Business Models

The largest copywriter in the Netherlands gives me his endorsement

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Comes a message from Robin Timmers, whose website bills him as the “grootste copywriter van Nederland.”

Google informs me that, translated from Dutch, this works out to “the largest copywriter in the Netherlands.”

I guess a more elegant translation might be, “the greatest copywriter in the Netherlands.” Though as Robin told me, the tagline is meant to be ambiguous, since he stands over 2 meters tall.

Anyways, Robin writes:

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Hey John,

Just finished MVE and am now halfway with SME.

Man … MVE is so simple, so easy-ish to implement, but such a strong concept and format.

Awesome course, awesome idea.

Same for SME.

Really simple, really powerful and easy to implement, and model with your own ideas.

I’m very happy with both courses, and can’t wait to start with Copy Riddles.

===

In case you don’t know… MVE is my course Most Valuable Email. SME is my course Simple Money Emails.

You might not know that because I haven’t promoted either course in a few months, ever since I started selling my Daily Email Habit service.

I find my enthusiasm for promoting those courses has dipped.

In part, it’s because Daily Email Habit is not just a daily prompt to write an email… but a distillation of the best ideas in both SME and MVE, as well as ideas I don’t have in either of those courses, particularly around building up status and authority.

And Daily Email Habit presents all this to you as an easy and manageable drip-drip of information, in your inbox, every day… rather than as a course, one which you may go through once or maybe not even once, which then sits behind some forgotten login or in some folder you never check.

But much more important:

Unlike those two course of mine — or any other courses, by me or anybody else — Daily Email Habit is really built around the idea of daily, practical, real-world implementation, rather than simply passive consumption of information.

Because even things that are easy-ish to implement, like Robin says the MVE trick is, tend not to get implemented, not without a lot of stubborn nudging and reminders from the outside.

That’s what Daily Email Habit is for. If you’d like to find out more about this “grootste e-mailservice”:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Looking to get a little off the coaching ship?

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In response to my email yesterday, a reader and former coaching client (not sure he wants me to share his name) wrote in to say:

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Hey John,

Hope all is well.

Good news – having a daughter by end of the month 😊

This sets an exciting challenge for me to dive further into low ticket product sales, ascension, repeat customers rather than clients.

So I can get a little off the coaching ship and buy back time.

===

The good news is if you are a coach, and you actually have clients you work with, then you are one lucky skunk.

That’s because coaches have personal contact with their best customers/clients, and the chance to really listen and ask a ton of questions — even very probing stuff.

A coach can get insights into what sucks for his or her prospects now… what they are really after… what they’ve tried before that didn’t work… what possible solutions would be unacceptable to them on religious, political, or dietary grounds.

All this info can go into the meat mincer, out of which comes a beautiful and shiny new offer-sausage that people actually want to buy.

That’s the high-level picture. I have much more to say about the specifics. But about that:

As I’ve been writing in my past couple emails, last year I came up with a new system for myself to help me get more predictable success with new offers.

I applied this system when I had the idea for my Daily Email Habit service. It worked great.

So far, I have only shared my system with the people inside my Daily Email House community.

This month, I will make this system available a bit more widely. I’ll be sharing it with a few people on my list, if I think it can actually be useful to them.

I will make you a deal right now:

If you’re looking to get a little off the coaching ship, then hit reply and tell me a bit about who you are and what you do. In turn, I will add you to a private announcement list, so you have the opportunity to get my system when I release it later this month.

A cautionary tale for course creators

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For five years, David Perell had kind of a dream online business.

Perell sold a high-ticket, cohort-based course, Write Of Passage, teaching people how to write online.

Write Of Passage sold for $4k a pop. It had 2,000+ buyers.

Like I said, a kind of dream business, at least in the little space of online course creators and such.

I mean, Perell was writing and helping people to do something positive for themselves. He was working in line with his own values and interests. And he was pulling in great money with it.

And then, last November, Perell shut it all down. In an email announcing that the current cohort of Write Of Passage would be the last one, Perell wrote:

“You need more than a great product to make a business work, and the main thing we were missing was a dependable flow of new students.”

I agree with Perell’s first conclusion. I don’t agree with the second.

You do need more than a great product to make a business work. Particularly if your product sells for a one-time fee (even if that’s $4k), and if you have a whole supporting team of coaches and facilitators and staff and whatever, and you’re running ads or paying affiliates to get those $4k sales.

But I don’t agree that the solution needs to be MORE NEW STUDENTS.

I’ve been making a 6-fig income off this newsletter for the past few years, off of just a few hundred buyers, way fewer than Perell’s 2k. I’ve even embraced this attitude formally. My goal is to make more sales from the same number of readers.

It’s a well-known direct marketing truth that all the profits are made on the back end.

It does take more than a great product to make a business work. But instead of chasing the mythical “dependable flow” of new students… you can just commit to creating a sequence of great new offers. (An offer by the way, doesn’t require creating a new product, though a new product will typically make you a new offer.)

Now about that:

As I wrote in my last email, last year, right around the time that Perell was shutting down his multimillion-dollar dream biz, I came up with a new system for myself to help me get more predictable success with new offers.

I applied this system when I had the idea for my Daily Email Habit service. It worked great.

So far, I have only shared my system with the people inside my Daily Email House community.

This month, I will make this system available a bit more widely. I’ll be sharing it with a few people on my list, if I think it can actually be useful to them.

I will make you a deal right now:

If more predictable success with new offers is something that could be useful to you, then hit reply and tell me a bit about your current offer situation. In turn, I will add you to a private announcement list, so you have the opportunity to get my system when I release it later this month.

More predictable success with new offers

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My first info product was called Salary Negotiation Blueprint. I created in 2012 after reading Gary Halbert’s Boron Letters.

Gary says something like, pick a problem, read a 3-4 good books on it, summarize the books, create your own super-dense guide packed with the best info, and then sell that at a premium.

So that’s what I did.

I picked salary negotiation because I was in an IT office job at the time, and the topic was a bit of a taboo to me, and personally fascinating.

It took me a few months to identify the right books, read them, summarize my notes, write my own little guide, and create a sales letter (maybe my first).

And once I launched The Salary Negotiation Blueprint on Clickbank, the result was…

Nothing.

Zero sales.

I later lowered the price. Nothing. I tried moving the Salary Negotiation Blueprint to Amazon Kindle. It didn’t sell there either. At some point I even ran ads to it via Adwords. Still nobody would buy the damn thing.

I recently checked the Google Drive folder where I kept all the work for this project.

There’s a spreadsheet of possible newsletter topics, a backlog of tasks to complete, and a subfolder of possible bonus ideas. Plus a half-dozen other files, probably totaling thousands of words of preparation, analysis, and plans,

In other words, I did all this work, spent all this time, created all sorts of busy work. The result was a very useful, well written, information-packed guide that nobody in the universe would pay me even a bit of money for.

I’m telling you this because it’s not the only time it’s happened to me.

The same thing has happened many times since — probably dozens of times.

Fortunately, I’ve also had a few random successes along the way, which kept me going, and some of which made me good money.

But last year, I finally got a bit fed up with having a “few random successes.”

So I developed a system.

This system is based on stuff that had done instinctively but inconsistently before… stuff I had learned from other good business owners and marketers… and on common sense which I too uncommonly applied.

I put my system to use when creating my Daily Email Habit service. It worked out really well.

That’s why I am now forcing myself to keep using this system for each new offer I think of creating, though the temptation remains strong to simply wing it once more, and have the thrill and rush of instant activity, followed by the dump and crash that comes when results roll in, or rather, don’t.

So far, I have only shared my system with the people inside my Daily Email House community.

This month, I will make this system available a bit more widely. I’ll be sharing it with a few people on my list, if I think it can actually be useful to them.

I will make you a deal right now:

If more predictable success with new offers is something that could be useful to you, then hit reply and tell me a bit about your current offer situation. In turn, I will add you to a private announcement list, so you have the opportunity to get my system when I release it later this month.

Don’t think of Greenland

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Back in 2019, Internet personality James Altucher ran a crowdfunding campaign to raise $100,000,000 to buy Greenland. He felt Greenland was too important not to be bought.

Altucher is a smart guy. He did his research to back up his claim.

His primary reason for wanting to buy Greenland?

Rare earth minerals, like yttrium, scandium, neodymium, which are used in modern-day technologies such as LED screens, wind turbines, and electric vehicles. Rare earth minerals today almost exclusively come via China, which puts the U.S. in an awkward and dangerously dependent position.

But don’t think of China, and don’t think of Greenland.

Because I read a story this morning in the Wall Street Journal, about how the U.S. is trying to feed its growing mineral hunger — by farming.

Apparently, certain plants are “hyperaccumulators,” and pull out lots of minerals from the ground.

The U.S. has millions of acres of barren, mineral-rich soil.

The minerals in this soil are not of high-enough concentration to deserve being refined by traditional means. But they can be farmed into plants, which can then be incinerated to produce a cost-effective new source of minerals.

If it all works out, farming might become a viable new source of rare minerals for the U.S. economy.

So don’t think of Greenland.

But do think how this story offers a simple, classic, and memorable example of what business and innovation are all about:

An abundant and cheap resource (land in this case)… a new or better process (hyperaccumulating plants)… and a rare and valuable end product (rare minerals).

Also, do think of how this might apply to you and your business.

Because what resource is more abundant and cheap than ideas, gossip, and news stories?

And yet, with a simple enough process, these cheap resources can be turned into rare and valuable end products — sales copy, or marketing content, or even highly priced courses, books, and training.

What is that simple enough process?

Daily emails, exactly like the one you’re reading now.

My email today happens to be based on today’s Daily Email Habit puzzle.

If you’d like to engage in your own “hyperaccumulation” process, and use daily emails to convert cheap and abundant resources into rare and valuable assets, then consider checking out Daily Email Habit today, before tomorrow’s puzzle appears and then disappears.

And whatever you do, don’t think of Greenland.

Here’s the link to take things into your own hands:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

A recipe for a newsletter that “VERY successful people would pay a lot of money for”

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A few days ago, I wrote an email floating the idea of a paid newsletter of business practices from other industries. Basically, giving subscribers Jay Abraham’s “industry cross-pollination” idea on a silver platter.

I said in that email I will most probably never end up creating such a newsletter. To which I got a message from marketer Frederik Beyer, who wrote:

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Industry cross pollination sounds like something VERY successful people would pay a lot of money for.

Those people don’t have time to sift through articles and such, but they DO have the assets/resources to leverage any cross-pollinating ideas you could come up with.

Are you SURE you don’t want to read whatever suits your fancy and get paid to come up with ideas for wealthy people with networks who can help you leverage your skills even MORE?

===

Never say never. I certainly have no plans to do this now.

But a newsletter like this is something I’d like to see and even be happy to pay for, if it gave me new ideas for what I myself can do.

So let me give you the recipe for creating such a newsletter, in the hope that you will create it, that it will be great, ad that I can subscribe:

1. Google [“industry news” + insider].

2. Sign up to all the “[Industry] Insider” newsletters that pop up. There are dozens of them (Manufactured Housing Insider, Linux Insider, Gambling Insider, Fashion Insider).

3. Read or get AI to summarize the business practices standard in different industries, as reported by these newsletters you’ve just signed up for.

4. Pick one business practice from some industry X; expand it with a few examples and a bit of detail/context.

5. Explain how this industry practice from industry X could be relevant to a different end industry Y, the one made up of your subscribers. For personal interest, I would hope this industry Y would be “online information businesses” or something similar. But you can pick whatever end industry you want, and in fact, I imagine you can create a whole bunch of these newsletters for a whole bunch of end industries Y, Y’, Y”…

6. (Optional: pick a few other industry business practices from other industries, along with links to relevant articles online to find out more.)

7. Format all your findings as a weekly or monthly newsletter with a paid subscription. Depending on the end industry you pick, I imagine you can charge a few dozen dollars to a few hundred dollars per subscriber per month.

I had this idea yesterday because I actually subscribe to a couple such “Industry Insider” newsletters. I realized it’s a newsletter format that repeats across industries, and that gives you all the raw materials for the kind of “Industry Outsider” newsletter I was thinking of.

And if you’d like to see the best, most interesting such insider newsletter I personally subscribe to… and find out the high-tech stuff happening in the fitness and wellness industry… and maybe get inspired to create your own publishing empire helping wealthy people with networks:

https://insider.fitt.co/

The end of info products

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THE FOLLOWING EMAIL IS CONTROVERSIAL AND MAY BE OFFENSIVE TO SOME AUDIENCES

READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED

You might be familiar with Max Sackheim’s famous ad, “Do you make these mistakes in English?”

The ad ran for decades, unchanged, and kept bringing in profitable business better than any contender.

Thousands of pages of analysis have been written about the 7-word headline of this ad and the copy that followed.

But what about the actual product this ad was ultimately selling? What about the means by which a prospect could hope to correct his or her mistakes in English? What were prospects actually exchanging their money for?

Sackheim’s copy only teases you about the product, and calls it a “remarkable invention” and a “100% self-correcting device.”

As far as I know, nobody today actually has this remarkable invention stashed away in their garage. Whatever it was, it’s clear it was sold as some kind of tool, a device, and not just information.

This is a well-known direct marketing truth that’s been around since Sackheim’s days and before, back into the age of patent medicines.

A real, tangible, external mechanism — a fat-loss potion, a dog seatbelt, a “100% self-correcting device” — sells much easier than just good info — how to lose weight, how to be a less negligent dog owner, how to speak gooder English.

Smart modern-day info marketers have gotten hep to this fact. That’s why people like Russell Brunson and Ben Settle and Sam Ovens have put their reputation and audience to work behind tools like ClickFunnels and Berserker Mail and Skool.

The thing is, creating a tool, whether physical or software, has traditionally been an expensive, complicated, and risky business.

Take a look at Groove Funnels, another tool created a few years ago by another experienced info marketer, Mike Filsaime. Groove Funnels is a bloated, buggy, frankly unusable product. I say that as somebody who invested into a lifelong subscription in Groove Funnels.

I have a couple degrees in computer science. I also have about a decade’s worth amateur and pro software development experience. But after I quit my IT job 10+ years ago, I never once considered putting this experience to use in order to develop any kind of tool I could sell.

Until now.

Because things are changing. Today even a monkey, working alone, can create and deploy a valuable app simply by querying ChatGPT persistently enough. And there are plenty of shovels available for such would-be gold miners, tools to build tools, which will do much of the in-between work for you. Just say what you will to happen, and it will be done.

Decades ago, master direct marketer Gary Halbert said that the best best product of all is… information!

But I bet if Gary were alive today, he’d be hard at work (or maybe easy at work) creating some kind of high-margin tool to sell, in the broadest sense of the word — a thing to do some or all of the work for an audience with a problem. A few reasons why:

* Again, tools are easy to sell. They fit with innate human psychology of how we want to solve problems.

* Tools can make for natural continuity income if you license them out instead of sell them outright.

* Tools can create their own moat over time. There can be lock-in or switching cost if your users build on top of your tool.

* And now, thanks to the most remarkable invention of AI, it’s possible to create tools quickly, cheaply, and with great margins.

All that’s to say, best product of all… information? I don’t think so. Not any more. Best start adapting now.

Speaking of which, I got an offer for you:

Would you say that there are any tech issues that are keeping you from starting your own email list?

If there are, write in and let me know about them.

In turn, I’ll have something for you that you might like.

My new 30-day startup

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Last week, my friend Sam — we studied computer nerdery together in college — forwarded me an interview with a note that said, “Pretty inspiring.”

I listened — 3 and 1/2 hours.

The guy being interviewed was a certain Pieter Levels. Levels is a software developer who creates websites and tech tools and puts them out into the world. Some take off, others don’t. At one point, Levels launched 12 startups in 12 months.

I realized while listening that I had actually come across some of these websites before. There’s Hoodmaps, which shows you a map of your city with crowdsourced tags for each neighborhood, down to the street level. There’s Photo AI, which I guess was one of the first services to allow you to put in your broke selfies and get out rich-looking professional headshots.

Levels has this philosophy of “build cool shit.” As far as the money goes:

Hoodmaps, virally popular though it is, makes no money.

On the other hand, Remote OK, another of Levels’s websites, was making $140k/month back in 2020 (it’s now scaled back to just $10k/month).

But since Levels keeps spinning up new projects, and since most of them run independent of him after the initial sprint of work, the income starts to stack very nicely.

I’m telling you this because there’s a general insecurity that plagues my mind and maybe yours, and that is, “Will it fly? Is this the right project to embark on? Will I end up wasting my time and only get frustration and disappointment as a reward?”

One option for dealing with this insecurity is to wait for a lightning bolt from heaven to strike you and leave you with the certainty of a life mission, one that you will pursue at all cost.

Another option could be something like Levels is doing. To commit to a process. Say, a new “startup” every month, one that you make so tight and well-defined and bare-bones that it can be launched in 30 days or fewer.

At the end of your month, if you reel in your line and find nothing there, then next month, you put a new piece of bait on your hook and cast it out into the world again.

On the other hand, maybe you catch a live and possibly magical goldfish. You then gotta figure out what to do with it — throw it back, club it to death and eat it, or maybe put it inside your aquarium at home and nurture it and watch it grow.

I’ve decided to do this myself.

I will tell you my first “startup.” It’s based on something I learned from Ben Settle, in an appendix to his Email Players Skhema. That’s where Ben gives a sample 30-day email schedule, with a different prompt — “personal story,” “challenge assumptions” — for each day.

I took that idea and I’ve been using it on and off for years. At the start of the month, I spend an hour or so to plan out what kind of email to send each day, over the coming 30 days.

Even when I’m “on” with this daily prompt habit, I don’t always stick to the prompt I’ve set out for myself. Some days I have a specific thing in mind for my daily email, or something specific to promote, and that is good enough.

But in general, I’ve noticed that when I’m “off” this daily prompt habit, when I entirely improvise each day’s email, day after day, my emails take longer to write… end up trying to do too much… and are simply less effective.

On the other hand, when I follow a prompt I’ve set for myself ahead of time, it forces me to actually be more creative. Plus I get my emails done faster, and the result (based on both feedback and sales I’ve had) seems to be better than emails that are improvised from the ground up.

I can tell you this email you’re reading now was based on a prompt I set out for myself ahead of time. As they say in the software development world, I am eating my own dog food.

Over the next 30 days, I will be creating a subscription that gives you a new daily email prompt each day. The ultimate goal here is to shave shave off writing time if you’re already sending emails regularly, and to make it more likely that you send consistently if you don’t do so yet, so you keep building up the relationship with the people on your list, and so you have a real shot at making sales.

I will be offering first access to this to a small number of people on my list, based on who I think will be most likely to get value from it.

But I will make you a deal right now:

If you feel daily email prompts are something that could be useful to you, then hit reply and tell me what you like about this idea. In turn, I will add you to the priority list, so you have a chance to test this service out sooner rather than later.

Czech Russell Brunson’s uncreative success

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A couple days ago, I asked readers what subscription or continuity offers they be payin’ for. I got a number of responses to that email, featuring some familiar offers, and some that are entirely new to me.

For example, a long-time reader from Czechia wrote to tell me about a mastermind he signed up for last month, centered around a “Czech copycat of Russell Brunson.”

“Copycat!” I hear someone saying. “That’s rrreprehensible!”

And yet, this Czech Russell Brunson is clearly seeing success. This made me think back to the real Russell Brunson’s mentor, Dan Kennedy. Dan likes to share the following quote, attributed to McDonald’s CEO Ray “Killer” Kroc:

“Creativity is over-rated. Most business success comes from doing boring, diligent work. From developing a system that produces consistent results and sticking to it.”

Developing, I might add, or swiping…

Anyways, my long-time reader from Czechia finished his message about Czech Russell Brunson by saying:

“I am interested in seeing if you are cooking some continuity of your own, maybe not a postcard this time around 😂“

That’s very on point. I am cooking up — or more like shopping for ingredients for – my own continuity offer.

I want to make this new continuity offer, well, continuous.

Instead of having 10 people sign up and stay signed up for two months each, I’d rather have one person sign up and stay signed up for 20 months.

Also, I want to cook up this new continuity offer sooner rather than later, simply because I am impatient.

Enter my 3rd Conversion training, which I announced in a bit of a hurry yesterday, without much fanfare, buildup, or teasing.

The promise for this 3rd Conversion training is that I will show you how to make your paid info products — whether courses, memberships, or paid newsletters — more likely to be consumable and enjoyable, with the goal of turning one-time buyers into long-term repeat customers.

(Hence, 3rd Conversion.)

I can tell you honestly, I am putting on this training as much for myself as for you.

I’m thinking about all the ways people have gotten me to stick around and consume their products… as well as techniques I’ve used to achieve the same, wittingly and unwittingly, in my own info products like Most Valuable Email and Copy Riddles.

After some pondering, I managed to group all these techniques into three broad categories. Using the analogy of a restaurant, these categories map broadly to 1. Kitchen 2. Table Service 3. Ambiance.

In each category, I have several specific techniques in mind, each backed with a few case studies.

Frankly, I might not be able to cover all this in the 3rd Conversion call on Thursday, not without violating my own rules of consumption. I’d rather make the call more enjoyable and useful than to comprehensive and nausea-inducing.

But I can promise you that, if I don’t decide to cover all the techniques I have in mind on the call itself, I’ll get them to you afterwards, most likely in some written format.

And in case you’re wondering:

Some of the techniques I have in mind would no doubt be familiar to you if you could see them now. Others, on the other hand, are almost sure to be new.

Frankly, even one or two of these techniques, whether you know them or not already, would instantly make your existing products more consumable and enjoyable for buyers.

That means that, if you were to implement just one or two of these techniques right after the call on Thursday, you could reasonably have a few extra sales by existing buyers by the end of the week. That’s likely to be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars right away, and probably, much more down the line.

And yet, I’m pricing this 3rd Conversion training at $100.

I’m offering it at this firesale price is because my primary goal is just to pull all this information together, and to do it now.

My secondary goal is to get feedback live from people once I share these techniques on the call. Maybe that will be you as well.

Last I can tell you that, if I ever make this training available again, it won’t be as a recording of this workshop… but as a proper course for $500 or more.

The 3rd Conversion call will happen this Thursday at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. There will be a recording which I will send out after the call, though if you can make it live, you and I both are sure to benefit more from it.

If you’d like to sign up for 3rd Conversion now, here’s where to go:

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

Do you make this mistake with your customer database?

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Back in the early 1990s, the New Jersey Nets — the NBA team that’s now the Brooklyn Nets — had a rather clever way of cutting costs:

Each season, they saved on hard drive space by deleting the names of the previous season’s ticket holders.

After all, who’s got space for all those names, addresses, and phone numbers of people who had paid thousands of dollars for season tickets?

Besides, if anybody had not renewed their season ticket this year, then what was the point of keeping their contact data? The Nets could just go out and run TV ads or radio ads or maybe go knock door-to-door to fill any unfilled seats.

Maybe my tone is not sarcastic enough, so let me make it clear:

If you do a good job selling to a cold audience — to people who have never bought from you before — you can hope for about a 2% conversion rate.

In other words, 1 out of every 50 strangers might decide to give you some money, carefully, guardedly.

On the other hand, if you do a modest job selling to a warm audience — to people who have bought from you before — you can hope for about 20% to 50% conversion rate.

In other words, 1 out of 5 people might decide to give you more money, or it might be as high as 1 in 2. Plus, the selling tends to be easier, and the price more flexible.

All that’s to say, the Nets’ habit of regularly deleting customer records was an act of criminal negligence. It probably cost the organization millions of dollars in profits over the years.

Of course, it’s not much less negligent to save customer records and never do anything with them.

One ecommerce client I worked with had a database of about 150,000 buyers. It just sat there inside Shopify, while the client worked furiously to optimize Facebook ads and bring in more new customers.

But you see where I’m going with this, so let me wrap it up:

Step one is to stop wiping your hard drive clean and throwing customer records away.

Step two is to start selling those customers.

If you want to get it done for you, write me and maybe I can help. Or if you want to get it done yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/sme