Research

Looking to get a little off the coaching ship?

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In response to my email yesterday, a reader and former coaching client (not sure he wants me to share his name) wrote in to say:

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Hey John,

Hope all is well.

Good news – having a daughter by end of the month 😊

This sets an exciting challenge for me to dive further into low ticket product sales, ascension, repeat customers rather than clients.

So I can get a little off the coaching ship and buy back time.

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The good news is if you are a coach, and you actually have clients you work with, then you are one lucky skunk.

That’s because coaches have personal contact with their best customers/clients, and the chance to really listen and ask a ton of questions — even very probing stuff.

A coach can get insights into what sucks for his or her prospects now… what they are really after… what they’ve tried before that didn’t work… what possible solutions would be unacceptable to them on religious, political, or dietary grounds.

All this info can go into the meat mincer, out of which comes a beautiful and shiny new offer-sausage that people actually want to buy.

That’s the high-level picture. I have much more to say about the specifics. But about that:

As I’ve been writing in my past couple emails, last year I came up with a new system for myself to help me get more predictable success with new offers.

I applied this system when I had the idea for my Daily Email Habit service. It worked great.

So far, I have only shared my system with the people inside my Daily Email House community.

This month, I will make this system available a bit more widely. I’ll be sharing it with a few people on my list, if I think it can actually be useful to them.

I will make you a deal right now:

If you’re looking to get a little off the coaching ship, then hit reply and tell me a bit about who you are and what you do. In turn, I will add you to a private announcement list, so you have the opportunity to get my system when I release it later this month.

Trump whale research intelligence

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This past November, right after Trump won the election, the WSJ ran a story about a “Trump whale” — a mysterious trader, known only as Theo, who had made a series of very large bets on the Polymarket prediction market.

Theo had bet $30 million of his own money that 1) Trump would win the election, that 2) he would win the popular vote, and that 3) he would sweep the “blue wall” of swing states.

Against the predictions of all pollsters, and against even the betting odds on Polymarket, all three things came to pass, and Theo collected $50 million as a payday.

The WSJ managed to get in contact with Theo. He explained some of his reasoning for why he was confident enough to put down $30 million of his own money on bets against what both experts and the wisdom of the crowd were saying.

That’s how I learned the following:

The normal way to poll people is to ask them, “Who you gonna vote for?” That produces certain results, which as this past election and previous elections have shown, can be significantly off from reality.

But a less normal way to poll people is to ask them, “Who your neighbor gonna vote for?” For whatever psychological reason, this tends to produce poll results that are significantly different than the normal way to poll.

Theo looked at a couple of these “neighbor” polls done in September alongside normal polls. The neighbor polls were all suggesting that support for Trump was several percentage points higher than everybody was saying.

This became one of the data points that gave this guy the confidence to make his ballsy bets, and the info to bet right and win $50 mil.

I’m telling you this for two reasons.

Reason one is if you’re trying to get info out of your readers, it might make sense not to ask them, “What do you want,” but to ask, “What do you think other people would want?” I tried it while initially working out the right pricing for Daily Email Habit, and it gave me useful info.

Reason two is simply that this neighbor polling thing is just another example of how much our own self-centered thinking tends to color how we see the world and how we behave.

I’m telling you this specifically in case you are ever plagued by thoughts like, “Nobody would want to read what I write,” or, “Nobody would want to pay money for this offer I have.”

The sticking point there is the old, I Me Mine.

If you find yourself ever thinking thoughts like — convincing yourself that you can predict what other people think, when it comes to what you are doing or could be doing — then take a lesson from the Trump whale:

The next time you are sure that you know what other people think, take yourself out of the equation. Ask yourself, “Would there be people who would want to read or buy this… if my neighbor were offering it?”

Do this, and you might win bigly.

And btw, today’s email was based on my daily puzzle that went out via Daily Email Habit. If you enjoyed today’s email, maybe you’d enjoy writing emails following daily email habit? Or maybe your neighbor would? Here’s more info in either case:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

I was an idiot then, but today I’m much more mature

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Two fingers on my right hand are crooked — the ring finger, and the pinkie.

They are crooked because back when I was a junior in college, I cut myself in a freak accident involving a butter knife, which I attempted to stab into the wall in a fit of rage.

(I was an idiot then, but I feel I’ve really, really matured since.)

This momentary, stupid action turned out to have major consequences.

I did serious damage to my fingers. I had to go to the ER to get the bleeding taken care of immediately.

A few days later, I had to go into a three-hour surgery to actually fix my fingers, since I’d managed to cut through the tendons.

After surgery, I had this big strange cast on my arm, which had wires and springs that were glued to my fingernails, to keep my fingers bent at exactly the right angle.

I had to walk around the university campus for months with this monstrosity catching everybody’s attention.

Inevitably, every fifteen steps or so, some college bro would stop and stare at me in wonder. “Dude… what happened to your hand?”

After the first dozen times of getting asked this question, I started to glare at the question asker with daggers in my eyes. If I said anything, I’d bark back, “I CUT MYSELF!” My friend Sam, who was my roommate at the time, would just walk alongside me and chuckle at my canned, hostile response.

But let’s get to work. You may have heard of Cunningham’s law, which says:

“The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.”

It’s not just on the Internet. It can be like that in the real world too.

Questions are supposed to be this miracle sales tool to get people to open up and share their innermost secrets. And they can be. But there are certain situations where questions don’t work, simply because they’ve been asked too many times, or because the person is too guarded.

What to do in those cases? Here’s Bejakovic’s corollary to Cunningham’s law:

“If people don’t want to answer your questions, then make an assumption or statement, regardless of how wrong.”

That’s a bit of a tip if you ever find yourself in situations, sales or otherwise, where doing the right thing normally, asking questions, gets people to glare at you or maybe bark a 3-word answer and then clam up.

Instead of asking them, “What happened to your hand,” just say, “That looks like an injury caused by a butter knife.” If you’re right, you look like a wizard. If you’re wrong, you find out the truth.

Anyways, it’s time for me to go to the gym and work out a bit, to keep my boiling rage under control. (Just kidding. Like I said, I’ve really, really matured.)

If you’d like my help writing daily emails — sometimes on strange topics, which nonetheless serve a purpose — then consider my Daily Email Habit service.

The next prompt goes out tonight at 12 midnight PST. To find out more about Daily Email Habit, or to sign up in time for that next prompt:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

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:

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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.

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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.

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

How to heal the partisan divide one dollar at a time

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Here’s a provocative but revealing little quiz for ya:

For every $1 spent by the US government in 2022, how many cents went to military spending?

(I’m asking about 2022 because it’s the most recent year for which I could find data.)

Think about that for a moment, and come up with yer best guess.

I’ll tell you the answer in a second but really, the specifics are not all that interesting. What is interesting is that, if you’re American and maybe even if you’re not, your answer can expose you as being either Democrat or Republican, left or right.

The right answer by the way is 14.2 cents.

Like I said, that’s not all that interesting. What’s more interesting:

Dems tend to guess US military spending is higher than Republicans guess.

Ok, maybe that’s not tremendously interesting either. Maybe that’s predictable.

So let me try again. Here’s the really interesting part:

If you don’t just ask people to guess, but instead you pay them to guess right, or you pay them to simply say, “Dang I don’t know,” then suddenly party bias shrinks by 80%.

In other words, put some live chips on the table, and suddenly, people’s beliefs change.

We know this because a professor at Northwestern, John Bullock, did the experiment. He found the result confirmed over a large number of participants and a large number of questions, involving topics like race, unemployment, and military deaths.

Curious, no? What’s going on?

I can’t say for sure, but I can imagine two options:

1. Maybe there’s extra thinking going on when money’s on the table. Maybe people take a moment to say, “Gee my gut says this, but let me take an extra second or two to think it over, since there’s real consequences to expressing my opinion.”

2. Maybe there’s extra thinking going on when money’s not on the table. Maybe people “know” the real answer, or at least their best guess at the real answer. But when there’s no consequences to guessing wrong, maybe people like to engage in some “extra thinking” — posturing or group identification — and that comes out as a more partisan guess.

Either way, the conclusion is, money gets you closer to the truth.

Of course, I’m really talking about business, not politics.

Prospects lie, or they embellish, or they just don’t think very hard about what you’re asking them. Not until there’s money on the table — their own money, which they just took out of their pocket, and which they are now considering sliding across the table to you.

​​Or maybe they won’t slide it across? Maybe they’ll just put it back in their pocket? Which brings me to a second little quiz:

Are you launching a new offer?

If you are, you can just put it out there, and see if the market buys. No doubt that will give you feedback. But it won’t be very detailed or granular feedback. It won’t tell you what, if anything, you can do to make more sales.

There might be a better way. If you’re launching a new offer, then hit reply. Tell me what your offer is. And I can tell you about this better way.

I know what you did last night

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Well, I can take a guess. It’s not like I have a little camera in your kitchen or anything like that.

​​Also, I don’t know everything you did last night, nor do I want to. But I can take a good guess about at least one thing you did last night.

​​I’m guessing it’s one of the following:

1. You checked the latest Wimbledon results, or

2. You nodded with approval at the news that the far-right party in France lost at the elections, or

3. You read up on the U.S. election, maybe even going so far as to investigate what exactly “Project 2025” is.

So?

Did I guess right?

Did you do any of those things last night?

If you did, you may now marvel at the amazing clairvoyant powers of Cavaliere Bejako.

And if you didn’t do any of those three things last night, well, you really should have. At least one. At least statistically speaking.

A few days ago, I made a list of 10 ways to get an idea of what people are thinking about and interested in, right now.

And this morning, I cross-referenced some of these sources of information. Those three things above were the top three things I saw in my CIA-like sleuthing.

I did this research because I’ve been re-reading the Robert Collier Letter Book, which I have come to believe is the most valuable copywriting book ever published.

For example, after reprinting a sales letter that had helped sell 250,000 copies of an 820-page history book (!) by mail (!) in 1923, Collier says the following:

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The point would seem to be that if you can tie in with what people are thinking about and interested in, you can sell anything. And the particular form that your letter takes is far less important than the chord it happens to strike.

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So there you go. Figure out what people are thinking about and interested in, and you can sell almost anything.

Of course, what people are thinking about doesn’t have to be of general interest — something that will show up on Google Trends.

​​Your particular audience might have a unique and specific obsession right now that only a small number of other people share.

But the point is the same. If you can figure out what that obsession is, and if you can tie your sales message into that, then…

Well, would you like to buy something? Then consider this highly topical and highly valuable offer:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Flamboyant, famously homosexual football club chairman

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A few months ago, a friend turned me on to a new addiction:

BBC Archive.

Sounds… archival, I know, and as exciting as a dusty library.

But the BBC Archive can be a fascinating look into a completely different time and often into places that have now fully disappeared.

For example, today I watched a BBC report from 1979, asking the question, does English football need investment?

Was a time when football (soccer) wasn’t much of a business. Back then, a couple English First Division team owners had audacious ideas such as expanding the number of seats in their stadiums past the 10k mark, or maybe even introducing functioning toilets.

The BBC interviewed a couple of these team owners and execs, including the director of Watford FC, a guy named Elton John.

“Haha,” I thought. “What a coincidence. This football club bro has the same name as the flamboyant, famously homosexual rock and roll star.”

Except, of course, it turned out that the football club bro was actually the flamboyant, famously homosexual rock and roll star.

Elton John has been a diehard supporter of Watford FC since he was a kid.

​​After he became rich and famous, he bought his way into the club. He acted as their chairman and director between 1976 and 1987, and then again from 1997 to 2002.

It’s only in my limited, stereotyping mind that it’s incongruent for a football club chairman and a flamboyant, famously homosexual rock and roll star to be one and the same person.

Maybe you’re nothing like me.

Or maybe you’re a bit like me.

In that case, let me share something that’s really been working for me to get a fascinating change of perspective from the usual.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve gotten on Zoom calls with a half dozen or so people who have bought my courses.

I wanted to find out a bit about who they are.

Oh, sure, I knew all about them already, everything I needed to know. I knew they were interested in copywriting, marketing, and my charming and funny personality.

What else is there to possibly know?

Turns out, a huge amount, measured in tons. I won’t list everything I learned here. But let me just say much of it has been as surprising and frankly eye-opening as seeing a 1970s Elton John discussing the plight of football fans who don’t have access to clean toilets.

I’ve also gotten lots of ideas for new offers by talking to my customers over the past few weeks.

​​Not just via ideas that popped up in my mind while I was listening to people talking. No, the people I talked to gave me specific recommendations and said, “Here, this is what I like to buy.”

So if you’re racking your brains about your next offer, might be time to invest in walking around the virtual bleachers, and talking to a few of the people who are sitting there on Friday nights.

I’ll be applying some of these ideas soon. Meanwhile, I just have a few archival offers, including the best thing I sell, a flamboyant program known as Copy Riddles. For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

“How do you know?”

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Over the past five or so years, I’ve noticed that I:

1. Am listening to the same music, mostly stuff I’ve listened to for decades

2. No longer enjoy going to restaurants

3. Prefer really simple food, prepared simply

4. (If I watch anything at all) watch TV shows I already know, like Arrested Development or Twin Peaks

5. Watch movies that were made up to the year 2000 but not beyond

6. Am no longer interested in traveling

7. Am in particular not interested in traveling to poor places where I can’t have the comforts I’m already used to at home

8. Have a very routinized life — work, gym, reading, walk

9. Am getting more politically conservative

10. Feel I have an explanation for everything — just ask me.

I’m telling you these 10 highly personal things to illustrate a valuable marketing and copywriting tip:

People in your market will often describe their situation with a statement like, “I am getting closed-minded.” I know I’ve been saying this lately as I’ve noticed myself getting older.

Trouble is, “getting closed-minded” is abstract. It’s fuzzy. It can mean lots of different things to different people.

And even to people who might actually agree such a statement describes them, it doesn’t really spark a very strong emotional self-identification.

The fix for this are four simple words:

“How do you know?”

Ask your market these four words.

These four words get to the specifics, the scenes people can truly see, hear, and touch.

​​This leads to emails and sales copy that hypnotize people.

​​And if you want to know why that is, just write in and ask. I have an explanation for it — and for everything else you might ever want to know.