One Man Businesses

Solid as a rock

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I was on the Barcelona metro yesterday, bouncing along, keeping my eye out for potential assailants, and listening to a podcast — James Schramko interviewing Ryan Lee.

In case those names don’t mean much to you, both guys are highly successful, highly influential Internet marketers.

Both James and Ryan have been at it for decades.

Both have made many millions for themselves, and probably hundreds of millions for their various coaching clients.

For example, Ryan has coached multimillionaire fitness marketers like Mike Geary (PaleoHacks, Truth About Abs) and Jeff Cavaliere (Athlean-X, 14M subscribers on YouTube).

James on the other hand has coached multimillionaire info marketers like Ryan Levesque (ASK Method) and Kevin Rogers (Copy Chief).

Point being, both Jeff and Ryan are the real deal when it comes to knowledge of Internet marketing and to getting actual results.

At the end of the interview, just as I was nearing my stop, James summed up the takeaways of their call, with Ryan jumping in:

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JAMES:

1. Find a way to get recurring income

2. Keep it as simple as possible

3. YouTube is a strong front-end driver and potentially a good income earner

4. Email is still solid as a rock

RYAN: No matter what you do, whatever social platform you pick…

JAMES: … build an email list.

RYAN: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram — get ’em on your list, because at the end of the day, you control it.

JAMES: That’s the simple advice that people ignore.

===

I’m telling you all this because there are still people who say they don’t have time to email.

Maybe that’s you too.

I’m sure you’re busy, and you have lots of stuff to do. Work, family, dog, cat.

I can completely understand.

I just wanted to share the point of view of James and Ryan above, because they are both very experienced… because they both make very nice money by working something like 10-15 hours a week… and because they are not in the business of selling email marketing or email copywriting.

And yet, both agree that there are only a few needed ingredients for long-term success… and that email is one non-negotiable part of that. (By the way, they both practice what they preach, and write emails, as Ryan says, dailyish.)

If you want to follow their simple advice, and you also want to see how to write dailyish emails faster, in as little as 15-20 minutes a day, without being particularly creative or inspired, then take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

MVE cancelled

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No, not Most Valuable Email.

The MVE that’s been cancelled is the Most Vivian Event, the big promotion I announced yesterday.

I had hoped to use this event to pull every remaining non-buyer on my list and get him to buy Most Valuable Email, will-he, nill-he.

My plan was to use I know about promos inside the Most Vivian Event — structure, copy, and most importantly offer:

An “Italian lottery,” giving new buyers a good chance to get MVE free…

A stack of free bonuses that I’ve sold for good money before, totaling the price of MVE and more, so even if somebody didn’t win the “Italian lottery,” they would still feel like they’re getting a steal…

An entirely new bonuses as well, which would reveal all the thinking that went into this promo — basically a little promo course built around a specific case study, to make this MVE offer so valuable that if you ever send any kind of emails, the investment would pay for itself with this one new bonus alone.

I had grand plans to make this event fun, epic, and undoubtedly immensely successful. Except…

It’s all been cancelled.

Reason why:

Each time I got near to settling on the final offer for the Most Vivian Event, I kept bouncing into one problem:

“What do I do with previous buyers?”

I have a long-standing policy to reward early buyers for buying for me. That means I grandfather previous buyers into any upgrades, new runs of a course, or bonuses I end up offering in the future. It also means I don’t feature discounts.

Yesterday, when I had the initial idea for this new promo, I shrugged this question off.

I told myself I’d figure out some way to incentivize new buyers… to reward previous buyers… and to have this promo make business sense for me personally.

But no matter how I structured this offer, there was always one end of the triangle — new buyers, old buyers, me — that was left high and dry.

I realized it’s not a matter of what bonuses or incentives I end up offering. It’s simply a consequence of my “reward previous buyers” policy, and the fact that I have hundreds of previous buyers of MVE.

That’s why I’ve actually never run a bonus- or discount-based promo for any of my offers, outside of a launch. I just never realized it until yesterday.

You might say I’m being stubborn to stick to this policy. And that’s exactly right. Because I want people to believe a few simple certainties when they think of me.

One of those simple certainties is that I won’t screw over previous buyers. I don’t ever want my buyers to think, even in passing, “Huh, maybe I should have waited to buy this, this new deal is better than what I got.”

Yesterday, I wrote that I had clearly been falling short by continuing to sell MVE on its merits alone.

Some people who could benefit from MVE — like Vivian, who wanted something for “coming up with interesting ideas and presenting it in a concise and compelling way” — never even considered buying.

Frankly, that falling short will most likely continue.

But if you have been on the fence about MVE for a while, I do have a special offer for you today. It’s nothing like the spectacle I was planning on. But you can decide whether it’s enough to get you to take me up on Most Valuable Email today.

I’m calling this offer the “Shangri La” MVE offer. And that’s because like Shangri La, the two parts of this offer only appear once every fifty years. Specifically:

1. I normally don’t offer a payment plan for Most Valuable Email. I did offer a payment plan for MVE once, as a joke, for one day only. Well, like Shangri La, the payment plan is back, and not as a joke.

You can get MVE for $99 today and then two more monthly payments of $99. This payment plan is there to make it psychologically easier to get started — in my experience, people take up payment plans not because they cannot afford to pay in full, but simply because it feels like a smaller commitment.

2. I am also offering a bonus, which I’m calling Shangri La Disappearing Secrets.

Over the past years, I have periodically sent out emails where I teased a secret, which I then turned into a disappearing, one-day bonuses for people who took me up on an offer before the deadline.

Inside this Shangri La Disappearing Secrets bonus, I have collected 12 emails that teased 12 secrets — and I have revealed the secrets themselves. These include:

* An email deliverability tip that is so valuable I decided not to share it publicly, but only with buyers of MVE. This tip is something that multiple people have told me I should turn into a standalone course or training — which I most probably will do one day.

* Stage Surprise Success. Step-by-step instructions for creating effective surprise in any kind of performance, whether thieving, magicking, comedy, drama, or simply writing for impact and influence. And no, it’s not just shocking people with something they weren’t expecting. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite of that.

* A daring idea to grow your list and build up your authority at the same time. I have not yet had the guts to put it into practice, even though I have lots of reasons to believe it would work great to build my own authority, and get me more high-quality leads than I’m getting now.

* A persuasion strategy used by con men, pick up artists, salesmen, even by legendary copywriters. I ran a little contest in an email to see if anybody could identify this strategy based on a scene from the movie The Sting. Out of 40+ people who tried to identify the strategy, only 2 got it right.

* An incredible free resource, filled with insightful and proven marketing and positioning advice. This resource comes from a man I’ve only written about once in this newsletter, but who has influenced my thinking about marketing and human psychology more deeply than I may let on — maybe more deeply than anybody else over the past few years.

* Magic Box calls-to-action. Use these if you don’t have a product or a service to sell yet, or if you only have a few bum offers, which your list has stopped responding to every day. Result of a “magic box” CTA when used by one of my coaching clients: the first hand-raiser ever for an under-construction $4k offer.

* A new way to apply the Most Valuable email trick, one I wasn’t comfortable doing until recently. Now that I’ve started using it, it’s gotten people paying more attention… leaning in more… even rereading my emails 3x… and reaching out to reopen dropped business conversations.

* Steven Pressfield (the author of the War of Art and the Legend of Bagger Vance) used to write scripts for porn movies. He once shared two porn storytelling rules. I’ll tell you what they are, and how smart marketers, maybe even me on occasion, use one of these rules in their own sales copy and marketing content.

* A list of 14 criteria of truthful stories. I’m not saying to get devious with this — but you could use these criteria to jelly up a made-up story and make it sound absolutely true. More respectably, you can use these criteria to take your true but fluffy story and make it sound 100% gripping and real.

* Why I drafted US patent application 16/573921 to get the U.S. Government to recognize my Most Valuable Email trick as novel, non-obvious, and having concrete, practical applications.

* Two methods for presenting a persuasive argument, as spelled out by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. I illustrate these two methods with a little public debate that Daniel Throssell and I engaged in via our respective email newsletters. Daniel and I each adopted opposing methods, just as described by Kahneman.

* An infotainment secret I stole from Ben Settle. As far as I know, Ben doesn’t teach this secret in his books or newsletters — I found it by tracking Ben’s emails over a 14-day period and spotting Ben using it in 8 of those 14 emails. And no, I’m not talking about teasing, or telling a story, or stirring up conflict. This is something more fundamental, and more broadly useful, even beyond daily emails.

So there you go. My Shangri La MVE offer:

A payment plan for Most Valuable Email that only appears twice in a century… and 12 bonus persuasion secrets.

This offer is good until tomorrow, Friday Oct 11, at 12 midnight PST.

If you’re at all interested, the time to act is now. That’s because of that simple certainty I wrote above — there won’t ever be a better time.

I won’t be running big promo events for Most Valuable Email, because it doesn’t fit my policy of treating previous customers with respect.

On the other hand, if you get MVE now, you will also be eligible for any future disappearing bonuses I might offer with it, or any other special offer or real I will make to new buyers also.

If you’d like to take me up on this Shangri La offer, before it disappears:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

P.S. And yes, if you have already bought MVE, you also get the Shangri La Disappearing Secrets. No need to write me for it. I’ll add it straight inside the MVE course area, right under the MVE Swipes document.

Jacob Pegs testifies about the JB effect

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Back in May, on the last day of my promotion for the Daily Email Fastlane workshop, I got a message from Modern Maker Jacob Pegs.

Jacob was one of the three daily emailers I had profiled inside that Fastlane workshop. In brief:

1. For about two years now, Jacob has been posting on LinkedIn as a way to build an audience (he’s built it up to 40k LinkedIn followers)

2. He’s been driving those followers from LinkedIn to his daily email list, where he promotes a lean stack of info products and a group coaching offer

3. A few days ago, Jacob wrote that he had just crossed the 60% mark of his $1M goal for 2024. According to my math — and I was a math major, so you can trust me — this means that Jacob has made $600k so far this year.

I’m telling you about Jacob for two reasons.

One is to show you what’s possible, and even how quickly it’s possible, if things line up right.

Two is that in that email back in May, Jacob sent me a nice testimonial/case study, and it’s now time to trot it out, with only a three-month delay.

Jacob approached me back in April, because he wanted to improve his copywriting and email game.

I mean, clearly it was already working great. But he wanted it to work even greater.

So we did a kind of one-month “Up Your Skills” engagement. Over the course of a month, I gave Jacob my feedback on his emails, and I told him how I might tweak some of the copy he was writing. Result, in Jacob’s words:

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Here’s a good bit of feedback for you from our latest engagement, which might help as an honest testimonial 😅 —

Something about your writing style kept me glued from start to finish.

I’d go to make a coffee, the kettle would finish boiling, and I’d delay the coffee to the point I’d have to reboil the kettle again!

Because, I had to finish the email. I couldn’t quite pin point what it was, but it made me reach out to you.

3 weeks into our mentorship, I’m getting the same feedback from my list (screenshots attached).

15 sales in, and they can’t “quite pin point how.”

Maybe it’s the JB effect.

And it’s definitely in the fast lane.

===

Like I said, Jacob already had everything lined up. He was making sales. He kept his readers reading day after day.

But Jacob did make changes to his emails during that time we worked together. I noticed the changes. It seems his audience noticed them too, and in a positive way. ​​​​

Maybe you’re in a similar situation to Jacob?

Not necessarily the same numbers with the money and the audience size… but maybe you have offers that are working, and you’re writing regularly to get your people reading and buying from you?

And maybe you’re wondering how much further you could take it?

If you are, I’m guessing it doesn’t make sense to do a long, extended, open-ended coaching program.

​​But maybe a one-month “Up Your Skills” engagement, like I did with Jacob, might make sense.

In case you’re interested, hit reply. No pressure, and no promises at this point. But I’ll get back to you, and we can talk in more detail.

Agency clients who don’t stay

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Last week, I was talking to the COO at a health clinic.

The CEO of that clinic — the doctor who heads the clinic — has written a good book, with lots of top endorsements and lots of 5-star reviews on Amazon.

But the book is hardly a best seller. I’m guessing it maybe makes a few dozen sales a month.

“You know,” I said in the voice of a precocious 9-year-old child, “you can run ads on Amazon to promote the book.” I’m smart like that, and I know lots of stuff, so I like to show it off.

“Oh yeah we tried that,” the COO said. “We hired an agency a while back to run ads on Amazon for us. But it didn’t drive that many more sales, and we were paying the agency $1k a month just to keep it going. So we stopped.”

Now, here are a few random facts, which I hope to snap together for you like nuclei colliding and fusing to release a tremendous amount of energy:

1. The core offer for this health clinic is a program that costs $50k a year

2. Rich, successful people tend to read books

3. People who read a book all the way through are prime prospects for an upsell, even a ridiculously elastic one ($5 => $50k)

You see where I’m going with this?

It’s quite feasible that, for this particular business, one good extra client a year, attracted via the help of this Amazon ads agency, would pay for the entire year’s services of the ads agency, and then some.

That would be great for the health clinic, for the Amazon ads agency, and presumably, for the patient who had decided to invest in that expensive year-long program.

And yet, it wasn’t happening.

I’m bringing this up because over the past few weeks, along with talking to health clinic COOs, I’ve also been talking to people who offer services and run agencies of different stripes.

I’ve heard a few of them complaining:

“We can’t make clients see the unique value of our services”

“The clients are never permanent, and I seem like a Chinese acrobat juggling many plates at once”

“Clients are comparing my work to much cheaper freelancers”

A part of this really can come down to having bum clients. Not much to do there, except find better clients.

But what if you have — or have had — clients like the health clinic I wrote about above? Somebody with a solid business… a good product… decent marketing… and still they couldn’t see the value in continuing to pay for your services, which should be plugging up a real gap in their business?

Well, in that case, write me and tell me about it.

I’m curious to hear your story.

And maybe we can figure out a way to prevent this from happening again… and even to profit from those clients who already got away.

4 lessons from my 9-day promo for Daily Email Fastlane

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Last night, I concluded the promo for for Daily Email Fastlane. That’s the workshop I’m hosting tonight, right now, as this email goes out.

Good news: I sold more tickets to Daily Email Fastlane than I was expecting.

Bad news: At $100 per sale, it’s still not enough to buy a Rolls-Royce.

But that’s okay. This workshop was most of all an experiment, in a few ways.

I’ve collected the data. It’s now time to analyze it.

Some of what my analysis shows is standard daily email propaganda. What I mean is, the data supports the basic idea I was plugging all week long, about the value of writing daily emails for your personal brand. For example:

#1. 87% of people who signed up for Daily Email Fastlane have bought other courses or trainings from me before. Many have been on my list for 3+ years.

Would they have stuck around and been willing to buy from me now if I failed to stay in touch with them during that time?

#2. There was also a handful of first-time buyers. Most of them have been on my list for weeks, months, or in one case, closing in on a year.

In other words, it took dozens or hundreds of daily email “touches” to close this first sale… but it wasn’t very hard to do.

In fact, I even had fun writing some of those dozens or hundreds of emails over the past weeks, months, and year.

#3. I made sales with every email I sent out during this promo. This tells me I probably could have sent out still more emails and made still more sales.

All these conclusions are probably obvious to you. And they are only really useful in case you too send daily emails, as validation, or want to start sending daily emails, as inspiration.

But I do have one extra tip for you.

It’s relevant whether or not you choose to send daily emails.

In fact, it might be more relevant if you don’t send daily emails.

This tip doesn’t come from the sales data. It comes from the replies and comments of the people who ended up signing up for the workshop.

It’s this:

Many of those who joined told me they were sold by the core idea I had for this training. The core idea was to share the common elements among 3 daily emailers I’ve coached, each of whom is uniquely successful in his own way.

The way I came up with that core idea wasn’t accidental. It wasn’t a unique moment of inspiration, either.

It was routine, and something you can do too.

It’s simply an application of my #1 strategy for creating offers of any kind, in any niche.

You can use this strategy to create offers that sell… even if you don’t have your own coaching program for authority, even if you don’t sell marketing advice, even if, like me, you don’t bother to set up a sales page.

You can find this strategy described in detail towards the end of chapter 1 of my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters. For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Announcing: Daily Email Fastlane

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Next Thursday, I’m putting on a workshop which until now did not have a proper name. I’m sure you were on pins and needles because of the uncertainty. I am writing now to set you at ease.

I’ve settled on a name. That name is Daily Email Fastlane.

Hear me out:

Over the past year or so, I’ve coached a dozen or so people who write daily emails as a central part of their business strategy.

Out of that dozen or so people, three stand out in my mind — based on the money they make, the stability of their income, and simply in how much they seem to enjoy their business and their life.

I won’t name these people. But I’ll tell you this:

These three daily emailers all move fast. They write emails fast. They spin up offers fast. They go from “good idea” to “let’s see if it works” fast.

“Yeah that’s swell for them,” you might say. “But what about me?”

Well, that’s actually why I’m calling this workshop Daily Email Fastlane.

I can’t motivate you to move any faster than you normally do. That’s up to you.

What I can do, in fact what I’ve done, is to look at what else these three daily emailers have in common, such as:

– how they write their emails and make those emails good, even when they are not feeling creative

– how they structure their offers in a way that makes those offers 17.4x more likely to succeed (that’s my inexact estimate, but it’s in the ballpark)

– how they get their leads and how they think about leads

– plus what I advised them to do to take their already successful daily email businesses and make them even more successful

So that’s why this training is called Daily Email Fastlane. ​​Not because you have to move fast. But because I’ll show you the commonalities of three very different, and yet very successful daily email business owners, so you can take what has worked for them and have it work for you.

Do this, and you will get to success with daily email for your personal brand, in the fast lane, regardless of your natural speed.

Daily Email Fastlane will happen next Thursday, May 23, at 8pm CET, 2pm EST, 11am PST. It will be recorded if you cannot make it live. Though if you can be there and I can see your handsome mug live on Zoom, that’s even better.

In case you’d like to sign up:

https://bejakovic.com/daily-email-fastlane

If sales calls are not your thing…

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Yesterday, I was talking to James “Get Paid Write” Carran.

​​James has 100k+ followers on Twitter. He also has a daily email newsletter I’m subscribed to.

James used to do ghostwriting on Twitter — he charged clients a few thousand dollars per month to write tweets. He’s since stopped client work and is writing for himself.

I asked if he would want to go back and do more ghostwriting for clients. To which James replied:

“The thing I don’t like about client work is the getting clients part, which is sales calls. Calls in general, not my thing.”

I told James something, which I will tell you also, because it’s absolutely true and maybe it will be the push you need:

If sales calls are really your block, you don’t have a block. You can do what you want.

There’s no rule out there that you have to get on a sales call and convince clients to work with you.

If you have expertise and an audience, it’s the other way around. You can tell people, “If you want to work with me, this is how I work.”

I don’t do client work any more. But this year I’ve closed $2k and $3k sales by email alone. That’s about the highest-ticket stuff I sell right now. But I bet I could go higher. I know there are people who have closed $5k and $10k and $15k stuff via email, no sales calls required.

Of course, if you decide that you don’t want to do sales calls, you’ll have to adjust other parts of your business to make up for that.

Specifically, you’ll need an audience, perceived authority, and perceived familiarity — your prospects feel they know you even though you’ve never met.

Getting any of these doesn’t happen overnight. But it doesn’t have to take forever either. Depending on where you are, a few weeks or a few months can be enough.

If you want to get started today, then create an optin form, and write an email like this one. ​​Or, if you want my help and guidance along the way, hit reply. I promise there won’t be any sales call.

Your kiss is on my list

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I have this quirk of the brain where if I’ve heard a song some time in the past few days, I will often wake up in the middle of the night with that song playing on full blast in my head.

Last night, around 3am, I woke up. What I clearly heard in the darkness was the refrain to Hall and Oats’s Kiss On My List:

“Because your kiss is on my list… of the best things in liiiiiiiiife…”

The reason Kiss On My List played in my head is that I recently listened to a lot of 80s hits. And that’s because I used several 80s hits to illustrate parts of the presentation I gave to Brian Kurtz’s Titans XL group this past Thursday.

Overall, the presentation went very well. This was a surprise to me, because I was a bit desperate in the lead-up to it.

I had tried running through the presentation a couple times before the actual call. ​It seemed like a disaster each time — “these stupid songs, what was I thinking?” But apparently, I managed to pull it off at the last minute because lots of people who watched have written me to say how much they liked it.

But!

What I want to share with you today is not a bit from my presentation.

Instead, what I want to share with you is a bit that came from the other presentation inside Thursday’s Titans call. That presentation was by a guy named Charley Mann. Charley runs a coaching business for law firm owners.

I’m not sure Charley wants me to share publicly how much money he’s making. But on the call, he shared his numbers. He’s doing very well, and he will do even better soon.

Anyways, towards end of his presentation, Charley said:

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One last thing I’ll say real quick, which is the idea of making money — trying to make it boring for myself.

I have plenty of things that I love in the rest of my life. I love building the business. But fundamentally, I want the fundamentals. And so that’s the way I think about the business. The fundamentals executed in a really sound, even spectacular way, over time.

===

That felt like a gentlemanly slap across the face to me. Because it made me realize I do get my kicks, or at least some fun and expression, via my work — via doing things like creating an 80s-music-themed business presentation, which refuses to come together until the very last minute.

The trouble is, such creative experiments 1) rarely make for optimal business solutions and 2) demand much more time and work than simply focusing on the proven fundamentals and performing those very well.

I’m sharing this in case you too might be like me.

If you are, then maybe it’s time to consider taking up skydiving or high-stakes roulette or perhaps drag racing as a way to get your kicks in the real world, outside your business. Or at the very least, perhaps it’s time to consider, like Charley says, focusing on just the fundamentals, and executing those very well over time.

And now, if you want the fundamentals of email copywriting, then I have a course for you.

I’m not sure I would ever have been able to prepare such a course had I only ever written emails for this newsletter, where I feel compelled to say something new and creative every day to get my small kick of excitement.

Fortunately, I’ve also worked extensively with clients, including a few clients where I had to write multiple daily emails every day for years at a time, along with tons of other copy, and where real money was on the line – $4k-$5k of actual sales coming in with each email.

If you want to learn what I learned while writing all those emails and pulling in all those sales, and if you want to implement something similar in your business, then here you go:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Ooooo, child!

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Last weekend, my friend Sam and I went to Savannah. On the drive there, we started started listening to an audiobook of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

That was a 1994 non-fiction book that stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for a remarkable 216 weeks.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil consists of a bunch of character studies of various eccentrics who lived in Savannah in the 1970s and 80s. The book cuts through Savannah society, from the rich and established to the poor and fringe.

Among the poor and fringe was Miss Chablis, “The Empress of Savannah.”

Chablis was a black drag queen.

The narrator of the audiobook, who normally speaks with a neutral accent, voiced Chablis, like all other Savannah locals, with a kind of southern drawl.

Except that in the case of Miss Chablis, the narrator, who sounded solidly white and male otherwise, also had to awkwardly act out dozens of draq-queeny, Black-English phrases such as:

“Ooooo, child!”

“Oh, child, don’t you be doin’ that!”

“Y-e-e-e-s, child! Yayyiss… yayyiss… yayyiss!”​​

I had flashbacks to this earlier today.

I got back to Barcelona yesterday. I checked my mailbox and found a stack of New Yorkers waiting for me.

This morning, I sat on my balcony and flipped open the latest one. The first feature story is about Ru Paul.

“Ooooo, child!” I said, “No more drag queens, honey, please!”

But as I often do, I forced myself to read something I had no inclination to read. I often find valuable things that way.

Today was no exception. I found the following passage in the first page of the article. Jinkx Monsoon, a 36-year-old drag queen who won two seasons of Ru Paul’s reality competition TV show, explained the power of drag:

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It’s armor, ’cause you’re putting on a persona. So the comments are hitting something you created, not you. And then it’s my sword, because all of the things that made me a target make me powerful as a drag queen.

===

If you have any presence online, this armor-and-sword passage is good advice. It’s something that the most successful and most authentic-seeming performers out there practice.

I once saw a serious sit-down interview with Woody Allen. I remember being shocked by how calm, confident, and entirely not Woody-Allen-like he was.

Closer to the email world, I remember from a long time ago an email in which Ben Settle basically said the same thing as Jinkx Monsoon above. How the crotchety, dismissive persona he plays in his emails is a kind of exaggeration and a mask he puts over the person he is in real life.

So drag is good advice for online entrepreneurs.

But like much other good advice, It’s not something I follow in these emails.

I haven’t developed an email persona, and I’m not playing any kind of ongoing role to entertain my audience or to protect me from their criticism.

That’s because I don’t like to lie to myself. Like I’ve said many times before, I write these emails for myself first and foremost, and then I do a second pass to make sure that what I’ve written can be relevant and interesting to others as well.

This is not something I would encourage anybody else to do. But it’s worked out well enough for me, and allowed me to stay in the game for a long time.

That said, I do regularly adopt various new and foreign mannerisms in these emails.

I do this because i find it instructive and fun, and because it allows me to stretch beyond the person/writer I am and become more skilled and more successful.

I’ve even created an entire training, all about the great value of this approach.

In case you’d like to become more skilled and successful writing online, then honey, I am serious! You best look over here, child:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

You never know who’s on your list

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The business owner across from me shrugged.

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

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

You can conclude what you like from the story above.

I’ll just tell you this:

You never know who’s on your list.

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

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

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

https://bejakovic.com/sme/