Business Ideas

How business owners can stop chasing every shiny object like a dog chasing soap bubbles

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I have a new plan. I’m trying to get in shape. I’m walking walk two hours a day as part of my plan. I’m listening to podcasts and courses to keep myself occupied while I walk.

I want to share a good idea with you that I just heard while walking around Barcelona in the rain, getting in shape, and getting wise at the same time.

The idea came up in a discussion between Dean Jackson and Frank Kern.

Both Dean and Frank are successful, influential, long-tenured Internet marketers who have made, I’m guessing, tens of millions of dollars for themselves and prolly hundreds of millions for clients and partners.

The discussion I listened to today was about focusing on what you’re irreplaceable at, and getting others to do the rest. Familiar enough stuff.

(It’s the “who not how” distinction, which Dean originated, and which his partner Dan Sullivan then turned into a best-selling book.)

At some point, Frank Kern threw out the following, less familiar thought experiment.

Imagine, says Frank, that you are a typical small business owner who has gotten to a certain level of success by working hard, and who is trying to get to the next level by working even harder.

The classic “10 million irons in the fire.”

And then imagine, in Frank’s words, that:

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… you are personally enjoined — legal term there — you are personally enjoined from doing any of this stuff yourself, except coming up with ideas.

Which means now you have to pay for the “who.”

What that would bring — and I know the listener is probably like, “okay don’t tell me I have to do this, this is horrible” — what that would bring is incredible clarity and purpose in the execution of the ideas.

If you had to pay to execute on every idea, you would immediately get yourself out of the “I’ve got 10 million irons in the fire” thing. Because you’re paying for it, right? So it’s like, well crap, if I’m paying all that…

===

Maybe I found this insightful because I’m actually in the process of hiring an assistant, and maybe I’ll even end up hiring two. Always insightful hearing what you want to believe.

In any case, if you’re running your own business, particularly if you’re a “solopreneur,” one-man band, one-woman show, this might be a worthwhile thought experiment to put to yourself the next time you come across a hot new opportunity you cannot wait to jump on.

“What if I were enjoined to not do any of this myself, and I could only pay somebody to implement this for me?”

If your answer is a shudder, then consider whether this hot new opportunity, which you don’t find worth paying money to implement, is worth paying for in a different, much scarcer currency, namely your own time and energy.

On the other hand, if you find that you are okay hiring, then you’ve got options. You can still do it yourself. Or you can hire. Or you can even hire two people.

Anyways, I gotta go make popcorn and drink a beer. That is not part of my getting in shape plan. But it is important.

Meanwhile, if you want to hear Dean and Frank’s full discussion — recommended if you are more busy and less productive than you like — here’s where to go:

https://www.morecheeselesswhiskers.com/podcast/147

I finally get a nice review

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For the past 10 months or so, I’ve been running ads on Amazon for my new 10 Commandments book.

Over the past month or so, it seems like Amazon is finally running out of people who are passionately interested in the connections between con men and pick up artists and Hollywood screenwriters.

To wit:

My sales have gone down… my cost of sale has gone up… and for what seemed like a stretch of months, all I got were carping reviews from disgruntled readers, who I guess should not have been reading the book in the first place.

Fortunately, with the coming of spring, it seems my luck is changing.

A few days ago, I got a nice 5-star review by a hypnotist and copywriter, Manuel Herrera Carillo. Manuel’s review is long but I will reprint it in full, for one because it strokes my ego, for another because it may convince you to give my book an open-minded read. Says Manuel:

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I am a hypnotist and also copywriter. Sometimes the mind thinks that it cannot be impressed or amazed anymore, and a book like this tells you otherwise.

We live in an age of cognitive calluses. We scroll. We skim. We assume we have seen every trick. The brain folds its arms like a bored aristocrat. Then along comes John Bejakovic with a lantern and a grin, and suddenly the room rearranges itself.

This is not a book about scams.

It is a book about gravity.

The gravity of attention.

The gravity of desire.

The gravity that pulls a thought from maybe into yes.

Bejakovic gathers an unlikely council: con men, pickup artists, magicians, salesmen, propagandists, stand up comedians, Oscar winning screenwriters. On paper, they look like strangers forced to share a train compartment. In practice, they are all fluent in the same ancient language: influence.

The ten commandments are not moral instructions. They are psychological pressure points. Each chapter peels back another layer of the theater curtain and shows you the machinery. Not in a clinical tone, not with academic frost, but with stories. And stories are the original hypnosis.

As a hypnotist, I recognized the rhythm immediately. Pattern interrupt. Authority. Framing. Tension. Release. The subtle dance between certainty and suggestion. He does not describe persuasion as manipulation in a dark alley. He describes it as choreography. If you understand timing, you can lead. If you understand expectation, you can bend it.

As a copywriter, I found something even more unsettling.

The principles are transferable.

The same mechanics that allow a magician to misdirect a crowd allow a headline to seize a wandering eye. An so and so and so on.

Combine this principles with AI and you obtain a nuclear bomb of influence.

===

I don’t know how to what Manuel suggests, to combine the principles in my book with AI, in order to obtain a nuclear bomb of influence.

But maybe you can tell me, if you know more about AI than I do, and if you’ve read my book?

And if you know more about AI than me but you haven’t read my book:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Two kinds of starving crowd

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Around age 15, a short time after I had learned to read, I started going through the books of Henry Miller because his books were 1) banned upon publication in the U.S. and 2) had sex in them, and those two things are all the endorsement a 15-year-old boy needs.

Anyways, in one Henry Miller book, I forget which, Henry Miller, who was a kind of joyous social parasite, furiously writes about some cousins of his, who (it being the Great Depression) are starving.

The part that made Miller furious was his cousins’ patiently accepting their fate and subsisting on a leaf of cabbage a day, because, from I can remember, they are too proud or too feckless to ask for help in their starvation.

Henry Miller, who was living in Paris at the time, and was surviving on borrowed food, drinking borrowed wine, and sleeping in borrowed beds, couldn’t understand this.

Whenever he was starving, he would simply beat down his friends’ and enemies’ doors and beg and scream and complain until they fed him.

You’ve probably heard of direct marketing legend Gary Halbert. Halbert used to give talks in which he’d play the “hot dog stand” game with his audience.

“You and I have competing hot dog stands,” Halbert would say. “I’ll give you every advantage you want. I’ll just ask for one thing. Take whatever you want, give me this one thing, and my hot dog stand will whoop yours.”

Halbert’s one thing was a “starving crowd.”

Except, I’d like to suggest to you today there are two kinds of starving crowd.

There’s the “Henry Miller” starving crowd, people who cannot and will not accept their starvation, and who demand that the problem be fixed, and now.

And then there’s the “Cabbage Cousins” starving crowd.

Whether through pride, weakness resulting from starvation, or simply the fact that there’s a pound of bacon stashed somewhere in their house, which they secretly reach for late at night, the “Cabbage Cousins” starving crow accepts what to everybody else looks like unbearable starvation.

And if you wanna play the “hot dog stand” game with me, I’ll give you as big of a starving crowd as you like, provided that it’s the “Cabbage Cousins” kind.

Just give me a few Henry Millers instead, and I bet you I’ll push more hot dogs than you.

(You know what I mean. Don’t give me Henry Miller the broke social parasite. But do give me people who have some money, and a problem, and have shown that they are intent on getting that problem solved, and now.)

Anyways, I’m not sure if this was illuminating. But it is a distinction I had to draw for myself, and I figured it might be useful to you as well.

Maybe you’re wondering how you can know that somebody is intent on getting a problem solved, so you can distinguish the Henry Millers from the Cabbage Cousins in real life.

Fortunately, Gary Halbert has written up the answer for you. In case you’re curious:

https://thegaryhalbertletter.com/newsletters/direct_marketing_to_a_starving_crowd.htm

I’m hiring an assistant

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At the start of this month, on Feb 1, I got on the train and choo-chooed my way from Barcelona down to Valencia.

My motivation was that 1) I like Valencia and 2) for a few days only, Jordan Parker and his wife Diana would be there.

I’d gotten connected to Jordan some months earlier, through channels I can no longer remember.

Jordan and Diana — as far as I can explain it — are a kind of back-end operations and scaling team for creators. They’ve worked with a small but select list of clients, including creators you are sure to know (just check Jordan’s site, parkerlabs.co).

At the end of our time together, Jordan and Diana asked if I have any team members?

No, I said. I don’t wanna hire or manage anybody.

Ever since I quit my office job 12 years ago and started doing stuff for myself, not managing anybody has been a nonnegotiable tenet of what I do and what I want to do.

Jordan and Diana nodded, in a way that I felt was forgiving, but that seemed to suggest that I will learn my lesson in good time.

Maybe I’m just oversensitive. Maybe they didn’t mean anything like that. In any case, it stuck in my head.

When I got back to Barcelona, I started keeping a list of things I could outsource to an assistant.

I told myself I will hire somebody if I can get the list up to 20 items.

Well, just yesterday, I got up to 20. So I’m hiring an assistant. And the first place I will look is here, inside my email list.

Because an email list is not just a way of making sales or getting clients. It’s also a way of solving problems, answering questions cannot get a good answer to, finding partners, getting cool stuff for free, and yes, even hiring people.

First off, let me say who this job is not a good fit for:

If you think of yourself as either a copywriter or online creator, if you have ambitions of being either a copywriter or online creator, if you’ve done copywriting (or online creation?) in the past and found that it’s something you’re good at, chances are excellent you are a terrible fit for this job.

In this case, I suggest you do not apply, even if you might want to take the job simply because you would like to work with me, or because you think you might learn something.

The reason is that, if you are anything like me by temperament or want to do what I do, then you probably get bored quickly, need new projects and stimulation all the time, are not renowned for your diligence and attention to detail.

(Unfun fact: The morning of my trip to Valencia, I wrote a demanding email to my Airbnb host asking when I would get the promised checkin instructions. It turned out I had booked an apartment for March 1, not February 1.)

On the other hand, if you are present, diligent, happy, and get your kicks out of completing tasks rather than being constantly driven to jump to the next thing, then this job I’m offering might be for you.

What’s actually the job to be done?

Well, if you join Bejako Enterprises, your primary responsibilities will include helping me grow my Monetization Mastermind group.

There will be a mix of online research (read: snooping on people), sending and replying to emails using a pretty templated approach, getting people inside the group, and updating some internal documents with their data, etc.

There will be other tasks too (fiddling with my cart software, email software, Skool, all according to processes I will lay out and am doing myself now).

But those will be less frequent.

The stuff with helping me grow my Monetization Mastermind group, in all its repetitive, chirpy, detail-oriented glory, is what you will mainly be engaged in to start, should you apply for and win this position.

What about pay? What about hours? What about vacation time, dental insurance, and team retreats?

I don’t know. I’m winging it here, as I do for most everything. That’s why I need you.

If you are reading this email, if you suspect, based on what I’ve written above, that you might be a fit for this job, then hit reply. Tell me things about you to give me a clear idea that you might be a fit, and why.

If you do that, we can talk in more detail, and we can see if we can come up with a deal that works for both of us.

Will you witness your own Moose Murders?

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Today being February 22, it makes for the 33rd anniversary of the one and only performance of the Moose Murders, said to be the most notorious flop that Broadway has ever seen, which opened and was shut down on the same night, February 22, 1983.

The Moose Murders was a slapstick murder mystery that featured plot elements such as:

* Attempted incest between son and mother

* A coffin, corpse, and a taxidermied moose head on stage for most of the play

* A mummified paraplegic who gets up from his wheelchair to kick a man dressed as a moose in the crotch

A New York Times theater critic who was present at that one and only performance wrote:

“The season’s most stupefying flop — a show so preposterous that it made minor celebrities out of everyone who witnessed it, whether from on stage or in the audience.”

I’m telling you this because, as two time Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman once put it, nobody knows anything.

Goldman was talking about Hollywood, but same applies to Broadway and elsewhere.

A bunch of people, typically trained pros and maybe even talented, putting their maybe-talented heads together… putting in a lot of effort… putting their reputations and emotional well-being on the line… only to produce a complete and embarrassing flop, one that will hopefully soon be forgotten, or worse, that will be remembered for years to come and held up as an example of BAD.

And now, a chance to witness your own Moose Murders?

As I announced in my email yesterday, I will be running a “behind the scenes” auction — auctioning off the offers, sales numbers, DM sales conversations, insights, and private conclusions, present and future, from auctions I will run in the coming weeks and months with partners and for myself.

An auction about auctions? Too meta?

I floated the idea in an email a few days ago to see if there is interest. There seems to be.

But the Moose Murders had 13 preview performances before that fateful February 22 1983 opening.

The writer, the director, and the actors still had no real idea this is gonna be a disaster. Like Goldman said, nobody knows anything, not until the stakes get real.

So let’s see what will happen with my “behind the scenes” auction.

Maybe it will go off well.

In this case, it might be a fun show and maybe you learn something and even get your hands on some private and behind-the-scenes data and insights.

Or maybe it will turn into the Moose Murders of auctions.

In other words, maybe this is your chance to witness a stupefying flop in real time, and become a bit of minor celebrity, and have a story you can tell your Internet Marketing grandchildren for years to come.

My “behind the scenes” auction will have its one and only performance this Tuesday, February 24.

The curtain goes up at 7pm CET/1 pm EST/10am EST.

If you’d like to grab your seat in time for the spectacle and possibly legendary flop:

​https://t.me/+_qLpIllO2IZlM2Q0

Follow up about yesterday’s follow up

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Yesterday, I sent an email telling readers to:

1. Find out who their highest-LTV customer is

2. Reach out to that customer and simply catch up

A couple hours after that email went out, I got a message from a long-time reader who runs a paid newsletter, which she sells via a $2k yearly subscription. The reader wrote:

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What a great idea, John!

I sorted my Google spreadsheet and found 11 current subscribers stood out as paying in the 5 figs, some of whom surprised me.

Sent them each a nice note since no one in [industry] answers the phone, while they do respond to emails.

Every one of them responded within an hour. Several good convos came out of this.

Also reached out to 6 expired subs worth over 5 figs.

One is in between jobs and will sub once they land somewhere.

Two have retired and miss the blog dearly.

One is waiting for the new 2026 budget to open.

One just re-upped their subscription and thanked me for the reminder.

===

That’s-a what I’m a-talking about!

Particularly impressive I thought was the last line, about somebody who had lapsed as a customer, and who ended up making a $2k purchase after being hit with a little reconnect message.

This morning, I took this to heart and created a spreadsheet which I titled “Follow Up Systems.” It’s a more structured way to follow up with people than simply counting on a kind guardian angel to remind me to do it. My spreadsheet has following columns:

* who

* when (eg. email, Skool)

* where

* about what

* next followup date

* next followup content

I noticed that creating this spreadsheet already took a lot of anxiety around the topic of followup out of my head.

Today, I found myself following up with people just so I could fill in the spreadsheet.

Tomorrow, I figure I will add any conversations in there that have stalled in the meantime.

And then in the days that come, I will sort this spreadsheet by the “next followup date” column, and follow up with people I said I should follow up with then.

Maybe it’s worth creating a spreadsheet like this for yourself right now, if you’re looking for clients, referrals, JV partners…

… except, that’s just the structure, the scaffolding.

What about the content? The stuff you actually send to people?

I figure you have a few options:

1. You can wing it each time.

2. You can craft your own system based on what worked and didn’t work for you.

3. Or you can take somebody else’s system that works.

The Notorious Nick Bandy has a system that works, called Ghostbuster Sequence.

It’s a series of 5 mostly templatized/somewhat adaptable followup messages you can send to clients, referrals, JV partners to get them to say yes or no.

Either a yes or a no is ok. What’s not ok is not following up at all or sending one message and treating silence as a reply, and letting it eat away at your little entrepreneur heart.

Btw, when I say Nick’s system works, here’s a recent story he shared about it:

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Last year I set my eyes on an A+ potential partner, he tried ghosting me. I even wrote about him on the sales page for The Ghostbuster Sequence.

I busted the ever-loving ectoplasm out of that ghost…

Totally flipped the script…

Got HIM chasing ME.

But I got busy…went to Singapore…hibernated for a month, chillin’ with my wife and toddler.

I’m a busy and very important guy.

🦥

He kept following up…over and over again.

And today? Just sent over his entire customer and lead database.

The LIFEBLOOD of his business.

THIRTY THOUSAND CUSTOMERS.

30k!

Do you know how hard I’m rubbing my hands together right now? With an average deal size of $20k and up?

To me. Some random guy. I’m dressed like a K-Drama fanboy in my profile picture. You should not trust this dude with your business. But he did.

Why? Because I’m the best copywriter in America?

No.

Because I read this 9-page, poorly formatted PDF and I know that NO isn’t NO.

===

That 9-page PDF Nick read?

It’s Nick’s Ghostbuster Sequence, which he himself rereads and applies.

The Ghostbuster Sequence will set you back a mighty $54. But it could legit be worth tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to you if you only put it to use.

If you wanna get it, and better yet, want to start using it today, in just five minutes from now:

https://bejakovic.com/ghostbuster

17 ideas for charging more

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I wanna write a new book about the art of charging higher prices:

How to overcome your own mental blocks around charging more…

How to make the technical changes that need to be made to your offers and positioning…

How to get people to happily pay you at new and higher prices.

I don’t know yet how I will organize this book. But I do have a bunch of ideas for the content to include.

Since one of my ideas for charging higher prices is to give away stuff for free in certain circumstances, here are 17 ways to charge higher prices, for you to use and profit from today:

#1. Just double your prices right now, without waiting, and then make whatever changes this new price forces you into

Yes, ​it can be done​.

#2. Specialize

People will pay more for an all-black German shepherd than they will for a mottled mixed-breed mutt, even if both ultimately have two ears, four legs, one tail, and the ability to bark.

#3. Sell an outcome, not deliverables

In other words, ​sell the house, not the hammer​.

#4. Deliver a more complete outcome

(I heard this advice from a “sales closer agency” that takes people’s $5k offers and turns them into $50k offers, and makes their clients and themselves tens of millions per year.)

Example: if you sell a live event, then instead of selling just entry to the event and what’s inside, sell a package that includes a hotel room, a flight, transportation from the airport, and maybe dinner at a fancy restaurant with the organizers of the event. And charge a premium on top of each.

#5. Sell a bigger outcome

instead of helping people get a client worth $1k, help them get a client worth $10k. Instead of helping them close one $1k client, help them close three $1k clients.

#6. Guarantee the outcome

My $31k auction went to $31k ​in large part because of the guarantee​.

#7. Sell something scarce vs. something common

You might have something legitimately scarce (“the last five copies ever that will ever be printed”) or you can have something artificially scarce (“only five spots open this entire year”).

#8. Sell yourself vs. selling your solution

If you have an audience and your audience likes you, you can sell yourself first and foremost. This is a special and easy kind of scarcity that nobody can take away from you or challenge you on.

As an example, consider the dozens of “how to write emails” courses that popped up over the past 2-3 years. Many of them sold, and well — to the audiences of the person creating the course, and to nobody else.

#9. Go after the Maverick segment rather than the Goose segment of your market

For more on this distinction, ​check here​. Or ​read this​ to see where I first got the idea.

#10. Go to a richer market

Example: ​people wanting to learn improv comedy vs. trial lawyers​. Who will pay more?

#11. Position yourself as the premier solution

A few examples: ​Rolex, Harvard, Jay Abraham​.

#12. Offer “real-world value” bonuses vs. “valued at” bonuses

The information in this email is “valued at” $10,000, by me personally, based on my extensive research and deep introspection.

Do you think I could use this “valued at $10k” email as a bonus for a legit $10k offer, and make the $10k offer feel effectively free?

No?

You don’t think so?

Well, maybe you will, after I take this information and turn it into a 4-week cohort I start charging $10k for, and start selling over and over to my list.

#13. Ask for future money rather than present money

The most money I ever made while working as a freelance copywriter came to me after I asked a client to let me write emails for them for free, on commission only.

They agreed, and offered me 20% of the profits made.

In this way, it became routine for me to get paid $500 for an email it took me 15 minutes to write, and $1k per email was not unheard of either.

There’s no way the client would have agreed to pay me such rates out of pocket. But out of profit? Different story.

#14. Get your prospects thinking what it costs not to buy rather than what it costs to buy

This is ​a classic lesson from sales trainer David Sandler​.

#15. Reframe or repackage your core offer into something valued more

I once put on an entire $197 training about this… but for just one example, ​take a look here​. (Just don’t write me asking for the offer at that link.)

#16. Charge for things you do for free now.

Research… replying to emails… sales calls…

… who says you have to do them for free?

Charging for such things automatically pushes everything else up also. Your perceived value rises. Plus you now have something you can anchor your other offers to, or offer as a real-world-value bonus.

(On the other hand, it can be better to give things away for free than to discount them. I’ll just leave it at that for now.)

#17. Change format

Books sell for $-$$. A one-evening Zoom training sells for $$-$$$. A course sells for $$$-$$$$. An in-person training sells for $$$$-$$$$$.

Same info, same outcome, but the format affects how people value that info, and what they are willing to pay for it.

… and that makes 17.

Did I miss anything? Do you have extra ideas for how to charge more?

Let me know, and maybe I will include your ideas in my new book, and put your name up in the “acknowledgements” marquee, with lights shining on it, right at the front. Thanks in advance.

Can I pay you $1.5k for sending one email?

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Maybe I can.

(Hat tip to the Notorious Nick Bandy for this idea.)

The background is this:

I’m looking for partners to run an auction for, using their offers and their audience.

(I ran an auction with my own offer and my own audience back in December. It brought in $31k. ​Case study here​.)

Not everybody makes for a great auction partner.

But if you’re working with a client who is spending $200/day on ads… or sending regular emails to a list of a few thousand souls or more… or has a community of a few hundred members or more… they might be a good partner for an auction.

My deal to you is this:

If you have a client who meets one of the criteria above, hit reply. I’ll give you a message to send to your client. The message will make you look good to them, and will put my offer of an auction partnership in a normal-sounding way into their head.

If you so choose, you then send the email to your client…

… and if I end up partnering with your client on an auction, I’ll pay you $1.5k or 10% of my cut of the auction profits, whichever is greater, just for putting me in touch with them.

Plus, if you want, you can ride along with me, and work alongside me to actually carry out this auction, and be privy to the behind-the-scenes offer design, and planning, and selling.

That way, you can can get invaluable experience you can use to run an auction of your own, or with partners, just like I’m doing.

(Of course, if you have no interest in ever running an auction, and you just wanna get paid for sending an email, that’s perfect too.)

So?

Worth hitting reply, and maybe sending one email to your client?

For solopreneurs making $10k+/month

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If you are a solopreneur or service provider making $10k/month or more, here’s an offer you might be interested in:

Less of YOU.

As in, you might be interested in trading in the business you’ve managed to build up so far with sweat and hustle… for a new business that can scale profitably, and that isn’t 100% tied to your energy, your availability, and your brainpower.

This offer, which goes under the name ScaleTribe, is being made by Michal Eisik.

If case you don’t know Michal, this transition is one she has made herself.

Michal started out as a busy and overdelivering freelance copywriter back in 2017.

She has since launched several courses (with hundreds of students)… a paid community… and a marketing agency… all while having not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, but SIX (6!) children.

Plus as she wrote when she joined my Monetization Mastermind community, “Monday and Thursday evenings are sacred for netball.” (I had no idea what netball is. I looked it up. It turns out to be English basketball with a weird hoop.)

The reason Michal can do the course and the community and the agency is because she is smart and works hard, but also because she has formed a small but dedicated team of 5 people around her, and she has developed systems to actually get those people to deliver results that meet her standards.

(Smart and hard-working alone would not give her time enough to do a fraction of what she does, and still have time for 6 kids and twice-a-week netball.)

Michal ran the first ScaleTribe cohort last year, with 30 people — copywriters, owners of design agencies, brand experts, creative directors, and founders. Here are some of their experiences:

#1. “Before joining ScaleTribe, I was working myself to the bone, overloaded with projects, and trying to stay on top of every detail. They helped me finally hire VAs and get two digital courses up and running. Most of all, they changed the way I operate and view my business.”

#2. “ScaleTribe gave me everything I was hoping for. I’ve been able to use my time so much more efficiently by outsourcing and delegating work which doesn’t require my level of skill or knowledge.”

#3. “Being part of a group of like-minded business owners navigating similar challenges was incredibly grounding. But the biggest shift for me was in management: I gained real structure and direction.”

#4. “…actually got me to take action and refine valuable processes.”

#5. “It pushed me to finally do things I’d been thinking about for ages, things I’d watched others do but never got around to myself.”

Michal is launching ScaleTribe for the second-ever cohort next week (gulp, very soon).

It’s a big purchase and a big decision. I don’t expect you to make up your mind now or to buy based on this short email.

If you are interested, you can get more details on the following page:

https://bejakovic.com/scaletribe

… and Michal will also be hosting a webinar about ScaleTribe next Tuesday at 2pm EST, where you can get to meet her and see if you vibe with her. If you wanna register for that:

https://bejakovic.com/michalwebinar

I’m now offering a $5 typo bounty

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Ever since I published my most recent book, “10 Commandments of Con Men, Pick Up Artists, Magicians, etcetera” last May, I have been running ads on Amazon to promote it.

Inevitably, whenever I start to stray far afield from the homey little village that is my email newsletter audience, and into the dark woods and wastelands of the cold traffic Internet, I find that people are not as kind as forgiving as they are back home. For example, here is a new 3-star review of my book:

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meh… Reads like advertising copy… Oh wait it is, at the end of the book he is asking you to subscribe to his email list. save your money and go to the source material. At one point he says he is using a 24-word title to stand out… to me it looks more like key-word packing.

Oh yes… there are typos, repeated lines, bad formatting, bad book layout, inconsistent spelling of peoples names… Seriously dude, proofread your work.

===

I went on an emotional rollercoaster when I saw this review.

First, anything at 3 stars or below hurts my fragile ego.

But then my ego bounced back when seeing that this review really has nothing to say about the content of my book, meaning the ideas or even the writing inside. It seems to be solely focused on finding things to pick at, like typos.

As for those, I did proofread my book multiple times. I caught some typos, but not all. I then had a number of beta-testers of the book proofread the book, and they caught some more. But it’s certainly possible that some typos snuck through.

So let me take a page from Joe Sugarman’s book, and make you a deal:

If you find a typo in my new 10 Commandments book, write me to tell me about it, and I’ll PayPal you $5. ($5 will cover the cost of the book if you’re getting it on Kindle.)

The only thing is, I will only reward the first person to find a given typo, and I’ll be documenting the reported typos in ​this Google Doc​. The sooner you send me your caught typo, the more likely you are to get a typo bounty.

If you have my book already, maybe reread it and see if you can catch me?

And if you don’t have my book, maybe get it now and give it a read?

Beyond just trying to get the spelling and formatting right, I put a lot of work into the ideas in this book, and into finding interesting stories to illustrate those ideas.

To prove that, here are some more favorable reviews, many of them, though not all, from folks closer to home, meaning this email newsletter:

#1. “The information John shares is invaluable for both your personal life and your professional life…especially if that professional life involves influencing others.”

#2. “This book seriously is a must read as you will understand at a deeper level human nature.”

#3. “Full of practical advice, information and life-changing wisdom.”

#4. “It’s got new and useful ways to look at sales and influence, that I’ve been testing and enjoying.”

#5. “I see it becoming one of those books I read at least once a year. It’s that good!”

#6. “I’ve read a lot of books in this space and this is one of my favorites. He skips over the common knowledge and dives into really eye opening insights.”

#7. “If the human mind intrigues you, then read this brilliant little book by John Bejakovic.”

For more info, or if you need a copy:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments