If you open

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Just now, I went on Amazon and checked the top three ebooks in the “nonfiction” category. They are:

#1: “Two Women Walk Into A Bar”

#2: “The Amish Wife”

#3: “If You Tell”

Unless you know these books already, the titles give you no clue as to what they might be about. And yet, they are at the top of Amazon.

Only once you dig into subcategories and the subcategories of those subcategories to get to the the marketing bestsellers, do you find understandable titles like:

“1-page Marketing Plan”

“How To Get To The Top Of Google”

“The Psychology Of Selling”

What gives?

Is it better to have a mysterious and opaque title to suck in aimless passersby? Do clear, benefit-oriented titles just scream “sales pitch” and drive readers away?

I’m sure it’s obvious to you, but I like to flog dead equines. So let me point out that the top three nonfiction books were all written by people with large existing audiences… big celeb endorsements (the author of the Women/Bar book was on Oprah multiple times)… and giant marketing pushes from established publishers.

On the other hand, the marketing bestsellers went to smaller existing audiences and probably had smaller if any marketing pushes (the last one, Brian Tracy’s The Psychology Of Selling, was published in 2006 and probably gets no active marketing whatsoever any more).

In other words, the top of the top nonfiction bestsellers are there in spite of their titles. While for the marketing books, clear, understandable, benefit-oriented titles help overcome other limitations, and sell books that might not sell otherwise.

And on that note, I’d like to tell you that yesterday I recorded a short presentation, 4 Proven Hooks That Sell More Books.

Based on that clear, benefit-oriented title, you can probably guess what the presentation is about.

I will be giving this presentation away as a bonus in a couple days’ time, if you buy a book I will be promoting. But more about that when it’s due.

For today, I’d like to point you to a little book with a clear and understandable title. It’s a title that I know for a fact has sold copies of this book that wouldn’t have sold otherwise.

I know this, because people who bought the book wrote me to say so.

The title is The 10 Commandments Of A-List Copywriters. The author is me.

And if you’d like to get this book, you can find it lurking among the direct-marketing bestsellers on Amazon. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

One of the very few newsletters I read with interest

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One year ago, on January 10 2023 to be exact, I got a sudden burst of 100+ new subscribers.

That’s not how things go on a normal day in the Bejako hobbit hole. Not anywhere close. So I picked up my walking stick and went outside to investigate.

Google Analytics told me I had a mass of new website visitors from Twitter that day. So I walked over to Twitter, asked around, and came upon a tweet, which had been seen by 120k people, recommending me among several other email copywriters.

The person who wrote that tweet was one Kieran Drew.

At that time, Kieran had something like 100k Twitter followers. Today, he has over 200k. He also has a weekly email newsletter with close to 30k subscribers.

Kieran is an ex-dentist. He quit his comfortable job pulling teeth in September 2021. And he started to write online, full-time, to an eager audience of zero.

Kieran got his success so quickly and so thoroughly not via clever algorithm hacks or by running paid ads. Rather, he did it simply by writing. Clear, valuable, fun writing.

Thankfully, Kieran is not one of the descendants of Matt Furey in the daily email world, the way that I am.

His newsletter is pleasantly free of shaming… mocking… us-vs-them dog whistles… the daily striptease of a throbbing subject line that’s only paid off behind the paywall… or try-hard contrarian takes.

And yet, without all of these staples of daily emails, and even without writing daily, Kieran has his huge and devoted audience. And if you’re wondering if that huge and devoted audience is actually worth anything, Kieran grossed over $500k in 2023 alone, and he hit two 6-figure months.

If you’re interested in writing, or in making money online, what I’ve just told you should be enough to motivate you to get on Kieran’s email list and see what exactly he writes about and how he does it and how he profits from it.

But if by any chance it’s not enough, I can also add my personal seal of approval.

The fact is, I subscribe to hundreds of email newsletters. Most of them I ignore with a kind of malicious glee.

Some I work through out of a feeling of responsibility.

And then, there are a very few that I read regularly and with interest.

Kieran’s newsletter is among those very few. If you’d like to see why, sign up below and try it for yourself:

https://kierandrew.com/

Meet me in Barcelona?

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Yesterday, I held the “How I do it” training on Zoom.

I was happy with the content and the presentation. I felt I gave people who were there some genuinely new ideas on how to write and profit from a newsletter. And inevitably, I also highlighted some things folks already knew, but that I could vouch really were important, from personal experience.

So the live presentation was good. But, as usual, it was a weird experience.

I minimized the various Zoom windows so could I see my slides and focus. I ignored the chat except at a few moments when I stopped to field questions.

Inevitably, I spent over an hour talking at my computer, which gave me zero feedback, while at the same time feeling that I should somehow be interacting with actual people, who were muted and invisible.

It was strange and unsatisfying. This same stuff doesn’t bother me when I write and send these daily emails. But doing a live video presentation that somehow doesn’t feel live is different.

All that’s to say, there’s genuine value to meeting and seeing people in real life.

I live in Barcelona. It’s a big city, and attractive.

I know some of my readers live around here as well.

Also, Barcelona happens to be one of Europe’s top 5 tourist destinations, so maybe you are planning a trip here some time soon.

I will organize a meet up in person, in the flesh, blood and hair and bones, some time in the next few days or weeks. If you would like to join me — if you live here or are just visiting — reply to this email, and I’ll keep you in the loop.

Double up and triple up

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As this email goes out, I will be hosting the training on how I do it, meaning how I write and profit from this newsletter.

I had to cut a lot of possible content from this training.

​​A bunch of worthwhile ideas didn’t make it because I wanted to keep the training tight. I wanted to share only the absolutely most core, valuable advice I would give myself five years ago at the time I was starting this newsletter.

But what about the rest of the content? What about the stuff that I had to cut out?

Let me tell you one idea I won’t talk about on the training, but which has been something valuable I do unconsciously, and should be something I do a lot more of consciously:

Everything you do should serve double or triple or quadruple purposes.

I think this is a good life philosophy in general. But since this newsletter focuses on marketing and making money via writing, let’s talk about that, with the example of this “How I do it” training:

1. I announced this training two weeks ago.

2. Since then, I’ve been collecting ideas to talk about on the actual training. I’ve also been collecting examples, case studies, illustrations to bring up on the training.

3. Some of those ideas and examples made it into my daily emails over the past 10 days.

4. On the other hand, some of the ideas from my daily emails over the past two weeks will go into this training, even though I hadn’t planned it initially.

5. Once it’s over, this training will be relevant and useful to me as a kind of business checklist, because it’s helped me crystalize my thoughts on many things I had been doing well without being aware of them, some I had been doing poorly while tolerating.

6. This training might become a lead magnet down the line. I might turn into text or keep it as is, give it away, in whole or in part.

7. Or perhaps I will turn this training into a paid product, or a bonus for some other offer. I’m sure to take ideas from it… or stories that I tell… or questions that come up… or the format itself, or even topics that I planned but didn’t end up including… and use those in the future in a different format.

That’s what I mean when I say double up or triple up the uses you get out of everything you do.

Emails become courses… and courses become books… and books become podcast appearances… and podcast appearances become emails… which in turn become live trainings, which become bonuses…

I think you get the idea.

I’ll leave you here for tonight. Because I gotta go. I still have lots to do before the training tonight.

In the meantime, if you want to see doubled-up or tripled-up content in action, check out my 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters.

That book was motivated by an email I wrote in this newsletter… some of the content first appeared as emails… some of the book content was later repurposed to emails. And all of it has been driving high-quality readers to my list for the past three years. Like a reader joined my list a few days ago and wrote me to say:

===

I’m writing to tell you that I absolutely loved your book 10 Commandments Of A-List Copywriters.

I found it so captivating that I was hooked page after page and just couldn’t put it down without completing the entire book in one sitting.

And I came away wanting so much to be able to write like you. So much that I caught myself being even a little jealous (sorry!).

So I’ll go about incorporating the many ideas that I have learnt from your book.

===

To get this doubled-up, tripled-up book:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments​​

If you want to learn to pray, raise your prices

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I live in Barcelona, have been for almost two years now. In order to find out a little about this city, I picked up a book, called Barcelona. It talks about the history and the architecture of the place.

Since Barcelona is on the sea, the culture has been influenced big time by sea and sailing.

​​One of the oldest churches in the city is Santa Maria del Mar.

​​The patron saint of Barcelona is St. Eulalia, also the patron saint of sailors.

​​And according to the book I’m reading, the locals have a saying:

“If you want to learn to pray, learn to sail.”

I wrote that down when I read it. It’s very practical advice, even if you don’t want to learn to pray.

It reminded me of my attitude from day zero of my copywriting career, back in 2015.

I started out charging $15/hour.

I told myself that after five jobs completed at that rate, I would raise my rate to $20/hr.

And I did so.

Then I repeated the process, over and over. $20, $25, $40.

While I was still on Upwork, around 2018, I eventually got to $150/hr.

Then I got off Upwork, and started charging clients still higher effective fees for the work I was doing.

At every step of the way, my mindset was lacking. I had zero inner game. I was emotionally sure that the work I was doing would not be worth the new price I wanted to charge.

And yet I raised my prices. My mindset and my skills and my deliverables caught up. They had to. I was working with clients who were suddenly paying me lots more money.

So if you want to learn to pray, learn to sail. And if you want confidence and the skills to back it up, raise your prices.

This applies beyond copywriting, and beyond client work. ​​

That’s why pricing will be something I will talk about on the free presentation I will host tomorrow, about how I write and profit from this newsletter that you are reading now. But that training is only open to people who are signed up to my list. If you’d like to get on there, click here.

How to get drug-dealer levels of cash without selling drugs

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Last Monday, I wrote an email about Pinky Cole, the founder of Slutty Vegan, a fast-food brand with 11 locations, valued at $100M.

I’ve been traveling in the days since, so I didn’t get a chance to finish the New Yorker article where I first read about Pinky Cole.

I was reading that article again this morning. I found out that when Cole first launched Slutty Vegan back in 2018, she did so without a physical location, just on a bunch of food-delivery apps.

The first day, Cole sold exactly one slutty, meat-free hamburger.

Things inched and middled and crawled along at this pace until Cole hired Ludacris’s manager, Chaka Zulu. Zulu helped Cole get a bunch of rappers, including Snoop Dogg, to endorse Slutty Vegan. Result:

===

From there, demand exploded. “I felt like a drug dealer,” Cole said. “We had, like, trash bags of money, because we only took cash.”

===

Along with reading the New Yorker, today I’ve been preparing intensely for the live training that I will host this coming Monday, about how I write and profit from this newsletter.

I’ve been collecting ideas for that training over the past couple weeks, and today I also made a big brain dump.

I realized I will have to significantly pare back all the valuable ideas I could share, in order to have a training that makes sense and that doesn’t go on forever.

But one thing I’m sure to keep is the point of the Pinky Cole story above.

It should be obvious enough. But if you want me to spell it out, and show you how it fits into making money with a newsletter, particularly if you also work with clients at the same time, then join me for the training on Monday.

This training will be free.

It will happen on Monday January 22, 2024 at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. But you will have to be on my list first. Click here to sign up.

How to write flawless transitions from your anecdotes to your sales pitches every day

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A couple months ago, I wrote an email about a surprising passage in Morgan Housel’s Psychology of Money.

The passage talked about the Wright brothers, and how they were publicly flying airplanes for four years before newspapers took any notice.

To which I got a reply from a reader, asking about another interesting anecdote from the same book:

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I’m curious if you could give some examples as to how you would segway the passage of the Bill Gates and Lakesides computer study program story in the chapter about “Luck and Risk” to make different points?

===

The topic of the actual Bill Gates story is irrelevant here. The point is simply this:

It might be a worthwhile exercise to sit down with an interesting story you come acrosss… write down different morals to squeeze out of that story… and sketch out how you would link that to what you sell.

But I’ve never done it, and I don’t plan on starting now.

Instead, what I do whenever I come across a story that I find surprising is just write it down, and have it sitting around for when it fits naturally into a point I want to make.

In my experience, this is the only way to write flawless transitions from your anecdotes to your sales pitches every single day.

Sometimes, surprising stories I’ve written down sit around for days, weeks, months, or years before I use them for something. And there are many surprising facts and stories and anecdotes I’ve written down and never used at all.

That’s ok.

Surprising facts and stories and anecdotes are free and plentiful. Millions of books are filled with them. Plus each day of your own life will provide a dozen new ones if you only keep your antennae up.

What’s not free or plentiful is your readers’ attention or ongoing interest.

And shoehorning a story to make a point that doesn’t really fit… or worse yet, pulling out a bland, predictable takeway from an otherwise good story, is a great way to lose readers’ interest today and to make it harder to get tomorrow.

I have more to say about the topic of keeping readers’ interest for the long term.

Specifically, I have a simple three-word question I use to guide all my emails, which you might also benefit from.

I’ve revealed this three-word question before, but perhaps you’ve missed it.

In case you would like to find out what it is, you can do that on the free training I will put on in a few days’ time.

The training will cover how I write and profit from this newsletter that you are reading now.

It will happen on Monday January 22, 2024 at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. But you will have to be signed up to my list first. Click here to do so.

Wherever you go, there you are

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Earlier today, I found myself at Europa Point at the tip of Gibraltar.

It was a sunny afternoon, with a few clouds rolling across the sky.

The massive rock of Gibraltar was to my back.

In front of me, to the south, across the Strait of Gibraltar, I could see Africa.

To the right was the Atlantic with a breeze blowing across to the left, where the Mediterranean started.

There was almost nobody at Europa Point today, except for one American couple walking a small black Scottish terrier.

As the three of them passed by, the woman looked down, smiled, and said hello. Her guy, who had the dog on the leash, paused for a moment. He grinned and said, “Where you guys from?”

“I’m from Croatia,” I said. I gestured to the girl next to me. “She’s from Ukraine.”

“Ukraine!” the guy said in shock. “We’re giving you a lot of money!”

The Ukrainian girl stared at him for a moment. “We appreciate it,” she said.

But he didn’t seem to hear her. “… billions of dollars! Billions!” The dog started pulling on the leash. They walked off into the breeze, but I could still hear the guy muttering to himself. “All my tax money!”

That made me chuckle and then think. And what popped into my head was, “Wherever you go, there you are.”

That’s the title of a book on meditation. The author of that book wanted to point out that the present moment is all you really have.

But it’s true the other way around also.

Most people go through their lives thinking, feeling, and reacting in the same automatic ways. Wherever they go, there they are. Nothing ever changes. Of course, it doesn’t have to be that way.

You might wonder what this has to do with copywriting or marketing. I won’t try to stretch it there. But I can tell you this:

Even though copywriting and marketing are why most people sign up to my list, I find the most response I get is when I write about topics that have little or nothing to do with making money. Such as the reply I got to yesterday’s email from a reader named Vivian:

===

I just finished rereading your SME course, jotting down notes, and planning my own newsletter in these few days.

As I read more and more emails daily, I’m really getting all these vibes that I’m learning new stuff from you, not just copywriting wise.

And this email, along with other emails, make me so excited and anticipated for your free training. Even though I can’t make it live, because it’ll be 3am here in Malaysia, but I know for sure that I will instantly watch the whole recording and jot down the notes, and do everything I did about SME as to this training.

Can’t wait!

===

That training that Vivian mentions will cover how I write and profit from this newsletter that you are reading now.

It will also talk about some fluffier, less tangible stuff that’s allowed me to stick with my newsletter for years, and to get to a place where I can pretty much write about whatever interests me, and still have people reading my writing and taking me up on my offers.

This training will be free. It will happen on Monday, January 22, 2024, at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. But you will have to be signed up to my email list first. Click here to do so.

Daily bloodletting

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Bloodletting used to be standard medical practice. Today, bloodletting might sound stupid or even barbaric, but way back when, it really seems to have helped people.

Here’s a passage about an army captain who experienced some insult that made him so furious that his friends couldn’t make sense of what he was saying:

“The regimental doctor, when he came, said it was absolutely necessary to bleed Denisov. A deep saucer of black blood was taken from his hairy arm and only then was he able to relate what had happened to him.”

That passage is from War and Peace, by Russian count Leo Tolstoy.

​​Between 1902 and 1906, Tolstoy was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times but never won once.

Somebody who did win the Nobel Prize is American journalist Ernest Hemingway.

​​Hemingway wrote many things, but he never wrote the following passage, which is often attributed to him:

“It is easy to write. Just sit in front of your typewriter, open a vein, and bleed.”

That quote is probably attributed to Hemingway so often because he was famous and because in the end he killed himself. Hemingway’s life and death go well with the sentiment that writing is hard, draining, even destructive to the writer.

But I would like to give you that other perspective on that passage, the medical bloodletting perspective.

Each day, before I write my daily email, I’m filled with a mess of ideas, emotions, reactions, and confused plans. I’m also restless because I feel I haven’t accomplished the one thing I set myself as a task for absolutely every day.

After I write my daily email, I function more normally. People can understand me better if I talk, I can make some kind of plans about the future, and I feel the satisfaction of having accomplished something concrete that day.

In other words, daily emailing has the benefits of medical bloodletting, or maybe journaling.

Except daily emailing also has the added benefits of building up an audience… producing content that can be repurposed for books, podcasts appearances, or courses… and of course, driving readers to sales or other types of actions.

Speaking of which:

In a few days’ time, I will host a free training.

The training will cover how I write and profit from this newsletter that you are reading now.

It will happen on Monday January 22, 2024 at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. But you will have to be signed up to my list first. Click here to do so.

The owner smiled when I tried to speak Spanish… but when I switched to English!

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Yesterday, I stepped into the beautiful Librería Nobel — Nobel Bookstore — in Almería, Spain.

“Buenos días,” I said as I entered.

The owner, who stood behind the counter, smiled at me politely and returned my greeting. He didn’t recognize me at first. So I changed tack.

“Hola Rafa,” I said and then switched to English. “How are you?”

A look of surprise spread across his face. “John! Coño! What are you doing here!”

The owner of Librería Nobel is one Rafa Casas, who I’ve written up before in this newsletter as a Spanish A-list copywriter.

Not only is Rafa a skilled copywriter who has helped a bunch of clients make money, but he’s building up his name in true A-list style.

Along with his bookstore and his client work, he now runs two coaching programs, one to help Spanish-speaking business owners get set up online with their digital marketing, and another called Circulo Copy where he mentors a number of Spanish-language copywriters, including some well-known names.

This was the first time I was meeting Rafa in real life. But I have known him online for a while.

Rafa first got on my email list in 2021. He then went through my Copy Riddles course, back when I was still offering live weekly Q&A calls.

At that time, I ran a weekly contest for the best answer to one of the week’s Copy Riddles. Rafa won the first contest ever. (Among the three books I offered him as a possible prize, Rafa wisely chose my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.)

Then some time in 2022, I interviewed Rafa for my Copy Zone guide to the business side of copywriting. His story of getting started writing daily emails about books while his bookstore was locked down — and then turning that into paid client work — was both interesting and impressive.

We also had a short-lived language exchange after I moved to Spain.

He’s even translated my 10 Commandments book to Spanish, and we will be putting that out soon, as soon as the cover designer gets back to me.

Point being:

I started out this email newsletter with the vague aims of having a sandbox in which to practice copywriting and marketing, as a possible source of samples to show clients, and as a way of maybe winning some client work, back when I was still hungry for that.

And my newsletter has delivered on all those fronts.

But it’s also produced a bunch of amazing opportunities and outcomes I never could have imagined when I got started.

It’s resulted in great new relationships both online and in real life… people doing me solid favors without ever being asked… cool free stuff shipped to my front door… speaking opportunities… and even the occasional note from people who tell me that what I’m doing has actually changed the course of their life for the better.

If you want, you too can have something similar. At least that’s my claim, one I will work to pay off on the free training I’m hosting in a few days’ time.

The training will cover how I write and profit from this newsletter that you are reading now.

It will happen on Monday January 22, 2024 at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. But you will have to be signed up to my list first. Click here to do so.