Business Ideas

Are you interested in a newsletter mastermind?

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Last night, I got an email with the subject line “Ideas for working together.” The person writing me this email is the silent partner in the company of a good friend of mine.

​​The background is that over the course of a couple of decades, this guy built up a large media company. He then sold it three years ago for some undisclosed but I assume ungodly sum of money.

He has been sitting on his wealth since, and investing here and there. But he finds retirement boring, so he wants to get back to work and put on a conference, which is something he used to do a lot of as part of his media company.

The topic of his proposed new conference is exactly the topic of my health newsletter, which I’ve been publishing weekly since the start of this year. So we talked last week about working together in some way.

​​And then he wrote me last night about ideas for how this might look:

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Some options

– I buy your newsletter and you come work for me

– You buy my conference and I come work for you

– I invest in your company

– We do an operating deal

– I promote your newsletter and you promote my conference

– You help me with speakers and content and you moderate a panel and we promote your newsletter

– I buy (bulk) your books to give away at conferences. Private labeled with our brand.

Other? I am wide open

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I don’t know what if anything will come of this.

I’m only sharing it because A) I started my health newsletter at the end of January and B) today in the middle of October there’s somebody credible and with money in his pockets who is talking about buying my newsletter or pouring some of his money into it.

Again, maybe this won’t turn into anything. Or maybe it will.

In any case, I’m pressing on with my health newsletter because I feel I’m on the right path.

​​Subscriber numbers keep growing. I’m getting positive feedback from readers. There are referrals. I’m starting to make money. And I have clear ideas in mind for the next steps to take to both grow subscriber count and to monetize better.

Back in March, I wrote an email about my “Plan Horse”:

“Plan Horse is to find a new opportunity to latch onto, but in a way that you will come out ahead whether the opportunity drops dead or delivers as hoped.”

I feel that publishing your own newsletter today is exactly this kind of opportunity.

​​If a specific newsletter catches steam, it might turn into a big thing.

​​If it doesn’t, but you do a good job with the newsletter itself, then you wind up with a list of people who are interested in a topic and trust you to tell them about it. This is a profitable position to be in one way or another.

You might think this is simply another restatement of the benefits of email marketing.

Yes and no.

Email marketing is great. But I’m talking about something different, which is really when email is the main product.

My health newsletter definitely falls into that category. In many ways, this daily email newsletter you are reading now also falls into that category.

This daily newsletter is not primarily there to promote a specific offer or another business I have.

​​The newsletter itself is really the main product I offer, and I just find occasional ways to monetize it by repackaging what I’ve learned through this newsletter and presenting it in a course, or a live training, or maybe some other, new format…

… which brings me to my feeling-out offer for today.

Again, I believe the moment is golden for publishing your own newsletter, of either stamp:

It can be personality-based and talk about direct marketing and business opportunities, something like what you are reading now.

Or it can be not tied to a specific personal identity and it can talk about an entirely different topic, like my health newsletter.

Either way, I believe the opportunity is great, and the opportunity is now.

So I’ve been thinking about putting together a paid mastermind or community of some sort that would be all about publishing, growing, and monetizing a newsletter.

The ultimate goal would be to share ideas and work together to create a newsletter-based business — something that either happily coughs up cash every month, or something that you can sell down the line for some undisclosed but ungodly sum of money. ​​

To start, the core content of this mastermind or community would be based on what I am learning and doing myself with my own newsletters from week to week. But I might also seek out other people who are experts in specific newsletter-related topics to present.

I am interested in creating such a community or mastermind because I’m planning to double-down with my health newsletter, so such a community would benefit me as much as anybody else joining me.

But I’ve learned my lesson before.

And that lesson is, gauge interest before committing even a day’s worth of work into creating a new offer.

So in case an ongoing community or mastermind around publishing, growing, and monetizing a newsletter is something you’d be interested in, then hit reply and tell me so.

Of course, if you’d like to expand by telling me more, you can do that too, because any extra info will influence whether I decide to put this new offer together and what to put inside of it. Thanks in advance.

Three bits of Dan Ferrari’s timeless wisdom

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A couple days ago, A-list copywriter Dan Ferrari, who was my copywriting coach once upon a time, sent one of his once-every-ice-age emails.

I’ll tell you an idea from that email that caught my eye. But first, a quick story to set it up:

I was talking to my friend Marci a few days ago. Marci has started a quick, daily, general-interest AI newsletter. He asked me if I had any suggestions for him.

I told him to consider picking a specific audience and niching down to writing about AI for that audience.

Marci’s brother Krisz was in the room and listening to the conversation. At this point he jumped in and said, “For me the newsletter is perfect as it is. It’s short, it’s interesting, it keeps me in the loop even if I’m not so much into AI.”

So who’s right? Should Marci niche down his newsletter? Should he keep it broad?

Or more relevant to you:

Should you go with one product name or a second product name? One segment of the market or another? One headline or a second one?

To answer that, let’s go back to that Dan Ferrari email from a couple days ago. In it, Dan wrote the following:

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Something that none of the gurus will ever say publicly… direct response is largely dictated by luck.

No one knows exactly which offers are going to work and more importantly, how successful they will be.

No one.

Some of us are better at guessing than others but make no mistake, we’re still guessing. There are too many variables at play. Many of them are not within your control or even the business’ control. They are external and completely unknowable.

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That might sound discouraging. And it’s true that “testing” AKA regular failure is an essential part of the direct response game.

But as Dan says in the same email, you can improve your luck by upping your skills.

​​Better skills help you come up with better ideas that are more likely to work… and they give you access to better opportunities that are more likely to succeed a priori.

And now, let me ease into my sales pitch.

There’s a third thing Dan said, not in this email, but on one of those exclusive coaching calls, talking to a small number of copywriting mentees, me among them:

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You can use a fascination/bullet midway through a story to get people to stick… or in a lead… or anywhere in the copy.

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Dan wasn’t talking about jamming in actual (*) sales bullets anywhere or everywhere in your copy. He was simply saying, if a bit of copy would make for a great sales bullet, it can work as an exciting, surprising, momentum-building sentence of copy, anywhere you need it.

So that’s one reason to learn sales bullets. Here are a few others:

Email marketer Ben Settle has said that, “when written correct everything ‘comes’ from the bullets, including non-bullet copy or ads where there are no bullets.”

Copywriting legend John Carlton has said that the sale often comes down to a single bullet.

And Stefan Georgi, who charges something like $50k for a single sales letter, has said that one of the biggest jumps he made as a copywriter came when he discovered bullets.

Ok, so much for the sales pitch.

Now, here’s my offer:

If you’d like to up your copywriting skills… double or triple your chances of success… put yourself in the path of better opportunities… and make your own luck long-term… then get Copy Riddles, my training that forces you write A-list sales bullets that are so important to all kinds of copy. You can find it here:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

My alternative to shameless teasing

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A couple days ago, I gave a copy critique to a successful course creator. Let’s call him Liam.

Liam is writing a welcome sequence for his newsletter. He has decided to not promote anything in his first seven emails, but rather just to offer solid advice and inspiration — the dreaded “value” autoresponder.

While I certainly don’t condone the nasty practice of not selling anything across seven welcome emails, I figured Liam’s mind was made up on this point, so I didn’t argue it. But I told him that, even if he is not selling his main course in these emails, he can certainly seed it.

Liam already does this already to an extent, by teasing his course in a PS and saying something like, “… if you liked this, you’ll find more good stuff like it in my course XYZ, which I’ll tell you more about soon.”

Teasing like this is fine. It works, and it can work great, the more shameless you’re willing to get with it.

But there’s an alternative to shameless teasing.

​​It makes for more natural content. It’s more sly. And yet it can be even more effective than teasing itself.

Would you like to know what I have in mind? ​​What I told this successful course creator? What I practice myself to good effect from time to time?

I’ll tell ya:

It’s simply to use yourself and your products as your case studies when illustrating a point that the reader should take away.

How exactly do you do that?

Well, look at what I’ve done in this email. I could have made the same point — use yourself as a case study — by talking about some legendary and dead marketer like Gary Halbert… or by referring to a scene from a movie like Brokeback Mountain Part 2.

Instead, I did it by about talking about ME ME ME, or more specifically, the way ME interacted with a client and the advice me gave him.

Which brings me to my offer today:

I do not offer one-off coaching critiques. Well, I did with Liam, but that was a special case, and not something I offer otherwise. Forget about that.

What I do offer is medium- to long-term, one-on-one coaching. It involves both email copywriting — you got a free tip on that today — and more broadly, easy marketing and money-making levers that I spot in your business, the pulling of which is often more lucrative and long-lasting than making any copy tweaks.

My coaching is expensive, and I only take on people rarely, when I feel they have a good chance of profiting and quickly.

If you are interested in getting my critical eye, help, and guidance applied to your business, then hit reply. Tell me who you are and what you do, and we can start a conversation to see if it might be a fit.

How I’m building a sales page in publick

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Two days ago, I released my Simple Money Emails course for the world to buy, even though the beast doesn’t have a sales page to promote it.

And you know what?

People did buy, even with no sales page.

But I bet more people would buy in the future if I actually were to have a proper sales page, one that explains the value of this course… and that answers questions prospects might have… and that assures them they are not being “had” but are in fact making a smart decision.

The trouble, as I wrote two days ago, is that I’ve been waiting for months for this sales page to magically write itself… but that hasn’t happened.

So I had an idea, which is just to write the sales page piecemeal, in publick, one email at a time.

I’ve done this once before, for the Influential Emails training I put on two years ago. It started out with just a headline, the details of the actual offer, and a “BUY NOW” button. I fleshed it out every few days, using stuff from my daily emails.

It ended up working great. Why not try it again?

So this morning, I took the core of my email from two days ago, about the actual SME offer along with a testimonial, and I put that onto a fresh page on my site. I added in a headline and the barest bit of deck copy.

Done. For now. ​​

In the future, I might write an email about how this course is unique… address objections I get from people… talk about how it’s taken me a good number of years to distill my experience into the simple idea at the core of this training… position myself against alternatives out there… hit you with some tear-jerking motivation copy to get going now… and all that can then be fitted into my existing minimal sales page, one block at a time.

If you’re curious about what’s actually inside the Simple Money Emails training, you can find it at link below. ​​And if you need a bit of an extra reason to click, here’s what Paul Morrison, who has helped marketing legend Ken McCarthy put out 11 of his most recent books, had to say about SME:

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I’m glad you wrote this email soliciting feedback for your course. I’ve been meaning to send you a testimonial ever since first going through it.

Put simply, this course is probably the most straight-forward and practical approach to writing emails I have yet to come across.

I valued it so much that I printed the pages out and keep them next to my desk for regular study.

(As a point of comparison, next to your course, on my desk, are Ben Settle’s Skhema Book, and Daniel Throssell’s Email Copywriting Compendium — I’m sure you likely have both of those courses yourself — and I now consider these three documents my personal “email writing bible”.)

For anyone who is struggling to actually get started writing emails for their biz (especially daily emails) I think Simple Money Emails takes the cake, and I couldn’t recommend it enough.

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If you wanna see a sales page being built in publick, or better yet, if you want to buy Simple Money Emails so you can start writing daily emails for your business, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Just another one of my industry-leading insights in this email

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A couple days ago, I started receiving a gentle barrage of email notifications like this:

“The John Bejakovic Letter: A new contact has been added to your list”
“The John Bejakovic Letter: A new contact has been added to your list”
“The John Bejakovic Letter: A new contact has been added to your list”
…

I checked where all these “new contacts” were coming from.

It turned out to be a website that promotes itself as a discovery platform for newsletters. And sure enough, on the front page of the site, there was the “John Bejakovic Newsletter” with the following nonsense description:

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“The John Bejakovic Newsletter is not simply another regular publication; it is a vibrant, information-rich tool that provides a unique entryway to the corporate and commercial worlds.”

“Pros: John Bejakovic’s newsletter provides subscribers a tactical advantage in today’s fast-paced business environment by delivering industry-leading insights.”

“Cons: Persistent follow-up emails from John Bejakovic’s newsletter may be sent to subscribers who unsubscribe, and over time these emails may start to annoy you.”

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​​In case it’s not clear:

This has nothing whatsoever to do with this newsletter you’re reading now.

​​I’m guessing the above fluff was generated by AI.

And I’m guessing the “new contacts” who subscribed to my list were all bots — based on the email addresses, the associated first names that were put in, and the behavior of the contacts after subscribing.

So that’s the bad part, the skeleton that I trotted out of the closet and made dance at the top of my email. Now here’s the good part:

These bot contacts came via Sparkloop. I’ve written about Sparkloop before. It’s a newsletter-recommendation marketplace.

​​Other newsletters (and occasional scam websites, like the above) can find you on Sparkloop and send you newsletter subscribers you pay for.

Or don’t pay for — because Sparkloop allows you to set your own criteria for who is an engaged, worthwhile subscriber, including location or activity or your own intuition.

For example:

I deleted all the contacts that came via that newsletter discovery website, prolly close to 100. This won’t cost me anything, except a bit of time, which I’m trying to recoup by writing this email.

On the other hand, I have been getting a trickle of actual engaged readers via Sparkloop. (It’s only a trickle, because I’m not using the co-reg functionality, but am only accepting leads who were sent to my optin page.) ​​

​​I’m also using Sparkloop to grow my health newsletter, and I’m getting good results there.

Point being, you gotta keep an eye on Sparkloop, because it’s a shiba inu that will eat from the trashcan from time to time.

​​But if you’re willing to keep an eye on it, then it’s as close as I’ve found to an automated way to grow your newsletter with the kinds of leads you yourself want.

If you wanna try Sparkloop out, you can find it at link below. ​​Yes, that’s an affiliate link but it’s not likely to pay me anything — not unless you also decide to use Sparkloop to make some money via promoting other newsletters, which is a topic for another email. ​​Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/sparkloop

Maybe I can help you publish a book fast

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Yesterday, I got on a call with Rob Marsh and Kira Hug of The Copywriter Club to record a new episode for their podcast.

To kick off the interview, I repeated my Peter Parker origin story, of getting bitten by a radioactive spider and becoming imbued with incredible copywriting powers, and then squeezing into a tight red and black spandex outfit, and renaming myself Spider-Bejako.

What’s that? I hear you groaning?

Fine. What I actually told Rob and Kira was my origin story, but it looked more like the following:

1. Nine years ago, I quit my IT job to write content on the cheap as a no-contract freelancer for The Motley Fool.

2. Things were going smoothly for the first two months, at which point they suddenly got rough. From one day to the next, the work disappeared forever due to changes inside the MF business.

3. I sighed and said, “Well that sucks, now what.” After making a list of my options to make money now, I decided to start a new career, writing tiny alternative health books and publishing them on Kindle, one or two or three per month, which is what I did for a year.

Whenever I tell this story to other writers, their ears always perk up and they ask me for more on my experiences writing little books and self-publishing them on Amazon.

I always tell them the same, as I told Rob and Kira yesterday:

I managed to sell a lot of books on Amazon, but I couldn’t make it work as a business because I was an idiot.

Back then, I knew nothing about marketing, email, back-end offers, all the stuff I take for granted today. I was selling hundreds of copies of my books each month, but I didn’t build a business out of it.

That’s why I eventually dropped the self-publishing and got into copywriting for direct response clients, which is the path that’s led me to where I am now.

Which brings me to my offer to you today:

I still think self-publishing on Amazon is an incredible opportunity. There’s cachet to having a published book — even self-published — that cannot be replicated by anything you do on your website. Besides, book readers are the highest quality leads you could ever get. Plus Amazon is free traffic — or even traffic that makes you money.

That’s why I have my “10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters” on Amazon, and why I’m putting together a new 10 Commandments book, tentatively titled, “10 Commandments of Hypnotists, Pick Up Artists, Comedians, Copywriters, Con Men, Door-To-Door Salesmen, Professional Negotiators, Storytellers, Spirit Mediums, and Stage Magicians.”

But back to my offer:

Odds are, you knew some or all of this before. You knew it’s good idea to have a book out there… but you still might not have one.

Perhaps you have no time to do it, or you have some other hangup that’s keeping you from creating a book, even though you realize it would be valuable for the authority you’re trying to project, for the product or service you’re trying to sell, for the business you’re trying to grow.

My offer is simply to help you get this all done fast — book, optin, emails. Or even to do it for you — in case you already have good content that could be combined, molded, and repurposed into a book.

I don’t have a formal offer defined yet because I want to first hear if there is any interest in this, and if there is, I want to hear what your situation is.

So if you have a business, or better yet, if you have a business and a bunch of content you’ve created — videos, podcasts, blog posts, emails, courses — then hit reply, and we can start a conversation about where you’re at and and how I might be able to help you.

Successful copywriter less interested than ever in writing daily emails

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Last week, I solicited feedback on my Simple Money Emails course, which I offered briefly this past summer.

To which, I got an appreciative but frustrated response from a successful copywriter who’s got a full-time copywriting job, writing for a big direct response business.

I’m not sure this copywriter wants me to share his name, but here’s what he wrote:

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Hey John, thanks for SME. In theory it’s inspired me to pick up daily emails again… but even though I went through the course immediately… I find myself even less interested in writing the dailies! (There was a time when I did write daily emails, for 2 or 3 years, but then I slowed way down and it’s been on-and-off since…)

The reason? I don’t have an offer other than “copywriting services” and so many ideas are re-hashed that I don’t even feel it’s worth discussing them again. Even though I know I should repeat myself and my story… But putting in time to market to a list that hasn’t bought previous offers (books, interviews, and copy services)… and seems interested in free-ideas-as-fellow-copywriters but not as business-owners-in-need… it’s not made me any direct money.

Daily emails and writing certainly improved my craft and speed, which I use for my copywriting work. But to my own list? The effort has taken a back seat. And I wish it hadn’t… but at the same time I see so many copywriters pitching their rehashed whatever that I don’t really want to join them in that.

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I thought for a moment, searching for just the right words to reply with. When I found them, I wrote back to my reader to encourage him by saying,

“Just shut up and write the stupid emails! If it’s not working, then the problem is with you! The system works if you work it!”

No, actually, I didn’t say any of that, nor did I think it. Because my reader raised two valid points:

1. The number of copywriters writing daily emails has exploded over the past few years

2. If you do write daily emails about copywriting, you are likely to attract a lot of freebie-seeking mooches, or as my reader generously calls them, “fellow copywriters”

There are ways to handle both of these issues head on.

But you can also sidestep both issues entirely.

If you have copywriting skills — or even if you don’t, but you want to develop them by writing regularly — then why not simply write to a different audience than other copywriters/marketers/opportunity seekers?

There are thousands of markets out there and millions of sub-markets.

In many of them, you could be the zebra in George Washington’s menagerie — a never-before-seen animal, with your regular email newsletter, and your intriguing subject lines, and your dramatic hooks. Readers in such a market would be amazed by tricks that copywriters would roll their eyes at.

​​I understand it can be easy, attractive, and even fun to write about what you know, what you’re doing right now, and what you’re learning about. That’s in fact why I write this daily email newsletter.

But earlier this year, I also launched a second email newsletter, about health. It’s about to pass this newsletter in the number of subscribers. And while it’s only made me a tiny bit of money so far, I hope to have it surpass this newsletter in earnings next year.

Anyways, all this is just something to think about if you’re a copywriter who’s resisting the idea of writing daily emails. ​​​​

Something else to think about:
​​
If you do decide to go into a different market and start a new newsletter, and if you need to actually choose a platform to send that newsletter, then I can recommend Beehiiv. It’s what I use for my health newsletter. It was the best platform I found when I was starting the newsletter earlier this year, and it keeps surprising me and getting better and better.

I pay for the top level of Beehiiv, and I find it a worthwhile $99 each month. But if you wanna give Beehiiv a try, you can do so for free by going here:​​​​​

​​https://bejakovic.com/beehiiv

How Edward Bernays manipulated me, and how he might do it again

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I once wrote an email with the subject line, “How I manipulated you, and how I might do it again.”

​​That email was all about the strategic use of inflammatory words — like “manipulated” — to get people reading stuff they might not read otherwise.

Well, Edward Bernays manipulated me, and I guess he manipulated millions of other people, too.

Right now, I’m reading Bernays’s book Propaganda. It’s been in print for the past 100 years, and it’s still discussed today, though I suspect few people who discuss it have ever read it.

Why do people know and discuss Propaganda? Because of that title. Propaganda. It’s like manipulated. On the one hand repulsive, on the other hand fascinating.

Imagine that Bernays had titled his book Public Relations — which is really what his book is about. Would we be talking about it today, much less reading it?

The answer is no. The proof is that Bernays did in fact write a book called Public Relations. Result?

Propaganda: 2,700+ reviews on Amazon
Public Relations: 74 reviews on Amazon — and I bet most of those only came via Bernays’s Propaganda fame

All that’s to say, hooks matter. And unless you hook someone right away, then all the other thousands of words you might have written won’t matter much.

But you knew that. It’s the oldest bit of advice traded around the copywriting bonfire.

What you might not know is how to write a great hook. How to make it sensational and inflammatory — propaganda for the rest of what you have to say.

About that. As Daniel Throssell wrote recently:

​The skill of coming up with a great hook, and the skill of making it sensational, are almost exactly the same as a tiny, mechanical, supposedly “niche” copywriting skill you probably do not yet possess.

​​But it’s a skill you can find out more about, and even acquire quickly, via the following page:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Shady and petty, or smart personal positioning?

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In 1906, magician Harry Houdini started to research an ambitious book he planned to call The Encyclopedia of Magic.

But the more Houdini worked, the more maniacal and single-minded his focus became — to discredit Robert-Houdin, the great 19th-century magician that Houdini had originally modeled himself after, down to the name.

Even the title of Houdini’s book changed. ​​First it became Robert-Houdin’s Proper Place in the History of Magic… and then, The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin.

Robert-Houdin was a hack, Houdini was effectively saying. Robert-Houdin had managed to fool magicians into thinking he was something great and original, when he was not.

Yesterday, I wrote an email about how negotiation coach Jim Camp snubbed his mentor Dave Sandler.

Sandler was a sales trainer who had influenced much of Camp’s thinking — take a look at their published works — but Camp never seems to have given due credit to Sandler for his influence or ideas.

You might call that — along with Houdini’s attack on Robert-Houdin — petty, shady, or simply inevitable human ego that crops up even among great men.

You might call it that.

But I might call it smart personal positioning.

Hear me out:

It’s undeniable that being unique, new, distinct, never-before-seen is a tremendous advantage to your personal positioning.

The trouble of course is that you’re probably not unique, distinct, or never-before-seen, just like the other 117 billion humans estimated to have ever lived.

​​We’re all quite similar to each other, and we’re all really the outgrowth of our families, friends, neighbors, coworkers, teachers, mentors, living and dead.

That might be true. But like I said yesterday, it’s not really what the human brain responds to.

The human brain responds to contrast. That’s the basis of cognition.

And what bigger contrast is there than saying about yourself, “There was darkness upon the face of the deep… and then there was light.”

So there you go. If you’re looking to improve your personal positioning, work on being more distinct, unique, new.

That’s given.

What you might not have thought about is to make yourself distinct and unique at the expense of the people who helped you get there.

It might seem like one of those unsavory and pointless things done by people who have made it to the top… but I disagree. At least about the pointless part.

People who get to the top often do things that seem unnecessary or even self-defeating — if you’re not in their place.

Anyways, that’s just an idea for you to consider.

I realize today’s message might seem a little dark, but that’s what happens if you want to reach into all corners of human nature. Some are nice and cheery… others are dark and disturbing.

If you are willing to face the dark and disturbing corners of human nature, and maybe even figure out how to work with them to your advantage, then I have an entire sub-training all about that.

That sub-training is Round 19 of my Copy Riddles program. It deals with the dark psychological things that are present in the best sale copy, which go deeper than mere self-interest.

For more info on Copy Riddles, from Round 1 to Round 20:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Jim Camp, plagiarist

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Last week, Ben Settle sent out an email in which he quoted a reader who said the following about negotiation coach Jim Camp:

“… his whole system for the most part comes from Dave Sandler and he never gives him credit, ever that I’ve heard. Now I realize he has done many things to make him an expert but he has never anywhere I’ve heard even mentioned Sandler.”

Ben is a big Jim Camp fan, and has infected many of his readers, me among them, with Jim Camp’s authority.

Ben shrugged off his reader’s comment, and said he had never heard of Sandler.

​​Neither had I. But I looked Sandler up. He was a sales trainer and he died in 1995.

I found a book of 49 of Sandler’s “Timeless Selling Principles.” Most of the rules line up very well with Camp’s system. And some line up exactly.

​​Take a quick look over the specific language in the chapter headings and summaries below, and you’ll see that Jim Camp was in fact taking a lot from Sandler. ​​From the book:

* “Don’t spill your candy in the lobby” [Camp swapped in “beans” for “candy”]

* “The best sales presentation you’ll ever give, the prospect will never see” [taken word-for-word]

* “The bottom line of professional selling is going to the bank” [Camp said “bottom line of negotiation…”]

* “You must be comfortable telling your prospect that it’s OK to say ‘No.’ You must also be comfortable hearing and accepting ‘No.'” [Camp used this pretty much word-for-word, and summed it up with the title of his book, Start With No.]

In that Ben Settle email, Ben wrote, “If you learn something that’s not common knowledge from a particular source it’s good to give credit.”

I’ve read and listened to Camp a lot, but I’ve never read or heard Camp credit Dave Sandler. I’ve heard him mention Peter Drucker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, even Gloria Steinam, but never Sandler. (I checked just now, and Sandler is credited once, among 20 other mentors, at the end of Start With No.)

So now what? Is Jim Camp really a plagiarist? Or did he at least snub an influential mentor by not crediting him enough?

It might be interesting for the gossip, but on a practical level, I couldn’t care less.

As I wrote a long time ago in this newsletter, I’m less interested in attribution than in ideas that work.

Jim Camp’s system works. I know because I’ve used it and seen it work.

But is it really Camp’s system? Or Sandler’s system? Or somebody else’s who came before Sandler? Or some amalgam?

Instead of agonizing over those tough questions, I would like to give you a better, easier question to ponder:

Do you remember any of Sandler’s points above?

​​The real value in this email is those five points, not a dogpile on the topic of whether Camp gave due credit or not.

And yet, I doubt one person in a hundred will remember any of Sandler’s ideas above from this email… while many will remember that I wrote an email with the subject line, “Jim Camp, plagiarist.”

No judgment there. Such is the human brain — wired for human action and drama. You can gripe about it and fight it without effect, or you can simply accept it and work with it.

As I wrote once before, it’s your choice whether you want to be subtle or savage in how you work with it.

What is not your choice is how people’s brains work, and what kinds of messages they respond to.

​​And the most condensed and powerful type of message that people respond to… well, you can read more about that here:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/