The extra something in Daniel Throssell’s BF 2021 campaign

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A few weeks before Christmas, I bought Daniel Throssell’s course Campaign Conqueror. I’m currently on my second pass through the course.

If you’re curious why I would buy Daniel’s course now, two years after he put it out, well, that’s something I might talk about in the coming weeks.

For now, let me just bring you back to November 2021, back when Daniel had his massively successful Black Friday campaign, which was the impetus for his creating this course.

I won’t rehash the history of that campaign — odds are, you know how it went down.

And if not, let me just say that it was an affiliate promotion/competition, involving a dozen email marketers (not me), including some with big guru status and much bigger lists than Daniel.

And yet, Daniel came out on top in that affiliate promotion. And not just on top, but I believe he made as many sales as all the other expert marketers combined.

Why was Daniel’s Black Friday 2021 campaign so successful?

My answer at the time was Daniel’s relationship with his list, and the quality of his offer. And no doubt, those were both a big part.

Daniel has a much more detailed answer inside Campaign Conqueror, including things I didn’t realize he was doing.

But there’s something extra I still haven’t heard anyone talk about, including Daniel in Campaign Conqueror. (I might be wrong, and I might have missed it. That’s why I’m on the second pass through Campaign Conqueror. But since this is my own observation, I’ll go ahead and share it.)

I first noticed this extra something in my own reaction during that 2021 event. It has been sitting in my head ever since. It’s influenced how I write emails inside promotions and during off-promo periods. It’s summed up in the phrase:

“Make it feel real”

The 2021 Black Friday affiliate event was a confluence of unusual, extreme events. There was genuine bad blood, public callouts, a never-before-seen and never-to-be-repeated offer on Daniel’s part, all in the middle of a time-limited, seasonal promotion, with everybody else in this small space observing, commenting, and firing shots back and forth.

This led to drama, yes. And to high stakes. But in my mind, it did something more.

Jay Abraham said in one of his trainings that the biggest reason sales fail to happen is that people are afraid of looking dumb. Of making a mistake. Of being played for a sucker.

Daniel’s offer and copy during that 2021 Black Friday promo cut through the usual manipulation techniques and marketing automation that people in this market normally experience. It made the event feel real. It made even skeptics, jaded and guarded, say, “Ok… it’s time to act.”

“Make it feel real” might sound vague to you.

If so, it’s worth looking at Daniel’s emails from then, and remembering the campaign if you witnessed it live, to note down what made this event a unique and real occurrence rather than a repeatable promotion that could be done every Black Friday.

And in case you’re wondering:

This “make it feel real” stuff is not something that’s only useful once in your career, when all the stars align.

It’s a valuable daily practice you can start right now.

For example:

Over the past week, I polled my list a few times. I asked if readers had any good offers they would like to promote to my list… I asked if readers would like to hire me for list management.

I got responses to both of those emails. But since I didn’t want to share anything publicly about those responses, I didn’t write any followup emails about either of these polls.

After couple days of this, I realized this is a problem. If I poll my list, and then never say anything about the results of that poll, my readers might start to feel some kind of disconnect… wonder if my emails are written by a living, thinking person… or suspect that they are interacting with a malfunctioning autoresponder.

That’s why, after I got an unusual number of replies to my email on Tuesday about the “zero-handclap unsubscriber,” I knew it was time to feature a bunch of those replies publicly.

So I did so in yesterday’s email.

Sure, featuring all those replies served the purpose of recognizing those readers, and of helping sell my Simple Money Emails course.

But the bigger reason in my mind was to make it clear that a live person is on this end of these emails, that I’m actually interacting and responding to readers, that I’m writing each email new every day, including today, Thursday, January 11 2024.

This is just one easy way to make it feel real.

Ultimately, what matters is that you keep the idea in mind, and that you do things consciously and regularly to make it feel real for your readers.

And now, time for a real offer:

I’m putting on a free training on Zoom. The plan is to do it in 10 days time, around Jan 21. But I will have the full info on the time and date tomorrow.

As for the content, this training will be an overview of how I do what I do: write emails about what interests me, get people to sign up to my list, buy stuff from me, hire me, recommend me, interact with me, in a way that contributes to other parts of my business and even my life.

I’ve done a lot of stupid things over the years with this newsletter, and it’s taken me a while to get to where I am.

So this training will be framed as advice to myself when I starting out this newsletter back in 2018, still a fresh and wriggling copywriter.

This training can be relevant to you if you work with clients right now, and you’re looking to create a second stream of income, or you want access to better clients, or more stability, or amazing opportunities you can’t even imagine now, or in case you simply want to do something for yourself rather than for others all the time.

I will be promoting this training over the next few days. If you want to join, you will first have to get on my list. Click here to do so.

Followup on the zero-handclap unsubscriber

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Yesterday, I wrote an email about a zero-handclap unsubscriber. This was a guy who unsubscribed from my list, and as the “reason why” he wrote that my emails are boring.

Rather than muttering in private that my emails are so not boring — so not! — I featured this guy’s comment publicly in an email. And then I turned it around in some way to sell my Simple Money Emails course.

​​To which I got a bunch of single-handclap responses. Here’s a sampler:

#1: “Funny because when you sent out that email yesterday about managing clients’ mailing lists I reflected that you would be the exact person I’d turn to if/when I have a mailing list. Your emails are very smart and very well written while also managing to seem understated.”

#2: “I’m enjoying these stories (and the clever way you turn them toward highlighting your offerings). I can see why Kieran Drew thinks so highly of you!”

#3: “What a great transition :)”

#4: “Lol. Really enjoyed this one. Also, SME is excellent.”

#5: “‘Zero-handclap’ made me LOL :-)”

Nice right? But wait, there’s more.

I’m sharing these nice replies with you for two reasons.

Reason one is that I also got a reply from a successful marketer, who has given me many good tips before. He wrote that he had once interviewed a super-successful speaker who shared her secret with him. She told him:

​​”Always write and talk about Positive Topics and people. Let the negative stuff drag competitors down.”

I’m sure this is solid advice, which will never lead you wrong.

At the same time, I have found that sharing frustrations, doubts, and even occasional outrage not only entertains people, but can create greater trust over time.

But you probably knew that. After all, this is the century of being told to be authentic and vulnerable.

That’s why I’ve got a second and much more important reason I shared the replies above with you. But one reason per day is all you get, so I’ll tell you this second reason tomorrow. You’ll want to be there — I’ll make it worth your while.

Meanwhile, if you enjoyed yesterday’s email, or today’s email, or are wondering what might be coming tomorrow, then I can recommend my Simple Money Emails course. It will show you how to write simple emails like this that keep readers reading, and that make sales in the process.

Plus, like my reader above wrote, “SME is excellent.” If you’d like to find out more about it:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Zero-handclap unsubscriber yawns at my emails

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Another day, another unhappy unsubscriber firing a parting shot.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve written a few emails featuring messages that former readers leave on that default “what made you unsubscribe” screen.

Most people never write anything, but on rare occasion, I find funny f-yous. And since I’ve been featuring these messages in my emails, I’ve been getting them more often. Like the guy who unsubscribed a few days ago and wrote:

“Emails tend to be too long, clever, and polished. Not dangerous enough. Yawn”

I shrugged. It’s all true. All except the dangerous part.

My emails are exactly dangerous enough — for my own tastes. Because I write with myself in mind first and foremost. I write things that I would find interesting and valuable, and then do a final check to see whether this can potentially be interesting and valuable to others as well.

That means sometimes I have genuinely dangerous things to say. Most days I don’t, and I have no intention of forcing it to sound edgy or to entertain jaded readers.

I could and maybe should end this email right here. But I like to write long and polish up my emails, often with concrete examples.

So I went in search of this unsubscriber on the Internet. What kind of dangerous, unpolished, raw writing might he be into?

I was hoping I would find something I could set myself in opposition to, like a dull, stubborn turtle.

I typed his email address into Google and… up came his Medium blog. It’s been live for the past few months. It’s filled with listicles and how-to articles with headlines like:

“The Features-Advantages-Benefits Copywriting Formula”

“Core Principles Of Copywriting”

“The Four C’s Copywriting Formula”

Unsurprisingly, all these posts have zero engagement. No comments, not even any of those Medium handclaps, though from what I understand, the whole point of publishing on Medium rather than your own site is to get free readers to your content.

The fact is, this danger-seeking unsubscriber could benefit from my Simple Money Emails course.

Simple Money Emails doesn’t require writing long, and doesn’t require over-polishing. That’s entirely optional.

What’s not optional is creating interesting content that keeps people reading, engaging, and even buying, without heavy-handed teaching that doesn’t even get a stupid handclap on Medium.

What’s more, if you insist on hard teaching in your content, you can use the strategies I teach inside Simple Money Emails to liven up your boring listicles and how-to articles.

For more information, or to get the course, here’s the (beware) mildly dangerous sales page for Simple Money Emails:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

I’m open to client work once again

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This morning, I summed up the money I made during 2023, and then I broke it down by where it came from.

I came up with a whole host of new insights, enough to fuel a week’s worth of emails.

Today, I’ll share just one thing I spotted, and that’s the outsized role of client work in my 2023.

Only a few days ago, I wrote that 2023 was my second-best year ever, trailing only behind 2020, when I was fully immersed in copywriting client work.

But last year, I did almost no client work. Or so I thought.

Because while I only had one client last year, and I only wrote quick and easy emails for this one client, it ended up accounting for almost 18% of my total income for 2023.

It turned out client work was the second-biggest source of income for me in 2023, ahead of most of the courses I sold, ahead of the coaching I did, ahead of the affiliate offers I promoted. And I didn’t realize it until just this morning.

Really, that shouldn’t have been a surprise.

Because done-for-you services are easy to sell. And if they have to do with marketing or sales, they are easy to charge a big chunk of money for. And yet, for the right client, they still make sense, and then some.

All of which is to say, for the first time in a long time, I am actually open to new client work.

Maybe you’d like to hire me.

Not for email copywriting, but for managing your entire email list. This includes writing the emails, but also everything else that goes with making money via a list, including picking offers, organizing promotions, and even doing things to grow the list, in case that makes sense.

Basically, I handle everything, take this worry off your plate, and make you money, probably much more than you’re making now.

And since this email is quickly turning into a sales pitch, let me give you some proof that this is something I am qualified to do:

One is my experience with this newsletter, and making a good living at it.

But more importantly, two is my experience managing the email lists of clients who had much much bigger businesses than mine.

I’ve written about this experience before. But the most interesting and notable was managing two lists of ecommerce buyers, each with over 70k names, each bringing in multiple millions of dollars in sales per year via daily emails alone — all of which I was doing.

So if you have an email list that you’re not monetizing at all… or that you are not monetizing well… or that you simply don’t want to manage yourself any more, then hit reply, and let’s talk. Maybe we can work together.

Do you want to promote something good to my list?

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Yesterday, a guy got onto my email list and wrote me straight away to ask for my physical mailing address — he had something very important to send me.

Since my mailing address is not something I share promiscuously, he ended up sending me the important something as a PDF attachment to an email. I opened it up to see the following:

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I wanted to send a large FedEx box to your address with the letter you are reading now. You must be wondering why I would do such a thing?

There are two reasons:

1. Sending FedEx boxes is expensive, so you can tell yourself that what I have to tell you is very important.

2. Large boxes are almost always opened immediately. This is important because what I have to say is extremely urgent.

===

I found myself a little dizzy reading a PDF about the importance of this expensive, extremely urgent FedEx package that I had just opened up but couldn’t remember opening.

Still, I pushed through the dizziness to the rest of the message. The gist was that the guy has a course he’s acquired the rights to, and he’s hoping I will promote it to my list and we can split the profits.

I took a quick look at the sales page of the course he has the rights to. And I quickly decided it’s not something I would promote to my list.

It might be a fine course. But the promise to me is not novel or exciting… there’s no strong proof to latch on to… and the whole lot doesn’t seem like something I could enthusiastically get behind and promote in the best interest of my readers, whose trust I have been cultivating and honoring for years.

So I wrote back to say thanks, but no thanks.

And then I got to wondering.

Because as I wrote recently, I promoted one affiliate offer last year, Steve Raju’s ClientRaker. That worked out great, from a financial point of view, from my personal satisfaction point of view, and most importantly, from the point of view of the people who ended up buying, many of whom wrote me to say thanks for turning them on to Steve and his great training.

So I got to wondering, are there other people on my list with good things to promote?

I don’t know. But I’m willing to find out.

So if you have something good to sell, promote, or offer, hit reply and let me know.

It could be a product that you sell.

Or it could be a service that you offer.

The main thing is​​ it’s good — meaning it’s got a great big promise, an element of excitement or novelty, and strong proof that it does what you say it does.

If you have something like that, then send me an email about it, or a virtual FedEx package. We can start a conversation to see if it’s a fit for my list of business owners, coaches, writers, in-house copywriters, and freelancers of various stripes.

Potentially harmful testimonial

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This morning, my floating guardian angel, Fred Beyer, wrote me a new message.

Over the years, Fred has repeatedly appeared out of the ether and pointed out harmful glitches and technical muckups in my marketing that were costing me thousands of dollars in lost sales.

But this morning, Fred wasn’t pointing out a technical issue. Instead he sent me a warning about my copy, specifically about a potentially harmful testimonial for my Copy Riddles program. He wrote:

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There’s a testimonial on your sales page that mentions the initial $300 you charged for Copy Riddles.

“Probably the best 300 bucks I’ve ever spent”

I’ve come across this before myself and I’ve always felt kind of cheated when I found out the training was now significantly more expensive.

There’s an inner voice that goes: “Sure it was worth 300, but is it worth 1000?”

Obviously You’re the expert.

I just wanted to share, in case this little testimonial drowned in the hubbub of running your biz.

===

Fred raises a good point.

That “best 300 bucks ever” is a kind of anti-anchoring. It goes against the smart marketing practice of pegging your price to a drastically higher sum, and then lopping off zeros to your prospect’s relief and joy.

Perhaps the thing to do would be to take that “300 bucks” testimonial down.

But I never miss an opportunity to flirt with sales prevention. So rather than take that testimonial down, I will actually highlight it. Here’s the full version, which came from Robert Smith, who runs his own CRO agency. Robert wrote:

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I’ve spent close to 150k on copy courses and mentors.

John Bejakovic’s Bullet Copy course is probably the best 300 bucks I’ve ever spent.

One word: “source”. He shows you source material — pre twist — and then re-twists it, so you know how the twist works.

Just send him an email and ask him to enroll you in it.

If, after lesson one, you don’t immediately say, “this is the best 300 bucks I’ve ever spent”, then send an email to rob@robertsmithmedia.com and I’ll send you a refund (then, write your name down in my book of “copywriters I’ll never hire.”)

===

Robert went through Copy Riddles back in 2021. And yes, the course has gone up in price since.

I first sold Copy Riddles at a low price and I gradually pushed the price up — this made it psychologically easier to sell something of my own.

In the meantime, my own status has grown, the endorsements for Copy Riddles have poured in, and today I can and do sell this course for $1,000.

But that’s about me me me. What about you you you? How is it possibly fair to you that I’m charging $1,000 for Copy Riddles today, when I charged just $300 for it a couple years ago?

First of all, $1,000 is still a fair price and then some.

If you actually go through this course and apply what it teaches in a real marketing endeavor, then the info inside can be worth tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars to you over your career.

You might think that’s exaggeration. But it’s just the nature of copywriting and marketing. Good selling skills, multiplied over a large enough audience, can create a lot of wealth, and quickly.

Second, a high, achievable, but uncomfortable price actually makes it more likely you will profit from the course.

I don’t believe the old chestnut, “If they pay, they pay attention.” I know many people who pay, and still never do anything with what they paid for.

But I do believe that if you pay a lot of money, and that makes nervous, you will push yourself out of your comfort zone and find ways to justify the uncomfortable price to yourself.

If you ask me for proof, I can give you myself as an example.

Some five years ago, I joined the coaching group of A-list copywriter Dan Ferrari. Over the course of about six months, I paid Dan multiple tens of thousands of dollars for this coaching.

This wasn’t money I could easily spare. In fact, I was eating away my savings, because I was paying Dan more than I was making. Each month, when it was time to make a new multi-thousand payment to Dan, I literally had cold sweat on my forehead and electric shocks down my spine.

I’ve written before about my experiences with this coaching:

Dan gave me valuable and practical marketing and copywriting ideas. But the real value was the price I was paying him. It made me so uncomfortable that I worked much harder to apply the ideas Dan gave me, to hustle and make do, simply because I had to.

Result:

In the month after I was done with Dan’s coaching, the floodgates opened. I started making the kind of money I had never made with copywriting before. Within the first two months at this new level, I had fully paid off the tens of thousands of dollars I had paid to Dan.

So to answer the question that was rumbling in Fred’s mind, and that may be rumbling in yours…

“Sure it was worth 300, but is it worth 1000?”

The answer is, it really depends.

Copy Riddles consists of 20 rounds. Each round covers a key copywriting concept.

If you don’t bother to go through all of the rounds, or if you don’t bother to apply them anywhere where they can possibly make you money, then Copy Riddles won’t be worth $1,000 to you, or any fraction of that.

On the other hand, if you go through each of these 20 rounds earnestly… if you do the daily exercises I give you… and if you apply the lessons in your own business or in your clients’ businesses, there’s no doubt in my mind that it will be worth $1,000 to you, and much, much, much more.

So Robert’s possibly harmful testimonial stays up. In case you’d like to see it in its native environment, or get started with Copy Riddles right now, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Would you bet on it?

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A few weeks back, I was talking to a successful copywriter, and he mentioned a stupid job he had just finished.

The client was a moron, the product a disaster, and there was little to no hope any of it would sell.

But the copywriter got paid well to write the sales letter. And he did it, and since he’s a good copywriter, he did a good job with the copy. Then he got his money and he moved on.

I used to have that same attitude.

But I don’t any more. Because I found in time that working on hopeless projects is not good long-term policy — not emotionally, not financially, not careerly.

Today, I’d like to give you a different perspective.

These days, when a new opportunity comes my way, I ask myself, “Would I do this if I were getting paid on commission only? Would I bet on it?”

It doesn’t mean that I actually only do stuff on commission. That’s often not practical, and it’s sometimes not even desirable, for me or for the other party.

But if I wouldn’t accept this opportunity if I were getting paid only based on results, if I’m not confident enough that it will be a success that I would bet on it myself, then I don’t do it at all.

I’ve applied this to client work… I’ve applied it to coaching that I’ve been doing over the past year… I will start to apply it to courses and trainings I’m thinking of creating.

Again, it doesn’t mean offering courses for free and hoping to somehow get paid later.

But it’s a valuable thought experiment. If I could somehow track what extra money this imagined course would bring in my students’ lives… and if I knew I could get, say 5% or 10% of that extra money… would that pay me enough?

Often, the answer is no. Even if I could make a super-thorough and valuable course.

Because if that course only attracts people who will never go through it… or who will go through it but never implement it… or who will implement it but who are not in a position to ever profit from it… then the total extra value created out of all of that is a big beefy zero. And 10% of zero is zero.

On the other hand, sometimes I would bet on it.

And if there’s one of my existing courses that I would bet on, that I would sell for only a percentage of future results, if such a thing were feasible, it’s Copy Riddles.

I’d bet on Copy Riddles because some of the previous people who have gone through this training have written in to tell me the results they ascribe to this course.

Some of those results are private because those people asked me not to share them. But some are public, and you can find them on the final page of the Copy Riddles sales letter. If you’d like to see that:

https://bejakovic.com/cr-3/

Matrix Denier rejoins my list and is promptly fired

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A couple days ago, I wrote an email in which I used the Matrix as a pop culture illustration. To which I got a reply from a guy who said, yea that’s great and all but “what if your reader hasn’t seen the movie and therefore doesn’t have a clue what the h*ll you’re talking about?”

A reasonable question… but something about the tone of it — it’s amazing how that comes through — made my terrier ears perk up.

I looked up this Matrix Denier to see if I’d had any previous email interactions with him.

And oh boy. Here’s the sorry story:

Two years ago, I ran a launch for my Copy Riddles program.

The Matrix Denier was signed up to my list at the time.

​​He replied on the last day of the launch to tell me that I name-drop famous copywriters a lot… that he wouldn’t be buying my course because my emails aren’t good enough to impress him… and that, rather than create my own offers, I should go back and study the work of people like Andre Chaperon and Ben Settle.

I shrugged, and I used this reply for a new email that I sent out to my list to promote my Copy Riddles course.

The Matrix Denier didn’t like this, and he wrote me in an offended and hurt tone to say so. Which I again turned into an email, and sent it out to my list as part of a sequence of emails about the different types of denial we all engage in.

This was the straw that broke the Denier’s back. He unsubscribed from my list, and as the reason why, he fired this farewell shot:

===​​

“You’re simply too dumb to be helped. I tried twice & you can’t tell the difference between a troll & someone with advice. Good luck. You’ll need it.”

===
​​
Like I said, now he’s back on my list. Well, he was, until yesterday, when I unsubscribed him. No sense in wasting perfectly good Matrix analogies on someone who would rather complain than go see a movie I specifically recommended as great marketing fodder.

The point of this being that a couple years have passed.

I’m still writing… my status in the industry has grown… and so has the number of people who recommend me and point new readers to my newsletter.

Meanwhile, I don’t know what the Matrix Denier has gained in those two years. Going by the tone of his replies, and by the fact he even took the time to write me, just so he could complain and say “But what about me?” makes me think he hasn’t gone far from where he was two years ago.

In other words, you might as well get going now.

Time passes unstoppably. It’s a trite observation, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

Whatever it is that you’re doing or want to do, if you start now, and start accumulating a bit of something valuable every day — whether of skills or money or subscribers — then you can be in much better position in a couple of years, while those around you are left standing still.

And on that note, my Copy Riddles was and remains a great program, the best thing I sell. If you’d like to find out more about it or use it to start accumulating your copywriting skills, starting today:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

I tried to cover up my failures, but a loyal reader caught me

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In reply to my January 1st email, which had little to say about New Year’s resolutions, goals, or themes, I got a reply from long-time reader, occasional co-hostess of my live trainings, and infamous Crazy Email Lady, Liza Schermann. Liza wrote:

===

What happened to your annual New Year’s email where you look back at the old year and set goals for the new one? I always look forward to reading it, especially this year.

===

As Liza says, the past four years, on January 1, I always sent some kind of email about how my past year has been, what I managed to accomplish, what I am planning for the next year — all fit inside the latest personal development hack I’d fallen in love with.

But this year, I quietly decided to skip it.

The fact is, I had three themes for the past year.

A theme is like a vague and fuzzy goal, a general direction to move in rather than a destination to arrive to and a time to arrive there by.

Themes worked well for me in years past.

​​But in 2023, even with fuzzy themes in place of hard goals, I found that I had only made any meaningful progress in one half of one of my three themes. And that’s in spite of regularly revisiting those themes, and putting in thought and work into pushing each of them forward.

One half of one out of three is not something I particularly wanted to crow about. And I was sure nobody would notice, until Liza called me out on it.

Now, here’s a bunch of personal stuff that you may or may not want to read. It explains how I got to where I am, and what I’m thinking for the future.

I started as a freelance copywriter in 2015.

I worked for years with the aim of building up my skills, creating a name for myself in the industry, and making the kind of money that AWAI sales letters promise you.

And the crazy thing is, I got there. It took me about five years.

Then I decided that really, I don’t like to work with copywriting clients. Wouldn’t it be great if I could just do something on my own like create courses or do coaching and consulting?

And I managed to do that as well. It took me about two years.

Last year, back in March 2023, I had my best-ever month in terms of income.

Over the course of the entire calendar year of 2023, I also had my second-best-ever year in terms of income, only following 2020, when I was neck-deep in client work, and when obscene amounts of money were flowing in to me via commissions and royalties.

But last year, I had practically no client work. I was free to do what I want, when I want, with who I want, and I still made good money.

And yet, in spite of my apparent success in reaching my goal of independence…

… a few months ago, around September or so, I found myself working for much of the day, every day, and not getting a lot of work done.

It wasn’t because I was overwhelmed with the heavy burdens of the online solopreneur.

All I really had to do was to write a daily email, do a bit of research and work for my health newsletter, and do something to actually make money — put together some sort of new training, or course, or promotion.

And yet, the work stretched from morning to night, and projects barely inched forward.

To make it worse, it felt like things had been that way forever, and would go on forever.

I believe the technical term for this condition is boredom, or maybe aimlessness, or sloth.

Perhaps it was initiated by my actually achieving what I was working towards for so long.

I tried to fight it via willpower, and that’s how I ended up working pretty much the whole day, without getting much done.

And then, some time in late November, I was listening to Dan Kennedy’s Opportunity Concepts, where Dan talks about the hidden psychology of the people he sells to. Says Dan:

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Most small business owners are doing enough not to go out of business. That’s where their level of ambition has settled.

===

I realized that’s exactly where I am. I also realized that it was the cause of my feeling of malaise, my struggle to move things forward in spite of working.

And I realized the fix for it, which is simply — ambition.

Because it’s more fun and enjoyable to have ambition, rather than to do just enough to not go out of business.

So in case you’re curious, that’s my theme for 2024. Ambition.

I invite you to keep reading my future emails to see how exactly this will play out over 2024, and then in a year’s time I can have another recap.

For now, I can tell you that things have already started moving. New offers, new partnerships, new sources of income — and most importantly, a new feeling of being motivated and optimistic.

This email is getting overly long. The only reason I allowed myself to write this much and this intimate is because 1) it helps me sort out my thoughts and 2) as business coach Rich Schefren likes to say, what’s most personal is most general. ​​So maybe you’ve found some worthwhile ideas in what I just wrote.

A few weeks ago, I said I would create a page on my site where I collect all my current offers for sale. I’ve done that.

In the future, I might even create a Dean Jackson-style “super signature” where I link to this in every email.

But for now, if you’re wondering what I have for sale, and why you might want it, and how it can help you in 2024, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/showroom/

Remember, all I’m offering is the truth, nothing more

by

A few days ago, I got a question from a reader:

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Hi John,

What are the differences between “most valuable email” and simple money emails”? Thanks!

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Now get ready for the big bland takeaway from this email, which will probably be as familiar to you as the taxes you have to pay:

Facts and figures rarely persuade, and often they don’t even inform.

For example, I could have replied to my reader’s question above by telling him the facts and figures of my two courses — the prices, the main promises, the intended audiences.

But that stuff is literally in the half page of deck copy on the sales pages for the two courses. This reader knows about those sales pages and clearly doesn’t want to read them, or maybe has even read them, but the facts and figures failed to mean much.

So what to do? Because this is hardly one reader asking about my specific courses. This is how most of us act and think and feel most of the time about most things.

Certainly, if you have customers or prospects, this is how most of them are. They will not read the well-researched facts and figures you send their way, or maybe they will even read, but those facts and figures won’t mean much.

One powerful strategy when facts and figures fail is to stop being so damn linear, logical, and thorough, and to instead make your point in an associative, intuitive, non-linear way.

In other words, instead of facts and figures, give people a metaphor. Let me give you an example:

I recently rewatched the first Matrix movie. To my mind, that movie is the richest source of powerful metaphors that’s come out in pop culture over the past 30 years (and longer, probably going back to the original Star Wars movie). It’s well worth rewatching from time to time so you have it close at hand when writing your marketing material.

But back to my reader’s question and the difference between Simple Money Emails and Most Valuable Email.

My best answer is that Simple Money Emails is like the kung fu, the use of semiautomatic weapons, the piloting of the fighter helicopter that Neo and Trinity and Morpheus can own in an instant with the push of a button thanks to their loading program.

These are powerful and practical skills, which look incredibly cool to the uninitiated, but which ultimately anybody can do and profit from very quickly — in the Matrix, to fight and destroy; with Simple Money Emails, to write quick and easy messages that make money and keep readers reading.

On the other hand, Most Valuable Email is like the little bald-headed monk-child at the Oracle’s house in the Matrix, the one who tells Neo that there is no spoon.

Really, at the core of MVE is a similarly simple but profound idea.

It’s not an idea that is meant for everyone, but only for a small group of pre-selected people.

However, if you can accept this idea and make it your own, you can start to bend reality — including both your readers’ reality, and your own.

This makes it so you ultimately don’t need to rely on the email copywriting equivalents of kung fu or semiautomatic weapons or even fighter helicopters, because the ultimate results happen simply via “inner work” of a sort, by just absorbing and repeating the mantra that there is no spoon.

Now, if you are interested in either of these two courses, I bet you still have questions even after this metaphor. But I imagine you might have a better sense which of the two courses is really right for you.

If you’re looking for practical, result-oriented, quickly acquired skills, then it will be Simple Money Emails.

If you’re looking for mastery and a long-term practice that will take you to places you cannot imagine yet, then it will be Most Valuable Email.

You can get your remaining questions answered on the sales pages for the two courses. In the slightly pompous words of Morpheus:
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“I can only show you the door. You’re the one who has to walk through it.”