Business Ideas

Mechanical process for writing a sales letter, book, or New Yorker article

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A traumatic new development in my life:

I’ve lost my Kindle.

I forgot it on the bus at the end of the 12-hour bus ride I wrote about yesterday.

It feels a little like a part of my brain has been cut out. I ordered a new Kindle and will get that part of my brain put back in within a few days.

But until that happens, and on my subsequent bus ride yesterday, I found myself with nothing to read.

So I went into the RSS reader app on my phone (I still use RSS), where I follow a bunch of blogs I don’t remember subscribing to over the past 15 years.

Yesterday, somewhere in the wooded heart of Croatia, halfway from Zagreb to the Adriatic coast, I read an article from one such blog, titled the McPhee method, about the writing process of John McPhee.

I’ve known John McPhee as a Pulitzer-winning nature writer, but I didn’t realize he has also been a long-time contributor to the only magazine I read and have read for years, the New Yorker.

In fact, the article I read about McPhee was written by a guy, James Somers, who also writes for the New Yorker, and who follows the McPhee method himself.

I found the McPhee Method very curious reading because it pretty much describes the process I’ve stumbled upon instinctively when writing sales copy and more recently when writing my new 10 Commandments book.

It’s McPhee’s (and my) fix for the misery of long-form, nonfiction writing. The idea is to replace writing (hard) with the joy of research (fun) and the mule work of organization (mechanical but easy).

If you’re interested in writing something longer and less solipsistic than a daily email, then how John McPhee done it, described in the article below, is worth a read:

https://jsomers.net/blog/the-mcphee-method

Yesterday didn’t work out as I planned

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Yesterday I left Stockholm, Sweden, around 10am, with plans to fly and arrive, after a layover in Belgrade, Serbia, to my home town of Zagreb, Croatia, by about 2:30pm.

Things didn’t work out as I planned.

First, I didn’t make my connecting flight in Belgrade (I blame Nikola Tesla Airport for this).

Second, there were no other flights from Belgrade to Zagreb yesterday, so I decided to take the bus, which left at 4:15pm. The drive is about four hours, but factor in about an hour for the border crossing, and we should be in Zagreb by 10pm?

Again, things didn’t work out as I planned.

I had many adventures last night, including…

– Walking through the corn fields for hours alongside the 3-mile-long border-crossing queue…

– Seeing an old Serbian man on my bus watching two-black-dudes-and-a-blonde hardcore porn on his phone…

– Border police openly asking for a bribe of two beers and 50 euro to allow the bus to skip the line and cut down the wait by an hour and a half…

– Stumbling around an Orthodox cemetery in the dark, in no man’s land, between the Serbian and Croatian border, at the witching hour…

– Driving out of the way to some small village to swap bus drivers, Le Mans style, after our bus driver became too exhausted to drive in his 10th hour behind the wheel…

… but I really can’t go into any of that in tremendous detail. That’s because my bus, which was supposed to arrive around 10pm, ended up arriving at 4:05am, almost 12 hours after it set out.

I dragged my carcass to the nearest hotel and had a lousy and short night of sleep.

Right now, as I write this, I’m exhausted. And in any case, it’s soon time for me to get back on the bus and head for the Croatian coast, so I can meet up with the rest of the numerous and warlike Bejakovic clan in the seaside resort town of Opatija.

So without further ado, let me just get to my offer. It’s my Simple Money Emails course, which I’ve promoted a few times over the past week, and made sales of each time I promoted it.

In one email this week I featured a testimonial I got for SME from online creator Kieran Drew. Yesterday, I got another high-profile testimonial, this one from Maliha Mannan, founder of The Side Blogger, who helps people monetize their skills via blogging and newsletters. Says Maliha:

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So… since you’re promoting SME, thought I’d share this…

Like Kieran Drew, I too, go through this course… often… haven’t really counted, but often… and yet, I forget stuff. Today, I was re-reading the 12 rules of emails and when I came across #6, I was like… Oookaayyy… I just violated rule #6… inside a promo email no less!

Anyway. Good stuff. One of my more underrated investments of all time.

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For more information on this underrated investment, or if you’d like to help support my daily bus habit:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Masculine and feminine hitchhiking

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Here’s a bit of an allegory about life and marketing:

My friend Marci, part of the group of my long-time friends who assembled during my current visit to Stockholm, told a story of hitchhiking across Europe at age 20 or so.

Marci is from Hungary. At the time of this story, he was living in Budapest. As an adventure, he decided to hitchhike to Amsterdam.

(Of course, when Marci’s mom found out about this, she threatened, begged, and offered to bribe him with anything to keep him from carrying out his plans. “I’ll buy you a plane ticket,” she said. “You will get murdered.” “I’ll have a heart attack.” Marci, for his own reasons, refused to buckle and decided to go on with the hitchhiking.)

On day zero, Marci walked to a gas station where the town ends and the highway begins.

He positioned himself along the road where lots of traffic was passing. He held up his cardboard “Austrian border” sign to his chest. He smiled. And he started waiting…

And waiting…

And waiting.

Nobody was stopping to pick him up. Hours passed.

At some point, another dude on foot walked by. He saw Marci, and did a bit of a double-take.

“Have you ever hitchhiked before?” the dude asked. Marci admitted that he hadn’t.

“You won’t ever get picked up like that.” said the dude. “You have to go to the gas station and start asking people to take you.”

Marci, being new at all this, decided to follow the dude’s advice. So he went to the gas station.

It took him a long time to muster up the courage, but eventually he scoped out a couple that looked nice and friendly enough.

He jogged up to them and asked if they were going towards the Austrian border and could take him.

And… no.

Marci went back to stalking the gas station. It took more time to muster up more courage to ask somebody else. Once again no.

One more time… and another no.

After a half hour or so, Marci had managed to ask five prospects if they were headed his way and would give him a lift.

All said no.

Marci, learning his first lesson, went back to his spot near the highway.

As he was readjusting his cardboard sign for an optimal position on his chest, he spotted the dude who had earlier given him advice about approaching gas-pumping drivers and asking them for a lift.

The dude was lying in the grass and reading a book. And then, Marci saw the dude’s friends arrive. The dude jumped up from the grass, greeted his friends, and the lot of them headed towards the gas station.

They split up. They started instantly asking anyone and everyone who stopped to take them to just the next gas station down the road.

Within five minutes, as Marci looked over from behind his cardboard sign, the dude and his friends all hitched rides and were off.

I think you see where this is going.

The short and shorter of it is, Marci learned his second lesson. He swallowed his pride, went back to the gas station, and did as the dude did.

He asked anybody and everybody who stopped to take him to the next gas station. He got picked up soon enough.

It was the beginning of a long adventure that Marci still talks about fondly. But I won’t retell all that here. Really, as far as marketing goes, the part above is the relevant part.

It’s a kind of allegory for what I’ve heard described as “masculine mojo” versus “feminine mojo.”

Feminine mojo you are probably well familiar with.

It’s what Marci was doing from behind his cardboard sign. It’s also what blog posts are about… as well as Facebook and LinkedIn posts… and even emails like this one.

Masculine mojo, on the other hand, is more like what got Marci to Amsterdam.

It doesn’t necessarily involve going up to strangers, but it does require proactively approaching people, one by one, and asking if they will give you a lift — or a job, or their advice, or help, or whatever — and keeping at it until somebody says yes.

The point of this allegory is not that masculine mojo is better than feminine mojo, or the other way around.

My point is simply to remind you that these two poles exist. In many situations, a blend of both will give you the best results. And when one pole stops working, it’s almost certain that the other pole will work.

By the way, the terms “masculine mojo” and “feminine mojo” are ones I picked up from Travis Sago.

If you’ve been reading my emails for a while, you might get the sense I am about to plug Travis’s Royalty Ronin community, of which I am a member. And that would normally be true. Except, I got the following question from reader Michael Hinchliffe the last time I plugged Royalty Ronin:

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I have no idea what the Ronin thing is?!! Even after listening to Travis Sago yacking on, I’m none the wiser. What is it?

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At bottom, Royalty Ronin is a place to learn from Travis and to apply his ideas. The guy is as close to the second coming of Claude Hopkins as I’ve been able to find, and the results he gets and his students get back up my claim.

Beyond that, Ronin is a place where you can get access to all of Travis’s big courses on topics such as selling high-ticket offers ($5k-$50k) without sales calls and with email only… or partnering with business owners to take over and monetize their “trashcan assets”… or running communities on the back of an email list for quadruple the total value.

These courses, which have sold for a combined $12k in the past, are all available for free inside Royalty Ronin.

Finally, Royalty Ronin is also a place to partner with over 500 other business owners, marketers, copywriters, and investors, plus of course Travis himself.

Travis keeps fiddling with the front-end offer for Royalty Ronin.

There’s currently a free 7-day trial.

In the past, that trial has both appeared and disappeared. It’s not clear that, the next time this free trial disappears, it won’t disappear for good.

If you’d like to see for yourself what Travis is about, and why I keep recommending his Royalty Ronin community:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

Endless traffic partners for an “info product” funnel factory

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Yesterday, I promised to tell you how I would find endless traffic partners for your “info product” funnel factory, starting from nothing.

But before you spend time reading this long and lionhearted email, let me warn you:

What I’m about to share is speculative rather than proven.

It’s what I would do, but the fact is, the one and only time I tried anything like this, it didn’t produce any results.

I’m guessing that’s because I gave up after just one outreach message… because I prolly picked a bad person to reach out to… plus, my offer wasn’t as tempting as I would know to make it now.

I do still think this process has lots of promise, whether or not you’re starting from nothing. That’s why I’m sharing it with you.

Still with me? If you are, let me open up:

Last year, I read a post inside the Royalty Ronin community with the title:

“I will BRIBE you to do this deal!”

The “deal” was:

Go on YouTube… find people with big audiences in hobby niches like dogs or woodworking… and offer to produce a newsletter for them for free.

The guy making this post was James Foster, one of the more active and successful people inside the Royalty Ronin. James was so confident this would produce good results that, as a joke incentive to get people to try this out, he offered a $2 Dogecoin bill to people who actually put the idea into to action.

James’s reasoning:

1. Most YouTubers live and die with the popularity and reach of their next video

2. Of course, most YouTubers don’t have a newsletter, and depend entirely on the whims of YouTube algorithm

3. You can offer to create a newsletter for such people for them, for free.

The offer is, the YouTube Channel owner drives their viewers to the newsletter, and in turn, you produce emails that drive their own viewers back to their new videos (something that YouTube won’t reliably do).

You profit by also using the newsletter to promote other relevant stuff. (You can even offer to split the profits with the YouTube owner, or you don’t have to.)

I am a bit of a monkey-see-monkey-do kind of monkey. Plus I liked the idea of getting rewarded for running a little experiment.

So when I read James’s idea, I decided to give it a go.

I went on YouTube and, after a bit of snooping, found a YouTube channel with Qigong videos, delivering vague instructions over B-roll footage of mountains.

The channel had hundreds of videos, over a million followers, and of course no newsletter.

Sidebar:

In the past, I’ve experimented with cold outreach. And I’ve learned that cold outreach is drastically more likely to get a response if I put in the work up front to do something for people… instead of simply offering to do so only after gotten a green light from them.

So what to do here?

I set up a new free Beehiiv account… branded it with the branding from the YouTube channel… created an email to simulate how a regular weekly email would look, with a screenshot of their latest video… and signed up the owner of the YouTube account to my newsletter.

All this took like 20-30 minutes, because really I just repurposed stuff from their YouTube channel.

I then wrote the owner a separate email, to explain what’s going on and to make my partner proposition.

And like I said… I never heard back from the guy.

I never followed up or pursued this further, the $2 Dogecoin bill be damned.

The reason is, I had other things that are already bubbling on the stove for me, and this idea, cool and tempting though it sounded, failed to produce an immediate win for me.

That might be because the person I was writing to was a 16-year old Chinese boy who didn’t speak English who was just playing with AI (I don’t know this for a fact, but it is quite possible, based on the email address on the YouTube channel).

Or maybe it was that my offer, no risk and all reward though I tried to make it, still seemed confusing and unattractive. My reasoning:

If you read my emails, you’re likely to know that an email newsletter is immensely valuable. But the majority of the world has never heard of email marketing and cannot believe it is as effective as it actually is.

And so explaining to YouTube channel owners how they will drive traffic to a newsletter I create… and I will drive their viewers back to them… and how this is good for you and for them — that’s already complicated and not clear. And not-clear offers often don’t get takers.

That’s why I think a much better, much clearer offer would be to create NOT a custom newsletter, but a custom info product, along with a sales page, branded with the YouTube channel’s identity, on some topic that their audience already has shown to care about.

I speculate this kind of offer would be much easier for YouTube channel owners to be interested in and to say yes to partnering on. “I made this product that your people want, send them here and we split the profits.” Much clearer, no?

Plus, the nice thing in this case is, you’re still building an email list, except an email list of info product buyers, instead of just random newsletter subs.

So that’s my idea for finding endless traffic partners for all the info product funnels you could stomach to create.

Of course, creating an info product and a surrounding funnel is nowhere as trivial as signing up for Beehiiv and creating a welcome email.

Except… it can be, thanks to the “AI Super Agent” I’ve been talking about the past couple days. This “AI Super Agent” does market research to figure out which info product ideas are likely to be a hit… it creates the product based on the winningest ideas… plus it generates all the sales copy.

I wouldn’t use this “AI Super Agent” for creating info products for personality-based list like my own.

But for partnering with people who already have large audiences… in hobby niches where much of the info is already out there, but just needs to be synthesized and pacakaged up… I think this AI gizmo could be very a very useful and lucrative tool.

If you wanna find out more about this “AI Super Agent,” then the guy who created it has a webinar in which he demoes it and explains how it works:

https://bejakovic.com/aisuperagent

The foundation that personal positioning is built on

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Back when I was researching my new 10 Commandments book, about con men, pick up artists, and among others, door-to-door salesmen, I came across a 10-minute documentary titled, “The Bronzer.”

The Bronzer is about a door-to-door salesman named Stu Larkin, who has been selling bronzed baby shoes his whole life.

(The movie came out 10+ years ago, but Larkin is still at it as far as I know.)

There weren’t any useful door-to-door selling techniques in this documentary. But there was a kind of wake-up call.

Bronzed baby shoes are nice. I guess they sell for $50 a pair? or $100? or $200? In any case, Larkin had this to say:

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The thing about selling that I’m kind of disturbed about, because I know that I’m so good at what I do, is that I think I missed my calling in something else. That I could have made millions and millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars selling something else. Like someone would be going, “We know that guy. He’s the most renowned salesman in the world.”

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There are good techniques for positioning yourself at the top end of your market, and I want to write my next book about those.

But those good techniques are like the blueprints for building a skyscraper. The foundation of that skyscraper, without which even the most sound blueprints will result in a janky leaning tower that nobody wants to live in, is choosing which market you will be in to begin with.

Fact one:

It takes as much skill to sell to people who aren’t interested in buying or who have no money… as to sell to people who both are eager to buy and who have the money to do so. Often, it takes more skill and more work, far more, to sell to the first group.

Fact two:

If you’re selling something right now, then there’s sure to be another market where your exact skills, and maybe even your exact offers, could sell for 5x or 10x or 100x of what you’re selling for now.

Of course, it’s not an easy or light decision to switch markets and to basically set sail in an unfamiliar and possibly shark-infested sea. But it’s worth thinking about, or at least that’s what I tell myself, as I’ve been thinking about it too.

I’ll leave you with that seed for today.

Meanwhile, as that seed germinates, if you wanna see what valuable techniques of door-to-door salesman I did find, and how those tie into related fields like copywriting, standup comedy, and con games:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

The guy who sold the Brooklyn Bridge (lights)

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A long time ago, in a chair very very near away, I read a story about a guy who bought the Brooklyn Bridge.

Well, he bought the lights of the Brooklyn Bridge, which were due to be replaced with new, brighter, more energy-efficient lights.

And then, some time later, one by one, the same guy sold the same lights, at a profit.

This guy, name Joe Pilato, flips random stuff for fun, because the business is not really all that great.

Pilato bought 123 of the Brooklyn Bridge lights for about $4.3k, and and he “made in total” between $13k and $14k. It’s not clear if that’s profit or revenue because it took Pilato a year to offload the lights — and along the way he had to pay for storage, transportation, cleaning, and even marketing.

But do the numbers really matter?

That snippet, “the guy who sold the Brooklyn Bridge (lights),” was good enough to get Pilato featured in a national magazine (one of a few still left with circulation of millions).

It will be a tagline he can use for the rest of his natural life to sell himself and his “flipping insider” knowledge if he were to create a bizopp course out of it, or a book on the matter, or if he wanted to get featured on podcasts or when Oprah does a segment on flipping (yeah right).

The point being:

A notable, simple, fascinating tagline, which is actually based on a pretty lousy reality (the numbers again are maybe $5k in profit, over the course of a year, and are completely unscalable), is worth more in positioning gold than an unremarkable, complicated, unglamorous summary of a genuinely successful project (“I flipped a beat-down house in Towson, MD, in just 4 months and made a profit of $67k, and that was just one of five such projects in the last year”).

He who has ears, let him hear.

Meanwhile, one thing I didn’t realize until pretty recent (I’m a slow learner, and much isolated from the world) is that “the guy who sold the Brooklyn Bridge” is such an effective tagline because it’s actually been used to describe a number of famous con men over the past century.

Con men have legitimately been selling the Brooklyn Bridge, often for cheap, to very gullible newcomers to New York, who were hoping to get something for nothing, but who ended up getting nothing for something.

That’s a bit of research that that didn’t make it into my new 10 Commandments book.

But there is a lot in that book about con men, and about valuable and even legal marketing and business and persuasion lessons that can be extracted from their sneaky and deceiving ways.

If that’s something you can imagine finding interesting:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

A billionaire’s personal positioning test

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A few days ago, a new reader and Copy Riddles member named Tim wrote me an email with the subject line, “a billionaire’s bullet idea.” Tim’s email said:

“This guy, Jason Cohen, founded a few billion dollar companies. Anyways, he wrote an article you might like and seems relevant to Copy Riddles.”

Tim linked to Cohen’s article, “The Opposite Test,” the gist of which was the following:

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So here’s my Opposite Test: For each feature/benefit bullet point, construct its negative and see if that statement is ridiculous. Would anyone be able to construct a rational strategy with that negative? Perhaps a competitor already has! If the negative is indeed ridiculous, if it would be impossible to have a product or positioning or strategy that included the negative, it means this bullet point is trivial, obvious, mandatory, or at least undifferentiating from the competition.

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This one of those ideas that is not 100% true but is 100% useful. Try it yourself and see. Take any well-established promise or positioning idea in your industry, even one that seems unassailable, and turn it around:

“Get rich quickly” => “Get rich slowly” [worked for Gary Bencivenga]

“How to Win Friends and Influence People” => “Winning Through Intimidation” [worked for Robert Ringer]

“Getting to Yes” => “Start with No” [worked for Jim Camp]

The underlying psychology here is that we don’t just align ourselves to certain people and ideas. Just as often, or probably more often, we align ourselves in opposition to certain people and ideas. The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t… unless you’ve really grown to hate the devil you know, in which, case any other devil, no matter how bad, will do.

I’m telling you this because I’m thinking of the next book I want to write, about personal positioning, and I’m testing out ideas for that.

In the meantime, I can point you to my new 10 Commandments book in case you still haven’t read that. My book has been on sale since May and has slowly accumulated 26 reviews, all of them 5 star. Here’s one from the same Tim who wrote me about the Opposite Test:

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“A new favorite”

You know, I’ve read a lot of books in this space and this is one of my favorites. He skips over the common knowledge and dives into really eye opening insights.

He condenses lots of research into a really fun book. I’ll be rereading this one soon.

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If you want to read probably the best thing I’ve written to date, in a fun and small package, for just $4.99:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

What everybody ought to know… about this online investor business

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This morning, I was sitting in a noisy cafe with music playing and coffee machines steaming away and a lampshade swinging above my head in the breeze. Amid all this confusion, I was trying to focus. I was looking for offers to promote.

I have several new and interesting offers slated for the next days and weeks. But what for today?

One of my go-tos on days like today is Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin community, which I lurk, learn, and even occasionally participate in.

Being in Ronin and following Travis’s advice has made me tens of thousands of dollars over the past 18 months that I’ve been subscribed to it, via new offers I’ve made, and via making me more money out of offers I already have. That’s why I keep recommending Ronin in my emails whenever I have a bit of a chance.

So this morning, I went to check out the Ronin front page.

In the past, Travis ran a free trial offer for Ronin. It makes sense to do a free trial because Ronin is 1) expensive ($299/month) and 2) a monthly charge (which everyone hates, including people who can afford it).

For a long time, that free trial offer was the norm.

But then, at odd times, including times when I promoted Ronin previously, it turned out that the free trial had disappeared. Then it came back. Then it disappeared again. Then the price dropped. Then it went back to normal. I guess Travis is constantly experimenting with the offer.

Today, when I thought of promoting Ronin, I went to check what the current front page looks like.

At first, I was confused. Then shocked.

It turns out there’s no free trial at the moment. Ok.

It turns out the price is the usual $299/month. Ok.

What had me confused and shocked is that right now, the entire Ronin community is open.

You can see all the members inside, read all their posts, as well as the comments.

You can see the “Welcome! START HERE!” post, which links to the “8-Day New Ronin Action Plan,” which is also currently open to everyone. You can see Travis’s advice on topics like partner getting, licensing, and “coffee dates,” and how to do that in just the next few days.

The only stuff that remains restricted, unless you’re actually a paying Ronin member, is the courses area, which contains about a dozen specialized trainings. Plus you don’t get access to the Royalty Ronin bonuses, which is a library of Travis’s courses that adds up to $12k in real-world value. And of course, you can’t participate or post in the community, but only observe and read.

This extra stuff is definitely worth paying for. But even without it, there’s enough valuable info inside the freely available Ronin community to fill a few airplane hangars with.

At least for the moment.

The current “everything in the open” offer might be a glitch. Maybe it will disappear very soon.

Maybe. Or maybe it’s just old-school marketing.

I remember a long time ago Andre Chaperon talking about lead magnets you didn’t have to sign up for.

Andre would simply lay out the entire, high-value lead magnet on his web site as a web page. He would then have an optin at the end of all that for the people who had gone to the trouble of reading the whole thing, which, unsurprisingly, turned out to be very high-quality leads.

Of course, there’s nothing new under the sun, and Andre didn’t invent this strategy.

It goes back millions of years, back to when brontosauruses ran direct-response weight-loss offers in the Jurrasic Times.

A little more seriously, it goes back at least to the 1940s, and the famous “What everybody ought to know… About This Stock and Bonds Business” ad.

That ad ran in major newspapers across the country. It featured 6,000 densely packed words of info and education about stocks and bonds, and a buried offer at the end, which drew tons of highly qualified leads for Merryl Lynch for over 10 years.

I thought about how to adapt that headline to the currently open Royalty Ronin community.

“What everybody ought to know about…”

I tried out different angles.

Eventually I remembered something Travis repeats over and over in Ronin, about how he really doesn’t have any ambition to be an entrepreneur or business owner. Running a business day after day is not for him, he says.

Rather, his goal is to be an investor, somebody who makes small bets that don’t cost much if they don’t pay off, but that have unlimited upside and the potential to pay him for years to come if they do work out.

Specifically, Travis talks about about how to be an online investor, making small bets on your own online products or audiences, or those of others.

And if you have no money to invest? That’s okay. Travis also talks about how you can invest other things, like your resourcefulness, your willingness to make connections, or your skills and expertise.

In any case, if you want to know what everybody ought to know about this online investor business, here’s an incredible free resource for you:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

Ben Settle & Dan Kennedy both said it — but who was the original source?

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Here’s the history of the men who influenced me to be where I am today, writing you this email:

Patient readers know my susceptibility and fondness for the phrase, “The only real security is your ability to produce.”

I read that idea in a Ben Settle email back in 2017, which got me to sign up to Ben’s Email Players newsletter, which eventually convinced me to start sending daily emails myself.

As Ben wrote in that email, he himself got the “ability to produce” idea from an even older Dan Kennedy newsletter. I thought it stopped there, even though I always felt that “ability to produce” is an odd phrase for Dan Kennedy to invent. (Perhaps that’s why it stuck in my mind so.)

But, as I found out only last week, this phrase is not a strange Dan Kennedy construction.

The quote about “ability to produce” actually goes back to Douglas MacArthur, one of only five 5-star generals in the history of the United States.

MacArthur’s quote, such as I could trace it, was “Security lies in our ability to produce.” MacArthur was speaking quite literally, about national security and the importance of industry and agriculture to that.

But I’m not here to talk tariffs. I’m telling you this because this is a newsletter about ideas, specifically insightful ideas, even more specifically, insightful ideas that you can apply and bring into reality and profit from.

And on that note, I have a new offer for you. It’s a $3.99 ebook called Click Send Earn.

This book is written by Igor Kheifets. I’ve known Igor for a while. Back in 2021, I gave a presentation inside his List Building Lifestyle mastermind, which eventually turned into my Simple Money Emails course.

I bought Igor’s book last week because, frankly, I was curious about the funnel he was using to sell it.

But I read the book as well. And I was surprised, in a very positive sense.

As Igor said somewhere (in private, not inside this book) he could charge $97-$297 for the info that’s inside. And I believe it. So I reached out to him and asked to promote his book, for the following three reasons:

First off, this book is very clearly written by Igor, not by AI, not a ghostwriter.

Second, it lays out how Igor walked the familiar rags-to-riches route — which in his case was literal, because he used to clean toilets at a hotel once upon a time, and now makes millions a year via email.

The book lays out lessons learned along the way and gives you the business blueprint that Igor uses today, and which he teaches others, for how to build and grow and monetize email lists.

Third, this book has ideas in it that were new and insightful for me. For example, it was early in Igor’s book (p. 11) that I learned that that “ability to produce” quote is not from Ben Settle or even Dan Kennedy, but from Douglas MacArthur.

Like I said, when I bought Igor’s book, I bought it out of curiosity around the marketing.

But I thought my audience — “MY audience is different” — is too sophisticated when it comes to email marketing to profit from a book titled Click Send Earn.

Well, like I said, I’ve since read the book. I’ve learned new things and gotten value from it. I can get behind and endorse everything he teaches inside this book. That’s why I asked Igor to promote it.

And that’s what I’m doing right now, recommending it to you.

If you’re looking for a proven (by Igor, and his students) blueprint for a successful email-based business, then buy this book, read it, apply it, and profit. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/clicksendearn

The catch behind my “me write book for you, for free” offer

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Yesterday, I wrote an email with the following offer:

“What if I write, publish, and even run ads to a book for you and your business… for free?”

… to which I got a bunch of confused responses, asking me what exactly I’m offering. A sampling:

#1: “Sounds too good to be true.”

#2: “I guess I don’t understand yet how the full offer works. So you provide a free service, and what’s in it for you?”

#3: “How long, what’s involved, and how much?”

Maybe there’s a copywriting lesson here. In the words of the man with the French castle, David Ogilvy, “The customer is not a moron. She’s your wife.”

I’ve never been married, and inshallah, I never will be. But I can imagine that, if over breakfast on a beautiful Sunday morning, I were to grin at my fairy-wife and say, “Honey, how about we go spend the day with your mother?” she would cross her arms and say, “What gives? What are you up to? What’s the catch?”

So let me be 100% clear about my offer, what’s involved, and what the catch is. My offer is this:

I write, publish, and even run ads to a book for you and your business… for free. Just like I said yesterday.

As for what’s involved, I have to admit I don’t know.

I’ve written and self-published a lot of books for myself. I’ve never written or published a book for somebody else, and I have no idea how long that might take.

I do know I am only willing to do this if you already have a good deal of content (emails, podcast episodes, videos, etc) that I could repurpose into a book… or if you have a good deal of expertise that I could pull out of you fairly quickly, over a few hours on Zoom.

And now the catch:

The end-goal of this book would be to drive impressed and eager readers to an existing, scalable, high-ticket offer of yours, which is already proven and selling.

We’d split the profits on those sales in some way we agree on. I would only get paid once this new money is sitting in your bank account.

In other words, I’m willing to do all the work and take on all the risk, including paying for ads.

If this process works out as planned, you’ve just come across a new way to make extra sales of your high-ticket offer, ideally every month, without having to do anything, either now or in the future.

If it doesn’t work, you’ve got a book on Amazon that you can point people to with pride.

So now that you know the full details, how about we go spend the day with your mother?

If this fully transparent proposal sounds like it could benefit you, then hit reply, and let’s talk in more detail.

And if you know somebody else who might be a fit — say, somebody with a podcast that’s been running for a while, with a $1k+ course or membership or group coaching, but no book — then forward them my email, and maybe do them a favor.