Reader wants to join my Insights & More Book Club, but doesn’t want to read

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This morning, I woke up to find a hot inquiry from a potential buyer:

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Hey john!

I wanna ask you a question about this insights book club thing you’re selling.

I’m interested in it but since I basically have a 10+ “must read” book list that’s pending at all times, realistically, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to read the “insight book” along with you.

Do you think this “mastermind” is still worth a buy?

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How to respond? My natural instinct would be to smile, unpack my sample set of stainless steel pots and pans, and start my pitch, explaining how these pots and pans pay for themselves in just two months’ time, thanks to the energy savings and reduction in food wastage. “As an added bonus, they maximize taste thanks to the Silichromatic Ring™ and Redi-Temp® Valve!”

But I stopped myself from doing what comes naturally. Instead, I responded like this:

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Fair question. I’d like to answer it but how can I? What would a mastermind call be worth to you? What would you want to get out of it in order for it to be worth $15/month to you?

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The only reason I thought and responded like this is because I am now going through Jim Camp’s book Start With No, for maybe the fourth time in five years.

I’m going through Camp’s book for the fourth time because, as I’ve written before, I believe books are the most condensed and most useful sources of ideas and information. They give you the kind of depth you will not find in any other format. They stimulate thinking in a way that no other format can match. What’s more, they offer the best value for your money. You should hate books if you’re selling info, and love them if you’re buying info.

Of course, you have to put in some work to get that value out of a book. Reading it, taking notes, thinking a bit, maybe even rereading, once, twice, or four times, like I’m doing with Camp.

​​Which brings me back to my Insights & More Book Club, and to that inquiry I got this morning.

I’ve opened the doors to the Insights & More Book Club to new members for a few days. I will close the doors again tomorrow. We are starting a new book right now for March and April, and it doesn’t make sense to have people join mid-way.

After my Camp-inspired response above, the potential new member of my book club thought for a bit. He decided it makes sense for him to join even if he has no time to read the actual books. I doubt that’s something I could have sold him on with my pots-and-pans sales shtick. And it’s not something I will try to sell you on either.

But if you are interested in the Insights & More Book Club, whether for the books themselves, for company to help you unlock value out of those books, or for other reasons of your own, you will have to sign up to my email newsletter as a first step. You can do that here. You have until tomorrow, February 27.

Why I’ve just sent you the only Times New Roman newsletter you are likely to read today

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This past Wednesday, I found myself mystified by an article titled The Reaction Economy. It was written by a William Davies — “a sociologist and political economist” — in the London Review of Books.

Davies was complaining about Twitter, and how he is trying to wean himself off it, and how his brain screams to set the record straight whenever it sees idiotic conservative tweets. But Davies is a disciplined person, so he didn’t give in to the urge and get back on Twitter. Instead, he went and wrote a 6,276-word article in the LRB about it.

As I read this, I found myself mystified why I was reading it at all. I mean, what was fresh here? Some guy saying he wants to use social media less? Or a liberal airing his lungs about conservative trolls? Or an online pundit shaking his finger and warning me, as I nod along in silence, that social media is designed to provoke outrage?

And yet, there I was, reading, paragraph after long paragraph. I asked myself why. One small part was the good headline, The Reaction Economy. That sucked me in initially. But what kept me going had nothing to do with the actual content, which was neither new nor insightful.

I realized that the real reason I was reading was that the article was hosted on the LRB website. Beyond that, it was the formatting — 10-line paragraphs, drop capitals, Times New Roman font.

Copywriter Gary Bencivenga once told a story of how his ad agency rushed an ad into the New York Times. In the rush, the NYT typesetters set the ad with a sans-serif font. Gary’s agency complained, and the Times offered to run the ad the next week, for free, with the correct serif font. This was not a proper A/B split test. Still, the serif ad ended up pulling 80% more sales than the sans-serif ad the week earlier.

Is there really sales magic to serif font? Probably not. But we use cues all the time to decide on value, and to guide our decisions. I’ve written before how I find myself unable to spend more than 20 seconds reading a 700-word blog entry or email newsletter, but that I’m happy to read a four-volume book of 1,900 pages for more than a year.

Quality of content is a part of it, but only a part. The fact is, I use cues all the time to evaluate that quality, and I rely on past habits to determine what deserves my attention or not.

So my point for you is is, why stack the odds against yourself? Why give your reader subtle cues that your writing is skimmable, disposable, low-value fluff? The bigger principle, which I’ve seen proven in different areas of life, is: Assume people are already acting how you want them to act. Very often, they will end up doing just that.

Since you’ve read this far, I assume you must be a reader. So I will remind you that, for the next three days, until February 27th, I am opening the doors to my Insights & More Book Club. After that, I will close off the club to new members. We will start reading the next book on March 1st, and it makes no sense to have people join mid-way. The only way to join is to be signed up to my email newsletter first. If you like, you can do that here.

Three money stories from the second Insights & More book

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Here’s three quick stories about a boy:

AGE 9: ​​Boy and his brother shine shoes to make money. They’re supposed to bring $2 back home to help feed the rest of the family.

Brother loses the $2 on the way home. Mother is about to start sobbing.

​​Boy thinks and has an idea. He and his brother take their last nickel and go and buy a flower at a flower shop. They sell it on the street for a dime. They go back to the flower shop and buy two more flowers. They sell those.

Soon they’re back home with $2. Mother joyous.

AGE 14: ​​Boy’s family moves to New York City. They can’t pay rent in their slum apartment.

It’s Christmas. The boy has a messenger job. He thinks again for a moment. He then writes out a neat and rhyming little message and puts it on his hat. The message invites passersby to drop a quarter in the hat in the spirit of Christmas.

Boy comes home at the end of the day and tells his mother to shake him. She does. Quarters start falling out everywhere, from his pockets, his hair, behinds his ears. Rent paid.

AGE 16: ​​Boy needs a job. He sees a sign on the street advertising a job, and a line of people waiting at the sign.

Boy walks up to the front of the line, picks up the sign. He kindly and professionally informs the waiting applicants that the job has been filled, and thanks them for coming.

Later, when the doors to the building open, he walks in, and is immediately hired, as the only applicant.

The point of all these stories is to show you how easy it is to make money.

“Yeah but it’s not always like that,” you might say. “Those are cherry-picked stories.”

Maybe so. The fact is, the boy in the stories above did not start a flower-reselling empire. Perhaps it was a lucky one-time thing.

​​Or perhaps, outside of that moment of need, which broke down his usual barriers and spurred him to innovation and action, he always had some mental block to keep him back.

It’s something I’ve often thought about, and not just in connection to making money.

Anyways, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of the boy in the three stories above. He’s still famous today, even though, as you can guess by the dollar amounts, these stories happened a long time ago.

If you know who he is, well, good for you.

And if you don’t know, but would like to know, you can find out by joining my Insights & More Book Club. Because these three stories came from the second book-club book, which I started reading two nights ago.

The Insights & More Book Club is only open to people who are signed up to my email newsletter. So in case you’d like to join, either now or in the future, sign up to my newsletter here.

Creativity for sticky, literal-minded, non-creative types like me

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I remember a negotiation I once had with a business owner, Mr. M. We were discussing a host-parasite relationship.

Mr. M organized conferences and masterminds composed of other business owners in his industry.

I provided a service that was of interest to those business owners — sales letter copy.

Mr. M offered to repeatedly refer people in his sphere of influence to me — for a 10% fee of what I made from his referrals.

“It’s a good deal,” he shrugged. “You wouldn’t ever have to hunt for new clients or negotiate fees. I know you must hate that since you’re a creative type.”

I just kept quiet. The fact is, I never minded hunting for clients or negotiating fees. And the other fact is, I’m far from a creative type. But why argue?

You might think it’s false modesty when I say I’m far from a creative type. After all, I write this newsletter, and I’ve done it every day for the past four years. Fine. Let me give you a snapshot from last night to illustrate:

Last night, I went to my Spanish class. We had a task to write a “Wanted” ad for our ideal roommate.

After a few minutes of creative idea generation, we went around the room sharing what we had come up with. Everybody had fun and surprising roommate criteria. I want a roommate who…

“Won’t organize parties without inviting me!”

“Knows how to cook food from around the world and is willing to share!”

“Is the same height as me so I can wear her clothes!”

My turn came. I looked down at my notes. “I want a roommate who can pay the bills.”

This isn’t about Spanish knowledge. It’s an example of something I’ve notice about myself over and over.

I’m extremely literal. My mind is sticky. It often jumps to the most immediate association and refuses to budge from there.

I’m telling you all this to maybe get you to budge.

I’ve repeatedly been told that what I write is creative, unique, surprising. And maybe it is. It’s certainly made good money for both my clients and for myself. Some of what I’ve written has even stood the test of time – if by time you are willing to accept months and years, instead of decades and centuries.

So here’s my bit of advice to get you to budge:

The secret is to recognize how your brain operates, and to work with it.

Business coach Rich Schefren likes to say, “Don’t put self-growth goals before business goals.” Meaning, don’t wait until you fix your laziness, procrastination, lack of money-motivation, fear of managing employees, flakiness, or distaste at self-promotion.

You will never fix those things, or it will take decades. If you want to start a business, start one now, and figure out how to make that business work in spite of all your faults.

Same thing with creative work. If you want to make a living off your ideas, insights, or just plain content, figure out a system that works with your brain. A system that allows you to consistently come up with creative, unique, surprising stuff, in spite of your natural literalness and mental stickiness.

I figured out a system that works for me. I will be describing it in my upcoming Insight Exposed training. If you like, you can get that training when it’s out, and it might give you one or two or three good ideas that allow you to be more creative, more consistently.

Insight Exposed is not released yet, but I will release it before the end of this month. So it makes sense to start seeding the idea in your head now.

Meanwhile, if you’re looking to create, start now. Write something.

And if you want a constraint, one that helps you be more creative instead of hindering you, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

The quantum theory of sitcom or blowing your readers’ minds

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Two weeks ago, I wrote an email all about my futile, morning-long search for a quote about Larry David and how he ran the writers for “Seinfeld” like a team of huskies pulling a sled.

It turns out my search wasn’t entirely futile. I did come across the following interesting bit by Larry Charles.

Charles used to be the supervising producer on “Seinfeld.” In a New Yorker article, he remembered the exact moment, during the development of season three, when he was talking to Larry David and when things clicked:

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We went, “What if the book that was overdue was in the homeless guy’s car? And the homeless guy was the gym teacher that had done the wedgie? And what if, when they return the book, Kramer has a relationship with the librarian?”

Suddenly it’s like — why not? It’s like, boom boom boom, an epiphany — quantum theory of sitcom! It was, like, nobody’s doing this! Usually, there’s the A story, the B story — no, let’s have five stories! And all the characters’ stories intersect in some sort of weirdly organic way, and you just see what happens. It was like — oh my God. It was like finding the cure for cancer.

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Last November, I put together a live training about creating an a-ha moment in your reader’s brain or brains.

I did a lot of research and a lot of thinking to prepare for that training.

One thing I realized is how there’s 98% overlap, perhaps 98.2%, between creating an a-ha moment and creating a ha-ha moment.

The difference mainly comes down to context, tone, the kind of setting you find yourself in.

On the other hand, the structure, techniques, necessary ingredients, and resulting effects are all the same between a-ha and ha-ha, insight and comedy.

So maybe it’s worth looking at Charles’s quote above in more detail, at least if you want to blow your readers’ minds.

Notice what it doesn’t say:

* There’s nothing about character development

* There’s nothing about carefully crafted language

* There really nothing about the substance of the thing, rather only about the form, the structure

Maybe you find all this kind of abstract.

Maybe you’d like some more concrete stories and examples to illustrate how to take the quantum theory of sitcom above, and use it to blow people’s minds.

If that’s what you’d like, I’ve put together a course about it, called Most Valuable Email. It tells you one way, which has worked very well for me, to take Charles’s idea above and apply it to writing daily emails.

Most Valuable Email also gives you 51 concrete examples of the most successful, influential, and insightful emails that use the Most Valuable Email trick.

It’s very possible you’ve decided Most Valuable Email isn’t for you. That’s fine. Otherwise, you can find more information here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

If this email makes me any money, I still won’t really get it

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I read a story a while back about a man named John Clauser.

Clauser studied physics but he struggled with it. That resonated with me, not because I studied physics, but because I studied math, and I struggled with that.

Anyways, Clauser had to take a grad-level course in quantum mechanics.

He failed. Twice. Eventually he managed to pass but he never really “got” it.

Some time later, Clauser decided to design an experiment to disprove quantum mechanics. His advisors told him not to do it. Clauser insisted. Maybe his ego was on the line.

Clauser carried out his experiment, which was meant to falsify a key prediction of quantum mechanics. Instead, to his disappointment, Clauser demonstrated quantum entanglement, just as the theory predicted.

Last year, Clauser won the Nobel Prize in physics for his work. He said, “I confess even to this day that I still don’t understand quantum mechanics.”

In his book Breakthrough Advertising, Gene Schwartz compared copywriters to atomic scientists. Gene argued that both copywriters and atomic scientists work with primal forces of nature. They cannot create those forces, but they can harness them and use them.

I’d like to extend Gene’s analogy. It’s not just that we can’t create those primal forces. We can’t even understand them, not really, not using our everyday human intuition.

Nobel-winning physicists still don’t understand quantum mechanics. ​​A-list copywriters still don’t understand human desire multiplied.

A few decades into his career, Gary Halbert put a lot of money into a weight loss product with a great proof element — a high school student who lost almost 600 lbs. “Without hunger! Without pills! Without low energy! Without giving up good food!”

Gary flew down to interview and record the guy. He created the product. He wrote and ran the ads. He put in dramatic before-and-after pictures and a money-back guarantee.

The ads bombed.

Nobody wanted this thing. Why? Nobody knows. You would think that a weight loss offer with a strong proof element and copy written by Gary Halbert would be a sure shot.

As screenwriter William Goldman once said — about those other people who cater to human desire, the Hollywood crowd — “Nobody knows anything.”

My point is not to depress you, by the way. Gary Halbert made millions of dollars and lived in Key West and fished all day long. William Goldman won a couple of Oscars. John Clauser got his Nobel prize. All that, in spite of not understanding how the damn thing works on a basic level.

The key of course is to keep generating ideas, to keep working, to keep taking a new step every day. And the day after, and so on until you drop dead. Great things can get accomplished in this way, and small things, and everything in between.

All right. I hope I haven’t inspired you too much.

I now have my Most Valuable Email training to pitch to you. I doubt you will be interested. You have probably heard me talk about this training before, and you have probably decided already it’s not for you.

That’s fine. But in case you want to find out more about Most Valuable Email, and how it can help you keep writing a new valuable email each day — and maybe even make money with it, God knows how — then take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Which email newsletters sell classified ads?

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Last week Ben Settle sent an email in which he wrote:

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I remember buying little $35 and $50 ads in email newsletters 20 years ago.

Nowadays, I don’t see a lot of them.

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True. So let me ask you, do you know of any such email newsletters?

I know of a few. In fact, I bought a couple of classified ads in two weekly newsletters this month.

​​One ran already, bringing me some 50 new subscribers. Another will run in a few more days.

The first of these ads cost $350. The other will cost $100. We will see if they end up paying for themselves.

I’ve also bought one of the three $1k classified ads in Daniel Throssell’s newsletter. That ad is supposed to run some time next month. I will let you know more about it as it’s nearing, because I will have a special offer in that ad, only available if you are on Daniel’s list at the time.

But why even bother with classified ads? Here’s why:

In the old direct mail days, one of they key pieces of info that marketers wanted to know was what format somebody was sold through.

An infomercial buyer was not the same as a magalog buyer was not the same as a sweepstakes buyer.

The same bit of psychology holds today.

A YouTube gawker is not the same as a Twitter endless-scroller is not the same as an email reader. Even if all of them are interested in marketing, or even bought marketing-related courses.

So that’s why I’ve been looking to buy more email classified ads.

I’ve being doing my research about email newsletters that sell them.But I would like to get your feedback also. So I have an offer for you:

Do you read any email newsletters that run classified ads?

Write in and tell me specific names. Ben Settle, Daniel Throssell, and Josh Spector are off the table, since I know about them already.

My offer for you is that, if you write in and tell me, I will reply to you with one source of email traffic to avoid, at least in my experience. I ran an experiment with it last year, spent $731, and made nothing in return. I will tell you what I learned, and maybe you can laugh at my stubbornness or folly.

Also, in case you are not interested in growing your list with paid ads, but you want to do it organically, then take a look at my Most Valuable Email training.

​​Personally, I’ve been able to trace hundreds of my subscribers to emails I’ve written using the Most Valuable Email trick I describe in this training.

On several occasions, influential people chanced upon one of those MVE emails, enjoyed it enough to share it with others, and ended up driving a large number of new subscribers to my list. If you’d like to find out more:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

I stopped reading a well-known marketer’s newsletter out of confusion and a desire for hygiene

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A couple days ago, I got a newsletter email from a well-known marketer. In what follows, I’m going to pick on this marketer, but as per usual, I don’t want to come across as picking on well-known marketers just as a way of getting exposure.

​​So let me refer to this guy by the impenetrable alias Arthur Lang.

Arthur used to send only one email a week, on Sundays. I would always read Arthur’s Sunday email, because it very often had interesting stories and interesting offers. I also took up Arthur on his offers, on three separate occasions, all in all totaling somewhere north of $700.

A while back though, Arthur upped his mailing frequency, and started sending a second email, on Fridays.

Pretty much since that happened, I find I never read Arthur’s emails any more. For example, I didn’t read his email from last Friday, and I didn’t read the Sunday email before that.

The reason I didn’t read either email is because the two emails are the same, just with a different subject line.

Arthur must be using some clever functionality in his ESP to re-send his Sunday email five days later to people who didn’t open, while camouflaging it with a new subject line.

Only problem is, I used to open and read Arthur’s Sunday emails. And yet I still got the Friday emails. And I used to open and read those too, until I realized, fairly quickly given how slow my brain works, that this is the same email I had read a few days earlier.

After a few weeks of this, I stopped opening both emails. Not out of any kind of irritation or spite, but simply out of confusion and a desire for hygiene. “I must have read this already. This isn’t fresh.”

So my small point for you is, beware of making key business decisions based on email opens. Those decisions can include re-sending emails, kicking people off your list, or determining which content resonates or not.

​​Opens were always flaky. But today, they are more flaky than a pretty 21-year-old girl in a big city on a Saturday night in July.

My bigger point, in case you want it, is to keep your emails fresh or even raw. That doesn’t mean you can never resend or reuse content. But few things are worse for an email newsletter than if your reader imagines, even if he has to squint to do it, that he’s having a real one-on-one interaction with you, only to find unquestionable proof that it’s really not so.

Today being Sunday February 19 means I will likely get a new email from Arthur Lang, which I will most probably ignore.

Today being Sunday February 19 also means I’m already several weeks behind schedule in releasing my training on journaling and taking notes.

I initially planned to call that training Insight Juggernaut, but I decided to rename it Insight Exposed. The reasons for that will become obvious if you keep reading my fresh and even raw email newsletter.

In the meantime, since I’m behind schedule, I don’t have anything planned to promote for you. So let me go back to my Most Valuable Email training. It’s a daily email-writing strategy that helps your emails stay fresh in two ways.

​​First, because of the actual Most Valuable Email trick, and the kind of content it produces, which tends to read fresh.

​​Second, because this trick is actually fun to use, at least for me, and therefore it makes it easy and even inviting to write a new email each day.

In case you’d like to find out more:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

If you have an ecommerce business, then I’d like to talk to you

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If you have an ecommerce business, and you want to make more front-end sales, increase your ad spend profitably, and make more money from your current customer list, then I’d like to talk to you.

I haven’t talked much about this over the past year — but these are things I know about.

My longest-running client, back when I still did client work regularly, was an 8-figure ecommerce business.

I wrote dozens of cold-traffic funnels from them, from snout to tail, including a unique front-end format I called the “horror advertorial.”

That client was consistently making up to 2,000 front-end sales each day, using a bunch of my “horror advertorial” funnels. Another client of mine went from $2k/day to $12k/day in daily ad spend by adding in one of my horror advertorials to their existing funnel.

I’ve also done email marketing for ecommerce businesses. I’ve worked with 8-figure direct response supplement businesses and tripled results in their email funnels. I’ve managed two 70,000-person email lists and pulled out free money for them out of thin air, month after month.

All that’s to say these are things I know about.

So if you have an ecommerce business, and you want my help or advice, then get on my email list. And then write me, and we can start a conversation.

The most radical division it is possible to make in the marketing world today

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There is one fact which, whether for good or ill, is of utmost importance in the lives of all marketers in the present moment.

There is no doubt this fact forms the most radical division it is possible to make in the marketing world today. It splits marketers into two classes of creatures: winners and losers.

I will tell you this fact. Or rather, I will illustrate it.

Yesterday, YouTube served me up a video. The video was blurry and showed a three-piece rock band. They were at some sort of daytime festival. They stood on a tiny stage with flower pots in the front and an American flag pinned to the back wall.

The band members were middle-aged. They all wore matching outfits — black dress pants and shimmering gold sport coats. They started to play a ZZ Top cover and—

The drummer. Something was clearly wrong with him.

He was grimacing. He was flailing his head. He was wrapping his arms around his head before striking the drums. He was doing the robot. He was drumming with one hand. He was doing a kind of imbecile tiny drumming.

If Chris Farley had learned to play the drums before he died of a speedball overdose, this is what it would have looked like.

This video has 51 million views on YouTube right now.

​​​A tiny stage with flowerpots in the front. Shimmering gold sport coats. A ZZ Top cover.

51 million views.

So here’s the fact of utmost importance:

If you prefer not to exaggerate, you must remain silent.

Such is the formidable fact of our times, described without any concealment of the brutality of its features.

It is, furthermore, entirely new in the history of our modern civilization. Never, in the course of its development, has anything similar happened. Never have there been other periods of history in which exaggeration has come to govern more directly than in our own.

I know well that many of my readers do not think as I do. This is most natural.

Many of those dissentient readers have never given five minutes’ thought to this complex matter. And yet they believe that they have a right to an opinion on the issue. It merely confirms the theorem.

These readers feel themselves complete and intellectually perfect. They have hermetically closed off their minds to new ideas and decided to settle down definitely amid old mental furniture.

​​How to reach such people — except through exaggeration?

The only question that remains is how to best adapt to the present moment. How to exaggerate in the most effective way possible.

I may be mistaken, but the present writer, when he puts is fingers to the keyboard to treat a subject which he has studied deeply, believes this most effective way is called Copy Riddles.

Copy Riddles brings together the greatest collection of copywriting talent ever assembled inside one program. These master persuaders are ready to reveal their secrets to you, to prepare you for the present reality, and to take you outside of yourself for a moment.

​​To start your transmigration:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/