Customer Service

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.

Copy Riddles customers hit jackpot with “Unannounced Bonus” scheme

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If you are a Copy Riddles customer, I sent you an email earlier today. That email talks about an unannounced bonus you can get right now. I personally paid $997 for this offer last year. But thanks to my threatening and cajoling and deal-making on your behalf, you can now get this same offer for absolutely free.

The chance to grab this unannounced bonus for free is valid until next Sunday, July 20, at 12 midnight PST. So if you haven’t yet seen that email I’ve sent you or acted on it, it might be worth doing so now.

And if you are not yet a Copy Riddles customer, I’d like to share something that can be useful if you sell your own courses or create your own offers.

I have a long-standing policy of doing right by previous customers. It has worked well for me — customers stick around, are always grateful and excited when I run a new promo to promote an offer they already bought, keep reading my emails and buying new offers.

But this “Unannounced Bonus” scheme has developed into a sales argument as well.

Because I promote my courses with special events and special new bundles of bonuses, and because I make those available to previous customers, the sooner somebody decides to buy, the more they end up benefiting in time.

For example, had you bought Copy Riddles a couple years ago, you would now also have:

* Copywriting Portfolio Secrets (which I later sold for $97)

* Horror Stories For Sales (which I later sold for $200)

* $2k Advertorial Consult (which a business owner paid me $2k for, and which lays out my entire process for writing advertorials that drove tens of millions of dollars in ecom sales)

So if you have offers of your own, it might be worth considering implementing an “Unannounced Bonus” policy like this, and then announcing it loudly, not only your customers, but also to your prospects, and using it as a sales tool.

Of course, that’s exactly what I’m doing here.

I will be running a promo for Copy Riddles over the next week. I will talk in great detail about that $997 bonus which will be available for free during the promo, plus I will give you a couple other good reasons why you might want to get Copy Riddles now rather than later.

But why might you want to get Copy Riddles at all? I mean, at $997, it’s a very, very expensive course.

My claim is that Copy Riddles allows you to own A-list copywriting skills more quickly than you would ever believe. If you want to find out how Copy Riddles does this, the mechanism behind why people say it’s “the best course I’ve ever taken, bar none” and “the most brilliant course concept I’ve ever seen,” I’ve written it all up here:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

How to get a one-time course to maintain its value

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Dr. Kiran Agarwal, who is both a practicing GP in London and a stress-management coach, writes in with a legit question (or actually 3) about my ongoing promo of ChatGPT Mastery:

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Thanks for introducing Gasper – I am interested as you are supporting him.

A couple of quick questions- is this specific for chatGPT? or prompts can be used for any other AIs?

And why would you not let it write your daily emails? Is it because you like writing them or anything else?

As things are changing so fast in AI space, how will this one time course maintain its value after a couple of months?

===

Kiran’s third question is really the most interesting, but let me answer the first two quickly:

1. ChatGPT Mastery is specific to ChatGPT. That said, I imagine the prompts would work in any other chat-like AI tool like Claude or Gemini.

2. I get value out of writing emails beyond just the money I make from them, or the fact that they’re sent out. Plus, I don’t think that anybody or anything can get my own tone and ideas exactly right.

That’s why I wouldn’t let AI write my emails, and why I wouldn’t hire a copywriter to write my emails either.

3. Like I said, this question is the most interesting. Sure, it’s fine to find out how to get the most out of ChatGPT today… but what about in July? Or August? Or next year?

I checked the sales page for ChatGPT Mastery, and there was nothing about this question. So I wrote to Gasper Crepinsek, the guy behind ChatGPT Mastery, to find out what he has to say.

Gasper got back to me with the exact response I was hoping for:

===

If someone wants to take the course again, I will simply add them in the future run.

I want to build long-term customers. My whole goal is to keep adding to the course and people who put the trust early will get everything I add locked in at the initial price they paid.

===

I think what Gasper is doing is super smart. I say that having done the same with my Copy Riddles course back when I ran it as a cohort course.

I allowed people who joined Copy Riddles in previous runs to join future runs for free. It bought me a bunch of goodwill, created customers who are still with me years later, plus it produced some great case studies and testimonials from people who got more on the 2nd or 3rd run than they did the first time around. He who has ears, let him hear.

Also, let him hear this:

The deadline to join ChatGPT Mastery is tomorrow, Thursday, at 12 midnight EST (not PST, the way I do).

If you’re on the fence, it’s time to make up your mind one way or the other, otherwise the deadline will make up your mind for you.

If you want more info to help you make up your mind, here’s my initial email, detailing why I’m endorsing and promoting ChatGPT Mastery:

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Today I’d like to recommend to you a 30-day program called ChatGPT Mastery, which is about… mastering ChatGPT, with the goal of having a kind of large and fast horse to ride on.

Here’s a list of exciting facts I’ve prepared for you about this new offer:

#1. ChatGPT Mastery is a cohort course — it kicks off and ends on a specific date — that helps you actually integrate and benefit from AI.

The idea being, things in the AI space are changing so fast that anything that came out even a few months ago is likely to be out of date.

And rather than saying “Oh let me spend a few dozen hours every quarter researching the latest advice on how to actually use this stuff” — because you won’t, just like I won’t – you can just get somebody else to do the work of cutting a path for you through the quickly regenerating AI jungle.

#2. I myself have gone through through ChatGPT Mastery, from A-Z, all 30 days, during the last cohort.

I didn’t pay for it because I was offered to get in for free.

I did go through it first and foremost for my own selfish interests — I feel a constant sense of guilt over not using AI enough in what I do — and only then with a secondary goal of promoting it if I benefited from it enough. So here I am.

#3. ChatGPT Mastery is created and run by Gasper Crepinsek. Gasper is an ex-Boston Consulting Group guy and from what I can tell, one of those hardworking and productive consulting types, the kind I look upon with a mixture of wonder and green envy.

But to hear Gasper tell it, he quit his consulting job to have more freedom, started creating info products online like everybody else, realized he had just bought himself another 70 hr/week job, and then had the idea to automate as much of it as he could with AI.

He’s largely succeeded — he now spends his mornings eating croissants and sipping coffee while strolling around Paris, because most of his work of content creation and social media and even his trip planning have been automated in large part or in full.

#4. Before I went through the 30 days of ChatGPT Mastery, I had already been using ChatGPT daily for a couple years. Inevitably, that means a good part of what Gasper teaches was familiar to me.

Other stuff he teaches was simply not relevant (I won’t be using ChatGPT to write my daily emails, thank you). The way I still benefited from ChatGPT Mastery was:

– By having my mind opened to using ChatGPT for things for things I hadn’t thought of before (just one example: I did a “dopamine reset” protocol over 4 weeks, which was frankly wonderful, and which ChatGPT designed for me, and which I got the idea for while doing ChatGPT Mastery)

– By seeing Gasper’s very structured, consulting-minded approach to automating various aspects of his business, and being inspired to port some of that to my own specific situation

– With several valuable meta-prompts that I continue to use, such as the prompt for generating custom GPTs

#5. The way you could benefit from ChatGPT Mastery is likely to be highly specific to what you do and who you are.

The program focuses on a different use case every day. Some days will be more relevant to you than others. The previous cohort covered topics like competitor analysis, insights based on customer calls or testimonials, and of course the usual stuff like content and idea generation, plus hobuncha more.

If you do any of the specific things that Gasper covers, and if you do them on at least an occasional basis, then odds are you will get a great return on both the time and money and that ChatGPT Mastery requires of you, before the 30 days are out.

Beyond that, ChatGPT Mastery can open your mind to what’s possible, give you confidence and a bunch of examples to get you spotting what could be automated in what you do, plus the techniques for how to do it (I’ve already automated a handful of things in what I do, and I have a list of next things to do).

#6. The time required for ChatGPT Mastery is about 15-20 minutes per day for 30 days. The money required is an upfront payment of $199.

I can imagine that one or the other of these is not easy for you to eke out in the current moment.

All I can say is that it’s an investment that’s likely to pay you back many times over, in terms of both time and money. And the sooner you make that investment, the greater and quicker the returns will come.

#7. If you’d like to find out the full details about ChatGPT Mastery, or even to sign up before the cohort kicks off:

https://bejakovic.com/gasper

Punishing previous buyers

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Last night, I got back to Barcelona after a few days in Rome.

As I found out in Rome, 2025 is apparently a jubilee year, which in the Catholic church is a special year of mercy, forgiveness, giving etc.

Jubilee years happen every 25 years. Each one has a special theme. The theme of Jubilee 2025 is “Pilgrims of Hope.”

I was staying a block away from the Vatican during my Rome trip.

Even though I’m not Catholic or even Christian, it was inspiring and impressive to see a slow-moving processions of thousands of ordinary people, every day, who have been walking for who knows how long, from who knows where, all passing through the enormous colonnade at St. Peter’s square and finally approaching their destination at St. Peter’s Basilica.

Really, that has nothing to do with what I’m about to tell you, but I thought it was worth sharing. You might still want to read on, or you might not.

A couple days ago, I got from Yosi Anderson, who is a medical doctor turned personal productivity strategist.

Yosi has been on my list for a hot minute. Last year, she took me up on my recommendation to sign up for Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin, which I promoted without getting paid for it, simply because I thought it’s such a valuable resource.

I’m now promoting Royalty Ronin as an affiliate, with a bundle of bonuses for those who sign up for a week’s free trial. And about that, Yosi wrote in to ask:

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Hi John,

Does this bonus apply to people like me who already joined Royalty Ronin when you wrote about it last year?

===

And my Jubilee 2025 answer to Yosi’s question is… of course not. The current bonuses don’t apply to previous buyers. The bonuses are there to get new people to sign up and help me make an affiliate cut. I’m running a business here, people. If you were foolish enough to take me up on my recommendation before, that’s too bad.

Err…

Actually no, let me try that again.

The fact is, Jubilee year or not, I always make new bonuses available to all previous buyers. That applies here too, for two reasons.

Reason one is simple and obvious, and a core part of my philosophy for how I run this little info publishing online biz.

I want to treat current and previous customers well, and reward them for taking me up on my offers when I make them, even if those offers didn’t pay me any money. I never want to put any doubts into my readers’ minds that now is the best moment to take me up on an offer I’m making.

Reason two I cannot tell you here, because it’s connected to a marketing tactic inside one of Travis’s paid trainings, called Shogun Traffic Method.

At the risk of sounding hypey:

This marketing tactic is one that Travis found so valuable that he didn’t share it for a decade or more, and kept just for himself. And when he did first share it, he delivered it via a mailed package because he wanted to restrict how many people would find out about it.

Times have changed. Jubilee 2025 is here. Travis’s tactic is now available inside an online course. That doesn’t change the fact it remains super valuable and in fact super underused, even if it’s available more broadly.

This marketing tactic is not something you will spot simply by looking at what Travis is doing, or what I’m writing about in these emails.

But this tactic is something you can find out today, and apply and profit from today, if you sign up for a free trial of Royalty Ronin, and then head inside Shogun Traffic Method, and look at the bonus lesson right before the one titled, “Unannounced BONUS: Bugatti Traffic.”

And yes:

There won’t be a better moment than now to sign up for this free trial of Royalty Ronin.

That’s because, if you sign up now, you’ll get any future bonuses I might offer. The reverse doesn’t hold — in the future, I will take away some of the current bonuses I am offering.

Plus, while I have no idea what Travis’s plans are, it’s conceivable he might at some point do away with the free trial, either because it’s worked well and done its job, or because it’s not working as well as he’d hoped.

If you don’t want to miss the opportunity while it’s here:

​https://bejakovic.com/ronin​

P.S. If you have signed up for the free trial of Royalty Ronin, or if you already signed up as a member even before I was promoting it as an affiliate, forward me your confirmation email from Travis, the one with “Vroom” in the subject line.

If you do that, I’ll give you access to my bonus bundle as my way of saying thanks for taking me up on my recommendation.

How I get customers to buy when I launch a new product

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Yesterday, I kicked off my White Tuesday event to promote my Copy Riddles program. I got a bunch of messages about it so far, including one from Logan Hobson, a long-time reader and Copy Riddles member. Logan wrote:

===

Every time you do a Copy Riddles promotion, I get excited because it means that I get a new free bonus or two.

I appreciate the way you treat previous customers, makes me feel like buying something from you the first time you promote it is a no-brainer.

I’m interested in the $2k Advertorial Consult as well.

===

I’m doing a podcast later today and one question that the podcast host wants to cover is,

“What’s one golden nugget of advice you’d give any writer who wants to make a living from their words?”

At first, I thought this question is so broad as to be impossible to answer.

But then I realized I have the same golden nugget to offer that I’ve already offered a million times over. That being:

It’s much easier and more profitable to make a sale to somebody familiar who has already paid you, than to some stranger you have to go out and hunt down, who doesn’t know you, who has never trusted you enough to give you money.

Maybe that’s obvious. But how many people act upon it?

The default question for most people, including writers who want to make a living from their words, is “How do I get new readers/customers/clients?”

My golden nugget is a different question, “How do I get existing readers/customers/clients to buy something new from me?”

And if that means giving good stuff away on occasion, to keep existing readers/customers/clients reading… and engaged… and eager to do business with me the next time I launch a new product… then so be it.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you cannot and should not ever try to win over new customers.

You can do both at once — win over new customers, and deepen the custom with existing customers.

Which brings me back to my White Tuesday event.

I’ve tried to make this White Tuesday offer one that’s easy to say yes to. In a nutshell, my White Tuesday offer is Copy Riddles plus three time-limited free bonuses, which total $2,300 in real-world value:

1. White Tuesday Storytelling Bundle

2. Make The Lights Come On

3. $2k Advertorial Consult

… along with the White Tuesday payment plan, which allows you to get started with Copy Riddles for just $97 today.

To find out the full details of this White Tuesday event while it’s still live:

​https://bejakovic.com/announcing-white-tuesday-copy-riddles-event/​

P.S. If you are already a Copy Riddles member, the White Tuesday bonuses are of course available to you too. To find out what they are and how to claim them, take a look at the page above.

MVE cancelled

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No, not Most Valuable Email.

The MVE that’s been cancelled is the Most Vivian Event, the big promotion I announced yesterday.

I had hoped to use this event to pull every remaining non-buyer on my list and get him to buy Most Valuable Email, will-he, nill-he.

My plan was to use I know about promos inside the Most Vivian Event — structure, copy, and most importantly offer:

An “Italian lottery,” giving new buyers a good chance to get MVE free…

A stack of free bonuses that I’ve sold for good money before, totaling the price of MVE and more, so even if somebody didn’t win the “Italian lottery,” they would still feel like they’re getting a steal…

An entirely new bonuses as well, which would reveal all the thinking that went into this promo — basically a little promo course built around a specific case study, to make this MVE offer so valuable that if you ever send any kind of emails, the investment would pay for itself with this one new bonus alone.

I had grand plans to make this event fun, epic, and undoubtedly immensely successful. Except…

It’s all been cancelled.

Reason why:

Each time I got near to settling on the final offer for the Most Vivian Event, I kept bouncing into one problem:

“What do I do with previous buyers?”

I have a long-standing policy to reward early buyers for buying for me. That means I grandfather previous buyers into any upgrades, new runs of a course, or bonuses I end up offering in the future. It also means I don’t feature discounts.

Yesterday, when I had the initial idea for this new promo, I shrugged this question off.

I told myself I’d figure out some way to incentivize new buyers… to reward previous buyers… and to have this promo make business sense for me personally.

But no matter how I structured this offer, there was always one end of the triangle — new buyers, old buyers, me — that was left high and dry.

I realized it’s not a matter of what bonuses or incentives I end up offering. It’s simply a consequence of my “reward previous buyers” policy, and the fact that I have hundreds of previous buyers of MVE.

That’s why I’ve actually never run a bonus- or discount-based promo for any of my offers, outside of a launch. I just never realized it until yesterday.

You might say I’m being stubborn to stick to this policy. And that’s exactly right. Because I want people to believe a few simple certainties when they think of me.

One of those simple certainties is that I won’t screw over previous buyers. I don’t ever want my buyers to think, even in passing, “Huh, maybe I should have waited to buy this, this new deal is better than what I got.”

Yesterday, I wrote that I had clearly been falling short by continuing to sell MVE on its merits alone.

Some people who could benefit from MVE — like Vivian, who wanted something for “coming up with interesting ideas and presenting it in a concise and compelling way” — never even considered buying.

Frankly, that falling short will most likely continue.

But if you have been on the fence about MVE for a while, I do have a special offer for you today. It’s nothing like the spectacle I was planning on. But you can decide whether it’s enough to get you to take me up on Most Valuable Email today.

I’m calling this offer the “Shangri La” MVE offer. And that’s because like Shangri La, the two parts of this offer only appear once every fifty years. Specifically:

1. I normally don’t offer a payment plan for Most Valuable Email. I did offer a payment plan for MVE once, as a joke, for one day only. Well, like Shangri La, the payment plan is back, and not as a joke.

You can get MVE for $99 today and then two more monthly payments of $99. This payment plan is there to make it psychologically easier to get started — in my experience, people take up payment plans not because they cannot afford to pay in full, but simply because it feels like a smaller commitment.

2. I am also offering a bonus, which I’m calling Shangri La Disappearing Secrets.

Over the past years, I have periodically sent out emails where I teased a secret, which I then turned into a disappearing, one-day bonuses for people who took me up on an offer before the deadline.

Inside this Shangri La Disappearing Secrets bonus, I have collected 12 emails that teased 12 secrets — and I have revealed the secrets themselves. These include:

* An email deliverability tip that is so valuable I decided not to share it publicly, but only with buyers of MVE. This tip is something that multiple people have told me I should turn into a standalone course or training — which I most probably will do one day.

* Stage Surprise Success. Step-by-step instructions for creating effective surprise in any kind of performance, whether thieving, magicking, comedy, drama, or simply writing for impact and influence. And no, it’s not just shocking people with something they weren’t expecting. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite of that.

* A daring idea to grow your list and build up your authority at the same time. I have not yet had the guts to put it into practice, even though I have lots of reasons to believe it would work great to build my own authority, and get me more high-quality leads than I’m getting now.

* A persuasion strategy used by con men, pick up artists, salesmen, even by legendary copywriters. I ran a little contest in an email to see if anybody could identify this strategy based on a scene from the movie The Sting. Out of 40+ people who tried to identify the strategy, only 2 got it right.

* An incredible free resource, filled with insightful and proven marketing and positioning advice. This resource comes from a man I’ve only written about once in this newsletter, but who has influenced my thinking about marketing and human psychology more deeply than I may let on — maybe more deeply than anybody else over the past few years.

* Magic Box calls-to-action. Use these if you don’t have a product or a service to sell yet, or if you only have a few bum offers, which your list has stopped responding to every day. Result of a “magic box” CTA when used by one of my coaching clients: the first hand-raiser ever for an under-construction $4k offer.

* A new way to apply the Most Valuable email trick, one I wasn’t comfortable doing until recently. Now that I’ve started using it, it’s gotten people paying more attention… leaning in more… even rereading my emails 3x… and reaching out to reopen dropped business conversations.

* Steven Pressfield (the author of the War of Art and the Legend of Bagger Vance) used to write scripts for porn movies. He once shared two porn storytelling rules. I’ll tell you what they are, and how smart marketers, maybe even me on occasion, use one of these rules in their own sales copy and marketing content.

* A list of 14 criteria of truthful stories. I’m not saying to get devious with this — but you could use these criteria to jelly up a made-up story and make it sound absolutely true. More respectably, you can use these criteria to take your true but fluffy story and make it sound 100% gripping and real.

* Why I drafted US patent application 16/573921 to get the U.S. Government to recognize my Most Valuable Email trick as novel, non-obvious, and having concrete, practical applications.

* Two methods for presenting a persuasive argument, as spelled out by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. I illustrate these two methods with a little public debate that Daniel Throssell and I engaged in via our respective email newsletters. Daniel and I each adopted opposing methods, just as described by Kahneman.

* An infotainment secret I stole from Ben Settle. As far as I know, Ben doesn’t teach this secret in his books or newsletters — I found it by tracking Ben’s emails over a 14-day period and spotting Ben using it in 8 of those 14 emails. And no, I’m not talking about teasing, or telling a story, or stirring up conflict. This is something more fundamental, and more broadly useful, even beyond daily emails.

So there you go. My Shangri La MVE offer:

A payment plan for Most Valuable Email that only appears twice in a century… and 12 bonus persuasion secrets.

This offer is good until tomorrow, Friday Oct 11, at 12 midnight PST.

If you’re at all interested, the time to act is now. That’s because of that simple certainty I wrote above — there won’t ever be a better time.

I won’t be running big promo events for Most Valuable Email, because it doesn’t fit my policy of treating previous customers with respect.

On the other hand, if you get MVE now, you will also be eligible for any future disappearing bonuses I might offer with it, or any other special offer or real I will make to new buyers also.

If you’d like to take me up on this Shangri La offer, before it disappears:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

P.S. And yes, if you have already bought MVE, you also get the Shangri La Disappearing Secrets. No need to write me for it. I’ll add it straight inside the MVE course area, right under the MVE Swipes document.

Customers who pay you to pay you

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Right now, for the meager price of $30,000 to start, and then $10,000 per year to keep going, you can sign up to get a spot at Carbone.

Carbone is an exclusive restaurant in New York.

​​The $30k + $10k/year membership gets you a regular weekly table there.

​​Of course, you still have to pay for the food and drinks and service, which, as you can imagine, are expensive.

It turns out there are more and more such restaurants, going members-only.

They cater to people with money who want a few different things. One is better service, less waiting, and being treated with respect. Two is status and recognition. Three, and more than anything it seems, is a feeling of community.

In other words, people are paying good money to be among others like themselves, and to feel comfortable, welcome, and warm.

I’m telling you this to maybe warm up your own mind to the possibilities that are out there.

You can charge people decent money — maybe even indecent money — just for the privilege of being able to buy from you.

Of course, you do have to offer something in return — exclusivity, top-level service, a community.

Who knows? Maybe this is even a way you can charge for the marketing you give away now. Such as your daily emails, for example.

And with that, let me remind you of my Simple Money Emails program.

This program teaches you how to write emails that people want to read, and that they buy from.

I’ve only sent these kinds of emails to prospects for free.

But maybe you can not only use use these kinds of emails to make sales, but charge for them as well, by combining them with the idea above.

Whatever the case may be, if you’d like to find out more about Simple Money Emails:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

Exploiting stupid and gullible customers

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I live in Barcelona and for the first time in my life, that means I’m drinking bottled water at home.

The Barcelona tap water looks and tastes like it was used to wipe down a chalkboard before being pumped to your house.

I drank the tap water for the first few months after moving here. I kept asking myself, “Why am I always thirsty?”

Then some friends came to stay with me for a few weeks. They took a sip of the tap water. They refused to have a second sip. They bought bottled water instead.

I drank the bottled water while they were here. And when they left, I found I couldn’t go back to the tap.

My thirst was finally cured. But now I have a new problem. I regularly have to go and buy the water, and schlep it back home.

That’s what I did last night after my evening walk. I walked to the nearest supermarket, about 200 yards away, bought a large 6-pack of bottled water, and schlepped it home.

As I was carrying it, I was thinking about how — bear with me here, I’m getting to a point — there’s a convenience store right in my building. A guy named Malik runs it. The total distance from Malik’s convenience store to my front door is 4 yards, not 200.

And yet, I haven’t shopped at Malik’s for almost a year now. I refuse.

The question is why. I’ve actually written about this before:

===

Malik doesn’t ever ring up what you’re buying. He never gives you a receipt.

Instead, he eyeballs the stuff you’re holding in your hands — a bottle of water, two cans of beer — and tells you the total. 7 euro 65 cents. Tomorrow, the same basket of stuff might cost 6 euro 30. Or 9 euro 15.

Sometimes, Malik senses he has overcharged you. And without looking at you directly, he senses whether you feel so too. If he ever thinks he’s gone too far, he doesn’t lower the price. Instead, he throws in something extra — a single-serve cookie, a lollypop, a piece of bubble gum. Lately it’s been happening a lot.

===

At first, this behavior was curious. Then cute. Then annoying. I stopped going.

I could afford the extra euro or two. I would even gladly pay for the convenience not to have to schlep my bottled water home from a block away. But the random price increases and drops, depending on Malik’s whims and how rich I was looking that day, drove me away. They made me feel gullible and stupid.

The point here is twofold:

First, I’d like to suggest you don’t make your customers feel gullible and stupid. That might seem perfectly clear — much clearer than Barcelona’s tap water. And yet, how many businesses engage in practices that make it seem their customers must be gullible and stupid? Stuff like:

– Transparently fake reasons why (“Our warehouse manager just phoned me in a panic and…”)
– One-time-only offers that really aren’t
– Price increases and drops based on a whim or on momentary greed, rather than strategy

Malik’s store still survives without my patronage. I see him sitting there all day long, looking exhausted and unhealthy. I would gladly pay him the top price he ever charged me for the bottled water, if I only didn’t feel stupid and gullible doing so.

And that brings me to the second point of the story above. But I will talk about that tomorrow, because one point a day is my new limit.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to write daily emails that allow you to 1) build trust rather than resentment and 2) charge high prices that people happily pay, then you might like my Simple Money Emails course. For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/​​

Bejako the airheaded technician strikes again

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Let’s play a game of “Hit the Bejako piñata”:

As you might already know about me, I am very prone to making technical mistakes, snafus, and cock-ups.

Earlier in my life, this manifested itself in all kinds of travel related mishaps: showing up to the airport many hours too early, too late, on the wrong day, without the right visa, without having bought a ticket but fully convinced I had one (yes, this really happened).

Over the decades, I’ve largely managed to eliminate my travel-related clunkers.

But since I now work online and even have a little business online, each day presents a fresh new opportunity to screw up something technical, all the way from the mildly embarrassing to the serious in terms of reputation and money.

For example, consider the events of the past few days:

All of past week, I’ve been telling people to get on the waiting list for my Influential Emails course.

On Wednesday, I opened up the course to people on the waiting list who had bought something from me before. On Thursday, I opened it up to people on the waiting list who had never bought anything from me.

By Friday morning, I’d reached the number of sales I had been hoping for. So I closed down the cart and wrote an email about it, which I scheduled to be sent out last night.

But then, starting yesterday morning and culminating after the email last night, I got replies like the following:

===

I thought you should know that I never received any cart-open emails for Influential Emails despite having signed up for the waiting list.

Actually, I know I clicked on at least two of the waitlist links (in different emails) to be sure I was on the list because I was interested in purchasing.

===

I would like to blame Octavia Campo aka ActiveCampaign for this. But really, it was Bejako the airheaded technician at work again.

Turns out I forgot to add the automation for adding people to the waiting list to at least two of the emails I sent out over the past week. As a result, some 100 people who expressed interest did not get added to the waitlist, and did not receive the email when the cart opened.

Yesterday and today, I’ve been doing damage control, replying to people who wrote me, and reopening the cart for them.

Like I said, it’s time to get out the sticks, and start working on the Bejako piñata.

In short, thanks to my airheadedness, I’ve created a bunch of extra work for myself… I’ve confused and possibly offended long-time customers, who were wondering why they got snubbed in this launch… and I’ve put myself in a situation in which I look like one of those ecommerce brands that says, “Whoa, somebody didn’t get a chance to buy yesterday, so we’re extending the sale for another day!”

So I’m sending this email for two reasons:

One is to explain what exactly happened to anyone who did get impacted by my technological prowess.

Reason two I’ll explain tomorrow, in case you’re curious.

Meanwhile, the Influential Emails cart remains closed except for the people I am ferreting out as having expressed interest earlier, and not having had a chance to buy.

So the only thing i have to offer you today is my 10 Commandments book. You might want to get it for its own inherent value, or for the reasons I talked about yesterday, and that I will talk more about tomorrow. If you’re interested, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Next Monday: My free presentation about storytelling

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Heads, tails, and possibly possibly other body parts up:

A few days ago, I announced I will hold a free presentation on the topic of, “Next-level storytelling tricks for emails that sell (no hero’s journey, thank you).”

Well, that presentation will happen next Monday, November 6, at 4pm CET/10am EST.

Now about the free part:

Some time ago, Kieran Drew, the bloodthirsty dentist turned gentle yet successful online entrepreneur, asked if he could promote my Simple Money Emails course.

I said sure.

Kieran also asked if we could work together to create a special, one-time bonus to entice his readers to buy.

I again said sure. But I also said this special, one-time bonus will go to my previous buyers of the course as well.

So that’s what this storytelling webinar is about.

I solicited questions about storytelling a few days ago.

I got several tons of replies and several hundred tons of questions.

I will be answering the most interesting ones on the webinar. I will also have some of my best storytelling techniques and tricks to share.

If you already have Simple Money Emails, you should have gotten an email from me earlier today with the instructions on joining this webinar. You can join live, or I will send out the recording after.

If you do not yet have Simple Money Emails, you can get it at the link at the end of this email.

And if you decide to get it before the time of the webinar, next Monday at 4pm CET, you will also get this storytelling webinar as a free bonus. After that, no free bonus for you.

So if this storytelling info is something you care about and want, I’d suggest taking care of it right now, while’s it’s on your mind.

​​As you might know already, I am strict about deadlines, and not even Kieran’s teeth-pulling wiles could get me to change my mind about that.

​​Here’s that link:

https://bejakovic.com/sme