Direct Marketing

Wouldn’t it be nice

by

This morning, I packed up my laptop, walked to the nearby museum to work (they have a nice garden with tables), was rebuffed (museum is closed), and turned back to sit down in a cavernous cafe next to my house.

I am now here, surrounded by other people with other laptops. I got my coffee, and am surveying the results of the 36-hour promo I was running for Parker Worth’s Cold Gold training until a few hours ago. Results:

* 4 emails sent

* 11 unsubscribes (people really didn’t like that “You gotta buy this” email)

* 259 clicks to the sales page

* 42 front-end sales

* 70 sales in total (front-end plus bumps and upsells)

* $4,391 that I made as an affiliate (Parker was giving away a 75% commission)

All in all, I reckon it took me about about 5 hours of total work to run this promo, meaning to write the 4 emails… conduct 5 interviews with people from my list… and package that up into the Cold Outreach Fastlane offer, which is what I was really selling the whole time, while making Parker’s training just a condition to getting what I was offering.

In my book, whenever I can make 1k+ from my list in a day, it’s a good day. And while I don’t really think in terms of hourly wage, I figure that whatever $4,391 divided by 5 comes out to is a fair and just hourly wage in today’s economy.

“Oh please,” I hear somebody in my audience sneering.

Perhaps you think it’s a dick move for me to lord it over people about how I’ve got this casual and comfortable lifestyle and an asset, in the form of my email list, which pays me, and not only in the form of money, but also in the form of offers, and introductions, and quiet but steady word-of-mouth around the Internet.

Maybe it is a dick move. But I am making it because I want to tell you that I am not all that unique. I know a bunch of other people who have similar little businesses to mine, based around an email list, around daily emails, and around a few monthly promos of interesting offers.

These people all get remarkably similar results to mine.

$1 per email subscriber per month is often touted as the norm for email marketing. But for me and other people who do similar stuff to what I do, $3-$5 per subscriber per month is very doable, month after month.

With even a modest-sized list, that becomes a nice income, whether on its own or on top of other stuff you might be doing.

Wouldn’t it be nice? Wouldn’t it be nice to have something similar?

If that’s what you’re asking yourself right now, then I want to point you to a very unique opportunity that’s good for the next 24 hours or so.

The fact is, it takes several things to line up for a business like mine to work. You have to write daily emails or close to it… what you write has to be interesting and valuable enough to keep people engaged… you have to have an audience of at least some size… you have to have good offers to promote.

Most people are missing more than one of the items above, and therefore getting to a little daily email biz like mine seems impossible.

Right now, Nick Bandy is making an offer to make all this very possible for you, to plug up any holes you might have right now, and to effectively build you a daily email business that just works.

Nick, by the way, is one of the people who does like I do, and gets similar results from his email list.

He knows how to grow a list. He knows how to email that list with emails that people (including me) love to read. And he’s got a stable of great offers, some of which I’ve promoted in this newsletter.

The very unique aspect of the current opportunity is that Nick is offering a completely “done for you” email business in a box, including proven offers you can sell… list growth… and help with daily emails… at a price of your own choosing.

Maybe you didn’t read the above paragraph to the end. So let me repeat the important bit:

At a price of your own choosing.

For more information on how this works, before Nick pulls this offer:

​Nick’s done-for-you “daily email business” offer​

Announcing: DFY daily emails on comission only

by

If you have a running business… if you also have an audience or database of previous customers, clients, or leads… and if you want to bolt on a new profit center to your business, with no work or upfront cost to you… then read on.

Fact 1: Lots of biz owners have proven products or services they sell, as well as a big list of previous customers, clients, or prospects. And yet, they are not sending out daily emails to link their offers and their audience, and to make sales and provide stability for their business.

Consider the following conversation I recently had.

Me (to my entire list): Do you have an email list of 5,000+ subscribers?

Biz owner (replying to my broadcast email): Yes

Me (replying directly to the biz owner, after 2 mins of research): Very cool! I see you’ve got the full offer stack, from courses to DFY. How often do you email these folks?

Biz owner: 👉🏼👈🏼 Umm… my last email… at january 🤦🏽‍♀️

Me: That sounds… criminal. If you’ve got offers and a list, what’s keeping you from mailing your offers out regularly?

Biz owner: Most people on my list subscribed to my Substack to receive “content” (which I haven’t produced in recent months—I’ve been completely swamped with work), and others are clients I never told I’d be emailing. I guess I’m afraid of being a nuisance.

Me: I see. So even if you had time, would you want to email these folks with offers that could lead to sales?

Biz owner: Yes, for sure

Fact 2: You might be in the same situation, or something similar to it.

I don’t know what your exact situation is. But if you have proven offers, and if you have an email list of at least 5,000 people, like the person above, and if you’re not sending daily emails but would want to, then…

Fact 3: I can help.

I can put you in touch with an email copywriter to write daily emails for you, to make you look good in front of your audience or database, and to make sales for you.

Also, this copywriter works on commission only. He only gets paid from the sales he makes for you, after the money has landed in your Stripe or PayPal.

No, I am not this copywriter. It is somebody in my audience.

It’s somebody who has the experience and skill to make you money and make you look good, and who also has a direct line to me for help, support, and consultation.

(Why a direct line to me is valuable is because I’ve written thousands of sales emails, managed the email marketing for many 7- and 8-figure businesses, and made businesses literally millions via daily emailing.)

So what do you think? Dumb idea? Let me know if you’re not too disgusted by my proposal, and we can talk more.

What good will that do you?

by

A new subscriber wrote in yesterday to ask:

===

How would you start over if you’d lost everything right now? Including your friends and connections that you acquired over the years, only you, your knowledge and your skill.

===

I paused at this, because I had recently been thinking about the same question, for my own reasons.

For a moment, I considered writing up my thoughts, and sharing them in an email. But then I asked myself, why?

What good will it do you to know what I would do if I lost everything but MY knowledge, MY skill, and MY good looks?

The fact is, my knowledge (of stuff like marketing principles and tactics) and my skill (in things like copywriting) took years to develop.

The same is true of my mindset, if by that we mean my ability to choose projects… to drive them to the end even when I’m feeling uncertain and dispirited… to tweak my approach and try again when I lay an egg… and to recognize when it’s time to cut my losses and move on.

Because of all this, it would be useless for me to tell you what I would do, unless you have my knowledge and skills and mindset.

(It would also be close to useless if you do have my knowledge and skills and mindset, because in that case you’re prolly not thinking of getting rid of everything you’ve got and starting from zero.)

Here are a few things I think are worth doing in general:

– Selling

– Writing

– Having an audience and maintaining a good relationship with that audience

If you do all three of these on a decent level — not “world class” level, not “so good they can’t ignore you,” simply decent — you will have work and money, as long as work and money are to be had.

Now please just give me a second. Let me go to my closet and dig it out… ah yes, here it is. My favorite hobby horse:

Daily emails.

The fact is, writing a daily email will, bit by bit, get you better at selling, at writing, and in time, even if you do absolutely nothing else, it will build up a small but dedicated audience for you (that’s how it happened for me at least).

Where daily emails will eventually take you, nobody knows. But I’m willing to bet it will be a good destination, better than where you’re at now. Plus, you might even enjoy the journey along the way.

If you want help starting and sticking with the habit of writing daily emails:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Why yes, that would be a dumb idea

by

I got an email yesterday from someone I don’t know, with the subject line, “Copy Riddles.”

Copy Riddles is the name of my highest-ticket info product.

Ok, attention engaged. I opened the email to read:

===

John,

A daily newsletter peers call the most underrated list in copywriting, built up around Copy Riddles, is a base worth working with.

My hunch is there’s a five figure opportunity in readers who’ve never been pointed at Copy Riddles outside of a launch window.

I fund and run that kind of campaign myself. I do the work, you spend nothing upfront, and I only earn a share of what converts.

Would it be a dumb idea to grab 15 minutes and see if there’s a test worth running there?

===

Why yes, that would be a dumb idea, and a waste of a perfectly good 15 minutes.

Ignore for the moment the strange English in this cold email, which makes me doubt this person can write in a way that would get people to buy.

The reason it would be a dumb idea is that I already regularly promote Copy Riddles “outside of a launch window,” and I have been for years.

I do it both inside one-off daily emails like this one, and during promos where I create a special offer around Copy Riddles, attach it to a deadline, and make a bit of a spectacle to reap all the demand that my daily emails may have sown.

Two minutes of research could have told my cold emailer all that.

Oh well. This guy’s dumb idea did serve two purposes:

1. To allow me to remind you to keep promoting your products regularly via daily emails, so you can create demand, and to run regular promos, so you can cash in on that demand, and

2. To allow me to point you to my Copy Riddles program, which is the best thing I sell.

For more information on Copy Riddles:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Why I won’t promote your paid community

by

Yesterday, I promoted Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin, a paid community. A reader who also has a paid community wrote in to ask:

===

Ronin is $111/mo. Mine is [a similar price]. If I invite you to be a lifetime member and provided you like what I’ve built inside, would you consider promoting it?

===

I appreciate the offer, and the answer is, I would not consider promoting this dude’s paid community, or really, anybody else’s paid community.

The fact is, it’s close to impossible to promote somebody else’s paid community with any success. Because of this, the promise of money isn’t much of a promise at all. I only keep promoting Travis’s thing because I’m a true believer, because I’m in the community myself and get a lot out of it.

If I did promote somebody else’s paid community primarily because I was hoping to get paid, I would do it the way Travis is preparing to auction off a recurring affiliate offer now inside Royalty Ronin.

Travis will be offering people a “Hero Package,” which provides a sexy outcome and overcomes all or most of the objections people might have when they are promised that outcome.

He’s gonna sell that Hero Package, rather than the continuity offer. He will make the continuity offer simply the condition for getting what people really want.

Of course, this model is well-known.

The magic is the way that Travis puts together his Hero Packages so that people are willing to pay 5x, 10x, 20x of whatever the underlying subscription might cost.

If you would like to observe Travis in action as he does this, and learn something you can use to promote recurring offers, whether your own or from affiliates:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

Creating value out of things that others would never think of

by

I’m at the airport as I write this, on my way to Budapest, my former home, for a reunion with friends I had when I lived there a long time ago.

Right now, I’m sitting on a tiny stool at an airport restaurant, about to bite into a refrigerated airport sandwich, crowded on the one side by a pushy French couple and on the other by cleaning woman with a large broom.

That’s the good part of my current trip.

The bad part is that I just spent 25 minutes waiting in line for the privilege of paying 48 euro to get my boarding pass.

I’m flying low-cost, and I didn’t check in online before the three-hours deadline mandated by this low-cost airline. When I tried to check in online a few hours ago, I was told I would have to do it at the airport, and pay.

It’s annoying when this happens on a low-cost flight, and yet it is instructive.

The fact is, all kinds of things can be turned into value that normally aren’t.

It feels petty when low-cost airlines do it, but it can be done in ways that don’t feel petty, but in fact feel the opposite — generous, exciting, convenient.

Imagine you’re buying a house.

Nominally, you’re paying for the keys and the right to move in.

You can buy a “low-cost” house, which gives you the keys and the right to move in, but which doesn’t have lightbulbs, windows, or running water, and you have to pay extra for those.

Conversely, can buy a “premium” house, which gives you not just the bare keys and the right to move in, but which has been furnished by an interior designer, comes with a concierged security service, and has a fridge stocked with food from Whole Foods.

Ultimately, it’s the same business practice, the only difference is the positioning of your business as upmarket or downmarket.

Maybe you’re munching on your own refrigerated sandwich right now and mumbling, “Right right…”

… but maybe you don’t see how this idea from real estate and the airline industry can apply to what you do, specifically to creating offers that you can sell to your audience.

For that, I’d like to invite you to sign up for a trial to my perennial recommendation, the Royalty Ronin community.

Travis Sago, the guy who runs Ronin, is the best person I have ever seen at creating value out of things that others would never think of.

Right now, Travis is preparing to auction off a year of a SaaS, which he is promoting as an affiliate.

In other words, Travis will ask people how much they would pay… to have him pay their bill for a year of this software service.

How do you possibly auction off something not unique, with a known and fixed value? And how do you auction it off for 5x, 10x, 20x of what it is currently selling for on the website of the SaaS company?

For that, I invite you to sign up to Ronin, and to follow along as Travis proceeds to build up his premium offer, out of elements that might seem like air to you right now:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

Father devastated by 9yo son’s lack of monetization

by

Have you heard the latest news about the “devastated father who says his 9-year-old son spent $118k on YouTube ads?”

The story broke yesterday. The events apparently happened over the past month. The background:

1. Last year, the kid started a YouTube channel streaming himself playing Minecraft, called Mighty Mike Plays.

2. Ever since, Mighty Mike uploaded a bunch of videos, but he wasn’t getting any views. He complained to dad.

3. Dad had a bright idea, and guided his son through a small $20 ad campaign to get some YouTube views.

4. Dad used his company card to fund this (it’s hard to tell if the dad is a moron or a criminal, and the article I read doesn’t say).

5. A few days ago, dad got called into his boss’s office. “What is this series of charges on the company card, totaling $118k?”

6. Turns out the Mighty Mike had kept running ads on YouTube, using dad’s company card, to the tune of $118k.

7. Two days ago, Mighty Mike posted on YouTube, “I’m in big trouble.”

8. Yesterday, Mike’s dad posted a video on the Mighty Mike Plays channel, explaining how it all went down. He also says it is yet not sure if he will be able to will keep his job or if he will have to repay the money. (Like I said, it’s not clear if he’s a moron or a criminal.)

Assuming that this isn’t just all made up by AI or by clickfarming scammers in some far-off land, it’s a wild story.

The best part is that I went to check the Mighty Mike Plays channel.

It currently stands at 39k subs, meaning that Mike apparently paid about $3 per YouTube subscriber.

I also checked the channel’s videos. The the top few videos are in the 200k views range, and the rest steeply drop off.

Adding it all up, I figure that Mighty Mike’s Minecraft streams didn’t get more than 1M views in total.

I’m not sure if Mike could monetize his channel (I’m guessing not, since he’s a minor, but I don’t know YouTube).

If he could, then according to my AI monkey’s best estimates, his 1M YouTube views, resulting from his $118k ad spend, would have netted him between $2k and $5k.

My takeaway for you is simply, if you think a bigger audience will solve all your problems, it won’t.

That’s not to say that you don’t need a certain size of audience to make a certain amount of money.

But you also need ways to monetize that audience.

Earlier today, I prepared a list of 10 ways to better monetize an email list of 3k+ subscribers. This list is based on things I’ve personally done to monetize my list, and the work I’ve done with consulting clients who I’ve helped to make more money from their email list.

This list won’t be useful to you if you don’t have a list of at least 3k subscribers. If you do, and if you’d like the list, hit reply and I’ll get it to you.

Readers kick my stupid analogy to the curb

by

In my email yesterday, I asked for my readers’ help for a sticky way to illustrate the distinction between a “predictable income biz” and an “uncertain cash grab biz.”

My best idea was “Rolls-Royce business” vs “DeLorean business.” I thought it was clever. The people who replied almost uniformly thought it was unclear and ineffective.

Fine. Have it your way.

Fortunately, I also got some good suggestions from readers about better analogies than the the unlucky Rolls-Royce/DeLorean thing. A few of my favorites:

A vase of cut flowers versus a potted plant that keeps blooming…

… a deli business (which just has a bunch of expenses on the first of the month) versus the water company (which has a bunch of income on the first of the month)…

… and foraging for food in the wild versus picking fruit in your orchard.

I got other kindsa help, too.

One reader (not sure he wants me to share his name), wrote in to challenge the very premise I was writing about yesterday.

He wrote me a reasoned argument why continuity offers, which provide predictable income for a business, are overrated. He focused on paid newsletters and raised the following points:

1. Paid newsletters have to keep delivering a lot of value or people will unsubscribe, defeating the point of the continuity offer

2. People are more reluctant to sign up for a subscription like a paid newsletter, and are unwilling to pay as high of a price as they might for a one-time purchase

3. It takes a good amount of work to produce a decent paid newsletter every month, and you can’t take any month off

I agree with this, particularly part 3.

Yes, some people make paid newsletters work. But many people, including myself in the past (I had a paid newsletter that I killed after 2 months), fail or give up on them because a lot of work or simply the ongoing commitment gets grating.

BUT—

Paid newsletters — or really personal access to you in whatever form — is not the only kind of recurring/subscription/continuity offer you can make.

They are certainly not the only way to have the equivalent of your own orchard you can pick a ripe peach in whenever you like… instead of having to head out into the dark forest with a little basket, in search of wild turnips and maybe a rutabaga.

But I’m not sure if this is of interest to you?

Maybe you can tell me. I’ve got a little poll below. If you like, tell me your attitudes and experience with continuity recurring offers:

#1. Recurring is a major part of what I do and the money I make each month

#2. I tried selling recurring offers but people on my list don’t want ’em

#3. I am reluctant to promote recurring offers because I don’t want to commit to delivering month after month

#4. I prefer the thrill of going to the woods to forage for roots and tubers rather than picking fruit from my orchard

If you can spare the energy to hit three keys — reply, your choice above, and send — you can tell me whether it’s worth me talking more about continuity income that requires ZERO ONGOING DELIVERY from you.

Of course, if you wanna elaborate on your answer in more words, that’s very welcome also. Thanks in advance.

help

by

Maybe you can help me?

All day long, I’ve been trying to come up with a sticky way to think about the difference between:

1. A business built on predictable income, where 60% or more of your desired income each month is covered with near certainty on the first of the month, by things like continuity and subscription offers, retainers, regular work with long-term clients, or payments on payment plans, and

2. A business completely lacking predictable income, where close to 0% of your monthly income is certain in advance, and each month is a series of scores or cash grabs, whether that’s launches, promos, or one-off work with new clients.

I’ve been thinking and thinking, pondering and pondering, summer autumn winter spring.

How to present this distinction in a more succinct, immediately understandable way?

My best idea so far is an analogy to two famous makes of car.

I thought to call the first type of business, the business built on predictable income, a “Rolls-Royce business.” That’s coming the famous David Ogilvy headline:

“At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock”

In other words, even at high speed income, there’s not a lot of noise, stress, or smoke in a Rolls-Royce business. It’s very efficient, comfortable, and even conservative. It’s likely to stick around for a long time, just like Rolls-Royce the company, which has been in business for 120+ years.

The other kind of business, completely lacking in predictable income, I though to call a “DeLorean business.”

DeLorean, you might or might not know. was an 80s sports car, which was only produced for two years. Today it’s only really known because it was used in the “Back to the Future” movies.

DeLorean was flashy with its gull-wing doors and low profile. It was also unreliable, uncomfortable, and ultimately led the company to bankruptcy. As Car and Driver magazine put it:

“Hopping, darting, and corkscrewing motions are not the stuff of confidence.”

I don’t know though.

What do you think of this analogy?

Does it carry the emotional impact I want it to have, if I’m trying to promote the stable and comfortable Rolls-Royce biz at the expense of the flashy and unstable DeLorean biz? Or are the gull-wing doors and the Back to the Future association too positive, and does a DeLorean biz sound too cool to give up?

Please hit reply and let me know what you think. Or let me know if you have a better sticky way to present the difference between a “predictable income biz” and an “uncertain cash grab biz.”

Thanks in advance.