Business Ideas

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.

Potentially harmful testimonial

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This morning, my floating guardian angel, Fred Beyer, wrote me a new message.

Over the years, Fred has repeatedly appeared out of the ether and pointed out harmful glitches and technical muckups in my marketing that were costing me thousands of dollars in lost sales.

But this morning, Fred wasn’t pointing out a technical issue. Instead he sent me a warning about my copy, specifically about a potentially harmful testimonial for my Copy Riddles program. He wrote:

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There’s a testimonial on your sales page that mentions the initial $300 you charged for Copy Riddles.

“Probably the best 300 bucks I’ve ever spent”

I’ve come across this before myself and I’ve always felt kind of cheated when I found out the training was now significantly more expensive.

There’s an inner voice that goes: “Sure it was worth 300, but is it worth 1000?”

Obviously You’re the expert.

I just wanted to share, in case this little testimonial drowned in the hubbub of running your biz.

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Fred raises a good point.

That “best 300 bucks ever” is a kind of anti-anchoring. It goes against the smart marketing practice of pegging your price to a drastically higher sum, and then lopping off zeros to your prospect’s relief and joy.

Perhaps the thing to do would be to take that “300 bucks” testimonial down.

But I never miss an opportunity to flirt with sales prevention. So rather than take that testimonial down, I will actually highlight it. Here’s the full version, which came from Robert Smith, who runs his own CRO agency. Robert wrote:

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I’ve spent close to 150k on copy courses and mentors.

John Bejakovic’s Bullet Copy course is probably the best 300 bucks I’ve ever spent.

One word: “source”. He shows you source material — pre twist — and then re-twists it, so you know how the twist works.

Just send him an email and ask him to enroll you in it.

If, after lesson one, you don’t immediately say, “this is the best 300 bucks I’ve ever spent”, then send an email to rob@robertsmithmedia.com and I’ll send you a refund (then, write your name down in my book of “copywriters I’ll never hire.”)

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Robert went through Copy Riddles back in 2021. And yes, the course has gone up in price since.

I first sold Copy Riddles at a low price and I gradually pushed the price up — this made it psychologically easier to sell something of my own.

In the meantime, my own status has grown, the endorsements for Copy Riddles have poured in, and today I can and do sell this course for $1,000.

But that’s about me me me. What about you you you? How is it possibly fair to you that I’m charging $1,000 for Copy Riddles today, when I charged just $300 for it a couple years ago?

First of all, $1,000 is still a fair price and then some.

If you actually go through this course and apply what it teaches in a real marketing endeavor, then the info inside can be worth tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars to you over your career.

You might think that’s exaggeration. But it’s just the nature of copywriting and marketing. Good selling skills, multiplied over a large enough audience, can create a lot of wealth, and quickly.

Second, a high, achievable, but uncomfortable price actually makes it more likely you will profit from the course.

I don’t believe the old chestnut, “If they pay, they pay attention.” I know many people who pay, and still never do anything with what they paid for.

But I do believe that if you pay a lot of money, and that makes nervous, you will push yourself out of your comfort zone and find ways to justify the uncomfortable price to yourself.

If you ask me for proof, I can give you myself as an example.

Some five years ago, I joined the coaching group of A-list copywriter Dan Ferrari. Over the course of about six months, I paid Dan multiple tens of thousands of dollars for this coaching.

This wasn’t money I could easily spare. In fact, I was eating away my savings, because I was paying Dan more than I was making. Each month, when it was time to make a new multi-thousand payment to Dan, I literally had cold sweat on my forehead and electric shocks down my spine.

I’ve written before about my experiences with this coaching:

Dan gave me valuable and practical marketing and copywriting ideas. But the real value was the price I was paying him. It made me so uncomfortable that I worked much harder to apply the ideas Dan gave me, to hustle and make do, simply because I had to.

Result:

In the month after I was done with Dan’s coaching, the floodgates opened. I started making the kind of money I had never made with copywriting before. Within the first two months at this new level, I had fully paid off the tens of thousands of dollars I had paid to Dan.

So to answer the question that was rumbling in Fred’s mind, and that may be rumbling in yours…

“Sure it was worth 300, but is it worth 1000?”

The answer is, it really depends.

Copy Riddles consists of 20 rounds. Each round covers a key copywriting concept.

If you don’t bother to go through all of the rounds, or if you don’t bother to apply them anywhere where they can possibly make you money, then Copy Riddles won’t be worth $1,000 to you, or any fraction of that.

On the other hand, if you go through each of these 20 rounds earnestly… if you do the daily exercises I give you… and if you apply the lessons in your own business or in your clients’ businesses, there’s no doubt in my mind that it will be worth $1,000 to you, and much, much, much more.

So Robert’s possibly harmful testimonial stays up. In case you’d like to see it in its native environment, or get started with Copy Riddles right now, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Matrix Denier rejoins my list and is promptly fired

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A couple days ago, I wrote an email in which I used the Matrix as a pop culture illustration. To which I got a reply from a guy who said, yea that’s great and all but “what if your reader hasn’t seen the movie and therefore doesn’t have a clue what the h*ll you’re talking about?”

A reasonable question… but something about the tone of it — it’s amazing how that comes through — made my terrier ears perk up.

I looked up this Matrix Denier to see if I’d had any previous email interactions with him.

And oh boy. Here’s the sorry story:

Two years ago, I ran a launch for my Copy Riddles program.

The Matrix Denier was signed up to my list at the time.

​​He replied on the last day of the launch to tell me that I name-drop famous copywriters a lot… that he wouldn’t be buying my course because my emails aren’t good enough to impress him… and that, rather than create my own offers, I should go back and study the work of people like Andre Chaperon and Ben Settle.

I shrugged, and I used this reply for a new email that I sent out to my list to promote my Copy Riddles course.

The Matrix Denier didn’t like this, and he wrote me in an offended and hurt tone to say so. Which I again turned into an email, and sent it out to my list as part of a sequence of emails about the different types of denial we all engage in.

This was the straw that broke the Denier’s back. He unsubscribed from my list, and as the reason why, he fired this farewell shot:

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“You’re simply too dumb to be helped. I tried twice & you can’t tell the difference between a troll & someone with advice. Good luck. You’ll need it.”

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Like I said, now he’s back on my list. Well, he was, until yesterday, when I unsubscribed him. No sense in wasting perfectly good Matrix analogies on someone who would rather complain than go see a movie I specifically recommended as great marketing fodder.

The point of this being that a couple years have passed.

I’m still writing… my status in the industry has grown… and so has the number of people who recommend me and point new readers to my newsletter.

Meanwhile, I don’t know what the Matrix Denier has gained in those two years. Going by the tone of his replies, and by the fact he even took the time to write me, just so he could complain and say “But what about me?” makes me think he hasn’t gone far from where he was two years ago.

In other words, you might as well get going now.

Time passes unstoppably. It’s a trite observation, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

Whatever it is that you’re doing or want to do, if you start now, and start accumulating a bit of something valuable every day — whether of skills or money or subscribers — then you can be in much better position in a couple of years, while those around you are left standing still.

And on that note, my Copy Riddles was and remains a great program, the best thing I sell. If you’d like to find out more about it or use it to start accumulating your copywriting skills, starting today:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Hell has no fury like a wizard scorned

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My email yesterday about a needy blackbird drew a bunch of amused replies from people who enjoyed the story.

But it also resulted in an unsubscribe rate of 3x the usual.

That’s okay. In fact, it was kind of the point of the email.

However, among all those quiet unsubscribes, there was one that was more vocal. That more vocal unsubscriber reported my email yesterday as spam.

Spam = unsolicited and unwanted email sent out to an indiscriminate recipient list

That’s not something I do. I make sure my emails are solicited and wanted (the headline of my optin page says “Prepare to decide”). I certainly don’t want to waste my time or effort or email marketing tokens writing to an indiscriminate recipient list.

So I got curious who this spam-reporter was, and how he possibly got on my list.

I put in his email address into Gmail and what popped up was this:

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That’s fucking hilarious… Great Email

Cheers

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… which was a reply he sent me to an email I wrote in the character of Bejako Baggins, about a deliverability wizard who approached me out of the cold, only for me to guide him back to the door.

The fact is, the spam-reporter above was the actual deliverability wizard from that story. He had opted in to my list a few days before that email and had written me a flattering message about my emails, along with concern that they weren’t getting through to him quickly enough.

All that’s to say, in the words of William Congreve, heaven has no rage, nor hell a fury, like a wizard scorned.

Because wizards — and men and elves and hobbits also — get outraged and furious when they don’t get what they want. When they feel ignored or dismissed.

But what to do?

You can’t go through life doing what everybody else wants of you all the time.

That means you will inevitably face some rage and fury, and have to learn to shrug it off. It’s not always about you. Many times, it’s just about people not getting what they want.

Anyways, this being the last day of the year, I will link to that Bejako Baggins email. Multiple people have written me to say it was my most entertaining email of the year.

Starting tomorrow, I’ll work to beat it.

But if you want a quick and fantastical story for New Year’s Eve:

https://bejakovic.com/you-dont-want-to-sell-to-a-hobbit-like-me/

My idea for getting others to pay for my advertising

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Yesterday, as the plane leveled off over the Bavarian Alps, I had a newsletter growth idea.

You might say that’s a waste of pleasant scenery on Christmas Day. But what to do? That’s how ideas seem to work.

They bubble up at the oddest times, when you’re not thinking about subject, triggered by nothing obvious.

Jim Rohn might shrug and say, “mysteries of the mind.”

Anyways, my idea was this:

I have another newsletter besides this one. That other one is in the health space.

The content is good. I know, because my audience says so, and even recommends me to others unbidden. ​​But my list is still small.

I could pay to get more readers onto my other newsletter, and in past I have done so.

But why pay when I might be able to get somebody else to pay?

So my Alps-high idea was to contact a few companies in the space and make them a deal they cannot refuse, or that they certainly can.

The idea is that they pay for my ads. Some modest sum at first, say $1k for one month as a test.

I then run ads on FB promoting my newsletter. And to every new subscriber, I also promote the partner company’s offer on my thank you page, in my welcome sequence, and as the main sponsor of each of my issues.

At the end of the month, we revisit the arrangement.

Did the company make back their $1k? Or is there hope they will do so because they got new customers via my newsletter that will add up to more than $1k in LTV?

If yes, we keep going, increase ad spend, and revisit the agreement one month later.

If no, we call it a failed experiment and that’s that.

That was my idea.

You might say it would never work. All the risk is on the company.

​​True.

I might need something extra — credibility, for example.

To get credibility, I could run an initial campaign with my own money, test out how it does, and have that data when I first pitch this idea to my would-be partner.

Or I might contribute some money myself so they feel I have skin in the game.

Or I might have to offer them a Calas-Powell-Rosenthal-and-Bloch-style guarantee, and say that I will refund their ad spend if the test is not successful.

Whatever. I’ll see. In any case, the bigger point still stands:

You don’t have to go at it alone. As the 21.7 Billion Dollar Man, marketing wizard Jay Abraham, once said:

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In business there is certainly no rule, no law, that says you have to do it alone. You don’t. There are a number of businesses out there that are as motivated if not more so than you are to help grow your business for you. You just never recognized that motivation and asked them, or taken advantage of their willingness to help. And that willingness means they can help finance, they can bring people into your business, all at no cost or risk to you.

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In the training where I heard that, Jay went on to give three concrete examples of his clients who got others to pay for their advertising… or for their operating costs… or even for their sales people.

This Jay Abraham training has been very valuable to me. It sold for something like $297 30 years ago. Today, it would probably sell for $2,997 and maybe much more.

But you can get it for an earth-shattering $12.69, and get hundreds or thousands of dollars in additional valuable ideas. The details are here:

https://overdeliverbook.com/

The folly of “show don’t tell”

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I wrote yesterday about worldbuilding. Well, here’s an anecdote that built a world:

Some time in the 1960s, artist Norman Daly created a tall and narrow sculpture. Daly taught at Cornell University, and so he placed his sculpture, without any fanfare, in a faculty dining room.

Daly expected his tall and narrow sculpture would spark commentary. Provoke emotions. Engage viewers.

But the sculpture didn’t spark any commentary or provoke any emotions. As for engagement, it did prove to be mildly engaging:

Faculty members interpreted it as a hat rack and treated it as such. Hats hung, they didn’t give Daly’s sculpture another look.

It was then that Daly realized he has to create a whole lot of supporting documentation to make sure his art is interpreted as art.

Point being:​​

It’s popular to say, “Show, don’t tell.” But that’s profoundly foolish.

You have to tell ’em, and tell ’em again, and tell ’em still some more. At least if you are after a given outcome — provocation, status, sales — and if you’re not okay with spending time and effort to create something that can then be dismissed as a hat rack.

I said the story above built a world. And I ain’t foolin’.

The story above was one of a few formative experiences that led Daly to create a whole new, made-up, Iron-Age civilization, including physical objects, works of visual art, music, as well as volumes of scholarship, commentary, maps, and even art catalogues for the whole thing.

Daly exhibited all this in art museums. People came, flipped through the art catalogue, nodded at the curious artifacts, and walked away feeling enlightened about a milennia-old civilization that never existed.

If you want to find out more about Daly’s project, you can do so at the link below.

It can interesting on its own merits.

It can prove useful if you are after crafting your own worlds.

And if you read just the section describing the other formative experience that led Daly to do create all this, it might be valuable if you yourself write or create content.

In case you’re interested, here’s the link:

https://theconversation.com/50-years-ago-an-artist-convincingly-exhibited-a-fake-iron-age-civilization-with-invented-maps-music-and-artifacts-189026