Direct Marketing

If you’re struggling to sell continuity…

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This morning, I got a DM on Skool from a business owner in Australia, who wrote:

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Hey John, I saw you promoting Ronin, how’s the signups going on your side? I’ve sent a couple of emails but only 50 odd clicks which is pretty low. I’m finding it a challenge to convey the real value of what Travis teaches without sounding like a scammy hypester!

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The background is that the past few days, I’ve been promoting Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin membership program. It’s a membership I’m personally signed up to, as is the business owner from Australia above who wrote me this morning.

So far, I’ve sent 4 emails to promote Ronin. I’ve had a few hundred people click through, but I have only had a handful of people sign up for the free trial.

I’m not bothered by that result.

Travis’s community is after all built around Travis, and selling my audience into a paid community built around a person they don’t really know is a tough ask.

Plus, Royalty Ronin is very expensive, and I figure people are wary of signing up for a $300/month subscription, even if they get a week’s free trial to make up their minds.

I keep cheerfully promoting the free trial of Royalty Ronin because 1) every day, I’m still getting more people to opt in, and 2) even if a few folks decide to stay signed up past the trial, it’s going to be long-term good for me and good for them.

That said, I thought it was actually a curious choice from Travis Sago to start selling Royalty Ronin as a per-month subscription (something he only started now, as far as I know).

That’s because I remember one training of his, and the question of continuity programs came up. Travis explicitly shared his philosophy, which was “Don’t sell continuity.”

That doesn’t mean you can’t get paid recurring month-to-month. It simply means how you price and position your existing offer (yes, the one you’re selling via continuity) in the audience’s mind.

Travis had a small, counterintuitive twist for making recurring sales, which gets you a bunch of money up front as well as more people to pay you month-to-month than if you just offer a monthly subscription.

If you yourself have a continuity program that’s not making as many sales as you like, this info could be gold for you. Or it might be something you choose to ignore, the way Travis seems to be doing now, for reasons of his own.

In any case, if you’re already signed up for a trial of Royalty Ronin, you can find this recurring-income-without-continuity tweak inside the “$1k a Day in 1 Hour a Day” training in the Ronin course area.

And in case you haven’t already signed up for trial of Ronin, but you would like to see what it’s about, and whether it’s worth your time and attention, then here’s more info on the membership from Travis himself:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

P.S. If you’ve already signed up for trial of Royalty Ronin via my link above, forward me Travis’s welcome email, the one with “Vroom” in the subject line. I have a small but growing bundle of bonuses that’s waiting for you as a way of saying thanks for taking me up on my recommendation.

Why discounting fails to drive sales, even when it’s by a lot

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A while back, I talked to a business coach, somebody who has a lot of experience with online marketing.

She told me about how she launched a new membership… how she offered a launch discount… how she even ended up increasing the discount over what she had initially planned.

Result:

One person ended up signing up.

Does this mean this new membership offer clearly sucks, since only one person bought even at a double-discounted launch price?

I told this business coach something that took me too long to internalize:

Discounting only works if people already value the thing you’re selling at the full price you’re selling it for.

In short, 20% off nothing is still nothing. So is 50% off.

The long term fix for this is your ongoing presence in your audience’s minds… trust and credibility built up by days and weeks and months of advertising yourself… sharing case studies of people who bought your offers and got value from them… and repeatedly driving home the fact that your offers sell for the price you are claiming for them, and that they’re worth every penny and in fact much more.

That’s how you convince people that, say, your membership is actually worth $300, and is even a steal at that price.

Good news:

There’s also a short-term fix. You can sell your offer at full price, and have people buy it, even if they don’t yet value the thing you’re selling at the price you’re selling it for.

This short-term fix is an obvious idea, but again, it took me too long to really internalize.

It finally clicked for me last year, via a little-known resource I was turned onto by marketer Travis Sago.

Travis is a very clever and very creative guy when it comes to Internet marketing… but he’s also a very thorough student of marketing and copywriting classics.

One of the things I have gotten via first stalking Travis online, and eventually paying him a lot of money for his marketing education and ideas, is simply exposure to really great, simple, often very old marketing ideas, which have made me much more money than the large sums I have paid Travis.

Speaking of which:

Yesterday, I started promoting Travis’s Royalty Ronin community as an affiliate.

I paid Travis $3k over the past year for access to Royalty Ronin and for a suite of his courses, which he makes available for members of Royalty Ronin.

I also recently renewed my membership to Royalty Ronin, ahead of schedule, for another year, in one lump sum payment of $1k.

Good news, part 2:

If you like, you can now get inside Royalty Ronin for a little less than the $3k I paid over the past year… and less even than the $1k I paid in a lump sum a few weeks ago to renew.

Specifically, you can get inside Royalty Ronin for free, because Travis has started offering a 7-day free trial.

Like I wrote/said yesterday, there aren’t many affiliate offers I’m wiling to promote. That’s because most are simply not good enough… because most aren’t a good fit for my audience… because I’m simply not enthusiastic about most of them.

On the other hand, I’m 110% enthusiastic to promote Travis’s Royalty Ronin, and all the multi-thousand dollar courses that come as bonuses, because I’ve so thoroughly benefited from them, and because I continue to benefit from them.

If you’d like to test out, look around, and even profit from Royalty Ronin, for free, for a week, you can do so here:

​https://bejakovic.com/ronin​

P.S. If you already signed up for a trial of Royalty Ronin via my affiliate link above, send me an email to let me know. Skool doesn’t let me see who has signed up, so the only way I know is if you write me.

And if you do write me to let me know, I’ll send you a recording of my Heart of Hearts training, about how to discover what the people in your market really want, so you can better know what to offer them and how to present it.

I previously planned to sell Heart of Hearts for $300, along with a few bonuses. I even had a few people pay me $300 for it, before I changed my mind, pulled the offer, and refunded their money. (I simply didn’t have time or desire to create the promised bonuses.)

Good news, part 3, is that Heart of Hearts is yours free, because you’ve taken me up on this trial of Royalty Ronin.

Plus, as an extra bonus when you write me, I’ll tie up this email, and I’ll tell you the short-term fix I mentioned above, for getting people to buy your offer at the full price even if they don’t value it yet. I’ll even tell you the little known resource, which I was clued into via Travis Sago, that finally made this click in my own head.

Magic Cave of Money-Making Opportunities

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I have a new offer for you today.

It’s an affiliate offer, which I’m calling the Magic Cave of Money-Making Opportunities, because it’s been that for me over the past year.

I’ll have more to say about this offer over the coming days.

For now, I’ve recorded a video to try to tempt you into giving it a whirl.

If you’re curious, take a look here:

Magic Cave of Money-Making Opportunities

The future of Internet marketing

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In my email yesterday, I asked for questions. Well, I got questions. For starters, reader Victoria Gordon writes in to ask:

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I have a question: where do you see internet marketing going in the next few years? This has been a volatile period—TikTok ban threats, boycotts of various platforms, and even this iOS inbox sorter that led to me missing a bunch of emails for a few days. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the future.

===

Just today, while pumping some iron (ie. I was at the gym), I was listening to a podcast by two very successful, very influential, but relatively low-profile Internet marketers.

One of them brought up a business model by a company I will only call Mystery Business.

Mystery Business is not doing Internet marketing or really anything related. But they are in an industry in turmoil, much like Internet marketing. I’ll call this other industry Turmoil Industry.

I looked up some facts just now. Overall returns in Turmoil Industry are about 20% on average over a two-year period. In other words, put in a dollar today into Turmoil Industry, and you get back $1.20 in two years’ time.

On the other hand, Mystery Business, with its unique business model, outperforms the average of Turmoil Industry. And how.

Mystery Business has a return on investment of 820%. In other words, put in a dollar today, and you get back $8.20 when all is said and done. And for the record, Mystery Business has been doing this for 25 years now.

I bring all this up because I believe what Mystery Business is doing is a great answer to Victoria’s question above. Not only in Turmoil Industry… but in Internet marketing as well.

In fact, one of my former clients, a highly successful but relatively low-profile Internet marketing company, has been thriving over the past several years, using pretty much the same playbook as Mystery Business.

This business model isn’t very obvious. It’s not something you will spot by reading sales emails or watching VSLs. But it is something many other people could be successful with, if they only knew about it.

After I listened to that podcast, I had the idea to share what I learned, and the connections I made to Internet marketing, as an answer to Victoria’s question in my email today.

But then, I remembered marketing etiquette.

It’s not polite to jump out of nowhere and hit people over the nose with useful and interesting and novel information. Rather, you gotta tease and taunt people with said information, over a long period of time, and get them to gradually build up their own desire and appreciation for this information when it does arrive.

And since I’m a polite person, I decided to mind my manners. I obfuscated the details above. But I will promise you the following:

I’ll reveal the details of Mystery Business and Turmoil industry, plus how they foreshadow the future of the Internet marketing industry, inside one of the bonuses will be releasing with my new book, full title:

10 Commandments of Con Men, Pick Up Artists, Magicians, Door-to-Door Salesmen, Hypnotists, Copywriters, Professional Negotiators, Political Propagandists, Stand Up Comedians, and Oscar-Winning Screenwriters

My goal is to finish and publish this book by March 24.

So far, some 340 people have expressed interest in this book, which makes me hopeful that the launch will be a success.

At the same time, it just puts extra pressure on me. I still have to complete the book, and a lot to write. And I have to do a good enough job that readers feel their money and time and attention were well-spent. Not much sense in having a list of past buyers if it’s a bunch of disappointed or burned buyers.

In any case, if you are interested in the topic of this book, and you’re thinking you might wanna get a copy when it comes out, click below. I’m planning some launch bonuses and I will be dripping them out early to people on this pre-launch list:

​​​​Click here to get on the bonus-dripping pre-launch list for my new 10 Commandments book​ ​​

Why I collect personalization data I never use

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Bridget Holland, a marketer out of Sydney, Australia, who runs a content marketing agency called NoBull Marketing, writes in with a question:

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I did a presentation for a business networking group yesterday about email marketing, and I used one of your emails as an example. (Frequency, formatting and results more than content. I was comparing it to a nicely formatted monthly email with stacks of articles, and arguing that either could work but you have to find out what was right for you and your market.)

For the first time ever – oops, embarrassing – I realised that you don’t use those first names you collect when people subscribed. (I had to go check that you collected them!) That you have no opening greeting at all.

So the question is:

* Why don’t you use greetings? Did you ever? If you did and you’ve stopped, has it made a difference? Either for the entire list, or for new subscriber behaviour?

* Why don’t you use personalisation? And since you don’t, why do you collect first names?

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I never used personalization in my emails because, like I wrote a few days ago in the context of calibration, it feels fake to me.

I don’t like it when people do it in emails I read, particularly in the body of the email. You know what I mean, [firstname]?

In the words of David Ogilvy, “The customer is not a moron. She’s your wife.” Or your mom, or your college roommate from UC Santa Cruz, or your ex-flatmate from Budapest, or an ex-girlfriend.

(The only person I’ve seen using personalization well is Daniel Throssell, who gets creative with it. However, in order to make that work, you have to police new subscribers to make sure they put in their real name when they sign up, which I don’t feel like doing.)

So like Bridget asks, why still ask for a name, if I’m never going to use it in an email?

Two reasons:

1. Most people do fill it out, and honestly. I make an occasional habit of doing a bit of detective work on new subscribers, and this bit of info can be helpful.

2. Filling in a first name is a commitment and give for those who choose to make it. It’s a tiny commitment, but I figure it’s important. The work of training strangers of the internet to become dedicated readers and customers starts early, with such baby steps.

With all that said:

I remember the early days of my own marketing education. I put a lot of time and thought into topics like “First name on optin form, or no first name???” I now largely feel it doesn’t matter much one way or the other. Really, it’s just personal preference, and then inertia.

I’m not sure if anybody will profit from this in-depth discussion. But Bridget wrote in to ask, and I figured others might be wondering the same. In any case, I’m grateful to Bridget for sending in her question, and I wanted to highlight it here.

And since I’m busy writing my upcoming and new and still highly unfinished book, and since my self-imposed March 24 deadline is nearing, I would like to invite further reader questions.

Because answering reader questions makes for particularly easy and yet engaging emails.

So if you got small questions, big questions, questions about influence, copywriting, or how to style your hair, then I invite you to hit reply and let me know.

There’s a fair a chance I will answer your question in one of these emails over the next week or so, and will be grateful to you in any case.

Should I offer to eat my shoe?

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Back in 1979, German film director Werner Herzog ate his shoe.

Herzog had once said that a fellow director, Errol Morris, would never finish his movie Gates of Heaven. Herzog was hoping to be proven wrong, so he added that if Morris did ever finish the movie, he, Herzog, would eat his shoe.

Morris eventually finished his movie.

So Herzog put on an event. The thing was filmed. A couple hundred people attended.

Herzog first boiled his leather shoe for five hours with garlic, herbs, and duck fat to make it somewhat edible. He then cut up the leather into tiny pieces. Over the course of about 45 minutes, Herzog chewed and swallowed much of the leather. The sole went uneaten.

I thought of this today because I was thinking of guarantees for an offer.

It is a well-known truth that a guarantee reassures undecided buyers and increases sales.

The standard is the money-back guarantee. You can get generous with it, and offer double-your-money-back. Or you can get creative. “I’ll eat my hat!”

But I don’t wear a hat. I don’t even own one. That’s why thought of Wener Herzog and his shoe.

I looked over to the shoe rack near my front door. There’s a pair of old white Converse All-Stars there. They’re made of canvas. I could boil them? Maybe season them? A bit vinegar? At least eat the laces?

But then I snapped out of my fantasy.

Guarantees are great. I encourage you to think about how to offer them for what you sell, and to get creative.

But I am not and will not be offering a guarantee for Daily Email Habit, the main offer I’ve been promoting over past few months.

It’s not simply that shoe canvas is tough, and my Converse have been through a lot, and that I don’t want to risk somebody actually requesting that I eat one of them.

My reason is simply that I actually want Daily Email Habit to be useful to the people who join.

The basic offer I’m making is to help you start and stick with the habit of sending daily emails.

What I offer is help getting you over initial hurdle of what to write about each day… guidance to making your daily emails more effective… and savings of time and brain power.

But you still have to put in the work.

I don’t want to encourage uncommitted or undedicated people to try out Daily Email Habit by promising to eat my shoe, or by offering any kind of guarantee.

As I wrote a few days ago, I’m even trying to turn people away if they don’t know what they’re getting into. Daily Email Habit only really makes sense for people who are committed and dedicated to write daily and profit from it.

If that’s you, Daily Email habit can be a great help. I have a growing wall of testimonials and case studies on the sales page from people who started their own daily email habit and who profited as a result.

If you’d like to read some of their stories, or start your own habit that can lead you to similar results, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

A free tip to minimize unsubscribes

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A few days ago, Maliha Mannan, who writes dailyish emails over at The Side Blogger, posted something interesting inside my little Daily Email House community.

Apparently, Maliha was trying a HARO-like service – HARO, which stands for Help A Reporter Out, basically being a service where industry experts can provide answers and quotes for reporters, in exchange for attribution or a link.

On a whim, Maliha decided to ask for a marketing specialist’s thoughts on daily email newsletters. She put her request out into the ether, and like a lightning bolt, an answer crashed upon her:

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Hi, this is C S Sultan, an experienced marketer for over 14 years and doing email marketing for over 5 years now.

As per our data, the highest you should send in a week are 2 emails. But the best would be to send only 1. Then moment we send more that 2, the unsubscribe rate goes up by 70%.

Our email list consists of marketers, content creators, bloggers, and small-to-medium businesses.

Even so, the highest response we get is when we send a single email every week at a fix time and day (for us, usually that’s Tuesday 8AM EST for one segment, and Thursday 8AM EST for another segment).

===

So there you go. An excellent tip to keep your unsubscribe rates really low. Though I imagine if C S Sultan only emailed his list every month, or maybe not at all, he might do even better with the unsubscribes.

Of course, there are other possible goals in the world than minimizing unsubscribes. For example, maximizing opens, clickthroughs, sales, or better yet, lifetime sales.

Or, something more wooly but still important, such as maximizing the quality of people who are buying from you… maximizing the results you get for customers or clients or even readers who don’t buy from you… or maximizing your own sensation of the influence and respect you get in your niche, and the satisfaction with which you run your business and life.

For all those, here’s another free tip:

Email daily.

Yes, people will unsubscribe. But people will read also, and way more than if you just email once a week or once an ice age.

And more people will buy, more will recommend you, more will look to you for entertainment, guidance, or simply the habit that they’ve formed of taking a few minutes each day (gasp!) to consume something fun or thoughtful you’ve put out into the world. Plus you might even grow to like the process. I know I’ve gotten there.

Like Maliha wrote, maybe C S Sultan should sign up for my Daily Email Habit service. I doubt that he will.

But maybe you are not playing to lose, but are playing to win. In that case, Daily Email Habit might be a fit for you. For more info, before the next puzzle has come and gone:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

My top 7 marketing books

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I heard once that reading lists make for great lead magnets.

Is that true? I don’t know.

But it got me to put together a recommended reading list of my own.

I started with a goal of 10 books — but though I’ve read many more than 10, I couldn’t honestly recommend 10. That’s a good thing for you — less reading to do.

So here are my top 7 marketing books, for you to enjoy, learn, and profit from:

1. The Robert Collier Letter Book, by Robert Collier

This book has it all — wagons of coal, silk stockings, genies in the lamp, free pens, rattlesnakes, dinosaurs. If you only ever read one book about direct marketing, this is my number-one recommendation.

2. Positioning, by Al Ries and Jack Trout

Tons of other good marketing advice beyond, “Get yourself into a niche of one.”

3. My Life In Advertising, by Claude C. Hopkins

All the wisdom in Hopkins’s vaunted Scientific Advertising, but presented with stories and detail that make it go down more easy.

4. The Adweek Copywriting Book, by Joe Sugarman

Very accessible, usable, and current, even if you never write a full-page magazine ad selling a calculator or UV-blocking sunglasses.

5. Influence, by Robert Cialdini

I wish I had written this book. What more can I say?

6. Start With No, by Jim Camp

You may have seen this negotiation book recommended before by online marketers. It happens a lot. What is it about Camp’s negotiation strategies that could be useful to sales and marketing online?

7. Made To Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath

I read this book only once but it’s stuck. That’s because the authors know what they’re talking about, and because they apply it to their own writing.

Like I said, I’ve heard that reading lists make for great lead magnets.

Do they also make for effective email copy? I don’t know.

But I’m willing to test it out.

If you haven’t already clicked away to Amazon to get one of the books above, maybe you will click below to the sales page for my Daily Email Habit service. It sometimes forces even me to write emails I would never write otherwise. Here’s the link if you’d like to find out more about it:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Grow your list with relevant people who will eventually buy from you

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I have a special, very time-limited offer for you today. But first, let me give you the background:

Last week, in my Daily Email House community, I ran a “JV Outreach Challenge.”

Basically, the goal was to open up a conversation with somebody who could turn into a potential business partner, however light and temporary.

As part of this, I asked House members to think about their own problems/wants/frustrations.

Not everybody shared publicly. But some did.

Among all the different problems/wants/frustrations, there was one common thread in everyone’s lists, always near the top. That was some variant of:

“Not enough subscribers/list is not growing fast enough/not enough of the right prospects who actually have money to spend”

… ie, the old problem of high-quality list building.

Of course, this problem came up with people who are just starting out. But it also came up even with people who are established and successful, and who already have lists of thousands of subscribers.

A fact that won’t shock you is that I’m no expert in list building.

In fact, I have been very casual about building my own list.

Like I’ve written before, I spent the first couple years of this newsletter writing to fewer than 100 people.

These days, my list remains small by industry standards, though it’s much bigger than it was. It’s also big enough that I can make a 6-figure income from it. I’ve also made a public and definite choice not to focus on list growth, but rather on list profitability.

All that said, I have learned a few things about list growth over the years. And ever since I started Daily Email House, I have been writing a series of posts about 6 techniques that have actually grown my list.

I jokingly called these techniques, “Magic List-Growing Secrets That Big Email Doesn’t Want You To Know.”

That’s because they are no secrets at all. They’re not hacks. They’re not something that is working today because of a glitch on TikTok and will be gone tomorrow.

They’re certainly not something that worked just for me because I was the first to exploit it, and with each subsequent person who tries it after, the results turn more meager and meager.

Instead, these 6 techniques of list growth have worked for me, and will work for anyone else, if you only apply them consistently.

In fact, there’s a good chance they will work better and faster for you than they did for me.

That’s because, when I wrote up these 6 techniques, I didn’t just list them.

For each one, I also included my own case study, along with a few key takeaways based on my experience, so you can get results more quickly and consistently than I did, since you can learn from my mistakes and successes.

So here’s the special time-limited offer I’m making you:

I have put together a guide, which I’m calling “What’s Grown My List Over The Years, Vol. 1-6.”

I guess I could try to sell this guide for a million dollars a copy. I doubt anybody would buy at that price.

I believe I could sell it for $500 dollars, particularly if I delivered it on a live call or two. I can imagine I might get a few people to take me up on that.

I could certainly sell this guide for $100, as it is now, a shiny and platform-independent PDF of 27 pages (single-column). I bet I could get a good number of people to take me up on that.

But instead, I am making this guide free, as a time-limited bonus for my Daily Email Habit service.

A month of Daily Email Habit puzzles currently costs $30.

I figure $30 is a no-brainer price for 6 proven list growth ideas, which can shave months or possibly years off your climb up the list-growth mountain, so you can get to a place where you have a basic number of good customers and clients on your list.

Once you get to this basic number, it gives you room to decide what you want to do — focus more on list growth, like a lot of people, or like me, on building a business that suits you.

So that’s what you get for $30. Plus, of course, you get a month’s worth of daily email puzzles via Daily Email Habit, so you actually have a chance to convert the people on your email list into long-term customers or clients.

If you’re writing emails already, Daily Email habit can help you write them more consistently, and faster. Even one extra email you send over the next month can easily be worth 10x the $30 of the Daily Email Habit subscription.

And if you’re not writing daily emails already, then this might be your moment.

If you have been faced with the chicken-and-omelette problem of “Why should I write if I have nobody reading?” and “Why should anybody read since I never write?” then consider what would need to happen for you to change what you’re doing.

Maybe you’ll find it’s the opportunity I’m offering today.

As with all opportunities, this one won’t be around long.

I’m making this free bonus offer available only until this Saturday, February 22, at 12pm midnight PST.

Sign up for Daily Email Habit before then, and I’ll send you a copy of “What’s Grown My List Over The Years, Vol. 1-6.” (I’ll be as quick about it as I can be, but I’ll be sending it out personally and one-by-one, so bear with me.)

If you would like to get started now, and not allow this opportunity to pass you by:

​https://bejakovic.com/deh​

PS. If you’re signed up for Daily Email Habit but you’re not in Daily Email House, this free bonus offer applies to you as well. So does the deadline.

In other words, write me an email before Saturday at 12 midnight PST to say you want “What’s Grown My List Over The Years, Vol. 1-6,” and I’ll send it to you. Don’t write me after that, because I will have closed the offer, and I am strict with deadlines.

Where it’s at: Two narrow columns and a PDF

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One of the rare daily email newsletters I read more often than not is by Jason Leister.

Jason used to be a direct response copywriter. He used to write about getting and managing copywriting clients. He’s since moved into stranger waters, where he talks about raising his 10 kids, living off the grid, “unplugging from the matrix,” and manifesting your desires.

All right up my alley, minus the 10 kids.

But let’s talk turkey:

Each Monday, Jason sends an email called Monday Hotsheet. It’s a bunch of curated resources — interesting articles, tech, videos that Jason has come across.

That’s pretty normal.

What was weird is that Jason used to send the Monday Hotsheet as a PDF that he’d link to in his email. Even weirder, the PDF was formatted in two columns, like some insurance brochure.

I liked to read through Jason’s Monday Hotsheet but I always chuckled at the experience. Who does PDFs any more? And in two columns like this?

Well, I guess I manifested something myself, and I should have been more careful about what I asked for.

Because Jason for some reason recently switched Monday Hotsheet to be simply delivered in his daily email, and in just one measly column.

I found myself disappointed. From one week to the next, Jason’s Monday Hotsheet looked cheaper, much less valuable and interesting.

Suddenly, I asked myself if I need another weekly email the curates useful and interesting resources online? I feel like everybody from Arnold Schwarzenegger on down has one of those. I ain’t got time for all these curated valuable resources.

A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos once got a tin pot and a wooden spoon. He then started banging on the tin pot with the wooden spoon while jumping up and down on his couch and chanting, “Format beats copy! Format beats copy!”

(Fine. The part with the wooden spoon and the tin pot I made up. But all the rest of that story is true, except the jumping up and down.)

Parris was specifically talking about the format of sales copy.

Once upon a time, you could take a proven sales letter, format it to look like a magazine or an article or a newsletter issue (the print kind), and you might get a 2.5x bump in response. Format beats copy: Ain’t no copy in the universe that’s gonna get you that kind of a bounce, not when you already have top copywriters working for you.

This holds just as well for info products, whether you give ’em away or charge thousands of dollars for them.

Yes, people should only want the truth, and nothing but the truth. Yes, it shouldn’t matter whether you deliver the truth on a 3×5 index card, or in a 3-ring binder, or a never-to-be-repeated secret performance in an amphitheater in the middle of some remote forest.

It shouldn’t matter, but it does matter.

So my point for you today is, think about the format in which you will deliver your truth.

And if you’ve already delivered your truth, and nobody much cared, or they cared at first and then they dropped off… then think about format again.

Rather than coming up with a new message, you might be able to keep the message and simply deliver it as a 2-column PDF, or whatever else feels unique and different and valuable in your industry.

And sometimes, simple word choice is enough to change the format. Or at least be a major part of it.

Take for example my Daily Email Habit service. At bottom, it’s delivered as a daily email. I could have simply said, “Hey, would you like to sign up for a new set of daily emails, and pay me $30 a month for the privilege?”

Maybe some forward-thinking people would have taken me up on this. But i don’t think it would have worked nearly as well as calling Daily Email Habit a service, which happens to be delivered by email, for your convenience.

Speaking of Daily Email Habit, if you’d like to find out more about this valuable service, or even try it out yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/deh