Direct Marketing

Ideas are cheap, here’s how to sell them for good money

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A couple days ago I got a message from Alex Popov, who works as a copywriter (he had a couple controls for an Agora affiliate) and as an NLP trainer. Alex read my new 10 Commandments book and wrote me with some qualified praise:

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Hey Bejako!

Your new book is quite simply fascinating.

I know most, not all, of the big persuasion ideas inside, yet I’m learning them in all new mind-expanding ways.

Your book is changing my thinking about these persuasion principles for the better.

Thanks!

Only one, negative, though. The price is ridiculously low. So low in fact, I almost didn’t buy it.

Anyway, I’m glad I did.

Real thanks and use this if you like.

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I’ve been saying it for a long time:

Ideas are cheap. Even good, profitable, proven ideas.

The real value lies not in sharing an idea. Odds are excellent people have heard it all before, even if you feel you thought it up yourself. (You may have, but others have thought it up before you.)

Instead, the real value lies in:

1. Presenting an idea in a way that has a chance to penetrate the defenses your reader’s mind is sure to throw up (“I don’t get it,” “I’ve heard this before,” “I’m busy,” “I could never do this”)

2. Presenting an idea in a memorable way so that it sticks with your reader long after he’s finished reading

3. All the surrounding stuff besides the idea or even its presentation — all the encouraging, taunting, goading, shaming, motivating your reader to actually do something with the idea you’re sharing other than just squirrel it away

And that’s what you can find in my new 10 Commandments book:

Grifters, suckers, the “World’s Youngest Hypnotist,” an openly racist “comic’s comic,” a couple of tophat-wearing magicians, a pickup artist who describes himself as “average, with a serious tilt towards ugly,” the “world’s most feared negotiator,” the last Russian Tsar, the first black mayor of a major U.S. city, Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams, Ronald Reagan, and much, much more.

They are all in the book so you see the underlying ideas in a new light in case you know them already, so you remember them in case you don’t, and so you put them to work in your business and personal lives, and profit from them.

As for the ridiculously low price, it’s there for a reason, which has nothing to do with the value of what’s inside. Don’t let it dissuade you:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

How to evaluate business opportunities

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Last week, I read an article about Samuel Langhorne Clemens, alias Mark Twain. I found the article hard going but I forced myself to push on through. And boy am I glad I did.

Because towards the end, when summing up Twain’s life, the author of the article wrote about all the time Twain spent not-writing, and instead investing in and losing money on various hare-brained business opportunities. Says the article:

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Why did a talent like Twain waste so much time on extraliterary pursuits? The question assumes a distinction he scarcely countenanced between writing and other forms of commercial activity. If there is a constant in his life, it’s his labored obsession with labor-saving. He poured his earnings into schemes meant to spin off money like a perpetual-motion machine.

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That phrase, “labored obsession with labor-saving,” really got to me. It hit home.

So one possible conclusion to this email would be to say that the constant human drive for “labor-saving,” for “almost passive income,” for business opportunities, is what keeps so many people broke, stressed, and working too hard.

Reasonable conclusion.

And yet, business opportunities do exist.

I got into copywriting 10+ years ago because getting paid thousands of dollars to write a sales letter sounded pretty good. And it turned out to be pretty good.

Working on commission with clients and getting paid a share of their profits sounded even better. So I started doing that. It turned out to be even better that straight-up copywriting.

Creating a course that people had already paid for and that I could keep selling sounded still better than working on commission with clients. It turned out to be exactly that way.

So, how do you evaluate possible business opportunities? How do you decide that something is worth diving into? How do you avoid wasting your time, money, and self-respect?

I thought about it. I came up with three questions to ask myself, which maybe you can ask yourself as well:

1. “Is this a 5-month plan or are you ok if it turns into a 5-year plan?”

For example, I hate the very idea of checking charts doing “technical analysis” or trading stocks or other financial vapor. I might be able to force myself to do it for 5 months. There’s no way I could do it for 5 years without throwing myself under a fast-moving train. But the chances that I would be so successful with trading in 5 months’ time that I never have to do it again are nil. Therefore trading, profitable bizopp though it might be, is out for me.

2. “Are you building up some kind of asset regardless?”

I recently thought of running ads to promote affiliate offers. Solid business opportunity, if you have good offers to promote, a good source of traffic, and copywriting skills to bridge the gap.

But what if it still doesn’t work? I have then just spent time and money to run ads to somebody else’s offer, without making money.

The solution in my mind is simple – get those people on a list first before sending them to the affiliate offer. For one, it increase the chances they will buy the affiliate offer in time. But more than that, it turns a black/white business opportunity into a gradually growing asset (an email list) that has value on its own, regardless of whether the direct business opportunity pans out.

3. “What happens if the opportunity disappears?”

I currently have a community on Skool. I was even thinking of starting another one. A lot of people are doing the same. After all, Skool already has a lot of users, plus they make it easy in some ways to run a group in a profitable way.

But what happens when Skool becomes a dumpster fire like Facebook? Or when it shuts down like Clubhouse? Or when it introduces new rules that specifically say, “no Bejakos,” like the r/copywriting subreddit already did?

In that case, I also have the email addresses of everyone in my community. I can simply send them an email and tell them that the community has been moved to a different URL. It would be an inconvenience, but not any kind of failure.

And with that, I have a hot new business opportunity to tell you about, specifically a bridge to sell you.

Well not really. Not even figuratively. All I have is my $4.99 new 10 Commandments book.

The underlying business opportunity there is more effective communication skills.

I don’t know if you’re ok with “more effective communication skills” as a 5-year business plan.

But if you are, it’s an asset that’s only going to build on itself, and one that will never disappear, as long as there are humans and as long as there is business. If you’d like to start investing now:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

The fiction business

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The last week or so, I’ve been spending a lot of time obsessively checking how my new book is doing on Amazon. This morning, in a bout of such checking, Amazon offered to show me its “Movers and Shakers: Our biggest gainers in sales rank over the past 24 hours. Updated frequently.”

This is something I had long wished for but didn’t know existed — a kind of first derivative of sales, what’s selling better lately, what’s moving up in the ranks quickly?

I checked the Kindle store. Unfortunately, there are just two pages of movers and shakers for the entire Kindle store, as opposed to movers and shakers across subcategories.

And what is moving and shaking in the Kindle store?

The same damn stuff as always.

Out of the 100 top movers and shakers, 99 are fiction books, mostly romance novels and literotica. Exactly one is a non-fiction book, Mark Manson’s Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, which, based on its promise alone, might as well be classified as fiction.

This made me think of something I heard Dan Kennedy say in one of his closed-door, multithousand-dollar, info marketing seminars. Said Dan:

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Many people make the mistake of thinking we’re in the non fiction business. Big mistake. We’re in the fiction business. First of all, remember that most of your customers never do anything with most of what they buy from you, therefore, their experience is fictional, not non-fictional. [The small audience of top info marketers laughs, but Dan continues.] Laugh if you want. I’m being very serious. They’re having a fictional experience. They actually believe they’re doing something. they are not, but they think they are doing something.

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If you sell information online, this is a very bitter pill to swallow, and in fact, it’s one that I keep refusing to swallow.

Which is dumb, because why argue against Dan Kennedy, who basically made everybody who has been successful in the info publishing business?

But I keep hoping and in fact working on getting people to not just buy my stuff, but to actually consume it, and ultimately, to put it to use and to benefit from it. It’s slow going, but it gives me hope and a goal to look forward to.

Anyways, as I say in the conclusion of my new 10 Commandments book, I hope you will apply the 10 principles I share in that book in your own business and personal life.

I’ve worked hard to make the book both interesting and practical, with new distinctions to help you actually get traction, putting to work good ideas that you may have heard of before but haven’t done anything with. Of course, you might also come across commandments that are entirely new to you. Put those to work as well.

And on that note, I’ve gotten a few more reviews after writing my dirge about having just one review a few days ago. Here’s a review from Maliha Mannan, who writes over at The Side Blogger:

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As someone who makes an offer almost daily via email, it’s essential that people like me, and also buy from me. This book is full of ideas for doing just that. I read it too quickly, so I plan to read it again soon (it’s a tiny book but packed with curious ideas that you should take a minute to fully comprehend, appreciate, and implement). I see it becoming one of those books I read at least once a year. It’s that good!

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In case you too would like to get a copy of my new non-fiction book:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Offer

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A few days ago, I was listening to a call put on by Internet marketer Travis Sago.

I’ve promoted Travis heavily over the past couple months as an affiliate for his Royalty Ronin community, which I am a member of and happily pay for.

In case you somehow missed all that promotion, the background on Travis is that he used to have a big Clickbank business in the relationship niche.

He then started working with other online business owners to help them pull more money out of their own customer lists. He made millions for them and for himself doing this. He eventually started teaching other marketers how to do the same.

Travis also happens to be a master of email copy. I always describe him as a “nice guy Ben Settle.” Travis is the one who first turned me on to the power of insight in marketing, because he both teaches it and practices it.

Anyways, in that call I was listening to, Travis said the following about the kinds of emails his list likes the best:

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I see this in email lists too. They’re like, “Oh, I’ve gotta keep giving them amazing content all the time.”

My best stuff, what people people like best, is when I make offers.

Now you have to wrap — ever pill a dog? You have to put the pill in some cheese, right?

But they love it. I think people want to solve problems.

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Maybe Travis’s “pill a dog” analogy doesn’t read very elegantly here in a transcript. It sounds cuter in the live call with Travis’s perpetually cheery voice saying it.

In any case, taking a cue from Travis, I got an offer for you today.

Last year, Travis wrote a book called Make ‘Em Beg To Buy From You. That books sells for $9.99 on Amazon right now. It’s frankly a steal, because it contains large and key excerpts from Travis’s $2k course Phoneless Sales Machine, which is all about how to persuade people to buy expensive offers in the most efficient and easy way possible.

So, $9.99 on Amazon right now, and worth much more than that.

But I got a deal for you:

I made an agreement with Travis, and you can get a free copy of his Make ‘Em Beg To Buy From You (in PDF format) if you have already bought my new 10 Commandments book. Just sign up to get the “apocryphal Commandment XI” (link at the end of my new 10 Commandments book) and follow the instructions at the bottom of that extra chapter.

And if you haven’t yet gotten a copy of my new 10 Commandments book, you can do so here:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Paperback

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A long-time reader named Jordan writes in reponse to my announcement yesterday, about the ebook version of my new 10 Commandments book being live on Amazon:

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I’ll wait for the paperback to be ready, I’ve found digital copies more likely to go unread (since like courses, the digital backlog always seems bigger and more step requiring than physical ones)

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I’m telling you this because:

1. There might be something to what Jordan says.

I know direct marketing legends like Dan Kennedy bang the drum about the value of physical content arriving in the mail, both for the excitement of actually getting something real delivered, and for the fact it will hang around the house and be visible and be more likely to be consumed, shared, and remembered.

2. Because the Amazon elves have finally woken up and done their job, so the paperback version of my book is now up and live.

If you like the sight of a book lying on your desk, or you want a reference you can reach for without relying on anything digital, or you simply enjoy the feel of some paper and ink in your hands:

​https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments​

Do not create a course and do not build an audience

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Yesterday, a friend texted me with a screenshot of an Instagram account of a duo of “Instagram & social media experts.”

“Do you know them?” my friend asked. “They create a course on how to create digital courses and sell them.”

I groaned and replied that I had never heard of these particular experts.

My friend was not happy with that response. She called me up right away. She explained how she was just on a webinar for this course and how it sounds like a good deal. It’s not so expensive (only 500 GBP), plus they really walk you through the whole thing, plus you can license their course and resell it.

“And they live in Bali!” my friend said, like it’s a proof element, rather than a red flag.

Fortunately, my friend lives in London and knows a million and one successful, accomplished, and rich people.

“There’s this nutritionist I know,” she said. “She has a lot of work but it’s all one-on-one. She actually asked me if I wanted to be her business partner, and do something online. Maybe I could create a course with her teaching what she knows?”

Finally a bit of sense in this conversation.

I’m gonna tell you what I told my friend, my best advice for how to launch an info biz for someone like her.

I’ll tell you this because it equally applies to someone like me or maybe you, if you are already somewhat established in a niche but thinking of doing something entirely new. Here’s what I told my friend:

1. If you really want to do this, then partner with the nutritionist woman. She’s the expert and she already has clients. That means she has knowledge and case studies. She can deliver the actual information and service. You can focus on the marketing and business stuff.

2. Do not create a course. A course takes between 6 weeks and 6 years to complete, and if you’re just getting started, odds are that it will be on the 6 years side.

3. Instead, create a live training based on information the nutritionist’s clients are already paying for. A live training is a very forgiving format to deliver information, and it has high perceived value. You can do it next week since the woman already knows the material, and you can run it with minimal infrastructure (Zoom and a clean t-shirt will do, pants not required). Plus, you can charge a good amount right out the gate because of the live, personalized feel.

4. Do not build an audience. An audience takes between 6 weeks and 6 years to build, and if you’re just getting started, odds are that it will be on the 6 years side.

5. Instead, reach out to people you know more or less personally, and ask them if they want to sign up to your training. (Like I said, my friend knows a lot of people socially in London, and from previous places she’s lived, jobs she’s worked at, schools she’s attended. Plus the nutritionist has her past clients list and her entire professional network. If, by a bit of social media posting and a few texts and DMs, they cannot get 10 women to sign up for their training, then the problem is with the training, and no amount of audience will fix that.)

6. Once you run that live training, you can run it again, each month, and for more money. Or you can polish it up and turn it into a course, except now it’s more likely to take 6 weeks than 6 years to complete.

I normally wouldn’t plop down a bowl of steaming how-to porridge right in front of you like this. It’s not good manners.

But this is a big weekend for me. I have a book to publish, an optin funnel to create (I bought a newsletter ad that’s due to run tomorrow, unrelated to the book), a lead magnet to write for that funnel, a gym to go to, and forced socializing to do (ahem, read the new book for that).

That also means I have nothing to promote to you today.

I prefer to build up your eagerness for my new book which will be published… imminently. I’ll have more information on that soon.

But if you absolutely need something to do with the energy that’s built up by reading this email, then go and implement the plan I’ve listed above.

Or if you already have a working business and you don’t want to get distracted, then forward my email to a competitor with a note that says, “Thought you might like this.” Maybe they will get distracted and go build a new info product business and move to Bali and stop competing with you. And if that happens, you can thank me by buying a copy of my new book.

Indecent proposal

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Last week, I wrote an email with the subject line “Operation Mincemeat.” At the end of that email, I asked readers if they have an audience to which they could promote my new 10 Commandments book.

I also said I don’t know what I can do in turn for those who promote me, but that I am happy to entertain all kinds of offers.

I got a lot of readers replying to say they would be happy to promote me to their lists. I appreciate everyone who wrote in.

Some people said they would do it without asking anything in turn, simply because I’m such a swell guy.

Others made me various decent and indecent proposals. Here’s one I got from James Carran, who writes several newsletters about the craft and business of writing:

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How about later in the year when I get a chance to polish them up, you take a gander at my course library and see if there’s one you’d like to promote as an affiliate? I just want to redesign them all and update them first…

With the proviso that you’d only promote anything if you thought it was genuinely helpful for your people and something you’d want to promote anyway. If not, I’ll take no offence.

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I’m bringing this up because James’s proposal is one that I wish more people would make me, all the time, whether or not they agree to promote my new book.

So let me explicitly make you my own proposal, which you may deem indecent, but which you probably won’t, because I’m really fishing here so I can pay off the subject line:

If you have a course, and you would love to have me promote your course to my audience, then write in and let me know.

A few points that will make it more likely for me to take you seriously:

1. Your course is amazing and previous customers love it

2. Your course is based on a new mechanism for an old promise (hat tip to Justin Goff for that idea — whatever happened to him)

3. Your course sells for at least $197, or you’d be okay raising the price to that level

If you have a course that matches these three criteria, or at least two out of three and you can compensate for the third with your own enthusiasm and force of personality, then write in and let me know.

I’m not promising anything. But I am always short of good offers to promote, and if you have an amazing course that I can get behind, then you’d be doing me a favor.

Cooling out course buyers

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A reader named Tom (not sure he wants me to share his last name) replied to my email yesterday with a thoughtful comment that could make somebody good money:

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I was reading today’s email about the customer who wanted the refund, and I started wondering if maybe there was a simple fix that could have saved you, him, and the people you were promoting for a lot of hassle.

Direct response teaches all these ways to build trust, harness momentum, overcome objections, frame value, reverse risk, etc, but I don’t see anywhere near as much focus on post-purchase persuasion – the buyer’s remorse mitigation bit where you tell them “you made a good decision – you weren’t duped.”

This is especially important for anything relatively high-ticket that needs a lot of persuasive leverage to get to over the line, and I think for those guys the hand holding and reassurance is not only more necessary, but probably has a lot of surplus value.

I think of it as “warming down” from a very emotionally charged, high-energy conversion ramp. As a copywriter you get so used to pushing the buttons and architecting the momentum that it’s easy to lose sight of what an emotionally and cognitively demanding experience the conversion process can be for the prospect (as in it uses emotional and cognitive resources, not that it’s high friction).

For me at least the takeaway is that the post-purchase excitation window is one of the most vulnerable and high-intensity moments of the entire arc, and that stepping in at that point (in the right way) can be one of the most valuable forms of nurture out there. By properly architecting a post-purchase nurture/wind down sequence, even for affiliate sales, you can 1. avoid refunds/months of avoidable back-and-forths 2) feel better about the sale (happy customers etc), 3. build trust, rapport and good will in a way that increases engagement, sales, and LTV of your list.

Anyway, I’m not sure I’m not stating the painfully obvious, but as I read today’s email that jumped out, and I thought I’d try and articulate it.

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As you might or might not know, since I’ve only mentioned the fact about 14 million times, I’m about to publish a book about the commonalities between con men, pickup artists, copywriters, etc.

I bring this up 1) to build a bit more buzz about the book and 2) because Tom’s use of the term “warming down” to describe a process for avoiding a post-purchase blowup.

Con men, who have more skin in the game than most copywriters, particularly more than freelance copywriters who work on one-off projects, call this process “cooling out a mark.”

Con men know that when you get somebody’s money, there’s still work to be done, so that the mark doesn’t go to the police. Crazy thing is it can be done. A mark in a good con doesn’t go to the police because he doesn’t even realize he’s been conned.

I’m not advising you to fleece, scam, or con people. I am advising you to take common human psychology seriously.

Like Tom writes above, we — marketers, copywriters, online business owners — have all learned how to amp and rile people up emotionally, up to the point where a sale is made.

We might think that, since we sell good products, ones as advertised, a sale is really all we need to do. Once people are faced with the good product — ta da!

Except what you sell, good or bad, is secondary, while what your customer feels and perceives is primary.

Tom gives some good ideas for how to “cool out” your course buyers so they don’t end up regretting the emotional spike that led them to a purchase.

I’ll give you one more idea, which is simpler and more universal.

It’s simply to keep writing daily emails, in which you inevitably keep promoting the same offer in new ways.

Ongoing daily emails resell people on what they bought, encourage them to actually dip in and consume it and benefit from it, and show you’re not a con man who is simply presenting a sexy front so you can swipe people’s money and then run to the horse track to gamble it all away.

So this entire email is really for the people who already subscribe to my Daily Email Habit service. If you needed one more reason to write daily emails, or to benefit from Daily Email Habit, or to believe in me as somebody who is looking to help you, then you’ve got it.

And if you’re not a Daily Email Habit subscriber, but you can see the value of sending daily emails, then here’s how to do it more quickly and easily:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

The day after

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Yesterday around 1pm, I finished writing my Daily Email Habit puzzle and was about to upload it to Kit. But my Internet had stopped working. The odd thing was I checked my phone, and not just the wifi was down, but it looked like the cellular network, too.

I shrugged and went to take a nap because… I live in Spain.

I woke up twenty minutes later. The Internet was still down. I looked inside the fridge to see if there was anything interesting happening there. It was dark. Aha. The power was out.

I opened the the circuit breaker box — all the circuit breakers were fine. I opened the front door of my apartment. The hallway outside was dark except for the emergency light.

Ok. So the power is out in the entire building. There was a notice a few days ago about some utilities work being done, maybe this was it.

I decided to go to the gym, because there was nothing else to do. The elevator wasn’t working so I took the stairs. On my way down, I passed a couple with a baby who were climbing up. The woman was carrying the baby, while the guy, panting, was carrying the stroller. Lucky for them, they live on just the second floor (the building has 12).

As I stepped out into the sunshine, I saw a bunch of people standing around on the street and talking. All stores, restaurants, and banks were dark and empty. I guess the was power out everywhere in my neighborhood?

I passed by a local brunch place. The waitress was explaining to the guests, “It’s everywhere! My boyfriend in Madrid says it, there’s no connection anywhere.”

I got to the gym, which was dark, silent, and full of people. I did my workout among suppressed grunts and increasingly stifling air (the AC wasn’t working).

I heard one of the trainers explain to somebody that this power outage is happening “en toda España.” Somebody else said Portugal too. Others were saying it’s in France and Italy as well (turned out to be exaggerations).

I walked back home. Drivers were carefully stopping at every zebra and intersection because the stoplights weren’t working either.

The streets were packed with people. Neither the metros nor trams were running. The whole city seemed to be either standing on the streets or walking home because no work could be done. An alarming number of women were sitting on park benches and reading books.

Convenience stores were the only thing that was somewhat open. Each one had a queue of people waiting at the front door. The store owners were letting in people one by one to do basic shopping if they could pay in cash.

As tends to happen, the sun started to set. I went for a walk and saw firefighters in front of a pharmacy beating down the rolling security shutter. It must run on electricity. I guess the firefighters were trying to close it by force for the pharmacists, to prevent a breakin at night.

I stood on my balcony as night fell. I was looking forward to seeing the city in total darkness for once. But it wasn’t to happen.

It turned out some buildings still had electricity — the fire station next door, various hotels, an entire neighborhood off on the hillside.

Still, Avinguda Diagonal, the main artery next to my house, was almost entirely dark. So was my little street. My own apartment was even darker.

I made a salad for dinner — the only food I had left in the house that didn’t require a stove to prepare. I had to move the cutting board to the window because the counter where I normally work was so dark I was afraid I would chop off a finger tip while slicing the cherry tomatoes.

By around 9:30pm, my apartment was like a cave. There was no Internet and I had switched off my phone earlier to conserve the battery. I lay on the couch and turned on the backlight on my Kindle to read in darkness.

Around 10pm, I heard cheering and clapping outside. A neighboring block had gotten its power back. But my block and most other blocks around me were still in the dark.

I went to bed around 10:30pm, feeling exhausted. I guess following the natural light cycle does that to you.

And then, some time during the night, I’m guessing around 2am, I woke up to loud beeping. My fridge was back and it was helpfully signalling that the temperature of the freezer was dangerously high.

All that’s to say, as of this morning, everything’s normal once again, and without even an interruption in my daily email cadence.

I have to admit I was actually looking forward to the possibility of a continuing power outage, and to having a proper, unavoidable excuse to not writing my daily email today. What would that be like? I’ve been writing a daily email for years now, every day, without fail. I was excited by the prospect of change. That’s something for me to think about.

Meanwhile, I can tell you that the curious day yesterday reminded me of a curious book I’d read two years ago. In fact, this book was the first book of my year-long Insights & More Book Club, which brought together a few of my readers specifically to read books that offered a mind-bending new perspective.

The first book of the book club fit the bill.

Even though the book is 100 years old, it was written in a particularly interesting and influential style, which I think can be relevant for anyone writing online today.

It also did lead me to moment of real insight, a perspective shift, which sticks with me to this day. I mean, even to yesterday, when I was really thinking about it.

If you’re curious, you can find the book, or maybe even read it yourself, at the following convenient link:

https://bejakovic.com/masses

“… which is really important yada yada”

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Yesterday, I made available my 3rd Conversion training for 36 hours. It’s about how to get people to consume and implement your info product, so they actually get value out of it beyond just the thrill of a purchase, and so they tell others about you, and buy more stuff when you create it.

Today, I got a question about 3rd Conversion from a course creator:

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I have just rewritten all my course slides and gearing up to rerecord them and to then release V2.

One of the things I’ve done is finish every lesson with a hook for the next lesson.

So something like “but what we haven’t covered is this and that which is really important yada yada. That’s what we’ll look at next, see you there.

Is this the sort of thing your training teaches? But many other tips like that?

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I don’t wanna razz this course creator because what he describes is endemic, and I too have been guilty of it.

But if you care about creating long-term customers from one-time buyers, and you want people to consume your info product, and get value from it, it takes active thought and work.

Just piling up a bunch of solid info, and at the end of it effectively saying, “…and there’s more, and it’s really important yada yada,” is typically too little, too loose, too late.

That’s not to say that “handing people IOUs,” as I like to call it, is never a good idea. But:

1. There are better places to hand out IOUs than at the end of a lesson

2. There’s more important stuff to do at the end of a lesson than to hand out an IOU

I’ve only made 3rd Conversion available once before, as a live training last November. To the people who took me up on that training, I also gave a free bonus document that I called, “Encyclopedia of Consumption & Digestion, 1st edition.”

This “Encyclopedia” includes 19 techniques for encouraging consumption and digestion, along with descriptions and illustrations of each technique, some of which I went over during the live training, some of which I didn’t.

I can tell you that technique #14 talks specifically about giving out IOUs… while technique #17 and #19 are about more important stuff to do at the end of a lesson, at least if you want to encourage consumption and implementation.

If you’ve already gotten 3rd Conversion from me, you will find the “Encyclopedia of Consumption & Digestion, 1st edition” as a bonus in the course area.

And if you haven’t yet gotten 3rd Conversion, you still have a few hours to get it and the bonus “Encyclopedia of Consumption & Digestion,” until 12 midnight PST, tonight.

This will be the last email I send about it.

If you need some help making up your mind, here are a few comments I got from people who attended the 3rd Conversion training live.

#1. From Jeffrey Thomas, in-house copywriter at MarketingProfs:

“JOHN this was one of the best trainings I’ve been a part of. I cannot express how excited I’ve been and I’m already reworking my presentation’s overdue slide deck.”

#2. From Folarin Madehin, freelance copywriter:

“The 3rd Conversion call was great, John! But I already expected that going in. I know you said to look at the training as more than a checklist, but that’s what was most on my mind, lol. ‘Here’s a list of stuff I can check to make products more awesome!'”

#3. From Antonet Vataj, owner of Ann Vee Marketing:

“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)”

#4. From Shakoor Chowdhury, digital marketer:

“I gotta also say the way you [a list of stuff I’ve done in the past to get people to consume my courses and trainings] makes you an effective teacher and I think there is a lot to be said about the way you teach compared to traditional schooling which teaches us nothing because there is no incentive to listen and no incentive to use it or use our own initiative to ’test ourselves’ like you have done…”

“I normally get bored easily, but you were able to keep my attention throughout the entire training with minimal distraction, mainly through [some of the techniques I used inside the actual 3rd Conversion training to encourage people to consume it]… perhaps the ’tiktok generation’ has some hope after all.”

#5. From Pete Reginella, email marketer and copywriter:

“Finally got the chance to use what you taught in the 3rd Conversion training. And it went great. I did a workshop on influential and persuasive storytelling, and I modeled it according to what you taught. First time I’ve done a workshop and after sending the recording getting replies about how much people loved it.”

If you’d like to get 3rd Conversion before it disappears:

https://bejakovic.com/3rd-conversion