One Man Businesses

3 great reasons to sign up to Josh Spector’s newsletter before Sunday

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Today I’d like to invite you to sign up to Josh Spector’s newsletter For The Interested.

​​Signing up is free, and I can think of no fewer than three great reasons to do so:

First, Josh writes both a weekly newsletter on Sundays (long, similar to what many others are doing) and a short daily newsletter in a different format on all the other days.

What Josh is doing with daily emails is innovative and it works. So much so I already wrote an email about it just a couple weeks ago. It might be something you want to keep an eye on and model yourself.

Second, if you ever find yourself crying “Value! More value!!!” and you want marketers to bombard you with non-stop, practical, how-to info and inspiration, without any teasing, guru-like grandstanding, or endless personal stories, then Josh is your man.

His newsletter is all value, zero charismatic manipulation, all day long.

Third, I will be running a classified ad in Josh’s newsletter this Sunday.

This ad will have a special offer to get my new Simple Money Emails course. I will sell this course after the promo in Josh’s newsletter ends, but if you are on Josh’s list by Sunday, and you take me up on the offer inside the ad before the deadline, you will get Simple Money Emails for free.

So are you… interested?

​​If you are (maybe you can sense where this is going) then here is Josh’s For The Interested:

https://bejakovic.com/fti

My new, Morning Brew-like newsletter gets an F

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A few days ago, I mentioned a guy named Scott Oldford, who is buying up other people’s newsletters. Yesterday, Oldford tweeted a long thread about what makes a newsletter worth buying.

I got my popcorn ready and I sat down to read.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve started a new, Morning Brew-like newsletter in the health space.

I told myself from the start to make it sellable. Not because I want to necessarily sell it. But simply because if it’s sellable, it’s more likely to be the kind of business that’s viable for the long term, and that I’d like to be involved in.

I stuffed my mouth full of popcorn and started reading down Oldford’s list. And though it’s still early days for my newsletter, I started feeling pretty good about myself.

Diverse traffic sources: check.

High engagement: check.

Not a personal brand: check.

Diverse monetization strategies: getting there. Like I said, it’s still early days, but monetization is something I know how to do.

​​But then, I got to this part of Oldford’s thread:

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5. You need everything inside of your media brand segmented and process driven & it shouldn’t require you whatsoever.

If I see a business and the founder is running everything— it’s not valuable.

If I see it and the founder is working 5hr/week— it is.

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I stopped chewing my popcorn and I swallowed hard. Fact is, I’m working way more than 5 hours a week on this thing. And I’m doing everything myself.

The biggest time suck is simply the research — keeping on top of all the news stories, tweets, podcasts, blog posts, YouTube videos, and science papers relevant to my newsletter.

​​Like I’ve written before, better ingredients, better emails. If you want to write an interesting newsletter, you have to have interesting things to write about. And that takes time.

So here’s where I hope you can help me:

I might in the end simply have to hire somebody trustworthy and competent to do all this research for me. ​But I’m holding out hope that there’s a technological solution to this problem. Some combination of automated polling of all these resources… machine transcription… AI-based parsing of what’s interesting or not.

​​Something that can reduce this research work by 50%, 80%, maybe 95%.

Something that can take this aspect of my newsletter from an F to maybe a C. Or who knows, a B or even an A.

Maybe it’s a pipe dream. Maybe not.

If you have any info here — whether you yourself have skills and experience to create something like this, or you know someone who does, or you have somewhere to point me to — write in and let me know.

​​All I can promise in return is my gratitude. But who knows — maybe there’s a business in here as well, because there are a million and one newsletters like mine, and I imagine most face this same problem.

“The one thing all my mentors have in common”

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This past Sunday, Novak Djokovic won the French Open and his 23 Grand Slam title — a big deal in the tennis world.

​​On Monday, in an off moment, I decided to check if there were any interesting news or interviews with Djokovic following the French Open.

I automatically headed to the r/tennis subreddit on Reddit. But in place of the usual page with tennis links and videos, I was hit with a blank page and the following notice:

“r/tennis is joining the Reddit blackout from June 12th to 14th, to protest the planned API changes that will kill 3rd party apps”

Perhaps you’ve heard:

Reddit the company, which is basically thousands of different news boards, is experiencing a kind of strike. Special Reddit users — mods — who control the different news boards are protesting Reddit’s proposed policy changes. As a result, they’ve basically made the site unusable for hundreds of millions of users.

I haven’t been following the drama. But apparently, as of yesterday, Reddit’s CEO said he plans to go ahead with the policy changes. To which many mods decided to extend the strike from 2-3 days, as originally planned, to indefinite.

All this reminded me of email conversation I recently had with Glenn Osborn.
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​Glenn is a curious creature. Once upon a time, Glenn attended 15 of Jay Abraham’s $15k marketing seminars by bartering his way in.

​​He also went to one of Gary Halbert’s copywriting seminars in Key West, and watched Gary go up on stage with that “Clients Suck” hat.

​​These days, Glenn writes an email newsletter called “Billionaire Idea Testing Club” about influence tricks he spots from people like Taylor Swift and James Patterson and J.K. Rowling.

For reasons of his own, Glenn likes to reply to my emails on occasion and send me valuable ideas. A few weeks ago, Glenn wrote me with some things he had learned directly and indirectly from Clayton Makepeace and Gary Halbert and Jay Abraham.

​​Good stuff. But then, in a PS, Glenn added the following:

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P.S. -For Consulting Clients I Do ALL THE Work F-O-R them – MYSELF and thru staffers.

CONTROL is the one thing all my Mentors Have in Common. If You Don’t CONTROL what you do You Cannot Make Munny.

===

That last idea definitely stood out to me.

There are so many ways to be successful in any field. And contradicting strategies will often produce equally good results.

But a very few things are non-negotiable. You could call those the rules of the system. Perhaps CONTROL is one of them.

At this point I would normally refer you to Glenn’s newsletter in case you want to read it yourself. ​​But as Glenn himself says, “My ARCHIVE Is By-Referral-Only – Too ADVANCED to Toss Strangers into.”

If you are determined, then a bit of Googling, based on what I’ve told you above, will lead you to Glenn’s optin page and his unusual but valuable newsletter.

And in case you yourself want to want to write an unusual but valuable newsletter, the following can help:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Anonymous personal guru

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“It’s anonymous,” he said. “They never see me or find out who I am.”

I took my face out from the little plate filled with different cheeses. I leaned back in my seat. “So how do you deliver it?”

“It’s just audio of me talking. They don’t see me. And I never say what my name is.”

I was getting excited. “But what about your high-end coaching clients, the ones who are paying you a grand?”

“Yeah, we get on a Zoom call. They do see my face, and I tell them my first name. But they still don’t know who I am.”

During the Gdansk conference, I met a copywriter who’s kind of a big thing on copywriting Twitter. But his Twitter account is anonymous. He only goes by Mercure.

A couple months ago, he launched a couple coaching offers.

The quirky sales page for these offers reads and looks like a detective pulp novel. It’s red font on black background and there’s an mp3 clip at the top, hosted on Soundcloud, that sets the mood with a kind of film noir soundtrack.

The “beginner copy camp” offer sold on this page is 200 euro. The “intermediate copy camp” is 1000 euro.

A bunch of people have bought, at both levels. And they keep buying. Even so, they don’t get to find out who Mercure is.

I’m telling you this for two reasons.

One, because Twitter might not be the meme-filled sewer I always assumed it was. I spent much of the farewell dinner at the Gdansk conference grilling this guy about what he does on Twitter and how. It all sounded very positive.

Reason two is, to remind you that you can do things your own way, and it can still work.

This guy never shares his name online, either on Twitter or to his customers. He never shares anything personal about himself, beyond the fact that he’s a successful copywriter. He says he also never engages in drama or mud-slinging or taking sides.

He has a sales page that looks like it was made by a teenager in 2001 using raw HTML… he makes people submit proof they are actually intermediate copywriters if they want to join his higher-tiered thing… he kicks people out of the coaching if they don’t do the work, and he doesn’t refund them — it’s part of the deal.

And yet, it works.

Maybe you don’t want to get on Twitter. Maybe you have no problem sharing your personal life online. Maybe you like engaging in drama.

All that’s fine. I’m just telling you there really are options. Lots of things can work, as long as you get some of the basics down.

If you want to see some of that in action, then I’ll point you to Mercure on Twitter.

He and I didn’t talk about doing any kind of cross-promotion. He doesn’t know I am writing about him. In fact, we haven’t talked since the farewell Gdansk dinner.

I’m just telling you about him because I think you might benefit from knowing about the guy — either directly, via what he does, or just as inspiration, via how he does it. In case you are curious:

https://twitter.com/MercureCopy

“If you’re a copywriter and you don’t do consulting…”

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On the last day of the copywriting conference in Gdansk, A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos gave his second talk.

As part of the talk, Parris said something encouraging and nurturing:

“If you’re a copywriter and you don’t do consulting — let me put this delicately – you’re a fucking idiot.”

In my email from a couple days ago, I asked readers what they know that they could sell.

I got a lot of responses to that email. Most of the ideas I heard I thought were very sellable. A few I was ready to pay money for then and there.

I wonder what will come of all those ideas. I hope many will in fact turn into something. And maybe Parris’s encouraging and nurturing words above will help somebody transform their sellable knowledge into cash.

If you’re a copywriter… or you like the idea of offering consulting, but something is blocking you… you might like my daily email newsletter. I occasionally share ideas which you might find valuable. Click here to sign up.

The fastest, but certainly not the newest, way to cash

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Day 3 of the copywriting conference.

​​You can’t make an omelette without cracking two to three eggs, and you can’t go to a copywriting conference without getting your brain scrambled with hundreds of different ideas, stories, pitches, open loops that never get closed, jokes, not-jokes, cliches, and important takeaways.

Let me pull it together for a moment and tell you about the fastest way to cash. It’s not the newest way to cash. In fact it’s not new at all. I’m sure you’ve heard about it. But maybe you need a reminder.

Yesterday, one of the speakers, Adam Urbanski, said the fastest path to cash, in his experience, is to sell what you know.

The day before, Barry Randall, who I wrote about in my email yesterday, said something similar.

Barry said that what he does is, learn something, keep it simple, and then sell it. On the other hand, what most other people do is learn something, complicate it, and then get stuck.

I’m not sure those are Barry’s exact words. In spite of 51 pages of notes so far, I didn’t write that bit down. I’ll have to seek him out today and confirm it.

Meanwhile, I have a deal for you:

Sign up to my email newsletter.

When you get my welcome email, hit reply and tell me what you have learned that you can sell. I genuinely want to know.

In return, I will reply to you and tell you a practical tip to make your presentation better if you ever do sell that knowledge you have in your head.

This tip is something that popped up in my head yesterday during Adam Urbanski’s presentation.

Adam’s presentation was excellent and very effective. But I believe with a small tweak it could be even more effective.

​​I won’t seek out Adam today and tell him that — nobody wants an unsolicited critique. But if you like, hit reply, tell me what you have learned that you can sell, and I will tell you what I have in mind.

If you consider yourself a paid traffic expert

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If you consider yourself to be something of a paid traffic expert, or you want to be seen as such, I’ve got a lead gen/business idea for you.

​​I’m giving away this idea. You’re free to use it. In fact, I hope you do.

Here goes:

1. Start a newsletter. Call it “Classified Growth” or something sexy like that.

2. Go around, finding other newsletters that sell classified ads. There are hundreds or thousands of such newsletters, but they are not organized, and they often do not make it known they sell ads. You might have to email them and ask or suggest it.

By the way, I’m not talking about big featured ads like you can find inside Morning Brew, which have a big photo and hundreds of words of copy, and which are really intended for rich brand advertisers. Databases of newsletters offering those kinds of ads already exist.

​​I’m talking about small, classified-like ads, 100 words max, no picture, which can be integrated into the content of a newsletter, which are likely to cost a few hundred to maybe a thousand or so dollars, and which are perfect for advertising to get dedicated newsletter readers. As far as I know, there’s no source to tell you where to find those.

3. Each week, send out a new issue of your newsletter. Publish the latest classified ad opportunities you’ve found, and link to a page where you keep a running list of all the previous classified ad opportunities you’ve found.

4. Add in a little intro paragraph to each issue with your own voice so people know who you are. Casually mention any status-building things that happened to you or to your newsletter over the past week.

5. To grow your newsletter, do a good job implementing 1-4 above for four weeks, then email me and I will promote your newsletter to my list for free. I’ll also give you the contacts of 10 other people with sizable email lists who are likely to promote your new newsletter for free.

6. After you start getting people onto your newsletter, to monetize, sell your own consulting services or products or community, or sell ads, or sell affiliate offers.

The cons of this:

You’re likely to attract people who are at the early stage of newsletter growth. This means they are unproven and uncommitted — they might fail or quit.

​​And if they do succeed, they are likely to outgrow your newsletter and focus on other newsletter growth strategies that are easier to scale. That’s why I say this makes sense if you want to offer services or products around paid traffic and can use this as a lead-gen method.

The pros:

There is clearly demand. I would subscribe and read this newsletter each week, and others would too.

​​There are literally thousands of people with newsletters hoping to grow, and hundreds more joining every day. And since we’re talking about paid traffic, you’re likely to attract a serious segment of that audience, who might even have some money to spend.

So that’s my business idea for you. Again, I hope you run with it, because I would love to see it happen.

I’m currently working on growing two newsletters — the one you’re reading, and a second one that’s still in a bit of stealth mode, about a health topic.

In the past, to grow various newsletters I’ve had or have, I’ve run Facebook ads, solo ads, Twitter ads, paid “recommendations” like they have on Substack, banner ads, and classified ads in other newsletters.

The classified ads in other newsletters win in terms of quality of traffic.

The problem is, classified ads take time and are not scalable, but a resource like the one I describe above could help.

​​At the same time, it could help you build your own list, quickly, with highly qualified and valuable leads, that you could then monetize into submission.

Speaking of which, if you do launch the above newsletter, you’re likely to have more success selling your services or products if you drive your readers to a second, daily email newsletter like the one I write each day.

If you’d like to see how I do that each day, so you can model what I’m doing to make money, you can sign up to my newsletter here.​

Two proven ways to run a city or a newsletter

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I was sitting by the Seine two days ago, part of a trip to Paris with friends. One of my friends looked up and said, in a kind of mock frustration, “All the buildings around here are so beautiful. Don’t they ever get tired of making beautiful buildings?”

Apparently they do. In fact, that same day, we went to visit something very ugly.

In the middle of Paris, on a square lined by elegant, classical architecture, sits the Pompidou Center.

If you look at the back of your refrigerator, where the coils and pipes and wires collect cobwebs and dust, scale that up to a building the size of a sports stadium, paint the different pipes and coils blue and green and red, then you get the Pompidou.

The Pompidou is a cultural center — exhibition spaces and galleries and stages and a huge public library.

It looks shockingly ugly today. ​I suspect it looked much worse to the eyes of Parisians who saw it being built in the 1970s. One of them called it the “incinerator absorbing all the cultural energy and devouring it — a bit like the black monolith in 2001.”

And yet, people stream into the Pompidou.

In its first two decades, the place attracted 145 million visitors. ​​Five years ago, in 2017, the last year I could find numbers for, the art museum inside the Pompidou had 3.3 million visitors. Untold millions more rode the free escalators to the top of the building to look at the Eiffel tower and Notre Dame and Montmartre, all nicely visible from the roof.

In other words, the Pompidou, ugly though it may be, is also a full-blown success. It’s doing what it’s designed to do, giving masses of people access to art, serving as a kind of new focal point in the city, renewing Paris as a cultural destination.

All that’s to say, there’s two ways to run your city:

One is to give visitors what they want – what they are expecting and demanding, what they have seen on postcards, what they initially came for.

The other is to do something shocking and new — because you have a new agenda for your city, or simply because you got bored of doing the same stuff you’ve done in the past.

The first of course is the more safe, more proven way. But both can work — as proven by the Pompidou.

As I mentioned above, I’m traveling right now. I’ll be away from home for next couple weeks, until May 19.

When I get back home after my trip, I will most likely open up enrollment for the group coaching on email copywriting I announced last month.

Which brings me to my point for this email. The two ways to run a destination city are also the two ways to run a profitable email newsletter.

One is to give readers more of what they came for, what they say they want, or that your research says they want.

The other is to do what you yourself want, what serves your purposes, your desires.

Both can work. But it’s good to be clear with yourself as to what you specifically are doing. This makes your job easier and makes you more effective over the long term.

When I do open up enrollment for the group coaching, I will only do so to people who have signed up to get (and stay) on the waiting list.

If you’ve done this already, there’s nothing more you need to do right now.

On the other hand, if you are curious about this group email coaching, then the first step is not to get on my waiting list, but to get on my main email list. That’s the first requirement I have for all people enrolled in this coaching. To sign up, click here and fill out the form that appears.

The next era for freelancers, full-time writers, and solo creators

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I woke up this morning, the sun shining into my eyes, an eager French bird chirping outside my window because it was almost 7am.

I groaned and realized it’s time to get up and get to work. In a few hours’ time, my friends, still asleep in various bedrooms around this cave-like Paris AirBnb, will wake up too. And by then, I will have to have this email finished.

I can tell you now, it won’t be easy.

I struggled during the night with a comforter that was too hot, a mosquito that wouldn’t shut up, and the effects of the first glass of alcohol I’ve had in months. The result is I’m tired this morning, and my brain is more foggy than usual.

“Let me read some stuff on the Internet,” I said. “Maybe that will help.” And lo — the email gods rewarded me with an article full of valuable and relevant ideas I can share with you today.

The article came from Simon Owens, somebody I’ve written about before in these emails. Owens is a journalist who covers the media landscape in his Substack newsletter.

Two interesting bits from Owens’s article:

1. The recent collapses of new media companies like Buzzfeed and Vox have left thousands of journalists, writers, and clickbait creators without a job. It’s not unlike the situation in the direct response space a few years ago, after Agora got into legal trouble and it put a chill on the whole industry.

2. The owners of media outlets and info businesses are realizing that freelancers just aren’t worth it. From Owens’s conversation with one such business owner: “Not only were they expensive to hire, but he also had to waste a lot of time editing their work so it met his quality standards.”

So if traditional employee-based companies that pump out content are failing… and if entrepreneurs are starting to realize that freelancers are a bum deal… where does that leave us?

You might say it leaves us with the creator economy — with all those unemployed journalists, writers, and clickbait creators going out and starting their own Substack or TikTok or OnlyFans.

​​Maybe so. But it’s harder to make that work than your Twitter feed might make you believe. From Owens’s article again:

“I’m on record as being an optimist about the future of the Creator Economy; I think we’re at the very early stages of an entrepreneurial media explosion. But at the same time, I’m a realist about how damn hard it is to launch and build a sustainable bootstrapped media business, especially as a solo operator. Not only can it require years of financial runway, but it’s also difficult for a single person to juggle a variety of tasks that include content creation, marketing, and business development.”

So? Where does all this really leave us?

Owens says it leaves us in a brave new world of partnerships, cooperatives, and jointly-created products. He gives examples of how each of these is already being done by people who create content and have an audience, and who are trying to monetize that content and audience, beyond just the work they can do themselves.

If you are running or want to run an info publishing businesses, or your own creator studio, then Owens’s article is worth a read. It might give you an idea that might mean the difference between failure and success in what you do.

And if you are currently a freelancer, or even a full-time employee at a marketing-led business, then Owens’s article is worth a read also, if only for an uncomfortable but possibly life-saving glimpse into what the future might bring unless you adapt.

In either case, if you are interested, here’s the link to Owens’s piece:

https://simonowens.substack.com/p/the-next-era-for-bootstrapped-media

Work on your business and not on delegating, systems, or automation

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Two nights ago I finally finished the 40-page pamphlet I’d been reading for three months, titled Leading With Your Head. It’s about the use of misdirection in magic. It ends with this:

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Tape your performances in front of an audience (either audio or video). Sit down and take notes. What works best for the audience? What doesn’t work (that you thought would)? Is there dead time you can eliminate? What needs to be improved? Keep the material that works, and concentrate on improving the weaknesses. Don’t fix what isn’t broken. It’s simply an excuse to avoid addressing more serious problems. Rehearse your improvements, then repeat the whole process again.

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It’s popular advice to say, work on your business, not in it.

The typical meaning of this is to delegate, build systems, automate the work. I’m sure that’s fine.

But there are ways of making a living — like my own — that are not about hiring and managing other people, not about scaling endlessly, and certainly not about automation. After all, what’s the sense in getting a magic-performing robot to go on stage and perform your magic show for you — if performing magic is what you like to do?

“Work on your business, not in it” is good advice. But in my personal case, I like the meaning above, the one from Leading With Your Head.

Plan and reflect, in addition to performing. It makes you better at what you like to do, and is in fact fun and enjoyable in itself, at least in my experience. And in my experience, it can be profitable too.

Last June 9th, I did an instance of this kind of working on my business. I opened up a text file on my computer and made a list, “10 things I’ve learned to do well over the past year.”

Item no. 2 on the list was “2. write [what I later came to call Most Valuable] emails.”

A couple weeks later, because of that small observation, I created a live training about Most Valuable Emails.

A month later, based on the surprising sales of the swipe file of Most Valuable Emails I offered at the end of the live training, I decided to create a standalone Most Valuable Email course.

I was hesitant — I figured anybody interested had already seen my presentation and wouldn’t buy. But again, I was surprised.

​​4.7% of my list bought the Most Valuable Email course during the launch. And interest hasn’t dropped off since, but has in fact gone up.

​​To date, 5.3% of my list has bought Most Valuable Email, though my list has grown by over 41% since last September, when I first launched the MVE course.

Great, right? — when you look at it from the perspective of how a typical info product sells. 2% or 3% of a qualified list is considered good.

But on the other hand, it also means 94.7% of my list has not yet bought Most Valuable Email.

​​Perhaps this includes you too.

There are many legit reasons why you might not want to buy Most Valuable Email. I list some of them right in the deck copy of the sales page.

On the other hand, there are also several legit reasons why you might want to buy Most Valuable Email. I list those in the deck copy as well.

In case you’d like to read that, and see and decide for yourself whether Most Valuable Email could be most valuable for you too, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/