A principled way to deal with chargebacks

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Last week, I wrote about a chargeback I got on my Most Valuable Email course. I solicited advice for dealing with this chargeback and preventing others in the future.

I got advice. I also got the folllowing question from a reader:

===

If you’re so inclined, I’d be interested in hearing about advice you got to handle chargebacks, but of course more importantly prevent them in the first place!

I’m newer to the solopreneur arena. Chargebacks are just a cost of doing business in the large company space, usually as a consequence of not following large customers’ procurement/delivery rules, not automating transactions, etc.

For smaller enterprises, I can imagine they could be debilitating…

===

Since I’m so inclined:

I got lots of what might be called tactical or technological advice for dealing with and preventing chargebacks.

I’m sure much of this advice is solid but the fact is, it’s overkill for my small info publishing operation, and more than I want to do at the moment. The fact that this kind of tactical advice could change from today to tomorrow is even more of a reason to not invest my limited time or energy into such solutions.

But I also got several people sharing what can be called principled advice on dealing with chargebacks. Advice that will stand the test of time, that’s not subject to a change in technology or the whims of banks.

That advice boiled down to simply this:

Don’t sell to every rando off the street who struts up to your counter and pulls out a credit card.

I first heard this advice a long time ago. It’s taken me a while to accept it.

The fact is, just because somebody offers to pay you today doesn’t mean that they will prove to be a good customer today, tomorrow, and the day after.

If you have your eye on LTV as the main metric in your business, then it makes sense to do lots of things, even counterintuitive things, to turn away people who might be bad customers tomorrow, even if they seem to be willing buyers today.

And that brings me to my current offer:

I announced yesterday I will make my Influential Emails training available once again next week.

But I won’t simply send a bunch of emails linking to a sales page for Influential Emails.

Instead, if you would like to get this training once it’s available, you’ll have to get on the waiting list first.

The main reason fr this is the anti-chargeback, pro-LTV idea above. A waiting list allows me to filter through people who want to buy. I can see if they are already good customers. And if not, I have to take a closer look at who they are and whether I want to sell to them.

Of course, the the velvet rope effect of a waiting list doesn’t hurt either.

I will have more to say about Influential Emails, and why you might want to get it, over the coming week. But you will have to be on my list to be able to buy it. Click here to get on there.

Incurable bachelor discovers a reality-bending mistake in human computational neurology

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I read today about a bride-to-be in the UK who took an eerie “spirit photograph” of herself trying on a wedding gown.

The woman was standing with her back to the camera. Facing her were two mirrors, one in front of her, one to her side.

The spirit photo, as captured by an iPhone, showed the following:

The woman in reality (ie, not reflected by a mirror) stood with one arm hanging by her side and other across her chest.

But the mirror in front of her showed a slightly different figure. In that front mirror, both the woman’s arms were clasped together in front of her chest.

And the mirror to her side showed a still different figure. In this mirror, neither of the woman’s arms was across her chest. Instead, both arms were down by her sides.

It’s like three slightly different different versions of the woman were all there in one room, looking at each other.

Maybe the iPhone captured a living human being and two spirits, who somehow looked exactly like each other?

Maybe it was the woman’s great-grandmother in the front mirror, and that great-grandmother’s grandmother in the side mirror, all coming together to convene with the bride-to-be at this crucial moment in her life?

T​​hat would be a good spectacle and a demonstration of the occult.

But the trick behind this bizarre photo is more modern and more technical.

As you might know, your phone camera, particularly if you got yerself a fancy iPhone, is not simply capturing “reality” as it exists out there in the world.

Instead, your camera is actually doing quite a bit of processing, selecting, and splicing to produce a final photo that looks good, and that makes the most satisfying visual presentation to you as the viewer.

That’s what happened with the bride-to-be.

​​Her poor iPhone got tricked into thinking it was seeing three different persons in one frame.

So the phone stitched together three slightly different visual moments to represent each of those three persons in the final shot.

​​If these were three different people, this would probably be undetectable. But since these were mirrored versions of one person, the iPhone’s mistake was glaring and unsettling.

“Haha stupid iPhone,” you might say. Except the reason why I clicked to read this article in the first place was the intriguing headline:

“A bride to be discovers a reality bending mistake in Apple’s computational photography”

This headline got my interest because I, an incurable bachelor, have learned, both by direct experience and by reading up on the matter, that what we see in our mind’s eye is not “reality” as it exists out there in the world.

The fact is, our brains work in a similar way to a modern iPhone camera.

Sure, the underlying “stuff” of our minds is different to what an iPhone is made of, as are the algorithms we use to create the final results.

But like an iPhone, our minds are also sampling from different points in the data stream… filling in the gaps… and stitching together and even inventing stuff to create a final, coherent result.

That final result is not 100% “true,” or even close to it. Instead, it’s what makes the most satisfying image, story, or interpretation to us as viewers.

You might find that hard to accept. I know I did when I first read about it.

But if you start paying attention, you can catch yourself in the act of conjuring up reality.

Anyways, if you want a storytelling tip for how to take mundane events and turn them into something more fun or interesting… then keep in mind the image of the bride-to-be in front of her imperfect doppelgangers across two mirrors.

​​Remember the three slightly different women in wedding gowns facing each other, remember the explanation for it, and then do something similar when you are writing your story.

In entirely related news:

I’ve decided once again offer my Influential Emails training. ​I only offered this once before, live, two years ago.

​​In this training, I shared several advanced email copywriting techniques I used then, and continue to use, to make my own emails stand out in people’s minds.

I’ve noticed that two years later, some of my long-time readers and customers still feed back ideas and names to me that I only shared during that training. That’s to say, maybe these folks really did find the training impactful, useful, and even insightful.

I’ll offer the recordings of this training next week, between Thursday December 6th and Sunday December 10th. But I will do something different than usual.

Rather than making this training available to everyone, I will only make it available to people who get on a waitlist first.

​​If you’re curious why, I’ll explain that in my email tomorrow.

​​Meanwhile, if you want to get on the waitlist, you’ll first have to get onto my email list. Click here to do so.

Ancestral Recall testimonial open

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How many words can you write in a day? How many words can you write consistently, day after day? Without AI?

Dan Ferrari, the A-list copywriter who was my copywriting coach in a different decade, once wrote that “most writers, when they put their ego aside and just get to work, can knock out about 3,000 words per day.”

I’ve never tried measuring it, but I have my doubts. I do know that today I’ve already written about 1,500 words. I still have this email to write, and my brain has already turned to mush, and is in danger of leaking out of my ears.

So let me take the easy path to the offer, and tell you about a valuable message I got a few days ago from copywriter Jesús Silva Marcano.

Jesús wrote in response to an email where I compared unprompted testimonials to the Black Lotus card in Magic The Gathering. To which Jesús wrote:

===

Reading the reference to Magic: The Gathering transported me several years into the past, and I loved it.

Also, I agree with Jakub that I learn a lot from your daily emails.

Several months ago, I was reading, enjoying and learning from them.

However, since I bought MVE, I can guarantee that you learn, easily 5 times more.

And although I can’t use the “most valuable trick” with all the clients that come and go into “my (copywriting) world”….

What you teach in Simple Money Emails definitely does.

Maybe this email is not a Black Lotus, but I hope it can be at least an Ancestral Recall.

I hope all is well and keep it up. A big hug.

===

It’s very nice to get message like this, and to hear that people are getting some real-world value from my courses and emails.

Plus, I’m now almost all the way to the offer. So:​​

If you want to learn a bunch of email copywriting tricks that you can use for clients who come and go into your copywriting world, then you can find those in my Simple Money Emails training.

If you want to discover a method to easily learn 5x more about marketing and copywriting by writing emails to your own list — or by reading the emails I write to my list — then you can find that in my Most Valuable Email course.

And if neither of those interests you, then you can always just write in and tell me how many words you can write consistently, day after day. I’m curious how I stack up, and maybe you can teach me something valuable. Thanks in advance.

I stand accused of pulling the prat-out on a reader

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A few months ago, I wrote an email about the “prat out,” a technique used by con men to get their marks salivating and eager for larceny.

​​I sent that email out and then also put it on my bare-bones, zero-images, black-and-white website. And I forgot all about it.

Until this morning that is, when I got the following message from a new reader, who wrote:

===

Im now about six years into designing and developing websites.

Your website just fucked my mind.

I was reading a book by Iceberg Slim, he talked about the prat out.

I had no idea wtf that was and found your article.

After reading, i realized that you just pulled the prat-out on me and I’m now much more ready to give you my money. You sneaky fucker.

But i forgive you because you just taught me how much can be done with just words.

I haven’t left your website for an hour. I’m fascinated by what you do with just words. Nothing else is needed. The words create the colors, images and shapes in my head.

As a designer, its blowing my mind how much can be done with words alone and it has opened my mind to all kinds of new possibilities.

Thank you man.

===

No, thank you, kind anonymous reader who wrote in with a testimonial.

I bring this up 1) to feature a flattering testimonial and to encourage more of the same from other readers, and 2) to explain why I have not really been selling much of anything over the past couple weeks.

There are multiple reasons actually.

One is that I made enough money for my modest standards very early this month, thanks to the affiliate promo that Kieran Drew did of my Simple Money Emails course, and the new readers who came in the wake of that promo.

Another reason is that I have found that most of my sales do come via promotion events, whether that be a new launch, or me promoting an affiliate offer for a limited time, or somebody else promoting my offers for a limited time.

So one lesson I’ve learned is to regularly have such events if I hope to keep paying for rent and my daily supply of lentils and canned sardines.

At the same time, I’ve learned to cut myself some slack, and not force myself to shoehorn every daily email into a promotion of one of my existing offers.

​​Linking to something like an Amazon book (yesterday) or simply inviting a response (Sunday) keeps more of my readers reading to the end, and makes it more interesting for me since I can write about a broader set of stuff.

So in case you were curious why I’m linking to random stuff recently, now you know.

That said, it is important to remind readers of my offers from time to time so they can’t use the excuse, “Oh I didn’t even know!” to not buy.

And today, following a testimonial in which a reader says I pulled the prat-out on him, is a particularly good time to remind you of my best selling course, in terms of copies sold at least.

In case you’re curious, you can find out all about it here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Do you know the flip side of this famous historical anecdote?

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Everybody and his monkey knows the story of how, back in 1903, some smug realist at the New York Times wrote that heavier-than-air flight won’t be possible for another “one million to ten million years.”

And then, several weeks later, the Wright brothers took off and flew for the first time.

Like I say, you probably know that.

But what you might not know is the flip side of this story, how little anybody cared about that first flight, or the second flight, or the third, then or for years afterwards.

​​Here’s an excerpt from a book I just finished reading:

===

Several years went by before the public grasped what the Wrights were doing; people were so convinced that flying was impossible that most of those who saw them flying at Dayton in 1905 decided that what they had seen must be some trick without significance — somewhat as most people today would regard a demonstration of, say, telepathy. It was not until May, 1908 — nearly four and a half years after the Wright’s first flight — that experienced reporters were sent to observe what they were doing, experienced editors gave full credence to these reporters’ excited dispatches, and the world at last woke up to the fact that human flight had been successfully accomplished.

===

That’s an interesting historical anecdote.

I had never heard it before.

It can be saved and used effectively in lots of different contexts. I would like to pass it on to you if you write and need lots of sticky messages to make your points more effectively.

I also want to clue you in to a resource that’s full of such sticky messages.

​​I already wrote about it in a recent email.

I’m talking about Morgan Housel’s Psychology of Money. I finished reading it a few days ago. It’s where I got the passage above, even though Housel didn’t write it — he’s just citing yet another book in his own book.

The Psychology of Money was published just over three years ago. And yet, it has over 30,000 5-star reviews on Amazon.

That’s not because the advice in the book is so new or so inspiring (“Save more”).

Rather, Housel’s Psychology of Money is so popular because it’s so effectively written, using lots of historical illustrations and novel metaphors and personal stories.

If you want to see how to write a book that keeps selling itself based on its content alone, then The Psychology of Money is worth a skim, read, or even some careful reverse engineering. To get your own copy:

https://bejakovic.com/housel

Chargeback inspiration

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In my email yesterday, I wrote about a chargeback I’d gotten earlier in the day. I asked for advice.

And I got it.

I got advice about possible ways to handle the current chargeback better.

I got good advice on how to prevent it in the future.

I got personal stories and experiences and consolation from others who have been there before me.

I can say I’m honestly grateful to everyone who wrote in. I can also say it’s reminder of something important:

People start email lists to do marketing. To sell stuff. Perhaps to become seen as an authority at whatever it is they do.

But if you do it right, it ends up going way beyond that.

I heard Codie Sanchez talking on a podcast a few days ago. As you might know, Codie runs Contrarian Thinking, a newsletter with some 250,000 subscribers, about buying and selling businesses. She’s built an eight-figure info business off the back of that newsletter, plus maybe several other 7-figure businesses also.

But it goes way beyond that. Codie said that via her newsletter, she’s automatically and without any extra effort also gotten:

– Unique business opportunities
– Financing
– Business partners
– Employees
– Advice and guidance
– Access and connections

My experience has been similar.

I’ve had direct job offers from people reading my newsletter. I’ve had business partnership offers.

People have shared their personal stories with me. I’ve gotten good business advice, from people who are qualified to give it.

I’ve hired people via my list, and I’ve been hired by people on my list.

I’ve gotten insider tips and tricks from people at the very top of the game.

I’ve met some of my readers in real life. We’ve gone to conferences together. I’ve even gotten nice stuff in my physical mail box from people who read these emails.

All of that fell out automatically, as a side-effect of relentlessly, mercilessly, unfailingly writing a 400-500-word email every day, and sharing something I have learned, or something unnerving that happened to me, or a bit of inspiration, or a bit of frustration, like I did yesterday.

I guess you see where this is going. But since this is a marketing newsletter, I will force myself to spell it out:

Start an email list.

Write to it regularly.

Preferably daily.

Good things will happen as a result. And if bad things happen also, you will have a powerful resource in your email list to deal with it.

I have a course about how to relentlessly, mercilessly, unfailingly write a 400-500-word email every day, and to make it interesting for yourself and valuable for your readers. If that’s something you’d like to do:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

Chargeback

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I woke up this morning to find a Sunday-morning email that read:

===

CAPITAL ONE, NATIONAL ASSOCIAT ION has initiated a $297 USD dispute.

A $297 USD payment for Desert Kite is being disputed by CAPITAL ONE, NATIONAL ASSOCIAT ION because your customer says they didn’t initiate this purchase (this is known as a fraudulent transaction).”

===

In other words, somebody bought my Most Valuable Email course a few days ago.

​​And now somebody — either the person who bought, or the actual credit card owner in case in case they had their credit card details fleeced — was contesting the charge.

I shrugged my shoulders and clicked to archive the email and get it out of my sight.

I had had something like this happen once already, back in September. Somebody bought my Copy Riddles course. A week later, I got the same Capital One chargeback notice, saying that the credit card owner wants to contest the charge.

Back in September, I went to check the account on my site associated with this purchase. I saw that they had logged in, gone through all the 40+ pages of the course in quick order, and now were claiming they had nothing to do with it.

I submitted whatever proof I could gather to contest the chargeback, and to show that this was a legitimate order, and that all the pages of my course were accessed. It probably took a half hour to an hour of my life.

Still, a few weeks later I got a notice that the chargeback had gone through anyhow. There’s no appeal process and that decision is final.

So the reason I shrugged my shoulders today is not that I accept that chargebacks are simply a part of doing business online, but rather that I don’t see that there’s anything I can do about it.

​​And if there’s nothing I can do, I don’t want to give it any more time out or emotion out of my day.

Except of course, I remembered that I do have the wonderful resource of this email list.

So not only can I get a daily email out of this event, but maybe I can even learn something from you, either to deal with the current chargeback request or to prevent others like it coming up in future.

So if you have any info for me, hit reply, and write away. I’ll be grateful to you.

Magic trick vs. miracle in email copywriting

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I’m reading a book about magic and showmanship. One part explains the difference between a magic trick and a miracle:

A ham-and-cheese sandwich, appearing in your shirt pocket, where there was nothing before, is a magic trick.

A ham-and-cheese sandwich, appearing in your shirt pocket, where there was nothing before, when you are starving, is a miracle.

This isn’t just for magicians, of course.

It’s also a key idea for email copywriting. It’s super important to hold on to. That’s why I put the above idea, in my own words, as the core tenet of my Simple Money Emails course, and why I repeat it from page 2 of the course until the end.

So if:

* You have an email list but you are not writing emails and therefore are not making any money from your list, while your subscribers forget who you are and why they signed up in the first place

* You are writing emails but nobody is buying from you, meaning that your newsletter is really just a hobby and not a marketing channel

* You futz and fiddle for hours just to write one stupid email, instead of producing something interesting and effective in just 20 minutes…

… then my Simple Money Emails course could appear in your life like a hand-and-cheese sandwich in a time of great famine.

​​For more information about this miraculous course:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

Take your likes to the bank

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A couple days ago, I sent an email about an email trick to get more engagement. To which, I got a response — an engagement!

The response came from Jakub Červenka, who runs an info publishing business in the men’s sexual health niche.

First, Jakub just replied to tell me he liked that email about engagement. Then we got into a bit of an email conversation. Then he told me about the trouble he was having with his Facebook ad agency.

And then he wrote:

===

So I learnt I am decent marketer and cannot let go of this part in my company.

Also, started writing daily emails again recently and looking at the mails I am writing now and I did year ago… it is as if 2 different people wrote them and that makes me happy.

And this is the main reason I am writing this to you, John, I think me improving so much is lot thanks to you. Yours is the only newsletter that I read almost daily and is amongst the 3 that survived my brutal opt-out-from everything. I don’t mean this to sound bad, I bought your Copy Riddles, Most Valuable email, your 2 pump-postcard newsletter and your latest Sales emails training.

I like all your courses, a lot, probably best spend money in copywriting courses, but still I think I learn most from your daily emails – probably due to the fact that it does not seem like I am working, I enjoy reading your stuff and it is small bites daily.

Keep up the good work,

Your grateful student and zealous reader,

Jakub

===

I once had a reader write in to tell me he always skips the quoted parts of my emails, the parts in italics that start with ===.

In case you also skipped what Jakub wrote, I can tell you it was a testimonial, with good things to say about my courses and in particularly about these emails.

And here’s something I’ve noticed about getting nice testimonials like this:

It rarely happens that somebody writes in just because they want to tell me how great they think one of my courses is, or how great I am.

Yes, it does happen from time to time. But it’s kind of like finding a Black Lotus in hundreds and hundreds of packs of Magic The Gathering cards — valuable yes, but also rare.

A little more common is when I explicitly ask for feedback on a course or training, and offer an incentive to reply.

People then reply in a pack. But even then, it’s not an overwhelming number of responses, and not everything I get is a great testimonial I can feature.

Really, the bulk of the good testimonials I’ve gotten, and that I’ve featured in emails and on sales pages, came like Jakub’s message above.

They came as an “oh by the way” that people tacked on when replying to one of my emails that had to do with an entirely unrelated matter. It’s been a steady drip-drip over the years that’s eventually filled up several buckets.

It’s popular to say in the direct response world that only sales mean anything, and that you can’t take your likes to the bank.

Except you kind of can.

True, a great testimonial like Jakub’s above is not cash. I can’t go and buy cans of beans and bags of rice with it today.

But a good testimonial is like a check, and eventually it will clear. Somebody somewhere will eventually be converted into a new and loyal customer because of testimonials like Jakub’s above. We all look to others when making our own decisions.

So my point is, if you work to increase engagement with your emails, you will get more testimonials, and you will be able to take those to the bank, in time.

Of course, for that to happen you do have to feature your testimonials so people can see them.

Sales pages are one place.

But really, emails are the main place, because emails are kind of the headlines for your sales pages.

Which brings me to the my latest Sales emails training, as Jakub put it, aka my Simple Money Emails course.

I’m probably giving away too much in these emails and I’m probably killing some sales for my courses like Simple Money Emails.

Maybe I will fix that in time.

For now, if you want to see how I’ve used emails to make (up to) tens of thousands of dollars in sales per day, and still kept readers coming back tomorrow, then Simple Money Emails will show you, and will show you how you can do it too. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Curious George creates a course

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It’s been three days since I wrote an email about the 40th anniversary of the first broadcast of The Day After, which happened on November 20 1983.

​​A reader wrote in to ask about that:

===

Beautiful story…but where do you find this kind of story?

Do you google the events for this day or something else? I’m really curious.

===

The short answer is that, like Curious George, I’m a good little monkey, and always curious.

In the particular case of The Day After email, the sequence of events was as follows:

1. A few months ago, I was reading an email by Lawrence Bernstein. Lawrence was talking about how he managed to delete his entire email list. As he put it, “Sunday morning felt like one of my favorite dark films from 1983, ‘The Day After.'”

2. I had never heard of The Day After so I made a note of it in a list of “movies to watch” that I have been keeping for years.

3. Some time later, I watched The Day After, without knowing anything about it except that Lawrence likes it.

4. After watching the movie, I was curious to find out more. So I read up on it. I was impressed to find out all the stuff connecting The Day After to Ronald Reagan and the Soviets and nuclear war averted.

5. A few days later, the thought popped into my mind to check when exactly The Day After was first broadcast. It turned out the 40th anniversary was coming up in a few weeks’ time. I thought it might be cool to write about it on the actual anniversary. So I made a calendar entry telling me to write an email about it on the day of.

6. The calendar notification fired a few days ago. So I wrote down an outline of what I remembered about the movie. I plumped it up with some details taken from Wikipedia and ¡tachán!

The particulars of how I wrote that email are probably completely useless to you.

But there are a few underlying principles which you might profit from. Such as for example:

​​Keeping extensive notes and having lists of everything you might care about…

​Digging in when you come across an unfamiliar reference from somebody you respect…

O​​r using your calendar app to make your life easier and to make sure stuff gets done when it should.

Over the past few years, I’ve come up with a handful of such processes to make sure I never forget a good idea, never fail to draw a valuable connection, never miss out on a profitable opportunity.

Of course, it doesn’t work all the time. Or even much of the time.

​​Even so, these processes have been incredibly valuable to to me for daily email writing, previously for client work, futurely for new projects I am starting up.

This stuff has become such an integral part of how I work that I created a course, Insight Exposed, all about how I keep notes, and write journals, and process all of the ideas and information coming at me so I can turn them into something productive and profitable.

I released Insight Exposed back in February for a few days. But I haven’t been selling it since.

I will release it again soon, after I’ve polished it a bit. But more about that in its own email.

For now, let me just share something valuable that I’ve kept track of thanks to my Insight Exposed system.

It’s an article I came upon back in September. It was published in the lying New York Time, but in the opinion section, so maybe it’s true.

In any case, I found it insightful, so much so that i took note of it, processed the note, and put it into long-term storage, so I could share it with you today. In case you’re curious:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/17/opinion/sports-zen-mental-subtraction.html