Intro – You / Me

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A few days ago, I got an email with the subject line:

“Intro – John / Matt”

I’ve gotten emails like this before, and I always open them eagerly. They normally come from one person, who I know, and introduce me to a second person, who I don’t know.

Not so in this case.

This email was from a guy named Matthias, who I don’t know, introducing me to himself (Matthias aka Matt), who I still don’t know.

That was a little subject line trick I wanted to share with you.

It reminded me of how Gary Bencivenga used to get get a great “endorsement” for his offer by having the offer owner say something about his own product, and then having that formatted like a testimonial.

I don’t know if I would use this “Intro You / Me” trick myself, but there’s no doubt it put me into a different, more favorable state of mind, at least right when opening the email, than I would have been in otherwise.

The bigger point is is that it matters immensely how you first position yourself when you try to open up 1-1 conversations with people.

One option is the above approach, to position yourself as a helpful and disinterested bystander, connecting the person you are reaching out to with a valuable new contact.

That’s not bad, but it’s not great either.

What’s much better is to adopt the positioning I talked about during a live workshop I put on a few years ago, called Water Into Wine.

On that workshop, I talked about positioning I had used to open up conversations (and eventually do deals) with business owners who wouldn’t have even opened my email had I come in presenting myself as a copywriter or a service provider.

I charged $197 for Water into Wine when I ran it. I haven’t made it available since. I am making it available now, and as part of my “Hogwarts of Influence” event, specifically in the “Dumbledore” tier. For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/core-promise-pwyw/

My biggest and most generous offer of the year

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Lesson (maybe) learned:

A few months ago, I ran an auction for the “behind the scenes” details of auctions I have and will be running.

As a bonus to that auction, I buried the most attractive part of the offer, which was the opportunity to ride shotgun with me on a future auction, and split the profits.

The low interest that auction got showed me the error of my ways. Or so you might expect…

… because maybe I’m making the same mistake again.

Yesterday, I launched a promotion for which I’m bundling my most attractive offers, at the most attractive terms I am going to make in 2026 and maybe through 3036.

But I launched this promo, as I often do, spur of the moment. And I made my most attractive offers, at the most attractive terms, available as free bonuses to a small core offer.

I’m currently sitting at the Barcelona airport, waiting for my delayed flight to London.

If the delay keeps getting worse, I’ll revamp the offer page to highlight what this offer is really about.

But whether or not I do that:

If you’ve ever been tempted to try out my Daily Email Habit service… if you’ve been curious to the point of irritation about what the Most Valuable Email trick is that I keep teasing… or if you have told yourself that one day you will invest in my Copy Riddles program, then you won’t get a better opportunity than I’m offering now.

For more details:

https://bejakovic.com/core-promise-pwyw/

Announcing: PWYW recording of last night’s Core Promise workshop

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Last night, I hosted the inimitable, unrepeatable, wonderful Core Promise Workshop and Q&A call.

To start, I had a bit of a presentation where I broke down, as economically as I could, the two components of a good promise, and why they are often at odds with each other.

That was all right because I got to use, as examples, the 5-Oscar-winning thriller Silence of the Lambs and the Silvester Stallone flop, Stop or My Mom Will Shoot.

Then came the fun part, where I ran through a buncha audience member questions, including:

#1. What core promise a copywriter should make when selling his or her services (hint: don’t sell your services)

#2. How to research what promises to make in an entirely unfamiliar professional industry where you know nobody (no, my answer was not “go on Reddit”)

#3. How to make your promise unique if you cannot (or refuse to) guarantee specific performance outcomes like “we will 3x your LTV”

#4. How to structure a core promise for a paid community

So altogether, a fine evening. And then, once I finished, I checked my email. I saw a message from one of my more dedicated readers, who had registered for yesterday’s call. She just wrote:

“I slept through big promise call…”

Unfortunately, the moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on. Yesterday’s workshop was live, and is over.

But thanks the wonders of space-age technology, there is a recording. As I announced a couple days ago, I am only making this recording available as a paid offer.

How paid?

Well, you can choose three levels at which to pay for this recording:

1. The Hermione Granger Level

2. The Severus Snape Level

3. The Albus Dumbledore Level

Each level comes with its own set of magical and mystical bonuses, meant to turn you into a persuasion wizard of greater and greater power. If you’d like to see the levels, and what’s on offer:

https://bejakovic.com/core-promise-pwyw/

Tiny mechanisms for huge offers

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I’m busy preparing for tonight’s Core Promise Workshop and A&Q call, so I will just share with you something interesting I read a few days ago, in an email by copywriter Mike Samuels.

Mike used to the the head copywriter at Clients on Demand, a big company that works with coaches to get them lients, I mean, clients.

Part of Mike’s job was to advise coaches on copy and offers.

You learn a lot by having to coach hundreds of people, all of whom are making one of three or four basic promises (“get rich, “get thin,” “get laid”), and all of whom are trying to compete with thousands of other people making the same promise.

How do you stand out? How do you say something different? How do you persuade people to go with you and not with one of the thousands of others? Says Mike:

===

The offers that worked best were the ones when we really dove into the mechanism to find something unique.

Often, it wouldn’t be the main part of the program.

It might have been something small the coach did.

In a fitness offer, maybe it was actually a mindset practice that we focused on.

For a dating coach, it could have been a confidence ritual that became the mechanism.

In the business coaching space, we might’ve dropped all talk of funnels, social media and ads, and instead spoke to the coach’s background in construction, and how they built their business methodologies around that.

===

I have seen smart marketers use “tiny mechanisms” before, meaning they only refer to a tiny part of the offer, in order to sell hugely successful offers.

I have snuck the same “tiny mechanism” idea into some of my own stuff as well.

But I’ve never heard somebody call it out until Mike did. I wanted to pass it on to you, so you can use it in your own marketing, positioning, and offers.

Of course, f you want to stand out with a generic, familiar promise, a tiny mechanism is not the only way to do that.

There are dozens of techniques to do so, which might be more or less appropriate for your specific case.

Oh, if only somebody would catalogue all these techniques?

And then present them in a way that gets you practicing them?

So as to stimulate your thinking about how you promote your own offers?

Yes, I am leading you on. Yes, this is exactly what my Copy Riddles program is about.

Copy Riddles is positioned around a tiny mechanism, the fact that I organized the lessons as riddles, to get you thinking and practicing real copywriting rather than just skimming the content.

In case you would like to create a huge offer, and present it effectively, Copy Riddles can help you do that. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Gary Bencivenga’s ultra secret A-list offer tactic

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Today I want to share with you an ultra secret A-list tactic I spotted legendary copywriter Gary Bencivenga using.

This tactic is not about copy. It’s in the offer.

I found it many years ago, back when I was learning copywriting by hand-copying ads. I spotted the following:

Gary once ran an ad to sell report A.

He also offered a free bonus, report B, which he said was “selling nationally” for the same price that report A was selling for.

Ok, so far, so standard.

But because I’m a bit of a direct response sleuth, I found that Gary was also running a second ad.

This second ad sold report B.

In that ad, Gary also offered a free bonus, report A, which he said was “selling nationally” for the same price that report B was selling for.

With this one tactic, Gary doubled his front-end offers. Plus, his bonuses were perceived as more valuable because he could say “selling nationally for $19.99” rather than “valued at $19.99, by my mother.”

So the offer tactic is to do like Gary, and sell your free bonuses in addition to your main front-end offer. It will force you to make a better, more attractive bonus, which will have higher perceived value than a bonus that you never officially sold. Plus you might actually make sales and get more customers.

“YAAAAWN,” I hear you say. “Bejako, you might not realize this, but I am an extremely loyal reader of your newsletter. That’s how I know that you already shared this ‘ultra secret A-list tactic’… let me check my notes… aha, yes, you shared it back on February 21, 2021. Don’t you have anything NEW for me today?”

Fine. I do have a NEW corollary to Gary Bencivenga’s ultra secret A-list offer tactic.

It is this:

If you do ever offer free stuff, for whatever reason, then sell it afterwards.

What? Yes. That’s it. It’s pretty basic, but powerful. The principles and reasons why are the same. I just want to highlight that:

1. Just because you offered something for free once, that doesn’t mean you cannot sell it later.

2. You probably have a ton of stuff that you’ve given away for free in the past, and are dismissing the real value of that.

Anyways, that’s my NEW marketing tip for today. It’s a marketing tip I myself am going to apply. Because tomorrow, I am putting on a FREE Core Promise Workshop and Q&A Call.

Free Free Free…

… if you decide to be there live tomorrow.

Not so free immediately afterwards, for all the reasons I listed above.

If you need a reminder of what this is all about, here are the details:

Tomorrow, Tuesday, at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST, I will hold a Core Promise Workshop and Q&A call.

It’s free & you can ​Register Here​.

I’ll share the most important parts of:

* What makes a good promise

* The importance of being clear over clever

* Choosing a promise that sounds credible

And we’ll end with a Q&A session to answer your Core Promise questions.

Don’t forget to register so I can send you the details.

See you there.

Why yes, I am entirely untrustworthy!

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There’s a well-known Internet marketer who recently ran a webinar on an intriguing topic.

Normally I don’t sign up for webinars. Who’s got time or patience to be teased and massaged into a sale for two and a half hours? But the topic of this webinar sucked me in.

I signed up. Of course, I still didn’t attend. And then, I got an email from this marketer.

Subject line: “a REPLAY??”

Preview text: “ok ok… I’ll cave this time. Replay is up for 48 hours.”

The body of the email talked all about how this marketer doesn’t normally do replays for webinars because people never watch them, and because attendance is higher if you don’t offer them.

And yet this time, the email said, he’s making an exception. Why? No one knows. The email didn’t say anything about that.

I recently ran a presentation I called Manna for Marketers, in which I covered how I consciously apply the commandments in my 10 Commandments of Con Men etc. book in everyday tasks like these emails and the offers that I make.

The example I gave for how I used Commandment II, about overcoming objections that my readers are likely to have, was all of 6 words, buried inside of a daily email.

I admitted inside that Manna for Marketers training that 6 words in the middle of an email might seem like a trivially small use of a persuasion idea.

But trust takes a long time to build up.

It can vanish quickly with one big blunder, or a little less quickly, with a few off-smells that signal that something isn’t right here.

Those off-smells can be implicit, like glossing over an objection or question your reader is likely to have…

… or they can be explicit, like what that well-known Internet marketer did in his emails.

“I never do this! But I’ll cave this time! Just this once! Trust me!”

The sad thing is, it’s so easy to avoid this.

Of course, the strategic way is simply to stick to your principles.

“I don’t offer webinar replays because I believe they are worthless. And so I won’t offer one for this webinar either.”

But if you really must go against principle, there’s a tactic for how to do it in a way that doesn’t tank your trust with your audience.

That’s something I cover in Commandment V of my 10 commandments book. If you still haven’t read that:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

The opportunity seeker’s way to success

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I’m a bit stressed as I write this. It’s Saturday morning. Tomorrow and Monday I’m going on a mini-vacation. Also on Monday, I have a deadline for the advertorial I promised to deliver to my first client/partner in years.

The advertorial that’s due Monday is, err, 75% of the way done?

I have a bunch of research, a bunch of notes, and a bunch of very rough AI drafts. Still, I’m far from having something I can give to the client. And I have today to finish it.

In moments like this, I ask myself, “Why do I do this to myself?”

And the answer comes, “Because I would never get anything done otherwise.”

I have long had this theory that everybody who succeeds in direct marketing is an opportunity seeker at heart.

Opportunity seeker = somebody who chases bright shiny objects, much like a bee that flits from flower to flower.

I think the business owners and the copywriters and everybody else who somehow makes it in direct marketing are first and foremost opportunity seekers, meaning that they get sucked in by marketing that promises you hot new riches now, even if you have no time or money to invest and cannot count past 5.

I myself am a veteran opportunity seeker.

It started in high school when I responded to a direct response ad in the back of a newspaper, which promised a lucrative and enjoyable new career (forestry service), without any qualifications, presumably even without finishing high school.

I have since spent tens of thousands of dollars buying various stuff that promises to be a hot new opportunity.

You might think I’d know better by now. I don’t know better.

Anyways, here’s my point for you:

If, like me, you are an opportunity seeker, then make it work for you. Take the psychological levers that you know can be pulled to make you act, and pull them yourself.

At the heart of every opportunity pitch are three words:

1. NEW

2. OPPORTUNITY

3. NOW

The NOW is why this opportunity wasn’t available yesterday, and why it won’t be available tomorrow. It’s enforced in opportunity marketing via scarcity and, more typically, urgency.

You can enforce NOW on yourself in the same way, by setting deadlines for yourself, like I did with that advertorial I told you about.

(Of course, for a self-imposed deadline to be meaningful, you need some kind of public accountability, like clients or customers who are expecting stuff to be delivered.)

The OPPORTUNITY part boils down to the idea of SOMETHING FOR NOTHING.

The fact is, we will all have to work in some way until the day we die. Even if you make all the money in the world, you will still have to invest and manage and secure that money.

But nobody wants to hear that. I certainly don’t.

So I embark on projects that promise to be bolt-on opportunities, things I can work on for a bit, get up to speed, and then simply profit from for the rest of my life, without sacrificing anything I’ve already got. Of course, it never really works out that way, but so what? It gets me moving.

And the NEW, of course.

If you’re an opportunity seeker like me, the familiar and old hat becomes invisible to you quickly.

This is where the danger lies, because the familiar and old hat is really what works, while something genuinely new is very likely to fail, or at least to fail when you try to set it up.

The way I deal with this is to introduce novelty WITHIN familiar and old-hat structures. Such as for example, daily emailing.

I’ve been doing this daily email every day for almost 8 years now.

Commitment and discipline, right? No. Novelty.

I never know what I’m gonna write about. It kind of stresses me out and excites me each morning. Today’s idea came (of course) during the shower.

So there you go:

1. Look at the marketing that’s working on getting you to move.

2. Figure out what done it.

3. Then apply it yourself in some way, to achieve whatever success you want to achieve in life.

Are you an opportunity seeker like me?

Do you want novelty? Do you want something for nothing? Do you want a reason to do it now?

If so, then daily emails might be for you. Like I told you, they work for me.

There’s public accountability. There’s the excitement of something new each day. And there’s something for nothing in the form of all the collateral content that gets produced, which you can feed into courses, books, paid newsletters, templates, apps, IP, which you can sell forever, without ever touching it again!

If you wanna get started with daily emails, today, I got a hot new opportunity for you:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Where to find bad promises?

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The past few days, I’ve been promoting a free workshop for next Tuesday, about crafting a good promise for your course, coaching package, service, or yourself as a person of trust and influence.

I wanted to contrast that with some BAD promises.

But where to find them?

I wasted a devilish amount of time today, poking around online, trying to find some really good bad promises. I mean, bad advertising is everywhere, but when you try to pin it down? It’s like frogs echoing around the pond, and if you ever try to catch one, it’s not where you look.

Anyways, here are few ho-hum bad promises I found, all of them in direct response advertising, all featured proudly as the headline on their respective sales pages:

* “Blow up your brand”

* “Connect every layer of your training stack”

* “Ignite Change, Lead Lives”

* “Strive for what’s possible with [brand]”

* “Drive Explosive Growth”

This last one, “Drive explosive growth” is interesting because… it’s from Tony Robbins. And the Tony Robbins people surely know a thing or two about direct marketing.

A couple thoughts on that:

1. When you build a strong personal brand, like Tony has, you can get away with a lot of “bad” marketing, because you’re ultimately selling yourself, not your product, whatever that may be.

2. This one is speculative, hear me out: When you have sufficient authority (eg. Tony Robbins), then better promises might actually work against you. I can’t prove this, but I suspect it might be true, based on something I heard from biz coach Rich Schefren, who found on his own skin that extra proof hurt his sales with an audience that had a lot of respect for him already.

So yeah, if you have a great personal brand and a great relationship with your audience, you can get away with a bad promise, and you might even do better with a bad promise.

But if you’re not at Tony Robbins levels of status and fame yet? In that case, you will do much better by not promising people to “blow up their brand” or “drive explosive growth” or “connect every layer of their training stack.”

What exactly is wrong with those promises? And how can you do better?

I’ll reserve that for Tuesday’s training. Details:

Next Tuesday, at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST, I will hold a Core Promise Workshop and Q&A call.

It’s free & you can ​Register Here​.

I’ll share the most important parts of:

* What makes a good promise

* The importance of being clear over clever

* Choosing a promise that sounds credible

And we’ll end with a Q&A session to answer your Core Promise questions.

Don’t forget to register so I can send you the details.

See you there.

My selfie with the Pope

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Two days ago, Tuesday, around 6:45pm, I snuck out of my house.

The streets were quiet and full of police.

There was no traffic, just people clustered in bunches along the curbs.

I waited for a while to watch a cavalcade of police motorcycles and two black and tinted vans drive by in the direction of Montjuic, where the Barcelona Olympic stadium is.

Then I started walking in the same direction.

Like I wrote last week, the Pope came to Barcelona this Tuesday.

I made plans with my friends Sanda and Victor to meet at the Olympic stadium and to participate in the drama of tens of thousands of people watching and cheering just some guy (I’m not Catholic).

It turned out that there wasn’t any drama. It was all very orderly. There were no giant crowds outside the stadium, even though the Pope was supposed to speak there in a little more than a half hour.

It also turned out we needed to register in advance to be allowed into the stadium. In other words, we weren’t getting in. We could just peak inside and see the promised tens of thousands of worshipers in there already, singing chipper and modern Christian rock songs, and waiting for the Pope.

So we couldn’t get in to see the Pope. Oh well.

It was a beautiful afternoon, and Montjuic is a beautiful place.

So Sanda and Victor and I decided to walk to a nearby pool (famous from photos of high divers during the ’92 Olympics) and get a drink.

And as we headed up the street, within the first few steps, on a little stretch where there was nobody else on the curb with us, another cavalcade of police motorcycles and black cars slowly came our way.

Except this time, one of the black cars had its window rolled down.

There was the Pope, about 15 feet away from us.

He saw us and waved. I guess it’s what popes do, but I still felt special, seen. I instinctively smiled and waved back.

So that’s my selfie with the Pope.

I don’t use my phone much. Even if I did, it would have taken lightning reflexes to pull it out and to grab a selfie with me in the foreground and the Pope waving in the background.

That’s ok. This email is effectively painting that picture for you, and serving the same purpose of gloating about something noteworthy in my life.

Like I said, all this happened two days ago.

I didn’t write about it yesterday because — and here’s the marketing lesson for today — you shouldn’t hide your new offers.

I’ve seen a problematic behavior among several people I am coaching.

It’s particularly problematic because it’s a behavior I also engage in.

It goes like this:

1. I come up with a new, potentially risky offer.

2. I write an email that doesn’t refer to this offer in any way in the subject line, the lead, or really the body of the email.

3. I then stuff the offer at the end of the email.

4. More often than not, I throw up my hands in frustration that nobody (or very few people) took me up on my offer, and I scrap the whole thing.

That’s kind of what I did two days ago.

I wrote an email about Dean Jackson… and how great Dean is… and about a lead gen method Dean has.

At the end of that email, I put in an offer for what I am calling the Core Promise Workshop and Q&A call, which is free and is happening live next Tuesday.

I sent out that email in the evening two days ago (right around the time I was hanging out with the Pope).

Result:

By the end of the evening, 6 people had registered for the call. Not even the Pope could save me.

I checked the stats again the next day.

21 people in total had registered by now. Better, but still, less than 1% of my list. For a free, live workshop, one where I’m offering to answer your questions and help you come up with a new core promise for your business.

Am I such a loser?

Are my readers losers?

Is this new offer a loser?

Or is it just that I really really worked hard to bury the lead?

That’s why yesterdays email was just the offer.

It’s my fix, my deal with myself, why I allow myself from time to time to bury a new offer like I did two days ago. My deal with myself is, if I ever bury it one day, I have to put it front-and-center the very next day.

In fact, yesterday’s email was just the tail end of the previous day’s email, with the copy completely unchanged. Even though I had this selfie with the Pope to tell you about.

Result:

66 registrants so far. Meaning, the second email brought in twice as many people as the first.

Which is good, and it supports the point I made to you above. I think I can do still better though. So let me remind you:

The most important part of your marketing message is the promise you make. That’s equally true whether you’re selling a service, coaching, a course, or yourself as a person of trust and influence.

Based on my 1-1 work with dozens of online business owners, I can tell you that most business owners DO NOT DO A GOOD JOB with the core promise they are making in their marketing.

Next Tuesday, at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST, I will hold a Core Promise Workshop and Q&A call.

It’s free & you can ​Register Here​.

I’ll share the most important parts of:

* What makes a good promise

* The importance of being clear over clever

* Choosing a promise that sounds credible

And we’ll end with a Q&A session to answer your Core Promise questions.

Don’t forget to register so I can send you the details.

See you there.

Core Promise Workshop and Q&A call

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The most important part of your marketing message is the promise you make. That’s equally true whether you’re selling a service, coaching, a course, or yourself as a person of trust and influence.

Based on my 1-1 work with dozens of online business owners, I can tell you that most business owners DO NOT DO A GOOD JOB with the core promise they are making in their marketing.

Next Tuesday, at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST, I will hold a Core Promise Workshop and Q&A call.

It’s free & you can Register Here.

I’ll share the most important parts of:

* What makes a good promise

* The importance of being clear over clever

* Choosing a promise that sounds credible

And we’ll end with a Q&A session to answer your Core Promise questions.

Don’t forget to register so I can send you the details.

See you there.