No B.S. scarcity

Yesterday, I got hypnotized.

I knew what was happening.

I didn’t stop.

I didn’t particularly want to stop.

Instead, I pulled out my credit card and signed up for a $137/month international subscription to a print monthly newsletter.

I had considered signing up before — it’s Dan Kennedy’s No B.S. Letter.

“But do I really need this?” I asked myself each time before. The answer is no.

Besides, I know what personality-based marketing newsletters are really about — and that’s selling you a personality.

And yet, last night I happily bought. Even though I knew what was happening, I justified it to myself as something I simply wanted to do.

What changed?

Very simple.

​​Dan (or somebody on his behalf, since the man doesn’t use the Internet) sent out an email with the subject line, “You’re Invited Into My Basement.”

The offer was a free, live, upcoming event broadcast from Dan’s basement, where he works. Dan would be interviewed by Russell Brunson of ClickFunnels. The reason was the following:

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Russell is flying out to grill me on my recent decision to shut down new sign-ups to The No B.S. Letter after 30 years. And it’s sure to be quite the masterclass in and of itself—no scripts, no pre-recorded sessions, and absolutely No B.S.

===

“Huh,” I said. “No doubt this is some marketing stunt. No way is Dan actually closing signups to his newsletter.”

But I clicked through to register for the event.

And the same message popped up. “The Last Day To Join Dan Kennedy’s NO B.S. Letter Is March 3rd.”

I still don’t really know what this last-day stuff is about. I didn’t listen to Russell Brunson’s VSL or read the copy that popped up after I signed up for the free upcoming event.

Instead, I just had Dan’s voice talking to me, because I have been listening to a course of his lately…

I had his ideas floating behind my eyes, because I recently finished a book of his…

And I felt like we were just in touch today, and yesterday, and the day before, because each day he sent me an email — which I read as I nodded my head and took notes.

All that stuff was true every day before yesterday. But thanks to this “doors closing” stuff — whatever that’s about — yesterday I got entranced, pulled out my credit card, and signed up to the No B.S. Letter. Even though, in spite of Dan’s No B.S. brand, I’m pretty sure this scarcity play is almost surely B.S.

So my point for you is the hypnotic power of scarcity, once you’ve built up sufficient trust and authority.

As for me, I will probably be doing some sort of promotion soon to relieve myself of this new monthly expense.

That’s one thing I’ve learned from Dan Kennedy — never pay for anything.

Another thing I’ve learned is to have an offer at the end of everything I write.

So today I’ll leave you with the link to the “Has Dan Kennedy Gone Mad?!?” campaign.

Yes, that’s an affiliate link. I signed up ages ago to promote Dan Kennedy’s newsletter, but I could never do it in good conscience because I wasn’t signed up myself.

​​Well… until today. How things change.

​So if you want to suss out whether this scarcity is for real or B.S., or sign up to the No B.S. Letter before the doors supposedly close:

https://bejakovic.com/no-bs-scarcity

#1 common feedback to my coaching group last night

Last night I hosted the first Write & Profit coaching call.

I aimed to get 5 qualified people to join this coaching program. And I got five qualified people.

We had the owner of dog-training business in the Midwest who’s had thousands of clients… a harp-playing marketing specialist who helps offline service businesses get online… a copywriter who’s gotten some big wins for coaches… a London banker who went on a hero’s journey to find satisfaction in his well-paid corporate job, and now teaches others to do the same… and a 24-year-old fitness wiz who’s already got a coaching business with hundreds of high-ticket clients.

All five are great at what they do.

All five have success stories to share, either their own or work they’ve done for others.

And yet, there was one piece of common feedback that I had to give all of them.

It probably applies to you too.

It certainly used to apply to me, and still does on some days. It’s this:

None of them was not making adequate use of their status, endorsements, case studies, and success stories.

Maybe you wince when I say that. If so, you should know that doing it adequately doesn’t have to feel tacky, like maple syrup left to dry on the counter.

You can build up your status and share success stories in a natural, even helpful way. For example, consider what I did with this email.

I told you about my coaching program. I told you I filled it how I wanted to fill it. I built up the people inside the program to highlight they are qualified and successful.

And if I could only find some way to also work in the fact that I got these 5 people to each agree to pay me multiple thousands of dollars, using a 3-page Google doc, with no sales calls, no pressure or awkwardness, no haggling over price…

… then you might ask me how? How did I do it? And more importantly, how can you do it?

It certainly isn’t a magical 3-page Google doc that makes sales like that.

Instead, it’s a constant commitment to share your own status items, case studies, success stories… and to stuff those into regular emails, that are written so that people will want to keep reading.

If you have inhibitions about doing the first, then this email you’ve read should help you with that.

As for the second:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Collapse the time

Later today, I will host the first call of my Write & Profit coaching group.

I launched that on the back of the “How I do it” live presentation did a couple weeks ago.

I had the idea for that presentation in the middle of January, and I tacked on the group coaching offer simply because I have a policy to put an offer at the end of everything I do.

I’ve been thinking about a change I’ve made recently to how I work.

I simply started starting things faster.

I don’t put as many ideas in a todo list. I don’t ponder as much. I don’t prepare. My default has become, just do it now.

Lots of things have been happening for me over the past couple months. I believe this change in behavior is a big reason why.

Yesterday, I got an email from direct marketing coach Dan Kennedy, who expressed the same idea. Dan wrote:

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I taught myself the habit of collapsing the time between each idea and acting on it. This has created a lot of messes and a few catastrophes but also made possible a lot more successes than occur at a normal pace.

===

So that’s my bit of advice for today. Collapse the time. Messes will happen. Maybe catastrophes, too. But overall, you will still come out way ahead of where you would have been otherwise.

Time to go.

I still have things to prepare for tonight’s coaching call. Meanwhile, since I have a policy to make an offer at the end of everything I do, consider my Simple Money Emails course. It can help you collapse the time between wishin’ and hopin’ to write daily emails and actually writing them regularly.

For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Gift-box theory of marketing

A few days ago, I bought the ticket for my second-ever Sean D’Souza meetup, this coming April, in Lisbon, Portugal.

Sean, as you might know, is an old-school online marketer who has been selling info courses about marketing since 2002.

The first meetup of his I attended, in Seville in Spain last year, was great.

I met a Hungarian who runs a dental clinic in Budapest, Hungary. We bonded over the fact that I lived in Budapest for a long time and had only good things to say about the place.

I guess he was grateful. Because in return, he told me his story and opened my eyes as to what marketing really is and how powerful it can be.

I’m about to share a part of this guy’s very clever marketing strategy for his dental clinic.

I can’t overstate how valuable and cool it is, at least if you’re into marketing.

What I’m about to write is worth reading closely, and remembering, and pondering. Here goes:

For years, the Hungarian ran a highly successful dental clinic doing dental tourism. He built the business on Google ads. Swiss or Brits came in to get their teeth fixed at a discount while enjoying a fancy hotel in Budapest.

And then, corona came. Lockdowns. Travel shut down entirely, as did most businesses.

After a few weeks, dental clinics in Hungary were allowed to reopen. But international travel to Hungary remained closed, which meant dental tourism was out. The Hungarian’s dental clinic had all these fixed costs, and no patients.

So he paced the floor of his empty clinic… he paced… and paced… and he came up with a plan.

He decided to create an entirely new dental business serving only locals. And how.

Within six weeks, he filled the entire practice… without running any ads, which had become super expensive because all the other clinics were running them… without tapping any prior customers or network… without begging masked people on the street to come in for a free cleaning… without creating content… without becoming a social media influencer… without paying other such influencers to promote him.

Pause for a moment.

Ask yourself.

How would you do the same?

How would you get dozens or hundreds of new patients, ready to pay you large sums of money, within just a few weeks, starting with nothing, except the tools of actually delivering the service, and your knowledge of human psychology?

Here’s how the Hungarian did it:

He started approaching the offices up and down the busy street where his offices sat. He would ask to speak to the CEO or to some other top exec and say:

“I have a dental clinic nearby. I’m going to write an email to promote my clinic to your employees…”

So far, so bleh. But this next part is not:

“… and I want you to send it, in your own name. It’s a pandemic outside. People are scared. Even small infections could compromise their immune system, and could prove to be deadly. So I want you to say that you, Mr. CEO, were thinking about your employees, and you reached out to us, and fought to get us to offer a special deal, a huge discount, to your employees to check if they have any dental problems. This is about healthy teeth of course, but in the present moment, it can keep your employees from getting sick or dying. You are doing it because you care.”

Pretty good, right? ​​

​​Good, but not a sure shot. ​​Mr. CEO might want to look good to his employees, but he might also have bigger, more pressing problems to deal with.

​​So the dental clinic owner continued with his pitch to Mr. CEO:

“Because of the lockdowns, your business is not operating right now. You are not making money. The fact is, when your employees come to us for their checkup, most of them are sure to have dental problems that will require further work. We will charge them a fair price for this work. And we will give you 10% of these fees to help you out, so you have cash during this hard time, while your business is frozen.”

Result?

Like I said, an entirely new business, a full clinic, highly profitable, in just 6 weeks time.

After the Hungarian told me this, I marveled for a while. And I came up with what I call gift-box theory.

Imagine a collection of beautiful gift boxes. Imagine the small lump of coal you want to sell.

Your small lump of coal might not be very attractive on its own (“I want you to promote my business to your employees”).

So you put your lump in one gift box (“be a hero to your employees”). But no need to stop there. You can then put that gift box into a second gift box (“… and make money at it too”).

Each market has its own set of beautiful gift boxes that they care about, that mean something to them, that tap into their emotional responses.

Your small lump of coal probably means nothing to your prospects. So it is your job as marketer to identify the gift boxes that your market responds to, and then to stack a combination of them in such a way that the entire experience — lump of coal inside a sequence of gift boxes — thrills your prospect.

Actually, there was more to the Hungarian’s story — more gift boxes, more smart and clever and free marketing they continued to do after this initial effort, which grew their business even larger.

But I’ve already shared too much. I wouldn’t normally write so long or share this much how-to information. But I profited from that Sean D’Souza meetup. I’m sure to profit from the next one. And so I wanted to give you something valuable as well.

That said, what I’ve just done is not a good sales email. It’s not what I recommend doing in my Simple Money Emails course. Therefore, I do not expect you to buy anything from me today. But if you want to prove me wrong, here’s more info on everything I offer right now:

https://bejakovic.com/showroom/

Exploiting stupid and gullible customers

I live in Barcelona and for the first time in my life, that means I’m drinking bottled water at home.

The Barcelona tap water looks and tastes like it was used to wipe down a chalkboard before being pumped to your house.

I drank the tap water for the first few months after moving here. I kept asking myself, “Why am I always thirsty?”

Then some friends came to stay with me for a few weeks. They took a sip of the tap water. They refused to have a second sip. They bought bottled water instead.

I drank the bottled water while they were here. And when they left, I found I couldn’t go back to the tap.

My thirst was finally cured. But now I have a new problem. I regularly have to go and buy the water, and schlep it back home.

That’s what I did last night after my evening walk. I walked to the nearest supermarket, about 200 yards away, bought a large 6-pack of bottled water, and schlepped it home.

As I was carrying it, I was thinking about how — bear with me here, I’m getting to a point — there’s a convenience store right in my building. A guy named Malik runs it. The total distance from Malik’s convenience store to my front door is 4 yards, not 200.

And yet, I haven’t shopped at Malik’s for almost a year now. I refuse.

The question is why. I’ve actually written about this before:

===

Malik doesn’t ever ring up what you’re buying. He never gives you a receipt.

Instead, he eyeballs the stuff you’re holding in your hands — a bottle of water, two cans of beer — and tells you the total. 7 euro 65 cents. Tomorrow, the same basket of stuff might cost 6 euro 30. Or 9 euro 15.

Sometimes, Malik senses he has overcharged you. And without looking at you directly, he senses whether you feel so too. If he ever thinks he’s gone too far, he doesn’t lower the price. Instead, he throws in something extra — a single-serve cookie, a lollypop, a piece of bubble gum. Lately it’s been happening a lot.

===

At first, this behavior was curious. Then cute. Then annoying. I stopped going.

I could afford the extra euro or two. I would even gladly pay for the convenience not to have to schlep my bottled water home from a block away. But the random price increases and drops, depending on Malik’s whims and how rich I was looking that day, drove me away. They made me feel gullible and stupid.

The point here is twofold:

First, I’d like to suggest you don’t make your customers feel gullible and stupid. That might seem perfectly clear — much clearer than Barcelona’s tap water. And yet, how many businesses engage in practices that make it seem their customers must be gullible and stupid? Stuff like:

– Transparently fake reasons why (“Our warehouse manager just phoned me in a panic and…”)
– One-time-only offers that really aren’t
– Price increases and drops based on a whim or on momentary greed, rather than strategy

Malik’s store still survives without my patronage. I see him sitting there all day long, looking exhausted and unhealthy. I would gladly pay him the top price he ever charged me for the bottled water, if I only didn’t feel stupid and gullible doing so.

And that brings me to the second point of the story above. But I will talk about that tomorrow, because one point a day is my new limit.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to write daily emails that allow you to 1) build trust rather than resentment and 2) charge high prices that people happily pay, then you might like my Simple Money Emails course. For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/​​

Today only: Stage Surprise Success

Here’s a fun story about thieves:

Penn Jillette is a famous magician. He was once sitting at a Las Vegas convention for magicians, holding court.

Among the people around him was a soft-spoken young man named Apollo Robbins. Robbins had been working in Las Vegas casinos as a performance pickpocket — stealing wallets and watches for show, and then giving them back to their owners.

Penn rates pickpockets “a few notches below hypnotists on the show-biz totem pole” — and God knows stage hypnotists rank low.

Penn braced himself to be unimpressed, and he challenged Robbins to steal something.

But Robbins shrugged his shoulders. He shook his head. He doesn’t like to perform in front of other magicians, he said.

Jillette repeated his challenge.

But Robbins said no again. Penn was wearing just shorts and a sports shirt, and Robbins said this wouldn’t be much to work with.

“Come on,” Jillette said. “Steal something from me.”

Robbins smiled and said no one last time. Instead, he offered to perform a magic trick for Jillette.

By this time, a large audience had formed around the two.

Robbins told Jillette that the trick would involve tracing a circle on a piece of paper around the ring Jillette was wearing.

Jillette took off his ring. He put it down on the table on a piece of paper. He reached for a pen in his shirt pocket. He brought the pen down to the paper and clicked it to start writing.

Suddenly, his face went white. He looked up at Robbins.

“Fuck. You,” Jilllette said.

Robbins was there, standing with a small plastic cylinder between his fingers. It was the ink cartridge from Penn Jillette’s pen.

There are lots of possible morals from this story. But let me focus on just one particularly valuable one. It is this:

For the next 24 hours, until 8:31pm Tuesday, Feb 6, to be exact, I have a special offer if you buy my Most Valuable Email course.

I will tell you the particularly valuable moral from the above story, which I am calling Stage Surprise Success.

​​Stage Surprise Success will give you step-by-step instructions for creating surprise in any kind of performance, whether thieving, magicking, comedy, drama, or simply writing for impact and influence.

If you want this disappearing bonus:

1. Get a copy of my Most Valuable Email training at https://bejakovic.com/mve/

2. Then reply to this email and say you want the disappearing bonus offer.

3. I will then reply with a brief writeup explaining Stage Surprise Success.

4. This disappearing bonus offer is good until tomorrow, Tuesday, February 6, at 8:31pm CET.

5. And of course, if you’ve bought MVE already, this is open to you as well. Write in and ask away, and I will send you Stage Surprise Success also. But the same deadline applies.

How to fix bad habits

Yesterday, I was ellipting on the elliptical and to make the process less maddening, I listened to a podcast, which turned out to be surprisingly valuable.

It was a health podcast. The guest was a psychotherapist, a certain Dr. Glenn Livingston, PhD.

That name was familiar to me.

Turns out it was the same Dr. Glenn Livingston, PhD, who was also a successful direct marketer a while back.

​​I checked for his name in my inbox just now. He has at different times partnered with or been named-dropped by direct marketing rhinos and mammoths like Terry Dean, Ryan Levesque, Ken McCarthy, and Perry Marshall.

But back to the podcast. Like I said, it was a health podcast, about how to quit overeating.

Turns out Dr. Glenn is an expert on the matter.

Not only has he battled overeating his whole life, but he has written a bunch of books on the topic. The best selling one, Never Binge Again, has 19,224 reviews on Amazon.

Perhaps you’re wondering whether this email will ever get to a point. The point is this:

For years, Dr. Glenn used his psychotherapeutic training to try to quit overeating.

Never worked.

After years of therapy, introspection, and digging into his family history, Dr. Glenn finally unearthed the surprising root cause of why he was overeating his whole life (mommy issues).

And it still didn’t fix a damn thing. If anything, it made his overeating worse, because he now had a legit excuse, where he didn’t have one before.

And yet, Dr. Glenn did manage to get his eating under control.

​​I’ll tell you how:

He isolated, named, and in fact shamed the part of his mind that was craving and reaching for chocolate, for chocolate was his weakness.

Dr. Glenn told himself, “That is my Inner Pig talking. The Inner Pig wants its slop. But I am not one to be ruled by farm animals.”

The effect wasn’t immediate — few things outside direct marketing promises are. But the effect was there, and after a bit of time, this inner-piggization cured Dr. Glenn Livingston, PhD, of his overeating habit, making him a healthier, happier, better person.

The bigger point, as Dr. Glenn says on the podcast, is that identity is stronger than will power.

You can use this truth if you’re trying to influence and persuade others.

Or you can use it to fix your own bad habits.

I’ve just told you the main highlight of this surprisingly valuable podcast with Dr. Glenn Livingston. But there are more good things inside that podcast. And there’s more development of that core idea, that identity is stronger than will power, in a way that might help it actually sink into your head.

If you want to influence and persuade others better… or if you want to improve your own life and control your mind better, this podcast is worth a listen. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/bad-habits

I shot a moose

“I shot a moose once,” says Woody Allen. The audience at the comedy club starts chuckling.

“I was hunting upstate New York,” Woody explains, “and I shot a moose.” It’s the beginning of a 3-minute routine. But it’s already funny.

The question is why.

If you don’t want me to kill this joke for you, then stop reading now. But if you’re curious why “I shot a moose” is already funny in itself, and how this can help you write better stories, then read on.

Still here? Let’s dissect this:

“I shot a moose once,” says Woody. The audience chuckles.

Partly it’s the improbable setup. Woody Allen, small, city dweller, nebbish, hunting in upstate New York.

But partly it’s the moose itself. The same improbable setup would not be as funny if Woody said, “I shot a deer.”

Why moose and not deer? A few possibilities:

Moose look funny. They have the round muzzle, the cauliflower antlers, they are oversized and look ungainly.

Also, moose are less common than deer. Maybe that makes the story less likely to be real, and therefore more absurd.

Finally, the word moose is funny for some reason to English speakers. Perhaps it makes us think of “moo” as in cow. Perhaps it’s the unexpected unvoiced “s” at the end. If the animal’s name were pronounced “mooze,” it might not be as funny.

In good comedy routines, as in good stories, the comedian takes you down a meandering garden path. What’s important is not the destination – the punchline — but the journey along the way.

So how do you organize a meandering stroll for the greatest effect?

Like a fountain in a real garden, some things are guaranteed to please during a comedy show — mockery, mimicry, slapstick.

Other times, it’s just important to stroll and take surprising new turns. What exactly lies around the corner doesn’t matter too much, as long as it’s new.

And then, there’s the unimportant detail that’s actually important. The cabbage patch instead of the flower bed… or the moose in the Woody Allen routine.

So why the moose?

We can guess, but ​​nobody knows for sure, not even Woody Allen. Whatever it is about the moose, the fact is this seemingly unimportant detail is actually important.

The point of today’s email is not the moose. It’s that fascinating gardens, like great stories and funny comedy routines, rarely spring forth fully formed.

They are the work of careful craftsmen.

Comedians like Woody Allen will deliver the same routine hundreds or thousands of times, each time perfecting the delivery and testing out small variations, including all the unimportant details. It’s the collection of all those details that ultimately “get the click.”

So that’s my takeaway for you.

If you have a story to tell, but it’s not clicking, maybe it’s not the story. In fact, it’s almost certainly not the story.

Retell it again, tweak it, add in stuff, take out stuff, polish it.

A new audience will keep thinking that it’s new. An old audience will need to be reminded. And to both an old and a new audience, the final walk down the garden path that you deliver will be more fascinating and stimulating than what you started with.

I wish I had a storytelling training to sell you right now. I don’t have one. But I’ve actually written quite a lot about storytelling, and experimented with storytelling techniques myself.

You can learn and profit from my experiments. They are one part of what’s documented inside my Most Valuable Email course, specifically in the Most Valuable Email Swipes #13,#16, #17, #18, #19, #20, and #22.

For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Sell the summer, not the seed

I’m making my way through an old issue of The New Yorker, from Mar 2023. I’m reading an article about seed and garden catalogues, which offer different strains of cabbage or beet for purchase by mail.

Fascinating, right?

Well, hold on. These seed and garden catalogues are mail-order businesses, and some have survived since the 19th century.

If you’re doing any kind of online marketing today, there’s probably something fundamental and (ahem) perennial to learn from businesses that have sold in a similar way for 100+ years.

So I pushed through the first page of the article. And I was rewarded. I read the following passage about what these seed catalogues really sell:

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Seed and garden catalogues sell a magical, boozy, Jack-and-the-beanstalk promise: the coming of spring, the rapture of bloom, the fleshy, wet, watermelon-and-lemon tang of summer. Trade your last cow for a handful of beans to grow a beanstalk as high as the sky. They make strangely compelling reading, like a village mystery or the back of a cereal box. Also, you can buy seeds from them.

===

This is a great though unexpected illustration of something I read in Dan Kennedy’s No. B.S. Marketing of Seeds And Other Garden Supplies:

===

As a marketer, you have a choice between selling things with ham-handed, brute force, typically against resistance, or selling aspirations or emotional fulfillments with finesse, typically with little resistance.

===

Perhaps you will say that’s obvious.

Perhaps it is.

But how many businesses insist on selling seeds, or even the promise of large or fruitful plants, when in reality what their customers want is a village mystery, the coming of spring, or the tang of summer?

It’s all gotta mean something. Whatever you sell has got to go in a gift-box, and I’m not talking about cardboard or paper.

And now it’s time to sell something.

My offer to you today is my Most Valuable Email training. The seeds inside this training are a copywriting technique you can use every day to create more interesting and engaging content than you would otherwise.

But what I’m really selling is something else — a path to mastery. The feeling of growing competence with each email you write… the joy of looking and seeing patterns others don’t… the ability to transform yourself at will, from what you are right now into anything you want to be, in an instant, like Merlin in Disney’s Sword in the Stone.

For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Don’t be like me

For the past two days, I’ve been running a kind of flash offer I’ve called Copy Riddles Lite.

In order to promote that, I have finally done something I should have done months ago, and that’s to go through the emails that Australia’s best & world’s most provocative copywriter, Daniel Throssell, wrote to promote Copy Riddles back in September.

Daniel’s emails are filled with gold I could and should have been using to promote Copy Riddles ever since. Such as, for example, the following quotes:

“There are few other courses I fully and wholeheartedly endorse as strongly as one of my own. Copy Riddles is one of them.”

“I have literally never had so many people write to me after I start promoting something, offering unsolicited & gushing feedback on it!”

“It’s the most brilliant course concept I’ve ever seen … literally a gamified series of sequential puzzles that teaches you copywriting.”

So don’t be like me — lazy, careless, and self-defeating when it comes to promoting your own good offers.

Instead, when people write nice things about you and what you sell, save those comments… cherish them… casually drop hints about them over tea or coffee… and every Sunday or even more often, stand up on a soapbox, and openly and dramatically read out those flattering endorsements to everyone who might be interested and many of those who are not.

The Copy Riddles Lite offer is closing down tonight, in another 8 hours, specifically at 8:31pm CET.

Copy Riddles Lite is not a gamified series of sequential puzzles. That’s the full Copy Riddles course, which contains 20 such sequential puzzles.

Copy Riddles Lite contains just one such puzzle.

But it’s a puzzle that stands alone, without the rest of the Copy Riddles program. And if you can guess the right answer — or even if you don’t, but you put in the effort — it will teach you something very valuable about copywriting, in a very short period of time.

Copy Riddles Lite is priced lightly, according to its lite nature. And if you buy it and decide you want to upgrade to the full Copy Riddles program, I will credit you the price you paid for Copy Riddles Lite.

So if you’d like to get this piece of a highly endorsed training before I close down the cart, here’s where to go (no sales page, just an order page):

https://bejakovic.com/crl​​