Cold Outreach

Angel Heart cold outreach

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Last night, I rewatched a dark but fascinating movie called Angel Heart:

Mickey Rourke plays private detective Harry Angel, who is on a missing persons case.

Throughout the movie, in order to unearth the next clue, track down his guy, and collect his unfortunate bounty, Harry Angel pretends to be:

– A researcher from the National Institutes of Health, when getting records from a hospital…

– A journalist writing an article, when talking to Toots Suite, a blues guitar player…

– A client coming to have his future told by a spirit medium…

– A customer at a hoodoo supplies store, looking to buy some High John De Conqueror root.

Harry Angel lies. He doesn’t work at the NIH, and no amount of squinting will make that fact true.

You don’t have to lie. But you can still reposition or repackage who you are and what you do, with integrity, right now, in a matter of seconds, to make it more likely people will hear you out. Without lying, you can get the benefit of what Harry Angel does to move his case forward.

Really, it’s the same thing I talked about in my email yesterday — ask what your prospects are looking to buy, instead of how you can sell what you have.

Because this doesn’t only apply if you want to get people to buy your PDFs or coaching or copywriting services or whatever.

It applies equally well if you’re simply trying to open up conversations with people, which can yield valuable information or lead to a valuable relationship or partnership down the line. In other words, cold outreach.

In entirely related news:

If you take the idea above ^^^^ and generalize it a bit, it applies just as well to get people to open up your newsletter emails, read them, and have their mind gradually or suddenly opened to the possibility of giving you some money.

And if you want specific step-by-step instructions on how exactly you can do this today:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

What I learned from my chat with a crypto billionaire scammer

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Two things you might not know about me is that 1) I used to be on YouTube and 2) I used to be in crypto.

This was back around 2018.

Once or twice a week, I’d put on a white dress shirt (no pants)… stand against the only neutral white wall in my then-apartment… and get on Zoom to interview various crypto founders and execs.

Back then, I had plans of becoming a marketer specialized in crypto, before I realized I just couldn’t be bothered to care about the field. In retrospect, it was probably a dumb decision.

But pressing on:

This crypto YouTube channel was how I had an hour-long chat with a certain Israeli-American entrepreneur.

He was already a multimillionaire before he got into crypto, thanks to a half-dozen other tech companies he had started and sold.

But this new crypto venture was by far the biggest thing he had ever done.

Within a year or so of getting started, right around the time I interviewed him, his company had $4 billion in assets under management (not made-up coins, but actual liquid assets). Later that grew to over $20 billion. I imagine the dude’s personal worth reached into the billions as well, for those few brief years at least.

Because it’s all come crashing down since.

The company has gone bankrupt. The guy I interviewed has been arrested and charged with securities fraud, wire fraud, and market manipulation. If convicted, he could spend the next 15 years in prison.

This isn’t a newsletter about crypto. And it’s not a newsletter about moralizing.

This is a newsletter about marketing, so let me stick to that:

What I learned from my chat with the crypto billionaire scammer is that, if you have a podcast or something like a podcast, you can get in touch with anyone.

Sure, you might say my experience was during a crypto boom period. Plus, how hard is it to get a scammer to accept a new opportunity to spread his scammy message?

Maybe you’re right. But the point about podcasts opening doors still stands.

I have seen it with myself. If pretty much anybody invites me to a podcast, I will say yes (just try me). My due diligence extends as far as seeing if the podcast has any episodes published, so I can assure myself that my interview will probably be published if I spend an hour to give it.

This truth about podcasting is one of the tips I share in The Secret of the Magi, my guide to opening the door to conversations that lead to business partnerships.

By the way, “podcasting” is not The Secret of the Magi. The secret is something else, and there are lots of other ways to implement it, even if you have zero intention of creating a podcast or getting on YouTube in your dress shirt and underwear.

I gave away The Secret of the Magi as a bonus for Steve Raju’s upcoming workshop, with my deadline for that being yesterday.

But I had a thought today, why let this little guide go idle now?

If you got The Secret of the Magi already as a bonus for Steve’s offer, great. I’ll see you at Steve’s workshop next week.

On the other hand, if you had no interest in Steve’s workshop, but you would like to know The Secret of the Magi, you can get it below.

Your investment, if you get it before tomorrow, Sunday, 12 midnight PST, is a whopping $23.50.

At that price, it might be worth getting The Secret of the Magi simply to slake your curiosity.

I won’t say anything about the actual value of putting The Secret of the Magi to use, because if it helps you open even one conversation that turns into some kind of business partnership… it’s likely to be worth so much more than what I’m asking for here that anything I say about it will sound absurd.

I’ll leave you to paint your own vision of the business partnerships this could lead you to.

I’ll just say that, after the deadline tomorrow, The Secret of the Magi will go up to $47.

If you’d like to get it before then:

​https://bejakovic.com/secret-of-the-magi​

I am a most utterly suggestible person

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This past Tuesday, Steve Raju floated the idea for a new workshop, one in which he would reveal:

* Why most traditional high-ticket offers don’t make sense any more in the age of AI

* Why most service providers are struggling nowadays

* What you should pivot to

* What hands down the best offer at the end of 2024 actually is

* All the tools you need to offer that

* How to outsource it if you can’t be bothered to do even that

* How to structure deals for the very highest return

“Interested?” asked Steve at the end of his email. “Just reply ‘Yeah, I’m interested, Steve,’ and if enough people say yes, we’ll do it next week.”

I hit reply and I wrote Steve to honestly say:

“I am not looking to pivot or offer another service but God yes I am interested.”

To which Steve wrote back:

“It’s amazing how you are a master in the arts of persuasion and manipulation… and yet you are one of the most utterly suggestible people I have ever met lol.”

It’s true. I am a most utterly suggestible person.

Frankly, it’s one of the reasons why I got into the direct response field — I wanted to figure out what was happening to me so often.

I also suspect my utter suggestibility is one of the reasons I’ve had success in this field. Because, if I only pay attention to my own reactions, I can say “Aha! Got it. I know what happened. And I bet this would work on others too.”

Maybe you’re utterly suggestible too. No shame in it. In fact, you can even think of it as a valuable gift, if you only pay attention.

Of course, in time I’ve developed a thick and cynical buffalo hide to protect me against the world. Today, my default response to most suggestions is “NO!” — before I even hear what the suggestion is about.

But with people I trust and respect, I will sometimes allow myself to indulge my suggestible nature, like I did with Steve above.

After floating the idea, and I guess hearing back from enough people like me, Steve decided to put on this workshop. It’s called The Word Is Not Enough. It will happen next Wednesday at 10am Pacific. As for your investment, it’s pay-what-you-want.

Plus, if you decide to 1) sign up for Steve’s workshop via the link below and 2) forward me your receipt by tonight, Fri, at 12 midnight PST, I will send you a free bonus, The Secret of the Magi.

The Secret of the Magi will tell you how to open up conversations with people you don’t know, even if they are busy, even if they are rich and successful, and even if they are way above you in status.

Of course, The Secret of the Magi will not work in 100% of cases.

But after observing other people cold contacting me… and after spending this past summer cold contacting a bunch of other people… I’ve had one big takeaway for how to open the door to conversations that can lead to those business partnerships.

I will tell you this takeaway, illustrate it with a few examples, and give you specific instructions on how you can apply it too.

Again, the deadline to send me your receipt for Steve’s workshop is tonight at 12 midnight PST. Why? Because I’ve noticed in the past how well deadlines work on me to get me to move. Maybe they work on you too? If so, here’s the link:

​https://bejakovic.com/the-word-is-not-enough​

How to stop being seen as a milquetoast

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Today is the last day to sign up for MyPEEPS and get my free “Shotgun Messenger” bonus. You can expect me to send many more emails about this offer today. And on that note, I wanna tell you a quick story of rejection:

I first discovered marketer Travis Sago thanks to a podcast interview back in 2019. I was super impressed by everything Travis said, and so I got on his email list right away.

Travis had an automated welcome email that ended with, “I’m curious… What business are you in?”

I wrote back. I told Travis that I loved his interview, I gave some specifics of what I loved, and I said my business was copywriting.

And what I got back was… nothing. No smiley face, no “good on ya,” not a single word.

I figured then and in all these intervening years that either Travis didn’t check the reply email regularly, or he simply didn’t think me important enough to reply to.

Then this very morning, Sunday September 15 2024, I was listening to a short recording that Travis did for the people in his community.

Travis was talking about how persistent he is in following up with his prospects, particularly the “movers and shakers.” And he said the following:

“In fact, in my business, if a copywriter reaches out to me, my typical M.O. is not to respond back. I wanna get rid of all the milquetoasts, because I’m looking for people who want to get things done in the face of a challenge.”

Point being:

You might know that followup can get the attention of those who forgot about you or never even noticed you.

You might also know followup can build more desire.

But I imagine you never thought of followup as a kind of proof element.

And yet it is. Because who follows up?

People who believe in what they are doing and selling, including themselves.

The milquetoasts drop away.

So send regular emails, preferably daily… and if you got a deadline coming up, send a bunch.

You’ll catch people’s attention… you’ll remind them of what they want and how you can help… and you will convince them you have something worthwhile, just because you keep following up about it. And now, since you’ve read this email, you are a few minutes closer to the deadline for my MyPEEPS offer. The deadline will come in a flash, tonight at 12 midnight PST.

In a nutshell, MyPEEPS shows you how to build up your email list with paid traffic — putting in $10-$15 and getting out 10-15 new subscribers a day — so you can in time have a proper audience of people who want to read your emails and buy from you.

And the free Shotgun Messenger bonus I’m offering gets you my direct help and input as you actually put the MyPEEPS process into practice.

If you want the full details on that, or to sign up for before the deadline strikes:

​https://bejakovic.com/shotgun​

Dan Kennedy’s “stealth tactic” for client attraction from scratch

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Yesterday, I got on Skype. I live in Spain, I have a Croatian phone number, and Skype is my only way to dial an American landline and not pay ridiculous charges.

Skype connected.

“Hello?”

“Hi Steve. It’s John Bejakovic. We were in contact on LinkedIn. Is now an okay time to talk?”

“Hi John. Yeah, absolutely. I was expecting your call.”

Last week, I cold-contacted this guy. We weren’t even connected on LinkedIn but I sent him a message out of the blue.

Earlier this week, I guess he finally opened up LinkedIn because he replied. We exchanged a couple more messages. At the end of it, I got him to agree to a call. He sent me his home phone number.

We did the call yesterday. ​​I was asking questions and he was willingly answering. ​At the end of the call, I also got him to give me his home address.

Now, this wasn’t a business-getting call. But… it coulda been.

The same strategy I used to get on a call with this guy and to even get his home address is one I heard Dan Kennedy advocate in his Business of Copywriting Academy.

Unfortunately, that training is hidden inside the ancient infrastructure at AWAI. That means it’s hard to buy, and impossible to promote as an affiliate. It’s a shame, because the training is really interesting and really valuable.

One idea that’s stuck with me is a kind of Trojan horse for client getting, something that Dan says he would use himself if he needed to. In his own words:

“Let me give you my stealth tactic. Here’s what I would do if I was starting from scratch, right now, and I wanted some clients in Cleveland. If and when I retire and I decide to spend six months out of the year in Orlando, if I then feel I want a couple clients, I will use this strategy exactly as I’m about to describe it to you.”

Dan is famous for 1) never leaving suburban Ohio and 2) for never using the Internet. ​​That’s why he’s talking about using this strategy locally in Cleveland and Orlando.

​​But the same strategy works online too. Again, I used it just yesterday on LinkedIn and Skype, though I wasn’t looking for client work.

So I got a deal for you:

As I wrote yesterday, I’m considering putting together something new, a kind of offer research service that tracks unique and effective offers. In particular, I’m interested in offers that are 1) working now, and that 2) don’t rely on authority or a personal brand.

Have you spotted any such offers recently? Or better yet, have you bought any such offers recently?

If you have, write in and tell me about it.

If the offer you tell me about is unique and actually matches the two criteria above (working now, not relying on authority or personal brand), then I’ll reply to tell you Dan Kennedy’s client-getting stealth tactic — what he would do if he needed clients today.

And by the way, Dan’s stealth tactic is not limited to getting copywriting clients. It’s relevant if you want clients of any kind, or partners, or just connections for your own ends, like what I was doing with the guy I contacted on LinkedIn.

In other words, this tactic can work whenever you really want a connection with a specific person or profile of person.

​​And if that sounds attractive to you, then think of an offer that matches my criteria above. Write in with it, and I’ll tell you what Dan would do.

I was ghosted by a business owner for an eternity

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Two weeks ago, July 7 to be specific, I sent an email to a business owner I had been talking to back in 2021.

Back in 2021, the conversation between us had dropped off.

I never followed up, not until 14 days ago, to see if it still makes sense to talk about the project we had been talking about back then, where I would help him get more back-end sales for his ecom brand.

The business owner didn’t respond to me 14 days ago. Or 13 days ago. Or 12 days ago.

He ghosted me entirely, all the way up to yesterday, 2 weeks after I sent him the original email. Yesterday, he wrote:

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Hi John,

Great to hear from you. Yes, we still own [his brand]. Let’s pick up the conversation again.

Here’s a link to my schedule: [calendly link]

I look forward to talking with you soon.

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I recently read a book called Business Buying Strategies. It’s a book about, er, strategies to buy businesses.

The book was solid, with worthwhile info by a guy named Jonathan Jay, somebody who had clearly done what he was writing about.

But more interesting than the what-to and how-to in the book were a few bonus chapters. These featured candid interviews with various business owners who had made a habit of buying other businesses.

I made two notes for myself from one of those interviews, here reproduced verbatim:

1. In spite of apparent outward success, business owners can be fucked. They might be in a place where they can’t make payroll, or can’t pay themselves.

2. Business owners get hundreds of emails a day.

All that’s to say:

1. It makes sense to reach out and offer a way out to business owners.

2. It makes sense to follow up if a business owner doesn’t respond or if the conversation goes cold.

By the way, in case you’re interested in growing by acquisition, or in cutting down the gigantic odds of failure that go into starting up anything new, now or in the future, then Jay’s book is worth a read.

Here’s the link if you’d like to spend $7.99 on some valuable info:

https://bejakovic.com/business-buying

Email pitches for highly customized service businesses

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The owner of a creative agency signed up to my list a couple weeks ago, and had a question:

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Would love to learn more about what kind of materials / services you offer in regards to specifically email pitches.

[My industry] is pulling back some right now, so we are having to put a larger emphasis on outbound, which we never really had to do before.

We are services based business and everything is so customized it makes it a challenge to really blanket offers.

However, we do get pretty good responses when we do put stuff out there.

Are you able to share some of what services you offer / any preferred reading that I should check out on your website etc?

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There’s nothing on my site I would recommend for learning about cold outreach, and there are no cold outreach services I offer at the moment.

But I have been experimenting with cold emails myself, and I have been reading up and listening up on it.

It seems there are two schools of cold emailing:

#1. Carpet bombing, where the bulk of the work goes into setting up the technology for sending dozens or hundreds of automated “personal” emails each day, and feeding that with more or less qualified leads from various databases or from virtual assistants.

​​The idea here is to send out thousands of cold emails and maybe get two or three qualified responses.

#2. Social engineering, where, much like a red team in cybersecurity, you try to find a way into a specific organization by sending just the right message to just the right people.

The idea here is to send out 10 emails and maybe get 10 responses, which you then have to somehow twist and turn into suiting your purpose.

There’s been plenty written and said about the first approach to cold emailing.

There’s no doubt it works, but I’m personally not interested in it. And maybe, if you’re like the agency owner above, it’s not really an option because of the way your business is set up or what you offer.

So what about the second, social engineering approach?

It’s tricky and time intensive.

But if you’re after large accounts or valuable partner relationships, it can make sense to invest that time and to learn the tricks.

Again, this is not something I personally am teaching at the moment. But I do have something to recommend.

The worst part of this recommendation is that it’s free, which will make many people shrug and say, “Oh, I will come back to this later.”

The best part of this recommendation is that it might stop being free or disappear at any minute, particularly if people like me keep linking to it.

If you’d like to get it before it goes away, or before it gets a big price tag stuck on the side of it:

https://bejakovic.com/cold

The highest paid quality on earth

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Last night, I started reading a little book on door knocking.

Door knocking?

Yep, it’s a real skill. And a lucrative one. ​​​

​​​The book was written by a real estate agent who built her entire career by going up to a stranger’s door, knocking on said door, and if somebody opened, asking if they wanted to sell their home.

​​Most of the time, the people inside said no. So the real estate agent would turn around, walk down to the next house, and do it all over again.

The author of the book gives a few good reasons why a sane person might want to live their life like this. Here’s a few that might resonate with you:

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You will earn more money than most doctors, lawyers, pilots, and professors. You will have more freedom to come and go than almost any other professional, and you will have a saleable product (your business) that will continue to support you after you exit the industry.

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I love this book so far, and in particular I love what the author says is the number one quality that leads to success as a door knocker, and by extension, to success in opening up any kind of sales conversation.

Can you guess what this quality is?

I’ll give you a hint. In fact I’ll give you a few hints, and tell you what it’s not:

* Persistence. A lot of people persist in spite of not getting any results or making any sales. (Such as, ahem, myself for large stretches of writing this newsletter.)

* Intelligence. Good God no.

* Extroversion. Now we’re getting a little warmer, but in the words of Eddie Murphy, that ain’t it…

* Likeability. Sure, being seen as likeable helps open conversations. But a lot of people, myself included, tend to default to thinking that you’re either likeable or not.

​​Of course, that’s not true.

​​We each morph from moment to moment, and from environment to environment. Our likability goes up and down, because it’s not really inherent to us. It’s in other people’s heads, and not something that we have control over. So likeability ain’t it either.

I’ve now given you some hints. I told you what this magic quality is not. As to what it is?

If you’d like to know that, I’ll tell you. Or rather, I’ll point you to it.

​​This quality makes up chapter one of one of the greatest sales books of all time, where it’s called the “highest paid quality on earth.”

If you’d like to know what this quality is and why it is so valuable and how to get it, read the book.

​​Plus, read the book because no less of an authority than Gary Bencivenga, the A-list copywriter who gets the most love an adulation from other top-level copywriters and marketers, credits his great success to this book.

And by the way, you can cheat. You can find out what this quality is without reading the book.

Somehow, I suspect this will do absolutely nothing for you. But you decide. Here’s the book, with all its sales wisdom:

https://bejakovic.com/highest-paid

Successful cold outreach that teases secrets

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In my email yesterday, I featured a failed cold outreach message that some dude sent me. I asked readers how they might improve this failed message.

I got a bunch of responses, commentary, and reworked cold pitches. Among them was the following reworked pitch, from a copywriter named Paul:

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Hi John,

I read your book about A-List copywriters and I found it very interesting. Actually, I am also a writer and I had an idea that I’m sure will push your results through the roof. It’s a very interesting concept, especially for your type of business.

I feel like we could do a partnership with me providing extra value to your business and you telling about your experience in direct response.

Let me know if this could interest you, we can schedule a call in the week to talk about it.

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Like I wrote to Paul, his reworked cold email was an improvement over the original.

Because of this, I might at least respond to this email to acknowledge it.

Or I might not. Because I feel I’m being baited by this promise of a “very interesting concept.” ​​It’s a bait I can well refuse, especially considering the risk of biting down on it — wasting my time and having to meet God-knows-who on a Zoom call.

One thing’s for sure. I definitely wouldn’t agree to get on a call based on just this email.

And yet…

A very similar cold outreach message has worked in the past.

In fact, a very similar cold pitch opened up doors, got a meeting, and launched a million-dollar, A-list copywriting career.

The pitch was very similar to the one above. But it was also different, in one critical regard.

I’m not sure the if the critical difference will be obvious to you.

But if you are looking to do cold outreach that actually gets a response, it might be worth trying to figure out the difference between the cold outreach message above, and the one on the following page.

In case you are curious:

Click here to schedule a call with me (no, just kidding, click here to see the successful cold outreach message)