Customer Selection

Why not just double your prices

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You may have heard the following story, because I’ve shared it before in these emails, but it’s worth repeating:

A business owner, an info marketer who sells marketing advice to martial arts schools, is in the red. He’s making a million a year, but he’s spending a million five — on ads, on employees, on fulfillment.

What to do? He has tried everything, and he’s still bleeding cash.

The business owner somehow manages to get in front of Jay Abraham, the “75 Billion Dollar Man,” a business coach who has mentored the likes of Tony Robbins and Dave Asprey and Ramit Sethi.

Over the course of a morning, Jay Abraham grills the business owner on all aspects of his operation. Jay makes one suggestion after another. But the business owner has tried it all already! It didn’t fix his problem!

Finally, after suggestion #1,001 has been shot down, Jay Abraham has had enough. “If you’re so fucking smart, you figure it out!” he says and storms out of the room. The business owner is left stunned.

A few moments pass. Jay Abraham comes back into the room, looking calmer and a bit apologetic.

“How much did you say you’re making?”

“A million a year.”

“And how much are you spending?”

“A million five.”

“How much would you want to make?”

“Two million would be great.”

“Ok,” says Jay Abraham. “That’s easy. Just double your prices.” And he walks out again.

That’s kind of the punchline of the story. Because the business owner, after shaking his head for a while and thinking what an ass Jay Abraham is, decides to actually take this advice. He doubles his prices, finds his market will tolerate them, and is suddenly and magically making a profit for the first time in forever.

The end.

So go and double your prices also! And let me know how it goes.

Maybe you are shaking your head right now, and thinking what an ass Bejako is.

Yes, “Just double your prices” can be a legit business strategy.

It can also be poor advice, for a few reasons:

1. You might need to update the offer along with the pricing. That can mean your positioning, your promise, and in some cases, your deliverables. (This was actually the case of the info publisher above, though the changes he had to make were small.)

2. You might have internal resistance to doubling your prices, and being told to do so can be useless. (Again, this was the case of the info publisher before. It took him several days to actually accept Jay Abraham’s advice as genuine. Many people never get there, because they aren’t as hard pressed as that guy was.)

3. Doubling your prices can be too little! You might be severely undercharging, and there might be people who would happily pay 5x or 10x for the same thing you’re offering now, if you would only ask.

4. Your current audience, or even your current market, might not support double your current prices, and you might need to get in front of different people first.

Which brings me to the Enterprise Clients workshop.

It shows copywriters and agency owners how to charge $15K-$100K for their current service by selling to “enterprise clients.”

Because you can put in the same effort you’re putting in now, or even less, and get paid 2x or 5x or 10x what you’re getting paid now, while working with better, nicer, more appreciative clients.

While increasing your price alone can have magic effects, you are likely to need some other things too, and this workshop will cover those.

This workshop, or actually series of workshops, is happening live on Zoom, from September 21 to 25, for an hour a day.

I’m telling you about it now, weeks in advance, because the early bird pricing is ending in a few days.

It’s only $97 if you act before the deadline. This is the last email I will personally send about this offer before then, because I have other things to talk about.

If you sell DFY services for clients, I figure it’s worth signing up for this workshop, seeing what they have to say, and then deciding whether or not it’s bullshit or whether it’s the transformation you’ve been waiting for years.

I myself bought it and signed up. So have a few of my readers after my email yesterday. Here’s what a couple of them wrote me about it:

“Bought this, looks interesting. We’re already aiming $100k+ per client, so any additional increase because of his approach will be worth a ton.”

“Now THIS offer is exactly perfect for me right now. Just about to launch an AI Agency. Couldn’t have been timed better. Got the VIP – no brainer. Thanks John!”

If you wanna charge more, work with better clients, and have a happier business:

https://bejakovic.com/enterpriseclients

How copywriters and agencies can go after enterprise clients and close them

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I just paid and signed up for a live series of workshops, happening later this month, which promises:

“We’ll Help Your Agency Charge $15K-$100K For Your Current Service In 5 Days By Selling To ‘Enterprise Clients'”

I’d never heard of the guy who’s putting this on, Alex Hartstuff, until a few days ago. I was introduced to him by copywriter and business owner Paul do Campo. As Paul put it, “Alex teaches copywriters and agencies how to go after enterprise level clients and close them.”

Sure enough.

If you go to the sales page below, where you can sign up for Alex’s workshop, you can see a wall of video testimonials from various copywriters and agency owners.

Inevitably, many of these are testimonials about how valuable and informative and inspiring the workshop is. But among those, there are also a bunch of hard, results-based case studies:

* An “email and SMS” agency owner (Adam Rehm) who went from $2.5k retainers to $10k retainers

* A LinkedIn content guy (Matthew Brown) who went from $5k deals to $18k deals

* An “AI agents” agency agent, I mean, owner (Tyler Savoy), who went from getting paid $4k per deal to getting paid $20k per deal

* A girl who runs a web development agency (Namya Hhan) who went from $5k deals to $22k deals

* A guy who runs a cold email agency (Nick Block), who went from $3k/month retainers to $30k/month retainers

Alex and his sales page have bigger success stories too. But do you really need to hear those? I think maybe not. Because if you’re doing good work but not charging $10k, $20k, $30k for it, there is probably some internal resistance there. I don’t want to pile on to that.

Instead, I’ll just tell you the following:

Alex’s workshop is happening live on Zoom, from September 21 to 25, for an hour a day.

I’m telling you about it today because I signed up just now myself, so it’s top of mind for me, and because of the early-bird pricing.

Currently, this series of 5 workshops is just $97. In five days, the price will go up from 97 dollars to 97 million dollars. Don’t quote me on that exact price increase, but the price does increase in 5 days to some higher amount. And why not just sign up now, instead of procrastinating on it and maybe letting it slip away?

If you are a copywriter… if you do email… if you create content for clients… if you build AI agents… if you do web development… if you run cold email campaigns for people… or if you are a freelancer or run an agency offering some other service…

… and if rather than working with clients for whom $3k per month is a big deal… you might rather work with clients for whom $13k per month is not a big deal and $30k per month is doable… then sign up here to have your mind expanded:

https://bejakovic.com/enterpriseclients

Looking to help all-stars improve

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A couple weeks ago, I promoted an affiliate offer around creating an easy coaching offer from your expertise. As part of that affiliate promo, I offered, as a bonus, to get on a consulting call with people who bought, and work with them until they get their first client.

I got on a call with one of those folks. I won’t say what he does, outside the fact he is in a traditional and highly respectable profession.

I will say that, on top of his regular job, this guy has a side gig related to his main career, which makes him an extra $200k per year.

On our consulting call, he brought up the idea of teaching other people in his profession how they could also make an extra $200k per year by bolting on this side gig to their regular business.

Cha-ching!

I was all for it and told him so.

The next step was simply to send out some handraiser emails to a few people he might know to see what they say to the idea. I figured that within the first five emails sent, he would get his first coaching client.

A week passed. Two weeks. I followed up with the guy to ask him what’s up. He replied:

===

2 major obstacles for me: 1. finding who I can send these emails to. I don’t know any [professionals who do what he does] that would need coaching for [how to make an extra $200k/year], or that would pay for it. 2. I have this block where I am telling myself – this is really cheesy, trying to sell coaching to any fellow [professional]. It’s just not done.

===

I didn’t reply to this. Not because I think anything bad of the guy or what he wrote.

From the little I know of him, he seems like a very nice person and good at his job.

I didn’t reply anything because I’m not in the business of convincing people to do stuff they don’t want to do.

I recently read a book titled Million Dollar Consulting. It has the following advice:

===

Everyone can solve problems, and problem solving is a commodity. But few people can systematically raise the bar and improve the performance of already stellar operations. Yet that’s where the value is. It’s a question of the all-stars improving still further. Orient yourself to innovation, not problem solving, and the worth of your project will be commensurately higher.

===

I’ve learned already that there are plenty of people with valuable and marketable expertise who just don’t want to put themselves out there with a personal brand and offers of their own.

That’s fine. It’s a perfectly legit choice. I respect it. In fact, I respect it so much I would never try to change anybody’s mind about it.

But maybe YOU have expertise and you’ve proven you’re willing to put yourself out there.

What I mean is, you have an email list already and some offers, and you’re trying to make those work better, faster.

In my book, that makes you a budding all-star. And I would LOVE to work with you.

I don’t know yet how that would look. I know the outcome is that you make MORE money and get to MORE success FASTER.

In case you’re interested, reply to this email and let’s talk.

Toxic, prejudiced, and “socially and democratic-ly regressive”

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I’ll pay off that subject line in a second. But first, let me tell you about the great Nick Bandy, who I mentioned in my email yesterday.

Last December, Nick won my “I endorse YOU” auction by bidding $31k, and boy was I lucky Nick was the one who won.

Because Nick Bandy is GREAT.

Nick works as a fractional CMO for a massive reverse mortgage company. He collects a lot of money for a little bit of work each week ($12k/month for 15 hours/week). That gives him expertise, credibility, and a unique perspective in the direct marketing industry.

Last year, Nick decided to start a personal email list about marketing and online businesses. Using his fractional CMO skills, Nick built out a great cold traffic funnel that pays HIM to add new buyers to his list every day.

On top of that, Nick has since created great courses he’s been selling to his list, like Ghostbuster Sequence, which I’ve promoted repeatedly and which I myself have used to shockingly good result.

And finally, Nick writes great daily emails. I read them pretty much every day, and I think they are funny, clever, and interesting.

Not everybody agrees with me though.

Yesterday, like I said, I sent out my daily email, not about Nick, but mentioning Nick. I got a reply to that from a long-time reader and customer, who wrote me the following block of text:

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So given Nick Bandy has recently come out in all his socially and democratic-ly regressive Trump (and MAGA aligned) ‘glory’, and given that he is platforming his prejudices and his views in his newsletter now in full stereotype, you might want to mention that in future eulogies. I understand he paid you a lot of money and you’re kind of stuck with him (and who knows you may genuinely like him), but I certainly won’t buy anything more off him. I did buy one product before he out-ed himself but the internet and marketing is toxic enough without financially enabling that. I am still on his list as I like to ‘know thy enemy’ although most emails now go into a file rather than read (said enemy is a tad predictable after a while). I do realise you’re not selling him in this email but the lucrativeness of your skool group, but the epithet was still promoting him. Maybe that cesspit-corner of the world is lucrative enough, I don’t know, but no promise nor amount of money is worth that.

===

Ok. so let me address this reader’s comment step-by-step.

First, Nick is American, and from what I can tell, he is happy and even proud to be American.

He recently hammed up his patriotism around the Fourth of July, including putting a “Proudly made in America 🇺🇸” line into his email signature and calling his promo the “Freelance Freedom Jubilee.”

I personally found it funny and even wrote Nick to say so, but again, I like Nick and his emails.

Second, as for Nick being a Trump and MAGA supporter, that was news to me.

Not that Nick is or is not pro-Trump — I have no idea either way. It’s just not something I’ve ever seen in his emails or heard him talk about anywhere else.

In fact, I just searched for both “MAGA” and “Trump” in Nick’s emails and Skool group. I found four mentions in total. Here’s the most recent and relevant one, and the only one that was anything more than a passing comment or third-party rant:

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I woke up at 4 am for this appointment SOLELY to get the “Trump” passport.

It’s only available in DC, and only available for in-person appointments.

But I put “Trump” in quotation marks because to me, it’s a semiquincentennial passport. It’s not a “Trump” passport unless you think one picture of Donald Trump among dozens of pages makes it a “Trump” passport. By that logic, it’s also a “Mount Rushmore” passport because there’s one page with Mount Rushmore.

It’s also a “Nick Bandy” passport, since there’s a big picture of ME inside it, too.

People see what they want to see.

===

Nick’s final line leads into my final point about my reader’s comment above.

People see what they want to see, and most often, that’s a reflection of their own mental state.

Like I said, that reader who wrote me yesterday has been on my list for years, and has replied to dozens of my emails in the past.

One time, after I wrote an email casually mentioning Ben Settle, she replied with a 562-word response, calling Ben a “toxic, insulting, method-acting control jerk.”

Now the same reader is calling Nick toxic, prejudiced, and “socially and democratic-ly regressive.”

You can draw your own conclusions.

My conclusion is that this reader is the toxic, prejudiced, and socially and democratically regressive one.

I mean, if you go around saying nasty stuff about people based only on your own whims, what is that but toxic?

If you assume that anybody who is patriotic must also be pro-Trump, what is that but prejudiced?

And if you think that everybody who doesn’t agree with you is your enemy, what is that but “socially and democratically regressive”?

Anyways, that long-time reader is not a long-time reader any more. I’ve unsubscribed her from my list and banned her from my Skool group. I don’t want people like her hanging around.

As for Nick, like I said, the guy is great. GREAT. I endorse Nick Bandy, wholeheartedly.

Yes, that’s because Nick won my auction. It’s also because I genuinely believe everything I’ve written in this email about Nick’s emails, courses, and marketing expertise. Plus I like the guy personally.

If you want to get on Nick’s list so you can be shocked by his funny, relevant, and patriotic emails — “Proudly made in America 🇺🇸” — then here’s where to go:

https://nickbandy.com/

How I’d get advertorial clients without Upwork, cold outreach, or a network

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A couple months ago, I got back on Facebook in a BIG way. What I mean by that is that I started spending a few minutes there every couple days or so.

I was lurking, and trying to see what offers I would get pitched by the Facebook ad algorithm. (I was and am planning on launching my own cold traffic funnel, and wiser heads than mine say that you gotta do your research ahead of time.)

That’s how I came across a pretty, pretty brilliant offer.

It’s a dude who is running an ad… telling you he will write an ad to beat your best performing ad… and if he doesn’t succeed in beating it, he’ll give you all your money back.

(The offer started at $97 and has been going up each time he sells out the slots he’s got for the month. It currently sells for $247.)

From what I can tell, the dude has been running this since last November.

He has had 67 people take him up on it so far.

Out of those, he’s been able to beat their best ad 61 times, while refunding people 6 times.

In true Gary Bencivenga fashion, his landing page is FULL of social proof resulting from this challenge, including the refund requests from the 6 refunders, all of whom were complementary to his skill and business model.

Do you think that, out of any of the remaining 61 people whose best ads he beat, he got any long-term clients who are now paying him thousands of dollars a month?

My guess is yes.

I’m telling you this because right now, I’m promoting a cohort iI will run, starting next Monday, May 1st. The cohort will involve writing advertorials and getting clients who will happily pay for those advertorials.

So far, a few dozen people have expressed interest in this. I’ve been talking to them, or rather, emailing with them. I asked them for more information about where they’re currently at.

A few people have told me that they are either sick of looking for copywriting clients on Upwork or via cold outreach… or that they don’t have time or interest in looking for clients at all, and would rather outsource that to me.

I’m sorry to say, in that case, this cohort is not for you.

For one thing, I’m offering to help and advise with getting clients, not do it in your stead.

For another, the client-getting methods we will be using are the ones outlined inside the 1-Person Advertorial Agency course, which are (gulp) Upwork and cold outreach.

(The good news is, Upwork is where I got my biggest advertorial clients, and the way of cold outreach that 1PAA teaches is likely to be more effective and efficient than your usual kind.)

Still, if you hate the idea of Upwork and cold outreach for getting advertorial clients, then I just gave you a working alternative above. Spelled out, it goes like this:

1. Create a landing page with a headline that says something like, “FREE advertorial for your ecom brand”

2. On that landing page, explain your deal, which is basically that you will write them a free advertorial if they will pay you a commission in case of success

3. Explain who it’s for and not for (eg. must have a working cold traffic funnel, must be making at least X sales per day, must not be currently under investigation by the FTC, etc.)

4. Get people to fill out some kind of a form with whatever details you want from them in order to decide if you want to work with them, or to invite them on a screening call

5. Run super basic ads on Facebook for $20 a day to advertise this landing page

6. Update your landing page with proof as you get it

I’ve kick-started my own advertorial agency by reaching out to my list and network. Maybe that will be enough to get me all the advertorial clients I will ever want. Or maybe i will eventually tap out that demand, in which case I will do exactly what I wrote above, with that Facebook advertising strategy.

But if you like, you can beat me to it, and get your name out there in the world, and get clients who pay you for advertorials in the process, by doing what I just told you I would do.

In any case, the countdown to my advertorial cohort continues. Here are the high-level details:

I’ve made an agreement to write an advertorial for a client.

I’m inviting copywriters to join me and work alongside me as I do this.

You get my help with writing an advertorial following the 1-Person Advertorial Agency system.

You get my help tracking down, vetting, and closing a client (or partner business) using the two client-getting methods in 1-Person Advertorial Agency.

Plus, I’m promising to keep working with you and giving you my support and input until you get to $10k from advertorial work.

We start next week. In case you’re interested, reply now.

Unstable copywriting clients

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“Hi Rob, Here’s the invoice for May. Take a look and see if everything looks kosher on your end. Thanks, John”

I sent that email out in June 2021.

I had been working with a dropshipping syndicate. When I say “syndicate,” I mean it was a few young American guys, living in Thailand, who had decided to band together to do dropshipping on an industrial scale.

They were running a dozen funnels for a dozen products, bringing in at the high point 2,000 new buyers per day, and I’m guessing making millions for themselves per year.

Starting in 2019, these guys had hired me to write copy for all the front-end stuff for all their funnels — ads, video scripts, advertorials, landing pages.

For the previous year or so, since early 2020, I was also writing daily emails to their list of about 200,000 buyers, on comission only.

The front-end copy paid me a paltry $150/hr. The back-end emails, after I finally convinced the guys to let me write them for free, on comission only, paid me much much more, the most money I’ve ever gottne paid as a freelance copywriter, money that’s stil sitting in my bank today.

“Hey Rob, Following up on this, not sure you saw it. I checked my account just now and didn’t see this invoice paid. Thanks”

That was a bit later in June 2021. Rob never replied to me. He also never paid my invoice.

I did in the end manage to get paid one last time, by writing to one of his partners, who informed me that the business was shutting down. I never found out why.

I did hear from Rob years later. He wasn’t doing dropshipping any more. He now had a new low-footprint business, buying and flipping land. He wanted to know if I was interested in writing copy for him again. I wasn’t. Also, I checked just now. That new business has also shut down in the meantime.

Here’s my point:

If somebody has no employees, no office, no expensive and custom equipment, no contracts to fulfill, and in general no obligations, what’s keeping them going if things ever get bad, sad, or even just boring? The answer is, nothing.

That’s why it’s a better long-term bet to sell to, say, dentists, who are tethered by a million hooks to their businesses, than to, say, dropshippers, who can decide from today to tomorrow to close their laptops and go work as a land flipper or to maybe roast coffee for a living.

Of course, it’s nice to make a quick cash grab by working where the money is churning right now. (It’s what I was able to do with the dropshipping guys while it still lasted.)

But isn’t it nicer to have a long-running cash grab, one that doesn’t just last for a few months or a year, but one that lasts for three years… five years… 15 years?

I’m telling you this because I’m now promoting an offer by Doberman Dan Gallapoo. I wrote about the full details yesterday. In a nutshell:

Dan is putting together a small group of copywriters and helping them profit from the confusion, uncertainty, and chaos in the market right now.

Dan’s system involves working with profitable businesses, which have been around for years and have large customer database, employees, and often, physical stores.

You can call these “Lindy” clients, as in “Lindy Effect,” which says that things that have been around for a while are likely to stick around.

Dan’s method of finding such clients, and delivering sales for them, is equally Lindy:

Direct mail.

I won’t try to sell you on direct mail or Dan’s system in this email.

Instead, I suggested to Dan that we create a free pop-up group to share more info about this opportunity.

The idea being, this free pop-up group would be a place for a few good folks to get to know Dan… to find out more about how he gets clients and delivers results with direct mail… and see if it’s something they would want to take on with Dan’s guidance, mentorship, and help.

Dan agreed with me. So we are creating this free pop-up group.

Would you like to join us?

Pirates, waddya gonna do

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Last week, Mercure and Svet Dimitrov, both members of my Monetization Mastermind group, ran a course launch.

The day after the launch ended, somebody who “bought” the course pirated the content and made it available for sale online.

Svet and Mercure investigated the offender!

And they found who done it!

“Now I got you, you son of a bitch!”

It turned out to be some girl in Illinois who had her credit card info stolen and who had no idea about the course.

In other words, nothing to do, nowhere to go.

I had almost the identical thing happen to me during a promo of Copy Riddles back in 2023.

The only difference was that I didn’t find Copy Riddles immediately for sale online. Instead, I found out about it when I got a chargeback a couple weeks after the promo.

Also some clueless girl from the heartland of America who had never heard of me or my Copy Riddles course.

I went to check the account associated with the name on my website, where the course is delivered. I saw a Ukrainian IP and all course pages cleanly swiped within 2 minutes after login, I’m guessing by a bot.

Waddya gonna do? I know what I did. I shrugged and put it out of my mind.

For this and many other reasons, I have long ago decided to avoid sailing where the pirates are, and to take harbor where pirates aren’t willing to follow me.

Specifically, I’ve decided to sail as little as possible on the risky, turbulent, pirate-infested Ocean Of Secrets, and to instead spend most my days cruising the safe, rich, and comfortable Sea Of Getting People Results.

That’s a metaphorical and philosophical shift, but it’s more than that. It’s also a matter of deliverables, and of the offers I’m making as well.

If you’d like an example, keep an eye out for my email tomorrow.

I will tell you about my Price Increase Challenge, which I will be launching next week, not with the goal of selling you hot and exclusive tactical info (“Raise your price exactly 18.2%!”)… but with the goal of getting you to actually run a promo to your list that boosts your positioning, and maybe even wins you a treasure chest of doubloons.

Two kinds of starving crowd

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Around age 15, a short time after I had learned to read, I started going through the books of Henry Miller because his books were 1) banned upon publication in the U.S. and 2) had sex in them, and those two things are all the endorsement a 15-year-old boy needs.

Anyways, in one Henry Miller book, I forget which, Henry Miller, who was a kind of joyous social parasite, furiously writes about some cousins of his, who (it being the Great Depression) are starving.

The part that made Miller furious was his cousins’ patiently accepting their fate and subsisting on a leaf of cabbage a day, because, from I can remember, they are too proud or too feckless to ask for help in their starvation.

Henry Miller, who was living in Paris at the time, and was surviving on borrowed food, drinking borrowed wine, and sleeping in borrowed beds, couldn’t understand this.

Whenever he was starving, he would simply beat down his friends’ and enemies’ doors and beg and scream and complain until they fed him.

You’ve probably heard of direct marketing legend Gary Halbert. Halbert used to give talks in which he’d play the “hot dog stand” game with his audience.

“You and I have competing hot dog stands,” Halbert would say. “I’ll give you every advantage you want. I’ll just ask for one thing. Take whatever you want, give me this one thing, and my hot dog stand will whoop yours.”

Halbert’s one thing was a “starving crowd.”

Except, I’d like to suggest to you today there are two kinds of starving crowd.

There’s the “Henry Miller” starving crowd, people who cannot and will not accept their starvation, and who demand that the problem be fixed, and now.

And then there’s the “Cabbage Cousins” starving crowd.

Whether through pride, weakness resulting from starvation, or simply the fact that there’s a pound of bacon stashed somewhere in their house, which they secretly reach for late at night, the “Cabbage Cousins” starving crow accepts what to everybody else looks like unbearable starvation.

And if you wanna play the “hot dog stand” game with me, I’ll give you as big of a starving crowd as you like, provided that it’s the “Cabbage Cousins” kind.

Just give me a few Henry Millers instead, and I bet you I’ll push more hot dogs than you.

(You know what I mean. Don’t give me Henry Miller the broke social parasite. But do give me people who have some money, and a problem, and have shown that they are intent on getting that problem solved, and now.)

Anyways, I’m not sure if this was illuminating. But it is a distinction I had to draw for myself, and I figured it might be useful to you as well.

Maybe you’re wondering how you can know that somebody is intent on getting a problem solved, so you can distinguish the Henry Millers from the Cabbage Cousins in real life.

Fortunately, Gary Halbert has written up the answer for you. In case you’re curious:

https://thegaryhalbertletter.com/newsletters/direct_marketing_to_a_starving_crowd.htm

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

Tired of experimenting?

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Last year, I started snooping on people.

Specifically, I started snooping on 3-4 online business owners, who have businesses that are doing well, and who I was frankly jealous of, because I wanted something similar.

I won’t tell you all the folks I snooped on, but I will tell you one was a guy named Olly Richards.

I’m not here to hype up Olly — if you wanna find out more about the guy, the Internet’s your friend.

I simply want to share a testimonial I saw on Olly’s site, or rather a video confessional, by one of Olly’s coaching students.

This coaching student runs a 6-figure online education business. In other words, he has an audience. He’s making good money. He’s unlikely to respond to typical promises made in the “creator” economy.

So why did this student decide to work with Olly, and pay Olly tens of thousands of dollars? From the video, in the student’s words:

“You can do things by experimenting and doing things yourself. You learn that way. That is one way of doing things. But in my opinion, I’ve just found it’s extremely exhausting after a certain point. I’m really tired of experimenting. Just give it to me. Just tell me what to do, tell me what not to do.”

At the time, as part of the research for my new 10 Commandments book, I was reading the book I’m OK — You’re OK by Thomas Harris. In that book, Harris writes:

“Structure hunger is an outgrowth of recognition hunger, which grew from the initial stroking hunger.”

That sounded profound to me when I read it, and seemed tightly connected with that testimonial for Olly Richards.

Now, after a year has passed, it seems less tightly connected and less profound, but it does describe the core process that people like Olly’s student go through:

1. They start out by just wanting to feel OK, ie. better about themselves and their place in the world.

2. To do that, they seek out recognition — via work, achievement, and the fruits thereof.

3. Getting recognition, and worse yet, keeping recognition, is tiring, and so people start looking for help, shortcuts, and “structure” eg. simply being told what to do.

Maybe you think I’m telling you something super obvious, and that there’s no need to flog such a poor and common horse.

Fine. In that case, let me just share a few simple takeaways:

1. People like Olly’s student, who have already achieved recognition, make for better customers than people who have not, simply by virtue of having money to spend (on your help) and resources (list, offers, team) to profit from your help quickly and effectively.

2. If you want to appeal to such people, try the “Tired of experimenting?” line, because it comes directly from the mouth of a member of that market.

3. If you yourself are personally tired of experimenting, then take a look at the community below.

It’s a place where business owners, marketers, and copywriters follow proven recipes to get more value out of their existing skills and assets, often while working dramatically less, and having a more fun time of it, than they are doing now:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin