8 things not to do in your emails

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1. Give people bulleted lists of how to content without any stickiness

2. Use really obstruse, arcane, or recherché language

3. Open up with something vague and fluffy

4. Talk about yourself in a way that’s not relevant to the topic or interesting to your readers

5. Insult or demean your customers

6. Get needy

7. Have a story that goes nowhere and says nothing

8. Have a listicle that’s not 7 or 10 items long

Um. It might seem to you on first impression that I’m telling you not to do some things in emails that I’ve actually done in this very email.

And you know what they say about first impressions.

They come before second impressions.

And they tend to be right more often than not.

If you’re wondering why I would deliberately tell you not to do some things that I’m doing myself, well, I’ll have more to say about that tomorrow.

For today, here’s one bonus thing not to do in your emails:

9. Write an email that in no way presells the offer you’re going to make

And on that note, here’s a course that has little to do with today’s email, but that might still be very valuable to you:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Agency clients who don’t stay

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Last week, I was talking to the COO at a health clinic.

The CEO of that clinic — the doctor who heads the clinic — has written a good book, with lots of top endorsements and lots of 5-star reviews on Amazon.

But the book is hardly a best seller. I’m guessing it maybe makes a few dozen sales a month.

“You know,” I said in the voice of a precocious 9-year-old child, “you can run ads on Amazon to promote the book.” I’m smart like that, and I know lots of stuff, so I like to show it off.

“Oh yeah we tried that,” the COO said. “We hired an agency a while back to run ads on Amazon for us. But it didn’t drive that many more sales, and we were paying the agency $1k a month just to keep it going. So we stopped.”

Now, here are a few random facts, which I hope to snap together for you like nuclei colliding and fusing to release a tremendous amount of energy:

1. The core offer for this health clinic is a program that costs $50k a year

2. Rich, successful people tend to read books

3. People who read a book all the way through are prime prospects for an upsell, even a ridiculously elastic one ($5 => $50k)

You see where I’m going with this?

It’s quite feasible that, for this particular business, one good extra client a year, attracted via the help of this Amazon ads agency, would pay for the entire year’s services of the ads agency, and then some.

That would be great for the health clinic, for the Amazon ads agency, and presumably, for the patient who had decided to invest in that expensive year-long program.

And yet, it wasn’t happening.

I’m bringing this up because over the past few weeks, along with talking to health clinic COOs, I’ve also been talking to people who offer services and run agencies of different stripes.

I’ve heard a few of them complaining:

“We can’t make clients see the unique value of our services”

“The clients are never permanent, and I seem like a Chinese acrobat juggling many plates at once”

“Clients are comparing my work to much cheaper freelancers”

A part of this really can come down to having bum clients. Not much to do there, except find better clients.

But what if you have — or have had — clients like the health clinic I wrote about above? Somebody with a solid business… a good product… decent marketing… and still they couldn’t see the value in continuing to pay for your services, which should be plugging up a real gap in their business?

Well, in that case, write me and tell me about it.

I’m curious to hear your story.

And maybe we can figure out a way to prevent this from happening again… and even to profit from those clients who already got away.

The highest paid quality on earth

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Last night, I started reading a little book on door knocking.

Door knocking?

Yep, it’s a real skill. And a lucrative one. ​​​

​​​The book was written by a real estate agent who built her entire career by going up to a stranger’s door, knocking on said door, and if somebody opened, asking if they wanted to sell their home.

​​Most of the time, the people inside said no. So the real estate agent would turn around, walk down to the next house, and do it all over again.

The author of the book gives a few good reasons why a sane person might want to live their life like this. Here’s a few that might resonate with you:

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You will earn more money than most doctors, lawyers, pilots, and professors. You will have more freedom to come and go than almost any other professional, and you will have a saleable product (your business) that will continue to support you after you exit the industry.

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I love this book so far, and in particular I love what the author says is the number one quality that leads to success as a door knocker, and by extension, to success in opening up any kind of sales conversation.

Can you guess what this quality is?

I’ll give you a hint. In fact I’ll give you a few hints, and tell you what it’s not:

* Persistence. A lot of people persist in spite of not getting any results or making any sales. (Such as, ahem, myself for large stretches of writing this newsletter.)

* Intelligence. Good God no.

* Extroversion. Now we’re getting a little warmer, but in the words of Eddie Murphy, that ain’t it…

* Likeability. Sure, being seen as likeable helps open conversations. But a lot of people, myself included, tend to default to thinking that you’re either likeable or not.

​​Of course, that’s not true.

​​We each morph from moment to moment, and from environment to environment. Our likability goes up and down, because it’s not really inherent to us. It’s in other people’s heads, and not something that we have control over. So likeability ain’t it either.

I’ve now given you some hints. I told you what this magic quality is not. As to what it is?

If you’d like to know that, I’ll tell you. Or rather, I’ll point you to it.

​​This quality makes up chapter one of one of the greatest sales books of all time, where it’s called the “highest paid quality on earth.”

If you’d like to know what this quality is and why it is so valuable and how to get it, read the book.

​​Plus, read the book because no less of an authority than Gary Bencivenga, the A-list copywriter who gets the most love an adulation from other top-level copywriters and marketers, credits his great success to this book.

And by the way, you can cheat. You can find out what this quality is without reading the book.

Somehow, I suspect this will do absolutely nothing for you. But you decide. Here’s the book, with all its sales wisdom:

https://bejakovic.com/highest-paid

Why do I keep linking to Amazon???

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I got a question from a reader last week, which I didn’t realize until just now had a slight dig at me towards the end:

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I noticed that you linked to Amazon quite a lot in recent weeks … curious about your rationale?

Engagement, commission, or simply being unpredictable (ultimately become predictable)?

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How’s this for predictable:

It is well known, by anybody who knows anything about Internet marketing, that linking to Amazon, particularly to books on Amazon, particularly to books on Amazon that feature word “eskimo” in the title, increases Gmail deliverability. This in turn translates to higher engagement and greater retention on expensive continuity programs like the ones I don’t sell.

No. Of course not. It’s nothing like that.

There’s no kind of tactical reason for why I’ve linked to a few Amazon books over the past few weeks.

I did it because the books were valuable and useful to me, and I thought they could be valuable and useful to you.

But beyond that, there is another, more personal reason.

I could explain that reason in my own words.

But the fact is, somebody has already explained it for me, in words that are so good thath they have stuck with me for 6+ years now, and that come ringing back in my head at certain key moments in my life.

If you’d like to find out those words, and maybe learn something that can help you run your business and your life better for the long term, then read the following, which is not an Amazon book:

https://www.psychotactics.com/greater-profits/

What comes after email promos?

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Last week, I got an email with the subject line, “quick question John.” I opened it up to read:

“I’ve been following your work since you’ve launched Simple Money Email – love your stuff!”

Mhm, sure you do. It’s Simple Money Emails, with an s, in the plural.

I skimmed over the rest of the guy’s message, which tried to be clever and funny. Finally, I got to the offer at the end:

“Would you be interested in re-launching Simple Money Email (or any other one of your courses) – to make $25k, $50k–and depending on your list size–even $100k… by the end of May?”

I would absolutely love that — especially since this cold email pitch hit my inbox on June 3rd, three days after the end of May.

But whatever. My point here is not to take apart this guy’s cold email and all the problems in it.

My point is simply to highlight that I, John Bejakovic, who am currently a hot seat coach in Shiv Shetti’s Performance Copywriter Method mastermind, where we teach people how to do email promos, am being pitched by copywriters I’ve never met, who want to run an email promo to “relaunch” my course for me.

All of which makes me wonder what’s coming in the future.

​​​Not necessarily as a replacement for email promos. Email promos work, the same way that email marketing works, the same way that marketing works.

No, what I’m wondering about is what will be the next business opportunity.

​​What will copywriters latch onto next as a thing to pitch to business owners?

​​What will business owners latch onto as the next business opportunity to pitch to people, copywriters included?

I have my own ideas about this.

​​But I’d like to hear yours as well.

​​If you’d like to share them with me, hit reply.

​​I’m not promising anything in return. But who knows, maybe we can get into an interesting conversation, and figure out something valuable for the future.

I’m free at last

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I entered the kitchen this morning in a kind of triumph and prepared a celebratory feast.

There was homemade shakshuka with a few fried eggs on top. There was bread, Catalan “pa de vidre,” which I love but rarely eat any more. There was butter, delicious butter, which I also rarely eat any more, except on special occasions.

And all this was a bonus added to the usual horsefeed that I chew through almost every morning.

“Free at last,” I said as a kind of thanksgiving prayer. “Free at last… thank God almighty, I’m free at last to eat whatever I want.”

The reason for today’s triumphal breakfast was that yesterday was the fifth and final day of the fasting mimicking diet I was doing.

If you don’t know the fasting mimicking diet, it’s a special diet, designed by a USC professor of nutrionology/how-not-to-die science.

The fasting mimicking diet has you eat significantly reduced calories and eliminate almost all protein for 5 days. Basically, you eat a bunch of vegetables and some olive oil for 5 days.

Why??

The claim is that this gives you A) all the benefits of an extended water fast, without B) any of the downsides, such as ravening hunger, impractical weakness, and long-term muscle wasting.

The USC professor has all kinds of medical studies, on rats and cats and maybe even owners of cats, to prove that his fasting mimicking diet does as he says.

I don’t have any real way to verify what he’s saying. But I trust the man — because you gotta trust somebody sometime.

I can also tell you that is that this is the second 5-day FMD cycle I’ve done, the first being back in February.

Both times, I was not hungry at all (just bored with eating vegetables all day), I could still go to the gym, and I got the results I was looking for.

As for what those results are, I’ll keep that private. I’m a little shy, and I’m sure you don’t wanna know anyhow.

The point though:

If you come from the world of direct marketing, as I do, you might be jaded, as I am, and think that every new “mechanism” is just some scheming copywriter’s invention.

But on occasion there really are genuine hacks, breakthroughs, secrets, better mousetraps or micetrap, which give you all the benefits without any of the downsides. Or at least something close to it, something close enough.

Once you have a new mechanism like that, your thing sells itself.

I was pretty much sold after hearing the name “fasting mimicking diet.” I guess so were many other people. Celebs such as Jennifer Aniston, Kate Hudson, and Gwyneth Paltrow have done the fasting mimicking diet — and somehow, I doubt that they read the sales or scientific literature on it.

But let’s get to business.

My claim has long been that online courses have a real problem:

The good information inside them flies in one ear and flies right out the other.

It takes repeated reading/listening of a course to remember any of it. That’s bad.

What’s worse, it takes application of the ideas inside a course to actually get any bit of real value from the course.

But most people never do any of that.

I say this in spite of the fact that I myself sell online courses.

But I also sell something completely different:

My Copy Riddles program.

Copy Riddles is not a copywriting course in any traditional sense. It’s not good information. It’s something else.

For more info on this training program that’s unlike anything you’ve seen before, with a genuinely new mechanism that gets valuable copywriting skills into your head:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

I know what you did last night

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Well, I can take a guess. It’s not like I have a little camera in your kitchen or anything like that.

​​Also, I don’t know everything you did last night, nor do I want to. But I can take a good guess about at least one thing you did last night.

​​I’m guessing it’s one of the following:

1. You checked the latest Wimbledon results, or

2. You nodded with approval at the news that the far-right party in France lost at the elections, or

3. You read up on the U.S. election, maybe even going so far as to investigate what exactly “Project 2025” is.

So?

Did I guess right?

Did you do any of those things last night?

If you did, you may now marvel at the amazing clairvoyant powers of Cavaliere Bejako.

And if you didn’t do any of those three things last night, well, you really should have. At least one. At least statistically speaking.

A few days ago, I made a list of 10 ways to get an idea of what people are thinking about and interested in, right now.

And this morning, I cross-referenced some of these sources of information. Those three things above were the top three things I saw in my CIA-like sleuthing.

I did this research because I’ve been re-reading the Robert Collier Letter Book, which I have come to believe is the most valuable copywriting book ever published.

For example, after reprinting a sales letter that had helped sell 250,000 copies of an 820-page history book (!) by mail (!) in 1923, Collier says the following:

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The point would seem to be that if you can tie in with what people are thinking about and interested in, you can sell anything. And the particular form that your letter takes is far less important than the chord it happens to strike.

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So there you go. Figure out what people are thinking about and interested in, and you can sell almost anything.

Of course, what people are thinking about doesn’t have to be of general interest — something that will show up on Google Trends.

​​Your particular audience might have a unique and specific obsession right now that only a small number of other people share.

But the point is the same. If you can figure out what that obsession is, and if you can tie your sales message into that, then…

Well, would you like to buy something? Then consider this highly topical and highly valuable offer:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

I don’t want people to see me fail

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It finally happened.

Yesterday afternoon, I reached the entrance to my apartment building and, for the first time ever, I realized that I’d left my keys at home.

I’ve been paranoid about this for months, ever since I started living alone again.

I don’t know any of my neighbors. The friends I have in town are away more than they are here. My landlord takes days to respond to my text messages.

If I were ever to lock myself out, who the hell would let me back in?

Fortunately, a few weeks ago, I acted on this paranoia.

I hid an extra key to my apartment somewhere inside the building. That meant I would just need to get inside the building and I could get back into my apartment.

Like I said, yesterday I finally forgot my keys.

But as I stood there at the building entrance, with a backpack full of groceries and a large leek in my hand, I refused to ring any of my neighbors to let me in.

Instead, I sat down on the bike rack that’s right in front of my building.

And I started to wait.

And wait…

And wait… until finally somebody came out of the building, and I could rush in beside them.

Maybe you’re wondering if this email will ever get to a point. So let me get to it now.

Why didn’t I simply ring some neighbors, politely explain the situation, and ask if they would let me in?

Brace yourself:

It’s because I hate to ask and be rejected…

Because I never want it to be known that I need something, which I might not get…

Because I don’t ever want to try and be seen to fail.

Stupid, right? Even nonsensical? Particularly in such a low-stakes, perfectly natural situation as just ringing a doorbell to ask a neighbor to let me in?

If you think my reasoning yesterday was stupid or nonsensical, I completely agree with you.

In fact, that’s why I’m telling you about it. Because it’s easy to recognize stupid and nonsensical reasoning in others, and maybe draw a conclusion that you can apply to your own life.

This “don’t want people to see me fail” is a strong instinct inside me.

On occasion I indulge it, in small, trivial things, like yesterday.

But in other situations?

Let me just focus on the business stuff.

Every time I write and send a new daily email to thousands of people, a voice inside me says, “What if people think this is dumb?”

Every time I launch a new offer, that same voice says, “What if this bombs? Everybody will see!”

And every time I have an idea for a change in this newsletter, the voice pipes up again. “But what if it doesn’t stick? People will know I tried and failed…”

The fact is, people don’t know I tried and failed, not most of the time, and certainly not most of the people.

That’s because nobody looks at my emails and offers with 1/1000th of the care and devotion with which I look at them.

And as for the people who actually notice when I do mess up, or when I try something and it doesn’t go like I planned — those people actually tend to like me better for it. Go figure.

In a second, I’m gonna pitch my Simple Money Emails program. But before I get there, maybe there’s something you can learn from my sitting outside my building yesterday, leek in hand, and waiting and waiting.

Specifically, if you’re afraid that:

1. You will write daily emails and they will be bad, or that

2. Nobody will sign up for your list, or that

3. People will sign up for your list and then (gasp!) unsubscribe, or that

4. People will sign up for your emails but not buy from you, or that

5. Worst of all, you will start sending daily emails, but not be able or willing to stick with it, and the whole world will know that you tried and failed at this new experiment…

… then I’d like to propose that nobody will notice, and if they notice, they won’t care.

I can tell you this because each of the above has happened to me. (Regarding #5 above, this newsletter, which has been running non-stop for close to 6 years now, is my third or fourth attempt to stick with writing daily emails. I failed every other time.)

My point being:

In spite of all of those awful, horrible things happening to me, and even though I’m a sensitive soul, I’m still standing. I’ve actually learned a bit in the process, and I’ve built something valuable as a result of it all.

Maybe you can do so too.

And if you fail?

Nobody will notice. And if they do, they won’t think bad of you.

​​The table stakes are very, very low. If you try and fail, you haven’t lost much, if anything.

On the other hand, if you manage to stick with it, the upside is huge.

And now, for my Simple Money Emails program.

You don’t need this program to start your email list or to start writing daily emails.

But if you want a bit of support and guidance along the way… if that will help you get started… and if you want to get going now instead of just waiting, waiting, and waiting some more… then Simple Money Emails can be a good investment.

If you’d like to find out more about it:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

A-pile vs. B-pile marketers

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A few days ago, I exchanged some emails with a business owner who was in a bad way.

“At the moment,” he said, “I’m feeling a bit like Halbert sitting in the dark trying to figure out what to write in that sales letter to get the power back on.”

If you don’t know the story of Gary Halbert, he was a well-known direct marketer and a better-known copywriting guru.

In the early days of his career, Gary was not very successful.

He would often spend his family’s utilities money to pay for stamps for sales letters to market some new scheme.

Those sales letters went out into the world. What came back were orders and some money, but never as many orders or as much money as Gary would have liked. Sometimes not even enough to cover the utilities bills.

The story goes that Gary was sitting in his kitchen one night, in the dark, with no water because he hadn’t paid the bills.

He was sick and tired of the stress and the visible signs of failure all around him.

And then — because that’s what makes a good story — the lights came on. Not in the kitchen, but in Gary’s head.

Gary had his moment of genius.

He figured out a new product and a new way to market it.

The result was a major success — millions of new customers and a multi-million dollar company, built on the back of one good, I mean, perfect, sales letter.

Now that I’ve told you this story, I’d like to propose that it’s proof that Gary Halbert was what I call a B-pile marketer.

We know of Gary today because his “sitting in the dark” moment actually produced a success. But it equally could have produced yet another failure. In fact, more than equally, because new direct marketing tests fail more than they succeed.

Had that happened, maybe nobody would know of Gary Halbert today, just like we don’t know the millions of other B-pile marketers who repeatedly failed and eventually disappeared. ​
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Compare this to marketers I’m calling “A-pile.”

A-pile marketers aren’t well-know either, but that’s because their story is not as dramatic. There’s no “sitting in the dark” moment. Instead, they build large, stable, cash-spewing businesses that work year after year, without ever being at risk of having the lights turned off.

What’s the difference between the A-pile and the B-pile?

Hark unto me, Buckwheat:

The difference is a marketing strategy that has the highest chance of being successful — of bringing back lots and lots of orders and lots and lots of money.

It’s a strategy that Gary Halbert must not have known early in his career. Or maybe he knew it and was just unable to practice it. I know for a fact — because I heard Jay Abraham say it — that it’s something Gary didn’t apply even later in his career, when he shoulda known better.

Maybe this proven, stable, cash-generating strategy went against Gary’s romantic and heroic nature.

If that’s your nature, too, then maybe this strategy won’t be right for you either.

On the other hand, if you’d like to keep the lights on, and keep the orders flowing, without having to produce a moment of genius, you can find this strategy described in detail in chapter 3 here:

https://bejakovic.com/a-pile

Mr. Beyagi’s sage advice

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I was in my shed today, trying to catch a buzzing fly with just a pair of chopsticks, when a rebellious, dark-haired youth of about 17 barged in.

“Hey are you the maintenance man?” he asked.

“No,” I said, without looking away from the buzzing fly.

“So are you gonna come and fix the faucet?”

I grunted. “Not my job.”

“Unbelievable!” the youth said. “Well, will you at least teach me karate?” And then he launched into the following monologue:

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I’m at a point where I don’t know how to go about my karate practice. I have zero funds, no bank account, and just arms willing to fight. But how do I go about doing this?

Should I start my own dojo and market it as “Join me in my journey as a newbie karateka”? If yes, how do I attract students that way? When I have no credentials or any incentive for anyone to join my dojo for that matter.

I know it’s useless trying to beg for help, because this stuff is what other people pay you for. But I’m proud that I at least tried. I’ve never asked anyone for help before you.

I would appreciate a lesson about for aspiring karate masters. I’m not pitching myself in any way. All I ask is guidance.

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Maybe, maybe… if only I had a collection of rusted old cars. But I don’t.

So I guided this rebellious dark-haired youth towards the door.

I opened the screen door and nudged him through it. And as I closed the door behind him, I gave him some parting advice, in my best broken English:

“You go YouTube. Free. Watch. Apply. Then go Amazon. Book, five dollar. Read. Apply. Read next book. Watch next YouTube. Apply. Apply. Come back. Five year.”

In less broken English:

It might seem cruel not to take in this youth and give him proper guidance.

It might seem cruel to send him away.

It might seem extra cruel that those who have the greatest need find it hardest to get a bit of good advice.

Except frankly that’s bullshit.

There’s never been such an abundance of free and good information out there. Or if you don’t want free and good, then $5 and really good.

The fact is, there is nothing new under the sun.

What I do, what everybody else in the course and coaching business does, is package up and simplify proven old knowledge, make it fun to consume and easy to believe in, to save you time and headspace, if that’s the kind of thing you can afford and choose to pay for.

If that’s not something you can afford, no shame in that. But in that case, you have to use your other resources — time, ingenuity, willingness to work — to get the same results that maybe you could buy with money.

I don’t currently offer any trainings about starting your own karate dojo.

But I do have a training teaching you the fundamentals of karate itself, ie. writing emails that make sales and keep readers reading.

There’s nothing new in this training. But it is proven, via literally millions of dollars worth of sales. And it is fun and easy to read. And it will save you many hours of time, if time is what you value over the bit of money I ask for this training.

Hai? Then you go here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme