Business Ideas

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.

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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.

I’m affordable = I wanna steal your money

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I read a “serves you right” story yesterday:

News broke a few days ago that the Ledger X, a specific and popular make of crypto wallet, a physical device meant to store your bitcoins, memecoins, and shitcoins, was compromised somewhere along the supply chain.

The wallets were tampered with and a little mechanism was added, which transmits your crypto secrets to somebody out there in this dark world and wide, and drains all the crypto that you were foolish enough to store in the Ledger X.

I say foolish enough because, according to the article I read:

“Tampered devices were available for nearly half the price of the original hardware.”

Point being, you don’t want to buy for cheap, because you get what you pay for.

Likewise, you don’t want to sell for cheap, because savvy customers, the one you want to have for the long term, know you get what you pay for, and will therefore avoid cheap.

And before you come at me with your counterexamples of things that were cheap but good, or pricey but bad — yes. This rule of thumb of thumb might not be 100% accurate. But in the words of Travis Sago, it is 100% useful.

I’m telling you all this because in my Daily Email House community, Community Shogun Chris Dyson asked, “What’s the ONE part of your process your customers seem to struggle with the most?”

I made a list of four different things that I think my customers struggle. #2 on my list was, “They are reluctant to raise their prices and frequently undercharge.”

Like I said, you don’t want to sell for cheap. Ideally, that means you raise your prices, up to and even including being the most expensive in your niche.

However, if you are reluctant to do that yet, then at least stop selling yourself as being cheap.

Yes, you can charge less than the going rate if you must. But give it another reason than “because I’m affordable” — otherwise smart customers will suspect you are actually trying to steal their money in some secret way, like the half-price crypto wallet did and does.

Good news is, there are dozens of possible justifications you can give for charging a lower rate than the rest of the market. If you wanna see some of them:

https://www.skool.com/daily-email-house/100-contest-reasons-to-be-cheap

They trust you and your process… so WHY don’t they buy?

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If you sell proven advice in the form of courses or coaching, but you’re finding it hard to convince people to buy, and even harder to get them to actually do what you say, then read on:

Chris Dyson has 25 years of 1-1 sales experience, including over email and DM.

For reasons that are beyond me (because Chris makes a lot of money doing sales), right now he is also teaching a few folks how to do what he does. Except, how do you teach people to make sales and actually get results? Because as Chris put it:

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Let’s be honest, doing something new is uncomfortable. You have to go through that awkward stage where you’re rubbish at something before you get any good at it (thanks dunning Kruger)

And if your process involves putting yourself out there, talking to strangers or risking rejection?

Good luck 😂

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Turns out, Chris has cracked the code (metaphorically speaking, because there was no encryption involved here), for getting people to actually implement and own the skills of 1-1 sales, which so many people feel fear and even aversion to.

And just so we’re clear:

This isn’t about teaching people sales. This is about getting customers and clients results, and getting them onboard for the process of getting results.

Chris wrote up a detailed post about how he’s done it in my Daily Email House community, under the title, “They trust you and your process… so WHY don’t they buy?”.

If you sell information or do coaching, but people are not implementing what you teach and therefore are not getting results, even with all the templates and checklists and video lessons and AI tools you might have given them..

… or better yet, if they are not even buying from you to begin with, even though they trust you and believe in your process, because they are one step ahead and know that they won’t implement and won’t get results if they do buy…

… then reading Chris’s case study, and thinking about how you might do something similar in structure, could make all the difference you need to both make sales now and in the future, thanks to all the amazing results your customers will be getting.

If you’re curious, here’s where to go:

https://www.skool.com/daily-email-house/they-trust-you-and-your-process-so-why-dont-they-buy

Advice I’ve given people

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Yesterday, I got on two coaching-like calls.

These calls were coaching-like because they are a mix of coaching and partnerships. I have agreements with both of the folks I talked to yesterday to help them reach an outcome, and I have an incentive in doing so.

These are not weekly calls, but on demand.

I don’t have to whip the guys, or shame them, or beg them to take action.

Instead, I give them my suggestions, they go off and do, and at some point in the future we reconvene and talk next steps. The guys are making progress with a minimum of wasted time and effort for either side. It’s a wonderful system.

Anyway, I have long taken to heart Sean D’Souza’s idea that, if you wanna solve your own problems, go solve somebody else’s. Meaning, we all give other people better advice than we can give ourselves.

So give other people advice, write it down, and then think about how to apply the same yourself.

Here’s some of the advice I gave my two coaching/partnership guys yesterday:

* Feed the recordings of your intensives/coaching calls to an LLM, extract all the advice you’ve given, and turn it into a lead magnet, ebook, or sellable course. This can also become a partnership asset you give to someone who already has the attention of your ideal audience so they send you more such clients.

* Stop trying to help people get started. People who haven’t started, haven’t started for a reason.

* Copy the proven group-coaching model: recorded training (videos + Google Docs), a Skool group for questions, weekly or biweekly hot seats that double as new content. Clean up your existing call transcripts into SOPs/how-to docs as the course content. Price it at $3k/$5k/$8k per year instead of as a monthly subscription.

This is advice I will be applying myself.

One of the guys I talked to yesterday has a sizeable email list. At the start of this year, he was only making about 30 cents per subscriber each month.

I have been coaching/partnering with him for the past 7 or so months, and each of the past three months he has made $1/subscriber or more.

So I will take the advice I’ve given him to get him that result and package that advice up, or rather, get Claude to package it up. I will then put it in front of my list… in front of other people’s lists… in front of the entire Wall Street Journal readership (well maybe not, but I will probably run cold traffic to it).

I’m also thinking of creating a group-coaching layer to my Skool group, like I advised the other guy yesterday. This group coaching would be there to help folks who have email lists monetize their list better, if for any reason it’s not a fit for us to do the kind of 1-1 partnership/coaching I am doing with the guys I talked to yesterday.

And finally, I’ve learned, but I have to keep relearning, to stop trying to help people get started.

People who haven’t started have their own reasons for not starting — whether that’s the timing is bad, or it’s a conflict with their identity, or they simply have better options and don’t want to put in the effort it would take.

Clearly, I’m not saying that everybody who hasn’t started will never get started. Saying that would be kind of… dumb. But people get started for their own reasons, in their own time.

If you haven’t yet gotten started sending daily emails and building a little personal brand online, which can support you through thick and thicker, then get started, in your own time.

Maybe that’s today, or maybe not.

Like I’ve written recently, it takes several ingredients to make a little daily email business work, among them a small audience, good offers you can promote, and of course the emails themselves.

If you’re just getting started today, then my advice is to start with the emails.

I say that because it’s the way I did it and I know it to work, and also because writing emails can get you a lot of the way to creating an offer, and it can even slowly but steadily build your list, via word-of-mouth or search traffic if you have a public email archive.

If you wanna get started today building your own little personal empire, here’s my stream of daily advice on what to put in your daily email to keep it both interesting for your readers and valuable for you:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Why haven’t course creators been told these facts?

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Have you tried to sell at least one course since 1947? Then here is the full, uncensored story of what it takes to make $100,000-$1,000,000+ in course sales… how you can avoid the pitfalls that swallow up and trap 86% of course creators… and live the 4-hour workweek you’ve dreamed of, in a hammock, by the beach, a piña colada with a little umbrella in your hand!

Today, while attempting to write you an entirely different email, I came across an article, written by Claude, and published earlier this year by the people at Kajabi.

Kajabi, as you might know, is a platform for hosting your courses, along with a shopping cart, and a bunch of other integrated tools for course creators.

Several people I know and have mentioned repeatedly in this newsletter are using Kajabi, among them Kieran Drew, Parker Worth, and Travis Sago.

Kajabi is in a unique position because 1) appeals to course creators 2) has info on the sales those course creators make.

Kajabi has been in business since 2010, and according to the article I read, its users have made more than $11.7 billion selling their knowledge and expertise.

Am I getting you a little warm here? A little curious?

Because, without revealing any private info, Kajabi crunched the numbers on their customers and found the truth about course creators, which Big Course has been hiding from you. Here are the vast, drear, naked facts:

* RAMPANT INEQUALITY: The top 1% of course creators collect 44.3% of everything ever earned on Kajabi. (That’s $5.18 billion.)

* COURSE CREATING MILLIONAIRES: Among those course creators who manage to sell even one copy of their course, 1 out of 40 managed to sell $1 million dollars’ worth or more.

* ONGOING EXPLOITATION: 53.8% of all course creator earnings arrived on a customer’s second purchase from a course creator, or their third, or their tenth.

Based on such facts, Kajabi gives the following recommendations to those course creators who want to succeed, and even become millionaires:

“The gap between the typical expert [lifetime earnings: $3,653] and the six-figure expert [14% of those who manage to sell anything at all] comes down to three measurable behaviors: customers who buy again, a catalog deeper than one offer, and enough months in the game for both to compound.”

In less Claude-y language, more offers… more followup with previous buyers… and time, blessed time.

You’ve already got time passing. No need to do anything there.

More followup with previous buyers is what daily emails are for. If you want my help there, you can find it here: https://bejakovic.com/deh

And as for offers:

I’m thinking about running a small workshop, limited to a few people, to help you create more offers, including $1k+ offers, without having to create entirely new suites of products or services.

If such a workshop is something you’d be interested in, then reply to this email, because your interest (or disinterest) will determine whether this workshop happens, or whether my offer-creation secrets go back to the attic, among my collection of dusty puppets and that one skeleton I keep meaning to get rid of.

10 things you need for email success

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A few days ago, in my Daily Email House community, copywriter Svet Dimitrov asked the members:

“what’s stopping you from emailing daily?”

I figure it could be a buncha different stuff, for a buncha different people. The situation is summarized by the quote, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

This morning, I sat down and wrote up a list of 10 things I think it takes to have success with an email list, based on what I’ve seen in 8+ years of running this newsletter.

I was pleasantly surprised by my own list.

You can find it at the link below, either so can feel good about the things you already have that you need to uscceed… or so you figure out what you don’t have yet, and so you can find a way to get it, if you so choose. Here’s the link:

https://www.skool.com/daily-email-house/10-things-you-need-for-email-success