Copywriting Archives - Page 12 of 103

Should you write emails that attract your target audience?

January 14, 2024 by John Bejakovic

In a few hours, I’m to board a plane to sunny Andalusia in the south of Spain. Before then, there’s still the gym, packing, and of course, this daily email to write.

Fortunately, a reader sends in a timely question:

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I have a (copy)riddle that’s been on my mind for a while now…

I have a tiny list of 40 people I want to grow and use to get copywriting clients.

Now… Should I keep writing to them about copywriting and marketing, or should I switch to something else that would attract the people I want?

Just because if I keep writing about copy, it is going to attract mainly copywriters and not the business owners I want, right?

What are some of your thoughts on this one?

===

When I first read this question, I felt it was either the world’s most gingerly tossed softball or some kind of setup.

Should you, or should you not, write emails that attract your target audience… hmm… let’s see… and it’s a copywriter asking me this…

Clearly, the answer is yes, right?

Yes. If you want people in a specific market to read your emails, you should write your emails in a way that attracts those people.

That’s what I replied to the reader above.

But then I thought a bit more. And the following question popped up in my mind:

Over the past 5 years, how many copywriters have started email lists with the goal of attracting clients?

And of those, what percentage have ever managed to get a single paying client from their email newsletters?

My guess for the first question is, thousands. My guess for the second question is, fewer than 5%, and maybe fewer than 1%.

So maybe there’s more to this question than meets the retina.

That’s why I’ll talk more about this on the free training I will put on at the end of this month, about how I do it, meaning how I write and profit from this newsletter you are reading now.

Because I have gotten copywriting clients via this newsletter, multiple times.

I’ve also gotten lots of one-time-gig, ongoing-job, and even partnership offers that I turned down, because I had enough work or because I wasn’t taking on clients at the time.

And yet, I’ve written many more emails about copywriting and marketing than I have about the troubles of being an online business owner… and my prime directive has never been to write in a way that attracts my ideal clients.

I’ll talk about this on the training, and I’ll work to make it interesting and valuable to you too, whether you’re hungry for clients or you simply want to write your own email newsletter for other reasons.

Once again, the training is free. It will happen on Monday January 22, 2024 at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. You will have to be signed up to my list in time to get on the training. If you’d like to sign up to my list, click here.

So long, Sparkloop

January 13, 2024 by John Bejakovic

Last year, I wrote several emails in which I recommended Sparkloop, a paid newsletter-recommendation platform.

As you might know, the promise of Sparkloop is quality newsletter subscribers, who will actually engage with your newsletter, all in a completely hands-off manner.

That’s the promise. Here’s the reality:

Sparkloop did grow my list, with a bunch of previous newsletter subscribers, who in theory should have been a good match for my health newsletter.

Plus, Sparkloop allows you to screen for subscribers engage with your newsletter via either clicks or opens, and to get rid of everyone else. As a result, my open rates stayed consistently high.

Sounds good, right?

But around December, cracks started to appear.

I regularly ran in-newsletter polls in my health newsletter. They weren’t getting a lot of participation. I also ran a survey outside the newsletter, on my website. Exactly one person filled that out. I put out a relevant, low-ticket offer. I got no buyers.

Everything I just told you happened with my health newsletter. But it’s backed up by an experiment I ran with Sparkloop on this marketing newsletter.

That experiment was small but perhaps indicative.

It involved newsletter subscribers that I vetted even more closely than I was doing for my health newsletter, both for source and for engagement. And yet, none of those vetted Sparkloop subscribers have bought anything from me, in spite of being on my list for months. None of them has even opted in for the free training am putting on at the end of this month.

The point I want to make is something that’s easy to forget if you’re a marketer:

A name is not just a name. An email address is not just an email address.

It matters how people find you, first interact with you, with what intent, and in what frame of mind.

Of course, this matters for whether they choose to engage with you in the first place. But it also persists over time, even if they somehow decide to give you a bit of their attention to start with. That’s obvious as water in the real world, but it’s easy to forget in the marketing world.

Conclusion:

So long, Sparkloop. Like everything else in life that sounds too good to be true, you were in fact too good to be true.

You might wonder what I will do to grow my list now that I have axed Sparkloop.

I have special plans for my health newsletter.

But for this marketing newsletter, I plan on going back to the three warhorses that have gotten me probably 80% of my total subscribers, and probably 99% of my best subscribers.

If you would like to know what those three warhorses are, come join me for that free training at the end of this month. On the training, I will talk about how I write and even profit from this newsletter, and how you can do it too if you’d like to do something similar.

The training will happen on Monday January 22, 2024 at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. I will send out a recording if you cannot make it live, but you will have to be signed up to my list first. Click here to sign up.

Zero-handclap unsubscriber yawns at my emails

January 9, 2024 by John Bejakovic

Another day, another unhappy unsubscriber firing a parting shot.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve written a few emails featuring messages that former readers leave on that default “what made you unsubscribe” screen.

Most people never write anything, but on rare occasion, I find funny f-yous. And since I’ve been featuring these messages in my emails, I’ve been getting them more often. Like the guy who unsubscribed a few days ago and wrote:

“Emails tend to be too long, clever, and polished. Not dangerous enough. Yawn”

I shrugged. It’s all true. All except the dangerous part.

My emails are exactly dangerous enough — for my own tastes. Because I write with myself in mind first and foremost. I write things that I would find interesting and valuable, and then do a final check to see whether this can potentially be interesting and valuable to others as well.

That means sometimes I have genuinely dangerous things to say. Most days I don’t, and I have no intention of forcing it to sound edgy or to entertain jaded readers.

I could and maybe should end this email right here. But I like to write long and polish up my emails, often with concrete examples.

So I went in search of this unsubscriber on the Internet. What kind of dangerous, unpolished, raw writing might he be into?

I was hoping I would find something I could set myself in opposition to, like a dull, stubborn turtle.

I typed his email address into Google and… up came his Medium blog. It’s been live for the past few months. It’s filled with listicles and how-to articles with headlines like:

“The Features-Advantages-Benefits Copywriting Formula”

“Core Principles Of Copywriting”

“The Four C’s Copywriting Formula”

Unsurprisingly, all these posts have zero engagement. No comments, not even any of those Medium handclaps, though from what I understand, the whole point of publishing on Medium rather than your own site is to get free readers to your content.

The fact is, this danger-seeking unsubscriber could benefit from my Simple Money Emails course.

Simple Money Emails doesn’t require writing long, and doesn’t require over-polishing. That’s entirely optional.

What’s not optional is creating interesting content that keeps people reading, engaging, and even buying, without heavy-handed teaching that doesn’t even get a stupid handclap on Medium.

What’s more, if you insist on hard teaching in your content, you can use the strategies I teach inside Simple Money Emails to liven up your boring listicles and how-to articles.

For more information, or to get the course, here’s the (beware) mildly dangerous sales page for Simple Money Emails:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

I’m open to client work once again

January 8, 2024 by John Bejakovic

This morning, I summed up the money I made during 2023, and then I broke it down by where it came from.

I came up with a whole host of new insights, enough to fuel a week’s worth of emails.

Today, I’ll share just one thing I spotted, and that’s the outsized role of client work in my 2023.

Only a few days ago, I wrote that 2023 was my second-best year ever, trailing only behind 2020, when I was fully immersed in copywriting client work.

But last year, I did almost no client work. Or so I thought.

Because while I only had one client last year, and I only wrote quick and easy emails for this one client, it ended up accounting for almost 18% of my total income for 2023.

It turned out client work was the second-biggest source of income for me in 2023, ahead of most of the courses I sold, ahead of the coaching I did, ahead of the affiliate offers I promoted. And I didn’t realize it until just this morning.

Really, that shouldn’t have been a surprise.

Because done-for-you services are easy to sell. And if they have to do with marketing or sales, they are easy to charge a big chunk of money for. And yet, for the right client, they still make sense, and then some.

All of which is to say, for the first time in a long time, I am actually open to new client work.

Maybe you’d like to hire me.

Not for email copywriting, but for managing your entire email list. This includes writing the emails, but also everything else that goes with making money via a list, including picking offers, organizing promotions, and even doing things to grow the list, in case that makes sense.

Basically, I handle everything, take this worry off your plate, and make you money, probably much more than you’re making now.

And since this email is quickly turning into a sales pitch, let me give you some proof that this is something I am qualified to do:

One is my experience with this newsletter, and making a good living at it.

But more importantly, two is my experience managing the email lists of clients who had much much bigger businesses than mine.

I’ve written about this experience before. But the most interesting and notable was managing two lists of ecommerce buyers, each with over 70k names, each bringing in multiple millions of dollars in sales per year via daily emails alone — all of which I was doing.

So if you have an email list that you’re not monetizing at all… or that you are not monetizing well… or that you simply don’t want to manage yourself any more, then hit reply, and let’s talk. Maybe we can work together.

Would you bet on it?

January 5, 2024 by John Bejakovic

A few weeks back, I was talking to a successful copywriter, and he mentioned a stupid job he had just finished.

The client was a moron, the product a disaster, and there was little to no hope any of it would sell.

But the copywriter got paid well to write the sales letter. And he did it, and since he’s a good copywriter, he did a good job with the copy. Then he got his money and he moved on.

I used to have that same attitude.

But I don’t any more. Because I found in time that working on hopeless projects is not good long-term policy — not emotionally, not financially, not careerly.

Today, I’d like to give you a different perspective.

These days, when a new opportunity comes my way, I ask myself, “Would I do this if I were getting paid on commission only? Would I bet on it?”

It doesn’t mean that I actually only do stuff on commission. That’s often not practical, and it’s sometimes not even desirable, for me or for the other party.

But if I wouldn’t accept this opportunity if I were getting paid only based on results, if I’m not confident enough that it will be a success that I would bet on it myself, then I don’t do it at all.

I’ve applied this to client work… I’ve applied it to coaching that I’ve been doing over the past year… I will start to apply it to courses and trainings I’m thinking of creating.

Again, it doesn’t mean offering courses for free and hoping to somehow get paid later.

But it’s a valuable thought experiment. If I could somehow track what extra money this imagined course would bring in my students’ lives… and if I knew I could get, say 5% or 10% of that extra money… would that pay me enough?

Often, the answer is no. Even if I could make a super-thorough and valuable course.

Because if that course only attracts people who will never go through it… or who will go through it but never implement it… or who will implement it but who are not in a position to ever profit from it… then the total extra value created out of all of that is a big beefy zero. And 10% of zero is zero.

On the other hand, sometimes I would bet on it.

And if there’s one of my existing courses that I would bet on, that I would sell for only a percentage of future results, if such a thing were feasible, it’s Copy Riddles.

I’d bet on Copy Riddles because some of the previous people who have gone through this training have written in to tell me the results they ascribe to this course.

Some of those results are private because those people asked me not to share them. But some are public, and you can find them on the final page of the Copy Riddles sales letter. If you’d like to see that:

https://bejakovic.com/cr-3/

Remember, all I’m offering is the truth, nothing more

January 2, 2024 by John Bejakovic

A few days ago, I got a question from a reader:

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Hi John,

What are the differences between “most valuable email” and simple money emails”? Thanks!

===

Now get ready for the big bland takeaway from this email, which will probably be as familiar to you as the taxes you have to pay:

Facts and figures rarely persuade, and often they don’t even inform.

For example, I could have replied to my reader’s question above by telling him the facts and figures of my two courses — the prices, the main promises, the intended audiences.

But that stuff is literally in the half page of deck copy on the sales pages for the two courses. This reader knows about those sales pages and clearly doesn’t want to read them, or maybe has even read them, but the facts and figures failed to mean much.

So what to do? Because this is hardly one reader asking about my specific courses. This is how most of us act and think and feel most of the time about most things.

Certainly, if you have customers or prospects, this is how most of them are. They will not read the well-researched facts and figures you send their way, or maybe they will even read, but those facts and figures won’t mean much.

One powerful strategy when facts and figures fail is to stop being so damn linear, logical, and thorough, and to instead make your point in an associative, intuitive, non-linear way.

In other words, instead of facts and figures, give people a metaphor. Let me give you an example:

I recently rewatched the first Matrix movie. To my mind, that movie is the richest source of powerful metaphors that’s come out in pop culture over the past 30 years (and longer, probably going back to the original Star Wars movie). It’s well worth rewatching from time to time so you have it close at hand when writing your marketing material.

But back to my reader’s question and the difference between Simple Money Emails and Most Valuable Email.

My best answer is that Simple Money Emails is like the kung fu, the use of semiautomatic weapons, the piloting of the fighter helicopter that Neo and Trinity and Morpheus can own in an instant with the push of a button thanks to their loading program.

These are powerful and practical skills, which look incredibly cool to the uninitiated, but which ultimately anybody can do and profit from very quickly — in the Matrix, to fight and destroy; with Simple Money Emails, to write quick and easy messages that make money and keep readers reading.

On the other hand, Most Valuable Email is like the little bald-headed monk-child at the Oracle’s house in the Matrix, the one who tells Neo that there is no spoon.

Really, at the core of MVE is a similarly simple but profound idea.

It’s not an idea that is meant for everyone, but only for a small group of pre-selected people.

However, if you can accept this idea and make it your own, you can start to bend reality — including both your readers’ reality, and your own.

This makes it so you ultimately don’t need to rely on the email copywriting equivalents of kung fu or semiautomatic weapons or even fighter helicopters, because the ultimate results happen simply via “inner work” of a sort, by just absorbing and repeating the mantra that there is no spoon.

Now, if you are interested in either of these two courses, I bet you still have questions even after this metaphor. But I imagine you might have a better sense which of the two courses is really right for you.

If you’re looking for practical, result-oriented, quickly acquired skills, then it will be Simple Money Emails.

If you’re looking for mastery and a long-term practice that will take you to places you cannot imagine yet, then it will be Most Valuable Email.

You can get your remaining questions answered on the sales pages for the two courses. In the slightly pompous words of Morpheus:

“I can only show you the door. You’re the one who has to walk through it.”

Dating and business advice to a needy blackbird

December 30, 2023 by John Bejakovic

A few days ago, I was minding my own business, washing the dishes. The weather was warm so I opened the window.

Just as I was in the middle of scrubbing the salad bowl, a little blackbird landed on my windowsill.

“CHEEP,” said the blackbird.

“Oh hello there,” I said. “How do you do?”

The blackbird paced for a moment and then sat down on the windowsill. He seemed to be getting comfortable, which made me frown and pause my dishwashing. And then the blackbird spoke:

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Interesting that you ask that. Very interesting.

Something I am really struggling with at the moment is securing a mate.

I can’t get a mate for my familybuilding services. Even when I catch the eye of female blackbirds, they seem to smell my neediness from a mile away even if I don’t reveal it intentionally.

I wanted to ask:

How would you go about getting a mate if:

===

… and then the blackbird listed his unique mate-getting situation, which happens to be the same unique situation faced by all single blackbirds, crows, and seagulls, as well as by all individuals, whether human or avine, who are hoping to go from zero to one in any endeavor that involves selling yourself.

I’ve long ago decided that I don’t want to be in the business of taking people or birds from zero to one.

So I just nodded to the blackbird in understanding, picked him up, placed him on the outside window sill, and closed the window shut.

That said, I do have one piece of advice.

I’m only sharing it because it applies to anybody who is looking to do anything new and frightening, whether they are beginners or much more advanced.

It applies to newbie copywriters looking for their first client… to experienced copywriters looking to send their first email to their own list… to business owners looking to go into a drastically more upscale market and charge 2x or 3x or 10x of what they are charging now.

It also applies to securing a mate. In fact, this piece of advice is something I heard from the infamous pick-up coach Owen Cook, aka RSD Tyler, the villain in Neil Strauss’s book The Game.

Owen was talking about the horrifying prospect of flying up to an attractive and unfamiliar female blackbird, in the middle of a park with lots of other blackbirds around, and striking up a fun and natural interaction.

Perfectly easy if you have total belief in yourself and your worth.

Perfectly impossible if you are overwhelmed by fear and self-doubt.

So here’s Owen’s observation:

“The halfway point between fear and total belief is indifference.”

You can’t go from fear and neediness to total belief and confidence.

But you can go from fear and neediness to indifference.

One way to do it is repeat exposure in a short enough period of time.

Go and cheep at seven attractive and unfamiliar blackbirds today. Each of those interactions might go horribly, though they probably won’t.

But whatever the outcome of the interactions, by the end of the seven, you will realize you are still alive. In fact, you are perfectly fine.

Do this a few days in a row, and those innate survival mechanisms, which underlie both fear and neediness, will begin to get habituated and calm down. You will start to get indifferent. And that’s the halfway point to total belief and confidence.

In other words, if you think you have a neediness problem… what you really got is an activity problem.

That’s all the free advice from Bejako’s windowsill for today.

If you’d like to buy something from me, I can recommend my Simple Money Emails training.

No, Simple Money Emails won’t replace the need to actually write and send emails, whether for your own business or for a client business.

But Simple Money Emails can teach you my effective one-two system for writing emails, much like this one, that make sales, keep readers reading, and keep birds chirping. If that’s an outcome you’d like as well:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

13 things mentally strong marketers do

December 28, 2023 by John Bejakovic

I will tell you about the 13 things in a second, but let me first set it up with a story:

Yesterday I listened to an interview with Amy Morin, who has created a publishing empire starting with her 2014 book 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do.

Morin has since written 13 Things Mentally Strong Parents Don’t Do… Strong Women Don’t Do… Strong Couples Don’t Do… you get idea.

She has sold hundreds of thousands or millions of copies of her books.

And yet, she said that she never hit bestseller status in the first week after publication.

In fact, the original 13 Things book took a whole year to reach bestseller status.

How did it happen?

A year after Morin published 13 Things, Rush Limbaugh mentioned it on his radio show.

”Today I will talk about 13 things mentally strong people don’t do,” Limbaugh said.

But he never got around to it.

That was Monday.

(Are you starting to guess the 13 things that mentally strong marketers do???)

The next day, Limbaugh mentioned 13 Things again. “Yesterday I didn’t manage to get to it, but today I will talk about 13 things mentally strong people don’t do.”

Again the show ran long, and again Rush didn’t talk about Morin’s book or the 13 things inside it.

This went on for the whole week. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday…

(By the way, we are getting really close to the 13 things that mentally strong marketers do. Bear with me.)

Finally, on Friday, Rush managed to list Morin’s list of 13 things mentally strong people don’t do.

But by then, bookstores had already sold out of all copies, and 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do had become a bestseller for the first time.

Point being… should I tell you?

Well, I might as well, instead of saving it for another email. The 13 Things Mentally Strong Marketers Do are:

1. Tease

3. Oh, I don’t know, tease?

4. How about teasing for a change?

5. Tease

6. Tease

7. Yep, still teasing

8. I think you now know where it’s going, and that’s teasing

9. I’ll give you a hint — it’s not giving away the secret. It’s kind of the opposite of that. Can you guess what it is?

10. Tease

11. Just in case it’s not clear: Tease

12. Tease

13. And tease some more!

It’s not easy to tease to its fullest effect. You might get queasy along the way. You might get bored. You might give in to angry readers who tell you to stop teasing already and tell them the secret or sell them the product already.

That’s why it takes a mentally strong marketer to tease to its full power.

And now that I’ve told you that, let me quickly mention I will rerelease my Insight Exposed training, all about my unique and supremely valuable journaling and notetaking system, some time in January.

For today, all I can offer you is my Most Valuable Email.

I released that training some 15 months ago.

I’ve been teasing it mercilessly ever since in these emails.

I always think I’ve gone too far, revealed too much, or tapped out reader curiosity.

And yet people continue to buy. So I will continue to tease Most Valuable Email and what the Most Valuable Email trick might be. In case you want to scratch the itch and find out:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

3 most not-boring emails I wrote this year

December 24, 2023 by John Bejakovic

A few days ago, I sent out an email with the subject line, “A primer on worldbuilding.” I got a reply to that email from Howard Shaw of Chester Toys, a UK toy wholesaler that’s been in business for 60 years. Howard wrote:

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Don’t ask me why, but I just felt like replying….

‘John Bejakovic - never a boring email.

I always learn something or receive a nugget to ponder on.’

Anyways, all the best for the festive season and may 2024 be good to you.

===

I followed up with Howard to ask if I could use his comment in an email. He said he would be offended if I didn’t. So here we are.

“Yah great for you and Howard,” I hear you saying. “Quite the love-in. But what about me? Where’s your ‘not boring’ email now? I don’t see anything particularly interesting or valuable so far today.”

True. It’s hard to write something not-boring every day.

I know, because I just spent the past one-and-a-half hours going through the 360+ emails I’ve written since the start of this year.

Most of my past 360+ emails I just scrolled through. I vaguely remembered writing them. They did their purpose at the time. But I certainly didn’t need to reread them.

However, some emails I did reread.

A few of those made me chuckle.

And a very few made me stop and think.

The emails that made me stop and think weren’t the ones that got the most replies and praise from readers.

They weren’t even the ones that made the most sales.

But looking back from today, at the end of the year, these top emails were somehow most interesting to me, as ideas that I should remember or practice, or because they sparked a change in how I how do marketing or how I write.

Over the course of the entire past year, I noted down 14 such top emails.

I then narrowed them down even more to the most not-boring 3, using myself as a sounding board.

In case you are looking for some not-boring emails, you can find them below. Don’t read any of them. Or read just one. Or read all three if you have got the time and stamina.

And like Howard says, all the best for the festive season to you.

How to become in-demand in your niche even if you have no contacts, portfolio, or good sense

Why the bathroom is a great place to negotiate

10 lessons from the ClientRaker promo