Copywriting

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

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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

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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.

My go-to source of market research

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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.

Breaking the silence after the promo

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Last night, after the 3rd Conversion training call, I got a note from one of the participants. I’m not sure she wants me to share her name, but she wrote:

===

It was so nice to see you on the call. I just wanted to drop you a quick note to say how much I absolutely loved your live class. It was perfectly timed for me, especially since I’m putting out my own offer for a done-for-you course blueprint. Your presentation was not only engaging but also such a clever demonstration of your course content in action – I was taking mental notes the whole time! (And trying to resist writing everything down lol)

===

I’m telling you this because, well, it says nice things about me, and I need all the ego stroking I can get.

But I’m also telling you this because I’ve noticed lots of people who sell online, myself included at times, are guilty of promoting an offer intensely… and when the promo period ends, it’s on to promoting the next damn thing.

Meanwhile, what happened to the previous training/course/book, which had such large promise about it?

There’s largely silence on that point, until of course it’s time to promote the same thing again.

My theory is that today, people are more than ever craving things that feel real.

It’s not simply because of the recent explosion of AI, but also the ability for automated communication, and simply the inhuman scale of the Internet.

When before in history was it an everyday possibility for most humans to write something that will go out to thousands or even millions of people?

Inevitably, we all become more guarded as a result of this. Things sound good, but they’re not actually good… or they might not even be there at all (Google “these cats do not exist”).

That’s why I think it’s valuable to not only do a good job promoting what you sell… not only do a good job delivering it… but also do good job continuing to communicate, even to people who didn’t buy, even after the fact, that this thing you were selling was for real, and that you in fact are for real.

That’s one way to cope with The Nothing that’s overtaking our world.

Another way is simply longevity, persistence, or maybe track record.

A few hundred words of text, once, can be optimized, faked, generated to suit the moment and to deceive the unguarded.

A few hundred words of text, every day, for years, are hard to fake, particularly if those words are going out to the same group of people.

That’s why there’s power in daily emails.

Writing daily for years might sound intimidating. It doesn’t have to be.

Really, it’s just one day’s effort at a time. And pretty soon, it becomes enjoyable and even addicting (ask me how I know).

The sooner you start, the sooner it will become easier, and the sooner you will reap the rewards.

Even if you don’t know nothing about email, or copywriting, or even writing, you can start writing a daily email today.

But if you must have a guide to help you get started, here’s one I created, based on my own real experience:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

937 days’ worth of email ideas, free

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A couple days ago, after I complained that there’s still a reader on my list, Vivian, who hasn’t bought my Most Valuable Email program, another reader on my list, Bridget, who also hasn’t bought my Most Valuable Email program, wrote in to point out where I’m falling short:

===

Key point – where you are falling short is you are not answering the questions:

* Where am I going to get interesting ideas every day?

* How am I going to make the ideas I do have interesting enough to send without making 99% of my current subscribers want to unsubscribe?

===

Bridget is absolutely right. I don’t make the “where to get interesting ideas” part clear on the MVE sales page.

It actually is there in the course — I have a little section where I list four sources where I regularly find interesting ideas for Most Valuable Emails.

The reason I don’t make a bigger deal out of it is that I feel interesting ideas are cheap. They are everywhere, and it’s more a matter of how freshly and insightfully they are presented. And that’s what MVE is about.

I wrote back to Bridget to tell her that. And she replied:

===

You may believe interesting ideas are cheap. They may well be. But Vivian’s afraid she’ll run out, and that’s more important to her buying decision than objective reality.

===

Again, Bridget is absolutely right. So now what?

Let it never be said that I am more stubborn than Andrew Jackson.

And that’s why, I’d now like to announce I am adding one more bonus to my Shangri La MVE event. I’m calling this bonus the Shangri La Library Of Rare and Priceless Ideas.

For years now, I’ve been collecting interesting ideas I come across, whether in books, newsletters, podcasts, or courses.

For each such idea, I write it down, along with the source of where I got it. Sometimes I also add in my own observations as well.

I checked just now and so far I have 937 such interesting ideas. Here’s a sample:

* “To build fascination and rapport, keep asking deeper, more enthusiastic questions” (from James Altucher via his podcast)

* “Use the same link text as the subject line to get clicks” (something Ian Stanley said somewhere)

* “Toil shared becomes no toil at all” (from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives)

* “Trialibility is the no. 1 factor affecting adoption of an innovation” (from Jonah Berger’s Catalyst)

* “Pick out a fun and relevant theme for email promotion events” (from Travis Sago, on some ancient podcast appearance)

Rare? Priceless? You decide. In any case, it’s my contention you still have to do something to these ideas to turn them into fresh and insightful emails. MVE shows you what to do, and it even gets you doing it.

But so you can say you will never ever run out of ideas for Most Valuable Emails, I’m making available my entire Library Of Rare And Priceless Ideas as part of this Shangri La event.

I collected all these rare and priceless ideas and put them into a type of endless scroll known as a PDF file.

If you have the stamina, you can read through them from beginning to end. If you don’t, you can pick off an idea each day, apply the Most Valuable Trick, and turn that idea into a fresh and insightful email that 1) pulls in readers, 2) builds your authority, 3) makes you just a tiny bit better as a writer and a marketer, 4) maybe even makes a sale or 10.

My Shangri La MVE event ends tonight at 12 midnight PST. If you need a reminder of what it’s about:

===

I’m calling this offer the “Shangri La” MVE offer. And that’s because like Shangri La, the two three parts of this offer only appear once every fifty years. Specifically:

1. I normally don’t offer a payment plan for Most Valuable Email. I did offer a payment plan for MVE once, as a joke, for one day only. Well, like Shangri La, the payment plan is back, and not as a joke.

You can get MVE for $99 today and then two more monthly payments of $99. This payment plan is there to make it psychologically easier to get started — in my experience, people take up payment plans not because they cannot afford to pay in full, but simply because it feels like a smaller commitment.

2. I am also offering a bonus, which I’m calling Shangri La Disappearing Secrets.

Over the past years, I have periodically sent out emails where I teased a secret, which I then turned into a disappearing, one-day bonuses for people who took me up on an offer before the deadline.

Inside this Shangri La Disappearing Secrets bonus, I have collected 12 emails that teased 12 secrets — and I have revealed the secrets themselves. These include:

* An email deliverability tip that is so valuable I decided not to share it publicly, but only with buyers of MVE. This tip is something that multiple people have told me I should turn into a standalone course or training — which I most probably will do one day.

* Stage Surprise Success. Step-by-step instructions for creating effective surprise in any kind of performance, whether thieving, magicking, comedy, drama, or simply writing for impact and influence. And no, it’s not just shocking people with something they weren’t expecting. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite of that.

* A daring idea to grow your list and build up your authority at the same time. I have not yet had the guts to put it into practice, even though I have lots of reasons to believe it would work great to build my own authority, and get me more high-quality leads than I’m getting now.

* A persuasion strategy used by con men, pick up artists, salesmen, even by legendary copywriters. I ran a little contest in an email to see if anybody could identify this strategy based on a scene from the movie The Sting. Out of 40+ people who tried to identify the strategy, only 2 got it right.

* An incredible free resource, filled with insightful and proven marketing and positioning advice. This resource comes from a man I’ve only written about once in this newsletter, but who has influenced my thinking about marketing and human psychology more deeply than I may let on — maybe more deeply than anybody else over the past few years.

* Magic Box calls-to-action. Use these if you don’t have a product or a service to sell yet, or if you only have a few bum offers, which your list has stopped responding to every day. Result of a “magic box” CTA when used by one of my coaching clients: the first hand-raiser ever for an under-construction $4k offer.

* A new way to apply the Most Valuable email trick, one I wasn’t comfortable doing until recently. Now that I’ve started using it, it’s gotten people paying more attention… leaning in more… even rereading my emails 3x… and reaching out to reopen dropped business conversations.

* Steven Pressfield (the author of the War of Art and the Legend of Bagger Vance) used to write scripts for porn movies. He once shared two porn storytelling rules. I’ll tell you what they are, and how smart marketers, maybe even me on occasion, use one of these rules in their own sales copy and marketing content.

* A list of 14 criteria of truthful stories. I’m not saying to get devious with this — but you could use these criteria to jelly up a made-up story and make it sound absolutely true. More respectably, you can use these criteria to take your true but fluffy story and make it sound 100% gripping and real.

* Why I drafted US patent application 16/573921 to get the U.S. Government to recognize my Most Valuable Email trick as novel, non-obvious, and having concrete, practical applications.

* Two methods for presenting a persuasive argument, as spelled out by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. I illustrate these two methods with a little public debate that Daniel Throssell and I engaged in via our respective email newsletters. Daniel and I each adopted opposing methods, just as described by Kahneman.

* An infotainment secret I stole from Ben Settle. As far as I know, Ben doesn’t teach this secret in his books or newsletters — I found it by tracking Ben’s emails over a 14-day period and spotting Ben using it in 8 of those 14 emails. And no, I’m not talking about teasing, or telling a story, or stirring up conflict. This is something more fundamental, and more broadly useful, even beyond daily emails.

3. The Shangri La Library Of Rare And Priceless Ideas. 937 interesting ideas I’ve collected over the years from books, podcasts, newsletters, courses. Reach into this library to never again run out of ideas for your Most Valuable Emails.

So there you go. My Shangri La MVE offer:

A payment plan for Most Valuable Email that only appears twice in a century… 12 bonus persuasion secrets… and all the email ideas you will ever need.

This offer is good until tonight, Friday Oct 11, at 12 midnight PST.

If you’re at all interested, the time to act is now. That’s because of that simple certainty I wrote about yesterday — there won’t ever be a better time.

I won’t be running big promo events for Most Valuable Email, because it doesn’t fit my policy of treating previous customers with respect.

On the other hand, if you get MVE now, you will also be eligible for any future disappearing bonuses I might offer with it, or any other special offer or real I will make to new buyers also.

If you’d like to take me up on this Shangri La offer, before it disappears:

​​https://bejakovic.com/mve/​​

P.S. And yes, if you have already bought MVE, you also get the Shangri La Disappearing Secrets and the Shangri La Library Of Rare And Priceless Ideas. No need to write me for them. I’ll add them straight inside the MVE course area.

MVE cancelled

by

No, not Most Valuable Email.

The MVE that’s been cancelled is the Most Vivian Event, the big promotion I announced yesterday.

I had hoped to use this event to pull every remaining non-buyer on my list and get him to buy Most Valuable Email, will-he, nill-he.

My plan was to use I know about promos inside the Most Vivian Event — structure, copy, and most importantly offer:

An “Italian lottery,” giving new buyers a good chance to get MVE free…

A stack of free bonuses that I’ve sold for good money before, totaling the price of MVE and more, so even if somebody didn’t win the “Italian lottery,” they would still feel like they’re getting a steal…

An entirely new bonuses as well, which would reveal all the thinking that went into this promo — basically a little promo course built around a specific case study, to make this MVE offer so valuable that if you ever send any kind of emails, the investment would pay for itself with this one new bonus alone.

I had grand plans to make this event fun, epic, and undoubtedly immensely successful. Except…

It’s all been cancelled.

Reason why:

Each time I got near to settling on the final offer for the Most Vivian Event, I kept bouncing into one problem:

“What do I do with previous buyers?”

I have a long-standing policy to reward early buyers for buying for me. That means I grandfather previous buyers into any upgrades, new runs of a course, or bonuses I end up offering in the future. It also means I don’t feature discounts.

Yesterday, when I had the initial idea for this new promo, I shrugged this question off.

I told myself I’d figure out some way to incentivize new buyers… to reward previous buyers… and to have this promo make business sense for me personally.

But no matter how I structured this offer, there was always one end of the triangle — new buyers, old buyers, me — that was left high and dry.

I realized it’s not a matter of what bonuses or incentives I end up offering. It’s simply a consequence of my “reward previous buyers” policy, and the fact that I have hundreds of previous buyers of MVE.

That’s why I’ve actually never run a bonus- or discount-based promo for any of my offers, outside of a launch. I just never realized it until yesterday.

You might say I’m being stubborn to stick to this policy. And that’s exactly right. Because I want people to believe a few simple certainties when they think of me.

One of those simple certainties is that I won’t screw over previous buyers. I don’t ever want my buyers to think, even in passing, “Huh, maybe I should have waited to buy this, this new deal is better than what I got.”

Yesterday, I wrote that I had clearly been falling short by continuing to sell MVE on its merits alone.

Some people who could benefit from MVE — like Vivian, who wanted something for “coming up with interesting ideas and presenting it in a concise and compelling way” — never even considered buying.

Frankly, that falling short will most likely continue.

But if you have been on the fence about MVE for a while, I do have a special offer for you today. It’s nothing like the spectacle I was planning on. But you can decide whether it’s enough to get you to take me up on Most Valuable Email today.

I’m calling this offer the “Shangri La” MVE offer. And that’s because like Shangri La, the two parts of this offer only appear once every fifty years. Specifically:

1. I normally don’t offer a payment plan for Most Valuable Email. I did offer a payment plan for MVE once, as a joke, for one day only. Well, like Shangri La, the payment plan is back, and not as a joke.

You can get MVE for $99 today and then two more monthly payments of $99. This payment plan is there to make it psychologically easier to get started — in my experience, people take up payment plans not because they cannot afford to pay in full, but simply because it feels like a smaller commitment.

2. I am also offering a bonus, which I’m calling Shangri La Disappearing Secrets.

Over the past years, I have periodically sent out emails where I teased a secret, which I then turned into a disappearing, one-day bonuses for people who took me up on an offer before the deadline.

Inside this Shangri La Disappearing Secrets bonus, I have collected 12 emails that teased 12 secrets — and I have revealed the secrets themselves. These include:

* An email deliverability tip that is so valuable I decided not to share it publicly, but only with buyers of MVE. This tip is something that multiple people have told me I should turn into a standalone course or training — which I most probably will do one day.

* Stage Surprise Success. Step-by-step instructions for creating effective surprise in any kind of performance, whether thieving, magicking, comedy, drama, or simply writing for impact and influence. And no, it’s not just shocking people with something they weren’t expecting. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite of that.

* A daring idea to grow your list and build up your authority at the same time. I have not yet had the guts to put it into practice, even though I have lots of reasons to believe it would work great to build my own authority, and get me more high-quality leads than I’m getting now.

* A persuasion strategy used by con men, pick up artists, salesmen, even by legendary copywriters. I ran a little contest in an email to see if anybody could identify this strategy based on a scene from the movie The Sting. Out of 40+ people who tried to identify the strategy, only 2 got it right.

* An incredible free resource, filled with insightful and proven marketing and positioning advice. This resource comes from a man I’ve only written about once in this newsletter, but who has influenced my thinking about marketing and human psychology more deeply than I may let on — maybe more deeply than anybody else over the past few years.

* Magic Box calls-to-action. Use these if you don’t have a product or a service to sell yet, or if you only have a few bum offers, which your list has stopped responding to every day. Result of a “magic box” CTA when used by one of my coaching clients: the first hand-raiser ever for an under-construction $4k offer.

* A new way to apply the Most Valuable email trick, one I wasn’t comfortable doing until recently. Now that I’ve started using it, it’s gotten people paying more attention… leaning in more… even rereading my emails 3x… and reaching out to reopen dropped business conversations.

* Steven Pressfield (the author of the War of Art and the Legend of Bagger Vance) used to write scripts for porn movies. He once shared two porn storytelling rules. I’ll tell you what they are, and how smart marketers, maybe even me on occasion, use one of these rules in their own sales copy and marketing content.

* A list of 14 criteria of truthful stories. I’m not saying to get devious with this — but you could use these criteria to jelly up a made-up story and make it sound absolutely true. More respectably, you can use these criteria to take your true but fluffy story and make it sound 100% gripping and real.

* Why I drafted US patent application 16/573921 to get the U.S. Government to recognize my Most Valuable Email trick as novel, non-obvious, and having concrete, practical applications.

* Two methods for presenting a persuasive argument, as spelled out by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. I illustrate these two methods with a little public debate that Daniel Throssell and I engaged in via our respective email newsletters. Daniel and I each adopted opposing methods, just as described by Kahneman.

* An infotainment secret I stole from Ben Settle. As far as I know, Ben doesn’t teach this secret in his books or newsletters — I found it by tracking Ben’s emails over a 14-day period and spotting Ben using it in 8 of those 14 emails. And no, I’m not talking about teasing, or telling a story, or stirring up conflict. This is something more fundamental, and more broadly useful, even beyond daily emails.

So there you go. My Shangri La MVE offer:

A payment plan for Most Valuable Email that only appears twice in a century… and 12 bonus persuasion secrets.

This offer is good until tomorrow, Friday Oct 11, at 12 midnight PST.

If you’re at all interested, the time to act is now. That’s because of that simple certainty I wrote above — there won’t ever be a better time.

I won’t be running big promo events for Most Valuable Email, because it doesn’t fit my policy of treating previous customers with respect.

On the other hand, if you get MVE now, you will also be eligible for any future disappearing bonuses I might offer with it, or any other special offer or real I will make to new buyers also.

If you’d like to take me up on this Shangri La offer, before it disappears:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

P.S. And yes, if you have already bought MVE, you also get the Shangri La Disappearing Secrets. No need to write me for it. I’ll add it straight inside the MVE course area, right under the MVE Swipes document.

A step above the A-list copywriters and marketers

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I remembered a little story today. I heard it just once, 3+ years ago, but it’s stuck with me ever since.

Marketer Caleb O’Dowd was talking about copywriter Clayton Makepeace.

Caleb said that Clayton was a step above the A-list copywriters — that he was an alchemist.

Caleb never knew Clayton personally. But here’s the little story Caleb told, which has stuck with me for years:

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When Clayton first came up on my radar I was living in Costa Rica. I had a spare room in my home and I would print out — there were several magalogs that I would print out of his — and I would tape them to the wall one page on top of the other on top of the other. I spent, not weeks, not months, I spent years doing that.

I lived there for a year and a half. By the time it was done I had to repaint the paint on the on the wall for the for the guy who owned the apartment because it was just tape pulling all the paint off the wall. But I studied him for years. There is years’ worth of mentorship and coaching and and education to be had in reverse engineering Clayton Makepeace packages.

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For reference, when Caleb was pasting his spare bedroom with Clayton Makepeace wallpaper, he was already a massively successful marketer.

Caleb had worked and mentored under Gary Halbert, and he had already sold a lot of stuff and made a lot of money.

And yet, Caleb obsessively studied Clayton Makepeace’s packages — because those packages were getting such good results in markets that Caleb was already in, and because of the audience insights that were available in Clayton’s copy.

I thought of this little story this morning, when looking over the results of the 3-question survey I ran yesterday.

I found one interesting thread in the survey results that I hadn’t thought of, a problem several people listed as their “single biggest challenge.”

I won’t tell you what that interesting thread is.

But if you were good enough to fill out my survey yesterday, I appreciate your help. Maybe the wallpaper story above connects in your mind to what you wrote in the survey and means something to you.

And if you haven’t yet filled out my little survey, you can do it now. Maybe simply filling out survey will make the above story more meaningful to you.

I will read, appreciate, and consider every response and bit of feedback I get. If you’d be good enough to give me yours, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/advice

Your advice please

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I’m hoping you can give me some advice. The background:

For a long time, I’ve had the feeling I know the people who read these emails. After all, I write every day and I make offers every day. People reply and buy pretty much every day, at least on average.

But then I started looking closer. I got on actual calls with people. I exported all my ThriveCart transactions, and looked at who was really buying.

I realized my picture of who is on my list not only vague and fuzzy, but it’s often flat-out wrong.

A small fraction of the people on my list reply to my emails. Another small fraction of the people on my list buy my offers. These two fractions are often not the same. And about the rest of my list, I can’t say much at all.

For all those reasons, I’m hoping you will click through the link below and answer 3 questions for me on the next page.

Why might you want to do this?

Because you can tell me what I should talk about that you want to listen to. Because if you have problems, my job is to solve them.

I will read, appreciate, and consider every response and bit of feedback I get. If you’d be good enough to give me yours, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/advice

Your FREE Copy Riddle

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My Copy Riddles program is based on a simple idea:

1. Take a look at a bit of dry, factual text

2. Write a sexy, intriguing fascination or headline to sell your reader on that text

3. Compare what you wrote to what an A-list copywriter wrote to sell that same bit of boring text, in a sales letter that brought in hundreds of thousands of sales and millions of dollars

Would you like to try this right now? If so, here’s your free Copy Riddle:

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Auto Dealer Rip-Off

Car-purchase padding: A prep fee of $100 or more (whatever the dealership thinks it can get away with). The cost of preparing your car for delivery is already included in the manufacturer’s sticker price.

Source: Consumer Guide To Successful Car Shopping by Peter Sessler, TAB Books, Blue Ridge Summit, PA.

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If you’d like to get better writing sales copy, follow the steps above. I mean, follow steps 1 and 2:

Read the text above carefully… then do your best to write a sexy, intriguing headline or fascination to sell a reader on that text.

And if you want to also follow step 3 — if you want to see how an A-list copywriter spun this dry and boring text into something fascinating that went out to millions of people, and convinced many of them to send in cash or check or credit card info as a result — you can find that inside a guide called “How To Turn Fascinations Into Fortunes.”

Specifically, you can find it on page 26, right under the sub-headline that reads, “Over 2 million copies sold… and no wonder!”

(Hey, I promised you a free Copy Riddle. I said nothing about a free answer to the Copy Riddle.)

The good news is, while “How To Turn Fascinations Into Fortunes” normally sells for $97, it is now available to you for the next few hours, because you happen to be a reader of this newsletter, for only $7.

You can read the full story about this offer on the page I’ve linked to below.

Final word about “How To Turn Fascinations Into Fortunes”:

I’m not an affiliate for this offer. I don’t get paid whether you buy it or not. I can tell you I did buy this offer myself, for my own purposes, several weeks ago, before I ever had any plans on promoting it to you.

If you’d like to grab it also, before the price shoots up 13-fold in just a few short hours:

​https://bejakovic.com/fascinations​