Business Models

Business opportunity: Coat of Arms email address

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This morning, as all mornings, I got up, opened the balcony doors, sat down on the couch, and started looking at new subscribers to my health newsletter. That’s an ugly addiction I formed in the first few months of my new newsletter, thanks to an early success.

I was doing the same back when I had only a couple hundred subscribers, when one morning, I saw that the CEO of the Oura Ring company had signed up to my newsletter.

Like a crypto fiend, I’ve been checking my new subscribers ever since, hoping for that same fix.

But while my subscriber list keeps growing, I’ve never found another new subscriber of the same caliber. Still, I make a point every day to look up anyone with a custom domain name.

Today, I got a signup from, let’s say, bill@shackleford.com. The “bill” part is not real, but the domain is. I checked it out so you don’t have to. Here’s what I found:

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Find your @shackleford.com email address

Swap out your generic email address for a professional and clear your firstname@shackleford.com email. Grab yours now.

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The price for this professional and clear service? $35/month.

What a great business idea.

I mean, stamping out another email account if you already have website hosting is free. These guys charge $35/month for it!

But is this still an opportunity? Won’t all these family name domains be taken?

I think the opportunity might still be there. I did the lightest bit of detective work and looked up grinell.com, which according to a census site is a last name of comparable frequency to Shackleford.

The domain is for sale. I don’t know for how much. But I can imagine that, across the entire universe of mildly common last names, you could find at least a few dozen or a few hundred .com domains that you could acquire for a reasonable price.

“Great,” you might say, “and then I have a stupid grinell.com domain. How would I possibly persuade any Grinells to actually use my custom email address?”

That’s the beauty of my plan. Because that entire marketing funnel has already been done for you, some 60 years ago.

I’m talking about Gary Halbert’s Coat of Arms letter. You could even use the original product — a framed report about the history of the Grinell family name — as a kind of loss leader to get people onto your email address subscription.

(Incidentally, if any Bejakovics are reading this right now who would like to get their very own firstname@bejakovic.com email address, write to me. It’s just $35/month, and I will tell you all I know about the illustrious and warlike Bejakovic clan, going two generations back.)

Maybe your greed glands have been set a-workin’ by my Coat of Arms plan.

But maybe you’re wondering what I’m on about.

So let me say that the bigger point of my email today is that key appeals, ones that worked 60 or 160 years ago, are most likely still around.

The specific products, the ways to satisfy those appeals might change.

But people’s desire for locking down and celebrating their family heritage… for free money from the government… for getting rich in real estate… for manifesting their thoughts into reality… all those worked a century ago, and they will still work today.

Don’t like any of those appeals?

Then let me tell you about another appeal that worked a century ago, which still works today.

That’s the appeal of new, money-making skills. For a specific way to get yourself a particularly lucrative set of such skills, more quickly than you might ever believe, I’ll refer you to the page below. It’s also courtesy of Gary Halbert:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Business opportunity for an honest, reliable businessman or woman

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Consider the following classified ad, which ran thousands of times across the US:

“BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY: For an honest, reliable businessman with $20,000 to invest for a large return. References exchanged.”

Now ask yourself…

How does this classified ad make you feel? Take a moment right now to look inside yourself:

Are you suspicious and wary?

Or are you excited, and eager to know more?

Or are you perhaps disappointed, because this business opportunity doesn’t apply to you for some reason?

Perhaps you don’t have $20k to invest? Perhaps you don’t think of yourself as a businessman? Perhaps… you suspect you are not fully honest?

Like I mentioned a few days ago, I’m reading a book called The Big Con. It’s about conmen, working complex, months-long schemes some 100 years ago, who took their rich marks for millions of dollars in today’s money.

One way that these “big con” grifters would rope in their marks was by running the above classified ad in local newspapers.

If you dig into the 17 words of the ad above, you will find a surprising amount of deep psychology.

Today, I want to focus on just one of those words. That’s the word honest. From The Big Con:

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But the mark must also have what grifters term “larceny in his veins” — in other words, he must want something for nothing, or be willing to participate in an unscrupulous deal.

If the mark were completely aware of this character weakness, he would not be so easy to trim. But, like almost everyone else, the mark thinks of himself as an “honest man.” He may be hardly aware, or even totally unaware, of this trait which leads to his financial ruin. “My boy,” said old John Henry Strosnider sagely, “look carefully at an honest man when he tells the tale himself about his honesty. He makes the best kind of mark…”

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I’m not sure what my point is by telling you this. I found it fascinating on some level, and I wanted to share it.

Perhaps you can consider it a public service announcement, warning you to take heed if anybody ever appeals to your inherent honesty.

Or perhaps it’s simply to soothe your conscience a bit, and to tell you that if you suspect you are not as honest as you might be, then in fact you’re probably more honest than the norm.

Whatever the case, it’s worth paying attention to business opportunity ads, whether “legit” or entirely fraudulent, like the ad above.

That’s because business opportunity ads appeal to some of the most powerful human drivers, and often get responses like no other copy ever could.

I experienced this first-hand a few years ago, when I first started looking at old business opportunity ads, and when, as a lark, I started introducing some business opportunity language into my own emails.

In particular, I once sent an email in which I claimed to have a new business opportunity, and I invited responses from people who wanted to know more.

I got swamped by replies.

I never followed up on these replies, for reasons of my own. But the demand for that offer is there, and it’s very real.

What’s more, taking advantage of this demand does not require any dishonesty, but would genuinely help business owners who are currently in distress.

Maybe this all sounds fairly abstract. If so, you can find the business opportunity I am talking about described in full detail in the swipe file that goes with my Most Valuable Email course — specifically, MVE #12.

If you actually apply the idea in MVE #12, it could be worth much more to you than the price I charge for the Most Valuable Email training. And you might find other valuable business ideas in that swipe file. As reader Illya Shapovalov, who bought MVE last month, wrote me to say:

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By the way, I printed out the MVE swipe file. Almost every day, I sit down to study and analyze it a bit. But every time, I just get sucked into the content itself! 😂 Learned a bunch of new stuff without even intending to do so. Thanks for that too.

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Here’s your opportunity to to invest for a large return, references exchanged:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

How to become a millionaire on Five-grand-err

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I read something mindblogging via Codie Sanchez’s newsletter:

A freelance designer by the name of Brett Williams is making $120,000 per month. Not per year. Per month. All from client work.

How?

Williams has a unique business model. He charges all his clients a flat fee, $5k per client per month. Clients can quit or pause their “design-as-a-subscription” at any time. They can only make one request at a time, but as soon that is fulfilled — usually within 30 minutes to 48 hours — they can make another.

It might sound impossible that this could work. But Williams has ~20 clients at any time. He seems to be alive. He doesn’t seem to be working superhuman hours.

Again, how?

My guess is he works with good clients, does good work, and delivers it in a reasonable timeframe.

Clients are happy with what they get, and happy with what they don’t get — no full-time payroll burden, no hassle of finding a new freelancer, no opportunity cost of reaching a new agreement with a known freelancer, each time they have some niggling design request to make.

Do you think you might do something similar?

Of course not. It’s outlandish. But just pretend.

Think of a Fiverr-able skill you have. And instead of offering it for $5 on Fiverr, imagine offering it for $5k on your own site.

If you have Williams’s kind of luck, you will be able to make a cool million in under a year. If you’re less lucky, it might take you two or even three years to get there.

But still, what else you got right now? If that’s not so hot, might as well start moving towards that million-dollar service business today.

In related news, the deadline for my 9 Deadly Email Sins training is nearing. The training happens next Monday, August 7, the deadline is the day before, Sunday the 6th.

I’ve given away a lot of valuable info over the past few days, in the form of hundreds of copies of my new Simple Money Emails course.

Simple Money Emails shows you how to write effective sales emails.

9 Deadly Email Sins shows you… how to avoid writing ineffective no-sales emails.

I realize that might sound like a promise nobody wants. The only thing I can say in my defense is that I have been paid to critique 100+ emails over past year. Including by people who have had all the email marketing and copywriting education in the world… including pro copywriters… including people whose entire businesses run on email.

​​And yet I find these people, who should know better, repeatedly commit these sins, and repeatedly pay for it, in the form of lower sales, bored readers, and shrinking engagement.

You might wonder how this 9 Deadly Email Sins offer is possibly related to the Brett Williams thing I told you above.

I can think of two ways:

You can use Simple Money Emails + 9 Deadly Email Sins to actually learn how to write effective sales emails, and avoid the mistakes that plague others. There’s plenty of demand for that at Fiverr, and might be legit demand for it on Five-grand-err. I’ve personally been paid much more than five grand per month by some clients, just to write effective daily emails for them.

Or if you have no interest in selling email copywriting services, but you have another skill that clients might want, then you can use daily emails to sell that. The only real difference I imagine between Fiverr and Five-grand-err is the Five-grand-err clients are likely to need a bit more trust and softening up, and daily email is the perfect format for that.

But you make the choice. If you decide that effective daily emails are something that’s worth knowing, and knowing well, then here’s where you can sign up for my training next Monday:

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

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

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

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

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

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

I bet.

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

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

​​That’s it.

“Whoa…” I hear you say.

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

Well, about that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But.

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

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

How? As I wrote yesterday:

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

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

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

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

​​All I can add is my personal experience.

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

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

My #1 takeaway from a $3k conference

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I went to a $3k copywriting conference 4 weeks ago. Since then, my impressions have settled.

What’s left? What ideas did I really get from the high-powered speakers at this conference?

What’s left today is the same as what struck me while I was still sitting in the freezing-cold conference room.

All the speakers kept repeating the word “simple.” Simple business model. Simple deliverables. Simple promises.

But here’s what I realized while listening to all these speakers:

Getting to simple isn’t simple. It takes time and thought and work to figure out what’s essential. It takes discipline and more work to eliminate what’s not essential. And there’s layers to it, so once you’ve made things simple once, you will probably realize that it’s still not really there, and there’s more that you can do.

Mark Ford wrote a post yesterday about how he loves to teach. And he wrote about physicist Richard Feynman, who believed that teaching is the best way to understand anything.

It’s easy to think you understand something, Feynman believed, until you try to explain it simply. And an audience gives you real feedback. Was it simple? Do they understand? Or are they lost?

If they’re lost, it’s because you lost them somewhere along the way.

Writing is a great way to make things simple. And writing to an audience is even better. Then tomorrow, you can do it all again, at a new level of understanding. Does that make sense? Write in and tell me, because it will help me figure things out also.

Clicks of the dial

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Another day, another Airbnb.

​​Today I am in Warsaw, Poland because it was one of the few places in central Europe that won’t be raining for the next five days. And five days is how much time I have until I go to Gdansk for my first-ever live event to do with marketing and copywriting.

This morning, I woke up, carefully stepped down the circular staircase from the second floor of the apartment to the ground floor, located the inevitable Nespresso machine, popped in a capsule, and made myself a coffee.

And you see where this is going, don’t you?

If you have anything to do with marketing, you should. It’s a basic topic, so basic that I in fact wrote about it in the first month of this newsletter, back in September 2018.

The same marketing model is shared by Nespresso, by King Gillette’s safety razors-and-blades empire, and by info publishers like Agora and Ben Settle. They all promise you almost-irresistible sign-up premiums in order to get you paying for a continuity offer.

You almost certainly know this. Many people have talked about the same. It’s obvious. I won’t belabor the point.

Yesterday, I promised to tell the bigger point behind such models — models which might seem obvious, when somebody else points them out to you.

There’s a document floating around the Internet, legendary marketer Gary Halbert’s “Clicks of the Dial.”

It’s a collection of Gary’s “Most Treasured ‘First-Choice’ Marketing Tactics.”

I read this document once. I even shared a link to it in this newsletter last year.

But I never really got much out of Gary’s “Clicks of the Dial” list. I doubt the hundreds or thousands of my readers who downloaded Gary’s “Clicks of the Dial” got much out of it either.

That’s because there’s a big difference between, on the one hand, reading, nodding your head, and saying “hmm good idea”… and, on the other hand, observing, thinking a bit, and writing down your own conclusions.

So my point to you today is to open a new text file on your hard drive. Title it “Clicks of the Dial.” Break it up into three columns to start.

Name one column “traffic.” Name the second “conversion.” Name the third “consumption.”

And then, each time you go for a coffee, or a bagel, or a haircut, observe an obvious business or marketing practice you’re exposed to. Odds are, it’s been proven in hundreds or thousands of different situations. “Chunk up” that practice to make a model out of it. And write it down in your list in the appropriate column.

Gary Halbert’s entire “Clicks of the Dial” list was something like 20 items.

In other words, it won’t take you long to fill up your own “Clicks of the Dial” document to full.

​​Very soon, you can have a list of core business and marketing strategies, that you can cycle through, and solve pretty much any marketing problem by clicking the dial.

​​And since you put this list together yourself, based on your own experiences, it will actually mean something to you. Eventually, you might even appear to others to be a marketing jeenius like Gary himself.

As for me, it’s time to go get a brownie. I have a long list of food recommendations for what to eat in Warsaw, but only a limited amount of time and stomach space to do so.

Meanwhile, if you have no more interest in reading anything from me, because you’ve determined to learn all of marketing and copywriting by observation and thinking, there is nothing more I can tell you, except farewell and good luck. On the other hand, if you do want to hear from me every day, with more ideas and occasional inspiration, you can sign up for my daily email newsletter here.

Free chocolate traffic and distribution model

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Yesterday morning, my friend Sam and I were sitting at a cafe terrace that hangs over the waters of Lake Lucerne. We were getting a coffee while waiting for a boat to take us down the lake, to the bottom of a big mountain, which we would attempt to scale.

Of course, this being Switzerland, we each got a little chocolate next to our coffees. Well, I got a chocolate, but for some unfair reason, Sam got two.

Our three little chocolates were all the same size. Later, at much higher altitude, we would find out they were also the same flavor. But each of the three chocolates had a slightly different design on the wrapper.

One was light blue and had a picture of a locomotive. That chocolate was advertising a “guest house and games paradise.”

The second chocolate was white with an elegant font. That was advertising a rentable space to hold events.

The third chocolate was also white but a bit more flashy in its font. That was advertising a “shopping restaurant.”

Since my mind has been entirely warped by thinking and writing about marketing every day, I noticed this and I thought about the underlying model. It’s this:

1. Take an expense for other businesses (for cafes, little chocolates next to each coffee)

2. Provide that thing for free both in terms of cost and effort and risk (the chocolate tasted good, and the design was classy)

3. Use the thing for traffic/distribution/advertising for your a product or service of your own choosing (“gasthof und spielparadies” on the wrapper)

You might say this is nothing special or unusual. But you can get creative.

For example, many people used to pay a few dollars a day to read the Wall Street Journal (1). Then some guys made a free email newsletter with the most important news of the past 24 hours (2). In between the news segments they also put in ads (3). The result was Morning Brew, which sold a controlling stake for $75 million a couple years ago.

Back in the Barcelona supermarket I go to, you can get free bubble gum (1 and 2) at the store, along with various other small items, if you download an app that tracks you and serves you ads for other products (3).

Then there’s the offer I made a couple months ago, to help businesses add in a “horror advertorial” into their cold traffic funnel for free (2) — a service I would normally charge a lot of money for (1) — if they would also insert an email into their welcome sequence to promote my new newsletter (3).

And finally, there’s an idea I’m planning for the future, to offer syndicated content (1) to businesses for free (2), as a means of advertising that same new newsletter I’m working on (3).

In other words, this simple little chocolate idea has broad applicability when you start to think about it.

But there’s a bigger point, too.

The bigger point is— well, I will talk about that tomorrow. No sense in jamming two good ideas into one email.

I’m approaching the Zurich airport as I write this. It’s time to leave this rainy but beautiful country. The train I’m on will be six minutes late in arriving, and the conductor just came alive on the PA to announce that shocking delay and to apologize in German, Italian, and English.

If you want to read my email tomorrow when it comes out, you can sign up for my daily email newsletter here.