Communities

Free welcome sequence for small businesses

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I recently met Liz Wilcox, and I’m gonna spend the rest of this email selling her to you.

Liz is fond of wearing large glasses, where the frame is of different colors for the left and the right eye.

She was once a contestant on the TV show Survivor (Survivor 46).

Today, Liz runs a paid membership for small business owners who want to do something with email marketing, but don’t really know what to to do.

Inside her paid membership, Liz teaches email marketing, has expert speakers come in and teach also (I will be speaking in May), plus, as the the main selling point, she gives members weekly templates and swipes for their business’s email newsletter, so they can get it out in minutes instead of hours or never.

Like I said, Liz’s membership is for business owners who have heard of the power of email marketing, but don’t really wanna write themselves… don’t wanna hire a copywriter either… don’t wanna entrust this to a VA… and yet want to get the benefit of regular communication with their prospects and clients and customers.

So how much would you pay for such an incredible and spectacular email marketing membership, which slices, and dices, and makes julienne fries?

$999/month?

NO!

$99/month??

NO!!!

$19/month???

NO! NO! NO!

Liz charges 9 whole bucks per month for her email marketing membership. And get this. She has… 4,000 members of her $9/month membership. At those numbers, she has the margin to make sure she can provide and deliver great templates, great trainings, and great everything.

But I’m not here to sell you on Liz’s membership. Not really, not yet at least.

All I really wanna do is just point you to Liz’s “Swipe Swipe Baby” lead magnet. It’s an entire templatized welcome sequence, plus three weekly newsletters, which you can plug into your business right now if you want.

When I initially talked to Liz, I asked her what lead magnet of hers I should send folks to.

She said, “I only have one. It’s six years old, and I’ll never create a new one, because it just works.”

And why not? Liz’s lead magnet is in fact the perfect magnet for prospective leads for $9/month membership.

So if you want Liz’s free welcome sequence templates… if you wanna know more about Liz (lots of Vanilla Ice references on her site)… or if you’ve been intrigued by her $9/month membership… here’s the front door, fully free to walk through:

https://bejakovic.com/lizwilcox

Am I ditching daily emails in favor of communities?

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Yesterday, I sent out an email about how my bank cancelled my debit card while they ship me a new one. I also dramatically stated I’ve been living on 200 euro in cash until my new card arrives.

In reply to that email, I got an offer from long-time reader, fellow Barcelona resident, and occasional coffee buddy named Matthias (not sure he wants me to share his last name). Matthias wrote:

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Hey John, just read your mail. Similar happened to me last month. If you need some cash, let me know, then I can meet you for a quick coffee or sth.

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Also yesterday, at the end of my email, which was really about how my Amazon book sales have cratered after I stopped paying for ads a few days ago due to the cancelled debit card — and dropped from 19 a day (last day of advertising) to just 2 a day (a couple days ago) — I asked readers to buy my book on Amazon, either because they are curious about it or because they want to help me goose sales until can get ads running again.

I have been promoting this book since May. I have written dozens of emails driving readers to the Amazon page for it.

Most of my best and most dedicated readers and customers have already bought this book.

And yet, I still made 11 new sales yesterday, and from what I can tell, all or close to all of those came via my email.

I’m telling you this because lately I’ve been talking a lot about the Skool community I’m running, and in particular the auction I ran last week inside that community.

(Maybe you heard? The winning bid in that auction was $31k. In case you haven’t heard, don’t worry, because it’s a fact I will be repeating several hundred more times before 2025 runs to a close.)

About that community and auction:

After the auction completed last week (with a $31k winning bid, just in case you forgot), I got lots of feedback and impressions from people who witnessed what went down.

One such bit of feedback came from Howard Shaw. Howard’s a Partner at Chester Toys, a UK toy wholesaler that’s been in business for 60 years. Howard also happens to read these emails, and he wrote:

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I think what showed during the whole auction was the affinity with your group – which I guess in no small part is down to people ‘knowing you’ from being on your list.

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Howard’s absolutely right.

Communities are great, and it’s been fun to build up something new.

But the fact is, my community wouldn’t exist had it not been for this email newsletter.

Not only in terms of members who form the core of the community, and who joined via these emails… but also in terms of engagement by those folks, which is there in large part because of the relationship that these emails have built up.

Fortunately, I don’t have to choose between having a community and an email list. It’s easy and profitable and fun to have both.

But if the direct marketing gods forced me to choose only one, then for all the reasons I’ve listed above, and for many other reasons besides, I’d choose an email list, and I’d MAIL IT DAILY.

Now, if you want some help with MAILING A LIST DAILY, and sticking with it for the long term, I’ve got just the thing to help you.

It’s my Daily Email Habit service. Speaking of:

Earlier this week, I got on a call with the winner of the auction I ran last week, Nick Bandy. (Nick’s winning bid, for the third and final time, at least in this email, was $31k.)

I grilled Nick about his current job (fractional CMO with a $12k/mo retainer), his life history, his list (about 800 people, all added since this spring) the offers he’s making the people on his list via daily emails, and then some.

At the end of our call, which lasted about two hours in total, Nick said about Daily Email Habit, which he wants to promote to his own list as well:

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That’s why I said Daily Email Habit so enthusiastically. I literally wouldn’t have started any of this if I didn’t buy that. I enthusiastically endorse this. It’s one of the best things I ever spent money on.

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If you wanna find out more about Daily Email Habit, or get going with this enthusiastically endorsed service today, so you can build up your own stock of human relationships with folks who support and drive on everything else you want to do online or offline:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

He auctioned his CAT?!?!

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Yesterday in my Daily Email House community, I announced the winner of the prestigious “Inaugural Pool Party Funniest Comment” award.

The lucky winner was audio-engineer-turned-newsletter-operator Filip Stilin. Filip’s winning comment was:

“Subject line: He auctioned his CAT?!?!”

(In case you’re wondering why Filip’s comment was possibly funny, I could explain it, but would that make it funny now? I suspect no. Such is the nature of humor. You had to be there.)

Filip’s prize for writing this funniest comment are A) a physical copy of my favorite comedy book, which has influenced my writing as much as any copywriting or marketing book I’ve ever read, and B) the pleasure of seeing his comment turned into an actual subject line in my email today.

Now here’s the point, and why you might feel this email is anything beyond an inside joke run amok:

The whole idea for this “funniest comment” contest came up as a suggestion during the auction I ran last week, by one of the auction participants.

It was a suggestion I immediately adopted.

That’s because the biggest thing I’ve learned over the past year of running a community is to stop trying to do everything myself… to start asking for feedback and guidance and input… to let people participate and shape the direction of the group… instead of hitting them over the head repeatedly with content and “value” and then wondering why nobody’s engaging.

It’s kinda opposite of how I run this newsletter, which is guided exclusively and jealously by my own standards and tastes and preferences.

That’s not to say I can never adopt others’ suggestions in these emails. In fact that’s what I’m doing today with Filip’s subject line.

But that’s all done in line with the core concept of this newsletter, which I’ve realized is about performing real magic, about turning ideas into reality, about casting spells that make living, breathing rabbits appear.

That might sound grandiose, and maybe it is. In any case it’s true.

For example, the spell for today was “Apply a suggestion coming from the audience.”

Tomorrow’s spell might be something else.

This spell-based approach has been profoundly valuable to me in running this newsletter, and has made this newsletter 1000x more fun and educational and ultimately profitable than it would have been otherwise.

If you you wanna find out more about this “real magic” way of running a newsletter, and of the power of turning ideas into reality, I have created a course all abut it. It describes my approach in detail, gives lots of examples, and maybe encourages you to apply the same in your own world. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

The “magazine model” for your paid membership or continuity offer

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A couple days ago marked the 1-year anniversary that my Daily Email Habit service has been going out, day after day after day, to members all around the world.

Following that announcement, a new subscriber to Daily Email Habit wrote in and asked:

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Wow. Happy Bday to your DEH!

I am curious to see the first seven. Any chance to send them to me?

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My response was some icy staring across the Internet, a bit of finger tapping on my desk, followed finally by a cold hard NO.

Like I’ve been telling people since I launched Daily Email Habit:

I don’t send out previous puzzles to new subscribers. The idea is Daily Email Habit works like a magazine subscription — you get the issues that go out from the time you subscribed, and not before. It’s a way to encourage people to sign up now rather than later.

After hearing my cold hard no, the DEH subscriber above replied to say:

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I know. I was just curious to see how it started. I respect your answer. It sounds fair and smart.

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I’m a-telling you this because this week, I launched a new 1:1 coaching program.

On Tuesday, I got on the first call with one of the coaching clients who already signed up. Let’s call her Ms. X.

Ms. X runs a paid membership and wants to increase the number of paying subscribers and reduce churn.

But like lots of other people who run memberships, she has so far been promising new subscribers access to everything inside her membership, including all the stuff that happened before they subscribed.

But what’s the incentive to join today… when joining tomorrow will give you everything you get if you join today, plus some more stuff… plus you get to hold on to your money for an extra 24 hours?

Not much incentive.

Fortunately, Ms. X already came to that conclusion before she even got on this coaching call with me.

At this point, her bottleneck is technical. Her membership software makes it hard to restrict/allow access to different members like this.

My Yoda-like suggestion was, “Many simple option you fail to see.”

I suggested some low-tech ways to deliver content that’s only available to current members. Ways that make it easy to test out this idea for impact. If this magazine model makes a difference, as it most likely will, then Ms. X can worry about the long-term tech later.

A magazine model is something to think about if you too are running or are thinking of launching a paid membership, or really any kind of continuity offer.

Not only will treating your membership like a magazine give people a legit reason to sign up today rather than tomorrow… but it will give them a reason to stay signed up instead of churning (thinking they can always come back later and get everything they missed in the meantime)…

… and if your subscribers are anything like my subscribers, when you introduce and stick to this “magazine” rule, you might hear them say, “I respect your answer. It sounds fair and smart.”

In other news, I have already signed up a few coaching students since launching this coaching program a few days ago. I am also looking for a few more.

The coaching I’m offering is specifically about list monetization, or as I say, about using your email list to pay for a house.

The coaching is 1:1, and runs for a year.

It’s also reasonably low-cost, because accountability and whip-cracking are not a part of it.

In order for me to be useful to you at all with this coaching program, I need to see you have some runway already.

In case you’re interested, hit reply and tell me a bit about your situation with your list.

Specifically, I’m interested in things like how many people you have on your list… how many new people you’re getting in an average week… what kinds of offers you’ve made so far… and how that’s gone for you.

2 facts about throwing good email parties

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Yesterday, I announced a new campaign inside my Daily Email House community. My goal is to get existing members to promote the group and help me grow it.

I appreciate all referrals.

At the same time, I’m not letting just anyone join.

To help me vet people, I have a few sphinx-like riddles set up at the front door.

I look at a potential new member’s profile and history on Skool.

I use my intuition to decide if he or she has something to get from and contribute to the group beyond trolling or whining.

Many I’ve allowed in. Some I have not.

Unfortunately, I only started keeping record last week of the colorful reasons why some people have found the doors to Daily Email House closed. Here are a few from the past week:

#1. In answer to “What’s your #1 goal right now?”: [entered his email address]

#2. In answer “What’s your #1 goal right now?”: “learn em”

#3. Bio: “sfd sfsfsf”

#4. In answer to “What’s your #1 goal right now?”: “邮件太多不知如何使用?” [ChatGPT translates this as “Too many emails and don’t know how to use them?” which would not pass muster even if it were written in English]

I recently read an article titled “21 Facts About Throwing Good Parties.” Fact #1:

“1) Prioritize your ease of being over any other consideration: parties are like babies, if you’re stressed while holding them they’ll get stressed too. Every other decision is downstream of your serenity: e.g. it’s better to have mediocre pizza from a happy host than fabulous hors d’oeuvres from a frazzled one.”

… and fact #20:

“20) Let me repeat that: Parties are a public service, you’re doing people a favor by throwing them. Someone might meet their new best friend or future lover at your gathering. In the short term, lovely people may feel less lonely, and that’s thanks to you. In the long term, whole new children may ultimately exist in the world because you bothered to throw a party. Throwing parties is stressful for most people, but a great kindness to the community, so genuinely pat yourself on the back for doing this.”

An online community should feel and work like something like a house party… as should an email newsletter. It should deliver value. It should be fun and the people participating — the members or readers — should feel like they can participate and express themselves more or less freely.

At the same time, you are still the one whose house it is, and you set the tone and the rules, and the #1 rule, and the #20 rule, is to make it convenient and fun for yourself first and foremost…

… and if that means not allowing people inside just because their vibe strikes you as off, then that’s ok.

So much for the long-term mindset.

If you want more practical, day-to-day advice on how to make your email list feel like an online party, you can find that inside my Daily Email Habit service.

Daily Email Habit currently sells for $30/month, which means you can get a daily email prompt and ongoing education in how to expand that prompt into a fun and valuable email for just $1/day.

In a few days, I will be jacking up the price of Daily Email Habit to Martin Shkreli levels. If you want to get in before the price increases, or better yet, if you simply want to start writing your own daily email habit today, so you can reap the benefits tomorrow:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Announcing: My new old Skool group

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About 6 weeks ago, I closed down my Skool group, at that time called Daily Email House.

I wanted to see if this group could be useful to people writing dailyish emails, and have a life of its own, as a kind of meeting point or social club, even without me at the center of it.

That concept did not work out. And so, in a moment of laziness and shortsightedness, I shut the group down.

But maybe the group could work well in some other way?

That question has been rattling around my head the past few weeks.

I reactivated the group this morning.

It turns out that since I had let the group lapse, I have lost my custom URL, which is actually a good thing.

It will allow me to change the URL and the name and even the concept of the group going forward.

I don’t know what that new concept will be yet.

The group members and I work it out as we go along.

One change so far is that I’ve decided to open this group up to other people on my list.

Another change is that I’ll give some sort of central mission to the group, where there wasn’t one before.

Again, I don’t know what that will be.

For now, as a placeholder, and a play on the group’s old name, I’ve set the group’s mission as “Use your email list to pay for a house. Or a car. Or a trip to Spain.”

But that mission is likely to change.

In fact, you can influence it, and make it useful and relevant to you.

You’re invited to join me inside this group. If you’d like to do so:

https://bejakovic.com/house

If you cannot persuade yourself to act however hard you try

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This morning, a private detective I know here in Barcelona sent me a screenshot of a trending social media story:

“Couple Who Met On Dating App Rob Bank On First Date”

Can this really be true? I decided to do my own sleuthing.

It turns out yes, the story is roughly true, but with an important detail that’s missing in the headline above.

The man, Christopher Castillo, age 33, and the woman, Shelby Sampson, age 40, agreed to meet for a date.

Castillo asked Sampson to pick him up in her car. Once in the car, Castillo started drinking wine, presumably red. He then asked Sampson to pull over at a bank.

Castillo was gone for a few minutes. He came back sweating, wearing sunglasses and a hat (!), and holding an antique gun and a wad of cash.

He told Sampson to drive, which she did, for a bit, until the cops pulled them over and put the date to an end.

The crucial bit is that Sampson was not charged with anything, because, so the state believes, she had absolutely no knowledge of or participation in any criminal aspect of this first date.

This missing detail is what I found most interesting in the whole story.

I’ve never robbed a bank, but I imagine it’s hard.

The stock joke is that a typical man is unwilling to pull over and ask for directions while driving. Can you imagine how much more unwilling a typical man is to pull over, walk into a bank, hold up a gun, and ask for $1,000 in cash (and five years in prison, it turns out)?

No wonder Castillo was drinking in the car. And no wonder he felt he needed somebody “in his corner,” even if that was an unwitting and unwilling non-accomplice he had met on Tinder.

I found this interesting because, while I’ve never robbed a bank, I have done other, legal, things in my life. Some of these things I found personally very difficult to do, because they challenged my own identity.

There were times when no amount of auto-suggestion, willpower, or even red wine would push me over the threshold.

There were times when the only thing that would help me act would be having somebody “in my corner,” having a feeling of a home base I could come back to, even if that was somebody I had met minutes earlier and had no special relationship with.

I imagine this is all a bit waffly without specific examples. I might give those in another email.

My point today is simply that if you have something you know you should be doing (don’t rob a bank), but you cannot persuade yourself to do it no matter how you try, then having some kind of support or community of other people to rely on, however tenuous, can make all the difference.

Ideally, this is other people in real life. Real life seems to make a big difference.

But if you cannot find people in real life to act as a home base, then people online can sometimes act as a substitute. At least that’s the promise of online communities, groups, and memberships.

I am still keen on spinning up a new online community of my own, but I haven’t yet decided which (legal) things I would like to support people in doing.

While that’s going on, I can only recommend once again a community that I myself am part of, Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin.

If you’re struggling to take the action needed to build your own audience… or to make deals with people who have an audience of their own… or to make your first $5k online… then you might find the support you need within Royalty Ronin. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

Why I’ve shuttered my online community

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Yesterday, I shuttered up Daily Email House, the community I had set up back in December ’24 on the back of my Daily Email Habit service.

The concept for Daily Email House was a “members-only club for business owners and marketers who write (more or less) daily emails.”

I made it clear from the start to all members that this was an experiment.

I didn’t want to have a specific promise behind Daily Email House.

I also didn’t want to be constantly in there, stirring up discussion and sharing new content.

If the community could live without me and still be useful, great. If not, that’s okay.

Daily Email House lived on for a while and served some use. Yesterday, on the post in which I announced I will be closing down the group, a couple of the active members wrote that “signing up was the best decision I made in 2025” and that the group had a “profound effect on me and my business.”

But my laissez-faire vision for this group didn’t have legs, and that’s why Daily Email House is coming to an end.

But, groups, groups, groups…

I am still sold on the promise and opportunity of having and running a group, and it’s something I want to get good at. In fact, I will tell you a secret:

Back in 2013 or so, when I first got addicted to Internet Marketing via the Tim Ferriss gateway drug, I was lucky enough to get convinced that email is where it’s at, and will be at, for a long time to come.

It’s a hunch that’s served me well.

My secret for you is that I have the same hunch about groups/communities.

Clearly, neither email nor online communities are anything new. Plus, communities have in fact been having their moment in the sun over the past couple years.

That’s fine.

Neither email nor communities will be going anywhere any time soon, at least that’s my bet.

My bet is also that, as with email, so with communities.

Most people (such as me above) are not doing a good job with their communities.

The people who do a good job running communities will have the same advantage that, say, a business that emails its customers regularly with interesting emails and desirable offers has over a business that emails stupid coupons at holiday time with nothing else in between, except maybe a ChatGPT-generated listicle.

But I’m running off on a tangent. My real point is that I got a deal for you.

I am looking to set up a new group/community. One that will be based on solving a problem… and one in which I will be more actively involved.

I don’t know yet what that group would be about. But you can influence that, and maybe you can help create a useful and valuable resource for yourself in the process.

Here’s my deal for you:

Hit reply and tell me what problems or frustrations you have — with your email list, with your business, or with your laundry. Anything goes.

I will read all responses, I might reply to you directly, and I will certainly consider what you write me as I work on my next community. And who knows, maybe I will see you inside the resulting group, and maybe one day, you too will say it had a profound effect on you and your business.