Your advice on salvaging a huge email list?

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One big lesson I learned long ago, from a former client in the real estate investing space, is that your email list can do much more for you than simply provide you with income.

The email addresses on your list stand for, more often than not, real, living, intelligent people, with experiences and skills and connections.

These people can help you with all sorts of stuff, including partnerships, referrals, and advice.

So let me ask you for advice on the following email list puzzle:

I’ve been talking to a FB ad agency owner who happens to read these emails. She has been patiently sitting on an email list, which was part of her payment for a revshare deal with a client (ie. she has full rights to use this list).

The bad/terrible:

– This email list hasn’t been emailed in the past 1-18 months (depending on when they bought)

– The guru who was the face of the offer is no longer involved

– His name or his offers cannot be used or even mentioned

– Emails can’t be sent from his account/domain

Bad, right?

Yes. There are only two positives to offset the four negatives I’ve just listed:

– There are 115k email addresses on this list

– All are buyers, with some spending as little as $27 and some as much as $15k (it’s a finance list)

So do you have any experience or advice with something like this?

If these were physical mail addresses, we could mail a small segment of the list as a test and see what happens.

Is that the thing to do here as well? Is our best bet to set up a new domain, and start slowly spamming people and see where it leads us?

Or should we throw away the whole list?

Or is there some third option I’m not seeing?

If you have any advice for me, or even better if you’ve been in a situation like this before and can share your experience, please let me know. Thanks in advance.

What everybody ought to know… about this online investor business

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This morning, I was sitting in a noisy cafe with music playing and coffee machines steaming away and a lampshade swinging above my head in the breeze. Amid all this confusion, I was trying to focus. I was looking for offers to promote.

I have several new and interesting offers slated for the next days and weeks. But what for today?

One of my go-tos on days like today is Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin community, which I lurk, learn, and even occasionally participate in.

Being in Ronin and following Travis’s advice has made me tens of thousands of dollars over the past 18 months that I’ve been subscribed to it, via new offers I’ve made, and via making me more money out of offers I already have. That’s why I keep recommending Ronin in my emails whenever I have a bit of a chance.

So this morning, I went to check out the Ronin front page.

In the past, Travis ran a free trial offer for Ronin. It makes sense to do a free trial because Ronin is 1) expensive ($299/month) and 2) a monthly charge (which everyone hates, including people who can afford it).

For a long time, that free trial offer was the norm.

But then, at odd times, including times when I promoted Ronin previously, it turned out that the free trial had disappeared. Then it came back. Then it disappeared again. Then the price dropped. Then it went back to normal. I guess Travis is constantly experimenting with the offer.

Today, when I thought of promoting Ronin, I went to check what the current front page looks like.

At first, I was confused. Then shocked.

It turns out there’s no free trial at the moment. Ok.

It turns out the price is the usual $299/month. Ok.

What had me confused and shocked is that right now, the entire Ronin community is open.

You can see all the members inside, read all their posts, as well as the comments.

You can see the “Welcome! START HERE!” post, which links to the “8-Day New Ronin Action Plan,” which is also currently open to everyone. You can see Travis’s advice on topics like partner getting, licensing, and “coffee dates,” and how to do that in just the next few days.

The only stuff that remains restricted, unless you’re actually a paying Ronin member, is the courses area, which contains about a dozen specialized trainings. Plus you don’t get access to the Royalty Ronin bonuses, which is a library of Travis’s courses that adds up to $12k in real-world value. And of course, you can’t participate or post in the community, but only observe and read.

This extra stuff is definitely worth paying for. But even without it, there’s enough valuable info inside the freely available Ronin community to fill a few airplane hangars with.

At least for the moment.

The current “everything in the open” offer might be a glitch. Maybe it will disappear very soon.

Maybe. Or maybe it’s just old-school marketing.

I remember a long time ago Andre Chaperon talking about lead magnets you didn’t have to sign up for.

Andre would simply lay out the entire, high-value lead magnet on his web site as a web page. He would then have an optin at the end of all that for the people who had gone to the trouble of reading the whole thing, which, unsurprisingly, turned out to be very high-quality leads.

Of course, there’s nothing new under the sun, and Andre didn’t invent this strategy.

It goes back millions of years, back to when brontosauruses ran direct-response weight-loss offers in the Jurrasic Times.

A little more seriously, it goes back at least to the 1940s, and the famous “What everybody ought to know… About This Stock and Bonds Business” ad.

That ad ran in major newspapers across the country. It featured 6,000 densely packed words of info and education about stocks and bonds, and a buried offer at the end, which drew tons of highly qualified leads for Merryl Lynch for over 10 years.

I thought about how to adapt that headline to the currently open Royalty Ronin community.

“What everybody ought to know about…”

I tried out different angles.

Eventually I remembered something Travis repeats over and over in Ronin, about how he really doesn’t have any ambition to be an entrepreneur or business owner. Running a business day after day is not for him, he says.

Rather, his goal is to be an investor, somebody who makes small bets that don’t cost much if they don’t pay off, but that have unlimited upside and the potential to pay him for years to come if they do work out.

Specifically, Travis talks about about how to be an online investor, making small bets on your own online products or audiences, or those of others.

And if you have no money to invest? That’s okay. Travis also talks about how you can invest other things, like your resourcefulness, your willingness to make connections, or your skills and expertise.

In any case, if you want to know what everybody ought to know about this online investor business, here’s an incredible free resource for you:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

Ben Settle: “How to make money in the make money online space”

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Yesterday, I wrote an email in which I quoted email marketer Ben Settle, in order to help me sell Igor Kheifets’s new book Click Send Earn.

Today, I’ll quote Ben again, to the same end:

“Make money online is not an easy market to consistently make money in the way Igor does. If you want to learn from someone how to make money in the make money online space, I can’t recommend Igor enough.”

If you’re eager to find out how Igor makes money consistently in the the “make money online” market — to the tune of several million a year — you can find that laid out in his book Click Send Earn.

I bought and read this book myself before reaching out to Igor and asking to promote it.

I endorse everything he teaches inside, plus I learned new and valuable things myself.

And in case you are not in the “make money online” market, the ideas and personal experiences that Igor shares in his book can be just as profitable for you, whether you’re offering coaching, or selling info products in another niche, or simply looking to grow and monetize an email list as a core part of whatever it is you do.

Igor’s Click Send Earn sells for a mighty $3.99.

Igor has said in private he could sell this info for $97-$297. Having read the book myself, I agree with him, and that’s why I asked him to promote it.

If you would like to grab a copy, so you can read it, and apply it, and profit from it:

https://bejakovic.com/clicksendearn

Ben Settle & Dan Kennedy both said it — but who was the original source?

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Here’s the history of the men who influenced me to be where I am today, writing you this email:

Patient readers know my susceptibility and fondness for the phrase, “The only real security is your ability to produce.”

I read that idea in a Ben Settle email back in 2017, which got me to sign up to Ben’s Email Players newsletter, which eventually convinced me to start sending daily emails myself.

As Ben wrote in that email, he himself got the “ability to produce” idea from an even older Dan Kennedy newsletter. I thought it stopped there, even though I always felt that “ability to produce” is an odd phrase for Dan Kennedy to invent. (Perhaps that’s why it stuck in my mind so.)

But, as I found out only last week, this phrase is not a strange Dan Kennedy construction.

The quote about “ability to produce” actually goes back to Douglas MacArthur, one of only five 5-star generals in the history of the United States.

MacArthur’s quote, such as I could trace it, was “Security lies in our ability to produce.” MacArthur was speaking quite literally, about national security and the importance of industry and agriculture to that.

But I’m not here to talk tariffs. I’m telling you this because this is a newsletter about ideas, specifically insightful ideas, even more specifically, insightful ideas that you can apply and bring into reality and profit from.

And on that note, I have a new offer for you. It’s a $3.99 ebook called Click Send Earn.

This book is written by Igor Kheifets. I’ve known Igor for a while. Back in 2021, I gave a presentation inside his List Building Lifestyle mastermind, which eventually turned into my Simple Money Emails course.

I bought Igor’s book last week because, frankly, I was curious about the funnel he was using to sell it.

But I read the book as well. And I was surprised, in a very positive sense.

As Igor said somewhere (in private, not inside this book) he could charge $97-$297 for the info that’s inside. And I believe it. So I reached out to him and asked to promote his book, for the following three reasons:

First off, this book is very clearly written by Igor, not by AI, not a ghostwriter.

Second, it lays out how Igor walked the familiar rags-to-riches route — which in his case was literal, because he used to clean toilets at a hotel once upon a time, and now makes millions a year via email.

The book lays out lessons learned along the way and gives you the business blueprint that Igor uses today, and which he teaches others, for how to build and grow and monetize email lists.

Third, this book has ideas in it that were new and insightful for me. For example, it was early in Igor’s book (p. 11) that I learned that that “ability to produce” quote is not from Ben Settle or even Dan Kennedy, but from Douglas MacArthur.

Like I said, when I bought Igor’s book, I bought it out of curiosity around the marketing.

But I thought my audience — “MY audience is different” — is too sophisticated when it comes to email marketing to profit from a book titled Click Send Earn.

Well, like I said, I’ve since read the book. I’ve learned new things and gotten value from it. I can get behind and endorse everything he teaches inside this book. That’s why I asked Igor to promote it.

And that’s what I’m doing right now, recommending it to you.

If you’re looking for a proven (by Igor, and his students) blueprint for a successful email-based business, then buy this book, read it, apply it, and profit. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/clicksendearn

How to stay off Reddit and improve your productivity

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In short, sign up to my Daily Email Habit service. Explanation plus proof:

I put in a funny image or meme at the top of each DEH email, to make it fun to keep opening up these emails day after day, and to put you in the right frame of mind to write your own daily email.

At least that was my reasoning for putting the funny image or meme in each DEH email. But apparently there are other benefits too. From email marketer Logan Hobson, who subscribes to Daily Email Habit:

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I find the daily meme an extra benefit to DEH. I started noticing that I recognized some of your images from reddit, and I wanted your images feel fresh, so I stopped browsing reddit as much and have improved my productivity, knowing I will receive a high-quality curated meme each day in your email without having to endlessly scroll to find one in the wild.

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Of course, the goal of Daily Email Habit goes beyond just improving your productivity and keeping you off Reddit. The real goal is to get you writing your own daily emails consistently, both so you make sales today, and so you build up a relationship with your audience, so they open and read your email tomorrow.

And about that, here’s marketing strategist Nick Bandy, who also subscribes to Daily Email Habit, and who has been emailing his list of buyers daily:

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DEH is the biggest ROI I’ve ever gotten on any course or product I’ve ever purchased. It’s incalculable.

===

I have a bunch more testimonials from subscribers who praise Daily Email Habit. I also give away a sample 0th Daily Email Habit email, so you get a sense of what it looks like and what you’d be signing up for, including the funny image/meme up top. For all that:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

X-ray goggles to avoid sales call prospects who like talking to salesmen but never buy

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“They like to talk to salesmen, something. They’re lonely. I don’t know. They like to feel superior. Never bought a fucking thing.”

That’s a line from Glengarry Glen Ross, with two frustrated salesmen talking about “doctors, lawyers, Indians,” and other prospects who simply like talking to salesmen for whatever reasons of their own, but who never buy.

Some of these reasons you can’t do anything about (“they like to feel superior”).

But some you can.

Like I wrote yesterday, if:

1. You do sales calls regularly, and

2. It happens more often than never that the prospect you’re talking to ends up not having the money for the offer you are selling…

… then hit reply.

I have a couple of questions I hope you can help me out with.

In exchange, I’ll tell you about a pair of X-ray goggles, and where to get ’em. These X-ray goggles allow you to peer into places you maybe shouldn’t be peering, like your prospect’s wallet.

The X-ray goggles I have in mind allow you to only get on calls with people who can afford what you’re selling, so you minimize the time you waste and the aggravation you suffer.

About my failed pickup attempt yesterday

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I was walking through the center of Barcelona yesterday. It’s been magically pleasant weather here — warm, breezy, sunny, clear.

I stopped at an intersection to wait for the light.

I saw a girl who stopped on the side of the street opposite me. I’m guessing she was in her late 20s. She had big curly hair, a white summer dress that stopped halfway down her thighs, and black leather boots that reached up to her knees.

And she was looking at me. Furtively. Here and there.

Of course, when the light changed, and as we passed each other on the crosswalk, she stared straight ahead so I couldn’t catch her eye.

That’s okay.

I wheeled around, waited for her to reach the sidewalk, then jogged up in front of her, smiled, and held up my hands to make it clear I have something to say. She took out her headphones with a look of pleased surprise.

If you’ve read my new 10 Commandments book, you know how a street approach like this goes.

I complimented the girl, saying she looks nice, and added something about the boots and dress. She laughed.

Since she seemed ready to talk, that’s exactly what we did.

I guessed she’s French. No, Catalan.

She tried to guess where I’m from (not easy). She was focusing so hard that I put my hand on her shoulder to reassure her it’s okay to guess wrong. She didn’t mind my doing that.

We kept the conversation going for a few minutes during which time we covered the usual gamut of personal stuff along with a bit of teasing and giggling.

In the end I said, “Look I gotta go. But another night, I’d like to invite you out for a drink.”

Suddenly, the girl grew flustered and confused. “Oh ok, but I should tell you, I have a boyfriend, just in case you were thinking…”

“I was thinking,” I said. “But it’s okay.” And it really was. It was nice and positive to talk to her. It made me feel better and loosened me up. And the whole interaction took something like five minutes. We said goodbye and that was that.

And now I’m gonna talk about business, and particularly sales, crass though it might seem.

If you have read my new 10 Commandments book, you know I make an analogy between picking up girls (what I was attempting to do yesterday, unsuccessfully) and other fields, like standup comedy, hypnosis, and, relevant for us today, direct, in-person, nose-to-nose, toes-to-toes sales.

I don’t know if you do sales calls. I’ve done a few on the back of this email newsletter, for people who were interested in coaching I was offering at the time. In my previous career as a freelance copywriter, I did probably a hundred or more sales calls — it was part of my standard process for getting copywriting clients.

If you’ve ever done sales calls, I wonder if the following sounds familiar:

A very promising prospect expresses interest in what you have. So you get on a sales call.

You cover the usual gamut of business stuff along with a bit of getting to know each other and friendly banter.

The prospect seems ready for you to close her. So you lay out your offer including the price. Suddenly your prospect grows flustered and confused. “Oh ok,” she says, “but I should tell you, I don’t have that kind of money to spend…”

Yes, some “I don’t have that kind of money” prospects say it as a ruse, just like some “I have a boyfriend” girls don’t really have a boyfriend.

But in many cases, it’s really true. Your prospect, even though she looked very promising, and even though she probably had a good sense of what you charge, just doesn’t have the money to pay you.

You see why I make an analogy between this and my failed pickup situation yesterday.

Of course, there are also differences between the two.

Failed sales calls tend to take up to an hour to get through, as opposed to five minutes. They are likely to be done in your office over gloomy Zoom, instead of on a sunny Barcelona street. And they don’t leave you feeling nice and energized afterwards, but are mainly a frustrating and draining waste of time.

If you do sales calls regularly, and if the situation above is one you experience from time to time, then I have an offer for you.

Hit reply. I have a couple of questions I hope you can help me out with. In exchange, I’ll tell you about a pair of X-ray goggles, and where to get ’em. These X-ray goggles allow you to peer into places you maybe shouldn’t be peering, like your prospect’s wallet.

The X-ray goggles I have in mind allow you to only get on calls with people who can afford what you’re selling, so you minimize the time you waste.

And if you do get on a call with someone who says, “I should tell you I don’t have that kind of money to spend,” with these goggles you will know to press a bit, because odds are, it’s a ruse, and one that your prospect hopes you will expose.

Mystery of the unknown French boy

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I got a story for you today that you can use to sell something new and untested:

On August 26 1900, during the 2nd Olympic Games, a team of Dutch rowers needed a coxswain.

If like me you don’t know what a coxswain is:

He steers the rowboat. It’s preferable to have somebody small and light in the role, so as not to create unnecessary drag and slow down the boat.

This being only the second Olympics, the Dutch team weren’t all that prepared. They had a coxswain but he was too heavy. So they pulled a boy from the audience. He was French (the 2nd Olympics being in Paris) and about eight years old. The Dutchmen stuck the boy at the end of the boat and told him how to steer.

And they’re off!

The 7 teams started rowing. The Dutchmen were working furiously. The unknown French boy was doing his best to keep the boat going straight towards the finish line.

7 minutes and 34.2 seconds later, the Dutch team, plus their unknown French boy-coxswain, pulled through the finish line… in first place.

A crowd assembled and started cheering the victors. Meanwhile, the unknown French boy slipped away into the throng, rejoined his family, and was never seen or heard from again.

In spite of decades of research, nobody has been able to track him down or identify him.

He remains “the biggest Olympics mystery of all” — the youngest Olympic gold medalist ever, though he never got his gold medal, and nobody even knows his name. Even today, he is only known as “unknown French boy.”

I found this whole story fascinating and curious.

I asked myself what done it.

I realized that, of course, participation in the Olympics, and Olympic gold in particular, is now an enormous honor, and sports are big business.

It’s unimaginable today to be successful at the Olympics without the highest levels of preparation and optimization, and even then, chances of success are slim.

Once upon a time, it was easy, or at least much easier. It was possible long ago for a bystander, completely unprepared or unskilled, to participate in the Olympics, and even to win a gold medal. And then, to value it so little as to slip away, rejoin the nameless crowd, without even a look over his shoulder.

But in spite of dramatic difference between then and now, a real gold thread connects the two. That’s where the fascination and curiosity come from.

That’s why I say this is a story you can use to sell something new and untested.

Once upon a time, the Olympics themselves were new and untested. In 1900, it was unclear if the Olympics would survive for a third iteration, and hard to imagine they would become what they are today.

Maybe you have an offer that’s new and untested like that.

If so, you can tell the story of the unknown French boy to open up your prospects’ minds to participating in your offer now, while it’s still early days and the opportunity is easy, rather than waiting for it to become established and highly competitive and almost impossible to win.

I myself have an offer that’s new and untested, to write and publish a book for you, for free. I only announced it two days ago. I’m talking to people who have replied so far. But I am looking for just the right partner.

Maybe that could be you? Maybe we could form a one-off team and win the marketing and money equivalent of an Olympic gold medal? For the full details of this opportunity:

https://bejakovic.com/the-catch-behind-my-me-write-book-for-you-for-free-offer

The catch behind my “me write book for you, for free” offer

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Yesterday, I wrote an email with the following offer:

“What if I write, publish, and even run ads to a book for you and your business… for free?”

… to which I got a bunch of confused responses, asking me what exactly I’m offering. A sampling:

#1: “Sounds too good to be true.”

#2: “I guess I don’t understand yet how the full offer works. So you provide a free service, and what’s in it for you?”

#3: “How long, what’s involved, and how much?”

Maybe there’s a copywriting lesson here. In the words of the man with the French castle, David Ogilvy, “The customer is not a moron. She’s your wife.”

I’ve never been married, and inshallah, I never will be. But I can imagine that, if over breakfast on a beautiful Sunday morning, I were to grin at my fairy-wife and say, “Honey, how about we go spend the day with your mother?” she would cross her arms and say, “What gives? What are you up to? What’s the catch?”

So let me be 100% clear about my offer, what’s involved, and what the catch is. My offer is this:

I write, publish, and even run ads to a book for you and your business… for free. Just like I said yesterday.

As for what’s involved, I have to admit I don’t know.

I’ve written and self-published a lot of books for myself. I’ve never written or published a book for somebody else, and I have no idea how long that might take.

I do know I am only willing to do this if you already have a good deal of content (emails, podcast episodes, videos, etc) that I could repurpose into a book… or if you have a good deal of expertise that I could pull out of you fairly quickly, over a few hours on Zoom.

And now the catch:

The end-goal of this book would be to drive impressed and eager readers to an existing, scalable, high-ticket offer of yours, which is already proven and selling.

We’d split the profits on those sales in some way we agree on. I would only get paid once this new money is sitting in your bank account.

In other words, I’m willing to do all the work and take on all the risk, including paying for ads.

If this process works out as planned, you’ve just come across a new way to make extra sales of your high-ticket offer, ideally every month, without having to do anything, either now or in the future.

If it doesn’t work, you’ve got a book on Amazon that you can point people to with pride.

So now that you know the full details, how about we go spend the day with your mother?

If this fully transparent proposal sounds like it could benefit you, then hit reply, and let’s talk in more detail.

And if you know somebody else who might be a fit — say, somebody with a podcast that’s been running for a while, with a $1k+ course or membership or group coaching, but no book — then forward them my email, and maybe do them a favor.

Me write book for you, for free?

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I’ve been checking who bought during last week’s Copy Riddles promo. It was a $997 offer, hence not cheap. You gotta build up lots of trust and likability to sell an offer like that via just email, and that takes time, right?

Sure enough, most of the people who bought from me are repeat customers and many have been on my list for years.

At the same time:

One guy who bought joined my list on July 6th, via the lead magnet I offer at the end of my new 10 Commandments book.

This guy hasn’t bought anything else from me aside from that book. He had only about a week of my charming and immensely persuasive emailing, as far as the “trust and likability” go, before I put the $997 offer in front of him, and he decided to take me up on it.

Here’s another fact:

I’ve been running Amazon ads for my book. I’m running ads at a loss — I give more to Amazon to sell a copy of my book than Amazon pays me in royalties.

I’m happy with this arrangement.

I couldn’t ask for better leads than people who buy and read my book. (Some of my best and longest-running customers came via my original 10 Commandments book.)

I don’t know if the guy who bought Copy Riddles came via an ad. But if he didn’t, somebody else will.

And in any case, every book sold on Amazon today, via ads or otherwise, makes it more likely that more books will sell tomorrow. And many of those people will get on my list, and will buy products that cost in total hundreds, or thousands, or maybe tens of thousands of dollars.

And with that I got an offer for you:

I have a lot of experience writing and publishing and even advertising books on Kindle.

Actually, my first successful “business venture,” from before I even got paid a single red cent to write sales copy, and before I even knew what copywriting is, was self-publishing books on Amazon.

So I had an idea recently.

What if I write, publish, and even run ads to a book for you and your business… for free?

Some terms and conditions would apply.

Like for example, you would need to have an offer on the back end that’s selling right now for $1k or more (and actually making sales).

You would also need existing content I could use as starter material, or at least expertise that I could yank out of you via some non-invasive procedure.

I don’t know if this is of any interest to you.

But if it is, and if the terms and conditions above sound reasonable to you, then hit reply and we can talk in more detail.