Business Ideas

One weird trick to grow your paid community

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“One weird trick”… yes, you got me. That’s the trick. In more detail:

I’ve been following a guy online named Hernan Vazquez. Hernan is a media buyer — he used to run ads for big big-name Internet marketers like Frank Kern and Grant Cardone.

Says Hernan, once upon a time, when he was working with Frank Kern, Frank was trying to sell his $397/month Inner Circle community.

It was a good offer and people inside Frank’s audience eagerly bought it.

But Frank and Hernan couldn’t send cold traffic to this offer. People are reluctant to sign up to be debited by you each month, particularly at $397 per month. If people don’t know you at all, that barrier is too great. Running ads to try to convince strangers otherwise wasn’t economical.

So what to do?

Like I promised you, “one weird trick.”

Specifically, the solution was to sell a low-ticket front-end offer that just promises to solve one specific problem in some exciting new way. After people buy that, you also offer them the paid community as a natural add-on.

Says Hernan, that little bit of psychological commitment — they already bought something from you — makes the continuity sale a million times easier.

And even if people don’t buy your paid community offer right away, you now have them on your email list, plus they’ve bought something from you already, so you can make them the same paid community offer regularly, and they will be more likely to take you up on it at some point down the line.

In Frank Kern’s case, this low-ticket funnel resulted in the Inner Circle membership growing to over 1,200 subscribers, or around $500,000 per month, or $6,000,000 per year.

Plus Frank’s list grew by tens of thousands of buyers, with almost all the ad cost recouped on day zero. The majority of those tens of thousands of buyers might not have joined the paid community but many bought other stuff down the line.

So there you go. One weird trick. Except…

… maybe you are such a grizzled direct response veteran that to you this trick is not WEIRD or not WEIRD ENOUGH.

Maybe you are super familiar with this unweird trick.

In which case, the only thing I would ask is, have you actually used this approach to grow your own paid community or subscription offer?

If not, then I have one more weird trick to grow your paid community. That one weird trick is to invest in Nick Bandy’s Lazy Ad Funnel offer, which Nick is offering until the end of today at a $1,000 savings.

Nick has been running several low-ticket ad funnels to grow his list, including one that’s been bringing in buyers day after day for a year and half now. He has then sold these people various paid community and continuity offers (both his own and as an affiliate), as well as selling them other one-time offers.

Nick is now offering to show you how to create such a Lazy Ad Funnel for yourself as well, with minimal ongoing work, hence the “Lazy” in the “Lazy Ad Funnel”.

Nick is even guaranteeing to personally troubleshoot your funnel and tell you exactly what to fix, change, or stop doing in order to get your offer live.

Again, this offer, guarantee included, disappears tonight, and the price jumps by $1,000. For more info before it vanishes:

https://bejakovic.com/lazy-way

My somewhat insane daily email history

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This morning, I received a heaven-sent question from a long-time reader and customer, a freelance copywriter who also has an email list:

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Hey man,

Question:

Did you do daily email from the start?

I know I “need” to and want to, but something’s holding me back (I do 3x/week now)

Probably because I don’t have a consistent new lead flow

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My somewhat insane daily emailing history goes like this:

1. Once upon a time, circa 2016, I started a blog in a non-marketing niche (alternative health).

2. I had an email list on the back of that blog. I started emailing people on that list 2x per week, pretty much in the same style that you’re reading now.

3. Then at some point (early 2017) I gave myself a challenge to write daily emails about marketing for 28 days straight. I did it. I liked it. And so naturally, challenge complete, I dropped it.

4. Around the summer of 2018, I started writing emails about marketing again, kind of randomly, maybe a few times a week, maybe once every few weeks (you can still find these early emails archived on my site).

5. In November 2018, after hearing for the 1,001st time about the value and importance of daily emails as a mechanism to achieving anything you want in life, I finally started writing daily emails about marketing. I’ve stuck with it ever since.

For the record, I had… 0 subscribers when I started doing daily emails regularly in 2018.

That’s why I say it has been a somewhat insane daily emailing history.

I was writing and sending daily emails for a good year without almost anybody reading (even after a year I only had something like 100 subscribers).

All in all, I was emailing for about 3 years without having made a single offer to or a single dollar from my email list.

Why would anybody be this stubborn and foolish?

I have a few things to say in my defense:

For one thing, I was selling myself as an email copywriter at the time. I figured I could use the practice, and create a portfolio that nobody could ever argue with.

For another thing, I was still learning a lot about copywriting and marketing. Daily emails allowed me both to write about what I was learning, and to put it into practice.

Third thing, in Eric Hoffer’s words:

“There is apparently an irremediable insecurity at the core of every intellectual, be he noncreative or creative. Even the most gifted and prolific seem to live a life of eternal self-doubting and have to prove their worth anew each day.”

I am not an intellectual, but I found myself in this quote. I definitely feel the need to prove my worth anew each day.

Maybe you are not as insecure as I am. Maybe you are more practical. Maybe you need some real and tangible benefit in order to be able to convince yourself to email daily and to thus achieve anything you want in life.

If so, like my reader above, you probably need consistent lead flow to justify writing daily and committing yourself to your list.

If you feel you “need” and even want to commit fully to your email list, but something is holding you back, then I have a solution to that.

A new solution.

A solution that can give you consistent new lead flow, starting in just a couple days from now if you so choose, with minimal ongoing work or commitment. This can justify help you justify emailing daily, which can then lead to income, stability, and opportunities you cannot imagine right now.

For more info on this new solution:

https://bejakovic.com/lazy-way

How to easily double, triple, even quadruple your course earnings

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Last night, I started promoting an offer I don’t normally promote, called 3rd Conversion, about how to get people to consume and implement your courses and trainings, with the outcome of turning one-time course buyers into long-term customers and evangelists.

This morning, I got a note about that from Copy Mechanic Pete Reginella, who joined 3rd Conversion when I first ran it as a live training. Pete is a copywriter and email marketer who has written copy for 2M-subscriber and 8-figure businesses. He also has a personal brand online that he is building up. Said Pete:

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Hey, John. Believe it or not, I recently ran a workshop on how to use Substack to grow your email list.

The core promise was: “How to easily double, triple, even quadruple your earnings per Substack subscriber”

Anyways…

The one thing I did before writing the content for the workshop was referring to your 3rd conversion workshop along with the companion guide you gave along with it.

I ran the first version for free, just to get it done, and then the plan was to get feedback and charge for it later.

I originally thought to charge about $50 for it…

But after direct feedback from A-List copywriter, Lorrie Morgan (who was on the call taking notes the whole time)…

I realized I should charge close to 4X that amount.

And I can thank all that because of what I learned from you.

Appreciate you, dude…

And yes, feel free to use the above to promote this if you like.

===

Just in case you are distracted by a howling dog and a crying baby and TikTok blaring on your phone and CNN on your TV, all at the same time as you’re trying to read my email…

… let me reiterate the part of Pete’s message that’s key for my message today:

Make your course content cool and fun, by applying the strategies I reveal inside 3rd Conversion.

Do this, and you will feel good about quadrupling the price over what you originally planned for your course, and your audience will enthusiastically back you for it. At least that’s how it went for Pete.

And if you quadruple the price for a good course that people want, you are likely to easily double, triple, or even quadruple your course earnings. Course prices are very elastic, assuming people actually want what you’re selling in the first place.

Like I said, I’m currently promoting 3rd Conversion during a very tight time window. I am making the following offer good for 36 hours only:

You can get 3rd Conversion for just $97 today, and another $100 in one month’s time. That’s as attractive a deal as I can make to you today, while still respecting people like Pete who have bought 3rd Conversion in the past.

This offer is good until tomorrow, Thursday at 11:15 pm PST.

If you’d like to easily double, triple, even quadruple your course earnings with the help of 3rd Conversion, you can get started here:

https://bejakovic.com/academy/3rd-conversion

Cheap is bad, free on the other hand…

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Last year, I read a book called Veeck as in Wreck, by Bill Veeck, who was one of the most innovative and influential owners of a major league baseball team in the history of the sport.

Veeck was a born promoter and an intuitive salesman.

He managed to sell out game after game by introducing spectacles (fireworks, before any other baseball teams had ’em), schemes (a dwarf playing as designated hitter), and creative giveaways (live lobsters, a horse). But Veeck drew the following line in the sand:

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I do not believe in giving away tickets. Tickets are the one thing I have to sell. To give them away is to cheapen the product I am selling. If an organization writes me for tickets to auction off as part of a fund-raising program, I’ll send a cash donation instead. If they write for a couple of tickets to give away as a door prize, I’ll send something that will serve the purpose at least as well. No tickets.

I’ll take care of 25,000 at a clip as our guests, yes. I’ll give large groups of tickets to organizations like the Boy Scouts, yes. But always to a particular group for a particular reason at a particular time. Because here the effect is precisely opposite. When a whole group is given tickets, the day at the park becomes a great event to be anticipated and remembered.

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Maybe you’re not as intuitive as Veeck, and cannot see quite why it’s ok to give away 25,000 tickets but not to give away a couple tickets.

Whatever. To me that’s not the point of the above.

The point to me is Veeck’s underlying motivation. On the one hand, “don’t cheapen the product.” On the other hand, make whatever it is you are offering a “great event to be anticipated and remembered.”

In other words, sell things based on their merit, on the value they deliver, not the fact that they are cheap.

Ironically — I read this somewhere but I cannot remember where — it can better to give away something than to cheapen it by discounting. Particularly, if you’re not limited like Veeck, and have more than one thing you could sell.

Such is my situation.

I am doing a live presentation next week about monetizing an email list, built around the case study of a list owner I’ve recently helped to roughly 3x his average monthly earnings from his list.

During that presentation, I will be giving away some valuable ideas, and a bit of my time.

That’s what I’m willing to give away for free.

On the other hand, I am only willing to sell my customized advice, my own direct help and availability, and my attention to you and your problems and unique challenges.

I am looking to get qualified leads for those things I do sell, and so I don’t mind making my presentation free, and even giving away some valuable ideas. If you want to get them:

https://bejakovic.com/monetization-case-study/

Two excellent reasons to get on Csaba Borzasi’s list today

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Last month, I interviewed email marketer and copywriter Csaba Borzasi. That was part of a new initiative I have to do regular interviews with people who have email lists of 5k+ subscribers.

As I found out during that interview, Csaba:

– Has a list of approximately 5,250 subscribers (pruned regularly from a much bigger list, since much of Csaba’s list growth comes from cold traffic)

– Makes on average $15,000-$25,000 per month from his list

– Works on average 2-3 hours a day on his business

– Went through a personal rough patch during this summer, didn’t really send many broadcast emails during the month of July (autoresponders were working), and still made $10,000 for the month

The universe of people who write daily emails and make a living from it is, in my experience, filled with flighty and impulsive people.

(Maybe that has been my experience because I am myself a flighty and impulsive person, though I have found ways of correcting and covering for that over the years.)

Flightiness and impulsivity have their benefits — they can be charming characteristics, particularly in a 4-year-old child — but they also have their downsides. Bad decisions made… instability… a ceiling to how high you can go, even if you want to go higher.

Csaba, even though he writes (almost) daily emails and makes a good living from it, is not a flighty or impulsive person. Quite the contrary. He is a dedicated and systematic person. His results show it. His offers show it. In fact, everything about his business and his marketing, his positioning, and his lead generation, shows it.

If you’re on my list but not on Csaba’s list, I encourage you to get on his list, for two excellent reasons.

Not only because you can see how Csaba does his marketing, and how he makes steady and good money from his list, even without writing emails all that time… not only because you can learn directly from him and profit from his offers… but because I believe his vibe and approach are a valuable complement to the flighty and impulsive approaches of people like me.

Call that “excellent reason number one.”

Excellent reason number two is that Csaba has prepared a free gift aka bribe to entice you onto his list.

I will talk more about that free gift tomorrow, and sell it on its own merits. For now, I will simply point out:

1. This free gift has a valuable and deliberate marketing system built into it (again, more on this tomorrow)

2. This free gift is delivered in a clever and systematic way. It is not information, but a living, breathing, feeling organism that Csaba has created, much like Dr. Frankenstein, to serve you and only you. It is worth unleashing into action even if you don’t want its services directly, just to see what a cool 2026 lead magnet can actually be like.

To get on Csaba’s list, and to get access to his valuable, deliberate, and clever free gift for you:

https://bejakovic.com/csaba

How to teach sg if you’re not an expert

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Yesterday, I sent a DM to an expert I know:

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Hey [firstname]

Could we talk about me sending you some money on the regular?

I’m hoping I could license one of your things to teach

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The background is:

I’ve gone through a training this guy has. I learned a valuable, named process he has. I have been using it since myself.

But his named process is not my thing. I didn’t invent it. I can’t claim I contributed enough to make it my own in any way. What’s more, I really don’t have any proof that it’s been effective for me personally.

I could of course just take somebody else’s stuff and teach it as if it were my own.

Plenty of people do this.

But it opens you up to accusations of being a hack, a copycat, a charlatan.

Not only that, but it makes selling hard. If a tree falls in the woods, but you don’t have a testimonial to prove it, did the tree really fall? The same with teaching ideas that you claim are valuable but cannot back up with personal or customer case studies.

That’s why I did what I did.

Much better than being called a charlatan, or not making any sales, in my mind, is to go to the expert who invented sg and offer to license his process/expertise, so I can teach it, with his full endorsement and blessing, while being able to say, “I got this directly from expert ABC, who has gotten results DEF with it.”

You can do the same. There’s nothing stopping you from having an endless amount of valuable stuff to teach, and proof to back it up, even if you’re not an expert on it.

Of course, if you are an expert on some things, the way I am on some things, this is still a great way to pad out what you can teach, and create new offers easily, and get new and valuable results for the people who pay you money.

Btw, the expert I wrote to yesterday suggested we get on a call immediately (offering to send people money regularly will do that). So we got on a call, and we agreed to the details within about 7 minutes. The deal is, I don’t have to pay him anything up front, but just a share of what I will make. So I will be teaching his process, prolly inside a workshop I put on some time soon.

That’s all I got for you right now.

I spent much of my time today planning out how to proceed with the “$1/subscriber” promise that I started teasing yesterday. More on that soon. If you missed yesterday’s missive:

https://bejakovic.com/talk-low-and-talk-slow/

“Talk low and talk slow”

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Lately I’ve been watching a lot of “behind the scenes” documentaries about various movies I have seen and liked.

That’s how I saw an interview a few days ago with actor Michael Caine, who you are most likely to know as Alfred from the Chris Nolan Batman movies, but who really has quite an acting career behind him.

In the interview I saw, Michael Caine was talking about the early days of that career, back in the 1960s, when he first became a star and was getting a lot of publicity.

One day during that time, Caine was sitting in the Beverly Hills Hotel lobby, when who walks by, dressed up in full cowboy gear, coming from a movie shoot, but the biggest movie star of the day, John Wayne.

John Wayne spots Michael Caine. And spurs jangling, leaning to the side, John Wayne comes over.

“Kid,” he says.

“Yes, Mr Wayne?”

“I just got a piece of advice for you. I see you’re doing well. If you wanna last long in this business… talk low and talk slow. It’s stood me in good stead. Goodbye kid.”

Maybe you’re smarter than I am, and can read some sort of useful meaning in John Wayne’s piece of advice. To me it just sounds like one of those cryptic things that people say to sound profound, maybe to others as well as to themselves. It doesn’t hurt that it rhymes.

My point for you today is that you can ask people what the secret to their long-lasting success is. Odds are fair that you will get back some version of “talk low and talk slow.”

Fact is, most people cannot pinpoint what their success comes down to, or won’t share. And even if they can and will, odds are still fair that what’s brought them success won’t work for anyone else, and in particular, won’t work for you.

That’s why I think it’s better to ask people who have managed to help others succeed, and not just had success themselves.

I am telling you that as a blatant pre-pitch for the promotional extravaganza I’m about to embark on.

As I mentioned in a recent email, I have for the past 6 months been advising the owner of a sizable email list, who only used to make about $0.30 per email subscriber month after month, and who wrote me once to say that $1/subscriber per month would be a great result for him.

I started giving him advice. He started applying my advice. After a few months, he started making $1/subscriber, first one month, then two months, and now three months in a row.

How?

Well, that’s what I’m gonna be promoting over the coming days.

As for today, I can tell you the first thing this list owner and I agreed on, and the first change he made to his email marketing. was to start emailing daily.

You’ve probably heard me give that advice before. That’s because it’s foundational. The sooner you start, the sooner results will come.

If you want to start seeing results sooner rather than later, and you want my help starting a daily email habit today:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

$100 contest conclusions

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Earlier this week, I ran a Battle Royale-style contest inside my Daily Email House community:

I asked House members to come up with public justifications for charging less than they could, as opposed to saying, “I’m just very affordable!” The last contestant standing (in a pool of blood and gore) would win a grand prize of $100.

The results of the contest:

112 comments in a little over 24 hours (a number of those comments were mine, but still)…

… a really comprehensive list of “reasons to be cheap,” which I then collected and grouped inside a “Reasons To Be Cheap Playbook” and put in the course area…

… and most important, an increased chance that each of the House members who thought about this topic, and participated in the contest, and contributed their own ideas will remember all this the next time they are pricing their products or services. That means they are likely to do a better job with their next offer… sell more of it… and preserve or improve their standing instead of compromising it.

I recently went through an old training by marketer Travis Sago. As a throwaway, Travis said the following about groups:

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The Facebook group [this training is so old that it was before Skool was invented] is not there for a sense of community. This is the biggest thing I learned this year. The Facebook group is there for your leadership.

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I’m telling you all this in case you yourself run a group, whether on Facebook or on Skool or somewhere else. Consider Travis’s insight above, that your group is about your leadership and not a sense of community. Try this idea on for size, and see if it changes how you interact with your members and run things in your group.

I can tell you I’ve started doing this consciously, and will be doing more of it in the future.

One way is via more contests like the above.

The goal is not just to throw away money in the hope of getting a bunch of comments or group “engagement.”

The goal is to gradually get more House members results — new and different kinds of money-making promos, offers that sell at a price point you couldn’t imagine, list growth strategies that get buyers into your world.

I don’t mind paying $100 here and there to motivate people to participate, take the first steps to getting big results, and inspire others, because — well, I’ve got self-serving reasons up my sleeves. But my self-interest and your self-interest can be aligned, and that’s what I’m working on.

If you’d like to be a member of Daily Email House when the next Battle Royale contest goes down, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/house

I help The Copy Nerd pay for his house

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A few weeks ago, I ran a promo for a new offer by Vasilis Apostolou, who styles himself online as The Copy Nerd. I wrote a lot about Vasilis in those emails, but in a nutshell, the man is:

* A former Agora copywriter

* Now an in-house copywriter at Advanced Bionutritionals, a big direct-response supplement company

* In a small and exclusive group of “copy cubs” that gets to be directly mentored by the reclusive A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos, somebody I have personally learned the most from, both directly and indirectly, when it comes to copywriting

* Himself mentoring a small group of younger copywriters

Anyway, Vasilis put together an offer based on a part of his own working process, which he called Million Dollar Hook Machine. I gave Vasilis some tips and advice about positioning and pricing this offer. I then promoted it to my list.

It went well.

After the promo was over, Vasilis wrote up the the details of how well it went, along with his conclusions, in a post in my Daily Email House community, under the headline, “John helps pay for my house.”

I am reproducing Vasilis’s post as-is below, both because it is flattering to me, and because it might be genuinely useful to you too. Says Vasilis:

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Less than two months ago, I started my email list.

And less than two weeks ago, I released my first offer.

I promoted it to my list, and John promoted it to his list as an affiliate.

In case you read John’s email from the other day, we sold about $7.5k worth of courses through his promotion.

Half goes to John. Half goes to my (wife’s) pocket.

I also sold about $2.5k directly to my own list, which had only 70-something people on it.

So in total, I made about $6k.

Not bad for something I’m doing part time. (Daily emails take less than 10 hours per week. Putting together the offer took about 20 hours over a few weeks.)

By the way, $6k is enough to pay my rent for a few months.

Which means the promise of the “Daily Email House” is true.

At least for the next few months.

And it’ll probably stay true for as long as I keep emailing my list and making offers, which I plan to do.

I’m writing this post to thank John for a few things, on top of being my first and only affiliate.

1. He convinced me to start my list

It was John’s insistence, through his daily emails, that finally made me start one.

And already, that tiny list has paid my rent for a few months.

It also got me a job offer.

(I said no because I’m not interested in getting a job, but it’s still proof that daily emails create opportunities you wouldn’t have otherwise.)

And I’m pretty sure that when I have time to offer consulting and mentoring again, I’ll have people interested in those too.

2. He made me charge more

Initially, I wanted to sell my offer for $47 or less.

This was despite people who had seen it telling me it was worth thousands of dollars.

And John insisted I should charge more.

Eventually, I settled on $297, which I think is a sweet spot for courses/tools.

Had I sold my offer for $47, the launch would have made me a fraction of what it did.

3. He gave me an affiliate case study

After this launch, I can now approach other potential affiliates and say:

“John Bejakovic promoted this offer to his list and generated $7.5k in sales.”

That’s a hell of a lot stronger than “wanna promote my course?”

So thank you, John.

For the affiliate sales, obviously.

But even more for repeatedly telling people to start a list, email it every day, make offers, and charge enough for what they sell.

===

A few things I’d like to highlight:

1. Vasilis has a list of 70 people, and yet he made $2.5k from his list directly during this launch. That’s $35 per subscriber. Those numbers won’t stay that high as his list grows but… damn.

2. He hadn’t been mailing for years before making this offer, but less than two months.

3. He basically packaged up a bit of his own daily work process, put that into a shiny box, slapped a sexy name on it, and sold it.

If you have an email list of marketers or copywriters and you want to promote Vasilis’s offer, you can write him at vasilis@thecopynerd.com. He says he’s planning to relaunch his Million Dollar Hook Machine sometime this month.

And if you have valuable skills and a work process that you could package up into an offer, and a list, however small, then write me at john@bejakovic.com. I’d like to help you have a dramatically more successful offer launch, and maybe even promote your offer myself to my list.