Am I just trying to provoke unsubscribes?

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In reply to my email yesterday, marketer and long-time customer Fred Beyer writes:

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Step 1: Tell your audience there are Mavericks who are worth serving and Gooses who are not (I refrained from using the plural geese ’cause we’re referencing a nickname here after all).

Step 2: Ask your audience which one they are, so you can ignore them appropriately according to your own suggestion in the email.

From Simple Money Emails: “What people do remember is the emotional stimulation”, and here you’re letting a large part of your subscribers know they are less desirable than the rest.

Are you just trying to provoke unsubscribes here? 😂

===

My primary goal yesterday was what I wrote in the email, to find out who on my list has their own email list that’s growing at a healthy clip.

At the same time, Fred raises a good point. It’s one I thought about yesterday as I wrote the email.

I decided that yes, I’m ok if a bunch of people I don’t have any plans on working with unsubscribe from my list.

It’s not about them being “undesirable” in some global, eugenic sense. It’s simply who I want to focus on working with, and who I don’t want to focus on.

Ironically, it didn’t end up happening. I’ve had just 2 unsubscribes so far from yesterday’s email.

This I think is a lesson in itself, and probably an interesting data point around the topic of natural authority.

But that’s a topic for another place, another time.

For today, if you are wondering about the reference that Fred makes, to Simple Money Emails, it’s my course on how to write simple, daily emails, like this one, which both bring in sales today, and keep readers — the ones you want — reading tomorrow as well.

For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

“Maverick” vs. “Goose” segments of your niche

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Yesterday, I sent a handraiser email asking readers if, assuming they have an email list, they get on average 30 or more new subs each week. I got two kinds of replies. See if you can spot the pattern:

#1. No

#2. No!

#3. I do not. But that would be awesome. even 3 a week would be good for me

#4. Nope. 😕

#5. Hell no

#6. I wish LOL

#7. yea

#8. Yes!

#9. Yes, I do… I use linkedin/Facebook and Instagram organic to drive leads.

#10. I get about 100-150 a week and about 30-35 unsubs per week (daily emails)

#11. I get that a day.

#12. Daily

I appreciate everyone who replied. And as thanks for that, let me share a distinction I make, which might be useful to you, called the “Maverick” vs. “Goose” segments.

I first made this distinction last year, when looking at three successful coaching clients I’ve had, each of whom was writing daily emails as a major part of their business.

I looked for commonalities.

One commonality I found was that each of these clients focused on the “Maverick” segment of their audience.

If you have ever seen Top Gun, you know that the movie is about Maverick, played by Tom Cruise. Maverick is the cool, good-looking, talented fighter pilot who inevitably gets the girl and the glory by the end of the movie.

And then there’s Goose, played by Anthony Edwards. Goose is Maverick’s likeable, goofy-looking sidekick, who never gets to fly the plane and who is ritually sacrificed halfway through the movie.

So the question becomes, who do you want to build a business around? Maverick or Goose?

I looked at those 3 coaching students I’d had, each of whom was doing very well. I saw all three focused on the Maverick segment of their niche. Specifically:

* In the “basketball” niche: On high school coaches, rather than high school players

* In the “fitness” niche: On 44-year-olds, rather than 24-year-olds

* In the “marketing” niche: On people who want time, rather than people who want money

My point being:

Yes, some niches are more promising than others to start. You’re more likely to find players with money subscribing to an investing newsletter than replying to a debt relief ad.

But within each niche, regardless of how initially promising or unpromising, there are also the Maverick and Goose segments.

If you’ve already got an audience, or if one is building up for you as we speak, it makes sense to find a binary question you can ask people to classify them as either Maverick or Goose, and then to focus your efforts on working with the Maverick segment, at least based on what I’ve seen.

And on that note, if you haven’t yet replied to my handraiser yesterday:

If you have an email list, do you on average get 30 or more new subscribers every week?

If you do, let me know. I mainly want to know who you are and what you do. I don’t have any particular agenda, though I do have a half dozen possible ways you could help me or I could help you.

Question

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If you have an email list, do you on average get 30 or more new subscribers every week?

“Play whatever you have”

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The fact is, I don’t wanna be writing this email. In fact I’d rather be doing one of about a dozen other things.

Maybe it’s because, somewhere along the line in the 2,500+ previous daily editions of this newsletter, I used up all the good topic ideas I had, and I don’t really have a hot new one for today.

Maybe it’s because, by my standards, it’s very late in the day for me to be writing.

Or maybe it’s because I spent too long walking in the sun earlier today without drinking any water, and right now my eyes feel heavy and my head is throbbing.

And you know what?

Well, let me tell you what, in the words of one Tristan de Montebello, who was at one point a world champion public speaker (yes, a championship for public speaking exists), and has since started an online business that has trained thousands of people in public speaking. Says Tristan:

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Play whatever you have.

If you show up and you don’t wanna be there, they should feel that you don’t wanna be there. Play the fact you don’t wanna be there, but play it with confidence.

What’s interesting about this idea is that it works in prepared speaking as well as in all of the other areas you’re going to be in.

What people tend to do is they will show up, in any environment, and they will start leaking.

They start leaking all of their insecurities. If they were hoping they would feel confident, and they show up and they don’t… a word comes out of their mouth wrong, they start fumbling, something happens that was not supposed to happen… everything internally is going to break down.

But what if instead you could keep those insecurities inside, plug the leaks, stay in character, and play whatever it is that you are experiencing, use that energy, in a confident way?

We call it staying in character. It kind of looks like conviction.

And what it does, it sends the message to your audience that they’re okay and you’re okay.

===

When I heard this a couple days ago as I listened to an interview with Tristan while massaging the elliptical at the gym, my ears perked up, for two reasons.

One reason is that this strategy, which Tristan calls “playing whatever you have,” is a topic I had planned on including in my new 10 Commandments book. I’ve found it to be a common element between the work of standup comedians, pickup artists, and hypnotists.

The topic didn’t make the cut because, well, there was space for only 10 Commandments, and I had others that I felt were stronger fit for the book.

Reason two my ears perked up was Tristan’s final sentence, about making your audience feel okay. That’s something that did make it into my book, because it’s probably the most important persuasion lesson out there, and that’s why it goes into Commandment I.

Anyways, if you’re interested in figuring out how to “stay in character” and “play whatever you have”:

Tristan’s online business for teaching people public speaking is called Ultraspeaking. They offer 30-day cohorts for getting you better with public speaking.

I’m thinking of signing up for the next one, although the $997 does make me wince. If I do sign up, I’ll have more to say about it. Meanwhile, if you want to speak better to groups, and you have $997 to spend, you can look up Ultraspeaking and see if it’s for you.

On the other hand, if you want others to treat you better, and happily go where you’d like them to go, and do what you’d like them to do, the Kindle version of my book is just $4.99, and is waiting to make you feel okay at the following link:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Free 14-day course after making $1.4M by writing online

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My friend Kieran Drew asked me to share a free 14-day course he is about to launch, so that’s what I’m doing.

In case you don’t know Kieran, the man used to pull teeth and make gums bleed for a living. Sensing there might be something more to life, Kieran quit his 9-5 as a dentist and started writing online.

That was 4 years ago, this coming September 2nd.

Kieran likes to celebrate momentous events in his life by putting together overly generous offers. And so it is this time.

Kieran is about to launch a 14-day email course about the insights that have allowed him to make over $1.4 million over the past 4 years by writing online, first on Twitter and then via his newsletter.

And to atone for all the pulled teeth and bleeding gums, Kieran is making this course free. But you have to sign up in time, by September 2. That’s this coming Tuesday.

I won’t be writing more about Kieran’s overly generous offer. So if you’d like to get paid to write online, about stuff that interests you, and if you want to hear what wisdom Kieran can share based on his successful journey, then I suggest you sign up now, before it slips your mind and slips away forever:

https://bejakovic.com/4years

Once more, yesterday didn’t work out as I planned

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Early this morning, I got back to Barcelona following a 2-week trip that spanned 5 countries.

Diligent readers of this newsletter know that last weekend, as part of this trip, I missed a layover flight, which led to an almost 12-hour, cross-country, cross-corn-field bus ride.

Yesterday, I missed a second layover flight, which led to a 17-hour total trip to get back to Barcelona.

As I sat at Frankfurt airport, uncertain that I would make it back at all before the “airport curfew” struck, and faced with the prospect of spending the night at an awful airport hotel and then another day at the airport, I swore to myself I would never ever travel again, or in fact ever leave the house.

I bring this up because I got a question recently from a long-time reader and customer by the name of Jordan:

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This one might be a bit meta, but how did you start traveling and how do you travel so much? Did you start before having the income from this newsletter or after?

I’m also looking to travel more and I’ve found it intriguing how others do it. your insights are always very unique though.

===

I don’t feel I travel very much these days, certainly not compared to how I did a few years ago, when I was living in Airbnbs for almost 2 years straight. I got burned out after that, and it took me a couple years to develop any interest in taking a trip further than the local grocery store.

I also don’t really have all that much to say about “how to travel.”

I personally had zero obligations or restrictions when I decided to uproot and start living like a high-class hobo. I also had good money to support this lifestyle, which was pouring in via freelance copywriting work, a year or so before I made a first dollar from this first newsletter.

Since Jordan flatters me by saying my insights are always very unique, let me share the one possibly unique thing I can say about traveling a lot.

It’s something I experienced personally, and something that I also heard confirmed when I had a quick call once upon a time with now-dead pickup coach Tom Torero, whose worldwide travels dwarfed anything I ever did or would ever want to do.

Possible insight alert:

If you travel intensely for extended periods of time, particularly to places where you don’t know anybody or have no right being, you have to have a routine, and ideally you have to have something productive to do most days, like a job.

… which is ironic, because I imagine most people want to travel so they can get away from their routine, and because they don’t want to work.

But such is the human mind.

We have a few basic needs. The rub is that among those basic needs, we have ones that are diametrically opposed to each other, such as the need for novelty and the need for stability. If you swing too far to either pole, it leads to craziness and eventual breakdown.

The thing is, you don’t need a tremendous amount of daily productive work to keep you grounded and sane.

For me, writing this daily email does it. Plus, like Jordan says, writing this daily email has had the nice knock-on effect of generating an income, and even introducing me to people online that I ended up meeting in real life on my travels.

I got a course that shows you how to write daily emails like this one to your own list. If you’d like to find out about it:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

Email marketing strategy for selling DFY services

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Reader Samu Parra writes in with a tough question:

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Hi John!

Here’s a tough one:

I’ve found email marketing to be effective for selling info products and “done-with-you” consulting services. However, I get the sense that selling “done-for-you” services is a different story. I feel the buyer has a different relationship with the solution and their emotional investment is lower.

How do you approach the email marketing strategy for selling “done-for-you” services?

[Bejako here again. My beagle ears perked up at “I get the sense…” so I followed up with Samu to ask what experiences made him get that sense. Samu updates:]

When I look at my own clients, I see a big difference between consulting clients (DWY) and service clients (DFY).

The former usually come from email: they’re subscribed to my newsletter, they read it regularly, and they respond to offers.

Service clients, on the other hand, usually come through referrals and word of mouth. I feel it would have been hard for them to sign up for my newsletter, read it, and respond to an offer.

I think this is even more apparent when you’re offering something highly operational (e.g., an ERP software consultant) or it’s only a part of their responsibilities.

Email marketing probably works in these cases too, but my hunch is the approach should be different.

I might be biased. 🙂

===

On the one hand, Samu’s question makes intuitive sense.

Good prospects for DFY services are more likely to be busy and successful, and busy and successful people are likely to be swamped with emails, and therefore less likely to pay attention to any particular email, particularly if it’s an email that features a 1000-word personal story.

At the same time, I have had plenty of busy and successful people sign up to this very email list. A few I know about:

1. One of the founders of the possibly biggest brand in the digital marketing space, who has founded, scaled, or sold over 30 businesses

2. A secretive forex investor whose own clients include people who have been fictionalized in the Showtime show Billions

3. An A-list copywriter with decades of experience in the industry who I have written about dozens of times in these emails

4. An investment fund manager with a billion+ dollars under management

6. The founder of an online photography school that has had over 250,000 paying students worldwide

7. The founder of a mid-8-figure telemedicine platform

“Ok,” you might say, “maybe busy and successful people will sign up for a daily email list like this, but will they read? And maybe more important, will they reply to DFY offers?”

I’ve personally heard from all the people I’ve written about above in reply to my emails. So yes, they will read.

As for buying DFY offers, why wouldn’t they? In any case, I can think of two DFY offers I’ve made over in recent times:

1. DFY book writing and publishing

2. DFY weekly newsletter writing and publishing

For the DFY book, I got a bunch of interested prospects, many of whom were busy and successful. I ended up not working with any of them, but that’s because I had very specific requirements for what I was looking for.

For the DFY newslettter, one of the subscribers on my list above, the founder of the mid-8-figure telemedicine platform, actually took me up on that offer.

I quoted him $2k for four emails a month, and I made it clear I would not be writing these emails but would be hiring a copywriter for it. The busy and successful client said fine without batting an eye, which made me think a higher price might have passed as well.

All that’s to say, if you look for examples that it’s hard to use daily emails like this to sell DFY offers to busy or successful people, you will find plenty of supporting evidence for that. And no doubt, other methods of selling, such as referrals, might sell people who would never read daily emails.

At the same time, if you look for examples that daily emails can sell DFY offers to busy and successful clients, you will also find plenty of evidence for that. In fact, let me look for some evidence now:

Do you provide a service that can help people grow their email lists?

I’m talking about — but certainly not limiting it to — services like running FB ads… social media ghostwriting… book writing and publishing… podcast booking… custom software tools that can be used as lead magnets.

If something like this is your business, and if you have helped people grow their email lists with either qualified prospects or buyers, then hit reply. I want to know who you are and what you do.

I have lots of people with email lists on my own list.

List growth is always a “hungry crowd” topic, even with the busy and successful among them.

And if you are good at what you do and you get results — ie. quality email list subscribers — then I can get you clients for your services, without you having to do anything except accept and deliver the work.

New licensing marketplace

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Over the past year, I’ve gotten excited by the idea of licensing intellectual property, which I got turned on to by Travis Sago.

On the surface, licensing IP looks a lot like an affiliate promotion of an info product:

* You license the right to promote somebody else’s info product, such as a course

* You then sell that product to your own list, or to a list you control

* You get paid some or all of the sale price for the products you manage to sell, while the creator of the thing gets paid the rest

But licensing also has several advantages over familiar affiliate sales. For example, if you license the right to promote somebody else’s product, you typically:

1. Can bundle that product (with your own stuff, or with others’ products) and sell the bundle instead of the standalone product

2. Can put the offer inside your own funnel as an upsell, and sell it as a frictionless and congruent one-click addon at a time when people are already “in buy”

3. Can collect money today, as opposed to getting paid weeks or months later (particularly relevant if you’re running ads to your funnel)

… all of which you cannot do if you’re simply driving traffic to somebody else’s sales funnel.

And those are just a few of the benefits of licensing over affiliating.

Of course, licensing also has a shortcoming that affiliating doesn’t have.

Affiliating, at least in the world of online marketing, is a familiar model. Lots and lots of businesses publicly offer affiliate programs, and large and proven marketplaces like Commission Junction and Impact and in the last resort Clickbank exist to bring together affiliates and offers those affiliates can promote.

In contrast, for licensing, you gotta reach out to potential partners yourself… explain and persuade them to work with you… strike custom deals… and do all this one-on-one. Few businesses advertise they will license their info products to you even if they might be open to it, and no marketplaces exist to facilitate the thing.

Until now.

Well, maybe.

The news, at least news to me:

Russell Brunson, the guy behind funnel-building software ClickFunnels, is launching something called OfferLab.

At first blush, I thought OfferLab is just a new affiliate marketplace. But no.

OfferLab is in fact a new licensing marketplace, or something like it.

It allows you to create your own custom funnels where you plug in other people’s offers… or to make available your own info products for others to use in their own funnels. I don’t know exactly how flexible this is, but from what I’ve read it sounds to me it offers the 1-3 benefits of licensing I listed above.

Last night, I signed up for OfferLab myself to look around.

Even though OfferLab is only in launch, or prelaunch, there are already a bunch of offers inside. I imagine that’s because of Russell’s control of ClickFunnels, which will provide a steady fire hose of automatically added licensable offers to OfferLab, in addition to any other offers that people add if OfferLab as a platform actually takes off.

Right now, OfferLab is free to sign up for and, as far as I can tell, to use, both as an offer owner and as an affiliate/licensee.

I have no idea whether this thing will take off, but it is something legitimately new, and it does offer to solve a legitimate problem in the world, and that’s the clunkiness of making licensing deals.

If you’d like to try out OfferLab (again, free, at least right now), and maybe find a new way to promote your own info products… or to find new products you could sell, upsell, and bundle with other stuff:

https://bejakovic.com/offerlab

How I conceived and delivered my first online course

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Four score and six months ago, I brought forth on the Internet a new offer, conceived in Columbia but delivered back in Europe, for what I called my “bullets course.”

I sold this new offer to a group of about 20 “beta-testers” who came via my email list. These beta-testers were willing to pay me for up front for this course, based simply on the info I shared in an email, without a sales page, sight unseen.

That’s just as well, because the course didn’t exist at that point yet. I only had the idea for it.

Since I managed to get the number of beta-testers I was looking for, I delivered the course over the next 8 or so weeks — via an email each workday, which I was writing day-for-day.

This way of creating a course turned out to be very low pressure and yet very productive for me. Meanwhile, it also provided accountability and a cohort feeling for the participants.

During those 8 weeks, I got feedback, corrections, and testimonials from that first group of students. I collected all that, integrated it into the second iteration of the course, which was largely the same, except it now had a higher price tag, and a new name, Copy Riddles.

I have been selling Copy Riddles ever since and have made — well, I won’t say exactly how much, but enough to buy several metric tons of glazed donuts.

That in a nutshell, is how you create value out of thin air.

If the way I told that story makes me sound like some kind of agile and entrepreneurial wizard, that’s not my intent.

The fact is, the only reason Copy Riddles was a success was that pretty much nothing I did was my original idea.

As I’ve written many times, the core idea for Copy Riddles content came from direct marketer Gary Halbert, and was drilled into my head via a training I had heard from A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos.

As for the structure of Copy Riddles — the fact I presold it and then delivered it via email, one day at a time — that came from me spying on course creator Derek Johanson, specifically, the way Derek created and delivered his CopyHour course.

I’m telling you this because Derek is currently launching a course, delivered daily by email, that gets you to launch, sell, and deliver a course that people want to pay for, in 30 days, all via email.

Derek’s course is creatively called “Email Delivered Courses” and it gets you to do what Derek did with CopyHour.

You certainly don’t need to buy Email Delivered Courses to launch your own email delivered course. Derek lays out the high-level process on his EDC sales page, which I’ve conveniently linked to below. And like I wrote already, I reverse-engineered and hacked many of the details myself, and that’s how I did Copy Riddles.

I’m still telling you about Email Delivered Courses for two reasons:

1. Maybe you don’t wanna do what I did, and spend weeks stalking Derek and reverse-engineering what he does. Instead, maybe you are happy to pay Derek to simply tell you what to do each day, so you come out 30 days from now with your own completed, desirable, and sales-validated course.

2. The real question is not whether you could figure out what Derek did, but whether you actually will do so, and whether you will then put it into practice in the next 30 days, and have an asset that you can sell ongoing, and buy yourself many metric tons of glazed donuts.

Derek’s launch for Email Delivered Courses closes at the end of this week. If you’d like more info, or to join before the doors close:

https://bejakovic.com/edc

Mechanical process for writing a sales letter, book, or New Yorker article

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A traumatic new development in my life:

I’ve lost my Kindle.

I forgot it on the bus at the end of the 12-hour bus ride I wrote about yesterday.

It feels a little like a part of my brain has been cut out. I ordered a new Kindle and will get that part of my brain put back in within a few days.

But until that happens, and on my subsequent bus ride yesterday, I found myself with nothing to read.

So I went into the RSS reader app on my phone (I still use RSS), where I follow a bunch of blogs I don’t remember subscribing to over the past 15 years.

Yesterday, somewhere in the wooded heart of Croatia, halfway from Zagreb to the Adriatic coast, I read an article from one such blog, titled the McPhee method, about the writing process of John McPhee.

I’ve known John McPhee as a Pulitzer-winning nature writer, but I didn’t realize he has also been a long-time contributor to the only magazine I read and have read for years, the New Yorker.

In fact, the article I read about McPhee was written by a guy, James Somers, who also writes for the New Yorker, and who follows the McPhee method himself.

I found the McPhee Method very curious reading because it pretty much describes the process I’ve stumbled upon instinctively when writing sales copy and more recently when writing my new 10 Commandments book.

It’s McPhee’s (and my) fix for the misery of long-form, nonfiction writing. The idea is to replace writing (hard) with the joy of research (fun) and the mule work of organization (mechanical but easy).

If you’re interested in writing something longer and less solipsistic than a daily email, then how John McPhee done it, described in the article below, is worth a read:

https://jsomers.net/blog/the-mcphee-method