Valuable positioning idea inside

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For the past year, I have been writing a second newsletter, one about health. About ten days ago, on a whim, I changed the name of it.

I’m still not publicly sharing either the old or the new name of my health newsletter, because the CIA asked me not to.

But I want to tell you something curious that’s happened following the name change.

So let’s pretend my old newsletter was named Morning Brew, which it was not. But Morning Brew is a big and popular email newsletter that covers the day’s business news, so you might know it.

My health newsletter’s old name was something like Morning Brew. Cute, possibly clever, with a brandable tinge to it.

But ten days ago, I decided to kill the cuteness, cut the possible cleverness, and go for clarity instead of branding.

As a result, my health newsletter is now called something like, Daily Business Newsletter. Again, that’s not the actual name, but it should give you an idea.

Now here’s the curious thing that happened:

As soon as I made that switch, I started getting organic traffic from Google. Finally — the first organic traffic I got after about 11 months of regular posting of content to my website.

And apparently, it’s high-quality traffic, because these Google-sent visitors are opting in to the newsletter at a clip of about 10-15 per day, double-opting in, and will hopefully be reading and buying in the future.

To be fair, this might be absolute coincidence.

Or, if it’s not coincidence, it might be something that’s not repeatable for anyone else, or even for me.

Or, maybe there’s something there. Maybe it’s an illustration of a valuable positioning idea I read once:

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For many people or products today, one roadway to success is to look at what your competitors are doing and then subtract the poetry or creativity which has become a barrier to getting the message into the mind. With a purified and simplified message, you can then penetrate the prospect’s mind.

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That idea comes from of the best marketing books I’ve ever read. It’s one of the best as long as you read it carefully and slowly, rather than skimming through it to “get the gist.”

And no, it’s not the same book I recommended yesterday, and it’s not written by Dan Kennedy.

If you think you know what this book is, or you want to know, you can find it revealed at the other end of this link:

https://bejakovic.com/lost

One word, out of 495, that drew a bunch of replies

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Last week I sent out an email, “Write 10 books instead of 1,” that got a good number of replies. The curious thing was the replies split neatly into two camps.

One camp was people who liked the core message in the email and felt inspired to start or finish their own book or books.

But the other camp, in fact the majority of people who replied to that email, had nothing to say about the core message.

Instead, this second group replied because of a single word of that email. A single word that was hidden, between two commas, in position 408 in an email of 495 words.

Would you like to know what that word was?

​​Good, then I’ll tell ya.

That word was inshallah.

Inshallah, as you might know, is a saying used in Muslim societies. It means “God willing.” It expresses both hope for a future event and resignation that the future is not in our control.

But why??? Why would I use this word in the tail end of my email?

Is it because I myself am Muslim?

Is it some kind of incredibly clever personalization based on the reader’s IP address?

Was it a joke or irony?

Readers wanted to know. And from my religious profiling based on these readers’ names, almost all the people who wrote me to ask about inshallah were either Muslim or came from Muslim societies.

I’ll leave the mystery of why I used inshallah hanging in the air. Instead, let me tell you a story that this reminded me of, from legendary marketer Dan Kennedy.

Dan used to travel the country on the Peter Lowe Success Tour, a modern-day speaking circus that featured former U.S. presidents and Superbowl quarterbacks as speakers.

Dan would go up on stage at the end of the night and deliver a rapid-fire comedy routine/sales pitch to sell his Magnetic Marketing program.

I highly recommend tracking down Dan Kennedy’s Magnetic Marketing speech and listening to it. ​​I’ve listened to it multiple times myself.

But one thing I never noticed, in spite of the multiple times listening, is that Dan somewhere mentions that he used to stutter as a kid.

Again, this speech is rapid-fire. It lasts maybe 50 minutes. It contains thousands of words. And among those words, there are a few — maybe a dozen, maybe a half dozen — that refer to the fact that Dan Kennedy stuttered as a kid.

It’s very easy to miss. Like I said, I’ve listened to this speech multiple times and I’ve never caught it.

But there’s a group of people who don’t miss it.

And that’s people who themselves stutter or who have kids who stutter.

Dan said somewhere, in one of his seminars, how he’d regularly finish his speech and try to get out of the room, only to be faced with an audience member, holding a brand new $197 copy of Magnetic Marketing in their hands, and ready to talk about stuttering and how Dan overcame his stutter and how he now performs on stages in front of tens of thousands of people.

That’s something to keep in mind, if you’re missing a word to put into the 408th position in your sales message… or if, like me, you suffered from epileptic seizures as a kid.

All right, moving on.

I got nothing to sell you today. But I do have something to recommend.

Well, I recommended something already, and that’s Dan Kennedy’s Magnetic Marketing speech. Dan has said that this speech is the best sales letter he’s ever written.

It’s worth listening to if you want to learn how to write an interesting, indirect, and yet effective sales message.

On the other hand, if you want to learn how to do marketing that gets you really rich — who to target, how to reach them, what offers to create — then I can recommend a book I’m reading right now. It’s also by Dan Kennedy. It’s more relevant now than ever before. You can find it here:

https://bejakovic.com/reallyrich

My first 1-star Amazon review

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It finally happened. I finally got my first 1-star Amazon review.

I wrote back in May about how I had gotten a 1-star review of my “10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters” on Goodreads, a book review platform.

That review was in Serbian, a language that I understand. The gist of the review was an attack on direct response copywriting. “Outdated!” “Cringe!” My poor book, which has the word “copywriters” in the title, apparently attracted somebody who loves to read about a topic they hate.

That’s okay. Because I wrote an email about that review and I profited from it.

But I’m not sure I can profit from my first 1-star Amazon review. Because a while back, Amazon started allowing reviews that don’t say anything, but simply just pick a number of stars.

What precise and profound comment did my reader mean to express by choosing a single star for my book?

Perhaps the reader had some genuine gripe or even a legitimate critique of the actual content.

But perhaps he or she read the book and thought it was great, and wanted to reward me for writing it: “This book is so good it reminds of my home state of Texas! Here’s a lone star fer ya.”

Or perhaps this reader thought the book was too valuable to share, and wanted to discourage others from reading it and getting good ideas from it also.

Unfortunately, we will never know.

Instead, in order to profit from this zero-content review, let me tie it up with something more substantive. And that’s a message I got last week from Kieran Drew.

As you might know, Kieran is a bit of a star in the creative entrepreneur space. He has close to 200k followers on Twitter. He also has a big and growing email newsletter, with over 25k readers.

Earlier this year, Kieran launched a course about writing, High Impact Writing. Over the course of two 5-day launches, he sold over $300,000 worth of this course to his audience.

But back to the message Kieran sent me last week.

​​It simply said, “hope you’re well mate, continuing to spread the good word.”

​​Beneath that was a screenshot of a tweet that Kieran wrote earlier that day:

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Copywriting is the most important skill for any creator.

My 5 favorite books (if you’re a beginner, read in this order):

1. Adweek Copywriting Handbook
2. Great Leads
3. Cashvertising
4. 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters
5. Breakthrough Advertising

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I’ve never read Cashvertising. But the others I have read, and multiple times each. It kind of tickles me to be included on a top-5 copywriting list along with Joe Sugarman and Mark Ford John Forde and Gene Schwartz.

I’ve been pushing my 10 Commandments book pretty hard over the past few days.

Today is last day will be pushing it for a while.

Of course, you can choose to buy it today or you can choose not to. There’s no urgency, beyond the fact that people who care about writing and know about online business success think that what’s inside this book is valuable.

It might be so for you too. If you’d like to stake $5 on it to find out:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

The essence of expert showmanship (prepare to be underwhelmed)

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I’m reading book about magic and showmanship by a magician with the fanciful name of Hake Talbot. Old Hake says:

“Attention to detail is the essence of expert showmanship.”

I see you rolling your eyes.

​​​​”Oh no Bejako! Please stop with all these profound, new, and immediately useful ideas! No more please, I’ve had enough value for today!”

Bear with me for a second.

Talbot’s advice to magicians is to write out their routine as if it were real, with no tricks, no sleights, and no misdirection necessary. Real magic, not stage conjuring.

And then, says Talbot, compare your actual act, detail by detail, to the real thing.

Any place where there’s a discrepancy from the real to the stage, well, you gotta address that in some way. At least if you wanna achieve “expert showmanship.”

That’s what attention to detail means.

But that’s abstract advice. Maybe an concrete example would help.

Let me use the example of my Influential Emails promotion earlier this week.

After all, I put on a kind of performance every day in these emails. I don’t play the role of a magician who makes rabbits appear out of top hats. But I do play the role of a marketing wizard who makes thousands of dollars appear on command out of daily emails.

Now, in an ideal case, in the case of real magic, what would a promotion for a course like Influential Emails look like?

​​Here’s an idea:

The offer would sell out before it even became publicly available.

That’s what I was planning to do with Influential Emails.

And I got tantalizingly close, first by having a waiting list, and second by offering the course a day early to the people on the waiting list who had bought something from me before, along with an inducement to buy now.

(In case you’re curious, the reason for this was both to reward those existing customers, and also to only do business with people I have sold to before and know to be good customers.)

But I didn’t make as many sales as I had planned during that secret pre-launch. So to reach my target, I had to open Influential Emails to the entire waiting list, before closing it down 12 hours later, as I wrote about in my email two days ago.

Are you still with me? Good. Because we’ve gotten to the discrepancy:

Even though I managed to reach my target number of sales within just 12 hours of the opening of the promo, I didn’t manage to do the truly magical thing, which would have been to announce that Influential Emails had sold out before the promo even started, and only to an insider circle of previous customers.

Maybe you’re rolling your eyes again. Maybe you think nobody cares, and nobody was expecting me to sell out Influential Emails without even opening up the promo.

Well, in that case, all I can do is refer you to Talbot’s advice above.

I care, and on some level, I believe it makes an impact.

That’s why I sent out the email yesterday about the technical muck-up I did with the waiting list for Influential Emails, which means a bunch of people who wanted to buy didn’t get a chance to.

I opened up the cart again just for those people.

And the fact is, with their added sales, I would have blown past my sales goal during that secret pre-sale period.

So in the interest of showmanship, I’m telling you about it now. I’m also thinking how I can make sure this kind of discrepancy never happens in future performances, I mean, promotions.

Because if you’re putting on a show as a marketing wizard, it’s fine to present yourself as an absent-minded luddite, like I did yesterday. ​​But it won’t do, not at all, to allow even a shred of doubt to form about your wizarding abilities.

Anyways, maybe that gives you some ideas for future promotions you too plan on running.

Meanwhile, as I said yesterday and the day before, all this is an added reason to get my 10 Commandments book if you haven’t done so yet.

At the end of that book, I have a special offer for an apocryphal 11th commandment.

If you take me up on that offer, I will know you bought the book, and in the future, you will be included in the special circle of previous buyers who get in on things that the rest of my list does not.

If you want in, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Bejako the airheaded technician strikes again

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Let’s play a game of “Hit the Bejako piñata”:

As you might already know about me, I am very prone to making technical mistakes, snafus, and cock-ups.

Earlier in my life, this manifested itself in all kinds of travel related mishaps: showing up to the airport many hours too early, too late, on the wrong day, without the right visa, without having bought a ticket but fully convinced I had one (yes, this really happened).

Over the decades, I’ve largely managed to eliminate my travel-related clunkers.

But since I now work online and even have a little business online, each day presents a fresh new opportunity to screw up something technical, all the way from the mildly embarrassing to the serious in terms of reputation and money.

For example, consider the events of the past few days:

All of past week, I’ve been telling people to get on the waiting list for my Influential Emails course.

On Wednesday, I opened up the course to people on the waiting list who had bought something from me before. On Thursday, I opened it up to people on the waiting list who had never bought anything from me.

By Friday morning, I’d reached the number of sales I had been hoping for. So I closed down the cart and wrote an email about it, which I scheduled to be sent out last night.

But then, starting yesterday morning and culminating after the email last night, I got replies like the following:

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I thought you should know that I never received any cart-open emails for Influential Emails despite having signed up for the waiting list.

Actually, I know I clicked on at least two of the waitlist links (in different emails) to be sure I was on the list because I was interested in purchasing.

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I would like to blame Octavia Campo aka ActiveCampaign for this. But really, it was Bejako the airheaded technician at work again.

Turns out I forgot to add the automation for adding people to the waiting list to at least two of the emails I sent out over the past week. As a result, some 100 people who expressed interest did not get added to the waitlist, and did not receive the email when the cart opened.

Yesterday and today, I’ve been doing damage control, replying to people who wrote me, and reopening the cart for them.

Like I said, it’s time to get out the sticks, and start working on the Bejako piñata.

In short, thanks to my airheadedness, I’ve created a bunch of extra work for myself… I’ve confused and possibly offended long-time customers, who were wondering why they got snubbed in this launch… and I’ve put myself in a situation in which I look like one of those ecommerce brands that says, “Whoa, somebody didn’t get a chance to buy yesterday, so we’re extending the sale for another day!”

So I’m sending this email for two reasons:

One is to explain what exactly happened to anyone who did get impacted by my technological prowess.

Reason two I’ll explain tomorrow, in case you’re curious.

Meanwhile, the Influential Emails cart remains closed except for the people I am ferreting out as having expressed interest earlier, and not having had a chance to buy.

So the only thing i have to offer you today is my 10 Commandments book. You might want to get it for its own inherent value, or for the reasons I talked about yesterday, and that I will talk more about tomorrow. If you’re interested, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

The third-hottest release of 2023 closes after just one night

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Last night, with crowds of paparazzi pushing outside the velvet rope, and a few stars making their way from their limos down the red carpet to the doors of the classy old theater, my Influential Emails show had its grand opening.

The show ran for exactly one night.

And then this morning, I locked and chained the theater doors, removed the “INFLUENTIAL EMAILS” letters from the marquee, and took out an ad in the local paper to announce this show is now over.

As I announced in the lead up and during the grand opening of Influential Emails, this promotion would go until Sunday at the latest, and I might close it down sooner.

Well, that sooner is today, about 12 hours after the initial grand opening. I would have closed it earlier but I was asleep.

The reason why I did this is that made up my mind, before I launched this promo, what a nice sum of money would be to make from it.

I’ve now made that money and more. And so the cart is now closed.

If you managed to squeeze in to the Influential Emails show, I hope you will get value out of it in a way pays for itself, and soon.

If you wanted to get in but didn’t manage to, then all I can say is — if you’re not too angered by this experience, then maybe you will have better luck next time.

And if you were not interested in buying Influential Emails, then I can share the following valuable truth with you:

You can choose who you sell to, and how much of something you sell. There’s no law against it. And it’s ultimately good for business, in many different ways.

Now here’s a little sneak peek behind the scenes:

This promo didn’t really run for 12 hours.

It ran for about 36 hours.

I opened it up a day earlier for a private showing, just for people who were on the waiting list and who had already bought something from me in the past.

I also gave them an inducement to buy within the first 24 hours.

Many did.

That’s how I managed to make more money with this one-and-a-half-day promo than I used to make in a whole month, the first few years of my copywriting career.

Some of the folks who were invited for this private showing had bought pretty much all of my offers in the past.

Some had bought just one of my courses.

And some only bought my little $5 Kindle book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

It didn’t matter.

They are all valued and ongoing customers, and I wanted to say thanks with this special opportunity.

All that’s to say, if you have not yet bought my 10 Commandments book, then consider doing so.

It might teach you a thing or two about copywriting. And it might just prove to be a ticket to an exclusive future show, and a walk down the red carpet. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Write 10 books instead of one

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A few months back, I made an offer to help people on my list write a book — if they already had a catalogue of content such as daily emails, blog posts, or secret diary entries.

Some people who expressed interest had too little such content.

Not good. That means too much writing for me personally, and I’m not interested in becoming a full-time ghostwriter.

But some people had too much good content. A million words written or more, across thousands of emails.

Where do you possibly start with that? Or where do I?

I don’t have a great answer. But I will claim one thing:

It’s often easier to write a series of ten books than to write a single, one-off book.

Hear me out.

First off, it’s important to remember that the definition of what makes up a book in today’s world has changed.

A collection of words no longer has to be as much of a blunt weapon as Gone With The Wind in order to count as a book.

My own 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters book, which has brought me hundreds of high-quality readers and tens of thousands of dollars in new sales, runs all of 12,266 words.

Ben Settle’s first Villains book, the book I believe has done the most for his positioning, has 118 tiny pages, and that’s with a giant font and US-national-debt-sized margins.

And yet, I never had nobody complain that my book is too short. I doubt Ben has either.

Today, in books as in sales letters, it’s not really length that makes the difference either way. Rather, it’s the concept, the headline or title, the “big idea”.

That’s why I say it’s easier to write, or at least honestly commit to write, 10 books rather than one.

Writing 10 rather than one forces you to be more specific, concrete.

It forces you pump out more decent ideas, rather than trying to come up with a single brilliant breakthrough.

And of course, it forces you to keep each of your ten books, including that crucial first one, short and manageable, rather than trying to squeeze in too much out of some subconscious guilt or worry.

Anyways, something to keep in mind if you want more influence via book publishing.

It definitely helps to have a big catalogue of previous writing, which you can then shape into a new book, or perhaps more easily, into five or ten.

In other news about influence:

Tomorrow, inshallah, I will make available my Influential Emails training. That training reveals some of the tricks I use to make my emails more interesting and influential than the average email writing bear.

It’s how I’ve produced content that could easily fill 10 tiny but effective Kindle books.

If you’re interested in Influential Emails, you will want to get on my email list first. Click here to do so.

How to take trivial, possibly made up facts and turn them into influential emails

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“So what did you learn today?”

My ex (still living together) was sitting on the couch, arms crossed, looking at me sternly.

“Err…” I said, my eyes darting around as I tried to remember some new fact. “Today I learned that… supposedly you’ll be twice as productive if you block off your time for specific tasks.”

Background:

Last week, I was listening to an interview with Codie Sanchez. Codie is a newsletter operator and boring business investor. But at this point in the interview, Codie was not talking about either of those topics.

Rather, she was talking about how she makes her marriage work.

One of Codie’s tricks is that, each day, she and her husband share one thing that they’ve learned that day.

I mentioned this to my ex (still living together). She liked the idea so much that now she grills me at unexpected times about what I’ve learned during the day. I then have to think up something in a panic.

Yesterday, when she asked me this, I had been watching a video by Cal Newport of Deep Work fame. Newport now sells a notebook for planning your workday and blocking off time for various tasks.

​​Newport says — and he’s an authority so why question him — that if you block off your time for specific work tasks, you’ll be twice as productive.

I told my ex this. She again liked the idea. And it developed into a conversation about day planners and productivity and places in Barcelona to go shopping for notebooks.

Here’s the point of all this:

That thing about [time blocking = 2x productivity] is a small, trivial bit of information. I’m not even sure if it’s true. But it was enough of a kernel to start a natural and free-flowing conversation there on the couch. I guess that’s why Codie Sanchez recommends the practice.

It’s not just marriages or exes that this works with.

If you’re ever struggling for daily email ideas, then just ask yourself, “What did I learn today?” ​​Pick something small, concrete, even trivial. Then secrete a bit of personal context or opinion around that, like an oyster around a grain of sand, and within a few minutes, you’ll have something that your audience will enjoy reading and might even get value from.

That’s kind of a micro class in influential email writing.

For the macro version, you’ll have to get my Influential Emails training, which I’ll make available later this week, starting Thursday.

​​You’ll have to be on my email list to have a chance to get Influential Emails. If you’d like to learn something new on Thursday, click here to get on my list.

Who Influential Emails is definitely not for

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A reader writes in with a timely question:

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Hey John,

I had a question about Influential Emails.

I’m looking to purchase your “Influential Emails” course next Thursday when my stripe payments clear from my clients…

…and am devoting more of my time to lead generation, list building, personal branding … kind of like what you do

I am curious, for this “Influential Emails Course” if it can help with someone for my specific use cases…

To grow an email list, establish authority, build a personal brand and sell copywriting and digital marketing services.

looking forward to reading your response…

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Yesterday, I wrote about how I’ve learned to regularly send emails telling people what exactly is in my offers.

Another thing I’ve learned to regularly send is emails that tell people who my offers are for, and more importantly, who they’re not for.

I wrote back to the reader above to ask whether he has already been writing daily emails to promote his marketing services… or if he has a long-term agreement with a client to write daily emails.

I haven’t heard back from him yet. But a few things — waiting for Stripe to clear, the specific use case of having to accomplish pretty much everything, from list building to authority to making sales… makes me think this person is more of a beginner.

Nothing wrong with that. But Influential Emails is a bunch of advanced email copywriting tricks and strategies.

When I offered this training the first and only time so far, two years ago, I gave students a chance at a copy critique.

A bunch of people took me up on my offer and submitted their emails. All the submitted emails had good ideas in them. But I also realized many of these emails also had really fundamental, technical problems.

Many of those student emails failed on basic and important points, which would cripple the effectiveness of the email. For people who couldn’t do the basics right, none of the advanced techniques I was sharing would matter at all.

That’s the reason why I eventually created a beginner-friendly email copywriting course, Simple Money Emails.

So to sum up:

If you have not been writing daily emails for yourself for a while…

… or if you have not been writing daily emails for a good client for a while, and you have the kind of relationship that makes you think this will go on for a long time, and is worth investing in…

… then do not get Influential Emails.

Instead, start writing daily emails for yourself, or start seeking out a client who will pay you to write daily emails for them.

And if you are looking for guidance on what to put into those daily emails, then you can find that inside my Simple Money Emails course, available here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

On the other hand, if you want some advanced writing techniques to help you not just make sales, but get into your readers’ minds so they think of you as an authority… spread your ideas on their own… even refer you to others… then can get some of my secret sauce inside Influential Emails.

The techniques and strategies inside this training have allowed me to make connections with some of the most successful marketers and copywriters in the direct response industry.

​​They have created an aura of authority for me, completely independent of my results in the field.

​​Most importantly, they have influenced the minds of my readers.

Anyways, if you want Influential Emails, then the only way to get it is to be on the waiting list first, when I open up the cart this Thursday. To get on the waiting list, you’ll have to sign up for my daily email newsletter. Click here to do that.

Advanced email copywriting tricks for sale soon

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This week I’m promoting my Influential Emails training. This training is something I’ve made available only once before, live, back in 2021, the Year of the Ox.

But starting next Thursday, and lasting at most until next Sunday, I will make Influential Emails available once again.

Over the y​​ears, by keeping track of when and why I’ve bought from other people’s via email, I discovered it makes good sense to send out regular emails telling your audience what exactly it is you are selling, without any frills, funniness, or flippancy.

​​So here’s whats inside Influential Emails:

​
1. The recordings of the three Influential Emails live calls, which all lasted around 2 hours.

2. Edited transcripts of all the calls, in case would rather read than listen to me talk.

3. Call 1 covers 5+ of my advanced email copywriting tricks, including the “Five Fingers” storytelling strategy, S. Morgenstern transitions, and the “Sophisticated Slapstick” structure that makes trivial or even silly things sound funny or profound.

4. Call 2 breaks down four emails I wrote to this list, shows you how I wrote them from snout to tail, and highlights the techniques from Call 1 in action. This second call also includes a lighting-round training, 15 Unique Things I Do To come Up With Ideas and Create Content.

5. Call 3 includes brutal and merciless copy critiques of a dozen emails I got from attendees of the original Influential Emails training. You see what I thought was good in these emails, and more importantly, what I would change to make each email more effective for 1) making sales and 2) being more influential/interesting/memorable.

6. There are also two bonuses. The first is “Mystery Screenwriting Insights For Copywriters.” The core of this is a special, never-produced screenplay from my favorite screenwriter, William Goldman, overlaid with my analysis of the writing tricks Goldman used, and how copywriters can apply the same.

7. The second bonus is “My 12/4 Most Influential Emails.” This is a micro swipe file, including 12 of my most influential emails, along with the background of why and how each email ended up influential. Plus, I’ll give you the four more emails, written by mysterious others, which had the biggest influence on me.

Over the coming days, I will have more to say about Influential Emails, specifically who it’s possibly for and who it’s definitely not for.

If you do decide you want to get Influential Emails, you will have to get on the waiting list. And in order to get on the waiting list, you will first have to get on the list to get my daily emails. Click here to do so now.