Insight Marketing

Turns out, I was right about the best kind of infotainment

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A few months ago, I wrote an email with the subject line, “The BEST kind of infotainment, for me, now.”

In that email, I said the kind of infotaining content that’s working best for me now is not not funny stories… nor personal reveals… nor pop culture references… nor rants and raves.

Instead, the best kind of infotainment for me now is “What’s working for me now,” and its flip side, “What’s not working for me any more.”

After I wrote that email, there was some chatter in other newsletters to the effect of, “Yeah but that’s because John writes to an audience of sophisticated marketers and marketing-savvy biz owners. The same is NOT true for the vast majority of other niches.”

Well, about that.

Yesterday I saw a post titled “The Great Blogging Collapse” by a guy named Daniel Stanica.

Stanica did some research.

Back in 2022, he took a look at 100 money-making blogs, spanning fields like blogging, recipes, travel, DIY, parenting, health.

Today, in 2026, Stanica looked at those same 100 blogs again. Did they grow, shrink, or disappear?

And yes, before you raise your hand, his post is mainly about blogging and about success as measured by SEO traffic.

Still, the conclusions he reached in comparing 100 successful online properties in 2022 and 2026 sound reasonable to me, and align very much with what I said above.

So what happened to the 100 successful 2022 blogs in 2026?

According to Stanica:

1. “The median successful blog lost 85% of its Google search traffic.”

2. “More than half of the blogs experienced catastrophic declines.”

At the same time, a small number of blogs maintained or became more successful. Looking at the commonalities among them, Stanica sums it up in four points:

1. Firsthand experience (“I made/tested/went”)

2. Owned audience

3. Real product

4. Brand search (people search for your name)

To me, that first point, about firsthand experience, sounds exactly like what I talked about when said “what’s working for me now.”

Combine that with the remaining 3 points, and it pretty much sums up what I’ve found to work and what I do with this newsletter.

It’s something that worked in 2016… that’s working in 2026… and that is highly likely to work still in 2036, even with the development of AI… and the great blog collapse… and the impending shortage of sulfur in the world.

If you’d like to find out more about how I and a small group of forward-thinking marketers and business owners are surviving and even thriving in 2026, and probably 2036:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Writing a novel is child’s play

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How do you write a novel?

According to Nobel-prize winning writer Harold Pinter, writing a novel is child’s play.

You just need a starting point, says Pinter. You look around and describe what you see. After that, it’s all downhill.

For example, if you happen to be in the middle of the 1974 movie Accident… which features a scene involving a middle-aged Oxford professor, his wife, and his two children, on a sunny Sunday afternoon in the yard of their countryside house… then you start with that.

As one of the characters in Accident (a cynical novel author) tells another (a naive student), you just describe what you see:

Middle-aged professor… wife… children… Sunday afternoon.

Except, says Pinter via his character in Accident, you can go further. (This is possibly where Pinter sweeps his Nobel-prize winning talent under the rug.)

For example, you can notice that the wife is pregnant.

You can spot subtle signs the professor is having an affair with a girl at Oxford.

You can even claim that he’s reached the age where he can’t keep his hands off girls at Oxford.

And there you go. That’s the start of your novel, or really, your screenplay, because that’s also what Accident is about.

Like I’ve written already, I’m in Bologna this entire week.

The reason is that there’s a movie festival going on, which shows curated old movies I’ve never heard of or seen before.

One of these movies is Accident, which was written by Pinter, and which I saw yesterday, in a sweltering hot theater, with a few hundred other movie nerds who were fanning themselves and wiping off their faces with handkerchiefs, and not out of sympathy for the philandering Oxford professor.

I don’t know why I started out by telling you about novels. The fact is, this email is about movies.

Movies movies movies.

I like ’em old, I like ’em young, I like ’em arty, I like em trashy and popular.

I’ve worked movies into my emails (Accident in this one)… into my books (The Sting in my 10 Commandments of Con Men etc), into my courses (Top Gun in Daily Email Fastlane), and into my offers (Harry Potter for my current promotional event).

Speaking of, today is the last day for my Hogwarts of Influence offer.

I came up with the the idea of Hogwarting this offer because in one of my most popular courses, Most Valuable Email, I already use a Harry Potter movie to make a point. Specifically, I make the comparison between the Most Valuable Email trick I teach inside that course to the Wingardium Leviosa spell from the Harry Potter movies:

“Just say the phrase — ‘make the ‘gar’ nice and long” — and with a swish and flick of your wrist, you can make any email rise into the air and levitate.”

The Hogwarts of Influence offer is disappearing later tonight, at the witching hour, 12 midnight PST.

If you want to find out all I’m including inside the various levels of this offer, before the movie runs out and the theater is locked up, here’s where to go:

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

4 words that tell you what people will do or want to do

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If you must know the four words, I’ll save you from scrolling and just tell you right away. The four words are:

“I’m not going to”

There. You’re done. You don’t need to read more. But, if you like, do read more, and I’ll give you a bit of context to make sense of these words.

A couple weeks ago, I got a message on LinkedIn (yes, LinkedIn, I have a profile there that I never check) from a dude who was reading my “10 Commandments of Con Men, Pick Up Artists, etc.” book.

I saw that he buys houses for cash. We got into a bit of a conversation. I asked him if, while dealing with house sellers, he has found any little persuasion tricks or deeper psychological principles, along the lines of what I share in the 10 Commandments book.

He had a bunch, including the following:

“When a person says ‘I’m not going to’ it usually means whatever they say after that, they’re going to do or want to do.”

He didn’t give me any examples, but I had heard an example just earlier that day. I had been listening to a call by marketer Travis Sago. Travis was talking about a campaign he ran to sell a bunch of spots for, I believe, an $11k program.

Travis’s strategy was to announce the price early in the campaign. People were shocked at how expensive the program was. One guy apparently wrote in to say, “Have you lost your everloving mind?”

Travis worked his magic during that campaign.

That “everloving” dude ended up buying on the final day. And when he did, he wrote Travis to say, “You know it’s funny, I told myself this morning I’m not going to do this.”

When you think about it, it’s obvious that when people say, “I’m not going to,” they are actually going to, or at least they want to.

Otherwise, why would the thought of doing the thing even be in their head? Even more so, why would they need to try to psychologically guard themselves against the thought by telling themselves and others that it won’t happen?

This is part of a bigger psychological principle, and one that you can use to communicate more effectively and influence people on a day-to-day level, whether you want to buy houses for cash, or to make people laugh, or even to win an election.

I cover all that in Commandment VI of my 10 Commandments book. Speaking of, here’s what the dude on Linked wrote me initially about that book:

“Hi John, I’ve almost finished your book (10 Commandments) and just wanted to say it’s delightful and I appreciate the menagerie of experts you drew on! Thank you”

If you haven’t gotten your copy of my book yet, here’s where you can find it waiting for you:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

[Psych Psundays] Metaphors for the brain

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Another week, another issue of my new Psych Psundays series. A few responses I got to last week’s issue:

#1. “Pswell pstuff, John!”

#2. “This felt very personal…”

#3. “Hi John, the Psych Psunday series is fantastic. I had already read about Daniel Kinahan and his father because I’m a big fan of investigative journalism and books written by former police officers, journalists, and prosecutors who fight these criminals. I agree with everything you wrote.”

That’s encouragement enough for me. So let’s mush on.

This morning I listened to an interview with Jason Stacy, who is the performance coach of Aryna Sabalenka, the current no. 1 female tennis player in the world.

Stacy took some audience questions. One woman, very blonde and with very white teeth, asked:

“My question is, when your body is tired, but your goal is bigger than your comfort, what is the mental switch that elite athletes use to keep going?”

What caught my attention is the use of the word “switch.” It’s such an innocent-sounding word, but it exposes the prevalent metaphor we use to think about the brain, which I claim is neither useful nor pleasant.

That unpleasant and unuseful metaphor is that the brain is a machine, or more specifically a computer, or more specifically still, a buggy computer.

I don’t know exactly where this metaphor comes from.

A bit of research today told me that people have been comparing the brain to the new technology of the time for centuries.

In the age of mechanical automatons, Descartes wrote that the brain is like a hydraulic machine.

In the age of electricity, the brain was compared to a telegraph relay.

In the age of computers, John Von Neumann wrote The Computer And The Brain, about the similarities and the differences between brains and computers.

Now, in the age of big data, brains have been metaphorically reduced to “prediction machines.”

The problem is, at the same time, we’ve had people like Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky doing research on just how good humans are as prediction machines.

The result of Kahneman and Tversky’s research is prospect theory, which says that predictions or statistical evaluations done by human brains are consistently and predictably wrong.

In this view, human brains are prediction machines that aren’t all that good, or like I said earlier, they are buggy computers.

It’s not a not a very pleasant way to look at yourself.

What about useful?

Jason Stacy, Aryna Sabalenka’s performance coach, answered the very blonde, very white-toothed woman’s question about the one mental switch of elite athletes with a chuckle and a shrug. He said, “There’s a problem in the world these days where everyone is waiting to feel good to do something versus doing something to feel good.”

Stacy’s advice was to take action, consistently, even if it’s the smallest, most miserable bit of action at the start.

In other words, here’s a performance coach, in an actual measurable and competitive field, coaching at the very highest level, telling you that the “mental switch” ain’t really there to be flipped, and that what you really need to do is to grow and adapt over time.

For the purposes of this email, that’s all the proof I need to tell you that computer metaphor of the brain is not only not pleasant, but it’s also not useful.

But we all crave understanding and we crave simplicity. If the brain is not a computer, even a buggy computer, then what is it? Or at least, how can we think about it in a pleasant and even useful way?

For that, I would like to point you to a book I read last year.

This book doesn’t explicitly spell out a metaphor for the brain, but it makes the case, through various fascinating case studies, that the brain is — shockingly — not a machine but a living thing, an organ or perhaps an organism, like a tree or a climbing vine.

There are no switches to be flipped inside.

But over time, the brain grows and adapts to its environment, in alignment with its goals and the constraints put on it. Also, unlike a machine, which comes pretty much finalized out of the factory, the brain is capable of growing and adapting throughout its life.

Maybe I’m not selling the book well or this metaphor of “the brain as a climbing vine.” I won’t try to sell either any better right now.

All I will tell you is this book is one of the most influential books I’ve read over the past few years because it’s 1) fun, 2) inspiring, and 3) practical. And the idea of the brain as being a living and adaptable thing, rather than a buggy computer, is much more pleasant and more useful to me personally.

If you’re interested in psychology and neurology, and if you want some practical and inspiring takeaways, I highly recommend this:

https://bejakovic.com/doidge

It’s as easy as ABC

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Maybe you’ve heard?

Google and Meta are now on trial for creating apps that are addicting to children.

No?

You haven’t heard?

Well I have heard. Or rather, yesterday I read an article about it.

I have little to say about the actual substance of this case, since I have neither children nor any apps, but I thought something else in the story was very interesting.

Trial lawyer Mark Lanier, who is representing the plaintiffs, was using all kinds of sticky messaging strategies. A few examples:

1. “They don’t only build apps; they build traps.”

2. “They didn’t want users, they wanted addicts.”

And my favorite…

3. “This case is as easy as ABC. Addicting the Brains of Children.” [Lanier also had some toy blocks to spell out ABC]

I looked up this Lanier guy.

Turns out he’s one of the biggest trial lawyers in the US. He’s represented plaintiffs against big corporations like Johnson & Johnson and Merck, and has been able to win ~$20 billion in damages for his clients.

And get this. In an asbestos damage trial, Lanier used the same ABC strategy as in the recent Meta and Google trial:

“This case is as easy as ABC. Asbestos, breathed in, causes cancer.”

My point for you today is as easy as ABC:

Aphorisms. Boost. Conversions.

(Particularly if you can get them to form an “ABC” acronym.)

If you’re interested in more ways to make your message sticky and persuasive, I have a book recommendation for you.

It’s a book I’ve read only once but that has been immensely sticky in my head, in part because the entire message of the book is summed but up in an easy-to-remember acronym (you’ll have to read it to find out).

I think this book is so important if you thrive or starve by how well you persuade people that I have repeatedly said I would include it in the first-semester required reading of my mythical AIDA School.

In case you’re interested in getting your hand on the ABC’s of effective messaging:

https://bejakovic.com/sticky

How to write a really great hook

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A hook, as you prolly know, is how you pull people into your marketing message. It’s the core sexy idea in the headline of your ad, or the lead of your sales letter, or the top half of your email.

A few famous hooks:

* “The lazy man’s way” (to riches, to comb your hair)

* “Do you make these mistakes” (in English, in your underpants)

* A picture of a dapper man with an eyepatch [to sell dress shirts, or a parrot]

So how do you write a really great hook?

I don’t know. I wish I did. Consider the following:

For the past few weeks, I’ve been talking, on and off, about creating a $1k+ offer that sells 3-5 times a month.

At some point, I created a 1-page overview of how I have already guided a few people to that outcome, and I started offering that to people on my list, if they reply to say they want it.

Here are the email hooks I’ve used, and the number of people who responded to ask for the 1-pager:

Jan 10. Hook: “Where to buy crack.” Responses: 26.

Jan 11. Hook: “Taking credit for your rock star clients’ results.” Responses: 14.

I then spent some time talking about the promise of a $1k+ offer, without directly offering the 1-pager. I eventually offered the 1-pager again and…

Jan 22. Hook: “You’re probably creating too many products.” Responses: 7.

7 replies for a free and short and valuable PDF? At this point, I figure I’ve pretty much tapped out demand. I still try one more time and…

Jan 23, yesterday. Hook: “Really great price on coaching.” Responses 39, including my own father, an economist, who wrote, “Dear John i really need this paper for the subject I teach on the prices. Kind regards”

In case you’re as bad with numbers as I am, my point is that the responses I got, while making the same offer to my list, day after day, with different hooks, went like this:

Big, small, tiny, BIGGEST.

That’s contrary to all intuition, but that’s the power of a really great hook.

And if I knew how to write one regularly, I would write one regularly.

But my best advice for how to write a really great hook is to write a bunch of hooks, to serve them up to your market, and to let the market surprise you by which ones they love and which ones they treat like blood pudding.

If you want my help coming up with hooks for your daily emails — some good, some meh, some AMAZING — I’ve got a service just for that. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

The next step

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A couple days ago, I heard a very smart marketer share a story from the trenches:

Back in the day, during the ClickBank wars, this marketer used to do webinars to promote offers from other offer owners.

The owner of one such offer told this marketer, “My upsells are sucking. Don’t be mad if you promote and nobody buys the upsells.”

The very smart marketer said, “We’ll fix that.”

He spent most of the webinar talking, not about the offer on sale, but about why folks need the upsells that will be available if they buy the front-end offer.

In a way, he flipped the script, or reversed the normal order of selling. He talked past the actual thing on sale, and focused entirely on the step after.

Result:

60% upsell take, and though it wasn’t mentioned when I heard the story, I imagine higher front-end conversions also.

In case you’re tempted to file this away in your mental folder of “interesting but useless factoids about webinar selling”:

This isn’t about just upsells, and it’s certainly not just about webinars.

As the very smart marketer put it:

“Any step that you know is coming, you want to presell or preframe that first.”

In entirely unrelated news, let me tell you about my own plans for the rest of this month.

This February, starting February 3, I will be going for a ride. I will also be taking a few folks along with me. You have the opportunity to come with.

The destination is a $1k+ offer, which you can sell 3-5 copies of per month, and which you can deliver in 5-6 hours total to start and then faster and faster each time you sell it.

You don’t need a lot in case you want to go for this ride with me.

I’ll provide the car (well, minivan), the route planning, the music, and maybe some snacks and drinks along the way.

What you will need:

A pair of sunglasses (to look cool), a small but dedicated audience, and knowledge or experience you can pass on to people.

(If you’ve previously thought of or tried selling “coaching” or “mentoring” to your audience, you are most likely ready to go, even if nobody took you up on your offer. We’ll fix that.)

For the rest of this month, I’ll be talking about this ride, and seeing who would like to come with me. I already have people who have expressed interest in various ways, and I will be starting with them.

Meanwhile, you might be interested in my Daily Email Habit service.

It makes it easier to email daily, which is key to being able to sell 3-5 copies of a $1k+ offer even with a small audience. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Taking credit for your rock star clients’ results

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A few days ago, I was on a call with “Rebelpreneur” Gasper Crepinsek.

Over the past couple years, Gasper built an online brand teaching people AI. He’s still doing that, but this year he is going broader, using his background as an ex-Boston Consulting guy to help people build actual and sustainable businesses online.

I helped Gasper launch a $1k+ offer last month.

We worked on it together for a couple weeks, then Gasper went out and sold it to three people in his audience in a matter of days. He then started delivering the actual offer.

Result: One of Gasper’s clients already closed his own sales and is making money as a result of working just a few weeks with Gasper.

About that, Gasper said, “He’s attributing it to me, but I told him, ‘It’s all you.'”

My message to Gasper on our call, and maybe to you now, is to take credit where you’ve earned it.

Sure, it’s smart to sell to people who would succeed with or without you. When they do inevitably succeed, there’s a glow on you as well.

That doesn’t mean you can’t take some of the credit, and legitimately.

Even if somebody is an absolute rock star, you can inspire them… you can push them a bit… you can guide them through a process so they get results faster, sooner, easier, more enjoyably than they might have done otherwise.

In Gasper’s case, his client might have done something similar in another 3 or 6 months. But because of working with Gasper, he’s got another, say, $5k in the bank, today.

That’s pretty much what my situation is with Gasper as well.

The dude was succeeding and would have succeeded more, one way or another, with or without me.

But I helped him come up with a simple, attractive offer that, from the looks of it, will be his main, high-ticket, backend money-maker for the coming year. (Gasper says, “It’s crazy how much people like it,” meaning the offer).

Is having a $1k+ offer, which you can readily sell to your list, something that interests you?

If so, hit reply and let me know.

You can’t buy anything here. But if you do reply, I’ll give you a 1-page overview of the process that I guided Gasper through, so you can go do it yourself if you like.

The BEST kind of infotainment, for me, now

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… is listicles. Let me give you 10 reasons why.

No, listicles ain’t it, though my recent email with 10 reasons why auctions can beat launches did work well. It drew a bunch of interest, including from some very successful course creators and audience owners.

I don’t think it was the listicle part of that email that did it. Rather, I think there were a few other reasons why that email drew big fish from deep under the surface of my email list.

Would you like to know what I think is the biggest of those reasons?

Would you like to know what I believe is the BEST kind of infotainment right now, which draws in even sophisticated and big-time marketers and business owners… and which also happens to be the only kind of infotainment I still regularly consume?

It’s not funny stories about what happened around the kitchen table last night…

… not personal reveals of childhood trauma…

… not pop culture references…

… not historical anecdotes…

… not insightful analogies that put familiar facts into a new context…

… not rants and raves…

… not, like I said, listicles.

Nothing wrong with any of those, and you can weave them into your emails, as I do, often.

But on their own, all of these have become insufficient, at least to draw my weary attention and interest.

Rather, the BEST kind of infotainment, in my immodest opinion, because it is the the ONLY kind of infotainment that still sucks me in on a consistent basis, is…

“What’s working for me now”

(… and its flip side, “What’s not working for me any more.”)

It’s important to highlight this is still infotainment. It’s still there to attract and give your readers momentary pause, to allow people to nod along for a minute and say hmmm.

It’s not heavy-handed teaching or nuance or complexity. And its ultimate and not-so-secret goal is still to sell – you as a trustworthy and successful and relatable person, and your current offer, whatever that may be, as a worthwhile and credible opportunity.

Why does “What’s working FOR ME now” work so well, for me, and on me?

Under the shiny “NOW” hood, it’s still the old-fashioned engine, made up of news and benefit and proof.

Except, in today’s world, news spreads quickly and soon stops being news, often before your audience has had a chance to even see your message.

And as for proof, we’ve all become skeptical and jaded and suspicious.

The fix to both is to share, not “What’s working now,” but “What’s working FOR ME now.” Not, “How TO” but “How I.”

So there you go.

Whether you’re new or established, my suggestion is to write more “What’s working FOR ME now” content.

Not only will it draw in even sophisticated readers, but it will force you to try out new things in your business, make them work for you, and then figure out how to package that up in a sexy and sellable way. And if you’re constantly doing that, you will find success, and soon.

By the way, “What’s working FOR ME now” is an expansive category that allows for lots of different experiments and reports.

One small slice of that category is what I’ve called my Most Valuable Email trick.

The Most Valuable Email trick allows you to create “What’s working FOR ME now” content quickly, without taking weeks or months to run an experiment and collect and process results.

In fact, I used the Most Valuable Trick in this very email. And like I say on the sales page, you can get going with it in an hour from now. If you’d like more info, or to get started today:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Hot new “no cure, no pay” repackaging of a service offer

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Long-time reader and customer Rasmus Gullaksen writes in reply to my email yesterday:

===

A bit unrelated, but I came up with a new ghostwriting offer for my audience a few weeks ago. And I’ve never experienced so much demand for a service EVER. literally had 25 ish people write to be about this offer after promoting it 2-3 times on LinkedIn.

Most LinkedIn ghostwriters sell 6-8 monthly posts for X amount. But that has all the risk on the clients side (if the posts dont perform, the client still pays) and no big upside for the ghostwriter (if 8 posts do well and make a lot of money, the ghostwriter doesnt get anything more)

So I came up with the offer (a kind of No cure, no pay ghostwriting)

1. I’ll overhaul your LinkedIn profile page for $1k (so it sells better)

2. And then I’ll ghostwrite for you for free until you get a new client from your content, and only once that happen, I get a cut off the amount you make from that deal. If it takes 10 posts to get there, the client wins (10 free posts) and then they also get a new client (win for them, win for me) + I don’t make any commitment to post X times for them, I just post as many as I think are necessary + ramp up if things go well etc. I then get paid only if my content gets them results, and that only gets easier and more lucrative as time goes.

Right now im just trying to figure out what kind of business owner has the best business model for me to do this for. Currently helping a motivational speaker, a legal advisor, and a SaaS founder.

===

I think what Rasmus is doing is… absolutely GREAT.

There’s lots of clever stuff going on in Rasmus’s offer above. What I wanna focus on is a super basic thing, which I believe drives this whole thing – that this is a service offer with a guaranteed outcome.

Is that really so hard?

To come up with a specific outcome for the service you provide… and to find a way to guarantee that outcome?

At least for some clients? And to then factor out your risk, by making this offer ONLY to those right kinds of clients?

If you offer services — copywriting, media buying, dog walking — maybe it’s worth thinking about how and for who you could provide a guaranteed, bundled up outcome.

Maybe it can mean you sell more easily… have an easier time with delivery… AND make more money?

Putting the idea out there.

If you already do this, and guarantee an outcome with some of the services you offer, write in and let me know.

I wanna hear your experiences. And who knows, maybe I end up promoting you and your offer, like with Rasmus above.