Mentors

A grateful reader succeeds in making me blush

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Last night, I got an email from marketer and copywriter Shakoor Chowdhury, who wrote:

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Hello John,

I wanted to take a moment of my day to say “thank you”!

Besides Dan Kennedy, you have played the most impactful role in growing my revenues every single day

most of my NEW cashflow can be directly attributed to you and your courses “MVE” & “influential emails”…

I write emails daily now and they always bring more money or book appointments with high ticket clients…

This year I decided to focus on building relationships with my customers and not just ‘direct selling’ one time…

And I have to say, nobody is able to teach the concepts of email marketing better than you have…

It is simple, straightforward and teaches the FUNDAMENTALS of what it takes to be an email copywriter

I am a lifelong fan and customer.

Hope many more people and great things find their way to you, you are a bit of a ‘best kept secret’ in the copy world

which is perhaps why you are the best… the mystic ‘guru at the top of the mountain’

I found you because OTHER copywriters spoke so highly of you

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Like I said in the subject line, Shakoor succeeded in making me blush, and I’m blushing now having to write about it. So let me change the topic immediately.

I recently heard business coach Rich Schefren say that he often gives presents to his mentor Mark Ford, because Mark doesn’t like to be in anybody’s debt, and so he always gives presents in return.

Let me do the same with Shakoor:

Based on what little I know of him, he sounds like a guy who gets things done and would probably have been successful one way or the other.

Last October when Shakoor and I first exchanged a couple emails, he was already working with a number of clients as a kind of full-service marketer for ecom businesses.

With just one of those clients working on a performance deal, Shakoor was taking in $10k+ per month. Overall, at that time, he was driving $300k+ in sales for his clients each month.

Somewhere along the line, Shakoor also had time to run his own dropshipping businesses, one of which got up to 100k+ buyers.

All that’s to say, after Shakoor decided to build up his personal brand and to start writing daily emails, I’m guessing he would have been successful with Dan Kennedy or without Dan Kennedy, with me or without me.

That said, I do appreciate Shakoor’s kind words.

​​I also do appreciate that I have been able to help occasional people learn something about direct marketing and copywriting… and even make transformations in their lives, whether that meant making more money, or getting going with daily emailing so they can build a personal brand and stop relying on cold outreach.

And on that topic:

I’m not currently selling the Influential Emails program that Shakoor was referring to. But I still am selling my Most Valuable Email program.

Most Valuable Email pulls back the curtain and shows you, in less than an hour, how to perform a specific email copywriting trick, one I use regularly in my own emails.

Emails using this trick are different from emails you might be familiar with, like story emails, or “hot takes,” or how-to emails, or personal reveals.

Unlike those other kinds of emails, Most Valuable Emails happen to work well whether you have authority or not, whether you’re just getting started with your personal brand or you have had a following for years.

And yet, none of that is the reason why these kinds of emails are most valuable.

The real reason is that Most Valuable Emails make daily emailing fun and educational for me personally, and easy to stick with for the long term.

And it seems for others like Shakoor also.

Maybe for you too?

I don’t know. But if you’d like to find out more about MVE, and see if it makes sense for you:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

How CopyHour changed my life (no joke)

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This week, until Thursday at 8:31pm CET, I am promoting Derek Johanson’s CopyHour program. I’ve never gone through CopyHour myself. And yet it changed my life.

By the time I found out about CopyHour, around 2017, I had already been handcopying successful ads and sales letters on my own.

That’s what CopyHour is about, and it’s a worthwhile exercise.

Maybe I can say more about hand copying ads in a future email. But not now, because that’s not how CopyHour changed my life.

Back in 2017, there was not the the glut of copywriting courses and education that there is now. So I eagerly joined the CopyHour group Facebook group to see if I could maybe learn something on the sly.

Back then, the Facebook group was where Derek delivered the trainings that go with the handcopying work. I could see Derek was legit, had experience and expertise, and had put in time and effort to make CopyHour a really great program.

For example, this group was where I first got exposed to the book Great Leads. It’s a valuable book. But more importantly, it turned on some light in my dim brain and turned me on to the idea that maybe I should find some classic books about copywriting and read those.

This led me down a deep rabbit hole of reading and research which helped make me a drastically better copywriter in time.

But that still not how CopyHour changed my life.

How CopyHour changed my life is that I got on Derek’s email list.

During the next launch of CopyHour, Derek sent a bunch of emails to promote the program. One of those emails was actually not written by him but by a copywriter named Dan Ferrari.

At the time, Dan was a star copywriter at financial publisher Motley Fool. Dan’s story is classic bizopp rags to riches — from subsisting on four teaspoon of olive oil for breakfast because that’s all he could afford, to writing a control with his second sales letter at Motley Fool and soon pulling in millions of dollars in copywriting royalties.

“Hm,” I said, “maybe I should see if this dude has his own email list.”

I found Dan’s site. I signed up to his list. And what followed was… nothing. No emails. Not for almost two years.

Long story even longer, one day in 2019, Dan finally sent out an email asking his list if anyone was in the Baltimore-Washington area at the moment. As luck would have it, I was there at the time.

That email led to me joining Dan’s small coaching group a few months later… learning directly from Dan… hitching my wagon in part to Dan’s rising star… and making, as a direct consequence of a few words of Dan’s advice inside that coaching program, some hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But let’s wrap this story up:

The program that Dan credits for taking him from the olive oil subsistence breakfast to being a control-beating star copywriter at Motely Fool is — CopyHour.

The reason I found Dan and ended up learning copywriting from him is — CopyHour.

That’s my story.

Yours, I don’t know? Maybe it can start today.

Derek has opened the doors to CopyHour today. He will close them on Sunday because CopyHour is a real-time program.

But while Derek’s doors will stay open until Sunday, I will give you a reason to act now. If you join CopyHour before this Thursday at 8:31pm CET, and you do so using my affiliate link below, I will give you the following five free bonuses:

#1. Copy Zone (price last sold at: $100). My 175-page, A-Z guide on the business side of copywriting, from getting started with no experience or portfolio, all the way to becoming an A-list copywriter. Only ever sold once before, during a flash 24-hour offer in March 2023.

#2. Most Valuable Postcard #2: Ferrari Monster (price last sold at: $100). A deep dive into a single fascinating topic — code named Ferrari Monster — which I claim is the essence of all copywriting and marketing. Get the Ferrari Monster right, and almost everything else falls into place.

#3. Copy Riddles Lite (price last sold at $99). A slice of my Copy Riddles program, proportionately priced. Try yourself against legendary A-list copywriters like Gene Schwartz, David Deutsch, and Clayton Makepeace — and in the process, implant new copywriting skills into your brain.

#4. Horror Advertorial Swipe File (price last sold at: $100). A zip file with 25 PDFs, featuring the original copy for 25 of my horror advertorials. These advertorials pulled in millions of dollars on cold Facebook and YouTube traffic, and sold everything from fake diamonds and dog seat belts, to stick-on bras and kids’ vitamins.

#5. 9 Deadly Email Sins (price last sold at: $100). 9 lessons distilled from my expensive and exclusive one-on-one coaching sessions with successful business owners and marketers.

In the past, I’ve sold each of these trainings at the prices listed. When you add all those prices up, you get a total of $499 in free bonuses. This happens to be more than CopyHour currently sells for.

That said, don’t join CopyHour just to get my free bonuses. Join because you decide that you will do the work involved in CopyHour, and that you will benefit from it.

For more info on that, take a look at Derek’s writeup of how CopyHour works:

https://bejakovic.com/copyhour

My confessions as Shiv Shetti’s hot-seat coach

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Last Dec, Australia’s best copywriter, Daniel Throssell, wrote me an email asking if I wanted an intro to Shiv Shetti, who was looking for a new coach for his program.

I had no idea what being a coach inside somebody else’s program entailed, but I was willing to find out.

It turned out Shiv has a new program to coach copywriters, called Performance Copywriter Method.

Normally, I would not be interested. For the past year, I have been consciously working to move away from coaching, selling, or marketing to copywriters.

But this was something different.

Shiv was looking for a “hot seat coach.” Each week, I would have to give a different copywriter a strategy for a new email promotion. The copywriters were working with solid, successful clients, and were writing email promos for them on performance-only deals.

I told Shiv I am interested in this. So we agreed I’d start a 2-week trial period at the end of January.

In the meantime, I got to work preparing.

I bought Daniel Throssell’s Campaign Conqueror course, because Shiv was explicitly looking for someone who knew how to do promos in that style. I went through Campaign Conqueror twice.

Second, I went through Shiv’s trainings inside PCM. They talked about mindset… about Shiv’s system for finding these PCM clients… about writing promos themselves.

Third, I looked over previous hot seats that Shiv had delivered himself, all of which surprised me in how thoughtful and thorough they were.

Fourth, I joined the PCM Skool community, where I first started lurking and then contributing bit by bit.

Long story short:

I was impressed by Shiv’s program… impressed by the copywriters inside… impressed by Shiv and his team.

I guess they liked me as well, because my trial period came and went, and now we continue to work together.

My main job is, as I said, to take in a bunch of info each week, and come up with the strategy for a new email promo, much in the style of Daniel Throssell’s Campaign Conqueror. The strategy includes a promo offer, a theme, and email hooks.

For example, tomorrow I have call set up with an Australian copywriter who’s working with a music coach. He’s supposed to send emails over 5 days to promote the coach’s $2,800 offer to the coach’s list of 12,000 names.

I will prepare the strategy. I will go over it with the copywriter over Zoom. He will then go off and write the implement the strategy some time in April.

If all goes well, the client will make a bunch of money without doing any work. The copywriter will end up getting paid much more for those emails than he ever could if he were getting paid up front. And then next month, he and the client will do it all again, with a new offer and a new theme.

So far, I’ve done five or six of these hot seats, one per week. Most of the promos are set to run in the next few weeks, so I can’t report on any impressive wins yet. I imagine those will come.

The other part of my work as a hot seat coach is participate in the PCM Skool community, fielding questions every day.

Those tend to range from technical questions to client acquisition questions to copy and promo questions.

Fortunately, this community is nothing like r/copywriting or the various Facebook copy groups. The people inside are all normal, are all looking for results, are all actually working copywriters with solid copy chops.

All that’s to say, i continue to work with Shiv and his PCM community.

I can tell you from the inside that this program is 100% legit.

​​Not only is it well-designed and well-delivered, with care and effort, but the copywriters inside are getting these performance deals going with quality clients, and from what I’ve seen of the results so far, they are making bank.

If you’re interested, you can find out more about PCM below.

But before you go there, you might notice the curious fact that I am not in any way creating a promo out of this offer.

There’s no deadline.

There’s no disappearing offer, or a bonus, or a discount.

That’s because I don’t want to create any additional urgency about this, beyond what you might already feel as a copywriter dissatisfied or worried with the status quo.

But if you are dissatisfied or worried, and if you’re looking for a new way to work as a copywriter, then PCM is definitely worth a look. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/pcm

I teased, promised, and threatened, and yet it’s not here

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I woke up this morning, confused about where I am and what time it might be.

It’s day one of my U.S. trip. I’m only just beginning the adjustment to the time zone change from Europe. I expect the adjustment to continue until it’s time for me to fly back to Barcelona.

In my confusion this morning, I checked my inbox and saw the many dozens of emails that had accumulated since yesterday. One email stood out.

“Uh-oh,” I said to myself. “That’s a problem.”

Because yesterday, I teased, promised, and threatened that today I would start promoting an exciting and legit business opportunity for working copywriters.

Well, as that email informed me, this promo has now been postponed.

As with most legit business opportunities, you gotta get on a call before you can buy. And as I found out this morning, the guy who does these calls is “taking a step back for urgent personal reasons.”

So I will not be promoting this exciting and legit business opportunity in my email today. Instead, my teasing of this business opportunity continues, and I will be promoting it in the future.

Meanwhile, since I had to adapt my plan for today, I’d like to share the following quote with you. It’s from one of the most successful direct marketers of all time, Joe Sugarman, of BluBlockers fame.

​​Joe was talking about a glaring objection in a product he was selling once. And he wrote:

“I recognized this as a problem that had to be addressed in our copy. And since I look at problems as opportunities, I wondered, ‘Where is the opportunity in this serious and rapidly growing problem?'”

I read this in the early days of my business and marketing education. And that “problems as opportunities” bit has stuck with me ever since.

Here’s a second quote I read only yesterday. It comes from Brad Jacobs, who started 7 billion-dollar companies so far in his life, and who recently published a book about his experiences, titled How to Make a Few Billion Dollars. Jacobs writes:

“Embrace everything that comes your way, the good and especially the bad. And don’t just accept adversity — figure out how to capitalize on it.”

So there you go. My tip for you for today, via Joe Sugarman and Brad Jacobs:

Train yourself. Change your mind. And the next time you come across a problem — big or small — tell yourself to look at it as an opportunity. In time, this attitude may lead you to a few billion dollars.

In my case, the fact that my planned affiliate offer for today fell through is an opportunity to promote something of my own.

So let me remind you of my Simple Money Emails course. It’s all about writing easy and fast emails that you can use day after day to adapt to problems and opportunities in your business, and even to use them to build credibility and trust with your audience.

For more information on Simple Money Emails:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Shady and petty, or smart personal positioning?

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In 1906, magician Harry Houdini started to research an ambitious book he planned to call The Encyclopedia of Magic.

But the more Houdini worked, the more maniacal and single-minded his focus became — to discredit Robert-Houdin, the great 19th-century magician that Houdini had originally modeled himself after, down to the name.

Even the title of Houdini’s book changed. ​​First it became Robert-Houdin’s Proper Place in the History of Magic… and then, The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin.

Robert-Houdin was a hack, Houdini was effectively saying. Robert-Houdin had managed to fool magicians into thinking he was something great and original, when he was not.

Yesterday, I wrote an email about how negotiation coach Jim Camp snubbed his mentor Dave Sandler.

Sandler was a sales trainer who had influenced much of Camp’s thinking — take a look at their published works — but Camp never seems to have given due credit to Sandler for his influence or ideas.

You might call that — along with Houdini’s attack on Robert-Houdin — petty, shady, or simply inevitable human ego that crops up even among great men.

You might call it that.

But I might call it smart personal positioning.

Hear me out:

It’s undeniable that being unique, new, distinct, never-before-seen is a tremendous advantage to your personal positioning.

The trouble of course is that you’re probably not unique, distinct, or never-before-seen, just like the other 117 billion humans estimated to have ever lived.

​​We’re all quite similar to each other, and we’re all really the outgrowth of our families, friends, neighbors, coworkers, teachers, mentors, living and dead.

That might be true. But like I said yesterday, it’s not really what the human brain responds to.

The human brain responds to contrast. That’s the basis of cognition.

And what bigger contrast is there than saying about yourself, “There was darkness upon the face of the deep… and then there was light.”

So there you go. If you’re looking to improve your personal positioning, work on being more distinct, unique, new.

That’s given.

What you might not have thought about is to make yourself distinct and unique at the expense of the people who helped you get there.

It might seem like one of those unsavory and pointless things done by people who have made it to the top… but I disagree. At least about the pointless part.

People who get to the top often do things that seem unnecessary or even self-defeating — if you’re not in their place.

Anyways, that’s just an idea for you to consider.

I realize today’s message might seem a little dark, but that’s what happens if you want to reach into all corners of human nature. Some are nice and cheery… others are dark and disturbing.

If you are willing to face the dark and disturbing corners of human nature, and maybe even figure out how to work with them to your advantage, then I have an entire sub-training all about that.

That sub-training is Round 19 of my Copy Riddles program. It deals with the dark psychological things that are present in the best sale copy, which go deeper than mere self-interest.

For more info on Copy Riddles, from Round 1 to Round 20:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Jim Camp, plagiarist

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Last week, Ben Settle sent out an email in which he quoted a reader who said the following about negotiation coach Jim Camp:

“… his whole system for the most part comes from Dave Sandler and he never gives him credit, ever that I’ve heard. Now I realize he has done many things to make him an expert but he has never anywhere I’ve heard even mentioned Sandler.”

Ben is a big Jim Camp fan, and has infected many of his readers, me among them, with Jim Camp’s authority.

Ben shrugged off his reader’s comment, and said he had never heard of Sandler.

​​Neither had I. But I looked Sandler up. He was a sales trainer and he died in 1995.

I found a book of 49 of Sandler’s “Timeless Selling Principles.” Most of the rules line up very well with Camp’s system. And some line up exactly.

​​Take a quick look over the specific language in the chapter headings and summaries below, and you’ll see that Jim Camp was in fact taking a lot from Sandler. ​​From the book:

* “Don’t spill your candy in the lobby” [Camp swapped in “beans” for “candy”]

* “The best sales presentation you’ll ever give, the prospect will never see” [taken word-for-word]

* “The bottom line of professional selling is going to the bank” [Camp said “bottom line of negotiation…”]

* “You must be comfortable telling your prospect that it’s OK to say ‘No.’ You must also be comfortable hearing and accepting ‘No.'” [Camp used this pretty much word-for-word, and summed it up with the title of his book, Start With No.]

In that Ben Settle email, Ben wrote, “If you learn something that’s not common knowledge from a particular source it’s good to give credit.”

I’ve read and listened to Camp a lot, but I’ve never read or heard Camp credit Dave Sandler. I’ve heard him mention Peter Drucker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, even Gloria Steinam, but never Sandler. (I checked just now, and Sandler is credited once, among 20 other mentors, at the end of Start With No.)

So now what? Is Jim Camp really a plagiarist? Or did he at least snub an influential mentor by not crediting him enough?

It might be interesting for the gossip, but on a practical level, I couldn’t care less.

As I wrote a long time ago in this newsletter, I’m less interested in attribution than in ideas that work.

Jim Camp’s system works. I know because I’ve used it and seen it work.

But is it really Camp’s system? Or Sandler’s system? Or somebody else’s who came before Sandler? Or some amalgam?

Instead of agonizing over those tough questions, I would like to give you a better, easier question to ponder:

Do you remember any of Sandler’s points above?

​​The real value in this email is those five points, not a dogpile on the topic of whether Camp gave due credit or not.

And yet, I doubt one person in a hundred will remember any of Sandler’s ideas above from this email… while many will remember that I wrote an email with the subject line, “Jim Camp, plagiarist.”

No judgment there. Such is the human brain — wired for human action and drama. You can gripe about it and fight it without effect, or you can simply accept it and work with it.

As I wrote once before, it’s your choice whether you want to be subtle or savage in how you work with it.

What is not your choice is how people’s brains work, and what kinds of messages they respond to.

​​And the most condensed and powerful type of message that people respond to… well, you can read more about that here:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Secret lineage to mysterious gurus

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I got in the cab. I was in front, copywriter Vasilis Apostolou and business guru Barry Randall were in back.

There were lots of conceivably smart and valuable questions I could have asked Barry. I could have asked for a business tip. I could have asked for connections to partners. I could have asked for mindset advice.

But I was not so disciplined. Instead, I turned around and said:

“Hey Barry. Today when Parris Lampropoulos got on stage, he said that he and you and Toe Cracker all have the same coach right now. But he didn’t say who. If it’s not a secret, who is it?”

Would you like to know who the mysterious coach is behind these legendary 8- and 9-figure copywriters and marketers?

Well I’m not surprised.

Yesterday I sent out an email, promoting my Most Valuable Email training, along with a 24-hour disappearing bonus. The disappearing bonus had 3 parts:

1) A freely available resource with several valuable marketing ideas
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2) One specific idea that caught my eye in that resource, and my advice on how to implement it today

​3) The man behind this resource, who I have only written about once before, but who has influenced my thinking on a deep level

Yesterday’s email was a big success. It made me more sales of MVE in a single day than I have had since the last day of the initial launch, last September.

Since the disappearing bonus was open to anyone who bought MVE previously (and not just last night), I also got dozens of responses from previous buyers.

The number #1 specific thing people said was they wanted to know part 3) the mysterious man behind the resource, who had influenced me so deeply.

So that’s my conclusion:

People are curious about secret lineage to mysterious gurus. And you can use that to drive action.

That disappearing bonus has now fully disappeared. The mysterious guru who influenced me will retreat to the shadows.

But if you’re curious about my lineage to several other gurus, you can find that inside my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

Bonus — this book doesn’t just tell you the name of each guru.

​​I found out the name of Barry Randall’s coach. And I got nothing from it — because the guy hasn’t written a book, doesn’t have a newsletter, doesn’t tweet. Unless you have $20k per month to join his mastermind, his name alone won’t do you any good.

​On the other hand, my little 10 Commandments book gives you a bunch of specific and valuable answer to questions about business, mindset, and marketing. All from some of the most smartest, most successful, and most influential people in this space that I’m in. All available here:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

The case against reading books

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One of the first-ever emails I wrote for this newsletter, back in August 2018, was about magician Ricky Jay. Jay was widely considered one of the best sleight-of-hand artists in the world.

Why write about a magician in a marketing and copywriting newsletter?

My feeling is that magic, as practiced by top performers like Ricky Jay, is about controlling the audience’s attention, about painting mental pictures, about entertaining, about building curiosity, all the while guiding people to a tightly controlled desired outcome — the magician’s desired outcome.

​​With some small tweaks, that also sounds like the job of a copywriter, or more broadly, any persuader.

Back in August 2018, Ricky Jay was still alive. He died a few months later. He left behind an enormous collection of magic artifacts — posters, books, handbills, paintings, personal letters — from some of the most bizarre, mystical, and skilled magicians, jugglers, acrobats, learned animals, con men, and sideshow freaks of all time.

After Ricky Jay died, his collection was broken up into four parts. Just the first part, auctioned off in 2021, brought in $3.8 million.

Today, I came across a little video of Ricky Jay talking about the books in his collection. And he had this to say:

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There are probably more books written about magic than any other art form. Literally thousands and thousands of books. And I’ve collected thousands of books in my life about magic technique.

But I believe that the real key to learning is personally. It’s almost like the sensei master relationship in the martial arts. That the way you want to learn is by someone that you respect showing you something.

There’s a level of transmission and a level of appreciation that’s never completely attainable just through the written word.

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I agree. If you can find somebody you respect, and you can get them to agree to teach you personally, you will learn things, and at a level of depth that you could never learn otherwise.

So go find a  sensei. But—

What if you can’t find one?

Or worse, what if you find a sensei, and, in spite of your best pleading and cajoling and stubbornly hanging around, he just says no? What if he’s too busy, too cranky, too secretive?

In that case I suggest being your own sensei.

Because books are great. I’ve read two or three of them, so I know. But there’s a level of understanding that’s never completely attainable through the written word.

Anyways, that’s my entire message for you for today. Except, if you want some help becoming your own sensei, take a look at my Most Valuable Email course.

​​Yes, Most Valuable Email is a bit of a how-to guide to a specific technique of email copywriting. But more than that, it’s a framework, a magical one in my experience, for becoming your own sensei. More info here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

A mystery about people who willingly live in hell

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A few months ago, I was reading a New Yorker article about foreign nationals — Americans, Frenchmen, Kiwis — who volunteered to fight in Ukraine.

I found the article fascinating. I mean, ask yourself:

What makes someone willing to go halfway around the world, into a war zone, to live in a basement and crawl through mud and huddle in icy trenches, as constant explosions blow out his eardrums and traumatize his nervous system?

What makes a person willing to expose himself to getting shot at and wounded and possibly killed? And what makes him willing to shoot and wound and possibly kill others, who have never done any harm to him or his kind?

Most incredibly, what makes a person do all this voluntarily, without any promise of reward or even any real chance at glory, and without the usual government coaxing or propaganda or impressment?

“Maybe,” you say, “these foreign fighters are fighting for freedom, for justice, for the right thing. Maybe they feel they are doing their duty, as soldiers and as human beings.”

No doubt.

​But taking a page from Frank Bettger’s book, let me ask you one further:

In addition to doing the right thing, what other reason might these foreign fighters have to willingly put themselves in what most people would consider a living hell?

Take a moment to think about that. And when you’re done, read about it from the horse’s mouth, or rather, from the Turtle’s mouth. Here’s a bit from the New Yorker article, about a New Zealander fighting in Ukraine, code name Turtle:

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In New Zealand, he’d been “planning out the rest of my life with a girl.” Before coming to Ukraine, he’d ended the relationship, quit his job, and sold his house and car. “In hindsight, it was very selfish,” he acknowledged. Although he may have suggested to his friends and relatives that Russian atrocities — in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha and elsewhere — had instilled in him a sense of obligation, such moral posturing had been disingenuous. “It was just an excuse to be in this environment again,” Turtle said.

===

Turtle had spent a large and formative part of his life fighting in war zones — he was first sent to Afghanistan in 2002, when he was 17.

Today, a generation later, he’s left his house, his car, his job, and Mrs. Turtle back in the Shire, and he’s decided to trade all that in for an environment he is more familiar with — an army unit in Mordor.

​​“In the end, it’s just that I love this shit,” Turtle said. “And maybe I can’t escape that — maybe that’s the way it’s always gonna be.”

All that’s to say:

Never underestimate how powerful the pull of the familiar, the known, the status quo is on people, even if that status quo is hell on earth.

And that’s it. That’s my possibly sobering psychological insight for you for today. Think about how it might apply to you and the people you deal with regularly, and maybe you can get some value out of it.

As for me, the time has come for my once-in-a-blood-moon pitch for my coaching program on email marketing and copywriting.

It might seem tacky to put a sales pitch at the end of an email about extreme self-sacrifice, or extreme self-immolation. I do it because extreme cases uncover the everyday cases. In any case, here’s my pitch.

I’ve only let in two kinds of people into my coaching program so far:

1. Business owners who want to use email to build a stronger, longer-lasting relationship with their prospects and customers, in order to sell more and to sell more easily

2. Copywriters who have a profit-share agreement with a client to manage an email list, allowing a large degree of control and an upside when things go well

There are multiple reasons why I restrict my coaching program to only those two groups of people. If you’re curious, I’ll tell you one reason, which is that my coaching program is expensive. I only want the kinds of people to join who can quickly get much more out of this coaching than what they pay me.

So if you fit one of the two categories above, and if you’re interested in my coaching program, then hit reply, tell me about yourself, and we can talk in more detail.

And in case you’re wondering whether a coaching program is something you possibly need:

I can tell you that personally, in most areas of life where I’ve had success, I didn’t have and didn’t need any kind of coach. Instead, I either figured it out myself, or I followed a book or a course to the letter, and got results that way.

On the other hand, there have been a few areas where I hired a coach, and even paid that coach lots and lots of money.

As I’ve written before, some of the value I got from coaching was genuine technical feedback. Some of the value was added confidence, via getting an experienced second pair of eyes to look over what I was doing.

But the majority of the value I got from expensive coaching — I would say 75% — came from having to justify the price to myself. From finally being forced to abandon the status quo, and to do things I should have been doing already, but found excuses not to do.

Maybe you say that’s stupid or illogical. All I can say is that this get-out-of-the-status-quo motivation made coaching absolutely worth it to me, and made it pay for itself many times over.

So do you need coaching?

Only you can decide if you’re stuck in the status quo, and if you find that unacceptable. If you decide the answer is yes, then like I said, write me an email, and we can talk in more detail to see whether my coaching program and you could be a good fit.

I tried to make this email light and fluffy and still potentially valuable

by

Two weeks ago, I got a check in the mail for $1,000. A real, physical check, landing in a real, physical mailbox, in Baltimore, MD, some 3,750 miles or 6,040 kilometers away from where I actually live now.

The backstory is t​hat last December, I wrote four articles for the Professional Writers Alliance.

​​It was great opportunity — write a few easy articles, promote myself to a list of copywriters, and even get paid for it. ​​​​$1,000 — that’s 42.5 movie nights for a couple, at an average ticket price of $11.75, if I can stay disciplined and not buy any popcorn.

But not just that.

​​I’m even supposed to get an extra $100 — that’s 4.25 more movie nights, no popcorn — after I do a kind of private podcast interview next week with Jen Adams from PWA. ​​Hopefully, it won’t be a check again because that first check is still languishing at a friend’s house in Baltimore, I imagine under a growing pile of magazines and takeout boxes.

I’m telling you all this because of the strange chain of events that led to this $1,000 check.

I wrote those PWA articles about my experience self-publishing my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters on Amazon.

I wrote that book, as I’ve shared many times before, based on James Altucher’s “I plagiarized” blog post, which I read the first time back in January 2020.

I discovered James’s blog a short time earlier because Mark Ford linked to it in his email newsletter.

I signed up Mark Ford’s newsletter maybe back in 2018, because Mark is a big name in the direct response world. I kept reading after I signed up because I in some way identified with Mark, or at least I identified the kind of person I might like to one day to be with Mark.

Maybe the point of the above chain of events is obvious to you. Maybe it’s not.

If not, you can find it explained in section 3.3 of my Insight Exposed training. You might potentially find that explanation valuable, and even enjoyable, at least in the long term. Insight Exposed is only available to people who are signed up to my email list. If you’d like to sign up to my list, you can do that here.