10 personal stories I’ve told in my emails

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A few days ago, I was on a Zoom call with a business owner who reads these emails. He said how he likes reading my newsletter because I lead such an interesting life — “all these podcasts, all these amazing books, all these movies, dates, and traveling and all that. Like, wow.”

That surprised me. I can tell you the inside view of my life. It does not appear very interesting.

In fact, maybe you’ve noticed I almost never write emails that share genuine personal stories any more. (The exception is small status-building snippets, like the one at the start of this email.)

There are two reasons why I almost never write personal story emails any more:

1. I just don’t think I lead a very interesting life, and I don’t want to subject you to trivial anecdotes, pumped up to seem like they are something fun. (Seinfeld did it way better than I ever will.)

2. I have been writing this newsletter for 8 years, and I feel I’ve told every interesting story I ever had. In other words, I’m bored by my own stories, and so I’m projecting that you will be bored by them too.

This, of course, is one of the classic blunders, which can cost you millions of dollars if you do your own marketing.

The fact is, most business owners get bored of their own marketing way sooner than their market gets bored.

It helps that the market isn’t ever fully paying attention, and that it’s also a “moving parade”:

New people are constantly coming in. Old people are walking out. The upshot is that the stories (and marketing) that you’ve used a thousand times before are still fresh and interesting to a thousand people in your market.

So let me take my own advice, and share with you some personal stories I’ve already shared in this newsletter. Here’s a menu. Maybe you will find one or two items intriguing enough to click through and read:

1. ​The time a car fell in front of me out of the sky​

2. ​The time I had an honest-to-goodness religious epiphany on a bridge​

3. ​The origin story of how I became a writer, going back to kindergarten​

4. ​The time I almost approached the woman who was most probably “The ONE” but fortunately didn’t​

5. ​The time I had an epiphany at a gym that wasn’t religious but was more insightful and long-lasting than just about anything else in my life​

6. ​The time the “license plate game” made me think that manifestation is real, and that I can do it​

7. ​The time I spent 45 minutes waiting outside my own apartment building because I forgot my keys at home and even though I had an extra set hidden somewhere in the building, I was too shy or something to ring my next-door neighbor and ask to be let in ​

8. ​The time a reader unsubscribed and wrote that I’m “simply too dumb to be helped”​

9. ​The time I gave my girlfriend-at-the-time a nice gold necklace for our anniversary, and she started crying, and not out of happiness​

10. ​The time I attacked a wall with a butter knife, severed two tendons in my right hand, and spent three months in recovery, which was only partial​

So there you go. 10 personal stories, all true, and maybe even interesting enough to be worth retelling.

But maybe you’ve been a reader of my newsletter for a while? And maybe you remember me telling some other personal story? If so, write in and let me know. I’ve almost certainly forgotten the story you remember (I struggled to come up with the list of 10 above). I’ll appreciate you reminding me.

Public service announcement

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Every few months or so, I like to promote an affiliate offer that doesn’t make me much money, but that I still promote as a kind of chirpy public service announcement.

Today it’s time to do so again.

Because yesterday, in my Daily Email House community, I wrote about an email I sent out recently, which did well for me in terms of sales. That email was based on an idea I got from marketer Travis Sago, who I’ve mentioned often in this newsletter.

After I wrote about that, I got a DM on Skool from a Daily Email House member, who works as a freelance copywriter, and who also has his own email list and a few products he sells to that list.

Here’s that DM interaction:

===

FREELANCE COPYWRITER: Hey John, how are you? I keep seeing you mention Travis Sago, and I wonder… how much of an influence does he have on you? It looks like he is the brain behind a lot of campaigns you do and sales

BEJAKO: Yep, I’ve learned a ton from the dude. Highly recommended if you are looking to do more with your email list and audience

FREELANCE COPYWRITER: As somebody who’s pretty fed up with client work and wants the email based business lifestyle, that might make sense. So is his Skool page the only way to see what it’s all about? Or is there a TSL/VSL?

BEJAKO: Pretty much everything he’s doing now is inside that Skool group. He had courses before that you can still buy separately, but they are also inside Skool if you sign up for that

FREELANCE COPYWRITER: Cool. I’ll have a look

===

I figure if this guy is interested, maybe you too will be. I’m not holding my breath though.

I’ve promoted Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin Skool group a dozen times in these emails.

I promoted it before Travis made it available to affiliates, because I was in it, and because I saw it from the inside, and because it made me money.

I promoted it after after Travis set up the affiliate program last year, because I’m still in it, and I can still see it from the inside, and it’s still making me money.

Over the past year that I’ve been promoting Ronin as an affiliate, I have made about $6k in commissions.

That might sound like real money to you, and it is pretty good money for sending a dozen or so emails, but it’s also much much less than I’ve made by promoting much less valuable affiliate offers that I’m much less personally involved with and less enthusiastic about.

It’s also much much less than I’ve made by applying Travis’s teachings inside Ronin. As for that, I can directly trace about $135k in income to Ronin:

* ~35k+ from auctions, following Travis’s “24 Hour FUN Auction” course

* ~60k+ from Daily Email Habit, which I created by following step-by-step Travis’s “Passive Cash Flow Mojo” course, about creating continuity offers

* ~$40k+ from three tiny promos, which were based around ideas I got from Travis’s “$1k a day in 1 Hour a Day” training and his “Big Ticket Email Mojo” course

On top of that, I’ve made much more money indirectly thanks to the ideas and people inside Ronin:

Copy hacks I’ve seen Travis and nobody else use (like the email I mentioned at the start)…

… affiliate offers I’ve promoted from other Ronin members…

… changes I’ve made to the way I create my own offers, which I’ve picked up both from Travis’s trainings and by looking at what he does.

So eat your vegetables.

Brush your teeth.

Don’t smoke.

And sign up to Royalty Ronin, and then start applying the ideas inside, one by one.

I figure that just like other public service announcement, most people will shrug this one off.

But maybe you won’t, at least if you too are fed up with client work and are looking for a way out. If so, I have believed for years and continue to believe this is the best deal on the Internet:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

P.S.. Travis offers a free 7-day trial. If you sign up for Ronin and make it past the first 7 days, write me and let me know. I’ve got some bonuses with your name on them.

Price increase case study: “fucking swimming in sales over here!!!!”

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Last month, I ran the Price Increase Promo Challenge. One of the people who took me up on it was Chris Howes, who runs Creative Strings Academy, an online music school.

Over the past few days, Chris ran his price increase promo for a course he delivered last year and sold for $30. This morning, Chris wrote me with the results:

===

JB- I’m fucking swimming in sales over here!!!!!

63 sales of the $30 product based on PIP (“get it before it goes up to $67”) Remember I originally sold 74 of them at the launch in December. That’s almost as many as I sold the first time. So thats $1900.

Tons of the original 74 buyers bought the new Pentatonic Patterns PDF and Web App. And lots of the new buyers also bought the new thing at checkout as upsell.

We did about $1500 on that product. Which i will split with my developer and he will be super happy, because that is a good payday for the few hrs of work he put in, and now it’s launched evergreen.

And then I had sales of other upsells on the checkout pages as well…. which I didn’t even remember to add until the last minute.

I want to try to sell everyone who bought something on joining the membership tmrw or this week, because every new member gets a free private lesson with me, which what could be a better way to follow through and implement?

So I probably earned about $3,000 – thrilled to tell my wife that – and I want to use the sequence I created as the new opening welcome sequence for people into my list, and/or start running ads and promotions to the funnel somehow. because I think I’m onto something that resonates with my audience.

So, yeah, thanks John. You kicked my ass in a good way.

===

So much good stuff in what Chris writes above. Specifically:

1. A higher priced asset he can use to sell his other offers more easily in the future…

2. A proven funnel he can run more traffic to (welcome sequence or maybe even cold traffic)…

3. 67 new buyers who make for new leads for his continuity offer or coaching if he wants to make that available, possibly leading to thousands or tens of thousands of dollars more…

4. Higher overall perceived value of his own expertise and products (yes, people do judge a book by its cover as well as its price)…

5. Something nice to tell his wife…

… plus $3k for himself and about $750k for his developer. That’s not Pablo Escobar cocaine money, but getting paid $3k to also get a bunch of new leads and some new assets in your business sounds like a good deal to me.

All in all, that’s 6 benefits of running a promo, or more specifically, a price increase promo for an offer that sold pretty well once upon a time.

The Price Increase Promo Challenge is over. I have no plans to run it ever again. But if you have a list, and an offer, and if you would like my help making more money from your list and offer, hit reply, and maybe we can work something out.

 

[Psych Psundays] Metaphors for the brain

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Another week, another issue of my new Psych Psundays series. A few responses I got to last week’s issue:

#1. “Pswell pstuff, John!”

#2. “This felt very personal…”

#3. “Hi John, the Psych Psunday series is fantastic. I had already read about Daniel Kinahan and his father because I’m a big fan of investigative journalism and books written by former police officers, journalists, and prosecutors who fight these criminals. I agree with everything you wrote.”

That’s encouragement enough for me. So let’s mush on.

This morning I listened to an interview with Jason Stacy, who is the performance coach of Aryna Sabalenka, the current no. 1 female tennis player in the world.

Stacy took some audience questions. One woman, very blonde and with very white teeth, asked:

“My question is, when your body is tired, but your goal is bigger than your comfort, what is the mental switch that elite athletes use to keep going?”

What caught my attention is the use of the word “switch.” It’s such an innocent-sounding word, but it exposes the prevalent metaphor we use to think about the brain, which I claim is neither useful nor pleasant.

That unpleasant and unuseful metaphor is that the brain is a machine, or more specifically a computer, or more specifically still, a buggy computer.

I don’t know exactly where this metaphor comes from.

A bit of research today told me that people have been comparing the brain to the new technology of the time for centuries.

In the age of mechanical automatons, Descartes wrote that the brain is like a hydraulic machine.

In the age of electricity, the brain was compared to a telegraph relay.

In the age of computers, John Von Neumann wrote The Computer And The Brain, about the similarities and the differences between brains and computers.

Now, in the age of big data, brains have been metaphorically reduced to “prediction machines.”

The problem is, at the same time, we’ve had people like Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky doing research on just how good humans are as prediction machines.

The result of Kahneman and Tversky’s research is prospect theory, which says that predictions or statistical evaluations done by human brains are consistently and predictably wrong.

In this view, human brains are prediction machines that aren’t all that good, or like I said earlier, they are buggy computers.

It’s not a not a very pleasant way to look at yourself.

What about useful?

Jason Stacy, Aryna Sabalenka’s performance coach, answered the very blonde, very white-toothed woman’s question about the one mental switch of elite athletes with a chuckle and a shrug. He said, “There’s a problem in the world these days where everyone is waiting to feel good to do something versus doing something to feel good.”

Stacy’s advice was to take action, consistently, even if it’s the smallest, most miserable bit of action at the start.

In other words, here’s a performance coach, in an actual measurable and competitive field, coaching at the very highest level, telling you that the “mental switch” ain’t really there to be flipped, and that what you really need to do is to grow and adapt over time.

For the purposes of this email, that’s all the proof I need to tell you that computer metaphor of the brain is not only not pleasant, but it’s also not useful.

But we all crave understanding and we crave simplicity. If the brain is not a computer, even a buggy computer, then what is it? Or at least, how can we think about it in a pleasant and even useful way?

For that, I would like to point you to a book I read last year.

This book doesn’t explicitly spell out a metaphor for the brain, but it makes the case, through various fascinating case studies, that the brain is — shockingly — not a machine but a living thing, an organ or perhaps an organism, like a tree or a climbing vine.

There are no switches to be flipped inside.

But over time, the brain grows and adapts to its environment, in alignment with its goals and the constraints put on it. Also, unlike a machine, which comes pretty much finalized out of the factory, the brain is capable of growing and adapting throughout its life.

Maybe I’m not selling the book well or this metaphor of “the brain as a climbing vine.” I won’t try to sell either any better right now.

All I will tell you is this book is one of the most influential books I’ve read over the past few years because it’s 1) fun, 2) inspiring, and 3) practical. And the idea of the brain as being a living and adaptable thing, rather than a buggy computer, is much more pleasant and more useful to me personally.

If you’re interested in psychology and neurology, and if you want some practical and inspiring takeaways, I highly recommend this:

https://bejakovic.com/doidge

If list growth is your priority, do not read this email

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It’s Saturday morning as I write this, if you can call 1:22pm morning.

I can call it that, or will call it that, because I went out last evening, had some drinks, and then spent a strange, tossy-turny, dream-oppressed night in bed.

All that’s to say, my brain, which is normally not the fastest and most energetic of my organs, is right now even slower than usual.

In my present state, around 1:18pm, I was unsure what to put into today’s email, or if there will even be an email today.

Fortunately, I checked my own inbox. And there I saw a fresh-off-the-presses email by my online buddy Kieran Drew.

“Hullo,” I said. Because the subject line of Kieran’s email was, “I lost $2,152 this month.”

It’s not a tremendously complicated situation:

Kieran sends out weekly emails to his list. Last month he didn’t make any new offers but just promoted his existing courses. That, plus some sales directly from his welcome sequence and some affiliate sales, made him about $3k.

On the other hand, Kieran’s expenses, including his VA, the ads he’s running, and the software he pays for, added up to over $5k.

Subtract one from the other, carry the zero, get out your red marker, and you get a $2,152 loss for March.

Now here’s the rub, and what made me decide to write an email about this:

Kieran’s audience is north of 250,000 people. His email list alone is close to 30k people.

My point being, if you think that a big list or a big audience will solve all your problems with your online business… well, no.

Kieran has made over $1.5M in the past, mainly from his email list, mainly by doing launches around new offers and promos around existing offers.

From what I understand, he’s gearing up to do so again.

But without new offers and without email-intensive launches and promos, he wound up in the red, thanks to an earnings last month of about $0.10/subscriber.

On the other hand, I recently listened to a case study by marketer Travis Sago, involving some unnamed dude. Said Travis:

===

He just went through a transition point in his life, and everything was going wrong. Like Infusionsoft took his list. Like he was coming off a bad relationship.

I remember he was like, “Dude, can you help me?”

I said, “Well, I’m not sure. Come out here.”

I really like the guy. He came out here. He’s got a seven hundred person list.

I’m like, “What I would do is I would mail your list every day, invite them to a phone call, right?”

We came up with an offer for them.

In December, during the Christmas season, he had fifty grand in sales from that seven hundred person list. Now thirty five was collected, about fifteen was on payments.

===

50 grand from a 700 person list. That’s $71/subscriber.

Now, I don’t know the behind-the-scenes details of this dude’s business. Plus, not everybody gets somebody like Travis Sago in their corner. Plus plus, it’s often easier to make higher and more impressive earnings per subscriber with a smaller list.

STILL.

Maybe you don’t make $71/subscriber.

Maybe you make $20/subscriber.

Or $10/subscriber.

Or $5/subscriber.

Or just $2/subscriber.

It’s quite doable.

And if you want some help with that, regardless of the size of your audience, come join me inside Daily Email House. that’s my free Skool group, where our collective mission is, “Email daily, make a $1k offer, pay for a house.” Your spot is waiting for you here:

https://bejakovic.com/house

I could not be in better company

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Today I’ve got quite the testimonial to share with you. Please indulge me.

This testimonial comes from a man who has sold 8 million books, and who, through his marketing and copywriting savvy, has gotten his business partner, who is the face of their business together, on 6,000 radio shows and 120 TV appearances, including the Oprah Winfrey Show.

This man’s name is J.Michael Palka. Somehow J.Michael found my “10 Commandments of Con Men, etc.” book. He read the book, and then he wrote me to say:

===

John,

I have been writing copy for decades.

I have read, listened to and watch everything available on copywriting.

Probably have 500GB of copywriting material from all the greats and a few from the not so greats.

Your book is right there at the top.

As a master of marketing for over 50 years (my business partner and I sold 8 Million of our own self published books in print), I understand the foundation for marketing is psychology which I have studied for decades.

And your book blew me away.

Why I never heard of it before mystifies me. But the Universe always delivers when the time is right.

I will read it a few more times to get a full grasp of some of the concepts.

Your book is one of 2 books I will always have with me. The other is Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz. You could not be in better company.

Thanks for your effort in writing the book. And may you live a long, healthy and fruitful life.

===

I feel I should pull out some kind of a clever marketing or psychology lesson to share with you out of all this…

… but can’t I just share a glowing testimonial from time to time?

If you really want a some clever marketing or psychology lessons, I’ve written a book that’s full of that. People who are in the know like this book and recommend it quite highly. If you haven’t read it yet, your copy is waiting for you, right now. Here’s where you can find it:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

SICTFOY: Last call for Ghostbuster Sequence

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This is the last email I’m sending to promote Nick Bandy’s Ghostbuster Sequence before the price doubles.

I was gonna be clever and use as my subject line Nick’s nuclear option followup, which Nick says works “TOO well,” a 7-word message that ultimately goes back to negotiation coach Jim Camp.

Fortunately, I caught myself in time.

If you wanna find out what Jim Camp’s 7-word message is, you can try to guess what SICTFOY could possibly stand for.

Or you can simply get the entire Ghostbuster Sequence, in which case it makes sense to act immediately, so you don’t have to pay double what everybody else will be paying, starting a few hours from now.

Speaking of Jim Camp, here’s an inspirational message I heard him deliver once:

“When someone says no, that’s just no for now. It’s not over until we want it to be.”

If you wanna get Ghostbuster Sequence, and reanimate “mostly dead” or even “all dead” conversations, and get more clients and do more deals, starting with what you’ve already got, and not take silence for a “no,” or a “no” as the end, then here’s where to get your fix:

https://bejakovic.com/ghostbuster

P.S. If you do get it before the deadline, forward me your receipt. I will personally send you a bonus of equal real-world value, my Secret of the Magi. It sells for $54 on my site right now, and tells you the biggest secret I’ve learned about opening up (not following up on) conversations that lead to business partnerships.

Flakebuster

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A couple weeks ago, I wrote an email with the subject line “Nasty followup.”

That was about a potential auction partner who was stringing me along. He kept pushing off the test for our potential auction, first to next week, then the week after that.

I sent that potential auction partner a slightly snarky message, hence the “Nasty followup” subject line.

My potential auction partner didn’t get offended at my slightly snarky message. He replied to me in a cheerful way. But once again, he told me to push off our auction test until the end of what is now last month.

At the end of last month, I followed up with him again.

At this point, he didn’t reply any more. A few days later, I followed up again. He still didn’t reply.

And then last night, I was going through Nick Bandy’s Ghostbuster Sequence v2.0, which Nick just rolled out yesterday to existing buyers.

Of course v2.0 is bigger than v1.0, but I was genuinely impressed by how cool of a product it is now.

Nick includes some sample case studies in the back. I picked out a message from one of those case studies and sent it to my mostly dead potential auction partner.

And you know what?

After two+ weeks of silence, the dude got back to me! Amazing! Exciting! Incredible! He wrote me to say:

“Hey buddy! Let’s do next month?”

… in other words, more flakiness, more maybe, more mañana.

I’m telling you this for two reasons:

1) I wanna be transparent about the realities of 1-1 follow-up.

Sometimes you send one message after months, and the deal gets immediately and magically done. Ch-ching!

Other times, like here, you get somebody who is a flake to keep stringing you along. But if it’s a partnership worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars (as this has the potential to be), it warrants at least sending some messages to push it along or to find out for sure it will never happen.

2) After I got the “Let’s do next month?” reply, I sent Nick Bandy a message. I told Nick his next offer should be about converting people who keep saying “maybe” into people who tell you a clear yes/no. Working title, “Flakebuster Sequence.”

I’m glad I wrote Nick, because he gave me a great recommendation. He suggested I send his “Stage 7” message next, which I called the “Mr. America” technique in my email earlier today.

I’ll wait a couple days and then do exactly as Nick says, and maybe even report on the results of it.

But by the time that happens, it will be too late for you, at least if you’re looking to get Nick’s Ghostbuster Sequence (v2.0!) before the price doubles, today at 8pm EST.

Yes, you will still be able to buy Ghostbuster Sequence next week. But why spend more? And why wait? Mañana, mañana, mañana…

Ghostbuster Sequence is a set of copy-and-paste messages that can be worth a pirate ship’s worth of gold bullion to you, starting right now. If you wanna get the lot today before the price goes up forever, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/ghostbuster

P.S. If you do get it before the deadline, forward me your receipt. I will personally send you a bonus of equal real-world value, My Secret of the Magi. It sells for $54 on my site right now, and tells you the biggest secret I’ve learned about opening up (not following up on) conversations that lead to business partnerships.

Glossary of 1-1 follow up

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The past few days, I’ve been telling you about Nick Bandy’s system for reactivating leads and deals that have gone silent, called Ghostbuster Sequence.

If you open up Ghostbuster Sequence, you might find yourself confused by the unfamiliar follow-up jargon. I don’t want you to be confused. I really don’t. So let me give you a glossary that defines some of the terms you’ll see inside:

Stage 1: Conversations that have been dead for 2 weeks or more. For conversations like this, send Nick’s “Stage 1” message and proceed to Stage 2.

Stage 2: Conversations that have been dead for less than 2 weeks. In Princess Bride terms, these are “mostly dead” conversations. There’s a big difference between “mostly dead” and “all dead.”

Meme Warfare: A strategic graphical assault on your dead (or mostly dead) prospect, designed to get them to crack a smile and make it easy for them to reply.

The “Jim Camp Nuclear Option”: A 7-word message to send prospects after multiple previous followups have failed to produce a response. (Nick attributes this message to marketer Travis Sago. I happen to know it goes back to negotiation coach Jim Camp.) Says Nick, “It works TOO well.”

The “Negative Reply Pivot”: A message to send high-value prospects who explicitly tell you “NO.”

Educated assumptions: Statements to send your dead (or mostly dead) prospects that break the pattern of constant follow-up questions.

“Mr. America” technique: Nick doesn’t call it this inside his Ghostbuster Sequence. Instead, he calls it “Stage 7.”

I think my name is distinctly better. It comes from the following story from the book Mr. America, about health publisher Bernarr MacFadden:

“With his marriage to Mary officially over, Macfadden had captured headlines by taking a new bride. Johnnie Lee McKinney was a forty-four-year-old health lecturer and former interior designer when she met the seventy-nine-year-old publisher — a sturdy, vivacious blond Texas beauty molded in Macfadden’s preferred silhouette. Theirs was a whirlwind courtship. He attended one of her talks in Manhattan, then hounded her into a lunch date at the New York Athletic Club. After a wholesome meal, the two proceeded to Johnnie Lee’s apartment, where the vigorously amorous Macfadden demonstrated his usual distaste for small talk by unzipping his trousers to reveal what Johnnie Lee called ‘the most exquisite sex organ I had ever seen on a man.’ Johnnie Lee declined her date’s unspoken offer — as well as his shouted proposal to marry her immediately—” though she did end up marrying MacFadden and his exquisite sex organ within the month.

Maybe you find that story crude. Don’t worry. Nick’s take on this technique is anything but crude. In fact, Nick’s use of this technique is professional and yet effective, and can work not just at the start of a courtship, but after everything else has failed to produce a response.

Nick’s Ghostbuster Sequence goes up in price from $54 to $97 at 8pm EST tonight. If you’d like to get it before then:

https://bejakovic.com/ghostbuster

P.S. If you do get it before the deadline, forward me your receipt. I will personally send you a bonus of equal real-world value, My Secret of the Magi. It sells for $54 on my site right now, and tells you the biggest secret I’ve learned about opening up (not following up on) conversations that lead to business partnerships.