Influential Writing

How Bill Bonner can be so wrong and still so successful

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I’m in Palm Beach. The place is rich.

This morning, I walked along the sandy beach facing the Atlantic, a few hundred yards from where Billionaires Row starts — where people like the CEO of Blackstone and the widow of David Koch have their palatial residences.

I was walking there with my friend Sam, who came to Palm Beach with me.

We were discussing how nice the weather is here… how good the Atlantic Ocean looks against the pristine sand… how pleasant the people are in Palm Beach… even how there’s magically free and abundant parking on the island.

“It’s kind of like heaven,” Sam said. “It makes me want to make a fuckton of money so I could move here.”

I paused for a moment. I looked inside. And I concluded:

Palm Beach is great. But I have zero ambition to move here for the long term, or to make the tens of millions of dollars that would be necessary to support even a B-level lifestyle among the billionaires and multimillionaires here.

I’m telling you this because after the beachside walk, I had the good fortune to have lunch with one of the most successful copywriters in the world.

I won’t name him — I’m not sure he wants me to. But I will say he is a senior copywriter, working for 10+ years at one of the biggest and best-known direct response financial publishers.

Over lunch, one topic that came up was how Bill Bonner — the founder of direct marketing behemoth Agora — has been making financial predictions for 40 years.

Most of those predictions have been proven to be wrong. Year after year, decade after decade.

And yet, loyal readers of Bill Bonner continue to read his opinion pieces. Apparently, he now has the most successful financial-topic Substack out there, making some $1M/year from I guess editorial content alone.

The question is, why would people continue to listen to a financial prophet who is consistently making mistaken prophecies?

The very successful copywriter I met today has an elegant and interesting take on it. It’s something I hadn’t heard before. But that’s his intellectual property, so I won’t share it here.

What I will tell you is my theory on it, which I really got from legendary marketer Dan Kennedy:

The best customers, the most long-term customers, are not really buying whatever offer you’re supposedly making them. Instead, they are really buying you as a person. And they decide whether to buy you or not by how they match up with you on certain intangible, vaporous values.

All that’s to say, you might have really horrible, taboo things inside your head, things you think you should never share about yourself with your audience.

Such as for example, the fact that you are not very money-motivated — not a helpful thing to reveal to a bunch of business owners and marketers.

And yet, even though revealing such things is sure to drive many people in your audience away… it will bind a small number of them even more closely to you. And you can build a successful business — or even, if you insist, a large business — on the strength of those strong bonds alone.

You never know who’s on your list

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Yesterday, I took the Q train from the Barclays Center in Brooklyn to Union Square in Manhattan. I got off and walked down to East 9th street where there’s a little concentration of Japanese restaurants.

I went into one of these restaurants that specializes in Japanese comfort food.

I was meeting a business owner there who had replied to my “Meet me in NYC/Baltimore/Palm Beach?” email last week. We had already exchanged a couple emails and had talked on Zoom once at the end of last year. But this was the first time we were meeting in person.

I ordered the rice omelette, he ordered the beef stew. We talked a bit about living in the U.S… about living in different countries which both of us had done… about the things we’re working on now.

I said something about this marketing newsletter and my health newsletter. And then I asked him what he’s currently doing with his business.

I won’t tell you what that business is. But I will say it’s an online business, one that’s built on marketing, and more specifically, on long-form ads.

This business is currently doing mid seven-figures per year. It’s growing 30% month-over-month. And the entire team consists of the business owner sitting across from me and one developer in San Francisco.

The business owner across from me shrugged.

“Sam Altman predicted there would be a one-person billion-dollar company one day,” he said. “But before that, there would be a 10-person billion-dollar company.”

We finished our lunch, left the restaurant, and stood on the street corner. We talked a bit more about what to do and see while in New York. He recommended the Morgan Library & Museum. We shook hands, said good to meet you, hope we meet again. And we went our separate ways.

You can conclude what you like from the story above.

I’ll just tell you this:

You never know who’s on your list.

Start writing emails. Create an offer. Start growing your list. You never know who you might attract, who might be reading, and what ideas or opportunities that might open up to you.

If you want help with first part of that tried above, writing emails, then take a look at my Simple Money Emails course.

That’s how the business owner above got onto my list initially, by buying that course. And then he replied to other emails I wrote using the strategies in that course. That’s to say that the strategies I describe in Simple Money Emails work. if you’d like to find out more:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

The lucrative opportunity of Twitter ghostwriting

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I recently found out about the shadowy world of Twitter ghostwriting. In the shell of a nut:

People will write on your behalf on Twitter, if you pay them well. They will pretend to be you, so you can grow your audience and business and status.

I was actually considering hiring somebody to do this for me. Not for this newsletter, but for my health newsletter.

I asked around how much it would cost.

The answer came back:

$5k-$6k per month, if you want somebody to genuinely tweet newish content on your behalf day in and day out.

I also had a business owner who employs copywriters in other capacities quote me (“at cost,” he said) $500 a week just to take my existing newsletter content and repurpose it into 10 pieces of Twitter and LinkedIn fodder.

Quite the racket, I think. ​But it wouldn’t exist if somebody wasn’t getting value out of it on the other end.

​​In fact, Alex Lieberman of Morning Brew, who I wrote a lot about last week, feels so confident about this Twitter ghostwriting opportunity that he recently started an agency providing just this as a service.

But back to work:

You can pay somebody $5k per month to pretend to be you on Twitter. Or you can pay Kieran Drew just $297, one time, to learn how to be yourself on Twitter, or something close to yourself, and to have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people follow you, listen to you, and ultimately buy from you.

Kieran should know about this. He’s succeed at it himself, and he’s taught and coached a small country’s worth of other people to succeed at it as well.

But the opportunity is disappearing.

Not because Kieran has spilled his secrets on social media writing. There’s enough audience out there for all of us, because only 1 out of approximately 714 people will ever write a single line of online content.

But the opportunity is disappearing. Because later tonight, specifically at 12 midnight PST, Kieran’s High Impact Writing is going back in its secret silo, somewhere in the north of England where Kieran has his lair.

If you’d like to get Kieran’s High Impact Writing while it’s still available, and while the price is still an attractive $297 rather than the explosively higher price it will be in the future, then I suggest you act now.

I also suggest you act now if you want to get the recordings of my Age of Insight training, which sold for $297 when I put this show on a little over a year ago.

Age of Insight shows you how to write in an insightful-sounding way, even if you have nothing very insightful to say.

I’m offering these recordings for free as a bonus to Kieran’s High Impact Writing. But that’s only if you act before the deadline.

If you’re interested, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/hiw

Awkward in real life, funny in print

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I just watched a short, very awkward clip of Silicon valley multimillionaire Bryan Johnson, being interviewed by comedian Andrew Schulz.

Johnson has made a lot of headlines over the past year. He’s spending a couple million of his own money on his anti-aging regimen. He has done a great job publicizing that on his social media, and so people have taken notice.

Schulz, on the other hand, is a white dude whose shtick is talking about race in a way that white people aren’t supposed to. He opens the interview like this:

“First question. Do black people age better?”

Johnson lets out a little gasp that he modulates into a nervous chuckle. He looks around for help. And then he retreats to the saferoom deep inside his mind, and he replies,

“There’s data showing that different people, in different circumstances, in different environments, have different clocks.”

Andrew Schulz nods in understanding. “The one time black people are slower,” he explains to the audience. To which Johnson nervously guffaws again.

Here’s why I thought this was notable.

I follow Bryan Johnson on Twitter. He gets a lot of hate and mockery there for his rejuvenation quest.

And yet, his tweets are uniformly funny and crisp. He agrees-and-amplifies like a master. He diffuses attacks. And he works trolls to his own advantage, all with a smirk that you can somehow feel in those 180 characters.

On the other hand, whenever I’ve listened to Johnson speak, he sounds exactly like he did while talking to Andrew Schulz. Abstract. Humorless. Pedantic.

I don’t know whether Bryan Johnson manages his own social media. Maybe he has somebody else write for him. It would explain a lot.

But whether or not he writes his propaganda himself, the following point still stands:

You can be an entirely different person in your writing. You can be smarter, better, funnier than you ever could be in real life.

And like Bryan Johnson’s case shows, you can build up a large audience this way, and create a lot of influence, and have your ideas and your offers reach millions of people, who you could never reach otherwise.

And on that note:

Until this Monday, I’m promoting something to help you get there yourself. It’s Kieran Drew’s High Impact Writing.

High Impact Writing is a course that takes you by the hand from what you are now — no judgment — and turns you into an inspiring, funny, influential presence on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Kieran, by the way, has some authority when he teaches this. He has succeeded in building up his own presence on social media to an audience of over 200,000. He’s built a million dollar-personal brand as a result, with course launches that bring in $100k-$200k over a few days (like right now).

Also, if you buy Kieran’s High Impact Writing via my affiliate link below, I’ll give you a free bonus. It’s the recordings of my Age of Insight training, which sold for $297 when I actually gave this training live.

Age of Insight shows you how to write in an insightful way, even if you’re not very insightful and you have nothing particularly insightful to say.

I, by the way, have some authority when I teach this. People regularly tell me my emails sound insightful. And yet, in all honesty, I think of myself as rather shallow-minded in real life, very pedantic and very formulaic. Again, you can be somebody entirely different in print.

The cart for High Impact Writing closes this Monday at midnight 12 PST. The next time Kieran offers HIW, the price will explode to never-before-seen levels.

If you’d like to get it before then, and grab my Age of Insight training as a free bonus, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/hiw

Sell the summer, not the seed

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I’m making my way through an old issue of The New Yorker, from Mar 2023. I’m reading an article about seed and garden catalogues, which offer different strains of cabbage or beet for purchase by mail.

Fascinating, right?

Well, hold on. These seed and garden catalogues are mail-order businesses, and some have survived since the 19th century.

If you’re doing any kind of online marketing today, there’s probably something fundamental and (ahem) perennial to learn from businesses that have sold in a similar way for 100+ years.

So I pushed through the first page of the article. And I was rewarded. I read the following passage about what these seed catalogues really sell:

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Seed and garden catalogues sell a magical, boozy, Jack-and-the-beanstalk promise: the coming of spring, the rapture of bloom, the fleshy, wet, watermelon-and-lemon tang of summer. Trade your last cow for a handful of beans to grow a beanstalk as high as the sky. They make strangely compelling reading, like a village mystery or the back of a cereal box. Also, you can buy seeds from them.

===

This is a great though unexpected illustration of something I read in Dan Kennedy’s No. B.S. Marketing of Seeds And Other Garden Supplies:

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As a marketer, you have a choice between selling things with ham-handed, brute force, typically against resistance, or selling aspirations or emotional fulfillments with finesse, typically with little resistance.

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Perhaps you will say that’s obvious.

Perhaps it is.

But how many businesses insist on selling seeds, or even the promise of large or fruitful plants, when in reality what their customers want is a village mystery, the coming of spring, or the tang of summer?

It’s all gotta mean something. Whatever you sell has got to go in a gift-box, and I’m not talking about cardboard or paper.

And now it’s time to sell something.

My offer to you today is my Most Valuable Email training. The seeds inside this training are a copywriting technique you can use every day to create more interesting and engaging content than you would otherwise.

But what I’m really selling is something else — a path to mastery. The feeling of growing competence with each email you write… the joy of looking and seeing patterns others don’t… the ability to transform yourself at will, from what you are right now into anything you want to be, in an instant, like Merlin in Disney’s Sword in the Stone.

For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

My frustrating experience shipping alcohol overseas

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This morning, I wired money to Daniel Throssell for his share of the Copy Riddles sales made over the past week. But I wanted to send Daniel something more than just an email notification of a wire transfer.

I know Daniel has this message in his signoff:

“Fan mail, death threats and gifts of expensive whisky can be dispatched via messenger kangaroo to:”

“All right,” I said. As a first step, I found an article, “24 Best Alcohol Delivery Services in Australia.”

I went to the website of one of those 24 best alcohol delivery services in Australia.

I added a bottle of Oban to my cart.

Five years ago, I visited the Oban distillery in Oban, Scotland. It was a rare highlight of an otherwise miserable trip, plagued by cold, food poisoning, and a terrifying ride in a van down the wrong side of the road.

Those memories flooded back as I filled out the form with Daniel’s PO Box and my billing details. I clicked the “Is this a gift?” option, and I wrote a little note to Daniel, explaining why exactly this whisky.

​​I pressed the button to get to the final order page… and… and… loading… almost there… still loading… loading…

I tried again. No.

I tried from beginning. Same thing.

I tried a different browser. It wouldn’t work.

I contacted their support. But nothing I did or they advised would get the order complete or my bottle of 14-year-old Oban on the road.

I exhaled to calm myself. I’d wasted a good 40 minutes fighting with one of the best alcohol delivery services in Australia. “It’s okay,” I told myself in a cheery tone. “I’ve learned something!” I made my way down the list.

The next among Australia’s 24 best alcohol delivery services also sold Oban. But since this was a site that specializes in “business gifts,” the bottle cost 40 dollars more.

I stared hard at the screen. I grunted. Fine.

I filled everything out once again, including the gift message about why exactly this whisky.

Only, once I’d written that message out, I got a notification that it would cost me an extra $5.95 to have the gift card with the message included. I stared in confusion at this notification, and then I got furious. “Oh no you don’t!” I roared. “That’s the straw that broke this donkey’s back!”

I closed down this second website, and I moved on to number 3 on list of the 24 best alcohol delivery services in Australia. My nerves were starting to fray.

The third site did not sell Oban at all. So much for my carefully crafted note to Daniel, explaining why exactly this whisky. But at this point I didn’t care. I was entirely fixated on shipping something brown, in a bottle, with alcohol in it, to Daniel’s PO Box.

This website did not have a “Is this a gift?” option. So not only would there be no note, but perhaps the receipt would go along with the present.

Tacky?

“Efficient!” I told myself, my teeth clenched together, my eyes darting from side to side.

I entered my credit card details, cackled as I watched the order go through, wiped the sweat off my brow, and started to finally relax. And only then did I realize the sun was starting to go down — and I still hadn’t written my daily email.

So no point or takeaway to today’s email. Who’s got time for a takeaway?

Only thing I can perhaps highlight is how dogged I was in making this purchase, in spite of obstacles put in front of me — frustration, time, effort, and even insults by that “business gifts” website.

My point is not that I’m a uniquely determined personality. My point is that this is how people normally shop for stuff they want.

If you haunt copywriting lists, you will hear expert and non-expert copywriters tell you how important it is to reduce friction… to spend time crafting your headline… how good copy matters! And it’s true, at the margins, and at scale, hundreds of sales per day, or thousands, or tens of thousands.

If you play at that level, you will have to get everything right.

But odds are good you are not playing at that level. And so you don’t have to get everything right. You just have to get basic psychology right, and apply it correctly and consistently. People will still buy.

And on that note, consider my Most Valuable Email training. It won’t teach you basic psychology directly, but it will give you a framework for getting basic psychology downloaded into your brain, day after day, by applying the Most Valuable Email trick correctly and consistently.

This might sound confusing, but I can’t explain it better without giving away stuff that I charge for in the course.

All I can tell you is that lots of people have gone through this Most Valuable Email training before, many have praised the approach, and quite a few have benefited from actually implementing it. In case you’d like to learn more:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

One big proof element

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I read a story this morning about Tim Meeks, the inventor of the harpejji.

The harpejji is a new instrument, one of only a few new instruments invented in 21st century to actually take off. It’s a combination of a piano and an electric guitar. It sells for $6,399 a piece, and Meeks sold more than $1 million worth of them last year.

That’s where we are today. Here’s how we got to where we are:

Meeks invented the harpejji in 2007. He made videos of himself playing the thing. He showed it off at music festivals. He had a few other harpejji enthusiasts play it and hype it up for him.

Sales. Were. Meager.

And then one day, Meeks was at a trade show in Anaheim, CA. Somebody tapped him on the shoulder.

“Hey, can you teach me how to play this thing?”

Meeks stared for a moment and then snapped out of his trance. “Sure,” he said. “Sure! Of course! I’d love to!”

It was Stevie Wonder who was asking.

Stevie Wonder loved the harpejji. He bought one immediately. He has since performed a bunch with it in public.

And here we are today. Point being:

One big proof element can be worth 100 small or middle-sized proof elements.

In fact, entire sales promotions, and even entire businesses, have been built on the back of one big proof element.

So if you’re smart, you will work to get yourself such a big proof element, or maybe even to bake it in to your offer when you create it.

But on to business. I have my Most Valuable Email course to sell. And odds are, you haven’t bought it yet, because only about 5.1% of my list has bought to date.

I’ve shared lots of proof elements for MVE so far:

My own results, tangible successes, and intangible benefits resulting from applying the MVE trick…

The reason why of the thing, which I hint at publicly and explain in detail inside the course…

The testimonials and endorsements and even money-making case studies from many satisfied customers.

The fact is though, none of this qualifies as the One Big Proof Element.

So let me tell you that feared negotiating coach Jim Camp used the Most Valuable Email trick on the very first page of his legendary book Start With No.

This book has formed and influenced other influential people, like email marketer Sen Settle… business coach Travis Sago… and FBI negotiator Chris Voss.

Did all these influential folks find Start With No influential because of the ideas inside?

Yes, but — the presentation was also immensely important. In fact, in the case of somebody like Camp, the presentation and the ideas were really an indistinguishable blend.

If you’re a Jim Camp fan, it will be obvious to you how Camp is using the MVE trick in Start With No once you know what this trick is.

And whether or not are a Camp fan, if you would like to have similar influence on your readers, particularly the influential ones among them, then Most Valuable Email might be your ticket. Here’s where to buy it:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

I thought “fake news” was stupid but this is not

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A few weeks ago, I was reading an article about Ozempic, the diabetes drug that celebs are using to lose weight quick and easy. The article appeared in the New Yorker, which is not ashamed of its left-leaning proclivities.

One of the points in the article is that the main harm from obesity is negative perception both by doctors and obese people. In other words, it’s not the fat that’s the real problem.

​​To make its point, the article used the following statistics sleight-of-hand, which put a smile on my face:

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A recent study examined subjects’ B.M.I.s in relation to their blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and insulin resistance. Nearly a third of people with a “normal” B.M.I. had unhealthy metabolic metrics, and nearly half of those who were technically overweight were metabolically healthy. About a quarter of those who were classified as obese were healthy, too.

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A few years ago, there was a lot of fuss over fake news. I always thought that fuss was stupid. Predictably, it has passed now.

I’m not advising anyone to write fake news or to make up stuff.

But you can and in fact you must spin. You must twist facts and figures, cherry pick quotes and stories, and direct and misdirect your readers’ attention at every step.

Not only to make your point, like in that “metabolically unhealthy” quote above.

But also to give people what they want. I mean, I read the New Yorker because I find the articles interesting and horizon-expanding. But I also read it because I enjoy agreeing with the writers’ points of view, and I enjoy even more disagreeing with their point of view.

I hope I’ve managed to get you to disagree with at least some of the points I’ve made in this email.

But if I’ve just managed to make you agree, I’ll have to settle for that today. Tomorrow, I’ll work to do better.

That’s the beauty of writing a daily email. You have a chance to constantly get better at influencing your audience, and to make your case anew, and to get people to agree or disagree with you. If you want to keep agreeing or disagreeing with me, starting tomorrow, you can sign up to my daily email newsletter here.

6 weeks of Times New Roman

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6 weeks ago, I switched over the font for my newsletter from some web-optimized sans serif font to ugly, old-school Times New Roman. So far, I’ve had two people write in and complain.

One reader said Times New Roman hurts his eyes when he reads my emails in dark mode. Another reader said my newsletter now reminds him of long, factual 2000s websites and the font change made him scroll to the end without really taking anything in.

Has Times New Roman hurt my newsletter?

Like I’ve written recently, I had a record month last month, so it doesn’t seem to have hurt sales. More softly, I keep getting thoughtful and courteous replies from readers, even if it’s sometimes just to say that they’re not fans of the new font.

And the point?

If you read emails from marketers who write daily emails, it’s common to read messages that effectively say, “Heh, it works for me, you can either like it or leave.”

So rather than ending my email with another “Heh it works for me” message, let me tell you the two reasons why I decided to change my newsletter to Times New Roman in the first place. This might be genuinely useful to you, beyond just the satisfaction of agreeing or disagreeing with my attitudes and my personal font choices.

Reason one I switched fonts was that I had a phrase by marketer Dan Kennedy echoing in my head. Dan was softly croaking into my ear, and saying how you want to create a sense of place for your audience, a door that they walk through, which separates your little and unique world from everything else outside.

You might think this is just another way to say, be unique, have a brand, different is better than better.

And sure, that’s a part of it. But a key part of what Dan is saying is that this sense of place should be consistent with the kind of influence you want to have on your audience, and that it should permeate everything you do, beyond just fonts, beyond logos, beyond color choices.

Still, this might sound vague and fluffy to you. You might wonder whether this kind of “sense of place” stuff has a role in the hard world of results-based marketing.

That’s for you to decide.

I’m just putting the idea out there for you, because it influenced me. If you really want an argument for it, then I can only refer you to the authority of Dan Kennedy himself, who helped guide and build up Guthy-Renker, the billion-dollar infomercial company, and who influenced and educated more direct marketers and copywriters than probably anybody else in history, and who was himself responsible for hundreds of direct marketing campaigns and many, many millions in direct sales.

So that’s reason one for the font change.

Reason two is that switching my font to Times New Roman was an instance of my Most Valuable Email trick in action. Yes, this little trick goes beyond just email copy, all the way to font choice, in the right context. If you’d like to make more sense of that, you can find out all about my Most Valuable Email course on the following page:

🦓

https://bejakovic.com/mve

If you want people to remember you

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My grandma is 92 years old. Yesterday I was talking to her. She got to saying how she is “counting down the days.”

​​Everybody of her generation who lived in her building — a 17-story brutalist skyscraper built in the 1960s — has already died.

“The last two died just recently,” she said. ​​”There was Marija, who was 94, and then there was that guy—” here she turned to my mother “—what was that guy’s name, the guy who liked fried chicken?”

I found this both cruel and hilarious. You live your whole life, even a very long life, and this is how people remember you — “the guy who liked fried chicken.”

It’s not because my grandmother’s memory is failing. At 92, the woman is still razor-sharp and has a much better memory than I ever had.

It’s simply how how mental imprint happens.

Unless there’s something notable, sound bite-worthy, legendary about you, and unless you repeat it often enough to make it stick in people’s heads, then people will pick something random to remember you by — if they remember you at all.

Maybe you don’t want to be remembered. Nothing wrong with that.

But if you are driven to have people remember you, and if you want to make it good, then take matters into your own hands.

A/B test different sound bites about yourself. When you hit upon one seems to resonate, that people feed back to you, then repeat it from here to eternity. Either that, or risk becoming “the guy who liked fried chicken.”

And on that note, let me remind you what I already said yesterday:

I’m now launching my Most Valuable Postcard #2. I’m selling it until tomorrow night at a 50% discount.

Most Valuable Postcard #2 covers a fundamental marketing topic. In fact, it’s a topic that I claim is the essence of marketing and copywriting.

Last night, Jeffrey Thomas from Goldmine.Marketing wrote me to say (some parts redacted):

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Finished reading #2 tonight.

And it was great.

I’ll read it again tomorrow.

Earlier today, before seeing this offer, I thought about [here Jeffrey named “the best copywriting guide ever written” according to a reclusive, bizarre, and yet highly successful financial copywriter]—wild to see it appear in this Postcard!

#2 reminds me that [here Jeffrey spelled out the counterintuitive idea at the end of Most Valuable Postcard #2, which a lot of marketers and copywriters struggle with, but which is true nonetheless].

Definitely some new tools to use. Much appreciated John.

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I redacted some parts of Jeffrey’s message above. For one thing, I want to keep those specifics behind the paywall. For another thing, I don’t think you really mind. Do you?

Anyways, Most Valuable Postcard #2 is available now, but only to people who are signed up to my email list. Maybe you don’t want to get on my email list. Nothing wrong with that. But if you do, here’s where to go.