One Man Businesses

Writing formulaic copy month after month

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A couple weeks ago, I got on a call with a long-time reader, who works as an in-house copywriter.

This is part of an illuminating practice I’ve taken up, of actually interacting with people who read my emails and buy my courses.

Anyways, this reader, who has been working as a copywriter at the same company for four years, said the following:

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The main problem is, each month, the offers don’t really change so I’m writing the same stuff repeatedly.

The only difference is when they have a product launch, I get to write different stuff and set up more flows.

Other than that, it’s quite routine. There’s not much growth for my skill set.

To be honest, I don’t write a lot of copy there, because the copy I write there is quite formulaic and it’s also, not much variation. I don’t get to experiment much with ideas.

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About that:

Gary Bencivenga, widely called the world’s best living copywriter before he retired, liked to quote Al Davis, the coach from 1963-1965 for the infamously tough, mean, aggressive 1965 Oakland Raiders team.

One time, during a press conference before a game, a reporter asked Davis, “So I guess you’ll just have to take what the defense gives you?”

Davis glared. “We don’t take what the defense gives us. We take what we want.”

Gary Bencivenga, who seems to be as sweet and nice of a man as you can put a hat on, recommended Davis’s tough-guy attitude for copywriters also.

Gary didn’t just take the offer the client gave him to promote. Instead, he took what he wanted — he switched the offer altogether, or reworked it, or added to it — until it was as close to his ideal as he could get it, and many miles ahead of where it had started.

So that’s point 1.

Point 2 is that you’re not Gary Bencivenga. You don’t have his authority, and you don’t command the same deference and respect from clients. That’s normal. Gary, again, was the world’s best, and he had a reputation to match.

The situation is even trickier if you’re an in-house copywriter, working with one company full-time. In this case, the power dynamic shifts even more to your client/employer.

And maybe, when you try to “take what you want” — to rework an offer, or to experiment with copywriting ideas, or to simply do something that will stretch and increase your skills — your client/employer gives you a look and just says, “No.”

What then?

It’s up to you. But one thing you can do is say, “Fine. I’ll do my own thing.”

I’m not saying to quit your job. You can “take what you want” on your own time, with nobody controlling what you do or how you do it. It can give you new skills, experience, extra authority.

And who knows?

If you come to your client/employer next time, and cite a personal success story, instead of just pulling a good idea out of the air, maybe you’ll get a better hearing.

If not, you will still feel more fulfilled, skilled, and stimulated. And you’ll have options, because you’re building your own thing on the side, and taking what you want there.

On the call I had with the in-house copywriter I mentioned above, I heard that this is exactly what he’s doing. He’s hunting and working with freelance clients as well. Plus, he’s started his own email list, and he’s writing to it daily.

Who’s got time for all that?

I don’t know. You almost certainly don’t. Or maybe you do. And maybe, if you want some help with the last part, starting and sticking to writing a daily email, you will like my Daily Email Habit service.

Every day, Daily Email Habit prompts you to write something different.

At the end of 7 days, you already have a bunch of little experiments you wouldn’t have had before. And at the end of 30 days, you can experience a transformation.

If you’d like to experience that transformation as soon as possible, it makes sense to get started today:

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

A frustration that only grows with each email I write

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Yesterday, I wrote an email with the subject line, “Only open this if you play Wordle.” I guess that drew in some people who rarely read my emails, such as the following reader, who wrote:

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You sold… dog seat belts?

I didn’t know that was an actual product until I saw you mention it.

I’m a dog-owner – should I be concerned? 😧

Anyway, hi, I’m Anastasia.

I’m an e-com email copywriter, and I’m trying to learn how to write (hopefully great) advertorials.

So I came across your video with Chase Dimond where you discussed this concept of ‘horror advertorials.’ Do you have a swipe file with successful examples you wouldn’t mind sharing?

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“OH YOU GOTTA BE KIDDING ME,” I said.

An ongoing frustration in the running of this newsletter is that, in spite of writing a fairly in-depth email each day, many of which end up repeating stuff about me, most people on my list still known very little about who I am or what I do.

It’s a frustration that only gets more common the longer I’ve been writing this newsletter and the bigger my list gets.

The fact is, I do have a swipe of “horror advertorials.”

I’ve sold it in the past for $100, and just last month, I included it as one of the bonuses to my $997 Copy Riddles program during the “White Tuesday” promo, which also included a “$2k Advertorial Consult” as another bonus.

And yet, I still get questions like the one above. What to do? After my initial childish rush of frustration, I reminded myself this is inevitable, and just a part of how the world works, particularly online.

Some people got on my list only recently. Some miss my emails in their overflowing inboxes. Some don’t get drawn into my emails because I didn’t deliver on the copy front.

Other readers skim because they’re busy or distracted… and still others open, and read diligently, and then forget — because my newsletter, immensely important though it is to me, is really only 2-3 minutes in the day of even my most devoted readers.

In all these cases, the responsibility really lies with me to do something and improve the situation. So:

Regarding my “horror advertorial” swipe file, it’s not something I’m selling at the moment, and it’s certainly not something I’m sharing, if that means giving it away for free — because I’ve had lots of good customers who have paid me good money for the same info.

At the moment, I am selling and promoting my Daily Email Habit service.

You may wonder if you really need DAILY emails. After all, you may already have a website… or ads on Facebook… or you may even send a weekly email. Surely that’s enough???

I’d like to propose to you that your prospects know much less about you than you could ever believe. Shockingly less.

Daily emails can help with that, so you make more sales today, and so you get lodged more deeply in your prospects’ minds, so you make more sales tomorrow.

And if daily emails fail to deliver? If you end up writing daily emails, and most people in your audience still don’t know who you are and what you do?

Well, that just becomes a topic of a new email.

And if you’d like to see how I and a group of other smart folks are transmuting such everyday frustrations, or reader questions, or personal insights into daily emails that both entertain and sell, you can find that inside my Daily Email Habit service. For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Not the kind of testimonial I want

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Last night, I opened up my Daily Email Habit service to my entire list.

Since then, over the past 12 hours, close to two dozen new people have signed up.

Many of those people have written me to say they are excited to get started and develop their skills.

Others, who didn’t sign up for good reasons of their own, wrote to tell me how they like the concept and design of the service.

And then, I got the following “testimonial” from a reader who neither signed up for Daily Email Habit, nor had a good reason for not signing up:

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What a brilliant idea!

This is truly an extremely valuable offer for someone who has any sort of expertise and has his/her offers nailed down to get into the habit of daily writing.

Sadly, I have none of the above 2 things at the moment. Once I do find my ICP for whom I have sufficient expertise, this will be something I’ll definitely come to you for.

Thank you for launching such an amazing offer!

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I didn’t reply to this. I had a sense there’s a game afoot here that I don’t want to play.

I tried to figure out what game that is, and what’s really going on in the message above, in between that compliment sandwich.

I had to translate it to myself to understand. For some reason, I thought of a little olive, looking out at a large tract of land and saying:

“What beautiful, fertile soil! This land would be perfect to support a whole orchard of olive trees, given that they have deep roots and broad branches. But alas, as you can see, I have neither. Just look at me! Do you see any roots or branches on me? No, there are none. It’s quite sad. Beautiful land though.”

There are lots of good reasons not to write daily emails, but lack of expertise is not one of them. You don’t write consistently because you have expertise… you have expertise because you write consistently.

That’s something that I believe on a deep level, and that’s why I put it right on the sales page for Daily Email, at the very start of the deck copy, right after “I’ll help you start a consistent daily email habit that…”

Like I said, there are lots of good reasons why you might not want to write daily emails. There are also lots of good reasons why you might.

If you decide to write daily emails, you most certainly don’t need my Daily Email Habit service to do it. But my service might help you stick with it… be more consistent… save time… or write better emails than you would otherwise. For more info on all that:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Why I’ve been turning away doubting subscribers

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Over the past few days, I launched my Daily Email Habit service to people who raised their hand to get on the priority list. At the end of the sales page, rather than linking to an order form, I asked people to write me to say if they are in, out, or have any questions. Most people who wrote me said they are in, like these folks:

#1. “Yes, I am in!”

#2. “No questions, I’m in!”

#3. “This looks brilliant John, I’m in. Thank you for coming up with such an exciting service!”

#4. “Count me in, please! Looking forward to it…”

#5. “I am IN. Please send me the link to join.”

#6. “Wtf dude you are such a badass. Yes I’m in.”

#7. “Yes absolutely im in. This sounds like an awesome idea”

… but some people had questions. Here’s one that came up a few times:

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I took a loooong look (plus a night to sit on it), and I want to try it out.

But I’m going to be honest with you:

I’m still debating whether I need prompts like this or random insightful articles to expand my thinking.

(for example, the recent one you shared from Sean got the creative juice flowing)

This means I can’t promise I’m in for the long term yet. I understand that the concept of any subscription is to lower the entry cost in exchange for longer loyalty (like Daniel’s AiC newsletter).

So, if this “test the water mindset” bothers you, I’m okay with putting this one off for now, too.

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Each time I got this particular question, I’ve been telling people NOT to sign up. Why?

I read once of a study in which people evaluated the attractiveness of a core offer (a bunch of saucers and cups and plates) + a free bonus bundle (more saucers and cups and plates, some in good shape and others a little chipped).

The conclusion of the study was that people evaluated the core offer as more valuable if it were sold on its own, with no free bonuses (perceived value: $33)… than if it were sold with the free bonuses, some of which were good and some of which were chipped (perceived value: $23).

I’m not saying that people who are not sure if they want my Daily Email Habit are “chipped saucers.” I’ve known a few of them for a while, and I know they are good people. Plus, I appreciate their honesty in voicing their doubts.

I just mean to tell you a kind of psychology quirk. The human brain tends to evaluate sets of items by using the AVG function, rather than the SUM function.

That includes my own brain. Yes, maybe it’s not very smart. But the fact is:

1. I don’t need the money from an extra subscriber.

2. I particularly don’t need the money if that subscriber won’t be getting anything out of it. (I can’t say for sure that anybody who expresses doubts on signing up will not get value out of it, but to my mind, the odds jump up dramatically.)

3. There’s an impact on my will to work and my long-term sticktoitiveness if I feel that what I’m doing has some sort of meaning vs. if it’s meaningless.

Maybe that makes perfect sense to you.

Or maybe it makes you a little uncomfortable. After all, aren’t we in business? Isn’t the goal to make money? When and how do you decide to turn away good, hard money today because of something vague like “will to work and long-term sticktoitiveness” tomorrow?

All that, and more, is something I tried to address in my Most Valuable Postcard #1.

Most Valuable Postcard was my short-lived paid newsletter, some two years ago.

And Most Valuable Postcard #1 was about the most important and valuable topic I could find — the most important thing to focus on in your business, whether you sell products or your own services, according to the most successful direct marketers in history.

If you’d like to find out more:

https://bejakovic.com/mvp1/

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?

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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/

The first online course to sell for $1M?

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Will an online course ever sell for $1M a pop?

Probably not, but who knows. Maybe it will be yours. Consider the following:

In 2007, rare-book dealer Glenn Horowitz made a prediction in the New York Times that a rare, signed copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses, known as the Kaeser edition, would become the first 20th-century book to sell for $1M.

“I can’t remember now,” said Horowitz later, “but, knowing myself, I imagine I would have used the statement as a come-hither.”

And that’s what it turned out to be.

Soon after, Horowitz got a call from a collector who proposed paying $1M for the Kaeser. Horowitz then called Ron Delsener, the then-owner of the book, who had paid $460,500 for it a few years earlier.

“It took Ron about 10 seconds to say yes,” Horowitz recalled. Horowitz’s commission for making that come-hiter statement about the first $1M book, for making the call to the then-owner, and for waiting 10 seconds to hear yes, was $100,000.

I was amazed to read an article about Horowitz, the top-of-the-top among rare-book dealers. I found so much in common between the rare-book dealer’s world and the course creator world.

Sure, course buyers won’t pay $1M for a course (yet), and most people buy courses for reasons other than collecting.

But consider the following change in the rare-book industry, brought on by the Internet, as described in the article:

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The Internet made scarcity scarce: everyone could see that there were a gazillion copies of the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica for sale online, and their price plunged. To sell, a book now had to be the best copy, the cheapest copy, or the only copy.

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Swap out “copy” for “course,”” and “the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica” for, say, “How to write emails,” and maybe you can see a valuable lesson in the above. Again from the article:

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Such books required dealers to know more and to be more imaginative: they had to articulate what made a particular provenance or inscription so valuable. Christian Jonkers [a rare book dealer] said, “Our job as booksellers is to justify the difference between the price we bought it at and the price we’re selling it at by providing a narrative about why you should buy it.”

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Marketing guru Jay Abraham, who claims he has helped his clients create an extra 8 billion dollars in value, has this idea of industry cross-pollination. Says Jay, valuable practices that are as common as gravel in one industry can be imported profitably into your own industry, where they appear to be magic, or gold.

I would never have thought to go searching for business ideas in the rare-book dealer’s world. but the article I read is full of ’em, down to Glenn Horowitz’s downfall, near-bankruptcy and possible jail time, for engaging in a common though legal-gray-area business practice.

I have pages of notes from this article. I even got the idea to create a kind of paid newsletter where I would profile interesting people from other industries, in a kind of done-for-you cross-pollination report.

That’s almost certainly never going to happen. But if you sell courses or information more broadly… and if you’re looking for profitable ideas that nobody else in the course creator industry is using… then the following article is worth a read:

https://bejakovic.com/rare-book-dealer

Mandatory vacation day

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This morning at 9am Barcelona time, I concluded the White Tuesday event that promoted my almost 4-year-old Copy Riddles program.

I ended up making 20 sales of Copy Riddles over 6 emails and 36 hours.

I offered a payment plan as a key part of the White Tuesday promo, which means I collected $2,848 so far (one person paid in full) and will be getting another $17,056 over the next 10 months as the payments roll in, for a grand total of $19,940.

In my small, modest world, with my small, modest list, this counts as a good result — $9,970 per day, $3,323 per email, when all the money is in.

This, by the way, is not any kind of “HOT: Work Just 2 days A Month!” bizopp pitch. In fact, it’s the opposite.

I always do a review for myself of a completed promo and list 10 conclusions. I did the same this morning.

My key conclusion was about the reason why this promo was a success, and that’s because of perceived real value.

Copy Riddles sells for $997. The $2k Advertorial Consult I gave away as a free bonus I really got paid $2k for.

Except, for either of those to really matter, to feel real, it took constant work over months and years leading up to this promo. Selling and promoting Copy Riddles… selling and promoting and delivering my other offers… doing consulting and coaching and client work (back when I still did)… featuring testimonials… talking about case studies… going on podcasts… dripping out my experiences writing advertorials… writing these daily emails, from home, from airports, and at train stations.

A couple days ago, Kieran Drew wrote the following in a review of his own successful promo:

“Sure, courses have little-to-no fulfillment cost. But I now have over 3,000 customers and let me tell you, there is no free lunch. Products are not ‘true’ passive income—especially if you send thank you videos to every customer and reply to every email (I recommend both).”

Not “true passive income” is not a problem for me any more.

Five years ago, I published my 10 Commandments Of A-list Copywriters book. Commandment VI I got from Claude Hopkins, who wrote that love of work can be cultivated, and that for him work and play are interchangeable.

I put that in the book as an interesting and possibly useful idea. At the time, it definitely was not a belief I had managed to adopt. But over the years, maybe because I wrote it down then, it’s gradually taken hold in my head.

Today I work, don’t mind working, and in fact have slowly turned work into a kind of game that I can actually enjoy.

Except even games need a break now and then — body and brain need to rest and recover.

And so I’m taking a mandatory vacation day today. This email is the only thing I will do, besides replying to previous Copy Riddles buyers who asked for the bonuses I offered as part of the White Tuesday promo.

Meanwhile, I can only recommend you read or reread my 10 Commandments book. Looking back over it after 5 years, all the commandments are still supremely valuable. In fact, I only wish I myself would follow them more regularly. Maybe you too can benefit from reading them or being reminded of them? For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

How I get customers to buy when I launch a new product

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Yesterday, I kicked off my White Tuesday event to promote my Copy Riddles program. I got a bunch of messages about it so far, including one from Logan Hobson, a long-time reader and Copy Riddles member. Logan wrote:

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Every time you do a Copy Riddles promotion, I get excited because it means that I get a new free bonus or two.

I appreciate the way you treat previous customers, makes me feel like buying something from you the first time you promote it is a no-brainer.

I’m interested in the $2k Advertorial Consult as well.

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I’m doing a podcast later today and one question that the podcast host wants to cover is,

“What’s one golden nugget of advice you’d give any writer who wants to make a living from their words?”

At first, I thought this question is so broad as to be impossible to answer.

But then I realized I have the same golden nugget to offer that I’ve already offered a million times over. That being:

It’s much easier and more profitable to make a sale to somebody familiar who has already paid you, than to some stranger you have to go out and hunt down, who doesn’t know you, who has never trusted you enough to give you money.

Maybe that’s obvious. But how many people act upon it?

The default question for most people, including writers who want to make a living from their words, is “How do I get new readers/customers/clients?”

My golden nugget is a different question, “How do I get existing readers/customers/clients to buy something new from me?”

And if that means giving good stuff away on occasion, to keep existing readers/customers/clients reading… and engaged… and eager to do business with me the next time I launch a new product… then so be it.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you cannot and should not ever try to win over new customers.

You can do both at once — win over new customers, and deepen the custom with existing customers.

Which brings me back to my White Tuesday event.

I’ve tried to make this White Tuesday offer one that’s easy to say yes to. In a nutshell, my White Tuesday offer is Copy Riddles plus three time-limited free bonuses, which total $2,300 in real-world value:

1. White Tuesday Storytelling Bundle

2. Make The Lights Come On

3. $2k Advertorial Consult

… along with the White Tuesday payment plan, which allows you to get started with Copy Riddles for just $97 today.

To find out the full details of this White Tuesday event while it’s still live:

​https://bejakovic.com/announcing-white-tuesday-copy-riddles-event/​

P.S. If you are already a Copy Riddles member, the White Tuesday bonuses are of course available to you too. To find out what they are and how to claim them, take a look at the page above.

The end of info products

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THE FOLLOWING EMAIL IS CONTROVERSIAL AND MAY BE OFFENSIVE TO SOME AUDIENCES

READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED

You might be familiar with Max Sackheim’s famous ad, “Do you make these mistakes in English?”

The ad ran for decades, unchanged, and kept bringing in profitable business better than any contender.

Thousands of pages of analysis have been written about the 7-word headline of this ad and the copy that followed.

But what about the actual product this ad was ultimately selling? What about the means by which a prospect could hope to correct his or her mistakes in English? What were prospects actually exchanging their money for?

Sackheim’s copy only teases you about the product, and calls it a “remarkable invention” and a “100% self-correcting device.”

As far as I know, nobody today actually has this remarkable invention stashed away in their garage. Whatever it was, it’s clear it was sold as some kind of tool, a device, and not just information.

This is a well-known direct marketing truth that’s been around since Sackheim’s days and before, back into the age of patent medicines.

A real, tangible, external mechanism — a fat-loss potion, a dog seatbelt, a “100% self-correcting device” — sells much easier than just good info — how to lose weight, how to be a less negligent dog owner, how to speak gooder English.

Smart modern-day info marketers have gotten hep to this fact. That’s why people like Russell Brunson and Ben Settle and Sam Ovens have put their reputation and audience to work behind tools like ClickFunnels and Berserker Mail and Skool.

The thing is, creating a tool, whether physical or software, has traditionally been an expensive, complicated, and risky business.

Take a look at Groove Funnels, another tool created a few years ago by another experienced info marketer, Mike Filsaime. Groove Funnels is a bloated, buggy, frankly unusable product. I say that as somebody who invested into a lifelong subscription in Groove Funnels.

I have a couple degrees in computer science. I also have about a decade’s worth amateur and pro software development experience. But after I quit my IT job 10+ years ago, I never once considered putting this experience to use in order to develop any kind of tool I could sell.

Until now.

Because things are changing. Today even a monkey, working alone, can create and deploy a valuable app simply by querying ChatGPT persistently enough. And there are plenty of shovels available for such would-be gold miners, tools to build tools, which will do much of the in-between work for you. Just say what you will to happen, and it will be done.

Decades ago, master direct marketer Gary Halbert said that the best best product of all is… information!

But I bet if Gary were alive today, he’d be hard at work (or maybe easy at work) creating some kind of high-margin tool to sell, in the broadest sense of the word — a thing to do some or all of the work for an audience with a problem. A few reasons why:

* Again, tools are easy to sell. They fit with innate human psychology of how we want to solve problems.

* Tools can make for natural continuity income if you license them out instead of sell them outright.

* Tools can create their own moat over time. There can be lock-in or switching cost if your users build on top of your tool.

* And now, thanks to the most remarkable invention of AI, it’s possible to create tools quickly, cheaply, and with great margins.

All that’s to say, best product of all… information? I don’t think so. Not any more. Best start adapting now.

Speaking of which, I got an offer for you:

Would you say that there are any tech issues that are keeping you from starting your own email list?

If there are, write in and let me know about them.

In turn, I’ll have something for you that you might like.