Emily tried to warn me, but I wouldn’t listen

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Last Monday, Josh Spector’s assistant Emily sent me an email with an alarmist subject line:

“TIMELY: For The Interested Classified Ad Copy Needed”

I was annoyed Emily was pushing me for the ad copy, since there was still a week to go. But I wrote it up and sent it over, along with the link I wanted the ad to go to.

A message immediately shot back. Emily again:

“Thanks for sending your copy and link over. Unfortunately, I’m getting an error message when I click on your link:” — and then a screenshot of an error page on my site.

I rolled my eyes at Emily’s pickiness. Of course it takes you to an error page — I’m still working on it, it’s in draft status!

I took a deep breath and collected myself. I politely replied to Emily and explained the situation. The landing page was still under development. “I will have it ready by the time the ad runs,” I said at the end.

(Cue ominous music. Clouds gather on the horizon, and a sudden gust of cold wind blows the window open in my office, scattering papers everywhere.)

Fast forward to yesterday.

In the eleventh hour before my ad in Josh Spector’s newsletter, I finished all the stuff I needed for it, including that landing page.

I could finally take a break. I decided to set work aside completely for the rest of the day.

I was in the mountains with friends yesterday, so we went for a walk. We had lunch. I packed, and got ready for five-hour ride from the Pyrenees back to Barcelona.

(The dark clouds on the horizon have fully built up now, and they flash with lightning every few seconds. Ominous music swells to unbearably tense levels.)

It was almost time to get in the car and drive home. But even though I’d decided to ignore any work-related stuff for the rest of the day, my resolve broke down.

I impulsively checked my email.

It had been about a half hour since the ad in Josh’s newsletter went out — plenty of time for a bunch of new people to get on my list.

I opened my inbox. But instead of dozens or hundreds of “new subscriber” notifications, I saw…

“Aww dude, clicked that FTI link and it leads to an error page 😳“

“John, I took your offer on Josh’s newsletter but the link is throwing an error.”

“Just tried to get the course. It says that I dont have access to the page”

… plus a dozen or more such messages from existing subscribers, who I’d routed to Josh’s newsletter to get a free copy of my new course via the classified ad.

There’s no knowing how many potential new subscribers, who weren’t yet on my list, clicked on the ad and were taken to the wrong page, with no chance to opt in.

In my daily email yesterday, I jokingly predicted crippling electrical storms or perhaps a meteorite strike to sink my ad in Josh’s newsletter.

But I didn’t account for the real danger:

My own mule-like ability to run a $350 classified ad and genuinely include a wrong link inside of it, which is indeed what happened.

Emily tried to warn me. But I wouldn’t listen.

I double-checked my own link when I submitted the ad.

​​I checked it again when Emily told me it was taking her to the wrong page.

The link was wrong both times, and yet I hypnotized myself into believing it wasn’t.

What’s more, when I clicked on the link myself to test it, it took me to the wrong page. I saw that, but I told myself it was was a website caching issue. “No problem here. It will be ready in time!”

Conclusion:

Too blind… too self-assured… too ready to rationalize away any conflicting evidence.

(Finally, violent storm over, the clouds break. A single ray of sunlight shines through to the soaked and ravaged countryside.)

Almost miraculously, my colossal mistake turned out to be salvageable.

It took me all of two seconds to create a website redirect from the wrong page to the right page. Anybody who clicked on the ad after that would now be taken to the right landing page.

Sure enough, people immediately started signing up for the free course I am giving away via the ad.

And some also signed up for the paid upsell I am offering, 9 Deadly Email Sins. One person who signed up was Shawn Cartwright, the owner of TCCII, an online martial arts academy. Shawn wrote to say:

===

Killer subject line and nice flex on the Pyrenees…

Also, killer offer… and something of real value to the business owners like me who love the idea of being copywriting experts but would rather create their products than perfect a sales page or email.

===

Here’s why this 9 Deadly Sins training could be of real value to business owners like Shawn:​​​​

It’s the email equivalent of Emily writing to me and saying, “Uhhh, your link doesn’t work. Do you want to double check that?”

Over the past year, I’ve coached, taught, and consulted a few dozen business owners, course creators, coaches, marketers, and copywriters on their email marketing and email copy.

I’ve found that my feedback keeps coming back to 9 persistent mistakes. All 9 of these mistakes are easy and quick to fix. And yet they are widespread, costing people sales day after day.

Perhaps you’re sure that you could never write emails which blatantly violate the laws of good sense and effective salesmanship.

You’re probably right. You are probably not as ready to hypnotize yourself as I am… to dismiss conflicting evidence like I did… or to be over-confident that what you’re doing right now is just perfect, with zero chance of being improved.

​​But isn’t it worth finding out what these most common 9 Deadly Email Sins are, to be 100% sure you yourself are not falling prey to them?

In case that’s got you wondering, here are the full details of this training, which will happen live, next Monday, August 7:

https://bejakovic.com/sme-classified-ty/

I predict a crippling electrical storm or perhaps a meteorite strike tonight

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I am up in the Pyrenees, in theory meant to be enjoying a few days of fresh air, beautiful scenery, and time spent with friends.

In reality, I have spent the past two days staring at the computer and frantically trying to prepare for the consequences of the ad I will run in Josh Spector’s newsletter, which is supposed to send a bunch of new subscribers my way, some time between now, the moment I am writing this, and later tonight, the moment this email will go out.

The last time I ran an ad like this, this past March, in Daniel Throssell’s newsletter, my email service provider, Active Campaign, decided to completely collapse for about 12 hours.

Since I am prone to catastrophizing, I am expecting a worldwide electrical storm tonight, or possibly a meteorite strike that will entirely cripple telecommunication networks.

That’s ok. I will deal with it tomorrow.

Today, as I am finally pretty much finished with all the niggling things that this project required, I will go and enjoy a bit of the time I have left in this beautiful setting.

And now, my offer for you today:

Next Monday, I will put on a training I’ve titled 9 Deadly Email Sins, about the most common mistakes I’ve seen in the 100+ emails I’ve reviewed for various business owners, marketers, and copywriters over the past year.

If you are not interested in this training, well, I will be sending more emails over the next week to try to get you interested.

But if you are interested, you can get the full details on this training or sign up right now at the link below (nb: it’s the thank you page for the Josh Spector ad):

https://bejakovic.com/sme-classified-ty/

FREE: Get my new course for free by simply getting on Josh Spector’s list by Sunday and promptly following the instructions in the ad (also free)

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The past two days, I’ve been promoting Josh Spector’s newsletter, because tomorrow I will run an ad there, which will offer a free copy of my new course, Simple Money Emails.

Several readers wrote in to tell me they got on Josh’s list and are waiting eagerly for Josh’s email tomorrow to take advantage of my free offer.

Others wrote in to tell me they have already been on Josh’s list since the first time I wrote about it, several weeks back. They had glowing things to say about Josh himself. For example, reader Anthony La Tour wrote to say:

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Dude, I’ve already unsubscribed from a few daily emails and yours is the only one I’ve read religiously. I even signed up to Josh’s newsletter a little while ago when you spoke about his newsletter and how to borrow the idea of a one paragraph newsletter.

Josh and I have already exchange some emails back and forth and he’s seriously a cool guy.

I’m proud to say that I’m also going to be launching a “Spector-style” newsletter, following the advice you gave in one of the emails you sent.

I own a couple of your offers and everything you’ve done is top-notch.

Thanks John!

===

On the other hand…

I also had one long-time reader and customer write in to ask about my new Simple Money Emails course — which I am offering for free, if you simply get on Josh Spector’s list by Sunday and promptly follow the instructions in the ad — with the following:

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Will the people who bought any of your previous courses get the course as an add on or do we need to buy it separately?

===

This reader wrote this in reply to an email in which I had said, “if you are on Josh’s list by Sunday, and you take me up on the offer inside the ad before the deadline, you will get Simple Money Emails for free.”

You might think I am shaming this reader for missing an obvious point. But though I did learn email marketing via Ben Settle, shaming is not what I am doing.

My point is just to illustrate that you rarely have your readers’ full attention — even of the readers who like you, who buy from you regularly, and who read your emails eagerly.

Which is something I address in Simple Money Emails, specifically in Rule #11 of the 12 Rules of Simple Money Emails. And I tell you how to deal with it.

Incidentally, you can get Simple Money Emails for free. By signing up to Josh Spector’s newsletter at the link below. And reading Josh’s email tomorrow, which will have my ad in it.

I won’t be sending out more emails to push you towards this free offer.

In case you want something for free, click on the link below, sign up for free, and you will be rewarded:

https://bejakovic.com/fti

3 great reasons to sign up to Josh Spector’s newsletter before Sunday

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Today I’d like to invite you to sign up to Josh Spector’s newsletter For The Interested.

​​Signing up is free, and I can think of no fewer than three great reasons to do so:

First, Josh writes both a weekly newsletter on Sundays (long, similar to what many others are doing) and a short daily newsletter in a different format on all the other days.

What Josh is doing with daily emails is innovative and it works. So much so I already wrote an email about it just a couple weeks ago. It might be something you want to keep an eye on and model yourself.

Second, if you ever find yourself crying “Value! More value!!!” and you want marketers to bombard you with non-stop, practical, how-to info and inspiration, without any teasing, guru-like grandstanding, or endless personal stories, then Josh is your man.

His newsletter is all value, zero charismatic manipulation, all day long.

Third, I will be running a classified ad in Josh’s newsletter this Sunday.

This ad will have a special offer to get my new Simple Money Emails course. I will sell this course after the promo in Josh’s newsletter ends, but if you are on Josh’s list by Sunday, and you take me up on the offer inside the ad before the deadline, you will get Simple Money Emails for free.

So are you… interested?

​​If you are (maybe you can sense where this is going) then here is Josh’s For The Interested:

https://bejakovic.com/fti

Start and grow a “tiny book” publishing business

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I read an article yesterday about a new title for an old book.

​​The old book was written by Aristotle around 350 BC. It has been known for the roughly 2,372 years since as The Nichomachean Ethics.

​​But a new edition of the book has just been put out by Princeton University Press. The new title is, “How to Flourish: An Ancient Guide to Living Well.” ​​From that article I read yesterday:

“The volume is part of a series of new translations of ancient texts. Aristotle’s Poetics, for instance, is now ‘How to Tell a Story: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Storytelling for Writers and Readers,’ and Thucydides’ ‘History of the Peloponnesian War’ is now ‘How to Think About War: An Ancient Guide to Foreign Policy.'”

This reminded me of E. Haldeman-Julius. A hundred years ago, Haldeman-Julius had a publishing business that sold literally hundreds of millions of copies of what were known as little blue books — tiny paperback editions of both new how-to books and reissues of fiction classics.

As part of his publishing business, Haldeman-Julius operated what he called The Hospital, where he would operate on books that were ailing and not making sales.

The Hospital involved several possible procedures. The most extreme was a type of frontal lobotomy, in which Haldeman-Julius would do just like those Aristotle publishers did — lop off the book’s original, opaque, unsexy title, and replace it with something new and clear and exciting. Results:

“The mystery of the iron mask” => “The mystery of the man in the iron mask”: 277% jump in sales

“Ten o’clock” => “What art should mean to you”: 450% jump in sales

“Fleece of gold” => “The quest for a blonde mistress”: 833% jump in sales

Haldeman-Julius wrote up a book about his experiences publishing the little blue books. In a typical move, he didn’t apply what he knew so well to his own personal marketing. So he titled his book, The First Hundred Million.

The title “The First Hundred Million” doesn’t exactly scream READ ME! A much better title would have been something like, “Start and grow a ‘tiny book’ publishing business.”

As it was, The First 100 Million first went out of print, and then became obscure. You had to be a real student of the human psyche, and of the info publishing biz, to get yourself a copy. Somebody truly obsessive, possibly maniacal.

Somebody like legendary copywriter Gary Halbert, who once wrote in his newsletter:

“Indeed, The First Hundred Million is a book that contains a precise and valid statistical measurement of America’s inner most needs and greeds. So why didn’t I mention it in last month’s newsletter when I listed the greatest marketing books of all time? Simply because I didn’t have a copy of it and I wasn’t sure it was obtainable.”

Thanks to his unique connections, Gary did manage to find himself a used copy back in the 90s.

Fortunately, we live in a much more connected era, where even out-of-print books can be tracked down easily for a price.

For example, you can now get a paperback of The First 100 Million on Amazon for $19.95.

Carl Galletti also sells copies on his site for $29.97 (original) or $49.97 (expanded).

Or if you like, you can get The First Hundred Million for free.

​​I’ve tracked it down for you, via the University of Illinois library, at the link below.

I’ve already read this book once. I plan to reread it again next month. ​​Why? Why, to start and grow a “tiny book” publishing business.

​​In case you’d like to do something similar:

https://bejakovic.com/100million

Valuable but quite elitist business practices

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Last week, I got a notification telling me about a new subscriber to this newsletter.

​​A familiar name. A familiar email address. A guy named Ian, who is a good friend of a good friend of mine, named Sam.

I guess Sam and Ian were hanging out in real life. My email newsletter came up somehow. And Ian, who is a social worker and has nothing to do with the shady but fraternal underworld that is the direct marketing industry, decided to sign up.

Then yesterday, Sam, who also reads these emails, forwarded me a text message thread between him and Ian:

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Ian: I don’t have $100. What is the Most Valuable Email Trick?

Sam: If you get it for free will it be as valuable?

Ian: Hmmm that’s right. Most valuable to whom? Maybe to John as he is pocketing the $100.

Sam: Quite elitist to charge for this knowledge

===

I agree. And here’s another quite elitist practice:

I recently started, or rather restarted, a valuable daily habit. I call it “between the lines.” It goes like this:

1. Look at all the emails I get from readers and customers over the past 24 hours.

2. Paste them into a Google Doc.

3. Go through and ask myself, “What is really going on here? What’s really behind these words this person wrote me?” Then write down the answer in a comment on the side.

I’ve been doing this for a few weeks now.

Lots of interesting stuff pops up.

Other times, I’m just reminded of what is truly fundamental — simple stuff you can’t do without, and vice versa, simple stuff you can build an entire business around.

For example, one “between the lines” comment that I keep writing over and over in my Google Doc is that people really buy because of 1) curiosity and 2) trust.

I guess you can make sales just by doing one of trust or curiosity, by amping up the other. But if you increase both, results multiply.

And so all your marketing, at least all of your email marketing, should really be oriented to building up trust. Or curiosity. Or ideally, both.

Of course, you still have to sell something that people can somehow justify to themselves.

I doubt I will ever sell my Most Valuable Email to Ian and frankly I wouldn’t want to. I’m not sure how he would profit from it aside from satisfying his curiosity.

But perhaps you are a marketer or copywriter. Perhaps you want to write emails like this one, or LinkedIn posts, or whatever. In that case, perhaps I’ve gotten you a bit curious about my MVE trick, and built up trust via these daily emails to make you want to buy.

Yes, if you buy, it will be valuable to me. But it can also be valuable to you, and much more than the $100 you will put into my pocket.

If you want to see what the Most Valuable Trick is all about:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

I paid a cool extra $1k to bring you the following hot tip

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The third and final, “VIP” day of the copywriting conference I attended this past May, which added a particularly heavy extra $1k to my ticket, consisted of just one presentation:

A-list copywriter Parris Lampropolous, giving a talk that he has not given before, at least as far as I know, and I’m a bit of a connoisseur of Parris Lampropoulos talks.

At one point, near the end of his talk, Parris revealed what is, in his words, the “most important thing” he has ever learned in his long, successful, and very lucrative marketing career.

Would you like to know what this most important thing is?

I bet.

And since I am in a generous mood, I’ll tell you. It’s something Parris learned early on from one of his biggest mentors, Jay Abraham:

There are only three ways to grow a business, says Jay. ​​The first is to get more customers or clients. The second is to increase the size of their transactions. The third is to increase the frequency of their transactions.

​​That’s it.

“Whoa…” I hear you say.

Or actually, I don’t​​​ hear you say that. Probably, you find the “most important thing” above to be so general as to be almost useless. Probably, there’s no “whoaing” going on anywhere around you right now.

Well, about that.

If you would like to know more than just this one-line summary of Jay Abraham’s approach to building businesses, which Parris Lampropoulos has found so valuable in his career…

Then you can hire Jay to consult you directly, and to apply his knowledge and experience to your business. The man’s consulting rate is currently $150k/day.

Of course, if that’s outside your budget, you can hire him virtually, and have him teach you everything he knows via a “6 week interactive consulting process.”

Really, that’s just a sexy way that Jay describes a big course he sells, which covers each of the three above ways to grow a business in complete and unrelenting detail.

​​Jay’s big course gives you dozens upon dozens of marketing strategies total, along with a bunch of case studies from his clients, big and small, to show you how those strategies work in real life.

if you go on Jay’s website right now, this big 6-weeek course currently sells for $997.

And that’s a fair price when you consider, as per Jay’s website, that “two years and over $200,000 were spent creating this 6 week interactive consulting process.”

But.

​​Maybe you don’t have $997 that’s aching to get spent right now. If so, then hold on to your barstool.

​​Because you can get Jay’s “interactive consulting process” not for $997… but for a grand total of $12.69. That’s such a price drop that it might sound almost impossible. But it’s quite possible.

How? As I wrote yesterday:

1. Go buy Brian Kurtz’s book Overdeliver at https://bejakovic.com/overdeliver. It costs $12.69 on Kindle.

2. Then go to https://overdeliverbook.com/ and put in your Amazon order number from step 1 above.

3. You will then unlock a treasure trove of free bonus material, which includes Jay’s “6 week interactive consulting process.”

Since you are continuing to read this email, maybe there is still some hesitation and indecision in your head. Maybe you are wondering if it’s really worth your $12.69 and a few clicks right now to get Jay’s big course.

​​All I can add is my personal experience.

I am going through Jay’s training right now for the fifth time over the past two years. I’m applying ideas from it to this little info publishing business, to my new health newsletter, to JV promos I do, to coaching clients I advise.

Does Jay’s stuff produce results? Is it magic? ​​Only if you go through it and apply it. And the first step is to get it, at the link above.

Magic vs. money in daily emails

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A couple days ago, I prompted my readers for input on a new course I’ll put out, Simple Money Emails, about writing simple emails that make sales. I even offered a reward for the most useful question.

I got lots of good replies. I also picked the winner of the contest, and I’ll announce who it is in a few days’ time.

Meanwhile, let me tell you something that you might not find interesting, or maybe you will:

Most of the questions I got I will be addressing in Simple Money Emails. But a few… I will not.

For example, I got a surprising number of people writing in and basically saying, “How can I do something creative, exciting, novel with my email copy?” A few quotes:

“I always struggle to come up with creative ideas for call to actions.”

“Sometimes I think the emails I write are almost all the same.”

“… it’s true that you can get stories from day to day, but I’m looking for something more magical than that.”

Creativity, self-expression, and novelty can happen as a result of writing a daily newsletter. But they are far from the primary or even secondary goals of Simple Money Emails.

The primary and the secondary goals of Simple Money Emails are 1) making a sale today and 2) doing so in a way that people will still read tomorrow.

If self-expression or magic happen as a result, it’s incidental. The good part is, the sales you make, and the chance to make more sales tomorrow, can soothe an occasional lack of magic.

And now, a confession:

This email that you are reading right now not what I would call a Simple Money Email. The reason is that the opening, what you read up to now, doesn’t do any kind of a job setting up the offer that’s about to come.

I told you the above story because I wanted to. Because it’s on my mind. Because I felt like writing it down.

The offer below has nothing to do with it, and in fact, it might contradict what I just said.

In spite of the poor job I’ve done selling the following offer, you might still want to get it. That’s because it’s frankly the best deal in the entire direct response marketing universe.

​​Here’s the deal:

1. Go buy Brian Kurtz’s book Overdeliver at https://bejakovic.com/overdeliver. It costs $12.69 on Kindle.

2. Then go to https://overdeliverbook.com/ and put in your Amazon order number from step 1 above.

3. You will then unlock a treasure trove of free bonus material, most of it not available anywhere else, at any price.

I once calculated that the stuff inside the Overdeliver bonuses adds up to $5,133.64 in value, based only on what the various items last sold for. But the real value is much greater than that, or at least has been to me, if you actually apply the ideas inside.

By the way, the first link above is an Amazon affiliate link. Not because I’m hoping to earn the $2.37 in commissions that this email is likely to make, but because I want a chance to track any sales that might come.

If you’re curious why, I will explain it in a couple days. But for now, if you don’t yet have it, I strongly recommend Brian’s Overdeliver above and the bonuses it comes with.

How to write emails that won’t embarrass you and show off your lack of skill

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Last week, I got an email from a marketer with a big-promise subject line:

“How to hook your reader in 5 seconds…”

Oh, the ironing. It took me all about 1 second to swipe left and get rid of that email without ever opening it.

Clearly, whatever techniques that guy was selling inside his email, they weren’t helping him personally.

That would never happen had he known about my Most Valuable Email trick, which is all about preventing ugly and embarrassing situations like the above from happening.

I last promoted Most Valuable Email 10 days ago. Due to the phase of the moon, I pulled in a surprising number of new buyers then. One was email marketer Illya Shapovalov, who wrote me soon after buying to say:

===

Oh. My God.

After slightly more than 2 hours, I still haven’t gone fully through MVE. I’m a tedious notetaker. My head is literally spinning. I feel like Ned Stark (assuming you’ve watched GOT) when he pieced together that the “Baratheon” kids are bastards. I’m gonna take a break and continue where I left off (the riddles)

Even though I’m fairly new to copywriting (7 months in), I’ve been gnawing at this idea of “telling without telling”. For example, how to not have a lead magnet, but make so everyone who lands on the signup form can’t help but join. Basically “show don’t tell”. Because. as you point out in MVE too, stories are getting commoditized. Everyone can spin a story. This however … this answers so many seemingly unanswerable questions I had, or didn’t even know I have.

Easily the best $100 I ever invested in something. This is something I can apply not only to email but to my website copy, to my LinkedIn profile/posts, to name a few examples …

Bottom line: Huge thank you for making this course – and for seriously underpricing it. In hindsight, it’s worth way more than a measly $100. And I haven’t even checked the swipe file yet.

P.S. Yesterday’s email looks completely different – in fact, it did so right after your response. That, and the whole MVE trick … something so pointedly simple, yet so fucking powerful.

===

The MVE trick takes less than an hour to learn. (Or more than two hours, depending on how many notes you take.) Point being, it’s quick to grasp.

You can then apply the MVE trick in your subject lines, in your email copy, in your personal positioning, in the way you price your offers, in your funnels, as I’ve done, over and over, a dozen times or more in my emails just this month, and many more times over the past months and years.

Each time I have applied the MVE trick, I have profited, either with sales that I made directly, or indirectly, by learning, and becoming better at what I do, every day, a small but significant step each time.

If you’d like to do the same:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

How you can influence my new course, and why you might want to

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Next week, I will release a small course on writing simple emails that make money.

The course will be small because my claim is that writing emails that make money is just a matter of two things: sitting down to write, and continuing until you finish.

“Ha ha,” you might say, “very funny, Bejako. You almost had me there but clearly you are a joker and a suspect one at that.”

Fair enough. But I really do believe that writing a simple email which gets people 1) reading, 2) buying, and 3) reading again tomorrow, is actually a matter of just two things:

1. Opening the email

2. Closing the email

And if you think I am once again pulling your leg, nose, or ear, let me refer you to no less of an authority than A-list copywriter Gary Bencivenga, who said the same thing about all sales messages. It’s all really just a matter of 1) opening the sale and 2) closing the sale.

This new course will be a paid course, but you will have a chance to get it for free for a limited time, by following some simple instructions I’ll send out next week.

Also, I would like to give you an opportunity to influence this course, and I’ll even give you an incentive to do so.

How you can influence it:

Write in and tell me what has you bothered when writing simple sales emails. What you would like to learn, and why you haven’t been able to learn it yet. You don’t have to write paragraphs, though you can if you want to. A sentence or two, or a specific question, will also work.

And here’s the incentive:

The most useful response, as chosen by a panel of one, all named Bejako, will get a free ticket to a paid training which I am planning to piggyback onto this simple emails course.

​​The tentative name for this paid training is 9 Deadly Email Sins, and it will be all about the 9 fundamental mistakes I keep seeing in the few dozen business owners, course creators, coaches, marketers, and copywriters whose emails I have consulted and coached over the past year.

I am actively working on this simple emails course, and I want to have it in a few more days.

​​So the deadline, if you want to give me your input, if you want to have it mean anything, and if you want to have a chance at a free ticket to that 9 Deadly Email Sins training, is tomorrow, Saturday, at 8:31pm CET.

Thousands of readers… 24 hours… 1 survivor. Thanks in advance.