Announcing: The winner of the “Influence my Simple Money Emails course” contest

by

It’s 6:45pm as I write this, which means it’s about 8 hours later than I normally write these emails. I’ll tell you in a sec why that’s significant.

But first, let me tell you why I’m writing so late:

I’ve spent much of the day wandering the streets of Budapest, my once-adopted but then renounced home.

​​I lived here for 11 years but then left. This trip is the first time I’ve been back in over 4 years.

The last few days were all about meeting up with old friends.

Today is my last day. I spent it by doing a full tourist circuit, up to the renovated City Park, with its new hot air balloon and its convex garden-covered museum of ethnography… and then, via the oldest metro in continental Europe (1896)… up to the Castle District with its panoramic views of the various bridges over the Danube right below.

Oh, and when I stopped in along the way at different Starbuckses to order my decaf latte, I used my faded but still passable Hungarian and kept introducing myself as János. Nobody realized I’m not a local.

All that’s to say, it’s been a nice and nostalgic day.

But now it’s night. And night is when I find it impossible to write anything sensible or quick.

In fact, I have no idea how I can possibly tie the above Budapest opener with any kind of offer I sell, except to say that I was so strapped for ideas for this email that I started rooting around my journal for this newsletter… and going far, far back.

So far back, that I found that I had still not announced the winner of the “Influence my Simple Money Emails course” contest, which I ran back in July, before I released the course.

For that contest, I asked readers to write in and tell me what has them bothered when writing simple sales emails. What they would like to learn, and why they haven’t been able to learn it yet.

The best such response — as chosen by me — got a free ticket to my 9 Deadly Email Sins training, which cost $100 to attend.

So let me do what I should have done months ago:

The winner — fanfare please — of the “Influence my Simple Money Emails course” contest is Richard Terry, owner of Accolade Kitchen and Bath, a construction and remodeling company in St. Louis, Missouri.

​​Richard won himself the free ticket to the Email Sins training by writing in with the following:

===

I’m told that a sales email should be in a story format that tells the story about the client’s fears, concerns, what keeps them up at night etc. Your product or service should solve your prospects problem. My challenge is not being creative enough to produce these emails on a consistent basis with relevant content.

===

Even though I didn’t announce Richard as the winner publicly until now, I gave him access to 9 Deadly Email Sins when I put it on.

​​I also used his comment a guiding light when I actually the Simple Money Emails course.

My goal for the course was to demystify email copywriting, and show that writing effective daily sales emails is not a matter of unusual creativity — but a matter of preparation, and a willingness to follow a few simple rules, which I laid out in the course.

In case you’d like to write sales emails on a consistent basis, but you have not been able to, then my Simple Money Emails course can help you get started.

​​I even included the 9 Deadly Email Sins training as a free bonus.

​​If you’d like to get the whole package now, go here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

Are you interested in a newsletter mastermind?

by

Last night, I got an email with the subject line “Ideas for working together.” The person writing me this email is the silent partner in the company of a good friend of mine.

​​The background is that over the course of a couple of decades, this guy built up a large media company. He then sold it three years ago for some undisclosed but I assume ungodly sum of money.

He has been sitting on his wealth since, and investing here and there. But he finds retirement boring, so he wants to get back to work and put on a conference, which is something he used to do a lot of as part of his media company.

The topic of his proposed new conference is exactly the topic of my health newsletter, which I’ve been publishing weekly since the start of this year. So we talked last week about working together in some way.

​​And then he wrote me last night about ideas for how this might look:

===

Some options

– I buy your newsletter and you come work for me

– You buy my conference and I come work for you

– I invest in your company

– We do an operating deal

– I promote your newsletter and you promote my conference

– You help me with speakers and content and you moderate a panel and we promote your newsletter

– I buy (bulk) your books to give away at conferences. Private labeled with our brand.

Other? I am wide open

===

I don’t know what if anything will come of this.

I’m only sharing it because A) I started my health newsletter at the end of January and B) today in the middle of October there’s somebody credible and with money in his pockets who is talking about buying my newsletter or pouring some of his money into it.

Again, maybe this won’t turn into anything. Or maybe it will.

In any case, I’m pressing on with my health newsletter because I feel I’m on the right path.

​​Subscriber numbers keep growing. I’m getting positive feedback from readers. There are referrals. I’m starting to make money. And I have clear ideas in mind for the next steps to take to both grow subscriber count and to monetize better.

Back in March, I wrote an email about my “Plan Horse”:

“Plan Horse is to find a new opportunity to latch onto, but in a way that you will come out ahead whether the opportunity drops dead or delivers as hoped.”

I feel that publishing your own newsletter today is exactly this kind of opportunity.

​​If a specific newsletter catches steam, it might turn into a big thing.

​​If it doesn’t, but you do a good job with the newsletter itself, then you wind up with a list of people who are interested in a topic and trust you to tell them about it. This is a profitable position to be in one way or another.

You might think this is simply another restatement of the benefits of email marketing.

Yes and no.

Email marketing is great. But I’m talking about something different, which is really when email is the main product.

My health newsletter definitely falls into that category. In many ways, this daily email newsletter you are reading now also falls into that category.

This daily newsletter is not primarily there to promote a specific offer or another business I have.

​​The newsletter itself is really the main product I offer, and I just find occasional ways to monetize it by repackaging what I’ve learned through this newsletter and presenting it in a course, or a live training, or maybe some other, new format…

… which brings me to my feeling-out offer for today.

Again, I believe the moment is golden for publishing your own newsletter, of either stamp:

It can be personality-based and talk about direct marketing and business opportunities, something like what you are reading now.

Or it can be not tied to a specific personal identity and it can talk about an entirely different topic, like my health newsletter.

Either way, I believe the opportunity is great, and the opportunity is now.

So I’ve been thinking about putting together a paid mastermind or community of some sort that would be all about publishing, growing, and monetizing a newsletter.

The ultimate goal would be to share ideas and work together to create a newsletter-based business — something that either happily coughs up cash every month, or something that you can sell down the line for some undisclosed but ungodly sum of money. ​​

To start, the core content of this mastermind or community would be based on what I am learning and doing myself with my own newsletters from week to week. But I might also seek out other people who are experts in specific newsletter-related topics to present.

I am interested in creating such a community or mastermind because I’m planning to double-down with my health newsletter, so such a community would benefit me as much as anybody else joining me.

But I’ve learned my lesson before.

And that lesson is, gauge interest before committing even a day’s worth of work into creating a new offer.

So in case an ongoing community or mastermind around publishing, growing, and monetizing a newsletter is something you’d be interested in, then hit reply and tell me so.

Of course, if you’d like to expand by telling me more, you can do that too, because any extra info will influence whether I decide to put this new offer together and what to put inside of it. Thanks in advance.

Three bits of Dan Ferrari’s timeless wisdom

by

A couple days ago, A-list copywriter Dan Ferrari, who was my copywriting coach once upon a time, sent one of his once-every-ice-age emails.

I’ll tell you an idea from that email that caught my eye. But first, a quick story to set it up:

I was talking to my friend Marci a few days ago. Marci has started a quick, daily, general-interest AI newsletter. He asked me if I had any suggestions for him.

I told him to consider picking a specific audience and niching down to writing about AI for that audience.

Marci’s brother Krisz was in the room and listening to the conversation. At this point he jumped in and said, “For me the newsletter is perfect as it is. It’s short, it’s interesting, it keeps me in the loop even if I’m not so much into AI.”

So who’s right? Should Marci niche down his newsletter? Should he keep it broad?

Or more relevant to you:

Should you go with one product name or a second product name? One segment of the market or another? One headline or a second one?

To answer that, let’s go back to that Dan Ferrari email from a couple days ago. In it, Dan wrote the following:

===

Something that none of the gurus will ever say publicly… direct response is largely dictated by luck.

No one knows exactly which offers are going to work and more importantly, how successful they will be.

No one.

Some of us are better at guessing than others but make no mistake, we’re still guessing. There are too many variables at play. Many of them are not within your control or even the business’ control. They are external and completely unknowable.

===

That might sound discouraging. And it’s true that “testing” AKA regular failure is an essential part of the direct response game.

But as Dan says in the same email, you can improve your luck by upping your skills.

​​Better skills help you come up with better ideas that are more likely to work… and they give you access to better opportunities that are more likely to succeed a priori.

And now, let me ease into my sales pitch.

There’s a third thing Dan said, not in this email, but on one of those exclusive coaching calls, talking to a small number of copywriting mentees, me among them:

===

You can use a fascination/bullet midway through a story to get people to stick… or in a lead… or anywhere in the copy.

===

Dan wasn’t talking about jamming in actual (*) sales bullets anywhere or everywhere in your copy. He was simply saying, if a bit of copy would make for a great sales bullet, it can work as an exciting, surprising, momentum-building sentence of copy, anywhere you need it.

So that’s one reason to learn sales bullets. Here are a few others:

Email marketer Ben Settle has said that, “when written correct everything ‘comes’ from the bullets, including non-bullet copy or ads where there are no bullets.”

Copywriting legend John Carlton has said that the sale often comes down to a single bullet.

And Stefan Georgi, who charges something like $50k for a single sales letter, has said that one of the biggest jumps he made as a copywriter came when he discovered bullets.

Ok, so much for the sales pitch.

Now, here’s my offer:

If you’d like to up your copywriting skills… double or triple your chances of success… put yourself in the path of better opportunities… and make your own luck long-term… then get Copy Riddles, my training that forces you write A-list sales bullets that are so important to all kinds of copy. You can find it here:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

My alternative to shameless teasing

by

A couple days ago, I gave a copy critique to a successful course creator. Let’s call him Liam.

Liam is writing a welcome sequence for his newsletter. He has decided to not promote anything in his first seven emails, but rather just to offer solid advice and inspiration — the dreaded “value” autoresponder.

While I certainly don’t condone the nasty practice of not selling anything across seven welcome emails, I figured Liam’s mind was made up on this point, so I didn’t argue it. But I told him that, even if he is not selling his main course in these emails, he can certainly seed it.

Liam already does this already to an extent, by teasing his course in a PS and saying something like, “… if you liked this, you’ll find more good stuff like it in my course XYZ, which I’ll tell you more about soon.”

Teasing like this is fine. It works, and it can work great, the more shameless you’re willing to get with it.

But there’s an alternative to shameless teasing.

​​It makes for more natural content. It’s more sly. And yet it can be even more effective than teasing itself.

Would you like to know what I have in mind? ​​What I told this successful course creator? What I practice myself to good effect from time to time?

I’ll tell ya:

It’s simply to use yourself and your products as your case studies when illustrating a point that the reader should take away.

How exactly do you do that?

Well, look at what I’ve done in this email. I could have made the same point — use yourself as a case study — by talking about some legendary and dead marketer like Gary Halbert… or by referring to a scene from a movie like Brokeback Mountain Part 2.

Instead, I did it by about talking about ME ME ME, or more specifically, the way ME interacted with a client and the advice me gave him.

Which brings me to my offer today:

I do not offer one-off coaching critiques. Well, I did with Liam, but that was a special case, and not something I offer otherwise. Forget about that.

What I do offer is medium- to long-term, one-on-one coaching. It involves both email copywriting — you got a free tip on that today — and more broadly, easy marketing and money-making levers that I spot in your business, the pulling of which is often more lucrative and long-lasting than making any copy tweaks.

My coaching is expensive, and I only take on people rarely, when I feel they have a good chance of profiting and quickly.

If you are interested in getting my critical eye, help, and guidance applied to your business, then hit reply. Tell me who you are and what you do, and we can start a conversation to see if it might be a fit.

How I’m building a sales page in publick

by

Two days ago, I released my Simple Money Emails course for the world to buy, even though the beast doesn’t have a sales page to promote it.

And you know what?

People did buy, even with no sales page.

But I bet more people would buy in the future if I actually were to have a proper sales page, one that explains the value of this course… and that answers questions prospects might have… and that assures them they are not being “had” but are in fact making a smart decision.

The trouble, as I wrote two days ago, is that I’ve been waiting for months for this sales page to magically write itself… but that hasn’t happened.

So I had an idea, which is just to write the sales page piecemeal, in publick, one email at a time.

I’ve done this once before, for the Influential Emails training I put on two years ago. It started out with just a headline, the details of the actual offer, and a “BUY NOW” button. I fleshed it out every few days, using stuff from my daily emails.

It ended up working great. Why not try it again?

So this morning, I took the core of my email from two days ago, about the actual SME offer along with a testimonial, and I put that onto a fresh page on my site. I added in a headline and the barest bit of deck copy.

Done. For now. ​​

In the future, I might write an email about how this course is unique… address objections I get from people… talk about how it’s taken me a good number of years to distill my experience into the simple idea at the core of this training… position myself against alternatives out there… hit you with some tear-jerking motivation copy to get going now… and all that can then be fitted into my existing minimal sales page, one block at a time.

If you’re curious about what’s actually inside the Simple Money Emails training, you can find it at link below. ​​And if you need a bit of an extra reason to click, here’s what Paul Morrison, who has helped marketing legend Ken McCarthy put out 11 of his most recent books, had to say about SME:

===

I’m glad you wrote this email soliciting feedback for your course. I’ve been meaning to send you a testimonial ever since first going through it.

Put simply, this course is probably the most straight-forward and practical approach to writing emails I have yet to come across.

I valued it so much that I printed the pages out and keep them next to my desk for regular study.

(As a point of comparison, next to your course, on my desk, are Ben Settle’s Skhema Book, and Daniel Throssell’s Email Copywriting Compendium — I’m sure you likely have both of those courses yourself — and I now consider these three documents my personal “email writing bible”.)

For anyone who is struggling to actually get started writing emails for their biz (especially daily emails) I think Simple Money Emails takes the cake, and I couldn’t recommend it enough.

===

If you wanna see a sales page being built in publick, or better yet, if you want to buy Simple Money Emails so you can start writing daily emails for your business, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

The psychology of misdirection

by

Today I meant to write an elaborate email about the sales page for my Simple Money Emails course.

But against my better judgment, I got roped into chauffeuring a friend of my father through stop-and-go traffic in the middle of the city.

While my blood pressure has largely returned to normal, the 45 minutes that that unnecessary drive ate up cannot be replaced. So the SME email will have to wait until tomorrow.

As for today, let me tell you something acute that one of my readers wrote in with a few days ago, after I wrote about my 10 jaw-dropping email deliverability tips. My reader wrote:

===

#5 – Links at the end of almost every email
I noticed that most of the time it is either an offer or an affiliate offer. Very rarely do you link elsewhere, unless you invite engagement like right now.

===

That’s very true. I almost always link to something I am selling at the end of my email. I never link to, say, the Red Cross website or to a cute ferret video.

On the one hand you might say that’s only natural — it’s what most daily sales emails look like, because their goal is to make sales.

But at the same time, I don’t have a huge list, and I don’t have surprising new offers every day. In other words, I am not necessarily sacrificing sales by not plugging the same well-trodden offer in each of my emails, day after day after day.

Plus, I remember a time when I first got onto Ben Settle’s list, circa 2012.

After a few weeks, I dismissed Ben because each of his emails at the time followed the same format: promise + tease + CTA to sign up to his print newsletter. I gradually got bored and I unsubscribed.

It took a conscious effort a few years later to get back on Ben’s list and start listening to him again, and I only did that because there still wasn’t anybody else talking about email regularly.

So when you put those two things together, you get the following heretical conclusion, heretical at least in the direct marketing world:

I can see good business sense in occasionally linking to stuff that won’t make you any money, but that can benefit, surprise, or delight your audience.

As Rich Schefren said once about the length of his own emails, you want to keep people guessing. You don’t ever want to give them a reason to dismiss you out of hand, before they’ve even had a chance to see your message.

I figure there must be some optimal rate of “public service emails” that keeps the interest of a large number of readers, while still allowing sales emails to predominate, and while maintaining or even increasing total sales. I don’t know what that rate might be, but I’m guessing somewhere around 10%-15%.

All that is really a long open to the following close:

When I decided to write this email today, I asked myself what was the most valuable resource that I don’t sell, but that I could share with readers on my list.

One thing popped up in my mind immediately.

It’s a book. I discovered it a few weeks ago. It talks about the psychology and neurology of misdirection.

Misdirection isn’t a great term, by the way — because what it really is is the control and focus of attention, along channels that serve the purpose of, say, a magician… or, say, a marketer or copywriter.

For the past couple weeks, I’ve been devouring this book and taking pages of notes on it.

I was planning on hoarding all this knowledge for myself, and profiting from it all by myself.

But you gotta keep people guessing.

At the same time, to make myself feel better, I tell myself not one person in a hundred on my list will actually get this book, and even fewer will actually read it and apply it. But in case you’re curious, here’s the naked, non-affiliate link of a valuable resources that I do not sell:

https://bejakovic.com/misdirection

It might be fantastic and refreshing, but it ain’t got a sales page

by

I’ll admit it right away:

The world has not been crying out to buy my Simple Money Emails course.

This past summer, I launched it as a special offer via an ad in Josh Spector’s newsletter. Many of my readers got it back then.

I haven’t advertised it or offered it since, because I’ve been waiting for the sales page to write itself.

But the sales page refuses to do any writing. And I have little interest in doing its job for it. I have lots of more exciting, more promising things I can be doing.

Things were at this impasse until a couple days ago, when I got the following email from a reader:

===

I subscribed through Josh Spector’s newsletter and thought The Simply Money Emails Course was fantastic and refreshing.

Of the many different courses (free and paid) that I have taken, Simple Money Emails is the only course that has taken me from being a complete email copywriting newbie to feeling ready to take on client projects after completing the course.

As for my feedback on the course I’d say it is very detailed and meaty even though it looks like a short course initially. What tied everything together is the video interview you did with Igor and I’d say for future versions of Simple Money Emails I’d like to see more video content for visual learning (and faster consumption)

I haven’t gotten through the swipe files yet but I think they’re the cherry on top and I definitely will use them as a base or inspiration for the emails that I am going to write for my clients.

===

The fact is, I’ve gotten lots of positive feedback from people who have gone through Simple Money Emails already.

And so from today on, I’ve decided to make this course available to buy, even without a sales page.

(I will deal with the sales page issue in a possibly exciting way starting tomorrow.)

For now, I will just tell you what’s inside my Simple Money Emails offer:

1. My Simple Money Emails training

​​Since 2015, I’ve written close to 2,000 daily sales emails. I’ve used them to successfully sell info courses, live trainings, high-ticket coaching, supplements, software, ecommerce products, even pet supplies.

​​In this training, I distill all this experience to give you a simple, repeatable, 1-2 process, which almost anyone can use, to write daily emails that make sales today and keep your readers coming back tomorrow.

2. Simple Money Email Swipes

​​This is a swipe file containing 51 of my simplest, most effective money-making emails. These include all the emails I reference in the core SME training, plus many more — all highlighted and marked up to show you the relevant ideas or concepts in action.

3. Quick & Dirty Emails That Make Money

​​This is a presentation I gave 2021 to Igor Kheifets’s $97/month mastermind. I talked about my experience writing daily emails to two large lists made up of ecommerce buyers — which were each making $4k to $5k in sales with each email, day after day. In many ways, this training was the forerunner to the complete Simple Money Emails training.

4. 9 Deadly Email Sins

​​Over the past year, several successful business owners and course creators have paid me multiple thousands of dollars to critically look at each email they were sending and give them my feedback.

​​This training sums up the 9 most frequent pieces of copywriting feedback I’ve given in these exclusive coaching situations, along with examples of actual copy I critiqued. I sold this training for $100 when I put it on live, but it’s yours free as part of Simple Money Emails.

5. The price for Simple Money Emails, parts 1-4 above, is $197.

If you decide you’d like in, you can buy Simple Money Emails here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

… and if not, that’s okay. I’ll be back tomorrow, teasing and demoing the ideas from this course without spelling them out. Perhaps in time you will figure it all out. Or if you have no time to be teased and you’d like to get going now, well, the link is above.

10 jaw-dropping email deliverability tips you must know in 2023: A complete guide for marketers

by

A new reader writes in:

===

John – just wanted to let you know that deliverability on your emails is pretty terrible.

I’ve marked your emails as not-spam multiple times. They keep ending up in spam though!

I want to read your emails.. ha.. you’re making it difficult for me though, haha. Are DKIM and SPIF set up properly?

===

I’m grateful to this reader, both for fishing my emails out of the spam folder, and for writing me to tell me about my deliverability problems.

I do have DKIM and SPF set up but apparently it makes no difference for some email providers and some inboxes.

Beyond that, I have no interest in tech fixes for email deliverability, any more than I have in SEO tweaks for getting my stuff to rank on Google.

Instead, I prefer the following ultimate deliverability tips:

1. Novelty — writing something new in my emails, which gets people curious what I might have to say tomorrow, and seeking them out even in the spam folder

2. Deadlines — having strict, often 24-hour deadlines, to reward people who seek out and open my emails when I send them out

3. Featuring reader replies like above — encouraging others to reply to me as well

4. Replying personally to people who write me — encouraging more readership and replies in the future

5. Links at the end of almost every email plus a reason why to click — apparently Gmail and other inboxes like lotsa clicking

6. Occasional valuable ideas — again, this makes people want to seek out my emails and open them

7. Sending daily — so my most loyal readers sense something is wrong if they don’t get my email, and they go searching for it, or even write me to ask what’s up

8. Being transparent about what I offer so people can decide easily if it’s not for them and unsubscribe — unengaged readers are supposed to be bad for deliverability

9. Occasionally purging people who don’t open or click my emails

So there you go:

​​9 jaw-dropping, ultimate email deliverability tips you NEED to know in 2023.

And if you’re wondering about the disconnect between my subject line (10 tips) and that list of 9, I’ll make you a deal:

1. Get my Most Valuable Email course at https://bejakovic.com/mve

2. Reply to this email before 8:31 CET tomorrow, Wednesday Oct 11

3. I will then write back to you with a simple but effective 10th way I’ve found to increase my email deliverability — something that multiple people have told me I should turn into a standalone course or training

4. Of course, if you’ve bought MVE before, this offer is open to you as well. But the same deadline applies.

Here’s something interesting you haven’t thought about before

by

This morning I was chewing on a carrot — I’m trying to eat more vegetables — and to distract myself, I put on a standup comedy routine by Larry David, the writer behind Seinfeld and later the star of Curb Your Enthusiasm. David opened his set by saying:

===

You seem like a very nice audience. I’m wondering, in case I break into some Spanish or French, may I use the familiar “tu” form with you people? Instead of “usted”? Because I think “usted” is gonna be a little too formal for this crowd. I feel already that I’ve established the kind of rapport that I can jump into the “tu” form with you.

===

Larry David’s brand of humor is awkwardness. He always hits a snag on social interactions that others handle smoothly. He has to verbalize and negotiate things that others do subconsciously or nonverbally. That’s why his opening above illustrates the following point so well:

Comedians assume familiarity in their sets.

Why familiarity? Because being familiar is a precondition to being funny.

Comedian Bill Burr opens his “Why Do I Do This” special — my favorite — by saying, “It’s nice to be here. I didn’t do shit today. I didn’t. I’m a loser man. I just sat around watching TV and all that type of stuff. Let me tell you something…” Only then does he launch into his actual set.

You might wonder why I’m killing the joke in this way.

It’s because the same applies to you, at least if you want to influence other people, to sell your products, your services, or your ideas.

Comedians assume familiarity. So do pick up artists. Hypnotists do something similar that suits them, and that’s to assume trance.

The result is that their audiences, targets, and subjects, follow.

So that’s my suggestion for you too:

Figure out what goal you are trying to lead people to. Then figure out what the preconditions are for that.

And then, just act as-if. Assume that the preconditions are true.

Do it with enough conviction — not like Larry David, but like Bill Burr — and people will fall into step with you. This is as true of sales and copywriting as it is of comedy, magic, and seduction.

Speaking of seduction:

If you think you might learn a thing or two from me about influence, then consider my Copy Riddles course.

​​I break down the seemingly simplest type of copy — sales bullets — along dimensions you might not have ever thought about.

​​The result is you go from unconscious incompetence to conscious competence quickly… and then with a bit of practice to unconscious competence, where you simply own these copywriting skills, cold.
​
​In case you’re interested:

​https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Just another one of my industry-leading insights in this email

by

A couple days ago, I started receiving a gentle barrage of email notifications like this:

“The John Bejakovic Letter: A new contact has been added to your list”
“The John Bejakovic Letter: A new contact has been added to your list”
“The John Bejakovic Letter: A new contact has been added to your list”
…

I checked where all these “new contacts” were coming from.

It turned out to be a website that promotes itself as a discovery platform for newsletters. And sure enough, on the front page of the site, there was the “John Bejakovic Newsletter” with the following nonsense description:

​===​

“The John Bejakovic Newsletter is not simply another regular publication; it is a vibrant, information-rich tool that provides a unique entryway to the corporate and commercial worlds.”

“Pros: John Bejakovic’s newsletter provides subscribers a tactical advantage in today’s fast-paced business environment by delivering industry-leading insights.”

“Cons: Persistent follow-up emails from John Bejakovic’s newsletter may be sent to subscribers who unsubscribe, and over time these emails may start to annoy you.”

===

​​In case it’s not clear:

This has nothing whatsoever to do with this newsletter you’re reading now.

​​I’m guessing the above fluff was generated by AI.

And I’m guessing the “new contacts” who subscribed to my list were all bots — based on the email addresses, the associated first names that were put in, and the behavior of the contacts after subscribing.

So that’s the bad part, the skeleton that I trotted out of the closet and made dance at the top of my email. Now here’s the good part:

These bot contacts came via Sparkloop. I’ve written about Sparkloop before. It’s a newsletter-recommendation marketplace.

​​Other newsletters (and occasional scam websites, like the above) can find you on Sparkloop and send you newsletter subscribers you pay for.

Or don’t pay for — because Sparkloop allows you to set your own criteria for who is an engaged, worthwhile subscriber, including location or activity or your own intuition.

For example:

I deleted all the contacts that came via that newsletter discovery website, prolly close to 100. This won’t cost me anything, except a bit of time, which I’m trying to recoup by writing this email.

On the other hand, I have been getting a trickle of actual engaged readers via Sparkloop. (It’s only a trickle, because I’m not using the co-reg functionality, but am only accepting leads who were sent to my optin page.) ​​

​​I’m also using Sparkloop to grow my health newsletter, and I’m getting good results there.

Point being, you gotta keep an eye on Sparkloop, because it’s a shiba inu that will eat from the trashcan from time to time.

​​But if you’re willing to keep an eye on it, then it’s as close as I’ve found to an automated way to grow your newsletter with the kinds of leads you yourself want.

If you wanna try Sparkloop out, you can find it at link below. ​​Yes, that’s an affiliate link but it’s not likely to pay me anything — not unless you also decide to use Sparkloop to make some money via promoting other newsletters, which is a topic for another email. ​​Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/sparkloop