Coffee and guilt at 10:40am

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It’s around 10:40am as I write this, and a beautiful, sunny, warm, Barcelona December morning outside. So far today, I’ve only taken a stroll to Starbucks to buy a new coffee mug — the old one mysteriously shattered last night after I poured some hot water into it.

Now I’m sipping my coffee, from my new mug, sitting at my living room table and getting down to writing this daily email, and I feel…

… really guilty.

A popular routine for many marketers — I’m thinking of one guy in specific, but the sentiment is common — is to hype up the promise of “morning coffee + daily email and my work day is done!”

My guess is that most of the people who sell that dream in their marketing are actually working or thinking about work for much of the day… and if not, then they previously spent decades of their life working or thinking about work all day long, in order to get to where they are now.

The fact is, I have way more autonomy today than I did 10 years ago, the last time I still had a proper job. I have way more autonomy today than I had even a few years ago, when I still regularly worked with clients, had deadlines, meetings, etc.

But the more autonomy I have, the more time I spend working, or thinking about work. And if I catch myself slacking off, or getting to work super late like today, well, I feel guilty. Like a joke in Dan Kennedy’s Time Management For Entrepreneurs says:

GOOD NEWS! You are now your own boss!

BAD NEWS! You are a lousy boss with one unreliable employee!

I’m not sure who needs to hear this or why. The only thing I can tell you to reclaim some of the dream is that I wouldn’t trade the autonomy I have now for the ability I had 10 years ago, to show up to the office, hung over and useless for the day, and not feel guilty about it, because after all, they are just paying for my time.

Plus, I even like I what I do now. Yes, sometimes it takes a bit of prodding to get me to work. But then again, it takes a bit of prodding to get me to stop work also.

If you’re willing to work, and to even enjoy working, but you need some prodding like I do, then you might like my Daily Email Habit service.

Daily Email Habit will help you start and stick with writing daily emails.

No, a daily email is not a business in itself — there’s other things that need doing, and doing regularly, to make it work. What can I tell you? That’s the truth.

But if you still like the idea of writing regularly, of building something for yourself, and in sharing your own insights with the world, so the world can give you something back, then maybe check out Daily Email Habit, before the day runs out on you:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

I want Justin Goff back

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Two days ago, Justin Goff sent a new email.

Do you remember Justin Goff?

He was a direct marketer who made between $30k-$70k per month, writing a daily email and creating a new offer a month, usually in partnership with some industry expert.

I wrote an email about Justin back in July, with the subject line, “What happened to Justin Goff?”

Because back then, Justin had decided to stop emailing daily. First, he switched to emailing weekly, but that didn’t stick, and so he stopped emailing altogether.

By my count, Justin has sent only 3 emails since. One, back in October, to say he’s struggling to adjust to no longer having the identity of an entrepreneur… a followup a few days later, with a self-help lesson… and now this one, two days ago, about success, like nothing happened.

I don’t know if Justin’s latest email means he’s preparing for a comeback. I hope so, because I found his email newsletter valuable.

Justin used to share the results of his ultra-profitable, very simple campaigns, and he reminded me of fundamental, make-or-break direct marketing truths that are easy to forget in the chase for something new. For example, take the following koan, about all it takes to create a hyper-successful offer, from Justin’s email on 2023/6/3:

“Making money with an email list is really about selling the same benefits over and over again with a new mechanism.”

“Pff,” I hear you saying. “So obvious. Perhaps you’re not aware, John, but I’ve read Breakthrough Advertising. Well, the first three chapters anyway. I know all about new mechanisms.”

I’m sure. The thing is, it’s not about knowing, but about applying, creating, and actually doing a good job of it.

Because so many marketers, so many business owners, think that a mechanism is the same as an acronym:

“Buy from me because of my proprietary, 5-step F.A.N.C.Y. system! What could those letters stand for? You’ll never know, not unless you buy! And you’ll be sorry if you miss out, because I’m telling you, F.A.N.C.Y. is unique, and it’s new, and it’s an acronym!”

No, a new mechanism, at least one done right, is not an acronym. A few examples of new mechanisms done very right:

* Travis Sago’s Phoneless Sales Machine, about making $5k sales without ever getting on a sales call, all via email and Google Docs, which every guru and coach is now using and peddling

* Donovan Health Solutions massive promo a few years back, about curing all your health problems with a special, magical sound frequency that activates your vagal nerve

* Justin’s own “Pocket Change Offers” training, which he did in partnership with Ning Li, for building an email list of thousands of buyers, quickly, with little $7 offers

So that’s why I’m hoping Justin will come back. I want him to promote stuff again, and share more impressive results, and remind me of what really matters, and how it looks when it’s actually carried out well.

But on to work:

Daily email. Sticking to it. It can be very valuable, as Justin’s promo results have shown.

On the other hand, letting your daily emails go slack can be harmful to your mental health. At least that’s my reading of Justin’s few emails of the past 6+ months.

If you want my help writing daily emails, and sticking to it, in a completely new way that you haven’t seen or tried ever before, you can find that at the link below.

Frankly, each day matters, each day is unique, and so my recommendation is that you get started today.

For the full info:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

A frustration that only grows with each email I write

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Yesterday, I wrote an email with the subject line, “Only open this if you play Wordle.” I guess that drew in some people who rarely read my emails, such as the following reader, who wrote:

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You sold… dog seat belts?

I didn’t know that was an actual product until I saw you mention it.

I’m a dog-owner – should I be concerned? 😧

Anyway, hi, I’m Anastasia.

I’m an e-com email copywriter, and I’m trying to learn how to write (hopefully great) advertorials.

So I came across your video with Chase Dimond where you discussed this concept of ‘horror advertorials.’ Do you have a swipe file with successful examples you wouldn’t mind sharing?

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“OH YOU GOTTA BE KIDDING ME,” I said.

An ongoing frustration in the running of this newsletter is that, in spite of writing a fairly in-depth email each day, many of which end up repeating stuff about me, most people on my list still known very little about who I am or what I do.

It’s a frustration that only gets more common the longer I’ve been writing this newsletter and the bigger my list gets.

The fact is, I do have a swipe of “horror advertorials.”

I’ve sold it in the past for $100, and just last month, I included it as one of the bonuses to my $997 Copy Riddles program during the “White Tuesday” promo, which also included a “$2k Advertorial Consult” as another bonus.

And yet, I still get questions like the one above. What to do? After my initial childish rush of frustration, I reminded myself this is inevitable, and just a part of how the world works, particularly online.

Some people got on my list only recently. Some miss my emails in their overflowing inboxes. Some don’t get drawn into my emails because I didn’t deliver on the copy front.

Other readers skim because they’re busy or distracted… and still others open, and read diligently, and then forget — because my newsletter, immensely important though it is to me, is really only 2-3 minutes in the day of even my most devoted readers.

In all these cases, the responsibility really lies with me to do something and improve the situation. So:

Regarding my “horror advertorial” swipe file, it’s not something I’m selling at the moment, and it’s certainly not something I’m sharing, if that means giving it away for free — because I’ve had lots of good customers who have paid me good money for the same info.

At the moment, I am selling and promoting my Daily Email Habit service.

You may wonder if you really need DAILY emails. After all, you may already have a website… or ads on Facebook… or you may even send a weekly email. Surely that’s enough???

I’d like to propose to you that your prospects know much less about you than you could ever believe. Shockingly less.

Daily emails can help with that, so you make more sales today, and so you get lodged more deeply in your prospects’ minds, so you make more sales tomorrow.

And if daily emails fail to deliver? If you end up writing daily emails, and most people in your audience still don’t know who you are and what you do?

Well, that just becomes a topic of a new email.

And if you’d like to see how I and a group of other smart folks are transmuting such everyday frustrations, or reader questions, or personal insights into daily emails that both entertain and sell, you can find that inside my Daily Email Habit service. For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Only open this if you play Wordle

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For much of his life Fyodor Dostoevsky struggled with a gambling addiction. He played roulette obsessively, and would lose huge sums of money, and be driven into debt and self-loathing as a result.

I’m no Fyodor Dostoevsky, either in terms of writing or in the depravity of my addictions. Where Dostoevsky wrote Crime And Punishment, I wrote an advertorial for a dog seat belt. Where Dostoevsky played roulette, I play… Wordle.

This email is really only for you if you play Wordle as well. If you don’t, or have never even heard of Wordle, then you are a better or luckier man than I.

Wordle has been a daily addiction for me for the past three years or so, pretty much since I discovered it.

I tell myself Wordle is a tool I use to relax and reward myself for a job well done. But the the fact I play Wordle first thing in the morning, when I’m neither stressed nor when I’ve done any job, well or otherwise, exposes my reasoning as a lie.

The fact is, I like word games, puzzles, brain teasers, clues that tell me if I’m on the right path, the brief flash of insight when a solution comes together.

And then the added features of Wordle — the fact that it’s simple and limited in scope, that there’s just one puzzle a day, that it tells you how many days you’ve kept up a streak of guessing the day’s Wordle puzzle right…

Well, you play also. You can understand me.

Really, Wordle is harmless. It’s also useless, at least in any adult view of the world. But in the words of Claude Hopkins:

“The love of work can be cultivated, just like the love of play. The terms are interchangeable. What others call work I call play, and vice versa. We do best what we like best.”

These be profound words.

The same motivations and drives — love of word games, narrowing in on a solution, a flash of insight when it comes together, a streak you don’t want to break — can be put to some adult use.

It’s why I’ve been writing these daily emails even longer than I’ve been playing Wordle.

And unlike Wordle, these daily emails have been very valuable to me, personally, professionally, and metaphysiologically.

My point for you being, see what you already like to do, and see how you can take elements of that and make it a part of something that pays you.

Nobody was ever going to pay me to play Wordle professionally — THE WORLD IS UNFAIR — but writing daily, in a short format, keeping a streak up, getting some kind of feedback always, is the next best thing, and in some ways, even better.

All that’s to say, if like me you play Wordle, you might enjoy writing daily emails.

You might also enjoy my Daily Email Habit service, because I very consciously introduced elements of Wordle into it — the hints, the streak, the unique once-a-day puzzle.

You can see an example of a daily email puzzle at the page below, or you can sign up to start playing the game yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

The first time I tried it, I didn’t last very long

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Dan Kennedy has a joke that goes something like, if we all stopped doing a thing in case the first time didn’t work out well, the human race would soon die out.

Get it? Get it? Wink wink, nudge nudge?

It’s about sex.

I bring this up for two reasons:

Reason one is that the first time I tried it — meaning writing emails, get your mind out of literotica section please — it didn’t work out well. Or actually I just didn’t last very long.

I believe this current newsletter, which has been running for 6+ years day in and day out, is something like my third or fourth attempt to stick to emailing consistently.

Reason two is because I want to share with you a case study I got from a reader named Jakub Červenka.

Jakub runs an online business called Muž 2.0. From what Google tells me, that translates from Czech into into Man 2.0. Because Jakub’s business is teaching men self-development stuff, specifically how to fix various bedroom problems.

Now, I happen to know from having exchanged lots of emails with Jakub over the years that his main thing is running ads on Facebook to a webinar that sells his core program.

But lately, Jakub gave another shot to daily emailing, even though it didn’t work out well the first time around. Jakub reports:

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I had been sending emails daily and then stopped for a good part of this year mainly due to feeling burnt out and feeling like I was riding on a dead horse, writing emails about the same topic.

With your service, this block is gone. I like to see the puzzle and then read in your email how you personally used it. It’s great over-the-shoulder learning experience.

I also noticed how not wanting to break the streak is motivating me – even more so than I don’t know, say making potentially money from making a sale to my list… that’s crazy. I am ashamed to admit it, as it is completely irrational, but it’s the truth. And probably not so surprising to anyone in the copywriting world, we know we are not rational beings, but still, this surprised me.

Also, I used a few of your prompts in my Black Friday promo. I made crazy good offer to my list, (20 of my flagship courses for 40% of the price) due to some messed up technical stuff ended up selling 23, which with some up/cross/down sells brought home close to $20k in 3 days… my best Black Friday yet.

So it was a good offer, but I was not promoting it in any other way than by e-mails and your inspiration was part of it, so you can say that your service contributed to this result. Which is true and it restored my resolve to write daily.

===

The service Jakub is referring to is my Daily Email Habit. It makes it easier to come up with a daily email topic every day, plus it has an in-email streak counter to keep you accountable.

Like Jakub says, why the streak counter works is not particularly rational… but it can be very effective.

And the results?

Jakub already had a successful business, and he had all the pieces in place. Reintroducing daily emails helped him make another $20k last month that he might not have made otherwise.

Your particular situation? Only you can really answer that question.

One thing I’m sure of, if you’re planning to ever or restart daily emails, the sooner you do, the sooner you will see results. Yes, even if you tried it before and it felt like riding on a dead horse.

For more info on Daily Email Habit, and how it can help you start and stay consistent with daily emails:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Don’t think of an Iranian drone

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A couple nights ago, I rewatched the 1997 comedy Wag The Dog… as research for work.

Robert De Niro plays a political communications consultant. He’s brought in for clean-up after news breaks that the President of the United States has had sex with a 15-year-old girl in a closet behind the Oval Office.

The situation is bad. De Niro needs at least a day to think up a way out of this sticky situation. Fortunately, the President is on a visit to China.

“Keep him there,” De Niro tells the President’s handlers. “Say he’s sick. And say his visit has nothing to do with the B3 bomber.”

“Sir, as far as I know, there’s no such thing as a B3 bomber,” says a White House staffer.

“That’s exactly what I said,” says De Niro.

The rest of the movie is about how De Niro’s character, along with a Hollywood producer played by Dustin Hoffman, orchestrate a make-believe war against Albania (“They seem shifty”), which happens entirely on the evening news.

I thought about this while reading a news article yesterday, titled, “New Jersey drone cluster sightings prompt call for ‘state of emergency.'”

In case you haven’t heard, the state of New Jersey is under attack by swarms of unexplained drones. An FBI official explained:

“Are we concerned there are nefarious intentions that could cause either an actual security or public safety incident? There’s nothing that is known that would lead me to say that, but we just don’t know. And that’s the concerning part of it.”

Could it be Iran? China? Perhaps the Albanians?

“There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States,” said the Pentagon press secretary, “and there’s no so-called mothership launching drones towards the United States.”

So you’re saying it could be the Albanians…

Look, I’m just fooling around. I’m certainly not claiming there are any parallels between the current drone situation and Wag The Dog. As far as I know, there’s no evidence that the drone situation is any kind of ploy to cover up some new atrocity being committed by people in power as we speak.

(See what I did there?)

All I really want to do is to introduce you to the powerful concept of a “frame.”

A frame is all the stuff that goes on in your head before, after, and around a specific message. A frame is how the phrase “SHUT UP!” can be interpreted in your head as an insult… a joke between friends… a cry of surprise or disbelief… a sign of mental breakdown… and probably 10 other things, all depending on the context.

There’s a guy named George Lakoff, who is a real-life version of Robert De Niro’s character in Wag The Dog.

Lakoff is a professor of linguistics at Berkeley, and he has long advised Democratic candidates on messaging and communication.

Lakoff believes that frames are such powerful and valuable communication tools that he wrote a guidebook, all about how to use them in politics, which he titled, “Don’t Think Of An Elephant.”

Because you can activate a frame even if you seemingly deny or negate that frame.

Frames are definitely an interesting topic, and it makes sense to actively play with them in high-stakes situations like political messaging.

But in everyday life, it can be exhausting and paralyzing to try to “control the frame,” as pick up artists like to say.

Fortunately, it’s not necessary to be constantly aware and constantly in control of the frame as you go about your life.

Because you can simply adopt a frame which will always serve you well.

That frame is that everything that happens works in your favor and is there for your benefit.

It works in politics, and in daily emails too, where it’s often expressed by the maxim, “Nothing bad ever happens if you write a daily email.” Everything becomes fodder for the content beast.

If you’d like to see how I and a group of other smart folks are taking our everyday frustrations, thoughts, and even stupid news items, and turning them into daily emails that both entertain and sell, you can find that inside my new service Daily Email Habit.

I’m not saying this service could transform your life, or be the equivalent of hitting the lottery. The people who subscribe to Daily Email Habit have reported good results, but nothing so far that would lead me to say this is the one thing you will ever need in your life for success, happiness, and contentment.

And that’s the concerning part of it.

For more info on Daily Email Habit:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

When scarcity wears out, what then?

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I only have a half-dozen print books in my apartment. The print books I do have are there because I feel the book is simply so important that I want it around me, available even if the grid goes down, sitting there on the shelf, catching my attention from time to time, inviting me to pull it down and open it up and look inside once again.

One of these half-dozen books is the Robert Collier Letter Book.

If I were ever stranded on a desert island… if for some unlikely reason I wanted to get off and rejoin civilization… and if my only hope of rescue was to write an effective sales letter that I would mail to millions of homes around the country… then I’d want Collier’s book next to me under that palm tree.

Collier’s book has got everything — rattlesnakes, beheadings, genies in the lamp, war heroes, romance, adventure, silk stockings, wagons of coal, dinosaurs.

But let me get to the point of this email:

Collier at some point was selling an O. Henry book set by mail. He sold literally millions of copies of this book set, in a single year.

How?

Well, prices of paper, binding, and labor were increasing (it was during World War I). Collier’s sales letters all emphasized that future editions of the book would have to cost more, and people saw that it must be true. In fact, Collier found that his most effective headline was:

“Before The Price Goes Up!”

But when the price eventually did go up, sales of the O. Henry dropped to such low levels that it wasn’t profitable to mail out any more sales letter.

Testing out different copy produced no improvement.

What then?

Side note:

One trick I practice (I think I got it from John Carlton) is to stop when I come across a puzzle like this. Rather than reading on to find out the answer — and there is an answer — I ask myself, what would I do here?

If I were selling something, using scarcity language to knock in a bunch of golf balls that are close to the hole… what then?

Time to move on? Or time for a new product? Or for more leads? Or what?

Think about that for a moment. Really, try it, now.

And once you’re done…

Then read on to find out the answer, in Collier’s words:

===

So we decided to try another kind of hurry-up, and the one we hit upon was: “Last Chance To Get Jack London free!” Mind you, we had been giving Jack London (or Oppenheim or the mystery and detective stories, or some other premium) for six years, and people had come to expect it. They had grown tired of hearing of raises in price, probably no longer believed further raises possible, but the threat of losing the premium was something different.

Strange as it may seem, putting in that one line changed the results over night. Back went the sales to the previous year’s figures. Ads pulled again. And circulars — how they pulled! For the second time we sold $1,000,000 worth of O. Henry books in a single year!

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Point being, when one kind of scarcity wears out, move on to another kind. From price… to free bonus… to a special limited edition… to an event at a given time, happening only once…

There are lots of aspects of an offer that can become scarce, that you can focus on. As one more example, take my Daily Email Habit service. I’ve repeatedly gotten variations of the following question about it:

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Looks so good, if I subscribe do I get access to the previous daily prompts from when you started this service?

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The answer is no, and to emphasize it, I even number the daily email “puzzles” that go out, much like daily Wordle puzzles are numbered. (Today’s daily email puzzle, based on which I’m writing this email, is #18.)

It seems reasonable to me to only give access to those “issues” of Daily Email Habit that go out while somebody is subscribed, much like with a magazine subscription.

I think this is a way to respect people who signed up earlier… it’s a motivation to sign up now, rather than later, and avoid missing out on any new puzzles… and in my mind, it assigns greater value to each puzzle that goes out — it makes each puzzle feel more unique. You either get it, or you don’t.

If you’d like to get tomorrow’s daily email puzzle (#19) before it flutters away, or to find out what Daily Email Habit is all about:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

For sale

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Today I’d like to tell you about my Daily Email Habit service.

I’ve been promoting this offer for a couple weeks now, usually at the tail end of my emails.

But from time to time, it’s good to stop the infotainment and just sell. So.

Daily Email Habit is for you if you’ve been convinced over the years that:

– a regular online presence is valuable

– email, ancient though it is, is more resilient and independent than social media platforms

– there’s a good number of people out there who actually enjoy receiving and reading emails, even daily, as long as those emails are not just drily and selfishly selling, the way this email is

Daily Email Habit is a new service I’ve come up with to help you take advantage of these facts, by helping you start and stick with your own consistent daily email habit.

Daily Email Habit is delivered as a daily email, with a new prompt each day — a specific “puzzle” to mull over and answer in your own email, along with a few “hints” if you need them.

I choose each day’s puzzle based on my experience writing this newsletter for the past 6+ years, my work with clients over the past almost decade, and the totality of close to 3,000 sales emails I’ve written in that time.

Each daily email puzzle is chosen both to make your emails interesting and different day after day, and to slowly but surely flip the many small switches that ultimately lead to a sale.

My initial guess at why Daily Email Habit would be useful to people was “time saving.” And it has been that way for some subscribers, but the major benefit seems to have been something else.

Here’s James Carran, a published author, poet, ghostwriter, the owner of a Twitter account with 100k+ followers, and the writer of several email newsletters, including the daily Carran’s Cabin. James subscribes to Daily Email Habit, and he said about it:

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I really enjoyed the email prompt today and it did indeed lead to a very different email than I’d have written otherwise. And some useful thinking.

I can already sense this is going to be a great process. Perhaps not so much for reducing time (though it will do that) as making it more interesting for my readers. I wrote a better email than I otherwise might have done.

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One final thing that can be curious, useful, or motivating to you if you join Daily Email Habit. Here, let me give it in James’s words again:

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And as a bonus, you get to watch John Bejakovic eat his own cooking by using the prompts in the emails and seeing how he applies it… Which is another round of education right there.

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I’m not guaranteeing the fact, but most days I myself use my own daily email puzzle to kick off my own email.

In that way, Daily Email Habit is like the “riddles” in my Most Valuable Email and Copy Riddles programs, if you know those.

Basically, Daily Email Habit, in combination with this newsletter, serves as a series of prompts to get you to practice and implement, and then an opportunity to compare what you’ve done to what somebody with a lot of experience would do based on the same prompt.

This is not a way of playing, “Mine is better than yours.” It’s simply a way of learning, getting new ideas, and being inspired to try different things.

At the moment, I’m still offering Daily Email Habit for the Charter Member investment of $20/month. At some point, I’ll increase that, but if you join now, you’ll be grandfathered in even when others have to pay more.

If you have any questions about Daily Email Habit, hit reply + ask away.

Otherwise, if you would like to see an example daily email puzzle as delivered each day in Daily Email Habit, or to have the opportunity to sign up for this service:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Time misers

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I went to college two years late, at age 20 instead of the usual 18. That meant I had had two extra years’ practice with teenage philosophizing compared to my classmates.

So when one of those classic freshman-year, fall-semester, late-night, deep discussion topics came up — “What would you do if tomorrow was the last day on Earth?” — I had a unique take.

The usual answers to that question are sky diving… some kind of wild sex proposal to your old crush… or going to admire the sunset one last time.

“I wouldn’t do anything different than usual,” I said. “I imagine I’d be paralyzed with fear. I’d probably just do the same things as every other day. Or maybe I’d spend the day lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling.”

I proposed a different hypothetical instead.

“What would you do if tomorrow there was an announcement that death has been cancelled, or at least pushed back by a few dozen millennia?”

That’s a question I’ve thought about a few times. I think it’s worth thinking about even today, long after college.

If you could live on, as you are now, or as healthy and as young as you want to be, pretty much indefinitely, what then?

How many more days or hours would you go on doing the job you are doing now? What would you do instead?

Would you try to save money? What for?

Would you stay in the same relationship that you’re in now? How would the prospect of thousands more years together weigh on you?

Of course, this is just a hypothetical. I used to write a weekly newsletter about the latest longevity science, and based on what I’ve read, death will not be cancelled tomorrow, or the day after.

Still, I think the above is a useful thought experiment.

A lot of modern-day gurus out there preach an abundance mindset. “Those who have will be given more,” they say, paraphrasing the Bible, “and those who have not will lead miserable, miserly lives regardless of their actual circumstances.”

This abundance mindset is almost always applied to things like money, achievements, opportunities, stuff in your life.

But then those same gurus — and I can name three off the top of my head — turn around and say, “Life is short.”

The implied message being to use your time wisely and conservatively, not to waste it or fritter it away. In other words, to be a bit of a time miser.

Maybe these abundance gurus are right. Maybe time is different from all the stuff that’s abundant in the universe.

All I can tell you is that personally, I’ve found that thinking that “life is short” is more likely to lock me up with fear and indecision than it is to make me hustle and prioritize.

That’s why I choose to believe I have all the time in the world, specifically, all the time I need, and that everything that needs doing is getting done, or will get done.

Counterintuitively, I find this actually helps me move and get things done now, while urgency and scarcity have the opposite effect.

I’m not sure if you can agree with me, or if this helps you in any way. But perhaps it can give you a different way to look at some familiar things.

In entirely unrelated news:

The last few days, I’ve stopped promoting my Daily Email Habit service because, frankly, I thought I had tapped out demand for the moment.

But then yesterday, a handful more people signed up, “on their own,” that’s to say, even without me promoting the offer in my daily email.

Maybe I was wrong?

So let me remind you of my Daily Email Habit service, which is designed to help you start and stick with sending daily emails to your list.

It’s only the second week this service has been running, but I’ve already had a bunch of results-based testimonials about it. Here’s one from Alex Ko, who is a senior copywriter at edtech company KooBits:

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Thanks for setting up DEH and troubleshooting the streak counter. While the streaks feature is great, I especially love your daily puzzle.

It takes the stress out of finding a topic to write about, and for me, looking back at the body of work I’ve done over the past week feels much better than keeping the streak alive.

It’s already gotten me to write on weekends, something I usually avoid since I treat them as rest days.

Looking forward to sharing more results in the future!

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If you feel that it might be the right time to start a consistent daily email habit (weekends optional), here’s the full info on how I can help you with that:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

What it’s like to be the writer of an email newsletter

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A couple days ago, I wrote a 1,400-word email about what I called Boredom Therapy, and the strange psychological hypothesis known as “free won’t.”

I ended that email by recommending Brian Kurtz’s $12.67 book Overdeliver, because of the crazy-valuable bonuses that Brian gives away for free to buyers of that book.

As usual, as the final part of the email, I had a link, in this case, to Brian’s page where my readers could go take advantage of this great offer.

In response to this 1,400-word email in which I tried to put in a novel idea and a great offer, I got a reply from a new reader:

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Great. I have read your mail from your engaging story to your closing.

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“Harumph,” I said to myself. I doubt my new reader meant his comment as an insult, and yet…

I’ve been listening to Dan Heath’s podcast What It’s Like To Be. Dan interviews people from different fields — recent episodes featured a marine biologist, a Christmas tree farmer, a life insurance salesman. Dan’s goal to find out what it’s like to live your life doing these sometimes strange, sometimes mundane jobs.

The podcast typically ends with a series of lightning-round questions. One of these is, “What’s the most insulting thing that can be said about the work of someone in your profession?”

I thought about sales copywriting, which is as close to a profession as I’ve ever had. I realized the worst thing you can hear as a copywriter is, “Wow, this is great copy.”

This goes back to copywriter Gary Halbert, who would give his sales letters to the local barflies to read.

If Gary ever heard, “Wow this is a GREAT sales letter,” he knew he had written a flop. The response he was hoping to hear is, “Damn, where can I buy this???”

Writing a daily email newsletter is not quite like writing a cold traffic sales letter. An email newsletter does try to make sales, but it goes out to a warm audience, to people who know you, trust you, want to hear from you, at least sometimes.

And so the responses I’m hoping for are either Gary’s “Where can I buy this?” (hint: usually a link at the end of the email)… or on the other hand, something that indicates I’ve helped the lights come on in some way, usually manifested by responses like, “This made me think of…”

If my email gave you a new idea, or helped you make a new connection, or brought up some personal memory or experience, I wanna hear about it.

Just don’t write me to say something about the writing itself, even if it seems complimentary, because then I’ll know you either didn’t read this email… or that I failed to write it in a way that had any impact on you.

By the way, I’ve been writing lately about cross-pollination — getting ideas from other industries.

The What It’s Like To Be podcast is actually a good resource for that. Plus, it’s easy and pleasant to consume — short, light, and yet substantive.

That’s not surprising, considering that Dan Heath is the author of several books on effective business communication, including a personal favorite of mine, Made To Stick.

If you want to give Dan’s podcast a try the next time you’re at the gym or going for a walk:

https://www.whatitsliketobe.com/