Revenue Share

I asked for ideas to fail, and I got ’em

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The results are in. Well, some of the results.

Yesterday, I wrote an email asking my readers for ideas. On how I could make more money. And I offered a $100 reward — if I run with the idea and it fails.

Result:

I got a small number of replies so far. Almost all the replies were thoughtful, serious ideas that could legitimately make me more money.

I’ve decided to try out an idea sent to me by Modern Maker Jacob Pegs. I’ll report on the final result of that — $100 or glory — by the end of this month.

The thing is, I would like to do more. Try out two, three, all of the ideas people sent me. All at the same time.

I’d also like to finish that book I’ve been working on for a while. Plus I’d like to go through my existing emails and package those up into even more books.

I’d like to create a couple new courses, or maybe a half dozen. I have ideas for a few workshops as well. Plus I’ve been toying with the idea of creating a community for a while.

I’d like to find new affiliate offers to promote… I’d like to come up with some sort of continuity program… I’d like to build up my list with more people with money.

And that’s just for this little info publishing business.

There’s a whole big world of money-making opportunities out there that regularly calls my attention and tempts me with the thought of cool new projects using skills and assets I already have.

All that’s to say:

I’m a moderately successful dude. And I have a moderately infinite list of possible projects to do, all of which sound cool, all of which which could make me a ton of money, all of which could be good for me in other ways.

But there are people out there who are vastly more successful than I am. And those people have vastly infinite lists of possible projects to do, all of which sound cool, all of which could make them a ton of money, all of which could be good for them in other ways.

You see the problem:

Infinite opportunities…

Finite time. Finite energy. Finite head space.

And that’s pretty much the argument for going to business owners and saying, “Hey. You. How about I just do this for you? Don’t pay me anything. Don’t stress about this at all. I’ll handle all of it. Just, if it makes money, you give me a share?”

These kinds of offers work. I know, because I’ve made them, and I’ve had them accepted.

I can vouch first hand that these offers can collect you — as the party doing the work — a lot of money.

You can go out now and start reaching out to business owners and saying “Hey. You.”

If that works, great.

But if not, then consider Shiv Shetti’s PCM mastermind.

Shiv’s got a whole system for how to find business owners to partner with… how to approach them… what to say to them… and how to deliver on work that makes the business owner free money, which they are then happy to share with you.

Oh, and there’s also coaches inside PCM to help you along. I’m one of those coaches.

If you’d like to find out more about PCM:

https://bejakovic.com/pcm

What’s the problem with retainers?

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I woke up this morning to a bang.

I’ve been staying at my friend’s Adams-family-like mansion in the Bolton Hill area of Baltimore.

I have an entire floor of the house to myself.

It’s been great. Except each morning I’ve been here, I’ve been woken up in the same way.

Bang. Against my window. Then a few seconds later, another bang. On and on and on.

A robin – a strange, possibly idiot bird — keeps flying against the window all morning long. After it hits its head against the window, it flies to a nearby branch. It resets. And then it flies at the window again.

And like that until I wake up, get up, and leave the room so I don’t have to listen to him any more.

This week, in fact ever since I got to Baltimore, I’ve been promoting Shiv Shetti’s Performance Copywriter Method.

I’ve been getting a lot of comments from readers who have good things to say about Shiv, and who are happy to hear I’m working with him.

I’ve also gotten a few questions, including the following from Dr. Liza Schermann, formerly the Crazy Email Lady, now a full-time copywriter with an ecommerce brand. Liza wrote:

===

So cool you are now one of the coaches in Shiv’s programme!

I was actually considering his retainer coaching a few years ago because I figured that if I was going to quit my job at the time, it would have to be for a retainer or retainers. Which is pretty much what I ended up doing without him, only a couple of years (and a lot of sweat and blood) later.

Out of curiosity: what’s the problem with retainers? (If it’s public info.)

===

The answer to Liza’s question is really Shiv’s territory, and he goes into it in detail in his video in which he makes the case for the Performance Copywriter Method.

That said, here’s a few possible issues with retainers:

From the copywriter’s side, it’s typically a lot of work, for not all that much money…

​​It’s a lot of stress because the client could decide at any moment to sack you…

​It’s not too scalable because you can only have so many of these retainers before you run out of hours in the day…

​​Plus it’s hard to sell clients on the retainer agreement to start with.

On the other hand, from the client’s view, it feels like an ongoing expense and a need to find stuff for the copywriter to do to make it worth while. And that means they keep wondering whether they should keep it going or sack you before the next retainer payment.

I’m sure not all retainer deals end up like that. Liza has a retainer-like gig. And it’s going well for her.

At the same time, I’ve had a couple retainer-like deals myself. I could never make them work, so I can believe retainers do go bad often.

And yet, for many copywriters, retainers remain some kind of enchanted castle, a magical destination they keep hoping to reach.

Perhaps i could tie that up to that robin beating his head against my window each morning.

Or perhaps I can just tell you there is a legitimate new opportunity for copywriters, a way to make great money, in a scalable way, without the storm and stress of retainers.

It’s called the Performance Copywriter Method. If you’d like to find out more about it:

https://bejakovic.com/pcm

My confessions as Shiv Shetti’s hot-seat coach

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Last Dec, Australia’s best copywriter, Daniel Throssell, wrote me an email asking if I wanted an intro to Shiv Shetti, who was looking for a new coach for his program.

I had no idea what being a coach inside somebody else’s program entailed, but I was willing to find out.

It turned out Shiv has a new program to coach copywriters, called Performance Copywriter Method.

Normally, I would not be interested. For the past year, I have been consciously working to move away from coaching, selling, or marketing to copywriters.

But this was something different.

Shiv was looking for a “hot seat coach.” Each week, I would have to give a different copywriter a strategy for a new email promotion. The copywriters were working with solid, successful clients, and were writing email promos for them on performance-only deals.

I told Shiv I am interested in this. So we agreed I’d start a 2-week trial period at the end of January.

In the meantime, I got to work preparing.

I bought Daniel Throssell’s Campaign Conqueror course, because Shiv was explicitly looking for someone who knew how to do promos in that style. I went through Campaign Conqueror twice.

Second, I went through Shiv’s trainings inside PCM. They talked about mindset… about Shiv’s system for finding these PCM clients… about writing promos themselves.

Third, I looked over previous hot seats that Shiv had delivered himself, all of which surprised me in how thoughtful and thorough they were.

Fourth, I joined the PCM Skool community, where I first started lurking and then contributing bit by bit.

Long story short:

I was impressed by Shiv’s program… impressed by the copywriters inside… impressed by Shiv and his team.

I guess they liked me as well, because my trial period came and went, and now we continue to work together.

My main job is, as I said, to take in a bunch of info each week, and come up with the strategy for a new email promo, much in the style of Daniel Throssell’s Campaign Conqueror. The strategy includes a promo offer, a theme, and email hooks.

For example, tomorrow I have call set up with an Australian copywriter who’s working with a music coach. He’s supposed to send emails over 5 days to promote the coach’s $2,800 offer to the coach’s list of 12,000 names.

I will prepare the strategy. I will go over it with the copywriter over Zoom. He will then go off and write the implement the strategy some time in April.

If all goes well, the client will make a bunch of money without doing any work. The copywriter will end up getting paid much more for those emails than he ever could if he were getting paid up front. And then next month, he and the client will do it all again, with a new offer and a new theme.

So far, I’ve done five or six of these hot seats, one per week. Most of the promos are set to run in the next few weeks, so I can’t report on any impressive wins yet. I imagine those will come.

The other part of my work as a hot seat coach is participate in the PCM Skool community, fielding questions every day.

Those tend to range from technical questions to client acquisition questions to copy and promo questions.

Fortunately, this community is nothing like r/copywriting or the various Facebook copy groups. The people inside are all normal, are all looking for results, are all actually working copywriters with solid copy chops.

All that’s to say, i continue to work with Shiv and his PCM community.

I can tell you from the inside that this program is 100% legit.

​​Not only is it well-designed and well-delivered, with care and effort, but the copywriters inside are getting these performance deals going with quality clients, and from what I’ve seen of the results so far, they are making bank.

If you’re interested, you can find out more about PCM below.

But before you go there, you might notice the curious fact that I am not in any way creating a promo out of this offer.

There’s no deadline.

There’s no disappearing offer, or a bonus, or a discount.

That’s because I don’t want to create any additional urgency about this, beyond what you might already feel as a copywriter dissatisfied or worried with the status quo.

But if you are dissatisfied or worried, and if you’re looking for a new way to work as a copywriter, then PCM is definitely worth a look. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/pcm

Announcing: Exciting and legit business opportunity for working copywriters

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Over the past two weeks, I’ve teased on a few occasions that I will tell you about and exciting and legit business opportunity for working copywriters.

Today, I will finally tell you what this business opportunity is.

I will just tell you about it today, and I will then work to sell you on it tomorrow, Wednesday, and over the weeks and months to come.

This business opportunity is Shiv Shetti’s Performance Copywriter Method.

Shiv, as you might know, was once the “retainer guy.”

He was very successful in coaching copywriters to land clients who would pay healthy monthly retainers.

Thanks in part to his success getting copywriters set up with retainer deals, Shiv realized in time that retainers are a raw deal both for copywriters and for clients.

To Shiv’s great credit, he didn’t ignore this reality. He was both honest and proactive about it. And so he figured out a new and different way for copywriters to work with clients.

That’s the Performance Copywriter Method.

The promise of PCM is that it’s a scalable way for copywriters to work with clients, make $20-$30k per month, while working just 4 hours a day.

Another way to look at PCM is as a coaching group or mastermind, which is led by three experienced coaches who guide things — me being of these three coaches.

You can find out more about PCM at the link below.

There’s no deadline to do so.

Joining PCM is a big decision, and it won’t be right for anyone.

That’s why I don’t want to create any urgency about this, fake or real, beyond telling you about this new way to work as a copywriter, which is likely to be entirely different from what you’re doing now.

Tomorrow, I will give you my inside view on PCM, and what exactly what I do as a coach inside it.

But if you’re intrigued by what you’ve heard so far, you can sign up to watch Shiv’s presentation about PCM below. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/pcm

Never start a relationship with a commission-only arrangement

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A few days ago, I shared a Jeff Paul sales letter that tells the story of how Jeff dug himself into a deep hole, with $100k worth of debt, living in his sister-in-law’s basement, without a job, humiliated, scared, and unable to provide for his wife and two kids.

What happened to Jeff? How did he get trapped in this hole? In Jeff’s own words:

I got talked into a 100% commission job with a company in Philadelphia, while my wife and children were living here in Chicago. I stupidly allowed the company to talk me into moving my family to Philly, uprooting them from the only home they knew, away from Peggy’s large and close family, and all the kids’ friends.

Here’s the killer. Two weeks after Peggy and the kids moved into the home I bought with our last nickel, I found out the company was going under. Shutting the doors. Without paying me one cent of the six-figure commissions they owed me. (Because they weren’t paying me, and like an idiot I believed their lies of future money coming, I was using credit card advances to live on.)

I don’t know how true this story is in Jeff’s case. But it rings true enough, based on my experience.

I don’t mean I’ve ever racked up $100k of debt by accepting a commission-only job. But I’ve never made a single cent from such a job. And not for want of trying.

I’ve had three client arrangements that were commission-only from the start.

In each case, there were lots of stupid meetings, wasted weeks or months of time I could have spent on others things, and even free work that I did. And I never saw a cent from it.

Maybe it’s just been bad luck. Or maybe it’s the reverse of my “Why royalties are good for everyone” argument.

If a client has never paid you anything, and feels they never have to pay you anything until you make them some money, maybe they don’t take the project seriously. They become eager to drag their feet, or to have things done exactly how they imagine it, or to pursue dumb ideas, instead of taking your expert advice into consideration.

So what’s the point?

Well, all this is not to say commissions or royalties aren’t great. Or that commission-only arrangements can’t be great.

The fact is, the most money I’ve made to date from copywriting came from a commission-only arrangement.

But it came from an existing client, who had paid me a lot of money already for other work I was doing for him. The commission-only project was a bonus on top of that other work. ​​

On the other hand, whenever I started a new client relationship with working only on commission, it’s lead to nothing except the stress and hassle of eventually having to call it off — with the client being offended that I don’t want to keep working for them for free.

So should you just say no when somebody makes you a commission-only offer?

In my experience, it’s certainly better than saying yes.

​​Of course, you can also try to spin it a little. Set yourself up with a better deal than zero. But that’s a conversation for another time, and perhaps, for another Jeff Paul sales letter. In case you want to join that conversation, whenever it does happen, sign up for my email newsletter.

The story my clients offered me $0 not to tell

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A few days ago, a mysterious-sounding story bubbled up in several corners of the Internet where I make my home. Its title:

“The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell”

BCG in this case is Boston Consulting Group, a big international consulting company.

And the story sounds mysterious… until you realize that $16k isn’t very much money for a big corporation like BCG. So whatever this guy had to tell can’t be that shocking. Still…

I found the article interesting and surprisingly familiar. And if you are a freelancer or consultant of any sort, I think it can be valuable for you to hear.

In a nutshell, this former BCG-er’s article says three things:

1. Consulting clients often don’t know why they’ve hired a consultant. It’s a kind of cargo cult thing — just something that businesses like them do.

2. Consultants often have to make their work fit the client’s foregone decisions. Even if that means supporting foolish or wasteful actions.

3. As a result, the consultant who wrote the article burned out. His pay was good. His workload was small. And yet, his motivation, as a result of 1 and 2 above, was even smaller.

Perhaps you see where I’m going with this.

I’ve had similar experiences working as a freelance copywriter. Not with all clients. But with enough.

I’ve been hired by clients who only wanted a sales letter because of direct response buzz in their mastermind. Often this meant the client had no real need of a copywriter, because there was zero hope they’d make any money from the copy I wrote.

There were other situations where the client was more experienced… but also very set on doing things that were clearly a bad idea. In this case, whatever expertise I could bring to the project was like trying to stop a runaway train by throwing a pillow at it.

I found both cases to be frustrating and demotivating work — even when it was well-paid.

And so, over time, I started screening out clients like these. But often I still didn’t screen well enough.

That’s one of the reasons why these days I’m trying not to take on new copywriting clients. Instead I just look to partner up with businesses, in a way where I simply get a share of the money that I make for them.

Like I said, I thought the BCG guy’s experiences and my own might be useful to you if you are a freelancer or consultant also.

That said, there is a good chance that you have to simply live all this stuff… and experience it on your own skin before you learn.

Still, I wanted to let you know about it. It might save you some wondering if there’s something uniquely wrong with you… and maybe it will even help you move more quickly towards work freelance or consulting work that’s more motivating, and less frustrating.

And if you want more like this:

I write a daily email newsletter. Mostly about hard-core direct marketing and copywriting topics. But occasionally about the business of copywriting, like today. If you’d like to try it out, here’s where to go.

“Good-bye, please don’t cry”: Dan Kennedy and Dolly Parton enforce the rules

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“I cried all night,” Dolly said, “cause I just pictured Elvis singing it.”

Back in 1974, Dolly Parton had a no. 1 hit with a song she’d written, I Will Always Love You. And a year later, she got word that the king himself, Elvis, wanted to record the song.

“I was so excited,” Dolly said.

And then, the night before the recording session was supposed to happen, Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, told Dolly the deal.

“Elvis don’t record nothing unless we get the publishing rights or at least 50%.”

Dolly cried all night. But she said no. It was her song and it didn’t feel right giving away the rights to it.

​​In the end, Dolly made out all right. I Will Always Love You became a giant hit for Whitney Houston in 1995, and Dolly got over $10 million in royalties — in the 90s alone.

But most songwriters aren’t like Dolly. They give in. And apparently, this kind of thing is a dirty little secret of the music world, according to an article I read in Variety today.

Big stars routinely get songwriting credit — including publishing royalties — for songs they didn’t write or even help write.

But now, a bunch of songwriters are pushing back.

They find it outrageous that they are forced to share a part of their creative ownership with people who were not involved in the creation in any way.

It sounds like a perfectly legit complaint against a perfectly outrageous practice.

But it goes industry to industry, doesn’t it?

Take copywriting.

It’s standard that you write something and hand over all the control to the client.

In fact, if you’re very good and you manage to claw your way to the top, then you can hope to hand over all control of your copy in exchange for a few percent of the revenue it generates.

But it don’t have to be like that.

I heard Dan Kennedy talk about different things he does. How he bakes into his contract that he might later reuse copy that he’s writing for that client. Or that he might use copy on the current project that he wrote for a previous client. Or how he creates templetized copy, and licenses it to clients instead of giving away the copyright.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not telling you to be outraged if you are working the same standard way as every other copywriter. I just want to, as Ben Settle likes to say, give you options for thinking differently.

​​Because the standard way is not the only way it can be. You can create your own rules, and like Dolly and Dan, you can stick to them. And if a potential client doesn’t go for it, you can sing him a bit of Dolly’s song:

Good-bye, please don’t cry
‘Cause we both know that I’m not
What you need…

And then, when the song ends, you wonder what’s next. Perhaps you open up your inbox and read a new email I’ve written, and get some more ideas for thinking differently. Because I have an email newsletter — click here if you’d like to sign up for it.

Copywriting: a business or a job?

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I was out of clean underwear, and things were looking bleak.

I was staying in an Airbnb apartment. I put my clothes to wash earlier in the morning.

But halfway through the cycle, the washing machine got stuck. It blinked stupidly. Even though I talked to it and comforted it, it wouldn’t spin or finish the cycle. My clothes, including all my underwear except what I had on, were stuck inside.

I wrote to the owner. “Oh, that’s too bad,” she answered. “My husband will come after work to take a look at it. If he can’t fix it, we’ll call the repairman.” It was 10am.

A few hours passed. I walked by the washing machine and spotted that the floor was wet. The washing machine was leaking somewhere. Water had pooled behind the machine, and was running along the wall all across the room. It even reached the next room, with the hardwood floor.

I wrote to the owner again. “Oh my God!” she said. “I’ll call the washing machine repairman right away!”

The point being, incentives matter. And on that topic:

Today I got paid the second 50% of the biggest copywriting project I have done to date. And so I did a debrief for myself, to see how the project went, and what I could learn from it.

My conclusion was this: I did a good job. I put in a lot of work, I gave the client much better ideas than they had initially, and I delivered solid copy.

And yet:

Will the client actually get value out of my copy? Will they simply send some cold traffic to it, and have the copy make money out the gate? And if not, will they know what to fix and tweak and test?

If I’m being honest with myself, I know there would be a bunch of things I’d have done differently if there were was some revenue share at stake on this project.

I would have taken more control of the project to put this copy into action sooner… I would have pushed back harder against client ideas that I thought were suspicious… I would have insisted on being involved in the project even now, after I’d delivered the copy.

Royalties are a good system. I’ve told my clients this for a while. And if you’re a copywriter, maybe you can do the same, using the same argument I’ve just given you.

And if you need an argument to bite the bullet and actually make this suggestion to your clients, and to even insist on it, then remember Dan Kennedy. “Copywriting is a business,” says Dan. “You have to get paid on the back end, otherwise you just have a job.”

That’s all the motivation I have for you for today. Now for the sales pitch:

I write an email newsletter. Sometimes I talk about the business of copy, other times I talk about copywriting itself. If this is the kind of thing that floats your lancha, you can join the newsletter here.