Business Ideas

If you want to learn to pray, raise your prices

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I live in Barcelona, have been for almost two years now. In order to find out a little about this city, I picked up a book, called Barcelona. It talks about the history and the architecture of the place.

Since Barcelona is on the sea, the culture has been influenced big time by sea and sailing.

​​One of the oldest churches in the city is Santa Maria del Mar.

​​The patron saint of Barcelona is St. Eulalia, also the patron saint of sailors.

​​And according to the book I’m reading, the locals have a saying:

“If you want to learn to pray, learn to sail.”

I wrote that down when I read it. It’s very practical advice, even if you don’t want to learn to pray.

It reminded me of my attitude from day zero of my copywriting career, back in 2015.

I started out charging $15/hour.

I told myself that after five jobs completed at that rate, I would raise my rate to $20/hr.

And I did so.

Then I repeated the process, over and over. $20, $25, $40.

While I was still on Upwork, around 2018, I eventually got to $150/hr.

Then I got off Upwork, and started charging clients still higher effective fees for the work I was doing.

At every step of the way, my mindset was lacking. I had zero inner game. I was emotionally sure that the work I was doing would not be worth the new price I wanted to charge.

And yet I raised my prices. My mindset and my skills and my deliverables caught up. They had to. I was working with clients who were suddenly paying me lots more money.

So if you want to learn to pray, learn to sail. And if you want confidence and the skills to back it up, raise your prices.

This applies beyond copywriting, and beyond client work. ​​

That’s why pricing will be something I will talk about on the free presentation I will host tomorrow, about how I write and profit from this newsletter that you are reading now. But that training is only open to people who are signed up to my list. If you’d like to get on there, click here.

How to get drug-dealer levels of cash without selling drugs

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Last Monday, I wrote an email about Pinky Cole, the founder of Slutty Vegan, a fast-food brand with 11 locations, valued at $100M.

I’ve been traveling in the days since, so I didn’t get a chance to finish the New Yorker article where I first read about Pinky Cole.

I was reading that article again this morning. I found out that when Cole first launched Slutty Vegan back in 2018, she did so without a physical location, just on a bunch of food-delivery apps.

The first day, Cole sold exactly one slutty, meat-free hamburger.

Things inched and middled and crawled along at this pace until Cole hired Ludacris’s manager, Chaka Zulu. Zulu helped Cole get a bunch of rappers, including Snoop Dogg, to endorse Slutty Vegan. Result:

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From there, demand exploded. “I felt like a drug dealer,” Cole said. “We had, like, trash bags of money, because we only took cash.”

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Along with reading the New Yorker, today I’ve been preparing intensely for the live training that I will host this coming Monday, about how I write and profit from this newsletter.

I’ve been collecting ideas for that training over the past couple weeks, and today I also made a big brain dump.

I realized I will have to significantly pare back all the valuable ideas I could share, in order to have a training that makes sense and that doesn’t go on forever.

But one thing I’m sure to keep is the point of the Pinky Cole story above.

It should be obvious enough. But if you want me to spell it out, and show you how it fits into making money with a newsletter, particularly if you also work with clients at the same time, then join me for the training on Monday.

This training will be free.

It will happen on Monday January 22, 2024 at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. But you will have to be on my list first. Click here to sign up.

Daily bloodletting

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Bloodletting used to be standard medical practice. Today, bloodletting might sound stupid or even barbaric, but way back when, it really seems to have helped people.

Here’s a passage about an army captain who experienced some insult that made him so furious that his friends couldn’t make sense of what he was saying:

“The regimental doctor, when he came, said it was absolutely necessary to bleed Denisov. A deep saucer of black blood was taken from his hairy arm and only then was he able to relate what had happened to him.”

That passage is from War and Peace, by Russian count Leo Tolstoy.

​​Between 1902 and 1906, Tolstoy was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times but never won once.

Somebody who did win the Nobel Prize is American journalist Ernest Hemingway.

​​Hemingway wrote many things, but he never wrote the following passage, which is often attributed to him:

“It is easy to write. Just sit in front of your typewriter, open a vein, and bleed.”

That quote is probably attributed to Hemingway so often because he was famous and because in the end he killed himself. Hemingway’s life and death go well with the sentiment that writing is hard, draining, even destructive to the writer.

But I would like to give you that other perspective on that passage, the medical bloodletting perspective.

Each day, before I write my daily email, I’m filled with a mess of ideas, emotions, reactions, and confused plans. I’m also restless because I feel I haven’t accomplished the one thing I set myself as a task for absolutely every day.

After I write my daily email, I function more normally. People can understand me better if I talk, I can make some kind of plans about the future, and I feel the satisfaction of having accomplished something concrete that day.

In other words, daily emailing has the benefits of medical bloodletting, or maybe journaling.

Except daily emailing also has the added benefits of building up an audience… producing content that can be repurposed for books, podcasts appearances, or courses… and of course, driving readers to sales or other types of actions.

Speaking of which:

In a few days’ time, I will host a free training.

The training will cover how I write and profit from this newsletter that you are reading now.

It will happen on Monday January 22, 2024 at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. But you will have to be signed up to my list first. Click here to do so.

The owner smiled when I tried to speak Spanish… but when I switched to English!

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Yesterday, I stepped into the beautiful Librería Nobel — Nobel Bookstore — in Almería, Spain.

“Buenos días,” I said as I entered.

The owner, who stood behind the counter, smiled at me politely and returned my greeting. He didn’t recognize me at first. So I changed tack.

“Hola Rafa,” I said and then switched to English. “How are you?”

A look of surprise spread across his face. “John! Coño! What are you doing here!”

The owner of Librería Nobel is one Rafa Casas, who I’ve written up before in this newsletter as a Spanish A-list copywriter.

Not only is Rafa a skilled copywriter who has helped a bunch of clients make money, but he’s building up his name in true A-list style.

Along with his bookstore and his client work, he now runs two coaching programs, one to help Spanish-speaking business owners get set up online with their digital marketing, and another called Circulo Copy where he mentors a number of Spanish-language copywriters, including some well-known names.

This was the first time I was meeting Rafa in real life. But I have known him online for a while.

Rafa first got on my email list in 2021. He then went through my Copy Riddles course, back when I was still offering live weekly Q&A calls.

At that time, I ran a weekly contest for the best answer to one of the week’s Copy Riddles. Rafa won the first contest ever. (Among the three books I offered him as a possible prize, Rafa wisely chose my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.)

Then some time in 2022, I interviewed Rafa for my Copy Zone guide to the business side of copywriting. His story of getting started writing daily emails about books while his bookstore was locked down — and then turning that into paid client work — was both interesting and impressive.

We also had a short-lived language exchange after I moved to Spain.

He’s even translated my 10 Commandments book to Spanish, and we will be putting that out soon, as soon as the cover designer gets back to me.

Point being:

I started out this email newsletter with the vague aims of having a sandbox in which to practice copywriting and marketing, as a possible source of samples to show clients, and as a way of maybe winning some client work, back when I was still hungry for that.

And my newsletter has delivered on all those fronts.

But it’s also produced a bunch of amazing opportunities and outcomes I never could have imagined when I got started.

It’s resulted in great new relationships both online and in real life… people doing me solid favors without ever being asked… cool free stuff shipped to my front door… speaking opportunities… and even the occasional note from people who tell me that what I’m doing has actually changed the course of their life for the better.

If you want, you too can have something similar. At least that’s my claim, one I will work to pay off on the free training I’m hosting in a few days’ time.

The training will cover how I write and profit from this newsletter that you are reading now.

It will happen on Monday January 22, 2024 at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. But you will have to be signed up to my list first. Click here to do so.

Slutty email

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Yes, the subject line of today’s email includes the word “slutty.”

If that didn’t outrage or shock you so much that you marked this email as spam already, then read on, because I will tell you how to turn any shock and outrage you did feel into profits, regardless of what you sell.

I’m making my way through a backlog of old New Yorker magazines that have gathered under my living-room coffee table.

​​The one I’m currently on is from April 2023. The main article is about Pinky Cole, the founder of a fast-food chain called Slutty Vegan.

The Slutty Vegan menu features no-meat burgers such as Fussy Hussy ($13) and Super Slut ($15).

When customers step forward to order, a Slutty employee announces through a microphone, “It’s Slutty Saturday!”

​​If it’s the customer’s first time at the restaurant, and they admit it, then the employee adds over the microphone, “We have a virgin slut!”

There’s a bouncer at the Slutty Vegan entrance, and a DJ plays Drake and Aaliyah inside. On the wall, there’s a bright sign that reads, “EAT PLANTS YA SLUT.”

As one investor in the company said, “It’s this very unusual juxtaposition of veganism, which is often connected to what I’m not allowed to eat, with sluttiness, which is all the things that I’m gonna do even though I’m not allowed to.”

And it’s resonating.

Most people who go to Slutty Vegan are not going because they are militant vegans. In fact, most are not vegans at all, or really going for the food.

Slutty hamburgers seem to be middling — “better than American McDonalds,” as one interviewed customer put it. Or in the words of the author of the New Yorker article, who was trying to quit eating factory-farmed meat when he first went to Slutty Vegan, “Like most people, though, I went back in equal parts for the vegan food and for the vibes.”

You might wonder whether it’s viable long-term business strategy to sell people middling food while calling them sluts.

As of that April 2023 article, Slutty Vegan had 10 locations around Georgia, Alabama, and New York. It’s had investment that valued the company at $100 million (the first location opened in 2018).

Slutty Vegan has since opened a new location in Texas and is opening a new one in Baltimore, one of my adopted home towns.

Pinky Cole, the founder, is also launching an entrepreneurial reality show, and Slutty Vegan has had partnerships with designer Steve Madden and was planning one with Lululemon.

The point I’m trying to illustrate is the power of creating a sense of place around whatever and wherever you sell, whether that’s a slutty drive-through or your own slutty website.

Of course, you don’t have to get all crass and sexual with your sense of place, like Slutty Vegan does.

This idea of sense of place has long been practiced to perfection by another restaurant franchise, Unslutty Starbucks.

As the Starbucks website says (under the “Stories” subdomain), Starbucks is the Third Place, a place of warmth and connection and belonging, a place apart from work (presumably, where coldness and alienation reign) and home (filled with mess and stress).

And if you need reminding how valuable that Third Place concept has been, Starbucks now has 35,000 locations worldwide and is valued at $104 billion.

So if you felt any shock or outrage at today’s “slutty email” subject line, then good.

It will help you remember today’s email, and apply, in your own business, the lesson of creating a sense of place — a gift-box-and-bow around whatever you sell, which elevates your product from a commodity to a price-elastic emotional experience.

You might wonder what kind of sense of place I aim for with my emails, and with the products that I sell.

Or maybe you don’t wonder. Maybe it’s obvious. Because I’ve written emails about it before, and I’ve even created paid courses about my chosen “sense of place” in the past.

But if would like to hear me spell it out, you can do do so on the free training putting on later this month.

The training will cover how I write and profit from this newsletter that you are reading now.

It will happen on Monday January 22, 2024 at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. But you will have to be signed up to my list first. Click here to do so.

Should you write emails that attract your target audience?

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In a few hours, I’m to board a plane to sunny Andalusia in the south of Spain. Before then, there’s still the gym, packing, and of course, this daily email to write.

Fortunately, a reader sends in a timely question:

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I have a (copy)riddle that’s been on my mind for a while now…

I have a tiny list of 40 people I want to grow and use to get copywriting clients.

Now… Should I keep writing to them about copywriting and marketing, or should I switch to something else that would attract the people I want?

Just because if I keep writing about copy, it is going to attract mainly copywriters and not the business owners I want, right?

What are some of your thoughts on this one?

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When I first read this question, I felt it was either the world’s most gingerly tossed softball or some kind of setup.

Should you, or should you not, write emails that attract your target audience… hmm… let’s see… and it’s a copywriter asking me this…

Clearly, the answer is yes, right?

Yes. If you want people in a specific market to read your emails, you should write your emails in a way that attracts those people.

That’s what I replied to the reader above.

But then I thought a bit more. And the following question popped up in my mind:

Over the past 5 years, how many copywriters have started email lists with the goal of attracting clients?

And of those, what percentage have ever managed to get a single paying client from their email newsletters?

My guess for the first question is, thousands. My guess for the second question is, fewer than 5%, and maybe fewer than 1%.

So maybe there’s more to this question than meets the retina.

That’s why I’ll talk more about this on the free training I will put on at the end of this month, about how I do it, meaning how I write and profit from this newsletter you are reading now.

Because I have gotten copywriting clients via this newsletter, multiple times.

​​I’ve also gotten lots of one-time-gig, ongoing-job, and even partnership offers that I turned down, because I had enough work or because I wasn’t taking on clients at the time.

And yet, I’ve written many more emails about copywriting and marketing than I have about the troubles of being an online business owner… and my prime directive has never been to write in a way that attracts my ideal clients.

I’ll talk about this on the training, and I’ll work to make it interesting and valuable to you too, whether you’re hungry for clients or you simply want to write your own email newsletter for other reasons.

Once again, the training is free. It will happen on Monday January 22, 2024 at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. You will have to be signed up to my list in time to get on the training. If you’d like to sign up to my list, click here.

Free training on how I do it

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As I mentioned at the tail end of my email yesterday, I will put on a free training soon, specifically on Monday January 22, 2024 at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST/1am east Kazakhstan time (+1 day in case you are in Kazakhstan).

This training will be about what I’ve learned while running and writing a personal daily newsletter, the one you are reading now.

I started this newsletter 5+ years ago.

It’s been great to me in many ways, most of which I could never have anticipated.

It’s also been bad in a few ways, and I’ve found some ways to deal with those.

And then, there have been certain things about this newsletter about which I have been stubborn and bullheaded, and this resulted in me making much less money and having much less objective success than I might have had otherwise.

Some of those things I’ve changed in time.

Some I still refuse to change, for reasons that make sense to me.

So if you’re curious about the good, the bad, and the stubborn, you can join me for this free training, where I’ll share all about it.

This training can be relevant if you want to write a personal email newsletter for any reason.

It can be particularly relevant if you also work with clients.

I started out as a freelance copywriter. I know there are many folks on my list who do something similar, related to marketing or writing. But I also know that on my list there are other folks who work with clients too, including designers, coaches, IT consultants, corporate trainers, even lawyers.

This training can be relevant and useful to you in all those cases, as long as you’re open to the idea of writing your own newsletter.

My newsletter has given me a second source of income besides client work and the stability and peace of mind that come with that… standing and status in the little corner of marketing industry in which I work… the satisfaction of building something for myself… connections with smart and very successful people… and both a perceived and a real improvement, and a pretty massive one, in my professional skills and expertise.

If you want something similar, then join me for the training, where I will share what I do now, what I have learned over the past five years, what I wish I had done differently.

If you’d like to join, you’ll have to be on my list first. Click here to sign up.

Zero-handclap unsubscriber yawns at my emails

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Another day, another unhappy unsubscriber firing a parting shot.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve written a few emails featuring messages that former readers leave on that default “what made you unsubscribe” screen.

Most people never write anything, but on rare occasion, I find funny f-yous. And since I’ve been featuring these messages in my emails, I’ve been getting them more often. Like the guy who unsubscribed a few days ago and wrote:

“Emails tend to be too long, clever, and polished. Not dangerous enough. Yawn”

I shrugged. It’s all true. All except the dangerous part.

My emails are exactly dangerous enough — for my own tastes. Because I write with myself in mind first and foremost. I write things that I would find interesting and valuable, and then do a final check to see whether this can potentially be interesting and valuable to others as well.

That means sometimes I have genuinely dangerous things to say. Most days I don’t, and I have no intention of forcing it to sound edgy or to entertain jaded readers.

I could and maybe should end this email right here. But I like to write long and polish up my emails, often with concrete examples.

So I went in search of this unsubscriber on the Internet. What kind of dangerous, unpolished, raw writing might he be into?

I was hoping I would find something I could set myself in opposition to, like a dull, stubborn turtle.

I typed his email address into Google and… up came his Medium blog. It’s been live for the past few months. It’s filled with listicles and how-to articles with headlines like:

“The Features-Advantages-Benefits Copywriting Formula”

“Core Principles Of Copywriting”

“The Four C’s Copywriting Formula”

Unsurprisingly, all these posts have zero engagement. No comments, not even any of those Medium handclaps, though from what I understand, the whole point of publishing on Medium rather than your own site is to get free readers to your content.

The fact is, this danger-seeking unsubscriber could benefit from my Simple Money Emails course.

Simple Money Emails doesn’t require writing long, and doesn’t require over-polishing. That’s entirely optional.

What’s not optional is creating interesting content that keeps people reading, engaging, and even buying, without heavy-handed teaching that doesn’t even get a stupid handclap on Medium.

What’s more, if you insist on hard teaching in your content, you can use the strategies I teach inside Simple Money Emails to liven up your boring listicles and how-to articles.

For more information, or to get the course, here’s the (beware) mildly dangerous sales page for Simple Money Emails:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

I’m open to client work once again

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This morning, I summed up the money I made during 2023, and then I broke it down by where it came from.

I came up with a whole host of new insights, enough to fuel a week’s worth of emails.

Today, I’ll share just one thing I spotted, and that’s the outsized role of client work in my 2023.

Only a few days ago, I wrote that 2023 was my second-best year ever, trailing only behind 2020, when I was fully immersed in copywriting client work.

But last year, I did almost no client work. Or so I thought.

Because while I only had one client last year, and I only wrote quick and easy emails for this one client, it ended up accounting for almost 18% of my total income for 2023.

It turned out client work was the second-biggest source of income for me in 2023, ahead of most of the courses I sold, ahead of the coaching I did, ahead of the affiliate offers I promoted. And I didn’t realize it until just this morning.

Really, that shouldn’t have been a surprise.

Because done-for-you services are easy to sell. And if they have to do with marketing or sales, they are easy to charge a big chunk of money for. And yet, for the right client, they still make sense, and then some.

All of which is to say, for the first time in a long time, I am actually open to new client work.

Maybe you’d like to hire me.

Not for email copywriting, but for managing your entire email list. This includes writing the emails, but also everything else that goes with making money via a list, including picking offers, organizing promotions, and even doing things to grow the list, in case that makes sense.

Basically, I handle everything, take this worry off your plate, and make you money, probably much more than you’re making now.

And since this email is quickly turning into a sales pitch, let me give you some proof that this is something I am qualified to do:

One is my experience with this newsletter, and making a good living at it.

But more importantly, two is my experience managing the email lists of clients who had much much bigger businesses than mine.

I’ve written about this experience before. But the most interesting and notable was managing two lists of ecommerce buyers, each with over 70k names, each bringing in multiple millions of dollars in sales per year via daily emails alone — all of which I was doing.

So if you have an email list that you’re not monetizing at all… or that you are not monetizing well… or that you simply don’t want to manage yourself any more, then hit reply, and let’s talk. Maybe we can work together.

Do you want to promote something good to my list?

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Yesterday, a guy got onto my email list and wrote me straight away to ask for my physical mailing address — he had something very important to send me.

Since my mailing address is not something I share promiscuously, he ended up sending me the important something as a PDF attachment to an email. I opened it up to see the following:

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I wanted to send a large FedEx box to your address with the letter you are reading now. You must be wondering why I would do such a thing?

There are two reasons:

1. Sending FedEx boxes is expensive, so you can tell yourself that what I have to tell you is very important.

2. Large boxes are almost always opened immediately. This is important because what I have to say is extremely urgent.

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I found myself a little dizzy reading a PDF about the importance of this expensive, extremely urgent FedEx package that I had just opened up but couldn’t remember opening.

Still, I pushed through the dizziness to the rest of the message. The gist was that the guy has a course he’s acquired the rights to, and he’s hoping I will promote it to my list and we can split the profits.

I took a quick look at the sales page of the course he has the rights to. And I quickly decided it’s not something I would promote to my list.

It might be a fine course. But the promise to me is not novel or exciting… there’s no strong proof to latch on to… and the whole lot doesn’t seem like something I could enthusiastically get behind and promote in the best interest of my readers, whose trust I have been cultivating and honoring for years.

So I wrote back to say thanks, but no thanks.

And then I got to wondering.

Because as I wrote recently, I promoted one affiliate offer last year, Steve Raju’s ClientRaker. That worked out great, from a financial point of view, from my personal satisfaction point of view, and most importantly, from the point of view of the people who ended up buying, many of whom wrote me to say thanks for turning them on to Steve and his great training.

So I got to wondering, are there other people on my list with good things to promote?

I don’t know. But I’m willing to find out.

So if you have something good to sell, promote, or offer, hit reply and let me know.

It could be a product that you sell.

Or it could be a service that you offer.

The main thing is​​ it’s good — meaning it’s got a great big promise, an element of excitement or novelty, and strong proof that it does what you say it does.

If you have something like that, then send me an email about it, or a virtual FedEx package. We can start a conversation to see if it’s a fit for my list of business owners, coaches, writers, in-house copywriters, and freelancers of various stripes.