Copywriting

For sale

by

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:

===

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.

===

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:

===

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.

===

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

Wickedful

by

I like to go see movies without knowing anything about them other than they’re playing at my local movie theater. I don’t want to know the genre, the actors in it, the plot summary, the reviews.

“Let them surprise me,” I say with a magnanimate sweep of my hand, as I hand over my 7 euro at the box office.

And so this Wednesday, I went to see Wicked. I only knew it had something to do with the Wizard of Oz. But I was surprised to find it’s three hours long, and a musical of the kind I don’t like, and a heavy-handed morality play to boot.

I emerged from the theater several years older, no wiser, and looking desesperately for something, anything, a little shred from this ordeal that I could reclaim for my daily email.

And there was something.

In between all the unendful singing, Wicked also has bits of dialogue. And the dialogue regularly makes use of a little word-trick. Each time it happened, it put a smile on my face and lightened the heavy burden of watching this movie.

I won’t spell out exactly what this word-trick is. But perhaps you can guess? I’ve tried to use it myself numerious times in this email.

My point for today is that it makes sense to make up and use your own words, terms, slang, even if it’s nonsense, or silly. It lightens the burden of reading (or watching) otherwise valuable but dry material.

You might shrug at that. Perhaps it’s because you’ve heard this advice before. Perhaps it’s because you think it doesn’t apply to you, and the serious business you are engagified in.

So there’s a bigger and to me much more interesting point I want to share with you. But I will save it for my email tomorrow. It’s not that humor is important, though it is. It’s not that it can be done in every field, even if your field is accounting for mortuary offices.

Rather, the point I want to share with you is a surprising idea I heard recently in the crypto space, which applies much more broadly, to business and perhaps to life.

Maybe you think that’s a grand claim. I can only promise to pay it off tomorrow.

Meanwhile, if you would like to learn a different trick, one that can lighten the burden of reading AND writing daily emails, you might like the enfollowing:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

What’s happening in my business: CENSORED

by

Today I had planned to write an email about changes I’m making to this little online info publishing business, and my plans for the coming months and next year.

But then I stopped and censored myself.

There was a quote echoing in my head. It said:

===

One of the greatest clues I ever had was working at Mercedes-Benz. My most successful clients — STFU. They were, “Lid on it, black box.”

So many times, they would buy a very nice car — I’m talking an SL 65 — but they wouldn’t drive it to their workplace. They would just keep it for their other place, down by the beach house, hinterland property, like it wasn’t part of their public thing.

===

That quote came from business coach and Internet marketer James Schramko. James has been in the industry for a few decades, and has coached big-name, multimillionaire marketers like Ryan Levesque (ASK Method), Patt Flynn (Smart Passive Income), and Kevin Rogers (Copy Chief).

James says it took discipline, but in time he’s learned to keep a “cone of silence” around what he and his clients are doing and planning. He says not sharing his best ideas is what makes him valuable to his clients, and it’s also intensely valuable to him.

Is what James is saying true? Is it right?

I don’t know. Maybe it is. I can imagine the opposite also, that giving away your best ideas is the smart way to go, because ideas are ultimately cheap, while things like relationships and reputation are really where value lies.

But the concept behind this newsletter has always been to share ideas that are first of all interesting and second possibly useful. “True” or “right” is not something I obsess over. I like to try things out and see how they fit. And so — my plans are CENSORED, at least in this email.

The past few days, as I roll out my Daily Email Habit service in private, I’ve been sharing links to content that is “not predictable” for a newsletter like mine.

The link I’m about to share is quite predictable, because it’s James Schramko’s podcast. It’s predictable both because James is part of direct response world, so it’s normal I would link to him, and because his podcast episodes cover (seemingly) standard industry topics.

But maybe something more is going on?

I don’t listen to podcasts by business gurus and I had no intent on listening to James’s podcast either.

And yet, each of James’s past 5 podcast episodes, ever since I got on his email list, got me sucked in, and ultimately gave me interesting and possibly useful ideas I didn’t have before.

Maybe it can do the same for you? If you’d like to try it out:

https://www.jamesschramko.com/list-all

The unpardonable sin in daily emails

by

> be me
> get email yesterday
> feel sucked in by the subject line because it’s the same as the name of a paid training i’m thinking to create
> read email
> interesting opening, about how the author wrote something that got a whole lot of reader engagement and replies
> get to the takeaway
> “Vulnerability”
> feel face drop, groan
> close email and vow never to read another of the author’s emails again

An A-list copywriter, Robert Collier, once wrote that the unpardonable sin in nature is stagnation, standing still.

Another A-list copywriter, Jim Rutz, once wrote that the #1 sin in ad mail is being predictable.

It applies to daily emails as well. The #1, unpardonable sin in daily emails is stagnant, predictable content. That’s why a point of my personal philosophy, which may resonate with you, is to do anything but be predictable.

Right now, I’m in the middle of rolling out my new Daily Email Habit service to people who expressed interest and got on priority list.

While I do that, I have no paid offers to promote.

So let me take the next few days, while the rollout is happening, to share some unpredictable pieces of writing.

I mean “unpredictable” both because these pieces of writing contain surprising ideas presented in insightful ways… and because you wouldn’t expect to have them shared inside of a newsletter like this one, about direct marketing and online businesses.

To start with, here’s something I read two years ago that still pops up in my mind pretty much every week.

The title of it is When Magic Was Real.

The idea that sticks with me is that magic — real magic, not stage magic — is real, and is “the product of belief x belief.”

If you want to read something surprising, insightful, and maybe mind-altering:

https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/when-magic-was-real

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

by

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:

===

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.

Mickey Mouse promos for Mickey Mouse reasons

by

Today, being November 18, is the birthday of Mickey Mouse. I bet you weren’t expecting that?

Mickey made his first public appearance in Steamboat Willy, which premiered on November 18, 1928, at the Colony Theater in New York city. And so, November 18 became Mickey’s birthday.

I only found this out today because from time to time I like write emails on the topic of, “On today’s date.”

But actually Mickey’s birthday fits perfectly to something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. That being:

Lots of businesses run promos around big and generic holidays — Black Friday, Valentine’s, Labor Day.

Some businesses try to get cute with it, and run promos for small but generic holidays — Mickey Mouse’s birthday is an example.

I guess that’s fine, if you are Ford Motors or the local gym chain.

But if you have anything like a personal brand, or want to build personal authority and a personal relationship with your list, then in my mind it’s much better, more convincing, and more effective long-term to run promos that tie into you, your business, or your customers.

The occasion for such personal promos doesn’t have to be huge (“I’m getting married!”) or cataclysmic (“I’m getting divorced!”).

It can be modest and frankly trivial — my “Most Vivian Event” from a couple months ago comes to mind, where I decided (and failed) to run a promo in honor of a reader who wouldn’t buy from me.

As long as you think up a personal occasion and reason to your promo, it builds a connection to your audience while selling at the same time… it makes your promo unique to you and uncopyable by others… and it feels more credible and real than “because Black Friday” or “because Steamboat Willy!”

I’m in the middle of launching my Daily Email Habit service. Of course, it’s turned out to be more work than I had anticipated just to put it in front of the first few people. Once I solve all the issues still facing me, I plan to promote this offer through the rest of this month.

But now that I’ve already written this Mickey Mouse email about Mickey Mouse promos, it feels like a shame not to run a promo myself, my Mickey Mouse reasons notwithstanding.

So I have a special offer for you, which I’m calling the “Better Than Mickey” Promo-in-a-Box.

In short:

If you have a list and an offer, I will come up with a personal, congruent, sexy promo strategy for you — a “Promo-in-a-Box.”

This is something I’ve done dozens of times for my own list and while I was a coach inside Shiv Shetti’s PCM mastermind. I’m estimating a few hundred thousand dollars in extra sales that would not have happened otherwise.

Here’s how this “Better Than Mickey” process will work, if you’re game for it:

1. You and I will get on an onboarding call, so you can tell me about your list, your offers, and your business.

2. I will go away to my cave and conjure up a “Better Than Mickey” Promo-in-a-Box that involves a congruent occasion, a sexy offer (without requiring creating new products), and copy angles (to tie it all together).

3. We will then get on a second call, and I’ll walk you through the promo strategy, answer your questions, and make sure this is something you will be happy to run and can actually implement on time.

I am only opening up two spots for this “Better Than Mickey” Promo-in-a-Box. I’m not sure I will ever offer this deal or anything like it again.

The price is $500.

I can tell you this is a small fraction of what I used to get paid inside Shiv’s mastermind to deliver exactly this kind of custom promo strategy. (I won’t say exactly what small fraction, because that’s Shiv’s business as well as mine.)

I’m asking just $500 because frankly this isn’t about money. While it doesn’t pay for me in terms of the work involved (at $500 or more), I like finding out about new businesses, and strategizing these promos. And I figure that I’ve limited my exposure by just offering two spots.

More relevant for you:

If you have a list and an offer, then running a successful promo can net you thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. Paying me $500 for my experience and help, to make sure it happens and that it goes well, is in my mind a no-brainer.

If you’re interested in this “Better Than Mickey” Promo-in-a-Box, hit reply and tell me so. I’ll take it from there.

Again, I’ve only opened up two spots for this, and I am only responding to hand raises that express interest before tonight, Monday, November 18, at 12 midnight PST.

Yes, it’s for Mickey’s birthday, and for Mickey Mouse reasons. But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m stubborn, and that I stick to deadlines like a koala to bamboo. Or maybe like a mouse to cheese. In any case, if you want your own “Better Than Mickey” Promo-in-a-Box, I suggest you act now.

A price does not need to be paid

by

This is a personal email and there’s a good chance it won’t say anything to you.

Take that as a warning and only read on if you’re not looking for marketing tips or copywriting hacks today.

I’m sitting in a cafe as I write this, my usual refuge on Thursday afternoons when Flor the cleaning woman takes charge of my apartment.

Since I have a laptop, I am required to sit at the big table of computer-bound immigrants, next to the espresso machine, along a window that faces the street.

On Thursday afternoons when I sit here and work, more often than not, I see an old woman walking down the street, who comes to the cafe window and knocks.

The barista then opens the window.

The old woman and the barista chat for a couple of minutes.

The barista then gets ready a coffee and hands it out the window. The old woman takes the coffee, smiles, waves a farewell, and walks away.

I don’t know the agreement or relationship this old woman has with the cafe, but one thing that’s clear is that she is not paying anything for her coffee.

I’m telling you this because I recently caught myself thinking about success, about things I want in my life.

The phrase that popped up in my head was, “A price needs to be paid.” When I investigated a bit more, I found that I believe that in order to have the things that I want, I have to pay a price, and the currency must be something that is dear and valuable to me — time, comfort, my own self-image.

It’s a kind of grocery-store metaphor of life. “You can have whatever you want — if you can afford it, and if you can stomach to pay for it.”

No doubt, this metaphor of life works to an extent. It’s gotten me to where I’m at today.

But grocery stores are only one kind of thing you can see while walking down the street. You can also see, say, playgrounds, trees growing in the park, couples walking hand-in-hand.

If you’re anything like me, and if you think a price needs to be paid, maybe this is something to think about.

Maybe another metaphor of life might serve you better?

Maybe another metaphor might allow you to get what you want sooner, hold on to it longer, and enjoy yourself more along the way?

Maybe, rather than “a price needs to be paid,” it’s possible that “toys are there to play with”… or “a gift is there to be accepted”… or “it’s a free and voluntary exchange”?

I don’t know. But I’ve been thinking about it.

Anyways, all this popped up in my mind while I was doing “The Work.”

I’ve talked about The Work in these emails already. The Work was working for me when I wrote about it, and it’s working for me still.

Plus, right now, I’m in the middle of putting together a new offer. I also recently promoted my biggest course with some success.

So rather than trying to get you to send me money today, I will tell you the best thing I did this year was to read the following book, and to start doing what it says as soon as I got to chapter 2:

https://bejakovic.com/stillworking

Introducing the world’s slowest copywriter

by

No, not me, though I am a worthy contender. The honor goes to:

“Mel Martin was the world’s slowest copywriter. It would take him three to four months to write a direct mail package. He could get stuck for a month on a letter opening.”

That’s from a sales letter written by Lawrence Bernstein, “the world’s most obsessed ad archivist.” Lawrence’s wrote that sales letter a couple months ago, to sell a collection of ads that Mel Martin had written back in the 1970s and 80s.

Who cares about old ads from decades past? Well, people who care about making sales via writing today. Because, as Lawrence says:

“Mel Martin, the ‘father of fascinations,’ almost singlehandedly catapulted Boardroom Reports to $125 million through the power of his pen and captivating copywriting fascinations.”

When I recommended Lawrence’s collection of Mel Martin ads a couple months ago to my list, more than 150 people ended up buying.

If you were one of those people, and if you had a chance to look over some of Mel Martin’s ads in the meantime, I wonder what you thought?

If you’re anything like me, you might look at Martin’s bullets and think, “Pff, I can do the same. So simple, so basic. Just promises and how-to’s.”

Except, there was clearly something magical and mysterious going on during those months that Mel Martin was agonizing over his copy. That’s why his sales letters pulled in millions of dollars year after year, and that’s why he beat out all competing copywriters he was pitted against.

Maybe you can see the skill and thought in Mel Martin’s finished work.

But if you cannot, then there’s the Copy Riddles approach.

Don’t just look at the finished product… but look at the starting material as well. Try to write your own bullets based on that starting material… and then compare what you did to what Mel Martin did.

In fact, that’s what the first couple of rounds of Copy Riddles are all about — trying to sell the same products as Mel Martin, and comparing your bullets to his.

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.

I’m running a special event today to promote Copy Riddles, which I’m calling the White Tuesday event. It ends later tonight at 12pm PST. The core of the offer for this event is Copy Riddles, plus there are 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 and act before the deadline.

How I write sexy bullets without writing

by

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.

My go-to source of market research

by

Comes a question from a reader in followup to my email yesterday, about what I’m reading now:

===

Hi John.

Thanks for sharing this.

I have another question for you, something I wanted to ask from you for some time now.

What are your go-to sources/websites/forums to do market research whenever you’re working on a sales copy related project?

If this is something you teach in one of your paid offers, feel free to dismiss this.

===

I don’t mind sharing the fact that I don’t go to no scrubby forums or websites to do market research.

Instead, I get on a real, live, anxiety-inducing call.

In fact, I have three calls lined up today to do research for the daily email prompts service I’m launching.

Last week, I asked for a show of hands from people who are interested in this service. A few dozen people replied.

I reached out to some of them yesterday to see if they would get on a call with me today.

We managed to schedule a time with a few of them.

And so, later today, we’ll get on Zoom. I’ll listen, ask followup questions, and then think about what I heard.

In my experience, reaching out and talking to people is the fastest way to get information. It reveals stuff that might take forever to find out otherwise.

That’s why it’s my go to way to quickly test out an offer, see if it has legs, and gauge the primary sales appeals.

By the way, if the idea of a daily email prompt service sounds useful to you, then hit reply and tell me what you like about this idea (do tell me why, because simply replying and saying “yes” or “reply” won’t do it). If you do that, I will add you to the priority list, so you have a chance to test this service out sooner rather than later.