Emails

Will Simple Money Emails be available after I finish traipsing around the U.S.?

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My travels around the U.S. continue. Today I left Palm Beach in Florida and arrived to charming and moss-covered Savannah, Georgia.

The next few days are supposed to be something like vacation for me — as vacation as it gets while having to deliver two weekly coaching programs, and writing one weekly newsletter and this daily newsletter.

Fortunately, I have a stockpile of interesting reader comments and questions to help me out with these daily emails. Yesterday, a reader and recent taker-upper of one of my offers wrote in to ask:

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Idk if you remember me, but a few weeks ago I purchased Kieren Drew’s HIW through your affiliate link. Your age of insights videos came as a bonus offer.

Within three days I watched all the videos and went through the supplemental material. Now, I apply the FREE framework to all my content writing. It’s a game changer. Thank you for putting it out there.

But that’s not why I’m emailing you. I’m wondering if your simple money emails will be available in April?

You see, I’m on a budget and spent my monthly “education” budget on HIW. I’d love to buy your course, but I can only do so in April. If you’ll still be offering the course in April, I’d love to become a happy paying customer again.

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The answer in short is yes, Simple Money Emails will be available in April, after I finish my trip across the US. It will also be available in May, and June, and onwards, just as it is available now.

I only ever ran a deadline-based promo around Simple Money Emails once, and that was for its launch last July.

​​I might create some kind of disappearing bonus for SME in the future — but as long-time readers might know, whenever I do offer a new bonus to an existing offer, I make it available to all previous buyers as well.

All that’s to say, if Simple Money Emails is not in your budget now, you will be able to get it later.

But if it is in your budget now, and you want to learn how to stamp out your own profitable and simple emails on demand, day after day if you so choose, even while traveling and not having a ton of time to work, then there’s no sense in waiting.

Simple Money Email will never be a better deal than it is today, and by getting it today, can apply it and profit from it sooner. For more info on SME:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Darkness at 1pm

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It’s 1:34pm as I write this but it’s dark.

​​I’m inside a freezing Boeing 777 somewhere above the Atlantic ocean, flying from Barcelona to New York.

Lunch is over and now the crew has walked down the cabin, telling us to put the blinds down. I can only guess that this is an attempt to reduce future jet lag. Like kindergartners, it seems we passengers have to get our afternoon nap.

Lots of things happened to me on the way to the plane today.

And lots of things happened in my business over the past 24 hours.

I thought of different ways to try to fit the most important and interesting of these events into my email today.

Fortunately, I remembered all the student emails I’ve critiqued over the past few weeks as part of my little Write & Profit coaching program.

One thing I’ve been repeating often to the folks in that group is that they are trying to do too much in their emails… to say too much… that what they have is really two or three or even nine emails’ worth of content.

So let me stop myself and leave you with this advice for today:

If your email isn’t clicking, you are probably trying to say too much.

Now that I’ve told you that I’ll go back to sitting in the dark, or maybe I’ll take that kindergartner nap.

I want to be in shape for tomorrow so I can get to the last of the affiliate promotions I’ll be doing for the foreseeable future, and tell you about an exciting and legit business opportunity for working copywriters.

Boring copy beats interesting copy

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Yesterday, I wrote about the value of being clear in email copy. I got a curious reply to that from a business owner who has been on my list for a while.

​​This business owner gave his personal experience with two email lists he’s on, by two marketers I will codename Jeremy and Gavin. My reader wrote about these two marketers:

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Jeremy’s emails are interesting, full of personality, and always something going on.

Gavin’s emails are super simple, clear, and direct to the point. Almost boring.

If I had to choose a better writer, it would probably be Jeremy.

But I’ve bought about 4 products from Gavin over the past 6 months, and none from Jeremy.

I also tend to read all of Gavin’s emails, because I know they are going to be easy to read, while I often just save Jeremy’s emails for later and end up not reading them.

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The point being:

If you write simply, clearly, and make a valuable point, you don’t need to be clever or impressive. You can even be boring. And you will still be effective.

That was why I created my Simple Money Emails training the way I did, and why I named it like I did.

Simple Money Emails shows you how to write simple emails, that make a clear point, and that lead to a sale.

I’ve used the approach inside this training to write emails that sold between $4k and $5k worth of products, every day, for years at a time.

If you’d like to do something similar:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

How to stop readers from skimming your emails

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I’m working on my new 10 Commandments book, and so I’ve been going through the archive on my website, in search of old emails that I could use in the new book as-is.

There are literally hundreds of these old emails.

Most I skim across without reading at all. But from time to time, some of the emails catch my eye.

I noticed that there’s one characteristic among the emails in my archive that do make me stop, read more carefully, nod my head.

The emails that made me do that are clear.

Being clear goes beyond getting a good Hemingway-app score.

You can write at a 3rd-grade level and still not have a clear message. If you don’t believe me, think of former U.S. President George W. Bush, who said:

​​”I’m looking forward to a good night’s sleep on the soil of a friend.”

The key thing for a clear email isn’t the word choice. It’s actually having something clear to say.

I’ve personally started forcing myself to write each of my emails in just three bullet points. Here’s an example for today’s email:

1. been reading my old emails
2. good ones are clear
3. sme: don’t need quirks or style

Which brings me my Simple Money Emails training. As I say inside that training:

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Your email doesn’t need to be perfectly written or polished. It doesn’t need to use clever language or have your own “unique voice.” It doesn’t need to have any particular character or surprising, breakneck transitions.​​

Just because you saw some unique quirk in an email guru’s personal email, don’t think you have to do the same to make sales.

You don’t. I know because I have written super basic emails, without any “flair” to them other than an interesting story that I dug up somewhere online, and they did well. In fact, simple, clear, interesting emails will often do better that clever, unusual, or flowery emails.

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You can write clearly. And you can write in an interesting way. And you can write in a way that makes you sales today, and tomorrow, and the day after.

Simple Money Emails can help you get there. ​​For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

An incredibly powerful email hook

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Oh boy.

Yesterday’s email, about scarcity as a performance art, brought the replies pouring in.

I feel like I’m in the courtroom scene in Miracle on 34th Street, with postal workers bringing in satchels of mail for proof of how strongly people feel on this issue.

The issue, in case you missed my emails over the past couple days, is an upcoming livestream by marketers Dan Kennedy and Russell Brunson.

During the livestream, which is set to happen in a couple weeks’ time, Russell will interview Dan, from Dan’s sacrosanct basement workspace. The topic will be Dan’s mind-boggling decision to shut down new subscriptions to his No B.S. print newsletter, starting March 3 of this year.

Real? Fake?

Some of my readers turned detective and wrote in with their findings.

They spotted a detail on the optin page for this upcoming livestream. An image shows Russell, with a mild look of panic on his face, holding a fax from Dan to demonstrate how real this decision is.

The fax has a headline in huge font that reads “SHUT ‘ER DOWN!!!”

Only problem is, the fax also has a small date in the upper right corner, and that date reads 10/24/2022.

Other readers acknowledged that Russell does go for fake scarcity, but defended the man. Some called him a marketing genius. Others just said he does a great job distilling marketing concepts and makes them usable quickly — and it’s up to you to decide what to do with them.

My main takeaway after this whole experience is that industry gossip is an incredible powerful email hook. If, like me, you needed any reminding of that, then let me remind you:

Industry gossip is an incredible powerful email hook.

The only problem I have with anything that’s incredibly powerful is that I bore quickly.

As I said recently on my “How I do it” presentation, I look at this newsletter first and foremost as a sandbox, a playground.

It’s kind of a miracle that it’s turned into a nice source of income and a fountain of good opportunities.

But once something stops being interesting for me, it stops being a topic for this newsletter. So I won’t be writing about this bit of industry gossip, as Dan himself might say, for the foreseeable future.

That said, my playground attitude is not an attitude I encourage anyone else to take.

So if you want to see how two professionals who take their jobs very seriously do it, then check out Dan and Russell’s current “SHUT ‘ER DOWN!!!” campaign.

I continue to promote it with an affiliate link, even though I don’t know if I’ve made any sales, and even though, given that it’s Dan Kennedy, I would promote it without getting paid, simply because I’ve learned so much from the man, and I think you can too.

If you’d like to sign up for that free upcoming livestream, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/no-bs-scarcity

How to write flawless transitions from your anecdotes to your sales pitches every day

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A couple months ago, I wrote an email about a surprising passage in Morgan Housel’s Psychology of Money.

The passage talked about the Wright brothers, and how they were publicly flying airplanes for four years before newspapers took any notice.

To which I got a reply from a reader, asking about another interesting anecdote from the same book:

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I’m curious if you could give some examples as to how you would segway the passage of the Bill Gates and Lakesides computer study program story in the chapter about “Luck and Risk” to make different points?

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The topic of the actual Bill Gates story is irrelevant here. The point is simply this:

It might be a worthwhile exercise to sit down with an interesting story you come acrosss… write down different morals to squeeze out of that story… and sketch out how you would link that to what you sell.

But I’ve never done it, and I don’t plan on starting now.

Instead, what I do whenever I come across a story that I find surprising is just write it down, and have it sitting around for when it fits naturally into a point I want to make.

In my experience, this is the only way to write flawless transitions from your anecdotes to your sales pitches every single day.

Sometimes, surprising stories I’ve written down sit around for days, weeks, months, or years before I use them for something. And there are many surprising facts and stories and anecdotes I’ve written down and never used at all.

That’s ok.

Surprising facts and stories and anecdotes are free and plentiful. Millions of books are filled with them. Plus each day of your own life will provide a dozen new ones if you only keep your antennae up.

What’s not free or plentiful is your readers’ attention or ongoing interest.

And shoehorning a story to make a point that doesn’t really fit… or worse yet, pulling out a bland, predictable takeway from an otherwise good story, is a great way to lose readers’ interest today and to make it harder to get tomorrow.

I have more to say about the topic of keeping readers’ interest for the long term.

Specifically, I have a simple three-word question I use to guide all my emails, which you might also benefit from.

I’ve revealed this three-word question before, but perhaps you’ve missed it.

In case you would like to find out what it is, you can do that on the free training I will put on in a few days’ time.

The training will cover how I write and profit from this newsletter that you are reading now.

It will happen on Monday January 22, 2024 at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. But you will have to be signed up to my list first. Click here to do so.

Daily bloodletting

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Bloodletting used to be standard medical practice. Today, bloodletting might sound stupid or even barbaric, but way back when, it really seems to have helped people.

Here’s a passage about an army captain who experienced some insult that made him so furious that his friends couldn’t make sense of what he was saying:

“The regimental doctor, when he came, said it was absolutely necessary to bleed Denisov. A deep saucer of black blood was taken from his hairy arm and only then was he able to relate what had happened to him.”

That passage is from War and Peace, by Russian count Leo Tolstoy.

​​Between 1902 and 1906, Tolstoy was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times but never won once.

Somebody who did win the Nobel Prize is American journalist Ernest Hemingway.

​​Hemingway wrote many things, but he never wrote the following passage, which is often attributed to him:

“It is easy to write. Just sit in front of your typewriter, open a vein, and bleed.”

That quote is probably attributed to Hemingway so often because he was famous and because in the end he killed himself. Hemingway’s life and death go well with the sentiment that writing is hard, draining, even destructive to the writer.

But I would like to give you that other perspective on that passage, the medical bloodletting perspective.

Each day, before I write my daily email, I’m filled with a mess of ideas, emotions, reactions, and confused plans. I’m also restless because I feel I haven’t accomplished the one thing I set myself as a task for absolutely every day.

After I write my daily email, I function more normally. People can understand me better if I talk, I can make some kind of plans about the future, and I feel the satisfaction of having accomplished something concrete that day.

In other words, daily emailing has the benefits of medical bloodletting, or maybe journaling.

Except daily emailing also has the added benefits of building up an audience… producing content that can be repurposed for books, podcasts appearances, or courses… and of course, driving readers to sales or other types of actions.

Speaking of which:

In a few days’ time, I will host a free training.

The training will cover how I write and profit from this newsletter that you are reading now.

It will happen on Monday January 22, 2024 at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. But you will have to be signed up to my list first. Click here to do so.

More thin content inside

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When my masochistic urges become too strong I like to go into ActiveCampaign and read the “reasons why” left behind by people who unsubscribed from my list.

There’s usually nothing good. Unsubscribers either leave the “reason why” blank or they select the uninspired “I don’t want to receive these emails any more.”

But every few months, I come upon a thoughtful and good “reason why” that I can write a daily email around.

It’s been a long time since the last one, but I finally got a new one a few days ago.

This past Saturday, I opened up the ActiveCampaign Pandora’s box, peeked inside, and saw a custom-made “reason why” from an unsubscriber peeking back at me. It just said:

“Thin content”

The irony is that the email this reader unsubscribed from was less thin than usual.

In that Saturday email, I fleshed out the idea that you are not in the business you think you might be in… I gave specific signposts for creating a business that charges drastically more and that people still eagerly buy from… and I included a personal story (featuring a multimillionaire A-list copywriter) to make the whole thing more memorable and easier to go down.

The fact is, I would write thinner emails than this every day, if I only had more time.

Because over the course of working with dozens of clients as an email copywriter, writing 1800+ sales emails over the past 8 years, and contributing my persuasive share to funnels that brought in uncountable millions of dollars in sales, I have found that you don’t want to make your content very thick at all — if thick means burdened with specific how-to information and step-by-step teaching.

Such thick content does little for your reader except make him feel glutted.

And it does nothing for you — if you happen to sell services or info products — other than producing an occasional “thank you” note from people who will never give you money anyhow.

So what to do instead? How do you write emails that make money?

Well, I could tell you right here. But in the interest of making this email thin, fluffy, and profitable, I won’t. Because the fact is, I’ve created an entire training about what goes into emails that sell and make money.

I’ve told you that how-to teaching is not it.

But if you want to see what is it, you can find it via the page below:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

How to take trivial, possibly made up facts and turn them into influential emails

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“So what did you learn today?”

My ex (still living together) was sitting on the couch, arms crossed, looking at me sternly.

“Err…” I said, my eyes darting around as I tried to remember some new fact. “Today I learned that… supposedly you’ll be twice as productive if you block off your time for specific tasks.”

Background:

Last week, I was listening to an interview with Codie Sanchez. Codie is a newsletter operator and boring business investor. But at this point in the interview, Codie was not talking about either of those topics.

Rather, she was talking about how she makes her marriage work.

One of Codie’s tricks is that, each day, she and her husband share one thing that they’ve learned that day.

I mentioned this to my ex (still living together). She liked the idea so much that now she grills me at unexpected times about what I’ve learned during the day. I then have to think up something in a panic.

Yesterday, when she asked me this, I had been watching a video by Cal Newport of Deep Work fame. Newport now sells a notebook for planning your workday and blocking off time for various tasks.

​​Newport says — and he’s an authority so why question him — that if you block off your time for specific work tasks, you’ll be twice as productive.

I told my ex this. She again liked the idea. And it developed into a conversation about day planners and productivity and places in Barcelona to go shopping for notebooks.

Here’s the point of all this:

That thing about [time blocking = 2x productivity] is a small, trivial bit of information. I’m not even sure if it’s true. But it was enough of a kernel to start a natural and free-flowing conversation there on the couch. I guess that’s why Codie Sanchez recommends the practice.

It’s not just marriages or exes that this works with.

If you’re ever struggling for daily email ideas, then just ask yourself, “What did I learn today?” ​​Pick something small, concrete, even trivial. Then secrete a bit of personal context or opinion around that, like an oyster around a grain of sand, and within a few minutes, you’ll have something that your audience will enjoy reading and might even get value from.

That’s kind of a micro class in influential email writing.

For the macro version, you’ll have to get my Influential Emails training, which I’ll make available later this week, starting Thursday.

​​You’ll have to be on my email list to have a chance to get Influential Emails. If you’d like to learn something new on Thursday, click here to get on my list.

Advanced email copywriting tricks for sale soon

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This week I’m promoting my Influential Emails training. This training is something I’ve made available only once before, live, back in 2021, the Year of the Ox.

But starting next Thursday, and lasting at most until next Sunday, I will make Influential Emails available once again.

Over the y​​ears, by keeping track of when and why I’ve bought from other people’s via email, I discovered it makes good sense to send out regular emails telling your audience what exactly it is you are selling, without any frills, funniness, or flippancy.

​​So here’s whats inside Influential Emails:

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1. The recordings of the three Influential Emails live calls, which all lasted around 2 hours.

2. Edited transcripts of all the calls, in case would rather read than listen to me talk.

3. Call 1 covers 5+ of my advanced email copywriting tricks, including the “Five Fingers” storytelling strategy, S. Morgenstern transitions, and the “Sophisticated Slapstick” structure that makes trivial or even silly things sound funny or profound.

4. Call 2 breaks down four emails I wrote to this list, shows you how I wrote them from snout to tail, and highlights the techniques from Call 1 in action. This second call also includes a lighting-round training, 15 Unique Things I Do To come Up With Ideas and Create Content.

5. Call 3 includes brutal and merciless copy critiques of a dozen emails I got from attendees of the original Influential Emails training. You see what I thought was good in these emails, and more importantly, what I would change to make each email more effective for 1) making sales and 2) being more influential/interesting/memorable.

6. There are also two bonuses. The first is “Mystery Screenwriting Insights For Copywriters.” The core of this is a special, never-produced screenplay from my favorite screenwriter, William Goldman, overlaid with my analysis of the writing tricks Goldman used, and how copywriters can apply the same.

7. The second bonus is “My 12/4 Most Influential Emails.” This is a micro swipe file, including 12 of my most influential emails, along with the background of why and how each email ended up influential. Plus, I’ll give you the four more emails, written by mysterious others, which had the biggest influence on me.

Over the coming days, I will have more to say about Influential Emails, specifically who it’s possibly for and who it’s definitely not for.

If you do decide you want to get Influential Emails, you will have to get on the waiting list. And in order to get on the waiting list, you will first have to get on the list to get my daily emails. Click here to do so now.