How to enjoy the holidays and be inspired by your own creativity and smartness

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Today being Christmas, of course I thought it would be a perfect time to book a ticket to fly home. Empty airports… friendly fares… friendlier cabin crew.

And so I did it.

It was a beautiful and sunny morning as I took off from Barcelona today around 9am. The sky was perfectly clear so I could see every gleaming little house as we edged along the Mediterranean coast, by Marseilles and Cannes, and then as we turned inland over the Alps.

The plane flew over thousands of sunny and snowy peaks, and down into the Bavarian flatlands. We landed in Munich.

45 mins later, another plane lifted me up again. More snowy peaks — Germany, Austria, Slovenia, then into Croatia.

The winter clouds finally started to gather as we reached the smoggy grey fortress that is my hometown of Zagreb. But even here, there was still some sunlight — magical for central Europe in December.

Like Little Red Riding Hood, I took the shortest path to my grandmother’s place. What followed was a typically overwhelming Christmas lunch — an appetizer made up of minced pork meat wrapped in sauerkraut, then some sort of beef soup, then a greasy duck with the local mlinci, then a chocolate cake which was the only part of the feast I was allowed to skip as I cited medical and psychological reasons to avoiding sugar.

Now as I write this, I am on the couch recovering from the travel and the food.

It would be easy to shrug, say I don’t have anything more to share with you, and just tell you to enjoy your Christmas.

But the fact is this:

Since I was deprived of Internet in general and email in particular the whole day until just now, I actually found my brain bursting with bunches of ideas as I looked down onto the Alps.

I will share one of those ideas with you tomorrow — a way to grow my health newsletter via paid ads, while not paying nothin’ for the ads.

I don’t know whether this idea will work, but I plan to test it out starting right after the holidays. And you can try it too if you find out tomorrow what I have in mind.

For today, I will simply say that good things happen when you cut off the stupid Internet, including that social media channel known as your email inbox.

Try it. You might be inspired by the ideas that you invent in the absence of constant digital input. Plus you might enoy the holidays much more.

And if you find yourself bored and craving stimulation while you go into airplane mode with the Internet, then try reaching for a book.

I have one I wrote that I keep recommending. You can find it below. Whether or now you choose to get it, merry Christmas.

My book 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters

3 most not-boring emails I wrote this year

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A few days ago, I sent out an email with the subject line, “A primer on worldbuilding.” I got a reply to that email from Howard Shaw of Chester Toys, a UK toy wholesaler that’s been in business for 60 years. Howard wrote:

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Don’t ask me why, but I just felt like replying….

‘​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​John Bejakovic ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​- never a boring email.

I always learn something or receive a nugget to ponder on.’

Anyways, all the best for the festive season and may 2024 be good to you.

===

I followed up with Howard to ask if I could use his comment in an email. ​​He said he would be offended if I didn’t. So here we are.

“Yah great for you and Howard,” I hear you saying. “Quite the love-in. But what about me? Where’s your ‘not boring’ email now? I don’t see anything particularly interesting or valuable so far today.”

True. It’s hard to write something not-boring every day.

​​I know, because I just spent the past one-and-a-half hours going through the 360+ emails I’ve written since the start of this year.

Most of my past 360+ emails I just scrolled through. I vaguely remembered writing them. They did their purpose at the time. But I certainly didn’t need to reread them.

However, some emails I did reread.

A few of those made me chuckle.

And a very few made me stop and think.

The emails that made me stop and think weren’t the ones that got the most replies and praise from readers.

​​They weren’t even the ones that made the most sales.

But looking back from today, at the end of the year, these top emails were somehow most interesting to me, as ideas that I should remember or practice, or because they sparked a change in how I how do marketing or how I write.

Over the course of the entire past year, I noted down 14 such top emails.

I then narrowed them down even more to the most not-boring 3, using myself as a sounding board.

In case you are looking for some not-boring emails, you can find them below. Don’t read any of them. Or read just one. Or read all three if you have got the time and stamina.

And like Howard says, all the best for the festive season to you.

How to become in-demand in your niche even if you have no contacts, portfolio, or good sense

Why the bathroom is a great place to negotiate

10 lessons from the ClientRaker promo

The business of selling “feeling good”

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This morning before heading out for coffee, I thumbed through the pages of my Kindle and read a passage of Dan Kennedy’s No B.S. Marketing to the Affluent.

​​Dan was talking about those colorful patterned dress shirts, the ones with a second colorful print on the inside of the cuff. And he said:

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The shirts are very popular in the Southwest with the rodeo crowd, rich oil men — one of whom has “collected 130 different designs” and spent so much money, the 2014 “collection” includes a design named after that customer, and quite a few GKIC members. The shirts go for $225.00 to over $500.00, and are sold direct, in catalogs, at Nieman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, high-end country western shops, and in several Las Vegas stores.

===

“I wanda,” I said to myself as I raised my nose in the air, “I wanda if this brand of shirts is the one that Parris Lampropoulos buys.”

As you might remember if you were reading my emails back this past May, I went to a copywriting conference. Multimillionaire A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos was the star there.

The first night, Parris worked the room. As he did, he kept showing off his colorful, patterned shirt. “It’s a Robert Graham,” Parris would say to anyone who expressed interest. “I put his kids through college.”

I brought my nose back down to the pages of Marketing to the Affluent. Sure enough, Dan Kennedy was talking about Robert Graham shirts. And he had this to say:

===

The brand’s owner, Robert Stock, calls customers “connoisseurs.” He says he is in the business of selling “feeling good” — getting favorably noticed, getting compliments, getting bragging rights.

===

My point is that old chestnut, that you are not in the business that you think you are in. At least, that is, if you want people bragging about how much money they spent on a collection of your stuff, instead of treating your offer like a commodity or at best a necessary occasional expense.

That’s all I got for you today. Except for an encouragement to read No B.S. Marketing to the Affluent if you haven’t done so.

It’s a valuable book, and I wish I had read it earlier.

If you wish to read it now, here’s where you can get it:

No B.S Marketing for the Affluent

The folly of “show don’t tell”

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I wrote yesterday about worldbuilding. Well, here’s an anecdote that built a world:

Some time in the 1960s, artist Norman Daly created a tall and narrow sculpture. Daly taught at Cornell University, and so he placed his sculpture, without any fanfare, in a faculty dining room.

Daly expected his tall and narrow sculpture would spark commentary. Provoke emotions. Engage viewers.

But the sculpture didn’t spark any commentary or provoke any emotions. As for engagement, it did prove to be mildly engaging:

Faculty members interpreted it as a hat rack and treated it as such. Hats hung, they didn’t give Daly’s sculpture another look.

It was then that Daly realized he has to create a whole lot of supporting documentation to make sure his art is interpreted as art.

Point being:​​

It’s popular to say, “Show, don’t tell.” But that’s profoundly foolish.

You have to tell ’em, and tell ’em again, and tell ’em still some more. At least if you are after a given outcome — provocation, status, sales — and if you’re not okay with spending time and effort to create something that can then be dismissed as a hat rack.

I said the story above built a world. And I ain’t foolin’.

The story above was one of a few formative experiences that led Daly to create a whole new, made-up, Iron-Age civilization, including physical objects, works of visual art, music, as well as volumes of scholarship, commentary, maps, and even art catalogues for the whole thing.

Daly exhibited all this in art museums. People came, flipped through the art catalogue, nodded at the curious artifacts, and walked away feeling enlightened about a milennia-old civilization that never existed.

If you want to find out more about Daly’s project, you can do so at the link below.

It can interesting on its own merits.

It can prove useful if you are after crafting your own worlds.

And if you read just the section describing the other formative experience that led Daly to do create all this, it might be valuable if you yourself write or create content.

In case you’re interested, here’s the link:

https://theconversation.com/50-years-ago-an-artist-convincingly-exhibited-a-fake-iron-age-civilization-with-invented-maps-music-and-artifacts-189026

A primer on worldbuilding

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Thanks to my space-age “Insight Exposed” system, which allows me to retrieve interesting and valuable information that I came across hundreds or thousands of Earth-days ago, I was reminded that in November 2022 I came across a unique, rare, and precious document.

This document shoulda been titled,

“A Primer On Worldbuilding For Content Creators With Ambitions Of Creating Multi-Billion Idea Franchises”

As it is, this document has no title. It jumps straight into the meat of it.

You can find a way to get at this document below. But first, a word of warning:

This document is written in what is known as “experiential learning” style.

In other words, this document won’t spell out ABC how to build a world of your own.

Rather than telling you, it will show you.

That means you will have to put on a little light Marvin Gaye, and as Marvin builds up in the background, you will have to look at this document and ask yourself, “What’s going on? What is really happening here?”

I did this exercise myself just now.

​​I took about a page-and-a-half of notes from this document on how to build an effective and engaging world.

For example, based on the first sentence of the third paragraph on page 12 of this document, I wrote down to myself:

“Keep the setting utilitarian and unobstructive, except for a few key details to signal novelty.”

I suggest you do the same. That is, if you can see the value in building your own expansive, coherent, and exciting world.

If you want this unique, rare, and precious document, as a first step, you’ll have to get onto my email list. Click here to do so. And when you get my welcome email, reply to it and say, “I want the primer on worldbuilding please.”

Unsexy, neglected, mistreated email lists

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Yesterday I was listening to a Dan Kennedy seminar where Dan says, in his typically tactful fashion:

===

There is no magazine out there — you can check the newsstand — there is no magazine called, Wives In Sweatpants and Sneakers.

There’s all sorts of unimaginable fetishes. But that is not one of them. There’s just not a lot of interest in that.

That’s their business.

===

Dan’s point is that what business owners have gotten used to, they no longer find exciting. It also means they also don’t notice the bad stuff any more.

The past week, I was promoting a done-for-you newsletter service.

I figured no qualified leads would respond, since I write so much about email marketing and making money from email. If there’s one thing I’m known for, it’s probably that.

Surely, business owners who manage to track down my email list — in spite of my best efforts to hide it — surely such business owners also think email marketing is sexy and are already doing sophisticated email stuff in their own businesses.

I was wrong.

I got readers reaching out to me who have large, successful businesses.

Some of them have email lists of tens of thousands of people, made up of customers, who have never been mailed.

Others send out an email here and there… make good money each time they send out that lonesome email… and don’t think or know to do it more often.

And one person, who wasn’t replying to the done-for-you newsletter service, but who did take me up on the Newsletter Consult I did last month, followed up yesterday to say:

===

Thought I’d follow up after our recent discussion, which was much appreciated.

So went ahead and ran a one-month birthday sale for a 2-YR subscription at a $1K discount. Don’t think we have done a sale in 5 years, nor one for a 2 year sub duration.

With 4 days yet to run, we have so far generated $18K in sales with 4 people subscribing for the 2-YR plan and 1 other taking up a (full priced) annual sub.

Not bad considering I only mentioned it as a PS in the twice a week email alerts, plus December is historically a slow month for sales here. This has been our best December to date!

I plan to send two more such alerts this week and have been pondering what to write in case we might be able to tip one more cheerful soul over the edge.

===

The results above are clearly not common.

The person who wrote me offers a yearly subscription costing multiple thousands of dollars… has lots of credibility built up over a long time… and can now make an extra $18k with an “oh by the way” casual throwaway in a PS, after a 5-year promo hiatus.

But uncommon details aside, the point still stands:

You might have that beautiful email list, wearing sweatpants and sneakers around you. Maybe you’ve been looking at it for years, and maybe you’ve stopped appreciating how just how sexy it really can be.

I figure that’s as much my fault as yours.

Clearly, I’m not doing a good job putting forward offers to help you get more value out of your email list.

I’ll work on fixing that in 2024.

Meanwhile, it’s mid-December. It’s almost the holiday season. Who the hell wants to work?

I do. So I have a quick, band-aid offer for you right now:

If you have a business and are making sales… if you have an email list and have been neglecting and mistreating it for too long… then I offer you my 1-hour “Extreme Makeover For Email Lists” session.

One hour, to hear what your business is about, who your customers are, what you offer them, how you currently mail them.

I will then tell you the quickest and easiest buttons to push to make money from your list, in the future as well as now. Maybe I can even help you pull out some thousands of dollars from your email list by the end of this month.

I’m limiting this offer to three people, the first three qualified people who reply.

Price is $300.

I will not be offering this again, at least not at this price.

In case you are interested, hit reply, tell me who you are, and I can send you the payment link.

Ramit Sethi: Brave or stupid?

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I recently listened to an interview with Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a data scientist who is perhaps most notorious for discovering, through Google Trends data, that the country of India has a unique and unholy interest in adult breastfeeding.

Less well-known is that Stephens-Davidowitz was also college roommates with Ramit Sethi, the best-selling “I Will Teach You To Be Rich” finance guru who currently has his own Netflix show.

I don’t follow Ramit, so I don’t know if the story below is well-known. But it was new to me. Stephens-Davidowitz said of Ramit and their time as roommates:

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He announces he’s going to teach everyone personal finance. So he starts plastering around the whole dorm, “RAMIT SETHI’S PERSONAL FINANCE CLASS.”

I’m just like, “Ramit, you don’t know anything about personal finance. What the hell are you talking about? Nobody’s going to show up to your stupid class on personal finance.”

He puts on this class.

​​I think two people showed up. One of them had a big crush on him.

And I felt so bad. I’m like, this poor guy has no sense of what the world wants from him. He’s making a fool of himself. What a loser.

===

I read somewhere that, “Courage is knowing it might hurt, and doing it anyway. Stupidity is the same. And that’s why life is hard.”

Ramit Sethi persisting in spite of total initial failure is courage.

But we’ve never heard of the millions of unsuccessful morons who persisted and maybe persist still, in spite of clear signs telling them to stop.

And that’s why life is hard.

Except then I thought a bit more. I realized that you can make the odds better in your favor, and make life a little less hard.

It comes down to asking, does persistence here give me any meaningful accumulation?

There are fields where, if you continue to stick to it, your odds get no better, and maybe they even get worse.

Me winning the lottery is no more likely tomorrow even if I play the lottery today.

​​And me becoming a professional tennis player… that’s impossible today, and even with practice and dedication, it would only become more impossible tomorrow, as I get older, slower, and less likely to take even a point off a highly promising 14-year-old prospect.

But there are other areas where persistence does give you meaningful accumulation.

An email list is one. If you don’t do much of anything but stick around and keep emailing, your list will grow, however slowly. Eventually, you’ll cross some threshold where you have real influence.

Another area is money-making skill. You might have zero or negative money-making skills today. You might be an actual anti-talent. So was I, once upon a time.

But if you persist in learning and practicing a money-making skill, then the knowledge accumulates. Eventually, it crosses over a threshold where you have real skill at making money, first for others, then maybe even for yourself.

Life is hard if you don’t choose wisely, and if you keep investing in things that cannot or will not give you a return.

But invest in things that are almost guaranteed to pay you back, and you can wind up with your own version of the Ramit Sethi story above. Maybe some smartass who knows you today will be telling the story tomorrow of how, unbelievable but true, you weren’t always the huge success everybody now knows you as.

Anyways, enough Eat Pray Ramit.

I’ll now point you to my Most Valuable Email course today. For one, because it can help you keep emailing day after day (I personally find Most Valuable Emails most fun to write).

For another, because Most Valuable Email can help you build up an audience by doing nothing more than creating content (people will start recommending you on the strength of your emails alone).

But most importantly, because each time you write a Most Valuable Email, it accumulates a bit of money making skill in your brain. And eventually, that accumulation becomes meaningful.

If you’d like to get started today:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Two main chain cutters that delink price from product

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The past few days, I’ve been reading the eye-opening “No B.S. Marketing To The Affluent” by marketing coach Dan Kennedy.

​​​​As you can imagine, one of Dan’s main points is that you should charge a lot, and that you can, because with a bit of thought and preparation, it’s easy to break the heavy chain that links product to price in most people’s minds.

Dan suggests two main ways to do it:

“The two biggest chain cutters that delink price from product are 1) who is buying and 2) the context in which the product is presented, priced, and delivered.”

There’s a lot in that one sentence. So let’s get specifical. Let me tell you just one specific way to create a high-price selling context.

It’s to assume authority.

In the olden days, this meant getting a soapbox… walking to the the northeast corner of Hyde Park… putting your soapbox down on the ground among the chestnut leaves… stepping onto the soapbox… and starting to talk.

The modern-day version of this is creating your own digital platform of any kind and using it to communicate.

Because there’s some shortcut in the human brain, so that when you speak from a platform, the rest of us listen.

Sure, some of those listening will walk away after a time. But others will continue to stand there, transfixed, nodding their heads.

And if you, the speaker, ever deign to directly address me, the transfixed audience member, I’ll get a flush of excitement. I’ll look around to make sure others saw it too. “Did you catch that? He spoke to me! He made me an offer, directly! It’s expensive, but what else would you expect? He’s an authority!”

I know I react like this. I imagine that if you are honest with yourself, you will find you react like this too.

All that’s to say, get your own soapbox if you haven’t got one yet. Or get me to create one for you. ​​

And on that note, today is the last day I’ll be talking about my done-for-you newsletter service.

​​Your own newsletter is good for business, good for authority, and great for delinking price from product.

So if you have a business, but you haven’t got a newsletter, then take a look here for more information on this service:

https://bejakovic.com/announcing-done-for-you-newsletter-service/

The popping of the newsletter bubble

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A couple weeks ago, I signed up to a weekly newsletter that aggregates interesting links and online resources. At the top of the welcome email and in every email since, this newsletter says:

“Want to sponsor the newsletter and reach 9,000+ startup founders, designers, developers and tech enthusiasts? Just reply to this email to get in touch.”

So far, some of my best list growth results have come via classified ads I’ve run in other newsletters. And I like this new newsletter, and the recommendations they send out.

So I wrote to inquire about reaching 9,000+ startup founders, designers, developers and tech enthusiasts. How much?

It turns out the newsletter offers various packages, ranging from $300 per issue (main sponsor at the top) down to $60 (quick shout out at the bottom).

I calculated how much this newsletter is making per issue if each of the ads slots is filled. It comes out to $880 per weekly issue.

In other words, in the ideal scenario, the guy behind this newsletter makes about $3.5k per month, and it’s probably significantly less in reality because not all the ad slots are filled all the time.

Over the past few years, there’s been a lot of excitement, hype, and buzz about newsletter businesses. Thousands of newsletters have started up. Maybe tens of thousands. Inevitably, it’s led to a bubble.

Just as inevitably, most of those newsletters will not persevere long enough to succeed and become self-sustaining businesses.

All of which means today is the best time ever to start a newsletter — if you have a back-end business that a newsletter can promote and support, so you can be in it for the long term.

Not only will a newsletter help you recruit leads for your main business, and convert them, and retain them.

But pretty soon, you will be able to buy other newsletters that are folding. For cheap, you will be able to become the owner of vetted lists of self-selected, engaged readers or even buyers, who have expressed interest in what you offer.

In fact, the great newsletter poppening might already be under way.

I recently started listening to the Newsletter Operator podcast by Matt McGarry and Ryan Carr. Over the last few episodes, I’ve heard stories of such newsletter acquisitions, ranging from newsletters of a few hundred to a few thousand subscribers or more.

Of course, in order for the acquisition of a competitor newsletter to make any sense for you, you must have your own newsletter already set up and humming.

You must have somewhere to send those new subscribers, and you must be able to confidently tell them, “Of course, you can unsubscribe if you like. But if you liked [insert name of stupid and dull competitor newsletter], you will love [insert the name of your amazing and fun newsletter].”

All of which leads me, with the force of irrefutable logic, to my ongoing offer, the done-for-you newsletter service.

I’ve been talking about this done-for-you offer for the past few days. I will talk about it tomorrow still, and then I will shut up, at least on this particular topic.

If this offer is something that interests you, you can find more info below:

https://bejakovic.com/announcing-done-for-you-newsletter-service/

Shockingly illegal and stupid opportunity to make a lot of money

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A few days ago, I was at the gym, taking a break and looking at the squat rack with hate. I picked up my phone in the hope that some interesting bit of news would keep me from going back to exercise. And sure enough, I found it:

“Spain expels two US spies for infiltrating secret service”

The short and long of it is that the U.S. is spying on Spain, an ally country. Two American spies, associated with the U.S. Embassy in Madrid, convinced two Spanish counterparts — agents of the CNI, Spain’s equivalent of the CIA — to secretly hand over classified info.

The Spanish are confused. “What do Americans have to pay for if we give them everything they ask for?”
​​
I’m sure there are details I don’t know of this bizarre story. But from the outside, it looks so immensely stupid.

Let’s ignore the part about the U.S. pointlessly spying on a friendly and accommodating ally.

Let’s just look at the two Spanish CNI agents who made it possible. One was an area chief, head of one of the sections that make up the CNI. The other was his assistant.

The area chief was a veteran of the agency. He was well-known. His colleagues were shocked.

Why? How? You can probably guess.

As per the article I read at the gym, this area chief risked freedom, career, and self-respect “in exchange for a large sum of money.”

It’s hardly the first time someone has done stupid things for a large sum of money. But this case is an example of uniquely and immensely stupid.

First off, this area chief must be a person who was vetted and selected over a number of years for loyalty, intelligence, and trustworthiness.

And yet, not only did the area chief steal classified data from within the Spanish CIA, which you can imagine has all kinds of really complex and high-tech safeguards to prevent the detection of leaks…

… but apparently he was so careless that he was caught during a routine security check, when it became obvious he was accessing data that he didn’t need to perform his duties.

Now that the treason has become known, both the area chief and his assistant face 6 to 12 years in prison… the contempt of all their former colleagues and friends… and lifelong shame to carry around, which I estimate weighs as much as a baby rhinoceros.

Point being:

Greed.

​​Never underestimate how it warps people’s minds and how appealing to this motive can get people — including smart, upright, and self-possessed people — to do shockingly improbable, stupid, and even treasonous things.

Now I’ve gotta take a step back. Because I’m not telling you to tempt others to treason. Nor to engage in anything criminal.

But if you think that people in your marketplace are too this or too that to be tempted by pure greed… then remember the CNI area chief and that baby rhinoceros around his neck.

Remembering this image might just be a legal and quite smart opportunity to make a large sum of money.

All right, on to my offer:

My days of “done-for-you newsletter service” continue.

Like I’ve been saying for the past few thousand emails, a newsletter can be an easy, profitable, prestige-building way to get more people into your world, to get more of them to buy what you sell, and to keep them around until you sell the next thing.

And with my new done-for-you newsletter service, I’m offering to take all the work off your plate. In case you’re interested, you can get the full details below:

https://bejakovic.com/announcing-done-for-you-newsletter-service/