Ramit Sethi: Brave or stupid?

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I recently listened to an interview with Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a data scientist who is perhaps most notorious for discovering, through Google Trends data, that the country of India has a unique and unholy interest in adult breastfeeding.

Less well-known is that Stephens-Davidowitz was also college roommates with Ramit Sethi, the best-selling “I Will Teach You To Be Rich” finance guru who currently has his own Netflix show.

I don’t follow Ramit, so I don’t know if the story below is well-known. But it was new to me. Stephens-Davidowitz said of Ramit and their time as roommates:

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He announces he’s going to teach everyone personal finance. So he starts plastering around the whole dorm, “RAMIT SETHI’S PERSONAL FINANCE CLASS.”

I’m just like, “Ramit, you don’t know anything about personal finance. What the hell are you talking about? Nobody’s going to show up to your stupid class on personal finance.”

He puts on this class.

​​I think two people showed up. One of them had a big crush on him.

And I felt so bad. I’m like, this poor guy has no sense of what the world wants from him. He’s making a fool of himself. What a loser.

===

I read somewhere that, “Courage is knowing it might hurt, and doing it anyway. Stupidity is the same. And that’s why life is hard.”

Ramit Sethi persisting in spite of total initial failure is courage.

But we’ve never heard of the millions of unsuccessful morons who persisted and maybe persist still, in spite of clear signs telling them to stop.

And that’s why life is hard.

Except then I thought a bit more. I realized that you can make the odds better in your favor, and make life a little less hard.

It comes down to asking, does persistence here give me any meaningful accumulation?

There are fields where, if you continue to stick to it, your odds get no better, and maybe they even get worse.

Me winning the lottery is no more likely tomorrow even if I play the lottery today.

​​And me becoming a professional tennis player… that’s impossible today, and even with practice and dedication, it would only become more impossible tomorrow, as I get older, slower, and less likely to take even a point off a highly promising 14-year-old prospect.

But there are other areas where persistence does give you meaningful accumulation.

An email list is one. If you don’t do much of anything but stick around and keep emailing, your list will grow, however slowly. Eventually, you’ll cross some threshold where you have real influence.

Another area is money-making skill. You might have zero or negative money-making skills today. You might be an actual anti-talent. So was I, once upon a time.

But if you persist in learning and practicing a money-making skill, then the knowledge accumulates. Eventually, it crosses over a threshold where you have real skill at making money, first for others, then maybe even for yourself.

Life is hard if you don’t choose wisely, and if you keep investing in things that cannot or will not give you a return.

But invest in things that are almost guaranteed to pay you back, and you can wind up with your own version of the Ramit Sethi story above. Maybe some smartass who knows you today will be telling the story tomorrow of how, unbelievable but true, you weren’t always the huge success everybody now knows you as.

Anyways, enough Eat Pray Ramit.

I’ll now point you to my Most Valuable Email course today. For one, because it can help you keep emailing day after day (I personally find Most Valuable Emails most fun to write).

For another, because Most Valuable Email can help you build up an audience by doing nothing more than creating content (people will start recommending you on the strength of your emails alone).

But most importantly, because each time you write a Most Valuable Email, it accumulates a bit of money making skill in your brain. And eventually, that accumulation becomes meaningful.

If you’d like to get started today:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Two main chain cutters that delink price from product

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The past few days, I’ve been reading the eye-opening “No B.S. Marketing To The Affluent” by marketing coach Dan Kennedy.

​​​​As you can imagine, one of Dan’s main points is that you should charge a lot, and that you can, because with a bit of thought and preparation, it’s easy to break the heavy chain that links product to price in most people’s minds.

Dan suggests two main ways to do it:

“The two biggest chain cutters that delink price from product are 1) who is buying and 2) the context in which the product is presented, priced, and delivered.”

There’s a lot in that one sentence. So let’s get specifical. Let me tell you just one specific way to create a high-price selling context.

It’s to assume authority.

In the olden days, this meant getting a soapbox… walking to the the northeast corner of Hyde Park… putting your soapbox down on the ground among the chestnut leaves… stepping onto the soapbox… and starting to talk.

The modern-day version of this is creating your own digital platform of any kind and using it to communicate.

Because there’s some shortcut in the human brain, so that when you speak from a platform, the rest of us listen.

Sure, some of those listening will walk away after a time. But others will continue to stand there, transfixed, nodding their heads.

And if you, the speaker, ever deign to directly address me, the transfixed audience member, I’ll get a flush of excitement. I’ll look around to make sure others saw it too. “Did you catch that? He spoke to me! He made me an offer, directly! It’s expensive, but what else would you expect? He’s an authority!”

I know I react like this. I imagine that if you are honest with yourself, you will find you react like this too.

All that’s to say, get your own soapbox if you haven’t got one yet. Or get me to create one for you. ​​

And on that note, today is the last day I’ll be talking about my done-for-you newsletter service.

​​Your own newsletter is good for business, good for authority, and great for delinking price from product.

So if you have a business, but you haven’t got a newsletter, then take a look here for more information on this service:

https://bejakovic.com/announcing-done-for-you-newsletter-service/

The popping of the newsletter bubble

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A couple weeks ago, I signed up to a weekly newsletter that aggregates interesting links and online resources. At the top of the welcome email and in every email since, this newsletter says:

“Want to sponsor the newsletter and reach 9,000+ startup founders, designers, developers and tech enthusiasts? Just reply to this email to get in touch.”

So far, some of my best list growth results have come via classified ads I’ve run in other newsletters. And I like this new newsletter, and the recommendations they send out.

So I wrote to inquire about reaching 9,000+ startup founders, designers, developers and tech enthusiasts. How much?

It turns out the newsletter offers various packages, ranging from $300 per issue (main sponsor at the top) down to $60 (quick shout out at the bottom).

I calculated how much this newsletter is making per issue if each of the ads slots is filled. It comes out to $880 per weekly issue.

In other words, in the ideal scenario, the guy behind this newsletter makes about $3.5k per month, and it’s probably significantly less in reality because not all the ad slots are filled all the time.

Over the past few years, there’s been a lot of excitement, hype, and buzz about newsletter businesses. Thousands of newsletters have started up. Maybe tens of thousands. Inevitably, it’s led to a bubble.

Just as inevitably, most of those newsletters will not persevere long enough to succeed and become self-sustaining businesses.

All of which means today is the best time ever to start a newsletter — if you have a back-end business that a newsletter can promote and support, so you can be in it for the long term.

Not only will a newsletter help you recruit leads for your main business, and convert them, and retain them.

But pretty soon, you will be able to buy other newsletters that are folding. For cheap, you will be able to become the owner of vetted lists of self-selected, engaged readers or even buyers, who have expressed interest in what you offer.

In fact, the great newsletter poppening might already be under way.

I recently started listening to the Newsletter Operator podcast by Matt McGarry and Ryan Carr. Over the last few episodes, I’ve heard stories of such newsletter acquisitions, ranging from newsletters of a few hundred to a few thousand subscribers or more.

Of course, in order for the acquisition of a competitor newsletter to make any sense for you, you must have your own newsletter already set up and humming.

You must have somewhere to send those new subscribers, and you must be able to confidently tell them, “Of course, you can unsubscribe if you like. But if you liked [insert name of stupid and dull competitor newsletter], you will love [insert the name of your amazing and fun newsletter].”

All of which leads me, with the force of irrefutable logic, to my ongoing offer, the done-for-you newsletter service.

I’ve been talking about this done-for-you offer for the past few days. I will talk about it tomorrow still, and then I will shut up, at least on this particular topic.

If this offer is something that interests you, you can find more info below:

https://bejakovic.com/announcing-done-for-you-newsletter-service/

Shockingly illegal and stupid opportunity to make a lot of money

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A few days ago, I was at the gym, taking a break and looking at the squat rack with hate. I picked up my phone in the hope that some interesting bit of news would keep me from going back to exercise. And sure enough, I found it:

“Spain expels two US spies for infiltrating secret service”

The short and long of it is that the U.S. is spying on Spain, an ally country. Two American spies, associated with the U.S. Embassy in Madrid, convinced two Spanish counterparts — agents of the CNI, Spain’s equivalent of the CIA — to secretly hand over classified info.

The Spanish are confused. “What do Americans have to pay for if we give them everything they ask for?”
​​
I’m sure there are details I don’t know of this bizarre story. But from the outside, it looks so immensely stupid.

Let’s ignore the part about the U.S. pointlessly spying on a friendly and accommodating ally.

Let’s just look at the two Spanish CNI agents who made it possible. One was an area chief, head of one of the sections that make up the CNI. The other was his assistant.

The area chief was a veteran of the agency. He was well-known. His colleagues were shocked.

Why? How? You can probably guess.

As per the article I read at the gym, this area chief risked freedom, career, and self-respect “in exchange for a large sum of money.”

It’s hardly the first time someone has done stupid things for a large sum of money. But this case is an example of uniquely and immensely stupid.

First off, this area chief must be a person who was vetted and selected over a number of years for loyalty, intelligence, and trustworthiness.

And yet, not only did the area chief steal classified data from within the Spanish CIA, which you can imagine has all kinds of really complex and high-tech safeguards to prevent the detection of leaks…

… but apparently he was so careless that he was caught during a routine security check, when it became obvious he was accessing data that he didn’t need to perform his duties.

Now that the treason has become known, both the area chief and his assistant face 6 to 12 years in prison… the contempt of all their former colleagues and friends… and lifelong shame to carry around, which I estimate weighs as much as a baby rhinoceros.

Point being:

Greed.

​​Never underestimate how it warps people’s minds and how appealing to this motive can get people — including smart, upright, and self-possessed people — to do shockingly improbable, stupid, and even treasonous things.

Now I’ve gotta take a step back. Because I’m not telling you to tempt others to treason. Nor to engage in anything criminal.

But if you think that people in your marketplace are too this or too that to be tempted by pure greed… then remember the CNI area chief and that baby rhinoceros around his neck.

Remembering this image might just be a legal and quite smart opportunity to make a large sum of money.

All right, on to my offer:

My days of “done-for-you newsletter service” continue.

Like I’ve been saying for the past few thousand emails, a newsletter can be an easy, profitable, prestige-building way to get more people into your world, to get more of them to buy what you sell, and to keep them around until you sell the next thing.

And with my new done-for-you newsletter service, I’m offering to take all the work off your plate. In case you’re interested, you can get the full details below:

https://bejakovic.com/announcing-done-for-you-newsletter-service/

Announcing: Done-for-you newsletter service

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Really, I already announced my done-for-you-newsletter service yesterday, at the bottom of my last email.

But nothing is truly announced until you write an email with a subject line that starts with “Announcing.”

So here goes:

The background is I’ve been writing a newsletter in the health space for the past year.

​​In that space, I’ve seen lots of both new and established companies, which either don’t have a newsletter or have a terrible one, for various reasons ranging from unreadable layouts to offensively infrequent sending to tear-inducing dullness.

I thought, with my email marketing and copywriting and newsletter-creating experience, I could go and help these companies.

I could come up with a new concept for a newsletter for them, and give them ideas for ongoing content that would be interesting to their readers and valuable to the company.

But “concept” and “content ideas” are not easy to sell, at least in my experience.

So I thought I could offer the entire package.

Problem:
​​
I don’t want to write another ongoing newsletter, particularly if it’s not for myself.

Solution:

I do have this first newsletter, the one you are reading now, with hundreds or maybe thousands of writers who might be interested in a job.

I figured I could hire one or a dozen such writers from my list, coach them, monitor them, crack the whip on occasion, and guide them to make sure they provide quality work, so that everybody’s ultimately happy — the company, the writers, me.

That’s still pretty much the plan.

But I decided, as an experiment, to offer this done-for-you newsletter service to my marketing list first.

Here’s what to know:

1. This service is meant for you if you have a business already but no newsletter or, let’s be honest, a terrible newsletter.

​​This is for you if you have customers and an offer that’s selling, whether a product or a service.

​​Like I wrote yesterday, a newsletter can be an easy, profitable, prestige-building way to get more people into your world, to get more of them to buy what you sell, and to keep them around until you sell the next thing. And with my done-for-you newsletter service, you don’t have to do anything, except pay me to get it all done for you. ​​

2. This is not for you if you have nothing to sell. There’s nothing wrong with starting a newsletter if you have nothing to sell. But that’s just not the kind of client I’m looking for for this done-for-you service.

3. This is also not for you if you already have a newsletter, and you want my help growing your newsletter. My take is that, if you think you have a newsletter growth problem, what you really have is a monetization problem.

As you might be able to tell from my tone above, I’m not desperate to find clients for this service. I have enough money and other plans and opportunities. I even debated for a good while about offering this at all.

At the same time, it would be great to find a business I could genuinely help.

​​I like this newsletter game, and I find I’m good at it.

​​It would be great to have the experience of starting new newsletters and helping them succeed, without having to 1) create the offers to make the newsletters pay off and 2) do the writing myself. That experience was the reason I did decided to offer this in the end.

If you are interested in this done-for-you newsletter service, and if you fall into group #1 above, then write me and we can start a conversation.

I’ll talk about this offer over the next few days and then I’ll shut up about it.

​​If the offer turns out to be successful and the delivery enjoyable, I’ll take it to that health niche I was originally planning on targeting.

​​And if it’s not enjoyable or not successful, then I’ll lock it up in the cellar, along with my Most Valuable Postcard (locked up since 2022, next up for parole in 2038) and my “Win Your First Copywriting Job Workshop” (locked up in 2021, life sentence, not eligible for parole).

For now, this done-for-you newsletter offer still stands. If it’s got you excited, write me, and we can talk.

Edward Bernays, Dana White, and possibly you

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The UFC is one of the two sports promotions I follow. And so I know that earlier this week, UFC president Dana White teased potential fights that will happen next April at UFC 300, a milestone number for the monthly MMA event.

White says that UFC 300 will make fight fans “lose their minds” because of the caliber of the fights he will organize.

That’s the kind of problem the UFC faces these days: coming up with bigger and more exciting fights, and figuring out where to bury all the cash that these fights produce.

Today, the UFC is by far the dominant player in the sport of MMA.

​​The company is worth an estimated $12 billion.

But back in 2005, the UFC, already a decade old at the time, looked like it might have to fold.

They’d had a few successful fights that did well on pay-per-view. And yet, financially, the UFC was not successful or sustainable as a business. It looked like the company would go bankrupt if it had just one or two more lackluster events.

So how did we get from near-bankrupcy at UFC 50… to a $12 billion valuation at UFC 300?

I’ll tell ya. But before I give you the answer, it’s worth thinking about what you yourself — as a marketer, or a business owner — might do in the situation that the UFC was in back in 2005.

Would you run ads on TV hyping up upcoming PPV fights?

Would you send direct mail to subscribers of martial arts magazines, and try to sell recordings of your previous events?

Would you hire celebrities to come sit cageside to build up public interest?

None of those were what saved the UFC from ruin.

Instead, the owners of the UFC did something clever.

They didn’t try to sell their core product at all. Instead, they created a second product, and they promoted and sold that.

Specifically, they created a reality TV show, called The Ultimate Fighter. It showed a bunch of guys, living together in a house, training and bickering and competing with each other for the right to get a six-figure contract for the regular UFC promotion.

The show was a huge success. It drew lots of viewers. It became profitable in itself. It converted many of those new viewers into PPV customers.

The Ultimate Fighter saved the UFC. And then next year, with the next season, The Ultimate Fighter did it all over again.

Now, you are probably nowhere close to bankruptcy. But the point still stands:

You can tap into a popular format or medium. You can use that popular format or medium create a new offer that’s easy to promote… easy to sell… keeps people in the loop… builds your standing and reach… warms prospects up to your main business… and keeps them engaged even after they buy your core offer.

It’s a proven playbook to get traffic, conversion, and retention all in one.

Edward Bernays did it a hundred years ago.

Dana White did it 20 years ago.

You can do it today.

Now, if you’ve been reading these emails for a while, then you can probably guess the popular format or medium I would recommend for all of the above:

An email newsletter.

Odds are, if you’re reading my emails, and if you have a successful business, then you already have your own email newsletter.

But if you don’t, and you would like to, then hit reply. Because as of today, I’m offering a done-for-you newsletter service.

I will have more to say about it in my email tomorrow. But if you want to talk about it now, then hit reply, tell me who you are and what your business is, and we can take it from there.

Valuable positioning idea inside

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now here’s the curious thing that happened:

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

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

To be fair, this might be absolute coincidence.

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

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

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

===

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

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

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

https://bejakovic.com/lost

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

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

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

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

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

Would you like to know what that word was?

​​Good, then I’ll tell ya.

That word was inshallah.

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

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

Is it because I myself am Muslim?

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

Was it a joke or irony?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All right, moving on.

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

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

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

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

https://bejakovic.com/reallyrich

My first 1-star Amazon review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unfortunately, we will never know.

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

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

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

But back to the message Kieran sent me last week.

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

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

===

Copywriting is the most important skill for any creator.

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

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

===

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

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

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

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

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

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

The essence of expert showmanship (prepare to be underwhelmed)

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

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

I see you rolling your eyes.

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

Bear with me for a second.

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

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

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

That’s what attention to detail means.

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

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

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

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

​​Here’s an idea:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I opened up the cart again just for those people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you want in, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments