Mentors

Public service announcement

by

Every few months or so, I like to promote an affiliate offer that doesn’t make me much money, but that I still promote as a kind of chirpy public service announcement.

Today it’s time to do so again.

Because yesterday, in my Daily Email House community, I wrote about an email I sent out recently, which did well for me in terms of sales. That email was based on an idea I got from marketer Travis Sago, who I’ve mentioned often in this newsletter.

After I wrote about that, I got a DM on Skool from a Daily Email House member, who works as a freelance copywriter, and who also has his own email list and a few products he sells to that list.

Here’s that DM interaction:

===

FREELANCE COPYWRITER: Hey John, how are you? I keep seeing you mention Travis Sago, and I wonder… how much of an influence does he have on you? It looks like he is the brain behind a lot of campaigns you do and sales

BEJAKO: Yep, I’ve learned a ton from the dude. Highly recommended if you are looking to do more with your email list and audience

FREELANCE COPYWRITER: As somebody who’s pretty fed up with client work and wants the email based business lifestyle, that might make sense. So is his Skool page the only way to see what it’s all about? Or is there a TSL/VSL?

BEJAKO: Pretty much everything he’s doing now is inside that Skool group. He had courses before that you can still buy separately, but they are also inside Skool if you sign up for that

FREELANCE COPYWRITER: Cool. I’ll have a look

===

I figure if this guy is interested, maybe you too will be. I’m not holding my breath though.

I’ve promoted Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin Skool group a dozen times in these emails.

I promoted it before Travis made it available to affiliates, because I was in it, and because I saw it from the inside, and because it made me money.

I promoted it after after Travis set up the affiliate program last year, because I’m still in it, and I can still see it from the inside, and it’s still making me money.

Over the past year that I’ve been promoting Ronin as an affiliate, I have made about $6k in commissions.

That might sound like real money to you, and it is pretty good money for sending a dozen or so emails, but it’s also much much less than I’ve made by promoting much less valuable affiliate offers that I’m much less personally involved with and less enthusiastic about.

It’s also much much less than I’ve made by applying Travis’s teachings inside Ronin. As for that, I can directly trace about $135k in income to Ronin:

* ~35k+ from auctions, following Travis’s “24 Hour FUN Auction” course

* ~60k+ from Daily Email Habit, which I created by following step-by-step Travis’s “Passive Cash Flow Mojo” course, about creating continuity offers

* ~$40k+ from three tiny promos, which were based around ideas I got from Travis’s “$1k a day in 1 Hour a Day” training and his “Big Ticket Email Mojo” course

On top of that, I’ve made much more money indirectly thanks to the ideas and people inside Ronin:

Copy hacks I’ve seen Travis and nobody else use (like the email I mentioned at the start)…

… affiliate offers I’ve promoted from other Ronin members…

… changes I’ve made to the way I create my own offers, which I’ve picked up both from Travis’s trainings and by looking at what he does.

So eat your vegetables.

Brush your teeth.

Don’t smoke.

And sign up to Royalty Ronin, and then start applying the ideas inside, one by one.

I figure that just like other public service announcement, most people will shrug this one off.

But maybe you won’t, at least if you too are fed up with client work and are looking for a way out. If so, I have believed for years and continue to believe this is the best deal on the Internet:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

P.S.. Travis offers a free 7-day trial. If you sign up for Ronin and make it past the first 7 days, write me and let me know. I’ve got some bonuses with your name on them.

RSVP

by

I have an invitation for you. Here’s what’s happening:

I’ve been talking to Doberman Dan Gallapoo.

As you might know, Dan is a legit A-list copywriter. As in, he’s been hired by clients like Agora not just to write for them… but to start entire new divisions for them.

Once upon a time, Dan actually roomed with Gary Halbert. He’s one of the five or so people in the entire world that Dan Kennedy will pick up a phone call from, any time.

Since 2011, Dan has been writing and publishing a paid print newsletter about marketing, The Doberman Dan Letter. It’s read by the “who’s who” of the DR space.

Dan runs his own direct response businesses, and he still works with clients and partners with other business owners on revshare deals.

He gets these deals whenever he wants, by doing something no other copywriters today are doing, at least none that I know.

Every economic crisis or so, Dan puts together a small group of copywriters and helps them profit from the confusion, uncertainty, and chaos in the market.

The last time Dan did this was during Covid.

With the Iran war leaking out globally, and the AI bubble getting ever larger and ever more taut, right now is a time of proper uncertainty and stress.

Sure enough, Dan is putting together his group again.

He asked if I would help him promote it. I said yes.

If you’re a copywriter, here’s what is basically on offer here:

* Security in an uncertain time

(Dan’s system involves working with profitable businesses, which have been around for years and have large customer database, employees, and often, physical stores. This is not about trying to write emails for some fly-by-night dropshipper who will be here today and gone tomorrow, while you wait to get paid for the work you did last month.)

* Income that’s not capped or tied to your time

* The “one-eyed man” advantage in the land of the blind

* A ready pool of prospective clients, and a unique mechanism to get the attention of those clients and turn them into gigs fast

* A unique mechanism to make money for those clients in a straightforward way, which doesn’t require daily emailing or writing millions of new ad creatives each week

As for those two secret mechanisms, one to get clients, and the other to make money for those clients… they are actually the same:

Direct mail.

Yes, Dan uses direct mail both to get clients, and to deliver for those clients.

The fact is, direct mail never went away. It’s even growing, with smart online-first DTC brands and high-ticket coaching businesses rediscovering direct mail and bumbling their way through it.

You can do the same. Or you can profit from the experience of a master who’s been doing it for decades, at the highest level, and who makes his living by doing exactly what he is offering to personally help others do.

This opportunity is big and new and probably unfamiliar to you.

I have zero hope of trying to sell it to you in this email.

Like I said, I’ve been talking to Dan.

I suggested we create a free pop-up group to share more info about this opportunity.

The idea being, this free pop-up group would be a place for a few good folks to get to know Dan… to find out more about how he gets clients and delivers results with direct mail… and see if it’s something they would want to take on with Dan’s guidance, mentorship, and help.

Dan agreed with me. So we are creating this free pop-up group.

Would you like to join us?

Really great price on coaching

by

I talked to a dude recently who has made a new coaching offer to his list, with 1-1 access to him, in various formats, for a full year, at a really great price.

Nobody bought.

Now here’s a marketing and psychology truth that took me embarrassingly long to learn:

If you offer people a really great price on something they don’t want to buy, the really great price won’t make them want to buy it either.

That’s why discounting fails to drive sales in so many situations. Discounting only works when people want the thing being sold, and they value it at the full price you claim for it.

But back to coaching.

As I’ve been croaking about for a few weeks now, nobody really wants “coaching.”

Yes, some people manage to sell “coaching” because they have so much status, authority, and relationship with their audience. In those situations, their coaching clients are effectively buying the coach, and the relationship with that coach, rather than the coaching itself.

That’s definitely a nice position to be in.

But what if you don’t have that level of status, authority, and relationship with your audience yet?

The fix is simple, and can be executed quickly. It’s to sell people something they actually want to buy, and which they value at the price you ask for it.

This is how you go from trying and failing to sell “coaching,” which people don’t want even at a really great price… to having a $1k+ offer, which you can make 3-5 sales of each month, and which is both easier to sell and deliver than “coaching.”

Maybe you’re interested in how to implement this fix, which I claim is “simple, and can be executed quickly.”

I’ve prepared a 1-page overview of how to do it, a process I’ve guided a few people through already.

I’m begrudgingly willing to share this 1-page overview with you.

If you like what you read, you’ll have the opportunity to work with me directly in February, to implement this for yourself and your own list.

Or of course, you can just run with it yourself.

In case you’re interested in the 1-page overview, hit reply, tell me you want it, and I’ll get it to you.

How to sell a $1k+ coaching program without testimonials

by

I’ll tell you in a a sec how to sell a $1k+ coaching offer without testimonials. But first lemme tell you a related and intriguing list-building tactic.

It comes courtesy of marketer Kevin Hood, who shared it inside my Daily Email House community a couple days ago. It goes like this:

1. Come up with a list of “mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive buyer personas” who could potentially be interested in what you offer (Kevin used AI, but you can use… other methods also)

2. Come up with a list of “pain points, desires, beliefs, thoughts, and feelings” those people might have

3. Go on social media and write 100s of tweets or threads or stories or whatever and combine one item from list 1 and one item from list 2 in a statement that looks like:

“If you spent your 20s or 30s digging yourself into debt but deep down you desperately want to become financially free, I hope you find my page.”

Says Kevin:

===

Where most posts get 500-1000 views.

These get thousands.

No matter your follower count.

This is a real post from one of my clients who teaches Financial Independence and investing, and it got 189,000 views while generating 1,600 new followers for his account. And while we can’t be 100% precise on measuring email subscribers according to individual posts, the estimate is around 100 new email subscribers from this post alone.

===

I don’t know what Kevin client’s “my page” looks like. Maybe it has some testimonials. Maybe it has a unique mechanism for how he financially frees 20- and 30-somethings from debt. Maybe it features risk-reversal copy such as, “Sign up to my newsletter and if you don’t like my emails, you get to come to my house and kick me in the shin.”

Whatever. All those things are nice addons.

But the fact remains, specificity, and in particular double-specificity like Kevin is using, is a powerful way of drawing attention… creating interest and desire… and providing proof. Even if you have nothing else going on.

Now back to coaching programs.

Q: How do you sell a $1k+ coaching program without testimonials?

A: You rely on other forms of proof.

There’s many, beyond testimonials. In particular, there’s specificity. I’ll leave you with a riddle related to that:

If you’re looking to monetize your list with a $1k+ offer… if you tried offering “coaching” or “mentoring” to your list before but got zero takers… then how do you figure out what specific or double-specific segment of your audience to appeal to in order to actually make some sales?

I’ll give you a hint about my thinking.

My recommendation is not to do what Kevin did, and use AI to come up with a bunch of stuff that you throw at the wall to see if it sticks.

My recommendation is also not to use your own creativity and brainpower, to sit and introspect what specific segment you could appeal to.

If you eliminate both of those options… then what’s left as a means of determining which specific people you could help with your $1k+ coaching offer?

If you like, guess what I have in mind, write in and tell me so, and I’ll tell you quick whether you got it or no.

Taking credit for your rock star clients’ results

by

A few days ago, I was on a call with “Rebelpreneur” Gasper Crepinsek.

Over the past couple years, Gasper built an online brand teaching people AI. He’s still doing that, but this year he is going broader, using his background as an ex-Boston Consulting guy to help people build actual and sustainable businesses online.

I helped Gasper launch a $1k+ offer last month.

We worked on it together for a couple weeks, then Gasper went out and sold it to three people in his audience in a matter of days. He then started delivering the actual offer.

Result: One of Gasper’s clients already closed his own sales and is making money as a result of working just a few weeks with Gasper.

About that, Gasper said, “He’s attributing it to me, but I told him, ‘It’s all you.'”

My message to Gasper on our call, and maybe to you now, is to take credit where you’ve earned it.

Sure, it’s smart to sell to people who would succeed with or without you. When they do inevitably succeed, there’s a glow on you as well.

That doesn’t mean you can’t take some of the credit, and legitimately.

Even if somebody is an absolute rock star, you can inspire them… you can push them a bit… you can guide them through a process so they get results faster, sooner, easier, more enjoyably than they might have done otherwise.

In Gasper’s case, his client might have done something similar in another 3 or 6 months. But because of working with Gasper, he’s got another, say, $5k in the bank, today.

That’s pretty much what my situation is with Gasper as well.

The dude was succeeding and would have succeeded more, one way or another, with or without me.

But I helped him come up with a simple, attractive offer that, from the looks of it, will be his main, high-ticket, backend money-maker for the coming year. (Gasper says, “It’s crazy how much people like it,” meaning the offer).

Is having a $1k+ offer, which you can readily sell to your list, something that interests you?

If so, hit reply and let me know.

You can’t buy anything here. But if you do reply, I’ll give you a 1-page overview of the process that I guided Gasper through, so you can go do it yourself if you like.

If nobody is taking you up on your coaching offer

by

In the words of Bob Marley:

Sun is shining. The weather is sweet.

Make you want to launch a new offer that has some heat.

To the rescue. Here I am.

Over the past few months, I’ve heard a frustration from a number of readers who offer coaching. Here is a sample:

===

I can’t get people to buy from my emails.

I have good engagement ( I think. I get a good amount of replies, and even more when I ask questions.)

I THINK my copy must be at least halfway decent because I have a self liquidating front end funnel on Facebook. Good take rate on upsells. People seem to like the products.

But I barely make any sales from daily emails.

Maybe 4 or 5 a month on a list of about 700.

===

I followed up with this reader to ask what offers exactly he is making to his list. It turned out two kinds:

1. The upsells from his front end offer, and

2. Coaching

Like my reader says above, there’s a good take rate on his upsells when he sells his front-end offer. I can’t say for sure, but I’m guessing that most of the sales he does make on the back end come from people taking him up on those upsells as well.

Which leaves coaching…

… which nobody wants.

Now here’s my pet theory:

For the past couple of years, we were in this moment. Perhaps it was covid, or perhaps the fact that everything moved online. But everyone became a coach. And magically, coaching was selling, because… it was the moment.

But my long-running suspicion has been it will eventually get harder to sell coaching. Which is precisely what I’ve been seeing from readers like the reader above, who are offering coaching and seeing a response rate of a little over 0.

And now, I don’t mean to pry, but I do have a question for you.

Do you have the same problem? Do you offer coaching? And nobody’s buying?

To the rescue. Here I am.

I have a possible fix for you, which I’m calling the New “Wanna Get High?” Offer for coaches (a nod to Bob Marley above).

In case you’re interested, hit reply and tell me a bit about what you do, and who you do it for. In turn, I’ll tell you more about my New “Wanna Get High?” Offer, and you can then decide if it’s right for you.

Is this a stupid idea?

by

I had an idea. I wonder if it’s a ridiculous or stupid idea, or if there is in fact any interest in it.

Maybe you can tell me:

Would you be interested in doing unlimited 1:1 coaching with me, get on as many calls as you want, for the next year…

… with the goal of losing 30lbs and fitting into your old jeans?

No, just kidding.

I’m thinking yearlong, unlimited 1:1 coaching with me, so you can turn your emails into money, and monetize your list, and ultimately use it to pay for a house.

There would be some caveats to how this coaching would work, and I would want to see you already have some runway to build on.

To make up for it, the price would be ridiculously or possibly stupidly low.

So can you tell me, what do you think of this idea?

If you think it’s stupid, this is your chance to write in and laugh at me.

If on the other hand you’re intrigued or even excited by the possibility of having me coach you 1:1 so you can turn your emails into money, then write in and tell me so, and maybe we will end up working together.

How I ended up paying an inconcievable price for coaching

by

The date was July 17, 2019. I remember exactly where I was, walking in the old 18th century part of my home town of Zagreb, Croatia, where I was living at the time.

I pulled out my phone and saw that I had a new email from Dan Ferrrari.

In case you don’t know, Dan is an A-list copywriter. I profiled him in Commandment IV of my first 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters, because he has string of winning sales letters that few if any copywriters over the past 10 years can match. As just one example, Dan once wrote a sales letter that tripled sales over the previous control and sold out the entire stock of a longevity supplement.

In July 2019, my connection to Dan was extremely tenuous and unlikely.

I had gotten on his email list years earlier, but he never sent any emails.

Then, in the spring of 2019, while I was on a short trip to visit a friend in Baltimore — my first trip back to the U.S. in over five years — Dan finally sent an email to his list. Is anybody in the Baltimore/Washington area who wants to meet?

I replied yes. I don’t know exactly why or what I was hoping for. I just had a sense I was stuck with copywriting as a career. I had only heard stellar things about Dan. I thought if I met him in person maybe it would lead to something.

Aaaand… it turned out no. Our schedules didn’t fit, and we never ended up meeting in Baltimore.

I went back to Croatia, and Dan went back to his non-emailing.

And then, a few weeks later, Dan wrote me to ask whether I might be interested in his coaching program? I said yes.

To which, Dan replied with nothing. No response, first for a few days, then a week, then a month.

I forgot about Dan, and started fishing around for a different copywriting coach. But crazy as it might seem today, nobody in 2019 was offering coaching for copywriting.

And then, over a month after our last email exchange, Dan did reply. We got on a call to discuss his coaching program. I asked about everything but the price because I didn’t want that to cloud my judgment. The coaching sounded like the exact thing I had been looking for. I told Dan I’m in, and I figured I’d make the price work for me somehow.

The day after the call, Dan sent me an email with a PayPal payment link and the actual per month price for the coaching.

That was the email I got while walking around the old town in Zagreb. The reason I remember exactly where I was is that the price took my breath away.

I expected the coaching to be expensive. But not this expensive. I won’t say exactly how expensive it turned out to be. I’ll just say it was as high as my total income on many months at the time.

Still, I had some savings. I decided that, as long as I had some money in the bank, I was willing to give it a go. I mean, everything seemed to be building up to here — my stagnation with copywriting as a career, the near misses I’d had in meeting with Dan, the constant drum beating of “get a mentor” that was popular at the time.

So I took a deep breath, PayPaled Dan the money, and the coaching started.

I’ve written before about the actual coaching I got from Dan. I won’t repeat that here. Here I just want to focus on the price of the coaching, which, as I said, took my breath away when I first saw it.

Had anybody sat me down a few days prior and asked me whether I would pay, each month, what I ended up paying Dan, I would have just stared at them bug-eyed. “Absolutely not” would be my answer, and I would have meant it 100%.

Here’s the fundamental dilemma of setting prices:

Nobody knows what anything is truly worth. You don’t know what your offer is truly worth to your customers. They don’t know either. You can ask them, but they cannot and will not tell you the truth. The only way to know is to put an offer in front of them and see if they will buy.

I ended up buying Dan’s coaching at a price that would have been inconceivable to me only days earlier. Your customers or clients might end up buying your offers at prices that seem inconceivable to you now.

The only way to know is to put your offer in front of them, and see if they will buy.

That said, you can be a little more strategic about your price than simply throwing darts at a dartboard now and then. And on that note, I’d like to remind you of a mini-course I released yesterday, called Modified Depoorter Pricing.

This mini-course is about a pricing strategy I’ve used in the past to sell both services (back when I was working as a sales copywriter) and, later, my own courses.

This pricing strategy was elegant and worked very well when I used it.

My one regret is, I haven’t been consistent enough or thorough enough about using this pricing strategy. So I’ve created a mini-course outlining this pricing strategy, both for your benefit and for mine.

This is a “mini-course,” because I didn’t fill it with a lot of fluff or infotainment. You can consume it in 10 minutes if you so choose.

As such, I still don’t have a sales page for it. But if you’d like to get it nonetheless, you can do so at the link below.

The reason you might want to act now is that I will soon use the Modified Depoorter Pricing strategy to increase the price of this mini-course from its current modest level. To get it before then:

https://bejakovic.com/depoorter

The joy and food-poisoning risk of exploring and experimenting

by

I’m in Rome for a few days. My dad and his wife were coming for a trip here and asked if I would like to tag along. I said yes.

We arrived yesterday. And after visiting four churches, three fountains, and one set of famous stairs, it was time to sit down and eat something.

“Where will we eat?” I’d asked my dad’s wife before we arrived. They had been here a few times before, and I figured they might have favorite places.

“Oh, we’ll just sit down somewhere,” she said. “All the food is great there.” Right as she said that, thunder started rumbling off on the horizon.

So yesterday, we just sat down somewhere. The first course of pasta came. It looked unimpressive and yet had an off smell.

I ate it – I was very hungry. “This must be some unique ingredient they use in Rome,” I said to myself, as I tried to ignore the unpleasantness of it.

But by the time the second course came, it was undeniable. The meat was tough, the potatoes were in a state between undercooked and raw, and the two pieces of seafood were communicating in various ways that they had been bought a week or more ago, and caught who knows when.

I put my knife and fork down, figuring that it’s best to lose this single battle rather than the entire Rome campaign.

My bit of wisdom for you today is that there can be joy in exploring and experimenting, and occasionally discovering something really great and new.

In fact, that’s how I like to live much of my life. And that’s why I can say with a lot of confidence that exploring and experimenting does largely result in failure, and occasionally will lead to food poisoning.

The other option is to get recommendations, to follow in somebody’s tracks who’s been there before, whose experience and integrity you trust.

I’m no longer just talking about restaurants in Rome. I’m talking about other things in life as well, such as for example, the topic of this newsletter, which is effective communication, marketing, and online business.

And with that, I would like to remind you of Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin free trial offer, which I’m recommending as an affiliate these days.

Travis is somebody I personally have learned a ton from, whose experience and integrity I trust. The man has made tens of millions of dollars selling his own offers, in various niches. Plus he’s worked as a kind of JV marketing partner for a bunch of other online businesses, and made tens of millions of dollars for their businesses too.

Now, Travis has built a community of like-minded marketers and business owners around him. Plus, he’s sharing a lot of wisdom that he’s collected over the years, in the form of various high-ticket courses, which he makes available as free bonuses in this community.

And like I said, Travis is now offering a week’s free trial to this, so you can look inside, and discover something really great and new, without risking anything, including food poisoning.

If you’re curious to find out more about Royalty Ronin, or even take Travis up on his risk-free 7-day offer, take a look here:

​https://bejakovic.com/ronin​

P.S. If you already signed up for a trial of Royalty Ronin via my link above, then send me the confirmation email you got from Travis, the one with “Vroom” in the subject line.

In turn, I’ll send you my Heart of Hearts training, about how to discover what the people in your market really want, so you can better know what to offer them and how to present it, as a way of saying thanks for taking me up on my recommendation.

Magic Cave of Money-Making Opportunities

by

I have a new offer for you today.

It’s an affiliate offer, which I’m calling the Magic Cave of Money-Making Opportunities, because it’s been that for me over the past year.

I’ll have more to say about this offer over the coming days.

For now, I’ve recorded a video to try to tempt you into giving it a whirl.

If you’re curious, take a look here:

Magic Cave of Money-Making Opportunities