Business Ideas

Do not create a course and do not build an audience

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Yesterday, a friend texted me with a screenshot of an Instagram account of a duo of “Instagram & social media experts.”

“Do you know them?” my friend asked. “They create a course on how to create digital courses and sell them.”

I groaned and replied that I had never heard of these particular experts.

My friend was not happy with that response. She called me up right away. She explained how she was just on a webinar for this course and how it sounds like a good deal. It’s not so expensive (only 500 GBP), plus they really walk you through the whole thing, plus you can license their course and resell it.

“And they live in Bali!” my friend said, like it’s a proof element, rather than a red flag.

Fortunately, my friend lives in London and knows a million and one successful, accomplished, and rich people.

“There’s this nutritionist I know,” she said. “She has a lot of work but it’s all one-on-one. She actually asked me if I wanted to be her business partner, and do something online. Maybe I could create a course with her teaching what she knows?”

Finally a bit of sense in this conversation.

I’m gonna tell you what I told my friend, my best advice for how to launch an info biz for someone like her.

I’ll tell you this because it equally applies to someone like me or maybe you, if you are already somewhat established in a niche but thinking of doing something entirely new. Here’s what I told my friend:

1. If you really want to do this, then partner with the nutritionist woman. She’s the expert and she already has clients. That means she has knowledge and case studies. She can deliver the actual information and service. You can focus on the marketing and business stuff.

2. Do not create a course. A course takes between 6 weeks and 6 years to complete, and if you’re just getting started, odds are that it will be on the 6 years side.

3. Instead, create a live training based on information the nutritionist’s clients are already paying for. A live training is a very forgiving format to deliver information, and it has high perceived value. You can do it next week since the woman already knows the material, and you can run it with minimal infrastructure (Zoom and a clean t-shirt will do, pants not required). Plus, you can charge a good amount right out the gate because of the live, personalized feel.

4. Do not build an audience. An audience takes between 6 weeks and 6 years to build, and if you’re just getting started, odds are that it will be on the 6 years side.

5. Instead, reach out to people you know more or less personally, and ask them if they want to sign up to your training. (Like I said, my friend knows a lot of people socially in London, and from previous places she’s lived, jobs she’s worked at, schools she’s attended. Plus the nutritionist has her past clients list and her entire professional network. If, by a bit of social media posting and a few texts and DMs, they cannot get 10 women to sign up for their training, then the problem is with the training, and no amount of audience will fix that.)

6. Once you run that live training, you can run it again, each month, and for more money. Or you can polish it up and turn it into a course, except now it’s more likely to take 6 weeks than 6 years to complete.

I normally wouldn’t plop down a bowl of steaming how-to porridge right in front of you like this. It’s not good manners.

But this is a big weekend for me. I have a book to publish, an optin funnel to create (I bought a newsletter ad that’s due to run tomorrow, unrelated to the book), a lead magnet to write for that funnel, a gym to go to, and forced socializing to do (ahem, read the new book for that).

That also means I have nothing to promote to you today.

I prefer to build up your eagerness for my new book which will be published… imminently. I’ll have more information on that soon.

But if you absolutely need something to do with the energy that’s built up by reading this email, then go and implement the plan I’ve listed above.

Or if you already have a working business and you don’t want to get distracted, then forward my email to a competitor with a note that says, “Thought you might like this.” Maybe they will get distracted and go build a new info product business and move to Bali and stop competing with you. And if that happens, you can thank me by buying a copy of my new book.

Platform is magic

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I went for a walk this morning and as I was dodging the puddles from last night’s rain, I listened to a podcast, a conversation between James Schramko and Dean Jackson.

In case those names are not familiar to you, both belong to Internet marketers who have been in the business a combined 50+ years.

Both James and Dean have made many millions of dollars for themselves and many more for their clients and customers.

Whatever. The point is simply that, in the little corner of the Internet where I live, these guys are influential and established and respected. I’ve known about each for many years, and I’ve been paying attention to both intensely over the past year.

This morning, while listening to the podcast, James Schramko talked about changes he had made to his business following the advice of his friend, a guy named Kory Basaraba.

That caught my attention and maybe made me step into a puddle.

The fact is, I’ve known Kory for years. A few years ago, back when I was still doing freelance copywriting stuff, I even worked with him.

Through this experience, I know Kory is smart, successful, and established. But on hearing his name being mentioned on a podcast, by two people I follow, I felt some sort of electric jolt.

I don’t know how wide of a reach this Schramko/Dean podcast episode might get. Maybe a few thousand people, maybe tens of thousands? In any case it’s not Joe Rogan.

It doesn’t matter. My opinion of Kory, while it was positive before, suddenly jumped. He got the warm bright glow of a star in my eyes.

Of course, I’m a hardened cynic and a bit of a wizard when it comes to knowing influence spells. So I quickly shook my head to clear my mind from this strange persuasion.

But I wanted to share this story with you, such as it is, for a bit of motivation.

I don’t understand what it is about having a platform. Maybe I’ll figure it out one day.

Right now, my best answer is that having a platform is simply magic.

A few hundred or a few thousand people around the world listen to you. It’s not a tremendous amount of reach or power. But it doesn’t matter.

The very fact of having a platform, of speaking to a group of people, gives you status and authority and charisma, and even the power to transfer that to others, simply by mentioning their name. That’s magic.

The motivating part is that, if you haven’t done so already, you can do this same thing for yourself.

Nobody’s stopping you from starting a podcast, or writing an email newsletter, today.

Like I said, you don’t need a tremendous overall audience to have a tremendous influence on the people who do listen or read to what you have to say. I can vouch for that from personal experience, having been both on top of the platform at certain times, and in the audience, looking up, at other times.

I know nothing about podcasting. But I know something about newsletters. Such as for example, that the more often you send emails, the greater your influence over the people in your audience.

And with that in mind, let me point you to a service that can help make it easier to send something every day, so you can work your magic quickly:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Солярис

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Last night, I went to the movies. By myself. At 10pm, which is pretty much my bedtime.

First came one trailer — some Iraq war thriller with Matt Damon as a solider yelling at other soldiers and lots of explosions and jets swooping in and rapid-fire editing between more yelling and explosions and gunfire.

Then came another trailer — a horror movie about vampires in the deep south, with bloody mouths and fangs and a vampire banging his head on the door of a wood cabin, asking to be let in, while the non-vampires inside cower and transfer their fear to the audience.

And then, after about six total minutes of this adrenaline-pumping overstimulation, the screen got dark. A Bach piece on organ started playing and a barebones title card showed the name of the movie:

Солярис

… or Solaris, if you can’t read that. A three-hour-long science fiction movie from 1972. In Russian, which I don’t speak. With Spanish subtitles, which I can barely read before they disappear. The movie opens up with a five-minute sequence of a man walking next to a lake, without any dialogue.

I’ve seen Solaris twice before, years ago. A few days ago, I finished reading the science fiction novel on which it’s based. When I saw it was playing at the local old-timey movie theater, I decided I would violate my usual bedtime and go see it again, and on the big screen.

I’m not trying to sell you on Solaris. All I really want to highlight is the contrast that was so obvious between those new Hollywood trailers and the start of the 1972 Russian movie. It reminded me of something I read in William Goldman’s Adventures In The Screen Trade:

“In narrative writing of any sort, you must eventually seduce your audience. But seduce doesn’t mean rape.”

Goldman was writing in a different era. He was contrasting movie writing to TV writing.

At the beginning of a movie, Goldman said, you have some time. You can seduce. Things are different in TV land — you gotta be aggressive, right in the first few seconds. Otherwise the viewer will simply change the channel.

Things have changed since Goldman wrote the above. Today, all Hollywood movies have become like TV. That doesn’t eliminate the fact that different formats allow you to do different things, and that not every movie needs to start with a heart-pounding sequence of bloody vampires banging their heads on the door.

The bigger point is, just because you know a trick, this doesn’t require you to use it at every damn opportunity. Holding back can in fact can make the show better.

A year ago, I read a book titled Magic And Showmanship, about… magic and showmanship. The author of that book, a magician named Henning Nelms, kept coming back to a principle he called conservation.

Conservation is keeping from overselling what you’ve got, and from making yourself out to be more skilled or powerful than absolutely necessary for the effect in question.

It’s a lesson that can apply to a lot of showmanship, including showmanship in print.

Anyways, I suspect nobody will take me up on a recommendation to read Nelms’s Magic And Showmanship, but recommend it I will. In order to sell it to you, I can only say that last year, I was even thinking of taking the ideas from this book and turning them into a full-blown course or training about running email promos, because I found the ideas so transferable.

In case you’re a curious type, or in case you simply want new ideas for running email promos:

https://bejakovic.com/nelms

Indecent proposal

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Last week, I wrote an email with the subject line “Operation Mincemeat.” At the end of that email, I asked readers if they have an audience to which they could promote my new 10 Commandments book.

I also said I don’t know what I can do in turn for those who promote me, but that I am happy to entertain all kinds of offers.

I got a lot of readers replying to say they would be happy to promote me to their lists. I appreciate everyone who wrote in.

Some people said they would do it without asking anything in turn, simply because I’m such a swell guy.

Others made me various decent and indecent proposals. Here’s one I got from James Carran, who writes several newsletters about the craft and business of writing:

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How about later in the year when I get a chance to polish them up, you take a gander at my course library and see if there’s one you’d like to promote as an affiliate? I just want to redesign them all and update them first…

With the proviso that you’d only promote anything if you thought it was genuinely helpful for your people and something you’d want to promote anyway. If not, I’ll take no offence.

===

I’m bringing this up because James’s proposal is one that I wish more people would make me, all the time, whether or not they agree to promote my new book.

So let me explicitly make you my own proposal, which you may deem indecent, but which you probably won’t, because I’m really fishing here so I can pay off the subject line:

If you have a course, and you would love to have me promote your course to my audience, then write in and let me know.

A few points that will make it more likely for me to take you seriously:

1. Your course is amazing and previous customers love it

2. Your course is based on a new mechanism for an old promise (hat tip to Justin Goff for that idea — whatever happened to him)

3. Your course sells for at least $197, or you’d be okay raising the price to that level

If you have a course that matches these three criteria, or at least two out of three and you can compensate for the third with your own enthusiasm and force of personality, then write in and let me know.

I’m not promising anything. But I am always short of good offers to promote, and if you have an amazing course that I can get behind, then you’d be doing me a favor.

Fundamental theorem of sustainable, stress-free businesses

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I studied computer science in college. A very few lessons have stuck with me. For example, I still remember the “Fundamental theorem of software engineering,” which says:

“All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection.”

In computer science, that means something like, take a step away from the core problem, look at things from a higher level of abstraction, and everything will sort itself out.

Along the same lines, I would like to propose to you the fundamental theorem of stress-free, sustainable businesses, which says:

“All problems in your business can be solved by another level of indirection.”

Would an example help?

Think of the 1848 California Gold Rush.

The zeroth level of that was to take a sieve and sit by the side of the American River, sifting thousands of pounds of silt every day and maybe finding a few nuggets of gold.

As you probably know, that’s not how the real money was made.

The real money was made in selling sieves and pots and shovels to miners, not in shoveling for gold. California’s first millionaire was a man named Samuel Brannan, who opened a big store during the Gold Rush. A first level of indirection.

But you can do still better. Because if your business is selling shovels to miners, then you might be out of business when a gold rush passes. Plus, gold miners are a rowdy, desperate bunch, and selling to them means you might get pulled into a brawl or hit over the head with one of your own shovels.

That’s where the fundamental theorem comes in.

You can introduce another layer of indirection, a second level.

You can get out of the shovel-selling business, and you get into the shovel-distributing business, or the store-construction business, or the info product business targeting owners of big stores, men like Samuel Brannan, a kind of customer with greater staying power and ability to pay than the miners he sells to.

And if it turns out that you don’t like the selling to the Samuel Brannans of the world, you know what to do. Third level, fourth level, fifth level of indirection, and everything will sort itself out.

Somebody recently asked me if I have a course or a training on choosing a niche.

I don’t. I don’t imagine I will ever create one. The above is my bit of advice to help you choosing a niche.

But I do know somebody who has a lot of experience with online businesses, and who has great advice about criteria for choosing a new niche.

That person is Travis Sago. Travis has an entire training called “Niche Factors That Never Fail.”

Travis’s courses, including Passive Cash Flow Mojo, the one that contains that niches training, all sell for thousands of dollars each.

But through some glitch in the matrix, you can currently get access to all of Travis’s courses by being a part of Travis’s Royalty Ronin community. That community is not cheap either, but it’s a fraction of the price of just one of Travis’s high-ticket courses.

I can recommend Royalty Ronin, because I myself am a member.

But you don’t have to decide anything now. Because you can get a free trial to Ronin for 7 days. If you’d like to find out more about this trial offer:

http://bejakovic.com/ronin

Announcing: 1% Writer

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Today I’d like to clue you in on a new offer called 1% Writer.

It’s not my offer.

I’m not even an affiliate.

It’s Kieran Drew’s new offer to go along with his upcoming birthday.

I asked Kieran recently if he’d be one of the people to read my new 10 Commandments book and give me feedback. He turned me down because he was busy putting this new course together.

But Kieran made me a deal, which was that he’d promote my new 10 Commandments book to his audience when I do publish it.

In turn, I said I’d gladly promote his 1% Writer to my audience.

The thing is, I haven’t seen, read, or profited from 1% Writer myself. (It’s a live cohort course, delivered by email, which will kick off next week, May 8.)

I’m still happy to promote 1% Writer to you, for the following two reasons:

Reason #1 is Kieran himself.

In case you don’t know the guy, he has a huge audience (something like 250,000 people across various platforms), and he’s made a huge amount of money in a few years’ time by selling stuff to that audience (north of $1.2 million).

Kieran’s done it all with nothing but his little typing fingers.

Clearly, he knows a thing, two, or maybe even three about how to succeed online by just writing.

What’s more, he’s directly coached a bunch of other people who have gone from zero to hero in that space, so he knows how to pass his knowledge on to others.

I’ll also say I read Kieran’s newsletter myself, when I’ve largely started to ignore most of the other people I used to follow online.

Add it all up and the sum is that I know, respect, and endorse Kieran for what he does in general.

Reason #2 I’m happy to promote 1% Writer is that it costs a whopping $33, or $1 a day. (The course lasts for 33 days, since Kieran is turning 33, and apparently there’s a mathematical connection between the two facts.)

What do you get for $33?

Says Kieran, this course has his best advice, compressed down into 33 lessons, about how to grow your audience, build authority, and turn your ideas into income.

He also says it’s the highest value-to-dollar ratio product he’s made.

I’ve happily promoted Kieran’s high-ticket courses in the past, and I’ve seen the thought and care and value he’s put into those offers.

If he says 1% Writer is the highest value-to-dollar product he’s made, I believe him. That takes nothing away from his high-ticket offers, but it does make 1% Writer an attractive offer, and one to consider seriously.

Of course, you make the final decision. To help you do that, you can find out the full details about 1% Writer, including that May 7 deadline, on the page below:

​https://1pw.kierandrew.com/

Mr. Malaprop

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About a month ago, my friend Sam forwarded me a WSJ article about a Ford executive named Mike O’Brien. Over the course of his decades-long career, O’Brien compiled a list, 2,229 items long, of his colleagues’ corporate malapropisms. A few examples:

“I don’t want to sound like a broken drum here, but…”

“Let’s not reinvent the ocean.”

“It’s no skin on our back.”

“Too many cooks in the soup.”

“We need to talk about the elephant in the closet.”

Last night, I called my mom. She’s one of the people I’ve sent an early draft of my new 10 Commandments book to. Being my mom, she’s found the book tremendous. “I’m just so impressed that you know so many facts, and can refer to all these stories, and know the names of all the directors and the screenwriters of the movies you talk about…”

I had to set my mom straight.

It’s writing. Writing.

My mom wouldn’t agree with this, but the fact is, in real life, I’m not all that smart, educated, or informed.

I say stupid stuff all the time. I don’t remember names or dates at all. I’m prone to using cliches and saying generalities. I’ve definitely slipped into worse malaprops than the ones above from O’Brien.

But in writing, it doesn’t matter. In writing, you can take a moment to think. You can look things up. You can pack your writing full of relevant facts. You can edit, so you don’t publish something that ends up stabbing you in the foot.

I don’t know if anybody needed to hear that or not.

In any case, my new 10 Commandments book, which will have a chapter about the elephant in the closet, is nearing publication.

Yesterday, I made an offer related to this book, or maybe asked for a favor. Let me repeat that once more:

Do you have an audience of your own? A newsletter, an online community, a local book club or bingo group?

What I want is for you to promote my book when it comes out. Of course, that means nothing to you and does nothing for you. I don’t know what I can offer you to make it worth your while to promote my book when it comes out, but I am open to all kinds of ideas, from straightforward to outlandish.

If you are open to it as well, at least in theory, hit reply. Let’s talk, and maybe we can figure something out that works for both of us.

The day after

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Yesterday around 1pm, I finished writing my Daily Email Habit puzzle and was about to upload it to Kit. But my Internet had stopped working. The odd thing was I checked my phone, and not just the wifi was down, but it looked like the cellular network, too.

I shrugged and went to take a nap because… I live in Spain.

I woke up twenty minutes later. The Internet was still down. I looked inside the fridge to see if there was anything interesting happening there. It was dark. Aha. The power was out.

I opened the the circuit breaker box — all the circuit breakers were fine. I opened the front door of my apartment. The hallway outside was dark except for the emergency light.

Ok. So the power is out in the entire building. There was a notice a few days ago about some utilities work being done, maybe this was it.

I decided to go to the gym, because there was nothing else to do. The elevator wasn’t working so I took the stairs. On my way down, I passed a couple with a baby who were climbing up. The woman was carrying the baby, while the guy, panting, was carrying the stroller. Lucky for them, they live on just the second floor (the building has 12).

As I stepped out into the sunshine, I saw a bunch of people standing around on the street and talking. All stores, restaurants, and banks were dark and empty. I guess the was power out everywhere in my neighborhood?

I passed by a local brunch place. The waitress was explaining to the guests, “It’s everywhere! My boyfriend in Madrid says it, there’s no connection anywhere.”

I got to the gym, which was dark, silent, and full of people. I did my workout among suppressed grunts and increasingly stifling air (the AC wasn’t working).

I heard one of the trainers explain to somebody that this power outage is happening “en toda España.” Somebody else said Portugal too. Others were saying it’s in France and Italy as well (turned out to be exaggerations).

I walked back home. Drivers were carefully stopping at every zebra and intersection because the stoplights weren’t working either.

The streets were packed with people. Neither the metros nor trams were running. The whole city seemed to be either standing on the streets or walking home because no work could be done. An alarming number of women were sitting on park benches and reading books.

Convenience stores were the only thing that was somewhat open. Each one had a queue of people waiting at the front door. The store owners were letting in people one by one to do basic shopping if they could pay in cash.

As tends to happen, the sun started to set. I went for a walk and saw firefighters in front of a pharmacy beating down the rolling security shutter. It must run on electricity. I guess the firefighters were trying to close it by force for the pharmacists, to prevent a breakin at night.

I stood on my balcony as night fell. I was looking forward to seeing the city in total darkness for once. But it wasn’t to happen.

It turned out some buildings still had electricity — the fire station next door, various hotels, an entire neighborhood off on the hillside.

Still, Avinguda Diagonal, the main artery next to my house, was almost entirely dark. So was my little street. My own apartment was even darker.

I made a salad for dinner — the only food I had left in the house that didn’t require a stove to prepare. I had to move the cutting board to the window because the counter where I normally work was so dark I was afraid I would chop off a finger tip while slicing the cherry tomatoes.

By around 9:30pm, my apartment was like a cave. There was no Internet and I had switched off my phone earlier to conserve the battery. I lay on the couch and turned on the backlight on my Kindle to read in darkness.

Around 10pm, I heard cheering and clapping outside. A neighboring block had gotten its power back. But my block and most other blocks around me were still in the dark.

I went to bed around 10:30pm, feeling exhausted. I guess following the natural light cycle does that to you.

And then, some time during the night, I’m guessing around 2am, I woke up to loud beeping. My fridge was back and it was helpfully signalling that the temperature of the freezer was dangerously high.

All that’s to say, as of this morning, everything’s normal once again, and without even an interruption in my daily email cadence.

I have to admit I was actually looking forward to the possibility of a continuing power outage, and to having a proper, unavoidable excuse to not writing my daily email today. What would that be like? I’ve been writing a daily email for years now, every day, without fail. I was excited by the prospect of change. That’s something for me to think about.

Meanwhile, I can tell you that the curious day yesterday reminded me of a curious book I’d read two years ago. In fact, this book was the first book of my year-long Insights & More Book Club, which brought together a few of my readers specifically to read books that offered a mind-bending new perspective.

The first book of the book club fit the bill.

Even though the book is 100 years old, it was written in a particularly interesting and influential style, which I think can be relevant for anyone writing online today.

It also did lead me to moment of real insight, a perspective shift, which sticks with me to this day. I mean, even to yesterday, when I was really thinking about it.

If you’re curious, you can find the book, or maybe even read it yourself, at the following convenient link:

https://bejakovic.com/masses

What matters more than results

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Last year, a dude with some personal domain email address signed up to my list.

I make a habit of doing a bit of detective work on new subscribers. This led me to a New York Times article about the dude from 2015.

At that time, said the article, he was the manager of an investment fund with $35 billion under management.

I wrote him a 1-1 email, as I do sometimes with new subscribers, to say hello, to mention the article about him I had dug up in my snooping, and to ask what a person of his profile is doing signing up to a daily email list like mine, about writing and marketing and effective communication. He replied:

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I basically do the same thing I did for the pension fund, but now for a small group of direct clients. I also run quite a bit of money for other investment advisors and their clients. I manage about $1.2 billion total – I’m a solo shop, do it all myself.

I decided a few years ago that I wanted to be out of the public eye – 20 years was enough, so I’m pretty secretive and off the grid.

My results are still among the best in the country, but I’ve learned in the retail investment world perceptions matter more than results. So I generate best in class returns mostly for myself and personal pride.

My business actually runs and grows off the image I portray to clients and prospects. I’ve learned that I’m lucky enough to have the ability to naturally make complex things simple, which people are dying for in the investment business.

I’ve developed a somewhat unique way to communicate, mostly using very focused, simple communications. Especially in the world of AI, I think this skill will matter more than most. So I’ve become a closet student of writing, copywriting, communication, etc. That’s how I can across your newsletter. I bought your book too.

===

I thought that was curious and wanted to share it with you.

Here’s a dude who, so you might imagine, lives and breathes by measurable results. I mean, either he makes his investors money, or he doesn’t. Either he outperforms the other guy, or he doesn’t.

Except, as he says, that doesn’t really matter, not as much as perception, as the image he portrays to his clients and prospects.

That’s something to keep in mind, if you yourself work in a field that’s supposedly results-based, and particularly if you work in a field that’s more fuzzy and wooly.

So how do you build up and maintain an image that clients and prospects are willing to pay for?

The message above from the investment advisor spells it out.

I can only add that he also told me he sends “clients and prospects periodic emails about the markets, my strategy, etc.”

Maybe it’s something you could profit from too? If you’d like my help on that:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

It drops out the bottom of every sales funnel

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Last summer, I listened to an old sales training by a guy named Fred Herman. Says Fred:

“I believe every sale sort of funnels down this way. You need to have a product or a service. You need to have a customer, of course, to talk to. Then you need to find out what his dominant buying motive is. And then the picture he will buy will drop right out the bottom of the funnel, because people don’t buy products or services, they buy pictures of the end result of that product or service, playing a part in their life.”

This echoes something that the great Robert Collier wrote a hundred years ago in his Letter Book:

“Thousands of sales have been lost, millions of dollars worth of business have failed to materialize, solely because so few letter-writers have that knack of visualizing a proposition — of painting it in words so the reader can see it as they see it.”

And of course, if you need something a bit more modern, there’s negotiation coach Jim Camp, who summed it up in his pithy and dramatic way:

“No vision, no decision.”

“Sure sure,” you say. “Words, words, more words. I need pictures though! Isn’t that what you’re trying to sell me on?”

All right, let’s see if you can picture this:

Yesterday, I told you about Albert Lasker and Claude C. Hopkins.

Lasker, who ran the biggest and most powerful ad agency in the US, wanted Hopkins to come and work for him.

Problem was, Hopkins 1) didn’t want to be in advertising any more and 2) had made millions and didn’t need to work ever again.

Lasker asked Hopkins to meet for lunch at an upscale restaurant.

He played to Hopkins’s vanity, pulling out several pages of typewritten copy for a major new client, the best copy he had been able to get written by the best copywriters out there, which just wasn’t good enough to be submitted.

He made Hopkins an “easy yes” proposition — “just write three ads for us so we can submit it to this one client.”

Crucially — and this is really the picture-within-the-picture I want to give you — Lasker didn’t offer Hopkins any money to take the job.

After all, what’s money gonna do for Hopkins? He’s already got enough.

Instead, as the dessert arrived, Lasker told Hopkins to send his wife to the car dealer so she can pick out whatever car she likes, and Lasker would pay for it.

A bit of backstory:

1. Hopkins’s wife wanted an electric car (crazy thing is, those existed in 1907).

2. Hopkins, though a multimillionaire, was cheap and couldn’t part with the money to buy his wife the electric car. This was causing… tension at home.

You might think, what’s the difference between getting paid outright and getting paid via a free car for your wife?

In theory, no difference.

In practice, all the difference in the world.

And so it is with your prospects and customers too.

You might be promising them money.

That works some of the time. But what works all the time is to promise people what they really want. And that, like old Fred says up top, is a picture of the end result of what they are buying, playing a part in their life.

Of course, that takes some research on your part. Lasker had to do some scheming and digging to find out that Hopkins’s wife wanted an electric car and that Hopkins was too cheap to buy it for her, and that this was the most pressing problem in his life right now. But that’s what made Hopkins yield, “as all do, to Lasker’s persuasiveness.”

And that’s it. That’s all I got for you.

I have nothing to sell you today, at least nothing wonderfully expensive the way I would like.

But if you want more stories that can buy you a car, featuring Claude C. Hopkins and Albert Lasker, can find a couple in my original 10 Commandments book.

I’ve shipped off the new 10 Commandments book to several trusted readers and I am waiting, my cheeks red from holding my breath, for their feedback so I can integrate said feedback and hit publish on Amazon.

Meanwhile, if you still haven’t read the original 10 Commandments, you can find them all waiting for you here:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments