Emails

10 hacks for writing daily emails

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I’ve been writing daily sales emails, first for clients and then for myself, since 2017. In that time, I estimate I’ve written 3,000+ such emails. I have learned a thing or a thousand in the process. Here’s 10 of ’em, selected for impact and ease of use:

1. Write a 1-2-3 outline. Point 1 is your opening. Point 2 is your takeaway. Point 3 is your offer. Each point should be a few words to a sentence max. If you cannot express what you want to say in 3 points and each point in max a few words, your email will turn out a mess with startling probability.

2. Repurpose the headlines of long-running but little-known sales letters as your subject lines. One of my most successful (notorious) ones:

“Start a profitable repositioning business… with your own home as headquarters”

3. If you are ever in a horrible crunch for time or brainpower, you can always write a super basic email using the following format:

– Where you are right now

– How you are feeling

– Why you are short of time/brainpower to write a better email

– Why you’re writing an email nonetheless (and make this into a net positive for you reader)

– A link to your offer

An email like this can be just 150-250 words. It’s something you can do in 5 minutes or less, even if you’re brain-dead at the time.

4. Reuse content you’ve already written in other emails (eg. my point 3 above), or in your courses, books, blog posts, comments on Facebook, comments on Reddit, letters to your grandma.

5. The #1 most powerful editing tool is the delete key. If something isn’t quite working, take it out instead of trying to fix it.

6. If you have written a cliche, either take it out or “lampshade” it — exaggerate it and draw even more attention to it.

7. If you have written something your reader already knows, either take it out or acknowledge your reader already knows it, and explain why you are still talking about it.

8. Writing ungrammatical gets people to pay more attention, to notice and remember you more, and maybe even to be amused. It sometimes also draws replies from very intelligent people, replies which can be profitably put to work in future emails.

9. Just about anything can be a daily email topic. If it doesn’t look like it, it’s because you’re not looking close enough. Look closer.

10. It’s helpful to restrict yourself in terms of topic, style, core idea you want to get across, etc. It saves time and makes your emails more impactful and surprising day after day. For help with that:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

This kind of email drives more sales than the average

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Here’s a free marketing tip for you:

If people are buying, it makes sense to advertise the fact.

In the many promos I’ve run within this email newsletter, I’ve always found that when I write an email in which I share a message from someone who’s just taken me up on the promo offer, it drives more sales than your average sales email.

As an example:

Since Monday, I have been running a little promo, the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle, for my original 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

That promo is ending today at 12 midnight PST.

The whole idea behind the promo has been to pile on the bonuses. The little time I’ve had to write emails has been eaten up by spelling out what exactly people get inside the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle.

And so, though people have been buying, I haven’t had time to advertise that fact. Lemme fix that now. Here are a few messages I got from readers who took me up on this offer over the past 24 hours.

First, from email marketer Logan Hobson, who lives in Japan:

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Alright John,

I got 5 copies of “Book” coming to Japan.

Yes, even though I could have ordered them from Japanese Amazon and gotten free shipping with Prime (which is cheaper here than in the US), rankings and sales on the US Amazon have more impact for you so I ordered them from my US Amazon account.

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Second, from copywriter and marketing consultant Chuck Gibson:

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John,

Receipt attached.

I, of course, already have the book, but not printed copies. But it’s the bonus intrigue that hooked me. Very interesting offer.

And a cool way to get your Amazon sales up. Now I have copies to give to certain protégés.

===

And third, from a reader who I’m guessing doesn’t want me to share his name:

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Alright, you got me. This is the worst possible time for me to spend any more money since I have to go on a multi-country trip in 45 days and gotta save as much as possible.

Frankly I don’t even KNOW what I’ll do with every book, Maybe leave one in every Airbnb I stay at as a parting gift? That would be funny but anyway, your bonuses are always amazing and they will be great companions for all the travels.

===

As a result of the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle and of dedicated readers and customers like the above, the paperback copy of my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters has jumped from an Amazon book ranking of 1,016,096 at the start of the promo to a current ranking of 75,795.

In the process, it’s leapfrogged such industry standards as Mark Ford and John Forde’s Great Leads, Brian Kurtz’s Overdeliver, and Dan Kennedy’s No B.S. Direct Marketing.

So much for the education/demonstration part of this email. Now for the sales.

Like I said, the chance to get the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle ends tonight. If you have taken me up on this offer, check the bonus area I gave you access to, and you will find the following:

#1. Copywriting Portfolio Secrets (Price last sold at: $97)

In this training, I show you how to build up your copywriting portfolio in the fastest and most efficient way, so you can start to win copywriting jobs even today. I show you the best way I’ve found to win 4- and 5-figure jobs I REALLY wanted, even when I wasn’t qualified for them, and how you can do it too.

I previously sold this training for $97. But it’s yours free inside the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle, which also includes my…

#2. No-Stress Negotiation For Well-Paid Copywriters (Price last sold at: $100)

This guide outlines my 7-part negotiating system, which I adapted from negotiation coach Jim Camp. This system kept me sane while I still regularly interviewed and worked with copywriting clients. Follow these seven principles, and you will end up making more money, working with better clients, and being able to stick to it for the long term.

I only offered this information before as part of the $100 Copy Zone guide, which also featured….

#3. How To Get Set Up On Upwork

This free bonus is an excerpt from a short self-published book I wrote once, How to Become a $150/Hr Sales Copywriter on Upwork: A Personal Success Story that Almost Anyone Can Replicate. It tells you how to actually get set up on Upwork — the details of your profile page, your description, your title.

If you combine this bonus with the two bonuses above — Copywriting Portfolio Secrets and No-Stress Negotiation — you have a great shot of winning a job on Upwork by the end of this week, or even today.

#4. Dan’s Timeless Wisdom (priceless, or $25k+)

Between August of 2019 and March 2020, I was in Dan Ferrari’s coaching group. As you might know, Dan started out as a star copywriter at The Motley Fool, and went on to become one of the most successful, most winning, big-money direct response copywriters working today.

Inside his coaching group, Dan dispensed copy critiques, marketing advice, and mystical koans to help his coaching students get to the next level.

At some point, I had the bright idea to start archiving the best and most valuable things that Dan was saying. I got 25 of them down, and they are all included in this document.

(By the way, I never tallied up the exact and rather painful amount of money I paid Dan for the coaching. It was north of $25k. I do know I made it all back, and then some, in just the first two months after I stopped with the coaching, thanks to just one tip I got from Dan.)

#5. Copy Riddles Lite (Price last sold at: $97)

Copy Riddles Lite includes one of the 20 rounds included in my full Copy Riddles program. The round is composed of two parts, in which you practice writing sales bullets, and compare what you wrote to what Mel Martin (as well as several other A-list copywriters) wrote starting with the same prompt.

Do this, and you very quickly realize how much skill went into Mel Martin’s bullets. Fortunately, you also very quickly manage to leech some of that skill from Mel Martin, without spending the months and years of agony it took him.

And once you get a taste for Martin’s skill, then the next step is natural:

#6. “How to Turn Fascinations into Fortunes: Copywriting Secrets To Fascinate, Captivate, And Dominate” (Price last sold at: $97)

Lawrence Bernstein, “the world’s most obsessed ad archivist,” once hunted down a collection of all of Mel Martin’s million-dollar ads for Boardroom, along with other control-beating ads Martin had written for the New York Times book division.

Lawrence then printed out the ads, stuffed them in an envelope, and mailed the collection to Marty Edelston, the founder and CEO of Boardroom.

Did Edelston get a kick out of seeing those old ads that helped build up Boardroom? He sure did.

Marty Edelston was so grateful for these ads that he sent Lawrence a thank-you note, along with a check for $2,000.

If you’d like to see these ads yourself, and study them, and model them for selling your own products, then Lawrence put them together into a collection he called “Turn Fascinations Into Fortunes.”

Lawrence got $2,000 as a thank you for putting together this collection of ads. He then sold this collection for $97.

But you don’t have to pay $2,000, or even $97 for “Fascinations Into Fortunes.”

I’ve made a special deal with Lawrence so you can get “Fascinations Into Fortunes” free, along with Copy Riddles Lite, as part of the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle.

#7. “How I made an extra $1404.53/month in Amazon royalties at the push of a button”

This report outlines a hack, which involves the push of a button — literally, that’s all there is to it — and which made me an extra ~$1.5k per month in Amazon royalties. I used this hack once, over the span of a few months, or rather a few weeks. I made money with it. And I never used it again.

I’m not saying anybody else should use this hack. I’m not saying anybody else should NOT use it either.

All I’m willing to do is to tell you what this hack is, why I’m no longer using it myself, and how you can try it out yourself, if you so choose, to make easy money off Amazon.

And that’s it.

Those seven bonuses, with a real-world value of $386, counting just what they sold for previously, are what you get if you’ve already taken me up on the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle.

And if you haven’t yet taken me up on it, here’s how you can:

1. Get five (5) paperback copies of my original 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

2. Forward me your Amazon receipt.

I will then set you up with the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle.

The deadline is tonight at 12 midnight PST. After that, no more bonuses — I am merciless about this. To get in while the doors are still open:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

10 books I could not write from content I’ve created recently

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I have a habit, 10 daily ideas, that I got from James Altucher.

It’s the first thing I do each morning after turning off the meatlocker like air-conditioning in my apartment and brushing my teeth.

This morning, the topic was “10 new books I could write from the content I’ve been writing about lately.”

It’s a prompt I come back to from time to time. I go through emails I have written recently, and ask myself how I could generalize them, or combine them with other emails have written, and turn them into a book or a course or whatever.

Here’s what I came up with today:

#1. “101 Magic Words”

I already got 5: “Rosebud,” “One,” “Big,” “Black,” “Love.”

#2. “Mystery Merchants: How To Create And Profit From Curiosity”

Everything from Robert Collier to Novak Djokovic.

#3. The nature of reality

Ok that’s not a title, but it’s the core idea, and one I come back to a lot in these emails, including a few times over the past few weeks (“Amputees needed,” “The dark side of social proof”).

#4. Overcoming procrastination/avoidance/resistance to doing what’s needed

I try to distance myself from this topic and from the people who seek out such info, but the fact is I’m one of them and that’s why I find myself writing about it repeatedly.

#5. “How to be an effective teacher”

Certainly not by writing a book titled “How to be an effective teacher.” But I have written a lot, including recently, about how to get people to pay attention, to understand, to accept, to remember, to apply information.

#6. “Online Info Business Quick Start Guide”

Yeah, I won’t be writing that, but I could, since I have content that would definitely fit into such a book.

#7. “Influencers, or what really happens when somebody has a platform”

This is connected in my mind to #3 above, the nature of reality. I’ve written about the strangeness having an audience, and, when you think about it, the equal strangeness of being in somebody else’s audience. Not a practical topic, but interesting to me.

#8. “How To Choose A Niche”

Again, this won’t be happening, but it could.

#9. “Consumption & Digestion”

Related to #4 above. I have an entire training on this, which I’ve sold for good money before. But some part of that training, plus a few recent emails, could become a book as well.

#10. “Flip The Script”

Oren Klaff unfortunately already wrote a bad book by this title, which is a shame, because I find the topic very interesting. I know I could develop it with lots of examples, from different disciplines and different eras (I wrote an email once about a 4th-century B.C. greek general who “flipped the script” to keep assassins from his bedside and poison from his cup).

I don’t know what will come from these ideas. Maybe something. Maybe nothing. In any case, there’s no lack of opportunities.

The point is, if you are writing emails daily, generating a bit of content regularly, this can serve multiple purposes.

It can make you sales today.

It can build a relationship with readers so they keep reading tomorrow.

And it can be repurposed next week or month into a book that gets you lots of new subs to your list, or to a course that gets you lots of new dollars under your mattress.

That’s why my subject line today was “10 books I could not write” rather than “10 books I could write.” Because the idea is, these books will already have been written — by somebody, not me, at least not in that moment. All I really have to do, in that moment, is the editorial work of pulling together that writing and adding a cover on it. And of course, reaping the benefits.

It can be the same for you.

It happens bit by bit. Within a few weeks of daily action, you already have resources that you can do something more with.

But you do gotta take some action though. Maybe even now.

If you want my help in starting and sticking with the habit of writing daily emails, so you can make sales, and grow a relationship with readers, and have the building blocks of future books and courses:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Faster typing = better writing?

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A few days ago, recently released Greek soldier GC Tsalamagkakis, who used to write code for CERN (the particle accelerator people) and now writes copy for ecom brands, posted an interesting question in my little Daily Email House community:

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A lot of times I find myself ready to write my daily email but not starting.

I have all these ideas in my head, I know how I wanna start and I have a brief idea on what it will look like on the middle and end.

But I don’t start immediately. Sometimes I catch myself thinking “I have to type aaaaall that now? It will take so much time 😒“

Or I might write a part of the email in a way that is more brief but also worse.

Now, it might be because I’m lazy or it might be because caffeine can hit me like a truck sometimes and thoughts are zooming too fast.

But either way, I believe that the faster I can type, the less friction will be between the thought and its materialization.

Have you ever thought about it?

What do you think?

===

I never thought about typing speed — maybe because I’m a mediocre typist.

But I do agree with the underlying thought. I find it’s really important to write down ideas quickly. It’s a race against my own short-term memory to capture something that can turn out to be effective or useful before it disappears.

Over the years, I’ve hit upon a number of tricks to write down stuff quick, in spite of my mediocre typing speed:

1. absence of punctuation

2. absence of capitalization

– tricking myself with the “hyphen” trick, using a bunch of hyphens at the start of each line to make it feel like notes instead of proper sentences, so i just write it down instead of agonize over it

4. shorthand w/ lotsa abbrevs

5. placeholders for [sections that i’ll figure out later]

6. using abc in place of names i don’t know and xyz for figures that i’ll have to look up

7. stupid ideas that i will delete later

8. no editing if i make mistakes, i meant even if i make mistakes but whatever

9. phonetic spelling that’s good enuff

10. headings that i write down before i start writing to sketch out the general trend of what i want to say such as:

GC QUESTION

MY STRATEGIES FOR WRITING IDEAS DOWN FAST

OFFER

Speaking of offer:

My offer today would be Daily Email House, the lively community where the GC posted his question, and a number of other daily email writing marketers and business owners chimed in with their thoughts.

However, The House is not yet available as a “front-end” offer, but only as an upsell for those who sign up for my Daily Email Habit service.

Currently, I’m offering people a week’s trial on Daily Email house on me, but again, only if you sign up for Daily Email Habit.

For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

For sale

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Today I’d like to tell you about my Daily Email Habit service.

I’ve been promoting this offer for a couple weeks now, usually at the tail end of my emails.

But from time to time, it’s good to stop the infotainment and just sell. So.

Daily Email Habit is for you if you’ve been convinced over the years that:

– a regular online presence is valuable

– email, ancient though it is, is more resilient and independent than social media platforms

– there’s a good number of people out there who actually enjoy receiving and reading emails, even daily, as long as those emails are not just drily and selfishly selling, the way this email is

Daily Email Habit is a new service I’ve come up with to help you take advantage of these facts, by helping you start and stick with your own consistent daily email habit.

Daily Email Habit is delivered as a daily email, with a new prompt each day — a specific “puzzle” to mull over and answer in your own email, along with a few “hints” if you need them.

I choose each day’s puzzle based on my experience writing this newsletter for the past 6+ years, my work with clients over the past almost decade, and the totality of close to 3,000 sales emails I’ve written in that time.

Each daily email puzzle is chosen both to make your emails interesting and different day after day, and to slowly but surely flip the many small switches that ultimately lead to a sale.

My initial guess at why Daily Email Habit would be useful to people was “time saving.” And it has been that way for some subscribers, but the major benefit seems to have been something else.

Here’s James Carran, a published author, poet, ghostwriter, the owner of a Twitter account with 100k+ followers, and the writer of several email newsletters, including the daily Carran’s Cabin. James subscribes to Daily Email Habit, and he said about it:

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I really enjoyed the email prompt today and it did indeed lead to a very different email than I’d have written otherwise. And some useful thinking.

I can already sense this is going to be a great process. Perhaps not so much for reducing time (though it will do that) as making it more interesting for my readers. I wrote a better email than I otherwise might have done.

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One final thing that can be curious, useful, or motivating to you if you join Daily Email Habit. Here, let me give it in James’s words again:

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And as a bonus, you get to watch John Bejakovic eat his own cooking by using the prompts in the emails and seeing how he applies it… Which is another round of education right there.

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I’m not guaranteeing the fact, but most days I myself use my own daily email puzzle to kick off my own email.

In that way, Daily Email Habit is like the “riddles” in my Most Valuable Email and Copy Riddles programs, if you know those.

Basically, Daily Email Habit, in combination with this newsletter, serves as a series of prompts to get you to practice and implement, and then an opportunity to compare what you’ve done to what somebody with a lot of experience would do based on the same prompt.

This is not a way of playing, “Mine is better than yours.” It’s simply a way of learning, getting new ideas, and being inspired to try different things.

At the moment, I’m still offering Daily Email Habit for the Charter Member investment of $20/month. At some point, I’ll increase that, but if you join now, you’ll be grandfathered in even when others have to pay more.

If you have any questions about Daily Email Habit, hit reply + ask away.

Otherwise, if you would like to see an example daily email puzzle as delivered each day in Daily Email Habit, or to have the opportunity to sign up for this service:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

How to prepare for a future in which people can’t think

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I was talking to a friend today. She has a kid who is 11. The kid has to go through a rigorous set of state-sanctioned exams that will determine his future education, career progression, and I suppose retirement community.

“It’s crazy!” my friend said. “Who even knows what will happen in the future?”

I have no kids and am generally clueless about what’s going on in the world. “Huh? Future? What are you talking about?”

“AI!” she said. “What will kids have to learn? How will that even look?”

I read an article by Paul Graham a couple weeks ago. I’ve written about Graham before in these emails. In a nutshell:

Graham is a kind of modern-day renaissance man — a painter, computer programmer, businessman, and investor. This last one is what he’s best known for.

Graham cofounded Y Combinator, the early-stage investing firm behind companies like Airbnb, Coinbase, Stripe, Twitch, Instacart, Reddit. Thanks to his stake in these companies, Graham is worth north of $2.5 billion.

Along with his many other activities, Graham also writes interesting online essays. He wrote a new one a few weeks ago.

In the future, predicts Graham, not many people will be able to write because AI has made it unnecessary.

Is that bad? In Graham’s words:

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Yes, it’s bad. The reason is something I mentioned earlier: writing is thinking. In fact there’s a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing. You can’t make this point better than Leslie Lamport did:

“If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.”

So a world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots. I know which half I want to be in, and I bet you do too.

===

Is Graham right about writing?

I don’t know. I have heard said that 2,500 years ago, smart people were making the same argument AGAINST writing, saying that it weakens critical thought and makes the mind flabby.

I can only report my personal results, today, in 2024.

Writing, at least in my case, causes me to think more and make distinctions I wouldn’t make otherwise. Plus, I even find it kind of enjoyable. And there’s no doubt that thanks to writing, I’ve achieved a level of influence I could never have achieved otherwise.

I am telling you this because I’m finally ready — with two days’ delay — to start rolling out my new Daily Email Habit service.

A key idea behind Daily Email Habit is that there’s value in writing.

And so this service is designed to help you start and stick with the habit of writing a daily email. A big part of how it does this is by giving you a new constraint each day, and narrowing the scope of what to write about.

At the same time, Daily Email Habit is designed NOT to narrow the scope so much that you end up filling out a template. There’s value in writing, and it’s something you cannot get by outsourcing your daily email to a template — or to AI.

I will start rolling out Daily Email Habit tomorrow.

If you’ve already written me to express interest in this new service, there’s nothing more you need to do.

But if you haven’t written me yet, and Daily Email Habit sounds like it might be useful to you, then write me and tell me what you like about this service. I will then add you to the priority list, so have a chance to try out Daily Email Habit sooner rather than later.

How I write sexy bullets without writing

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Last month, I ran a promo for a couple of days to sell my Most Valuable Email course. Part the offer for that event was a bonus called Shangri-La Disappearing Secrets.

I teased some of those disappearing secrets in my emails with a few sales bullets…

… and thanks to those bullets, I made a buncha sales of MVE during that Shangri-La event. I also got people commenting on the bullets themselves. Here’s a sample:

#1. “Those are some sexy bullets.”

#2. “But although I’ve considered buying your MVE before, I was reading your bullets and thinking I need to buy your bullets course cause you were reeling me in with those.”

… and the winner of the “Odd Place To Go” prize:

#3. “Damn. These are some sexy bullets man! Soo sexy in fact they can even make even a gay copywriter straight. (I’m not gay but these bullets are just 🔥🔥🔥)”

I’ll tell you the secret of my sexy, sexual-orientation-flipping bullets:

I didn’t write any of them.

Well, I didn’t write any of them for that Shangri-La promo. Instead, they all came from previous emails that I had written months or years earlier.

I simply took the sexiest one or two sentences from those old emails, stitched them together, and those turned them into bullets that could make a covid skeptic vax up (I’m trying to keep a joke running here).

It goes the other way too. In fact, I feel there’s a 1-to-1 correspondence between sales bullets and sales emails.

When I first launched my Copy Riddles program, one successful marketer took me to task for not using any bullets in my emails that were selling a course about bullets.

My response was that a sales email is effectively a sales bullet, just expanded and adapted for the medium of email marketing.

So if you want to write sexy emails, my advice is to learn to write sexy bullets… and then simply fluff up those bullets from 50-80 words to 300-word emails, with a bit of personal context or a little story.

And if you don’t yet know how to write sexy bullets, or you simply want to write sexier emails, so sexy that virtue signalers will lobby to have them cancelled (give me a break, I’m trying), then consider my Copy Riddles program, and consider it now.

Because I’m running a special White Tuesday event right now to promote Copy Riddles right. My time-limited, special White Tuesday offer is Copy Riddles at the core, plus three time-limited free bonuses, which total $2,300 in real-world value:

1. White Tuesday Storytelling Bundle

2. Make The Lights Come On

3. $2k Advertorial Consult

… along with the White Tuesday payment plan, which allows you to get started with Copy Riddles for just $97 today.

To find out the full details of this White Tuesday event while it’s still live:

https://bejakovic.com/announcing-white-tuesday-copy-riddles-event/

P.S. If you are already a Copy Riddles member, the White Tuesday bonuses are of course available to you too. To find out what they are and how to claim them, take a look at the page above.

If your open rates are excellent but your sales suck

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Yesterday, I wrote an email about a magical, far-off place called Affiliate World. I even invited you to meet me there.

​​To which, I got a reply from James “Get Paid Write” Carran, whose newsletter I am a reader of. James wrote:

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I’m obviously not in the right crowd because I spent this entire email thinking affiliate world was a thing you were making up for the email until I got to the end and realised it was a conference 😂

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James is right — i didn’t explain Affiliate World at all.

I didn’t mention it was a conference, or that it was in Budapest until halfway through the email, or anything about the dates. I figured there was no point — either people are already going and they know, or there’s no way I will persuade them to go with this one email.

Lazy?

Maybe.

Self-defeating?

Maybe.

But I remember hearing something about this a long time ago in an interview with marketer Travis Sago.

Travis a kind of nice-guy Ben Settle. Like Ben, Travis is an expert email copywriter and direct marketer. Like Ben, he has a cult-like following. And like Ben, he has made millions with his own online businesses and has helped others make millions too. One curious thing:

Travis says he writes his email subject lines like he has to pay for each open.

Rather than trying to get everyone to open, and hoping to somehow persuade or convince or explain to them why it’s in their interest to take the next step before they click away… Travis uses each email to select from the audience a tiny pocket of highly qualified people.

There’s a broader approach here – efficiency as a business principle. It’s how Travis has been able to build up a multimillion business selling little $39 ebooks… and how he was later able to build up a second multi million business, selling $5k and $10k and $25k programs and masterminds.

I don’t practice Travis’s subject line approach with this newsletter, not every day. But maybe it’s something for you to think about on this Sunday, particularly if your open rates are excellent but your sales suck.

And in case you’d like to know what to write once people open your emails, so your emails not only get opened, not only get read, but also make sales, you might like:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

8 things not to do in your emails

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1. Give people bulleted lists of how to content without any stickiness

2. Use really obstruse, arcane, or recherché language

3. Open up with something vague and fluffy

4. Talk about yourself in a way that’s not relevant to the topic or interesting to your readers

5. Insult or demean your customers

6. Get needy

7. Have a story that goes nowhere and says nothing

8. Have a listicle that’s not 7 or 10 items long

Um. It might seem to you on first impression that I’m telling you not to do some things in emails that I’ve actually done in this very email.

And you know what they say about first impressions.

They come before second impressions.

And they tend to be right more often than not.

If you’re wondering why I would deliberately tell you not to do some things that I’m doing myself, well, I’ll have more to say about that tomorrow.

For today, here’s one bonus thing not to do in your emails:

9. Write an email that in no way presells the offer you’re going to make

And on that note, here’s a course that has little to do with today’s email, but that might still be very valuable to you:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Inadequate performance

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Yesterday, my friend Sam wrote me that he had downloaded the presidential debates so he could watch the bloodshed.

This morning, my friend Peter forwarded me a New York Times editorial that’s calling for Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race after his “inadequate performance in the debate.”

And then this afternoon, I met my friend Olga, who spent much of the day in bed, and who said the only thing she has done today is to watch the presidential debate.

Olga told me her impressions of the debate. And then she said, “Maybe the debate’s something you could write about in your newsletter.”

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, the following will not be any kind of shock:

I am completely out of the loop. Permanently. Always.

I didn’t even know there was a presidential debate until friends started chattering to me about it via text and in real life.

I most definitely have not watched it.

And as for writing about the top news of the day in this newsletter… as I told Olga, I would never do that.

Well, obviously I’ve broken that vow with this email. But I didn’t know how else to get the following point across.

My theory is that you gotta pay the piper somewhere.

If you decide to talk about the immediately available stuff, the stuff that hundreds of millions of people are talking about right now on TV, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Reddit, among your friends and family, then you gotta try really really hard to have something unique and clever and hot-takey to say.

And even if you try really hard, and even if you expose yourself to looking like a tryhard, odds are good that most days you will fail to say something that hasn’t already been said, better, by a hundred other people, just a few minutes ahead of you.

That to me is an inadequate performance.

On the other hand, if you choose to spend your time and effort reading and watching less available stuff, stuff that’s not being talked about today, or yesterday, or last week, then you have a green, untrammeled field to play in.

For example:

Did you know that the problem of bloody, hateful, two-party elections was solved 2,500 years ago?

Two opposed tribes lived together inside one city’s walls.

They were highly suspicious of each other.

​​Each had a strong us vs. them mentality.

The city was ruled by a king from one tribe, who favored his own and harmed those from the other tribe.

​​Then the king died, or more correctly, he was made to disappear after he showed signs of serious cognitive decline.

How to choose a new king without devolving into civil war?

It didn’t look promising.

Each of the two parties was horrified by the leader of the other side.

Each party absolutely refused to accept the other side’s leader as the new king.

Tensions were rising. Weapons were starting to jangle.

​​So what to do?

Simple. It was the old, “you cut, I choose.”

Specifically, it was decided that the Romans, the party that had just lost its king, would choose a new king from the other tribe, the Sabines. The Sabines could not veto or influence the Romans’ choice.

The Romans chose a quiet, reserved man from the Sabine tribe, named Numa Pompilius.

At first, Numa refused to take command of the city. He liked his quiet life. But after being persuaded that Rome would devolve into civil war without him, he agreed to become king.

Numa reigned for 43 years in peace and prosperity. He founded some of Rome’s most important institutions, such as the pontifex maximus, the 12 month calendar, and the cult of the Vestal Virgins.

Two thousand years later, a clever politician, Niccolo Machiavelli, said Rome owed a greater debt to its second king, Numa, then it did to its first king, Romulus.

Good Lord this has turned into a long email.

​​Don’t write emails like this. Or do. It’s up to you.

If you do choose to write emails like this, I have something that might help. It’s my Insight Exposed course, about my notetaking, journaling, and media-consumption process.

I don’t normally sell this course, for reasons of my own.

But since I’ve already broken one law today, I might as well break two?

If you want Insight Exposed, the order form is below. I will close it down in exactly 24 hours, tomorrow, Sunday, at 8:31pm.

And if you have questions or doubts if this course is right for you, write me before you buy.

​​Here’s how to read stuff others are not reading, and make it useful for your marketing and your life:

https://bejakovic.com/ie/