Affiliate contests suck, so here’s an alternative

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I sat down just now and tried to write a list of 10 reasons why affiliate contests suck.

(Affiliate contest = Person X is selling an offer during a time-limited launch. Persons Y, Z, and Q are promoting it as affiliates. Whoever sells the most gets bragging rights and additional prizes, beyond just the affiliate commissions.)

I feel internally that affiliate contests suck, and so I was sure that I could come up with 10 good reasons to back up my feeling.

So I started writing and… I realized that my arguments were not really arguments against affiliate contests, but about mass launches with a bunch of affiliates who promote the same offer.

Mass affiliate launches devalue the core offer… they force each affiliate to come up with a new and unique offer (bonuses or bundles or whatever) if they hope to sell anything, which to me defeats the main point of promoting affiliate offers… they cut into sales since people on your list are likely to be on 5 other lists that are promoting the same.

I realized affiliate contests are actually a way of getting around all these negatives of mass affiliate launches.

List owners (persons Y, Z, and Q above) know that promoting an offer at the same time as a dozen other people sucks… and offer owners (Person X above) try to draw them back by promising additional prizes for the best performers, above and beyond the affiliate commissions.

Does it work?

People do affiliate contests all the time, so I’m guessing it works, at least for somebody out there.

At the same time, I can speak from personal experience that I avoid affiliate contests like I avoid the metro at rush hour on an August afternoon, both because I don’t like being in a sweaty crowd, and because I don’t like directly competing against people for one of a few available seats.

I imagine there are others who are like me, who are in fact turned off by the competitive aspect of winner-takes-most contests.

I’m telling you all this because today I announced a new campaign inside my Daily Email House.

The goal of the campaign is to grow the community.

I’m asking existing members to help me do so. Beyond the altruistic reasons of helping me out or building a more thriving community, I’ve also announced prizes:

Prize #1: For anyone who refers anyone to the group, whether this referred person ends up getting inside or not (I’m picky, and I don’t let just anyone inside)

Prize #2: for anyone who refers 10 people who end up getting inside

Prize #3: For the entire group, once we reach the magic number of new members I’ve set as the target for this campaign

It’s a different kind of incentive scheme to overcome the problem of multiple people promoting. Rather than an “affiliate contest,” this is an “affiliate challenge.”

In the affiliate challenge, people are not competing with each other (or are competing directly to a much smaller extent). They are primarily competing with themselves.

They are not falling behind each other, and not giving up because they feel it’s hopeless to win, or even refusing to engage altogether.

They are encouraged to participate and to achieve a manageable goal.

And at the end of it, the group benefits, and is hopefully stronger, rather than divided or deflated.

Maybe an “affiliate challenge” is something you can consider as an alternative to an affiliate contest, when running an offer or a promo or a launch where you’re hoping to get a bunch of referrals or affiliate sales from different people.

“Yeah but does this work?” I hear you ask.

Fair enough. I have no idea. I’m just testing out this campaign, and it’s likely that there will be hiccups or missteps along the way.

If you’d like to find out how it does, or participate to get yourself one of the prizes I’m offering, or you simply want to join a community with the shared goal of using your email list to pay for a house, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/house

How to make the coming tax season 11x more exciting

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A couple weeks ago, I wrote about attending my first ever pro football game.

I don’t really care about football.

And after the first 20 or so minutes of the game, when the novelty of being in a big stadium and seeing billion of dollars’ worth of talent running around on the pitch, I thought to myself, “This is nice, but I could imagine going home at half time.”

And yet, I didn’t leave, and the rest of the game proved endlessly exciting and fascinating.

After the game, I asked myself what did it.

In part, it was the game itself — an underdog versus an overdog, lots of attacking and good chances, a last-minute goal.

But I’m not sure I would have cared about any of that had my friends and I not decided to also make a 1 euro bet on the outcome of the game. I think the bet, small and stupid though it was, suddenly sucked me into what was happening in a way that simple sports never could.

The fact is, betting makes anything more exciting.

I heard once that a person who bets any amount of money on a game is 11x more likely to watch the game.

I’ve been thinking about how to take advantage of that instinct to make betting a sales mechanism, or useful for sales. While I figure that out, betting is useful to me today for the sake of simple content.

For the past couple days, I’ve been promoting Jeanne Willson and Kirsten Graham’s free “Taxes for solopreneurs” masterclass. I got a reply to my email about that yesterday from a reader who wrote:

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I have to be totally honest: given the state of US politics and the IRS as an institution, not only do I not think that’s true, but I’m also pretty confident that no one is getting audited until another administration comes in. They’re just too understaffed.

===

I don’t know if that’s true, but I figure betting on it is a sure way to make the coming tax season 11x more exciting.

Of course, in this context, this will not be any positive kind of excitement. Bet that the IRS is too understaffed to single you out is likely to turn 11x otherwise good moments into moments of worrying, fretting, and taking out mental time that could be used to more productive or profitable uses.

If that’s not the kind of excitement you want or need in your life, I would refer you to Thursday’s training by Jeanne and Kirsten.

Jeanne and Kirsten will share a plan to take care of the looming cloud of a tax audit, without paying the $200-$500 per month that you would pay to your local CPA.

And yes, there will be a done-for-you service for sale at the end of Thursday’s training to make your tax worries disappear.

And yes, I will get paid something as an affiliate if you take Jeanne and Kirsten up on this offer.

But I’m not getting paid anything to plug Jeanne and Kirsten’s training on Thursday, which will be valuable and instructive on its own, whether you choose to buy the offer at the end.

If you would like to sign up for this free training, and reclaim the part of your brain that’s worried about taxes:

https://lessmathmoremoney.com

Others get audited for their travel and entertainment deductions… YOU deduct TWICE as much, yet get no flack from the IRS

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This week I’m promoting Jeanne Willson and Kirsten Graham’s free training on how solopreneurs can offload their bookkeeping without paying CPA prices.

Unfortunately, I know very little about the world of taxes or bookkeeping.

Fortunately, I know something about copywriting, and the world of direct marketing. That’s how I know of a sales bullet, written by A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos, in a blockbuster sales letter from 1996:

“Others get audited for their travel and entertainment deductions. You deduct TWICE as much, yet get no flack from the IRS. The secret is on page 18.”

In case you’re curious about the secret to not getting audited while others do, it’s this, from page 18 of the book Parris was promoting (I’m summarizing):

Submit documentation and proof along with your tax return. The IRS officially discourages attached proof and evidence. Even so, it’s a proven recipe to reducing your chances of an audit, because while audits are triggered automatically, they are reviewed by a live human, and a human might look at your attached proof and decide your claims are legit.

This info, which supposedly comes from a well-connected IRS insider, is from the 1990s.

Is it still true today?

I cannot say. If you’re really worried about getting audited, I would refer you to Thursday’s training by Jeanne and Kirsten.

Jeanne and Kirsten will share a plan to take care of the looming cloud of a tax audit, without paying the $200-$500 per month that you would pay to your local CPA.

And yes, there will be a done-for-you service for sale at the end of Thursday’s training to make your tax worries disappear.

And yes, I will get paid something as an affiliate if you take Jeanne and Kirsten up on this offer.

But I’m not getting paid anything to plug Jeanne and Kirsten’s training on Thursday, which will be valuable and instructive on its own, whether you choose to buy the offer at the end.

If you would like to sign up for this free training, and reclaim the part of your brain that’s worried about taxes:

https://lessmathmoremoney.com/

You can laugh at tax worries — if you follow this simple plan

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Next Thursday, November 6, at 2pm EST/11am PST, Jeanne Willson and Kirsten Graham will put on a free training about the sexy and exciting topic of taxes. The full title:

“How Online Business Owners Can Get Their Books Organized Before April 15, 2026 (Without Paying CPA Prices)”

I met Jeanne and Kirsten earlier this year within a small paid community I’m a member of.

The two of them partner together in several businesses that support solopreneurs, or as they put it, “business owners who need help the most.”

Jeanne and Kirsten’s training will be about how you can offload bookkeeping from your head if you are doing it yourself currently… or finally get it done if you are (gulp) not doing anything about your taxes at the moment, and are simply hoping this problem will somehow fix itself before tax day comes.

Jeanne and Kirsten will share a plan to take care of this looming cloud without paying the $200-$500 per month that you would pay to your local CPA.

And yes, there will be a done-for-you service for sale at the end of Thursday’s training to make your tax worries disappear.

And yes, I will get paid something as an affiliate if you take Jeanne and Kirsten up on this offer.

But I’m not getting paid anything to plug Jeanne and Kirsten’s training on Thursday, which will be valuable and instructive on its own, whether you choose to buy the offer at the end.

If you would like to sign up for this free training, and reclaim the part of your brain that’s worried about taxes:

https://lessmathmoremoney.com/

Pricing quiz

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See if you can spot the pattern among three of my recent culinary purchases:

1. Last week I bought a bag of roasted chestnuts from a seller on the street. The smallest bag was 4 euro, the middle 7 euro, the biggest 14 euro.

I got the 7 euro bag, and was thinking how expensive everything has gotten when a middle-sized bag of chestnuts costs that much.

But when I got the bag — about the size of a futsal football — I couldn’t even be mad.

2. A few days ago, I sat down with my friend Sam for a beer on the Rambla de Catalunya, Barcelona’s most touristy street.

The beers arrived and each was the size of a fishbowl, I’m guessing 1 liter of beer or more.

I was wondering how much we’d get ripped off for this. I was pleasantly surprised when the bill arrived that the huge beers were only 9 euro each.

3. Today I had lunch beneath Montserrat, a mountain close to Barcelona.

The lunch was a fixed menu including appetizers, a main course, and dessert. The price was 30 euro, which frankly is outrageous for the kind of countryside restaurant this is.

The way they justified it — again, I couldn’t even be mad — was that along with the single main course and the single dessert, each menu included not one but five separate appetizers.

So can you see the pattern?

If you’re not 100% sure, or you simply want to hear me pontificate on a Sunday afternoon:

Marketing guru Jay Abraham, also known as the “$75 billion man,” for that’s as much business growth the man has supposedly created, likes to say there are only three ways to grow a business.

The first is more customers, which is what everybody focuses on, until they get it, and realize that it’s not what they really want.

The second is to increase the frequency of purchase, and its logical conclusion, continuity offers. This sounds like the dream, and is no doubt good for some people, but comes with issues of its own.

The third is the least discussed, and it’s to increase the transaction size. There are various ways to do increase transaction size, but a simple way is simply to sell a barrel rather than a bucketful, a giant bag instead of a normal bag, a fishbowl of beer rather than a glass, 5 appetizers instead of one.

That’s something to consider if you too sell things and are looking to increase your prices and grow your business.

I’m considering it because today marks the end of the first week of my revived Daily Email House group, where the core promise still remains, “Use your email list to pay for a house.”

It’s hard to pay for a house with an email list selling $27 offers.

It’s fairly easy to do if you’re selling $2,700 offers.

It’s an afterthought if you’re selling $27,000 offers.

I had something to say about this inside Daily Email House, and I’ll have more to say, and hopefully some of it will help some of the folks inside the group. If you want to join them:

https://bejakovic.com/house

If you’d like to partner with businesses on the back end…

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A couple weeks ago, I wrote about a new “back end” partnership I was testing out.

A business owner, who spends $700 a day on Facebook ads to generate leads, is converting a minuscule share of these leads to clients, while doing no ongoing followup with the rest.

After 2 minutes of talking to this guy over Zoom, we made a preliminary partnership deal:

1. He’d give me control of his email list.

2. I’d see what I could do.

3. If I could do something, we’d keep working together and split the profits.

4. If I could not, I’d have spent a bit of time writing a few emails for this guy for nothing, and he’d have spent a bit of time to talk to me over Zoom, also for nothing.

After I sent out that email, I got a reply from a Spanish copywriter, who wrote:

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I’m not sure if you’ll read this email, since I assume you’ll receive a lot.

But what you mentioned today really interests me. In my country (Spain), I don’t see the practice of sending a daily email as a very common one. Often, they don’t even use email as a sales channel.

In my niche (trading and finance), I see a lot of people with large social media followers who don’t follow up via email.

And that’s a service I’d like to offer: using other email lists and earning a commission on the sales those emails generate. But the question is…

How do you know for sure how many sales the list owner is making thanks to emails?

How do you know how many of those sales come from emails?

Should we trust the list owner?

Can they somehow give you access so you can see the sales generated yourself?

Thank you. I love your writing and job!

===

Maybe I’m projecting here, but the underlying frame I see in this reader’s questions is, “Will I get screwed? Will the owner not pay me for some sales I made him? Will there be INJUSTICE, perpetrated against ME?”

That’s the wrong way to look at it.

If you ask me, the right way to look at it is, does this make good sense for me to do now, and to keep doing?

When the topic of doing work on commission comes up, people often get hung up on revshare percentages, splits, tiers, contracts, agreements, and the technology of tracking, reporting, and checking whether sales you made were correctly attributed to you or not.

Ultimately none of that matters.

What matters is, are you happy with the money that ends up coming in as a result of the investment that you made?

If that works for you, then my advice is to stop stressing about the possible injustice — that somebody somewhere failed to pay you what you are due.

Travis Sago, who runs a “back end agency” that does exactly these kind of back-end partnerships, once proposed a thought experiment.

Imagine betting $1 on a coin flip. You put in $1, and then flip a coin. If the coin comes up heads, you lose your $1. If it comes up tails, you win $100.

Travis’s point was, keep putting in your $1, and keep flipping the coin. Even if the odds aren’t exactly 50-50, soon enough, you will be more than rich.

So much for a new perspective. Now for the offer.

If you are interested in partnering with businesses on the “back end” and maximizing your chances of success at every step, then Travis has an entire course about this, called BEAMER.

That course sells for $2,900. (It’s actually what I paid for it last year.)

$2,900 is a good deal for BEAMER, because if BEAMER leads you to even one modestly successful, one-time partner deal, it will pay for its $2,900 price tag, and then some.

And maybe you’ll have more than just one modestly successful, one-time partner deal.

Maybe you can take it as far as Travis has taken it, and make a few million dollars each year, simply partnering ongoing with people who aren’t really doing much with their email lists.

Now at this point, I could simply link to the BEAMER sales page, except…

There’s also another way to get BEAMER, at 1/10th (one-tenth) the price that it sells for via Travis’s site.

Travis also gives away BEAMER as a free bonus for those who sign up to his Royalty Ronin community, and who stay signed up past the free 7-day trial.

A month of Royalty Ronin will cost you $290.

That’s not exactly $1. But to me, it’s a reasonable investment — a reasonable wager to stake — to get set up with with inside knowledge on running back-end agency from someone who’s made millions from doing so… and to see if you are happy with the money that ends up coming to you as a result of this knowledge.

If you’d like to start a “back end agency” and you want to learn from an expert who’s done it before:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

Would you bid $1 to have me promote you to my list?

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Inside my Daily Email House group, I recently started a discussion about list swaps.

(“List swap” = cross-promotion with another list owner. You send an email to drive your readers to my list… and I do the same for you.)

One big objection that lotsa people raised was “my list is too small to be interesting to anyone for a list swap.”

I don’t agree with this — there are ways out and around it, even with a small list.

But of course, there’s also an entirely different approach to doing something like a list swap, one which is much more direct, and which can lead to results much more quickly.

That other way is simply to pay somebody to promote you, instead of offering to do a quid pro quo with them. Which brings me to an idea I had recently.

I have long been itching to try running an auction, the way marketer Travis Sago teaches and practices.

An auction works just how you think:

Different people bid what they are willing to pay… the winning bidder takes the prize.

In this case, the prize would be a solo ad in my newsletter. Basically, a single email I’d send to my list, dedicated completely to building you up and to promoting your unique offer.

I would also work with you directly to define and refine the offer in your ad… so as to entice the greatest number of qualified subscribers or buyers to go to your page and sign up or buy…

… and I’d work with you to come up with a back-end offer you could offer right away, so you could liquidate your ad cost, and maybe then some, on DAY ZERO.

I’ve never offered an ad in my newsletter before.

I also don’t have a huge list.

But when I did run a list swap with Alin Dragu a few months ago — basically the same kind of thing I’m offering here, but getting paid in cross-promotion instead of cash — I drove about 200 clicks and got Alin about 120 new subscribers.

When I did something similar with Lawrence Bernstein last year, and promoted Lawrence’s $7 offer as part of a list swap, I drove 157 buyers to Lawrence’s list.

If those kinds of numbers get you interested even a tiny bit, here’s my question to you:

If I were to make this offer, and make a monkey out of myself by running an auction to sell it… would you bid at least $1?

If you would, hit reply and let me know.

(If you’ve already let me know inside Daily Email House, no need to write again.)

If there’s enough interest… I will put this auction on, and you will have a chance to bid $1 or more on a solo ad in my newsletter, and on getting my help to make it profitable immediately.

My goal is to help you create a little break-even funnel so you can turn around and run your ad again immediately, in another newsletter, and another newsletter after that, and so on… quickly growing your list with buyers and high-quality readers… and making yourself much more interesting as a list swap partner in the future.

On the other hand, if there’s not enough interest in my little auction idea, that’s fine. Really. You won’t hurt my feelings. I will simply go and sulk, and pretend like I never even considered making this offer.

Your choice. If you’re interested, you know what to do.

The “gold standard” of course design

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From the annals of effective course design:

I recently read about real-life Dr. House competitions, aka “clinicopathological conferences.”

C.P.C.s work like this:

A doctor is given a case study of a real patient.

The would-be Dr. House is told the patient’s initial symptoms and lab results.

The doctor can then follow up with more questions, and if the data is known (eg. more lab results or more background info is available), then he or she is told what those are.

The doctor probes and narrows in.

Eventually, the goal is to make the right diagnosis of what actually ailed the patient.

The key thing is, since these are real-life case studies, the right diagnosis is known, because pathologists on the case actually found it, often in an autopsy.

(I checked just now and some of the correct diagnoses in these Dr. House competitions included “tertiary syphilis with mercury poisoning,” “intestinal anthrax,” and “wrong-site surgery.”)

In this way, the doctor is either proven right, meaning the diagnostic process was on point, or wrong, in which case the diagnostic process was lacking in some way, and there’s learning opportunity.

The article I read about this called C.P.C.s “the gold standard of diagnostic reasoning; if you can solve a C.P.C., you can solve almost any case.” Because of their design, C.P.C.s have become so popular as a teaching tool that the New England Journal of Medicine has been publishing transcripts for more than a century.

This caught my attention because I recently asked myself about other domains where I could apply the mechanism behind my Copy Riddles program.

The basic mechanism behind Copy Riddles is the same as the one behind the C.P.C.:

There’s starting data… there’s a nonobvious final result… which is in some way validated or proven.

In the case of Dr. House competitions, the starting data is symptoms and lab results. The nonobvious final result is the correct diagnosis, as validated by pathologists.

In Copy Riddles, the starting data is dry and factual source material, from a course or a how-to book. The nonobvious final result is a sexy sales bullet, as validated in a sales letter by an A-list copywriter, with sales across millions of households, often following an A/B test against other top copywriters.

I had a few ideas for other domains in which the same kind of mechanism could work:

– Comedy writing (take a premise, then come up with a punchline, compare it to one that got laughs)…

– Subject line writing (obvious enough)

– “Influence Riddles” (a setup where you have to convince someone to do as you want, given severe constraints, and then compare your answer to how it was done for real, in a real-life situation)

Apparently, medical diagnosis is another field.

If you have more examples or ideas for me of how to use this same mechanism in other domains, write in and let me know.

Or, if you are thinking of creating a course of your own, and are wondering how to best organize it, then consider the above “gold standard” approach.

Or, if you are simply interested in the gold standard among courses that teach you how to write sales copy, you can read the full story of Copy Riddles here:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

If nobody wants your profit-making offer, give it away

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Yesterday I organized a Zoom call for a few list owners.

One of these, a successful copywriter and marketer, was asking how to price, or how to persuade businesses to take him up on, his newfangled sales machine.

“Is $15k a year a good offer? The sales machine is super valuable, and has produced great results for the businesses who have used it. But it’s been a hard sell.”

I thought it was instructive that a successful copywriter and marketer was asking this question.

My answer was, if this thing produces sales so well, why not package up the results into a nice gift box, and sell that gift box instead?

In other words, instead of persuading business owners to buy a gizmo that costs $15k a year and promises to produce sales… why not persuade them to accept new money in the bank, which they can pay you a finders fee for?

In the words of marketing legend Claude Hopkins, who became the modern equivalent of a billionaire using little more than a typewriter:

“In every business expenses are kept down. I could never be worth more than any other man who could do the work I did. The big salaries were paid to salesmen, to the men who brought in orders, or to the men in the factory who reduced the costs. They showed profits, and they could command a reasonable share of those profits. I saw the difference between the profit-earning and the expense side of a business, and I resolved to graduate from the debit class. “

“Yes,” I hear someone saying in the back, “but business owners should already know that a sales gizmo isn’t really an expense, because it will help them make money. They should be smart enough to see a profit-generating solution when they see one. They should they should they should.”

Yes, they should.

But they don’t, just in the same way that the successful copywriter above should have remembered the century-old lesson that turned Claude Hopkins into a billionaire, but he didn’t.

The fact is, we have limited time and attention and energy, and doing the work of translation — of turning what we have into what we could possibly have, of what we buy into what it could do for us, of what we sell into what people really want — requires time and effort.

You can argue against this aspect of reality. Or you can work with it, and simply translate what you sell into a result that people care about, and that they can take you up on without risk.

Moving on.

I recently got a bunch of feedback from my readers, and I found that a large number of people list, as their #1 goal, getting consistent with emailing daily.

Maybe you too feel you should should should be writing consistent daily emails. But you still don’t do it.

If it’s not happening, and if it’s important to you, maybe it’s time for to take a different tack:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

How to 3x your price and have clients say it’s still too cheap

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Inside my recently resurrected Daily Email House community, I ran a poll asking folks if they have ever made an offer for $1k+.

I got a response to that from Jordan Parker, who owns Parker Labs, which from what I understand is a kind of boutique agency that provides operations support for online creators. Jordan wrote:

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I have the dumbest story on this from 2 years ago:

Decided I want to practice downsells… but in sales calls.

And I SUCK at sales calls.

(I’m too eager to solve problems and forget to, you know, sell)

So, I intentionally threw a few extra things in & offered my typical $10k offer for $30k – planning to have this cool moment where I scratch the extra features off on one side as I scratch off the price & write a lower price on the other.

Perfect plan. Perfect visual anchor for the downsell.

Except…

The person just said “yes” instantly, and I didn’t even get to try my plan.

(he actually said it’s too cheap)

Sure, $30k isn’t that much for most businesses (and my IT agency’s usual deals had at least 1 more zero), but for some reason when I was the person closing it felt like a LOT. I was pretty surprised after.

(and just mildly annoyed that I didn’t get to test my system 😅)

But if you want to up your prices, give it a shot – list a bunch of stuff and get ready to cross out some of it. Many people will want everything. Getting everything feels nice.

And you always have an out and your old price as a “backup”

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Upsells — addons you make to your core offer — are often seen as allowing your customers to spoil themselves, or maybe a play to their inertia.

The typical example is buying a new car, when a customer ends up agreeing to the the “nitrogen-filled tires” or “key replacement insurance,” simply because they are not thinking right at the moment.

But that exploitative way is not the only way to do upsells.

There’s a good chance people need your upsells to actually get value out of your core offer.

Your prospects can sense this on their own. Or maybe, they are simply eager to solve their problem completely, and so they put themselves into your hands, since they have decided to trust you.

My point being:

Rather than asking “What’s the amount I’m most likely to get my customer to pay,” ask yourself, “What’s the amount that’s most likely to fix their problem fully?”

If you ask yourself that, and if you bundle all of the resulting upsells and downsells and crosssells into a single sale, you can 3x your price, like Jordan did above, and still have your prospect say it seems too cheap.

In other news:

When people ask to join Daily Email House, I ask them what their #1 goal is right now.

A buncha people have replied something along the lines of writing emails consistently, even daily:

#1. “Learn to write engaging and persuasive daily emails”

#2. “Get back to writing consistently”

#3.”Mail daily”

#4. “Consistency”

If writing emails better and consistently is your goal, then I have my simple Daily Email Habit to offer you.

Every day, you get a prompt to write a daily email, which is based on my own experience writing thousands of sales emails, both for clients and for myself.

Every day, you also get 2-3 “hints,” which are really a steady drip of how-to info on influential and persuasive writing.

When you combine this with any email software (​Beehiiv​ works fine) and the ongoing support inside ​Daily Email House​ (free), you have most of what you need to succeed.

One thing that’s still needed is your own commitment. Only you can provide that.

If you have it, and you want my help in getting consistent with writing daily emails:

https://bejakovic.com/deh