Pricing

The anti-subscription high-ticket community

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I’ve recently noticed an interesting new pricing model. As an example, take Codie Sanchez’s Contrarian Community.

As you might know, Codie is an ex-private-equity, Goldman Sachs woman. She quit the corporate world and started using her PE background to buy boring, cash-flow businesses. Laundromats, RV parks, and the like.

Codie also started an info publishing business, Contrarian Thinking, teaching players with money to do the same as she’s doing.

Codie writes a free Contrarian Thinking newsletter, in which she gets her audience of 200,000 readers hyped up on the opportunity of buying boring businesses.

And once they get hyped up enough, she sells them training teaching them how to actually buy a boring businesses, plus ongoing support and networking, inside what she calls Contrarian Community.

So far, so standard.

The part that got me is that Codie doesn’t charge for access to Contrarian Community monthly. She doesn’t charge for it yearly either. Instead, she charges a one-time fixed fee of $10k. And she’s built a 8-figure business out of Contrarian Thinking this way.

I’ve noticed this pricing model in a few other successful info publishing and coaching businesses recently. At first, this had me surprised — because I’ve been trained to think continuity offers are where it’s at.

But a one-time, large fixed ticket to join a community makes a lot of sense. It means:

1. More money per member, today instead of tomorrow.

2. Better quality of member.

3. Better results for members, and therefore easier sales down the line, and a more attractive offer.

4. A better community. Rather than people constantly churning, there’s stability. There are more members contributing, and more successful members supporting and encouraging those who aren’t as successful yet.

So this is something to consider.

If you too offer ongoing coaching, training, or a community of some sort, you can do this too.

Figure out what your LTV is per customer… round that up… or double it or triple it. And then charge people a one-time fee, instead of leaving them to constantly wonder if it’s worth sticking around and renewing for another cycle.
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​Do this, and you might end up producing a better community, getting better results for your customers, and making a lot more money yourself.

Exploiting stupid and gullible customers

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I live in Barcelona and for the first time in my life, that means I’m drinking bottled water at home.

The Barcelona tap water looks and tastes like it was used to wipe down a chalkboard before being pumped to your house.

I drank the tap water for the first few months after moving here. I kept asking myself, “Why am I always thirsty?”

Then some friends came to stay with me for a few weeks. They took a sip of the tap water. They refused to have a second sip. They bought bottled water instead.

I drank the bottled water while they were here. And when they left, I found I couldn’t go back to the tap.

My thirst was finally cured. But now I have a new problem. I regularly have to go and buy the water, and schlep it back home.

That’s what I did last night after my evening walk. I walked to the nearest supermarket, about 200 yards away, bought a large 6-pack of bottled water, and schlepped it home.

As I was carrying it, I was thinking about how — bear with me here, I’m getting to a point — there’s a convenience store right in my building. A guy named Malik runs it. The total distance from Malik’s convenience store to my front door is 4 yards, not 200.

And yet, I haven’t shopped at Malik’s for almost a year now. I refuse.

The question is why. I’ve actually written about this before:

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Malik doesn’t ever ring up what you’re buying. He never gives you a receipt.

Instead, he eyeballs the stuff you’re holding in your hands — a bottle of water, two cans of beer — and tells you the total. 7 euro 65 cents. Tomorrow, the same basket of stuff might cost 6 euro 30. Or 9 euro 15.

Sometimes, Malik senses he has overcharged you. And without looking at you directly, he senses whether you feel so too. If he ever thinks he’s gone too far, he doesn’t lower the price. Instead, he throws in something extra — a single-serve cookie, a lollypop, a piece of bubble gum. Lately it’s been happening a lot.

===

At first, this behavior was curious. Then cute. Then annoying. I stopped going.

I could afford the extra euro or two. I would even gladly pay for the convenience not to have to schlep my bottled water home from a block away. But the random price increases and drops, depending on Malik’s whims and how rich I was looking that day, drove me away. They made me feel gullible and stupid.

The point here is twofold:

First, I’d like to suggest you don’t make your customers feel gullible and stupid. That might seem perfectly clear — much clearer than Barcelona’s tap water. And yet, how many businesses engage in practices that make it seem their customers must be gullible and stupid? Stuff like:

– Transparently fake reasons why (“Our warehouse manager just phoned me in a panic and…”)
– One-time-only offers that really aren’t
– Price increases and drops based on a whim or on momentary greed, rather than strategy

Malik’s store still survives without my patronage. I see him sitting there all day long, looking exhausted and unhealthy. I would gladly pay him the top price he ever charged me for the bottled water, if I only didn’t feel stupid and gullible doing so.

And that brings me to the second point of the story above. But I will talk about that tomorrow, because one point a day is my new limit.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to write daily emails that allow you to 1) build trust rather than resentment and 2) charge high prices that people happily pay, then you might like my Simple Money Emails course. For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/​​

If you want to learn to pray, raise your prices

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I live in Barcelona, have been for almost two years now. In order to find out a little about this city, I picked up a book, called Barcelona. It talks about the history and the architecture of the place.

Since Barcelona is on the sea, the culture has been influenced big time by sea and sailing.

​​One of the oldest churches in the city is Santa Maria del Mar.

​​The patron saint of Barcelona is St. Eulalia, also the patron saint of sailors.

​​And according to the book I’m reading, the locals have a saying:

“If you want to learn to pray, learn to sail.”

I wrote that down when I read it. It’s very practical advice, even if you don’t want to learn to pray.

It reminded me of my attitude from day zero of my copywriting career, back in 2015.

I started out charging $15/hour.

I told myself that after five jobs completed at that rate, I would raise my rate to $20/hr.

And I did so.

Then I repeated the process, over and over. $20, $25, $40.

While I was still on Upwork, around 2018, I eventually got to $150/hr.

Then I got off Upwork, and started charging clients still higher effective fees for the work I was doing.

At every step of the way, my mindset was lacking. I had zero inner game. I was emotionally sure that the work I was doing would not be worth the new price I wanted to charge.

And yet I raised my prices. My mindset and my skills and my deliverables caught up. They had to. I was working with clients who were suddenly paying me lots more money.

So if you want to learn to pray, learn to sail. And if you want confidence and the skills to back it up, raise your prices.

This applies beyond copywriting, and beyond client work. ​​

That’s why pricing will be something I will talk about on the free presentation I will host tomorrow, about how I write and profit from this newsletter that you are reading now. But that training is only open to people who are signed up to my list. If you’d like to get on there, click here.

Potentially harmful testimonial

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This morning, my floating guardian angel, Fred Beyer, wrote me a new message.

Over the years, Fred has repeatedly appeared out of the ether and pointed out harmful glitches and technical muckups in my marketing that were costing me thousands of dollars in lost sales.

But this morning, Fred wasn’t pointing out a technical issue. Instead he sent me a warning about my copy, specifically about a potentially harmful testimonial for my Copy Riddles program. He wrote:

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There’s a testimonial on your sales page that mentions the initial $300 you charged for Copy Riddles.

“Probably the best 300 bucks I’ve ever spent”

I’ve come across this before myself and I’ve always felt kind of cheated when I found out the training was now significantly more expensive.

There’s an inner voice that goes: “Sure it was worth 300, but is it worth 1000?”

Obviously You’re the expert.

I just wanted to share, in case this little testimonial drowned in the hubbub of running your biz.

===

Fred raises a good point.

That “best 300 bucks ever” is a kind of anti-anchoring. It goes against the smart marketing practice of pegging your price to a drastically higher sum, and then lopping off zeros to your prospect’s relief and joy.

Perhaps the thing to do would be to take that “300 bucks” testimonial down.

But I never miss an opportunity to flirt with sales prevention. So rather than take that testimonial down, I will actually highlight it. Here’s the full version, which came from Robert Smith, who runs his own CRO agency. Robert wrote:

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I’ve spent close to 150k on copy courses and mentors.

John Bejakovic’s Bullet Copy course is probably the best 300 bucks I’ve ever spent.

One word: “source”. He shows you source material — pre twist — and then re-twists it, so you know how the twist works.

Just send him an email and ask him to enroll you in it.

If, after lesson one, you don’t immediately say, “this is the best 300 bucks I’ve ever spent”, then send an email to rob@robertsmithmedia.com and I’ll send you a refund (then, write your name down in my book of “copywriters I’ll never hire.”)

===

Robert went through Copy Riddles back in 2021. And yes, the course has gone up in price since.

I first sold Copy Riddles at a low price and I gradually pushed the price up — this made it psychologically easier to sell something of my own.

In the meantime, my own status has grown, the endorsements for Copy Riddles have poured in, and today I can and do sell this course for $1,000.

But that’s about me me me. What about you you you? How is it possibly fair to you that I’m charging $1,000 for Copy Riddles today, when I charged just $300 for it a couple years ago?

First of all, $1,000 is still a fair price and then some.

If you actually go through this course and apply what it teaches in a real marketing endeavor, then the info inside can be worth tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars to you over your career.

You might think that’s exaggeration. But it’s just the nature of copywriting and marketing. Good selling skills, multiplied over a large enough audience, can create a lot of wealth, and quickly.

Second, a high, achievable, but uncomfortable price actually makes it more likely you will profit from the course.

I don’t believe the old chestnut, “If they pay, they pay attention.” I know many people who pay, and still never do anything with what they paid for.

But I do believe that if you pay a lot of money, and that makes nervous, you will push yourself out of your comfort zone and find ways to justify the uncomfortable price to yourself.

If you ask me for proof, I can give you myself as an example.

Some five years ago, I joined the coaching group of A-list copywriter Dan Ferrari. Over the course of about six months, I paid Dan multiple tens of thousands of dollars for this coaching.

This wasn’t money I could easily spare. In fact, I was eating away my savings, because I was paying Dan more than I was making. Each month, when it was time to make a new multi-thousand payment to Dan, I literally had cold sweat on my forehead and electric shocks down my spine.

I’ve written before about my experiences with this coaching:

Dan gave me valuable and practical marketing and copywriting ideas. But the real value was the price I was paying him. It made me so uncomfortable that I worked much harder to apply the ideas Dan gave me, to hustle and make do, simply because I had to.

Result:

In the month after I was done with Dan’s coaching, the floodgates opened. I started making the kind of money I had never made with copywriting before. Within the first two months at this new level, I had fully paid off the tens of thousands of dollars I had paid to Dan.

So to answer the question that was rumbling in Fred’s mind, and that may be rumbling in yours…

“Sure it was worth 300, but is it worth 1000?”

The answer is, it really depends.

Copy Riddles consists of 20 rounds. Each round covers a key copywriting concept.

If you don’t bother to go through all of the rounds, or if you don’t bother to apply them anywhere where they can possibly make you money, then Copy Riddles won’t be worth $1,000 to you, or any fraction of that.

On the other hand, if you go through each of these 20 rounds earnestly… if you do the daily exercises I give you… and if you apply the lessons in your own business or in your clients’ businesses, there’s no doubt in my mind that it will be worth $1,000 to you, and much, much, much more.

So Robert’s possibly harmful testimonial stays up. In case you’d like to see it in its native environment, or get started with Copy Riddles right now, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Eye-opening stuff following my first newsletter consult

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Yesterday, I fixed my hair and smiled and fired up Zoom.

On the other side of the Zoom tube was the writer and publisher of a free newsletter, which promotes a premium content subscription.

The cost of this premium content subscription?

$2,625 per year. And yet, many individual readers happily pay for this subscription, and a few companies buy 30-40 user packs for their employees.

Eye-opening stuff, when you compare it to $9.99/month paid Substack newsletters, or even to $97/month print newsletters by marketing gurus.

The reason I was on Zoom yesterday was that this was the first of three paid newsletter consults I offered last week.

The reason I offered these paid newsletter consults was that, as I said when I made the offer, it was research for my own projects. I’m thinking of creating newsletter community or mastermind, and I want to know what problems newsletter publishers have.

When I made that offer last week, all three available spots were snapped up in the first ten minutes after the email went out. And as I raced to turn off the cart, a fourth buyer sneaked in.

One of the people who got in, in fact the person I talked to yesterday, said that getting one of the three spots felt like winning the lottery.

Compare this to when I offered free coaching some five years ago, as a way of preparing for a book I was planning to write.

Out of my entire list, just one dude from Germany signed up. I think somebody else scheduled a call and then canceled last minute.

Granted:

Stuff has changed in past four years. My list has grown… I’ve written 1,000+ additional emails… I’ve learned a lot about marketing and copywriting… I’ve worked with several large clients with whom I made a lot of money… and I’ve built a name for myself in the copywriting and email marketing field.

But with or without all that, the point I want to share with you still stands:

You can get paid to do research for your own projects.

​​Or you can get paid for a diagnostic call.

​​Or to learn stuff that you’re interested in learning. Or for content that you’re currently giving away. Or for answering questions that you currently answer for nothing.

Somebody smart said it, and I believe it’s true — it takes as much work to give something away as to sell it.

So why not sell it instead?

If you don’t have the status or the experience yet, then charge a little bit.

If you do have the status or the experience, then charge accordingly.

But pretty much anything you are currently doing for free, you can ask money for.

There’s nobody and nothing stopping you, except your own beliefs of what the market will accept. And those beliefs are often wrong.

All right, on to my offer:

I am not offering any more one-off newsletter consults. But I do offer ongoing coaching about publishing a newsletter — everything from audience selection to zero-cost ways to grow.

My coaching program is expensive. It’s not right for you unless you already have some experience, or even better, an already running newsletter.

If you think this might be for you, reply to this email. Tell me a bit about who you are, what you do, and what the current situation or ambition is with your newsletter.

If I think it could be a good fit, we can get on a call and talk more.

​​Thinking of it now, maybe I’ll take my own advice and start charging for those calls. But that’s in the future.

​​For today, it’s still free. If you’re interested, you know what to do.

Announcing: pre-Black Friday Copy Riddles stable price

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Day 2 of The Copywriter Club live event in London.

​​I’m trying to finish all my work — this newsletter, plus my health newsletter which goes out each Thursday — before 9am so I don’t have to lug my laptop to the conference venue.

​​Fortunately, a reader writes in:

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Hi John,

Greetings!

Are you planning to make a Black Friday/Cyber Monday offer, especially of your Copy Riddles course?

The reason I ask is so that I can start saving for it and blissfully ignore other offers.

===

The grand answer is no, I’m not planning any kind of Black Friday offer on Copy Riddles or any of my other courses. In case you’re curious, here are two reasons why:

For one thing, I don’t know when Black Friday falls. Maybe there are ways around this significant obstacle. But even if there are, the following obstacle remains…

Black Friday typically means discounts. And several years ago, I copied and adopted, without shame or remorse, Daniel Throssell’s policy of not running sales or discounting offers down from an established price.

My reasoning is simple:

I sell expensive offers to a small batch of dedicated buyers. I never want one of these buyers to open a new email from me and be faced with a cheerful message, informing them that a course they bought from me now costs hundreds of dollars less — “Haha, sucks for you, shoulda waited for Black Friday!”

I’ve consulted clients who run regular discounts to large lists. They say they’ve never ever gotten a complaint from earlier buyers about a new sale.

I can believe it. But I still won’t do it. I can imagine that if I found myself on the other end of such a deal, I wouldn’t complain either, but I would still feel soured. And I would think twice when buying the next time.

One of the greatest copywriters of all time, Robert Collier, once said that the most effective appeal he knew to get people to buy is to say, “The price is going up.”

Well, the price of Copy Riddles is not going up, at least today. (It’s also not going down, today, tomorrow, or ever.)

So the only urgency I can appeal to today is if you actually plan to go through this course and profit from it.

The sooner you buy it, the sooner you can go through it, and the sooner you will take your copywriting skills to a new level. If you do this honestly, it will be worth much more to you than any discount on this course that I could offer. In case you would like to get started now:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Mysterious copy chief gets me moving

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Back in May, I wrote about the mysterious Mercure. That’s the pseudonym of a guy with a big following on copywriting Twitter.

Mercure ​​only reveals publicly that he is the copy chief of $10M company. He offers coaching to copywriters without them knowing his real name or even seeing his face.

(I happen to know Mercure’s real identity because I met him in real life. But I ain’t telling.)

Two weeks ago, for reasons of his own, Mercure bought himself a ticket to the Most Valuable Email show. He wrote me a few days later to report an “aha!” moment:

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Whew, what can I say! It’s a rollercoaster! I loved it!

It resonates with my way of writing, and puts some words and ideas on otherwise unconscious processes.

It wasn’t easy to follow at times, and it did require my full attention, but that’s due to the (circular) nature of the idea. Your fluid writing actually made things easier to get. And your choice of examples make everything clear in the end.

Truth be told, it did get me a “Aha!” moment, concerning my current sales letter, product, offer, and future newsletter. I’m now curious to see how it can be applied to others niches, even though you did say it may or may not work. I think it can, as it appears close to some of the “techniques” I’ve been using in the supplement niche.

All in all, I believe Copywriters fascinated by the architecture of persuasion will appreciate it a lot and find it indeed most valuable.

I think it deserves a second and third read to grab onto the smaller details, that’s what I’ll do in the coming days.

So thank you very much for this! I’ll be focusing on implementing the many lessons now. 🙂

===

It always warms the old heart-cockles to get an endorsement like that. But Mercure wrote me something else that wasn’t as cockle-warming:

“I think you should absolutely raise your prices. 100 for MVE is a steal (I believe it.)”

Mercure told me he raised his prices for the group coaching he offers. Twice. Result:

* Less demand for his coaching
* Less work to do
* More money coming in

So while I wasn’t too happy to hear this message — I fight like a dying man against making any kind of change — I decided it was time to finally listen.

Like I announced yesterday, I will increase the price of Most Valuable Email from $100 to $297.

The price will change in two days’ time, on Tuesday at 8:31pm CET.

If you’d like to get Most Valuable Email, or rather steal it, before the price changes:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

They laughed when I created a payment plan, but when I jacked up the price…

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This past Tuesday, I created a new, mildly troll-like “financed payment structure” for my Most Valuable Email course. Just $97 today… plus three easy $1 payments each 30 days.

I did make some sales with that new payment structure. But what I did not expect is the sheer amount of laughter, chortling, and knee slapping this aroused.

I got a lot of LOLOL, funny, this is hilarious af 😂😂😂 replies. One particularly amused reader wrote in to say:

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HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I’ve been laughing at this checkout page for longer than I’ve laughed at ANY standup comedian’s joke.

‘just thought about it again and had to laugh (again) before typing this sentence.

It’s the most absurd thing I’ve seen in ages!

I FUCKING LOVE IT!

Gotta take the ‘sting’ out of those one hundred bucks!

===

I’ve since removed that financed payment structure — as I said, it was destined to disappear without ceremony or notice. MVE is back to its usual one hundred bucks price. But soon, it will be time for a new payment structure, with much more sting:

I’ll be raising the price of Most Valuable Email from $100 to $297, effective next Tuesday, July 22, at 8:31pm CET.

I’m deadly serious about this price increase.

I realize that doing so on the heels of a trollish “financed payment structure” might not get me taken the most seriously.

But this is not a stunt, and not something will reverse like I did with that $97 + 3x$1 setup.

This is a genuine price increase. If you’re curious, I will have my explanation and reasoning for it over the next few days. Or in case you’d like to get MVE before the price triples, and you don’t want to risk missing the deadline as so often happens:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Announcing new financed payment structure for Most Valuable Email

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This past May I went to the one and only copywriting conference I have ever attended. Trevor “Toe Cracker” Crook, who organized the conference, got up on stage on day two to give his presentation, all about creating outrageous offers.

Trevor had something like 9 points to cover. And then he got into the 10th, which was a pitch for his paid offer, something called Silent Sales Formula.

The structure of Trevor’s offer went like this:

* Access to Trevor’s Own The Casino training (a $5,970 value)
* 3-7 Zoom calls with Trevor for the rest of 2023 ($5,000 value)
* All for an affordable $497 today, and then “9 financed payments of $497 every 30 days”

Trevor made it clear this was not a subscription offer, and you could not hope to cancel after the first month, or really at any other month.

I remember talking to some of the marketers and copywriters after the fact. We were all confused by that payment structure. It seemed to put a kind of anti-demonstration on Trevor’s otherwise excellent presentation about great offers.

It turns out I and the people I had been talking to were probably wrong, and Trevor was probably right.

I say “probably,” going by the other successful marketers I have seen since, offering exactly the same pricing structure:

I saw Sean Anthony do it recently for his High-Ticket Email Conversion Workshop ($590 today + 4 more payments of $590). I saw Justin Goff do it last week for the 7-Figure Email course he was promoting ($97 today + three future payments of $297).

You might think this is just a payment plan.

But for all these folks, there was no option to pay in bulk, and there was not really any talk of the total price. It seems the main reason for this pricing structure is a kind of reverse price anchoring. What you pay today is quite affordable, and the rest… well, the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.

As you might know, I am all about taking effective marketing strategies and putting them into practice.

And so I would like to announce I am stealing this idea from Trevor and Sean and Justin.

I have changed the payment structure for my Most Valuable Email course.

Before, the course was much more expensive than it is today — though still grossly underpriced for the value it delivers.

But I’ve changed all that with my new financed payment structure for MVE.

Now, you can get started with Most Valuable Email for just $97 today + 3 financed payments of $1, each 30 days.

You might not believe me. You might think I’m a joker. You might think I’m trivializing an otherwise valuable marketing idea. So check for yourself.

In order to do that, you will have to click through to the page below… scroll past all the big claims I make about MVE (build your authority, grow your email list, create exciting new offers out of thin air)… skirt the towering wall of testimonials… turn right at my guarantee that puts John Carlton and Gary Halbert to shame… and then click on the “Yes I want to learn the Most Valuable Email trick” button.

You will then see my new financed payment structure in action.

I don’t make any promises about how long I will keep this generous payment option up, but right now it’s there. Check for yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Easy way to go from a bit of a failure to a big-time success

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I have an offer for you at the end of today’s email. But first, I have a sexy marketing story that might make you want that offer. The story goes like this:

Back in the early 2000s, a guy named Andrew Wood ran an info publishing business, teaching marketing to karate schools. Wood knew what he was talking about, because he had previously created and then sold a chain of 400 karate schools.

Wood’s info publishing business was pulling in good money, around $30k each month. The trouble was, Wood’s expenses — business, car, wife — totaled $40k each month. In other words, he was losing blood like a harpooned whale.

So in a moment of desperation, Wood got in touch with Jay Abraham. The two met.

Over the course of a morning, Jay Abraham grilled Wood all about his business. After each question, Abraham came up with suggestions. And Wood replied he was already doing that — or he had tried it before but it didn’t work.

As the meeting wore on, Jay Abraham grew more and more frustrated. Eventually, he stood up from the table.

“You’re so fucking smart,” Abraham said, “figure it out for yourself.” And he walked out.

Wood sat there stunned. But before he had a chance to do anything, Jay Abraham came back and apologized. And he asked Wood to run through the numbers one more time.

“What are you taking in each month?”

“$30k.”

“How much are you spending?”

“$40k.”

“And how much do you want to make?”

“$60k would be great.”

“Okay,” Jay Abraham said. “That’s easy. Just double your prices! Find something you can add to the program to increase the value and double the price.”

And with that, Jay Abraham said goodbye.

Silence. Do you think Andrew Wood sat there thinking, “What a great insight!”

Of course not. He thought it was a total lack of advice. But on his way home, he stopped for a beer. A few of his employees joined. After the third beer, they started kicking around the “just double your prices” idea.

A couple weeks later, Wood stood on stage in front of his two hundred customers. And he announced a new monthly program.

It would cost $200, twice as much as what they were already paying. The contents were not much more than what they were already getting.

Result?

Wood says that in three months, he went from taking in $30k a month to $100k a month. More importantly, he went from losing $10k each month to making a profit of $60k. By Christmas, he was entirely debt-free and owned his first Ferrari.

So that’s the sexy story. Now here’s the offer:

A couple weeks ago I sent out an email asking who would be interested in a training about increasing your prices.

​​I got a fair number of yeses in response to that email, but not enough to make me want to put that training on. Lately been saying no to middling opportunities and putting my effort only in near sure shots.

At the same time, your first Ferrari — or whatever the equivalent moonshot proof of success might be in your own mind. That’s what can happen if you double your prices.

​​And yet people don’t double their prices.

Why? And what can you specifically do about it?

That’s what I want to address on this training. And if it’s something you’d be interested in hearing about and profiting from, then hit reply, and let me know. If it enough people say yes, then I’ll put this training on.