Business Ideas

Why yes, that would be a dumb idea

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I got an email yesterday from someone I don’t know, with the subject line, “Copy Riddles.”

Copy Riddles is the name of my highest-ticket info product.

Ok, attention engaged. I opened the email to read:

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John,

A daily newsletter peers call the most underrated list in copywriting, built up around Copy Riddles, is a base worth working with.

My hunch is there’s a five figure opportunity in readers who’ve never been pointed at Copy Riddles outside of a launch window.

I fund and run that kind of campaign myself. I do the work, you spend nothing upfront, and I only earn a share of what converts.

Would it be a dumb idea to grab 15 minutes and see if there’s a test worth running there?

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Why yes, that would be a dumb idea, and a waste of a perfectly good 15 minutes.

Ignore for the moment the strange English in this cold email, which makes me doubt this person can write in a way that would get people to buy.

The reason it would be a dumb idea is that I already regularly promote Copy Riddles “outside of a launch window,” and I have been for years.

I do it both inside one-off daily emails like this one, and during promos where I create a special offer around Copy Riddles, attach it to a deadline, and make a bit of a spectacle to reap all the demand that my daily emails may have sown.

Two minutes of research could have told my cold emailer all that.

Oh well. This guy’s dumb idea did serve two purposes:

1. To allow me to remind you to keep promoting your products regularly via daily emails, so you can create demand, and to run regular promos, so you can cash in on that demand, and

2. To allow me to point you to my Copy Riddles program, which is the best thing I sell.

For more information on Copy Riddles:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Why I won’t promote your paid community

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Yesterday, I promoted Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin, a paid community. A reader who also has a paid community wrote in to ask:

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Ronin is $111/mo. Mine is [a similar price]. If I invite you to be a lifetime member and provided you like what I’ve built inside, would you consider promoting it?

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I appreciate the offer, and the answer is, I would not consider promoting this dude’s paid community, or really, anybody else’s paid community.

The fact is, it’s close to impossible to promote somebody else’s paid community with any success. Because of this, the promise of money isn’t much of a promise at all. I only keep promoting Travis’s thing because I’m a true believer, because I’m in the community myself and get a lot out of it.

If I did promote somebody else’s paid community primarily because I was hoping to get paid, I would do it the way Travis is preparing to auction off a recurring affiliate offer now inside Royalty Ronin.

Travis will be offering people a “Hero Package,” which provides a sexy outcome and overcomes all or most of the objections people might have when they are promised that outcome.

He’s gonna sell that Hero Package, rather than the continuity offer. He will make the continuity offer simply the condition for getting what people really want.

Of course, this model is well-known.

The magic is the way that Travis puts together his Hero Packages so that people are willing to pay 5x, 10x, 20x of whatever the underlying subscription might cost.

If you would like to observe Travis in action as he does this, and learn something you can use to promote recurring offers, whether your own or from affiliates:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

Creating value out of things that others would never think of

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I’m at the airport as I write this, on my way to Budapest, my former home, for a reunion with friends I had when I lived there a long time ago.

Right now, I’m sitting on a tiny stool at an airport restaurant, about to bite into a refrigerated airport sandwich, crowded on the one side by a pushy French couple and on the other by cleaning woman with a large broom.

That’s the good part of my current trip.

The bad part is that I just spent 25 minutes waiting in line for the privilege of paying 48 euro to get my boarding pass.

I’m flying low-cost, and I didn’t check in online before the three-hours deadline mandated by this low-cost airline. When I tried to check in online a few hours ago, I was told I would have to do it at the airport, and pay.

It’s annoying when this happens on a low-cost flight, and yet it is instructive.

The fact is, all kinds of things can be turned into value that normally aren’t.

It feels petty when low-cost airlines do it, but it can be done in ways that don’t feel petty, but in fact feel the opposite — generous, exciting, convenient.

Imagine you’re buying a house.

Nominally, you’re paying for the keys and the right to move in.

You can buy a “low-cost” house, which gives you the keys and the right to move in, but which doesn’t have lightbulbs, windows, or running water, and you have to pay extra for those.

Conversely, can buy a “premium” house, which gives you not just the bare keys and the right to move in, but which has been furnished by an interior designer, comes with a concierged security service, and has a fridge stocked with food from Whole Foods.

Ultimately, it’s the same business practice, the only difference is the positioning of your business as upmarket or downmarket.

Maybe you’re munching on your own refrigerated sandwich right now and mumbling, “Right right…”

… but maybe you don’t see how this idea from real estate and the airline industry can apply to what you do, specifically to creating offers that you can sell to your audience.

For that, I’d like to invite you to sign up for a trial to my perennial recommendation, the Royalty Ronin community.

Travis Sago, the guy who runs Ronin, is the best person I have ever seen at creating value out of things that others would never think of.

Right now, Travis is preparing to auction off a year of a SaaS, which he is promoting as an affiliate.

In other words, Travis will ask people how much they would pay… to have him pay their bill for a year of this software service.

How do you possibly auction off something not unique, with a known and fixed value? And how do you auction it off for 5x, 10x, 20x of what it is currently selling for on the website of the SaaS company?

For that, I invite you to sign up to Ronin, and to follow along as Travis proceeds to build up his premium offer, out of elements that might seem like air to you right now:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

help

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Maybe you can help me?

All day long, I’ve been trying to come up with a sticky way to think about the difference between:

1. A business built on predictable income, where 60% or more of your desired income each month is covered with near certainty on the first of the month, by things like continuity and subscription offers, retainers, regular work with long-term clients, or payments on payment plans, and

2. A business completely lacking predictable income, where close to 0% of your monthly income is certain in advance, and each month is a series of scores or cash grabs, whether that’s launches, promos, or one-off work with new clients.

I’ve been thinking and thinking, pondering and pondering, summer autumn winter spring.

How to present this distinction in a more succinct, immediately understandable way?

My best idea so far is an analogy to two famous makes of car.

I thought to call the first type of business, the business built on predictable income, a “Rolls-Royce business.” That’s coming the famous David Ogilvy headline:

“At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock”

In other words, even at high speed income, there’s not a lot of noise, stress, or smoke in a Rolls-Royce business. It’s very efficient, comfortable, and even conservative. It’s likely to stick around for a long time, just like Rolls-Royce the company, which has been in business for 120+ years.

The other kind of business, completely lacking in predictable income, I though to call a “DeLorean business.”

DeLorean, you might or might not know. was an 80s sports car, which was only produced for two years. Today it’s only really known because it was used in the “Back to the Future” movies.

DeLorean was flashy with its gull-wing doors and low profile. It was also unreliable, uncomfortable, and ultimately led the company to bankruptcy. As Car and Driver magazine put it:

“Hopping, darting, and corkscrewing motions are not the stuff of confidence.”

I don’t know though.

What do you think of this analogy?

Does it carry the emotional impact I want it to have, if I’m trying to promote the stable and comfortable Rolls-Royce biz at the expense of the flashy and unstable DeLorean biz? Or are the gull-wing doors and the Back to the Future association too positive, and does a DeLorean biz sound too cool to give up?

Please hit reply and let me know what you think. Or let me know if you have a better sticky way to present the difference between a “predictable income biz” and an “uncertain cash grab biz.”

Thanks in advance.

Do you have a great gig right now? Beware and prepare

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Yesterday, I talked to a coaching client, someone who has a sizeable email list and a bunch of offers he’s been selling for a while.

Recently, he decided to step back from this to take a proper job. He enjoys learning something new at his new role, and he finds the work exciting, and he likes the company and the people, and there’s more money, stability, and free time than with all the stuff he has been doing by himself.

He asked if I have any advice as he transitions from his online business to this new job.

I’ll tell you what I told him:

Over the course of the past six months, I have had a number of people come to me and say, “I used to have this great gig, until yesterday.”

One was a business owner whose business partner screwed him and took everything.

Another was a freelancer whose main client’s business turned out to be shaky, so the client decided to bring the work in-house as a cost-cutting measure.

A third was a salaried employee whose employer decided to simply terminate the role, even though the guy was making the employer more money than he was getting paid, and could prove it.

All these people, and a few others, came to me after their once-great gig disappeared, with the idea to build a personal brand as a way of making money now.

So what I told my coaching client yesterday is, enjoy the new job and make the most of it. But at the same time, even the best, most certain gigs can disappear, overnight.

Businesses go out of business. Partners cheat you or simply step away. Employers get sick, die, or go bankrupt.

For all these reasons and more, it makes sense to have a backup to your great gig.

My coaching client is very lucky, because he’s already got the best backup I know, a personal brand, an audience, and a relationship with that audience.

If anything happens to his current job — the company is sold and the new owners fire everyone, or they slash everybody’s salaries while keeping the workload the same, or they hire somebody else to do the job because he’s cheaper/better/a nephew — then he can go to this list, and write an email or two, and most likely find a new client or a series of clients by the end of this week.

So my takeaway for you is, if you have a personal brand, don’t let it go.

You don’t have to email daily or create new offers or moonlight in addition to your day job. All you have to do is show up on some regular schedule (once a week is good), and let people know you are alive, and give them proof that you’re doing well, and are still worth listening to and knowing about.

And my takeaway for you if you don’t have a personal brand but you have a great gig going… is also to start now.

For one thing, your great gig can give you authority and content ideas and behind-the-scenes data to make it easy to be somebody online.

For another thing, as I’ve been saying, your great gig might not always be there, so it makes sense to beware and prepare for that possibility now.

Here’s one more thing I told my coaching client yesterday:

Just focus on the content. Don’t worry about list growth or about offers or about what form this personal brand might take in the future.

This is true for you even if you are starting a personal brand now.

There’s value in creating content online EVEN IF NOBODY’S READING. For one thing, it makes you better at what you do. For another thing, it can grow your list on its own (albeit slowly), and it becomes fodder if you do want to create offers or lead magnets or books in the future. Most important of all, it becomes a proof element if you are ever talking to someone you want to impress. Compare:

“Why should you hire me? Gee, let me try to sum up the past 12 years of my career for you in the next 45 seconds before I lose your attention…”

… to…

“Why should you hire me? I don’t know that you should. Here’s my website where I’ve written tens of thousands of words on this topic, based on my previous experience. Take a look at it and we can talk afterwards.”

So let me ask you?

Do you have a great gig right now?

Do you want to have a personal online brand, and an audience, and a great relationship with them that you can use as a backup in case your great gig ever vanishes?

Then write me and let me know.

You can’t buy anything here. But I am curious what you do, and what kind of a personal brand you want to build and how, and what questions you have about the process.

Why not just double your prices

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You may have heard the following story, because I’ve shared it before in these emails, but it’s worth repeating:

A business owner, an info marketer who sells marketing advice to martial arts schools, is in the red. He’s making a million a year, but he’s spending a million five — on ads, on employees, on fulfillment.

What to do? He has tried everything, and he’s still bleeding cash.

The business owner somehow manages to get in front of Jay Abraham, the “75 Billion Dollar Man,” a business coach who has mentored the likes of Tony Robbins and Dave Asprey and Ramit Sethi.

Over the course of a morning, Jay Abraham grills the business owner on all aspects of his operation. Jay makes one suggestion after another. But the business owner has tried it all already! It didn’t fix his problem!

Finally, after suggestion #1,001 has been shot down, Jay Abraham has had enough. “If you’re so fucking smart, you figure it out!” he says and storms out of the room. The business owner is left stunned.

A few moments pass. Jay Abraham comes back into the room, looking calmer and a bit apologetic.

“How much did you say you’re making?”

“A million a year.”

“And how much are you spending?”

“A million five.”

“How much would you want to make?”

“Two million would be great.”

“Ok,” says Jay Abraham. “That’s easy. Just double your prices.” And he walks out again.

That’s kind of the punchline of the story. Because the business owner, after shaking his head for a while and thinking what an ass Jay Abraham is, decides to actually take this advice. He doubles his prices, finds his market will tolerate them, and is suddenly and magically making a profit for the first time in forever.

The end.

So go and double your prices also! And let me know how it goes.

Maybe you are shaking your head right now, and thinking what an ass Bejako is.

Yes, “Just double your prices” can be a legit business strategy.

It can also be poor advice, for a few reasons:

1. You might need to update the offer along with the pricing. That can mean your positioning, your promise, and in some cases, your deliverables. (This was actually the case of the info publisher above, though the changes he had to make were small.)

2. You might have internal resistance to doubling your prices, and being told to do so can be useless. (Again, this was the case of the info publisher before. It took him several days to actually accept Jay Abraham’s advice as genuine. Many people never get there, because they aren’t as hard pressed as that guy was.)

3. Doubling your prices can be too little! You might be severely undercharging, and there might be people who would happily pay 5x or 10x for the same thing you’re offering now, if you would only ask.

4. Your current audience, or even your current market, might not support double your current prices, and you might need to get in front of different people first.

Which brings me to the Enterprise Clients workshop.

It shows copywriters and agency owners how to charge $15K-$100K for their current service by selling to “enterprise clients.”

Because you can put in the same effort you’re putting in now, or even less, and get paid 2x or 5x or 10x what you’re getting paid now, while working with better, nicer, more appreciative clients.

While increasing your price alone can have magic effects, you are likely to need some other things too, and this workshop will cover those.

This workshop, or actually series of workshops, is happening live on Zoom, from September 21 to 25, for an hour a day.

I’m telling you about it now, weeks in advance, because the early bird pricing is ending in a few days.

It’s only $97 if you act before the deadline. This is the last email I will personally send about this offer before then, because I have other things to talk about.

If you sell DFY services for clients, I figure it’s worth signing up for this workshop, seeing what they have to say, and then deciding whether or not it’s bullshit or whether it’s the transformation you’ve been waiting for years.

I myself bought it and signed up. So have a few of my readers after my email yesterday. Here’s what a couple of them wrote me about it:

“Bought this, looks interesting. We’re already aiming $100k+ per client, so any additional increase because of his approach will be worth a ton.”

“Now THIS offer is exactly perfect for me right now. Just about to launch an AI Agency. Couldn’t have been timed better. Got the VIP – no brainer. Thanks John!”

If you wanna charge more, work with better clients, and have a happier business:

https://bejakovic.com/enterpriseclients

How copywriters and agencies can go after enterprise clients and close them

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I just paid and signed up for a live series of workshops, happening later this month, which promises:

“We’ll Help Your Agency Charge $15K-$100K For Your Current Service In 5 Days By Selling To ‘Enterprise Clients'”

I’d never heard of the guy who’s putting this on, Alex Hartstuff, until a few days ago. I was introduced to him by copywriter and business owner Paul do Campo. As Paul put it, “Alex teaches copywriters and agencies how to go after enterprise level clients and close them.”

Sure enough.

If you go to the sales page below, where you can sign up for Alex’s workshop, you can see a wall of video testimonials from various copywriters and agency owners.

Inevitably, many of these are testimonials about how valuable and informative and inspiring the workshop is. But among those, there are also a bunch of hard, results-based case studies:

* An “email and SMS” agency owner (Adam Rehm) who went from $2.5k retainers to $10k retainers

* A LinkedIn content guy (Matthew Brown) who went from $5k deals to $18k deals

* An “AI agents” agency agent, I mean, owner (Tyler Savoy), who went from getting paid $4k per deal to getting paid $20k per deal

* A girl who runs a web development agency (Namya Hhan) who went from $5k deals to $22k deals

* A guy who runs a cold email agency (Nick Block), who went from $3k/month retainers to $30k/month retainers

Alex and his sales page have bigger success stories too. But do you really need to hear those? I think maybe not. Because if you’re doing good work but not charging $10k, $20k, $30k for it, there is probably some internal resistance there. I don’t want to pile on to that.

Instead, I’ll just tell you the following:

Alex’s workshop is happening live on Zoom, from September 21 to 25, for an hour a day.

I’m telling you about it today because I signed up just now myself, so it’s top of mind for me, and because of the early-bird pricing.

Currently, this series of 5 workshops is just $97. In five days, the price will go up from 97 dollars to 97 million dollars. Don’t quote me on that exact price increase, but the price does increase in 5 days to some higher amount. And why not just sign up now, instead of procrastinating on it and maybe letting it slip away?

If you are a copywriter… if you do email… if you create content for clients… if you build AI agents… if you do web development… if you run cold email campaigns for people… or if you are a freelancer or run an agency offering some other service…

… and if rather than working with clients for whom $3k per month is a big deal… you might rather work with clients for whom $13k per month is not a big deal and $30k per month is doable… then sign up here to have your mind expanded:

https://bejakovic.com/enterpriseclients

I am abolishing my $5 typo bounty

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Back in February, I set up typo bounty for my 10 Commandments of Con Men, Pick Up Artists, Magicians etc. book. That was in response to a 3-star review I got back then, which said the book is full of typos.

I found that hard to believe, since I had more than a dozen people proofread the book before I published it.

But money can fix many things, and maybe it could find and fix typos my proofreaders had missed?

So I set up the bounty, and announced it to my list.

Since then, thanks to the Herculean efforts of nitpicking readers around the world, I have been clued into 3 legitimate typos in the book. Actually, make that 4, because just this morning I got an email notifying me of one more.

I’ve honored all typo bounty hunters so far, and paid out $5 via PayPal, as promised.

But from this moment on, I am abolishing this typo bounty, for two reasons.

The first is that I have no interest in actually updating the book to fix a few spread-out typos. Amazon makes it a pain to update the manuscript, and I don’t want to mess with it for the sake of changing “Cialidini” to “Cialdini” in one place on page 7 (that’s the typo I was notified of today).

The second reason is that this entire bounty process makes me actively dislike the people who write in to tell me about the typos.

Which, appropriately enough, goes back to most important Commandment of Con Men, Pick Up Artists, Magicians etc., a commandment so important, so prime, that I put it at number one, in the first chapter of the book.

If you disobey this prime commandment, it becomes absolutely impossible to influence people to do what you want.

If you obey this commandment, you can perform almost magical feats of persuasion.

You can find Commandment I, and 9 more surprising and valuable commandments, in my book. Beware though, because there are 4 typos there as well, on pages 7, 48, 80, and 136. If that doesn’t scare you off:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Looking to help all-stars improve

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A couple weeks ago, I promoted an affiliate offer around creating an easy coaching offer from your expertise. As part of that affiliate promo, I offered, as a bonus, to get on a consulting call with people who bought, and work with them until they get their first client.

I got on a call with one of those folks. I won’t say what he does, outside the fact he is in a traditional and highly respectable profession.

I will say that, on top of his regular job, this guy has a side gig related to his main career, which makes him an extra $200k per year.

On our consulting call, he brought up the idea of teaching other people in his profession how they could also make an extra $200k per year by bolting on this side gig to their regular business.

Cha-ching!

I was all for it and told him so.

The next step was simply to send out some handraiser emails to a few people he might know to see what they say to the idea. I figured that within the first five emails sent, he would get his first coaching client.

A week passed. Two weeks. I followed up with the guy to ask him what’s up. He replied:

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2 major obstacles for me: 1. finding who I can send these emails to. I don’t know any [professionals who do what he does] that would need coaching for [how to make an extra $200k/year], or that would pay for it. 2. I have this block where I am telling myself – this is really cheesy, trying to sell coaching to any fellow [professional]. It’s just not done.

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I didn’t reply to this. Not because I think anything bad of the guy or what he wrote.

From the little I know of him, he seems like a very nice person and good at his job.

I didn’t reply anything because I’m not in the business of convincing people to do stuff they don’t want to do.

I recently read a book titled Million Dollar Consulting. It has the following advice:

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Everyone can solve problems, and problem solving is a commodity. But few people can systematically raise the bar and improve the performance of already stellar operations. Yet that’s where the value is. It’s a question of the all-stars improving still further. Orient yourself to innovation, not problem solving, and the worth of your project will be commensurately higher.

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I’ve learned already that there are plenty of people with valuable and marketable expertise who just don’t want to put themselves out there with a personal brand and offers of their own.

That’s fine. It’s a perfectly legit choice. I respect it. In fact, I respect it so much I would never try to change anybody’s mind about it.

But maybe YOU have expertise and you’ve proven you’re willing to put yourself out there.

What I mean is, you have an email list already and some offers, and you’re trying to make those work better, faster.

In my book, that makes you a budding all-star. And I would LOVE to work with you.

I don’t know yet how that would look. I know the outcome is that you make MORE money and get to MORE success FASTER.

In case you’re interested, reply to this email and let’s talk.

The best piece of copy Dan Kennedy ever wrote

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Thanks to the sleuthing of two members of my Daily Email House community, Robin Timmers (the Netherlands’ largest copywriter) and Maliha Mannan (who runs the Side Blogger), I can bring you the link at the end of today’s email.

It’s a recording of the legendary “Success Tour” speech that direct marketer Dan Kennedy gave hundreds of times across the U.S. back in the 1990s.

Dan, for the record, was at one point the highest-paid copywriter on Earth. And I heard him say somewhere, I forget where, that this speech is the best piece of copy he has every written.

And no wonder:

This speech sold millions of dollars’ worth of Dan’s Magnetic Marketing program from the back of the room…

… it got tens of thousands of people to become prospects for Dan’s paid newsletter, high-ticket seminars, and done-for-you services…

… and it has fed Dan’s stable of racing horses for many decades now.

For several years, this speech wasn’t available anywhere online.

Years ago, I managed to track down a copy using archive.org. I’ve listened to this speech multiple times all the way through, and I’ve started it again this morning after Robin and Maliha clued me in that it’s now on YouTube.

Yes, Dan’s speech is worth listening to for the content, to learn the fundamentals of direct marketing, to be amused by Dan’s jokes and fast-paced delivery and combative approach, and to hear some good stories, told well.

But the real value in Dan’s speech is if you take the time to look between the lines of what he is saying. I’ve done it, and I’ve profited from it in ways I’ve written about before.

I suggest you analyze and model Dan’s speech also, so you can sell, whether from a stage, on a podcast, in a webinar, from a Zoom call with prospects or buyers, or just in an email, book, or sales letter.

If you have a personal online brand, I cannot recommend this enough:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNcu27fpfBs