Direct Marketing

Public appeal: What are you eyeing to buy?

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During my CopyHour promo last week, I got a message from a reader who got stung by buying too soon:

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Man you really gotta start posting an affiliate calendar, your bonuses are always amazing… same case as High Impact Writing. I already bought it on the first round of the year and I will say it was phenomenal. would’ve been great to get it from your affiliate though

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An affiliate calendar is a smart idea. But the fact is, as things stand, I have no major affiliate offers planned soon. Maybe you can help me with that.

Ask yourself:

Is there anything you’re thinking of buying?

Any course, mastermind, coaching program you have your eye on, you’ve been saving up for, you’re on the fence with?

If there is, write in and let me know.

If it’s an offer that makes sense to promote to my entire list, I will reach out the offer owner and ask about striking some kind of a deal.

And when I do, I will make sure you benefit.

Maybe I can wrangle a sizeable discount on your behalf.

Or maybe I’ll add on valuable bonuses — extra trainings or a community or secret info — that make the original price seem like a steal.

You win. I win. And maybe even that offer owner wins.

So think for a moment. And if something pops up in your mind, let me know.

10 lessons from my CopyHour promo

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I finished my CopyHour promo last night. I can say it was a success.

I made a healthy number of sales and made good money. No, it’s not “buy a chateau in France” kind of money. But if I could do this every week, honestly I would.

I made a list for myself of 10 lessons learned from this promo. Maybe these lessons won’t speak to you at all. Or maybe you’ll find one interesting or valuable point inside. Here goes:

1. I was worried that there would be nobody left to buy. I mean it’s CopyHour. The program has been around for 12 years and 3,000+ people have bought so far. Plus, there’s a lot of overlap between Derek’s list and mine… plus, Justin Goff promoted CopyHour a couple months ago.

“Surely everybody knows CopyHour and has either bought or has decided not to buy…”

But I was wrong. There were people for whom CopyHour was genuinely new. And there were others who were swayed by my bonuses (more on those below).

2. As has happened before when I’ve promoted affiliate offers, people wrote in thanking me for turning them on to a good product or service they hadn’t heard of before. This is a strange phenomenon known as “people are happy to be sold as long as you sell them stuff with their best interest in mind, and you communicate that.”

3. I officially ended the promo with more subscribers on my list than I started with, in spite of sending 10 emails over 3 1/2 days. I’m ascribing that to the following…

4. The event felt lively. In fact it always feels lively when I’m promoting something I haven’t promoted before… when sales are coming in… when sales are coming in from people I had never heard from before, but who turn out to have been reading my emails for a year or more… when I’m pushing out lots of emails quickly… and when even people who are not interested in buying are writing in to comment on the event and the emails.

5. It feels great to promote a solid proven offer that really helps people. And when it feels great, I’m much more ready to work.

6. It feels really nice to promote an offer where I don’t have to do any delivery after the fact. I’m planning to take most of the day off today after I finish this email.

7. Bonuses: The fact that they added up to what CopyHour cost, and even a bit more, made it feel like buy-one-get-one-free to people. Some bought because of that, and wrote in to say so.

9. A few people wrote in to say they were persuaded to buy by a specific bonus among the five I offered. Lesson learned: Keep creating content, keep putting out offers, and even if those offers don’t become evergreen sellers like my Simple Money Emails program, they can still have value.

10. It’s often easier to write 10 emails than to write 1.

I had been really struggling writing emails the past couple days/weeks before promoting CopyHour.

I’ve been looking to make some significant changes in the way I run this newsletter and the kinds of offers I promote.

The result has been a lot of baggage in my head and feeling inhibited when I write and second-guessing myself. Promoting a solid affiliate offer and simply being able to write fun emails cleared that from my head, at least for this week.

All that’s to say:

If you bought CopyHour, thanks again for buying. I hope you will do the work and get the promised results.

And whether or not you bought, I hope my emails over the past few days were still entertaining and maybe even valuable.

I’ll be back tomorrow with something new. I have no idea what yet. But now, it’s time to go have coffee and go for a walk.

Daniel Throssell offers a thought on my CopyHour promo

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This morning, I started my final-day email barrage promoting CopyHour. In reply to my last day’s first email, I got a message from Australia’s best copywriter, Daniel Throssell, who wrote:

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Can I offer a thought?

If it were me I’d make more of a big deal of how little a burden your extra training will add to the not insignificant time burden of doing CopyHour.

I get the feeling one of the big objections to a program like CopyHour is the massive time & work commitment it entails, and buyers will (justifiably or not) use that as a reason to excuse themselves from the promo. I think a five-bonus stack does you no favours in that regard. But it looks like mostly small, punchy stuff … so you might do well to emphasise each time that it only adds (say) 1 hour of total time to get the benefit of all those bonuses.

Of course it may be presumptuous of me to say that to you, but it was just a thought I had when reading this.

Good luck!

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As Daniel tends to do, he makes a good point above.

There are two costs to any kind of product. One is the price you pay up front. The other is the effort and time to actually consume or use the beast.

Info product owners often think that the more mere tonnage they pile onto their offer, the better it will sell. But I have personally been turned off by offer smorgasbords that made me think, “Ugh, who’s got the stomach to swallow all those mixed meats…”

So let me take and apply Daniel’s advice:

The core promise for CopyHour is “write six & seven figure copy in the next 90 days.”

Yes, getting there will require work. It’s there in the name — CopyHour.

I encourage you to sign up to CopyHour if you plan to do the work, since that’s the only way to actually get the promised benefits in those 90 days.

If you do decide to join CopyHour today, and you do so before 8:31pm CET using my link below, I will also give you a free bonus, which I’ve taken to calling Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets. This is a bundle of five bite-sized offers which I’ve previously sold for a total of $499.

I won’t overwhelm you now by talking about what each of the five offers is about. I will say that you can use three of these offers as references, meaning you reach for them when you need to, at a cost of just a minute or two of your time.

The remaining two offers inside Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets will take you under an hour total to consume and benefit from — and I have worked hard to make those trainings entertaining as well as valuable.

And now the deadline, always the deadline…

Less than 5 hours remain before I close down my CopyHour promo. If you’d like to get in before then, take a gander now at the CopyHour landing page:

https://bejakovic.com/copyhour

P.S. If you do join CopyHour, write me and say so. Also write me in case you already have bought via my affiliate link. The affiliate portal only lets me see the first name of who’s bought and not the email. So write me and say you bought, and I’ll send over your bonuses. Like a reader named Esat who just wrote:

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Hey John!

Just finished buying the CopyHour program by using your affiliate link. Thanks for this – I’d have never seen it if I wasn’t a big fan of you & read your emails.

Please send over my bonuses when you get a chance, thanks.

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Get ready

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I’ve just had a large and rich breakfast, fit for an Olympian. Today is the last day of my CopyHour promo, and I had to make sure I had enough calories in me to run the extra laps around the daily email track.

Because the last day of an email promotion is where most of the sales come in.

​​And when I say most, I mean most — 40%-60% of total sales typically come in the last 12-18 hours, even if the promo has been running for a week or more.

That fact always blows my mind.

​​What equally blows my mind is that so many business owners and email marketers don’t take advantage of this, and don’t send out more emails on the last day to highlight that the deadline is here, that the deadline is near, and that missing it will cost their readers dear.

So that’s my advice for you today:

Get ready.

Have a big breakfast that last day of your promo. Send an alert, warning your readers that there will be more emails than usual. Make your content funny, or cute, or excessively valuable — whatever you need to do to get those extra emails out the door.

I’ll have more promo tips like that for you today.

Because I am closing my promo of CopyHour tonight at 8:31pm CET — less than 10 hours away. If you join CopyHour before then, using my affiliate link below, I’ll also give you access to the following five free bonuses, each of which I previously sold for good money:

#1. Copy Zone (price last sold at: $100). My 175-page, A-Z guide on the business side of copywriting, from getting started with no experience or portfolio, all the way to becoming an A-list copywriter. Only ever sold once before, during a flash 24-hour offer in March 2023.

#2. Most Valuable Postcard #2: Ferrari Monster (price last sold at: $100). A deep dive into a single fascinating topic — code named Ferrari Monster — which I claim is the essence of all copywriting and marketing. Get the Ferrari Monster right, and almost everything else falls into place.

#3. Copy Riddles Lite (price last sold at $99). A slice of my Copy Riddles program, proportionately priced. Try yourself against legendary A-list copywriters like Gene Schwartz, David Deutsch, and Clayton Makepeace — and in the process, implant new copywriting skills into your brain.

#4. Horror Advertorial Swipe File (price last sold at: $100). A zip file with 25 PDFs, featuring the original copy for 25 of my horror advertorials. These advertorials pulled in millions of dollars on cold Facebook and YouTube traffic, and sold everything from fake diamonds and dog seat belts, to stick-on bras and kids’ vitamins.

#5. 9 Deadly Email Sins (price last sold at: $100). 9 lessons distilled from my expensive and exclusive one-on-one coaching sessions with successful business owners and marketers.

When you add all those prices up, you get a total of $499 in free bonuses. This happens to be more than CopyHour currently sells for.

Again, the deadline to get these bonuses is tonight, 8:31pm CET. If you want ’em, you’ll have to join CopyHour before then.

For more info on that, take a look at Derek’s writeup of how CopyHour works:

https://bejakovic.com/copyhour

P.S. If you do join CopyHour, write me and say so. Also write me in case you already have bought via my affiliate link. The affiliate portal only lets me see the first name of who’s bought and not the email. So write me and say you bought, and I’ll send over your bonuses.

Announcing: Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets

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I’m excited to announce my new offer, Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets.

​​I’ll tell you about this new offer in a moment, but first I want to share a valuable marketing tip with you. Here goes:

Back in the 1990s, Gary Bencivenga, widely believed by marketing experts to be the greatest living copywriter, sold a little offer of his own.

Gary’s offer was a book of tips for winning jobs. He sold it via ads in USA Today, like this:

Headline — “Do you make these mistakes in job interviews?”

Offer — The core book, “Interviews that Win Jobs,” for $49.95. There was also a free bonus, which Gary said was “selling nationally for $49.95,” called “How to Answer the 64 Toughest Interview Questions.”

So far, so standard.

Except, I am a bit of an amateur advertising sleuth.

And so I happen to know that Gary also ran a second ad for a second book about job and interview tips.

He sold this second offer via ads USA Today, like this:

Headline — “Job hunting? How well can YOU answer these 64 toughest interview questions?”

Offer — The core book, “How to Answer the 64 Toughest Interview Questions,” for $49.95. There was also a free bonus, which Gary said was “selling nationally for $49.95,” called “Interviews that Win Jobs.”

So that’s my little tip for you today:

Do what Gary did, and double your front-end offers by selling both your bonus and your core offer.

This will force you to make both offer and bonus sexy and appealing.

​​And it will add legitimacy and authority when you say that the bonus sells for $49.95, as opposed to the mealy-mouthed alternative of so many marketers, valued at $49.95.

I don’t bring up this Gary Bencivenga tip by accident.

I bring it up because I discovered this tip back in the decade of the 2010s, when I spent 100+ hours copying old and successful ads by hand, including both of Gary’s jobs ads.

I doubt that I would have spotted Gary’s doubled-up offer had I simply “read” Gary’s first ad, skimmed past that “selling nationally for $49.95” at the very end, and tossed the ad aside.

That to me is the value of hand-copying ads and sales letters.

Other people ascribe magic to the actual neurology of copying stuff out by hand.

I’ve personally never experienced that. But I have found the process of copying ads immensely valuable because it forced me to sit and really examine ads carefully, and spot many of the valuable details that make them work, which I would have missed otherwise.

Which brings me to my new offer. It’s a special, one-time bundle called Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets. Inside this unique bundle, you can find the following:

#1. Copy Zone (selling nationally for $100). My 175-page, A-Z guide on the business side of copywriting, from getting started with no experience or portfolio, all the way to becoming an A-list copywriter.

#2. Most Valuable Postcard #2: Ferrari Monster (selling nationally for $100). A deep dive into a single fascinating topic — code named Ferrari Monster — which I claim is the essence of all copywriting and marketing. Get the Ferrari Monster right, and almost everything else falls into place.

#3. Copy Riddles Lite (selling nationally for $99). A slice of my Copy Riddles program, proportionately priced. Try yourself against legendary A-list copywriters like Gene Schwartz, David Deutsch, and Clayton Makepeace — and in the process, implant new copywriting skills into your brain.

#4. Horror Advertorial Swipe File (selling nationally for $100). A zip file with 25 PDFs, featuring the original copy for 25 of my horror advertorials. These advertorials pulled in millions of dollars on cold Facebook and YouTube traffic, and sold everything from fake diamonds and dog seat belts, to stick-on bras and kids’ vitamins.

#5. 9 Deadly Email Sins (selling nationally for $100). 9 lessons distilled from my expensive and exclusive one-on-one coaching sessions with successful business owners and marketers.

The trainings inside Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets sell nationally for a total of $499.

But you can get this bundle at a discounted price of just $497 — if you act by this Thursday at 8:31pm CET, using the link below.

Plus, if you get Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets before the deadline, I’ll also add in a free bonus, membership in Derek Johanson’s CopyHour program.

​​CopyHour sells nationally, and internationally, for $497. But it’s yours free when you get Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets.

​​To get both before the doors close:

https://bejakovic.com/copyhour

P.S. If you do get Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets, write me and say so. Due to the quirks of the above sales cart, I can only see the first name of who’s bought, and not the email. So write me and say you bought, and I’ll make sure you get both Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets and access to CopyHour.

If sales calls are not your thing…

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Yesterday, I was talking to James “Get Paid Write” Carran.

​​James has 100k+ followers on Twitter. He also has a daily email newsletter I’m subscribed to.

James used to do ghostwriting on Twitter — he charged clients a few thousand dollars per month to write tweets. He’s since stopped client work and is writing for himself.

I asked if he would want to go back and do more ghostwriting for clients. To which James replied:

“The thing I don’t like about client work is the getting clients part, which is sales calls. Calls in general, not my thing.”

I told James something, which I will tell you also, because it’s absolutely true and maybe it will be the push you need:

If sales calls are really your block, you don’t have a block. You can do what you want.

There’s no rule out there that you have to get on a sales call and convince clients to work with you.

If you have expertise and an audience, it’s the other way around. You can tell people, “If you want to work with me, this is how I work.”

I don’t do client work any more. But this year I’ve closed $2k and $3k sales by email alone. That’s about the highest-ticket stuff I sell right now. But I bet I could go higher. I know there are people who have closed $5k and $10k and $15k stuff via email, no sales calls required.

Of course, if you decide that you don’t want to do sales calls, you’ll have to adjust other parts of your business to make up for that.

Specifically, you’ll need an audience, perceived authority, and perceived familiarity — your prospects feel they know you even though you’ve never met.

Getting any of these doesn’t happen overnight. But it doesn’t have to take forever either. Depending on where you are, a few weeks or a few months can be enough.

If you want to get started today, then create an optin form, and write an email like this one. ​​Or, if you want my help and guidance along the way, hit reply. I promise there won’t be any sales call.

The oddest info product creators on my list

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Last night, I sent an email asking my readers if they sell their own info products. That email got a LOT of response.

Of course, most people on my list sell familiar info products — ebooks and courses on marketing, writing, bizopp.

But some people wrote in and managed to surprise me. A few standouts:

#1: “My wife and I are developing theatre training courses, mainly to sell to school teachers who are not drama teachers by trade, but have been ‘elected’ to teach the courses and put on the productions.”

#2: “Am currently writing some digital reports requested by our specialist cancer research audience although I have no real idea how to do this!”

#3: “I sell Numerology info products, such as relationship forecasts, life forecasts, name adviser, lucky numbers and in depth reports. I sell to business owners, individuals and women looking for alternative angle to motivate and advise on current situation.”

This morning, I sat down to reply to these folks and to everyone else who had written me. But before I did so, I asked myself:

“What do I want out of this interaction? Why did I even ask this question?”

The following reasons poured out of me. Maybe they will be of some interest or value to you:

1. Find out who’s doing well

2. Connect with more people

3. Find out what problems people are having

4. Find out what problems their customers are having

5. Find out if they have [CENSORED but keep reading, trust me]

6. Find out what’s currently working for them, what’s not working

7. Maintain or rather enhance my reputation

8. See if any opportunities [CENSORED again, but still keep reading, I promise I won’t keep doing this much more]

9. Get possible ideas for new offers to create

10. See if there are any good offers that [CENSORED, last censored thing, keep reading to find out how to uncensor]

11. See if there are people I could connect with each other, either as some kind of broker or just to help out

I’m not sure whether the list above can be useful to you in any way.

Whatever the case may be, my offer from yesterday still stands.

So if you sell your own info products:

1. Hit reply

2. Tell me what info product or products you sell and who you sell it to

When I get your message, I will reply and tell you a genuine secret way to sell more of what you’ve created.

I’ll also tell you about a special, free training — free as in not even any optin required — that lays out real gold about how to actually run this secret selling strategy in practice.

If you watch this free training, the CENSORED bits above will become clear as day.

And who knows. If you just reply to this email, maybe we can connect or exchange some ideas along the way.

The heart and soul of great copywriting

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Last night, I announced the new “Secret Demand” training I’ll hold on Friday.

This live training will be all about unlocking secret demand in your list. Once you can do that, you can pull an extra $5k, or $15k, or $50k from your list, in just 3-5 days, whenever you so decide.

A good number of people raised their hand to express interest in Secret Demand. I sent them the full details. And this morning, I woke up to the first notifications from ThriveCart that sales had come in.

That’s nice.

Still…

Based on the number of people who had raised their hand, I expected more sales to come in by now.

Maybe that’s greed. Maybe it’s impatience. Maybe it’s simply that I know how valuable what I will teach can be to the right person.

What to do in a situation like that? When some sales are coming in… but you suspect you can do better?

I’ll just share the following quote with you, from marketing legend Gary Halbert, who once wrote:

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Hark unto me, Buckwheat: Writing “copy” is less than 1/10 as important as learning to think about new offers and getting them down on paper as I just did. I can’t say it often enough or strongly enough…

It Is The Deal… The Offer… The Proposition
You Are Making That Is The Heart And Soul
Of Great Copywriting!

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This is why the largest of the Secret Demand training will be devoted to the offer. Writing copy is fairly straightforward once you have the right offer in place.

Anyways, signups for the Secret Demand training are now open. If you’re interested, you’ll have to raise your hand by tomorrow, Wednesday night at 12 midnight PST.

That’s because I’m not sending people straight to a sales page. I first want to find out if you’re in a situation where this training can possibly help you. And that will take a couple of emails back and forth.

So ask yourself:

Do you have a business?

Do you have an email list?

Does the promise of unlocking secret demand in your list sound appealing?

If so, then reply to this email.

I’ll have a couple questions for you. And if it sounds like a fit, I’ll send you the full details about this training. You can then decide if you’d like to join me on Friday.

Announcing: Secret demand in your list

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As I’ve been teasing for the past week:

This Friday, I will hold a live presentation about how to unlock secret demand in your email list.

Once you can do this, then you can pull an extra $5k, $15k, $50k from your list — depending on who exactly you’ve got on there. And you can do it again and again, whenever you like.

I’m limiting this training to business owners. If you’re curious why, I might talk about that in the future. For now, just ask yourself:

Do you have a business?

Do you have an email list?

Does the promise of unlocking secret demand in your list sound appealing?

If so, then reply to this email. I’ll send you the full details about this training. And you can then decide if you’d like to join me on Friday.

My supplement stack

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I’m not sure why you’d want to know. But after 15+ years of obsessing over my health, and researching and experimenting with dozens of different, often exotic and possibly toxic supplements, here is my current daily supplement stack:

* Magnesium, zinc, and vitamin D (because they are important and I probably don’t get enough)

* A multivitamin and some fish oil (because why not)

* A teaspoon of glycine and a capsule of NAC (because there’s good science showing this combo actually reverses many hallmarks of aging, at least if you’re getting old)

* A teaspoon of creatine (because it helps increase energy production in both the body and the brain, and God knows I need that)

I’m sharing my supplement stack for two reasons.

Reason one is that I’ve found I like to read stuff like this in other people’s marketing-related newsletters. It makes no sense, and yet it’s there. Maybe you’re the same.

Reason two is that opening this email with my supplement stack allows me to seamlessly, like a silky fox, transition into talking about my supplement theory of email marketing.

Yesterday, I sent out an email that promoted my Copy Riddles program. I made one sale of Copy Riddles as a result, at $997. I’m actually very happy with that.

Because I gotta admit:

That’s hardly the norm. Most times that I send out a regular, daily, broadcast email to promote a familiar offer like Copy Riddles, I don’t make any sales.

As a result, I’ve come to think of daily emails that promote existing offers — buy it today, buy it tomorrow, buy it whenever — like supplements.

Yes, such daily emails will make sales. But the fact that people can buy the offer today, or tomorrow, or the month after, means such sales are unpredictable and rare.

That’s why I say such emails are supplements. Nice to have, but you can’t live off ’em. Instead, you gotta live off proper nutrition.

In email marketing terms, proper nutrition means a regular diet of email-based promotions – time-limited events that get people to ACT NOW.

This coming Friday, I will hold a live training about such promotions for a small group of business owners who have a list.

If that’s you, then my promise is that on this training, I’ll show you how how to pull extra money from your list, even if you don’t create a new offer, and even if you’re not pumping in hundreds or thousands new names to your list every week.

Of course, if you do have an entirely new offer, or you do get a big influx of new leads, these promotional events work even better.

And for the record, these kinds of email promos are something I have quite a bit of experience with. Via my own list and offers… via clients clients I’ve worked with… and most recently, via the coaching I’m doing inside Shiv Shetti’s mastermind, where I strategize on a new such promotion every week.

Maybe you’d like to benefit from my experience, and shortcut your path to a healthy and nutritious email list. If so, then read my email tomorrow, because I’ll have more info on Friday’s training.