Clicks of the dial

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Another day, another Airbnb.

​​Today I am in Warsaw, Poland because it was one of the few places in central Europe that won’t be raining for the next five days. And five days is how much time I have until I go to Gdansk for my first-ever live event to do with marketing and copywriting.

This morning, I woke up, carefully stepped down the circular staircase from the second floor of the apartment to the ground floor, located the inevitable Nespresso machine, popped in a capsule, and made myself a coffee.

And you see where this is going, don’t you?

If you have anything to do with marketing, you should. It’s a basic topic, so basic that I in fact wrote about it in the first month of this newsletter, back in September 2018.

The same marketing model is shared by Nespresso, by King Gillette’s safety razors-and-blades empire, and by info publishers like Agora and Ben Settle. They all promise you almost-irresistible sign-up premiums in order to get you paying for a continuity offer.

You almost certainly know this. Many people have talked about the same. It’s obvious. I won’t belabor the point.

Yesterday, I promised to tell the bigger point behind such models — models which might seem obvious, when somebody else points them out to you.

There’s a document floating around the Internet, legendary marketer Gary Halbert’s “Clicks of the Dial.”

It’s a collection of Gary’s “Most Treasured ‘First-Choice’ Marketing Tactics.”

I read this document once. I even shared a link to it in this newsletter last year.

But I never really got much out of Gary’s “Clicks of the Dial” list. I doubt the hundreds or thousands of my readers who downloaded Gary’s “Clicks of the Dial” got much out of it either.

That’s because there’s a big difference between, on the one hand, reading, nodding your head, and saying “hmm good idea”… and, on the other hand, observing, thinking a bit, and writing down your own conclusions.

So my point to you today is to open a new text file on your hard drive. Title it “Clicks of the Dial.” Break it up into three columns to start.

Name one column “traffic.” Name the second “conversion.” Name the third “consumption.”

And then, each time you go for a coffee, or a bagel, or a haircut, observe an obvious business or marketing practice you’re exposed to. Odds are, it’s been proven in hundreds or thousands of different situations. “Chunk up” that practice to make a model out of it. And write it down in your list in the appropriate column.

Gary Halbert’s entire “Clicks of the Dial” list was something like 20 items.

In other words, it won’t take you long to fill up your own “Clicks of the Dial” document to full.

​​Very soon, you can have a list of core business and marketing strategies, that you can cycle through, and solve pretty much any marketing problem by clicking the dial.

​​And since you put this list together yourself, based on your own experiences, it will actually mean something to you. Eventually, you might even appear to others to be a marketing jeenius like Gary himself.

As for me, it’s time to go get a brownie. I have a long list of food recommendations for what to eat in Warsaw, but only a limited amount of time and stomach space to do so.

Meanwhile, if you have no more interest in reading anything from me, because you’ve determined to learn all of marketing and copywriting by observation and thinking, there is nothing more I can tell you, except farewell and good luck. On the other hand, if you do want to hear from me every day, with more ideas and occasional inspiration, you can sign up for my daily email newsletter here.

Free chocolate traffic and distribution model

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Yesterday morning, my friend Sam and I were sitting at a cafe terrace that hangs over the waters of Lake Lucerne. We were getting a coffee while waiting for a boat to take us down the lake, to the bottom of a big mountain, which we would attempt to scale.

Of course, this being Switzerland, we each got a little chocolate next to our coffees. Well, I got a chocolate, but for some unfair reason, Sam got two.

Our three little chocolates were all the same size. Later, at much higher altitude, we would find out they were also the same flavor. But each of the three chocolates had a slightly different design on the wrapper.

One was light blue and had a picture of a locomotive. That chocolate was advertising a “guest house and games paradise.”

The second chocolate was white with an elegant font. That was advertising a rentable space to hold events.

The third chocolate was also white but a bit more flashy in its font. That was advertising a “shopping restaurant.”

Since my mind has been entirely warped by thinking and writing about marketing every day, I noticed this and I thought about the underlying model. It’s this:

1. Take an expense for other businesses (for cafes, little chocolates next to each coffee)

2. Provide that thing for free both in terms of cost and effort and risk (the chocolate tasted good, and the design was classy)

3. Use the thing for traffic/distribution/advertising for your a product or service of your own choosing (“gasthof und spielparadies” on the wrapper)

You might say this is nothing special or unusual. But you can get creative.

For example, many people used to pay a few dollars a day to read the Wall Street Journal (1). Then some guys made a free email newsletter with the most important news of the past 24 hours (2). In between the news segments they also put in ads (3). The result was Morning Brew, which sold a controlling stake for $75 million a couple years ago.

Back in the Barcelona supermarket I go to, you can get free bubble gum (1 and 2) at the store, along with various other small items, if you download an app that tracks you and serves you ads for other products (3).

Then there’s the offer I made a couple months ago, to help businesses add in a “horror advertorial” into their cold traffic funnel for free (2) — a service I would normally charge a lot of money for (1) — if they would also insert an email into their welcome sequence to promote my new newsletter (3).

And finally, there’s an idea I’m planning for the future, to offer syndicated content (1) to businesses for free (2), as a means of advertising that same new newsletter I’m working on (3).

In other words, this simple little chocolate idea has broad applicability when you start to think about it.

But there’s a bigger point, too.

The bigger point is— well, I will talk about that tomorrow. No sense in jamming two good ideas into one email.

I’m approaching the Zurich airport as I write this. It’s time to leave this rainy but beautiful country. The train I’m on will be six minutes late in arriving, and the conductor just came alive on the PA to announce that shocking delay and to apologize in German, Italian, and English.

If you want to read my email tomorrow when it comes out, you can sign up for my daily email newsletter here.

Email coaching for sale

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When doctors go on strike, patient deaths either stay the same or go down. Such was the conclusion of a 2008 literature review by four professors of public health at Emory University.

The scientists looked at the results of five doctors’ strikes from 1976 to 2003.

​​They found that in the absence of doctors, deaths never went up, but often went down.

You can interpret that how you will. I know how I will interpret it, and it’s to tell you that when copywriters go on strike, sales either stay the same or go up.

Well, of course not every time. But in many situations, getting tricky with your messaging, optimizing for the sophistication of your market, or being clever and indirect actually harms rather than helps your sales.

One of the most successful of all copywriters, Gary Bencivenga, summed it up as the “duck for sale principle.” Gary wrote:

“If you are trying to sell a duck, don’t beat about the bush with a headline such as, ‘Announcing a special opportunity to buy a white-feathered flying object.’ You’ll get much better results with, ‘DUCK FOR SALE.'”

If you would like my guidance and help writing emails, which don’t need to be complicated or take a lot of time to get you results, I will soon have email copywriting coaching for sale. The only way to join it is to be on my email list first. You can sign up for that here.

Reader hopes I can understand why he unsubscribed

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My email yesterday got a high number of unsubscribes. The normal is 1 or 2 but yesterday’s email got 5. One unsubscriber wrote:

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I do LOOOVEEE the emails and I just want them to keep coming ALWAYS. But the thing is I’ve subscribed to A LOT of lists already and I’m consuming a lot of content than I should. In fact, I’m at the point where I’m inches away from getting the infamous “information overload”. So most of the time I just skip some emails to let my brain rest. Unfortunately, very very unfortunately, I have to let your email list go (FOR NOW). But I need to get those emails in the future so kindly don’t put me on your blacklist. It’s temporary. Hope you can understand.

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Here’s a free and valuable email marketing tip:

Don’t apologize. Don’t explain yourself. Don’t hedge or flip-flop.

Email is a wonderful medium because you can control any neediness you might feel.

​​You can be however you are in real life. You can even write like that. But then you can take a moment to distance yourself from what you’ve written to cut out any unasked-for apologies, waffling, or attempts to lessen the insult that your message wasn’t going to cause anyhow.

As for the guy above, he has been placed on a blacklist. Not out of any malice. Active Campaign does it automatically whenever somebody unsubscribes.

I used to occasionally go in and purge that blacklist so unsubscribed readers could get back on my list if they so choose.

​​I don’t bother any more. I do get on occasion somebody writing to me to say they signed up but are not getting my emails, in which case I will add them by hand.

Famed negotiation coach Jim Camp used to say negotiation is a series of decisions. You can’t tell people anything. The only thing you can do is help them see and decide for themselves.

My email yesterday got a high number of unsubscribes. I’m sending a new email today because you only ever get people off your list when you a send a new email. You also only ever get people reading and opting in and PayPaling you money when you send a new email.

Negotiation is a series of decisions. You can only send people emails to help them make those decisions for themselves. ​​If that’s something you can see for yourself, you might decide to start applying it. You certainly don’t need my help to do it. But in case you want it, you can sign up for my email list here.

Two proven ways to run a city or a newsletter

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I was sitting by the Seine two days ago, part of a trip to Paris with friends. One of my friends looked up and said, in a kind of mock frustration, “All the buildings around here are so beautiful. Don’t they ever get tired of making beautiful buildings?”

Apparently they do. In fact, that same day, we went to visit something very ugly.

In the middle of Paris, on a square lined by elegant, classical architecture, sits the Pompidou Center.

If you look at the back of your refrigerator, where the coils and pipes and wires collect cobwebs and dust, scale that up to a building the size of a sports stadium, paint the different pipes and coils blue and green and red, then you get the Pompidou.

The Pompidou is a cultural center — exhibition spaces and galleries and stages and a huge public library.

It looks shockingly ugly today. ​I suspect it looked much worse to the eyes of Parisians who saw it being built in the 1970s. One of them called it the “incinerator absorbing all the cultural energy and devouring it — a bit like the black monolith in 2001.”

And yet, people stream into the Pompidou.

In its first two decades, the place attracted 145 million visitors. ​​Five years ago, in 2017, the last year I could find numbers for, the art museum inside the Pompidou had 3.3 million visitors. Untold millions more rode the free escalators to the top of the building to look at the Eiffel tower and Notre Dame and Montmartre, all nicely visible from the roof.

In other words, the Pompidou, ugly though it may be, is also a full-blown success. It’s doing what it’s designed to do, giving masses of people access to art, serving as a kind of new focal point in the city, renewing Paris as a cultural destination.

All that’s to say, there’s two ways to run your city:

One is to give visitors what they want – what they are expecting and demanding, what they have seen on postcards, what they initially came for.

The other is to do something shocking and new — because you have a new agenda for your city, or simply because you got bored of doing the same stuff you’ve done in the past.

The first of course is the more safe, more proven way. But both can work — as proven by the Pompidou.

As I mentioned above, I’m traveling right now. I’ll be away from home for next couple weeks, until May 19.

When I get back home after my trip, I will most likely open up enrollment for the group coaching on email copywriting I announced last month.

Which brings me to my point for this email. The two ways to run a destination city are also the two ways to run a profitable email newsletter.

One is to give readers more of what they came for, what they say they want, or that your research says they want.

The other is to do what you yourself want, what serves your purposes, your desires.

Both can work. But it’s good to be clear with yourself as to what you specifically are doing. This makes your job easier and makes you more effective over the long term.

When I do open up enrollment for the group coaching, I will only do so to people who have signed up to get (and stay) on the waiting list.

If you’ve done this already, there’s nothing more you need to do right now.

On the other hand, if you are curious about this group email coaching, then the first step is not to get on my waiting list, but to get on my main email list. That’s the first requirement I have for all people enrolled in this coaching. To sign up, click here and fill out the form that appears.

I am wired for story… from a trusted, liked, famous source

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A non-personal but true story:

Late into his career escape artist Harry Houdini started cutting some corners in his stage show.

Houdini was injured and physically exhausted, and it was hard to put in the same level of shoulder-dislocating, suffocating, skin-tearing escapes he used to put on.

Sure, Houdini still did some of that, but he minimized it. Instead, he filled up the empty time on stage with some magic tricks and with talking. About himself.

One viewer was shocked and disgusted.

This viewer was the newspaper critic for the local paper in Nottingham, England. So rather than simply firing off an outraged email to Houdini to say how the show isn’t as good as it used to be and to demand to be unsubscribed, this critic wrote up the following review and published it in his paper:

“Why on earth should Houdini imagine that any audience would be entertained by hearing a long and uncalled-for account of what he has been doing during the past six years… people go to a vaudeville house to see a performance… not to hear a diatribe on the personal pronoun around ‘the story of my life, Sir.”

Truly, who would want to hear a diatribe on the personal pronoun? Certainly not the critic.

​​But the audience?

Turns out Houdini broke all attendance and earnings records that year. He earned the highest salaries of his career, pulling down $3,750 a week — about $60,000 a week in today’s money.

Now at this point your brain might jump ahead and conclude, That’s the power of personal stories and reveals! Almost $60k a week! Let me get on it!”

But I’ve made the point before, and I will make it again:

Nobody cares about your stories and personal reveals. Not unless you already have real authority and even fame.

When Houdini changed up his show to be more personal and story-based, he had already been performing his stage show for decades. He didn’t change the core of his show during that time, and it’s probably a good thing. It’s what the crowds wanted and expected.

But then Houdini went to Hollywood. He made a couple of hugely successful movies, rubbed shoulders with Hollywood celebrities, and became a truly international star himself, beyond just the vaudeville stage.

That’s when people wanted to hear Houdini’s stories and the details of his personal life — and that’s what he was talking about on the stage. As Houdini himself put it, “Blame it all on the fact I have been successfully in the movies.”

So tell your stories and share your vulnerabilities — after you’re known and respected and even admired. People will love it then.

Before then?

Well, before then you might be interested in my Most Valuable Email training.

Most Valuable Emails never required I have any status or authority.

These emails make it 100% clear I know what I’m talking about, even when I don’t harp on about the great results I’ve had for clients or the testimonials or endorsements I’ve gotten.

As a result, Most Valuable Emails helped me build up immediate and unquestionable authority — even when I had no standing in the industry. ​​

And I claim Most Valuable Emails can do the same for you. In case you’d like to find out more:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

I stepped inside the unicorn room to bring you this email

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“Did you see the ceiling?” I asked my friend Sam.

Sam shrugged and walked back to the little alcove by which I was standing. He leaned inside the alcove and looked up. His eyes got wide. “Whoa!”

The entire ceiling was plastered with owls. Eyes, beaks and all the body feathers.

Imagine five owls had fallen upside from a great distance onto the ceiling, splatted and become entirely flat. The owls now stick there, waiting day after day for people to look up and notice them.

That’s just one of the curiosities at the Museum of Hunting and Nature in Paris.

I’m staying in Paris for a few days.

My three friends, all Americans, all independently heard recommendations for the Museum of Hunting and Nature.

There might be a worthwhile marketing study there — how to stand out in an immensely crowded marketplace, when surrounded with competitors with much more money, authority, experience, market share, and resources than you will ever have.

The Museum of Hunting is a strange mix of art and natural history.

There’s the owl-covered ceiling. There’s the paintings of dogs hunting from the 18th century. There’s the installation of a little wooden shack, filled with books, and covered with black feathers. There’s the taxidermied baby elephant. There’s the instructional video on methods of falconry.

And then, of course, there is the unicorn room.

In the unicorn room are specimens of the magical. A large ostrich egg in a jeweled display case. Two rhinoceros horns encased in gold. And in the dark, by the window, a genuine, 6-foot-long unicorn horn, mounted on a statue of a horse’s head to show how it looked in real life as the unicorn proudly walked through its enchanted forest home.

If you’re feeling a little disoriented right now, and wondering whether I’ve gone off the rails, let me say there is a chance it’s not a real unicorn horn. Rather, there is a chance it’s actually the canine tooth of a narwhal, a medium-sized whale that lives in Arctic waters.

Back in medieval times, and well after also, narwhal teeth were often peddled for many times their weight in gold as genuine unicorn horns. In the 16th century, Queen Elizabeth was gifted one worth 10,000 pounds sterling — the going price for a castle at the time.

What can I tell you? People believe in magic.

They believed it in the middle ages, in the 16th century, and even today. Has the unicorn disappeared from our consciousness now that we’ve catalogued the world’s animals and failed to find one? If anything, the unicorn is hotter than ever.

It’s worth ruminating on that. But I won’t spoil the magic here by continuing to yap on into actual marketing advice.

Instead, I will only tell you about a unicorn-like land creature, with magical powers and mystical origins. It’s been known since ancient times but only recently have scientists correctly identified, catalogued, and named it. The scientific name is Nuntium aureum v. electricum, but it’s popularly known as the Most Valuable Email.

If you’d like to get a peek at this strange and wondrous beast, pull back the curtain below and look inside, if you dare:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

The next era for freelancers, full-time writers, and solo creators

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I woke up this morning, the sun shining into my eyes, an eager French bird chirping outside my window because it was almost 7am.

I groaned and realized it’s time to get up and get to work. In a few hours’ time, my friends, still asleep in various bedrooms around this cave-like Paris AirBnb, will wake up too. And by then, I will have to have this email finished.

I can tell you now, it won’t be easy.

I struggled during the night with a comforter that was too hot, a mosquito that wouldn’t shut up, and the effects of the first glass of alcohol I’ve had in months. The result is I’m tired this morning, and my brain is more foggy than usual.

“Let me read some stuff on the Internet,” I said. “Maybe that will help.” And lo — the email gods rewarded me with an article full of valuable and relevant ideas I can share with you today.

The article came from Simon Owens, somebody I’ve written about before in these emails. Owens is a journalist who covers the media landscape in his Substack newsletter.

Two interesting bits from Owens’s article:

1. The recent collapses of new media companies like Buzzfeed and Vox have left thousands of journalists, writers, and clickbait creators without a job. It’s not unlike the situation in the direct response space a few years ago, after Agora got into legal trouble and it put a chill on the whole industry.

2. The owners of media outlets and info businesses are realizing that freelancers just aren’t worth it. From Owens’s conversation with one such business owner: “Not only were they expensive to hire, but he also had to waste a lot of time editing their work so it met his quality standards.”

So if traditional employee-based companies that pump out content are failing… and if entrepreneurs are starting to realize that freelancers are a bum deal… where does that leave us?

You might say it leaves us with the creator economy — with all those unemployed journalists, writers, and clickbait creators going out and starting their own Substack or TikTok or OnlyFans.

​​Maybe so. But it’s harder to make that work than your Twitter feed might make you believe. From Owens’s article again:

“I’m on record as being an optimist about the future of the Creator Economy; I think we’re at the very early stages of an entrepreneurial media explosion. But at the same time, I’m a realist about how damn hard it is to launch and build a sustainable bootstrapped media business, especially as a solo operator. Not only can it require years of financial runway, but it’s also difficult for a single person to juggle a variety of tasks that include content creation, marketing, and business development.”

So? Where does all this really leave us?

Owens says it leaves us in a brave new world of partnerships, cooperatives, and jointly-created products. He gives examples of how each of these is already being done by people who create content and have an audience, and who are trying to monetize that content and audience, beyond just the work they can do themselves.

If you are running or want to run an info publishing businesses, or your own creator studio, then Owens’s article is worth a read. It might give you an idea that might mean the difference between failure and success in what you do.

And if you are currently a freelancer, or even a full-time employee at a marketing-led business, then Owens’s article is worth a read also, if only for an uncomfortable but possibly life-saving glimpse into what the future might bring unless you adapt.

In either case, if you are interested, here’s the link to Owens’s piece:

https://simonowens.substack.com/p/the-next-era-for-bootstrapped-media

“There’s magic in the structure itself”

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[Clayton Bigsby removes his KKK hood to reveal he’s black. The white-supremacist rally attendees are stunned. One woman throws up. A man’s head explodes.]

There’s a reliable way to make a joke and it’s to put things in threes. You can make each subsequent thing more exaggerated, starting with normal, then moving to exaggerated, then moving to absurd.

Alternative: You can simply make the first two things straightforward, and then the third thing somehow unusual or unexpected.

Jerry: So we go into NBC, and we say we have an idea for a show about nothing?
George: Exactly.
Jerry: They say, “What’s your show about?” I say, “Nothing.”
George: There you go.
Jerry: I think you may have something here.

My point is not this triple thing. Instead, my point is something I heard marketing guru Dan Kennedy say.

Back in the 90s, Dan used to tour the country giving a rapidfire speech/sales pitch in front of tens of thousands of people in a different arena every night. As part of this speech/sales pitch, Dan said the following about his patented Magnetic Marketing 3-letter campaign:

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Our response was letter number one 7%, letter number two 8%, letter number three 3%. Total response 18%.

Now there’s two things you have to know. Number one, nobody gets 18% response from direct mail. 1.8% yes. Maybe my people, but nobody else does.

But what’s more important, if they stopped where everybody stops with letter number one, in their case, they leave 11% behind, they don’t get it. They don’t know it was there to get. Maybe they have an unsuccessful instead of a successful experience.

There’s magic in the structure itself.

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So that’s my point for you. There’s magic in the structure itself. Speaking of which, here’s another comedy triple:

“Mawwage. Mawwage is what bwings us togeva today. Mawwage, that bwessed awwangement, that dweam within a dweam.”

I’m traveling over the next several weeks. In fact, I’m writing this at the airport, while boarding is going on. I keep glancing over my shoulder, checking whether they will close the gate before I get a chance to finish and schedule this email.

Because I’m traveling, I’ll have limited time to write emails over the next few weeks, and no time to release or prerelease new offers during that time.

And since I forever closed down my Copy Riddles program last month, the only offer I have ready to go is my Most Valuable Email. If you read my newsletter regularly, you can expect to see it at end of emails where it belongs and where it doesn’t belong.

But today it belongs. Because my Most Valuable Email course is about the structure of some of my own most effective and valuable emails.

If you look over the emails I’ve sent over past several weeks, and you look at the structure, will find my Most Valuable Email trick used a dozen or more times.

There’s magic in the structure itself. In case you want my step-by-step explanation of this powerful Most Valuable Email structure, you can find it here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Work on your business and not on delegating, systems, or automation

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Two nights ago I finally finished the 40-page pamphlet I’d been reading for three months, titled Leading With Your Head. It’s about the use of misdirection in magic. It ends with this:

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Tape your performances in front of an audience (either audio or video). Sit down and take notes. What works best for the audience? What doesn’t work (that you thought would)? Is there dead time you can eliminate? What needs to be improved? Keep the material that works, and concentrate on improving the weaknesses. Don’t fix what isn’t broken. It’s simply an excuse to avoid addressing more serious problems. Rehearse your improvements, then repeat the whole process again.

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It’s popular advice to say, work on your business, not in it.

The typical meaning of this is to delegate, build systems, automate the work. I’m sure that’s fine.

But there are ways of making a living — like my own — that are not about hiring and managing other people, not about scaling endlessly, and certainly not about automation. After all, what’s the sense in getting a magic-performing robot to go on stage and perform your magic show for you — if performing magic is what you like to do?

“Work on your business, not in it” is good advice. But in my personal case, I like the meaning above, the one from Leading With Your Head.

Plan and reflect, in addition to performing. It makes you better at what you like to do, and is in fact fun and enjoyable in itself, at least in my experience. And in my experience, it can be profitable too.

Last June 9th, I did an instance of this kind of working on my business. I opened up a text file on my computer and made a list, “10 things I’ve learned to do well over the past year.”

Item no. 2 on the list was “2. write [what I later came to call Most Valuable] emails.”

A couple weeks later, because of that small observation, I created a live training about Most Valuable Emails.

A month later, based on the surprising sales of the swipe file of Most Valuable Emails I offered at the end of the live training, I decided to create a standalone Most Valuable Email course.

I was hesitant — I figured anybody interested had already seen my presentation and wouldn’t buy. But again, I was surprised.

​​4.7% of my list bought the Most Valuable Email course during the launch. And interest hasn’t dropped off since, but has in fact gone up.

​​To date, 5.3% of my list has bought Most Valuable Email, though my list has grown by over 41% since last September, when I first launched the MVE course.

Great, right? — when you look at it from the perspective of how a typical info product sells. 2% or 3% of a qualified list is considered good.

But on the other hand, it also means 94.7% of my list has not yet bought Most Valuable Email.

​​Perhaps this includes you too.

There are many legit reasons why you might not want to buy Most Valuable Email. I list some of them right in the deck copy of the sales page.

On the other hand, there are also several legit reasons why you might want to buy Most Valuable Email. I list those in the deck copy as well.

In case you’d like to read that, and see and decide for yourself whether Most Valuable Email could be most valuable for you too, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/