Business Ideas

The moat of asking for help

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A few months ago got an email from copywriter Suraj Punjabi. I know Suraj from the PCM community I worked in as a coach last year.

Suraj and I exchanged a couple emails, in one of which Suraj opened up and shared some pretty personal stuff. I’m reprinting it below, with Suraj’s permission. It’s a long message but worth reading in detail if you are looking for clients, copywriting or otherwise. Says Suraj:

===

I’ve been on a dry spell since April, but I finally landed a gig thankfully.

It turns out I was busy doing cold outreach that didn’t bother looking at my own data.

So in January, I did just that. Gave cold outreach a break and looked at my own data hard.

And I noticed that literally 100% of my clients for the past 5 years came from referrals through connections I made from Facebook.

I felt pretty dumb for abandoning such a proven strategy in favor of cold emailing.

So, when I went back to leveraging this strategy, I immediately started getting inbound leads.

One of them, a 9-figure powerhouse in the keto space, just became a client.

In fact, I’m starting with them TODAY.

Oh and another gig I got was working under a senior copywriter who currently has his plate full and needed help with emails.

I’ll never forget the lesson life just taught me.

Some coaches swear by cold outreach, others by Upwork, LinkedIn, or X.

They might be right in their own way.

But nothing beats looking at your own past data to see where most of your clients have come from and doubling down on that.

Of course, this is not exactly newbie stuff. You need to have solid data. And I have 5 years worth.

Since PCM until today, I have sent at least 5000 cold outreaches using different strategies.

I have done PCM, I have tried sending conversation starters…

I have tried sending personalized Looms to show them how they can get more subscribers to their list…

I have pitched low risk offers like helping them write a blog just to get my foot in the door.

I made a LinkedIn profile and paid monthly for the premium subscription.

I even went back to Upwork to compete against $10/email copywriters! 🤢🤢🤢🤢

And none of those strategies held a candle to simply reaching out to my Facebook network and asking for help.

Not saying those other strategies don’t work. Perhaps they do work for some people (I know PCM works for A LOT of people), but it didn’t work for me.

Felt like a fish being told to fly. haha.

I felt so stupid when I realized it.

But oh well.

Lesson learned.

===

Two things to point out:

The first is the obvious — expert opinion doesn’t mean much compared to your own direct experience.

The second is less obvious, and it’s where Suraj says, “And none of those strategies held a candle to simply reaching out to my Facebook network and asking for help.”

Asking for help.

Most people don’t have a problem asking for the time, or for directions, or for a book to borrow.

But asking for help finding work — something that suggest genuine unokayness on your part — is something that few people are willing to do.

I never really did it when I was a freelance copywriter, and in need of work, except tentatively, with a few previous clients. (Even that rare and hesitant asking for help got me new leads.)

All that’s to say:

Asking for help works. People like feeling helpful, useful, and important.

At the same time, most people won’t ever ask for help, not in things like getting work, because it’s too threatening to the ego.

That just means that, if you can get over your own hesitations about asking for help, then you’ve just created a kind of moat around yourself and your success, which the hordes of others in your industry are not able to swim, jump, or walk across.

That’s my message for you today.

My offer to you today is my new 10 Commandments book, because this asking for help is actually Commandment I in the book.

It’s easy to read this book and think, “Oh these are interesting ideas, maybe I could use one of them in an email or a headline.”

But the fact is, each of the commandments in this book deals with the fundamentals of effective communication, and each is applicable to pretty much any problem you might be facing, whether personal or business. If you haven’t yet gotten your copy:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

How to turn $99 courses into $999 offers

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Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a magic spell that turns plain, small, $29 or $99 courses into shiny, exciting, $299 or $999 offers?

The past week, I’ve been trawling the Royalty Ronin community, of which I am a paying member.

I found a curious and old post inside. A lightbulb came on. I had actually written an email on the exact same topic, back in 2021, as a kind of joke, talking about repositioning physical products.

Here’s what I wrote back then:

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If you sell dog clippers today and nobody’s buying, then bundle your clippers with a video. Tell people how to set up their own dog grooming business in their back yard in their spare time.

Charge 10x what the clippers cost… and find yourself in a marketplace of one, instead of a commodity market.

===

I suffer from what is known as “copywriter brain,” which is limited in its thinking and reach.

It takes “marketing and business brain” to take the above idea seriously and see its full potential, particularly when applied to info products.

And that’s exactly what I found in that post inside Royalty Ronin. This post talked about this same idea, and it gave a real example involving Travis Sago (the guy who runs Royalty Ronin).

Travis took a course that sold well for $99 and transformed it, successfully and ethically, into a $999 offer that also sold well.

The point being, you don’t have to start from scratch.

If you want to create a big-ticket offer, this doesn’t mean you need big new course content, a big new topic, a big new mechanism.

You can take what you already have, even if it’s only selling now for $29 or $99 or whatever, and reposition it so it becomes a genuine big-ticket offer.

But what if you don’t have even a $29 or $99 offer right now?

That’s ok. Millions of other people do have such offers. And you can start a profitable repositioning business, with your own home as headquarters, by helping such people turn their $29 offers into $299 offers and their $99 offers into $999 offers.

If you want more info or advice or support on how to do all this, then you might be a good fit for Royalty Ronin.

You can sign up for a trial below and see for yourself if it’s for you.

If you do sign up, forward me your welcome email (the one that says “Vroom” in the subject line). I’ll then tell you where to find the post I mentioned above, which lays out how Travis repositions his $99 courses into $999 offers. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

Bejako After Dark, my new OnlyFans project

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I’ve spent a lot of time in Ubers the past few days, jetsetting back and forth across my home town of Zagreb, Croatia.

A part of that experience has been listening to the local pop radio stations, which seem to be the music of choice for Uber drivers here.

(Bear with me for a minute. I promise to give you a good payoff to this story.)

During an Uber today, an awful pop song came on the radio. A woman was singing a childish tune over a reggae rhythm played by synthesizers. The chorus kept repeating (translated from Croatian):

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When you’re alone, you need to go to the sea

When you’re alone, you need a friend

When you’re alone, you need a bottle of wine, you need a nice girl

===

“What is this horror,” I asked myself after the chorus repeated for the 45th time. Then on the 46th repeat, the final line changed:

“When you’re alone, you need a bottle of wine, you need Severina”

“Oh ok that makes sense,” I said.

In case you don’t know — and if you do, I have questions for you — Severina is the most nationally and internationally famous singer from Croatia.

Starting in the early 90s, for a decade and more, Severina recorded dutiful and horrible songs like the one I heard today. Her career wasn’t going anywhere.

And then, in June 2004, a sex tape involving Severina leaked out. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, the tape was quickly viewed more times than the moon landing.

As you can probably guess, Severina’s sex tape transformed Severina’s music career.

It opened up huge new audiences both locally and internationally. It helped her change her image to a kind of sex vixen.

It got a lot of musicians, including some respectable ones, interested in working with her. And it has kept her music, awful though it is, playing on the radio, even today, 20 years later.

But I promised you a good payoff to today’s story, and a sex tape ain’t it.

Along with listening to Severina, I am also reading a book titled Veeck As In Wreck. It’s the autobiography of Bill Veeck, who was one of the most innovative and influential owners of a major league baseball team in the history of the sport.

At different times, Veeck owned the Chicago White Sox and Cleveland Indians.

But he started out by working for the Chicago Cubs, back when the Cubs were a horrifically losing team. Of course, no fans wanted to go see the Cubs since they were so bad, and the Cubs’ stadium, Wrigley Field, sat empty.

Veeck managed to turn all this around. Well, not the Cubs’ losing record, but the attendance problems.

Veeck managed to sell out game after game by introducing creative giveaways (live lobsters, a horse), spectacles (fireworks, before any other baseball teams had ’em), and schemes (a dwarf playing as designated hitter). As Veeck put it in in his autobiography:

“A team that isn’t winning a pennant has to sell something in addition to its won-and-lost record.”

And now I’d like to point out something crazy that might have slipped your attention:

Both the Chicago Cubs and early-stage Severina were in the entertainment business — sports and music. I mean, what sells easier and better than sports and music?

Except, of course, for the Cubs and Severina, being “entertaining” wasn’t enough. They both kind of sucked at that, and so they had to tack on a second degree of entertainment — a circus environment, a sex tape — in order for fans to care or at least stomach their first degree of entertainment.

And that’s the point I wanted to get across to you.

If you’re selling something important and dutiful, you can sell more of it by trying to be entertaining. You probably already know that – it’s the “infotainment” idea that people like Sean D’Souza have been championing for two decades.

The thing is, you might not be much of an entertainer. Or you might be decent, but you might simply be in a marketplace where everybody else is also entertaining, and maybe as well as you.

In that case, you can still lap the pack if you offer a second-degree of entertainment — entertainment of a different kind, preferably in an entirely different format.

And with that, I’d like to announce I’m launching a new project, an OnlyFans channel, Bejako After Dark — no, you wish.

But I am thinking about this topic of second-degree entertainment seriously. In time, some good idea will land on me. Maybe it will be OnlyFans.

In any case, until that happens, let me just turn you on to something I’ve already created — an entertainment of a different kind, in an entirely different format, in which I bare myself quite naked:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

How cool are you?

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If you’ve ever wondered if you’re cool, I mean really cool, you don’t have to wonder any longer. You can now know with absolute certainty, thanks to a group of scientists who have conclusively studied, analyzed, and answered this question, from here to eternity.

Based on a worldwide study of 600 people, published a few weeks ago, the scientists say coolness breaks down into the following six characteristics:

1. Extroverted

2. Hedonistic

3. Powerful

4. Adventurous

5. Open

6. Autonomous

So you just gotta look at yourself honestly, decide how you measure up on each of these traits, add up the scores, and ta-da!

I did this exercise myself. And if you’re curious about how cool I am, I’ll tell you:

I’m as extraverted as a late-stage Howard Hughes… as hedonistic as Greta Thunberg… as powerful as Steven Seagal… as adventurous as Fred Rogers… and as open as Winston Churchill.

In other words, on the first five measures of coolness, I score a cool, hard ZERO.

All that’s left to me is trait six, autonomous.

I do pretty well there.

I live where I want, I do what I want, when I want and with who I want. I have enough money to satisfy my appetites and then some, without a boss to answer to, a constituency to appease, or a strict to fulfill.

If I want to change where I am or what I do or how much time I spend doing it, I can — I have done so in the past and I might do it again.

No man is an island, entire of itself, but I am autonomous enough to score myself as a 10 on the autonomy scale, giving me a solid 16.6% overall coolness rating.

The thing is, 16.6% is as good as 100%, at least when it comes to having a personal brand online.

In fact, once upon a time, I wrote a daily email with the hidden goal of communicating how I value autonomy over all kinds of other goods. I got a shocking number of “that’s right!” replies from long-term readers and customers, or people who have since become such.

I wrote that very deliberate email after hearing Dan Kennedy say how autonomy is the core appeal that underlies his popularity and standing and authority as a marketing guru.

That might be a valuable something to consider if you are trying to sell people stuff online.

And on that note, as I wrote yesterday, if that’s a world you’re looking to get into, then Kieran Drew is launching a new offer, called Productize Your Knowledge.

The end result of Productize Your Knowledge is you take what you already know or are already doing for clients as service work, and package a part of that into a product that sells, just for you, without making more demands on your time or lifeblood.

Like I wrote yesterday, Kieran’s Productize Your Knowledge is not a collection of “secrets” on how to create a course.

Instead, it’s both a process to help you go from where you are now to having a info product that actually sells and makes money.

It’s process that Kieran himself has followed, and also a process 7 private clients each paid Kieran $2,997 to help them implement, earlier this year.

Kieran lays out the process on the sales page below. And while you can read the sales page and then follow the process and try to do all this yourself, it’s worth considering paying Kieran for Productize Your Knowledge now. Three reasons why:

1. The launch price of $297, which will go up to $497 after the launch

2. The “Product Summer Bootcamp” community — basically an 8-week implementation and support group kicking off after the launch, with Kieran leading, giving feedback, and possibly cracking the whip (though don’t hold me to that last one)

3. Two free bonuses which I am adding in:

BEJAKO BONUS #1: 3rd conversion (last sold for $197)

Kieran’s Productize Your Knowledge guides you how to making a great info products people wanna buy. But the fact is, you can sell great info, and have people excited to pay you for it, and yet won’t consume it and won’t implement it.

3rd conversion shows you how to take care of that next step, and dramatically incraeses the odds people consume and implement the info you sell.

Not only does this make it more likely that one-time buyers buy the next thing from you and turn into long-time customers, but it makes it so you feel good continuing to sell info products instead of wanting to hang yourself (ask me how I know).

BEJAKO BONUS #2: Most Valuable Postcard #1: Nota Rapida (last sold for $100)

… all about the most important number to focus on in your business, whether you sell info products or services.

The fact is, I never cottoned on to this until I started selling info products. And out of the many mistakes I made while working as freelance copywriter, not focusing on this number is the only one I truly regret.

Whether you’re planning to completely shift to selling products or you want to sell a mix of products and services, I belive the info in this Most Valuable Postcard will keep you happy, wealthy, and wise.

These two bonuses I’m offering add up get a real-world value of $297, which is what Kieran’s PYK sells for during the launch.

If you want to get PYK but you already have both my 3rd Conversion and MVP #1:

Then write me and I will give you something of equivalent or greater value as a bonus.

Kieran’s launch, including the special launch price and the Product Summer Bootcamp, runs until next week.

However, if you want to also get the free bonuses I am offering, there’s a tighter deadline, tomorrow, Sunday July 6, at 12 midnight PST.

The sales page for Kieran’s offer is below.

If you have knowledge or expertise… if you’ve been thinking about turning that into products you can sell… if you want Kieran’s guidance and even personal feedback on what you’re doing so can get this product done in the next eight weeks instead of the next eight months or the next eight years… then take a look at Kieran’s page below, and decide if Productize Your Knowledge is for you.

If you do decide to join, forward me your receipt. I will then get you hooked up with 3rd Conversion or Most Valuable Postcard #1 — or if you already have those, with something of equivalent or greater value.

Here’s the sales page:

https://bejakovic.com/pyk

New money from old courses

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Do you have an old course that’s not selling much any more?

Or do you know somebody else’s great course from a ways back?

If so, here’s my deal for you:

1. Hit reply.

2. Tell me what the course is.

3. In turn, I’ll share with you a resource about how to make new money from this old course, without paying for ads, or running a promo, or recruiting affiliates, or becoming an affiliate yourself.

A quick and permanent fix to lots of seemingly insurmountable problems

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Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, I heard an enlightening Jay Abraham story:

Jay was advising a client who was in deep trouble. The client had tried everything — “Everything!” — and was still about to go bankrupt.

After a half day of frustrating consultation — “I already tried that,” the client kept saying — Jay finally just threw up his hands, told the client to double his prices, and stormed out.

The client first thought Jay was an idiot and a jerk. Then, he had a beer with his colleagues, and thought a bit. He decided to double his prices exactly as Jay had advised. Suddenly, everything clicked and his business was saved.

Point being, pricing can be the quick and permanent fix to lots of seemingly insurmountable problems, which can otherwise suck up years of life and blood and effort, with nothing to show for it.

That applies to you if you’re a business owner, the way Jay Abraham’s client was. It also applies to you if you’re working for someone else.

And if that’s the case:

This week, until Thursday, I’m promoting Shaina Keren’s neat, elegant, and effective course Get A Raise.

Get A Raise is for you if you’re working for someone else, and you’re frustrated, and you think your only way out is to get a new job, or to quit your job and strike out on your own, or to go into a completely new career etc.

I’m not telling you not to do any of those things — you’re smart and grown up, and you can make your own decisions. All I am telling you is that there is another option as well, which is simply to “raise your prices” in the form of getting paid significantly more for what you already do, right where you are.

I’ve been out of the employee world for a good while, as evidenced by my telling the above story of Jay Abraham’s business client to sell Shaina’s course for people who work 9-5.

I’m promoting Shaina’s course nonetheless because I was so impressed by the results her clients got:

* An accountant, who was getting paid $50k, who went on to be paid $110k

* A secretary who was in reality the brains behind the entire company, who went from a $90k salary to a $150k salary

* A salesperson who had gradually taken on a kind of operator role, and who went from a salary of $250k to $500k

The best part is that Shaina’s process is new (at least to me, and I once wrote a book about salary negotiation) and it’s stress-minimal. Just prepare a single document the way Shaina tells you to prepare, and deliver it to your boss, along with a 55-word scripted explanation. No haggling, intimidating, or being intimidated necessary.

Shaina’s Get A Raise course is based on her $1,500 one-on-one coaching program. It contains the same information, without the handholding.

The course normally sells for $197, a fraction of what the coaching sells for. But right now, as a special deal for you and you alone, because you happen to be a reader of this newsletter, you can also get an extra $50 off the regular price.

That means the current deal on Get A Raise is just $147, 1/10th of Shaina’s coaching, which itself was 1/10th (or even less) of the salary increases that people who apply this process typically get.

This offer is good until this Thursday, June 26, at 12 midnight PST. If you wanna get it:

1. Head on over to https://bejakovic.com/raise. There’s no sales page for this baby, just an order form with a few testimonials (eg, “I still can’t believe I get to keep the job I love and feel well compensated.”)

2. Put in the code BEJAKOVIC50 at checkout. Make sure the price drops from $197 to $147 before you buy.

If you got questions or doubts, write me and I will address them either in private or, if appropriate, under the bright lights of this newsletter.

But as I wrote yesterday, I’ve never sold, bought, or even seen a course that offers such clear and direct ROI.

If you’re working a 9-5 job, and if you believe you’re not worth firing, then you are likely being underpaid, and Shaina’s course can help fix that.

Last call for Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle

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“To gain a fortune, marriage must be dared.”

I read that quote in a book that’s a couple thousand years old. I thought it was funny. I am sharing it with you now because it ties into my message tonight:

To gain a fortune in bonuses, a crazy Amazon purchase must be dared.

This is the last email I will send to promote the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle, which I have been promoting since Monday.

The deadline for this offer is tonight, 12 midnight PST.

In case you have successfully evaded or ignored or misunderstood all my emails about this offer, here’s the gist:

1. Get five (5) paperback copies of my original 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

2. Forward me your Amazon receipt

Do this crazy thing — buy five paperback copies of the same book — and I will give you the following bonuses:

#1. Copywriting Portfolio Secrets (Price last sold at: $97)

In this training, I show you how to build up your copywriting portfolio in the fastest and most efficient way, so you can start to win copywriting jobs even today. I show you the best way I’ve found to win 4- and 5-figure jobs I REALLY wanted, even when I wasn’t qualified for them, and how you can do it too.

I previously sold this training for $97. But it’s yours free inside the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle, which also includes my…

#2. No-Stress Negotiation For Well-Paid Copywriters (Price last sold at: $100)

This guide outlines my 7-part negotiating system, which I adapted from negotiation coach Jim Camp. This system kept me sane while I still regularly interviewed and worked with copywriting clients. Follow these seven principles, and you will end up making more money, working with better clients, and being able to stick to it for the long term.

I only offered this information before as part of the $100 Copy Zone guide, which also featured….

#3. How To Get Set Up On Upwork

This free bonus is an excerpt from a short self-published book I wrote once, How to Become a $150/Hr Sales Copywriter on Upwork: A Personal Success Story that Almost Anyone Can Replicate. It tells you how to actually get set up on Upwork — the details of your profile page, your description, your title.

If you combine this bonus with the two bonuses above — Copywriting Portfolio Secrets and No-Stress Negotiation — you have a great shot of winning a job on Upwork by the end of this week, or even today.

#4. Dan’s Timeless Wisdom (priceless, or $25k+)

Between August of 2019 and March 2020, I was in Dan Ferrari’s coaching group. As you might know, Dan started out as a star copywriter at The Motley Fool, and went on to become one of the most successful, most winning, big-money direct response copywriters working today.

Inside his coaching group, Dan dispensed copy critiques, marketing advice, and mystical koans to help his coaching students get to the next level.

At some point, I had the bright idea to start archiving the best and most valuable things that Dan was saying. I got 25 of them down, and they are all included in this document.

(By the way, I never tallied up the exact and rather painful amount of money I paid Dan for the coaching. It was north of $25k. I do know I made it all back, and then some, in just the first two months after I stopped with the coaching, thanks to just one tip I got from Dan.)

#5. Copy Riddles Lite (Price last sold at: $97)

Copy Riddles Lite includes one of the 20 rounds included in my full Copy Riddles program. The round is composed of two parts, in which you practice writing sales bullets, and compare what you wrote to what Mel Martin (as well as several other A-list copywriters) wrote starting with the same prompt.

Do this, and you very quickly realize how much skill went into Mel Martin’s bullets. Fortunately, you also very quickly manage to leech some of that skill from Mel Martin, without spending the months and years of agony it took him.

And once you get a taste for Martin’s skill, then the next step is natural:

#6. “How to Turn Fascinations into Fortunes: Copywriting Secrets To Fascinate, Captivate, And Dominate” (Price last sold at: $97)

Lawrence Bernstein, “the world’s most obsessed ad archivist,” once hunted down a collection of all of Mel Martin’s million-dollar ads for Boardroom, along with other control-beating ads Martin had written for the New York Times book division.

Lawrence then printed out the ads, stuffed them in an envelope, and mailed the collection to Marty Edelston, the founder and CEO of Boardroom.

Did Edelston get a kick out of seeing those old ads that helped build up Boardroom? He sure did.

Marty Edelston was so grateful for these ads that he sent Lawrence a thank-you note, along with a check for $2,000.

If you’d like to see these ads yourself, and study them, and model them for selling your own products, then Lawrence put them together into a collection he called “Turn Fascinations Into Fortunes.”

Lawrence got $2,000 as a thank you for putting together this collection of ads. He then sold this collection for $97.

But you don’t have to pay $2,000, or even $97 for “Fascinations Into Fortunes.”

I’ve made a special deal with Lawrence so you can get “Fascinations Into Fortunes” free, along with Copy Riddles Lite, as part of the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle.

#7. “How I made an extra $1404.53/month in Amazon royalties at the push of a button”

This report outlines a hack, which involves the push of a button — literally, that’s all there is to it — and which made me an extra ~$1.5k per month in Amazon royalties. I used this hack once, over the span of a few months, or rather a few weeks. I made money with it. And I never used it again.

I’m not saying anybody else should use this hack. I’m not saying anybody else should NOT use it either.

All I’m willing to do is to tell you what this hack is, why I’m no longer using it myself, and how you can try it out yourself, if you so choose, to make easy money off Amazon.

And that’s it.

Those seven bonuses, with a real-world value of $386, counting just what they sold for previously, are yours if you take me up on the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle offer.

Once again, if you want this, here’s what to do:

1. Get five (5) paperback copies of my original 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

2. Forward me your Amazon receipt.

I will then set you up with the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle.

The deadline is tonight at 12 midnight PST. After that, no more bonuses — I am merciless about this. To get in while the doors are still open:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

How I made an extra $1404.53/month in Amazon royalties at the push of a button

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This week, I’ve been promoting my Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle. It’s a total of $386 in real-world value bonuses, if you buy five (5) paperback copies of my original 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

This promo ends tomorrow, Thursday, at 12 midnight PST. But before the final deadline, I have one more bonus.

This final bonus doesn’t have a real-world value, except to me. That’s because I never sold this info, anywhere, at any price. In fact, I’ve never shared it with anyone, as far as I can remember, in real life or online. I’ve been sitting on it and keeping mum about it for years, ever since I hit upon it.

This info is a real make-money hack. You don’t come across many of those.

This hack involves the push of a button — literally, that’s all there is to it — that made me an extra ~$1.5k per month in Amazon royalties. I used this hack once, over the span of a few months, or rather a few weeks. I made money with it. And I never used it again.

I’m not saying anybody else should use this hack. I’m not saying anybody else should NOT use it either.

All I’m willing to do is to tell you what this hack is, why I’m no longer using it myself, and how you can try it out yourself, if you so choose, to make easy money off Amazon.

I’ve written up a report, “How I made an extra $1404.53/month in Amazon royalties at the push of a button.”

If you have already gotten my Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle, you can find the report in the bonus area.

I’d appreciate it if you don’t share the info in this report around. I have no way to enforce this — of course you can do what you like, and it’s no skin off my back if you do share this info.

But for reasons I list inside the report, I think it’s better if this stays as hush-hush as it can, and so I’d appreciate it if you use this info by yourself, or not use it, but keep mum about it either way, the same way I have been.

And if you haven’t yet gotten my Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle, there’s still time. The offer is this:

1. Get five (5) paperback copies of my original 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

2. Forward me your Amazon receipt.

I will then set you up with the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle, which includes my little report on this Amazon hack.

It also includes Copy Riddles Lite, Lawrence Bernstein’s Fascinations Into Fortunes, Dan Ferrari’s Timeless Wisdom, How To Get Set Up On Upwork, No-Stress Negotiation For Well-Paid Copywriters, and Copywriting Portfolio Secrets, for a total of $386 in real-world value, counting just what these offers sold for previously.

If you’d like to take me up on this now, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

10 reasons you might want to buy 5 paperback copies of my original 10 commandments book

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This morning, I made a rather outrageous offer, inviting people to buy five (5) paperback copies of my original 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

Why might you ever want to buy multiple physical copies of this 5-year-old book?

I tried to do the work for you, so here ere are 10 possible reasons why:

1. You want to support me in some modest way, and you want something concrete in return.

2. You make a habit of rereading books if you find them valuable. I know i do, and it’s served me very well. And a symbolic way to make rereading easier is to read a new copy each time.

3. So you can give give away copies to friends, family, colleagues, mentees who could benefit from it. (For example, marketing legend Matt Bacak recommends my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters to mentees in his Secret Email System mastermind.)

4. One of the A-list copywriters I profile in the book, Gene Schwartz, got so rich through writing copy that he lived in a Manhattan penthouse, kept a separate Manhattan office, and presumably sometimes went back to visit his parents in Montana and work there.

If, like Gene, you apply the ideas in this book diligently and you end up becoming the owner of multiple houses and work locations, you will need multiple copies on hand in different location.

Errr…. wait. If you think that’s stretching it, try the next one:

5. For ballast. Another of the A-list copywriters in my book was Claude Hopkins. Hopkins hated the sea but owned an ocean-going yacht, because when you’re effectively a billionaire, the way he was thanks to copywriting, you gotta spend your money somehow. But yachts need to be weighted down for stability, and what better way with a few extra copies of 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters?

A little more seriously:

6. As prizes for a giveaway. In fact, Robin Timmers, “the largest copywriter in the Netherlands,” has took me up on this offer earlier today. When he sent me his receipt, he said that he’s thinking of using copies of my book as giveaways, presumably in some kind of contest or game with his audience.

7. As a coffee table talking point. The physical dimensions of my book are small and if you put one copy on your coffee table, it might get ignored.

But if you lay out five copies, all next to each other, that’s sure to elicit questions from guests. “What’s that about? Why five copies of the same book?”

Good thing is, the book is filled with interesting anecdotes so you can have a ready in to become the eloquent and fascinating host for a few moments.

8. To serve as a doorstop, paperweight, kindling, or a stable platform to put your laptop on when you do Zoom calls, particularly copywriting client calls, which you are likely to have many more of when you start religiously following the commandments outlined in this book.

9. So you can rip up a few copies and take out particularly significant passages and pin them on your pinboard so they remind you while you write copy… and still maintain a fresh copy or two to sit in your library.

10. Because buying five (5) paperback copies of the 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters is my condition to get the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle, which currently includes everything listed below.

Tomorrow I will add something else to this bonus bundle. If you’ve already bought your five paperback copies and sent me your receipt, the extra stuff will appear automagically in the course area where the bonuses are hosted.

And if you haven’t yet taken me up on this offer, here are the details of what’s inside the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle, and how exactly to get it:

#1. Copywriting Portfolio Secrets ($97 value)

In this training, I show you how to build up your copywriting portfolio in the fastest and most efficient way, so you can start to win copywriting jobs even today. I show you the best way I’ve found to win 4- and 5-figure jobs I REALLY wanted, even when I wasn’t qualified for them, and how you can do it too.

I previously sold this training for $97. But it’s yours free inside the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle, which also includes my…

#2. No-Stress Negotiation For Well-Paid Copywriters ($100 value)

This guide outlines my 7-part negotiating system, which I adapted from negotiation coach Jim Camp. This system kept me sane while I still regularly interviewed and worked with copywriting clients. Follow these seven principles, and you will end up making more money, working with better clients, and being able to stick to it for the long term.

I only offered this information before as part of the $100 Copy Zone guide, which also featured….

#3. How To Get Set Up On Upwork

This free bonus is an excerpt from a short self-published book I wrote once, How to Become a $150/Hr Sales Copywriter on Upwork: A Personal Success Story that Almost Anyone Can Replicate. It tells you how to actually get set up on Upwork — the details of your profile page, your description, your title.

If you combine this bonus with the two bonuses above — Copywriting Portfolio Secrets and No-Stress Negotiation — you have a great shot of winning a job on Upwork by the end of this week, or even today.

And finally, this first part of my Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle also includes…

#4. Dan’s Timeless Wisdom (priceless, or $25k+)

Between August of 2019 and March 2020, I was in Dan Ferrari’s coaching group. As you might know, Dan started out as a star copywriter at The Motley Fool, and went on to become one of the most successful, most winning, big-money direct response copywriters working today.

Inside his coaching group, Dan dispensed copy critiques, marketing advice, and mystical koans to help his coaching students get to the next level.

At some point, I had the bright idea to start archiving the best and most valuable things that Dan was saying. I got 25 of them down, and they are all included in this document.

(By the way, I never tallied up the exact and rather painful amount of money I paid Dan for the coaching. It was north of $25k. I do know I made it all back, and then some, in just the first two months after I stopped with the coaching, thanks to just one tip I got from Dan.)

So there you go. $197 in real-world value if you count what people have paid me for these bonuses previously… or $25,000+ in value if you count the blood, flesh, and hair it took for me to get this information to you… or ∞ in value, if you actually take these ideas and apply them, and keep applying them.

And if that’s not enough for you, my Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle will have several other bonuses as well. I will announce those over the coming days, and they will be automatically added to the bonus area if you get my offer before Thursday at 12 midnight PST.

As for what that offer is:

Like I said, it costs $50.

And it’s to get five (5) paperback copies of my original 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

Put in your order on Amazon, forward me your Amazon receipt, and I will set you up with Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle. If you’d like to do that now, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

10 books I could not write from content I’ve created recently

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I have a habit, 10 daily ideas, that I got from James Altucher.

It’s the first thing I do each morning after turning off the meatlocker like air-conditioning in my apartment and brushing my teeth.

This morning, the topic was “10 new books I could write from the content I’ve been writing about lately.”

It’s a prompt I come back to from time to time. I go through emails I have written recently, and ask myself how I could generalize them, or combine them with other emails have written, and turn them into a book or a course or whatever.

Here’s what I came up with today:

#1. “101 Magic Words”

I already got 5: “Rosebud,” “One,” “Big,” “Black,” “Love.”

#2. “Mystery Merchants: How To Create And Profit From Curiosity”

Everything from Robert Collier to Novak Djokovic.

#3. The nature of reality

Ok that’s not a title, but it’s the core idea, and one I come back to a lot in these emails, including a few times over the past few weeks (“Amputees needed,” “The dark side of social proof”).

#4. Overcoming procrastination/avoidance/resistance to doing what’s needed

I try to distance myself from this topic and from the people who seek out such info, but the fact is I’m one of them and that’s why I find myself writing about it repeatedly.

#5. “How to be an effective teacher”

Certainly not by writing a book titled “How to be an effective teacher.” But I have written a lot, including recently, about how to get people to pay attention, to understand, to accept, to remember, to apply information.

#6. “Online Info Business Quick Start Guide”

Yeah, I won’t be writing that, but I could, since I have content that would definitely fit into such a book.

#7. “Influencers, or what really happens when somebody has a platform”

This is connected in my mind to #3 above, the nature of reality. I’ve written about the strangeness having an audience, and, when you think about it, the equal strangeness of being in somebody else’s audience. Not a practical topic, but interesting to me.

#8. “How To Choose A Niche”

Again, this won’t be happening, but it could.

#9. “Consumption & Digestion”

Related to #4 above. I have an entire training on this, which I’ve sold for good money before. But some part of that training, plus a few recent emails, could become a book as well.

#10. “Flip The Script”

Oren Klaff unfortunately already wrote a bad book by this title, which is a shame, because I find the topic very interesting. I know I could develop it with lots of examples, from different disciplines and different eras (I wrote an email once about a 4th-century B.C. greek general who “flipped the script” to keep assassins from his bedside and poison from his cup).

I don’t know what will come from these ideas. Maybe something. Maybe nothing. In any case, there’s no lack of opportunities.

The point is, if you are writing emails daily, generating a bit of content regularly, this can serve multiple purposes.

It can make you sales today.

It can build a relationship with readers so they keep reading tomorrow.

And it can be repurposed next week or month into a book that gets you lots of new subs to your list, or to a course that gets you lots of new dollars under your mattress.

That’s why my subject line today was “10 books I could not write” rather than “10 books I could write.” Because the idea is, these books will already have been written — by somebody, not me, at least not in that moment. All I really have to do, in that moment, is the editorial work of pulling together that writing and adding a cover on it. And of course, reaping the benefits.

It can be the same for you.

It happens bit by bit. Within a few weeks of daily action, you already have resources that you can do something more with.

But you do gotta take some action though. Maybe even now.

If you want my help in starting and sticking with the habit of writing daily emails, so you can make sales, and grow a relationship with readers, and have the building blocks of future books and courses:

https://bejakovic.com/deh