Business Ideas

Sell the summer, not the seed

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I’m making my way through an old issue of The New Yorker, from Mar 2023. I’m reading an article about seed and garden catalogues, which offer different strains of cabbage or beet for purchase by mail.

Fascinating, right?

Well, hold on. These seed and garden catalogues are mail-order businesses, and some have survived since the 19th century.

If you’re doing any kind of online marketing today, there’s probably something fundamental and (ahem) perennial to learn from businesses that have sold in a similar way for 100+ years.

So I pushed through the first page of the article. And I was rewarded. I read the following passage about what these seed catalogues really sell:

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Seed and garden catalogues sell a magical, boozy, Jack-and-the-beanstalk promise: the coming of spring, the rapture of bloom, the fleshy, wet, watermelon-and-lemon tang of summer. Trade your last cow for a handful of beans to grow a beanstalk as high as the sky. They make strangely compelling reading, like a village mystery or the back of a cereal box. Also, you can buy seeds from them.

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This is a great though unexpected illustration of something I read in Dan Kennedy’s No. B.S. Marketing of Seeds And Other Garden Supplies:

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As a marketer, you have a choice between selling things with ham-handed, brute force, typically against resistance, or selling aspirations or emotional fulfillments with finesse, typically with little resistance.

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Perhaps you will say that’s obvious.

Perhaps it is.

But how many businesses insist on selling seeds, or even the promise of large or fruitful plants, when in reality what their customers want is a village mystery, the coming of spring, or the tang of summer?

It’s all gotta mean something. Whatever you sell has got to go in a gift-box, and I’m not talking about cardboard or paper.

And now it’s time to sell something.

My offer to you today is my Most Valuable Email training. The seeds inside this training are a copywriting technique you can use every day to create more interesting and engaging content than you would otherwise.

But what I’m really selling is something else — a path to mastery. The feeling of growing competence with each email you write… the joy of looking and seeing patterns others don’t… the ability to transform yourself at will, from what you are right now into anything you want to be, in an instant, like Merlin in Disney’s Sword in the Stone.

For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Don’t be like me

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For the past two days, I’ve been running a kind of flash offer I’ve called Copy Riddles Lite.

In order to promote that, I have finally done something I should have done months ago, and that’s to go through the emails that Australia’s best & world’s most provocative copywriter, Daniel Throssell, wrote to promote Copy Riddles back in September.

Daniel’s emails are filled with gold I could and should have been using to promote Copy Riddles ever since. Such as, for example, the following quotes:

“There are few other courses I fully and wholeheartedly endorse as strongly as one of my own. Copy Riddles is one of them.”

“I have literally never had so many people write to me after I start promoting something, offering unsolicited & gushing feedback on it!”

“It’s the most brilliant course concept I’ve ever seen … literally a gamified series of sequential puzzles that teaches you copywriting.”

So don’t be like me — lazy, careless, and self-defeating when it comes to promoting your own good offers.

Instead, when people write nice things about you and what you sell, save those comments… cherish them… casually drop hints about them over tea or coffee… and every Sunday or even more often, stand up on a soapbox, and openly and dramatically read out those flattering endorsements to everyone who might be interested and many of those who are not.

The Copy Riddles Lite offer is closing down tonight, in another 8 hours, specifically at 8:31pm CET.

Copy Riddles Lite is not a gamified series of sequential puzzles. That’s the full Copy Riddles course, which contains 20 such sequential puzzles.

Copy Riddles Lite contains just one such puzzle.

But it’s a puzzle that stands alone, without the rest of the Copy Riddles program. And if you can guess the right answer — or even if you don’t, but you put in the effort — it will teach you something very valuable about copywriting, in a very short period of time.

Copy Riddles Lite is priced lightly, according to its lite nature. And if you buy it and decide you want to upgrade to the full Copy Riddles program, I will credit you the price you paid for Copy Riddles Lite.

So if you’d like to get this piece of a highly endorsed training before I close down the cart, here’s where to go (no sales page, just an order page):

https://bejakovic.com/crl​​

How to sell 100,000 books with no audience, fame, or endorsements

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Yesterday, I wrote about Andrew Kap’s book 3 Words I Used To Sell 100,000 Books.

​​That book talks about the marketing behind Andrew’s law of attraction book, which has sold 100k+ copies since 2019.

One thing Andrew has done to promote his law of attraction book is start a YouTube channel in which he answers reader questions, highlights testimonials, and shares additional stories to illustrate points from his book.

In the chapter of the 3 Words book about that YouTube channel, Andrew says you shouldn’t worry too much about the production value of your YouTube videos. He gives an example:

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A perfect example of not needing high production value if you have high quality content is Alex Hormozi. You look at his content on YouTube, and a lot of his stuff seems like he’s filming inside of a closet. And the funny thing is — that’s because he actually is!

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I don’t agree with Andrew that Alex Hormozi’s inside-the-close videos stand on their high-quality content.

They stand because Hormozi is rich, successful, and now famous.

But that’s actually a good reason to read Andrew Kap’s 3 Words book.

Because Andrew made his law of attraction book a genuine bestseller without any of Alex Hormozi’s advantages.

He sold 100,000 copies of his book on his own — without a previous audience, without fame, without headline-worthy personal success stories, without celebrity endorsements.

And so, this point about Hormozi notwithstanding, it’s well worth reading Andrew’s 3 Words book about how he made his law of attraction book such a success.

By the way, YouTube is only one of the things Andrew is doing. So if you object to going on YouTube to promote yourself or your book — and if you do, I’m right there with you — then you’ll find lots of other strategies Andrew has used to promote his book and sell many metric tons of it.

I encourage you to read Andrew Kap’s book. In fact, I’m offering two free bonuses if you get it by tomorrow and write me:

Free Bonus #1: How Andrew Kap Wrote His Last Law Of Attraction Book in 60 Days

This is an interview I did with Andrew this past week.

His 3 Words book talks about book marketing: titles, covers, reviews, etc.

It doesn’t talk much about his writing process. But Andrew wrote his 200-page Last Law book in two months. And again, it has a 4.6 rating.

So I sat down with Andrew for an hour, grilled him on how he writes, how he prepares, researches, organizes his writing, the tools he uses, etc.

I also chimed in with my own thoughts and experiences. You might wonder why. I checked just now. I haven’t sold 100,000 books. But adding up all the books I have published on Amazon, I have sold 69,500 books.

Free Bonus #2: 4 Proven Hooks To Sell More Books

This is a short presentation I recorded a few days ago. It will give you the hooks, three examples for each, and how-to advice for coming up with each of the hooks for the book project you are working on.

These hooks are what I reach for when I’m thinking of writing a new book. They are also what I advised someone recently after he came to me and asked for help with writing his book. ​​​​

Hear me now:

​​You can get Andrew Kap’s book any time. But if you’d like to also get the free bonuses above, the deadline for that is tomorrow, Monday, Jan 29, at 8:31pm CET.

​​Here’s what to do:

1. Buy Andrew Kap’s 3 Words book on Amazon. You can get it in Kindle, audiobook, paperback, hardback, used, new, or collectible versions — your choice. The link to the book is at the end of this email.

2. Forward me the receipt email that Amazon sends you, and do it by the deadline (tomorrow, Monday, Jan 29, at 8:31pm CET).

3. I will then send you the free bonuses, the interview I did with Andrew, and the 4 Proven Hooks presentation.

Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/3words

My book recommendation for book marketing

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Today, I have book to recommend to you. It’s called, 3 Words I Used To Sell 100,000 Books.

I came across this book because I saw it hovering in the Amazon direct response bestsellers above my 10 Commandments book.

I looked up the author. His name is Andrew Kap. He’s the author of The Last Law Of Attraction Book You’ll Ever Need To Read. Facts about this book:

* Publication date: Nov 24, 2019

* Amazon rank as of today: 17,819, which means it’s selling around 220 copies per month, almost 5 years after its publication

* Number of reviews: 3,898, of which 79% are 5-star

I got curious. I bought Andrew’s 3 Words book. I started to read. I finished. And now I’m recommending it to you.

Actually, before recommending, a few disclaimers.

First, the “3 words.” They are not magic. They are not last, not law, not attraction. They are not words you can put in your title or anywhere in your text and automatically sell 100k copies.

Second, the book is written in a kind of sales copy style.

​​The first few chapters, which build up to the reveal of the three words, might sound like a video sales letter teasing you about the three health foods in your fridge you should never eat if you hope to lose weight.

Except Kap doesn’t keep teasing you for an hour and then tell you to buy something else. Instead, he reveals the three words, and pretty soon into the book.

He then unpacks the three words throughout the rest of the book, and tells you all the tactical and strategic things he did to sell and keep selling his Last Law of Attraction Book to 100k copies and beyond.

So get Kap’s book. Read it. Apply it. Or apply a part of it.

Because as you will see, Andrew Kap is rather obsessive in his determination to get his Law of Attraction book into as many hands as belong to humans that could benefit from the ideas he has to share.

But even if you don’t implement all of what Kap has to tell you, and even if you apply only 10% of it, you’re still likely to outsell 99% of self-published authors, and I imagine the majority of traditionally published authors as well.

Final disclaimer:

​​I wrote to Andrew and told him I want to recommend his book to my readers. I also asked if he would be willing to do the same with my 10 Commandments book to his readers. He agreed.

So not only am I telling you about this book, but I am actively promoting it. For that, I’ve got two free bonuses in case you get Andrew Kap’s 3 Words I Used To Sell 100,000 Books:

Free Bonus #1: How Andrew Kap Wrote His Last Law Of Attraction Book in 60 Days

This is an interview I did with Andrew this past week.

His 3 Words book talks about book marketing: titles, covers, reviews, etc.

It doesn’t talk much about his writing process. But Andrew wrote his 200-page Last Law book in two months. And again, it has a 4.6 rating.

So I sat down with Andrew for an hour, grilled him on how he writes, how he prepares, researches, organizes his writing, the tools he uses, etc.

I also chimed in with my own thoughts and experiences. You might wonder why. I checked just now. I haven’t sold 100,000 books. But adding up all the books I have published on Amazon, I have sold 69,500 books.

Free Bonus #2: 4 Proven Hooks To Sell More Books

This is a short presentation I recorded a few days ago. It will give you the hooks, three examples for each, and how-to advice for coming up with each of the hooks for the book project you are working on.

These hooks are what I reach for when I’m thinking of writing a new book. They are also what I advised someone recently after he came to me and asked for help with writing his book. ​​​​

Hear me now.

​​You can get Andrew Kap’s book any time. But if you’d like to also get the free bonuses above, the deadline for that is this coming Monday, Jan 29, at 8:31pm CET.

​​Here’s what to do:

1. Buy Andrew Kap’s 3 Words book on Amazon. You can get it in Kindle, audiobook, paperback, hardback, used, new, or collectible versions — your choice. The link to the book is at the end of this email.

2. Forward me the receipt email that Amazon sends you, and do it by the deadline (Monday, Jan 29, at 8:31pm CET).

3. I will then send you the free bonuses, the interview I did with Andrew, and the 4 Proven Hooks presentation.

Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/3words

Magic words that bring you status

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Yesterday, I went on Twitter in search of my own name.

What I found was a photo somebody had posted of a densely scribbled page, containing the text of one of my emails.

I squinted and leaned in so far my nose almost touched the screen. It was true.

People are actually copying out my emails by hand as a way to learn email copywriting.

It was a bizarre moment. It reminded me of the first time I printed a black-and-white photograph in my high school’s darkroom.

Take a normal-looking piece of paper, expose it to light for a second, then dump it into a bit of clear, water-like liquid. A picture emerges of something you had photographed days or weeks ago.

It feels like magic, because the ingredients seem so ordinary — paper, light, a bit of water-like liquid.

I’ve been writing this daily email newsletter for 5+ years. At first, I was writing mostly just to practice and then sending my emails out into the void.

After a while, I created an offer. I sent out an email just like the ones I had been sending out. Except this time, money came back at me.

It felt like magic, because it was still the same ordinary ingredients — a bare-bones text editor, ActiveCampaign, the blue “send” button.

Since then, I’ve continued sending the same text-only emails, just words in a text editor. And that’s been good enough to give me status and authority in this field. I got into copywriting some ten years ago by hand-copying issues of Gary Halbert’s newsletter. Today people are copying my newsletter issues by hand.

A few days ago, I announced I’m looking for five beta testers for a 3-month group coaching program.

The goal for this group coaching program is to implement the techniques and ideas I talked about on the “How I do it” call I held on Monday. Write interesting emails… build a list… grow your status… make money.

I announced this group coaching program to the people who were there for the live “How I do it” call, and to the people who signed up for the recording.

And in spite of the fact I once again managed to muck up the tech, so that some people never got the link to join the live call, and others never got the recording, I’ve so far filled three of those five spots. I also have a few people who’ve expressed interest in the remaining two.

But I want to get this sign-up process wrapped up now, so I can kick the group coaching off.

So if you’re interested, hit reply and let me know a bit about who you are and what you do.

I will send you a doc with the full info on this 3-month program, and you can decide if it’s for you or not.

If not, no problem. But if yes, then you can join us, and we will start next week.

One of the very few newsletters I read with interest

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One year ago, on January 10 2023 to be exact, I got a sudden burst of 100+ new subscribers.

That’s not how things go on a normal day in the Bejako hobbit hole. Not anywhere close. So I picked up my walking stick and went outside to investigate.

Google Analytics told me I had a mass of new website visitors from Twitter that day. So I walked over to Twitter, asked around, and came upon a tweet, which had been seen by 120k people, recommending me among several other email copywriters.

The person who wrote that tweet was one Kieran Drew.

At that time, Kieran had something like 100k Twitter followers. Today, he has over 200k. He also has a weekly email newsletter with close to 30k subscribers.

Kieran is an ex-dentist. He quit his comfortable job pulling teeth in September 2021. And he started to write online, full-time, to an eager audience of zero.

Kieran got his success so quickly and so thoroughly not via clever algorithm hacks or by running paid ads. Rather, he did it simply by writing. Clear, valuable, fun writing.

Thankfully, Kieran is not one of the descendants of Matt Furey in the daily email world, the way that I am.

His newsletter is pleasantly free of shaming… mocking… us-vs-them dog whistles… the daily striptease of a throbbing subject line that’s only paid off behind the paywall… or try-hard contrarian takes.

And yet, without all of these staples of daily emails, and even without writing daily, Kieran has his huge and devoted audience. And if you’re wondering if that huge and devoted audience is actually worth anything, Kieran grossed over $500k in 2023 alone, and he hit two 6-figure months.

If you’re interested in writing, or in making money online, what I’ve just told you should be enough to motivate you to get on Kieran’s email list and see what exactly he writes about and how he does it and how he profits from it.

But if by any chance it’s not enough, I can also add my personal seal of approval.

The fact is, I subscribe to hundreds of email newsletters. Most of them I ignore with a kind of malicious glee.

Some I work through out of a feeling of responsibility.

And then, there are a very few that I read regularly and with interest.

Kieran’s newsletter is among those very few. If you’d like to see why, sign up below and try it for yourself:

https://kierandrew.com/

Meet me in Barcelona?

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Yesterday, I held the “How I do it” training on Zoom.

I was happy with the content and the presentation. I felt I gave people who were there some genuinely new ideas on how to write and profit from a newsletter. And inevitably, I also highlighted some things folks already knew, but that I could vouch really were important, from personal experience.

So the live presentation was good. But, as usual, it was a weird experience.

I minimized the various Zoom windows so could I see my slides and focus. I ignored the chat except at a few moments when I stopped to field questions.

Inevitably, I spent over an hour talking at my computer, which gave me zero feedback, while at the same time feeling that I should somehow be interacting with actual people, who were muted and invisible.

It was strange and unsatisfying. This same stuff doesn’t bother me when I write and send these daily emails. But doing a live video presentation that somehow doesn’t feel live is different.

All that’s to say, there’s genuine value to meeting and seeing people in real life.

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

I know some of my readers live around here as well.

Also, Barcelona happens to be one of Europe’s top 5 tourist destinations, so maybe you are planning a trip here some time soon.

I will organize a meet up 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.

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.