Business Ideas

I got a hot date tonight HONK

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Yeah, about my hot date… I’ll get to that in a second.

First, here’s a scene from the animated TV show The Simpsons. The scene illustrates a valuable/funny point about influence. But hold on.

I grew up watching The Simpsons. If you didn’t, that’s no problem. You don’t need to like The Simpsons or even to have ever seen a single episode to get what this scene is about, or to understand the underlying point.

Scene:

Moe the bartender is being interrogated by the police for shooting the local billionaire, Mr. Burns.

Moe is hooked up to a lie detector machine. He’s asked if he ever held a grudge against Mr. Burns. He answers no. But the lie detector machine HONKS to indicate he’s lying.

“All right,” Moe says. “Maybe I did. But I didn’t shoot him!” Sure enough, the lie detector machine DINGS to confirm Moe’s statement as true.

“Checks out,” says the cop. “Ok sir, you’re free to go.”

So far, so conventional. But then, Moe executes the following rapid-fire descent into humiliation, to the sounds of the lie detector machine:

“Good,” he says. “Cause I got a hot date tonight!” HONK

“A date.” HONK

“Dinner with Fred.” HONK

“Dinner alone.” HONK

“Watching TV alone!” HONK

“All right!!!” Moe says. “I’m gonna sit at home and ogle the ladies in the Victoria’s Secret catalogue!” HONK

Moe hangs his head. “Sears catalogue.” DING

“Now would you unhook this already please! I don’t deserve this kind of shabby treatment!” HONK

That’s the end of the scene. Maybe you found it funny even in my transcript above. But if you didn’t, trust me that it’s funny in the original version.

The question is… why?

Is it just funny to find out Moe is a loser? That’s part of it. But would it have been as funny if the scene simply went:

“Good. Cause I got a hot date tonight!” HONK

[Moe hangs head] “Actually, I’m gonna sit at home and ogle the ladies in the Sears catalogue.” DING

My contention is no. That wouldn’t be nearly as funny. Which brings me to the following valuable point that I promised you:

“We build interest by adding more: more movement, more color, more sound, more light, more people, more intensity, more concentration, more excitement. In short, anything whatever that the spectators regard as increasing will also increase their interest.”

That comes from a book about magic and showmanship. In other words, the above advice about adding more is how expert magicians build the audience’s interest.

But it works the same for comedy.

And in fact, it works the same for copywriting.

Stack a bunch of moderately interesting, or funny, or insightful stuff on top of each other… and the effect is multiplicative, not additive.

And with that punchline, we conclude today’s episode. DING

But if by any chance you want more simple tips on building interest and desire in your readers, you can find that here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

The end of newsletters

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Well, the end of my newsletter.

No, not this one. This one will keep going, as long as I keep needing therapy and as long as I keep refusing to trust anyone else with the task.

But as of today, I have decided to stop publishing my health newsletter.

I started that newsletter in January 2023. I published a new issue every week until this week — some 120k words in total.

Researching, writing, and publishing all that word-tonnage took up 300-400 hours of my productive waking time over the past 15 months.

And yet, I’m closing the old heap down. My reason is simple:

I couldn’t get my health newsletter going as a business. And rather than thinking about what I’ve already invested into it, I’m thinking about the time, money, and effort it might still take to turn it into something.

It’s not simply a matter of persistence, either. Because knowing what I know now, I’m not sure my health newsletter would ever turn into something, even if I were to persist.

I could tell you my arguments for that, or my predictions for the future of newsletter businesses.

But instead, I’ll share something by someone much more invested in newsletters than me. That someone is Scott Oldford.

Over the past year or two, Scott bought up dozens of newsletters and newsletter-related businesses with the goal of creating a newsletter roll-up. And then, here’s what he found:

===

Our model originally with newsletters was to create lead flow for the companies that we owned inside of our portfolio.

As time went on we ended up a little further away from that model than I’d like to admit.

We attempted to monetize in many different ways and in the end we realized that keeping it with its original intent was a much better strategy.

[…]

We realized that the cost of running a media company at scale simply did not make sense and majority of the costs were actually from attempting to make it a direct-profit driver instead of a value-driver for the dozens of businesses we own and eventually hundreds of businesses we will own.

In short — newsletters and owned media makes a lot of sense. However, I believe the opportunity that people see isn’t the true one.

The real opportunity? Owning your audience.

===

For me at least, it’s the end of newsletters as a business.

​​On the other hand, I will be looking for a business to start or grow, one where a newsletter could be a valuable tool.

Maybe you’re lucky, and you already have a business like that. Maybe you even have your own owned audience. But maybe you’re not doing anything with it.

If so, you’re not alone. I’m always amazed by how many businesses have email lists of tens of thousands of leads or even buyers — that they never do anything with.

If you want my help or advice with that, hit reply and we can talk.

​​Or if you don’t want my help, and you want to profit from your email list all by yourself, here’s how to start writing a newsletter that complements and feeds your business:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Ooooo, child!

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Last weekend, my friend Sam and I went to Savannah. On the drive there, we started started listening to an audiobook of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

That was a 1994 non-fiction book that stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for a remarkable 216 weeks.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil consists of a bunch of character studies of various eccentrics who lived in Savannah in the 1970s and 80s. The book cuts through Savannah society, from the rich and established to the poor and fringe.

Among the poor and fringe was Miss Chablis, “The Empress of Savannah.”

Chablis was a black drag queen.

The narrator of the audiobook, who normally speaks with a neutral accent, voiced Chablis, like all other Savannah locals, with a kind of southern drawl.

Except that in the case of Miss Chablis, the narrator, who sounded solidly white and male otherwise, also had to awkwardly act out dozens of draq-queeny, Black-English phrases such as:

“Ooooo, child!”

“Oh, child, don’t you be doin’ that!”

“Y-e-e-e-s, child! Yayyiss… yayyiss… yayyiss!”​​

I had flashbacks to this earlier today.

I got back to Barcelona yesterday. I checked my mailbox and found a stack of New Yorkers waiting for me.

This morning, I sat on my balcony and flipped open the latest one. The first feature story is about Ru Paul.

“Ooooo, child!” I said, “No more drag queens, honey, please!”

But as I often do, I forced myself to read something I had no inclination to read. I often find valuable things that way.

Today was no exception. I found the following passage in the first page of the article. Jinkx Monsoon, a 36-year-old drag queen who won two seasons of Ru Paul’s reality competition TV show, explained the power of drag:

===

It’s armor, ’cause you’re putting on a persona. So the comments are hitting something you created, not you. And then it’s my sword, because all of the things that made me a target make me powerful as a drag queen.

===

If you have any presence online, this armor-and-sword passage is good advice. It’s something that the most successful and most authentic-seeming performers out there practice.

I once saw a serious sit-down interview with Woody Allen. I remember being shocked by how calm, confident, and entirely not Woody-Allen-like he was.

Closer to the email world, I remember from a long time ago an email in which Ben Settle basically said the same thing as Jinkx Monsoon above. How the crotchety, dismissive persona he plays in his emails is a kind of exaggeration and a mask he puts over the person he is in real life.

So drag is good advice for online entrepreneurs.

But like much other good advice, It’s not something I follow in these emails.

I haven’t developed an email persona, and I’m not playing any kind of ongoing role to entertain my audience or to protect me from their criticism.

That’s because I don’t like to lie to myself. Like I’ve said many times before, I write these emails for myself first and foremost, and then I do a second pass to make sure that what I’ve written can be relevant and interesting to others as well.

This is not something I would encourage anybody else to do. But it’s worked out well enough for me, and allowed me to stay in the game for a long time.

That said, I do regularly adopt various new and foreign mannerisms in these emails.

I do this because i find it instructive and fun, and because it allows me to stretch beyond the person/writer I am and become more skilled and more successful.

I’ve even created an entire training, all about the great value of this approach.

In case you’d like to become more skilled and successful writing online, then honey, I am serious! You best look over here, child:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

My list-building plans from under a large oak tree

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5pm today. Forsyth park. Savannah, Georgia.

I found a large oak tree. Rolled up my jacket. Put it on the ground. Lay down on it in the shade under the tree.

It’s been two-plus weeks of non-stop travel. Changing five cities along the way. Over 5k miles traveled. And more talking with people in real life than I have done in the past six months combined.

I’m tired. I had a chance to lay down today. Under a tree. So I took it.

Tomorrow, I head back from Savannah to New York. After an afternoon layover at JFK, I will have an overnight and most likely sleepless flight back to Barcelona, to the safety of my cave, the comfort of my own bed, the routine of my regular work day.

All that’s really just to prepare you for yet another Q&A email, the third this week. Came a question in reply to last night’s milk-themed email:

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I bought SME a few weeks ago. I’d love to hear more about how you grow your list or “add cream”. I’ve started daily emails and unsubscriber rates are up. I’m currently using FB ads. I was relying on SEO, but that’s proven volatile this year.

===

After 10+ years of trying to grow various audiences online, I’ve come to believe there’s no magic to it beyond time and persistence.

​​Whatever you do consistently to grow your list will work in time. And almost nothing will work if you jump around too much too quick.

That said, I will tell you one specific cream-getting/list-building strategy I personally plan to focus on. And that’s books, either ones I put on Amazon or that I sell on my own site and drive paid traffic to.

Books in my mind are the highest-quality leads you can possible get.

They create customers right away.

If you tack on some upsells, it’s possible to use them to break even on paid ad spend on day zero or soon after.

Plus books are immensely shareable and influential. People will gladly and actively recommend or hype up your book, much more so than a course or a coaching program or even a community.

If you want to see how this works in action, take a look at my 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters.

It took me about a month of on-the-side work to complete this book. It has been driving subscribers to my list ever since.

The only real problem is this is my only book and I should have written more suc books. I’m working on fixing that.

Meanwhile, if you want to see how I organized this book, how I sold my email list within it, and even learn something valuable about copywriting and marketing in the process, the 10 Commandments is only $5 on Amazon.

Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

My credentials are very near zero, except for one thing

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A few hours ago, I was standing at the back of Ballroom A in the Palm Beach Convention Center.

Seated in the ballroom were a few hundred people, watching the breakout session of a larger conference that’s been going on since yesterday.

Up on stage, two doctors were talking about continuous glucose monitors.

Suddenly, a girl working for the conference picked me out of the crowd at the back. She walked up to me, leaned into me, and whispered, “Are you John?”

“Why yes,” I said. “Yes, I am in fact John.”

“Great,” she said. “I’ve been trying to call you. We’re gonna need you near the stage so we can just transition smoothly. As they finish up, they’ll walk off the stage, and you can go up.”

I was set to host the next breakout session. At a health conference. Talking about health.

I and another cohost got up on stage, talked for 15 minutes, then fielded questions, then called it a day.

People applauded.

The other guy and I walked off stage. As I tried to snake my way to the door, a few people from the audience called over to me. “Thanks so much for that.” “Great info.”

That’s quite odd when you think about it.

My credentials for speaking at a health conference are very near zero.

I didn’t study anything related to health. The closest I ever came to working in a health field was writing sales copy for supplement companies.

And yet, there I was on stage, at a health conference, mixing and mingling with medical doctors and CEOs of health startups.

The only thing that set me above total zero for credentials to speak at this conference, the only thing that separated me from the thousand or so people in the audience and gave me a place on the stage, is that I write.

For the past year, along with this daily newsletter about marketing, I’ve been writing a weekly newsletter about health.

In the process, I have learned a ton, and I have discovered lots of worthwhile things to share.

Writing a newsletter is how I could get on stage today and pretty much riff for 30 minutes while sounding authoritative and even reasonably smart.

Writing is also how I got invited in the first place to appear on stage at this conference.

All that’s to say, if you have zero expertise in a field, but you would like to develop expertise, then start writing.

And if you already have expertise but not enough people know it, then start writing.

A weekly email newsletter is good.

A daily email newsletter is better.

And if your objection is, “Sure, easy for you, but I don’t know exactly what to write or how to write it,” then I have you covered.

I’ve created a quick and easy course all about writing, specifically writing daily emails, in a way that entertains and informs your audience, while secretly building up your perceived and actual expertise. For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

How Bill Bonner can be so wrong and still so successful

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I’m in Palm Beach. The place is rich.

This morning, I walked along the sandy beach facing the Atlantic, a few hundred yards from where Billionaires Row starts — where people like the CEO of Blackstone and the widow of David Koch have their palatial residences.

I was walking there with my friend Sam, who came to Palm Beach with me.

We were discussing how nice the weather is here… how good the Atlantic Ocean looks against the pristine sand… how pleasant the people are in Palm Beach… even how there’s magically free and abundant parking on the island.

“It’s kind of like heaven,” Sam said. “It makes me want to make a fuckton of money so I could move here.”

I paused for a moment. I looked inside. And I concluded:

Palm Beach is great. But I have zero ambition to move here for the long term, or to make the tens of millions of dollars that would be necessary to support even a B-level lifestyle among the billionaires and multimillionaires here.

I’m telling you this because after the beachside walk, I had the good fortune to have lunch with one of the most successful copywriters in the world.

I won’t name him — I’m not sure he wants me to. But I will say he is a senior copywriter, working for 10+ years at one of the biggest and best-known direct response financial publishers.

Over lunch, one topic that came up was how Bill Bonner — the founder of direct marketing behemoth Agora — has been making financial predictions for 40 years.

Most of those predictions have been proven to be wrong. Year after year, decade after decade.

And yet, loyal readers of Bill Bonner continue to read his opinion pieces. Apparently, he now has the most successful financial-topic Substack out there, making some $1M/year from I guess editorial content alone.

The question is, why would people continue to listen to a financial prophet who is consistently making mistaken prophecies?

The very successful copywriter I met today has an elegant and interesting take on it. It’s something I hadn’t heard before. But that’s his intellectual property, so I won’t share it here.

What I will tell you is my theory on it, which I really got from legendary marketer Dan Kennedy:

The best customers, the most long-term customers, are not really buying whatever offer you’re supposedly making them. Instead, they are really buying you as a person. And they decide whether to buy you or not by how they match up with you on certain intangible, vaporous values.

All that’s to say, you might have really horrible, taboo things inside your head, things you think you should never share about yourself with your audience.

Such as for example, the fact that you are not very money-motivated — not a helpful thing to reveal to a bunch of business owners and marketers.

And yet, even though revealing such things is sure to drive many people in your audience away… it will bind a small number of them even more closely to you. And you can build a successful business — or even, if you insist, a large business — on the strength of those strong bonds alone.

My confessions as Shiv Shetti’s hot-seat coach

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Last Dec, Australia’s best copywriter, Daniel Throssell, wrote me an email asking if I wanted an intro to Shiv Shetti, who was looking for a new coach for his program.

I had no idea what being a coach inside somebody else’s program entailed, but I was willing to find out.

It turned out Shiv has a new program to coach copywriters, called Performance Copywriter Method.

Normally, I would not be interested. For the past year, I have been consciously working to move away from coaching, selling, or marketing to copywriters.

But this was something different.

Shiv was looking for a “hot seat coach.” Each week, I would have to give a different copywriter a strategy for a new email promotion. The copywriters were working with solid, successful clients, and were writing email promos for them on performance-only deals.

I told Shiv I am interested in this. So we agreed I’d start a 2-week trial period at the end of January.

In the meantime, I got to work preparing.

I bought Daniel Throssell’s Campaign Conqueror course, because Shiv was explicitly looking for someone who knew how to do promos in that style. I went through Campaign Conqueror twice.

Second, I went through Shiv’s trainings inside PCM. They talked about mindset… about Shiv’s system for finding these PCM clients… about writing promos themselves.

Third, I looked over previous hot seats that Shiv had delivered himself, all of which surprised me in how thoughtful and thorough they were.

Fourth, I joined the PCM Skool community, where I first started lurking and then contributing bit by bit.

Long story short:

I was impressed by Shiv’s program… impressed by the copywriters inside… impressed by Shiv and his team.

I guess they liked me as well, because my trial period came and went, and now we continue to work together.

My main job is, as I said, to take in a bunch of info each week, and come up with the strategy for a new email promo, much in the style of Daniel Throssell’s Campaign Conqueror. The strategy includes a promo offer, a theme, and email hooks.

For example, tomorrow I have call set up with an Australian copywriter who’s working with a music coach. He’s supposed to send emails over 5 days to promote the coach’s $2,800 offer to the coach’s list of 12,000 names.

I will prepare the strategy. I will go over it with the copywriter over Zoom. He will then go off and write the implement the strategy some time in April.

If all goes well, the client will make a bunch of money without doing any work. The copywriter will end up getting paid much more for those emails than he ever could if he were getting paid up front. And then next month, he and the client will do it all again, with a new offer and a new theme.

So far, I’ve done five or six of these hot seats, one per week. Most of the promos are set to run in the next few weeks, so I can’t report on any impressive wins yet. I imagine those will come.

The other part of my work as a hot seat coach is participate in the PCM Skool community, fielding questions every day.

Those tend to range from technical questions to client acquisition questions to copy and promo questions.

Fortunately, this community is nothing like r/copywriting or the various Facebook copy groups. The people inside are all normal, are all looking for results, are all actually working copywriters with solid copy chops.

All that’s to say, i continue to work with Shiv and his PCM community.

I can tell you from the inside that this program is 100% legit.

​​Not only is it well-designed and well-delivered, with care and effort, but the copywriters inside are getting these performance deals going with quality clients, and from what I’ve seen of the results so far, they are making bank.

If you’re interested, you can find out more about PCM below.

But before you go there, you might notice the curious fact that I am not in any way creating a promo out of this offer.

There’s no deadline.

There’s no disappearing offer, or a bonus, or a discount.

That’s because I don’t want to create any additional urgency about this, beyond what you might already feel as a copywriter dissatisfied or worried with the status quo.

But if you are dissatisfied or worried, and if you’re looking for a new way to work as a copywriter, then PCM is definitely worth a look. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/pcm

Is the daily email marketplace glutted?

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I’m on the Amtrak from New York to Baltimore, sitting the wrong way, away from the direction of travel, bouncing up and down as trees and warehouses zoom by me. It’s not a great time to write a daily email.

​​Fortunately, a long-time reader fed me a good email prompt a few days ago. He wrote:

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For a while now, I’ve been feeling like I’m inundated with emails from copywriters, marketers and direct marketing companies.

Until a few months ago, I took pleasure in reading everything.

Now I don’t anymore.

[…]

Lately, I enjoy reading newsletters about what is happening in the world, novels, history books, detective stories, and business history textbooks.

I hope this metamorphosis of mine is normal.

===

My reader’s message sums up the concept of the sophistication of the marketplace, as described by legendary marketer Gene Schwartz, in the experiences of one person.

A man will enter a specific marketplace. He will be new, interested, and engaged by just about everything there.

In time, he will become more selective, more skeptical, or even leave that specific marketplace altogether.

Is this a problem?

​​Is it a vote against ever starting a business in general?

​​Or is it a vote against starting a daily email newsletter right now?

Of course not.

The fact is, there are uncountably many humans alive on the planet right now. You only need a tiny number of them to be interested in what you are writing or selling right now to do very well for yourself and your business.

It’s much like a direct mail sales letter, which will typically only get a 2% response rate, even when mailed to a highly qualified list of prospects.

98 out of 100 targeted, pre-selected prospects won’t get the sales letter… or won’t bother to read it all the way to the order form… or won’t be persuaded to buy.

Only 2 out of 100 will actually respond and send in any money.

And yet many big fortunes over the past century have been built on those 2%.

The same applies to you today, with even more extreme numbers.

That said, it is undeniable that different formats – email newsletters as opposed to video courses as opposed to books — will attract different kinds of people, and in different mindsets and stages of sophistication.

In my experience, he more serious and successful people are, the more likely it is that they read books.

So if you do write a regular newsletter, it makes sense to adapt your best content, and turn it into a book. You will often reach great prospects who might be among the 98 out of 100 who would never read your newsletter, at least not today, before they really know you and trust you to have something worthwhile to say.

That was one of the motivations for my 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters book.

​​That book was quick to write. And yet it’s one of the best thing I’ve ever done for my standing in the industry and for attracting quality readers to my newsletter — readers who might never have read otherwise.

For more info on this quick and yet worthwhile book:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

You never know who’s on your list

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Yesterday, I took the Q train from the Barclays Center in Brooklyn to Union Square in Manhattan. I got off and walked down to East 9th street where there’s a little concentration of Japanese restaurants.

I went into one of these restaurants that specializes in Japanese comfort food.

I was meeting a business owner there who had replied to my “Meet me in NYC/Baltimore/Palm Beach?” email last week. We had already exchanged a couple emails and had talked on Zoom once at the end of last year. But this was the first time we were meeting in person.

I ordered the rice omelette, he ordered the beef stew. We talked a bit about living in the U.S… about living in different countries which both of us had done… about the things we’re working on now.

I said something about this marketing newsletter and my health newsletter. And then I asked him what he’s currently doing with his business.

I won’t tell you what that business is. But I will say it’s an online business, one that’s built on marketing, and more specifically, on long-form ads.

This business is currently doing mid seven-figures per year. It’s growing 30% month-over-month. And the entire team consists of the business owner sitting across from me and one developer in San Francisco.

The business owner across from me shrugged.

“Sam Altman predicted there would be a one-person billion-dollar company one day,” he said. “But before that, there would be a 10-person billion-dollar company.”

We finished our lunch, left the restaurant, and stood on the street corner. We talked a bit more about what to do and see while in New York. He recommended the Morgan Library & Museum. We shook hands, said good to meet you, hope we meet again. And we went our separate ways.

You can conclude what you like from the story above.

I’ll just tell you this:

You never know who’s on your list.

Start writing emails. Create an offer. Start growing your list. You never know who you might attract, who might be reading, and what ideas or opportunities that might open up to you.

If you want help with first part of that tried above, writing emails, then take a look at my Simple Money Emails course.

That’s how the business owner above got onto my list initially, by buying that course. And then he replied to other emails I wrote using the strategies in that course. That’s to say that the strategies I describe in Simple Money Emails work. if you’d like to find out more:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Impoverished wizard tries to sell me, a hobbit, on playing a game

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During the last crescent moon, before I had set out from the Shire on my great quest to the Western Isles, I, Bejako Baggins, was packing my traveling trunk full of cheeses and dried meats, when when an impoverished-looking wizard burst through the doors of my hobbit-hole and held his arms out as if to beg me to hear him out.

I stared at this wizard, both because he had just barged into my hobbit hole, and because he seemed somehow familiar.

And sure enough, I knew him.

This wizard had already burst through my doors once. But back then, his peak hat wasn’t squashed like now, and his cloak wasn’t torn at the sleeve.

Back then, this wizard offered me advice about my circular letter. I had even written about him before, in a letter that became one of my most popular of the past year.

Now the wizard was back, just looking a little beat up. He stood by the door, his arms still up in the air. And he spoke in a deep but cracking voice:

===

Bejako Baggins!

I have a proposition for you mate

Don’t turn me to a troll again in one of your circular letters this time!

What do you think of framing the writing of magical sales spells as a Game then creating a ware to teach its principles and rules.

Basically something in those lines:

“You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.”

===

The impoverished wizard went on to say how he even had a good name in mind for such a ware. “Let me know what you think mate,” he said.​
​​​
I frowned. I genuinely couldn’t tell if this impoverished wizard was trying to ask me an honest question, or if he was in fact using whatever wizarding skill he had to turn himself into a troll.

In any case, I stepped away from my trunk, and I escorted him to the door.

I told him his idea is marvelous.

We hobbits love games, and we also love learning magical spells.

That’s why, many years ago, I did exactly what he is suggesting now.

I read through many ancient books. I collected hundreds of powerful written sales spells in a great leather-bound tome. I called this tome Copy Riddles. And I turned it into a Game.

I was even fortunate enough to get one of the great wizards of this age, Daniel Throssell the White, to say that Copy Riddles “the most brilliant course concept I’ve ever seen… literally a gamified series of sequential puzzles that teaches you written sales magic.”

If you’d like to find out more about this Game that teaches you how to turn plain written words into magical spells:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/