The positioning you want if you live and die by your expertise

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“Looks like you just about cleaned everybody out, fella. You haven’t lost a hand since you got the deal. What’s your secret of your success?”

“Prayer.”

Let’s see if you recognize this magical Hollywood scene, and if you can spot the influence and positioning lesson within.

The scene in set in a Wild West saloon. Some cowboys are playing blackjack. One cowboy has been winning. ​​Too much.

“You’re a hell of a card player,” says one of the other cowboys. “I know, cause I’m a hell of a card player. And I can’t even spot how you’re cheating.”

All the other cowboys push away from the table in a hurry. The accusing card player stands up. His hand is hovering at his hip, next to his gun.

“The money stays,” the accuser says. “And you go.”

I’ll continue the scene in a sec. I would just like to point out this is also likely to be how your prospects size up you and your business. “The money stays,” they say. “And you go.”

Moving on:

Suddenly, a new figure enters the scene.

This new guy is friendly and cheery. He goes over to the possibly cheating card player, who’s still seated. The new guy tries to pull the possible cheater out of the saloon before a gunfight goes down. But the guy won’t budge.

“I wasn’t cheating,” he says. “If he invites us to stay, then we’ll go.”

So now there’s this tense three-way standoff.

The accusing cowboy, standing and ready to draw his gun. The possibly cheating cowboy, still seated and looking cool and a little sad. And the third guy, cheery and helpful, trying to negotiate between the two of them.

“What would you think about maybe asking us to stick around?” the cheery guy says to the accusing cowboy. “You don’t have to mean it or nothing, just ask us—” But he gets shoved out of the way.

The cheery guy sighs and hangs his head. He turns to the seated, possibly cheating cowboy and says, “I can’t help you, Sundance.”

Suddenly the accuser, who was ready to draw his gun a second before, opens his eyes wide. Then he starts blinking.

“I didn’t know you were the Sundance Kid when I said you were cheating. If I draw on you, you’ll kill me.”

Sundance finally stands up from the table. “There’s that possibility,” he says.

But nobody dies in this scene, because, against all odds, the accusing cowboy decides to invite Sundance and his partner, Butch, to stick around.

“Thanks, but we gotta get going,” says Butch. So the two friends collect the money off the table, take a last sip of whisky, and head on out the door.

This magical scene, as you may have guessed, comes from Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, which won the Oscar for best screenplay in 1969. It’s one of my favorite films.

As for the influence and positioning lesson — well, I’ll leave you to think about that.

It’s particularly worth thinking about if you make a living via your expertise, your undeniable skill, in a world filled with other with other cowboys who might be faster draws than you are.

Because here’s what doesn’t happen in the scene above. There’s no demonstration of skill. No guns being drawn. There’s not even any bluster or talk of how fast anybody is. There’s just the mention of a name — Sundance.

I’ll write more about that one day soon.

Meanwhile if this topic interests you, take a look at my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters. Not just for the content inside.

But for the fact that, out of tens of thousands of people who have worked as copywriters over the past century, there are just 10 that I thought worthy to highlight in this book.

How did they get to have that status and influence?

Well, you can get an idea of that by seeing how I talk about them in the book. To get that at an atrociously high price:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

My 11-inch Stonehenge now for sale for $12.69

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The similarities are uncanny:

On the one hand, you have the members of Spinal Tap, the hard rock bank, standing on stage, cowls over their heads, smoke billowing around them, eerie lighting from underneath.

​​They are supposed to be druids. As a mysterious guitar riff plays, a reproduction of one of the Stonehenge pillars is lowered onto the stage.

The pillar was meant to be monumental — 11 feet high. Except, due to a typo in the blueprint, the pillar is only 11 inches high. It’s lowered onto the stage, and is below the knees of guitar player Nigel Tufnel.

And similarly, this morning:

You have me, cowl over my head, lit up eerily from underneath, laughing a villainous laugh, going into my Kindle publishing account and raising the price of my 10 Commandments ebook from $4.99 to $200 — as high as Amazon will let me.

“What a spectacle,” I exclaim in triumph. “The whole Internet will soon be talking about me and my $200 40-page Kindle ebook.”

And then, a few minutes later, I go on Amazon to see my 11-inch Stonehenge lowered onto the stage:

Digital List Price: $200.00
Kindle Price: $12.69
Save: $187.31 (94%)

It turns out that, even if you set a ridiculously high price for your Kindle ebook, Amazon won’t actually honor that. They will sell your book for what they like, not for what you like.

I guess there are many lessons to draw from this.

But for today, I just want to say this is a fitting example of the chasm between spectacle conceived and spectacle delivered.

Lots of business owners think their marketing stunts are groundbreaking, terrific, sure to go viral among prospects and non-prospects alike.

The reality is an increase in price from $4.99 to $12.69.

Oh well. It’s just an opportunity to learn something and try again, with some new sensation. Because what else is there?

I’ll leave you with the following story from the godfather of modern advertising, Claude Hopkins, after he first tried and failed to make it as a marketer in Chicago:

===

That night after dinner I paced the streets. I tried to analyze myself. I had made a great success in Grand Rapids; I was making a fizzle here. What were the reasons? What was there I did in the old field which I could apply to Swift & Company’s problems?

At midnight, on Indiana Avenue, I thought of an idea.

===

Hopkins realized that in Grand Rapids, he had created sensations. So his new idea was to create the largest cake in the world to advertise Cotosuet, a margarine sold by Swift & Company.

Result?

105,000 visitors to see the world’s largest cake… thousands of new Cotosuet buyers… and the start of a very long, very successful, and very influential advertising career for Claude Hopkins.

That’s a valuable Claude Hopkins lesson. But not as valuable, in my opinion, as the Claude Hopkins lesson I write about in Commandment VI of my 10 Commandments book.

You can find that, along with a generous discount that Amazon has decided to provide for you, on the following page:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

“Pharma Bro in contempt”: Everything going to plan

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I’m signed up for the Federal Trade Commission newsletter, because I like to get news of marketing scams, pyramid schemes, and other skulduggery that can be useful for business. So a few days ago, I got a press release with the unlikely but highly satisfying headline:

“FTC Asks Federal Court to Hold ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli in Contempt”

You probably know Shkreli. He’s a young guy who caused mass outrage a few years back. He bought a pharma company that sold a lifesaving drug, and then raised the price of that drug 55x, from $13.50 to $750 per pill.

Shkreli then schemed to suppress competition, to make sure desperate patients were forced to pay the new 55x price for his drug.

When this became international news, Shkreli smirked at cameras, and said the one mistake he made was that he didn’t raise the price even higher.

“Why are people coming after you?” asked one interviewer.

“It might have something to do with me being very handsome,” Shkreli answered with a smile.

People were fuming.

“Martini Shkreli,” said one irritated TV announcer, doing what he does best: looking like a real slappable prick.”

So the FTC headline is very clever and very fitting. The new news, by the way, is not that Shkreli is now officially contemptible — which is what the headline makes you think, and which is what most people feel — but that he disobeyed court orders, and is therefore himself “in contempt of court.”

Whatever. Point is:

Maybe Shkreli is a natural-born “slappable prick.” Or maybe it’s an act he’s putting on for reasons of his own.

Either way, I think Shkreli’s behavior is worth studying — and even emulating.

“Whoa whoa hold on there,” I hear you saying. “John, you don’t want to go down that road! There are many better ways to get attention than to become contemptible. It’s not worth it!”

No doubt. And I’m not actually planning on getting into the pharma business, or doing anything to taunt the FTC, or playing around with people’s lives.

But that doesn’t change the fact that specific strategies Shkreli is using — whether instinctively or consciously — can be very valuable if you run a completely above-board, highly moral, or even noble business.

That’s something I will write more about in a future book on positioning, which I’m working on now.

But to twist the advice of James Altucher:

“The best way to promote your next book? Get people to read your current book.”

And so let me remind you of my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

​​Get it now if you want, because tomorrow I will be raising the price of this baby to $200 for the ebook and $250 for the paperback — the highest prices Amazon will me allow me to charge. You can watch the price increase at the page below:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Be grateful you read my newsletter

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This past weekend I finished removing the free bonuses from my Copy Riddles program. I sent out an email to previous buyers to tell them 1) they will continue to get access to bonuses and 2) when I flesh out those bonuses into paid courses, they will be automatically upgraded to those new courses.

To which I got a response from a Copy Riddles member:

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Thanks for the update, John. You’ve been treating us OG buyers very well and fairly, and I think you deserve a bit of appreciation!

===

I really do. I really do deserve a bit of appreciation.

I’m telling you I deserve appreciation for two reasons. One is that it’s self-serving — I’m a good guy, and others say so about me. I treat my customers well and fairly, and you should keep that in mind the next time I make an offer.

There’s a second reason also:

If you run any kind of business, chances are you’re doing good stuff that you’re not getting credit for.

That means you’re shirking your duties really. As “guru to the gurus” Rich Schefren likes to say, marketing is teaching prospects to value your offer.

The thing is, valuing stuff at what it’s worth is not something we humans are good at. If you want proof of that, go on Amazon, and look at the thousands of gratitude journals for sale, and the hundreds of inspirational guides telling you how important gratitude is, and how you should practice it regularly.

None of that would be necessary if appreciation came easy to humans.

Oh well. that just means you have to do the work for your prospect, and teach him to appreciate what you do.

So be grateful you read my newsletter. Because I always make a point to share something valuable and interesting, usually something you can take and apply right away, if you only think for a second or two.

Now on to my interesting and valuable offer. It’s my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters book.

The fact is, I could take the content of this book, change absolutely nothing except the format, and sell it as a $100 course instead of $5 Kindle book.

Or I could take that same content, deliver it over in a series of 5 Zoom calls, and charge $500 for it.

And people would pay, and they would get great value from it.

And yet, you can get all this value for just $5.

Perhaps you can guess my reasons why. And if not, that’s a topic for another interesting and valuable email.

Meanwhile, if you still haven’t read my 10 Commandments book, you’re shirking your duties as a marketer. Here’s where you can fix that:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

The Eleven Steps of Shiny Objectaholics Anonymous

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I got an email from a reader yesterday with an excessively long subject line:

“The most valuable info is rarely sexy, and it’s probably been staring you in the face for a long while.”

Hm. Sounded familiar. It turned out to be a quote from the last chapter of my 10 Commandments book. The body of the email went on to explain:

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Hi John,

In a sea of great quotes from your book, this one spoke to me differently.

Why?

Cause I’ve been chasing shiny objects and secrets the past one year after quitting my banking job to write online.

Only to realize it’s BS 😅

The plan this year is to do the boring shit, on repeat. Till I get good at it. Means reading the fundamental books on copy and doing copywork a lot.

I’m already on your list and enjoy reading your emails. But it’s premature for me to buy yet – in due course though haha.

Anyways, this was an open invitation so I went for it.

Have good Sunday!

===

I have this theory that people who wind up in copywriting and direct marketing are all shiny object addicts by nature.

It’s just that the ones who make it realize their addiction at some point, and begin a gradual process of detox and recovery.

If you want a ten-step program to begin your own detox and recovery, then consider my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

A few of these commandments might be new to you. But odds are, most will be either familiar, or obvious. That doesn’t change the fact it’s where the real value is.

If you have already admitted to yourself you are powerless over shiny objects — and that your life has become unmanageable as a result — then have taken the first step. For the next 10 steps:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

The royal way to grow a list

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Yesterday, King Charles III and Queen Consort Camila went for a drive to Bolton Town Hall in London. Birds chirped, armed guards looked on tensely, and crowds of well-wishers and paparazzi pushed around the fences, trying to catch a geek of the aged couple.

Nothing really remarkable there. It’s just another pebble in the mountain of news coverage about the British royal family over the past year.

The news coverage continues, because people look at the royals as a symbol of something ancient, enduring, quintessentially British.

That’s kind of amazing if you think about it.

Charles III is the fourth English monarch from the house of Windsor, which is only 105 years old. Before that, it was called the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, in reference to its original German domains. The name was changed during World War I. The image of a bunch of goose-stepping Germans running the UK was too threatening.

How did the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha get to rule the UK? Well, they replaced another German house that ruled the UK, the House of Hanover.

The history of Europe, and really of the world, has seen this pattern over and over. Conquerors and adventurers, foreign princes and stranger kings, appear from somewhere far away and take control of a large and well-trained population.

I read about this in David Wengrow and David Graeber’s Dawn of Everything. The two D’s say the key is that a population has been well-trained and disciplined to obey rule. Who rules doesn’t matter very much at all.

You might be starting to feel a little uncomfortable, and worry that I’m about to preach anarchy, or talk about political revolution.

Quite the opposite. I’m preaching monarchy, and talking about long-term business stability.

Via your list. Specifically, via growing your list with the best prospects, the kind who will buy and read and do what you tell them to do.

I listened to a Dan Kennedy seminar yesterday. Dan said how his best customers were always the martial arts guys — because they had been trained and selected over years to be disciplined.

I remember when pick-up coach RSD Tyler did a list swap with the dreamy fitness coach Eliott Hulse. Eliott said how the buyers he got from the RSD list were fantastic customers, because Tyler’s whole message was self-improvement and taking responsibility and putting in the work.

I’ve even experienced this same phenomenon myself. Back in 2021, I did a list swap with Daniel Throssell. I couldn’t believe how many sales I got from new subscribers who came from Daniel’s list. And that’s with a hidden sales page I had at the time, and without pitching anything myself. It was simply because Daniel has trained and prepared his audience so well.

So there you go. If you want the best leads and future customers, do it the royal way.

Find a market — or an audience — that’s already been disciplined.

It sure beats the hard work of taking an unruly mass, devising new laws, and trying to beat those laws in over the course of generations.

Ok, so much for monarchy.

Now, let’s talk old-time religion. Specifically, my 10 Commandments book. To find out more about that, or maybe even to spend $5 and get some valuable discipline in return, go here:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

You see it, but you don’t really see it

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A few days ago, Andy Griffiths, who publishes a newsletter about newsletter formats, wrote up an issue about email marketer Ben Settle. The most interesting bit came in the last sentence:

===

I sent Ben Settle a few questions. He declined to answer, saying anyone could work out his business model by deduction. That’s true. It’s all there in the emails.

===

But is it really?

I doubt Ben really believes that. He runs an info publishing business telling people exactly what’s really going on in his free emails, underneath the surface.

This extra information is worth paying for, and a lot. Ben’s info publishing business started pulling in $1M/year a few years back. Today it’s probably higher.

So the question becomes:

How can anybody sell something that’s out there for free?

It’s because you see it… but you don’t really see it. A-list copywriter John Carlton put it this way:

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The ads you see in the wild are finished products. All the work that went into creating that finished product is invisible. There’s no “infrastructure” to an ad, no curtain to peek behind once it’s posted or printed.

===

Except of course there is a curtain to peek behind.

You can pay Ben Settle to find out how he runs his email marketing business — how he got you to pay him to find out how he got you to pay him.

You can also pay me to find out how A-list copywriters, like John Carlton above, wrote some of their most lucrative ads, and how you might be able to do something similar.

​​I worked it all out by deduction — well, not really. I had a secret resource at my disposal.

You can find out the details of that secret resource on the page below, which is the sales page for my Copy Riddles program.

For now, I will just say that today is the last day can get two free bonuses I have long offered with Copy Riddles.

The first bonus is Storytelling For Sales. The second bonus is Copywriting Portfolio Secrets.

Don’t buy Copy Riddles just for the free bonuses.

But if you decide you want to get Copy Riddles, you have until tonight at 12 midnight PST to get Storytelling for Sales and Copywriting Portfolio Secrets as free bonuses.

That’s just a few short hours away, and this will be my last email before the deadline. ​​

Once the deadline passes, Copy Riddles will remain available, but the free bonuses will disappear. My plan is to flesh them out and turn them into paid upsells for Copy Riddles.

To get the whole package before then:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Jerry Seinfeld’s serious joke about the news

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Today I watched a clip of Jerry Seinfeld on the Johnny Carson Show. Jerry smiles his precocious-boy smile and says:

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To me the most amazing thing about the news is that whatever goes on in the world, it exactly fits the number of pages that they’re using in the paper that day. [Johnny Carson chuckles off screen. Jerry continues:]

They must stand around after each edition going, “I don’t believe we just made it again! If one more thing happens, we’re screwed. There’s no more room in this paper!”

===

This is a joke if you hear Jerry Seinfeld tell it, or imagine him with his mannerisms, or if you include that exaggeration at the end.

It’s not a joke if you just read the first sentence of that quote. It really is amazing that the day’s news always just fit the newspaper.

Of course, who reads newspapers any more — but the underlying point still stands:

The news was and is just a constant drip of telling you what to think, how to feel, how to react.

The news is not what’s worth knowing. At least that’s the way I look at it.

If you’re still reading, you might wonder what I think is worth knowing. I call it anti-news.

I’ve written before of my policy of not reading books that were published in just the last year.

I’ve been informed this has a clever name, “the Lindy effect,” after some long-surviving deli in New York.

The idea is, if something is worthwhile, it will still be worthwhile in a year from now. More generally, the longer something has been around, the more likely it is to keep being around.

This simple but powerful idea impacts everything I do, from the books I read to the emails I write to the offers I create. And since it’s time to start promoting:

It also lies behind my Copy Riddles program.

Copy Riddles is built on examples of winning copywriting that have been around for three, four, five, six decades or more.

But I’d take it still further back:

I believe Copy Riddles is really about the principles of effective communication, going back thousands of years. That might sound high-heeled, but it’s really what direct response marketing is — a merciless distillation that purifies and concentrates the evergreen principles of effective communication.

These principles were relevant yesterday, last year, a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago.

And if you are looking to influence or manipulate people, these principles are your best bet for what will continue to be relevant tomorrow.

As marketing consultant Khaled Maziad wrote me to say after going through Copy Riddles:

===

Man, this’s the best course on bullets I have ever seen. And believe me, I have seen a lot. I loved that you didn’t include bullet templates but went deep into the psychology behind each bullet. This course is not just about the “how-to” of writing bullets but understanding the artistry and the deep psychology behind them… Plus, when and where to use them.

===

As you might know already:

This is the last week I am giving away two free bonuses with Copy Riddles. The first bonus is Storytelling For Sales. The second bonus is Copywriting Portfolio Secrets.

Don’t buy Copy Riddles just for the free bonuses.

But if you decide you want to get Copy Riddles, you have until tomorrow, Saturday Jan 21, at 12 midnight PST to get Storytelling for Sales and Copywriting Portfolio Secrets as free bonuses.

After then, Copy Riddles will remain available, but the free bonuses will disappear.

To get the whole package:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Billion-dollar psychology lessons for cheap

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“Look at what they’ve done to you. I’m so sorry. You must be dead… because I don’t know how to feel. I can’t feel anything any more. You’ve gone someplace else now.”

You recognize that?

​​It’s from E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. One of the biggest movies of all time. And an incredibly valuable resource — if you only know when to stop watching.

When I was a kid, around age five, my eyes bulged out each time my parents took me past the main movie theater in town.

​​For some reason, the ​theater​ still showed the marquee for E.T., even though the movie had stopped playing years earlier.

I was too young to see E.T. when it came out. And I suffered for years, seeing that marquee. I wanted to watch the movie so bad — a real life alien! On Earth! Makes friends with a little boy and turns the boy’s bike into a flying machine!

It’s everything my 5-year-old self wanted in life. But the movie was no longer in theaters, and there was no VHS either.

So a few years ago, fully grown and rather jaded, I downloaded E.T. to finally heal this childhood wound, and to see why this Spielberg fantasy is called the #24 greatest film of all time.

Unfortunately, the moment has passed.

I couldn’t really get into E.T. But I did get some use out of it.

​​That scene above. Let me repeat it in case you didn’t read:

“Look at what they’ve done to you. I’m so sorry. You must be dead… because I don’t know how to feel. I can’t feel anything any more. You’ve gone someplace else now.”​​

That’s when E.T. dies, about nine-tenths of the way through the movie. And the boy, Elliott, who had a psychic link with E.T. and who has felt everything E.T. has felt, suddenly cannot feel anything any more.

I can imagine that when E.T. played in movie theaters, both the kids and the parents choked up at this point.

​​The kids, because the cute little extraterrestrial is dead.

​​The parents, because they felt on some level this scene might be about their childhood dreams, hopes, and capacity for joy and wonder… which have been drained out of them as they grew up and became adults.

And then of course, in the movie, E.T. comes back to life and everything works out just fine. Which is the insight I want to leave you with today.

If a story reaches mass popularity — E.T., Fight Club, Bad Santa — it’s because it makes people vibrate.

The thing is, social order must be maintained. That’s why each mass-market story either has a happy ending (if the characters were deep-down deserving) or a moral to be learned (if they were not).

Don’t let that fool you.

Market-proven tear-jerkers like E.T. can really show you true human nature — if you don’t wait until the end. The end is just tacked on to muddy the waters. But the psychology lesson is all the emotional buildup that happens before the turnaround.

That buildup shows you how people really are. Those are the real problems and desires people respond to, and that’s what you should speak to. Everything else is just Hollywood.

Meanwhile, in an alternate cinematic universe:

I’d like to remind you that this is the last week I am giving away two free bonuses with my Copy Riddles program. The first bonus is Storytelling For Sales. The second bonus is Copywriting Portfolio Secrets.

Don’t buy Copy Riddles just for the free bonuses.

But if you decide you want to get Copy Riddles, you have until Saturday Jan 21 at 12 midnight PST to get Storytelling for Sales and Copywriting Portfolio Secrets as free bonuses.

That’s just two days away. ​​

Once the deadline passes, Copy Riddles will remain available, but the free bonuses will disappear.

To get the whole package:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

The best way to market your old course

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In the virtual pages of this daily email newsletter, I’ve gone back over and over to an article by James Altucher, titled, I Plagiarized And You Can, Too!

I’ve written about James’s core idea several times already. I won’t repeat it today. But I will point out the interesting 12 words of advice with which James ends his article:

“The best way to market your first book? Write your next book.”

That’s how the cookie crumbles, book-wise. But what about course-wise?

For the last few days, I’ve been promoting my Copy Riddles course.

This is the third time I am promoting this course at the current price in the past 6 months.

And yet, during this run, over just a few days, I’ve made more sales of Copy Riddles than I did over several weeks of promotion earlier.

The difference is I’ve announced this is the last week to get the free bonuses that come with Copy Riddles.

At the end of this week, I will remove the free bonuses, expand them, and turn them into paid upsells.

So the best way to market your old course?

​​Take your free bonuses and convert them into an upsell funnel. And then advertise that fact well to your audience.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. The candle is burning down. The hourglass is noiselessly draining away.

The free bonuses for Copy Riddles will disappear this Saturday Jan 21, at 12 midnight PST.

The first bonus is Storytelling For Sales. The second bonus is Copywriting Portfolio Secrets.

Don’t buy Copy Riddles just for the free bonuses.

But the majority of people who bought Copy Riddles over these past few days have been on my list for a while.

That makes me think they’ve been eyeing Copy Riddles for a while.

If, like them, you’ve been weighing up Copy Riddles for a similar while, you have until Saturday to get the whole package, free bonuses included. You can do that at the link below:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/