Yesterday didn’t work out as I planned

by

Yesterday I left Stockholm, Sweden, around 10am, with plans to fly and arrive, after a layover in Belgrade, Serbia, to my home town of Zagreb, Croatia, by about 2:30pm.

Things didn’t work out as I planned.

First, I didn’t make my connecting flight in Belgrade (I blame Nikola Tesla Airport for this).

Second, there were no other flights from Belgrade to Zagreb yesterday, so I decided to take the bus, which left at 4:15pm. The drive is about four hours, but factor in about an hour for the border crossing, and we should be in Zagreb by 10pm?

Again, things didn’t work out as I planned.

I had many adventures last night, including…

– Walking through the corn fields for hours alongside the 3-mile-long border-crossing queue…

– Seeing an old Serbian man on my bus watching two-black-dudes-and-a-blonde hardcore porn on his phone…

– Border police openly asking for a bribe of two beers and 50 euro to allow the bus to skip the line and cut down the wait by an hour and a half…

– Stumbling around an Orthodox cemetery in the dark, in no man’s land, between the Serbian and Croatian border, at the witching hour…

– Driving out of the way to some small village to swap bus drivers, Le Mans style, after our bus driver became too exhausted to drive in his 10th hour behind the wheel…

… but I really can’t go into any of that in tremendous detail. That’s because my bus, which was supposed to arrive around 10pm, ended up arriving at 4:05am, almost 12 hours after it set out.

I dragged my carcass to the nearest hotel and had a lousy and short night of sleep.

Right now, as I write this, I’m exhausted. And in any case, it’s soon time for me to get back on the bus and head for the Croatian coast, so I can meet up with the rest of the numerous and warlike Bejakovic clan in the seaside resort town of Opatija.

So without further ado, let me just get to my offer. It’s my Simple Money Emails course, which I’ve promoted a few times over the past week, and made sales of each time I promoted it.

In one email this week I featured a testimonial I got for SME from online creator Kieran Drew. Yesterday, I got another high-profile testimonial, this one from Maliha Mannan, founder of The Side Blogger, who helps people monetize their skills via blogging and newsletters. Says Maliha:

===

So… since you’re promoting SME, thought I’d share this…

Like Kieran Drew, I too, go through this course… often… haven’t really counted, but often… and yet, I forget stuff. Today, I was re-reading the 12 rules of emails and when I came across #6, I was like… Oookaayyy… I just violated rule #6… inside a promo email no less!

Anyway. Good stuff. One of my more underrated investments of all time.

===

For more information on this underrated investment, or if you’d like to help support my daily bus habit:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

What I really think about open rates and subject lines

by

Course creator Matt Giaro, who helps folks monetize their skills and knowledge online, writes in with a softball question to help me out while I travel:

===

A pretty simple one that might be a bit “too educational”:

What’s YOUR process of writing subject lines?

e.g, What comes first, the egg, the subject line, the chicken, or the email body?

PS: Enjoy your trip 🙂

===

In a zero-drama nutshell, I almost always write my subject line…

… let me tease you for a minute…

… this is gonna be super valuable…

… AFTER I’ve written the body of the email. The egg comes after the chicken. As I say inside my Simple Emails course, after I explain how to open up an email, eg. how to roast the chicken:

===

Subject line tip #2: Write your subject line after your email body.

I am talking about the subject line after I talked about opening your email, because that’s how I actually work.

I find it very hard to come up with a subject line out of thin air, and if I do come up with one that I feel is good, I’m most likely fooling myself. What I do instead is first write my email, then go back and pull out different phrases or ideas or facts that could go into the subject line.

===

Beyond this, I don’t have a tremendous amount to say about writing subject lines, either in my own daily work, or inside Simple Money Emails.

In fact, I have just one other tip, which I think is much more important, and which is much more universal, than the one above.

This second tip explains why some copywriters insist that subject lines are super important, and determine the success or failure of your email…

… while other copywriters say that subject lines don’t matter all, and even make a show of sending their emails out with silly or flat subject lines, without any apparent detriment.

If you’d like to find out what my other subject line tip is, and more generally, if you’d like to find out how to write effective daily emails that make sales today and keep readers reading tomorrow, then:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Masculine and feminine hitchhiking

by

Here’s a bit of an allegory about life and marketing:

My friend Marci, part of the group of my long-time friends who assembled during my current visit to Stockholm, told a story of hitchhiking across Europe at age 20 or so.

Marci is from Hungary. At the time of this story, he was living in Budapest. As an adventure, he decided to hitchhike to Amsterdam.

(Of course, when Marci’s mom found out about this, she threatened, begged, and offered to bribe him with anything to keep him from carrying out his plans. “I’ll buy you a plane ticket,” she said. “You will get murdered.” “I’ll have a heart attack.” Marci, for his own reasons, refused to buckle and decided to go on with the hitchhiking.)

On day zero, Marci walked to a gas station where the town ends and the highway begins.

He positioned himself along the road where lots of traffic was passing. He held up his cardboard “Austrian border” sign to his chest. He smiled. And he started waiting…

And waiting…

And waiting.

Nobody was stopping to pick him up. Hours passed.

At some point, another dude on foot walked by. He saw Marci, and did a bit of a double-take.

“Have you ever hitchhiked before?” the dude asked. Marci admitted that he hadn’t.

“You won’t ever get picked up like that.” said the dude. “You have to go to the gas station and start asking people to take you.”

Marci, being new at all this, decided to follow the dude’s advice. So he went to the gas station.

It took him a long time to muster up the courage, but eventually he scoped out a couple that looked nice and friendly enough.

He jogged up to them and asked if they were going towards the Austrian border and could take him.

And… no.

Marci went back to stalking the gas station. It took more time to muster up more courage to ask somebody else. Once again no.

One more time… and another no.

After a half hour or so, Marci had managed to ask five prospects if they were headed his way and would give him a lift.

All said no.

Marci, learning his first lesson, went back to his spot near the highway.

As he was readjusting his cardboard sign for an optimal position on his chest, he spotted the dude who had earlier given him advice about approaching gas-pumping drivers and asking them for a lift.

The dude was lying in the grass and reading a book. And then, Marci saw the dude’s friends arrive. The dude jumped up from the grass, greeted his friends, and the lot of them headed towards the gas station.

They split up. They started instantly asking anyone and everyone who stopped to take them to just the next gas station down the road.

Within five minutes, as Marci looked over from behind his cardboard sign, the dude and his friends all hitched rides and were off.

I think you see where this is going.

The short and shorter of it is, Marci learned his second lesson. He swallowed his pride, went back to the gas station, and did as the dude did.

He asked anybody and everybody who stopped to take him to the next gas station. He got picked up soon enough.

It was the beginning of a long adventure that Marci still talks about fondly. But I won’t retell all that here. Really, as far as marketing goes, the part above is the relevant part.

It’s a kind of allegory for what I’ve heard described as “masculine mojo” versus “feminine mojo.”

Feminine mojo you are probably well familiar with.

It’s what Marci was doing from behind his cardboard sign. It’s also what blog posts are about… as well as Facebook and LinkedIn posts… and even emails like this one.

Masculine mojo, on the other hand, is more like what got Marci to Amsterdam.

It doesn’t necessarily involve going up to strangers, but it does require proactively approaching people, one by one, and asking if they will give you a lift — or a job, or their advice, or help, or whatever — and keeping at it until somebody says yes.

The point of this allegory is not that masculine mojo is better than feminine mojo, or the other way around.

My point is simply to remind you that these two poles exist. In many situations, a blend of both will give you the best results. And when one pole stops working, it’s almost certain that the other pole will work.

By the way, the terms “masculine mojo” and “feminine mojo” are ones I picked up from Travis Sago.

If you’ve been reading my emails for a while, you might get the sense I am about to plug Travis’s Royalty Ronin community, of which I am a member. And that would normally be true. Except, I got the following question from reader Michael Hinchliffe the last time I plugged Royalty Ronin:

===

I have no idea what the Ronin thing is?!! Even after listening to Travis Sago yacking on, I’m none the wiser. What is it?

===

At bottom, Royalty Ronin is a place to learn from Travis and to apply his ideas. The guy is as close to the second coming of Claude Hopkins as I’ve been able to find, and the results he gets and his students get back up my claim.

Beyond that, Ronin is a place where you can get access to all of Travis’s big courses on topics such as selling high-ticket offers ($5k-$50k) without sales calls and with email only… or partnering with business owners to take over and monetize their “trashcan assets”… or running communities on the back of an email list for quadruple the total value.

These courses, which have sold for a combined $12k in the past, are all available for free inside Royalty Ronin.

Finally, Royalty Ronin is also a place to partner with over 500 other business owners, marketers, copywriters, and investors, plus of course Travis himself.

Travis keeps fiddling with the front-end offer for Royalty Ronin.

There’s currently a free 7-day trial.

In the past, that trial has both appeared and disappeared. It’s not clear that, the next time this free trial disappears, it won’t disappear for good.

If you’d like to see for yourself what Travis is about, and why I keep recommending his Royalty Ronin community:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

Can I get your help/advice on how to apply the “Commandments” from my new book?

by

Reader Brooks Allisen writes in with a question I don’t know how to answer:

===

Hi John,

Sounds like a real adventure you’re on Stockholm – don’t forget to try some traditional home-grown Scandinavian delicacies – they aren’t spicy like you would find in Mexico, Asia, or India.

Here’s my question:

Having studied con men, pick-up artists, and professional negotiators, what’s one principle you apply in your own marketing (that you learned from them) which most marketers ignore?

===

I have tried some of the traditional home-grown Scandinavian delicacies in my trip to Stockholm… and I’ve been mighty pleased. I wouldn’t imagine Sweden to be a culinary destination but the entire week I’ve been here, but I’ve been eating well.

As for Brooks’s question… I kinda wrote an entire book about that?

I don’t know how to answer this question without giving away valuable stuff that I have in my new 10 Commandments book. I don’t wanna do this, because I put a lot of work into making the book good, and I want you to read it.

The alternative is to give away supposed “secrets” that simply weren’t good enough to make it into the book. That would make for a weak email today, which is also something I don’t wanna subject you to.

So what to do? How do I handle Brooks’s question and similar questions I’ve gotten?

Like I said, I don’t know. I hope you can help me out. In fact, I’ll even make you a deal. We can do a tit for tat.

I’m looking for examples and ideas for how to apply the “commandments” from my new 10 Commandments book to marketing, copywriting, daily work, and personal and business life.

Here’s the deal:

1. If you’ve read my new 10 Commandments book, write in and let me know how you would apply one of the commandments I cover in that book, or how you’ve seen somebody else apply one of these commandments to their marketing, copy, personal life, etc. (Just please don’t feed me back the examples I give in the book.)

2. If you do this, I will reply to you personally and tell you how I applied Commandment I just a couple weeks ago, during an affiliate promo that didn’t feel like an affiliate promo.

(In spite of over 1k people who have bought and supposedly read my new 10 Commandments book, many of whom also read these daily emails, nobody spotted me using this commandment in public, or at least nobody called me out on it.)

And I can tell you this isn’t simply a curious thing to know for the sake of collecting cool marketing ideas. It’s a legit and valuable marketing strategy that can 1) make your work easier and 2) make your affiliate promotions more successful.

Do we have a deal?

I hope so. If you want to take me up on this deal, then think a bit and reply away with your best examples of my 10 Commandments in use in the wild, or ideas for how to apply these commandments.

And if you haven’t yet read my new 10 Commandments book, you can find it, including the first commandment that I applied recently, at the following candy-colored pasture:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

How to write in a client’s brand voice

by

Copywriter Theo Seeds writes in with a cheeky two questions (as opposed to the usual one-per-family). Let me take Theo’s questions in reverse order:

> 2. Are there any non-marketing books you’ve picked up weird marketing lessons from?

Yes, dozens?

Books, including non-marketing books, are one of the main sources of ideas I draw on for this newsletter.

I estimate I’ve drawn marketing ideas from dozens of non-marketing books in hundreds of these emails over the 7+ years of this newsletter. The most recent one I can remember came last month, from the autobiography of MLB club owner Bill Veeck.

> 1. Do you have any tips on writing copy in a client’s brand voice? Is this something you ever took on, and if so, how did you approach it?

I’ve actually written an email about this topic before, and it was all about how I hated the experience of having to write in a client’s brand voice.

Sure, it’s fine if you’re writing a sales letter, where “good enough” is good enough.

But if you want to write dailyish emails, where it really has to sound like that person, and has to have their stories, and verbal ticks, and unique phrasing, I really don’t have any smart advice to give, because it’s not something I ever mastered myself.

Fortunately, I know somebody who specializes in exactly this.

The guy’s name is Justin Blackman, and he is known as the “Brand Voice Guy.”

Not only does Justin have a very clear and recognizable brand voice for his own daily emails (which I read), but he has a course on exactly what Theo is asking about above, how copywriters can write in a client’s brand voice, in a perfectly chamelon-like fashion.

The course is called Write Like Anyone. The core promise is that it will turn you into someone who is able to echo any client’s voice so well they will hire you again and again.

I haven’t been through Justin’s course. I don’t write for clients any more, and I’m pretty good at echoing my own voice.

But Justin’s course has gotten endorsements from people like Chris Orzechowski and Rob Marsh of the Copywriter Club, plus it features folks like Daniel Throssell and Abbey Woodcock as guest instructors.

Oh, and students seem to love it too. They credit it, like Justin promises, with making them look good in front of clients and winning them more projects.

In case you wanna find out more about Write Like Anyone:

https://bejakovic.com/writelikeanyone

How my work day looks when I’m not ferrying around Stockholm

by

My Stockholm trip continues. (I know. A fascinating opening sentence.)

Yesterday, I went to a large park in the middle of town with “the world’s oldest outdoor museum,” which is apparently filled with bears and cows and little houses collected from different parts of Sweden.

I’m saying “apparently” because I showed up too late to make it worthwhile to go inside the outdoor museum. I had to be content to simply walk around the park in the balmy weather and gawk at handsome Swedish people strolling around and looking happy and well adjusted.

I will be in Stockholm for a few more days, ferrying around the many islands and bays that make up this city.

After that, I’m going to my home country of Croatia for a few days to visit family. Then I will finally get back to Barcelona, where I live, so I can get back into my daily routine.

And about that, a reader who goes by “Captain Jack” writes in with a question:

===

Hi John.

I’m sure you have addressed this in your previous emails… but what does your day look like?

Your perspective on all things, marketing and non marketing, always seems fresh to me.

And your copywriting and marketing prowess is second to none.

So I wanted to ask.

What does a typical day look like for you apart from writing a daily email?

How much time daily do you spend on sharpening your marketing and persuasion skills and learning new things?

And what you recommend a person do, working a full time job, who wants to level up these skills?

===

I actually don’t think I’ve ever explicitly addressed my daily routine in a previous email. My typical day on the routine schedule, which I repeat seven days a week, looks something like this:

1. Wake up and roll out of bed (usually around 7am-8am)

2. Daily “10 ideas” practice I got from James Altucher, if I can remember to do so, or some journaling, and then a shower (by about 8:30am)

3. Walk down to the beach and back (maybe 9:30am)

3. Write this daily email (ideally by about 10:30am)

4. My routine breakfast, which is literally the same every day, and which I have written about before (done by about 11:30am or so)

5. More work (such as new promos, bonuses, courses, communities, books, software projects, or other schemes I am excited by at the moment)

6.. Gym (get there around 2pm-3pm)

7. Lunch/dinner (around 4:30pm-5pm)

8. Unless I’m really behind on work, leisure time for the rest of the day (maybe go out into the city, or meet some people, or go for a walk, or stay at home and read)

9. Bed around 11pm-12pm

Captain Jack asked what my routine day looks like aside from writing the daily email. But the fact is, the only part of my routine that’s truly routine and non-negotiable, whether traveling or not, even if I’m sick, hungover, or dying, is this daily email I write.

A daily email like this one takes about thirty minutes to an hour a day of actual writing.

It also consumes some of my time and attention throughout the rest of the day.

For example, writing these emails forces me to read more and more broadly than I might otherwise, because my ideas for daily emails start to dry up otherwise.

The good news is, writing these daily emails isn’t just about making occasional sales or keeping readers engaged until the next promo, either. Because I write about marketing ideas and because I look to implement those ideas whenever I can, this daily email sharpens my skills each day.

And so if you are working a full-time job, or even if you’re not, my best recommendation to level up your skills and expertise is to write a daily email about a topic that interests you and that other people find valuable as well. Again, it takes just a half hour to an hour max.

The crazy thing is, if you keep at it, people will eventually want to read even those emails that are entirely have nothing to do with the core topic of your newsletter. Such as, for example, the topic of what your daily routine looks like.

If you want to get going writing daily emails like this one, and profiting from them, then I got a course for that. It’s called Simple Money Emails. Here’s what big-time course creator Kieran Drew said after he went through Simple Money Emails for the fifth (5th!) time:

===

John’s strategies aren’t pushy. They won’t teach you how to squeeze every drop of revenue from your audience. But they are simple, and they’re bloody effective (they helped me hit two 6 figure launches during the summer).

I’ve taken his course 5 times in 5 months. It’s an hour read yet every time I come out noticeably better at copy.

The best email writing course I’ve ever taken.

===

If you wanna write daily emails and level up your marketing and persuasion skills:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

10 things I regret doing (or not doing) in my business

by

Yesterday, I asked for questions I can answer in emails while I’m traveling, and questions I got.

Let me start from the beginning, from the first question that landed in my inbox yesterday, asked by a reader named Moeed:

===

What are some things you regret doing in your business?

From when you started out till now.

It’d be great to know, like a list of things to avoid, no matter what.

And hi John, I love your daily emails, including all the promotions.

Thank you for all that you’ve done, you’ve helped me a lot as someone who’s young and obsessed with the world of Direct Response.

===

On the one hand, I don’t really regret nothing, because I pretty much get to do what i want when I want, and I guess all the mistakes I’ve made got me here. But that’s not a fun email.

So let me regret some stuff. Here’s a list of 10 things I regret doing doing or not doing in my business:

1. Not continuing to find more revshare partners after I realized how much money one good revshare partner could make me, and after running into a bit of an obstacle finding more such partners

2. Not repurposing my content better

3. Not charging higher prices or capping the prices I was willing to charge (both for services and for info products)

4. Setting prices based on what I felt comfortable charging, rather than on what this could be worth to the buyer or what they would be willing to pay

5. Not listening to Travis Sago ideas sooner, or paying him to find out his full systems like Phoneless Sales Machine and BEAMER, and applying that to what I was doing both for myself and for others

6. Thinking that the only way I can communicate with my readers is via broadcast, or maybe over 1-on-1 email, instead of regularly reaching out to some of them to suggest getting on a call

7. Launching stuff without validating demand

8. Launching stuff after I attempted to validate demand and was told explicitly by the market that there was no demand for what I wanted to launch

9. In general, coming upon obstacles and saying, let me turn back or simply sit here instead of looking for ways over, under, through, or around the obstacle

10. Thinking that the only options are either do everything myself or hire others to do it for me.

And now, for my offer:

In regret 5 above, I say I regret not listening to Travis Sago or paying him earlier.

The fact is, the remaining 9 of my 10 regrets would have been reduced or maybe even eliminated had I not only stalked Travis Sago online for years, but had I gladly and unquestioningly paid him a few thousand dollars for his programs, and had I started implementing those programs in my “business” earlier.

All of that is a warm introduction to and endorsement for Travis Sago’s community, Royalty Ronin, which I am member of, and which gives you access to all of Travis’s programs, along with contact with Travis himself, plus over 500 online business owners, investors, and marketers.

At the moment there’s even a free 7-day trial for Royalty Ronin. If you want to avoid making the same mistakes I made, I highly recommend Ronin:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

Everything you ever wanted to know about me, but were afraid to ask

by

In a couple hours from now, I will be setting off for the “Real Stockholm Tour.”

I’ve been in Stockholm for a day and a half so far. I have seen the posh and pretty center… the cute and cobbly old town… and, thanks to a boat ride I took with lots of tall and blonde Swedes, an island named Vaxholm, one of over 24,000 that form the Stockholm archipelago, which starts in the city and stretches for over 60km. I never knew that Sweden was basically Earthsea.

I’m here for the next week with a large fraction of my lifelong friends — a flatmate I lived with for 6 years, 10+ years ago in Budapest; a “daygame wing” I’ve known for 12+ years and have spent hundreds of hours with on the street; and a college friend and former housemate I’ve known for close to 25 years, since our time at UCSC, who I’m living with again after all that time.

Somehow we all assembled here, in part by luck and in part by strategy.

Today, like I said, it’s time for the real Stockholm tour.

Unlike the pretty, posh, or pristine that we’ve seen so far, the real Stockholm tour will consist of getting a burek — a Balkan pastry — somewhere in the suburbs and then seeing other and realer parts of this enormous though not tremendously populated city.

I’m telling you all this because frankly I don’t have a lot of time or mental space to write a different kind of email this morning. Which ironically, is my takeaway for you today.

If you write dailyish emails, but you find yourself without a lot of time or brain power, you can always simply tell people where you are right now, what’s going on, why you are either braindead or pressed for time, and then lead into your offer.

In my experience, readers enjoy those kinds of emails a lot. And such emails serve their purpose of keeping people reading to your offer and beyond.

Speaking of:

I will be traveling for a while still, even after Stockholm. I will have interesting things to promote and possibly interesting ideas to share during that time. But I expect I will also find myself again in situations like I am in today, without a lot of time or creativity.

Email marketing side tip:

Another good kind of email to write in a time or brain crunch is a Q&A email.

To help me do that, would you send me your questions?

It can be questions about anything I am qualified to talk about, including email marketing, copywriting, or online businesses.

It can also be questions about things I am eminently not qualified to talk about, such as climate change, weight loss, or raising children.

Or if there are things that you always wanted to know about me personally, but were afraid to ask, now’s your chance.

I don’t promise to answer all questions in a future email, but I do promise to read and honestly consider them.

And who knows, if you write me, you might find your name under the bright lights of this newsletter in a few days’ time, along with my best or most entertaining answer to what you ask.

The only way to have that happen is to hit reply right now, think what you most want to know from me, and then send me a email carrier pigeon, straight to my hotel room in Archipelago Central. Thanks in advance.

“Way too biz oppy”

by

For the past few days, I’ve been promoting a webinar in which a guy named Josh Rosenberg — previously a big-time ClickBank seller, then a fractional CMO for direct response businesses — lays out his new offer, “AI Super Agent,” which builds out entire info product funnels, all the research, production creation, and copy included.

Lots of people have clicked through to Josh’s offer. A fair number have signed up for the webinar. Some have bought the “AI Super Agent.”

But a good number of people are also skeptical. Here’s a comment I got from a reader:

===

Yeah I had the same reaction to his offer. Sounds way too biz oppy. Like every other offer in the “AI gold rush” … seems like only the shovel sellers are making any money.

===

There’s no doubt that Josh’s “AI Super Agent” is presented as a business opportunity, starting with the fact it’s sold via webinar, and then continuing to how it’s positioned, argumented, and priced.

Maybe you’ve been burned by a biz opp before, and have simply decided that anything that looks like that is not for you. Fair enough, and I certainly won’t try to change your mind if that’s the case.

If you’re a little less decided, I can repeat what I wrote in an email back in May.

On the one hand, jumping from biz opp to biz opp, in a chase after “passive income” or “almost passive income,” is a sure recipe for staying broke, stressed, and working too hard.

On the other hand, legitimate business opportunities do exist. You won’t know one for sure until you try it and succeed with it.

I’ve personally been sold on biz opps like copywriting, revshare deals with clients, and starting and writing an email list. Each one has ended up making me lots of money and making my life significantly more free.

How to decide if a biz opp has a chance to win you money and freedom, or is likely to keep you further away from them?

In that email back in May, I gave three questions to help you evaluate business opportunities. Let me repeat those now with Josh’s “AI Super Agent” in mind:

#1. “Is this a 5-month plan or are you ok if it turns into a 5-year plan?”

#2. “Are you building up some kind of asset regardless?”

#3. “What happens if the opportunity disappears?”

The only of those questions I can answer for you is #2.

Josh’s gizmo definitely builds up assets for you as long as you keep using it. It gives you info products you can sell that in smart ways, by partnering with clients or audience owners, the way I’ve been talking about the last few days.

But even if you don’t do that, you can sell these info products by running ads to them, or simply publishing them on Amazon and seeing which ones sell on their own.

As for the other two questions, they are yours to decide on.

Will info products as a business opportunity disappear?

Weirder things have happened, and the very tech (AI) that’s making this biz opp possible might in the end also kill it.

(My personal feeling is that people will still be paying for information for at least a few years to come.)

But even if info products do stick around for years, are you ok sticking around info products for years?

Do topics like email lists and sales pages and traffic interest you, or are you hoping to run away from them as soon as possible so you can jump into another biz opp, or into something else entirely?

I cannot answer that for you.

But if you believe that info products have a future, and if you decide it’s a future you are interested in being part of, then Josh’s thing is worth a look, in spite of its “gold rush” biz opp marketing style. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/aisuperagent

Endless traffic partners for an “info product” funnel factory

by

Yesterday, I promised to tell you how I would find endless traffic partners for your “info product” funnel factory, starting from nothing.

But before you spend time reading this long and lionhearted email, let me warn you:

What I’m about to share is speculative rather than proven.

It’s what I would do, but the fact is, the one and only time I tried anything like this, it didn’t produce any results.

I’m guessing that’s because I gave up after just one outreach message… because I prolly picked a bad person to reach out to… plus, my offer wasn’t as tempting as I would know to make it now.

I do still think this process has lots of promise, whether or not you’re starting from nothing. That’s why I’m sharing it with you.

Still with me? If you are, let me open up:

Last year, I read a post inside the Royalty Ronin community with the title:

“I will BRIBE you to do this deal!”

The “deal” was:

Go on YouTube… find people with big audiences in hobby niches like dogs or woodworking… and offer to produce a newsletter for them for free.

The guy making this post was James Foster, one of the more active and successful people inside the Royalty Ronin. James was so confident this would produce good results that, as a joke incentive to get people to try this out, he offered a $2 Dogecoin bill to people who actually put the idea into to action.

James’s reasoning:

1. Most YouTubers live and die with the popularity and reach of their next video

2. Of course, most YouTubers don’t have a newsletter, and depend entirely on the whims of YouTube algorithm

3. You can offer to create a newsletter for such people for them, for free.

The offer is, the YouTube Channel owner drives their viewers to the newsletter, and in turn, you produce emails that drive their own viewers back to their new videos (something that YouTube won’t reliably do).

You profit by also using the newsletter to promote other relevant stuff. (You can even offer to split the profits with the YouTube owner, or you don’t have to.)

I am a bit of a monkey-see-monkey-do kind of monkey. Plus I liked the idea of getting rewarded for running a little experiment.

So when I read James’s idea, I decided to give it a go.

I went on YouTube and, after a bit of snooping, found a YouTube channel with Qigong videos, delivering vague instructions over B-roll footage of mountains.

The channel had hundreds of videos, over a million followers, and of course no newsletter.

Sidebar:

In the past, I’ve experimented with cold outreach. And I’ve learned that cold outreach is drastically more likely to get a response if I put in the work up front to do something for people… instead of simply offering to do so only after gotten a green light from them.

So what to do here?

I set up a new free Beehiiv account… branded it with the branding from the YouTube channel… created an email to simulate how a regular weekly email would look, with a screenshot of their latest video… and signed up the owner of the YouTube account to my newsletter.

All this took like 20-30 minutes, because really I just repurposed stuff from their YouTube channel.

I then wrote the owner a separate email, to explain what’s going on and to make my partner proposition.

And like I said… I never heard back from the guy.

I never followed up or pursued this further, the $2 Dogecoin bill be damned.

The reason is, I had other things that are already bubbling on the stove for me, and this idea, cool and tempting though it sounded, failed to produce an immediate win for me.

That might be because the person I was writing to was a 16-year old Chinese boy who didn’t speak English who was just playing with AI (I don’t know this for a fact, but it is quite possible, based on the email address on the YouTube channel).

Or maybe it was that my offer, no risk and all reward though I tried to make it, still seemed confusing and unattractive. My reasoning:

If you read my emails, you’re likely to know that an email newsletter is immensely valuable. But the majority of the world has never heard of email marketing and cannot believe it is as effective as it actually is.

And so explaining to YouTube channel owners how they will drive traffic to a newsletter I create… and I will drive their viewers back to them… and how this is good for you and for them — that’s already complicated and not clear. And not-clear offers often don’t get takers.

That’s why I think a much better, much clearer offer would be to create NOT a custom newsletter, but a custom info product, along with a sales page, branded with the YouTube channel’s identity, on some topic that their audience already has shown to care about.

I speculate this kind of offer would be much easier for YouTube channel owners to be interested in and to say yes to partnering on. “I made this product that your people want, send them here and we split the profits.” Much clearer, no?

Plus, the nice thing in this case is, you’re still building an email list, except an email list of info product buyers, instead of just random newsletter subs.

So that’s my idea for finding endless traffic partners for all the info product funnels you could stomach to create.

Of course, creating an info product and a surrounding funnel is nowhere as trivial as signing up for Beehiiv and creating a welcome email.

Except… it can be, thanks to the “AI Super Agent” I’ve been talking about the past couple days. This “AI Super Agent” does market research to figure out which info product ideas are likely to be a hit… it creates the product based on the winningest ideas… plus it generates all the sales copy.

I wouldn’t use this “AI Super Agent” for creating info products for personality-based list like my own.

But for partnering with people who already have large audiences… in hobby niches where much of the info is already out there, but just needs to be synthesized and pacakaged up… I think this AI gizmo could be very a very useful and lucrative tool.

If you wanna find out more about this “AI Super Agent,” then the guy who created it has a webinar in which he demoes it and explains how it works:

https://bejakovic.com/aisuperagent