Who Influential Emails is definitely not for

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A reader writes in with a timely question:

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Hey John,

I had a question about Influential Emails.

I’m looking to purchase your “Influential Emails” course next Thursday when my stripe payments clear from my clients…

…and am devoting more of my time to lead generation, list building, personal branding … kind of like what you do

I am curious, for this “Influential Emails Course” if it can help with someone for my specific use cases…

To grow an email list, establish authority, build a personal brand and sell copywriting and digital marketing services.

looking forward to reading your response…

===

Yesterday, I wrote about how I’ve learned to regularly send emails telling people what exactly is in my offers.

Another thing I’ve learned to regularly send is emails that tell people who my offers are for, and more importantly, who they’re not for.

I wrote back to the reader above to ask whether he has already been writing daily emails to promote his marketing services… or if he has a long-term agreement with a client to write daily emails.

I haven’t heard back from him yet. But a few things — waiting for Stripe to clear, the specific use case of having to accomplish pretty much everything, from list building to authority to making sales… makes me think this person is more of a beginner.

Nothing wrong with that. But Influential Emails is a bunch of advanced email copywriting tricks and strategies.

When I offered this training the first and only time so far, two years ago, I gave students a chance at a copy critique.

A bunch of people took me up on my offer and submitted their emails. All the submitted emails had good ideas in them. But I also realized many of these emails also had really fundamental, technical problems.

Many of those student emails failed on basic and important points, which would cripple the effectiveness of the email. For people who couldn’t do the basics right, none of the advanced techniques I was sharing would matter at all.

That’s the reason why I eventually created a beginner-friendly email copywriting course, Simple Money Emails.

So to sum up:

If you have not been writing daily emails for yourself for a while…

… or if you have not been writing daily emails for a good client for a while, and you have the kind of relationship that makes you think this will go on for a long time, and is worth investing in…

… then do not get Influential Emails.

Instead, start writing daily emails for yourself, or start seeking out a client who will pay you to write daily emails for them.

And if you are looking for guidance on what to put into those daily emails, then you can find that inside my Simple Money Emails course, available here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

On the other hand, if you want some advanced writing techniques to help you not just make sales, but get into your readers’ minds so they think of you as an authority… spread your ideas on their own… even refer you to others… then can get some of my secret sauce inside Influential Emails.

The techniques and strategies inside this training have allowed me to make connections with some of the most successful marketers and copywriters in the direct response industry.

​​They have created an aura of authority for me, completely independent of my results in the field.

​​Most importantly, they have influenced the minds of my readers.

Anyways, if you want Influential Emails, then the only way to get it is to be on the waiting list first, when I open up the cart this Thursday. To get on the waiting list, you’ll have to sign up for my daily email newsletter. Click here to do that.

Advanced email copywriting tricks for sale soon

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This week I’m promoting my Influential Emails training. This training is something I’ve made available only once before, live, back in 2021, the Year of the Ox.

But starting next Thursday, and lasting at most until next Sunday, I will make Influential Emails available once again.

Over the y​​ears, by keeping track of when and why I’ve bought from other people’s via email, I discovered it makes good sense to send out regular emails telling your audience what exactly it is you are selling, without any frills, funniness, or flippancy.

​​So here’s whats inside Influential Emails:

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1. The recordings of the three Influential Emails live calls, which all lasted around 2 hours.

2. Edited transcripts of all the calls, in case would rather read than listen to me talk.

3. Call 1 covers 5+ of my advanced email copywriting tricks, including the “Five Fingers” storytelling strategy, S. Morgenstern transitions, and the “Sophisticated Slapstick” structure that makes trivial or even silly things sound funny or profound.

4. Call 2 breaks down four emails I wrote to this list, shows you how I wrote them from snout to tail, and highlights the techniques from Call 1 in action. This second call also includes a lighting-round training, 15 Unique Things I Do To come Up With Ideas and Create Content.

5. Call 3 includes brutal and merciless copy critiques of a dozen emails I got from attendees of the original Influential Emails training. You see what I thought was good in these emails, and more importantly, what I would change to make each email more effective for 1) making sales and 2) being more influential/interesting/memorable.

6. There are also two bonuses. The first is “Mystery Screenwriting Insights For Copywriters.” The core of this is a special, never-produced screenplay from my favorite screenwriter, William Goldman, overlaid with my analysis of the writing tricks Goldman used, and how copywriters can apply the same.

7. The second bonus is “My 12/4 Most Influential Emails.” This is a micro swipe file, including 12 of my most influential emails, along with the background of why and how each email ended up influential. Plus, I’ll give you the four more emails, written by mysterious others, which had the biggest influence on me.

Over the coming days, I will have more to say about Influential Emails, specifically who it’s possibly for and who it’s definitely not for.

If you do decide you want to get Influential Emails, you will have to get on the waiting list. And in order to get on the waiting list, you will first have to get on the list to get my daily emails. Click here to do so now.

A principled way to deal with chargebacks

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Last week, I wrote about a chargeback I got on my Most Valuable Email course. I solicited advice for dealing with this chargeback and preventing others in the future.

I got advice. I also got the folllowing question from a reader:

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If you’re so inclined, I’d be interested in hearing about advice you got to handle chargebacks, but of course more importantly prevent them in the first place!

I’m newer to the solopreneur arena. Chargebacks are just a cost of doing business in the large company space, usually as a consequence of not following large customers’ procurement/delivery rules, not automating transactions, etc.

For smaller enterprises, I can imagine they could be debilitating…

===

Since I’m so inclined:

I got lots of what might be called tactical or technological advice for dealing with and preventing chargebacks.

I’m sure much of this advice is solid but the fact is, it’s overkill for my small info publishing operation, and more than I want to do at the moment. The fact that this kind of tactical advice could change from today to tomorrow is even more of a reason to not invest my limited time or energy into such solutions.

But I also got several people sharing what can be called principled advice on dealing with chargebacks. Advice that will stand the test of time, that’s not subject to a change in technology or the whims of banks.

That advice boiled down to simply this:

Don’t sell to every rando off the street who struts up to your counter and pulls out a credit card.

I first heard this advice a long time ago. It’s taken me a while to accept it.

The fact is, just because somebody offers to pay you today doesn’t mean that they will prove to be a good customer today, tomorrow, and the day after.

If you have your eye on LTV as the main metric in your business, then it makes sense to do lots of things, even counterintuitive things, to turn away people who might be bad customers tomorrow, even if they seem to be willing buyers today.

And that brings me to my current offer:

I announced yesterday I will make my Influential Emails training available once again next week.

But I won’t simply send a bunch of emails linking to a sales page for Influential Emails.

Instead, if you would like to get this training once it’s available, you’ll have to get on the waiting list first.

The main reason fr this is the anti-chargeback, pro-LTV idea above. A waiting list allows me to filter through people who want to buy. I can see if they are already good customers. And if not, I have to take a closer look at who they are and whether I want to sell to them.

Of course, the the velvet rope effect of a waiting list doesn’t hurt either.

I will have more to say about Influential Emails, and why you might want to get it, over the coming week. But you will have to be on my list to be able to buy it. Click here to get on there.

Incurable bachelor discovers a reality-bending mistake in human computational neurology

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I read today about a bride-to-be in the UK who took an eerie “spirit photograph” of herself trying on a wedding gown.

The woman was standing with her back to the camera. Facing her were two mirrors, one in front of her, one to her side.

The spirit photo, as captured by an iPhone, showed the following:

The woman in reality (ie, not reflected by a mirror) stood with one arm hanging by her side and other across her chest.

But the mirror in front of her showed a slightly different figure. In that front mirror, both the woman’s arms were clasped together in front of her chest.

And the mirror to her side showed a still different figure. In this mirror, neither of the woman’s arms was across her chest. Instead, both arms were down by her sides.

It’s like three slightly different different versions of the woman were all there in one room, looking at each other.

Maybe the iPhone captured a living human being and two spirits, who somehow looked exactly like each other?

Maybe it was the woman’s great-grandmother in the front mirror, and that great-grandmother’s grandmother in the side mirror, all coming together to convene with the bride-to-be at this crucial moment in her life?

T​​hat would be a good spectacle and a demonstration of the occult.

But the trick behind this bizarre photo is more modern and more technical.

As you might know, your phone camera, particularly if you got yerself a fancy iPhone, is not simply capturing “reality” as it exists out there in the world.

Instead, your camera is actually doing quite a bit of processing, selecting, and splicing to produce a final photo that looks good, and that makes the most satisfying visual presentation to you as the viewer.

That’s what happened with the bride-to-be.

​​Her poor iPhone got tricked into thinking it was seeing three different persons in one frame.

So the phone stitched together three slightly different visual moments to represent each of those three persons in the final shot.

​​If these were three different people, this would probably be undetectable. But since these were mirrored versions of one person, the iPhone’s mistake was glaring and unsettling.

“Haha stupid iPhone,” you might say. Except the reason why I clicked to read this article in the first place was the intriguing headline:

“A bride to be discovers a reality bending mistake in Apple’s computational photography”

This headline got my interest because I, an incurable bachelor, have learned, both by direct experience and by reading up on the matter, that what we see in our mind’s eye is not “reality” as it exists out there in the world.

The fact is, our brains work in a similar way to a modern iPhone camera.

Sure, the underlying “stuff” of our minds is different to what an iPhone is made of, as are the algorithms we use to create the final results.

But like an iPhone, our minds are also sampling from different points in the data stream… filling in the gaps… and stitching together and even inventing stuff to create a final, coherent result.

That final result is not 100% “true,” or even close to it. Instead, it’s what makes the most satisfying image, story, or interpretation to us as viewers.

You might find that hard to accept. I know I did when I first read about it.

But if you start paying attention, you can catch yourself in the act of conjuring up reality.

Anyways, if you want a storytelling tip for how to take mundane events and turn them into something more fun or interesting… then keep in mind the image of the bride-to-be in front of her imperfect doppelgangers across two mirrors.

​​Remember the three slightly different women in wedding gowns facing each other, remember the explanation for it, and then do something similar when you are writing your story.

In entirely related news:

I’ve decided once again offer my Influential Emails training. ​I only offered this once before, live, two years ago.

​​In this training, I shared several advanced email copywriting techniques I used then, and continue to use, to make my own emails stand out in people’s minds.

I’ve noticed that two years later, some of my long-time readers and customers still feed back ideas and names to me that I only shared during that training. That’s to say, maybe these folks really did find the training impactful, useful, and even insightful.

I’ll offer the recordings of this training next week, between Thursday December 6th and Sunday December 10th. But I will do something different than usual.

Rather than making this training available to everyone, I will only make it available to people who get on a waitlist first.

​​If you’re curious why, I’ll explain that in my email tomorrow.

​​Meanwhile, if you want to get on the waitlist, you’ll first have to get onto my email list. Click here to do so.

Ancestral Recall testimonial open

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How many words can you write in a day? How many words can you write consistently, day after day? Without AI?

Dan Ferrari, the A-list copywriter who was my copywriting coach in a different decade, once wrote that “most writers, when they put their ego aside and just get to work, can knock out about 3,000 words per day.”

I’ve never tried measuring it, but I have my doubts. I do know that today I’ve already written about 1,500 words. I still have this email to write, and my brain has already turned to mush, and is in danger of leaking out of my ears.

So let me take the easy path to the offer, and tell you about a valuable message I got a few days ago from copywriter Jesús Silva Marcano.

Jesús wrote in response to an email where I compared unprompted testimonials to the Black Lotus card in Magic The Gathering. To which Jesús wrote:

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Reading the reference to Magic: The Gathering transported me several years into the past, and I loved it.

Also, I agree with Jakub that I learn a lot from your daily emails.

Several months ago, I was reading, enjoying and learning from them.

However, since I bought MVE, I can guarantee that you learn, easily 5 times more.

And although I can’t use the “most valuable trick” with all the clients that come and go into “my (copywriting) world”….

What you teach in Simple Money Emails definitely does.

Maybe this email is not a Black Lotus, but I hope it can be at least an Ancestral Recall.

I hope all is well and keep it up. A big hug.

===

It’s very nice to get message like this, and to hear that people are getting some real-world value from my courses and emails.

Plus, I’m now almost all the way to the offer. So:​​

If you want to learn a bunch of email copywriting tricks that you can use for clients who come and go into your copywriting world, then you can find those in my Simple Money Emails training.

If you want to discover a method to easily learn 5x more about marketing and copywriting by writing emails to your own list — or by reading the emails I write to my list — then you can find that in my Most Valuable Email course.

And if neither of those interests you, then you can always just write in and tell me how many words you can write consistently, day after day. I’m curious how I stack up, and maybe you can teach me something valuable. Thanks in advance.

I stand accused of pulling the prat-out on a reader

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A few months ago, I wrote an email about the “prat out,” a technique used by con men to get their marks salivating and eager for larceny.

​​I sent that email out and then also put it on my bare-bones, zero-images, black-and-white website. And I forgot all about it.

Until this morning that is, when I got the following message from a new reader, who wrote:

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Im now about six years into designing and developing websites.

Your website just fucked my mind.

I was reading a book by Iceberg Slim, he talked about the prat out.

I had no idea wtf that was and found your article.

After reading, i realized that you just pulled the prat-out on me and I’m now much more ready to give you my money. You sneaky fucker.

But i forgive you because you just taught me how much can be done with just words.

I haven’t left your website for an hour. I’m fascinated by what you do with just words. Nothing else is needed. The words create the colors, images and shapes in my head.

As a designer, its blowing my mind how much can be done with words alone and it has opened my mind to all kinds of new possibilities.

Thank you man.

===

No, thank you, kind anonymous reader who wrote in with a testimonial.

I bring this up 1) to feature a flattering testimonial and to encourage more of the same from other readers, and 2) to explain why I have not really been selling much of anything over the past couple weeks.

There are multiple reasons actually.

One is that I made enough money for my modest standards very early this month, thanks to the affiliate promo that Kieran Drew did of my Simple Money Emails course, and the new readers who came in the wake of that promo.

Another reason is that I have found that most of my sales do come via promotion events, whether that be a new launch, or me promoting an affiliate offer for a limited time, or somebody else promoting my offers for a limited time.

So one lesson I’ve learned is to regularly have such events if I hope to keep paying for rent and my daily supply of lentils and canned sardines.

At the same time, I’ve learned to cut myself some slack, and not force myself to shoehorn every daily email into a promotion of one of my existing offers.

​​Linking to something like an Amazon book (yesterday) or simply inviting a response (Sunday) keeps more of my readers reading to the end, and makes it more interesting for me since I can write about a broader set of stuff.

So in case you were curious why I’m linking to random stuff recently, now you know.

That said, it is important to remind readers of my offers from time to time so they can’t use the excuse, “Oh I didn’t even know!” to not buy.

And today, following a testimonial in which a reader says I pulled the prat-out on him, is a particularly good time to remind you of my best selling course, in terms of copies sold at least.

In case you’re curious, you can find out all about it here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Do you know the flip side of this famous historical anecdote?

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Everybody and his monkey knows the story of how, back in 1903, some smug realist at the New York Times wrote that heavier-than-air flight won’t be possible for another “one million to ten million years.”

And then, several weeks later, the Wright brothers took off and flew for the first time.

Like I say, you probably know that.

But what you might not know is the flip side of this story, how little anybody cared about that first flight, or the second flight, or the third, then or for years afterwards.

​​Here’s an excerpt from a book I just finished reading:

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Several years went by before the public grasped what the Wrights were doing; people were so convinced that flying was impossible that most of those who saw them flying at Dayton in 1905 decided that what they had seen must be some trick without significance — somewhat as most people today would regard a demonstration of, say, telepathy. It was not until May, 1908 — nearly four and a half years after the Wright’s first flight — that experienced reporters were sent to observe what they were doing, experienced editors gave full credence to these reporters’ excited dispatches, and the world at last woke up to the fact that human flight had been successfully accomplished.

===

That’s an interesting historical anecdote.

I had never heard it before.

It can be saved and used effectively in lots of different contexts. I would like to pass it on to you if you write and need lots of sticky messages to make your points more effectively.

I also want to clue you in to a resource that’s full of such sticky messages.

​​I already wrote about it in a recent email.

I’m talking about Morgan Housel’s Psychology of Money. I finished reading it a few days ago. It’s where I got the passage above, even though Housel didn’t write it — he’s just citing yet another book in his own book.

The Psychology of Money was published just over three years ago. And yet, it has over 30,000 5-star reviews on Amazon.

That’s not because the advice in the book is so new or so inspiring (“Save more”).

Rather, Housel’s Psychology of Money is so popular because it’s so effectively written, using lots of historical illustrations and novel metaphors and personal stories.

If you want to see how to write a book that keeps selling itself based on its content alone, then The Psychology of Money is worth a skim, read, or even some careful reverse engineering. To get your own copy:

https://bejakovic.com/housel

Chargeback inspiration

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In my email yesterday, I wrote about a chargeback I’d gotten earlier in the day. I asked for advice.

And I got it.

I got advice about possible ways to handle the current chargeback better.

I got good advice on how to prevent it in the future.

I got personal stories and experiences and consolation from others who have been there before me.

I can say I’m honestly grateful to everyone who wrote in. I can also say it’s reminder of something important:

People start email lists to do marketing. To sell stuff. Perhaps to become seen as an authority at whatever it is they do.

But if you do it right, it ends up going way beyond that.

I heard Codie Sanchez talking on a podcast a few days ago. As you might know, Codie runs Contrarian Thinking, a newsletter with some 250,000 subscribers, about buying and selling businesses. She’s built an eight-figure info business off the back of that newsletter, plus maybe several other 7-figure businesses also.

But it goes way beyond that. Codie said that via her newsletter, she’s automatically and without any extra effort also gotten:

– Unique business opportunities
– Financing
– Business partners
– Employees
– Advice and guidance
– Access and connections

My experience has been similar.

I’ve had direct job offers from people reading my newsletter. I’ve had business partnership offers.

People have shared their personal stories with me. I’ve gotten good business advice, from people who are qualified to give it.

I’ve hired people via my list, and I’ve been hired by people on my list.

I’ve gotten insider tips and tricks from people at the very top of the game.

I’ve met some of my readers in real life. We’ve gone to conferences together. I’ve even gotten nice stuff in my physical mail box from people who read these emails.

All of that fell out automatically, as a side-effect of relentlessly, mercilessly, unfailingly writing a 400-500-word email every day, and sharing something I have learned, or something unnerving that happened to me, or a bit of inspiration, or a bit of frustration, like I did yesterday.

I guess you see where this is going. But since this is a marketing newsletter, I will force myself to spell it out:

Start an email list.

Write to it regularly.

Preferably daily.

Good things will happen as a result. And if bad things happen also, you will have a powerful resource in your email list to deal with it.

I have a course about how to relentlessly, mercilessly, unfailingly write a 400-500-word email every day, and to make it interesting for yourself and valuable for your readers. If that’s something you’d like to do:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

Chargeback

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I woke up this morning to find a Sunday-morning email that read:

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CAPITAL ONE, NATIONAL ASSOCIAT ION has initiated a $297 USD dispute.

A $297 USD payment for Desert Kite is being disputed by CAPITAL ONE, NATIONAL ASSOCIAT ION because your customer says they didn’t initiate this purchase (this is known as a fraudulent transaction).”

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In other words, somebody bought my Most Valuable Email course a few days ago.

​​And now somebody — either the person who bought, or the actual credit card owner in case in case they had their credit card details fleeced — was contesting the charge.

I shrugged my shoulders and clicked to archive the email and get it out of my sight.

I had had something like this happen once already, back in September. Somebody bought my Copy Riddles course. A week later, I got the same Capital One chargeback notice, saying that the credit card owner wants to contest the charge.

Back in September, I went to check the account on my site associated with this purchase. I saw that they had logged in, gone through all the 40+ pages of the course in quick order, and now were claiming they had nothing to do with it.

I submitted whatever proof I could gather to contest the chargeback, and to show that this was a legitimate order, and that all the pages of my course were accessed. It probably took a half hour to an hour of my life.

Still, a few weeks later I got a notice that the chargeback had gone through anyhow. There’s no appeal process and that decision is final.

So the reason I shrugged my shoulders today is not that I accept that chargebacks are simply a part of doing business online, but rather that I don’t see that there’s anything I can do about it.

​​And if there’s nothing I can do, I don’t want to give it any more time out or emotion out of my day.

Except of course, I remembered that I do have the wonderful resource of this email list.

So not only can I get a daily email out of this event, but maybe I can even learn something from you, either to deal with the current chargeback request or to prevent others like it coming up in future.

So if you have any info for me, hit reply, and write away. I’ll be grateful to you.

Magic trick vs. miracle in email copywriting

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I’m reading a book about magic and showmanship. One part explains the difference between a magic trick and a miracle:

A ham-and-cheese sandwich, appearing in your shirt pocket, where there was nothing before, is a magic trick.

A ham-and-cheese sandwich, appearing in your shirt pocket, where there was nothing before, when you are starving, is a miracle.

This isn’t just for magicians, of course.

It’s also a key idea for email copywriting. It’s super important to hold on to. That’s why I put the above idea, in my own words, as the core tenet of my Simple Money Emails course, and why I repeat it from page 2 of the course until the end.

So if:

* You have an email list but you are not writing emails and therefore are not making any money from your list, while your subscribers forget who you are and why they signed up in the first place

* You are writing emails but nobody is buying from you, meaning that your newsletter is really just a hobby and not a marketing channel

* You futz and fiddle for hours just to write one stupid email, instead of producing something interesting and effective in just 20 minutes…

… then my Simple Money Emails course could appear in your life like a hand-and-cheese sandwich in a time of great famine.

​​For more information about this miraculous course:

https://bejakovic.com/sme