Direct Marketing

The largest copywriter in the Netherlands gives me his endorsement

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Comes a message from Robin Timmers, whose website bills him as the “grootste copywriter van Nederland.”

Google informs me that, translated from Dutch, this works out to “the largest copywriter in the Netherlands.”

I guess a more elegant translation might be, “the greatest copywriter in the Netherlands.” Though as Robin told me, the tagline is meant to be ambiguous, since he stands over 2 meters tall.

Anyways, Robin writes:

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Hey John,

Just finished MVE and am now halfway with SME.

Man … MVE is so simple, so easy-ish to implement, but such a strong concept and format.

Awesome course, awesome idea.

Same for SME.

Really simple, really powerful and easy to implement, and model with your own ideas.

I’m very happy with both courses, and can’t wait to start with Copy Riddles.

===

In case you don’t know… MVE is my course Most Valuable Email. SME is my course Simple Money Emails.

You might not know that because I haven’t promoted either course in a few months, ever since I started selling my Daily Email Habit service.

I find my enthusiasm for promoting those courses has dipped.

In part, it’s because Daily Email Habit is not just a daily prompt to write an email… but a distillation of the best ideas in both SME and MVE, as well as ideas I don’t have in either of those courses, particularly around building up status and authority.

And Daily Email Habit presents all this to you as an easy and manageable drip-drip of information, in your inbox, every day… rather than as a course, one which you may go through once or maybe not even once, which then sits behind some forgotten login or in some folder you never check.

But much more important:

Unlike those two course of mine — or any other courses, by me or anybody else — Daily Email Habit is really built around the idea of daily, practical, real-world implementation, rather than simply passive consumption of information.

Because even things that are easy-ish to implement, like Robin says the MVE trick is, tend not to get implemented, not without a lot of stubborn nudging and reminders from the outside.

That’s what Daily Email Habit is for. If you’d like to find out more about this “grootste e-mailservice”:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Another customer I like

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Yesterday, I wrote about an ex-subscriber of my Daily Email Habit service.

Even though this guy decided to unsubscribe, he’s still the kind of customer I like, simply because he took something I was teaching and actually put it to use.

Of course, I have other customers I like too, including some who keep being subscribed to Daily Email Habit, and keep putting it to use.

A couple days ago, I heard from one such customer, business coach Steph Benedetto, who is subscribed to Daily Email habit.

I want to share Steph’s message with you both because it serves my purpose, and because it might be valuable to you. In Steph’s own words:

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I wanted to send you a little message to share an unexpected side effect of the daily emails.

Many of these daily emails are prompting me to think about things, like the one that said, “Share the coming attractions. What are you working on? What offers do you have coming up? Share them.”

When I do, I go, “Oh! I guess I have to know what I’m doing next then.” So I look and go, “Ok, this is what I’m doing… and this is what I’m doing… and this is what I’m doing.”

And it creates it through the writing.

As I’m writing about something, whatever the prompt is, and then tying it into whatever offer I have, the offers themselves are evolving and becoming clearer.

And new things are showing up. And I had no freaking idea that was available.

===

Most the Daily Email Habit puzzles are not “creative writing” prompts. Many of them are exercises that anyone with an online biz should be doing regularly, like figuring out who you want to work with… or what offers you’re putting out next… or what of business you actually want to run.

Now here’s the possibly valuable part I promised you:

You might not have the time and willpower to sit down and think about those things, and even less time and willpower to think about them regularly, over and over, as things adapt and change.

I know I don’t, not when it’s simply a todo item on my already-infinite todo list.

But like Steph says, with daily emails, you can two things at once. You can create content and make sales, on the one hand, and think about the big picture of your business and the next steps, on the other.

In other words, you can work IN the business… while at the same time working ON the business, just by taking the daily action of writing and sending a daily email.

And if you’d like to do that — to create offers, clarity, a plan — just by writing, then my Daily Email Habit might be a help for you. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

A cautionary tale for course creators

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For five years, David Perell had kind of a dream online business.

Perell sold a high-ticket, cohort-based course, Write Of Passage, teaching people how to write online.

Write Of Passage sold for $4k a pop. It had 2,000+ buyers.

Like I said, a kind of dream business, at least in the little space of online course creators and such.

I mean, Perell was writing and helping people to do something positive for themselves. He was working in line with his own values and interests. And he was pulling in great money with it.

And then, last November, Perell shut it all down. In an email announcing that the current cohort of Write Of Passage would be the last one, Perell wrote:

“You need more than a great product to make a business work, and the main thing we were missing was a dependable flow of new students.”

I agree with Perell’s first conclusion. I don’t agree with the second.

You do need more than a great product to make a business work. Particularly if your product sells for a one-time fee (even if that’s $4k), and if you have a whole supporting team of coaches and facilitators and staff and whatever, and you’re running ads or paying affiliates to get those $4k sales.

But I don’t agree that the solution needs to be MORE NEW STUDENTS.

I’ve been making a 6-fig income off this newsletter for the past few years, off of just a few hundred buyers, way fewer than Perell’s 2k. I’ve even embraced this attitude formally. My goal is to make more sales from the same number of readers.

It’s a well-known direct marketing truth that all the profits are made on the back end.

It does take more than a great product to make a business work. But instead of chasing the mythical “dependable flow” of new students… you can just commit to creating a sequence of great new offers. (An offer by the way, doesn’t require creating a new product, though a new product will typically make you a new offer.)

Now about that:

As I wrote in my last email, last year, right around the time that Perell was shutting down his multimillion-dollar dream biz, 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 more predictable success with new offers is something that could be useful to you, then hit reply and tell me a bit about your current offer situation. 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.

More predictable success with new offers

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My first info product was called Salary Negotiation Blueprint. I created in 2012 after reading Gary Halbert’s Boron Letters.

Gary says something like, pick a problem, read a 3-4 good books on it, summarize the books, create your own super-dense guide packed with the best info, and then sell that at a premium.

So that’s what I did.

I picked salary negotiation because I was in an IT office job at the time, and the topic was a bit of a taboo to me, and personally fascinating.

It took me a few months to identify the right books, read them, summarize my notes, write my own little guide, and create a sales letter (maybe my first).

And once I launched The Salary Negotiation Blueprint on Clickbank, the result was…

Nothing.

Zero sales.

I later lowered the price. Nothing. I tried moving the Salary Negotiation Blueprint to Amazon Kindle. It didn’t sell there either. At some point I even ran ads to it via Adwords. Still nobody would buy the damn thing.

I recently checked the Google Drive folder where I kept all the work for this project.

There’s a spreadsheet of possible newsletter topics, a backlog of tasks to complete, and a subfolder of possible bonus ideas. Plus a half-dozen other files, probably totaling thousands of words of preparation, analysis, and plans,

In other words, I did all this work, spent all this time, created all sorts of busy work. The result was a very useful, well written, information-packed guide that nobody in the universe would pay me even a bit of money for.

I’m telling you this because it’s not the only time it’s happened to me.

The same thing has happened many times since — probably dozens of times.

Fortunately, I’ve also had a few random successes along the way, which kept me going, and some of which made me good money.

But last year, I finally got a bit fed up with having a “few random successes.”

So I developed a system.

This system is based on stuff that had done instinctively but inconsistently before… stuff I had learned from other good business owners and marketers… and on common sense which I too uncommonly applied.

I put my system to use when creating my Daily Email Habit service. It worked out really well.

That’s why I am now forcing myself to keep using this system for each new offer I think of creating, though the temptation remains strong to simply wing it once more, and have the thrill and rush of instant activity, followed by the dump and crash that comes when results roll in, or rather, don’t.

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 more predictable success with new offers is something that could be useful to you, then hit reply and tell me a bit about your current offer situation. 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.

Zero-resistance daily emails for your own business

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Last week, I got a message from Nick Bandy, who used to be the lead copywriter at an ad agency named Klicker, and who has since last year worked as a freelance marketing strategist. Nick wrote:

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I’ve known for months that I NEED to start sending emails daily, or at least very frequently. Heard it more times than I can count from Ben Settle, Daniel Throssell, and every other email marketer.

I know HOW to write daily emails. I write the same style of emails for my clients. Yet every time I think about writing them for my business?

Meh. Next month.

I don’t even remember how I found your product (probably stumbled on your site after seeing your name mentioned by Daniel Throssell), but I’m really glad I did.

Literally within 5 minutes of getting your first “prompt” in my inbox, I was cranking out my first email. Zero resistance. It flowed freely from my fingertips like Manekin Pis spraying proudly in the wind.

===

Maybe you’re in a similar situation to Nick. Maybe you know HOW to write daily emails… you’ve done it for clients… you’re sure you need to do it for yourself… and yet maybe it’s still not happening?

If so, I figure you have some options.

Option one is to let more time pass. Maybe something will eventually change.

Another option is to try out my Daily Email Habit service, the way Nick did.

A month’s subscription is a whopping $30, effectively $1 per daily prompt puzzle.

It might be just the thing you need to start writing daily emails for yourself, with zero resistance.

Time is passing either way. if you’d like to saddle up on the daily email horse, before tomorrow sneaks up on you:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

The Secrets Of Growing Up

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I’m in my home town of Zagreb, Croatia, lying on the bed of my AirBnb as I write this.

A moment ago, I was looking around the room, determined to find something to write about. But what?

The strange ceramic crucifix on the wall, which looks like a starfish?

The mysterious unlit match on the ground?

The flowering white orchid by the window?

None of it was good enough.

So I got up off the bed and started rifling through a basket of tourist brochures and city maps in the corner of the room.

It turned out there were a bunch of old books in the basket as well. Among them was what I was looking for:

A 1996 gem called, “The Secrets Of Growing Up: Advice For Boys.”

The cover shows a manic- and aggressive-looking ruffian of about 14, pumping his fist in triumph.

I flipped through the book. A few section headings jumped out:

“What is petting really?”

“From the first tiny hairs to a real beard”

“Can muscles be sinful?”

I broke out in a light sweat, remembering the horror and awkwardness of my teenage years. These days, whenever I wish that I were younger again, I have to remind myself how bad things were back then.

But really, The Secrets Of Growing Up is such a quaint throwback.

There’s a section describing musical styles for boys to consider: techno (“the more BPM, the better”)… grunge (“the terms ‘punk’ and ‘grunge’ mean the same — garbage”)… and hip hop (“the rapper pays much attention to his artfully rhymed texts”).

I guess The Secrets of Growing Up was a useful book in its time?

It must have been. It was published in German originally, then translated to a bunch of different languages and republished in countries across Europe, including Croatia.

But who would possibly need or want or buy such a book today?

There was a time when there were real secrets, or at least taboo topics. Access to information was limited, scattered, restricted.

That’s not true any more.

Over the past few decades, and culminating today with Perplexity and ChatGPT, whatever you want to know or do, you have the information available instantly, for free, wherever you are.

But will you actually bother to seek out the information?

Will you actually consume it when it’s served up to you?

And most of all, will you act on it, and benefit from it?

I’m telling you this in case you KNOW how to write marketing emails… and if you already KNOW the value of doing so.

If that’s the case, do you need another email copywriting equivalent of “The Secrets Of Growing Up?”

My guess is no. And if you suspect I’m right, I’d like to point you to my Daily Email Habit service.

It’s not more information on how to write emails.

In the words of marketing agency owner Eric Mann, who signed up for daily email habit a few weeks ago:

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Thanks for the DEH – without it and the fear of missing out on getting one more day in a row – I’m sure I wouldn’t be doing this at all.

The content isn’t nearly as difficult as I imagined, I assume because I read so many daily emails from so many great copywriters like you and Ben and Daniel T, etc, it almost feels second nature to me now…

It’s the discipline of writing when you don’t have something dripping from your pen – that’s what the DEH solves for me! Thanks again!! 🙂

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If you’d like to find out more about Daily Email Habit, and get writing for real, today:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Payment plan lapsed buyer stats

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A few days ago, a reader and customer named Alexander wrote to ask:

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Hey John,

I bought your Copy Riddles on a payment plan, but I’ve just recently changed my banks, so I have new details for the charges. I believe I’m due to be charged again in about a week, so I’d like to change the details so you actually get the money you’re owed… Can you let me know how to do that?

Thanks mate!

===

“Well hot damn,” I said. This kind of email early in the morning definitely cheers me up.

Not that I’ve really had much cause to be worried.

The fact is, over the past six or so months, I have sold 100+ things on payment plan, whether of my own products or affiliate offers.

To date, I have had exactly one lapsed buyer.

The rest have all paid as agreed, updating their credit card numbers when they expire. A few particularly diligent souls, such as Alexander, even do it in advance.

Does this mean that all people everywhere have always been and will always be fundamentally good and decent?

Maybe. I don’t know enough people to be able to say one way or another.

But based on my amateur research into the human mind, I do know a few things:

– We all tend to mirror and adapt to the unspoken context or “frame” of an interaction

– Time is a factor in creating a frame of intimacy, trust, and respect

– So is frequency of contact

What drops out at the bottom of this funnel is that the longer you stay in touch with people… the more often you stay in touch with them… and the more you treat them with trust, respect, and intimacy, the more likely you are to get the same treatment in return.

One way to do this is what I personally do, and that’s to write daily emails like this one.

Which brings me to my offer, which helps you start and stick with writing emails for the long term, every day, or at least dailyish. For more information on this way to create the right frame with the people in your audience:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

The BCG Recurring Income Matrix

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At the start of this year, I wrote about three themes I had set for myself. Theme #1 was more recurring income.

To help me (and maybe you) get there, I’ve come up with the BCG (Bejakovic Consulting Group) Recurring Income Matrix.

Maybe know the Growth-Share Matrix by that other “BCG,” Boston Consulting Group. (The imposters!)

Their matrix asks two questions about a product or company — low/high market share, fast/slow growth. The result are four quadrants:

3. ??? | 4. Star

1. Dog | 2. Cash Cow

I don’t want to even dignify those other BCG people by explaining what their stupid animal quadrants are about.

But I do like the matrix idea.

So I decided to create my own for recurring income. My questions about recurring income, the ones dear to my heart are:

1. Does it require personal authority to sell?

2. Does it require personal involvement to deliver?

I thought about the four yes/no combinations. And so I’d like to present to you the Bejakovic Consulting Group Recurring Income Matrix:

3. Hosting on QVC   | 4. Renting out

1. Flipping burgers    | 2. Pushing the sled

Let me explain the quadrants in order:

#1. The lower left is flipping burgers. It doesn’t require personal authority to sell, but it does require personal involvement to deliver.

In other words, this is a regular job, or at least most regular jobs, except those few regular jobs where you’re truly irreplaceable.

Flipping burgers is a steady paycheck, provided by somebody else, as long as you keep working. Fair enough. Unfortunately, due to a genetic disorder, I find myself highly allergic to any prolonged time spent in this quadrant.

#2. The lower right is pushing the sled. It requires personal authority to sell, and also requires personal involvement to deliver.

This is most recurring income plays for solopreneurs and small info publishers online. Think paid newsletters, paid memberships, coaching, etc.

I call it pushing the sled because it’s like the sled at the gym — you gotta put in a lot of effort to get it moving, and as soon as you stop, it stops.

That might sound like a raw deal. But because it requires personal authority to sell, it tends to pay better per unit of work compared to flipping burgers. (Plus, if you’re the type to enjoy discipline-and-punish activities like Crossfit, you can even convince yourself that pushing the sled has salutary effects.)

#3. The upper left is hosting on QVC. It requires personal authority to sell, but doesn’t require personal authority to deliver.

This is where you trade on your good name, your charisma, or your previous success to promote something that will pay you for a time to come.

My best example of this is George Foreman, who allowed his name to be put on a grill and who appeared in infomercials to promote the product. The result was $200M in royalties and licensing fees into George’s pocket over the years.

This might seem out of reach for mere mortals. But if you have an audience, it’s really what recommending a specific tool in a crowded category is about (eg. ​Convertkit, sign up for it because it’s what I use​). Also, I’d put recurring income like copywriting royalties into this quadrant.

#4. Finally, the upper right is the “renting out” quadrant. It doesn’t require personal authority to sell, and it doesn’t require personal involvement to deliver.

I thought of calling this the “cheating” quadrant because that’s how it can feel, at least if you’re coming at it with a perspective like mine, of selling info products via daily emails.

But really, this quadrant is familiar enough. If you have a lot of money already, it’s what rental income or stock dividends are all about. If you don’t have a lot of money yet, well, there’s ways around that that still make living in this quadrant possible. But that’s really a topic for a $5k course.

Final point:

You can move from quadrant to quadrant.

If you appear on QVC once to endorse a product, that appearance can be recorded and replayed over and over, which basically puts you into the renting out quadrant, as long as somebody else drives viewers to the recording.

If you’re pushing the sled now, you can eventually delegate or automate the delivery and move yourself into the QVC host position.

And if you’re in the flipping burgers quadrant, you can jump straight to renting out quadrant if you have the money or know-how… or you can build up your personal authority, so you can go to the #2 or #3 quadrants.

On that last note, if you would like to build up your personal authority, I have a recurring service to help you do that.

I am still creating this service by hand, day-by-day, instead of automating or delegating, putting me squarely into the #2 quadrant.

Maybe that will change in the future. But for now, I keep pushing the sled, because I tell myself it’s good for me.

In any case, if you’d like my help in building up your personal authority, so you can sell things that pay you over and over:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

PSA: Beware the anti-launxxers

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This morning at 9am Barcelona time, I wrapped up the Prospective Profit Pricing event for Daily Email Habit.

Since I rolled out Daily Email Habit some 6 weeks ago and only sold it via regular daily emails since, this PPP event served as a kind of launch.

The event lasted for two days and four emails.

62 new people ended up signing up to Daily Email Habit as a result of those four emails.

Considering how small my list is, and the fact that I have been promoting Daily Email Habit pretty much every day for the past 6 weeks, and that I thought demand was near tapped out (there were days in the past weeks when I made 0 sales), I gotta say I’m pleased with how this turned out.

And now, public service announcement #1:

I’ve been seeing a new crop of online marketers who are positioning themselves as anti-launch.

Their spiel is no deadlines, no scarcity, no urgency — “no manipulation!” Just put your offer out there every day, and eventually everyone who is right for it will buy.

I’m not sure if this is just positioning themselves in a contrary way. Or maybe they’re catering to people who have been exhausted by massive affiliate-based PLF-style launches that have to be run every three months in order to generate any income, with a few lonely crickets chirping in the meantime.

In any case, beware their anti-launch propaganda.

It’s ironic, because those same anti-launxxers run plenty of offers with scarcity and urgency baked in — effectively launches, or email promos at least.

But what if they didn’t?

Their core message is still terrible advice if you ask me.

Launches and daily emails are like heads and tails — two sides of a gold krugerand that you can drop into your piggy bank.

Daily emails build desire for what you sell, and overcome objections. Launches, or promos, or whatever you want to call them, give people an undeniable reason to act NOW.

And as for manipulation?

I side with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who said that the only bad manipulation is manipulation that’s obvious.

The fact is, not a single person wrote me during this “launch” to complain about my manipulative deadline and manipulative disappearing bonus. If anything, I got a lot of people who wrote me to tell me they are excited to get started, and that this was the push they needed.

End of public service announcement #1.

Begin public service announcement #2:

I’d like to turn your attention to something free, new, and frankly AMA~ING.

I will write a full email about it tomorrow.

But if you are at all interested in copywriting, you MUST MUST MUST click through below.

Do you ever hear me using such over-the-top and positive language?

You don’t, because it’s almost never warranted, and in fact it usually works against you, by letting people down when they finally see your offer.

Well, not today. If you are into copywriting, you have to click through, and in fact, you have to sign up for what’s waiting for you here:

https://bejakovic.com/back-in-town

Last chance to gamble before the Daily Email Habit price increase

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Here’s a curious story about looming deadlines:

In the early days of FedEx, founder and CEO Fred Smith took the company’s last $5k and went to Vegas.

FedEx had a fuel bill of $25k. That last $5k wouldn’t be enough to cover it anyhow.

So Smith went to Vegas and played blackjack. He gambled and won $27k. That was enough to cover the fuel bill.

FedEx had survived for another week. And then it survived another week. Eventually, it turned into something big.

Now let me ask you:

Will you gamble $20 on a month of Daily Email Habit?

Will-ye or nill-ye, the price of Daily Email Habit is going up tonight, from $20/month to $30/month, at 12 midnight PST, just three hours from now.

This is the last email I will send before the fateful price increase.

As a reminder, Daily Email Habit is my service to help you start and stick with consistent daily emailing.

Here’s what that means in real terms, from virtuoso-making guitar teacher René Kerkdyk, who subscribes to Daily Email Habit:

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Just a short raving review:

I just wrote my daily email in 10 minutes going from sheer panic about what to write to a finished email building my expertise and selling my stuff. Thank you, John!

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I have also created a members-only club, Daily Email House, for business owners and marketers who send more or less daily emails.

Until to-night at 12 midnight, Daily Email House is a free bonus in case you sign up to Daily Email Habit. After that, it will disappear as a free bonus, and rise from its ashes as a new, fiery, paid offer.

All that’s to say, maybe the sales page below is worth a look? And right now? Before the deadline sneaks up on you with its cold, sleep-inducing claws?

If you’d like my help writing your daily emails, tomorrow, and the day after, and then next week, until eventually your daily emailing turns into something big:

https://bejakovic.com/deh