Jumbo PT Barnum writing tip from me to you

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Many people like to start off their emails with categories and abstractions. They say stuff like…

This past Thursday night, I hosted the weekly Write & Profit coaching call. Around 7:15pm Barcelona time, I was in the middle of copywriting feedback to a business owner, Jeff, on an email he wrote. His email started by saying:

“I have heard many stories of…”

Whoa there. That word many is a trigger. It triggered me to think of a passage from Joe Vitale’s book about P.T. Barnum, There’s A Customer Born Every Minute.

In chapter 8 of that book, Joe sums up 17 copywriting lessons to be drawn from Barnum’s massively effective advertising. Lesson #10 is “Say Jumbo.” Joe explains:

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Whenever you write something vague, such as, “they say,” or “later on,” or “many,” train yourself to stop and rewrite those phrases into something more concrete, such as “Mark Weisser said…” or “Saturday at noon” or “seven people agreed.” Don’t say “dog” when you can say “collie.” Don’t say “elephant” when you can say “Jumbo.” Don’t say you have a “midget” on display when you can have “General Tom Thumb.”

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In completely unrelated news, my promotion of Newsletter XP is nearing its climax.

Newsletter XP is an expensive and valuable course on how to build, grow, and monetize a successful newsletter. It’s put on by Alex Lieberman and Tyler Denk, the founders of Morning Brew and Beehiiv, respectively.

I’ve managed to claw out a $200 discount for you from the usual price that Newsletter XP sells for. That discount is good until tomorrow night, Monday Feb 26, at 12 midnight PST. If you’d like to take advantage of this, here’s what to do:

1. Go to the Newsletter XP sales page at https://bejakovic.com/nxp

2. If you decide you want to get Newsltter XP, then use coupon code JB20 at checkout.

3. Make sure the coupon code works — that you see the price drop by $200. This is not my funnel, and if you end up buying at full price, there’s nothing I can do about it.

Magic meetup

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I just come home from the inaugural Bejako Barcelona meetup.

A month ago, I sent out an email asking if anyone on my list would like to meet me in Barcelona, where I happen to live.

Some 15 people replied to say yes. (Though one guy said yes from Japan. Hi Logan.)

Of the 15 who expressed interest, 6 said they would come for sure when I set the time, and a couple more said maybe they could make it.

Today, four of my readers actually showed up.

We had a lawyer who quit his job last week to become a copywriter… an info-business owner in the dating space… a creative copywriter who has added direct response to his arsenal… and one author of a soon-to-be-published thriller book.

They were all nice. All smart. All had interesting life stories.

Before, during, and after this meeting, I found myself amazed, once again, that the typing I do in the silence of my living room has real-world effects.

It’s like magic. Money somehow shows up. Opportunities appear. Real-world connections are formed.

All that’s to say:

Start a newsletter.

It’s like magic.

I’m currently promoting Newsletter XP. It’s a course hosted by Alex Lieberman and Tyler Denk, people who started and built up Morning Brew (Alex, then Tyler) and then started and built up Beehiiv (Tyler only).

These guys, and the high-profile guests they feature, know how to start a newsletter. They know what kinds of content gets read. They know how to get more people reading a newsletter. They know how to make money just by sending emails.

If you’d like more magic in your life, and if you want to start a newsletter as a way of creating some magic, then Newsletter XP can be a valuable tool for you.

And until Monday, just two days from now, I’ve managed to claw out a $200 discount for you from the usual price that Newsletter XP sells for. If you’d like to take advantage of this, here’s what to do:

1. Go to the Newsletter XP sales page at https://bejakovic.com/nxp

2. If you decide you want to get Newsltter XP, then use coupon code JB20 at checkout.

3. Make sure the coupon code works — that you see the price drop by $200. This is not my funnel, and if you end up buying at full price, there’s nothing I can do about it.

How to create value from a broke, flaky, uncommitted audience

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This week, I’m promoting Newsletter XP, a course on how to build, grow, and monetize a successful newsletter.

The undeniable star of the Newsletter XP show is co-host Alex Lieberman.

​​In 2015, Lieberman started Morning Brew, an email newsletter covering the day’s business news. Within five years, he built up Morning Brew into a 9-figure company. In 2020, he sold a controlling stake in Morning Brew for $75 million.

There’s a bit in the monetization section of Newsletter XP where Alex is asked to give an example of how he pitched big brands like IKEA on buying six-figure ad packages in Morning Brew.

​​Alex obliges.

He delivers a 1 min 24 second masterclass — the pitch he performed 10 times a day, every day, for three years.

​​His pitch is truly impressive because what he is really selling is an audience of 18-30 year olds, largely broke, uncommitted, and flaky — not an audience any serious business would be excited to advertise to.

And yet, Alex does it with such enthusiasm, cleverness, and conviction, that by the end of his pitch, I bet the IKEA marketing execs were begging him to run their ad, versus the other way around.

Once again, this pitch was how Morning Brew got to tens of millions of dollars a year in ad revenue, before Alex cashed out for $75 million.

You can use Alex’s IKEA pitch to inform your own sales strategy if you want to start a newsletter and you’re bent on selling ads to big brands for a lot of money.

Or, you can use Alex’s pitch to guide where you take your newsletter.

Because you might not be getting into the newsletter business to hang out on LinkedIn and pitch marketing managers 10 times a day.

​​The good news is, Newsletter XP gives you real options for both the ad-supported path to monetizing your newsletter, as well as the no-ad path, where you simply create content you love and get paid well to do it.

It’s all there inside the course.

​​I’m promoting Newsletter XP until Monday, Feb 25, at 12 midnight PST. During this promotion, you can get $200 off the usual price of Newsletter XP. Here’s how:

1. Go to the Newsletter XP sales page at https://bejakovic.com/nxp

2. If you decide you want to get Newsltter XP, then use coupon code JB20 at checkout.

3. Make sure the coupon code works — that you see the price drop by $200. This is not my funnel, and if you end up buying at full price, there’s nothing I can do about it.

Newsletter XP sale

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Starting today and ending next Monday, I am promoting Beehiiv’s Newsletter XP course.

Newsletter XP is hosted by Alex Lieberman, the co-founder of Morning Brew, and Tyler Denk, the CEO of Beehiiv. They teach you how to start, grow, and monetize a successful newsletter business.

Newsletter XP is not cheap. Or maybe is cheap, given the expertise of the people inside this training. Newsletter XP features not only Alex and Tyler, but the operators behind some of the most successful newsletters out there, worth hundreds of millions of dollars when added up.

Whatever your price tastes, whether low or high, if you can afford this course, and if you are serious about starting and running a successful newsletter, then this course is a 100% worthwhile investment.

And besides, I got the Beehiiv people to agree to a $200 discount, only to my readers, only for the next five days, until next Monday, Feb 25, at 12 midnight PST.

If you would like to take advantage of this opportunity:

1. Go to the Newsletter XP sales page at https://bejakovic.com/nxp

2. If you decide you want to get Newsltter XP, then use coupon code JB20 at checkout.

3. Make sure the coupon code works — that you see the price drop by $200. This is not my funnel, and if you end up buying at full price, there’s nothing I can do about it.

The best source of info for starting a successful newsletter

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I checked just now. I first wrote about Alex Lieberman in this newsletter back in June 2020. Here are the first three sentences of what I wrote then:

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In 2015, Alex Lieberman started sending a daily email to 45 friends and classmates at the University of Michigan. Each email was empty except for a PDF attachment. The PDF was made from an ugly Word doc template, and contained a fun-to-read summary of the top business news for that day.

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That email described the beginnings of Morning Brew, a daily email newsletter about business news.

By June 2020, Alex had managed to grow Morning Brew to about $20 million a year in ad revenue.

Later in 2020, Alex sold a controlling stake in Morning Brew for $75 million.

After finding out about Alex Lieberman and how successful he had mad Morning Brew, I got kind of obsessed.

I’d long been interested in running a magazine-like email newsletter. And here was somebody doing it, and making millions off it.

So when I found out that Alex Lieberman was actually hosting a course, all about how to create a successful Morning Brew-like newsletter, I jumped on it.

The course was called Newsletter XP.

It was hosted and presented by Alex and Tyler Denk, who was employee #2 at Morning Brew and who is now the CEO of Beehiiv.

As you might know, Beehiiv is the email service platform that makes it easy to create a Morning Brew-like newsletter, and that’s currently used by newsletter successes like Milk Road (the biggest crypto newsletter)… the Rundown (the biggest AI newsletter)… and Arnold’s PUMP CLUB (the Gubernator’s personal newsletter).

Point being, Alex and Tyler have strong credentials for talking about newsletter success.

And inside Newsletter XP, they do so. They tell you how to create a newsletter if you want to succeed, and perhaps more importantly, how not to create a newsletter if you want to succeed.

Because there have been thousands or tens of thousands of newsletters launched over the past few years. But only a small fraction have become real businesses.

The secrets of the successful are within Newsletter XP.

The course doesn’t only feature Alex and Tyler.

​​It’s also got Codie Sanchez of Contrarian Thinking (8-figure business, wrote about her a couple days ago)… Max Tcheyan of Puck News (40k paid subscribers at $16/month, $70 million valuation)… Kendall Baker (Axios Sports, ~500k subscribers)… and a bunch more people who have been behind the biggest newsletter success stories, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars in value.

I first wrote to the people at Beehiiv last summer, and asked to promote Newsletter XP then.

I didn’t hear back anything.

I wrote again. Still nothing.

But I was not deterred.

​​I kept following up.

Eventually they agreed.

The hook was in! ​​Now that they agreed to let me promote Newsletter XP, I asked to have a discount over the regular price. Because why else would anybody buy now?

Since they had already agreed to let me promote, they agreed to the discount as well. Commitment and consistency for the win.

So starting tomorrow, and ending Monday, Feb 25, at 12 midnight PST, I will be promoting Newsletter XP, at a substantial discount over what it sells for normally.

If you are interested in starting a big-success newsletter, you will want to read my emails starting tomorrow.

And if you’re not interested, you still might want to read my emails, because I will be sharing and teasing the best stuff I personally got this star-studded training.

Stale autoresponders

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A personal confession:

I’m a compulsive salad buyer. I buy those prewashed and precut bags of mixed greens, and I stack them in my fridge. I eat them too, but not at the speed that I buy them at.

This often means that, like this morning, I’ll peek into an already opened bag of salad and evaluate critically whether it’s too wilted to consume. Meanwhile, other, perfectly fresh, new bags of salad sit in my fridge, waiting until they too become old enough and unfresh enough to deserve my attention.

Do you maybe sense an analogy in the making? Something to do with marketing? Well, here goes:

On last week’s Write & Profit coaching call, I asked one question to three of the five people who are in that group. The question was:
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​”What’s the strategy behind your autoresponder?”

There are good reasons to have an email autoresponder. And then there are bad reasons.

One bad reason is, “Everybody says I should.” Another bad reason is, “Because it’s a functionality of my ESP.”

Here are a few of the problems I saw with the autoresponders among my coaching students:

#1. They were out of date. They did not represent the current philosophy or positioning or main offers of the person writing.

#2. They were not as good as their more recent emails.

#3. They did not feel fresh or real, because they were not fresh or real.

#4. They did not allow new subscribers to get to the most current and exciting offers.

If you have nothing else to eat in your fridge but wilted salad, then that makes your choice of dinner easier.

Likewise, if you don’t write fresh emails, then having a stale autoresponder is better than sending no emails at all.

On the other hand, if you are writing fresh emails, then you need to have good reasons for also having an autoresponder.

And in the absence of such good reasons, it’s better to just throw the old salad, I mean old emails, out, and serve up what’s fresh and new.

Fresh and new is not hard to do. And if you want my recipe book for fresh emails, on demand, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

The anti-subscription high-ticket community

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I’ve recently noticed an interesting new pricing model. As an example, take Codie Sanchez’s Contrarian Community.

As you might know, Codie is an ex-private-equity, Goldman Sachs woman. She quit the corporate world and started using her PE background to buy boring, cash-flow businesses. Laundromats, RV parks, and the like.

Codie also started an info publishing business, Contrarian Thinking, teaching players with money to do the same as she’s doing.

Codie writes a free Contrarian Thinking newsletter, in which she gets her audience of 200,000 readers hyped up on the opportunity of buying boring businesses.

And once they get hyped up enough, she sells them training teaching them how to actually buy a boring businesses, plus ongoing support and networking, inside what she calls Contrarian Community.

So far, so standard.

The part that got me is that Codie doesn’t charge for access to Contrarian Community monthly. She doesn’t charge for it yearly either. Instead, she charges a one-time fixed fee of $10k. And she’s built a 8-figure business out of Contrarian Thinking this way.

I’ve noticed this pricing model in a few other successful info publishing and coaching businesses recently. At first, this had me surprised — because I’ve been trained to think continuity offers are where it’s at.

But a one-time, large fixed ticket to join a community makes a lot of sense. It means:

1. More money per member, today instead of tomorrow.

2. Better quality of member.

3. Better results for members, and therefore easier sales down the line, and a more attractive offer.

4. A better community. Rather than people constantly churning, there’s stability. There are more members contributing, and more successful members supporting and encouraging those who aren’t as successful yet.

So this is something to consider.

If you too offer ongoing coaching, training, or a community of some sort, you can do this too.

Figure out what your LTV is per customer… round that up… or double it or triple it. And then charge people a one-time fee, instead of leaving them to constantly wonder if it’s worth sticking around and renewing for another cycle.
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​Do this, and you might end up producing a better community, getting better results for your customers, and making a lot more money yourself.

How to go from not funny to funny

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Yesterday, I read about championship golfer Lee Trevino, who went from being not funny to being funny. Here’s how he did it, in his own words:

“When I was a rookie, I told jokes, and no one laughed. After I began winning tournaments, I told the same jokes, and all of a sudden, people thought they were funny.”

This might sound like a joke itself. It’s not. It’s a fact of life. Status, success, and authority are more important than what say.

A corollary is that what you say should be as much about hinting at your status, success, and authority, as it is about your “actual” message.

Think Tai Lopez, talking about the importance of reading books, while standing in his garage, and casually mentioning how it’s fun to drive his new black Lamborghini “here in the Hollywood hills.”

Of course, you can be more subtle than Tai if you want.

If you want to learn some subtle ways that I build up my status, success, and authority in my emails, you can find those described in my Simple Money Emails training.

This training shows you my simple, “hypnotic,” 1-2 process to make sales today and to keep your readers’ interest tomorrow.

I distilled down this process after close to 2,000 sales emails, written both for myself and for 7- and 8-figure clients I used to work with.

So if your jokes aren’t getting any laughs right now, and if your emails aren’t making any sales right now, this training could be the fix.

For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

What’s coming up in the next few weeks

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Over the next few weeks, I will be promoting 3 affiliate offers. I’ve never promoted any of them before. But I have personally bought, consumed, or participated in each one. They are:

#1. An actual, legit business opportunity for copywriters. This is for you if you want to get new copywriting clients who pay you a lot of money, a lot more than you are used to getting for the same work.

#2. The best source of info if you are looking to start your own Morning Brew-like newsletter. I’ve endorsed this offer multiple times already. And now, I’ve reached out and gotten the good people behind this offer. I got them to provide a special and sizeable discount while I’m promoting it.

#3. A writing course for entrepreneurs who want to build an audience on social media. I’m going through this course myself right now. And when I promote it, I will aim to make it free for you.

I’m telling you what’s coming up because if one of the above offers can benefit you, I want you know. And if you have an education or business-development budget for yourself, so that you save up. Don’t fritter away your money on other offers, just because.

I’ll promote the three offers above in the next 2-3 weeks, though the exact dates are still not fixed.

Meanwhile, if none of these three offers speaks to you, you might like my Simple Money Emails training. It shows you how to make more money from your list today and keep your readers coming back tomorrow. For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

Boring copy beats interesting copy

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Yesterday, I wrote about the value of being clear in email copy. I got a curious reply to that from a business owner who has been on my list for a while.

​​This business owner gave his personal experience with two email lists he’s on, by two marketers I will codename Jeremy and Gavin. My reader wrote about these two marketers:

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Jeremy’s emails are interesting, full of personality, and always something going on.

Gavin’s emails are super simple, clear, and direct to the point. Almost boring.

If I had to choose a better writer, it would probably be Jeremy.

But I’ve bought about 4 products from Gavin over the past 6 months, and none from Jeremy.

I also tend to read all of Gavin’s emails, because I know they are going to be easy to read, while I often just save Jeremy’s emails for later and end up not reading them.

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The point being:

If you write simply, clearly, and make a valuable point, you don’t need to be clever or impressive. You can even be boring. And you will still be effective.

That was why I created my Simple Money Emails training the way I did, and why I named it like I did.

Simple Money Emails shows you how to write simple emails, that make a clear point, and that lead to a sale.

I’ve used the approach inside this training to write emails that sold between $4k and $5k worth of products, every day, for years at a time.

If you’d like to do something similar:

https://bejakovic.com/sme