Customer Selection

Pick one of these 3 niches

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Less is often more when it comes to marketing education.

Example:

I’ve heard marketer Travis Sago say he was once selling a biz op training, about providing some sort of marketing service to businesses.

The first iteration of the training didn’t work out well — Travis had to spend too much time helping his students figure out what niche of businesses to go after.

After it was all over, Travis took stock.

He paced and paced the floor of his laboratory, deep into the night.

And then, in the early morning hours, he had an epiphany:

For the second iteration of the training, Travis simply took out the niche selection part.

Instead, he made niche selection a part of the marketing and application process. When you signed up for the training, you had to pick one of three niches to be in.

Result:

Much easier delivery of the training, and much better results for the students.

I bring this up because I have my Daily Email Fastlane coming up on Thursday. This is a workshop about sending daily emails for your personal brand.

It’s the first time I’m ever offering this workshop.

I have learned a lot from Travis Sago, and I plan to learn from him here as well. So I will not be covering how to pick a niche in Daily Email Fastlane.

Instead, for anyone who does not yet have a niche, but is considering writing daily emails for themselves, my advice is to pick one of these 3 niches for your daily emails:

1. Personal interest

2. Previous experience (preferably, something you got paid for)

3. Make money

You can mix and meld these. My daily emails started out as #1 (interest in persuasion, influence, and personal development)… moved into #2 (talking about copywriting and marketing, based on the work I was doing for clients)… and I’ve since introduced #3, how to get adequately rich so you can live life on your own terms. Which brings me back to Daily Email Fastlane.

The above advice about niches holds whether or not you decide to join me for Daily Email Fastlane. If you want to write daily emails and build a personal brand based on those emails, pick one of the 3 niches above.

But if you want my advice on topics that are a bit further down the daily email road, then consider actually joining me for this workshop.

I will talk about 3 daily emailers I have coached. Each of them fits primarily into one of three categories above. And each built a nice lifestyle business, with one daily email at the center of it.

The deadline to sign up for Daily Email Fastlane is this Wednesday, at 8:31pm CET. If you know you want in, and you want to make sure you don’t miss the deadline, here’s where to go now:

https://bejakovic.com/daily-email-fastlane

Four chapters more important than new customers

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Yesterday, I was flying from Girona, Spain to Zagreb, Croatia. It was not a pleasant flight. I tried to distract myself by opening up a valuable marketing book I’ve been reading:

Ice To The Eskimos, or, How To Market A Product Nobody Wants

I’ve been at this book for a couple of weeks already. I’m a very slow reader, which means I’ve just started chapter 5.

“Finally,” I said to myself as I started reading. “Now we’re getting into the sexy stuff, getting new customers!”

But that’s a classic mistake I was making.

Sure, the chapter 5 stuff sounded sexy.

But there were 4 chapters that the author thought were more important to write about before that.

The author of this book is Jon Spoelstra. Spoelstra was a sports marketer who was brought in to boost sales at the New Jersey Nets back in the 1990s.

Here was Spoelstra’s first and most important lesson:

Back in the early 90s, the New Jersey Nets were the worst team in the NBA. They had no stars. They even had no kind of home team advantage — New Jersey residents support the New York Knicks. To top it all off, there was a legitimate curse on the franchise.

The owners brought in Spoelstra to try to turn things around.

They told him to devise a strategy to lure people from Manhattan to buy Nets tickets. After all, Manhattan is so rich and so near, and so full of people hungry for entertainment.

Spoelstra refused.

He called it his Ulysses Method.

Spoelstra plugged up the owners’ ears with wax. He lashed himself to the mast of the Nets ship, so he would not be tempted to heed the siren song that leads to certain ruin, trying to woo customers from a sexy segment of the market where he just. could. not. win.

Instead, Spoelstra focused on unsexy New Jersey. Result:

The Nets went from zero sold-out games the year before Spoelstra was hired, to 35 sold-out games a few years later.

During the same time, the Nets also managed to increase revenue from local sponsorships from $400k per year to more than $7 million per year.

How Spoelstra achieved this is clever and worth knowing, and Spoelstra’s book is worth reading.

But none of it would have mattered much if not for the basic Ulysses Method.

I’m telling you this because I needed being told this myself.

When I first read Spoelstra’s chapter about the Ulysses Method, I impatiently sped through.

“Sure of course makes sense. But not really relevant to me. I am in no danger of chasing after markets where I can’t win.”

A few days passed. With a bit of space and time, I slowly realized Spoelstra’s warning applies very directly to me, and to stuff I’m trying to do now.

So I’m sharing the Ulysses Method with you now, because maybe you can use it as well.

All right, on to my offer to you for today:

If you feel you never learned the fundamentals of copywriting, and you’ve just been winging it based on what you’ve observed others doing, then my Copy Riddles program might be the fix you’re looking for.

Copy Riddles covers the A-Z of copywriting in 20 individual rounds.

Each round covers a specific copywriting topic or technique. The topics and techniques get progressively more sophisticated and rarefied as the 20 rounds go on.

But just like with Spoelstra and his Ulysses Method, the most important stuff is right there in rounds 1 and 2.

Internalize just those two rounds, or have them internalized for you, simply by following the Copy Riddles process, and you will be ahead of 95% of the people who call themselves professional copywriters, including many who make a good living at it.

For more info on Copy Riddles:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Should you write emails that attract your target audience?

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In a few hours, I’m to board a plane to sunny Andalusia in the south of Spain. Before then, there’s still the gym, packing, and of course, this daily email to write.

Fortunately, a reader sends in a timely question:

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I have a (copy)riddle that’s been on my mind for a while now…

I have a tiny list of 40 people I want to grow and use to get copywriting clients.

Now… Should I keep writing to them about copywriting and marketing, or should I switch to something else that would attract the people I want?

Just because if I keep writing about copy, it is going to attract mainly copywriters and not the business owners I want, right?

What are some of your thoughts on this one?

===

When I first read this question, I felt it was either the world’s most gingerly tossed softball or some kind of setup.

Should you, or should you not, write emails that attract your target audience… hmm… let’s see… and it’s a copywriter asking me this…

Clearly, the answer is yes, right?

Yes. If you want people in a specific market to read your emails, you should write your emails in a way that attracts those people.

That’s what I replied to the reader above.

But then I thought a bit more. And the following question popped up in my mind:

Over the past 5 years, how many copywriters have started email lists with the goal of attracting clients?

And of those, what percentage have ever managed to get a single paying client from their email newsletters?

My guess for the first question is, thousands. My guess for the second question is, fewer than 5%, and maybe fewer than 1%.

So maybe there’s more to this question than meets the retina.

That’s why I’ll talk more about this on the free training I will put on at the end of this month, about how I do it, meaning how I write and profit from this newsletter you are reading now.

Because I have gotten copywriting clients via this newsletter, multiple times.

​​I’ve also gotten lots of one-time-gig, ongoing-job, and even partnership offers that I turned down, because I had enough work or because I wasn’t taking on clients at the time.

And yet, I’ve written many more emails about copywriting and marketing than I have about the troubles of being an online business owner… and my prime directive has never been to write in a way that attracts my ideal clients.

I’ll talk about this on the training, and I’ll work to make it interesting and valuable to you too, whether you’re hungry for clients or you simply want to write your own email newsletter for other reasons.

Once again, the training is free. It will happen on Monday January 22, 2024 at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. You will have to be signed up to my list in time to get on the training. If you’d like to sign up to my list, click here.

I’m open to client work once again

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This morning, I summed up the money I made during 2023, and then I broke it down by where it came from.

I came up with a whole host of new insights, enough to fuel a week’s worth of emails.

Today, I’ll share just one thing I spotted, and that’s the outsized role of client work in my 2023.

Only a few days ago, I wrote that 2023 was my second-best year ever, trailing only behind 2020, when I was fully immersed in copywriting client work.

But last year, I did almost no client work. Or so I thought.

Because while I only had one client last year, and I only wrote quick and easy emails for this one client, it ended up accounting for almost 18% of my total income for 2023.

It turned out client work was the second-biggest source of income for me in 2023, ahead of most of the courses I sold, ahead of the coaching I did, ahead of the affiliate offers I promoted. And I didn’t realize it until just this morning.

Really, that shouldn’t have been a surprise.

Because done-for-you services are easy to sell. And if they have to do with marketing or sales, they are easy to charge a big chunk of money for. And yet, for the right client, they still make sense, and then some.

All of which is to say, for the first time in a long time, I am actually open to new client work.

Maybe you’d like to hire me.

Not for email copywriting, but for managing your entire email list. This includes writing the emails, but also everything else that goes with making money via a list, including picking offers, organizing promotions, and even doing things to grow the list, in case that makes sense.

Basically, I handle everything, take this worry off your plate, and make you money, probably much more than you’re making now.

And since this email is quickly turning into a sales pitch, let me give you some proof that this is something I am qualified to do:

One is my experience with this newsletter, and making a good living at it.

But more importantly, two is my experience managing the email lists of clients who had much much bigger businesses than mine.

I’ve written about this experience before. But the most interesting and notable was managing two lists of ecommerce buyers, each with over 70k names, each bringing in multiple millions of dollars in sales per year via daily emails alone — all of which I was doing.

So if you have an email list that you’re not monetizing at all… or that you are not monetizing well… or that you simply don’t want to manage yourself any more, then hit reply, and let’s talk. Maybe we can work together.

The third-hottest release of 2023 closes after just one night

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Last night, with crowds of paparazzi pushing outside the velvet rope, and a few stars making their way from their limos down the red carpet to the doors of the classy old theater, my Influential Emails show had its grand opening.

The show ran for exactly one night.

And then this morning, I locked and chained the theater doors, removed the “INFLUENTIAL EMAILS” letters from the marquee, and took out an ad in the local paper to announce this show is now over.

As I announced in the lead up and during the grand opening of Influential Emails, this promotion would go until Sunday at the latest, and I might close it down sooner.

Well, that sooner is today, about 12 hours after the initial grand opening. I would have closed it earlier but I was asleep.

The reason why I did this is that made up my mind, before I launched this promo, what a nice sum of money would be to make from it.

I’ve now made that money and more. And so the cart is now closed.

If you managed to squeeze in to the Influential Emails show, I hope you will get value out of it in a way pays for itself, and soon.

If you wanted to get in but didn’t manage to, then all I can say is — if you’re not too angered by this experience, then maybe you will have better luck next time.

And if you were not interested in buying Influential Emails, then I can share the following valuable truth with you:

You can choose who you sell to, and how much of something you sell. There’s no law against it. And it’s ultimately good for business, in many different ways.

Now here’s a little sneak peek behind the scenes:

This promo didn’t really run for 12 hours.

It ran for about 36 hours.

I opened it up a day earlier for a private showing, just for people who were on the waiting list and who had already bought something from me in the past.

I also gave them an inducement to buy within the first 24 hours.

Many did.

That’s how I managed to make more money with this one-and-a-half-day promo than I used to make in a whole month, the first few years of my copywriting career.

Some of the folks who were invited for this private showing had bought pretty much all of my offers in the past.

Some had bought just one of my courses.

And some only bought my little $5 Kindle book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

It didn’t matter.

They are all valued and ongoing customers, and I wanted to say thanks with this special opportunity.

All that’s to say, if you have not yet bought my 10 Commandments book, then consider doing so.

It might teach you a thing or two about copywriting. And it might just prove to be a ticket to an exclusive future show, and a walk down the red carpet. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Who Influential Emails is definitely not for

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A reader writes in with a timely question:

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Hey John,

I had a question about Influential Emails.

I’m looking to purchase your “Influential Emails” course next Thursday when my stripe payments clear from my clients…

…and am devoting more of my time to lead generation, list building, personal branding … kind of like what you do

I am curious, for this “Influential Emails Course” if it can help with someone for my specific use cases…

To grow an email list, establish authority, build a personal brand and sell copywriting and digital marketing services.

looking forward to reading your response…

===

Yesterday, I wrote about how I’ve learned to regularly send emails telling people what exactly is in my offers.

Another thing I’ve learned to regularly send is emails that tell people who my offers are for, and more importantly, who they’re not for.

I wrote back to the reader above to ask whether he has already been writing daily emails to promote his marketing services… or if he has a long-term agreement with a client to write daily emails.

I haven’t heard back from him yet. But a few things — waiting for Stripe to clear, the specific use case of having to accomplish pretty much everything, from list building to authority to making sales… makes me think this person is more of a beginner.

Nothing wrong with that. But Influential Emails is a bunch of advanced email copywriting tricks and strategies.

When I offered this training the first and only time so far, two years ago, I gave students a chance at a copy critique.

A bunch of people took me up on my offer and submitted their emails. All the submitted emails had good ideas in them. But I also realized many of these emails also had really fundamental, technical problems.

Many of those student emails failed on basic and important points, which would cripple the effectiveness of the email. For people who couldn’t do the basics right, none of the advanced techniques I was sharing would matter at all.

That’s the reason why I eventually created a beginner-friendly email copywriting course, Simple Money Emails.

So to sum up:

If you have not been writing daily emails for yourself for a while…

… or if you have not been writing daily emails for a good client for a while, and you have the kind of relationship that makes you think this will go on for a long time, and is worth investing in…

… then do not get Influential Emails.

Instead, start writing daily emails for yourself, or start seeking out a client who will pay you to write daily emails for them.

And if you are looking for guidance on what to put into those daily emails, then you can find that inside my Simple Money Emails course, available here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

On the other hand, if you want some advanced writing techniques to help you not just make sales, but get into your readers’ minds so they think of you as an authority… spread your ideas on their own… even refer you to others… then can get some of my secret sauce inside Influential Emails.

The techniques and strategies inside this training have allowed me to make connections with some of the most successful marketers and copywriters in the direct response industry.

​​They have created an aura of authority for me, completely independent of my results in the field.

​​Most importantly, they have influenced the minds of my readers.

Anyways, if you want Influential Emails, then the only way to get it is to be on the waiting list first, when I open up the cart this Thursday. To get on the waiting list, you’ll have to sign up for my daily email newsletter. Click here to do that.

A principled way to deal with chargebacks

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Last week, I wrote about a chargeback I got on my Most Valuable Email course. I solicited advice for dealing with this chargeback and preventing others in the future.

I got advice. I also got the folllowing question from a reader:

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If you’re so inclined, I’d be interested in hearing about advice you got to handle chargebacks, but of course more importantly prevent them in the first place!

I’m newer to the solopreneur arena. Chargebacks are just a cost of doing business in the large company space, usually as a consequence of not following large customers’ procurement/delivery rules, not automating transactions, etc.

For smaller enterprises, I can imagine they could be debilitating…

===

Since I’m so inclined:

I got lots of what might be called tactical or technological advice for dealing with and preventing chargebacks.

I’m sure much of this advice is solid but the fact is, it’s overkill for my small info publishing operation, and more than I want to do at the moment. The fact that this kind of tactical advice could change from today to tomorrow is even more of a reason to not invest my limited time or energy into such solutions.

But I also got several people sharing what can be called principled advice on dealing with chargebacks. Advice that will stand the test of time, that’s not subject to a change in technology or the whims of banks.

That advice boiled down to simply this:

Don’t sell to every rando off the street who struts up to your counter and pulls out a credit card.

I first heard this advice a long time ago. It’s taken me a while to accept it.

The fact is, just because somebody offers to pay you today doesn’t mean that they will prove to be a good customer today, tomorrow, and the day after.

If you have your eye on LTV as the main metric in your business, then it makes sense to do lots of things, even counterintuitive things, to turn away people who might be bad customers tomorrow, even if they seem to be willing buyers today.

And that brings me to my current offer:

I announced yesterday I will make my Influential Emails training available once again next week.

But I won’t simply send a bunch of emails linking to a sales page for Influential Emails.

Instead, if you would like to get this training once it’s available, you’ll have to get on the waiting list first.

The main reason fr this is the anti-chargeback, pro-LTV idea above. A waiting list allows me to filter through people who want to buy. I can see if they are already good customers. And if not, I have to take a closer look at who they are and whether I want to sell to them.

Of course, the the velvet rope effect of a waiting list doesn’t hurt either.

I will have more to say about Influential Emails, and why you might want to get it, over the coming week. But you will have to be on my list to be able to buy it. Click here to get on there.