Business Ideas

My idea for getting others to pay for my advertising

by

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:

===

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.

===

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”

by

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

A primer on worldbuilding

by

Thanks to my space-age “Insight Exposed” system, which allows me to retrieve interesting and valuable information that I came across hundreds or thousands of Earth-days ago, I was reminded that in November 2022 I came across a unique, rare, and precious document.

This document shoulda been titled,

“A Primer On Worldbuilding For Content Creators With Ambitions Of Creating Multi-Billion Idea Franchises”

As it is, this document has no title. It jumps straight into the meat of it.

You can find a way to get at this document below. But first, a word of warning:

This document is written in what is known as “experiential learning” style.

In other words, this document won’t spell out ABC how to build a world of your own.

Rather than telling you, it will show you.

That means you will have to put on a little light Marvin Gaye, and as Marvin builds up in the background, you will have to look at this document and ask yourself, “What’s going on? What is really happening here?”

I did this exercise myself just now.

​​I took about a page-and-a-half of notes from this document on how to build an effective and engaging world.

For example, based on the first sentence of the third paragraph on page 12 of this document, I wrote down to myself:

“Keep the setting utilitarian and unobstructive, except for a few key details to signal novelty.”

I suggest you do the same. That is, if you can see the value in building your own expansive, coherent, and exciting world.

If you want this unique, rare, and precious document, as a first step, you’ll have to get onto my email list. Click here to do so. And when you get my welcome email, reply to it and say, “I want the primer on worldbuilding please.”

The popping of the newsletter bubble

by

A couple weeks ago, I signed up to a weekly newsletter that aggregates interesting links and online resources. At the top of the welcome email and in every email since, this newsletter says:

“Want to sponsor the newsletter and reach 9,000+ startup founders, designers, developers and tech enthusiasts? Just reply to this email to get in touch.”

So far, some of my best list growth results have come via classified ads I’ve run in other newsletters. And I like this new newsletter, and the recommendations they send out.

So I wrote to inquire about reaching 9,000+ startup founders, designers, developers and tech enthusiasts. How much?

It turns out the newsletter offers various packages, ranging from $300 per issue (main sponsor at the top) down to $60 (quick shout out at the bottom).

I calculated how much this newsletter is making per issue if each of the ads slots is filled. It comes out to $880 per weekly issue.

In other words, in the ideal scenario, the guy behind this newsletter makes about $3.5k per month, and it’s probably significantly less in reality because not all the ad slots are filled all the time.

Over the past few years, there’s been a lot of excitement, hype, and buzz about newsletter businesses. Thousands of newsletters have started up. Maybe tens of thousands. Inevitably, it’s led to a bubble.

Just as inevitably, most of those newsletters will not persevere long enough to succeed and become self-sustaining businesses.

All of which means today is the best time ever to start a newsletter — if you have a back-end business that a newsletter can promote and support, so you can be in it for the long term.

Not only will a newsletter help you recruit leads for your main business, and convert them, and retain them.

But pretty soon, you will be able to buy other newsletters that are folding. For cheap, you will be able to become the owner of vetted lists of self-selected, engaged readers or even buyers, who have expressed interest in what you offer.

In fact, the great newsletter poppening might already be under way.

I recently started listening to the Newsletter Operator podcast by Matt McGarry and Ryan Carr. Over the last few episodes, I’ve heard stories of such newsletter acquisitions, ranging from newsletters of a few hundred to a few thousand subscribers or more.

Of course, in order for the acquisition of a competitor newsletter to make any sense for you, you must have your own newsletter already set up and humming.

You must have somewhere to send those new subscribers, and you must be able to confidently tell them, “Of course, you can unsubscribe if you like. But if you liked [insert name of stupid and dull competitor newsletter], you will love [insert the name of your amazing and fun newsletter].”

All of which leads me, with the force of irrefutable logic, to my ongoing offer, the done-for-you newsletter service.

I’ve been talking about this done-for-you offer for the past few days. I will talk about it tomorrow still, and then I will shut up, at least on this particular topic.

If this offer is something that interests you, you can find more info below:

https://bejakovic.com/announcing-done-for-you-newsletter-service/

Announcing: Done-for-you newsletter service

by

Really, I already announced my done-for-you-newsletter service yesterday, at the bottom of my last email.

But nothing is truly announced until you write an email with a subject line that starts with “Announcing.”

So here goes:

The background is I’ve been writing a newsletter in the health space for the past year.

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

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

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

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

So I thought I could offer the entire package.

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

Solution:

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

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

That’s still pretty much the plan.

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

Here’s what to know:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edward Bernays, Dana White, and possibly you

by

The UFC is one of the two sports promotions I follow. And so I know that earlier this week, UFC president Dana White teased potential fights that will happen next April at UFC 300, a milestone number for the monthly MMA event.

White says that UFC 300 will make fight fans “lose their minds” because of the caliber of the fights he will organize.

That’s the kind of problem the UFC faces these days: coming up with bigger and more exciting fights, and figuring out where to bury all the cash that these fights produce.

Today, the UFC is by far the dominant player in the sport of MMA.

​​The company is worth an estimated $12 billion.

But back in 2005, the UFC, already a decade old at the time, looked like it might have to fold.

They’d had a few successful fights that did well on pay-per-view. And yet, financially, the UFC was not successful or sustainable as a business. It looked like the company would go bankrupt if it had just one or two more lackluster events.

So how did we get from near-bankrupcy at UFC 50… to a $12 billion valuation at UFC 300?

I’ll tell ya. But before I give you the answer, it’s worth thinking about what you yourself — as a marketer, or a business owner — might do in the situation that the UFC was in back in 2005.

Would you run ads on TV hyping up upcoming PPV fights?

Would you send direct mail to subscribers of martial arts magazines, and try to sell recordings of your previous events?

Would you hire celebrities to come sit cageside to build up public interest?

None of those were what saved the UFC from ruin.

Instead, the owners of the UFC did something clever.

They didn’t try to sell their core product at all. Instead, they created a second product, and they promoted and sold that.

Specifically, they created a reality TV show, called The Ultimate Fighter. It showed a bunch of guys, living together in a house, training and bickering and competing with each other for the right to get a six-figure contract for the regular UFC promotion.

The show was a huge success. It drew lots of viewers. It became profitable in itself. It converted many of those new viewers into PPV customers.

The Ultimate Fighter saved the UFC. And then next year, with the next season, The Ultimate Fighter did it all over again.

Now, you are probably nowhere close to bankruptcy. But the point still stands:

You can tap into a popular format or medium. You can use that popular format or medium create a new offer that’s easy to promote… easy to sell… keeps people in the loop… builds your standing and reach… warms prospects up to your main business… and keeps them engaged even after they buy your core offer.

It’s a proven playbook to get traffic, conversion, and retention all in one.

Edward Bernays did it a hundred years ago.

Dana White did it 20 years ago.

You can do it today.

Now, if you’ve been reading these emails for a while, then you can probably guess the popular format or medium I would recommend for all of the above:

An email newsletter.

Odds are, if you’re reading my emails, and if you have a successful business, then you already have your own email newsletter.

But if you don’t, and you would like to, then hit reply. Because as of today, I’m offering a done-for-you newsletter service.

I will have more to say about it in my email tomorrow. But if you want to talk about it now, then hit reply, tell me who you are and what your business is, and we can take it from there.

Valuable positioning idea inside

by

For the past year, I have been writing a second newsletter, one about health. About ten days ago, on a whim, I changed the name of it.

I’m still not publicly sharing either the old or the new name of my health newsletter, because the CIA asked me not to.

But I want to tell you something curious that’s happened following the name change.

So let’s pretend my old newsletter was named Morning Brew, which it was not. But Morning Brew is a big and popular email newsletter that covers the day’s business news, so you might know it.

My health newsletter’s old name was something like Morning Brew. Cute, possibly clever, with a brandable tinge to it.

But ten days ago, I decided to kill the cuteness, cut the possible cleverness, and go for clarity instead of branding.

As a result, my health newsletter is now called something like, Daily Business Newsletter. Again, that’s not the actual name, but it should give you an idea.

Now here’s the curious thing that happened:

As soon as I made that switch, I started getting organic traffic from Google. Finally — the first organic traffic I got after about 11 months of regular posting of content to my website.

And apparently, it’s high-quality traffic, because these Google-sent visitors are opting in to the newsletter at a clip of about 10-15 per day, double-opting in, and will hopefully be reading and buying in the future.

To be fair, this might be absolute coincidence.

Or, if it’s not coincidence, it might be something that’s not repeatable for anyone else, or even for me.

Or, maybe there’s something there. Maybe it’s an illustration of a valuable positioning idea I read once:

===

For many people or products today, one roadway to success is to look at what your competitors are doing and then subtract the poetry or creativity which has become a barrier to getting the message into the mind. With a purified and simplified message, you can then penetrate the prospect’s mind.

===

That idea comes from of the best marketing books I’ve ever read. It’s one of the best as long as you read it carefully and slowly, rather than skimming through it to “get the gist.”

And no, it’s not the same book I recommended yesterday, and it’s not written by Dan Kennedy.

If you think you know what this book is, or you want to know, you can find it revealed at the other end of this link:

https://bejakovic.com/lost

The essence of expert showmanship (prepare to be underwhelmed)

by

I’m reading book about magic and showmanship by a magician with the fanciful name of Hake Talbot. Old Hake says:

“Attention to detail is the essence of expert showmanship.”

I see you rolling your eyes.

​​​​”Oh no Bejako! Please stop with all these profound, new, and immediately useful ideas! No more please, I’ve had enough value for today!”

Bear with me for a second.

Talbot’s advice to magicians is to write out their routine as if it were real, with no tricks, no sleights, and no misdirection necessary. Real magic, not stage conjuring.

And then, says Talbot, compare your actual act, detail by detail, to the real thing.

Any place where there’s a discrepancy from the real to the stage, well, you gotta address that in some way. At least if you wanna achieve “expert showmanship.”

That’s what attention to detail means.

But that’s abstract advice. Maybe an concrete example would help.

Let me use the example of my Influential Emails promotion earlier this week.

After all, I put on a kind of performance every day in these emails. I don’t play the role of a magician who makes rabbits appear out of top hats. But I do play the role of a marketing wizard who makes thousands of dollars appear on command out of daily emails.

Now, in an ideal case, in the case of real magic, what would a promotion for a course like Influential Emails look like?

​​Here’s an idea:

The offer would sell out before it even became publicly available.

That’s what I was planning to do with Influential Emails.

And I got tantalizingly close, first by having a waiting list, and second by offering the course a day early to the people on the waiting list who had bought something from me before, along with an inducement to buy now.

(In case you’re curious, the reason for this was both to reward those existing customers, and also to only do business with people I have sold to before and know to be good customers.)

But I didn’t make as many sales as I had planned during that secret pre-launch. So to reach my target, I had to open Influential Emails to the entire waiting list, before closing it down 12 hours later, as I wrote about in my email two days ago.

Are you still with me? Good. Because we’ve gotten to the discrepancy:

Even though I managed to reach my target number of sales within just 12 hours of the opening of the promo, I didn’t manage to do the truly magical thing, which would have been to announce that Influential Emails had sold out before the promo even started, and only to an insider circle of previous customers.

Maybe you’re rolling your eyes again. Maybe you think nobody cares, and nobody was expecting me to sell out Influential Emails without even opening up the promo.

Well, in that case, all I can do is refer you to Talbot’s advice above.

I care, and on some level, I believe it makes an impact.

That’s why I sent out the email yesterday about the technical muck-up I did with the waiting list for Influential Emails, which means a bunch of people who wanted to buy didn’t get a chance to.

I opened up the cart again just for those people.

And the fact is, with their added sales, I would have blown past my sales goal during that secret pre-sale period.

So in the interest of showmanship, I’m telling you about it now. I’m also thinking how I can make sure this kind of discrepancy never happens in future performances, I mean, promotions.

Because if you’re putting on a show as a marketing wizard, it’s fine to present yourself as an absent-minded luddite, like I did yesterday. ​​But it won’t do, not at all, to allow even a shred of doubt to form about your wizarding abilities.

Anyways, maybe that gives you some ideas for future promotions you too plan on running.

Meanwhile, as I said yesterday and the day before, all this is an added reason to get my 10 Commandments book if you haven’t done so yet.

At the end of that book, I have a special offer for an apocryphal 11th commandment.

If you take me up on that offer, I will know you bought the book, and in the future, you will be included in the special circle of previous buyers who get in on things that the rest of my list does not.

If you want in, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Bejako the airheaded technician strikes again

by

Let’s play a game of “Hit the Bejako piñata”:

As you might already know about me, I am very prone to making technical mistakes, snafus, and cock-ups.

Earlier in my life, this manifested itself in all kinds of travel related mishaps: showing up to the airport many hours too early, too late, on the wrong day, without the right visa, without having bought a ticket but fully convinced I had one (yes, this really happened).

Over the decades, I’ve largely managed to eliminate my travel-related clunkers.

But since I now work online and even have a little business online, each day presents a fresh new opportunity to screw up something technical, all the way from the mildly embarrassing to the serious in terms of reputation and money.

For example, consider the events of the past few days:

All of past week, I’ve been telling people to get on the waiting list for my Influential Emails course.

On Wednesday, I opened up the course to people on the waiting list who had bought something from me before. On Thursday, I opened it up to people on the waiting list who had never bought anything from me.

By Friday morning, I’d reached the number of sales I had been hoping for. So I closed down the cart and wrote an email about it, which I scheduled to be sent out last night.

But then, starting yesterday morning and culminating after the email last night, I got replies like the following:

===

I thought you should know that I never received any cart-open emails for Influential Emails despite having signed up for the waiting list.

Actually, I know I clicked on at least two of the waitlist links (in different emails) to be sure I was on the list because I was interested in purchasing.

===

I would like to blame Octavia Campo aka ActiveCampaign for this. But really, it was Bejako the airheaded technician at work again.

Turns out I forgot to add the automation for adding people to the waiting list to at least two of the emails I sent out over the past week. As a result, some 100 people who expressed interest did not get added to the waitlist, and did not receive the email when the cart opened.

Yesterday and today, I’ve been doing damage control, replying to people who wrote me, and reopening the cart for them.

Like I said, it’s time to get out the sticks, and start working on the Bejako piñata.

In short, thanks to my airheadedness, I’ve created a bunch of extra work for myself… I’ve confused and possibly offended long-time customers, who were wondering why they got snubbed in this launch… and I’ve put myself in a situation in which I look like one of those ecommerce brands that says, “Whoa, somebody didn’t get a chance to buy yesterday, so we’re extending the sale for another day!”

So I’m sending this email for two reasons:

One is to explain what exactly happened to anyone who did get impacted by my technological prowess.

Reason two I’ll explain tomorrow, in case you’re curious.

Meanwhile, the Influential Emails cart remains closed except for the people I am ferreting out as having expressed interest earlier, and not having had a chance to buy.

So the only thing i have to offer you today is my 10 Commandments book. You might want to get it for its own inherent value, or for the reasons I talked about yesterday, and that I will talk more about tomorrow. If you’re interested, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

The third-hottest release of 2023 closes after just one night

by

Last night, with crowds of paparazzi pushing outside the velvet rope, and a few stars making their way from their limos down the red carpet to the doors of the classy old theater, my Influential Emails show had its grand opening.

The show ran for exactly one night.

And then this morning, I locked and chained the theater doors, removed the “INFLUENTIAL EMAILS” letters from the marquee, and took out an ad in the local paper to announce this show is now over.

As I announced in the lead up and during the grand opening of Influential Emails, this promotion would go until Sunday at the latest, and I might close it down sooner.

Well, that sooner is today, about 12 hours after the initial grand opening. I would have closed it earlier but I was asleep.

The reason why I did this is that made up my mind, before I launched this promo, what a nice sum of money would be to make from it.

I’ve now made that money and more. And so the cart is now closed.

If you managed to squeeze in to the Influential Emails show, I hope you will get value out of it in a way pays for itself, and soon.

If you wanted to get in but didn’t manage to, then all I can say is — if you’re not too angered by this experience, then maybe you will have better luck next time.

And if you were not interested in buying Influential Emails, then I can share the following valuable truth with you:

You can choose who you sell to, and how much of something you sell. There’s no law against it. And it’s ultimately good for business, in many different ways.

Now here’s a little sneak peek behind the scenes:

This promo didn’t really run for 12 hours.

It ran for about 36 hours.

I opened it up a day earlier for a private showing, just for people who were on the waiting list and who had already bought something from me in the past.

I also gave them an inducement to buy within the first 24 hours.

Many did.

That’s how I managed to make more money with this one-and-a-half-day promo than I used to make in a whole month, the first few years of my copywriting career.

Some of the folks who were invited for this private showing had bought pretty much all of my offers in the past.

Some had bought just one of my courses.

And some only bought my little $5 Kindle book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

It didn’t matter.

They are all valued and ongoing customers, and I wanted to say thanks with this special opportunity.

All that’s to say, if you have not yet bought my 10 Commandments book, then consider doing so.

It might teach you a thing or two about copywriting. And it might just prove to be a ticket to an exclusive future show, and a walk down the red carpet. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments