Copywriting

How one copywriter gets hired without making explicit offers

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It’s 8:52am as I write this, and I’m sitting on the terrace of my AirBnb in Bologna, where I arrived just last night.

Crickets are chirping in nearby trees, swallows are circling overhead, and the sun is rising in the cloudless sky.

It’s very pleasant on the terrace at the moment, though that will change soon. It’s supposed to get up to 36 degrees today, or 97 if you do Fahrenheit.

I’m trying to take advantage of the bit of day before the city turns into a furnace, so let me just share with you a reader experience with client-getting.

A while back, in my Daily Email House group, long-time reader Carlo Gargiulo, who works as a senior copywriter at Metodo Merenda, wrote about how he had moved his newsletter to Substack. I asked Carlo why he did that and how it went. He replied:

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I also chose Substack because I want to write purely informative emails. They’re actual articles designed to help readers apply what I’ve taught them.

At the core of these articles (emails) are always the principles you shared with me in Most Valuable Email.

Readers love learning and putting into practice tips to improve offers, copy, etc.

And the interesting thing is that—without making explicit offers—I receive emails from entrepreneurs who want to hire me to write emails, Facebook ads, and landing pages.

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Is it the magic of Most Valuable Email that gets entrepreneurs reaching out to hire Carlo without him even offering?

Is it the magic of Substack?

Is it some combination of the two?

I don’t know.

But if you are looking to get copywriting clients, and if you don’t like the dynamic of you pitching yourself, and the world ignoring you, then hearken to what Carlo says. It’s worked for him, and it might work for you, if you only put it to use.

Substack as far as I know is free.

Most Valuable Email I know for sure is not free.

But at the moment, you can effectively get Most Valuable Email for free, as part of my Hogwarts of Influence event.

I’m bundling together a bunch of my offers, at various levels of craziness, meant to turn you into a persuasion wizard of greater and greater power.

Most Valuable Email is available at the “Snape” and “Dumbledore” levels, along with so many other bonuses to make any of the individual items effectively free.

If you’d like to find out more before this offer vanishes in a puff of magical smoke:

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

How to pitch clients who don’t have the problem you solve

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Yesterday, I wrote about a cold email I got with the sneaky subject line, “Intro – John / Matt.”

But what about the body of that email? What was the guy pitching?

The email ran as following:

1. He was writing to me specifically because I have a Skool group

2. Skool owners who sell memberships to their Skool groups via webinars get low conversions

3. The way to solve this problem is by making an AI clone of myself that I can bundle into my webinar offer

If you just shook your head in confusion, let me highlight the good and the bad of this pitch, which might be useful to you in your own client- and customer-getting efforts:

The GOOD:

1. The dude didn’t try to pitch me his AI clone directly, based on its own merits, social proof, technology etc. Frankly, I wouldn’t have cared one bit about any of that.

2. Instead, he picked a problem that people with paid Skool communities might have (it’s hard to get people to sign up), and he tied in his solution to that.

The BAD:

1. I don’t have a paid Skool community (both my groups are free), I don’t have conversion problems, and I don’t run a webinar.

2. If I did have a paid community and did have problems getting people into it, an AI clone of me would sounds as good of a solution as shipping new members a free life-sized cardboard cutout with my smiling mug on it

All that’s to say, if you’re trying to get new clients or customers, if you’re trying to sell your existing products or services, do the stuff in the “GOOD” above.

Don’t do the stuff in the “BAD.”

What to do instead?

Well, honest research. Detailed research. Research into what actual people in your market actually do, instead of what they say they do, or what you think they do.

This is something I’ve covered in detail inside a training I’ve called Heart of Hearts.

It’s about doing research on your market — ideally, your own audience — to find out 1) what actual problems they have and 2) what solution of yours they would pay for to solve that problem.

And no, it’s not something you can automate to Claude or ChatGPT, because it doesn’t involve silently scouring forums.

I sold Heart of Hearts for $297 when I first released it, back in 2024. I haven’t made it available since. I am making it available now, as part of my “Hogwarts of Influence” event, specifically in the “Snape” and Dumbledore” tiers. For more info on that:

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

Tiny mechanisms for huge offers

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I’m busy preparing for tonight’s Core Promise Workshop and A&Q call, so I will just share with you something interesting I read a few days ago, in an email by copywriter Mike Samuels.

Mike used to the the head copywriter at Clients on Demand, a big company that works with coaches to get them lients, I mean, clients.

Part of Mike’s job was to advise coaches on copy and offers.

You learn a lot by having to coach hundreds of people, all of whom are making one of three or four basic promises (“get rich, “get thin,” “get laid”), and all of whom are trying to compete with thousands of other people making the same promise.

How do you stand out? How do you say something different? How do you persuade people to go with you and not with one of the thousands of others? Says Mike:

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The offers that worked best were the ones when we really dove into the mechanism to find something unique.

Often, it wouldn’t be the main part of the program.

It might have been something small the coach did.

In a fitness offer, maybe it was actually a mindset practice that we focused on.

For a dating coach, it could have been a confidence ritual that became the mechanism.

In the business coaching space, we might’ve dropped all talk of funnels, social media and ads, and instead spoke to the coach’s background in construction, and how they built their business methodologies around that.

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I have seen smart marketers use “tiny mechanisms” before, meaning they only refer to a tiny part of the offer, in order to sell hugely successful offers.

I have snuck the same “tiny mechanism” idea into some of my own stuff as well.

But I’ve never heard somebody call it out until Mike did. I wanted to pass it on to you, so you can use it in your own marketing, positioning, and offers.

Of course, f you want to stand out with a generic, familiar promise, a tiny mechanism is not the only way to do that.

There are dozens of techniques to do so, which might be more or less appropriate for your specific case.

Oh, if only somebody would catalogue all these techniques?

And then present them in a way that gets you practicing them?

So as to stimulate your thinking about how you promote your own offers?

Yes, I am leading you on. Yes, this is exactly what my Copy Riddles program is about.

Copy Riddles is positioned around a tiny mechanism, the fact that I organized the lessons as riddles, to get you thinking and practicing real copywriting rather than just skimming the content.

In case you would like to create a huge offer, and present it effectively, Copy Riddles can help you do that. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Why yes, I am entirely untrustworthy!

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There’s a well-known Internet marketer who recently ran a webinar on an intriguing topic.

Normally I don’t sign up for webinars. Who’s got time or patience to be teased and massaged into a sale for two and a half hours? But the topic of this webinar sucked me in.

I signed up. Of course, I still didn’t attend. And then, I got an email from this marketer.

Subject line: “a REPLAY??”

Preview text: “ok ok… I’ll cave this time. Replay is up for 48 hours.”

The body of the email talked all about how this marketer doesn’t normally do replays for webinars because people never watch them, and because attendance is higher if you don’t offer them.

And yet this time, the email said, he’s making an exception. Why? No one knows. The email didn’t say anything about that.

I recently ran a presentation I called Manna for Marketers, in which I covered how I consciously apply the commandments in my 10 Commandments of Con Men etc. book in everyday tasks like these emails and the offers that I make.

The example I gave for how I used Commandment II, about overcoming objections that my readers are likely to have, was all of 6 words, buried inside of a daily email.

I admitted inside that Manna for Marketers training that 6 words in the middle of an email might seem like a trivially small use of a persuasion idea.

But trust takes a long time to build up.

It can vanish quickly with one big blunder, or a little less quickly, with a few off-smells that signal that something isn’t right here.

Those off-smells can be implicit, like glossing over an objection or question your reader is likely to have…

… or they can be explicit, like what that well-known Internet marketer did in his emails.

“I never do this! But I’ll cave this time! Just this once! Trust me!”

The sad thing is, it’s so easy to avoid this.

Of course, the strategic way is simply to stick to your principles.

“I don’t offer webinar replays because I believe they are worthless. And so I won’t offer one for this webinar either.”

But if you really must go against principle, there’s a tactic for how to do it in a way that doesn’t tank your trust with your audience.

That’s something I cover in Commandment V of my 10 commandments book. If you still haven’t read that:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

My selfie with the Pope

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Two days ago, Tuesday, around 6:45pm, I snuck out of my house.

The streets were quiet and full of police.

There was no traffic, just people clustered in bunches along the curbs.

I waited for a while to watch a cavalcade of police motorcycles and two black and tinted vans drive by in the direction of Montjuic, where the Barcelona Olympic stadium is.

Then I started walking in the same direction.

Like I wrote last week, the Pope came to Barcelona this Tuesday.

I made plans with my friends Sanda and Victor to meet at the Olympic stadium and to participate in the drama of tens of thousands of people watching and cheering just some guy (I’m not Catholic).

It turned out that there wasn’t any drama. It was all very orderly. There were no giant crowds outside the stadium, even though the Pope was supposed to speak there in a little more than a half hour.

It also turned out we needed to register in advance to be allowed into the stadium. In other words, we weren’t getting in. We could just peak inside and see the promised tens of thousands of worshipers in there already, singing chipper and modern Christian rock songs, and waiting for the Pope.

So we couldn’t get in to see the Pope. Oh well.

It was a beautiful afternoon, and Montjuic is a beautiful place.

So Sanda and Victor and I decided to walk to a nearby pool (famous from photos of high divers during the ’92 Olympics) and get a drink.

And as we headed up the street, within the first few steps, on a little stretch where there was nobody else on the curb with us, another cavalcade of police motorcycles and black cars slowly came our way.

Except this time, one of the black cars had its window rolled down.

There was the Pope, about 15 feet away from us.

He saw us and waved. I guess it’s what popes do, but I still felt special, seen. I instinctively smiled and waved back.

So that’s my selfie with the Pope.

I don’t use my phone much. Even if I did, it would have taken lightning reflexes to pull it out and to grab a selfie with me in the foreground and the Pope waving in the background.

That’s ok. This email is effectively painting that picture for you, and serving the same purpose of gloating about something noteworthy in my life.

Like I said, all this happened two days ago.

I didn’t write about it yesterday because — and here’s the marketing lesson for today — you shouldn’t hide your new offers.

I’ve seen a problematic behavior among several people I am coaching.

It’s particularly problematic because it’s a behavior I also engage in.

It goes like this:

1. I come up with a new, potentially risky offer.

2. I write an email that doesn’t refer to this offer in any way in the subject line, the lead, or really the body of the email.

3. I then stuff the offer at the end of the email.

4. More often than not, I throw up my hands in frustration that nobody (or very few people) took me up on my offer, and I scrap the whole thing.

That’s kind of what I did two days ago.

I wrote an email about Dean Jackson… and how great Dean is… and about a lead gen method Dean has.

At the end of that email, I put in an offer for what I am calling the Core Promise Workshop and Q&A call, which is free and is happening live next Tuesday.

I sent out that email in the evening two days ago (right around the time I was hanging out with the Pope).

Result:

By the end of the evening, 6 people had registered for the call. Not even the Pope could save me.

I checked the stats again the next day.

21 people in total had registered by now. Better, but still, less than 1% of my list. For a free, live workshop, one where I’m offering to answer your questions and help you come up with a new core promise for your business.

Am I such a loser?

Are my readers losers?

Is this new offer a loser?

Or is it just that I really really worked hard to bury the lead?

That’s why yesterdays email was just the offer.

It’s my fix, my deal with myself, why I allow myself from time to time to bury a new offer like I did two days ago. My deal with myself is, if I ever bury it one day, I have to put it front-and-center the very next day.

In fact, yesterday’s email was just the tail end of the previous day’s email, with the copy completely unchanged. Even though I had this selfie with the Pope to tell you about.

Result:

66 registrants so far. Meaning, the second email brought in twice as many people as the first.

Which is good, and it supports the point I made to you above. I think I can do still better though. So let me remind you:

The most important part of your marketing message is the promise you make. That’s equally true whether you’re selling a service, coaching, a course, or yourself as a person of trust and influence.

Based on my 1-1 work with dozens of online business owners, I can tell you that most business owners DO NOT DO A GOOD JOB with the core promise they are making in their marketing.

Next Tuesday, at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST, I will hold a Core Promise Workshop and Q&A call.

It’s free & you can ​Register Here​.

I’ll share the most important parts of:

* What makes a good promise

* The importance of being clear over clever

* Choosing a promise that sounds credible

And we’ll end with a Q&A session to answer your Core Promise questions.

Don’t forget to register so I can send you the details.

See you there.

Core Promise Workshop and Q&A call

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The most important part of your marketing message is the promise you make. That’s equally true whether you’re selling a service, coaching, a course, or yourself as a person of trust and influence.

Based on my 1-1 work with dozens of online business owners, I can tell you that most business owners DO NOT DO A GOOD JOB with the core promise they are making in their marketing.

Next Tuesday, at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST, I will hold a Core Promise Workshop and Q&A call.

It’s free & you can Register Here.

I’ll share the most important parts of:

* What makes a good promise

* The importance of being clear over clever

* Choosing a promise that sounds credible

And we’ll end with a Q&A session to answer your Core Promise questions.

Don’t forget to register so I can send you the details.

See you there.

How to make direct marketing FUN for yourself

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OLD, DULL WAY OF DOING DIRECT MARKETING

You get bombarded with direct response ads, whether via Facebook, in your inbox, or via your physical mailbox. And if you’re anything like me, your reactions as you flip trough these ads is…

“Not for me… not for me… God this is ugly… this COULD be for me except they are talking to me like I’m an idiot… not for me… not for me…”

On the flip side, you bombard others with direct response ads, whether actual ads or emails or sales letters. And if you’re anything like me, you dutifully stuff your ads full of the old DR chestnuts you have read about in books and courses:

“Buy now… amazing… secret… our warehouse manager just called… my accountant says I’m crazy… maximum money… minimum time…”

FUN, NEW WAY OF DOING DIRECT MARKETING

You open up a new text file. And when you get bombarded with DR ads, you treat each one like a riddle, a puzzle, or a scavenger hunt. You look for curious or interesting patterns or phrases. You write down any that you find in your text file.

“Why isn’t this number lower”… “You can’t buy anything here”… “A month from today, you can be nothing more than 30 days older”… “It costs you nothing to learn about this opportunity…”

On the flip side, you take your curious or interesting patterns and phrases from your text file, and you find ways to test them out in your own marketing.

“Will it work for me, I wonder… and if it doesn’t work for me, I wonder why that other ad was using it and if it worked for them… and if it does work for me, I wonder how else I can use it…”

I’ve done this in many forms, with many ads, over many years.

When I just got started with copywriting, I did it with sales letters my clients wanted me to model.

Later, on my own, i did it with emails. (I went for a month in 2019 reading Ben Settle’s emails not for the content, but with an eye to patterns in the hooks he was using and the offers he was promoting.)

And just yesterday, I started doing it with Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin group.

I’ve been promoting Ronin regularly, because I’m in it and because I’ve profited mightily from being in it.

If you’re not as much into Ronin as I am, you might not realize that Royalty Ronin is basically one big direct response ad. I mean the content inside the group.

Travis Sago, the guy behind Ronin, is a master of direct marketing. And everything he does inside Ronin is done with a purpose, and that purpose is selling.

Ronin, for all the education, inspiration, and value it delivers along the way, is effectively a giant, ongoing, direct response sales letter for various of Travis’s new offers.

Some of Travis’s direct response experiments work. Some don’t. Some he ends up codifying and sharing with others, often in the form of an expensive new training. Some he keeps to himself for years, or maybe forever.

For my own benefit, and in order to make direct marketing more FUN for myself, yesterday I sat down and started looking for phrases and patterns inside Ronin that caught my eye.

I made a list of 10 ideas, looking over just a few of Travis’s recent posts.

One of these 10 ideas, a subject line Travis used, led to the offer behind my email yesterday, about an auction to get investors to purchase your newsletter or group.

Other ideas I spotted I might use in other emails, or in sales letters, or on live workshops, or maybe in one of my communities.

So my advice for you is to do likewise.

Make direct marketing more FUN for yourself.

Turn it into a game, and you will enjoy yourself more, and make more money. (In minimum time!)

I also got an offer for you:

Try out Ronin yourself. Travis offers a week’s free trial. If you find it’s not for you, you can cancel before the week is out and get charged nothing.

If you do sign up for a trial of Ronin, forward me your welcome email from Travis.

In turn, I will send you a list of the 10 valuable ideas I noted in Ronin yesterday, along with how I am planning to apply a few of them.

I’m making this offer good until tomorrow, Tuesday Jun 9, at 8:31pm CET.

If you’re interested, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

How I’d get advertorial clients without Upwork, cold outreach, or a network

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A couple months ago, I got back on Facebook in a BIG way. What I mean by that is that I started spending a few minutes there every couple days or so.

I was lurking, and trying to see what offers I would get pitched by the Facebook ad algorithm. (I was and am planning on launching my own cold traffic funnel, and wiser heads than mine say that you gotta do your research ahead of time.)

That’s how I came across a pretty, pretty brilliant offer.

It’s a dude who is running an ad… telling you he will write an ad to beat your best performing ad… and if he doesn’t succeed in beating it, he’ll give you all your money back.

(The offer started at $97 and has been going up each time he sells out the slots he’s got for the month. It currently sells for $247.)

From what I can tell, the dude has been running this since last November.

He has had 67 people take him up on it so far.

Out of those, he’s been able to beat their best ad 61 times, while refunding people 6 times.

In true Gary Bencivenga fashion, his landing page is FULL of social proof resulting from this challenge, including the refund requests from the 6 refunders, all of whom were complementary to his skill and business model.

Do you think that, out of any of the remaining 61 people whose best ads he beat, he got any long-term clients who are now paying him thousands of dollars a month?

My guess is yes.

I’m telling you this because right now, I’m promoting a cohort iI will run, starting next Monday, May 1st. The cohort will involve writing advertorials and getting clients who will happily pay for those advertorials.

So far, a few dozen people have expressed interest in this. I’ve been talking to them, or rather, emailing with them. I asked them for more information about where they’re currently at.

A few people have told me that they are either sick of looking for copywriting clients on Upwork or via cold outreach… or that they don’t have time or interest in looking for clients at all, and would rather outsource that to me.

I’m sorry to say, in that case, this cohort is not for you.

For one thing, I’m offering to help and advise with getting clients, not do it in your stead.

For another, the client-getting methods we will be using are the ones outlined inside the 1-Person Advertorial Agency course, which are (gulp) Upwork and cold outreach.

(The good news is, Upwork is where I got my biggest advertorial clients, and the way of cold outreach that 1PAA teaches is likely to be more effective and efficient than your usual kind.)

Still, if you hate the idea of Upwork and cold outreach for getting advertorial clients, then I just gave you a working alternative above. Spelled out, it goes like this:

1. Create a landing page with a headline that says something like, “FREE advertorial for your ecom brand”

2. On that landing page, explain your deal, which is basically that you will write them a free advertorial if they will pay you a commission in case of success

3. Explain who it’s for and not for (eg. must have a working cold traffic funnel, must be making at least X sales per day, must not be currently under investigation by the FTC, etc.)

4. Get people to fill out some kind of a form with whatever details you want from them in order to decide if you want to work with them, or to invite them on a screening call

5. Run super basic ads on Facebook for $20 a day to advertise this landing page

6. Update your landing page with proof as you get it

I’ve kick-started my own advertorial agency by reaching out to my list and network. Maybe that will be enough to get me all the advertorial clients I will ever want. Or maybe i will eventually tap out that demand, in which case I will do exactly what I wrote above, with that Facebook advertising strategy.

But if you like, you can beat me to it, and get your name out there in the world, and get clients who pay you for advertorials in the process, by doing what I just told you I would do.

In any case, the countdown to my advertorial cohort continues. Here are the high-level details:

I’ve made an agreement to write an advertorial for a client.

I’m inviting copywriters to join me and work alongside me as I do this.

You get my help with writing an advertorial following the 1-Person Advertorial Agency system.

You get my help tracking down, vetting, and closing a client (or partner business) using the two client-getting methods in 1-Person Advertorial Agency.

Plus, I’m promising to keep working with you and giving you my support and input until you get to $10k from advertorial work.

We start next week. In case you’re interested, reply now.

You + me = advertorials?

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Things move fast in Bejako land:

Last week, I asked for an advertorial client. As of yesterday, I’ve got an advertorial client.

He sells an ecom product I have never heard of before, and apparently he is running millions of dollars worth of traffic to it every year.

I will be writing a test advertorial for him over next few weeks. If it makes money, I’ll get paid on commission. if doesn’t make money… we’ll see. Maybe I’ll try again. Or maybe I’ll go write an advertorial for someone else.

Earlier this year, I promoted the 1-Person Advertorial Agency training, and I wrote that this is the hottest opportunity for copywriters in 2026.

I still believe it.

In fact, it’s why I even decided to offer advertorials to businesses, and why I offered them for free.

I will be implementing what’s inside 1PAA myself, and combining it with my own knowledge, expertise, and copywriting savvy.

But you know what? Selling bizarre ecom products to the tune of millions of dollars every year is a lonely business.

That’s why I’ve decided to take a few people along with me.

Specifically, what I’m offering here is to:

1. Help you write an advertorial that’s up to my standards

2. Help you get a client or clients who will run that advertorial

3. Keep working with you until you make $10k from your advertorial work

Would you like to join me and a few others who will be going for this trip?

We start next week. In case you’re interested, reply now.

A new episode about clever product names

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This morning, I showered, shaved, looked at myself squarely in the mirror, and said, “It’s time.”

I picked up a little plastic bottle, which had arrived by mail yesterday.

For the first time ever, I opened up the bottle and squeezed some of its contents onto my hand.

Out came a creamy white liquid, which is distinctly unwaterlike. I smiled at my own gullibility, and I rubbed the creamy white liquid all over my face.

The thing I bought and rubbed on my face is called “Fusion Water.” It promises 50 SPF, immediate absorption, and no stinging of the eyes. Pretty much, it’s a sunscreen like any other sunscreen.

And yet, a few days ago, as I walked around the city and saw an ad on an advertising column for this thing, I instantly decided to buy it.

I was sold by the “Water” in the name. I imagined something actually like water, cool, clear, not white or creamy, that I could splash on my face to protect myself against the Barcelona sun.

Sure, I knew deep down that “Fusion Water” is probably a sunscreen like any other. But that “Water” in the “Fusion Water” still sold me.

Another example:

After moving to Barcelona, I found that many people here are fans of the air fryer.

“Have you used one? It’s amazing! You should get one.”

I looked up what an air fryer is. It’s basically a small, stovetop convection oven.

But “Fry with air!” sounds much more appealing than “Bake without oil.”

The first brings to mind an image of crunchy and delicious French fries which are somehow good for you.

The second brings to mind the image of a lump of flavorless baked potato, and who cares whether that’s good for you or not.

So what’s in a name?

A lot. That which we call a rose, by any other name would NOT smell as sweet. Neither would “Fusion Water” be as appealing if it were called “Fusion Sun Cream.” Nor would “yet another stovetop oven” sell as well as an “air fryer.”

So think about names. Think about what your audience hates about your category of solution. Call your thing by a name for an entirely different category, which is blessedly free from the negative associations your audience might have with what you sell.

And on that note, I’d like to tell you about a unique digital tool that implants A-list copywriting skills into your brain.

This tool is called Copy Riddles, and one of the A-list copywriting skills it implants into your brain is precisely the skill of seductive names, which can make the sale before a prospect even knows anything about your offer.

For more information about this unique tool:

http://bejakovic.com/cr