Influential Writing

Announcing: DFY daily emails on comission only

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If you have a running business… if you also have an audience or database of previous customers, clients, or leads… and if you want to bolt on a new profit center to your business, with no work or upfront cost to you… then read on.

Fact 1: Lots of biz owners have proven products or services they sell, as well as a big list of previous customers, clients, or prospects. And yet, they are not sending out daily emails to link their offers and their audience, and to make sales and provide stability for their business.

Consider the following conversation I recently had.

Me (to my entire list): Do you have an email list of 5,000+ subscribers?

Biz owner (replying to my broadcast email): Yes

Me (replying directly to the biz owner, after 2 mins of research): Very cool! I see you’ve got the full offer stack, from courses to DFY. How often do you email these folks?

Biz owner: 👉🏼👈🏼 Umm… my last email… at january 🤦🏽‍♀️

Me: That sounds… criminal. If you’ve got offers and a list, what’s keeping you from mailing your offers out regularly?

Biz owner: Most people on my list subscribed to my Substack to receive “content” (which I haven’t produced in recent months—I’ve been completely swamped with work), and others are clients I never told I’d be emailing. I guess I’m afraid of being a nuisance.

Me: I see. So even if you had time, would you want to email these folks with offers that could lead to sales?

Biz owner: Yes, for sure

Fact 2: You might be in the same situation, or something similar to it.

I don’t know what your exact situation is. But if you have proven offers, and if you have an email list of at least 5,000 people, like the person above, and if you’re not sending daily emails but would want to, then…

Fact 3: I can help.

I can put you in touch with an email copywriter to write daily emails for you, to make you look good in front of your audience or database, and to make sales for you.

Also, this copywriter works on commission only. He only gets paid from the sales he makes for you, after the money has landed in your Stripe or PayPal.

No, I am not this copywriter. It is somebody in my audience.

It’s somebody who has the experience and skill to make you money and make you look good, and who also has a direct line to me for help, support, and consultation.

(Why a direct line to me is valuable is because I’ve written thousands of sales emails, managed the email marketing for many 7- and 8-figure businesses, and made businesses literally millions via daily emailing.)

So what do you think? Dumb idea? Let me know if you’re not too disgusted by my proposal, and we can talk more.

What good will that do you?

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A new subscriber wrote in yesterday to ask:

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How would you start over if you’d lost everything right now? Including your friends and connections that you acquired over the years, only you, your knowledge and your skill.

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I paused at this, because I had recently been thinking about the same question, for my own reasons.

For a moment, I considered writing up my thoughts, and sharing them in an email. But then I asked myself, why?

What good will it do you to know what I would do if I lost everything but MY knowledge, MY skill, and MY good looks?

The fact is, my knowledge (of stuff like marketing principles and tactics) and my skill (in things like copywriting) took years to develop.

The same is true of my mindset, if by that we mean my ability to choose projects… to drive them to the end even when I’m feeling uncertain and dispirited… to tweak my approach and try again when I lay an egg… and to recognize when it’s time to cut my losses and move on.

Because of all this, it would be useless for me to tell you what I would do, unless you have my knowledge and skills and mindset.

(It would also be close to useless if you do have my knowledge and skills and mindset, because in that case you’re prolly not thinking of getting rid of everything you’ve got and starting from zero.)

Here are a few things I think are worth doing in general:

– Selling

– Writing

– Having an audience and maintaining a good relationship with that audience

If you do all three of these on a decent level — not “world class” level, not “so good they can’t ignore you,” simply decent — you will have work and money, as long as work and money are to be had.

Now please just give me a second. Let me go to my closet and dig it out… ah yes, here it is. My favorite hobby horse:

Daily emails.

The fact is, writing a daily email will, bit by bit, get you better at selling, at writing, and in time, even if you do absolutely nothing else, it will build up a small but dedicated audience for you (that’s how it happened for me at least).

Where daily emails will eventually take you, nobody knows. But I’m willing to bet it will be a good destination, better than where you’re at now. Plus, you might even enjoy the journey along the way.

If you want help starting and sticking with the habit of writing daily emails:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Do you have a great gig right now? Beware and prepare

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Yesterday, I talked to a coaching client, someone who has a sizeable email list and a bunch of offers he’s been selling for a while.

Recently, he decided to step back from this to take a proper job. He enjoys learning something new at his new role, and he finds the work exciting, and he likes the company and the people, and there’s more money, stability, and free time than with all the stuff he has been doing by himself.

He asked if I have any advice as he transitions from his online business to this new job.

I’ll tell you what I told him:

Over the course of the past six months, I have had a number of people come to me and say, “I used to have this great gig, until yesterday.”

One was a business owner whose business partner screwed him and took everything.

Another was a freelancer whose main client’s business turned out to be shaky, so the client decided to bring the work in-house as a cost-cutting measure.

A third was a salaried employee whose employer decided to simply terminate the role, even though the guy was making the employer more money than he was getting paid, and could prove it.

All these people, and a few others, came to me after their once-great gig disappeared, with the idea to build a personal brand as a way of making money now.

So what I told my coaching client yesterday is, enjoy the new job and make the most of it. But at the same time, even the best, most certain gigs can disappear, overnight.

Businesses go out of business. Partners cheat you or simply step away. Employers get sick, die, or go bankrupt.

For all these reasons and more, it makes sense to have a backup to your great gig.

My coaching client is very lucky, because he’s already got the best backup I know, a personal brand, an audience, and a relationship with that audience.

If anything happens to his current job — the company is sold and the new owners fire everyone, or they slash everybody’s salaries while keeping the workload the same, or they hire somebody else to do the job because he’s cheaper/better/a nephew — then he can go to this list, and write an email or two, and most likely find a new client or a series of clients by the end of this week.

So my takeaway for you is, if you have a personal brand, don’t let it go.

You don’t have to email daily or create new offers or moonlight in addition to your day job. All you have to do is show up on some regular schedule (once a week is good), and let people know you are alive, and give them proof that you’re doing well, and are still worth listening to and knowing about.

And my takeaway for you if you don’t have a personal brand but you have a great gig going… is also to start now.

For one thing, your great gig can give you authority and content ideas and behind-the-scenes data to make it easy to be somebody online.

For another thing, as I’ve been saying, your great gig might not always be there, so it makes sense to beware and prepare for that possibility now.

Here’s one more thing I told my coaching client yesterday:

Just focus on the content. Don’t worry about list growth or about offers or about what form this personal brand might take in the future.

This is true for you even if you are starting a personal brand now.

There’s value in creating content online EVEN IF NOBODY’S READING. For one thing, it makes you better at what you do. For another thing, it can grow your list on its own (albeit slowly), and it becomes fodder if you do want to create offers or lead magnets or books in the future. Most important of all, it becomes a proof element if you are ever talking to someone you want to impress. Compare:

“Why should you hire me? Gee, let me try to sum up the past 12 years of my career for you in the next 45 seconds before I lose your attention…”

… to…

“Why should you hire me? I don’t know that you should. Here’s my website where I’ve written tens of thousands of words on this topic, based on my previous experience. Take a look at it and we can talk afterwards.”

So let me ask you?

Do you have a great gig right now?

Do you want to have a personal online brand, and an audience, and a great relationship with them that you can use as a backup in case your great gig ever vanishes?

Then write me and let me know.

You can’t buy anything here. But I am curious what you do, and what kind of a personal brand you want to build and how, and what questions you have about the process.

The best piece of copy Dan Kennedy ever wrote

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Thanks to the sleuthing of two members of my Daily Email House community, Robin Timmers (the Netherlands’ largest copywriter) and Maliha Mannan (who runs the Side Blogger), I can bring you the link at the end of today’s email.

It’s a recording of the legendary “Success Tour” speech that direct marketer Dan Kennedy gave hundreds of times across the U.S. back in the 1990s.

Dan, for the record, was at one point the highest-paid copywriter on Earth. And I heard him say somewhere, I forget where, that this speech is the best piece of copy he has every written.

And no wonder:

This speech sold millions of dollars’ worth of Dan’s Magnetic Marketing program from the back of the room…

… it got tens of thousands of people to become prospects for Dan’s paid newsletter, high-ticket seminars, and done-for-you services…

… and it has fed Dan’s stable of racing horses for many decades now.

For several years, this speech wasn’t available anywhere online.

Years ago, I managed to track down a copy using archive.org. I’ve listened to this speech multiple times all the way through, and I’ve started it again this morning after Robin and Maliha clued me in that it’s now on YouTube.

Yes, Dan’s speech is worth listening to for the content, to learn the fundamentals of direct marketing, to be amused by Dan’s jokes and fast-paced delivery and combative approach, and to hear some good stories, told well.

But the real value in Dan’s speech is if you take the time to look between the lines of what he is saying. I’ve done it, and I’ve profited from it in ways I’ve written about before.

I suggest you analyze and model Dan’s speech also, so you can sell, whether from a stage, on a podcast, in a webinar, from a Zoom call with prospects or buyers, or just in an email, book, or sales letter.

If you have a personal online brand, I cannot recommend this enough:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNcu27fpfBs

What niche I am in, as are you

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A couple days ago, copywriter Svet Dimitrov, one of the content-creating, profit-making partners in my Daily Email House community, asked a question of the group:

“What niche are you in?”

It’s one of those questions I hate answering when asked by marketing folks, much like I hate answering “What do you do?” when asked by non-marketing normies. (My stock answer to the second question is, “Not much.”)

As far as I am able to articulate:

I’m currently in the niche of sharing what’s been working for me, and for the people I’ve been coaching, in order to make money online.

Previously, around the start of this decade, I was in the niche of writing Most Valuable Emails.

And before that, in the first year or two of my newsletter, I was in the niche of quoting Gene Schwartz’s books and seminars.

The fact is, as grandiose as it sounds, I am in the niche of being me.

If you want to have a personal brand online, the same is true of you.

That means YOUR personality, YOUR unique interests, and (as I am doing these days) YOUR results and case studies.

Yes, you typically have to have some sort of core topic to circle back to. But the “core topic” your readers will happily consume from you is surprisingly fluid, and it can definitely change over time (as it has for me).

The one thing that is constant is YOU.

Maybe you’re thrilled by that fact, or maybe it makes you uncomfortable.

In either case, you might as well start writing online now, because you ultimately have everything you need, or will ever need. If you want my help turning that into daily emails that make people buy today, and keep them reading tomorrow:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Last call for 1PAA cohort

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I’m reading a book called No More Mr. Nice Guy, and on page 65 it says:

“Nice Guys have a difficult time comprehending that in general, people are not drawn to perfection in others. People are drawn to shared interests, shared problems, and an individual’s life force.”

The book is about 1-1, personal relationships. But the same applies to 1-many or business relationships.

Let that be the useful marketing message for today.

In entirely unrelated news, this is the last call I will make for the 1-Person Advertorial Agency cohort.

It’s come to my attention that this entire week, I’ve been promoting this cohort and insisting that it kicks off on May 1.

That of course is nonsense, since May 1 is well past.

The fact is I made a mistake, one I then copy-pasted over and over. The cohort actually kicks off tomorrow, JUNE 1.

Since I’ve been promoting this offer all week long, I imagine that you’ve either dismissed it as not being for you, or you’ve replied to me to express interest. But on the odd chance that this is the first time you’re hearing about this offer, here’s what’s up, in 3 points:

#1. The investment is $5k

The destination we’re headed to is advertorials that you can reasonably make $2k+ with the right clients, and that take max 1-2 days each to finish.

If you get just one such gig a month, I figure it’s worth $24k over the next year.

$5k is a reasonable investment to fix that.

That said, I am committed to getting you to where I say I will get you.

That’s why I’m breaking up the $5k as follows, so I have a stake in the outcome I promise to get you:

* $2k to start

* The remaining $3k when you make your first $10k from advertorial work

#2. I will help you get clients via the two methods laid out in 1PAA

One of these methods is Upwork (that’s where I got my biggest advertorial clients back in the day).

The other is cold outreach to promising brands with a ready-made advertorial.

(I suggest doing both of these methods in parallel during the cohort, for the quickest and best results.)

I will help you filter out who to approach, the messages to send them, the offers to make them. But you still have to do the work, as laid out in 1PAA.

#3. We get started next week, May June 1st, and we keep going until you get to $10k

The cohort will be organized as a month-long Skool group where I can answer questions and give feedback on copy and client-getting efforts.

1 month is plenty of time to pick/get a client, write an advertorial for them, and deliver it. (If you’re feeling very proactive, it’s enough to write and deliver 5 or 10 advertorials.)

After the month is done, I’ll keep giving you ongoing support and feedback over email (for any questions you might have) or Google Docs (for advertorial critiques).

Again, my promise is to keep working with you until you make $10k from advertorial work.

That’s it.

If you’re interested, reply to this email. Again, we start tomorrow, JUNE 1st.

Two tracks, client and student

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A couple weeks ago I talked to a dude, a successful marketer.

On the one hoof, he sells courses and coaching via his email list. On the other, he does bespoke done-for-you work for clients.

I asked him how he gets his done-for-you clients. Are these people who are part of his audience, and just kept ascending from course buyer to coaching student to DFY client?

Turns out no. In the dude’s words:

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It’s funny because the bespoke clients that I’ve worked for or have on retainer, they always come by referral.

They always have. I’ve been in business since 2010 and the big whale clients, they come by way of some sort of referral.

Whether that’s a past client of mine referred them, a vendor referred them, a colleague, somebody like that.

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I’m telling you this because I’m finishing up my first-ever Most Valuable Offer cohort.

I’ve been helping nine people plan, market, and deliver a paid live workshop.

As the first step, I asked them, what’s the next step? In other words, who do they want to attract to this workshop, and what do they want to sell to them afterwards?

One of the participants replied:

“Get more high-quality DTC clients who will implement the work I do for them.”

Well, about that. I’d like to suggest to you, going back to the experience of the successful marketer above, that there are two separate tracks:

A client track and a student track.

Like I said, the two tracks are separate.

At the same time, that doesn’t mean that they are independent.

The two tracks are mutually reinforcing, the same way that train tracks have those wooden sleepers in between them to keep each one in place by connecting it to the other.

Here’s how that works:

DFY client work gives you content, expertise, and standing and with your student audience.

It makes it easier to sell to students and gives you something worthwhile to sell.

The teaching you do via courses and coaching, in turn, gives you reach (including referrals), star glow, and non-neediness when dealing with clients.

It makes it easier to have clients find you instead of you having to prospect… to work with better clients, ones that you like… and to charge more with zero pushback on your rates.

My back-of-the-napkin math is that by having both a client and a student track, you get 500% of the benefit for 75% of the work, compared to having each one alone.

At the moment, I still haven’t finished the current Most Valuable Offer cohort. I am not sure when I will be running the next one.

If you’re interested in creating a Most Valuable Offer yourself, both to monetize your current audience and to make your client work easier, then reply to this email and I’ll put you on the priority list.

At the moment, I’m also not doing any client work.

If you are interested in having me completely handle some projects for you — whether that’s handling daily emails or a weekly newsletter for your business, or advertorials for your cold traffic funnel, or something else you need but I’m not thinking of — then reply to this email and we can talk.

My overly optimistic book-writing plans

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A few days ago, I sent an email in which I collected 10 old emails I’d written with personal stories inside. A reader replied to that to say:

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I really loved reading the story about your mystical experience and how it translated into customer insights. Honestly it was one of the best emails I’ve gotten from you all year.

I’m super curious do you have more stuff like this coming up in your emails?

Also, where are you at with writing that Insight Marketing Bible?

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Huh? Insight Marketing Bible? I had to check the email in question to remind myself of what this could possibly be.

Turns out Insight Marketing Bible was my early title for a book I have been working on for the past 6 years, on the topic of creating insight in readers’ minds.

If you’ve been waiting with bated breath for that, don’t worry. It will come next year. I promise.

This year though, my overly optimistic plan is to write and publish a different book, The Art of Charging More. Just this morning, I sat down and restarted work on this new book by writing up v4 of outline. I really feel like this might be the one.

Point being, writing and finishing a book is a giant pain in the ass, at least if you’re someone like me and you care about doing a good job and telling people something new and valuable.

And yet I keep writing books, or trying to, and I keep justifying to myself that the long-term payoff is worth it. And no doubt that books open doors that nothing else can, plus they have a host of other knock on benefits, plus I guess some part of me enjoys the frustration.

Anyways.

Today, I would like to turn you onto a new report published by Kieran Drew, which shows you “4 steps to build your business through writing online.”

As you might know, Kieran is a former dentist turned online creator, who has built up a $500k/year business and an audience of over 250k people, and who’s done it all by writing.

Kieran boils down what he did and shows you in a straightforward way how you might do the same.

Except, just last week, I wrote an email in which I highlighted Kieran’s latest public earnings report, in which he honestly and transparently says he was actually in the red for the month of March.

(Kieran’s response to my email: “I feel assaulted by your hungover words.”)

The fact is, Kieran has been writing a book of his own and prioritizing it over other things like creating new products or promoting old ones.

That’s cost him short-term time and money, but it’s in the service of a greater business good to come.

In any case, Kieran is coming out of his book-writing cave, and he has been plans for the coming weeks and months. If you want to see what those plans are first-hand, or if you want to learn about writing online and profiting from your writing from somebody who’s done it quickly and at a very high level, then here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/4-steps

10 personal stories I’ve told in my emails

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A few days ago, I was on a Zoom call with a business owner who reads these emails. He said how he likes reading my newsletter because I lead such an interesting life — “all these podcasts, all these amazing books, all these movies, dates, and traveling and all that. Like, wow.”

That surprised me. I can tell you the inside view of my life. It does not appear very interesting.

In fact, maybe you’ve noticed I almost never write emails that share genuine personal stories any more. (The exception is small status-building snippets, like the one at the start of this email.)

There are two reasons why I almost never write personal story emails any more:

1. I just don’t think I lead a very interesting life, and I don’t want to subject you to trivial anecdotes, pumped up to seem like they are something fun. (Seinfeld did it way better than I ever will.)

2. I have been writing this newsletter for 8 years, and I feel I’ve told every interesting story I ever had. In other words, I’m bored by my own stories, and so I’m projecting that you will be bored by them too.

This, of course, is one of the classic blunders, which can cost you millions of dollars if you do your own marketing.

The fact is, most business owners get bored of their own marketing way sooner than their market gets bored.

It helps that the market isn’t ever fully paying attention, and that it’s also a “moving parade”:

New people are constantly coming in. Old people are walking out. The upshot is that the stories (and marketing) that you’ve used a thousand times before are still fresh and interesting to a thousand people in your market.

So let me take my own advice, and share with you some personal stories I’ve already shared in this newsletter. Here’s a menu. Maybe you will find one or two items intriguing enough to click through and read:

1. ​The time a car fell in front of me out of the sky​

2. ​The time I had an honest-to-goodness religious epiphany on a bridge​

3. ​The origin story of how I became a writer, going back to kindergarten​

4. ​The time I almost approached the woman who was most probably “The ONE” but fortunately didn’t​

5. ​The time I had an epiphany at a gym that wasn’t religious but was more insightful and long-lasting than just about anything else in my life​

6. ​The time the “license plate game” made me think that manifestation is real, and that I can do it​

7. ​The time I spent 45 minutes waiting outside my own apartment building because I forgot my keys at home and even though I had an extra set hidden somewhere in the building, I was too shy or something to ring my next-door neighbor and ask to be let in ​

8. ​The time a reader unsubscribed and wrote that I’m “simply too dumb to be helped”​

9. ​The time I gave my girlfriend-at-the-time a nice gold necklace for our anniversary, and she started crying, and not out of happiness​

10. ​The time I attacked a wall with a butter knife, severed two tendons in my right hand, and spent three months in recovery, which was only partial​

So there you go. 10 personal stories, all true, and maybe even interesting enough to be worth retelling.

But maybe you’ve been a reader of my newsletter for a while? And maybe you remember me telling some other personal story? If so, write in and let me know. I’ve almost certainly forgotten the story you remember (I struggled to come up with the list of 10 above). I’ll appreciate you reminding me.

PSA: Lock your laptop

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I’ve just came home from the Drassanes, Barcelona’s 13th-century-Gothic-shipyard-turned-maritime-museum.

I go there to work sometimes instead of sitting at home. The museum cafe attracts idle foreigners with laptops, like me, because it’s huge, old, beautiful, quiet, and free.

Until a few days ago, I was super casual with my stuff when working at the Drassanes. I’d leave my laptop, screen open, no password set, as I went to investigate the bathroom around the corner from the cafe.

I mean, it’s a museum, right? And just a bunch of other digital nomads sitting there, deep in their own worlds. Who’s gonna take my stuff?

Probably nobody.

Probably.

Even so, I’ve recently become paranoid.

My paranoia set in after I read Kieran Drew’s latest email, about the ordeal which followed after Kieran’s laptop and phone were stolen a few weeks ago, in Buenos Aires, where Kieran has been living lately (he is English).

As a result of the theft, Kieran has had his personal accounts hijacked, his money taken from his bank, and his half-finished book, which was only saved locally to his laptop, disappear in smoke.

Plus there was and is just a bunch of stress and fear… plus endless hours on the phone trying to recover what could be recovered… plus, I imagine, a feeling like you’ve been lobotomized, since all the stuff you rely on being there is simply not.

So yeah.

I finally put a password on my laptop. I’ve been keeping an eye on all those shifty nomads who pretend to work around me. And I’ll start being a little more diligent about backing things up, and security in general. In my paranoid state, I’m advising you to do the same.

And now, to the business end of this email:

Kieran, as you might know, is a guy who writes online.

Unlike many others who write online, Kieran makes a lot of money from it, over $1.4 million over the past four years.

Pretty magically, he does it by writing an email only once a week, and only about stuff that interests him (or that befalls him, like the recent theft).

Kieran has now put together a new guide about how to write online, about what you like, and make a living at it, even a very good living.

Spoiler alert:

Kieran’s guide is not filled with the newest and hottest tactical info. If you’ve seen it all before, and if you can only get aroused by the latest gimmick, you won’t find it in Kieran’s guide, or, for that matter, in Kieran’s other content.

What you will find is exactly what Kieran has done and found to work over the years, and the principled 4-step process he now teaches to others whom he has helped to succeed as well. If you’re interested:

https://bejakovic.com/writeonline