Positioning

Do you have a great gig right now? Beware and prepare

by

Yesterday, I talked to a coaching client, someone who has a sizeable email list and a bunch of offers he’s been selling for a while.

Recently, he decided to step back from this to take a proper job. He enjoys learning something new at his new role, and he finds the work exciting, and he likes the company and the people, and there’s more money, stability, and free time than with all the stuff he has been doing by himself.

He asked if I have any advice as he transitions from his online business to this new job.

I’ll tell you what I told him:

Over the course of the past six months, I have had a number of people come to me and say, “I used to have this great gig, until yesterday.”

One was a business owner whose business partner screwed him and took everything.

Another was a freelancer whose main client’s business turned out to be shaky, so the client decided to bring the work in-house as a cost-cutting measure.

A third was a salaried employee whose employer decided to simply terminate the role, even though the guy was making the employer more money than he was getting paid, and could prove it.

All these people, and a few others, came to me after their once-great gig disappeared, with the idea to build a personal brand as a way of making money now.

So what I told my coaching client yesterday is, enjoy the new job and make the most of it. But at the same time, even the best, most certain gigs can disappear, overnight.

Businesses go out of business. Partners cheat you or simply step away. Employers get sick, die, or go bankrupt.

For all these reasons and more, it makes sense to have a backup to your great gig.

My coaching client is very lucky, because he’s already got the best backup I know, a personal brand, an audience, and a relationship with that audience.

If anything happens to his current job — the company is sold and the new owners fire everyone, or they slash everybody’s salaries while keeping the workload the same, or they hire somebody else to do the job because he’s cheaper/better/a nephew — then he can go to this list, and write an email or two, and most likely find a new client or a series of clients by the end of this week.

So my takeaway for you is, if you have a personal brand, don’t let it go.

You don’t have to email daily or create new offers or moonlight in addition to your day job. All you have to do is show up on some regular schedule (once a week is good), and let people know you are alive, and give them proof that you’re doing well, and are still worth listening to and knowing about.

And my takeaway for you if you don’t have a personal brand but you have a great gig going… is also to start now.

For one thing, your great gig can give you authority and content ideas and behind-the-scenes data to make it easy to be somebody online.

For another thing, as I’ve been saying, your great gig might not always be there, so it makes sense to beware and prepare for that possibility now.

Here’s one more thing I told my coaching client yesterday:

Just focus on the content. Don’t worry about list growth or about offers or about what form this personal brand might take in the future.

This is true for you even if you are starting a personal brand now.

There’s value in creating content online EVEN IF NOBODY’S READING. For one thing, it makes you better at what you do. For another thing, it can grow your list on its own (albeit slowly), and it becomes fodder if you do want to create offers or lead magnets or books in the future. Most important of all, it becomes a proof element if you are ever talking to someone you want to impress. Compare:

“Why should you hire me? Gee, let me try to sum up the past 12 years of my career for you in the next 45 seconds before I lose your attention…”

… to…

“Why should you hire me? I don’t know that you should. Here’s my website where I’ve written tens of thousands of words on this topic, based on my previous experience. Take a look at it and we can talk afterwards.”

So let me ask you?

Do you have a great gig right now?

Do you want to have a personal online brand, and an audience, and a great relationship with them that you can use as a backup in case your great gig ever vanishes?

Then write me and let me know.

You can’t buy anything here. But I am curious what you do, and what kind of a personal brand you want to build and how, and what questions you have about the process.

The best piece of copy Dan Kennedy ever wrote

by

Thanks to the sleuthing of two members of my Daily Email House community, Robin Timmers (the Netherlands’ largest copywriter) and Maliha Mannan (who runs the Side Blogger), I can bring you the link at the end of today’s email.

It’s a recording of the legendary “Success Tour” speech that direct marketer Dan Kennedy gave hundreds of times across the U.S. back in the 1990s.

Dan, for the record, was at one point the highest-paid copywriter on Earth. And I heard him say somewhere, I forget where, that this speech is the best piece of copy he has every written.

And no wonder:

This speech sold millions of dollars’ worth of Dan’s Magnetic Marketing program from the back of the room…

… it got tens of thousands of people to become prospects for Dan’s paid newsletter, high-ticket seminars, and done-for-you services…

… and it has fed Dan’s stable of racing horses for many decades now.

For several years, this speech wasn’t available anywhere online.

Years ago, I managed to track down a copy using archive.org. I’ve listened to this speech multiple times all the way through, and I’ve started it again this morning after Robin and Maliha clued me in that it’s now on YouTube.

Yes, Dan’s speech is worth listening to for the content, to learn the fundamentals of direct marketing, to be amused by Dan’s jokes and fast-paced delivery and combative approach, and to hear some good stories, told well.

But the real value in Dan’s speech is if you take the time to look between the lines of what he is saying. I’ve done it, and I’ve profited from it in ways I’ve written about before.

I suggest you analyze and model Dan’s speech also, so you can sell, whether from a stage, on a podcast, in a webinar, from a Zoom call with prospects or buyers, or just in an email, book, or sales letter.

If you have a personal online brand, I cannot recommend this enough:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNcu27fpfBs

Magic positioning through maddening repetition

by

I’m sitting in the Croatian coast town of Cavtat as I write this, under some pine trees with crickets chirping around me, an occasional plane landing overhead, and incredible humidity rolling off my body drop by drop.

I don’t know anything about this town — I ended up here last night due to my usual missed connecting flight — expect one curious thing.

A long time ago, I read a Bloomberg article about a gang of casino sharks who kept winning at roulette in casinos around the world, to the tune of millions of dollars per year.

The entire article was set up in the classic “Cialdini mystery structure,” teasing out the answer to the question of how the gang kept winning.

Was it computers up their sleeves?

Was it glasses that recorded and transmitted to some processing center?

Did they tamper with the roulette table in some way?

After all these avenues were explored and found to be dead ends, the author of the article tracked down the ringleader of the casino shark gang.

The ringleader was a Croatian guy who lives somewhere around… Cavtat.

He said the secret was simply that he bought a specific roulette table for his house and watched it spin millions of times, until his brain caught on to tiny regularities that he could exploit on other similar roulette tables in real casinos.

Point being:

What looks like magic can sometimes simply be maddening repetition and preparation, the kind of work that nobody would believe a sane person would ever do.

Yesterday, I had a call with a coaching client, a bona fide expert in his field, with years of experience and a sizable audience.

He said that while he is having success selling info products and even some 1-1 engagements, he still hasn’t hit upon the exact right positioning that would make it seamlessly easy.

I unfortunately don’t know any magic, rabbit-out-of-a-hat way to create the exact right positioning for established experts.

My best advice for figuring out winning positioning is simply to keep writing daily emails, keep making offers, keep seeing what works, and then doubling down on that.

Yes, it can take hundreds or maybe thousands of tries (millions?).

But it also means you can see the kind of ultimate success others only dream about and wonder at when they see it in you.

And even along the way, life can be pretty good… money can flow… and it can even be kind of fun.

Which brings me to my Most Valuable Offer training, which is happening tomorrow, at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST.

This training will show you my process for coming up, selling, and delivering paid live training, which I call Most Valuable Offers.

Most Valuable Offers are easy, fast, cheap. Inevitably, a few might flop. Some will be a modest success. And some will be a big success.

Along the way, you can be making money… building a relationship with your audience that translates into future sales… and zeroing in on the perfect positioning that both keeps you happy and lights up your prospects’ eyes.

All that, and more, tomorrow. If you’d like to sign up for Most Valuable Offer before the casino doors close:

https://checkout.bejakovic.com/most-valuable-offer

What niche I am in, as are you

by

A couple days ago, copywriter Svet Dimitrov, one of the content-creating, profit-making partners in my Daily Email House community, asked a question of the group:

“What niche are you in?”

It’s one of those questions I hate answering when asked by marketing folks, much like I hate answering “What do you do?” when asked by non-marketing normies. (My stock answer to the second question is, “Not much.”)

As far as I am able to articulate:

I’m currently in the niche of sharing what’s been working for me, and for the people I’ve been coaching, in order to make money online.

Previously, around the start of this decade, I was in the niche of writing Most Valuable Emails.

And before that, in the first year or two of my newsletter, I was in the niche of quoting Gene Schwartz’s books and seminars.

The fact is, as grandiose as it sounds, I am in the niche of being me.

If you want to have a personal brand online, the same is true of you.

That means YOUR personality, YOUR unique interests, and (as I am doing these days) YOUR results and case studies.

Yes, you typically have to have some sort of core topic to circle back to. But the “core topic” your readers will happily consume from you is surprisingly fluid, and it can definitely change over time (as it has for me).

The one thing that is constant is YOU.

Maybe you’re thrilled by that fact, or maybe it makes you uncomfortable.

In either case, you might as well start writing online now, because you ultimately have everything you need, or will ever need. If you want my help turning that into daily emails that make people buy today, and keep them reading tomorrow:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

How to make a $5 offer easy to sell

by

This morning, I shut off the cart and concluded my Daily Emails 101 experiment. Results:

* 155 sales

* About 65 first-time buyers

* A sales page conversion rate north of 33%

In my book, that makes this Daily Emails 101 experiment a success.

What done it? Is the usual threesome? An amazing list of dedicated readers and customers… an irresistible offer… my hypnotizing copy?

Yes, yes… but I would like to wager, there’s something else as well.

The price of Daily Emails 101 was just $5.

That alone won’t do it. There are plenty of $5 offers that don’t sell a single copy. So price alone ain’t it.

What is it is that, most of the time, I sell things that are $197 or $997 or $5k.

Yes, $5 is genuinely cheap, particularly for all I was giving away with Daily Emails 101. But $5 is extra cheap if you’ve been on my list for weeks, months, or years, and you’ve seen me promoting other, much more expensive offers with success. Human beings live by contrast.

My point for you today is two-part.

One part is to raise your prices. Once again, people live by contrast, and if you have at least some expensive offers, it makes everything else easier to sell.

The other part is that once you’ve raised your prices, to remind your readers of your high prices regularly, and to justify those prices, so that, whether people buy or not, they know you and your high prices are for real.

Speaking of:

Today, I would like to tell you about my Copy Riddles program. Copy Riddles sells for $997 and has been for years. Several hundred people have bought it and gone through it, some when it wasn’t yet priced at 997, many at $997.

Copy Riddles is the best thing I sell.

I created it 5 years ago, back when I was still orienting this email list to copywriters alone. The sales page for Copy Riddles reflects that.

The fact is though, Copy Riddles is a course in effective communication and persuasion, and it is relevant to if your business involves written communication of any sort.

I would love to repackage Copy Riddles in industry-specific versions tailored to investment fund managers who communicate with investors via reports… to trial lawyers who need to craft persuasive arguments… to carpet cleaners and HVAC installers who do their own marketing.

Maybe one day. For now, if you are interested in learning how to persuade using words, based on hundreds of millions of dollars of tested advertising, in a way that ensures these insights get burned into your brain rather than slip in one nostril and out the other, then take a look at the Copy Riddles sales page.

Yes, you might have to put in a bit of brain work to see how this program targeted at copywriters could be useful to you in what you do.

That’s the cost.

The payoff you can get for that cost is to be the first in your industry to download this proven influence and persuasion knowledge into your brain, and have first-mover advantage for months or years over all your competitors, at least until I create that specific version of Copy Riddles for your industry.

If you’re interested in the full details on Copy Riddles:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

A non-zero amount of sales

by

This morning, I woke up to a ThriveCart sale notification.

“What’s this?” I said. I ripped it open like Dudley Dursley ripping open his 36 Christmas presents.

The notification revealed its secrets, and told me the new sale I made:

===

Emails That Did Well – $79

===

“Emails that did well” is an offer made earlier this week, in one email only.

After I made that offer and sent that email, I got a reply from expert email marketer and superior fractional CMO Nick “Jolly” Bandy, who wrote:

“Actually laughing my ass off reading this. So you are selling the SAME bonus stack as last week… without the main offer…for the same amount of money…and this will most likely make a non-zero amount of sales.”

Yes, it’s pretty much like Nick says, minus the laughing.

I first offered “Emails That Did Well,” plus all the free bonuses eventually included with it, as free bonuses to an affiliate offer.

After the affiliate offer closed, I offered the same bonuses for $79, which happened to be the price of the affiliate offer.

And I made a non-zero amount of sales as a result. As for how non-zero?

That’s for me to know and you to find out, at least if you have gotten yourself access to my Emails That Did Well document.

But before I send you to a page that outlines all the details of that offer and possibly entices you to buy it, a bit of marketing insight:

The first email I ever wrote to my list on the topic of positioning came in 2020.

In that email, I compared your positioning to a spear, which needs to have a very small and very sharp point, in order to pierce your prospect’s thick defenses (his skull) and lodge in the soft gray matter inside.

The thing is, if you fuse together several very small and very sharp points, they lose their “very small” and “very sharp” qualities.

Your positioning becomes less like a spear, small and sharp, and instead becomes more like an iron, flat and heavy.

An iron will hurt somebody if you throw it at their head, but it won’t pierce anything or create any kind of new understanding.

In short, positioning is not additive. A plus B plus C is not always greater than A alone, and often it is less.

That’s why a non-zero amount of people have taken me up on the Emails That Did Well offer.

If you’d like to get that offer, so you can find out how well that email has done so far, and to keep track of my other successful emails, now and in the future, here are the full details:

https://bejakovic.com/announcing-emails-that-did-well/

Intro – You / Me

by

A few days ago, I got an email with the subject line:

“Intro – John / Matt”

I’ve gotten emails like this before, and I always open them eagerly. They normally come from one person, who I know, and introduce me to a second person, who I don’t know.

Not so in this case.

This email was from a guy named Matthias, who I don’t know, introducing me to himself (Matthias aka Matt), who I still don’t know.

That was a little subject line trick I wanted to share with you.

It reminded me of how Gary Bencivenga used to get get a great “endorsement” for his offer by having the offer owner say something about his own product, and then having that formatted like a testimonial.

I don’t know if I would use this “Intro You / Me” trick myself, but there’s no doubt it put me into a different, more favorable state of mind, at least right when opening the email, than I would have been in otherwise.

The bigger point is is that it matters immensely how you first position yourself when you try to open up 1-1 conversations with people.

One option is the above approach, to position yourself as a helpful and disinterested bystander, connecting the person you are reaching out to with a valuable new contact.

That’s not bad, but it’s not great either.

What’s much better is to adopt the positioning I talked about during a live workshop I put on a few years ago, called Water Into Wine.

On that workshop, I talked about positioning I had used to open up conversations (and eventually do deals) with business owners who wouldn’t have even opened my email had I come in presenting myself as a copywriter or a service provider.

I charged $197 for Water into Wine when I ran it. I haven’t made it available since. I am making it available now, and as part of my “Hogwarts of Influence” event, specifically in the “Dumbledore” tier. For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/core-promise-pwyw/

An influence and positioning riddle

by

Let’s see if you can spot the pattern:

1. Today, I got a question from a paying subscriber to my Daily Email Habit service. The question was about writing daily emails. I wrote up my answer to that question and posted it inside my Daily Email House community, which has ~500 members, many of them also Daily Email Habit paying subscribers.

2. Earlier today, I got a question from one of the folks who joined my advertorial cohort, which kicked off yesterday, and which I charged $5k for. This cohort member wanted feedback on a couple advertorials she had written, and she had a question about cold outreach.

3. Yesterday afternoon, I got on a call with a business owner who I’m helping to better monetize his email list. We spent some time talking about email copy (I gave him a little tip about positioning) and then we moved on to talking offers, which is where the real money lies.

So, can you spot the pattern?

I’ll give you a moment.

No rush.

I’ll be right over here, eating a banana and getting a sip of water, while you prepare your answer.

Got your best guess?

Ok. So let me tell you what’s up:

Yesterday on that call with the coaching client, he said something like, “I’ll be able to increase the price of this offer in the future after I get some client wins that I can share.”

No doubt, case studies of client wins are valuable.

But I would argue that an occasional case study, even one featuring a very dramatic and successful turnaround, is less valuable than simply hammering home to people, day after day, that you’re the kind of person that others come to and pay for advice, guidance, and help.

In other words, it’s more valuable to be seen as a leader than to be seen as an expert.

It’s what I done above.

I told you I had people coming to me, paying me, getting my advice and guidance.

I didn’t say anything about the results of that advice and guidance. There was no “case study,” no “client wins.” I simply positioned myself as the wise old man (quite old) at the mouth of the cave at the top of the mountain, who others seek out for his wisdom (and old age).

Of course, if you can combine expertise and leadership, then you’re really in the money.

If you wanna flex both your leadership and your expertise at the same time, and if you’re willing to email regularly about topics like influence, marketing, or copywriting, then I’ll remind you of my Most Valuable Email program.

I’ve had a few hundred people pay me a few hundred dollars for this program. Here are the results that some of them have reported after implementing the Most Valuable Email trick:

#1. “… made me make 5 times more the investment in MVE”

#2. “The highest-converting single-email campaign sent to the non-buyers of all time”

#3. “My inbox is flooded with applause and response and compliments”

For more info on MVE:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Two tracks, client and student

by

A couple weeks ago I talked to a dude, a successful marketer.

On the one hoof, he sells courses and coaching via his email list. On the other, he does bespoke done-for-you work for clients.

I asked him how he gets his done-for-you clients. Are these people who are part of his audience, and just kept ascending from course buyer to coaching student to DFY client?

Turns out no. In the dude’s words:

===

It’s funny because the bespoke clients that I’ve worked for or have on retainer, they always come by referral.

They always have. I’ve been in business since 2010 and the big whale clients, they come by way of some sort of referral.

Whether that’s a past client of mine referred them, a vendor referred them, a colleague, somebody like that.

===

I’m telling you this because I’m finishing up my first-ever Most Valuable Offer cohort.

I’ve been helping nine people plan, market, and deliver a paid live workshop.

As the first step, I asked them, what’s the next step? In other words, who do they want to attract to this workshop, and what do they want to sell to them afterwards?

One of the participants replied:

“Get more high-quality DTC clients who will implement the work I do for them.”

Well, about that. I’d like to suggest to you, going back to the experience of the successful marketer above, that there are two separate tracks:

A client track and a student track.

Like I said, the two tracks are separate.

At the same time, that doesn’t mean that they are independent.

The two tracks are mutually reinforcing, the same way that train tracks have those wooden sleepers in between them to keep each one in place by connecting it to the other.

Here’s how that works:

DFY client work gives you content, expertise, and standing and with your student audience.

It makes it easier to sell to students and gives you something worthwhile to sell.

The teaching you do via courses and coaching, in turn, gives you reach (including referrals), star glow, and non-neediness when dealing with clients.

It makes it easier to have clients find you instead of you having to prospect… to work with better clients, ones that you like… and to charge more with zero pushback on your rates.

My back-of-the-napkin math is that by having both a client and a student track, you get 500% of the benefit for 75% of the work, compared to having each one alone.

At the moment, I still haven’t finished the current Most Valuable Offer cohort. I am not sure when I will be running the next one.

If you’re interested in creating a Most Valuable Offer yourself, both to monetize your current audience and to make your client work easier, then reply to this email and I’ll put you on the priority list.

At the moment, I’m also not doing any client work.

If you are interested in having me completely handle some projects for you — whether that’s handling daily emails or a weekly newsletter for your business, or advertorials for your cold traffic funnel, or something else you need but I’m not thinking of — then reply to this email and we can talk.

Ancient A-list secrets to coming up with new hooks for old offers

by

In my Daily Email House community, I have a thread titled, “What can you teach?” It’s a thread inviting people to share their bit of expertise, which we could turn into a training for the community or possibly even into a product.

A few days ago, a new member chimed in to say what he could teach:

===

I can teach anyone to write stories that sell in less than 30 mins even if they’ve never written a story in their life before.

I did live workshops a few years before and taught this method to 35 people and they ALL wrote stories in less than 30 mins. Some even got clients.

I’d love to know what everyone thinks about such an offer and I’d really appreciate if you could offer some pointers.

===

Here’s my pointer:

“Write stories that sell” is a promise that has been made a million and one times over the past few years, by a million and one people, myself among them.

That’s not to say that writing stories that sell is not a valuable skill.

But in order to sell it, at least to an audience that isn’t already in love with you, you’ll need to adapt it in some way so it sounds new.

In other words, if you’re selling some evergreen and familiar hammer, you need a new hook, a new way to package it up, a new way to make it sound different from the things people have already become deaf to.

How do you do that? Well lemme give you an example:

I have this course, Copy Riddles.

I have sold hundreds of copies of Copy Riddles in the past. But over the last couple years, I haven’t been promoting it too much.

There are different reasons for that:

Copy riddles is expensive ($999)… it’s evergreen (like I said, a bad thing for sales)… and on top of all that, I’ve lost interest in teaching copywriting stuff to would-be copywriters, and have moved to things like email marketing and offers to people who have stuff to sell.

BUT—

Copy Riddles remains filled with ancient wisdom from A-list copywriters.

This ancient wisdom includes dozens of secret techniques to repackaging existing, old-hat info, which gets ignored, inside shiny and sexy new giftboxes, which sell.

The reason why these secret techniques were developed is that copywriters typically have no control of the offer they are promoting (eg. they cannot control the stuff inside the giftbox).

That’s why these A-listers were forced to simply work with words and hooks, and to really do some persuasive wizardry (eg. to come up with more and more elaborate wrapping paper and decorative bows, in order to make the repackaged info appear irresistible).

And now, if you have an offer, or if you want to create an offer, you can benefit from the A-list copywriters’ wisdom, without being hampered by their copywriting limitations.

You can use these ancient A-list secrets to come up with incredible and yet irresistible new hooks for your existing (or planned) offer.

If necessary, you also have the leeway to actually adapt your offer, so it matches and pays off whatever exciting new hook the A-list secrets produced for you.

And the best part?

Since your aren’t just doing this as a copywriter working for a client, but as an offer owner who’s selling his or her own offer… YOU get to collect all the profit and reap all the benefit of repositioning your offer into something that the market wants right now.

When you think of it like that, then maybe the $997 investment in Copy Riddles doesn’t seem so impossibly high.

In any case, if you’re interested in finding out more about these ancient A-list secrets, and how you get get them, not just to hold in your arms, but to imprint in your brain and to have at your fingertips when you next need them, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/