it’s short yet cheap. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

The end of info products

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THE FOLLOWING EMAIL IS CONTROVERSIAL AND MAY BE OFFENSIVE TO SOME AUDIENCES

READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED

You might be familiar with Max Sackheim’s famous ad, “Do you make these mistakes in English?”

The ad ran for decades, unchanged, and kept bringing in profitable business better than any contender.

Thousands of pages of analysis have been written about the 7-word headline of this ad and the copy that followed.

But what about the actual product this ad was ultimately selling? What about the means by which a prospect could hope to correct his or her mistakes in English? What were prospects actually exchanging their money for?

Sackheim’s copy only teases you about the product, and calls it a “remarkable invention” and a “100% self-correcting device.”

As far as I know, nobody today actually has this remarkable invention stashed away in their garage. Whatever it was, it’s clear it was sold as some kind of tool, a device, and not just information.

This is a well-known direct marketing truth that’s been around since Sackheim’s days and before, back into the age of patent medicines.

A real, tangible, external mechanism — a fat-loss potion, a dog seatbelt, a “100% self-correcting device” — sells much easier than just good info — how to lose weight, how to be a less negligent dog owner, how to speak gooder English.

Smart modern-day info marketers have gotten hep to this fact. That’s why people like Russell Brunson and Ben Settle and Sam Ovens have put their reputation and audience to work behind tools like ClickFunnels and Berserker Mail and Skool.

The thing is, creating a tool, whether physical or software, has traditionally been an expensive, complicated, and risky business.

Take a look at Groove Funnels, another tool created a few years ago by another experienced info marketer, Mike Filsaime. Groove Funnels is a bloated, buggy, frankly unusable product. I say that as somebody who invested into a lifelong subscription in Groove Funnels.

I have a couple degrees in computer science. I also have about a decade’s worth amateur and pro software development experience. But after I quit my IT job 10+ years ago, I never once considered putting this experience to use in order to develop any kind of tool I could sell.

Until now.

Because things are changing. Today even a monkey, working alone, can create and deploy a valuable app simply by querying ChatGPT persistently enough. And there are plenty of shovels available for such would-be gold miners, tools to build tools, which will do much of the in-between work for you. Just say what you will to happen, and it will be done.

Decades ago, master direct marketer Gary Halbert said that the best best product of all is… information!

But I bet if Gary were alive today, he’d be hard at work (or maybe easy at work) creating some kind of high-margin tool to sell, in the broadest sense of the word — a thing to do some or all of the work for an audience with a problem. A few reasons why:

* Again, tools are easy to sell. They fit with innate human psychology of how we want to solve problems.

* Tools can make for natural continuity income if you license them out instead of sell them outright.

* Tools can create their own moat over time. There can be lock-in or switching cost if your users build on top of your tool.

* And now, thanks to the most remarkable invention of AI, it’s possible to create tools quickly, cheaply, and with great margins.

All that’s to say, best product of all… information? I don’t think so. Not any more. Best start adapting now.

Speaking of which, I got an offer for you:

Would you say that there are any tech issues that are keeping you from starting your own email list?

If there are, write in and let me know about them.

In turn, I’ll have something for you that you might like.