My piratin’ days

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ARRR, I be quite old, much like a giant tortoise. And to prove it, I can tell you I was there when the Internet was first becoming a thing.

Quite naturally, I was also there when a friend in high school first told me you could get music, for free, on the Internet.

For reference, this was back when the only way to listen to the music you wanted, when you wanted, was to hand over the modern equivalent of about $30 for a CD.

“No!” I told my friend in disbelief when he told me about this piracy stuff.

“Yes!” he said. “Any kind of music you want. You just type the name of the song into AltaVista, and you look for mp3 files.”

So I tried it. I remember that the first song I searched for and pirated was The Beach Boys’ I Get Around. It took about three days to download.

Now here’s the head trip:

A short while later, I actually ended up handing over the modern equivalent of about $30 for a CD, The Beach Boys’ Greatest Hits, Volume 1.

I did this even though I had already pirated several Beach Boys hits off the Internet… and even though I could probably get the other ones too, with just a bit of searching.

Now let me make it clear:

1. This email is not an invitation to pirate and salve your conscience by saying you will somehow pay for it later, when you have more money. Piracy, romantic though it may sound, is well known to lead to scurvy and hangings, among other unpleasant consequences. It’s a miracle I survived my piratin’ days and lived to tell the tale.

2. This email is also not an invitation to give away your catchy songs for free, in the hope that people will eventually pay for the album. In fact, my point is kind of the opposite of that.

My point is that format is positioning.

I don’t remember exactly what made me pay for the Beach Boys CD.

I probably rationalized it to myself. I could listen to the music on my stereo instead of the crappy computer speakers… there were songs I might not find online, and they took so long to download… I could take the music with me and play it in the car or at a friend’s house.

There was probably a bit of all that. But really, I imagine my decision was mostly irrational.

The album had a colorful, attractive cover. I had the modern equivalent of $30 burning a hole in my pocket. Plus, I had been well trained over the years to buy CDs, and this was in fact a CD for sale. So I bought, and I was even happy about it.

Here’s my takeaway for you:

If you have free content, you can legitimately repackage it and sell it for good money, even to the people who have gotten much of that stuff for free in another format.

And if you’re selling stuff but not making as much money as you like, then the same lesson applies. Change the format, and you can double, triple, decuple, or even vinguple the prices you charge. People will buy, and even be happy about it.

Because format is positioning.

And if you want my help putting this lesson into practice, well, then read on. Today is the last day I will be making the offer below, because tomorrow we weigh anchor and set sail:

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I’ve set aside time over the next month to help two business owners to quickly churn up new offers using their catalogue of existing products. The ultimate goal here is to:

* Create something new and exciting for your audience, without creating entirely new products

* Develop a new asset for yourself — a new offer you can reissue in the future with little tweaks or maybe without any tweaks

* Bring in new buyers who might then buy other stuff from you, or get deeper into your world

* Do a bit of work and make back a good deal of money as a result

If you want a specific example:

Last week, I sent three emails over two days in what I called my Shangri-La MVE event. Those three emails ended up selling 22 copies of a $297 course that I had already promoted hundreds of times over the past couple years. $6.5k or so when all the money comes in, and all it took in terms of work was a couple of hours of repackaging content I already had.

I’ve run other such promo events, ranging anywhere from 1-14 days. Some were complete duds, and brought in less money than this Shangri-La event. But others brought in more, well into the 5-figures.

Your specific numbers?

It will depend on how big your list is, the relationship you have with the people on there, and of course your offers.

But with my second pair of eagle eyes scanning over all your assets… and my experience running not only my own “reissue events” but also coaching a couple dozen copywriters who worked on these kinds of promos for clients… you will be more likely to come out of this with a result you can be happy with.

Like I said, I’m talking to a few business owners about this already.

If you’re interested in this offer in principle, hit reply and let me know a bit about your list (size, how often you write, etc.) and your back catalogue of previous hits.

I will be promoting this offer until this Thursday. I want to talk to everyone who’s interested and find the two people I think I am best qualified to help… and then we’ll kick things off.

The biggest secret to building a big audience

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I’ll tell you about the biggest secret in a second. But I feel I should sneak up on it a little, so it has more impact.

So let me ask you:

Have you ever heard of Leroy Smith? The former pro basketball player, with the story in his past?

Smith attended the University of North Carolina at Charlotte from 1981 to 1985, and he played for the UNC team.

After that, Smith turned pro and played for various prestigious basketball teams, including Hemel & Watford Royals, the Westchester Golden Apples, and Kumagai Gumi Bruins.

Yes, those are all real basketball teams. I did not make them up.

In many instances, Smith led these no-name, fourth-tier teams that nobody cares about in various important categories, including scoring, rebounds, and blocked shots.

No? None of this sounds familiar? You haven’t heard of Smith or his accomplishments?

Honestly I’m not surprised.

Really the only reason anybody today has heard of Smith, and that includes me, is that back in 1978, Smith got picked for his high school varsity team over his childhood friend Michael Jordan.

Smith and Jordan were both 15 at the time. But Smith already stood at 6’7, or 201 cm, while Jordan was only 5’10, or 180cm.

When Michael Jordan was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame, Smith was there in the audience. Jordan said of Smith, “He’s not any bigger, his game is about the same.”

Meanwhile, Jordan became Jordan. It helped that he had a rhinoceros-sized chip on his shoulder.

“It all started when Coach Herring cut me,” Jordan said. “It was embarrassing, not making that team.”

Jordan spent his sophomore year working hard on basketball. He became more skilled and confident. More importantly, he developed the habits of obsessive self-improvement and discipline and training.

These habits, combined with a growth spurt that saw him add another 8 inches in height, landed Jordan not just on the high school varsity team… not just on the college basketball team… not just in the pros… but made him into the greatest basketball player of all time.

“Business,” I hear you saying, “talk business, Bejako! Michael Jordan is all well and good, but don’t you realize my time is money…”

Fine. Let me hurry my analogy along. I’d like to present to you an idea I heard from marketer Travis Sago:

“The biggest secret to building a big audience is knowing how to monetize a small one.”

Travis’s point is that if every visitor you could drive to your sales page was worth a thousand bucks to you… would you really have a traffic problem?

Would you have any trouble buying traffic?

Would it be hard to get other people as affiliates for your offer?

Would you need to get motivated to write and send another email, knowing that 10 or 12 people – “only 10 or 12 people!” — will click through to your sales page?

I doubt it.

Maybe a thousand bucks per visitor to your sales page sounds ambitious or even unrealistic.

Fine. But if you’re constantly looking for new traffic, or if you think that more traffic will solve all your problems, then I bet you have some room to develop the habit of obsessive list monetization.

Figure out how to monetize your current list better… and not only will it become way easier to kick off that audience growth spurt… but when the growth spurt happens, you’ll have a shot at a Michael Jordan-like career, instead of a Leroy Smith-like career.

And on that note, I’d like to remind you of my ongoing hand-raiser campaign. Here are the details on that, from my email yesterday:

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I’ve set aside time over the next month to help two business owners to quickly churn up new offers using their catalogue of existing products. The ultimate goal here is to:

* Create something new and exciting for your audience, without creating entirely new products

* Develop a new asset for yourself — a new offer you can reissue in the future with little tweaks or maybe without any tweaks

* Bring in new buyers who might then buy other stuff from you, or get deeper into your world

* Do a bit of work and make back a good deal of money as a result

If you want a specific example:

Last week, I sent three emails over two days in what I called my Shangri-La MVE event. Those three emails ended up selling 22 copies of a $297 course that I had already promoted hundreds of times over the past couple years. $6.5k or so when all the money comes in, and all it took in terms of work was a couple of hours of repackaging content I already had.

I’ve run other such promo events, ranging anywhere from 1-14 days. Some were complete duds, and brought in less money than this Shangri-La event. But others brought in more, well into the 5-figures.

Your specific numbers?

It will depend on how big your list is, the relationship you have with the people on there, and of course your offers.

But with my second pair of eagle eyes scanning over all your assets… and my experience running not only my own “reissue events” but also coaching a couple dozen copywriters who worked on these kinds of promos for clients… you will be more likely to come out of this with a result you can be happy with.

Like I said, I’m talking to a few business owners about this already.

If you’re interested in this offer in principle, hit reply and let me know a bit about your list (size, how often you write, etc.) and your back catalogue of previous hits.

I will be promoting this offer until this Thursday. I want to talk to everyone who’s interested and find the two people I think I am best qualified to help… and then we’ll kick things off.

If you’ve skimmed the cream off your list via daily emails…

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Earlier this year, in March to be specific, I wrote an email about turning skim milk into butter. That email was based on a question from a reader, who wrote:

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I have a question about your Simple Money Email course.

I’ve been writing an email to my list six days a week (or occasionally five) for the past month and a half or so, since about the beginning of February. At first, sales came in, but since about the beginning of March, they’ve declined by a lot, by over 50%. Will your course help me to figure out what’s going wrong so that I can set things to rights?

===

The answer in short is “probably no.”

If you’ve never emailed your list regularly, then what you have yourself is a pail of rich whole milk, with the cream at the top. You simply go in there, use a ladle to skim the cream off the top, and with a bit of additional processing, you get yourself some delicious Kerrygold.

But once you’ve pretty much skimmed all the cream off top, the butter creation becomes harder.

It’s still possible to occasionally turn skim milk into butter — I had one guy on my list for 775 days, reading 775 emails, before he decided to buy something from me.

But it’s never as easy as right at the start.

And assuming you’ve been doing a decent job of cream collection, no kind of magical spoon, skimmer, or ladle will really make that much of a difference after a while.

So what do you do?

You got a couple options.

One, you can add new whole milk to your pail — ie. add new people to your list.

Two, you make other use of the skim milk that you have. There’s no law saying you can only sell your list just one thing, in just one way. Or stretching the analogy, there’s no law saying you can only ever make butter from your pail of milk, as opposed to also making cheddar, ice cream, and quark.

Back in March, when I first wrote about this, I promised I would one day talk more about cheddar creation, specifically, about churning up new offers that don’t involve creating whole new products.

Well, that day has come.

As I wrote yesterday, I’ve set aside time over the next month to help two business owners to quickly churn up new offers using their catalogue of existing products. The ultimate goal here is to:

* Create something new and exciting for your audience, without creating entirely new products

* Develop a new asset for yourself — a new offer you can reissue in the future with little tweaks or maybe without any tweaks

* Bring in new buyers who might then buy other stuff from you, or get deeper into your world

* Do a bit of work and make back a good deal of money as a result

If you want a specific example:

Last week, I sent three emails over two days in what I called my Shangri-La MVE event. Those three emails ended up selling 22 copies of a $297 course that I had already promoted hundreds of times over the past couple years. $6.5k or so when all the money comes in, and all it took in terms of work was a couple of hours of repackaging content I already had.

I’ve run other such promo events, ranging anywhere from 1-14 days. Some were complete duds, and brought in less money than this Shangri-La event. But others brought in more, well into the 5-figures.

Your specific numbers?

It will depend on how big your list is, the relationship you have with the people on there, and of course your offers.

But with my second pair of eagle eyes scanning over all your assets… and my experience running not only my own “reissue events” but also coaching a couple dozen copywriters who worked on these kinds of promos for clients… you will be more likely to come out of this with a result you can be happy with.

Like I said, I’m talking to a few business owners about this already.

If you’re interested in this offer in principle, hit reply and let me know a bit about your list (size, how often you write, etc.) and your back catalogue of previous hits.

I will be promoting this offer until this Thursday. I want to talk to everyone who’s interested and find the two people I think I am best qualified to help… and then we’ll kick things off.

Do you have a back catalogue of info products?

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Do you have a back catalogue of previous products — courses, ebooks, recorded workshops — that sold well once upon a time?

If you do, I have an offer you might like.

I teased this offer at the bottom of my email yesterday. Based on the responses I’ve gotten so far, I’m making this appeal more broadly and loudly.

The gist:

I’ve set aside time over the next month to help two business owners reissue some hits from their back catalogue. The ultimate goal here is to:

* Create something new and exciting for your audience, without creating entirely new products

* Develop a new asset for yourself — a new offer you can reissue in the future with little tweaks or maybe without any tweaks

* Bring in new buyers who might then buy other stuff from you, or get deeper into your world

* Do a bit of work and make back a good deal of money as a result

If you want a specific example:

Last week, I sent three emails over two days in what I called my Shangri-La MVE event. Those three emails ended up selling 22 copies of a $297 course that I had already promoted hundreds of times over the past couple years. $6.5k or so when all the money comes in, and all it took in terms of work was a couple of hours of repackaging content I already had.

I’ve run other such promo events, ranging anywhere from 1-14 days. Some were complete duds, and brought in less money than this Shangri-La event. But others brought in more, well into the 5-figures.

Your specific numbers?

It will depend on how big your list is, the relationship you have with the people on there, and of course your offers.

But with my second pair of eagle eyes scanning over all your assets… and my experience running not only my own “reissue events” but also coaching a couple dozen copywriters who worked on these kinds of promos for clients… you will be more likely to come out of this with a result you can be happy with.

Like I said, I’m talking to a few business owners about this already.

If you’re interested in this offer in principle, hit reply and let me know a bit about your list (size, how often you write, etc.) and your back catalogue of previous hits.

I will be promoting this offer until this Thursday. I want to talk to everyone who’s interested and find the two people I think I am best qualified to help… and then we’ll kick things off.

GOLD

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“We thought it was finished. I really believed that. Oh, they might play the odd song, with a reference to the seventies, perhaps, but that’s it.”

Those are the words of Björn Ulvaeus, one of the members of the Swedish pop foursome ABBA.

Maybe you’ve heard of ABBA? They were kind of a thing fifty years ago, back in the 1970s. But ABBA broke up in ’82. By the end of the 1980s, they had largely fallen into oblivion.

That’s how things go. Fashions change, audiences move on, content is disposable.

It would have ended up the same with ABBA. Except…

A team of record company execs at PolyGram saw some possibility there.

They worked to issue a compilation of ABBA hits, collected and organized specifically for the relatively new CD format, along with a loving set of new liner notes, and extensively promoted by the company.

The result, which came out in 1992, was ABBA: GOLD.

And GOLD is right:

The album has gone on to sell 32 million copies worldwide. It’s become not only ABBA’s best-selling album, but among the 25 top-bestselling albums of all time.

Every couple of years, the record company — first PolyGram, then Universal — finds an excuse to reissue the album, and make a few more million sales.

First there was a “Remastered Reissue” in 1999, to mark the 25th anniversary of ABBA’s EuroVision win…

In 2002, there was a 10th anniversary reissue…

In 2008, a new remastered version came out along with the release of Mamma Mia (the movie)…

In 2014, there was an edition to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Eurovision win…

And then, in 2022, there was still another reissue, to mark the 30-year anniversary of the initial release of the album.

There were regional versions, too — Spain, Australia UK… plus VHS and DVD versions… all totaling in the millions upon millions of sales.

But it’s not just money.

GOLD is most probably the only reason that anybody knows ABBA today… why hits like Dancing Queen and Mamma Mia and Waterloo are still super popular, and can be heard in cafes, dance clubs, karaoke bars, and wedding receptions… why entire new generations know and love ABBA songs (or know and hate, but the “know” is the important part).

And if you don’t believe me:

Try to remember some hits by The Sweet or Nazareth or Gentle Giant. All were big acts around the same time as ABBA. But they weren’t lucky enough to get their own GOLD compilation album — or at least it wasn’t properly promoted — and that’s why nobody today has heard of them.

GOLD, by the way, was the start of a giant sea change in the music business.

Lucian Grange, one of the record execs behind ABBA: GOLD, and now the CEO of Universal Music Group, has bought the back catalogues of Elton John, the Beatles, The Bee Gees, Bob Dylan, on and on.

Was a time when, if music wasn’t new, who wanted to listen to it? At best, it was relegated to the “Oldies” radio station.

Today, that’s all changed. Back catalogues account for 70% of the entire music industry. We’re all listening to music recorded 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago, whether we want to or not.

Maybe there’s a lesson there? Maybe?

Maybe you can take your proven hits from years or decades past… collect and organize them… add in some new liner notes… and reissue them to great success? And then, keep reissuing… remastering… and taking any and every occasion to bring in a few more million in sales?

So lemme ask you:

Do you have a back catalogue of previous products — courses, ebooks, recorded workshops — that sold well once upon a time?

If you do, hit reply. I have an offer for you that you might like.

Readers demand to know: Did Vivian buy?

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This morning, I got an email from a loyal reader, Liza Schermann, the original Crazy Email Lady, who wrote:

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I, and maybe other readers, have only one question left:

Has Vivian, after all these emails, bought MVE? Your audience deserves to know. Don’t leave us high and dry, the suspense is killing us.

===

If you have not been reading my emails over the past couple days, here’s a quick recap:

1. Last week, I sent out a survey. One respondent, named Vivian, replied that she found it very difficult to find info that could help her with “coming up with interesting ideas and presenting it in a concise and compelling way,” in order to create more effective email campaigns.

2. “Where am I falling short?” I asked myself. After all, I have courses that promise exactly that outcome. So I decided to put on a big promo event, in honor of Vivian, to sell my Most Valuable Email program in a better way than I’ve been doing so far.

3. After some furious late-night thinking, I realized a big promo event won’t work for me (it would burn my previous buyers). So I scaled it back to a smaller promo event, which I called the Shagri-La MVE offer.

This brings us to today. So the big question:

Did Vivian buy this offer for which she was responsible?

Did she invest to learn the MVE trick and to place herself in an exclusive group that has access to this rare and precious knowledge?

Or did she coolly and quietly ignore this offer, which was created in her honor?

The answer is…

[Quiet please…]

[Drum roll…]

[Spotlight on the center of the stage…]

[I open the envelope to reveal:]

A big, fat NO.

No, Vivian did not take me up on my Shangri-La MVE offer.

In fact, from what I can see, though open tracking is infamously unreliable, Vivian hasn’t even opened any of my emails around this promo that she kicked off.

What’s the cause of it?

Who knows.

Maybe I’m continuing to fall short. Or, like I heard from another loyal reader, Fotis Chatz, who once styled himself as the “world’s most handsome email marketer,” maybe it had nothing to do with my marketing or offer.

Maybe Vivian just doesn’t identify with me personally… or maybe she only ever buys from FB posts or webinars, and not emails and sales letters.

Again, who knows. I’ll have to live with this cruel uncertainty.

On the other hand, the good news is is that 22 other people did take me up on the Shangri-La MVE offer.

That means I managed to get 22 more people to find out the Most Valuable Email trick.

If put into practice regularly, this trick cannot fail to turn these folks into better marketers, and in time get them lots of sales, a more engaged list, and a good-old time writing daily emails.

That’s honestly what I hope for whenever I manage to put a copy of MVE into a new pair of virtual hands.

As for me, this promo means I got 22 people to be a little closer to me.

Of the 22 who took me up on this offer, the majority were previous buyers, a group that I protect and cherish.

Also, a good number who had never bought anything from me before took me up on this offer.

Every time I make a sale to somebody new, I make it drastically more likely they will buy something from me a second or third time. Like I wrote a couple days ago, my 18-month average customer value is something like $360 and climbing, and that’s not accounting for any affiliate sales I have made.

I expect the same will happen here.

Finally, since 5 people who bought this offer paid in full, that means this little promo has been worth somewhere between $3,266 (what I have in my PayPal and Stripe as of today) and $6,534 (what I will have once all the payments from the payment plan come in).

No, that’s not P. Diddy money. But I’m happy with it, considering MVE is a 2-year old course, promoted already hundreds of times.

Beyond that, I think $3,266-$6,534 is a respectable return for 3 emails over 2 days, and for creating a couple of bonuses, which took me about two hours in total.

I’ll leave you to draw your own marketing conclusions from this post-mortem of my Shangri-La event.

Or maybe, rather than figuring out the marketing takeaways from my little campaign, you can simply use it as inspiration for putting into practice all the good ideas you already have at your disposal, and doing the work that you know you want to get done.

You don’t have to be perfect, and you can still do quite well.

By the way, if you’re not as productive as you like… if you’re not putting all those good ideas available to you into practice… if you’re struggling with perfectionism… or if you’re simply not doing what needs to be done… I have a resource that might help.

I mentioned this resource earlier this year, in an email back in June.

I wrote at the time that the ideas inside this resource have been working for me, where things like meditation, and NLP, and willing myself to “create my own reality,” had failed.

It’s now four months later, and the ideas inside this little resource continue to work for me.

If you’d like to find out what this resource is, what those ideas are, and see if they can work for you too:

https://bejakovic.com/stillworking

Last chance: Shangri-La mountain pass closing

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“Shangri-La, he called it. La is Tibetan for mountain pass.”

No, it’s not. I checked just now. The Tibetan word for mountain pass is something entirely different than “la.”

But Shangri-La is what James Hilton, the author of Lost Horizon, called his magical lamasery hidden away in the Himalayas, And a narrow and hidden mountain pass is how he explained that Shangri-La was practically impossible to find or reach — every century only a few wanderers managed to happen upon the place.

I’m telling you this because in a few short hours, at 12 midnight PST, the mountain pass to my Shangri-La MVE event will close. Once the pass gets buried under of mountain’s worth of snow and ice, there’s no saying when or if it will ever be passable again.

I won’t be writing any more emails before the deadline. So if you are interested in reaching the magical and carefree valley on the other side, it might make sense and make your way through the narrow and hidden mountain pass right now:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

And if you need a reminder of what this Shangri-La MVE offer is all about, before the clock strikes 12, here are the full details:

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I’m calling this offer the “Shangri La” MVE offer. And that’s because like Shangri La, the three parts of this offer only appear once every fifty years. Specifically:

1. I normally don’t offer a payment plan for Most Valuable Email. I did offer a payment plan for MVE once, as a joke, for one day only. Well, like Shangri La, the payment plan is back, and not as a joke.

You can get MVE for $99 today and then two more monthly payments of $99. This payment plan is there to make it psychologically easier to get started — in my experience, people take up payment plans not because they cannot afford to pay in full, but simply because it feels like a smaller commitment.

2. I am also offering a bonus, which I’m calling Shangri La Disappearing Secrets.

Over the past years, I have periodically sent out emails where I teased a secret, which I then turned into a disappearing, one-day bonuses for people who took me up on an offer before the deadline.

Inside this Shangri La Disappearing Secrets bonus, I have collected 12 emails that teased 12 secrets — and I have revealed the secrets themselves. These include:

* An email deliverability tip that is so valuable I decided not to share it publicly, but only with buyers of MVE. This tip is something that multiple people have told me I should turn into a standalone course or training — which I most probably will do one day.

* Stage Surprise Success. Step-by-step instructions for creating effective surprise in any kind of performance, whether thieving, magicking, comedy, drama, or simply writing for impact and influence. And no, it’s not just shocking people with something they weren’t expecting. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite of that.

* A daring idea to grow your list and build up your authority at the same time. I have not yet had the guts to put it into practice, even though I have lots of reasons to believe it would work great to build my own authority, and get me more high-quality leads than I’m getting now.

* A persuasion strategy used by con men, pick up artists, salesmen, even by legendary copywriters. I ran a little contest in an email to see if anybody could identify this strategy based on a scene from the movie The Sting. Out of 40+ people who tried to identify the strategy, only 2 got it right.

* An incredible free resource, filled with insightful and proven marketing and positioning advice. This resource comes from a man I’ve only written about once in this newsletter, but who has influenced my thinking about marketing and human psychology more deeply than I may let on — maybe more deeply than anybody else over the past few years.

* Magic Box calls-to-action. Use these if you don’t have a product or a service to sell yet, or if you only have a few bum offers, which your list has stopped responding to every day. Result of a “magic box” CTA when used by one of my coaching clients: the first hand-raiser ever for an under-construction $4k offer.

* A new way to apply the Most Valuable email trick, one I wasn’t comfortable doing until recently. Now that I’ve started using it, it’s gotten people paying more attention… leaning in more… even rereading my emails 3x… and reaching out to reopen dropped business conversations.

* Steven Pressfield (the author of the War of Art and the Legend of Bagger Vance) used to write scripts for porn movies. He once shared two porn storytelling rules. I’ll tell you what they are, and how smart marketers, maybe even me on occasion, use one of these rules in their own sales copy and marketing content.

* A list of 14 criteria of truthful stories. I’m not saying to get devious with this — but you could use these criteria to jelly up a made-up story and make it sound absolutely true. More respectably, you can use these criteria to take your true but fluffy story and make it sound 100% gripping and real.

* Why I drafted US patent application 16/573921 to get the U.S. Government to recognize my Most Valuable Email trick as novel, non-obvious, and having concrete, practical applications.

* Two methods for presenting a persuasive argument, as spelled out by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. I illustrate these two methods with a little public debate that Daniel Throssell and I engaged in via our respective email newsletters. Daniel and I each adopted opposing methods, just as described by Kahneman.

* An infotainment secret I stole from Ben Settle. As far as I know, Ben doesn’t teach this secret in his books or newsletters — I found it by tracking Ben’s emails over a 14-day period and spotting Ben using it in 8 of those 14 emails. And no, I’m not talking about teasing, or telling a story, or stirring up conflict. This is something more fundamental, and more broadly useful, even beyond daily emails.

3. The Shangri La Library Of Rare And Priceless Ideas. 937 interesting ideas I’ve collected over the years from books, podcasts, newsletters, courses. Reach into this library to never again run out of ideas for your Most Valuable Emails.

So there you go. My Shangri La MVE offer:

A payment plan for Most Valuable Email that only appears twice in a century… 12 bonus persuasion secrets… and all the email ideas you will ever need.

This offer is good until tonight, Friday Oct 11, at 12 midnight PST.

If you’re at all interested, the time to act is now. That’s because of that simple certainty I wrote about yesterday — there won’t ever be a better time.

I won’t be running big promo events for Most Valuable Email, because it doesn’t fit my policy of treating previous customers with respect.

On the other hand, if you get MVE now, you will also be eligible for any future disappearing bonuses I might offer with it, or any other special offer or real I will make to new buyers also.

If you’d like to take me up on this Shangri La offer, before it disappears:

​https://bejakovic.com/mve/​

P.S. And yes, if you have already bought MVE, you also get the Shangri La Disappearing Secrets and the Shangri La Library Of Rare And Priceless Ideas. No need to write me for them. I’ll add them straight inside the MVE course area.

937 days’ worth of email ideas, free

by

A couple days ago, after I complained that there’s still a reader on my list, Vivian, who hasn’t bought my Most Valuable Email program, another reader on my list, Bridget, who also hasn’t bought my Most Valuable Email program, wrote in to point out where I’m falling short:

===

Key point – where you are falling short is you are not answering the questions:

* Where am I going to get interesting ideas every day?

* How am I going to make the ideas I do have interesting enough to send without making 99% of my current subscribers want to unsubscribe?

===

Bridget is absolutely right. I don’t make the “where to get interesting ideas” part clear on the MVE sales page.

It actually is there in the course — I have a little section where I list four sources where I regularly find interesting ideas for Most Valuable Emails.

The reason I don’t make a bigger deal out of it is that I feel interesting ideas are cheap. They are everywhere, and it’s more a matter of how freshly and insightfully they are presented. And that’s what MVE is about.

I wrote back to Bridget to tell her that. And she replied:

===

You may believe interesting ideas are cheap. They may well be. But Vivian’s afraid she’ll run out, and that’s more important to her buying decision than objective reality.

===

Again, Bridget is absolutely right. So now what?

Let it never be said that I am more stubborn than Andrew Jackson.

And that’s why, I’d now like to announce I am adding one more bonus to my Shangri La MVE event. I’m calling this bonus the Shangri La Library Of Rare and Priceless Ideas.

For years now, I’ve been collecting interesting ideas I come across, whether in books, newsletters, podcasts, or courses.

For each such idea, I write it down, along with the source of where I got it. Sometimes I also add in my own observations as well.

I checked just now and so far I have 937 such interesting ideas. Here’s a sample:

* “To build fascination and rapport, keep asking deeper, more enthusiastic questions” (from James Altucher via his podcast)

* “Use the same link text as the subject line to get clicks” (something Ian Stanley said somewhere)

* “Toil shared becomes no toil at all” (from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives)

* “Trialibility is the no. 1 factor affecting adoption of an innovation” (from Jonah Berger’s Catalyst)

* “Pick out a fun and relevant theme for email promotion events” (from Travis Sago, on some ancient podcast appearance)

Rare? Priceless? You decide. In any case, it’s my contention you still have to do something to these ideas to turn them into fresh and insightful emails. MVE shows you what to do, and it even gets you doing it.

But so you can say you will never ever run out of ideas for Most Valuable Emails, I’m making available my entire Library Of Rare And Priceless Ideas as part of this Shangri La event.

I collected all these rare and priceless ideas and put them into a type of endless scroll known as a PDF file.

If you have the stamina, you can read through them from beginning to end. If you don’t, you can pick off an idea each day, apply the Most Valuable Trick, and turn that idea into a fresh and insightful email that 1) pulls in readers, 2) builds your authority, 3) makes you just a tiny bit better as a writer and a marketer, 4) maybe even makes a sale or 10.

My Shangri La MVE event ends tonight at 12 midnight PST. If you need a reminder of what it’s about:

===

I’m calling this offer the “Shangri La” MVE offer. And that’s because like Shangri La, the two three parts of this offer only appear once every fifty years. Specifically:

1. I normally don’t offer a payment plan for Most Valuable Email. I did offer a payment plan for MVE once, as a joke, for one day only. Well, like Shangri La, the payment plan is back, and not as a joke.

You can get MVE for $99 today and then two more monthly payments of $99. This payment plan is there to make it psychologically easier to get started — in my experience, people take up payment plans not because they cannot afford to pay in full, but simply because it feels like a smaller commitment.

2. I am also offering a bonus, which I’m calling Shangri La Disappearing Secrets.

Over the past years, I have periodically sent out emails where I teased a secret, which I then turned into a disappearing, one-day bonuses for people who took me up on an offer before the deadline.

Inside this Shangri La Disappearing Secrets bonus, I have collected 12 emails that teased 12 secrets — and I have revealed the secrets themselves. These include:

* An email deliverability tip that is so valuable I decided not to share it publicly, but only with buyers of MVE. This tip is something that multiple people have told me I should turn into a standalone course or training — which I most probably will do one day.

* Stage Surprise Success. Step-by-step instructions for creating effective surprise in any kind of performance, whether thieving, magicking, comedy, drama, or simply writing for impact and influence. And no, it’s not just shocking people with something they weren’t expecting. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite of that.

* A daring idea to grow your list and build up your authority at the same time. I have not yet had the guts to put it into practice, even though I have lots of reasons to believe it would work great to build my own authority, and get me more high-quality leads than I’m getting now.

* A persuasion strategy used by con men, pick up artists, salesmen, even by legendary copywriters. I ran a little contest in an email to see if anybody could identify this strategy based on a scene from the movie The Sting. Out of 40+ people who tried to identify the strategy, only 2 got it right.

* An incredible free resource, filled with insightful and proven marketing and positioning advice. This resource comes from a man I’ve only written about once in this newsletter, but who has influenced my thinking about marketing and human psychology more deeply than I may let on — maybe more deeply than anybody else over the past few years.

* Magic Box calls-to-action. Use these if you don’t have a product or a service to sell yet, or if you only have a few bum offers, which your list has stopped responding to every day. Result of a “magic box” CTA when used by one of my coaching clients: the first hand-raiser ever for an under-construction $4k offer.

* A new way to apply the Most Valuable email trick, one I wasn’t comfortable doing until recently. Now that I’ve started using it, it’s gotten people paying more attention… leaning in more… even rereading my emails 3x… and reaching out to reopen dropped business conversations.

* Steven Pressfield (the author of the War of Art and the Legend of Bagger Vance) used to write scripts for porn movies. He once shared two porn storytelling rules. I’ll tell you what they are, and how smart marketers, maybe even me on occasion, use one of these rules in their own sales copy and marketing content.

* A list of 14 criteria of truthful stories. I’m not saying to get devious with this — but you could use these criteria to jelly up a made-up story and make it sound absolutely true. More respectably, you can use these criteria to take your true but fluffy story and make it sound 100% gripping and real.

* Why I drafted US patent application 16/573921 to get the U.S. Government to recognize my Most Valuable Email trick as novel, non-obvious, and having concrete, practical applications.

* Two methods for presenting a persuasive argument, as spelled out by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. I illustrate these two methods with a little public debate that Daniel Throssell and I engaged in via our respective email newsletters. Daniel and I each adopted opposing methods, just as described by Kahneman.

* An infotainment secret I stole from Ben Settle. As far as I know, Ben doesn’t teach this secret in his books or newsletters — I found it by tracking Ben’s emails over a 14-day period and spotting Ben using it in 8 of those 14 emails. And no, I’m not talking about teasing, or telling a story, or stirring up conflict. This is something more fundamental, and more broadly useful, even beyond daily emails.

3. The Shangri La Library Of Rare And Priceless Ideas. 937 interesting ideas I’ve collected over the years from books, podcasts, newsletters, courses. Reach into this library to never again run out of ideas for your Most Valuable Emails.

So there you go. My Shangri La MVE offer:

A payment plan for Most Valuable Email that only appears twice in a century… 12 bonus persuasion secrets… and all the email ideas you will ever need.

This offer is good until tonight, Friday Oct 11, at 12 midnight PST.

If you’re at all interested, the time to act is now. That’s because of that simple certainty I wrote about yesterday — there won’t ever be a better time.

I won’t be running big promo events for Most Valuable Email, because it doesn’t fit my policy of treating previous customers with respect.

On the other hand, if you get MVE now, you will also be eligible for any future disappearing bonuses I might offer with it, or any other special offer or real I will make to new buyers also.

If you’d like to take me up on this Shangri La offer, before it disappears:

​​https://bejakovic.com/mve/​​

P.S. And yes, if you have already bought MVE, you also get the Shangri La Disappearing Secrets and the Shangri La Library Of Rare And Priceless Ideas. No need to write me for them. I’ll add them straight inside the MVE course area.

MVE cancelled

by

No, not Most Valuable Email.

The MVE that’s been cancelled is the Most Vivian Event, the big promotion I announced yesterday.

I had hoped to use this event to pull every remaining non-buyer on my list and get him to buy Most Valuable Email, will-he, nill-he.

My plan was to use I know about promos inside the Most Vivian Event — structure, copy, and most importantly offer:

An “Italian lottery,” giving new buyers a good chance to get MVE free…

A stack of free bonuses that I’ve sold for good money before, totaling the price of MVE and more, so even if somebody didn’t win the “Italian lottery,” they would still feel like they’re getting a steal…

An entirely new bonuses as well, which would reveal all the thinking that went into this promo — basically a little promo course built around a specific case study, to make this MVE offer so valuable that if you ever send any kind of emails, the investment would pay for itself with this one new bonus alone.

I had grand plans to make this event fun, epic, and undoubtedly immensely successful. Except…

It’s all been cancelled.

Reason why:

Each time I got near to settling on the final offer for the Most Vivian Event, I kept bouncing into one problem:

“What do I do with previous buyers?”

I have a long-standing policy to reward early buyers for buying for me. That means I grandfather previous buyers into any upgrades, new runs of a course, or bonuses I end up offering in the future. It also means I don’t feature discounts.

Yesterday, when I had the initial idea for this new promo, I shrugged this question off.

I told myself I’d figure out some way to incentivize new buyers… to reward previous buyers… and to have this promo make business sense for me personally.

But no matter how I structured this offer, there was always one end of the triangle — new buyers, old buyers, me — that was left high and dry.

I realized it’s not a matter of what bonuses or incentives I end up offering. It’s simply a consequence of my “reward previous buyers” policy, and the fact that I have hundreds of previous buyers of MVE.

That’s why I’ve actually never run a bonus- or discount-based promo for any of my offers, outside of a launch. I just never realized it until yesterday.

You might say I’m being stubborn to stick to this policy. And that’s exactly right. Because I want people to believe a few simple certainties when they think of me.

One of those simple certainties is that I won’t screw over previous buyers. I don’t ever want my buyers to think, even in passing, “Huh, maybe I should have waited to buy this, this new deal is better than what I got.”

Yesterday, I wrote that I had clearly been falling short by continuing to sell MVE on its merits alone.

Some people who could benefit from MVE — like Vivian, who wanted something for “coming up with interesting ideas and presenting it in a concise and compelling way” — never even considered buying.

Frankly, that falling short will most likely continue.

But if you have been on the fence about MVE for a while, I do have a special offer for you today. It’s nothing like the spectacle I was planning on. But you can decide whether it’s enough to get you to take me up on Most Valuable Email today.

I’m calling this offer the “Shangri La” MVE offer. And that’s because like Shangri La, the two parts of this offer only appear once every fifty years. Specifically:

1. I normally don’t offer a payment plan for Most Valuable Email. I did offer a payment plan for MVE once, as a joke, for one day only. Well, like Shangri La, the payment plan is back, and not as a joke.

You can get MVE for $99 today and then two more monthly payments of $99. This payment plan is there to make it psychologically easier to get started — in my experience, people take up payment plans not because they cannot afford to pay in full, but simply because it feels like a smaller commitment.

2. I am also offering a bonus, which I’m calling Shangri La Disappearing Secrets.

Over the past years, I have periodically sent out emails where I teased a secret, which I then turned into a disappearing, one-day bonuses for people who took me up on an offer before the deadline.

Inside this Shangri La Disappearing Secrets bonus, I have collected 12 emails that teased 12 secrets — and I have revealed the secrets themselves. These include:

* An email deliverability tip that is so valuable I decided not to share it publicly, but only with buyers of MVE. This tip is something that multiple people have told me I should turn into a standalone course or training — which I most probably will do one day.

* Stage Surprise Success. Step-by-step instructions for creating effective surprise in any kind of performance, whether thieving, magicking, comedy, drama, or simply writing for impact and influence. And no, it’s not just shocking people with something they weren’t expecting. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite of that.

* A daring idea to grow your list and build up your authority at the same time. I have not yet had the guts to put it into practice, even though I have lots of reasons to believe it would work great to build my own authority, and get me more high-quality leads than I’m getting now.

* A persuasion strategy used by con men, pick up artists, salesmen, even by legendary copywriters. I ran a little contest in an email to see if anybody could identify this strategy based on a scene from the movie The Sting. Out of 40+ people who tried to identify the strategy, only 2 got it right.

* An incredible free resource, filled with insightful and proven marketing and positioning advice. This resource comes from a man I’ve only written about once in this newsletter, but who has influenced my thinking about marketing and human psychology more deeply than I may let on — maybe more deeply than anybody else over the past few years.

* Magic Box calls-to-action. Use these if you don’t have a product or a service to sell yet, or if you only have a few bum offers, which your list has stopped responding to every day. Result of a “magic box” CTA when used by one of my coaching clients: the first hand-raiser ever for an under-construction $4k offer.

* A new way to apply the Most Valuable email trick, one I wasn’t comfortable doing until recently. Now that I’ve started using it, it’s gotten people paying more attention… leaning in more… even rereading my emails 3x… and reaching out to reopen dropped business conversations.

* Steven Pressfield (the author of the War of Art and the Legend of Bagger Vance) used to write scripts for porn movies. He once shared two porn storytelling rules. I’ll tell you what they are, and how smart marketers, maybe even me on occasion, use one of these rules in their own sales copy and marketing content.

* A list of 14 criteria of truthful stories. I’m not saying to get devious with this — but you could use these criteria to jelly up a made-up story and make it sound absolutely true. More respectably, you can use these criteria to take your true but fluffy story and make it sound 100% gripping and real.

* Why I drafted US patent application 16/573921 to get the U.S. Government to recognize my Most Valuable Email trick as novel, non-obvious, and having concrete, practical applications.

* Two methods for presenting a persuasive argument, as spelled out by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. I illustrate these two methods with a little public debate that Daniel Throssell and I engaged in via our respective email newsletters. Daniel and I each adopted opposing methods, just as described by Kahneman.

* An infotainment secret I stole from Ben Settle. As far as I know, Ben doesn’t teach this secret in his books or newsletters — I found it by tracking Ben’s emails over a 14-day period and spotting Ben using it in 8 of those 14 emails. And no, I’m not talking about teasing, or telling a story, or stirring up conflict. This is something more fundamental, and more broadly useful, even beyond daily emails.

So there you go. My Shangri La MVE offer:

A payment plan for Most Valuable Email that only appears twice in a century… and 12 bonus persuasion secrets.

This offer is good until tomorrow, Friday Oct 11, at 12 midnight PST.

If you’re at all interested, the time to act is now. That’s because of that simple certainty I wrote above — there won’t ever be a better time.

I won’t be running big promo events for Most Valuable Email, because it doesn’t fit my policy of treating previous customers with respect.

On the other hand, if you get MVE now, you will also be eligible for any future disappearing bonuses I might offer with it, or any other special offer or real I will make to new buyers also.

If you’d like to take me up on this Shangri La offer, before it disappears:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

P.S. And yes, if you have already bought MVE, you also get the Shangri La Disappearing Secrets. No need to write me for it. I’ll add it straight inside the MVE course area, right under the MVE Swipes document.

Where am I falling short here?

by

The survey I ran a few days ago keeps giving, including some pretty, pretty shocking gifts.

For example, yesterday, a reader named Vivian filled out the survey. As her single biggest challenge with her email list, Vivian wrote:

“Coming up with interesting ideas and presenting it in a concise and compelling way.”

In the field about what difference it would make to get a solution to this challenge, Vivian explained:

“It would help me produce more effective email campaigns that produce better results.”

And in the field about how difficult it’s been to find a good answer to the above dilemma, Vivian selected:

“Very difficult”

When I read this, I heard a voice in my head. It was the voice of a ghost, of negotiation coach Jim Camp, who died back in 2014. Camp’s voice said:

“What in the world am I doing wrong? Where am I falling short here?”

Clearly, I’m doing something very wrong.

I checked and Vivian has been on my list for over a year.

In that time, I have promoted my various email trainings, including my Most Valuable Email program, hundreds of times.

Vivian hasn’t bought MVE, even though the core promise of MVE is a different way to present your ideas in email from what everybody else is doing… a way that produces concise and compelling emails that even grizzled, wary, and sophisticated marketers and copywriters find interesting.

The only thing I can think of right now is that I’m not doing a good enough job selling what I got.

The price for Most Valuable Email is $297.

Is that expensive?

Sure.

But I exported all my ThriveCart transactions a few days ago. I’ve been using ThriveCart as my shopping cart for the past 18 months.

On average, during these 18 months, I’ve been able to turn 12.7% of my newsletter subscribers into buyers. And on average, over those 18 months, each of those buyers has paid me $354.69.

Is that good? Bad? I don’t know.

I do know these numbers have allowed me to fully replace my freelance copywriting income, which was my main source of income for 5+ years, and which many people would find enviable.

I can also tell you I got the numbers above without any kind of continuity offer… without running a high-ticket coaching program for all but a few of those 18 months… and without counting the half dozen or so affiliate promotions I’ve run during that time, which would probably add another $100 or so to that average customer value.

I’ve been making the claim over and over that Most Valuable Emails are the #1 reason I’ve been able to stick to writing this daily newsletter and getting the kinds of results above.

The MVE trick has made me, and continues to make me, an exponentially better copywriter and marketer.

Plus it’s simply fun for me to write Most Valuable Emails regularly… and it produces emails that surprise readers and keep them reading, whether they buy or not.

It’s ain’t just me, either.

On the MVE sales sales page, I have a testimonial from Thomas Lalas, the director of retention marketing at Everyday Dose. Thomas sent out a Most Valuable Email to Every Dose’s 100,000+ list. Result, in Thomas’s words:

===

This email was the highest-converting single-email campaign sent to the non-buyers of all time.

Usually we get such results with 2- or 3-part campaigns, typical in launches.

Interesting to explore this [Most Valuable Email] method further.

Will likely make it a part of our welcome flow, too.

===

But I’ve been yappinatin’ about all this for a long time now.

Vivian still hasn’t bought.

Maybe you haven’t either.

Like Camp says, clearly I’m doing something wrong. I want to change that.

So I spent this morning scheming up something I’m calling the “Most Vivian Event.”

I don’t ever use personalizations in my emails, so I won’t try to make this the “Most [firstname] Event.”

But if you haven’t gotten MVE (the product) yet, and more importantly, if you haven’t been using the Most Valuable Email trick in your emails, this event applies to you too.

The Most Valuable Email trick really has been that valuable to me, without any hyperbole. And it can be the same for you — if I don’t keep falling short, and if I can finally persuade you to try it out.

I wanted to kick off the Most Vivian Event today… but with the grand plans I came up for it, I realized it will take a bit of time to set up. Tomorrow is the soonest I can do it. Full details in my next email. Be there?