Ooooo, child!

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Last weekend, my friend Sam and I went to Savannah. On the drive there, we started started listening to an audiobook of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

That was a 1994 non-fiction book that stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for a remarkable 216 weeks.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil consists of a bunch of character studies of various eccentrics who lived in Savannah in the 1970s and 80s. The book cuts through Savannah society, from the rich and established to the poor and fringe.

Among the poor and fringe was Miss Chablis, “The Empress of Savannah.”

Chablis was a black drag queen.

The narrator of the audiobook, who normally speaks with a neutral accent, voiced Chablis, like all other Savannah locals, with a kind of southern drawl.

Except that in the case of Miss Chablis, the narrator, who sounded solidly white and male otherwise, also had to awkwardly act out dozens of draq-queeny, Black-English phrases such as:

“Ooooo, child!”

“Oh, child, don’t you be doin’ that!”

“Y-e-e-e-s, child! Yayyiss… yayyiss… yayyiss!”​​

I had flashbacks to this earlier today.

I got back to Barcelona yesterday. I checked my mailbox and found a stack of New Yorkers waiting for me.

This morning, I sat on my balcony and flipped open the latest one. The first feature story is about Ru Paul.

“Ooooo, child!” I said, “No more drag queens, honey, please!”

But as I often do, I forced myself to read something I had no inclination to read. I often find valuable things that way.

Today was no exception. I found the following passage in the first page of the article. Jinkx Monsoon, a 36-year-old drag queen who won two seasons of Ru Paul’s reality competition TV show, explained the power of drag:

===

It’s armor, ’cause you’re putting on a persona. So the comments are hitting something you created, not you. And then it’s my sword, because all of the things that made me a target make me powerful as a drag queen.

===

If you have any presence online, this armor-and-sword passage is good advice. It’s something that the most successful and most authentic-seeming performers out there practice.

I once saw a serious sit-down interview with Woody Allen. I remember being shocked by how calm, confident, and entirely not Woody-Allen-like he was.

Closer to the email world, I remember from a long time ago an email in which Ben Settle basically said the same thing as Jinkx Monsoon above. How the crotchety, dismissive persona he plays in his emails is a kind of exaggeration and a mask he puts over the person he is in real life.

So drag is good advice for online entrepreneurs.

But like much other good advice, It’s not something I follow in these emails.

I haven’t developed an email persona, and I’m not playing any kind of ongoing role to entertain my audience or to protect me from their criticism.

That’s because I don’t like to lie to myself. Like I’ve said many times before, I write these emails for myself first and foremost, and then I do a second pass to make sure that what I’ve written can be relevant and interesting to others as well.

This is not something I would encourage anybody else to do. But it’s worked out well enough for me, and allowed me to stay in the game for a long time.

That said, I do regularly adopt various new and foreign mannerisms in these emails.

I do this because i find it instructive and fun, and because it allows me to stretch beyond the person/writer I am and become more skilled and more successful.

I’ve even created an entire training, all about the great value of this approach.

In case you’d like to become more skilled and successful writing online, then honey, I am serious! You best look over here, child:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Who’s the best email copywriter out there?

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John Bejakovic. There’s no doubt about it:

John Bejakovic is the best, and in fact, the only reasonable way to describe who wrote this email. In case you missed my name in the “From” field in your inbox and are wondering who this email is from, I hope you’re clear on everything now.

But maybe you’re not clear. Maybe you’re wondering what I’m on about with this non sequitur opening.

​So let me tell you that I’ve been watching a religious studies course on YouTube, all about the Hebrew Bible.

It’s a personal interest of mine. I listen to these lectures while I make dinner in the afternoons.

But it’s not just fun and games listening to lectures about the Hebrew Bible. It’s useful too.

For example, in lecture 5, the religious studies professor mentions “a little work called, “Who Wrote the Bible,” by Richard Friedman…”

(… the professor pauses and smiles after she says this. And then she continues…)

“… which has a great cover because it says, ‘Who Wrote the Bible? Richard Friedman.'”

At this point, the class laughs. ​​They get what’s funny.

My apologies in case I’m about to murder what’s funny. But maybe it’s not as clear here in writing as it was in the live lecture. So let me possibly murder it.

What’s funny on that book cover, and what’s valuable in this email that you can take away from it, is the following:

The human brain is sticky. Once an idea gets in there, however ridiculous, it’s hard to dislodge it. You can use this to your advantage. Such as for example, by planting an idea before denying that same idea, or qualifying or correcting that idea, or even doing a non sequitur.

So who’s the best email copywriter out there?

I am not saying it’s me.

​​After all, there’s no way to measure or compare email copywriters head to head, the way there was when direct mail copywriters battled it out for Boardroom controls.

But I will tell you that I do follow a process each week to make myself a better marketer and email copywriter. Maybe in time it will make me the best, by some arbitrary standard.

Or maybe it will make you the best. Because it’s a process you can follow, too.

This process is called the Most Valuable Email.
​
The Most Valuable Email is the #1 advanced email copywriting technique I use in this newsletter to set these emails apart from other newsletters, to turn myself into a more valuable marketer and email copywriter, and to build up my status and authority.

In case you’d like to find out how I do it, you can get more info here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Great headlines and subheads, great openers and closers, great subject lines and postscripts

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At the start of this year, I got a message from Matt Cascarino. Matt is the chief creative officer at FARM, a marketing agency that’s had among its clients the American Cancer Society, the SPCA, New Era (the company that makes Major League Baseball’s official caps), and Kelley Blue Book.

Matt had been going through my Copy Riddles program. And he wrote to say:

===

Hey, John…

Bluntly, Copy Riddles is kicking my ass. But in a good way.

Despite my bullets missing the mark in the first nine rounds, I’m learning a ton and referring back to the material to craft sneaky-good bullets for my own communications.

It wasn’t until Round 10B that things began to click. See my three bullets below and the A-listers’ efforts after that. I laid an egg by overthinking #3, but I’m pretty happy with my first two.

===

Below this message, Matt had pasted three of his sales bullets that he had written recently.

I took a look.

His bullets were great. Whatever he was doing to learn how to write bullets — hmm, I wonder what that could be — it was working.

For a while now, I’ve been beating on my tin pot and saying to anyone who would listen that sales bullets are the essence of effective sales copy. I’ve also been saying that bullets are as relevant today as they were when Gary Halbert and John Carlton wrote entire sales letters that were really just a pileup of sexy, bizarre, fascinating bullets.

But you might be skeptical when I promote the idea of learning to write bullets, since I sell a program on writing great bullets.

Fortunately, just yesterday (thanks to Thom Benny) I came upon a relevant passage from a well-known guy in this field, Eddie Shleyner of Very Good Copy. Eddie wrote:

“If you can write great bullets, you can also write great headlines and subheads, great openers and closers, great subject lines and postscripts.”

So there you go. Learn to write great bullets, and most other copywriting skills simply fall out as a side-effect.

As for how to write great bullets:

Copy Riddles is in all immodesty the best program to learn to write great sales bullets.

That’s not because I created Copy Riddles.

It’s because Copy Riddles doesn’t just tell you stuff.

Instead, Copy Riddles can do to you what it did to Matt. Get you practicing in a safe and controlled environment… correct you when you are not doing well enough… and within a matter of a few weeks, have you writing bullets that Halbert himself would be proud of.

For more info on Copy Riddles:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

My list-building plans from under a large oak tree

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5pm today. Forsyth park. Savannah, Georgia.

I found a large oak tree. Rolled up my jacket. Put it on the ground. Lay down on it in the shade under the tree.

It’s been two-plus weeks of non-stop travel. Changing five cities along the way. Over 5k miles traveled. And more talking with people in real life than I have done in the past six months combined.

I’m tired. I had a chance to lay down today. Under a tree. So I took it.

Tomorrow, I head back from Savannah to New York. After an afternoon layover at JFK, I will have an overnight and most likely sleepless flight back to Barcelona, to the safety of my cave, the comfort of my own bed, the routine of my regular work day.

All that’s really just to prepare you for yet another Q&A email, the third this week. Came a question in reply to last night’s milk-themed email:

===

I bought SME a few weeks ago. I’d love to hear more about how you grow your list or “add cream”. I’ve started daily emails and unsubscriber rates are up. I’m currently using FB ads. I was relying on SEO, but that’s proven volatile this year.

===

After 10+ years of trying to grow various audiences online, I’ve come to believe there’s no magic to it beyond time and persistence.

​​Whatever you do consistently to grow your list will work in time. And almost nothing will work if you jump around too much too quick.

That said, I will tell you one specific cream-getting/list-building strategy I personally plan to focus on. And that’s books, either ones I put on Amazon or that I sell on my own site and drive paid traffic to.

Books in my mind are the highest-quality leads you can possible get.

They create customers right away.

If you tack on some upsells, it’s possible to use them to break even on paid ad spend on day zero or soon after.

Plus books are immensely shareable and influential. People will gladly and actively recommend or hype up your book, much more so than a course or a coaching program or even a community.

If you want to see how this works in action, take a look at my 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters.

It took me about a month of on-the-side work to complete this book. It has been driving subscribers to my list ever since.

The only real problem is this is my only book and I should have written more suc books. I’m working on fixing that.

Meanwhile, if you want to see how I organized this book, how I sold my email list within it, and even learn something valuable about copywriting and marketing in the process, the 10 Commandments is only $5 on Amazon.

Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

How do you turn skim milk into butter?

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A question comes in about turning skim milk into butter:

===

I have a question about your Simple Money Email course.

I’ve been writing an email to my list six days a week (or occasionally five) for the past month and a half or so, since about the beginning of February. At first, sales came in, but since about the beginning of March, they’ve declined by a lot, by over 50%. Will your course help me to figure out what’s going wrong so that I can set things to rights?

===

The answer in short is “probably no.”

If you’ve never emailed your list regularly, then what you have yourself is a pail of rich whole milk, with the cream at the top. You simply go in there, use a ladle to skim the cream off the top, and with a bit of additional processing, you get yourself some delicious Kerrygold.

But once you’ve pretty much skimmed all the cream off top, the butter creation becomes harder.

It’s still possible to occasionally turn skim milk into butter — I had one guy on my list for 775 days, reading 775 emails, before he decided to buy something from me.

​​But it’s never as easy as right at the start.

​​And assuming you’ve been doing a decent job of cream collection, no kind of magical spoon, skimmer, or ladle will really make that much of a difference after a while.

So what do you do?

You got a couple options.

One, you can add new whole milk to your pail — ie. add new people to your list.

Or — and this is where my butter analogy breaks down — you can create new offers. There’s no law saying you can only sell people things once. Or stretching the analogy, there’s no law saying you can only ever make butter from your pail of milk, as opposed to also making cheddar, ice cream, and quark.

I’ll have more to say about cheddar creation, specifically, about churning up new offers that don’t involve creating whole new products. That’s something I have been thinking about a lot as part of my new “hot seat coach” role within Shiv Shetti’s PCM mastermind.

But that’s for the future.

For now, I do have a very high-quality ladle to sell you.

It will skim off the cream from your list if you’ve never emailed regularly before… it might pull in occasional sales even if you never do anything more to grow your list… and it will be an indispensable part of launching new offers, in case you ever do decide to do so.

For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

My advice about starting a new health publishing business

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A reader replies to my email yesterday and asks about starting a NEW project:

===

I’ve taken a break for a while from all emails and only just resubscribed. So I was wondering how your health project that you mentioned a while back is going.

I ask as I’m thinking of starting an affiliate content site in the sleep market but the clickbank Spark program kind of advises against pursuing health related topics unless you’re a health professional due to Google’s bias towards sites of professionals and organisations.

I was just wondering if this is good advice in your experience. I find picking a topic harder than the process of internet marketing itself.

===

I can only share my personal experiences and observations, based on writing and running a health newsletter.

As I said in my email from a couple days ago, I am no health expert.

​​But my health newsletter is growing and has good engagement.

​​There seems to be solid content-to-audience fit.

​​In spite of writing it pseudonymously, I am even building up a kind of authority in the field.

And yet, I am very seriously considering shutting down my health newsletter, soon, unless something drastic changes.

My trouble is the offers I’m making to my audience.

As I said during “How I do it” presentation back in February, about how I write and profit from this daily newsletter about marketing:

​One of the big lessons I’ve learned is you want to have a high-ticket offer as the bedrock of your email newsletter. ​Something that is reliably worth hundreds, or preferably thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to you.

I don’t have any such offer for my health newsletter. As for affiliate offers, at least in my corner of the health market, they will never pay out that kind of money.

I still have not given up on my health newsletter. I’ve witnessed over the past couple days at the conference in Palm Beach how much interest and frankly money there is in the space.

I’m just not sure that building up an email newsletter, and then trying to figure out how to monetize it a few nickles or dimes at a time, is the right way to go.

So if you don’t have your own high-priced info product that you’ve created or licensed… if you don’t have a service that you charge thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for… if you don’t have some kind of owned subscription that you know will on average net you hundreds or preferably thousands of dollars for each new customer…

… then my advice is to get that sorted first.

On the other hand, if you do have a good offer — your own services, or high-ticket products, or membership in a cult — then an email newsletter can be immensely valuable.

But you probably already know that, because I keep repeating it.

And you probably also know about my Simple Money Emails course, and how it can help you write an email newsletter, because I keep repeating that.

But if you could benefit from Simple Money Emails, and you still haven’t done so, you can get more info about this training here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

Will Simple Money Emails be available after I finish traipsing around the U.S.?

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My travels around the U.S. continue. Today I left Palm Beach in Florida and arrived to charming and moss-covered Savannah, Georgia.

The next few days are supposed to be something like vacation for me — as vacation as it gets while having to deliver two weekly coaching programs, and writing one weekly newsletter and this daily newsletter.

Fortunately, I have a stockpile of interesting reader comments and questions to help me out with these daily emails. Yesterday, a reader and recent taker-upper of one of my offers wrote in to ask:

===

Idk if you remember me, but a few weeks ago I purchased Kieren Drew’s HIW through your affiliate link. Your age of insights videos came as a bonus offer.

Within three days I watched all the videos and went through the supplemental material. Now, I apply the FREE framework to all my content writing. It’s a game changer. Thank you for putting it out there.

But that’s not why I’m emailing you. I’m wondering if your simple money emails will be available in April?

You see, I’m on a budget and spent my monthly “education” budget on HIW. I’d love to buy your course, but I can only do so in April. If you’ll still be offering the course in April, I’d love to become a happy paying customer again.

===

The answer in short is yes, Simple Money Emails will be available in April, after I finish my trip across the US. It will also be available in May, and June, and onwards, just as it is available now.

I only ever ran a deadline-based promo around Simple Money Emails once, and that was for its launch last July.

​​I might create some kind of disappearing bonus for SME in the future — but as long-time readers might know, whenever I do offer a new bonus to an existing offer, I make it available to all previous buyers as well.

All that’s to say, if Simple Money Emails is not in your budget now, you will be able to get it later.

But if it is in your budget now, and you want to learn how to stamp out your own profitable and simple emails on demand, day after day if you so choose, even while traveling and not having a ton of time to work, then there’s no sense in waiting.

Simple Money Email will never be a better deal than it is today, and by getting it today, can apply it and profit from it sooner. For more info on SME:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

My credentials are very near zero, except for one thing

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A few hours ago, I was standing at the back of Ballroom A in the Palm Beach Convention Center.

Seated in the ballroom were a few hundred people, watching the breakout session of a larger conference that’s been going on since yesterday.

Up on stage, two doctors were talking about continuous glucose monitors.

Suddenly, a girl working for the conference picked me out of the crowd at the back. She walked up to me, leaned into me, and whispered, “Are you John?”

“Why yes,” I said. “Yes, I am in fact John.”

“Great,” she said. “I’ve been trying to call you. We’re gonna need you near the stage so we can just transition smoothly. As they finish up, they’ll walk off the stage, and you can go up.”

I was set to host the next breakout session. At a health conference. Talking about health.

I and another cohost got up on stage, talked for 15 minutes, then fielded questions, then called it a day.

People applauded.

The other guy and I walked off stage. As I tried to snake my way to the door, a few people from the audience called over to me. “Thanks so much for that.” “Great info.”

That’s quite odd when you think about it.

My credentials for speaking at a health conference are very near zero.

I didn’t study anything related to health. The closest I ever came to working in a health field was writing sales copy for supplement companies.

And yet, there I was on stage, at a health conference, mixing and mingling with medical doctors and CEOs of health startups.

The only thing that set me above total zero for credentials to speak at this conference, the only thing that separated me from the thousand or so people in the audience and gave me a place on the stage, is that I write.

For the past year, along with this daily newsletter about marketing, I’ve been writing a weekly newsletter about health.

In the process, I have learned a ton, and I have discovered lots of worthwhile things to share.

Writing a newsletter is how I could get on stage today and pretty much riff for 30 minutes while sounding authoritative and even reasonably smart.

Writing is also how I got invited in the first place to appear on stage at this conference.

All that’s to say, if you have zero expertise in a field, but you would like to develop expertise, then start writing.

And if you already have expertise but not enough people know it, then start writing.

A weekly email newsletter is good.

A daily email newsletter is better.

And if your objection is, “Sure, easy for you, but I don’t know exactly what to write or how to write it,” then I have you covered.

I’ve created a quick and easy course all about writing, specifically writing daily emails, in a way that entertains and informs your audience, while secretly building up your perceived and actual expertise. For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

How Bill Bonner can be so wrong and still so successful

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I’m in Palm Beach. The place is rich.

This morning, I walked along the sandy beach facing the Atlantic, a few hundred yards from where Billionaires Row starts — where people like the CEO of Blackstone and the widow of David Koch have their palatial residences.

I was walking there with my friend Sam, who came to Palm Beach with me.

We were discussing how nice the weather is here… how good the Atlantic Ocean looks against the pristine sand… how pleasant the people are in Palm Beach… even how there’s magically free and abundant parking on the island.

“It’s kind of like heaven,” Sam said. “It makes me want to make a fuckton of money so I could move here.”

I paused for a moment. I looked inside. And I concluded:

Palm Beach is great. But I have zero ambition to move here for the long term, or to make the tens of millions of dollars that would be necessary to support even a B-level lifestyle among the billionaires and multimillionaires here.

I’m telling you this because after the beachside walk, I had the good fortune to have lunch with one of the most successful copywriters in the world.

I won’t name him — I’m not sure he wants me to. But I will say he is a senior copywriter, working for 10+ years at one of the biggest and best-known direct response financial publishers.

Over lunch, one topic that came up was how Bill Bonner — the founder of direct marketing behemoth Agora — has been making financial predictions for 40 years.

Most of those predictions have been proven to be wrong. Year after year, decade after decade.

And yet, loyal readers of Bill Bonner continue to read his opinion pieces. Apparently, he now has the most successful financial-topic Substack out there, making some $1M/year from I guess editorial content alone.

The question is, why would people continue to listen to a financial prophet who is consistently making mistaken prophecies?

The very successful copywriter I met today has an elegant and interesting take on it. It’s something I hadn’t heard before. But that’s his intellectual property, so I won’t share it here.

What I will tell you is my theory on it, which I really got from legendary marketer Dan Kennedy:

The best customers, the most long-term customers, are not really buying whatever offer you’re supposedly making them. Instead, they are really buying you as a person. And they decide whether to buy you or not by how they match up with you on certain intangible, vaporous values.

All that’s to say, you might have really horrible, taboo things inside your head, things you think you should never share about yourself with your audience.

Such as for example, the fact that you are not very money-motivated — not a helpful thing to reveal to a bunch of business owners and marketers.

And yet, even though revealing such things is sure to drive many people in your audience away… it will bind a small number of them even more closely to you. And you can build a successful business — or even, if you insist, a large business — on the strength of those strong bonds alone.

Ben Settle or Gary Bencivenga could hardly charge this much for emails

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As I write this, I’m at Baltimore Washington International, the “Best Airport in North America,” as the wifi popup window will tell you.

I’m waiting for my flight to West Palm Beach. I will spend the next few days there at a conferences related to my health newsletter.

My last day in Baltimore means it’s the last day for a while that I will promote Shiv Shetti’s Performance Copywriter Method.

Not because PCM is going away or because I am done being part of it.

It’s not. And I’m not.

I continue to work inside PCM as Shiv’s “hot seat coach.” And from what I can see with my inside perspective, Shiv will only grow PCM bigger, and soon.

So I will promote PCM again in the future. And if you are interested in PCM in the future, you will be able to join then.

I am telling you this because I am trying to tamp down any urgency on purpose.

Joining PCM is a big decision. This is not simply another copywriting community you should join or another product you should buy — and then do nothing with.

On the other hand, PCM can be right for you if you are frustrated with your copywriting business now, and you’re legitimately looking for something different.

And on that note, let me share a totally different result from Luiz, one of the copywriters inside PCM reported a few weeks ago. Luiz wrote:

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I already knew the PCM model was amazing and today I got proof.

Last month I wrote a promo for a client that generated $38k in sales.

My commission was 20% so I made $7,600 from one client!

If I tried asking for this amount of money without using the PCM model clients probably would look at me like I’m insane.

===

For reference, Luiz wrote 9 emails for the promo — 2 warmup emails and 7 promo emails.

That’s $7,800 for 9 emails, or $866 per email.

I don’t care if you’re Ben Settle or Gary Bencivenga, you won’t have an easy time trying to charge that much for writing emails without the PCM model.

Does this mean that everybody inside PCM makes this kind of money each time they write an email?

No.

Does it mean that everybody inside PCM has a giant success with their very first client?

No.

But does it mean that results like this are possible, for reasonably skilled and experienced copywriters, who are willing to follow the PCM model, and take advantage of the resources inside this community?

Well, yes.

So if you’d like to find out more about PCM today, head over to page at the link below.

Opt in, and you will see Shiv’s video explaining in detail how PCM works, why he created it, and what to do as the next step in case you’re interested. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/pcm