What never to swallow at the start of your newsletter

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No, I’m not talking about swallowing your pride. Read on because it’s important.

​​Last night I was reviewing a newsletter. The newsletter was full of valuable content, but the author didn’t try to sell me on that content in any way. He meant for it to sell itself.

This brought to mind something I heard marketing wizard Dan Kennedy say:

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We sometimes take the attention of the people with whom we communicate with all the time for granted. That they will give us attention because of who we are and our relationship with them. It’s a bad presumption. It was not a bad presumption a decade ago when there weren’t as many of us showing up every day, asking for their attention. But now there’s a lot more of us showing up every day, asking for their attention. And so we gotta earn it, every single time.

===
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If you’re anything like me, then your brain will try to feed you excuses, all day long, just because it wants to stop thinking. It will say:

“They opted​​ in to my newsletter. They expressed interest. They want to hear what I have to say.”

“They like my persona. They read my emails in the past. They bought stuff from me!”

“​​I’m sure they will read this too. It’s good enough.”

​Don’t swallow your brain’s excuses. ​Don’t take your readers attention for granted. That’s not good enough.

Not if you want the best chance to influence people, to present yourself as an authority, to get your readers to buy or share or do whatever it is you’re after.
​
The more closely people read your stuff, the more of your story and your arguments they swallow, the more you manage to spike their emotions in the minutes they spend with your content, the better it is for you. And in a way, for them.

As a Big Pharma salesman might tell you, the most expensive drug is the one that doesn’t work.

And as I, a Big Copy salesman, will tell you, the most expensive 3 seconds for your reader are clicking on your email and skimming straight through to the end because he’s not properly engaged. That’s 3 seconds wasted for nothing.

On the other hand, 3 or 13 minutes reading every word you wrote because you sold it properly ahead of time — that can be both valuable and enjoyable.

So how do you pre-sell your valuable content?

That knowledge is something I don’t pre-sell. That’s something I sell.

Specifically, that’s what I sell inside my Copy Riddles program. In case you’re interested:

Copy Riddles shows you A-list copywriters sell and pre-sell valuable but dry information. But Copy Riddles does much more. It gets you doing the same.

This doesn’t mean you have to go all John Carlton on your newsletter readers.

You can be subtle or savage in the way you pre-sell your content and your information. It’s your choice.

What is not your choice is how people’s brains work, and what kinds of messages they respond to. And the most condensed and powerful way to create messages that people respond to is inside Copy Riddles.

As I mentioned two days ago, 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 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/

Barcelona man discovers the secret of how to escape the online rat race

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“It was unbelievable. One day he’s driving around in a rusted out ’68 Pontiac station wagon, living in an uncarpeted house that didn’t even have a color T.V., and struggling to make ends meet like the rest of us. The next day he’s driving in a brand new Lincoln Mark, a brand new Mercury station wagon, a $35,000 GMC motor home, his house is fixed up like a palace, and he’s traveling all over the country.”

This morning I read an old but gold business opportunity ad.

The ad ran across a full page of newspapers, in tightly crammed print. I imagine the entire thing was 3,000 words or more.

This ad is a master class. If you are doing email marketing today, particularly if you sell yourself and your expertise and your authority and your trustworthiness, this ad is worth studying, thinking about, and emulating in your own email copy.

​​You can easily find versions of this ad by googling for the headline:

“Ohio Man Discovers the Secret of How to Escape the American Rat Race”

The Ohio man in question is marketer Ben Suarez. The secret in question is a system Suarez called NPGS.

​​Once upon a time, you could discover the NPGS secret if you mailed a check for $20 to get Suarez’s book, 7 Steps to Freedom.

A little-known fact about me is that I live in Barcelona in a hipster neighborhood called Poblenou.

An even lesser-known fact is that a few years ago, before I started living in Barcelona’s Poblenou, I went on a used-book website and actually bought Ben Suarez’s 7 Steps to Freedom.

I did it because it was one of the books recommended somewhere by Gary Halbert in his newsletter.

Suarez’s book arrived to my house. It is the size of a comprehensive dictionary and weighs as much as a brick. Over many hundreds of pages, it lays out Suarez’s NPGS system — basically how to run a successful mail-order business.

As you can probably guess, I never got beyond the table of contents in 7 Steps to Freedom. I bet that 99.9% of other people who bought this book didn’t get any further.

No matter.

Because as another Ohio bizopp marketer, Dan Kennedy, once said, people want miracles, not how-to information.

So if you want to escape the online rat race of endless content creation that never turns into much cash, here’s the secret:

Give people what they want. Miracles, and not how-to information.

This is why I organized my Copy Riddles program as I did.

Sure, Copy Riddles features some how-to information. That was unavoidable.

​​But the main thing inside Copy Riddles are the repetitive daily exercises, which I claim implant A-list copywriting skills into your brain, will ye or nill ye.

That’s not just an empty claim I’m making. Here’s proof for it, in the words of freelance copywriter Ivan Sršen, who went through Copy Riddles a while back:

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Before John’s Copy Riddles training, I knew about the problem mechanism… and I knew about the solution mechanism. In fact, I knew about around 60% of the stuff he teaches in this course. But I was still like a deer in headlights. Only after going through Copy Riddles… after applying all this that I ‘knew’ in daily exercises, did it all click together. My bullets — and my understanding of copy mechanics — are light years ahead of where they were after a few short weeks.

===

If you’d like to experience a miraculous transformation in your understanding of copy, you can find out more about Copy Riddles at the link below.

As I mentioned in my email yesterday, 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 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/

Free course on advertorials

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A couple days ago, I got an email with the subject line, “Your Future Mentee.” I sighed, hung my head, and clicked to open the email. It read:

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I am a 25 year old entrepreneur who dropped out of medical school to pursue my dream of starting a business in the e-commerce industry.

I have been dropshipping for the past 2.5 years and have done over half a million in revenue so far. I recently came across “advertorials” and it instantly grabbed my attention.

After a bunch of research on Youtube I realized I could barely find technical videos showing exactly how to create advertorials for e-commerce/dropshipping stores.

Through browsing many videos on Youtube, I came across an interview you did on the “Chase Diamond Email Marketing” channel and the information you provided in the short 18 minutes helped me a ton.

I am extremely eager to start testing products on Facebook through advertorials and I was hoping you could guide me through the process a bit. I promise to not take too much of your time.

Please let me know if you have any availability for a brief zoom call so I can further introduce myself. I can also gladly communicate through email if that is easier for you.

Looking forward to your reply!

===

Oh boy. Where to start? How about a free course on advertorials:

Between 2018 and 2021, I wrote dozens of five-page advertorials. These advertorials sold tens of millions of dollars of random ecomm products to cold Facebook and YouTube traffic. Supplements, shoe insoles, portable smoothie blenders.

After I got in the groove, it took me about a week to write each advertorial. A week might seem like a long time to write five pages, but four days of that went to research.

Research is something that apparently nobody else is willing to do.

In fact, in that Chase Dimond podcast episode, I mocked other advertorials that were running and not making sales. I know they weren’t making sales because my clients and I tested them. They weren’t making sales because were so clearly unbelievable — because the copywriter pulled them out of his head instead of doing research.

And so the first lesson of my free advertorial course is to thoroughly research anybody you are attempting to sell.

That lesson might seem obvious to you. But it certainly wasn’t obvious to my would-be future mentee.

For example, had my future mentee wanted to have a good chance to persuade me to become his mentor, he could have done some research on me first.

He could have searched on my website and read a few of the 1,400+ earlier emails I have written.

He could have found out I sell courses, and not for cheap, and I am therefore not likely to give away specific how-to information for free.

He could have found out I also offer a coaching program, and I don’t mentor new people unless they meet very specific criteria, and pay me a good deal of money to boot.

He could have found out that I have a sizeable and growing email list, that my days are eaten up by writing my daily emails, by creating new offers, by responding to paying customers, by delivering paid coaching, on top of my other projects, which I hint at from time to time.

In other words, with adequate research, this guy could have figured out that I am a terrible prospect for a “future mentee” whose big selling point is that he promises not to take too much of my time.

You might think I’m picking on a poor guy who is asking for help. That’s not my intent. I’m just trying to illustrate the shallowness of the persuasion that most people, including marketers, engage in by default.

And if you want a suitcase to float on as the Titanic sinks and all the other mice struggle in the cold water around you… then as the first step, do more work, and in particular, do more research than others are doing.

At this point, you might be worried that this is the end of my free course in advertorials.

But wait. There’s more.

Had my future mentee done a tiny bit more research, he would have come across my Copy Riddles program.

He would have found I currently offer a free bonus to go with Copy Riddles. That bonus is called Storytelling for Sales. It’s based on my experience writing all those advertorials.

Storytelling for Sales not a long training, and it is not an A-Z of ecommerce advertorial writing.

But along with Step 1: Research™, this Step 2: Storytelling for Sales covers 95% of what made my advertorials so effective, and of how I spent my time writing them.

Like I said, Storytelling for Sales is currently a free bonus for Copy Riddles.

But I will take it down at the end of this week, along with the other free bonus, Copywriting Portfolio Secrets. My plan is to flesh these bonuses out and turn them into paid upsells for Copy Riddles.

Don’t buy Copy Riddles just for the Storytelling for Sales free bonus.

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.

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

To get the whole package:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Daniel Throssell, Daniel Kahneman, and a robot lawyer walk into a bar…

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A few minutes ago, I got my coffee ready, I set my timer, and I got down to writing this email. As a first step, I checked some news headlines and bingo — I saw it:

“AI-powered ‘robot’ lawyer will be first of its kind to represent defendant in court”

Maybe you’ve heard the news already. A startup called DoNotPay is helping people fight speeding tickets.

Before, DoNotPay used AI to write a letter that you could mail in to contest your speeding ticket. But now, DoNotPay will help one lucky defendant in court.

The DoNotPay app will run on the defendant’s phone. It will listen in to the court proceedings. And it will tell the defendant what to say to get out of his speeding ticket in court.

“This courtroom stuff is more advocacy,” said Joshua Browder, the CEO of DoNotPay. “It’s more to encourage the system to change.” Browder says he wants to give access to law to people who can’t afford it.

As you might guess, this noble mission isn’t very popular with lawyers themselves.

When Browder tweeted about his new courtroom “robot”, lawyers jumped on him, and threatened he would go to jail if he followed through with this plan.

And verily, a courtroom robot is not legal in most places. In most places, all parties have to agree to be recorded. But I doubt good will and keeping Browder out of jail is why lawyers jumped all over Browder’s tweet, telling him to stop this project immediately.

Lawyers still have a bit of time.

Right now, courtroom AI robots just handle speeding tickets. And Browder admits even that took a lot of work.

His company had to retrain generic AI for this specialized task. “AI is a high school student,” Browder said, “and we’re sending it to law school.”

Law school… and then what? because Being a good lawyer is not just about knowing the letter of the law.

Specifically, I have in mind a passage I read in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow.

Kahneman says there are two fundamental ways lawyers argue.

These two ways are actually illustrated perfectly in the little debate Daniel Throssell and I had last week, in emails talking about newsletters and who wants ’em.

So I will make you an offer right now, which you are free to refuse, in case you’d rather go read Thinking Fast and Slow yourself.

My offer is a disappearing bonus.

It’s good until 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PSST tomorrow, Thursday, Jan 12 2023.

If you’ve already bought my Most Valuable Email course, and would like me to spell out Kahneman’s two lawyer strategies, write me before the deadline and ask.

​​I will write back to you, both with Kahneman’s passage, and the specifics of how Daniel and I each took one of the two approaches.

And if you haven’t bought my Most Valuable Email course, then my offer is the same, except you have to also buy the course before the deadline.

Buy just to get the bonus?
​​
If you find yourself desirous of the disappearing bonus, but reluctant to buy a course just to get that bonus, then I will argue that desire itself is a reason to get MVE.

​​Because this desire is something you too can create in others. It’s something I talk about in the course itself, specifically inside the 12 Rules of Most Valuable Emails, specifically Rule #10.

For more info on this course, or to get it before the deadline:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Who today remembers Ragged Dick?

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I was very grateful to find out the following fact just now:

Today being January 13, it is the birthday of Horatio Alger, one of the most popular and influential American writers of all time.

Starting with Ragged Dick in 1868, Alger published almost a hundred novels. They were all exactly the same — but readers didn’t mind.

Each of Alger’s novels starred a poor and luckless boy, who managed to stay afloat through honesty, hard work, and perseverance.

Eventually, following a noble act, the boy would be brought to the attention of a wealthy patron. The patron gave the boy his lucky break, setting him on the path to success and security.

It was good story for 19th-century America. That’s why it could be told over and over again.

Today, of course, nobody remembers Ragged Dick. Nobody reads Horatio Alger any more.

It takes somebody like me, an email columnist a little desperate for a daily email topic, to even bring up the fact that today is Alger’s birthday, and to tell you something interesting about the man. Such as the following haiku:

Rags-to-riches theme,
Urban tales of working class,
Alger’s legacy.

In case you are wondering what I’m getting at, I’ll admit that Alger’s story makes me think of the mysterious question of fame, and who gets it and who gets to keep it for more than a few years.

Alger sold some 20 million copies of his books in his time. But just a few years after his death, surveys showed that few kids had ever heard of him.

But — and maybe I am naive, and maybe I have bought into the Horatio Alger myth too much — I feel that today is a moment of opportunity as good as 19th-century America. Maybe better. And Alger’s stories, outdated as they are, remain emotionally relevant.

Ragged Dick was a bootblack.

If Dick lived today, I imagine he would join the creator economy, and maybe start a free email newsletter. Through honesty, hard work, and perseverance, he would toil away on his newsletter until he got his lucky break, which would set him on the path to success and security.

Maybe you don’t buy into my Ragged Dick daydream. And maybe this entire email isn’t relevant to you.

But if by chance you are starting a free email newsletter, or in case you’ve already got one, then you might want to know about my Most Valuable Email.

For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Free quiz: See if you should give up on that dream

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A while back, I came across an insightful analogy by a guy named Jeremy Enns. I don’t know Enns from Adam’s off ox, but the man seems to run a successful marketing agency.

Anyways, Enns had this to say (I’ve cherrypicked the most insightful bits):

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Podcasting Is Like Investing

I’ve had the opportunity to work alongside and talk with dozens of podcasters about how their shows have grown and when the effort finally started to feel like it was worth it.

The most common response is that it took at least two years before the investment really started to pay dividends.

I like to say that you can podcast for a year and it will feel like a massive waste of time. Podcast for three years and it can completely change your life.

===

This ties into a little quiz I devised last year, while writing my never-released Copy Zone project, about the business side of copywriting.

The quiz is a way to decide if any dream project is worth embarking on.

The quiz is simply this. Ask yourself:

“Would I be ok working on this for the next five years?”

If your answer is, “No way!” or “Really, I want to do this for a year or max two and get out,” then quit now.

And when you do quit, send me a thank-you note for saving you months or maybe years of your life, dabbling on the sidelines, and possibly wasting thousands of dollars on books and courses and seminars. Because the fact is, this project, dreamy though it sounds, is just not for you.

And if by chance your dream project involves an email newsletter, take my little quiz above.

If you find yourself thinking, “I’m willing to write this newsletter for the next year so I can then move on to something else,” then you know what to do. Don’t even get started.

But if your answer is a grudging but honest yes — yes, you’d be willing to work on this for the next five years — then I can tell you that:

1. After one year of writing the newsletter you’re reading right now, I had nothing to show for it — at least nothing in the way of money or recognition or red panties being thrown my way

2. After two years, this newsletter started to pay dividends

3. After three years, and and now moving on to four and more, it has completely changed my life

If you are willing to stick with it for the long term, then it makes sense to start. Even today.

Now for my pitch:

If you want to discover the one type of email I would write every day if I had to — the one I would choose above stories, or personal reveals, or how-to, or pop culture illustrations, or shock and controversy — then you can find that in a little course I’ve called Most Valuable Email.

For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Dan Kennedy was hoping for a laugh, but when he finished his joke~!

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I was listening to an awkward moment from a Dan Kennedy seminar this morning.

First, a bit of background is in order:

If you don’t know much about Dan, he is a marketer who has influenced more marketers than anybody else.

Dan got his big break back in the 90s, going around the US as part of the Peter Lowe Success Tour.

That was a bunch of famous and influential people — former US presidents, Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks, Suze Orman — giving motivational speeches to an audience of tens of thousands, in a different city every night.

At the end of each night, after the famous and influential people had finished their speeches, Dan would get up on stage as the last speaker. He would then deliver a blistering 60-minute standup routine that sold you on buying his Magnetic Marketing product.

If you’ve never listened to Dan’s speech, it’s fantastic. It’s worth searching around the Internet to dig it up.

The thing I listened to this morning was something else – a recording of a $12k/head seminar that Dan gave many years later, to a small group of select customers and proteges.

Dan was talking about the audience for the Peter Lowe Success Tour, and how politically conservative they were. So conservative that when Mario Cuomo, the liberal New York ex-governor, joined the Tour, the audience booed.

So far, so good. At least for Dan’s story.

And then, Dan, who is practiced at selling through humor, shifts into an exasperated tone of voice:

“… Mario Cuomo comes out, and everybody’s booing! By the time he’s done, I’m booing too, cause the schmuck’s thirty five minutes over, and people are streaming out in droves, you know???”

Beat.

Nobody in Dan’s seminar reacts. On the seminar recording, there’s a pause. You can hear Dan swallow hard and then move on to the next bit of his educational material.

That’s an illustration of something I just read in a book called Comedy Writing Secrets. “Humor in front of a small audience is very hard to bring off because each individual is afraid to laugh for fear of being conspicuous.”

Sitting at home and listening to Dan’s presentation, the image of him booing put a smile on my face.

In a large 10,000 person arena, the same bit would almost certainly draw laughs, and maybe loud laughs.

But in a small seminar, made up of 12 or 15 people, all it drew was a moment of awkward silence, and a gulp from Dan Kennedy.

That’s something to keep in mind if you’re ever trying to give a humorous speech.

But the bigger point is that the response you draw is not only a function of your message… of the audience you are talking to… or even your relationship to that audience.

There’s an extra thing, and that’s the context in which you are delivering your message.

Big room, small room, medium room… seminar stage, webinar, bus.

Maybe that idea seems super obvious to you. But the only thing that’s super obvious is that even masters of influence, people like Dan Kennedy, will forget about this crucial element to their own embarrassment and loss.

But enough about embarrassment and loss. Let’s talk about gain instead.

Specifically, my Most Valuable Email training, and some most valuable Dan Kennedy ideas.

In the Most Valuable Email training, I pull back the curtain on my Most Valuable Email trick.

And then, at the end of the training, I give you 10 riddles to ponder. These are valuable and interesting marketing ideas, each of which you can use as a prompt for creating your own Most Valuable Email, and applying the Most Valuable Email trick.

Two of those ideas come from Dan Kennedy. And in typical DK style, they are both very ugly truths, but also very insightful and practical…

You know???

To find out more about MVE:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Standing on stage, holding an award, to applause from colleagues and clients

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Last month, I got an email with a subject line in all caps:

“THANK YOU JOHN!”

Inside the email I found a picture of a young guy in a sharp suit, standing on stage, holding a microphone in his left hand and some kind of glass trophy in his right.

Behind him on the wall, projected in large letters, was his name, Carlo Gargiulo. That’s who was writing to me. Carlo had this to say:

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Hi John,

I am writing this email to say thank you.

Last night was one of the most important nights of my life.

I was awarded in the company as the most productive copywriter in the company where I work.

I was awarded for constant study, application of new writing techniques, and great results generated by my emails.

As for productivity, I really want to say thank you because I started writing much more quickly after taking the Most Valuable Email course.

Studying and re-studying the course and re-watching the video of your critique of my email several times was critical to my growth.

Despite the award and applause from colleagues and clients, I still feel like a copywriter eager to grow and improve!

I look forward to learning so much more from you and taking it to the next level!

Thank you for the valuable insights, information, and techniques you tell us about every day in your emails and in your amazing courses.

They are invaluable to me 🙂

Carlo

===

Obviously, this testimonial serves me very well. But can you possibly get anything out of Carlo’s message above?

Well no. At least not if you are looking for the secret shortcut to the Cave of Treasures, preferably a shortcut which doesn’t involve any walking.

On the other hand, if you are still reading, then let me repeat Carlo’s longcut to success:

“Constant study, application of new writing techniques, and great results generated by my emails.”

If the sound of constant study and the application of new techniques doesn’t make you cover up your ears in horror… and if you like the sound of great results generated by your emails, then consider my Most Valuable Email course.

It might be the first step on your path to the Cave of Treasures.

And who knows, maybe like Carlo, you will find MVE helps you write much more quickly, be more productive, and even win awards and applause from colleagues and clients.

For more info, go here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Announcing my new course: Somewhat Good Email

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Last October, I wrote an awesome email to promote my awesome Copy Riddles program. The subject line read, “Why would you ever say anything that’s not awesome?”

After I sent that email out, I was flying high for a bit. But then I was rudely brought down to earth. Because in response to my awesome email, reader Frederik Beyer wrote:

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Mr Bejakovic,

Is there a use for wildly understated testimonials?

’cause then I’d like to say: “Your emails are somewhat good”

===

Somewhat good? Somewhat???

After the initial trauma to my ego, I thought for a moment.

And I realized that of course there is a use to testimonials such as this. You are looking at it right now.

Thankfully, I am not at the moment promoting Copy Riddles.

So I can get to promoting my first love, which used to be called Most Valuable Email, but which I will soon rename to Somewhat Good Email.

Somewhat Good Email shows you how to take important but dry marketing ideas and turn them into cool and insightful emails. Somewhat.

That’s what I did with today’s email, which uses the Somewhat Good Email trick.

Perhaps the underlying important but dry idea is not obvious to you. No matter. You can find that idea spelled out in Somewhat Good Email Riddle #10, at the end of the Somewhat Good Email training.

If you’d like to get your hands on that riddle, and on the rest of the Somewhat Good Email training, head to the link below. Don’t allow the old course name on the sales page to confuse you. I’ll change that soon enough.

​​Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Bare metal: Poor single mom risks death to feed her family

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A couple days ago, I sent out an email about charging out, King Arthur-like, to fight dragons on the borders of your kingdom. That was my metaphor for defending your business interests.

I got lots of interesting replies to that email, and none more so than from Shawn Cartwright. Shawn runs TCCII, an online martial arts academy. He wrote:

===

While I sympathize with your position on this, I’d just like to ask this question…

Why are dragons always made out to be the bad guys?

Seriously…

Imagine you were the millenia old beast who woke up one day to find a bunch of unwashed simian descendants using your pristine mountain stream as a latrine?

Or erecting god-awful ugly structures made from your trees they took without so much as a please or thank you.

And shot at you when you went down to have a little chat with them to sort it out.

And then organized some sort of genocidal campaign to eradicate you and take all your stuff.

Is it any wonder they might be a little ill-tempered?

===

Shawn asks a great question. In response to it, my mind jumped to a tense scene from the 2015 Disney documentary, Monkey Kingdom.

The scene shows a tiny and cute macaque monkey dangling from a vine a few inches above some murky water.

This monkey is a single mother, the narrator tells you. But not only that. She’s also at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

Higher-caste females are safe up in a tree eating figs. But even though there’s plenty to go around, these higher-caste females are not willing to share any food with the low-born single mom.

So she is forced to roam deep into the jungle to feed her family. That’s why she’s now dangling above the murky water, so she can harvest some water lily seeds.

And then the scene shifts. It suddenly shows a monitor lizard.

The lizard is huge. It’s seven feet long, three or four times the size of the tiny monkey mom.

The lizard is ugly. It’s thick and black and scaly, with a long flame-like tongue flickering in and out of its mouth.

And worst of all, the lizard is treacherous. At first it’s lurking at the edge of the water. But then it slips in silently, and swims under the surface to where the water lilies are.

So why are dragons always made out to be the bad guys?

Because our race and their race have been at war since time immemorial. Because this feeling is baked into us. Because it’s bare-metal.

Bare-metal is my term for the fact that if you keep asking why long enough, you eventually always get to the answer, just because. Because it’s how we humans are. Because it’s right, whether or not it’s historically fair to the dragons, whether or not it makes sense in today’s world.

If you want to influence people, then write about bare-metal topics.

It’s not just slimy, treacherous serpents.

I gave you a few other bare-metal topics above, in that monkey scene setup. But there are many more.

I rewatched Monkey Kingdom last night. And because I’ve become obsessive through writing this newsletter, I took notes every minute or two.

I found 40+ bare metal topics in Monkey Kingdom. They are brilliantly illustrated because it’s monkeys. Monkeys are close enough to us to be relevant, but different enough to illustrate each bare-metal topic distinctly.

So my advice to you is, watch Monkey Kingdom. And take notes.

If I ever create my mythical AIDA School, this movie will be a part of the first-semester curriculum.

And now for something completely different:

Specifically, my Most Valuable Email course.

That course is connected in some way to today’s email, though only lightly.

That don’t change the fact that, as the name of it says, this course is about a type of email that has been most valuable for me.

If you also write about marketing or persuasion or copywriting, this type of email might be just as valuable for you.

To find out more about it — and about love, death, and politics — go here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/