Business Ideas

A splash of ‘expensive’ and ‘exclusive’

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Yesterday, I was exchanging emails with a low-profile email marketer who is quietly doing some big things.

He only has three clients. But two of those three clients are 8-figure businesses, and the third is a 9-figure business. Since he gets performance bonuses and equity for his work, I imagine he does very well.

Yeah yeah, good for him. But what about me?

Even though the above email marketer does very well, he decided not to spend $100 on my upcoming 9 Deadly Email Sins training, set to happen next Monday. He wrote me to explain:

“Personally, the training didn’t seem that interesting (I felt I would never pay for a ‘mistakes to avoid’ training, not sure why).”

It’s a fair point. The “9 Deadly Email Sins” angle was something that popped up in my head a few weeks back. I used it once in an email as a kind of placeholder, and then I just stuck with it just to git ‘er done.

The fact is, a good number of people on my list have already signed up for this 9 Deadly Email Sins training. But those are people who generally trust me and figure I make all my offers worthwhile.

But a different positioning might have attracted more people. Specifically, it might have attracted more people who joined my list via the classified ad I ran last weekend, people who don’t know me well yet.

For example, rather than talking about deadly email sins, I could have said something about private lessons… only given out in expensive and exclusive coaching to successful clients… which is how the content of the training came about.

​​I floated that idea to that email marketer above. He wrote back right away to say:

“See? That’s more attractive to me already. ‘Costly email mistakes’ that you’ve only revealed during your ‘expensive and exclusive coaching to successful clients’. Sounds like something I’d personally consider. Maybe that’s the issue I had. The ‘9 deadly email sins’ angle seems too broad and I’m not sure whether its contents will be valuable for me specifically. A splash of ‘expensive’ and ‘exclusive’, and I’m considering it!”

So there you go:

If you want people to at least consider your offer rather that dismissing it on first sight, give it a splash of expensive and exclusive. You’re likely to sell more, at least to rich and successful customers.

But there’s actually a bigger, rarer, more valuable point I want to make about this whole story.

I will reserve that for Monday’s training, which is unfortunately named 9 Deadly Email Sins. When I say, “9 Deadly Email Sins,” you hear, “expensive and exclusive.” Because that really is how this training came to be.

The deadline is slowly but surely nearing. If you want to sign up in time:

https://bejakovic.com/sme-classified-ty/

3 great reasons to sign up to Josh Spector’s newsletter before Sunday

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Today I’d like to invite you to sign up to Josh Spector’s newsletter For The Interested.

​​Signing up is free, and I can think of no fewer than three great reasons to do so:

First, Josh writes both a weekly newsletter on Sundays (long, similar to what many others are doing) and a short daily newsletter in a different format on all the other days.

What Josh is doing with daily emails is innovative and it works. So much so I already wrote an email about it just a couple weeks ago. It might be something you want to keep an eye on and model yourself.

Second, if you ever find yourself crying “Value! More value!!!” and you want marketers to bombard you with non-stop, practical, how-to info and inspiration, without any teasing, guru-like grandstanding, or endless personal stories, then Josh is your man.

His newsletter is all value, zero charismatic manipulation, all day long.

Third, I will be running a classified ad in Josh’s newsletter this Sunday.

This ad will have a special offer to get my new Simple Money Emails course. I will sell this course after the promo in Josh’s newsletter ends, but if you are on Josh’s list by Sunday, and you take me up on the offer inside the ad before the deadline, you will get Simple Money Emails for free.

So are you… interested?

​​If you are (maybe you can sense where this is going) then here is Josh’s For The Interested:

https://bejakovic.com/fti

I paid a cool extra $1k to bring you the following hot tip

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The third and final, “VIP” day of the copywriting conference I attended this past May, which added a particularly heavy extra $1k to my ticket, consisted of just one presentation:

A-list copywriter Parris Lampropolous, giving a talk that he has not given before, at least as far as I know, and I’m a bit of a connoisseur of Parris Lampropoulos talks.

At one point, near the end of his talk, Parris revealed what is, in his words, the “most important thing” he has ever learned in his long, successful, and very lucrative marketing career.

Would you like to know what this most important thing is?

I bet.

And since I am in a generous mood, I’ll tell you. It’s something Parris learned early on from one of his biggest mentors, Jay Abraham:

There are only three ways to grow a business, says Jay. ​​The first is to get more customers or clients. The second is to increase the size of their transactions. The third is to increase the frequency of their transactions.

​​That’s it.

“Whoa…” I hear you say.

Or actually, I don’t​​​ hear you say that. Probably, you find the “most important thing” above to be so general as to be almost useless. Probably, there’s no “whoaing” going on anywhere around you right now.

Well, about that.

If you would like to know more than just this one-line summary of Jay Abraham’s approach to building businesses, which Parris Lampropoulos has found so valuable in his career…

Then you can hire Jay to consult you directly, and to apply his knowledge and experience to your business. The man’s consulting rate is currently $150k/day.

Of course, if that’s outside your budget, you can hire him virtually, and have him teach you everything he knows via a “6 week interactive consulting process.”

Really, that’s just a sexy way that Jay describes a big course he sells, which covers each of the three above ways to grow a business in complete and unrelenting detail.

​​Jay’s big course gives you dozens upon dozens of marketing strategies total, along with a bunch of case studies from his clients, big and small, to show you how those strategies work in real life.

if you go on Jay’s website right now, this big 6-weeek course currently sells for $997.

And that’s a fair price when you consider, as per Jay’s website, that “two years and over $200,000 were spent creating this 6 week interactive consulting process.”

But.

​​Maybe you don’t have $997 that’s aching to get spent right now. If so, then hold on to your barstool.

​​Because you can get Jay’s “interactive consulting process” not for $997… but for a grand total of $12.69. That’s such a price drop that it might sound almost impossible. But it’s quite possible.

How? As I wrote yesterday:

1. Go buy Brian Kurtz’s book Overdeliver at https://bejakovic.com/overdeliver. It costs $12.69 on Kindle.

2. Then go to https://overdeliverbook.com/ and put in your Amazon order number from step 1 above.

3. You will then unlock a treasure trove of free bonus material, which includes Jay’s “6 week interactive consulting process.”

Since you are continuing to read this email, maybe there is still some hesitation and indecision in your head. Maybe you are wondering if it’s really worth your $12.69 and a few clicks right now to get Jay’s big course.

​​All I can add is my personal experience.

I am going through Jay’s training right now for the fifth time over the past two years. I’m applying ideas from it to this little info publishing business, to my new health newsletter, to JV promos I do, to coaching clients I advise.

Does Jay’s stuff produce results? Is it magic? ​​Only if you go through it and apply it. And the first step is to get it, at the link above.

Insurance against bad clients, present and future

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Three days ago, after I announced that I’d let Arnold Schwarzenegger shortcut his way into my coaching program, I got an reply from a long-time reader and customer, with a sad but familiar story:

===

I was lucky with a sales letter I wrote. I made a proposal. Their board loved it. When I actually wrote the piece the attorneys tore it apart. Can’t do this. Can’t say that…

I felt like walking away from it because I knew their ideas wouldn’t work. But they were still excited. I should have walked away, but it paid pretty good, and if it sold this gig would bring a lot more work. I didn’t walk away. I needed the money. It bombed. Not one response.

Fortunately for me, my contact said, “At least we know this type of advertising won’t work for us.”

I thought, “No. Your attorneys won’t let it work for you.” But I said, “You’re right, who would have thought it would have done so badly?”

===

I say this story is sad but familiar because in the past all those things happened to me as well.

​​I got to working with clients I should never have worked with. I stayed with bad clients because I needed the money and because of the promise that it would bring future work. I had clients, or people working for them, rip up my copy, replace it with their own, and then tell me that what I wrote didn’t work.

The guy who wrote me the above message wanted to know if I had ever had business insurance as a copywriter. You know, to protect myself in these kinds of situations, when my copy produces zero sales, and the client has a team of lawyers.

The fact is, I never did have business insurance as a copywriter.

What’s more, I figure the way to deal with above situations is not after the fact, with insurance, but proactively, by choosing the right clients and by setting the right expectations.

It’s not an easy thing to do. But it’s not immensely difficult either. There are different ways you can go about it. But if you ask me how, my recommendation is to check out Steve Raju’s ClientRaker.

Steve’s process will help you both 1) choose the right clients, and 2) set the right expectations with those clients.

​​You can think of it as an investment — insurance against any bad clients you have now, or might be tempted to take on in the future.

Registration for ClientRaker closes in just 8 short hours, at 8pm CET/11am PST. And in fact, the first ClientRaker training will happen later today. If you’d like to get in while there’s still time:

https://bejakovic.com/clientraker

Certifiable genius invents magical client-getting apparatus

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Once upon a time, I heard an A-list copywriter say there are only two valid archetypes for a guru who is the face of a direct response offer:

1. A bumbling loser who somehow lucks into secret knowledge that opens the path to success and riches, and…

2. A certifiable genius who invents some magical apparatus that the rest of us mere mortals can now profit from, just by pressing a button.

I’ve been promoting Steve Raju’s ClientRaker for the past week. Steve fits the second archetype, the certifiable genius.

Consider the following:

Steve was an actual child prodigy. At age 3, he was tested and retested and found to have the intellectual abilities of kids twice his age.

He could read fluently. He aced all the numeracy tests. He probably knew how to use the word “whom” and where to use it. All at age 3.

As you prolly know, IQ stands for “intelligence quotient.” That’s because the original definition was a quotient — intellectual age divided by chronological age, multiplied by 100.

So if you take Steve’s intellectual age back then, say 6 or 7… divide that by his actual, chronological age of 3… multiply it by 100… well, you get a really big IQ.

At one point, it was predicted Steve would end up proving string theory or fully explaining the quantum realm.

Instead, he skipped university and went to work at a Fortune 500 corporation that makes hydraulics. That’s how it goes.

Steve worked there for 19 years as a kind of independent one-man IT team, implementing entire systems on his own, left alone to do his magic and getting paid big sums of money for his work.

I’m telling you all this to highlight that Steve is not just some dude.

He has the brains and the mental makeup to spot and invent stuff that the rest of us might not ever figure out.

​​That’s probably why I was so amazed with the things that Steve told me when I first talked to him. There were things he took for granted, little tricks he had figured out, which I would look for blankly and never see on my own.

Steve eventually changed countries, moved from his native UK to his adopted Canada. And he decided that he’d spent enough nights drinking Pepsi and coding for 16 hours straight.

So he reinvented himself as a copywriter and direct response marketer.

​​He was a success at that also. Clients hired him after watching a paid webinar he put on. Businesses profited because of him. Stefan Georgi reached out and asked Steve to be one of the coaches for Copy Accelerator.

But let’s talk turkey:

Steve and his large brain decided to reinvent themselves yet again. This past January, he fired all his copywriting and marketing clients. He took a two-month vacation, came back, and started looking for bigger, better, brandier clients using a system he had cooked up himself, which he now calls ClientRaker.

Steve wrote me this morning with an update on his own client-getting activities, using the ClientRaker system:

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Hi John

If you want to use them, no mentioning of any companies because I’m about to sign NDAs etc

Steve

###

1. It’s for about 3 days work, of which most of that I’ll be sat around watching other people present.

Proposed fees: $150-200k plus expenses split: four-ways between facilitators with additional fees to ________ for admin.

2. Potential JV partner, don’t mention the niche

===

Frankly, I have no idea what the hell Steve is talking about here — chalk that up to my more ordinary intelligence. But I do understand the $150-200k numbers, and the fact he won’t have to work hard to get those.

Like me, you might not be a certifiable genius.

You can still profit from Steve’s ClientRaker system.

I’ve gone through the trainings myself, and Steve has made them push-button easy to implement. Half of it is feeding Steve’s prompts into ChatGPT. The other half is clicking buttons on LinkedIn and using more AI trickery that I’d only heard about from Steve.

The deadline to sign up for ClientRaker is in less than 24 hours, specifically, tomorrow at 8:00 CET/11am PST.

​​If you want this magical client-getting apparatus before it disappears:

https://bejakovic.com/clientraker

What CEOs and business owners really want

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Steve Raju shared an eye-opening story during the last run of his ClientRaker training.

Steve had used the client-getting system he describes in ClientRaker, and had landed a meeting with the CEO and founder of a biotech company, the world #1 company for performing complex clinical trials for new pharmaceuticals.

What might you guess that the CEO of such a company really wants?

Use your marketer intuition a little.

Do you think this CEO’s primary concern is bringing the newest livesaving drugs to the market in a safe way?

Or are you more cynical, and do you think he really just wants to make as much money as possible, as quickly as possible?

Or do you perhaps think this CEO’s focus is on operational issues, and his primary concern is getting more leads in the pipeline for his company?

All three are reasonable guesses.

All three are wrong.

Here’s what the CEO actually wants, according to what Steve shared on the ClientRaker call:

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But then we talked to the CEO, the founder, and he said, “I’m actually a bit fed up with this business. I want to exit. So I’ll throw a bit of money at you if you can kind of tidy up this project a bit and get some decent figures, get a bit of an uptick on the graph, so I can show that to potential investors and I can get out of here.”

===

Steve, who is a very sharp guy himself, says these biotech people have brains the size of planets. But they know nothing about marketing.

And like he heard from the CEO himself, they are ready to throw a bit of money at you if you can take their current marketing from godawful to *squint your eyes* having some promise, so they can show that to their investors and get on to the next thing.

Again, you don’t have to target biotech CEOs if that sounds boring or repulsive or intimidating to you.

There are lots of other markets that you might prefer to go into using the same process that Steve uses.

But whatever market you go into, this is the reality of what you’re dealing with. Of course, not with every business owner, and not in every moment. But more often than you might believe.

​​”Everybody wants to escape,” says Dan Kennedy, “at least on some days.” ​​And they are willing to pay good money if you can supply a file they can use to grind down the bars of their prison cell, and bedsheets they can use to lower themselves down to the ground.
​
Now a reminder:

What Steve teaches inside ClientRaker is how to figure out what promises to make to potential clients, and how to get on the radar of such clients, so a meeting becomes inevitable — their idea, rather than your own.

If you yourself are looking to escape whatever your current situation is, whether that’s starving because you don’t have enough clients, or hating your life because you have plenty of clients, including those who bully you or make you miserable, then this can be a way out.

If you want this knowledge before it disappears:

https://bejakovic.com/clientraker

Can you win client work in obscure niches like board games, candlestick makers, and glassblowing studios?

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During the last Insights & More call on June 29th, an Insights & More member named Jordan mentioned he was trying to offer services to clients in the board game industry. But he was struggling to get conversations going.

I planned to write an email this morning about Jordan’s struggles, since they tie into the offer I’m currently promoting, Steve Raju’s ClientRaker training.

But it turned out even better than I planned because Jordan wrote me just last night in reply to another ClientRaker email:

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I’m just about to pull the trigger on this one

My main concern is that I target obscure niches like Board Games, Crystal shops and Travel Agencies (big PWM on those) but I don’t really know if the system will work on those.

===

Can ClientRaker win you clients in your chosen pet industry, regardless of how small and obscure and very probably hostile to marketing that industry might be?

Can you use ClientRaker to win clients in the board game industry? Or among crystal shop owners? Or ship chandlers? Or tea house stewards? Or rare book sellers?

I have no bloomin’ idea. Maybe you can. Or maybe you can’t.

And yet I still believe that, if a pet niche is what you’re trying to go after, you should get ClientRaker, and it will be well worth it if you only do what it says.

ClientRaker has two steps. Step one is to pick out your target client, then whip the AI until it comes back half an hour later, cowering and exhausted, with your shiny, new, and effective positioning to attract that target client.

Step two is to actually track down and connect with those clients in an easy and low-stress way, so they get exposed your new positioning, and so they reach out to you.

But it doesn’t have to go from step one to two.

As Steve says himself in the training, you can go in opposite direction also.

You can first track down, or try to track down your target clients, using the info Steve gives you in ClientRaker. Very quickly, you can make sure your target clients are actually there, and have actually signaled they have problems and are looking for solutions.

If you do find them, then you go back to step one.

And if not, if there’s actually nobody there for you to serve or nobody who wants to be served, well, then you’ve saved yourself weeks or months of what would otherwise be fruitless and frustrating toil.

Is that worth the $297 Steve is asking for ClientRaker during this run? Yes, but that’s not only reason why you should get it.

There was a time when I was young and cheap. I would have wriggled and squirmed to give $297 to save myself hours or days of frustration and waste.

“Sure,” I might have said then, “it would be great to know in a half hour from now whether this market is a good one to go into… but $297, that’s a lot of money! And I’m quite cheap!”

Today, I am older and less cheap. I make those decisions in an instant. And I say, “Absolutely, hours or days of my time, plus weeks of opportunity cost, are worth $297 to me, or actually much more.”

But again, I know that argument wouldn’t have sold me 10 or 15 years ago. And maybe for you too, savings of your precious time are still not something you can get excited by.

So let me tell you why ClientRaker is still a good investment, even if it turns out that your pet industry is not actually a good fit for the services you offer.

And that’s the fact that there are bound to be other industries, adjacent to the one you have currently focused your sights on, which will be a good fit. For board games, that might be the collectible card industry. Or the puzzle industry.

Or it will turn out you have more than one pet interest or passion — board games AND crystal shops AND astrolabe manufacturers.

One of those will be a good fit, and ClientRaker can get you clients in that industry. In fact, in part one of ClientRaker, Steve goes through the process of figuring out different potential markets you could target, again using AI.

Why AI again? Don’t you already know what your pet industries and obscure interests are?

This goes back to the core point I made at the start of this promotion.

All of us go through much of life with blinders on, focused exclusively on one idea, the one that’s right in front of us right now, which currently has our attention, even though the world is much bigger and richer than what we can see at this very instant.

It takes a lot of discipline and work to rise above that for even a brief moment.

Or it takes an external system, which isn’t restricted by your own blinders, and which works in spite of your own maniacal focus on what you know and want right now.

ClientRaker is one such system, and a fantastic one. Both because of the care and thought Steve has put into it, and because of the real results it’s been getting him.

ClientRaker is open for registration now. But the doors will close soon, this Wendesday at 8pm CET/11am PST. In case you’d like to get inside before then:

https://bejakovic.com/clientraker

Most people get zero results from anything, but that doesn’t have to be you

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Valuable marketing idea:

If there’s a killer objection to what you’re selling, it can be smart to raise that objection right in your headline.

If that valuable marketing idea is true, then I screwed up. In fact I am three days too late.

I started promoting Steve Raju’s ClientRaker course three days ago.

​​ClientRaker is a paint-by-numbers approach to getting high-quality, long-term clients using AI in just the next 28 days.

That’s a big promise. Big promises are worthless if they are not believed. If there’s a killer objection in the way.

And the killer objection to Steve’s ClientRaker is… where’s the money?

So far, Steve has used his trainings to line up a bunch of high-end meetings.

He fired all his copywriting and marketing clients in January, took a 2-month vacation, came back home, decided to reposition himself as an AI expert, and within two weeks, already had high-end meetings lined up using this system he is teaching now.

I explained before how Steve’s targeting whale clients like Big Pharma and international organizations — slow-moving beasts that take months to digest information and make a decision. Hence no money yet, though if the money does come, it’s likely to be big.

​​These are the waters Steve is hunting in, and since he has other sources of income, he is not in a hurry.

“That might be okay,” you say, “but what about…”

Yep, I know. As I mentioned in that very first email when I started to promote ClientRaker, Steve already taught his system last month to a small cohort of people from his own list.

If ClientRaker works so well, where are the results? Where are the high-quality clients, and more importantly, where’s the money that this system is really meant to produce?

Steve followed up with the people from his previous ClientRaker cohort. The results were predictable. A ton of glowing reviews:

“Amazing session.” “My mind is blown.” “I had several epiphanies.”

The fact is, nobody from that first cohort has actually put Steve’s system into action, even now, more than a month later.

I’ve been selling trainings, courses, and books for a few years now. My estimate is that only 5% of people will ever do anything with the info they buy. And only 2% will actually use it as it’s meant to be used.

If that’s been you so far, then you can stop this kind of self-defeating behavior whenever you choose, including right now.

​​​​You might be surprised to find that it really wasn’t anything hard. You might even start to wonder at all the other people who have some invisible and imaginary chain around their leg, which keeps them from doing what you just did.

Like I said, Steve’s system is paint-by-numbers. It’s got AI baked into it — the whole point is that you don’t have to work beyond pressing the toaster lever down a few times and waiting for results to pop up. Do that, and you will get clients. And if you don’t, Steve’s got a guarantee. From his sales page:

===

If after 30 days, you can show me you’ve done the small amount of setup required, and you are putting in the minutes of work required each day to fill up your pipeline…

And you still haven’t met with a prospect you are excited by…

Then I’d be happy to give you your money back.

No point going through life and not being happy.

===

30 days… minimal work… no risk… big upside. Or an invisible and imaginary chain that you can cling to, because it’s familiar. The choice is yours:

https://bejakovic.com/clientraker

How to sell software to Fortune 500 CIOs, IT Directors, and developers

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After I sent out the first email last week to promote Steve Raju’s ClientRaker program, I got the following question:

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Do you think this would this work to get meetings with CIOs, IT Directors, developers, and architects on LinkedIn?

Specifically, meetings to sell SaaS software to Fortune 500’s? (Actual software, not copy services for software co’s).

===

I referred this reader to Steve, so the reader can be 100% sure of the answer.

But my personal feeling is, absolutely yes.

Steve’s system has already gotten him meetings with ridiculously bigwig prospects, like a high-ranking exec at a Big Pharma giant, a Silicon Valley CEO, and the UN subject matter expert for AI.

And as for whether you can sell software to these people rather than services, I figure it’s all about positioning yourself and what you offer to solve the most pressing problems in your prospect’s mind.

The key words there are “the most pressing problems in your prospect’s mind.”

​​Compare that to, “the most pressing problems you suppose, based on your gut feeling which is not wrong more often than a coin flip, to be in your prospect’s mind.”
​
​Keeping you from supposing anything and getting this positioning exactly right is where Steve’s training shines, and why he has been successful with it.

In fact, I believe Steve could repackage his system and sell it as a high-end sales training to companies and corporations, and charge 20x or maybe 50x the $297 he is charging for it.

But for reasons of his own — perhaps he hasn’t yet fully transitioned into the role of corporate consultant — Steve is still making ClientRaker available for a price that even the brokest service provider — or software provider — can afford.

But it won’t stay that way for long. The Wednesday deadline is slowly but surely approaching. If you don’t want to miss it, you can get more info on ClientRaker here:

https://bejakovic.com/clientraker

“Too many single moms” in my Facebook DMs

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Due to some client work I’ve been doing lately, I’ve been forced to go back into the cobweb-laced haunted house that is my Facebook account.

Each time I tip-toe my way along the creaky floorboards there, I see dozens of new friend requests pasted on the walls, all from people I don’t know from Adam’s off ox.

Occasionally, I go on binges of approving those friend requests.

Last week, I logged in and saw a message from a guy with an Italian name, whose friend request I must have approved some time earlier. My new friend wrote:

“Thanks for accepting my request man, I appreciate that! I noticed you’re into personal development. I have a quick question if you don’t mind.”

Personal development? I replied to say, sure. And I went about my day.

Since I don’t have any notifications enabled anywhere, I forgot all about it until I logged in to Facebook a few days later. And there was my friend’s quick question:

“Are you currently using online dating apps?”

That escalated quickly. ​​With just 7 words, this Italian stallion was quickly nearing “unwelcome pest” territory.

​​I replied with a professional and elegant “no.”

I thought that would be the end of it. But I was wrong. The next time I logged in, a follow-up was waiting for me:

“Too many single moms or not matching with the type of women you truly desire?”

At this point, like a hot 24-year-old girl who has lost interest in a boring Tinder chat, I stopped replying. But I did check his profile. It turns out he sells some kind of service to get you matching with the type of women you truly desire.

This got me wondering. Even if this guy’s presumptuous marketing approach is successful in hooking somebody, who is he gonna get?

A long-term, devoted customer or client?

Or somebody who will ghost him at the very first turn in the road?

My guess is the second.

That’s not a game I ever want to play, and not one I advise to you either.

A sale is never just a sale, and a client is never just a client.

My advice is to think actively about the relationships you build, the long-term potential of those relationships, or if you like, the lifetime value. That’s really my biggest and most valuable conclusion after having worked with hundreds of clients, many of who paid me $100, a few of who paid me $100k or more.

And on that note:

Until this Wednesday, I am promoting Steve Raju’s ClientRaker training.

ClientRaker is all about finding high-quality, long-term, devoted clients. Without sliding into anybody’s DMs, without embarrassing yourself, and without offending or annoying people who are no prospects of yours to begin with.

In case you’re interested:

https://bejakovic.com/clientraker