“A little scary”: X-ray goggles revealed

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In an email last week, I teased a pair of “X-ray goggles” that let you peer into places you maybe shouldn’t be peering, like your prospect’s wallet.

I thought these goggles might be particularly relevant for people who do lots of sales calls. They allow you to only get on calls with people who can afford what you’re selling, so you minimize the time you spend on the phone while maximizing the actual sales you make.

Last week, I talked to a few such people to find out more about their situation. At the end, I revealed to them what these goggles are, plus where to get ’em. Here are a few responses I got:

“I didn’t know such a tool existed, and I’m sure people on my list would like to have a pair.”

“That is interesting (and a little scary). Thanks for sharing that, John.”

“Damn! I WISH I could use that! I ran it on myself and it blew me away! That’s a killer app. Have you used it? Has it helped you?”

I have not used these X-ray goggles myself because frankly I don’t do sales calls. I am also not running lots of paid or affiliate traffic to generate leads I have to wade through.

But maybe you do?

Or maybe you have a sales team that does?

Or maybe you work with such a client?

If so, these X-ray goggles are worth a look:

https://bejakovic.com/xray

How to be a charming cad

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Many years ago, back when I had a proper office job, I used to work with a handsome and muscular guy named Roland.

One time at lunch, a woman on our team started reaching across the table and straining to get the salt shaker, which was in front of Roland.

Roland noticed this, and reached for the salt shaker himself, as though to push it closer to the woman and make her job easier. But instead of pushing the salt shaker towards the woman, he pulled it further towards himself, and firmly out of the woman’s reach.

The woman, now fully splayed out across the table, gave out a bit of an shocked gasp and then started laughing.

(I’ve repeated this little trick several times and it’s never failed to produce the same result.)

Example two:

Keith McNally is a New York restaurateur. Back in the 1980s, he opened up a restaurant called the Odeon that became a cultural icon — it was featured on the cover of Jay McInerney’s book “Bright Lights, Big City” and in movies like American Psycho.

When McNally used to walk around the Odeon, a new customer might ask where the bathroom is. To which, McNally would smile and say, “We don’t have one.” And then he would walk away, leaving the confused costumer to wonder for a second whether that could possibly be true.

It was small details like this that made McNally’s restaurant the “in” destination, and kept people coming back over and over.

So those are two examples of how to be a charming cad.

Though it might not look like it at first, they share a common structure. Perhaps you can see the structure, or perhaps you’ve heard me talk about it before. If not, you can find it laid out and explained in chapter, I mean, Commandment IV of my new 10 Commandments book.

But I won’t give you the link to buy that.

No, I wish. Here it is:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

What really makes for a good sex scene?

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As of last night, I’m about halfway through a 3-hour-long movie, titled Nymphomaniac, Volume 1. (There’s also a Volume 2, with more hours.)

I’m only halfway through it because I can only watch it in 25-minute increments. The movie is dark (literally, full of brown and black frames), heavy-handed, and worst of all, filled with gratuitous, very unsexy sex scenes.

I’m telling you this because, though you can’t tell it from Nymphomaniac, sex in movies can apparently be sexy.

Back in 1980, Francis Ford Coppola, best known as the director of the Godfather (volumes 1 and 2, each many hours long), was making a movie that was to feature a sex scene.

Coppola, who is a bit obsessive about making his movies good, tasked a UC Berkeley PhD student named Constance Penly with phoning up hundreds of famous and influential people to find out 1) which sex scenes were the best and 2) what those sex scenes had in common.

Would you like to know also?

Should I tell you?

I don’t know. Maybe I should, maybe I shouldn’t…

All right, here goes:

After hundreds of interviews and many hours of uncomfortable sex scene watching, Penley had her answer. The best sex scenes had two things in common:

1. The sex wasn’t supposed to happen, because of some big difference between the sexers

2. One or both of the characters were under threat of death

Penley gives the example of the sex scene in the original Terminator movie, between the characters of Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese. He is a rebel soldier from 45 years in the future, sent back in time. She is a woman of the present, being hunted by a cyborg assassin. Sarah and Kyle have sex, and apparently Penley thought it was hot.

(Incidentally, the Skynet future of the Terminator movies, which both Kyle Reese and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cyborg assassin are sent back from, was set in 2029.

That was distant back in 1984 when the Terminator came out, but it’s near to us now. And it looks like we’re right on track.

I saw a video just yesterday of an AI conference in China in which a woman was kickboxing with a humanoid robot that looked like it was trained on thousands of hours of UFC footage. For demonstration purposes, the robot was tuned to a setting of “Not Kill.”)

But back to those good sex scene criteria. What is it about these two criteria specifically?

I realized what makes a good sex scene is just like what makes a good promotional sales event — there’s a time-limited window and a real cost for not acting during it.

Is this a coincidence? Or am I reaching? I don’t think so. I think it goes back to the fundamental and age-old questions that all human minds are always asking:

Why? Why this? Why should I care? Why is it now or never?

And with that, I can finally wrap up my email and point you to the offer I have been working up to promoting. It’s a book, one I’ve written.

The reason I’m promoting it today is that it ties into the question of “why.” In fact, my book has the question of “why” running through it in different ways, from beginning to end. And not just that. It also shows you how to answer that question, implicitly and explicitly, to influence others without being heavy-handed and gratuitous about it.

Would you like to know how?

Should I tell you?

I don’t know. Maybe I should, maybe I shouldn’t…

All right, here goes:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

17 ideas to salvage a huge cold list

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Yesterday, I sent out an email asking for advice on what to do with a huge cold list that someone I know is in secret possession of.

This list is not only huge, not only cold, but there are also a bunch of other strange restrictions. Can anything be done?

After asking for advice yesterday, I got a buncha responses, including from people who manage email lists as a job (one guy for 20 years) and from others who have been in similarish situations and shared their experiences and suggestions.

I was honestly grateful to get so many thoughtful, detailed, and helpful responses. I read them all. I selected the ones that sounded feasible to me, and boiled related ones to get 17 separate ideas, most of which were new to me. I then organized them in three categories:

1. Technical ideas (how to email)

2. Content ideas (what to email)

3. Out-of-the-box ideas (how not to email)

I don’t know a better way to say thanks to everyone on my list who wrote me than to “pay it forward” and share the total collection of ideas with my whole list. You can find it below.

If you yourself are in secret possession of a list that’s huge, cold, possibly dead but maybe not, then read these ideas, and if you find them valuable, pass them on.

And in case you take any of these ideas and apply them, let me know — I’d love to hear about it and update the doc. Here it is:

https://bejakovic.com/salvage

Your advice on salvaging a huge email list?

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One big lesson I learned long ago, from a former client in the real estate investing space, is that your email list can do much more for you than simply provide you with income.

The email addresses on your list stand for, more often than not, real, living, intelligent people, with experiences and skills and connections.

These people can help you with all sorts of stuff, including partnerships, referrals, and advice.

So let me ask you for advice on the following email list puzzle:

I’ve been talking to a FB ad agency owner who happens to read these emails. She has been patiently sitting on an email list, which was part of her payment for a revshare deal with a client (ie. she has full rights to use this list).

The bad/terrible:

– This email list hasn’t been emailed in the past 1-18 months (depending on when they bought)

– The guru who was the face of the offer is no longer involved

– His name or his offers cannot be used or even mentioned

– Emails can’t be sent from his account/domain

Bad, right?

Yes. There are only two positives to offset the four negatives I’ve just listed:

– There are 115k email addresses on this list

– All are buyers, with some spending as little as $27 and some as much as $15k (it’s a finance list)

So do you have any experience or advice with something like this?

If these were physical mail addresses, we could mail a small segment of the list as a test and see what happens.

Is that the thing to do here as well? Is our best bet to set up a new domain, and start slowly spamming people and see where it leads us?

Or should we throw away the whole list?

Or is there some third option I’m not seeing?

If you have any advice for me, or even better if you’ve been in a situation like this before and can share your experience, please let me know. Thanks in advance.

What everybody ought to know… about this online investor business

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This morning, I was sitting in a noisy cafe with music playing and coffee machines steaming away and a lampshade swinging above my head in the breeze. Amid all this confusion, I was trying to focus. I was looking for offers to promote.

I have several new and interesting offers slated for the next days and weeks. But what for today?

One of my go-tos on days like today is Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin community, which I lurk, learn, and even occasionally participate in.

Being in Ronin and following Travis’s advice has made me tens of thousands of dollars over the past 18 months that I’ve been subscribed to it, via new offers I’ve made, and via making me more money out of offers I already have. That’s why I keep recommending Ronin in my emails whenever I have a bit of a chance.

So this morning, I went to check out the Ronin front page.

In the past, Travis ran a free trial offer for Ronin. It makes sense to do a free trial because Ronin is 1) expensive ($299/month) and 2) a monthly charge (which everyone hates, including people who can afford it).

For a long time, that free trial offer was the norm.

But then, at odd times, including times when I promoted Ronin previously, it turned out that the free trial had disappeared. Then it came back. Then it disappeared again. Then the price dropped. Then it went back to normal. I guess Travis is constantly experimenting with the offer.

Today, when I thought of promoting Ronin, I went to check what the current front page looks like.

At first, I was confused. Then shocked.

It turns out there’s no free trial at the moment. Ok.

It turns out the price is the usual $299/month. Ok.

What had me confused and shocked is that right now, the entire Ronin community is open.

You can see all the members inside, read all their posts, as well as the comments.

You can see the “Welcome! START HERE!” post, which links to the “8-Day New Ronin Action Plan,” which is also currently open to everyone. You can see Travis’s advice on topics like partner getting, licensing, and “coffee dates,” and how to do that in just the next few days.

The only stuff that remains restricted, unless you’re actually a paying Ronin member, is the courses area, which contains about a dozen specialized trainings. Plus you don’t get access to the Royalty Ronin bonuses, which is a library of Travis’s courses that adds up to $12k in real-world value. And of course, you can’t participate or post in the community, but only observe and read.

This extra stuff is definitely worth paying for. But even without it, there’s enough valuable info inside the freely available Ronin community to fill a few airplane hangars with.

At least for the moment.

The current “everything in the open” offer might be a glitch. Maybe it will disappear very soon.

Maybe. Or maybe it’s just old-school marketing.

I remember a long time ago Andre Chaperon talking about lead magnets you didn’t have to sign up for.

Andre would simply lay out the entire, high-value lead magnet on his web site as a web page. He would then have an optin at the end of all that for the people who had gone to the trouble of reading the whole thing, which, unsurprisingly, turned out to be very high-quality leads.

Of course, there’s nothing new under the sun, and Andre didn’t invent this strategy.

It goes back millions of years, back to when brontosauruses ran direct-response weight-loss offers in the Jurrasic Times.

A little more seriously, it goes back at least to the 1940s, and the famous “What everybody ought to know… About This Stock and Bonds Business” ad.

That ad ran in major newspapers across the country. It featured 6,000 densely packed words of info and education about stocks and bonds, and a buried offer at the end, which drew tons of highly qualified leads for Merryl Lynch for over 10 years.

I thought about how to adapt that headline to the currently open Royalty Ronin community.

“What everybody ought to know about…”

I tried out different angles.

Eventually I remembered something Travis repeats over and over in Ronin, about how he really doesn’t have any ambition to be an entrepreneur or business owner. Running a business day after day is not for him, he says.

Rather, his goal is to be an investor, somebody who makes small bets that don’t cost much if they don’t pay off, but that have unlimited upside and the potential to pay him for years to come if they do work out.

Specifically, Travis talks about about how to be an online investor, making small bets on your own online products or audiences, or those of others.

And if you have no money to invest? That’s okay. Travis also talks about how you can invest other things, like your resourcefulness, your willingness to make connections, or your skills and expertise.

In any case, if you want to know what everybody ought to know about this online investor business, here’s an incredible free resource for you:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

Ben Settle: “How to make money in the make money online space”

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Yesterday, I wrote an email in which I quoted email marketer Ben Settle, in order to help me sell Igor Kheifets’s new book Click Send Earn.

Today, I’ll quote Ben again, to the same end:

“Make money online is not an easy market to consistently make money in the way Igor does. If you want to learn from someone how to make money in the make money online space, I can’t recommend Igor enough.”

If you’re eager to find out how Igor makes money consistently in the the “make money online” market — to the tune of several million a year — you can find that laid out in his book Click Send Earn.

I bought and read this book myself before reaching out to Igor and asking to promote it.

I endorse everything he teaches inside, plus I learned new and valuable things myself.

And in case you are not in the “make money online” market, the ideas and personal experiences that Igor shares in his book can be just as profitable for you, whether you’re offering coaching, or selling info products in another niche, or simply looking to grow and monetize an email list as a core part of whatever it is you do.

Igor’s Click Send Earn sells for a mighty $3.99.

Igor has said in private he could sell this info for $97-$297. Having read the book myself, I agree with him, and that’s why I asked him to promote it.

If you would like to grab a copy, so you can read it, and apply it, and profit from it:

https://bejakovic.com/clicksendearn

Ben Settle & Dan Kennedy both said it — but who was the original source?

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Here’s the history of the men who influenced me to be where I am today, writing you this email:

Patient readers know my susceptibility and fondness for the phrase, “The only real security is your ability to produce.”

I read that idea in a Ben Settle email back in 2017, which got me to sign up to Ben’s Email Players newsletter, which eventually convinced me to start sending daily emails myself.

As Ben wrote in that email, he himself got the “ability to produce” idea from an even older Dan Kennedy newsletter. I thought it stopped there, even though I always felt that “ability to produce” is an odd phrase for Dan Kennedy to invent. (Perhaps that’s why it stuck in my mind so.)

But, as I found out only last week, this phrase is not a strange Dan Kennedy construction.

The quote about “ability to produce” actually goes back to Douglas MacArthur, one of only five 5-star generals in the history of the United States.

MacArthur’s quote, such as I could trace it, was “Security lies in our ability to produce.” MacArthur was speaking quite literally, about national security and the importance of industry and agriculture to that.

But I’m not here to talk tariffs. I’m telling you this because this is a newsletter about ideas, specifically insightful ideas, even more specifically, insightful ideas that you can apply and bring into reality and profit from.

And on that note, I have a new offer for you. It’s a $3.99 ebook called Click Send Earn.

This book is written by Igor Kheifets. I’ve known Igor for a while. Back in 2021, I gave a presentation inside his List Building Lifestyle mastermind, which eventually turned into my Simple Money Emails course.

I bought Igor’s book last week because, frankly, I was curious about the funnel he was using to sell it.

But I read the book as well. And I was surprised, in a very positive sense.

As Igor said somewhere (in private, not inside this book) he could charge $97-$297 for the info that’s inside. And I believe it. So I reached out to him and asked to promote his book, for the following three reasons:

First off, this book is very clearly written by Igor, not by AI, not a ghostwriter.

Second, it lays out how Igor walked the familiar rags-to-riches route — which in his case was literal, because he used to clean toilets at a hotel once upon a time, and now makes millions a year via email.

The book lays out lessons learned along the way and gives you the business blueprint that Igor uses today, and which he teaches others, for how to build and grow and monetize email lists.

Third, this book has ideas in it that were new and insightful for me. For example, it was early in Igor’s book (p. 11) that I learned that that “ability to produce” quote is not from Ben Settle or even Dan Kennedy, but from Douglas MacArthur.

Like I said, when I bought Igor’s book, I bought it out of curiosity around the marketing.

But I thought my audience — “MY audience is different” — is too sophisticated when it comes to email marketing to profit from a book titled Click Send Earn.

Well, like I said, I’ve since read the book. I’ve learned new things and gotten value from it. I can get behind and endorse everything he teaches inside this book. That’s why I asked Igor to promote it.

And that’s what I’m doing right now, recommending it to you.

If you’re looking for a proven (by Igor, and his students) blueprint for a successful email-based business, then buy this book, read it, apply it, and profit. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/clicksendearn

How to stay off Reddit and improve your productivity

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In short, sign up to my Daily Email Habit service. Explanation plus proof:

I put in a funny image or meme at the top of each DEH email, to make it fun to keep opening up these emails day after day, and to put you in the right frame of mind to write your own daily email.

At least that was my reasoning for putting the funny image or meme in each DEH email. But apparently there are other benefits too. From email marketer Logan Hobson, who subscribes to Daily Email Habit:

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I find the daily meme an extra benefit to DEH. I started noticing that I recognized some of your images from reddit, and I wanted your images feel fresh, so I stopped browsing reddit as much and have improved my productivity, knowing I will receive a high-quality curated meme each day in your email without having to endlessly scroll to find one in the wild.

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Of course, the goal of Daily Email Habit goes beyond just improving your productivity and keeping you off Reddit. The real goal is to get you writing your own daily emails consistently, both so you make sales today, and so you build up a relationship with your audience, so they open and read your email tomorrow.

And about that, here’s marketing strategist Nick Bandy, who also subscribes to Daily Email Habit, and who has been emailing his list of buyers daily:

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DEH is the biggest ROI I’ve ever gotten on any course or product I’ve ever purchased. It’s incalculable.

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I have a bunch more testimonials from subscribers who praise Daily Email Habit. I also give away a sample 0th Daily Email Habit email, so you get a sense of what it looks like and what you’d be signing up for, including the funny image/meme up top. For all that:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

X-ray goggles to avoid sales call prospects who like talking to salesmen but never buy

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“They like to talk to salesmen, something. They’re lonely. I don’t know. They like to feel superior. Never bought a fucking thing.”

That’s a line from Glengarry Glen Ross, with two frustrated salesmen talking about “doctors, lawyers, Indians,” and other prospects who simply like talking to salesmen for whatever reasons of their own, but who never buy.

Some of these reasons you can’t do anything about (“they like to feel superior”).

But some you can.

Like I wrote yesterday, if:

1. You do sales calls regularly, and

2. It happens more often than never that the prospect you’re talking to ends up not having the money for the offer you are selling…

… then hit reply.

I have a couple of questions I hope you can help me out with.

In exchange, I’ll tell you about a pair of X-ray goggles, and where to get ’em. These X-ray goggles allow you to peer into places you maybe shouldn’t be peering, like your prospect’s wallet.

The X-ray goggles I have in mind allow you to only get on calls with people who can afford what you’re selling, so you minimize the time you waste and the aggravation you suffer.