Business Ideas

[T-minus-5] Countdown to the start

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A few days ago, I was sitting in the center of Barcelona, near the Arc de Triomf, waiting for a friend, when I noticed something that deserved an email.

I was ogling the people, ogling the dogs, ogling the big red brick Arc itself. And then, I noticed a yellow and black construction in front of it.

It was a countdown timer, counting down second, minutes, hours, and days to something. Immediately, I was sucked it, and I wanted to know more.

“What’s gonna happen? And when? Should I be here? I bet it’s gonna be exciting.”

I saw that the construction had the yellow jersey of Tour de France on it.

I checked later. Sure enough, it’s a countdown clock, counting down the time to the start of the Tour de France, which will kick off on on July 4th, from Barcelona, which is not in France, but okay.

(I gotta tell you, there’s nothing more boring to me than watching bicyclists, but this year, I feel invested in the Tour de France.)

The day after that, I was at the gym, also very close to the Arc de Triomf.

I was listening to the latest James Altucher podcast. James was interviewing Amy Morin, author of the “13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do,” which is a bestselling book that spawned a whole series of “13 Things Mentally Strong X Don’t Do” books for Morin and made her a multimillionaire.

The weird thing is, Morin’s original book wasn’t an overnight smash success.

It took a year and a half for it to reach bestseller status.

James asked about that. Because normally, if a book doesn’t sell well straight out the gate, the publisher will give up on it and stop promoting it.

How did Morin’s book not sell well at first, and yet become a bestseller a year and a half later? Morin explained:

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Honestly it was from Rush Limbaugh. He mentioned my book on a Monday.

He said, “Today we’re gonna talk about the 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do.” And he never got to it that day.

So Tuesday he said, “Today is the day. We’re gonna talk about the 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do.” And he didn’t get to it that day either.

By about Wednesday, the book had literally sold out of every bookstore.

He didn’t get to it until Friday. He plugged my book five days in a row. It sold out.

A year and a half in, where it only sold ok, most bookstores only had one copy. Even Amazon didn’t have that many in stock. So it sold out everywhere by about Wednesday.

It was the next week that I hit Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller lists.

===

My point being:

Most marketers are plenty familiar with countdowns to the end. “Deadline in 24 hours! 12 hours! 8 hours! Deadline is here! Deadline! Deadline! Deadline!”

But few marketers are familiar enough with coountdowns to the start. To teasing excitement to the launch of a thing, and not just the disappearance of an opportunity.

But smart people, or some lucky ones, like Amy Morin above, know the benefit of not only counting down to the end of a thing, but the start of it as well.

Let me put that into practice right now.

I published my new 10 Commandments book, “10 Commandments of Con Men, Pickup Artists, Magicians, etc.” almost exactly a year ago.

In the meantime, I’ve amassed 99 reviews on Amazon, the majority of them 5 star.

To celebrate the 1-year anniversary of this book, and possibly, my 100th review, I will be kicking off a Tour de Commandments event on May 11th.

I’ll have more details about this exciting, unique, spectacular, historic, one-time, never-to-be repeated event over the next few days, as the countdown to the start gets closer and closer to zero.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t yet gotten your copy of my 10 Commandments book, your copy is waiting for you here:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Announcing: Done-for-you newsletter service

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A couple years ago, I announced a done-for-you newsletter service.

And since I recently wrote an email about the mutually reinforcing benefits of having both an education track (this newsletter) and a client track (something I gave up 3-4 years ago)… and since that email ended up persuading me as well… I’m bringing the done-for-you newsletter service back.

When I first launched this service, I was writing a newsletter in the health space.

​​In that space, I had seen lots of both new and established companies, which either didn’t have a newsletter or had a terrible one, for various reasons ranging from unreadable layouts to offensively infrequent sending to tear-inducing dullness.

I thought, with my email marketing and copywriting and newsletter-creating experience, I could go and help these companies.

I could come up with a new concept for a newsletter for them, and give them ideas for ongoing content that would be interesting to their readers and valuable to the company.

But “concept” and “content ideas” are not easy to sell, at least in my experience.

So I thought I could offer the entire package.

Problem:

​​I don’t want to write another ongoing newsletter, particularly if it’s not for myself.

Solution:

I do have this first newsletter, the one you are reading now, with hundreds or maybe thousands of writers who might be interested in a job.

I figured I could hire one or a dozen such writers from my list, coach them, monitor them, crack the whip on occasion, and guide them to make sure they provide quality work, so that everybody’s ultimately happy — the company, the writers, me.

I might still end up doing that, at scale, in the health space.

But I decided, as an experiment, to offer this done-for-you newsletter service to my marketing list first.

Here’s what to know:

1. This service is meant for you if you have a business already but no newsletter or, let’s be honest, a terrible newsletter.

​​This is for you if you have customers and an offer that’s selling, whether a product or a service.

As you probably know, a newsletter can be an easy, profitable, prestige-building way to get more people into your world, to get more of them to buy what you sell, and to keep them around until you sell the next thing. And with my done-for-you newsletter service, you don’t have to do anything, except pay me to get it all done for you. ​​

2. This is not for you if you have nothing to sell. There’s nothing wrong with starting a newsletter if you have nothing to sell. But that’s just not the kind of client I’m looking for for this done-for-you service.

3. This is also not for you if you already have a newsletter, and you want my help growing your newsletter. My take is that, if you think you have a newsletter growth problem, what you really have is a monetization problem.

As you might be able to tell from my tone above, I’m not desperate to find clients for this service. I have enough money and other plans and opportunities. I even debated for a good while about offering this at all.

At the same time, it would be great to find a business I could genuinely help.

​​I like this newsletter game, and I find I’m good at it.

​​It would be great to have the experience of starting new newsletters and helping them succeed, without having to 1) create the offers to make the newsletters pay off and 2) do the writing myself. That experience was the reason I did decided to offer this in the end.

If you are interested in this done-for-you newsletter service, and if you fall into group #1 above, then write me and we can start a conversation.

I’ll talk about this offer over the next few days and then I’ll shut up about it.

​​If the offer turns out to be successful and the delivery enjoyable, I’ll take it to that health niche I was originally planning on targeting.

​​And if it’s not enjoyable or not successful, then I’ll lock it up in the cellar, along with my Most Valuable Postcard (locked up since 2022, next up for parole in 2038) and my “Win Your First Copywriting Job Workshop” (locked up in 2021, life sentence, not eligible for parole).

For now, this done-for-you newsletter offer still stands. If it’s got you excited, write me, and we can talk.

Off-market affiliate deals

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I’ve been lurking on Facebook lately, doing research for my low-ticket funnel. That’s how I came across an interesting new offer for coaches and consultants:

1. We will build out a low-ticket funnel for you, for free

2. We will run traffic to it, for free, using our own money

3. We will drive buyers who come through this funnel to a sales call for your high-ticket coaching or consulting offer

4. We only take a cut when you close a deal

I don’t know how well these guys are doing.

But I do know another company that effectively has this same business model.

It’s a company I used to write copy for back in the day.

They didn’t advertise that this was their business model, but since I was a copywriter for them, I know that that’s what they did.

They started out with real estate investing gurus who had high-ticket coaching programs, and then graduated to more general bizopp coaching offers.

I happen to know that they were making a killing back when I was working with them. They only seem to have gotten bigger since.

My point for you is:

Affiliate marketing is great.

It allows you to promote and profit from offers, without having to go through the massive trouble of creating and delivering those offers.

Affiliate marketing also sucks.

Most of the available affiliate offers are no good, and the few good ones have a ton of other people promoting them.

The solution to this dilemma is to roll your own off-market affiliate offers, like the guys above.

In other words, to find people who have good offers, or the makings of good offers, but who aren’t promoting them adequately, and who certainly don’t have affiliate programs…

… and then make some sort of a deal with them to promote them adequately, using your own skills and resources.

(And better yet, to put yourself in toll position, so you get the unique right to promote this off-market affiliate deal, while others only look on with wonder and envy.)

If this is something that interests you, you can go off on your own right now and start doing.

I really hope that’s what you will do.

But if you want some support and help for this kind of stuff, my best recommendation is the Royalty Ronin community, which in many ways is a community of people who are rolling their own off-market affiliate deals, using various techniques and approaches.

In case you wanna find out more, you can sign up for a free 7-day trial here:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

P.S. If you sign up for Ronin and make it past the first 7 days, write me and let me know. I’ve got some bonuses with your name on them.

My list swap outreach template

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Today I wanna tell you about a free database of list swap partners, and how to actually use it to get others to promote you, even if your list is tiny.

First off, the database:

You’ve probably heard of it, because many list owners have promoted it over the past few months. It’s called List Match.

I’m late to the game of promoting List Match, but I will aim to make up for it.

Because since February, I have been signed up for List Match myself.

Thanks to that experience, I can tell you the good and the bad of List Match, and how you can turn the bad into great for you.

The good of List Match:

The people behind List Match keep promoting it. That means the platform is full of list owners who have said they want to run a list swap, and who have even gone through the trouble of signing up for an account and creating a profile.

The List Match database is fresh and more people keep getting added every week.

There are some whales on there, but most of the people on List Match have small audiences. (That fixes the problem of, “my list is too small for a list swap.”)

The bad of List Match:

List Match is hosted on Circle, which is community platform, and simply not a fit for a database tool like this.

People are supposed to “like” your automatically generated profile post, and then Circle is supposed to notify you, so you can somehow pick up the interaction.

I never get notified. Plus discovery of potential partners is inconvenient at best.

(I’ll tell you in a second the only decent way I’ve found to discover relevant newsletters on List Match).

How to turn the bad into great:

Like I said, the people behind List Match keep promoting and expanding the database. That means new people sign up, expecting others to reach out to them (that’s the official promise).

But because of List Match being on Circle and the tech problems around that, few if any of these list owners ever get any possible partners reaching out to them.

That becomes your opportunity, because this is effectively a starving crowd of people who have expressed interest in an outcome (list swaps), except nobody is satisfying that hunger for them.

My advice:

1. Get on List Match yourself

2. Once you’re on it, don’t just scroll through the hundreds of list owners on there. Instead, search the database using the search function for terms relevant to you.

(I just tried “email marketing” and found dozens of good people, including ones I have already done swaps with, bought ads from, have inside my Monetization Mastermind community, etc.)

3. Instead of relying on Circle’s unreliable “like” notifications, hoping that if you “like” somebody they will reach out to you, you reach out to them, and you do it off Circle.

(Yes, you have to be the one to take 100% of the initiative. But that’s precisely where the gold is, not just in this particular case, but everywhere else in life.)

List Match gives you the website of the person who wants to do a list swap.

Go to their website, find their contact email, or barring that, sign up to their list and then hit reply when you get the welcome email.

This bit of work is super likely to pay off. Again, these aren’t random list owners that you are cold-pitching for a list swap.

Instead, they are people who have expressly stated they are looking for list swaps… who have shared their list size so you know you are in the same ballpark… and who you have something in common with (you are both on List Match).

You can use these facts and your own copywriting or networking skill to craft a short outreach message to encourage these people to respond to you and to agree to a list swap.

Or if you like, I have a ready-made and proven list swap outreach email I’ve used in the past with another, earlier database of list swap prospects. You can use my outreach message instead of writing your own.

I used this outreach email to do a buncha list swaps for my now-dormant longevity newsletter.

Almost every list owner I reached out to with this message got back to me, and most people said yes, including when I had just a few subs.

My deal to you:

1. Sign up for List Match using my link here (it’s free): ​https://bejakovic.com/listmatch​

2. Forward me your account confirmation email (mine had the subject line, “Your account is ready”)

3. I will then send you the list swap outreach email I’ve used in the past, plus a templatized version you can fill in the blanks for and send out yourself

Three Most Valuable Offers with your name on them

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For the past few weeks, I have been helping a small group of folks design, launch, and deliver a paid live workshop, something I’m calling Most Valuable Offer.

These folks are running their Most Valuable Offers to their own lists and audiences.

But part of my own deal to them, for this initial cohort, was to get a bit of added distribution via a mention in this newsletter, if they launch their Most Valuable Offer before the end of April.

Three brave souls have done so and have taken me up on my deal.

Maybe you will be interested in the unique and Most Valuable Offers they are making? Here they are, for you to evaluate, judge, and decide:

#1 “The same system powers a live campaign right now with a 26% reply rate and 86 new clients won”

Ryan Lemos runs a Dubai-based AI agency and is hosting a live online 2-hour Claude Code workshop on May 14, where you will build two systems: one that automatically researches your ideal clients, and one that turns that research into LinkedIn content written in your voice.

No coding required. The same system powers a live campaign he is running right now with a 26% reply rate and 86 new clients won.

It is hands-on from the first minute, and both systems will be running before you close your laptop.

Click here to get the full details: https://claudecodeworkshop.replit.app/

#2 “For experienced coaches and consultants who have something valuable to share, but haven’t moved yet”

If you’ve got expertise but keep spinning about what to launch, this may help.

Steph DragonHeart Benedetto has put together a short, practical email series on how to choose the right offer when you have too many good ideas. It’s for experienced creators, coaches, and consultants who have something valuable to share, but haven’t moved yet.

Over 5 emails, she’ll help you choose a direction, simplify it, and take a real step forward. She’ll also share the details of her “Get It Done” workshop where (you guessed it) you’ll actually get it done and hit send.

Grab it here: https://www.theawakenedbusiness.com/getitdonebejako

#3 “Reclaim your evening with a simple shift about time itself”

Tom Grundy is a City of London banker who used to work so late the office cleaner would vacuum between his legs at his desk.

Nowadays, he eats dinner with his family at 5.30pm most evenings, writes daily emails and runs a coaching practice alongside his day job.

The change wasn’t blocking his calendar, setting boundaries or learning to say no. Instead, it was a simple shift about time itself which once he’d seen, he couldn’t unsee.

Tom’s sharing this shift in a one-off training called Reclaim Your Evening. Join Tom’s newsletter to get the details: https://reclaim.followingfulfilment.com/home

Two tracks, client and student

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A couple weeks ago I talked to a dude, a successful marketer.

On the one hoof, he sells courses and coaching via his email list. On the other, he does bespoke done-for-you work for clients.

I asked him how he gets his done-for-you clients. Are these people who are part of his audience, and just kept ascending from course buyer to coaching student to DFY client?

Turns out no. In the dude’s words:

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It’s funny because the bespoke clients that I’ve worked for or have on retainer, they always come by referral.

They always have. I’ve been in business since 2010 and the big whale clients, they come by way of some sort of referral.

Whether that’s a past client of mine referred them, a vendor referred them, a colleague, somebody like that.

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I’m telling you this because I’m finishing up my first-ever Most Valuable Offer cohort.

I’ve been helping nine people plan, market, and deliver a paid live workshop.

As the first step, I asked them, what’s the next step? In other words, who do they want to attract to this workshop, and what do they want to sell to them afterwards?

One of the participants replied:

“Get more high-quality DTC clients who will implement the work I do for them.”

Well, about that. I’d like to suggest to you, going back to the experience of the successful marketer above, that there are two separate tracks:

A client track and a student track.

Like I said, the two tracks are separate.

At the same time, that doesn’t mean that they are independent.

The two tracks are mutually reinforcing, the same way that train tracks have those wooden sleepers in between them to keep each one in place by connecting it to the other.

Here’s how that works:

DFY client work gives you content, expertise, and standing and with your student audience.

It makes it easier to sell to students and gives you something worthwhile to sell.

The teaching you do via courses and coaching, in turn, gives you reach (including referrals), star glow, and non-neediness when dealing with clients.

It makes it easier to have clients find you instead of you having to prospect… to work with better clients, ones that you like… and to charge more with zero pushback on your rates.

My back-of-the-napkin math is that by having both a client and a student track, you get 500% of the benefit for 75% of the work, compared to having each one alone.

At the moment, I still haven’t finished the current Most Valuable Offer cohort. I am not sure when I will be running the next one.

If you’re interested in creating a Most Valuable Offer yourself, both to monetize your current audience and to make your client work easier, then reply to this email and I’ll put you on the priority list.

At the moment, I’m also not doing any client work.

If you are interested in having me completely handle some projects for you — whether that’s handling daily emails or a weekly newsletter for your business, or advertorials for your cold traffic funnel, or something else you need but I’m not thinking of — then reply to this email and we can talk.

Daily Email Open House

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This Thursday at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST, I’ll get on Zoom for a bit of Daily Email Open House:

To hang out, maybe have a beer, and answer questions about sending daily emails… making a $1k+ offer… and using your list to pay for a house.

If you’d like to join me or get your questions answered live, here’s where you can sign up:

https://www.skool.com/daily-email-house/daily-email-house-live-qa-call

My overly optimistic book-writing plans

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A few days ago, I sent an email in which I collected 10 old emails I’d written with personal stories inside. A reader replied to that to say:

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I really loved reading the story about your mystical experience and how it translated into customer insights. Honestly it was one of the best emails I’ve gotten from you all year.

I’m super curious do you have more stuff like this coming up in your emails?

Also, where are you at with writing that Insight Marketing Bible?

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Huh? Insight Marketing Bible? I had to check the email in question to remind myself of what this could possibly be.

Turns out Insight Marketing Bible was my early title for a book I have been working on for the past 6 years, on the topic of creating insight in readers’ minds.

If you’ve been waiting with bated breath for that, don’t worry. It will come next year. I promise.

This year though, my overly optimistic plan is to write and publish a different book, The Art of Charging More. Just this morning, I sat down and restarted work on this new book by writing up v4 of outline. I really feel like this might be the one.

Point being, writing and finishing a book is a giant pain in the ass, at least if you’re someone like me and you care about doing a good job and telling people something new and valuable.

And yet I keep writing books, or trying to, and I keep justifying to myself that the long-term payoff is worth it. And no doubt that books open doors that nothing else can, plus they have a host of other knock on benefits, plus I guess some part of me enjoys the frustration.

Anyways.

Today, I would like to turn you onto a new report published by Kieran Drew, which shows you “4 steps to build your business through writing online.”

As you might know, Kieran is a former dentist turned online creator, who has built up a $500k/year business and an audience of over 250k people, and who’s done it all by writing.

Kieran boils down what he did and shows you in a straightforward way how you might do the same.

Except, just last week, I wrote an email in which I highlighted Kieran’s latest public earnings report, in which he honestly and transparently says he was actually in the red for the month of March.

(Kieran’s response to my email: “I feel assaulted by your hungover words.”)

The fact is, Kieran has been writing a book of his own and prioritizing it over other things like creating new products or promoting old ones.

That’s cost him short-term time and money, but it’s in the service of a greater business good to come.

In any case, Kieran is coming out of his book-writing cave, and he has been plans for the coming weeks and months. If you want to see what those plans are first-hand, or if you want to learn about writing online and profiting from your writing from somebody who’s done it quickly and at a very high level, then here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/4-steps

Meet me in Barcelona?

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Two years ago, I organized a live meetup of my readers right where I live, in Barcelona, Spain.

I imagined it might end up just me, having a coffee alone. (I count myself among my own readers.)

Surprisingly, after I sent out the email with the invite, I got a number of replies from people who wanted to attend the meetup and could actually do so.

We ended up meeting a few weeks later. There were around 8 of us from what I remember. It was a pleasant and fun experience, and I even stayed in touch and became friendly with one of the dudes who attended (hi Matthias).

And now, with the spring weather here and me entering my mating networking season, let’s see if we can make it happen all over again.

Here’s my offer to you:

Like I said, I live in Barcelona. It’s a big city, and attractive.

Maybe you live here or somewhere close.

Or maybe, Barcelona being one of Europe’s top 5 tourist destinations, you are planning a trip here some time soon.

I will organize a meetup in person, in the flesh, blood and hair and bones, some time in the next few days or weeks. If you would like to join me — if you live here or are just visiting — reply to this email, and I’ll keep you in the loop.

 

Coaching is dead

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I’m reading a book called Million Dollar Consulting, by Alan Weiss, in which Weiss makes the claim in a subhead that “Selling is dead.”

A few pages later, Weiss tells the story of how he got started as a consultant:

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When I was fired and thrust out on my own with about 250,000 independent consultants around around me in the United States, I asked myself how I could stand out. I decided to write and speak, since those are my strengths and you build on your strengths.

[Weiss decided to write an article with a contrarian take on a then-popular methodology, titled, “Quality Circles Are Dead.”]

The quality movement adherents besieged the magazine. I was so stunned, I called the editor to apologize.

“Kid,” he said, “I want you to write an article like this for us every month, and I’ll pay you $50 for each one.”

“But they hated it,” I pointed out.

“They read it,” he pointed back.

I wrote for 72 months, opposing every flavor of the month and program du jour extant. I became known as “The Contrarian.” And that name has stuck to this very day.

===

I’m reading Weiss’s book because the core message of it is to stop selling your time, and to start selling the value of the outcomes you deliver.

It’s a simple enough message, and one that everybody is willing to accept with their prefrontal cortex.

But go beyond that into the other parts of the brain, and the neural activity changes.

I’ve been talking to various business owners and marketers. Almost all of them fail to sell the outcomes they provide, and instead fall into the trap of selling a 16-page PDF, or a welcome sequence, or coaching once a week, every week, for an hour over Zoom.

The trouble is, PDFs are dead. Welcome sequences are dead. And coaching is really, really dead.

Yes, I am playing along with Weiss’s contrarian thing. But I also happen to believe what Weiss says about outcomes, and specifically, that coaching really is dead.

I’ve been working with a number of people this year. Some of the outcomes I’ve promised to deliver and problems I’ve promised to solve for them:

* Build them up into a name on the Internet, and help them make $31k in the process

* Help them define a new offer that sells 3-5 times copies per month for $1k+

* Increase the money they make from their email list to $1 per subscriber per month

In all these cases, what I’m actually delivering is some Zoom calls, some support by email, some copy critiques, and a lot of listening and occasional talking.

All of that could really be bundled up and called “coaching.” But I can tell you it’s been much more enjoyable and easy to sell it not as a bunch of Zoom calls and email support and some copy critiques, but as an exciting and lucrative outcome.

Maybe you offer coaching or some other form of dead deliverable that your audience doesn’t seem to value correctly. Maybe you also have an email list. Maybe you have a problem, or things just aren’t working right, and you suspect that coaching is dead, or deliverables are dead, or email is dead.

If so, reply to this email. I don’t offer coaching, but we can talk, and maybe I have a way to solve your problem, or to help you get to an outcome that you’d be ecstatic over.

It costs you nothing to tell me about your problem. You take not the slightest risk. You cannot possibly lose anything. And you can gain much.