You never know who’s on your list

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Yesterday, I took the Q train from the Barclays Center in Brooklyn to Union Square in Manhattan. I got off and walked down to East 9th street where there’s a little concentration of Japanese restaurants.

I went into one of these restaurants that specializes in Japanese comfort food.

I was meeting a business owner there who had replied to my “Meet me in NYC/Baltimore/Palm Beach?” email last week. We had already exchanged a couple emails and had talked on Zoom once at the end of last year. But this was the first time we were meeting in person.

I ordered the rice omelette, he ordered the beef stew. We talked a bit about living in the U.S… about living in different countries which both of us had done… about the things we’re working on now.

I said something about this marketing newsletter and my health newsletter. And then I asked him what he’s currently doing with his business.

I won’t tell you what that business is. But I will say it’s an online business, one that’s built on marketing, and more specifically, on long-form ads.

This business is currently doing mid seven-figures per year. It’s growing 30% month-over-month. And the entire team consists of the business owner sitting across from me and one developer in San Francisco.

The business owner across from me shrugged.

“Sam Altman predicted there would be a one-person billion-dollar company one day,” he said. “But before that, there would be a 10-person billion-dollar company.”

We finished our lunch, left the restaurant, and stood on the street corner. We talked a bit more about what to do and see while in New York. He recommended the Morgan Library & Museum. We shook hands, said good to meet you, hope we meet again. And we went our separate ways.

You can conclude what you like from the story above.

I’ll just tell you this:

You never know who’s on your list.

Start writing emails. Create an offer. Start growing your list. You never know who you might attract, who might be reading, and what ideas or opportunities that might open up to you.

If you want help with first part of that tried above, writing emails, then take a look at my Simple Money Emails course.

That’s how the business owner above got onto my list initially, by buying that course. And then he replied to other emails I wrote using the strategies in that course. That’s to say that the strategies I describe in Simple Money Emails work. if you’d like to find out more:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Impoverished wizard tries to sell me, a hobbit, on playing a game

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During the last crescent moon, before I had set out from the Shire on my great quest to the Western Isles, I, Bejako Baggins, was packing my traveling trunk full of cheeses and dried meats, when when an impoverished-looking wizard burst through the doors of my hobbit-hole and held his arms out as if to beg me to hear him out.

I stared at this wizard, both because he had just barged into my hobbit hole, and because he seemed somehow familiar.

And sure enough, I knew him.

This wizard had already burst through my doors once. But back then, his peak hat wasn’t squashed like now, and his cloak wasn’t torn at the sleeve.

Back then, this wizard offered me advice about my circular letter. I had even written about him before, in a letter that became one of my most popular of the past year.

Now the wizard was back, just looking a little beat up. He stood by the door, his arms still up in the air. And he spoke in a deep but cracking voice:

===

Bejako Baggins!

I have a proposition for you mate

Don’t turn me to a troll again in one of your circular letters this time!

What do you think of framing the writing of magical sales spells as a Game then creating a ware to teach its principles and rules.

Basically something in those lines:

“You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.”

===

The impoverished wizard went on to say how he even had a good name in mind for such a ware. “Let me know what you think mate,” he said.​
​​​
I frowned. I genuinely couldn’t tell if this impoverished wizard was trying to ask me an honest question, or if he was in fact using whatever wizarding skill he had to turn himself into a troll.

In any case, I stepped away from my trunk, and I escorted him to the door.

I told him his idea is marvelous.

We hobbits love games, and we also love learning magical spells.

That’s why, many years ago, I did exactly what he is suggesting now.

I read through many ancient books. I collected hundreds of powerful written sales spells in a great leather-bound tome. I called this tome Copy Riddles. And I turned it into a Game.

I was even fortunate enough to get one of the great wizards of this age, Daniel Throssell the White, to say that Copy Riddles “the most brilliant course concept I’ve ever seen… literally a gamified series of sequential puzzles that teaches you written sales magic.”

If you’d like to find out more about this Game that teaches you how to turn plain written words into magical spells:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Hamilton

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No, I didn’t go to see Hamilton on Broadway. But I am in New York City.

Last night, I went to dinner with my friend Sam and his girlfriend Olivia.

Olivia has a background in musical theater.

So while we sat in a very dim restaurant and ate sweet potatoes and Japanese-style chicken wings, Olivia enthused about Hamilton, the sung-and-rapped musical that’s broken all kinds of Broadway records.

Olivia won the Hamilton ticket lottery when the show was just opening. She had to actually quit her job to go see it. She loved Hamilton then, she loves it now, and she wanted to share it with Sam and me.

Sam and I were skeptical. But all right.

Last night was pouring rain. Tickets to Hamilton are generally impossible to get. So of course we didn’t go see the live show. Instead, we went back to Sam’s apartment and watched Hamilton, the recording of the Broadway production.

And it turned out to be… one damn musical number after another.

Sam and I kept dutifully quiet and stared at the projected images on the wall. After an hour, Sam paused it to go to the bathroom. This was an opportunity for Olivia to ask if we were enjoying it.

No. And no.

“I knew it,” said Olivia. “I could feel the energy in the room.”

With Hamilton, the recording, you are supposedly seeing and hearing the show just as it was when it was live. But the reality is that it’s impossible.

There’s the missing excitement of going somewhere live, and feeling that you’re participating.

Then of course there’s the intangibles of an actual live 3D presentation, the sound and vision that cannot be reproduced at home on a 2D surface and with a little speaker.

Plus in the theater, there are hundreds or thousands of other people there, all set to enjoy the show, all infecting each other with their enthusiasm.

All of this is just one more reason to do things live whenever possible.

To do in-real-life musicals rather than sell DVDs…

To offer live trainings over prerecorded ones…

To write live emails rather than send canned autoresponders.

No, I’m not saying a freshly written daily email will have the same impact as a live Broadway show. But in its own small way, a freshly written email feels live and real in a way that an autoresponder email cannot replicate. And over time, that effect builds up.

If you want to write fresh emails — new ones every day, which feel live and real as opposed to flat, canned, and stale — then you can find that in my Simple Money Emails training.

​​Simple Money Emails shows you how I do it, and how you can do it too, starting today. For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

I teased, promised, and threatened, and yet it’s not here

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I woke up this morning, confused about where I am and what time it might be.

It’s day one of my U.S. trip. I’m only just beginning the adjustment to the time zone change from Europe. I expect the adjustment to continue until it’s time for me to fly back to Barcelona.

In my confusion this morning, I checked my inbox and saw the many dozens of emails that had accumulated since yesterday. One email stood out.

“Uh-oh,” I said to myself. “That’s a problem.”

Because yesterday, I teased, promised, and threatened that today I would start promoting an exciting and legit business opportunity for working copywriters.

Well, as that email informed me, this promo has now been postponed.

As with most legit business opportunities, you gotta get on a call before you can buy. And as I found out this morning, the guy who does these calls is “taking a step back for urgent personal reasons.”

So I will not be promoting this exciting and legit business opportunity in my email today. Instead, my teasing of this business opportunity continues, and I will be promoting it in the future.

Meanwhile, since I had to adapt my plan for today, I’d like to share the following quote with you. It’s from one of the most successful direct marketers of all time, Joe Sugarman, of BluBlockers fame.

​​Joe was talking about a glaring objection in a product he was selling once. And he wrote:

“I recognized this as a problem that had to be addressed in our copy. And since I look at problems as opportunities, I wondered, ‘Where is the opportunity in this serious and rapidly growing problem?'”

I read this in the early days of my business and marketing education. And that “problems as opportunities” bit has stuck with me ever since.

Here’s a second quote I read only yesterday. It comes from Brad Jacobs, who started 7 billion-dollar companies so far in his life, and who recently published a book about his experiences, titled How to Make a Few Billion Dollars. Jacobs writes:

“Embrace everything that comes your way, the good and especially the bad. And don’t just accept adversity — figure out how to capitalize on it.”

So there you go. My tip for you for today, via Joe Sugarman and Brad Jacobs:

Train yourself. Change your mind. And the next time you come across a problem — big or small — tell yourself to look at it as an opportunity. In time, this attitude may lead you to a few billion dollars.

In my case, the fact that my planned affiliate offer for today fell through is an opportunity to promote something of my own.

So let me remind you of my Simple Money Emails course. It’s all about writing easy and fast emails that you can use day after day to adapt to problems and opportunities in your business, and even to use them to build credibility and trust with your audience.

For more information on Simple Money Emails:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Darkness at 1pm

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It’s 1:34pm as I write this but it’s dark.

​​I’m inside a freezing Boeing 777 somewhere above the Atlantic ocean, flying from Barcelona to New York.

Lunch is over and now the crew has walked down the cabin, telling us to put the blinds down. I can only guess that this is an attempt to reduce future jet lag. Like kindergartners, it seems we passengers have to get our afternoon nap.

Lots of things happened to me on the way to the plane today.

And lots of things happened in my business over the past 24 hours.

I thought of different ways to try to fit the most important and interesting of these events into my email today.

Fortunately, I remembered all the student emails I’ve critiqued over the past few weeks as part of my little Write & Profit coaching program.

One thing I’ve been repeating often to the folks in that group is that they are trying to do too much in their emails… to say too much… that what they have is really two or three or even nine emails’ worth of content.

So let me stop myself and leave you with this advice for today:

If your email isn’t clicking, you are probably trying to say too much.

Now that I’ve told you that I’ll go back to sitting in the dark, or maybe I’ll take that kindergartner nap.

I want to be in shape for tomorrow so I can get to the last of the affiliate promotions I’ll be doing for the foreseeable future, and tell you about an exciting and legit business opportunity for working copywriters.

The lucrative opportunity of Twitter ghostwriting

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I recently found out about the shadowy world of Twitter ghostwriting. In the shell of a nut:

People will write on your behalf on Twitter, if you pay them well. They will pretend to be you, so you can grow your audience and business and status.

I was actually considering hiring somebody to do this for me. Not for this newsletter, but for my health newsletter.

I asked around how much it would cost.

The answer came back:

$5k-$6k per month, if you want somebody to genuinely tweet newish content on your behalf day in and day out.

I also had a business owner who employs copywriters in other capacities quote me (“at cost,” he said) $500 a week just to take my existing newsletter content and repurpose it into 10 pieces of Twitter and LinkedIn fodder.

Quite the racket, I think. ​But it wouldn’t exist if somebody wasn’t getting value out of it on the other end.

​​In fact, Alex Lieberman of Morning Brew, who I wrote a lot about last week, feels so confident about this Twitter ghostwriting opportunity that he recently started an agency providing just this as a service.

But back to work:

You can pay somebody $5k per month to pretend to be you on Twitter. Or you can pay Kieran Drew just $297, one time, to learn how to be yourself on Twitter, or something close to yourself, and to have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people follow you, listen to you, and ultimately buy from you.

Kieran should know about this. He’s succeed at it himself, and he’s taught and coached a small country’s worth of other people to succeed at it as well.

But the opportunity is disappearing.

Not because Kieran has spilled his secrets on social media writing. There’s enough audience out there for all of us, because only 1 out of approximately 714 people will ever write a single line of online content.

But the opportunity is disappearing. Because later tonight, specifically at 12 midnight PST, Kieran’s High Impact Writing is going back in its secret silo, somewhere in the north of England where Kieran has his lair.

If you’d like to get Kieran’s High Impact Writing while it’s still available, and while the price is still an attractive $297 rather than the explosively higher price it will be in the future, then I suggest you act now.

I also suggest you act now if you want to get the recordings of my Age of Insight training, which sold for $297 when I put this show on a little over a year ago.

Age of Insight shows you how to write in an insightful-sounding way, even if you have nothing very insightful to say.

I’m offering these recordings for free as a bonus to Kieran’s High Impact Writing. But that’s only if you act before the deadline.

If you’re interested, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/hiw

10 minutes to get big Twitter accounts to follow you

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Once every 24 hours or so, I get asked a variant of the following question:

“How did you build up an email list without being on social media?”

My answer is always the same. I did it by being stubborn and stupid, by sending daily emails into the void, without anybody reading what I was writing. I did this for years before things slowly started to turn around.

The problem, by the way, was not that I was not on social media.

The problem was that I was and continue to be unsociable. Even in the world of email newsletters, even among people whose emails I read every day, I never thought to speak up, get introduced, put myself on the radar or sonar of a person with an audience bigger than mine.

Until the end of today, I am promoting Kieran Drew’s High Impact Writing. That’s Kieran’s course to teach you how to write for influence and growth on Twitter and LinkedIn.

But here’s the truth:

As with email, you can write for years on social media without anyone taking notice. The shortcut to success on social media, the royal road, is the same as in the world of email.

You gotta start making connections. You gotta start engaging with people who are more successful than you are. And you gotta do it in a way where they actually take notice and respond.

People often reply to my emails and write things like,

“Loved it!”

“😍”

“Great email!”

While I appreciate any and all reader feedback, there’s really nothing for me to reply to here. There’s nothing for me to grab onto, nothing to get curious about, nothing to make the reader stand out.

So what to do instead?

Back to Kieran’s High Impact Writing. Sure, he teaches you writing for social media. But he also teaches you the other stuff, the connecting and network building in a way that actually works.

In the one of the bonus modules (Social Media Made Simple), Kieran gives you an example of a twitter DM that got him to start following a smaller account. And then he gives you a step-by-step template that he’s since used to get his favorite accounts to start following him.

It takes all about 10 minutes to do this.

And I can tell you, it works in the world of email as well. I know, because people have written me similar things, and I’ve taken notice and then got on their list. (I still remain unsociable and I rarely reach out to anyone, even in email. And I’m paying a price for it. I don’t encourage anyone to do like I do.)

High Impact Writing goes offline today at 12 midnight PST. After that, when it does come back, the price will be explosively higher.

Also, if you act now and get High Impact Writing before the deadline via my affiliate link below, you get the recordings of my Age of Insight.

Age of Insight was a training I put on about a year ago and sold for $297. It shows you how to write in an insightful sounding way, even if you have nothing very insightful to say. Simply forward me your invoice for High Impact Writing and I will get you the recordings of Age of Insight.

Assuming, that is, that you decide High Impact Writing is right for you, and that you act before the deadline. In case you’re intrigued, go here for more details:

https://bejakovic.com/hiw

When orcs were real

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Three years ago, I read a viral, trending article titled, “When Orcs Were Real.” And three years in, I’m still thinking about it.

The article starts like this:

All cultures have stories of creatures that are like humans but more beastly, frightening, strong, and cruel than us, and that live by night instead of day.

Gotta scare the kids with something, right?

The question is why this story in particular is scary.

According to the argument in that article, it’s because this story taps into some kind of genetic memory in us.

There was a time, says the article, when orcs were real.

The orcs were bigger than us. Stronger than us. More brutish than us. They were the night to our day.

We, the race of men, were at war with the orc.

For a long time, the orcs’ strength and size meant they were winning. In fact, the orcs came to a rusty scimitar’s distance of wiping out mankind.

But for reasons we can only guess at today, the tide shifted. Men started to win the battles with the orcs. And then we won the war and wiped them entirely, to the point where now they only exist in our nightmares and on our Netflix viewing history.

Now here’s the kicker. This isn’t just some kind of evolutionary psychology handwaving to explain scary bedtime stories.

The orcs were real, and this is backed by the latest archeology and genetics research.

There was in fact an orc race that lived in the shadows, alongside men, for tens of thousands of years.

From what we know of them by their remains, they were like us but bigger. According to their skeletons, they were packed with muscle, and were several times stronger than the strongest of us.

Based on the shapes of their throats and mouths, it seems they couldn’t speak the way we can, but they could communicate in grunts and snorts.

They had a snout-like nose, large teeth, powerful jaws. Going by the size of their eye sockets, they had enormous eyes, meaning they lived by night. Most probably, they were covered in thick fur.

From their dwelling places, we know these orcs were experts in the use of short- and long-range weapons. They fed mostly on raw meat. They were deadly even to the most deadly animals — mammoths, wolves, cave lions.

They were also cannibals. And along with eating their own filthy kind, they hunted and ate men.

Who were these monsters? Today, we know them as the Neanderthals.

When I read that article and I got to the part about the Neanderthals, I said, “Whoa! Never knew that! Or never thought about it that way!”

The little that I knew about Neanderthals before, and what I learned about them through this article, suddenly snapped together into a new consistent picture, which fit what I had experienced first hand — which was about 10 hours of Lord of the Rings movies and a few months’ of reading Tolkien books when I was a teenager.

“So that’s why it’s so intriguing and dramatic,” I thought to myself.

When Orcs Were Real is an example of what I call insightful writing.

​​The article produced that feeling of insight in me — and not only me. That’s why the article went viral online, getting hundreds of likes, reshares, comments, and even YouTube videos being made after it.

I had this article in mind when gave the Age of Insight presentation a little over a year ago.

In fact, call 2 of that training (there were three calls in total) was all about the how-to of writing for insight using the underlying technique that’s there in the Orcs Were Real article.

That technique is the same technique that you can find in the “American Parasite” video sales letter by Craig Clemens, which went so viral that Joe Rogan tweeted it, not realizing he’s pushing a 40-minute ad to his audience.

The same technique is also there in the End of America VSL, which brought in something like 500,000 new premium subscribers and doubled Stansberry Research’s revenue.

But let’s talk turkey.

Until tomorrow, specifically until Monday, March 4, 2024, at 12 midnight PST, I’m promoting Kieran Drew’s High Impact Writing.

​​High Impact Writing shows you how to write on LinkedIn in and Twitter to build an audience and grow your business.

As a free bonus to High Impact Writing, I’m also offering the recordings of Age of Insight.

​​Age of Insight shows you how to have something insightful-sounding to say when you do get on Twitter or LinkedIn.

High Impact Writing sells for $297 until tomorrow night. Age of Insight sold for $297 the one and only time I offered it before.

So you buy one, you get one free. But more importantly, with these two trainings together, you get influence skills and techniques that can change the trajectory of your life and your business for life.

For the full info on High Impact Writing:

https://bejakovic.com/hiw

Awkward in real life, funny in print

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I just watched a short, very awkward clip of Silicon valley multimillionaire Bryan Johnson, being interviewed by comedian Andrew Schulz.

Johnson has made a lot of headlines over the past year. He’s spending a couple million of his own money on his anti-aging regimen. He has done a great job publicizing that on his social media, and so people have taken notice.

Schulz, on the other hand, is a white dude whose shtick is talking about race in a way that white people aren’t supposed to. He opens the interview like this:

“First question. Do black people age better?”

Johnson lets out a little gasp that he modulates into a nervous chuckle. He looks around for help. And then he retreats to the saferoom deep inside his mind, and he replies,

“There’s data showing that different people, in different circumstances, in different environments, have different clocks.”

Andrew Schulz nods in understanding. “The one time black people are slower,” he explains to the audience. To which Johnson nervously guffaws again.

Here’s why I thought this was notable.

I follow Bryan Johnson on Twitter. He gets a lot of hate and mockery there for his rejuvenation quest.

And yet, his tweets are uniformly funny and crisp. He agrees-and-amplifies like a master. He diffuses attacks. And he works trolls to his own advantage, all with a smirk that you can somehow feel in those 180 characters.

On the other hand, whenever I’ve listened to Johnson speak, he sounds exactly like he did while talking to Andrew Schulz. Abstract. Humorless. Pedantic.

I don’t know whether Bryan Johnson manages his own social media. Maybe he has somebody else write for him. It would explain a lot.

But whether or not he writes his propaganda himself, the following point still stands:

You can be an entirely different person in your writing. You can be smarter, better, funnier than you ever could be in real life.

And like Bryan Johnson’s case shows, you can build up a large audience this way, and create a lot of influence, and have your ideas and your offers reach millions of people, who you could never reach otherwise.

And on that note:

Until this Monday, I’m promoting something to help you get there yourself. It’s Kieran Drew’s High Impact Writing.

High Impact Writing is a course that takes you by the hand from what you are now — no judgment — and turns you into an inspiring, funny, influential presence on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Kieran, by the way, has some authority when he teaches this. He has succeeded in building up his own presence on social media to an audience of over 200,000. He’s built a million dollar-personal brand as a result, with course launches that bring in $100k-$200k over a few days (like right now).

Also, if you buy Kieran’s High Impact Writing via my affiliate link below, I’ll give you a free bonus. It’s the recordings of my Age of Insight training, which sold for $297 when I actually gave this training live.

Age of Insight shows you how to write in an insightful way, even if you’re not very insightful and you have nothing particularly insightful to say.

I, by the way, have some authority when I teach this. People regularly tell me my emails sound insightful. And yet, in all honesty, I think of myself as rather shallow-minded in real life, very pedantic and very formulaic. Again, you can be somebody entirely different in print.

The cart for High Impact Writing closes this Monday at midnight 12 PST. The next time Kieran offers HIW, the price will explode to never-before-seen levels.

If you’d like to get it before then, and grab my Age of Insight training as a free bonus, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/hiw

Cart open for High Impact Writing + my free bonus

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Starting today, and ending next Monday, I am promoting Kieran Drew’s High Impact Writing.

As you might know, Kieran is a bit of a star in the online entrepreneur space. He has over 200,000 followers on Twitter. He has a big and growing email newsletter, with over 30,000 readers. He has had several 6-figure launches and has built up a million-dollar personal brand.

Even more impressively, Kieran only got started with all this 3 years ago. Before that, he was a dentist. He started with an audience of zero.

Even most impressively, Kieran built up his audience and his business via writing alone.

No ads. No fly-by-night growth hacking strategies. No manipulating social media algorithms.

Just writing.

How exactly?

Well, that’s inside High Impact Writing. That’s Kieran’s course on social media writing. It’s for entrepreneurs who want to grow their brand and their business.

I’ve been going through High Impact Writing myself. I only have positive things to say about it. I’ll save those for my emails over the coming days.

For today, let me just say I endorse High Impact Writing 100%.

I also have a free bonus if you get High Impact Writing via my affiliate link below.

The free bonus is the recordings of my Age of Insight trainings, which I gave a little over a year ago.

These trainings consisted of three evening-long calls. Each of the calls focused on one of three “insightful writing” techniques.

The writing techniques I talk about in Age of Insight were at the heart of massively successful pieces of content, which used a feeling of insight to cut through the noise… to get into people’s heads… and to build marketshare and mindshare.

I sold Age of Insight for $297 at the time. Kieran is selling High Impact Writing for $297 right. So from whichever side you look at it, you buy one, you get one free.

Also, Kieran will be raising the price of High Impact Writing after this promo, which ends next Monday at 12 midnight PST. I don’t know by how much he’s increasing the price, but it will be a significant price bump.

If you have doubts or questions about High Impact Writing, then I will have more to say about it over the next three days.

But if you already know you want it, you can get it at the link below. Once you buy, forward me your email confirmation, and I will get you access to Age of Insight as well.

Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/hiw