Even better than getting rid of cliches

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“The good salesman combines the tenacity of a bull dog with the manners of a spaniel. If you have any charm, ooze it.”

— David Ogilvy, The Theory and Practice of Selling the Aga Cooker

You ever find yourself spewing cliches? I know I do, particularly when I write a quick first draft. But I hate cliches, or rather, I hate being seen as a person who speaks in cliches.

Fortunately, it’s easy to fix in writing. That’s what second drafts are for. You can always take a cliche out and replace it with something less cliched.

But better yet, in my humble opinion, expressed from my humble couch in my humble home, is to take the cliche and somehow extend it, exaggerate it, subvert it. I believe the term of trade is “hang a lantern on it.”

A couple more examples, with the cliches and lanterns highlighted for you. From Gary Gulman’s “the best joke in the world”:

“All you have to know for this is that we have fifty states in America and they each have a two capital letter abbreviation. But that wasn’t always the case! Up until, I WANNA SAY, 1973… [beat] and so I WILL.”

From William Goldman, I believe in the Princess Bride though I can’t find the original quote:

“It had SEEN BETTER DAYS (or at least ONE BETTER DAY)…”

There’s nothing quite so funny as explaining a joke, so I will end this email here without killing yet another funny example for you. But I hope you get the point. In the words of screenwriter and director David Mamet:

“I used to say that a good writer throws out the stuff that everybody else keeps. But an even better test occurs to me: perhaps a good writer keeps the stuff everybody else throws out.”

Today’s email is brought to you by my Daily Email Habit service. It forced me to write an email I wouldn’t have written otherwise. And it turned out to be useful, for me at least.

Maybe this practice could be useful for you as well? If you’d like more info on Daily Email Habit:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

I believe you’re a 10

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Last night, I finished my second reading of Dave Sandler’s book, You Can’t Teach A Kid To Ride A Bike At A Seminar.

As you might know, Sandler was a sales trainer. His book is about his sales system, which Sandler developed after having something close to a nervous breakdown, day after day, trying to make sales using the old-fashioned approach of tried-and-tested sales techniques — “Would you prefer it in red or in blue?”

Curious thing:

The first real teaching Sandler does in his book is not about the initial step of his sales system, but something he calls I/R theory.

Sandler sets it up with a little exercise. You can try it yourself, right now.

Imagine you’re on a desert island, and you’ve been stripped of all your roles.

In other words, imagine yourself without any professional skill or accomplishment… without family relations and responsibilities… without local, national, and religious affiliation… without all your hobbies, talents, and memberships.

Imagine yourself completely isolated and stripped down to just your identity — your sense of being you.

On a scale from 1 to 10, how do you evaluate that identity?

Many people, says Sandler, rebel at this exercise, and claim that without their roles, they are nothing. Zero!

Many others give their identity a 3 or a 4, or maybe a 5 or a 6.

And yet, Sandler insists that everybody’s identity, yours and mine included, is always a 10, regardless of the roles we play and how well we play them that day.

Sandler gives some sort of argument to make his case. A baby supposedly has a “10” identity… and by induction, it must hold for adults as well. “How could it be otherwise?” Sandler asks, waving his arms a little.

Now, Bejako bear being a particularly skeptical species of bear, chances are good I would have simply rolled my eyes the first time I read this.

But it just so happened that at the same time I was first reading Sandler’s book, I was reading another book also, called The Will To Believe, by American philosopher and psychologist William James.

James gives a rational argument why believing stuff — even without any rational argument for believing it — can make a lot of sense in a lot of situations.

I won’t repeat James’s argument. It doesn’t matter tremendously. Just for me personally, it reminded me something I had realized before.

If you ask me, belief is not something that happens to you. It’s not done to you from the outside, by somebody putting facts and arguments into your head like they put leis around your neck when you arrive to Hawaii.

Rather, believing stuff is a personal, creative act, much like seeing is a personal, creative act.

Remembering this in the context of Sandler’s I/R theory was enough for me to honestly say, “Fine. Let me choose to believe I’m a 10.”

I choose to believe you’re a 10 too.

But why does it matter? Numbers are kind of arbitrary. Why 10? Why not 11, like the guitar amplifier in Spinal Tap?

You can label the numbers how you will. The important thing, says Sandler, is that you will find ways to make your role performance — in his case, sales success — fit your identity, your self-image.

So if have a self-image of, say, 6 out of 10, and if things in your life go bad, down to 2, you will find a way to get back to normal, back to 6.

On the other hand, if things go too well — a 9 or a 10 — you will find a way to get back to normal, too.

And if you’ve ever wondered why things never stay too good for you — why they never stay at a 9 or a 10 — maybe this is an explanation why.

Maybe try imagining yourself on a desert island, just you without any roles you play, and choose to believe you are in fact a 10.

If you do give it a go, let me know how it works out.

And as for making sales, and connecting with people, and writing day after day without quitting because things have gotten too uncomfortably good, you might like my Daily Email Habit service. For more info on that:

​https://bejakovic.com/deh

Another customer I like

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Yesterday, I wrote about an ex-subscriber of my Daily Email Habit service.

Even though this guy decided to unsubscribe, he’s still the kind of customer I like, simply because he took something I was teaching and actually put it to use.

Of course, I have other customers I like too, including some who keep being subscribed to Daily Email Habit, and keep putting it to use.

A couple days ago, I heard from one such customer, business coach Steph Benedetto, who is subscribed to Daily Email habit.

I want to share Steph’s message with you both because it serves my purpose, and because it might be valuable to you. In Steph’s own words:

===

I wanted to send you a little message to share an unexpected side effect of the daily emails.

Many of these daily emails are prompting me to think about things, like the one that said, “Share the coming attractions. What are you working on? What offers do you have coming up? Share them.”

When I do, I go, “Oh! I guess I have to know what I’m doing next then.” So I look and go, “Ok, this is what I’m doing… and this is what I’m doing… and this is what I’m doing.”

And it creates it through the writing.

As I’m writing about something, whatever the prompt is, and then tying it into whatever offer I have, the offers themselves are evolving and becoming clearer.

And new things are showing up. And I had no freaking idea that was available.

===

Most the Daily Email Habit puzzles are not “creative writing” prompts. Many of them are exercises that anyone with an online biz should be doing regularly, like figuring out who you want to work with… or what offers you’re putting out next… or what of business you actually want to run.

Now here’s the possibly valuable part I promised you:

You might not have the time and willpower to sit down and think about those things, and even less time and willpower to think about them regularly, over and over, as things adapt and change.

I know I don’t, not when it’s simply a todo item on my already-infinite todo list.

But like Steph says, with daily emails, you can two things at once. You can create content and make sales, on the one hand, and think about the big picture of your business and the next steps, on the other.

In other words, you can work IN the business… while at the same time working ON the business, just by taking the daily action of writing and sending a daily email.

And if you’d like to do that — to create offers, clarity, a plan — just by writing, then my Daily Email Habit might be a help for you. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

The kind of customer I like

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Nine days ago, I got a message from a now ex-subscriber to my Daily Email Habit service, who wrote:

===

I haven’t really been emailing since I subbed. But I don’t want to cancel cause you keep me inspired. I can say though that I took your advice on making a simple coaching call offer that 12 ppl have now bought through my LinkedIn and newsletter. Started at 90 euro for 1 hour, now I made it 130 for 45 minutes. And ppl are booking. Made just about 1000 euro so far and I’m learning a ton teaching people.

===

… and then two days ago, I saw that this guy, inspired and learning a lot though he was, unsubscribed from Daily Email Habit.

What to say? Here’s something you might not expect me to say:

I’d much rather have customers like this, who implement something I teach and then leave the fold, than ones I have to shame into staying just so they keep paying me, even though they are doing nothing with any of the info I provide.

That said, it seems a little short-sighted to me to unsubscribe for this guy in particular, since he was a Charter Member of Daily Email Habit, and as such got free access to my Daily Email House community (where the discussion about coaching call offers happened), all for $20/month.

It seems like one bit of inspiration he got via that had already paid for many months of the subscription. And in those “free” months, there’s a good chance he’d get one more idea or one more bit of inspiration, which would pay for many more months still, or maybe years.

As of last month, the Charter Member offer for Daily Email Habit has gone the way of the brontosaurus.

That means a month of Daily Email Habit “puzzles” costs $30 at the moment.

It also means the Daily Email House community is no longer a free bonus, but a paid group, only available at the moment as an upsell when you sign up to Daily Email Habit.

You might feel a bit bummed that you can no longer get the Charter Member deal. You might feel a bit better when I tell you the following:

The current offer is the best offer I will ever be making on Daily Email Habit going forward. And inevitably, there will be people who miss out on this current offer as well.

But really, whatever offer I’m making, you can be sure you stand to make 10x or 100x whatever I ask for, if only you consume and implement, at least an idea here or there.

If you’d like to get on that path today, rather than doing nothing, here’s where to get started:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

It’s not an OPEN loop, it’s an OPENED loop

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A while back, marketer Daniel Throssell wrote an email pointing out the nonsense of the term “open loop.”

An open loop, as you might know, is a technique in copywriting where you start a story and then cut it off to talk about other stuff, basically leading the reader on and sucking him deeper and deeper in.

I was a tad irritated by Daniel’s calling out “open loop” as nonsense, because I always thought the term sounded somehow poetic. But really, I had to admit I couldn’t make sense of how an “open loop” makes sense.

Well, I found out yesterday where “open loop” actually comes from and what it actually is — a corruption of a term from computer programming.

Computer programs have constructs known as loops — “for” loops, “while” loops etc. – where an instruction is executed over and over while some condition holds true. So you open, say, a “for” loop within a computer program, and then you specify what happens next. (What happens next can actually include opening a new “for” loop — so you end up with a hierarchy of embedded “for” loops, one within the other.)

This analogy between computer program loops and a technique of communication was first made by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, the creators of neurolinguistic programming or NLP.

In the 1970s, Grinder and Bandler were at the University of California Santa Cruz (my alma mater), a school that combined such interests as computer programming, linguistics, and dropping acid. It was natural that Bandler and Grinder would make the loop analogy, not only because it was in the water at UCSC, but because of the nested nature of both kinds of structures.

Ultimately, Bandler and Grinder got the idea for this technique from psychotherapist and hypnosis innovator Milton Erickson, one of the most effective therapists of all time. Bandler and Grinder sat at Erickson’s feet and recorded Erickson’s unique patterns of communication, which then became formalized as NLP techniques.

This really gets to the core of this email. The core is my answer to the daily puzzle from my Daily Email Habit service, which you can sign up for at the link at the bottom. Because one thing that Bandler and Grinder noticed was that Erickson would often embed suggestions in the middle of a story.

Embedded suggestions supposedly work better than if you just tell people to do something outright. And if you tell a bunch of nested stories, and embed a suggestion at the center of them all, it supposedly works even better.

Who knows though? Maybe it just worked for Milton Erickson, because the guy was unusually skilled, observant, and charismatic.

Besides, Erickson enjoyed constantly experimenting and inventing new techniques and new means of allowing people to make the changes that they wanted to make. He didn’t seem to be particularly wedded to any one technique, which is something I admire him for, and a credo I live by myself.

Grinder and Bandler, on the other hand, took Erickson’s improvised, free flowing, one-time experiments and formalized them into set rules and templates with catchy names.

Rules and templates with catchy names tend to sell well, which is why NLP ideas, effective or not, have become so widespread and influential, from corporate training, to copywriting, to pick up artists.

Along the way, of course, a lot has been lost, and even more has become corrupted. Which brings me back to the term “open loop.”

Now that we know where the term comes from, it’s clear it’s not really an “open loop.” Rather, it’s that you “open a loop,” or maybe you have an “opened loop.”

In Ericksonian hypnosis as in computer programming, you eventually have to close your loop to have a program that’s syntactically valid. (And if you’ve nested multiple loops, one within the other, you have to close each one, in reverse order to how you opened them.)

All that’s to say, I have to admit that Daniel Throssell was right and that the term “open loop,” poetic though it sounded to me, doesn’t really make sense. And now you know what term really does make sense — an OPENED loop — and maybe you’ve learned something else along the way.

And as for that link I promised you, it’s below. Maybe it could be valuable for you to take a look at it now:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Seeing is believing

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Try this little experiment right now:

Stretch out your left arm so it’s straight in front of you. Do it so the thumb of your left hand rests on the screen (of your phone or laptop, where you’re reading this email), right next to the X below:

X

Try it, right now. It will make the rest of this email much more impactful. Litterally stretch out your arm, and put your thumb next to the X above.

Next, look at your thumbnail. Focus on it. Make sure it’s nice and clear in your mind’s eye. And then, if you can, without moving your eyes, shift your attention to the X.

Ok go. follow the instructions above. And when you’ve done it, keep reading below.

Done?

If you’ve done the experiment above, you’ll find it’s surprisingly hard to not move your eyes when you focus on something else, even a few millimeters away.

But if you can switch your attention to the X while keeping your eyes on your thumb, you will also find that the X, close as it is to where your eyes are looking, is blurry and out of focus.

You might know this fact already, but seeing is believing:

Human vision is remarkably low-fi.

Only about 1-2 degrees of our visual field are in high definition and in focus. (That’s about a thumbnail’s worth, at arm’s length in front of you.) The rest of your visual field is blurry and devoid of detail.

The reason it doesn’t FEEL like that is because what we look at is always in focus, and because our eyes are constantly flitting from one place to another, without conscious control, based on what we find interesting in the moment.

When I was a kid, and probably for a good part of my adult life, had somebody told me that pretty much all my vision is a blur, with one tiny thumbnail’s worth of detail and “truth,” I would have rebelled, argued. All my experience and intuition spoke against it.

So could somebody have changed my stubborn mind?

Explanations of the fovea… quoting scientific experiments… testimonials from other people who say, “Yes, my vision is super low-fi”… none as these would be as effective as simply getting me to simply stretch out my arm, make a thumbs up, and experience for myself how, if I focus on my thumbnail, I can’t see anything else clearly, even half an inch away.

All that’s to repeat a fundamental marketing truth:

Demonstration is the most valuable kind of proof.

You might know this fact already as well. But seeing is believing.

And on the topic of demonstration:

I can tell you that the past couple of days, I’ve been doing demonstration of my “Heart of Hearts” system. That’s a system I’ve come up with to figure out what people in my audience really want and how to best present it to them, with the ultimate goal of more consistent success with new offers.

At the end of my last couple emails, I’ve been polling for interest in the Heart of Hearts system. Polling for interest is definitely one part of the Heart of Hearts system. But it’s not the first part, and it’s certainly not the last.

There’s stuff behind the scenes that won’t be obvious if you’re simply reading my emails.

But I will make you a deal:

If more consistent success with new offers is something that you’d be interested in, then hit reply and tell me a bit about who you are and what you do.

In turn, I will add you to a private announcement list.

That way, you’ll have the opportunity to get my Heart of Hearts system when I release it later this month. And even if you choose not to get it, you might get a further bit of live demonstration about how my Heart of Hearts system works.

Looking to get a little off the coaching ship?

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In response to my email yesterday, a reader and former coaching client (not sure he wants me to share his name) wrote in to say:

===

Hey John,

Hope all is well.

Good news – having a daughter by end of the month 😊

This sets an exciting challenge for me to dive further into low ticket product sales, ascension, repeat customers rather than clients.

So I can get a little off the coaching ship and buy back time.

===

The good news is if you are a coach, and you actually have clients you work with, then you are one lucky skunk.

That’s because coaches have personal contact with their best customers/clients, and the chance to really listen and ask a ton of questions — even very probing stuff.

A coach can get insights into what sucks for his or her prospects now… what they are really after… what they’ve tried before that didn’t work… what possible solutions would be unacceptable to them on religious, political, or dietary grounds.

All this info can go into the meat mincer, out of which comes a beautiful and shiny new offer-sausage that people actually want to buy.

That’s the high-level picture. I have much more to say about the specifics. But about that:

As I’ve been writing in my past couple emails, last year I came up with a new system for myself to help me get more predictable success with new offers.

I applied this system when I had the idea for my Daily Email Habit service. It worked great.

So far, I have only shared my system with the people inside my Daily Email House community.

This month, I will make this system available a bit more widely. I’ll be sharing it with a few people on my list, if I think it can actually be useful to them.

I will make you a deal right now:

If you’re looking to get a little off the coaching ship, then hit reply and tell me a bit about who you are and what you do. In turn, I will add you to a private announcement list, so you have the opportunity to get my system when I release it later this month.

A cautionary tale for course creators

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For five years, David Perell had kind of a dream online business.

Perell sold a high-ticket, cohort-based course, Write Of Passage, teaching people how to write online.

Write Of Passage sold for $4k a pop. It had 2,000+ buyers.

Like I said, a kind of dream business, at least in the little space of online course creators and such.

I mean, Perell was writing and helping people to do something positive for themselves. He was working in line with his own values and interests. And he was pulling in great money with it.

And then, last November, Perell shut it all down. In an email announcing that the current cohort of Write Of Passage would be the last one, Perell wrote:

“You need more than a great product to make a business work, and the main thing we were missing was a dependable flow of new students.”

I agree with Perell’s first conclusion. I don’t agree with the second.

You do need more than a great product to make a business work. Particularly if your product sells for a one-time fee (even if that’s $4k), and if you have a whole supporting team of coaches and facilitators and staff and whatever, and you’re running ads or paying affiliates to get those $4k sales.

But I don’t agree that the solution needs to be MORE NEW STUDENTS.

I’ve been making a 6-fig income off this newsletter for the past few years, off of just a few hundred buyers, way fewer than Perell’s 2k. I’ve even embraced this attitude formally. My goal is to make more sales from the same number of readers.

It’s a well-known direct marketing truth that all the profits are made on the back end.

It does take more than a great product to make a business work. But instead of chasing the mythical “dependable flow” of new students… you can just commit to creating a sequence of great new offers. (An offer by the way, doesn’t require creating a new product, though a new product will typically make you a new offer.)

Now about that:

As I wrote in my last email, last year, right around the time that Perell was shutting down his multimillion-dollar dream biz, I came up with a new system for myself to help me get more predictable success with new offers.

I applied this system when I had the idea for my Daily Email Habit service. It worked great.

So far, I have only shared my system with the people inside my Daily Email House community.

This month, I will make this system available a bit more widely. I’ll be sharing it with a few people on my list, if I think it can actually be useful to them.

I will make you a deal right now:

If more predictable success with new offers is something that could be useful to you, then hit reply and tell me a bit about your current offer situation. In turn, I will add you to a private announcement list, so you have the opportunity to get my system when I release it later this month.

More predictable success with new offers

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My first info product was called Salary Negotiation Blueprint. I created in 2012 after reading Gary Halbert’s Boron Letters.

Gary says something like, pick a problem, read a 3-4 good books on it, summarize the books, create your own super-dense guide packed with the best info, and then sell that at a premium.

So that’s what I did.

I picked salary negotiation because I was in an IT office job at the time, and the topic was a bit of a taboo to me, and personally fascinating.

It took me a few months to identify the right books, read them, summarize my notes, write my own little guide, and create a sales letter (maybe my first).

And once I launched The Salary Negotiation Blueprint on Clickbank, the result was…

Nothing.

Zero sales.

I later lowered the price. Nothing. I tried moving the Salary Negotiation Blueprint to Amazon Kindle. It didn’t sell there either. At some point I even ran ads to it via Adwords. Still nobody would buy the damn thing.

I recently checked the Google Drive folder where I kept all the work for this project.

There’s a spreadsheet of possible newsletter topics, a backlog of tasks to complete, and a subfolder of possible bonus ideas. Plus a half-dozen other files, probably totaling thousands of words of preparation, analysis, and plans,

In other words, I did all this work, spent all this time, created all sorts of busy work. The result was a very useful, well written, information-packed guide that nobody in the universe would pay me even a bit of money for.

I’m telling you this because it’s not the only time it’s happened to me.

The same thing has happened many times since — probably dozens of times.

Fortunately, I’ve also had a few random successes along the way, which kept me going, and some of which made me good money.

But last year, I finally got a bit fed up with having a “few random successes.”

So I developed a system.

This system is based on stuff that had done instinctively but inconsistently before… stuff I had learned from other good business owners and marketers… and on common sense which I too uncommonly applied.

I put my system to use when creating my Daily Email Habit service. It worked out really well.

That’s why I am now forcing myself to keep using this system for each new offer I think of creating, though the temptation remains strong to simply wing it once more, and have the thrill and rush of instant activity, followed by the dump and crash that comes when results roll in, or rather, don’t.

So far, I have only shared my system with the people inside my Daily Email House community.

This month, I will make this system available a bit more widely. I’ll be sharing it with a few people on my list, if I think it can actually be useful to them.

I will make you a deal right now:

If more predictable success with new offers is something that could be useful to you, then hit reply and tell me a bit about your current offer situation. In turn, I will add you to a private announcement list, so you have the opportunity to get my system when I release it later this month.

Want to write a book?

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Last fall, marketer Sean Anthony launched a new offer that really took off.

For the few years prior, Sean was on the “sell coaching via Google Docs about how to sell coaching via Google Docs” bandwagon.

But now he had something new. He started selling “book writing” as a hot new bizniss opportunity. He called it the “1 Hour Book.”

I’m no longer on Sean’s email list, but it seems like this new bizopp was a big seller for him, because he went all in on it for a few months.

From what I could understand, the 1 Hour Book concept was 1) find client, 2) interview client on the phone for an hour, and 3) use that to produce a book for client.

I don’t know whether Sean’s customers were getting clients with this offer, or whether the clients were getting books that actually did anything good for them.

All I know is that books have unmatched impact and power. For example:

Last year, I read a book titled How To Make A Few Billion Dollars.

The book was written by Brad Jacobs, who had founded and then built up 5 separate billion-dollar businesses.

5!

In 5 different industries!

The curious thing is, in spite of Jacobs’s incredible track record, I had never heard of the man, not until he wrote his book and went around on podcasts to promote it.

This morning, I was walking around the beach near my house and thinking how many billionaires I could name.

I could definitely name 5. I couldn’t name 10.

And yet, there are 815 or so billionaires in the U.S. alone.

These are people who have all the money in the world. They have enormous power too. They might have even incredible insights, knowledge, and perspectives that few others have.

And yet, who knows them?

My point is not to bemoan the hard life of the anonymous American billionaire.

My point is simply to give you a kind of extreme counterargument, if you think that your own accomplishments, expertise, and credentials are enough to get you known and appreciated.

It doesn’t work for billionaires. The billionaires who do want to get known find they have to teach what they know… or entertain an audience… or frankly make a spectacle of themselves.

You might think this is where I tell you to write daily emails, because that’s your shot at teaching, entertaining, and making a spectacle of yourself.

But no!

I’m telling you to write daily emails because you can reuse much or all of your daily email collection to write a book. And an interesting, worthwhile book, a book you won’t simply get by waffling for an hour on the phone and having somebody transcribe and edit that for you.

Plus, as you go do along and write those daily emails, which can then turn into an interesting and worthwhile book, you can build up an audience that will snap up your book when it comes out… and will likely give it 5-star reviews because they already like you and what you write… and will probably even recommend your book to others.

So if you want to write a book, my immodest and self-interested suggestion to you is to start writing daily emails.

And if you want my help with doing that:

https://bejakovic.com/deh