First-cousin marketing incest

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A little over 100 years ago, on June 2, 1919 to be specific, a rather shabby-looking man named Albert took the hand of a fairly unattractive woman named Elsa. They looked deeply into each other’s eyes, and after a few moments of nervous calculation, each of them said “ja.”

The shabby-looking man was Albert Einstein. The rather unattractive woman was Elsa Einstein, Albert’s first cousin and second wife.

Einstein wasn’t the only famously smart person to marry his first cousin. H.G. Wells, author of some 50 books and best known today as the “father of science fiction,” also married his first cousin, Isabel Mary Smith. So did Charles Darwin, who married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood in 1839.

What’s my point?

Marketer Dan Kennedy has this routine about “marketing incest.” Here’s how Dan puts it:

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Whatever business you’re in, whatever product, service, profession — what do you pay most attention to? Everybody else in that business. If you don’t read anything else, you read your trade journal. If you go to no other meeting once a year, you probably go to your convention. If you’re traveling to another city, you look at your category in the Yellow Pages. You pay attention to everybody else who’s in your business. It’s like being Amish.

What happens with this kind of thinking — it’s a “closed” kind of thinking. It works just like real incest. Everybody gets dumber and dumber and dumber until the whole thing just grinds to a halt, and they just stand there looking at each other and nothing happens.

You’ve got to pay attention outside your little Amish community of jewelers or carpet cleaners or whatever it is that, up until tonight, you thought you were. You’ve got to pay attention to other stuff because you ain’t going to find any breakthroughs in the five other people standing in a circle looking at you. They aren’t any smarter than you are. They’re probably dumber than you are.

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My point is, “consanguineous” incest is universally reviled, and for good genetic reasons. You don’t want to marry your sister or brother — bad things happen if you do it, and that’s why most societies around the world find the practice disgusting.

On the other hand, “affinal” incest, marrying between first and second cousins and more distant relatives — well, I won’t say it has a long and glorious history, but it definitely does have a history, and much of it, including some very smart people.

I might be digging myself into an unnecessarily deep hole here, so let me state clearly that I am not advocating incest of any kind.

Well, except maybe in the marketing sense. Like Dan says, you don’t want to practice consanguineous marketing incest — copying what the five other guys who are most like you are doing. That’s likely to only produce worse and worse results with time.

On the other hand, going into a cousin industry, and copying ideas from there — well, that might just be another issue altogether. But I will write more about that in my email tomorrow, and tell you my experiences in paying a visit to a cousin industry lately.

If you’d like to read that email when it comes out, sign up to my email newsletter.

I made $1,100 so I decided to spend $6,000 more

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Two weeks ago, I was talking to copywriter Vasilis Apostolou, and he told me of a direct marketing conference that’s happening in May in Poland.

The conference is small but features some people I very much respect, foremost among them A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos and marketer Matt Bacak.

I asked Vasilis how much it costs to get in. He told me. I groaned.

$3,000 just for the ticket. And then there’s travel, a place to stay, plus 3-4 days lost from work.

This past Thursday, I got on a podcast-like interview with Jen Adams from the Professional Writers Alliance. Last December, I wrote some articles for PWA about my 10 Commandments book, and I got paid $1k for those articles. I got paid an extra $100 for this podcast-like appearance.

​​Getting paid $1,100 is a nice way to do self-promotion – but it’s not enough.

Last summer, I paid $1,200 for the Dig This Zoom calls. I found out about the PWA writing opportunity through the Discord channel for people who bought those Dig calls. So far, I’ve made back $1,100 of that $1,200 via this PWA thing. That means I still have $100 to make up somewhere.

I’ve written before how I have made back all the money I’ve paid for specific copywriting and marketing education.

​​Tens of thousands on coaching with Dan Ferrari… thousands on newsletters and books with Ben Settle… $297 for the Parris Lampropoulos webinars back in 2019. That last one, by the way, is my most winning investment. When I add up all the extra money I can directly trace back to Parris’s training, I estimate it to have been about a 300x return.

The thing is, all those returns turned out to be unconscious, after-the-fact, well-would-you-look-at-that results.

​​But I’ve since told myself not to make this into a matter of coincidence or luck. I’ve since made it a matter of attitude. I now put in thought and effort to make sure any investment, regardless of how small or large, has to eventually pay for itself.

That’s an outcome that’s impossible to control if you are buying stocks or bonds or race horses. But it’s quite possible to control if you are buying education, opportunities, or connections.

I will see what happens once those PWA articles get published and once interview goes live. Maybe one of those PWA people will join my list, buy something from me, and pay me that missing $100. Unless I can track $100 of extra sales to that, I will have to think what else I can do to make those Dig Zoom calls pay for themselves.

Likewise with that Poland conference. ​I decided to go. I budgeted $6k total for it — actual groan-inducing cost plus opportunity cost.

​​In other words, I will have to figure out a way to make the event pay me at least $6k. And I set myself the goal to have it happen within the first seven days after conference ends. I’m a little nervous about achieving that, but to me that signals that it’s possible.

So now I have three calls-to-action for you:

1. If you are planning to be there in Poland in May, let me know and we can make a point of meeting there and talking.

2. If you somehow already got on my list via PWA, hit reply and let me know. I’m curious to hear what you’re up to and why you decided to join. And if you’re thinking of writing a book like my 10 Commandments book, I might be able to give you some inspiration or advice.

3. If neither of the above applies to you, then my final offer is my Copy Riddles program. It costs $400. If you do decide to buy it, I encourage you to think of how you can make this investment directly and trackably pay for itself, and then some.

You might wonder if that’s really possible.

​​It is.

​​So today, instead of pointing you to the Copy Riddles sales page, let me point you to an email I wrote last year about a Copy Riddles member named Nathan, who doubled his income as an in-house copywriter, and who credits Copy Riddles for a chunk of that increase. ​​In case you’re curious:

https://bejakovic.com/how-to-bombard-copywriting-clients-with-extra-value-at-no-extra-effort/

Maybe this email will finally melt away your resistance

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I was talking to a girl a few days ago, and she was complaining about an annoying guy who had hounded her at a club.

The guy stopped her on the way out of the bathroom. Then he came up to her at the bar. Later he sidled up to her on the dance floor.

“Why are some guys annoying like that?” she asked me.

I shrugged. “Because it works.”

My ex-girlfriend once told me her perspective on why she decided to go out with me. I’d gotten her phone number once, during a brief interaction. And then, for about 6 weeks, I texted her every few days. Each time, she had some reason not to meet. She never said no flat out, so I kept texting her. “You were very persistent,” she mused later.

“Yeah sure,” you might say, “but there’s a big difference between being persistent and hounding somebody in an annoying way.”

Maybe so. But based on what I’ve seen, that’s a line that’s often drawn after the fact — after somebody decides either to give you a hard “no” or to take you up on your offer.

In the second case, the person who took you up on your offer will often say that it was your persistence that really won them over, that they found most attractive.

I took a break just now to check Google Analytics. Right now, as I write this, somebody’s on the third and final page of my Copy Riddles sales letter, and two more people are on the first page.

I don’t know if any of these people will decide to buy in the next few minutes. But I have noticed a trend.

I usually promote my existing offers in one-week stretches. For example, last week it was my Most Valuable Email, this week Copy Riddles.

Early in those week-long stretches, I get some sales. But I’ve noticed it takes a few days to get the wheel rolling, to get momentum built up, to get sales coming in unexpectedly and at odd hours and in bunches.

Today is day six of my Copy Riddles promo period. I’ll see if my theory about sales bunching up will be borne out.

In any case, the basic idea stands. As copywriter Gary Bencivenga said once, persistence melts away resistance.

Incidentally, this is something that ties into the very first big a-ha moment I got while following the road that eventually led me to creating Copy Riddles. In case you’d like to read more about that a-ha moment, you can find it on the sales page bwlo, which I’ve shared previously many times, and which I will continue to share:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

My secret admirer tries to emotionally blackmail me

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This past Monday, I woke up to find a love letter at the top of my inbox. It wasn’t signed, and it came from a pseudonymous email account. It started:

“Firstly, I want to tell you I love you.”

“I knew it!” I said to myself. “I always had a suspicion that I’m lovable.” I greedily jumped on the next sentence:

“And a very Big thanks to you for sending me daily emails. Those emails are inspiring and motivating. I’ve learnt a lot from them, from copywriting down to productivity and lot more.”

“Of course,” I thought, “those are all topics I write about often. No wonder my secret admirer loves me.”

​​I continued to read. More expressions of admiration followed. My ego blossomed and bloomed. But then, I got to the kicker:

“That’s why I decided to ask you this questions and I need your honest answers. Here are my questions…”

What followed was a series of five very broad “business of copywriting” questions, which it would take me about 175 pages to answer properly.

The fact is, I am a sucker for praise and admiration and inbox-based love. And I appreciated my reader’s message, even though it bordered on emotional blackmail.

But how to answer those very, very broad questions?

I pointed my secret admirer to my blog, which is the archive of these daily emails I send. The fact is, my best answers to all those big questions all out there on my blog, spread out across many pages. But I assume not one person in a thousand will go to my site and read through the 1,490+ emails I have archived there.

That’s not any kind of criticism. Most people have stuff to do and are not irrationally obsessive.

So my marketing takeaway for you is there’s value in simply packaging up what you already have, and organizing it neatly for other people to consume. People will pay good money for a sealed and bow-tied bag of figs at the market, even if those figs come from trees on public land two hills distant.

Which brings me to my Copy Riddles program. One day after I got the above declaration of love from my secret admirer, I got an email from copywriter Esat Akan. Esat wrote:

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I just wanted to let you know I’m having a BLASTTT with copy riddles. It’s so fun and I’m feeling like I’m becoming a better copywriter with each lesson I do. I’m only at lesson 3A I think (intrigue bullets) but I look forward to EVERY lesson hahaha.

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As I say on the sales page for Copy Riddles, much of what’s inside Copy Riddles is available for free on the Internet.

You can find most of the A-list sales letters I reference inside various free swipe files. And as for the books those sales letters sold, you can find many of them online in free online depositories with a bit of digging.

Once you have both the sales letters and the books they sold, you can compare the two, to find out the hidden tricks and secrets of A-list copywriters — tricks and secrets they might not even be consciously aware of using. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, and in time you will get an incredible copywriting education.

I’m an irrationally obsessive person, so I did this exact thing. It took me about three months of my life and maybe 100 hours of work.

It was very much worth it to me, because I discovered copywriting ideas I hadn’t heard of anywhere else, in spite of having previously spent thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars sharpening my copywriting chops.

Doing the same might be equally worth it to you.

On the other hand, if you don’t feel like spending 100 hours digging up these copywriting secrets, I’ve packaged them up and bow-tied them for you inside Copy Riddles.

Looked at one way, Copy Riddles is expensive. It costs $400 right now.

Looked at another way, Copy Riddles is not so expensive. For one thing, Copy Riddles is sure to go up in price, and maybe soon. Plus, if you think of it as some 80 hours of your life saved, it comes to $5/hr, which is less than the minimum wage in the Czech Republic.

Of course, the question is whether you would want these copywriting secrets in the first place. My best argument is that it took dozens of top copywriters years of experimentation, and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tested advertising, to invent the tricks and techniques that are inside Copy Riddles.

Plus, as Esat says above, the experience of going through Copy Riddles won’t just make you into a better copywriter… but is actually fun.

Is fun self-improvement and education worth paying for? Well, that’s for you to decide. For help making that decision, here’s the full info on Copy Riddles:

​https://bejakovic.com/cr/​

Going where no one has gone before?

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I have this unfortunate flaw in that I wake up every day, thanks to some internal alarm clock, which always rings earlier than I want.

Today it was 6am. I sat around in the dark for a while and then, at around 7, I went out for my morning walk.

At 7am on a Saturday in Barcelona, two worlds overlap.

I walked down the street, turned a corner, and saw a flash of naked ass. A girl was pulling up her leather pants, on the curb next to a small tree and some recycling containers. I guess she had just peed. Her friend stood guard but was facing in the wrong direction, away from where I and a few other people were coming and witnessing the shame. Pants up, the two oblivious girls staggered off drunkenly towards home.

That world, of people who hadn’t yet gone to bed by 7am, is one world.

I kept walking and the beach opened up before me. And the second world, the world of early-rising people, was already busy at work there.

A woman was holding her dog on a leash and yelling at her other dog to stop fooling around because it was time to go home. Two boys were kicking around a ball in the sand. And in the water, thanks to the large and rolling waves — not a common sight in Barcelona — there were some surfers.

Maybe you’re wondering whether there will be any hard “point” to today’s email. The point is this:

Down by the concrete pier that juts out into the Mediterranean, there was a clump of maybe a half dozen surfers. They were all bunched up. The waves were steady there and every 30 or so seconds, one of the surfers would catch a wave.

Meanwhile, further away from the pier, there was another surfer by himself. Every few minutes a small wave crested where he was waiting. The surfer would make an effort at catching it, but it was too small. As far as I saw, he never caught a wave, but he made a show at it.

And then further still, in the middle of the beach, there was yet another solitary surfer. He was bobbing up and down as the sea swelled underneath him. But he didn’t even have a wave to pretend to catch.

I think my point is clear, but if not:

It’s good to be different and distinct. It helps people make up their minds quickly about you. But if you rely on natural forces for motion — waves, money, desire — then you want to put yourself in a place where those things are moving.

It might seem clever and easy to go where nobody else has thought to go. Maybe you will get lucky. More likely, you will just bob around stubbornly in the cold water, while others, just a few feet away from you, have all the fun.

That’s most of my motivational message for you for today. And then there’s still the following promotional material:

My offer for you today is my Copy Riddles program. As I have said before, this program is really about going where the waves are:

– It’s about a proven way to write winning copy that’s been endorsed by A-list copywriters like Gary Halbert, Parris Lampropoulos, and Gary Bencivenga

– It features a bunch of examples from sales letters written to perennial markets, including finance, health, and personal development

– It gets you working alongside some of the top copywriters of all time who, whether by instinct or by design, knew how to tap into human desire where it was flowing

If any of that moves you:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

One thing Bencivenga got right

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If you go on YouTube right now, you can see how magic is done at the very highest level — I mean really see it, the trick behind the trick.

Frankly, it will seem preposterous.

A few weeks ago, a friend (hi Marci) clued me into an old but mind-opening video. The video shows one of the greatest magicians of all time, Tony Slydini, performing his “paper balls over head” trick on the Dick Cavett Show.

The unique thing is that this trick is done so it’s completely transparent to the audience. The audience can see all parts of Slydini’s trick in action. And it doesn’t seem like any trick at all.

But there’s a volunteer on stage, who Slydini focuses on.

The volunteer is determined to spot how Slydini makes a bunch of paper balls disappear. And yet, as the crowd laughs louder and louder with each new disappearing paper ball — it’s so obvious to be stupid — the poor guy on stage can’t ever spot the trick.

The volunteer goes from smiling and confident and sure of his own eyes at the start of the trick, to walking off the stage just a few minutes later, staring at the ground and shaking his head a little. “WTF just happened?”

What happened is misdirection.

I’m reading a book about misdirection right now. It’s called Leading With Your Head. The book gives specifics about movement and position and cues for actual stage magicians. But at the heart of it all, the book tells you, misdirection is not distraction. It is focused attention.

Copywriters do misdirection, too. Well, not all copywriters. Copywriters at the very highest level.

For example, I’ve spotted misdirection multiple times in Gary Bencivenga’s “Job Interviews” ad. That ad came pretty late in Gary’s career, after he had been writing sales copy for several decades. I didn’t find any examples of misdirection in Gary’s earlier sales letters, even if they were successful. It seems it took a while for him to get it right.

And in case you’re wondering:

You won’t spot the misdirection by looking at Gary’s ad. That’s like being the guy on stage during the “paper balls over head” trick. The Great Bencivenga will focus your attention where he wants you to look, and you will miss his sleight of hand.

But you can see how Gary’s magic works if you can find the book Gary was selling through that interviews ad. This brings up an important point.

I enjoy watching magic, and I enjoy being fooled by magicians. I enjoy it so much that I don’t want to find out how the trick is done, not really. I won’t ever perform magic, so why ruin the show for myself?

Maybe you feel something similar about sales letters. That might sound preposterous, but it’s very possible.

When you read a sales letter like Gary’s interviews ad — you’re likely to be amazed, astounded, to wonder at the impossible promises he is making you, which somehow still seem credible.

How is he doing it? Could Gary’s promises really be real? It’s possible to enjoy racking your brain over this in a bit of pleasurable uncertainty, as you try to resolve the mysteries Gary is setting out before you.

But once you see the actual “secrets” behind Gary’s copywriting tricks, the illusion vanishes like a cloud of smoke. And gone along with it is that enjoyable sense of wonder, of possible impossibility.

The only reason you might want to ruin the show for yourself is that you yourself want to perform sales magic — writing actual copy, which focuses people’s attention where you want it to go, all the way down to the order form where they put in their credit card information, and the big red button that says, “Buy NOW.”

It’s your decision. Amazed spectator shaking his head in wonder… or sly and knowing performer, controlling attention and doing magic.

If you decide you want the second, you can find Gary’s copy misdirection revealed inside Copy Riddles, specifically rounds 2, 6, and 17. For that show, step right up:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

What 44 percent of all Russian mystics wish you knew about the easiest way to bring them to an explosive death every time! (It’s news to a lot of marketers… see inside)

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The man was was not easy to kill. A mystic, prophet, and natural-born hypnotist who appeared at the court of the last Russian czar, and who, in just a short while, gained enormous influence:

Grigori Rasputin.

After a few years of growing nonsense at the court — nonsense caused by Rasputin’s influence — a faction of the Russian royal family had had enough. They schemed and plotted, and decided in secret to have Rasputin killed.

So on December 30, 1916, Rasputin was served poisoned wine and pastries laced with potassium cyanide. He swallowed glass after glass of the wine and wolfed down the pastries.

He groaned a little, but it wasn’t enough to kill the hearty Russian peasant.

Prince Felix Yusupov then emerged from behind a curtain and shot Rasputin with a pistol. More groaning but the beast still seemed to live.

So Rasputin was then stabbed repeatedly, and eventually dragged to the icy Neva river and drowned there. This finally did the job.

Of course, most people don’t put up so much resistance. I believe even one cyanide-laced chocolate chip cookie would be enough to do me in. But for more resistant, stubborn souls, other options exist.

I bring up the grisly story of Rasputin’s death because I’m about to make an inelegant comparison.

For the next few days, I will be promoting my Copy Riddles course. Copy Riddles teaches you copywriting, or really, effective communication, via the mechanism of teaching you sales bullets.

The reason sales bullets are so good for learning copywriting is that they have to pack an entire sales presentation in just a sentence or two. If you happen to write in the most competitive, sophisticated, stubborn, and resistant markets, this produces miracles/monsters of persuasion such as this:

“What 44 percent of all women wish you knew about the easiest way to bring her to an explosive climax every time! (It’s news to a lot of men… see pages 89-93.)”

That’s a bullet by A-list copywriter John Carlton. Carlton wrote this and dozens of bullets like it to promote a boring book about sexual health for direct response publisher Rodale, whose main business was selling how-to guides about tomato gardening.

Result? from Carlton’s files:

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I had to fight tooth and nail to get this piece mailed. At one point I was screaming at upper level veeps. I wish someone had taken a video of that meeting: there’s all these honchos sitting around the conference table, stunned, and there’s my voice hollering from the little speakerphone. (I never travel to client meetings, and have never met any of these people face-to-face.) Priceless.

It took me nearly a month to convince them to mail the piece as I wrote it. I caused such a fuss that I was actually blacklisted — until the results came in. I slaughtered the control. In fact, I’d hit a nerve in the public, and this piece mailed for over 5 years, despite frequent attempts by other top writers to knock it off. Ka-ching.

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Maybe you have no stomach for screaming at your clients or customers, or for writing explosive sales copy that slaughters the control in the easiest way possible every time. That’s fine. Not everybody is competing on the national stage, like Carlton was, or against other top writers.

On more modest stages, it’s enough to reach for just one or two of Carlton’s deadly persuasion weapons — instead of doing the equivalent of poisoning, shooting, stabbing, and then drowning your poor reader.

I told you it’s an inelegant analogy. But what to do — we’re talking about bullets. And as marketer Ken McCarthy put it once, bullets wound.

In any case, if you want access to the entire secret closet of persuasion poisons, knives, pistols, blunderbusses, mace, shuriken, anvils-on-a-frayed-rope, halberds, and brass knuckles, so you can choose a persuasion weapon or two for your particular purpose, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Serves me right for soliciting wishes

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Last month, I sent out an email about a training I want to put together, on how copywriters can create their own offers. I’m still planning to put that training together, and I will have it out later this month.

Anyways, in that email, I asked for input. What’s your current situation… what’s holding you back from creating your own offer… what questions would you wish that I answer if I put this training together.

I got some good responses. But one reader got greedy. He decided to treat me like the genie of the lamp, and he wished the forbidden wish:

“Tell me how to create an offer that’s guaranteed to be irresistible!”

Upon hearing this, I bounced around like an angry djinn, exploding into a million little exasperated stars. “That’s like wishing for more wishes! ‘Guaranteed’? ‘Irresistible’? It cannot be done!”

But then I rematerialized into my human form. I scratched my blue genie head, pulled on my genie beard, and thought for a moment. I reached back into my ancient genie memory, spanning thousands of years, thousands of copywriting books, and thousands of sales campaigns.

I realized there is a way that’s almost guaranteed to produce irresistible offers.

​​At least, I found there’s a common element to all the offers I’ve created which ended up successful. On the flip side, I also found this element was lacking in all the offers which fizzled.

I won’t spell out what this magical element is — not here. It’s something I will reserve for my Mystical Cave of Secrets, aka that training about offers I will put on later this month.

But I can give you an idea of what this element is, using my most successful offer to date, Copy Riddles. If you pay close attention to what I’m about to say, you can figure out what I have in mind.

Here goes:

Copy Riddles is built around a simple bit of advice by the legendary, multimillionaire copywriter Gary Halbert.

Gary’s bit of advice has been endorsed by A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos. Parris said that if you follow Gary’s bit of advice, you’ll learn to write copy and make lots of money. And Parris should know — because he himself followed Gary’s advice, applied it, and made lots of money.

Parris isn’t the only one. Marketer Ben Settle also admitted that he followed Gary’s advice and profited as a result.

And another Gary — Gary Bencivenga, who has been called America’s greatest living copywriter, said he managed to beat a control by Gene Schwartz as a result of following this same approach that Gary Halbert advised, though he arrived at it independently of Gary Halbert.

And what is that bit of advice?

It’s​​ simply to look at sales bullets from successful sales letters, and to compare those bullets to the source in the book or the course or whatever that the sales letter was selling. That’s how you can spot the “twists” that top copywriters use to turn sand into glass, water into wine, lead into gold.

So that’s what I did.

I tracked down both the source material, and the bullets that sold that source material. But not just any bullets. Bullets written by A-list copywriters — including the two Gary’s, including Parris, including many more like David Deutsch and John Carlton — who were all competing against each other in the biggest big-money arenas of sales copywriting and direct marketing.

And then, rather than just creating a how-to course based on the tricks and tactics that I saw these A-list copywriters using in their sales bullets, I created a fun, immersive, exercise-based experience that I summed up in the title of the course, Copy Riddles.

Result? Here’s marketer Chew Zhi Wei, who went through Copy Riddles a while back:

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By the way just wanted to thank you for such an amazing course. This might be one of the most valuable courses that I have ever have the privilege to attend. So much so that I even feel that you’re underselling how much value you’re actually gifting away. Thank you so very very much.

===

Is it clear now how to make an almost irresistible offer? I hope it is. And if not, you can find it discussed in more detail in rounds 6-12 of Copy Riddles, with round 11 being particularly relevant.

If you’re curious about all that, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

My Most Valuable Email trick leaks out all over the Internet

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This year, I set myself the task to do something “paid” each month to grow this newsletter, as well as something “free” — something I don’t have to pay for, except in my time, thought, and effort.

The free thing for February was writing up a guest newsletter issue for the Formats Unpacked people. Formats Unpacked is a Substack newsletter that looks at the underlying structure of interesting podcasts, newsletters, YouTube Channels, computer games, pop songs, subscription boxes, physical puzzles.

The format of Formats Unpacked itself is to briefly describe the format of the thing under examination, and then then to focus on “the magic that makes it special.”

I decided to unpack the format of the Brain Software podcast, by hypnotists Mike Mandel and Chris Thompson. I’ve written about Brain Software many times in this newsletter, because it’s one of only two podcasts that I listen to regularly.

The format of Brain Software is a cross between Car Talk, absurd late-night sketch TV, and a standup show.

But while writing that Formats Unpacked analysis, I realized that the magic that makes Brain Software special might just be that Mike and Chris use what I call the Most Valuable Email trick.

So maybe I should call it the Most Valuable Podcast trick.

Or maybe the Most Valuable YouTube Channel trick.

Or maybe the Most Valuable Book trick.

Because over just the past few weeks, I’ve noticed the MVE trick in action in Brain Software (hypnosis podcast), in a top YouTube channel about learning Spanish (Español con Juan), and in a cult book about negotiation (Jim Camp’s Start With No).

And then there’s a message I got a few days ago, from career coach Tom Grundy. Tom knows the Most Valuable Email trick, and he had this to say:

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Hi John,

I bought MVE a couple of weeks back – despite your warning a few months ago that it might not be best suited! And I love it.

I can see lots of ways to use the trick in my career advice/personal development emails. Mainly related to Topic 4 (positioning/attitude) but also general “life advice” (e.g. “there’s no such thing as perfection”) and self-promotion/self-marketing (some overlaps with direct marketing). I’m sure there’s other ways I could use the trick too which I haven’t figured out yet.

Looking forward to the second Book Club call. I’m a big magic fan so I was excited to see the book choice for round 2.

===

The warning Tom is referring to is right there on top of the MVE sales page:

“If you are NOT primarily a marketer or copywriter, or you do not write about those topics, then I advise you NOT to buy this training. The Most Valuable Email trick will not work for all niches, markets, or topics.”

I stand by that — even though the MVE trick can be used effectively to write about hypnosis, language learning, negotiation, and like Tom says above, personal development and career advice.

But maybe you are a daredevil. Maybe you don’t heed any warnings, including mine. ​In that case, I can’t stop you from buying Most Valuable Email and even profiting from it. To find out more about MVE:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

How to become in-demand in your niche even if you have no contacts, portfolio, or good sense

by

A long while ago, in the days when elephants still roamed the Earth, I came across the following question:

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Say I wanted my copywriting niche to be SaaS, but have no contacts or portfolio, what are the steps I’ll need to take to become in-demand for my niche?

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Here are the exact steps I would suggest:

Step 1: Go to Silicon Valley.

Step 2: Get in front of somebody famous in the startup space, like Elon Musk or Marc Andreessen or Peter Thiel. ​​Get creative if you have to — stalk them at a coffee shop they are known to go to, pay to go to a conference where they will appear, or maybe just write them an email and ask if they will meet you because you’re such a big fan.

Step 3: Take a selfie of yourself next to the famous nerd in Step 2.

Step 4: Put that selfie up on your site, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on TikTok, on Tinder, along with an article like, “10 surprising copywriting lessons from my meeting with Marc Andreessen.”

Step 5: In your article, mention several times that you are a SaaS copywriter, and link to a “Free Consultation” page.

Step 6: Repeat Steps 1-5 with additional famous nerds, as needed.

Result: Almost instant status and authority, and very probably, serious demand for your services.

You might think I’m being flippant. But I’m being 100% serious.

Yesterday, I promised to tell you the big secret of peak status.

The thing is, you might not want to hear it. Or you might not want to believe it.

Because the secret is that status can be manufactured, and very quickly.

In the same way that quality is only a minor part of the influence that your content is likely to have, your resume is only a minor part of the the status you are likely to achieve. And all the other, more important stuff, can be accomplished in two weeks’ time, if you are willing to really hustle.

Maybe you get what I’m saying.

But maybe you feel exasperated. Maybe you are sure I am either 100% wrong. Or maybe you suspect I am right, but you just find it impossible to really hustle to create status for yourself.

In that case, my advice is not to hustle. Take it slowly. Better slowly than never.

My added advice is that, if you are a marketer or copywriter in search of status, then take a look at my Most Valuable Email.

Sure, MVE will show you a new way to create quality content, but that’s not why I recommend it. Instead, the real status-building value of MVE is that it can get you gradually more comfortable with all those content-adjacent status-building practices which really make the difference.

I imagine that sounds very vague and abstract. I can’t make it more specific without giving away the Most Valuable Email trick. If you’d like to find out what that trick is, and even start practicing it today, head on over here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/