Business Ideas

If sales calls are not your thing…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The oddest info product creators on my list

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Last night, I sent an email asking my readers if they sell their own info products. That email got a LOT of response.

Of course, most people on my list sell familiar info products — ebooks and courses on marketing, writing, bizopp.

But some people wrote in and managed to surprise me. A few standouts:

#1: “My wife and I are developing theatre training courses, mainly to sell to school teachers who are not drama teachers by trade, but have been ‘elected’ to teach the courses and put on the productions.”

#2: “Am currently writing some digital reports requested by our specialist cancer research audience although I have no real idea how to do this!”

#3: “I sell Numerology info products, such as relationship forecasts, life forecasts, name adviser, lucky numbers and in depth reports. I sell to business owners, individuals and women looking for alternative angle to motivate and advise on current situation.”

This morning, I sat down to reply to these folks and to everyone else who had written me. But before I did so, I asked myself:

“What do I want out of this interaction? Why did I even ask this question?”

The following reasons poured out of me. Maybe they will be of some interest or value to you:

1. Find out who’s doing well

2. Connect with more people

3. Find out what problems people are having

4. Find out what problems their customers are having

5. Find out if they have [CENSORED but keep reading, trust me]

6. Find out what’s currently working for them, what’s not working

7. Maintain or rather enhance my reputation

8. See if any opportunities [CENSORED again, but still keep reading, I promise I won’t keep doing this much more]

9. Get possible ideas for new offers to create

10. See if there are any good offers that [CENSORED, last censored thing, keep reading to find out how to uncensor]

11. See if there are people I could connect with each other, either as some kind of broker or just to help out

I’m not sure whether the list above can be useful to you in any way.

Whatever the case may be, my offer from yesterday still stands.

So if you sell your own info products:

1. Hit reply

2. Tell me what info product or products you sell and who you sell it to

When I get your message, I will reply and tell you a genuine secret way to sell more of what you’ve created.

I’ll also tell you about a special, free training — free as in not even any optin required — that lays out real gold about how to actually run this secret selling strategy in practice.

If you watch this free training, the CENSORED bits above will become clear as day.

And who knows. If you just reply to this email, maybe we can connect or exchange some ideas along the way.

Ugly personal positioning

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“It’s pretty ugly,” my dad said.

I nodded and shrugged. “Yep… I agree.”

My dad and his wife and their two friends were visiting me in Barcelona over the past few days. Today was their last day.

Before leaving, they decided to go see the Sagrada Familia, Barcelona’s best-known landmark, the many-spired church designed by the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi.

My dad, a devoted atheist, is also a connoisseur of churches. He loves to travel the world and visit all kinds of churches with their beautiful architecture and their ancient frescoes and their sculptures of bleeding martyrs.

Earlier on this trip, my dad whimpered a little when we walked by the 14th-century Gothic cathedral in the old town of Barcelona, and the rest of the group decided that it wasn’t the right time to go in.

And yet, when faced with the Sagrada Familia, my dad was not impressed.

I agree. The Sagrada is pretty ugly to me too. It’s kitschy and garish, at least from up close.

And yet, every year, some 20M tourists come and see the creation. They look up, they marvel, and they take literally hundreds of millions of selfies with the church in the background.

I’m not sure what my point is. Maybe it’s just to share the following quote by filmmaker Pedro Almodovar.

Almodovar’s movies have been accused of being kitschy and garish. And yet Almodovar has built an incredible career and has become Spain’s most successful director. About that, Almodovar once said:

“When a film has only one or two defects, it is considered an imperfect film. But when there is a profusion of technical flaws, it is called style.”

Of course, you don’t care about style, at least not when reading this newsletter.

This newsletter is about making sales.

But Almodovar’s quote applies just as well to personal positioning, which makes selling so much easier.

So apply the lesson and confidently pile on the defects. The stupid opinions. The violations of industry norms. The flat-out typos, contradictions, and ugly design.

What you get is something that in time sells itself, because it stands out in people’s minds. And that can lead to millions in your future — and not counted in visitors, but in sales.

Your kiss is on my list

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

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

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

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

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

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

But!

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

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

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

Anyways, towards end of his presentation, Charley said:

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

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

===

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://bejakovic.com/sme

I got a hot date tonight HONK

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Yeah, about my hot date… I’ll get to that in a second.

First, here’s a scene from the animated TV show The Simpsons. The scene illustrates a valuable/funny point about influence. But hold on.

I grew up watching The Simpsons. If you didn’t, that’s no problem. You don’t need to like The Simpsons or even to have ever seen a single episode to get what this scene is about, or to understand the underlying point.

Scene:

Moe the bartender is being interrogated by the police for shooting the local billionaire, Mr. Burns.

Moe is hooked up to a lie detector machine. He’s asked if he ever held a grudge against Mr. Burns. He answers no. But the lie detector machine HONKS to indicate he’s lying.

“All right,” Moe says. “Maybe I did. But I didn’t shoot him!” Sure enough, the lie detector machine DINGS to confirm Moe’s statement as true.

“Checks out,” says the cop. “Ok sir, you’re free to go.”

So far, so conventional. But then, Moe executes the following rapid-fire descent into humiliation, to the sounds of the lie detector machine:

“Good,” he says. “Cause I got a hot date tonight!” HONK

“A date.” HONK

“Dinner with Fred.” HONK

“Dinner alone.” HONK

“Watching TV alone!” HONK

“All right!!!” Moe says. “I’m gonna sit at home and ogle the ladies in the Victoria’s Secret catalogue!” HONK

Moe hangs his head. “Sears catalogue.” DING

“Now would you unhook this already please! I don’t deserve this kind of shabby treatment!” HONK

That’s the end of the scene. Maybe you found it funny even in my transcript above. But if you didn’t, trust me that it’s funny in the original version.

The question is… why?

Is it just funny to find out Moe is a loser? That’s part of it. But would it have been as funny if the scene simply went:

“Good. Cause I got a hot date tonight!” HONK

[Moe hangs head] “Actually, I’m gonna sit at home and ogle the ladies in the Sears catalogue.” DING

My contention is no. That wouldn’t be nearly as funny. Which brings me to the following valuable point that I promised you:

“We build interest by adding more: more movement, more color, more sound, more light, more people, more intensity, more concentration, more excitement. In short, anything whatever that the spectators regard as increasing will also increase their interest.”

That comes from a book about magic and showmanship. In other words, the above advice about adding more is how expert magicians build the audience’s interest.

But it works the same for comedy.

And in fact, it works the same for copywriting.

Stack a bunch of moderately interesting, or funny, or insightful stuff on top of each other… and the effect is multiplicative, not additive.

And with that punchline, we conclude today’s episode. DING

But if by any chance you want more simple tips on building interest and desire in your readers, you can find that here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

The end of newsletters

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Well, the end of my newsletter.

No, not this one. This one will keep going, as long as I keep needing therapy and as long as I keep refusing to trust anyone else with the task.

But as of today, I have decided to stop publishing my health newsletter.

I started that newsletter in January 2023. I published a new issue every week until this week — some 120k words in total.

Researching, writing, and publishing all that word-tonnage took up 300-400 hours of my productive waking time over the past 15 months.

And yet, I’m closing the old heap down. My reason is simple:

I couldn’t get my health newsletter going as a business. And rather than thinking about what I’ve already invested into it, I’m thinking about the time, money, and effort it might still take to turn it into something.

It’s not simply a matter of persistence, either. Because knowing what I know now, I’m not sure my health newsletter would ever turn into something, even if I were to persist.

I could tell you my arguments for that, or my predictions for the future of newsletter businesses.

But instead, I’ll share something by someone much more invested in newsletters than me. That someone is Scott Oldford.

Over the past year or two, Scott bought up dozens of newsletters and newsletter-related businesses with the goal of creating a newsletter roll-up. And then, here’s what he found:

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Our model originally with newsletters was to create lead flow for the companies that we owned inside of our portfolio.

As time went on we ended up a little further away from that model than I’d like to admit.

We attempted to monetize in many different ways and in the end we realized that keeping it with its original intent was a much better strategy.

[…]

We realized that the cost of running a media company at scale simply did not make sense and majority of the costs were actually from attempting to make it a direct-profit driver instead of a value-driver for the dozens of businesses we own and eventually hundreds of businesses we will own.

In short — newsletters and owned media makes a lot of sense. However, I believe the opportunity that people see isn’t the true one.

The real opportunity? Owning your audience.

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For me at least, it’s the end of newsletters as a business.

​​On the other hand, I will be looking for a business to start or grow, one where a newsletter could be a valuable tool.

Maybe you’re lucky, and you already have a business like that. Maybe you even have your own owned audience. But maybe you’re not doing anything with it.

If so, you’re not alone. I’m always amazed by how many businesses have email lists of tens of thousands of leads or even buyers — that they never do anything with.

If you want my help or advice with that, hit reply and we can talk.

​​Or if you don’t want my help, and you want to profit from your email list all by yourself, here’s how to start writing a newsletter that complements and feeds your business:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

Ooooo, child!

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

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

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

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

Chablis was a black drag queen.

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

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

“Ooooo, child!”

“Oh, child, don’t you be doin’ that!”

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

I had flashbacks to this earlier today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So drag is good advice for online entrepreneurs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://bejakovic.com/mve

My list-building plans from under a large oak tree

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5pm today. Forsyth park. Savannah, Georgia.

I found a large oak tree. Rolled up my jacket. Put it on the ground. Lay down on it in the shade under the tree.

It’s been two-plus weeks of non-stop travel. Changing five cities along the way. Over 5k miles traveled. And more talking with people in real life than I have done in the past six months combined.

I’m tired. I had a chance to lay down today. Under a tree. So I took it.

Tomorrow, I head back from Savannah to New York. After an afternoon layover at JFK, I will have an overnight and most likely sleepless flight back to Barcelona, to the safety of my cave, the comfort of my own bed, the routine of my regular work day.

All that’s really just to prepare you for yet another Q&A email, the third this week. Came a question in reply to last night’s milk-themed email:

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I bought SME a few weeks ago. I’d love to hear more about how you grow your list or “add cream”. I’ve started daily emails and unsubscriber rates are up. I’m currently using FB ads. I was relying on SEO, but that’s proven volatile this year.

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After 10+ years of trying to grow various audiences online, I’ve come to believe there’s no magic to it beyond time and persistence.

​​Whatever you do consistently to grow your list will work in time. And almost nothing will work if you jump around too much too quick.

That said, I will tell you one specific cream-getting/list-building strategy I personally plan to focus on. And that’s books, either ones I put on Amazon or that I sell on my own site and drive paid traffic to.

Books in my mind are the highest-quality leads you can possible get.

They create customers right away.

If you tack on some upsells, it’s possible to use them to break even on paid ad spend on day zero or soon after.

Plus books are immensely shareable and influential. People will gladly and actively recommend or hype up your book, much more so than a course or a coaching program or even a community.

If you want to see how this works in action, take a look at my 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters.

It took me about a month of on-the-side work to complete this book. It has been driving subscribers to my list ever since.

The only real problem is this is my only book and I should have written more suc books. I’m working on fixing that.

Meanwhile, if you want to see how I organized this book, how I sold my email list within it, and even learn something valuable about copywriting and marketing in the process, the 10 Commandments is only $5 on Amazon.

Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

My credentials are very near zero, except for one thing

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A few hours ago, I was standing at the back of Ballroom A in the Palm Beach Convention Center.

Seated in the ballroom were a few hundred people, watching the breakout session of a larger conference that’s been going on since yesterday.

Up on stage, two doctors were talking about continuous glucose monitors.

Suddenly, a girl working for the conference picked me out of the crowd at the back. She walked up to me, leaned into me, and whispered, “Are you John?”

“Why yes,” I said. “Yes, I am in fact John.”

“Great,” she said. “I’ve been trying to call you. We’re gonna need you near the stage so we can just transition smoothly. As they finish up, they’ll walk off the stage, and you can go up.”

I was set to host the next breakout session. At a health conference. Talking about health.

I and another cohost got up on stage, talked for 15 minutes, then fielded questions, then called it a day.

People applauded.

The other guy and I walked off stage. As I tried to snake my way to the door, a few people from the audience called over to me. “Thanks so much for that.” “Great info.”

That’s quite odd when you think about it.

My credentials for speaking at a health conference are very near zero.

I didn’t study anything related to health. The closest I ever came to working in a health field was writing sales copy for supplement companies.

And yet, there I was on stage, at a health conference, mixing and mingling with medical doctors and CEOs of health startups.

The only thing that set me above total zero for credentials to speak at this conference, the only thing that separated me from the thousand or so people in the audience and gave me a place on the stage, is that I write.

For the past year, along with this daily newsletter about marketing, I’ve been writing a weekly newsletter about health.

In the process, I have learned a ton, and I have discovered lots of worthwhile things to share.

Writing a newsletter is how I could get on stage today and pretty much riff for 30 minutes while sounding authoritative and even reasonably smart.

Writing is also how I got invited in the first place to appear on stage at this conference.

All that’s to say, if you have zero expertise in a field, but you would like to develop expertise, then start writing.

And if you already have expertise but not enough people know it, then start writing.

A weekly email newsletter is good.

A daily email newsletter is better.

And if your objection is, “Sure, easy for you, but I don’t know exactly what to write or how to write it,” then I have you covered.

I’ve created a quick and easy course all about writing, specifically writing daily emails, in a way that entertains and informs your audience, while secretly building up your perceived and actual expertise. For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

How Bill Bonner can be so wrong and still so successful

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I’m in Palm Beach. The place is rich.

This morning, I walked along the sandy beach facing the Atlantic, a few hundred yards from where Billionaires Row starts — where people like the CEO of Blackstone and the widow of David Koch have their palatial residences.

I was walking there with my friend Sam, who came to Palm Beach with me.

We were discussing how nice the weather is here… how good the Atlantic Ocean looks against the pristine sand… how pleasant the people are in Palm Beach… even how there’s magically free and abundant parking on the island.

“It’s kind of like heaven,” Sam said. “It makes me want to make a fuckton of money so I could move here.”

I paused for a moment. I looked inside. And I concluded:

Palm Beach is great. But I have zero ambition to move here for the long term, or to make the tens of millions of dollars that would be necessary to support even a B-level lifestyle among the billionaires and multimillionaires here.

I’m telling you this because after the beachside walk, I had the good fortune to have lunch with one of the most successful copywriters in the world.

I won’t name him — I’m not sure he wants me to. But I will say he is a senior copywriter, working for 10+ years at one of the biggest and best-known direct response financial publishers.

Over lunch, one topic that came up was how Bill Bonner — the founder of direct marketing behemoth Agora — has been making financial predictions for 40 years.

Most of those predictions have been proven to be wrong. Year after year, decade after decade.

And yet, loyal readers of Bill Bonner continue to read his opinion pieces. Apparently, he now has the most successful financial-topic Substack out there, making some $1M/year from I guess editorial content alone.

The question is, why would people continue to listen to a financial prophet who is consistently making mistaken prophecies?

The very successful copywriter I met today has an elegant and interesting take on it. It’s something I hadn’t heard before. But that’s his intellectual property, so I won’t share it here.

What I will tell you is my theory on it, which I really got from legendary marketer Dan Kennedy:

The best customers, the most long-term customers, are not really buying whatever offer you’re supposedly making them. Instead, they are really buying you as a person. And they decide whether to buy you or not by how they match up with you on certain intangible, vaporous values.

All that’s to say, you might have really horrible, taboo things inside your head, things you think you should never share about yourself with your audience.

Such as for example, the fact that you are not very money-motivated — not a helpful thing to reveal to a bunch of business owners and marketers.

And yet, even though revealing such things is sure to drive many people in your audience away… it will bind a small number of them even more closely to you. And you can build a successful business — or even, if you insist, a large business — on the strength of those strong bonds alone.