Business Ideas

A quick and permanent fix to lots of seemingly insurmountable problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

And if that’s the case:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last call for Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Forward me your Amazon receipt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#3. How To Get Set Up On Upwork

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that’s it.

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

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

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

2. Forward me your Amazon receipt.

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

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

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Forward me your Amazon receipt.

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

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

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

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A little more seriously:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#1. Copywriting Portfolio Secrets ($97 value)

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

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

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

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

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

#3. How To Get Set Up On Upwork

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As for what that offer is:

Like I said, it costs $50.

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

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

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s what I came up with today:

#1. “101 Magic Words”

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

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

Everything from Robert Collier to Novak Djokovic.

#3. The nature of reality

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

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

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

#5. “How to be an effective teacher”

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

#6. “Online Info Business Quick Start Guide”

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

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

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

#8. “How To Choose A Niche”

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

#9. “Consumption & Digestion”

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

#10. “Flip The Script”

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

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

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

It can make you sales today.

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

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

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

It can be the same for you.

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

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

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

https://bejakovic.com/deh

How to completely dismantle your pre-talk nerves

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A couple days ago, a new Amazon review popped up for my “10 Commandments of Con Men etc” (5-stars; “Here’s why you should buy two copies…”).

That review came from Matt Cascarino, who is the chief creative officer at FARM, a marketing agency that’s had among its clients the American Cancer Society, the SPCA, New Era (the company that makes Major League Baseball’s official caps), and Kelley Blue Book.

I know Matt reads my emails and I have interacted with him before, so I wrote him an email to say thanks for the nice review. To which Matt responded with an even better testimonial:

===

I just got home from a new business pitch where I worked SIX commandments into my 18 minutes of material. Specifically, “commit to the bit” completely dismantled my typical pre-talk nerves.

I genuinely enjoy presenting, but your book helped me be more methodical when mapping out my talk.

Thanks for reaching out. Your book is insanely good and worth every hour you poured into it.

And no, your mom didn’t tell me to say that.

===

I’m about to give you a link to my 10 Commandments book in a bit, and if you haven’t yet read it, maybe Matt’s experience and recommendation will convince you to do so.

But before you go, here’s a tip I learned early in my email marketing career, which I didn’t realize the full power of until last year:

It’s okay to email people one-on-one.

That might seem like a particularly stupid point to make, but the fact is, having an email newsletter does something to the brain, and many people, myself included on occasion, start to think that the only way to reach out to people who have signed up to your newsletter is via broadcast emails, preferably ones that start with “Dear Friend.”

No.

You can write people on your list one-on-one, over and above broadcast emails.

Again, that might seem super obvious. What is less obvious is that I’ve used this strategy to make valuable connections with prospects right when they sign up to my list… to drive in sales that would never have happened otherwise… and to get nice extra testimonials like the one that Matt gave me (which my mom confirms she had no part of).

And now, as promised, here’s my new 10 Commandments book, to help you dismantle your pre-talk nerves, or take away the sting from objections to your offer, or hide a secret in plain sight:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Dark marketplace for courses

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I just bought a course, based solely on the glowing recommendation of somebody I’ve come to trust and respect.

The course is made up of five actual, physical books. It costs $300.

Since the seller is only willing to ship in the U.S., I will need to have these five books shipped to my friend’s post office box in South Carolina, and then pay more to have them forwarded on to me in Spain.

The whole process to order this course has taken about three weeks. The seller has no website, no phone number, no email address publicly listed.

And in case you’re wondering, there are no copies of the course available on Amazon or eBay or other popular “web sites.”

(After this course was recommended by somebody I’ve come to trust and respect in a semi-public setting, I saw someone on Twitter asking how and where to get this course. There were no responses.)

The way I managed to get this course is I remembered a copywriter who mentioned he had worked with the creator of the course. I contacted the copywriter. He put me in touch with the family of the guy who created the course.

Then it was back and forth over email with the daughter of the course creator for a couple weeks, with each back-and-forth taking another few days.

Finally, I made the payment last Friday. I had hoped to hear that the course has been shipped, but the weekend passed. Yesterday, I got a message from the daughter. She wrote:

“Hope you had a great weekend. Thanks for sending the PayPal; I received it and have the package ready. I forgot to ask earlier: Are you interested in other courses that I have…”

… and here followed a list of about 15 more attractive-sounding courses, at least going by titles alone, because that’s all there was. No price, no details, no sales page, no order form. That’s the upsell process. And thanks to this upsell process, it will be another few days before my course is shipped.

I’m not telling you this to complain. I’m happy to get this course and amused by the ordering process.

I am telling you this because, while you might not realize it, there’s a dark marketplace for courses. “Dark” as in “dark web,” the web that’s not accessible publicly or at least searchable by Google and Perplexity.

The fact is, there are billions of dollars’ worth of info products that are not sold on Clickbank, or eBay, or Amazon, or on anybody’s website.

Maybe these info products were created before the web and are simply sitting in a garage or warehouse, in book format or on tapes or DVDs.

Or maybe these info products were online once. But the hosting expired. Or they were a one-time offer. Or the creator simply moved on to other things, and the only place are now is on somebody’s hard drive.

Or maybe these info products are available online, but not publicly. Maybe they are simply sold via backchannels, to people who are on private email lists, or inside private communities, or only to people who know somebody who knows somebody.

To be fair:

Not everything that’s old is gold, and not everything that’s hidden is worth uncovering.

But there is gold, and a lot of it, among the many info products in the dark marketplace.

This is a legit opportunity, for anybody who has the digging instinct, and a bit of marketing and copywriting chops. To wit:

You can find these dark market info products, and simply sell them as-is to a new audience…

Or you can convert them to a new, more accessible format…

Or you can repackage and rebrand them into an offer of your own, while paying the original creator a licensing fee.

If any of this gets you excited, and you’re thinking “Oh if only there were more info on how to do all this,” well, then you’re in luck. This is the kind of stuff that’s taught, discussed, and practiced inside Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin community.

Travis happens to be the person who recommended the course that I ended up buying, based on his recommendation alone. That’s because I happen to be a member of Royalty Ronin, and while I’m not very publicly active there, I do lurk and absorb information and even put it to use.

As I’ve written before, at $300 per month, Royalty Ronin is expensive. But at least in my case, it has paid for itself many times over.

If you’re curious about profiting from the dark marketplace for courses, but hesitant to risk $300 to test out Ronin for a month, then you’re in luck once again. Because Travis is currently offering a week’s trial of Royalty Ronin for free.

If you’d like to join me inside and see if it’s for you:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

The crazy things my readers buy

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Over the past few weeks, I’ve been running Amazon ads for my new 10 Commandments book.

One ad campaign is “automatic targeting,” where Amazon simply tries to put my book in front of shoppers on its other pages. The ad reporting shows me which of these other pages resulted in clicks and sales for my book.

I’ve also been heavily promoting my new 10 Commandments book to my own list. Since I’m using an Amazon affiliate link (this is apparently against Amazon policies, but I love to live dangerous), I can see some of the other stuff that people who clicked on my affiliate link also bought.

If you just felt a chill rush up your back, as though you’ve been stripped naked in public, calm down. I cannot tell who specifically is buying anything, only that some people who bought my new 10 Commandments book (hundreds so far) or who clicked on my affiliate link (thousands) were also in the market for other things.

As you can guess, people who ended up buying my book were also in the market for dozens of ordinary, everyday purchases such as computer cables and supplement gummies and of course a “4.4 inch fixed-blade SEAX knife with a sheepsfoot blade.”

My readers were also in the market for a bunch of books that are in some way related to my own book, such as Jim Camp’s Start With No and Henning Nelms’s Magic and Showmanship — both of which I reference in my book — as well as Made to Stick, which is one of my go-to books for effective communication.

So far, so milquetoast. But then, my readers bought some quirky things I would not have expected or even known about had I not done this Amazon sleuthing. The top 3:

#1: How To Be The Jerk Women Love — a 1991 guide to picking up women by acting the jerk, written by “F.J. Shark.” A 5-star Amazon review by a shopper who goes by “The King of Jerks”:

“Some women made fun of me for praising this book. The laugh is on them. It ended up they were dumped by bigger jerks than me. What goes around comes around.”

#2: What is Wrong with Men — a feminist social critique, I guess written in reaction to F.J. Shark’s book and its positive reviews. “What is Wrong with Men” was only published a few days ago and doesn’t have any positive Amazon reviews yet, but the NY Times called it a “kind of road map for the current masculinity crisis. Reeled me in, like Absolut and cranberry. What a pairing!”

#3, and most intriguingly: Grade 23 Titanium Externally Threaded Nipple Bar Barbell Rings. For those who are too busy living life to worry either about acting the jerk or the jerks in their lives.

I’m telling you all this as a little hack so you can safely, legally, and ethically peek into the private shopping carts of your customers.

Amazon is the world’s biggest online marketplace. An estimated 64,000 metric tons of stuff pass through their warehouses every day. I just gave you a couple of ways to see what some of that stuff is, so you can adjust what and how you sell to your audience.

If you’d like to contribute to that data (don’t worry, it’s all anonymized), or more importantly, if you’d like to read my new 10 Commandments book — about effective communication, and magic and showmanship, and one secret negotiating trick of Jim Camp that he did not reveal in Start With No — then here is my Amazon affiliate link, ready to serve you:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

How I ended up paying an inconcievable price for coaching

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The date was July 17, 2019. I remember exactly where I was, walking in the old 18th century part of my home town of Zagreb, Croatia, where I was living at the time.

I pulled out my phone and saw that I had a new email from Dan Ferrrari.

In case you don’t know, Dan is an A-list copywriter. I profiled him in Commandment IV of my first 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters, because he has string of winning sales letters that few if any copywriters over the past 10 years can match. As just one example, Dan once wrote a sales letter that tripled sales over the previous control and sold out the entire stock of a longevity supplement.

In July 2019, my connection to Dan was extremely tenuous and unlikely.

I had gotten on his email list years earlier, but he never sent any emails.

Then, in the spring of 2019, while I was on a short trip to visit a friend in Baltimore — my first trip back to the U.S. in over five years — Dan finally sent an email to his list. Is anybody in the Baltimore/Washington area who wants to meet?

I replied yes. I don’t know exactly why or what I was hoping for. I just had a sense I was stuck with copywriting as a career. I had only heard stellar things about Dan. I thought if I met him in person maybe it would lead to something.

Aaaand… it turned out no. Our schedules didn’t fit, and we never ended up meeting in Baltimore.

I went back to Croatia, and Dan went back to his non-emailing.

And then, a few weeks later, Dan wrote me to ask whether I might be interested in his coaching program? I said yes.

To which, Dan replied with nothing. No response, first for a few days, then a week, then a month.

I forgot about Dan, and started fishing around for a different copywriting coach. But crazy as it might seem today, nobody in 2019 was offering coaching for copywriting.

And then, over a month after our last email exchange, Dan did reply. We got on a call to discuss his coaching program. I asked about everything but the price because I didn’t want that to cloud my judgment. The coaching sounded like the exact thing I had been looking for. I told Dan I’m in, and I figured I’d make the price work for me somehow.

The day after the call, Dan sent me an email with a PayPal payment link and the actual per month price for the coaching.

That was the email I got while walking around the old town in Zagreb. The reason I remember exactly where I was is that the price took my breath away.

I expected the coaching to be expensive. But not this expensive. I won’t say exactly how expensive it turned out to be. I’ll just say it was as high as my total income on many months at the time.

Still, I had some savings. I decided that, as long as I had some money in the bank, I was willing to give it a go. I mean, everything seemed to be building up to here — my stagnation with copywriting as a career, the near misses I’d had in meeting with Dan, the constant drum beating of “get a mentor” that was popular at the time.

So I took a deep breath, PayPaled Dan the money, and the coaching started.

I’ve written before about the actual coaching I got from Dan. I won’t repeat that here. Here I just want to focus on the price of the coaching, which, as I said, took my breath away when I first saw it.

Had anybody sat me down a few days prior and asked me whether I would pay, each month, what I ended up paying Dan, I would have just stared at them bug-eyed. “Absolutely not” would be my answer, and I would have meant it 100%.

Here’s the fundamental dilemma of setting prices:

Nobody knows what anything is truly worth. You don’t know what your offer is truly worth to your customers. They don’t know either. You can ask them, but they cannot and will not tell you the truth. The only way to know is to put an offer in front of them and see if they will buy.

I ended up buying Dan’s coaching at a price that would have been inconceivable to me only days earlier. Your customers or clients might end up buying your offers at prices that seem inconceivable to you now.

The only way to know is to put your offer in front of them, and see if they will buy.

That said, you can be a little more strategic about your price than simply throwing darts at a dartboard now and then. And on that note, I’d like to remind you of a mini-course I released yesterday, called Modified Depoorter Pricing.

This mini-course is about a pricing strategy I’ve used in the past to sell both services (back when I was working as a sales copywriter) and, later, my own courses.

This pricing strategy was elegant and worked very well when I used it.

My one regret is, I haven’t been consistent enough or thorough enough about using this pricing strategy. So I’ve created a mini-course outlining this pricing strategy, both for your benefit and for mine.

This is a “mini-course,” because I didn’t fill it with a lot of fluff or infotainment. You can consume it in 10 minutes if you so choose.

As such, I still don’t have a sales page for it. But if you’d like to get it nonetheless, you can do so at the link below.

The reason you might want to act now is that I will soon use the Modified Depoorter Pricing strategy to increase the price of this mini-course from its current modest level. To get it before then:

https://bejakovic.com/depoorter

Modified Depoorter Pricing

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I recently came across a clever pricing strategy for an online product.

I realized this pricing strategy is something I had used in the past to sell both services (back when I was working as a sales copywriter) and, later, my own courses.

This pricing strategy was elegant and worked very well when I used it.

The only problem was, I wasn’t consistent enough or thorough enough about using this pricing strategy.

So I’ve created a mini-course outlining this pricing strategy, both for your benefit and for mine. I’m calling this mini-course Modified Depoorter Pricing.

It’s a mini-course, because I didn’t fill it with a lot of fluff or infotainment.

It’s simply the core idea spelled out — Depoorter Pricing — plus a few key distinctions to help you apply it well to your particular situation — hence Modified Depoorter Pricing.

At this point, I don’t have a sales page for this mini-course. Everything I’ve just told you is all I have to tell you today. Maybe that will change in the future.

For now, the only added sales appeal I have to share is that I’m making a very special price available for the first 10 people who buy Modified Depoorter Pricing. If that’s enough for you:

https://bejakovic.com/depoorter