Newsletters

May we please have your attention

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Welcome aboard this Bejakovic Air email from Barcelona to wherever it is you may be right now.

For your safety and entertainment, please pay close attention to this short safety demonstration. Even if you are a frequent newsletter reader, the safety features of this Concord-like newsletter may be different from any you have flown on before.

There are no seat belts on this newsletter. Bejakovic Air only shares ideas that are found to be interesting or possibly useful, with no guarantee of truthfulness or consistency from email to email.

We recommend you fasten yourself to an idea whenever reading this newsletter. Unfasten that idea tomorrow by pulling on the buckle, like so, and consider fastening on tomorrow’s idea to see if it fits more snugly.

The emergency exits of this newsletter are clearly marked. We have 6 exits: two at the front (archive, or delete); two at the back (follow the link, or unsubscribe); and, if you are using a mobile electronic device, you can also swipe left or right, to read other emails in your inbox.

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Cabin pressure on all Bejakovic Air flights is maintained in a narrow range between “intriguing” and “impossible to parse.”

If we lose cabin pressure or gain too much of it, oxygen masks will deploy automatically. Immediately extinguish all cigarettes, and adjust your own newsletter first before offering to assist with ours.

Thank you for your attention during this brief safety demonstration.

In preparation for takeoff, please make sure your seat is upright and your tray table is stowed away. Now sit back, relax, and enjoy this personal message from our captain:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Coffee and guilt at 10:40am

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It’s around 10:40am as I write this, and a beautiful, sunny, warm, Barcelona December morning outside. So far today, I’ve only taken a stroll to Starbucks to buy a new coffee mug — the old one mysteriously shattered last night after I poured some hot water into it.

Now I’m sipping my coffee, from my new mug, sitting at my living room table and getting down to writing this daily email, and I feel…

… really guilty.

A popular routine for many marketers — I’m thinking of one guy in specific, but the sentiment is common — is to hype up the promise of “morning coffee + daily email and my work day is done!”

My guess is that most of the people who sell that dream in their marketing are actually working or thinking about work for much of the day… and if not, then they previously spent decades of their life working or thinking about work all day long, in order to get to where they are now.

The fact is, I have way more autonomy today than I did 10 years ago, the last time I still had a proper job. I have way more autonomy today than I had even a few years ago, when I still regularly worked with clients, had deadlines, meetings, etc.

But the more autonomy I have, the more time I spend working, or thinking about work. And if I catch myself slacking off, or getting to work super late like today, well, I feel guilty. Like a joke in Dan Kennedy’s Time Management For Entrepreneurs says:

GOOD NEWS! You are now your own boss!

BAD NEWS! You are a lousy boss with one unreliable employee!

I’m not sure who needs to hear this or why. The only thing I can tell you to reclaim some of the dream is that I wouldn’t trade the autonomy I have now for the ability I had 10 years ago, to show up to the office, hung over and useless for the day, and not feel guilty about it, because after all, they are just paying for my time.

Plus, I even like I what I do now. Yes, sometimes it takes a bit of prodding to get me to work. But then again, it takes a bit of prodding to get me to stop work also.

If you’re willing to work, and to even enjoy working, but you need some prodding like I do, then you might like my Daily Email Habit service.

Daily Email Habit will help you start and stick with writing daily emails.

No, a daily email is not a business in itself — there’s other things that need doing, and doing regularly, to make it work. What can I tell you? That’s the truth.

But if you still like the idea of writing regularly, of building something for yourself, and in sharing your own insights with the world, so the world can give you something back, then maybe check out Daily Email Habit, before the day runs out on you:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

What it’s like to be the writer of an email newsletter

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A couple days ago, I wrote a 1,400-word email about what I called Boredom Therapy, and the strange psychological hypothesis known as “free won’t.”

I ended that email by recommending Brian Kurtz’s $12.67 book Overdeliver, because of the crazy-valuable bonuses that Brian gives away for free to buyers of that book.

As usual, as the final part of the email, I had a link, in this case, to Brian’s page where my readers could go take advantage of this great offer.

In response to this 1,400-word email in which I tried to put in a novel idea and a great offer, I got a reply from a new reader:

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Great. I have read your mail from your engaging story to your closing.

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“Harumph,” I said to myself. I doubt my new reader meant his comment as an insult, and yet…

I’ve been listening to Dan Heath’s podcast What It’s Like To Be. Dan interviews people from different fields — recent episodes featured a marine biologist, a Christmas tree farmer, a life insurance salesman. Dan’s goal to find out what it’s like to live your life doing these sometimes strange, sometimes mundane jobs.

The podcast typically ends with a series of lightning-round questions. One of these is, “What’s the most insulting thing that can be said about the work of someone in your profession?”

I thought about sales copywriting, which is as close to a profession as I’ve ever had. I realized the worst thing you can hear as a copywriter is, “Wow, this is great copy.”

This goes back to copywriter Gary Halbert, who would give his sales letters to the local barflies to read.

If Gary ever heard, “Wow this is a GREAT sales letter,” he knew he had written a flop. The response he was hoping to hear is, “Damn, where can I buy this???”

Writing a daily email newsletter is not quite like writing a cold traffic sales letter. An email newsletter does try to make sales, but it goes out to a warm audience, to people who know you, trust you, want to hear from you, at least sometimes.

And so the responses I’m hoping for are either Gary’s “Where can I buy this?” (hint: usually a link at the end of the email)… or on the other hand, something that indicates I’ve helped the lights come on in some way, usually manifested by responses like, “This made me think of…”

If my email gave you a new idea, or helped you make a new connection, or brought up some personal memory or experience, I wanna hear about it.

Just don’t write me to say something about the writing itself, even if it seems complimentary, because then I’ll know you either didn’t read this email… or that I failed to write it in a way that had any impact on you.

By the way, I’ve been writing lately about cross-pollination — getting ideas from other industries.

The What It’s Like To Be podcast is actually a good resource for that. Plus, it’s easy and pleasant to consume — short, light, and yet substantive.

That’s not surprising, considering that Dan Heath is the author of several books on effective business communication, including a personal favorite of mine, Made To Stick.

If you want to give Dan’s podcast a try the next time you’re at the gym or going for a walk:

https://www.whatitsliketobe.com/

How I use AI in my latest little startup

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Comes a question from a tech-curious reader named Jordan:

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Yo John quick question, is the Daily Email Habit built with the AI tools you mentioned building in the “the death of infoproducts” email?

There seems to be a lot of tech behind this (Especially with the streak stuff) and it only makes me wonder.

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I mainly bring up this question so I can gush about AI. Have you heard about AI? It’s pretty incredible.

At the moment, AI is not doing the content behind the scenes at Daily Email Habit. I write each daily puzzle by hand, and I find the day’s meme or cartoon by hand also.

But as Jordan guessed, AI definitely helped (read: did everything) with the tech.

ChatGPT wrote all the back-end code I’m using to track the streaks for different Daily Email habit subscribers — how many days straight they have been sending a daily email — and to display each user’s streak inside of the Daily Email Habit email (not technically trivial).

And if in the future I decide to add more bells and whistles to Daily Email Habit, you can bet my ragged little AI elf will be the one doing all the work.

The reason why I’m telling you this:

If you’re only offering what you do as courses, or coaching, or really any kind of strict DIY how-to info, it’s worth thinking how to turn some or all of that into a cross-cut saw, or a calculator, or a Wordle-like daily puzzle, or at least how to add in a streak counter.

Because right now, creating tools or devices or games has become shockingly easy and quick, even if you don’t want to write a line of code. And a tool or a device or game can make your customers’ experience much nicer… and it can create a little moat around what you offer, beyond just your personal authority.

And AI does it all. Like I said, it’s pretty incredible.

Except, how do you decide what to tell AI to create?

How do you have cool ideas?

How do you find out what device or tool or game people in your market might want, and might be willing to pay for, so you can command AI to go down to the shed and make it?

Also, how do you develop a sense of taste, so that you don’t just accept the first thing that AI comes back with, but keep going until it matches your vision?

And once you do create something you’re happy with, how do you package it up and sell it?

For all that, my answer is as familiar as it is fundamental:

You write.

Writing gives you a point of view. It gives you a sense of taste. It exposes you to ideas, both your own (which might disappear otherwise) and from other people (which you might ignore otherwise).

Writing puts you in contact with people in your market, so you can get your finger on the pulse of what people are interested in and are willing to pay paying for.

And of course, writing helps you make better decisions — because writing is really an exercise in decision making.

In short, if you want to get the most out of AI, write.

It might sound self-serving when I say that. So let me share a message I got a couple days ago, from Justin Zack, who is the Head of Partnerships at Write With AI, a paid newsletter with 54,000 subscribers, all about how to… write with AI.

I figure if anybody has the inside scoop on getting AI to work for you, it’s Justin. And yet, Justin signed up for my Daily Email Habit service, so he can write and so he can think. Says Justin:

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I’m 2 days into the daily email habit (which means I have a 1-day streak, lol).

BUT, I friggin’ love it.

Exactly what I needed to get me thinking about my list and how to write better emails.

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Actually, I just checked, and Justin’s streak is up to three days now.

Maybe you can start your own streak?

To to find out the daily email puzzle I’m using as a starting point for each of my own emails… the same puzzle that folks like Justin are using to get over the initial hurdle, to write something more interesting, and to write something different than they might write otherwise… take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

A recipe for a newsletter that “VERY successful people would pay a lot of money for”

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A few days ago, I wrote an email floating the idea of a paid newsletter of business practices from other industries. Basically, giving subscribers Jay Abraham’s “industry cross-pollination” idea on a silver platter.

I said in that email I will most probably never end up creating such a newsletter. To which I got a message from marketer Frederik Beyer, who wrote:

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Industry cross pollination sounds like something VERY successful people would pay a lot of money for.

Those people don’t have time to sift through articles and such, but they DO have the assets/resources to leverage any cross-pollinating ideas you could come up with.

Are you SURE you don’t want to read whatever suits your fancy and get paid to come up with ideas for wealthy people with networks who can help you leverage your skills even MORE?

===

Never say never. I certainly have no plans to do this now.

But a newsletter like this is something I’d like to see and even be happy to pay for, if it gave me new ideas for what I myself can do.

So let me give you the recipe for creating such a newsletter, in the hope that you will create it, that it will be great, ad that I can subscribe:

1. Google [“industry news” + insider].

2. Sign up to all the “[Industry] Insider” newsletters that pop up. There are dozens of them (Manufactured Housing Insider, Linux Insider, Gambling Insider, Fashion Insider).

3. Read or get AI to summarize the business practices standard in different industries, as reported by these newsletters you’ve just signed up for.

4. Pick one business practice from some industry X; expand it with a few examples and a bit of detail/context.

5. Explain how this industry practice from industry X could be relevant to a different end industry Y, the one made up of your subscribers. For personal interest, I would hope this industry Y would be “online information businesses” or something similar. But you can pick whatever end industry you want, and in fact, I imagine you can create a whole bunch of these newsletters for a whole bunch of end industries Y, Y’, Y”…

6. (Optional: pick a few other industry business practices from other industries, along with links to relevant articles online to find out more.)

7. Format all your findings as a weekly or monthly newsletter with a paid subscription. Depending on the end industry you pick, I imagine you can charge a few dozen dollars to a few hundred dollars per subscriber per month.

I had this idea yesterday because I actually subscribe to a couple such “Industry Insider” newsletters. I realized it’s a newsletter format that repeats across industries, and that gives you all the raw materials for the kind of “Industry Outsider” newsletter I was thinking of.

And if you’d like to see the best, most interesting such insider newsletter I personally subscribe to… and find out the high-tech stuff happening in the fitness and wellness industry… and maybe get inspired to create your own publishing empire helping wealthy people with networks:

https://insider.fitt.co/

Sign up to Author Stack because it might be interesting or valuable to you

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Today I would like to get you to sign up to Author Stack. it’s free, though you can also pay if you want.

Author Stack is a Substack newsletter by Russell Nohelty.

It’s a newsletter for writers. It covers the mysterious business side of writing, as opposed to the familiar technical side that everybody else yaps about, telling you to tack on an ‘s’ to the the verbs in your headline (“TRIPLES your response!”).

As I wrote a few times over the past week, Russell reached out to me when he read that I’m going down the paid traffic route.

He offered to do a recorded interview, and share his experiences spending $30k to grow his own audience, which now stands at over 70,000 subscribers across his different newsletters.

I was grateful to Russell for the offer and for the info he shared with me.

I asked if there was something I could do in turn to make this worthwhile for him as well.

But Russell said he’s not worried about it. “If you put out good and do things with cool people,” he said, “things usually work out like they’re supposed to.”

Outwardly I smiled. Inwardly I cursed. I hate it when people are relaxed, generous, and non-needy around me.

Fortunately, Russell does write Author Stack, and I would like to get you to sign up for it.

Not because Russell asked me to (he didn’t) or because he was nice to me (he was).

Sure, maybe everything I’ve told you so far can be a bit of proof, or a bit of context to help ease you through the link at the bottom.

But really, I would like to get you to sign up to Author Stack because it might be interesting or valuable to you.

Author Stack can be interesting to you if you’re into things like Substack gossip… newsletter growth… or newsletter monetization strategies.

Author Stack can be valuable to you if you write or you want to write — newsletters, books, comics — but more than that, if you want to make money writing, and you’re looking for practical guidance on how to do that in the current moment.

Like I said, Author Stack is a Substack newsletter.

Like many Substack newsletters, there’s a free version and a paid version.

You can get the paid version if you like… or you can choose to not get it. The advice and info that Russell provides in the free version is already copious, and interesting and valuable without any add-ons.

Final point:

I’m not an affiliate for Author Stack. I am personally signed up to get it.

If you would also like to sign up for it, try it out, read Russel’s articles and see if they can benefit you, or open up your mind about what’s possible in the business of writing today:

​https://www.theauthorstack.com/​

The reputation benefit of a bigger list

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My own email list — this one, about marketing and copywriting and influence — is tiny. But some of the people on my list have much bigger lists than I do.

One such person is Russell Nohelty. Russell is a bestselling author of fantasy books and comics. He also writes about the business of writing, and he runs Writer MBA, a membership program to help writers make more money.

Russell’s audience on Substack is over 70,000 people.

Last week, when I started writing about my plan to grow a new list via paid traffic, Russell reached out. He offered to share his experiences spending $30k since February to grow his audience.

Russell and I got on a call this past Monday. It was interesting and valuable throughout, but one thing in particular stuck with me, something Russell said about the reputation benefits of various list sizes. In Russell’s words:

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There were a couple of break points where everything felt different.

10,000 emails felt different than 8,000.

30,000 emails felt way different than 20,000 emails.

From my experience, talking to other people, 50,000, 80,000 — there’s different break points where people go, “Oh you’ve got 45,000 people on your list! Yes, I want to get in front of them!”

Promotions become easier. When you’re a Dream 100 guy like I am, you can reach out to almost anyone and be like, “Hey, do you wanna be in front of my 35,000, 45,000, whatever the number is, people.”

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I can imagine that somebody somewhere has just crossed his arms and frowned. “Well, I’d much rather have a small but mighty list than a stupid big list that doesn’t read or buy from me.”

Sure. It’s my policy as well with my own list. That said, you can have both a large and a mighty list — Russell does.

But here’s the sneaky thing:

All of us constantly use mental shortcuts to evaluate the people around us and the choices we have.

On the one hand, a large list is an immensely valuable asset for its own sake.

On the other hand, a large list is also an immensely valuable asset because of its reputation benefit. Because people treat you differently if you get one. Because opportunities open up which would be closed otherwise.

All that’s to say, if you got a business, and a list, but it’s not quite going how you’d like… then the solution might just be to get a bigger list. Maybe if you can make it to the next break point, like Russell says above, then your problems now might just go poof.

Which brings me back to my plan to grow a new list via paid traffic.

If you like, you can join me. You can build up your own list using the same process I will be following, and get my copywriting feedback and marketing input while we work alongside each other.

I can tell you right now that the investment for this offer is $497 to get started, plus $10-$15 a day for ads. If that doesn’t deter you, hit reply and tell me so, and I can give you more information.

The course I wish I had created

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Just a few moments ago, I sent an email to marketer Matt Giaro, telling him he’s free to use the following line and to attribute it to me:

“You took the information I gave you and ran with it much further than I did, and developed a complete system for it and got repeatable results from it, unlike me. I wish I had done what you did, but now that you’ve done it, there’s no need for me to do it on my own and duplicate the work.”

The background:

Some time last fall, Matt contacted me.

​​He saw that, earlier in the year, I had run a $300 classified ad in Josh Spector’s newsletter. He was thinking about doing the same, and he wanted to know my experiences.

So we did a quick little one-hour paid consult.

I told Matt how I ran a few successful newsletter ads (Josh Spector, Daniel Throssell), where I got hundreds of new subscribers who paid for themselves, usually on day zero.

I also told him about the unsuccessful newsletter ads I ran, which just cost me money and probably sender reputation (I’m looking at you, Udimi).

And that was that. Matt said thanks, and we went our separate ways.

Until this March. That’s when I saw that Matt was launching a new course, called Subscribers From Scratch. It was all about how he was getting high-quality newsletter subscribers by running little ads in other newsletters.

The fact is:

The way I was running newsletter ads required a good deal of work. It wasn’t something that I wanted to do every month, much less every week or two.

And since I have plenty of other shiny gewgaws to distract me, I never bothered to figure out how to run newsletter ads repeatably and to still get good results.

But Matt did figure it out.

He took what I told him and ran with it. He developed his own system that allowed him to get a few dozen or a few hundred subscribers each time he ran a newsletter ad.

But much more importantly, he figured out how to get quality subscribers, subscribers who ended up paying for the ad, often in a matter of days.

So like I said to Matt, his Subscribers From Scratch is the course I wish I had created.

I wish I had taken the trouble to figure out a repeatable, scalable system for running newsletter ads. I wish I had packaged it up and sold it.

But I didn’t. And now that he’s done it, I won’t have to.

Right about now, you might expect me to plop in an affiliate link for Matt’s Subscribers From Scratch.

That won’t happen.

Subscribers From Scratch normally sells for $397. But I got Matt to agree to give away a “lite” version of it — all the training and how-to information, minus the bonuses and templates — for free.

Well, for free if you’ve already bought my Simple Money Emails course. Or if you buy it before this Saturday, June 1, at 12 midnight PST.

If you’ve already bought Simple Money Emails, you should have gotten an email from me already with the instructions on how to claim Subscribers From Scratch Lite.

And if you haven’t yet bought it, but you want to learn how to write effective daily emails that make sales, and get Matt’s Subscribers From Scratch Lite for free, and learn how to get readers who actually buy from the emails you write, then here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

The end of newsletters

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Well, the end of my newsletter.

No, not this one. This one will keep going, as long as I keep needing therapy and as long as I keep refusing to trust anyone else with the task.

But as of today, I have decided to stop publishing my health newsletter.

I started that newsletter in January 2023. I published a new issue every week until this week — some 120k words in total.

Researching, writing, and publishing all that word-tonnage took up 300-400 hours of my productive waking time over the past 15 months.

And yet, I’m closing the old heap down. My reason is simple:

I couldn’t get my health newsletter going as a business. And rather than thinking about what I’ve already invested into it, I’m thinking about the time, money, and effort it might still take to turn it into something.

It’s not simply a matter of persistence, either. Because knowing what I know now, I’m not sure my health newsletter would ever turn into something, even if I were to persist.

I could tell you my arguments for that, or my predictions for the future of newsletter businesses.

But instead, I’ll share something by someone much more invested in newsletters than me. That someone is Scott Oldford.

Over the past year or two, Scott bought up dozens of newsletters and newsletter-related businesses with the goal of creating a newsletter roll-up. And then, here’s what he found:

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Our model originally with newsletters was to create lead flow for the companies that we owned inside of our portfolio.

As time went on we ended up a little further away from that model than I’d like to admit.

We attempted to monetize in many different ways and in the end we realized that keeping it with its original intent was a much better strategy.

[…]

We realized that the cost of running a media company at scale simply did not make sense and majority of the costs were actually from attempting to make it a direct-profit driver instead of a value-driver for the dozens of businesses we own and eventually hundreds of businesses we will own.

In short — newsletters and owned media makes a lot of sense. However, I believe the opportunity that people see isn’t the true one.

The real opportunity? Owning your audience.

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For me at least, it’s the end of newsletters as a business.

​​On the other hand, I will be looking for a business to start or grow, one where a newsletter could be a valuable tool.

Maybe you’re lucky, and you already have a business like that. Maybe you even have your own owned audience. But maybe you’re not doing anything with it.

If so, you’re not alone. I’m always amazed by how many businesses have email lists of tens of thousands of leads or even buyers — that they never do anything with.

If you want my help or advice with that, hit reply and we can talk.

​​Or if you don’t want my help, and you want to profit from your email list all by yourself, here’s how to start writing a newsletter that complements and feeds your business:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Is the daily email marketplace glutted?

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I’m on the Amtrak from New York to Baltimore, sitting the wrong way, away from the direction of travel, bouncing up and down as trees and warehouses zoom by me. It’s not a great time to write a daily email.

​​Fortunately, a long-time reader fed me a good email prompt a few days ago. He wrote:

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For a while now, I’ve been feeling like I’m inundated with emails from copywriters, marketers and direct marketing companies.

Until a few months ago, I took pleasure in reading everything.

Now I don’t anymore.

[…]

Lately, I enjoy reading newsletters about what is happening in the world, novels, history books, detective stories, and business history textbooks.

I hope this metamorphosis of mine is normal.

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My reader’s message sums up the concept of the sophistication of the marketplace, as described by legendary marketer Gene Schwartz, in the experiences of one person.

A man will enter a specific marketplace. He will be new, interested, and engaged by just about everything there.

In time, he will become more selective, more skeptical, or even leave that specific marketplace altogether.

Is this a problem?

​​Is it a vote against ever starting a business in general?

​​Or is it a vote against starting a daily email newsletter right now?

Of course not.

The fact is, there are uncountably many humans alive on the planet right now. You only need a tiny number of them to be interested in what you are writing or selling right now to do very well for yourself and your business.

It’s much like a direct mail sales letter, which will typically only get a 2% response rate, even when mailed to a highly qualified list of prospects.

98 out of 100 targeted, pre-selected prospects won’t get the sales letter… or won’t bother to read it all the way to the order form… or won’t be persuaded to buy.

Only 2 out of 100 will actually respond and send in any money.

And yet many big fortunes over the past century have been built on those 2%.

The same applies to you today, with even more extreme numbers.

That said, it is undeniable that different formats – email newsletters as opposed to video courses as opposed to books — will attract different kinds of people, and in different mindsets and stages of sophistication.

In my experience, he more serious and successful people are, the more likely it is that they read books.

So if you do write a regular newsletter, it makes sense to adapt your best content, and turn it into a book. You will often reach great prospects who might be among the 98 out of 100 who would never read your newsletter, at least not today, before they really know you and trust you to have something worthwhile to say.

That was one of the motivations for my 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters book.

​​That book was quick to write. And yet it’s one of the best thing I’ve ever done for my standing in the industry and for attracting quality readers to my newsletter — readers who might never have read otherwise.

For more info on this quick and yet worthwhile book:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments