Partnerships

Can I pay you $1.5k for sending one email?

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Maybe I can.

(Hat tip to the Notorious Nick Bandy for this idea.)

The background is this:

I’m looking for partners to run an auction for, using their offers and their audience.

(I ran an auction with my own offer and my own audience back in December. It brought in $31k. ​Case study here​.)

Not everybody makes for a great auction partner.

But if you’re working with a client who is spending $200/day on ads… or sending regular emails to a list of a few thousand souls or more… or has a community of a few hundred members or more… they might be a good partner for an auction.

My deal to you is this:

If you have a client who meets one of the criteria above, hit reply. I’ll give you a message to send to your client. The message will make you look good to them, and will put my offer of an auction partnership in a normal-sounding way into their head.

If you so choose, you then send the email to your client…

… and if I end up partnering with your client on an auction, I’ll pay you $1.5k or 10% of my cut of the auction profits, whichever is greater, just for putting me in touch with them.

Plus, if you want, you can ride along with me, and work alongside me to actually carry out this auction, and be privy to the behind-the-scenes offer design, and planning, and selling.

That way, you can can get invaluable experience you can use to run an auction of your own, or with partners, just like I’m doing.

(Of course, if you have no interest in ever running an auction, and you just wanna get paid for sending an email, that’s perfect too.)

So?

Worth hitting reply, and maybe sending one email to your client?

If you’d like to partner with businesses on the back end…

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A couple weeks ago, I wrote about a new “back end” partnership I was testing out.

A business owner, who spends $700 a day on Facebook ads to generate leads, is converting a minuscule share of these leads to clients, while doing no ongoing followup with the rest.

After 2 minutes of talking to this guy over Zoom, we made a preliminary partnership deal:

1. He’d give me control of his email list.

2. I’d see what I could do.

3. If I could do something, we’d keep working together and split the profits.

4. If I could not, I’d have spent a bit of time writing a few emails for this guy for nothing, and he’d have spent a bit of time to talk to me over Zoom, also for nothing.

After I sent out that email, I got a reply from a Spanish copywriter, who wrote:

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I’m not sure if you’ll read this email, since I assume you’ll receive a lot.

But what you mentioned today really interests me. In my country (Spain), I don’t see the practice of sending a daily email as a very common one. Often, they don’t even use email as a sales channel.

In my niche (trading and finance), I see a lot of people with large social media followers who don’t follow up via email.

And that’s a service I’d like to offer: using other email lists and earning a commission on the sales those emails generate. But the question is…

How do you know for sure how many sales the list owner is making thanks to emails?

How do you know how many of those sales come from emails?

Should we trust the list owner?

Can they somehow give you access so you can see the sales generated yourself?

Thank you. I love your writing and job!

===

Maybe I’m projecting here, but the underlying frame I see in this reader’s questions is, “Will I get screwed? Will the owner not pay me for some sales I made him? Will there be INJUSTICE, perpetrated against ME?”

That’s the wrong way to look at it.

If you ask me, the right way to look at it is, does this make good sense for me to do now, and to keep doing?

When the topic of doing work on commission comes up, people often get hung up on revshare percentages, splits, tiers, contracts, agreements, and the technology of tracking, reporting, and checking whether sales you made were correctly attributed to you or not.

Ultimately none of that matters.

What matters is, are you happy with the money that ends up coming in as a result of the investment that you made?

If that works for you, then my advice is to stop stressing about the possible injustice — that somebody somewhere failed to pay you what you are due.

Travis Sago, who runs a “back end agency” that does exactly these kind of back-end partnerships, once proposed a thought experiment.

Imagine betting $1 on a coin flip. You put in $1, and then flip a coin. If the coin comes up heads, you lose your $1. If it comes up tails, you win $100.

Travis’s point was, keep putting in your $1, and keep flipping the coin. Even if the odds aren’t exactly 50-50, soon enough, you will be more than rich.

So much for a new perspective. Now for the offer.

If you are interested in partnering with businesses on the “back end” and maximizing your chances of success at every step, then Travis has an entire course about this, called BEAMER.

That course sells for $2,900. (It’s actually what I paid for it last year.)

$2,900 is a good deal for BEAMER, because if BEAMER leads you to even one modestly successful, one-time partner deal, it will pay for its $2,900 price tag, and then some.

And maybe you’ll have more than just one modestly successful, one-time partner deal.

Maybe you can take it as far as Travis has taken it, and make a few million dollars each year, simply partnering ongoing with people who aren’t really doing much with their email lists.

Now at this point, I could simply link to the BEAMER sales page, except…

There’s also another way to get BEAMER, at 1/10th (one-tenth) the price that it sells for via Travis’s site.

Travis also gives away BEAMER as a free bonus for those who sign up to his Royalty Ronin community, and who stay signed up past the free 7-day trial.

A month of Royalty Ronin will cost you $290.

That’s not exactly $1. But to me, it’s a reasonable investment — a reasonable wager to stake — to get set up with with inside knowledge on running back-end agency from someone who’s made millions from doing so… and to see if you are happy with the money that ends up coming to you as a result of this knowledge.

If you’d like to start a “back end agency” and you want to learn from an expert who’s done it before:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

If nobody wants your profit-making offer, give it away

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Yesterday I organized a Zoom call for a few list owners.

One of these, a successful copywriter and marketer, was asking how to price, or how to persuade businesses to take him up on, his newfangled sales machine.

“Is $15k a year a good offer? The sales machine is super valuable, and has produced great results for the businesses who have used it. But it’s been a hard sell.”

I thought it was instructive that a successful copywriter and marketer was asking this question.

My answer was, if this thing produces sales so well, why not package up the results into a nice gift box, and sell that gift box instead?

In other words, instead of persuading business owners to buy a gizmo that costs $15k a year and promises to produce sales… why not persuade them to accept new money in the bank, which they can pay you a finders fee for?

In the words of marketing legend Claude Hopkins, who became the modern equivalent of a billionaire using little more than a typewriter:

“In every business expenses are kept down. I could never be worth more than any other man who could do the work I did. The big salaries were paid to salesmen, to the men who brought in orders, or to the men in the factory who reduced the costs. They showed profits, and they could command a reasonable share of those profits. I saw the difference between the profit-earning and the expense side of a business, and I resolved to graduate from the debit class. “

“Yes,” I hear someone saying in the back, “but business owners should already know that a sales gizmo isn’t really an expense, because it will help them make money. They should be smart enough to see a profit-generating solution when they see one. They should they should they should.”

Yes, they should.

But they don’t, just in the same way that the successful copywriter above should have remembered the century-old lesson that turned Claude Hopkins into a billionaire, but he didn’t.

The fact is, we have limited time and attention and energy, and doing the work of translation — of turning what we have into what we could possibly have, of what we buy into what it could do for us, of what we sell into what people really want — requires time and effort.

You can argue against this aspect of reality. Or you can work with it, and simply translate what you sell into a result that people care about, and that they can take you up on without risk.

Moving on.

I recently got a bunch of feedback from my readers, and I found that a large number of people list, as their #1 goal, getting consistent with emailing daily.

Maybe you too feel you should should should be writing consistent daily emails. But you still don’t do it.

If it’s not happening, and if it’s important to you, maybe it’s time for to take a different tack:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

It took me two minutes to take control of a valuable email list

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“So you just would like to use our email list, and go from there?”

“Yep, pretty much.”

“Ok. Awesome. Awesome. Let’s do it. I don’t see why not.”

Yesterday I got on a call with a business owner. He runs $700 worth of Facebook ads per day, and has been for past two years, to get qualified prospects onto sales calls.

He does no followup after that and doesn’t send any emails.

I made him an offer of “lemme see if I can make sales for you on commission only via email.”

He said yes after the first two minutes of the call. By the end of the 15-minute call, he had already created an account for me in his GHL and given me access to his entire email list.

My point today is something I have heard for years, but that I didn’t really experience directly until yesterday:

Good partners are resourceful, quick to act, and ready to share access to underused assets. And they are out there.

I don’t know what this has to do with my current promotion, the Love/Hate AI event, based around Gasper Crepinsek’s ChatGPT Mastery. The only connection is that I myself might soon be using Gasper’s advice around AI for a lot more than just research.

In any case, if you would like to know more about ChatGPT Mastery and my current and soon-disappearing bonus to go with it, here are the details:

#1. ChatGPT Mastery is a cohort course — it kicks off and ends on a specific date — that helps you actually integrate and benefit from AI.

The idea being, things in the AI space are changing so fast that anything that came out even a few months ago is likely to be out of date.

And rather than saying “Oh let me spend a few dozen hours every quarter researching the latest advice on how to actually use this stuff” — because you won’t, just like I won’t – you can just get somebody else to do the work of cutting a path for you through the quickly regenerating AI jungle.

#2. I myself have gone through through ChatGPT Mastery, from A-Z, all 30 days, earlier this year.

I didn’t pay for it because I was offered to get in for free.

I did go through it first and foremost for my own selfish interests — I feel a constant sense of guilt over not using AI enough in what I do — and only then with a secondary goal of promoting it if I benefited from it enough. So here I am.

#3. Gasper, the guy behind ChatGPT Mastery, is an ex-Boston Consulting Group guy and from what I can tell, one of those hardworking and productive consulting types, the kind I look upon with a mixture of wonder and green envy.

But to hear Gasper tell it, he quit his consulting job to have more freedom, started creating info products online like everybody else, realized he had just bought himself another 70 hr/week job, and then had the idea to automate as much of it as he could with AI.

He’s largely succeeded — he now spends his mornings eating croissants and sipping coffee while strolling around his new home in Mimizan, France, because most of his work of content creation and social media and even his trip planning have been automated in large part or in full.

#4. Before I went through the 30 days of ChatGPT Mastery, I had already been using ChatGPT daily for a couple years. Inevitably, that means a good part of what Gasper teaches was familiar to me.

Other stuff he teaches was simply not relevant (I won’t be using ChatGPT to write my daily emails, thank you, though I might use it to help if I start working with partners). The way I still benefited from ChatGPT Mastery was:

– By having my mind opened to using ChatGPT for things for things I hadn’t thought of before (just one example: I did a “dopamine reset” protocol over 4 weeks, which was frankly wonderful, and which ChatGPT designed for me, and which I got the idea for while doing ChatGPT Mastery)

– By seeing Gasper’s very structured, consulting-minded approach to automating various aspects of his business, and being inspired to port some of that to my own specific situation

– With several valuable meta-prompts that I continue to use, such as the prompt for generating custom GPTs

#5. The way you could benefit from ChatGPT Mastery is likely to be highly specific to what you do and who you are.

The program focuses on a different use case every day. Some days will be more relevant to you than others. Some of the topics include competitor analysis, market intel based on customer calls or testimonials, and of course the usual stuff like content and idea generation, plus hobuncha more.

If you do any of the specific things that Gasper covers, and if you do them on at least an occasional basis, then odds are you will get a great return on both the time and money and that ChatGPT Mastery requires of you, before the 30 days are out.

Beyond that, ChatGPT Mastery can open your mind to what’s possible, give you confidence and a bunch of examples to get you spotting what could be automated in what you do, plus the techniques for how to do it.

#6. The time required for ChatGPT Mastery is about 15-20 minutes per day for 30 days. The money required is an upfront payment of $297.

I can imagine that one or the other of these is not easy for you to eke out in the current moment.

All I can say is that it’s an investment that’s likely to pay you back many times over, in terms of both time and money. And the sooner you make that investment, the greater and quicker the returns will come.

#7. To make sure ChatGPT Mastery is effectively free for you on day 0, I am also adding in a bonus with an equivalent real-world value. It’s a training called Age of Insight, which I sold for $297 when I gave it live a couple years ago.

Age of Insight has nothing to do with AI. Instead, it’s complementary, hence the Love/Hate AI name of this promo:

If Gasper’s ChatGPT Mastery helps you eliminate the parts of your work that you hate, Age of Insight will help you be better at things you love to do, at least if you’re anything like me — things like influencing and impacting people, often with written words alone.

The deadline to get Age of Insight along with ChatGPT Mastery is this Thursday at 12 midnight PST.

If you’d like to find out the full details about ChatGPT Mastery, or to get it now and get Age of Insight for free:

https://bejakovic.com/gasper

P.S. If you decide to get ChatGPT Mastery, then forward me your receipt, and I will get you access to Age of Insight.

P.P.S. If you bought ChatGPT Mastery when I promoted it before, then this bonus is for you too. So is the deadline. Write me before Thursday at 12 midnight PST to say you want the bonus, and I’ll get it to you.

Do I have an affiliate relationship with all these big names?

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A couple days ago, I opened the most recent Exploding Topics newsletter, which tracks topics and brands that are surging online.

The top Exploding Topic was Scandinavian Biolabs, “a hair growth startup” that raised $5M in funding last year.

“Hello,” I said, “this sounds familiar.”

I had a sense that I know the head copywriter at Scandinavian Biolabs. I suspected it might be one Liza Schermann, the original Crazy Email Lady, who also acted as a cohost of the Age of Insight and Influential Emails trainings I ran several years ago.

I forwarded the Exploding Topics email to Liza to confirm this is indeed the place where she works. Liza wrote back:

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Haha look at that, I’m back at work and growth is skyrocketing! That’s the place indeed. I remember the celebration party for that $5M funding vividly.

I was just typing a reply when you forwarded it so I might as well do it here.

Did you have an affiliate or some kind of other partnership with Chris Orzechowski? Or did you just promote his workshop because you found it interesting? I was wondering that every time you promoted a big name.

Anyway, it seems like it’s been an eventful year in Bejako Land business-wise with lots of different offers (at least from what I could keep up with). I’m looking forward to your annual summary email if you’re planning to send one!

===

In answer to Liza’s question:

Yes, I promoted Chris Orzechowski’s training (“5 steps to a million-dollar list”) as an affiliate.

I also promoted Derek Johanson’s CopyHour and Email Delivered Courses as an affiliate.

I promoted Thom Benny’s 1-Person Advertorial Agency as an affiliate.

I promoted Justin Blackman’s Different On Purpose as an affiliate.

I promoted Igor Kheifets’s Click Send Earn as an affiliate.

I promoted Kennedy’s “$27k to $544k” training as an affiliate.

And in a couple weeks from now, when I promote Gasper Crepinsek’s ChatGPT Mastery, I will do so as an affiliate.

I have in the past promoted people’s things simply because I thought they were cool and valuable, without getting paid.

I still do that sometimes.

But if I can promote something I think is cool and valuable AND get paid for it at the same time, well, I like to have my cake and lick it too.

The fact is, I have been feeling burned out this year about creating new offers.

I have created a lot of courses, trainings, reports, and even books over the 6+ years of running this newsletter.

Some have stuck around and become evergreen offers (Copy Riddles, Most Valuable Email, my new 10 Commandments book). Others were exotic one-time events (like the Age of Insight and Influential Emails workshops).

One thing’s for sure:

Even when I’m in full offer-creation mode, the appetite of my audience for cool and valuable new solutions to existing problems is much much bigger than what I can personally satisfy.

That’s one reason I’ve been building up a little invite-only group of list and offer owners.

I’ve been quietly pitching this group to people as a place to connect and partner and share ideas.

It’s proven to be that — it’s led to list swaps, podcast appearances, and affiliate promos, and not just involving me, either.

It so happens that Chris, Derek, Thom, Justin, Igor, Kennedy, and Gasper are all in my little invite-only group.

Maybe this group could be a good fit for you too?

If you’re interested, write in and let me know who you are and what you do.

A list is a mandatory requirement, as is the fact that you are writing that list regularly, and that you’ve made money from your list.

If have your own proven offers, that’s definitely a bonus.

Beyond that, I’m curious to hear who you are and what you do. If it’s a fit with the group, I’ll know it when I see it.

If more sales from your list with less work sounds sexy to you, write in and let’s talk.

Sneaky guru model for getting the most out of a pool of prospects

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If you’re the enterprising sort, here’s a direct-response recipe for getting the maximum value out of a pool of prospects:

1. Run a campaign featuring a guru who is promising an outcome, say, big stock market returns.

2. Make sales of your offer to people who respond to that campaign.

3. Take all the people who didn’t buy (or who bought once, but then canceled a subscription offer) and put in front of them another, entirely different-seeming offer, with a different guru, which actually makes the exact same promise as the offer in step 2.

4. Go back to step 2, and keep going back, with still another guru and another different-seeming offer, repeating until everyone has bought.

I once heard direct marketing expert Dan Kennedy talking about this sneaky multiple-guru model, which is actually very common among high-level direct response operators.

This strategy is obvious enough that in what behemoths like Agora are doing, but it happens in less obvious ways in many other businesses.

Some direct response businesses have low/mid/high variants of the same underlying product, all behind different brands that are impossible for prospects to see through.

Other businesses simply partner with related businesses who make the same promise but with a different feel, tone, or face to their message.

The point being, some people might not like you or your style. But if they’ve raised their hands to say they want the outcome you promise, that’s real value.

Sooner or later, somebody somewhere will sell these folks an offer to help them get that outcome. That somebody might as well be you, and that somewhere might as well be right here, right now, using the recipe above.

And with that, let me remind you one final time of the free training that email marketer Chris Orzechowski is putting on tomorrow, Monday, October 6, at 6pm CET/12 noon EST/9am PST.

Chris is gonna be sharing his “5 Steps To A Million Dollar List.”

I haven’t seen Chris’s training, but I do know his business model and his philosophy.

The fact is, it’s very similar to what I do, to what I preach in these emails, and to what I sell in my offers.

But — maybe you don’t want to hear this from me. Or maybe you have heard it from me, for a long time, and while you like hearing it, maybe it still hasn’t clicked, or hasn’t moved you to action.

In that case, Chris’s free training — and the 8-week coaching program he will be launching on the back of it in the coming weeks — might just be the fix.

If an email-based, flexible, profitable, and even fun business is an outcome you would raise your hand for, then here’s a free offer to help you get there:

https://bejakovic.com/mdl

Amazon or your own funnel for selling your book?

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A reader named Dan (not sure he wants me to share his last name) asks:

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Hi John

I bought both your books on my wife Hilary’s Amazon account and rated them 5 stars! Really enjoyed them.

I have just finished writing my second marketing book but avoid Amazon as I want to sell them through my funnel. Do you find there’s enough organic sales through Amazon to build your list?

Very best wishes

Dan (in London)

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I’ve only been selling my books via Amazon and it’s been doing all right for me, 10-15 sales a day on average. But only a fraction of those, maybe one or two a day, turn into subscribers to this newsletter, in part because I hide the optin at the end of the book.

Ideally, I’d be selling my books both via Amazon and via my own funnels. I haven’t done this because of the work involved in building out and managing a funnel that would make selling off Amazon, say via Facebook ads, feasible.

But… maybe we can split the work?

Specifically, I had the following idea:

I could sell my book via ads and my own funnel. And then, as an upsell, to break even with ad costs, I could sell a bundle of other related books from other authors. After all, a book buyer is a book buyer, and a book buyer who bought, say, a book about persuasion or self improvement will buy more such books.

I’m telling you this for two reasons:

1. I am honestly hoping that you will go and create this funnel instead of me, and put your own book (about say, marketing) as the front-end offer, and collect all the email addresses of buyers who come in.

I will gladly contribute either of my 10 Commandments books to be sold in the upsell bundle, and expect no royalties in turn, or even the email addresses you collect.

I will just be happy to get my book into more hands, and hopefully to get some of the owners of those hands to sign up to my list via the optin I have at the back of the book.

2. If you have your own book on a marketing or persuasion topic, but you refuse to do me the kindness of creating a cold traffic funnel and including my book in your upsell flow, then let me know, and maybe I will do the work that you cold heartedly refuse to do.

In other words, maybe I will get that cold traffic funnel created, and put my book as the front-end offer, and sell your book in a bundle as an upsell.

No guarantees. But if you have an interesting and well-written book, and you’re intrigued by the proposition, hit reply, and let’s talk.

And if you haven’t yet read my new 10 Commandments book, about con men and stage magicians and pickup artists and (gulp) copywriters, then you can find that charmer here:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Free training on client acquisition by half-cow-selling copywriter

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Even in the small world of “dudes who write daily emails about writing daily emails,” you can sometimes miss good people.

And so it was that, a few weeks ago, while putting together a group of people who have email lists and sell stuff related to email marketing and copywriting and course creation, it was for the first time ever that I heard of a guy named Alin Dragu.

I’m telling you this because in the weeks that followed, Alin and I agreed to do a “list swap.” That’s a lurid term for a clean idea. Basically, Alin and I agreed to let our respective lists know the other guy exists, and to coax our readers into joining the other’s list as well.

Alin has a long-form optin page that does a thorough job boosting his status and making the case for why you might want to hear from him daily. In a few words, Alin’s got:

– Endorsements for his daily emails from people like Daniel Throssell and Brian Kurtz

– The title of Vice President of a $2.8M Advertising Agency

– A testimonial from a copywriting client who sold a half cow (yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like) thanks to Alin’s email copy

… and if authority is not enough, Alin also has a legit and exclusive bribe bundle to entice you to sign up to his list, good for only the next 48 hours, just because you happen to be a diligent reader of my newsletter.

The core piece of this is a video training called “Warm-Ish Client Acquisition,” in which Alin lays out a (coldish) outreach strategy that led to two copywriting retainers worth $6k. Alin previously only made this training available inside a $300 product, but it’s yours free.

Also, Alin’s bribe bundle contains a copy of his book, Meaningful Marketing, and Copywriting Catalyst, a collection of copywriting tips.

And it’s all free. Did I mention that? FREE.

But only if you act before the deadline, which, tick-tock, is waiting like the crocodile in Peter Pan to bite the arm off the careless and the tardy.

To get Alin’s bribes and to sign up to the man’s list in time:

https://alindragu.com/john/

Indecent proposal

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Last week, I wrote an email with the subject line “Operation Mincemeat.” At the end of that email, I asked readers if they have an audience to which they could promote my new 10 Commandments book.

I also said I don’t know what I can do in turn for those who promote me, but that I am happy to entertain all kinds of offers.

I got a lot of readers replying to say they would be happy to promote me to their lists. I appreciate everyone who wrote in.

Some people said they would do it without asking anything in turn, simply because I’m such a swell guy.

Others made me various decent and indecent proposals. Here’s one I got from James Carran, who writes several newsletters about the craft and business of writing:

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How about later in the year when I get a chance to polish them up, you take a gander at my course library and see if there’s one you’d like to promote as an affiliate? I just want to redesign them all and update them first…

With the proviso that you’d only promote anything if you thought it was genuinely helpful for your people and something you’d want to promote anyway. If not, I’ll take no offence.

===

I’m bringing this up because James’s proposal is one that I wish more people would make me, all the time, whether or not they agree to promote my new book.

So let me explicitly make you my own proposal, which you may deem indecent, but which you probably won’t, because I’m really fishing here so I can pay off the subject line:

If you have a course, and you would love to have me promote your course to my audience, then write in and let me know.

A few points that will make it more likely for me to take you seriously:

1. Your course is amazing and previous customers love it

2. Your course is based on a new mechanism for an old promise (hat tip to Justin Goff for that idea — whatever happened to him)

3. Your course sells for at least $197, or you’d be okay raising the price to that level

If you have a course that matches these three criteria, or at least two out of three and you can compensate for the third with your own enthusiasm and force of personality, then write in and let me know.

I’m not promising anything. But I am always short of good offers to promote, and if you have an amazing course that I can get behind, then you’d be doing me a favor.

It drops out the bottom of every sales funnel

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Last summer, I listened to an old sales training by a guy named Fred Herman. Says Fred:

“I believe every sale sort of funnels down this way. You need to have a product or a service. You need to have a customer, of course, to talk to. Then you need to find out what his dominant buying motive is. And then the picture he will buy will drop right out the bottom of the funnel, because people don’t buy products or services, they buy pictures of the end result of that product or service, playing a part in their life.”

This echoes something that the great Robert Collier wrote a hundred years ago in his Letter Book:

“Thousands of sales have been lost, millions of dollars worth of business have failed to materialize, solely because so few letter-writers have that knack of visualizing a proposition — of painting it in words so the reader can see it as they see it.”

And of course, if you need something a bit more modern, there’s negotiation coach Jim Camp, who summed it up in his pithy and dramatic way:

“No vision, no decision.”

“Sure sure,” you say. “Words, words, more words. I need pictures though! Isn’t that what you’re trying to sell me on?”

All right, let’s see if you can picture this:

Yesterday, I told you about Albert Lasker and Claude C. Hopkins.

Lasker, who ran the biggest and most powerful ad agency in the US, wanted Hopkins to come and work for him.

Problem was, Hopkins 1) didn’t want to be in advertising any more and 2) had made millions and didn’t need to work ever again.

Lasker asked Hopkins to meet for lunch at an upscale restaurant.

He played to Hopkins’s vanity, pulling out several pages of typewritten copy for a major new client, the best copy he had been able to get written by the best copywriters out there, which just wasn’t good enough to be submitted.

He made Hopkins an “easy yes” proposition — “just write three ads for us so we can submit it to this one client.”

Crucially — and this is really the picture-within-the-picture I want to give you — Lasker didn’t offer Hopkins any money to take the job.

After all, what’s money gonna do for Hopkins? He’s already got enough.

Instead, as the dessert arrived, Lasker told Hopkins to send his wife to the car dealer so she can pick out whatever car she likes, and Lasker would pay for it.

A bit of backstory:

1. Hopkins’s wife wanted an electric car (crazy thing is, those existed in 1907).

2. Hopkins, though a multimillionaire, was cheap and couldn’t part with the money to buy his wife the electric car. This was causing… tension at home.

You might think, what’s the difference between getting paid outright and getting paid via a free car for your wife?

In theory, no difference.

In practice, all the difference in the world.

And so it is with your prospects and customers too.

You might be promising them money.

That works some of the time. But what works all the time is to promise people what they really want. And that, like old Fred says up top, is a picture of the end result of what they are buying, playing a part in their life.

Of course, that takes some research on your part. Lasker had to do some scheming and digging to find out that Hopkins’s wife wanted an electric car and that Hopkins was too cheap to buy it for her, and that this was the most pressing problem in his life right now. But that’s what made Hopkins yield, “as all do, to Lasker’s persuasiveness.”

And that’s it. That’s all I got for you.

I have nothing to sell you today, at least nothing wonderfully expensive the way I would like.

But if you want more stories that can buy you a car, featuring Claude C. Hopkins and Albert Lasker, can find a couple in my original 10 Commandments book.

I’ve shipped off the new 10 Commandments book to several trusted readers and I am waiting, my cheeks red from holding my breath, for their feedback so I can integrate said feedback and hit publish on Amazon.

Meanwhile, if you still haven’t read the original 10 Commandments, you can find them all waiting for you here:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments