Direct Marketing

Would you bid $1 for a magical “super subscriber” vending machine?

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Can you do me a favor?

Can you tell me if this sounds sexy to you?

Put in a fresh $100 bill into a vending machine… out come a couple new “super subscribers” to your email list… and, because this is a MAGICAL vending machine, you also get your $100 bill back?

Then, with your freshly returned $100 bill, you repeat the process, and get another couple “super subscribers,” and get your $100 bill back, over and over… continuing to build your email list… continuing to make back the money you’ve put in… GUARANTEED?

But wait, there’s more:

What if these are not just plain old subscribers to your email list… but, like I said, “super subscribers,” people who are on average 3.3x more likely to buy your offers as an ordinary subscriber would?

If you like the sound of that, here’s what’s going on:

I have partnered with Nick Bandy.

Nick has been running a “lazy” cold traffic funnel for the past year and a half.

This lazy funnel has been building up his email list with buyers.

It has been building up his list with minimal ongoing work, while paying him back all the money he puts into ads. It even makes him a small profit every month.

Not only that, but because the subscribers who come in via this funnel are already buyers, they are on average 3.3X MORE LIKELY TO BUY subsequent offers than “freebie” subscribers who never bought anything previously.

Nick’s quote about this cold traffic funnel:

“Without running this simple, low-stress ad funnel, I would have no list. I’d have no business. In all likelihood, I’d be working a 9-to-5 right now.”

Nick and I are offering to create such a cold traffic funnel for you, which gets buyers onto your list every day, and which is guaranteed to convert at breakeven or better at a $69/day ad spend ($69, because it’s Nick Bandy), so you get ALL THE MONEY BACK you put into ads, via just this funnel alone.

What we would be giving you as part of this offer:

***** Magical ad copy and images *****

Nick has been running and managing cold traffic funnels for himself and clients FOR YEARS. He will create ads for you using his deep and penetrating insights into what the hungry crowds milling around on social media are responding to right now.

***** Magical copy for the sales page and upsell pages *****

I’ve gotten paid $100,000+ by a single client to write sales copy for them. I will write the sales copy for your funnel and make sure you look good and people want to buy from you.

***** Quite magical tech setup for the sales page, order page, and upsell pages *****

We set up the tech for the entire cold traffic funnel ourselves. It won’t interfere in any way with your existing cart or require you to do anything.

***** Non-magical Facebook ad manager setup *****

Tedious one-time work. If you’ve already done it for your own previous cold traffic experiments, great. If not, we’ll do it for you.

***** Magical offer stack to go in your ad funnel *****

(Everything, including front end offer, order bumps, upsells.)

I’ve been creating offers for years and consulting others on how to create theirs. Nick on the other hand knows what offers work well on cold traffic.

If you have suitable offers already, we will use those.

If you don’t, we will create suitable new offers for you, in line with the business you want to have.

(If you’re in a field similar to Nick and me, we are even willing to license our courses to you to put into your cold traffic funnel so you can sell them and KEEP ALL THE PROFITS.)

***** Our free “unannounced bonus” to put into your delivery area *****

Basically, this will be a free lead magnet that Nick and I will create.

This unannounced bonus will be GOOD FOR YOUR CUSTOMERS — we will make sure it is something your customers want.

It will also be GOOD FOR YOU, because your customers will feel like they got a small diamond’s worth of extra value for free, and will be more likely to love your offer, less likely to ask for refunds, and more likely to buy stuff you offer in the future. Plus it will make Nick and me invested in your continued success.

***** 100% BREAKEVEN GUARANTEE *****

Nick and I will hand over your cold traffic funnel only after we have spent OUR OWN MONEY to test and tweak it until it makes at least 20 sales on cold traffic and BREAKS EVEN.

We are even considering paying for your first $420 worth of ads ($420 because, again, Nick Bandy).

Once we hand over this funnel to you, you get total control of the funnel, the ad account, the offers, everything. You do not owe us a cent after we hand it over, regardless of how much money this funnel ends up making you down the line.

Like I said, we are offering a magical vending machine here.

With this magical vending machine, it would not cost you a cent to grow your list, month after month, and you might even make a small monthly profit.

How much would a reliable, stable, and mostly hands-off way to grow your email list, with buyers, for years to come, be worth to you?

Enough to bid $1?

>>> Yes!! Good Golly this sounds sexy, and I’ve got $1 to bid, maybe more!

>>> No!! You had me until the $69 and $420 references, now I’m out

Hit reply and tell me if you’re in Camp YES or Camp NO (a simple YES or NO will do).

Your vote will determine whether this happens or not. Thanks in advance.

How to auction off your lifeblood

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Yesterday, I talked to a wary business owner.

This business owner is as a course creator and a coach. He does DFY stuff as well.

He had run one auction earlier this year for his coaching services.

You know how auctions work — people bid, the highest bidder gets the thing on auction.

What you might not have realized, if you have successfully avoided my 101 emails on the topic this year, is that auctions are also a viable way to sell DFY services, coaching, and even online courses.

Like I said, this business owner ran his own auction several months ago, with a coaching/DWY package as the core of the auction offer. The auction got him some clients, and made him some money. But overall it was underwhelming in its results.

He is now considering things to do for the rest of the year. Another auction is an option. Except, as he told me yesterday, “I definitely don’t want to do a higher-stakes thing.”

I asked him what he meant by “higher-stakes.”

He explained that he doesn’t want to offer a big DFY or coaching package as the auction offer. Ultimately, he’s wary of putting something on auction and then having to “do this $7,000 thing for $600.”

Here’s my take on this:

As you might or might not know, last year I ran my own auction. Rather than trying to guard and protect myself, I made my auction offer as big and as sexy as I could think of.

Not only did I make a big promise (“I’ll endorse you to my list”)… not only did I throw in a bunch of legit deliverables (solo emails to my list, direct help with creating new offers, resell rights to my courses)… but I capped it all off with a big proof element (“I will keep endorsing and promoting you until you make back all the money that you bid to win the auction”).

The result of this auction offer was that, within 24 hours, I had several people who were bidding not $600… not $7,000… but over $30,000. The winning bid, by the incomparable Nick Bandy, ended up at $31,001.

In short, my advice is to auction off your lifeblood and then some.

Of course, the business owner I talked to yesterday raises a completely valid point.

It doesn’t make sense to run an auction, end up saddled with a bunch of work, and not get paid well for it.

It doesn’t make sense to devalue what you sell, lower your status, and put doubts into your audience’s minds about whether you’re legit, by having a lackluster auction that goes nowhere, or just not very far.

This risk is real.

Even if you think your auction offer is amazing, and that people should be willing to pay thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for it, what will actually happen on auction day?

Will you be effectively selling your blood, sweat, and tears for $600?

Fortunately, there’s a simple and technical fix to mitigate or eliminate this risk.

If you’re a course creator, coach, or you do DFY stuff, and you are considering auctioning off your courses or coaching or services, you can run an auction without the risk of mass embarrassment or of getting saddled with a bunch of work at a coal miner’s wages.

If you’re considering running an auction, hit reply and I will tell you what this technical fix is.

There’s nothing to buy here. I just want to make sure I’m sharing this with people who can benefit from it.

One weird trick to grow your paid community

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“One weird trick”… yes, you got me. That’s the trick. In more detail:

I’ve been following a guy online named Hernan Vazquez. Hernan is a media buyer — he used to run ads for big big-name Internet marketers like Frank Kern and Grant Cardone.

Says Hernan, once upon a time, when he was working with Frank Kern, Frank was trying to sell his $397/month Inner Circle community.

It was a good offer and people inside Frank’s audience eagerly bought it.

But Frank and Hernan couldn’t send cold traffic to this offer. People are reluctant to sign up to be debited by you each month, particularly at $397 per month. If people don’t know you at all, that barrier is too great. Running ads to try to convince strangers otherwise wasn’t economical.

So what to do?

Like I promised you, “one weird trick.”

Specifically, the solution was to sell a low-ticket front-end offer that just promises to solve one specific problem in some exciting new way. After people buy that, you also offer them the paid community as a natural add-on.

Says Hernan, that little bit of psychological commitment — they already bought something from you — makes the continuity sale a million times easier.

And even if people don’t buy your paid community offer right away, you now have them on your email list, plus they’ve bought something from you already, so you can make them the same paid community offer regularly, and they will be more likely to take you up on it at some point down the line.

In Frank Kern’s case, this low-ticket funnel resulted in the Inner Circle membership growing to over 1,200 subscribers, or around $500,000 per month, or $6,000,000 per year.

Plus Frank’s list grew by tens of thousands of buyers, with almost all the ad cost recouped on day zero. The majority of those tens of thousands of buyers might not have joined the paid community but many bought other stuff down the line.

So there you go. One weird trick. Except…

… maybe you are such a grizzled direct response veteran that to you this trick is not WEIRD or not WEIRD ENOUGH.

Maybe you are super familiar with this unweird trick.

In which case, the only thing I would ask is, have you actually used this approach to grow your own paid community or subscription offer?

If not, then I have one more weird trick to grow your paid community. That one weird trick is to invest in Nick Bandy’s Lazy Ad Funnel offer, which Nick is offering until the end of today at a $1,000 savings.

Nick has been running several low-ticket ad funnels to grow his list, including one that’s been bringing in buyers day after day for a year and half now. He has then sold these people various paid community and continuity offers (both his own and as an affiliate), as well as selling them other one-time offers.

Nick is now offering to show you how to create such a Lazy Ad Funnel for yourself as well, with minimal ongoing work, hence the “Lazy” in the “Lazy Ad Funnel”.

Nick is even guaranteeing to personally troubleshoot your funnel and tell you exactly what to fix, change, or stop doing in order to get your offer live.

Again, this offer, guarantee included, disappears tonight, and the price jumps by $1,000. For more info before it vanishes:

https://bejakovic.com/lazy-way

My somewhat insane daily email history

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This morning, I received a heaven-sent question from a long-time reader and customer, a freelance copywriter who also has an email list:

===

Hey man,

Question:

Did you do daily email from the start?

I know I “need” to and want to, but something’s holding me back (I do 3x/week now)

Probably because I don’t have a consistent new lead flow

===

My somewhat insane daily emailing history goes like this:

1. Once upon a time, circa 2016, I started a blog in a non-marketing niche (alternative health).

2. I had an email list on the back of that blog. I started emailing people on that list 2x per week, pretty much in the same style that you’re reading now.

3. Then at some point (early 2017) I gave myself a challenge to write daily emails about marketing for 28 days straight. I did it. I liked it. And so naturally, challenge complete, I dropped it.

4. Around the summer of 2018, I started writing emails about marketing again, kind of randomly, maybe a few times a week, maybe once every few weeks (you can still find these early emails archived on my site).

5. In November 2018, after hearing for the 1,001st time about the value and importance of daily emails as a mechanism to achieving anything you want in life, I finally started writing daily emails about marketing. I’ve stuck with it ever since.

For the record, I had… 0 subscribers when I started doing daily emails regularly in 2018.

That’s why I say it has been a somewhat insane daily emailing history.

I was writing and sending daily emails for a good year without almost anybody reading (even after a year I only had something like 100 subscribers).

All in all, I was emailing for about 3 years without having made a single offer to or a single dollar from my email list.

Why would anybody be this stubborn and foolish?

I have a few things to say in my defense:

For one thing, I was selling myself as an email copywriter at the time. I figured I could use the practice, and create a portfolio that nobody could ever argue with.

For another thing, I was still learning a lot about copywriting and marketing. Daily emails allowed me both to write about what I was learning, and to put it into practice.

Third thing, in Eric Hoffer’s words:

“There is apparently an irremediable insecurity at the core of every intellectual, be he noncreative or creative. Even the most gifted and prolific seem to live a life of eternal self-doubting and have to prove their worth anew each day.”

I am not an intellectual, but I found myself in this quote. I definitely feel the need to prove my worth anew each day.

Maybe you are not as insecure as I am. Maybe you are more practical. Maybe you need some real and tangible benefit in order to be able to convince yourself to email daily and to thus achieve anything you want in life.

If so, like my reader above, you probably need consistent lead flow to justify writing daily and committing yourself to your list.

If you feel you “need” and even want to commit fully to your email list, but something is holding you back, then I have a solution to that.

A new solution.

A solution that can give you consistent new lead flow, starting in just a couple days from now if you so choose, with minimal ongoing work or commitment. This can justify help you justify emailing daily, which can then lead to income, stability, and opportunities you cannot imagine right now.

For more info on this new solution:

https://bejakovic.com/lazy-way

Announcing: The lazy way to a bigger list

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Today I’d like to point you to Nick Bandy’s new offer:

The lazy way to a bigger list, with minimal ongoing work.

As you might know, I endorse Nick Bandy fully, because I like the guy and because I have seen enough of his business, emails, and offers to know he’s legit.

Back to the lazy way to a bigger list:

Nick’s lazy way to a bigger list has been growing his list stably, from month to month, for a year and a half now, with minimal ongoing work.

What’s more, Nick’s lazy way has been putting money into his pocket each month, and would have done so, even if he had never sent a single email.

(Of course, Nick has been sending emails, daily, and so should you. Why else build an email list? The point is that Nick’s lazy way doesn’t cost you but actually pays you, unlike many other ways of growing your list. The most you ever risk is $100.)

The lazy way to a bigger list doesn’t require weeks or months of upfront setup.

That’s why Nick’s offer is not a sandpit of videos or Zoom calls that lull you into thinking you are doing important work by being busy.

Rather, Nick gives you a simple step-by-step process, the same process that has been building his list for the past year and a half, with minimal work from him.

If you get going with this today, you can legit have your own lazy way to a bigger list by the end of this weekend.

Nick is currently offering a deal on this new offer, bigger than the biggest Black Friday deal.

Right now, the investment for Nick’s lazy way to a bigger list is $500. After Sunday, when this deal ends, the price will irretrievably jump to $1,500.

For more info on the lazy way to get a bigger list, before the price jumps:

https://bejakovic.com/lazy-way

3x Monetization Case Study (plus an offer)

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On Tuesday evening, I fixed my hair, rearranged all the lamps in my apartment to point at me and light me up, and went live on Zoom to talk about:

“How I helped a list owner go from $2.2k per month from his list to regular 6k+ months”

Fortunately, I remembered to hit record, and so the priceless and rare gems of advice that I shared on this live presentation will not be lost like teardrops in the rain.

Earlier today, I posted the recording of Tuesday’s presentation, along with a nicely edited transcript, inside my Daily Email House community.

You can find the 3x Monetization Case Study here:

3x Monetization Case Study

Also, if you have an email list and you want to pull out another $3k-$5k from your list every month, here’s my offer to you, the same deal I made the list owner in the case study above:

* We work together for a year

* We determine a baseline based on your average earnings from your list over the past 3 months, and everything up to and including that baseline is yours each month

* Anything over the baseline we split it 75/25, with 75% going to you and 25% going to me

* A $3,100 one-time fee to get started

* After the year is up, you don’t owe me anything, and you get to keep 100% of your email revenue

If you’re interested, reply to this email and we can chat to see if I could be a good fit to help you pull out more money from your list.

TransformationNeverComes

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I just spent 2 minutes and 7 seconds smoking a virtual cigarette while being on an virtual office building rooftop. Even though I am not a smoker, it was oddly satisfying.

I found out about the possibility of taking a virtual smoke break a few weeks ago, from an article with the headline:

“South Korea’s ‘dopamine sites’ let you shop, order food, and spend nothing”

The smoke break website is one such dopamine site, which gives you a pretend experience without any actual action. (On the smoke break site, you tap the screen to “smoke,” while dropdown menus allow you to pretend to be in a half dozen smoke break locations, from the office building rooftop to a baseball stadium).

The virtual smoke break is maybe less bizarre than the even more elaborate Korean site FoodNeverComes.

FoodNeverComes lets you browse imaginary menus of imaginary restaurants… choose various imaginary dishes to be delivered to your presumably real home… put in imaginary credit card info… and then place the imaginary order.

Nothing is actually charged to your credit card, no food ever comes, and your stomach remains empty for real.

My guess is that people want the thrill of giving in to exciting marketing and presentation, but they know the ultimate experience won’t deliver.

If you’ve been selling courses for any length of time, this kind of behavior is something you will be familiar with.

Lots of people buy info products for the thrill of the purchase, and they stop right there. They never go through the info you’re selling, never put it into action, certainly never profit from it. TransformationNeverComes.

You as the course seller can accept that fact, and gleefully sell big promises and tease secrets, telling yourself that your customers get their money’s worth by the simple act of buying.

If on the other hand, you’re not ok with that, as I really am not, then you can take extra steps to seduce, invite, and cajole people who give you money into actually consuming the information that they bought, so they can benefit from it.

Of course, if they benefit, you benefit too — via more testimonials, more repeat customers, and more life energy and satisfaction to keep going.

Last night, I started promoting an offer I don’t normally promote, called 3rd Conversion, about how to get people to consume and implement your courses and trainings.

I’ve put all my knowledge about how to seduce, invite and cajole people to actually benefit from what you teach inside 3rd Conversion.

I’ve also done one better. Inside 3rd Conversion, I’m not just sharing the info, but I’ve applied it to the training itself, since I want you to use this info yourself, and benefit from it, by turning one-time course buyers into long-term customers and evangelists.

As I announced yesterday, I am making the following offer good for 36 hours only:

You can get 3rd Conversion for just $97 today, and another $100 in one month’s time. That’s as attractive a deal as I can make to you today, while still respecting people who bought 3rd Conversion in the past.

This offer is good until tomorrow, Thursday at 8:15am CET, some 12 hours from now.

If you’d like to increase your chances of benefiting your course buyers, and not leaving their bellies and bank accounts empty, here’s where to go:

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

How to easily double, triple, even quadruple your course earnings

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Last night, I started promoting an offer I don’t normally promote, called 3rd Conversion, about how to get people to consume and implement your courses and trainings, with the outcome of turning one-time course buyers into long-term customers and evangelists.

This morning, I got a note about that from Copy Mechanic Pete Reginella, who joined 3rd Conversion when I first ran it as a live training. Pete is a copywriter and email marketer who has written copy for 2M-subscriber and 8-figure businesses. He also has a personal brand online that he is building up. Said Pete:

===

Hey, John. Believe it or not, I recently ran a workshop on how to use Substack to grow your email list.

The core promise was: “How to easily double, triple, even quadruple your earnings per Substack subscriber”

Anyways…

The one thing I did before writing the content for the workshop was referring to your 3rd conversion workshop along with the companion guide you gave along with it.

I ran the first version for free, just to get it done, and then the plan was to get feedback and charge for it later.

I originally thought to charge about $50 for it…

But after direct feedback from A-List copywriter, Lorrie Morgan (who was on the call taking notes the whole time)…

I realized I should charge close to 4X that amount.

And I can thank all that because of what I learned from you.

Appreciate you, dude…

And yes, feel free to use the above to promote this if you like.

===

Just in case you are distracted by a howling dog and a crying baby and TikTok blaring on your phone and CNN on your TV, all at the same time as you’re trying to read my email…

… let me reiterate the part of Pete’s message that’s key for my message today:

Make your course content cool and fun, by applying the strategies I reveal inside 3rd Conversion.

Do this, and you will feel good about quadrupling the price over what you originally planned for your course, and your audience will enthusiastically back you for it. At least that’s how it went for Pete.

And if you quadruple the price for a good course that people want, you are likely to easily double, triple, or even quadruple your course earnings. Course prices are very elastic, assuming people actually want what you’re selling in the first place.

Like I said, I’m currently promoting 3rd Conversion during a very tight time window. I am making the following offer good for 36 hours only:

You can get 3rd Conversion for just $97 today, and another $100 in one month’s time. That’s as attractive a deal as I can make to you today, while still respecting people like Pete who have bought 3rd Conversion in the past.

This offer is good until tomorrow, Thursday at 11:15 pm PST.

If you’d like to easily double, triple, even quadruple your course earnings with the help of 3rd Conversion, you can get started here:

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

The only of my courses I regularly consult

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As this email goes out, I will be holding the live 3x Monetization Case Study presentation to some unknown number of people.

(190+ people have registered. Let’s see how many show up.)

I finished the outline and notes for this presentation earlier today, and I’m happy with what I’ve got to share:

I’ve got Stuart the Minion from the Gru movies… I’ve got Captain Picard from Star Trek… I’ve got (in an indirect way) Felix from the Odd Couple. All this makes the important and valuable information I have to share go down more easy.

After I finished the outline and the notes this morning, I consulted a training I created a few years ago.

I’ve created lots of valuable courses and trainings over the years, such as Copy Riddles and Most Valuable Email and Age of Insight. But it’s rare for me to go and consult one of my own courses or trainings. I figure, possibly to my own hurt, that I KNOW IT ALL.

But there is one training I consult regularly, whenever I create a new course, info product, or presentation, like I did this morning. (And when I don’t consult this training, I regret it later, and wish I had.)

The training in question is called 3rd Conversion.

3rd Conversion is about how to get people to consume and implement your courses and trainings, with the outcome of turning one-time course buyers into long-term customers and evangelists.

Inside 3rd Conversion, I’ve collected specific strategies to make the content of paid or free teaching more fun, insightful, easier to go down, more memorable, more likely to be implemented, acted on, and benefited from.

I practice some of the strategies I’ve catalogued inside 3rd Conversion instinctively, after years of creating courses and trainings.

Still, after consulting 3rd Conversion this morning, I found things in my presentation today that I could improve, as well as important things I had completely forgotten.

As a result, I tweaked the opening of my presentation in a way to make people feel more invested in the upcoming content.

I also added in something super simple and obvious to keep folks in their seats until the end, which I had nonetheless overlooked until I consulted 3rd Conversion.

Finally, I completely changed how I will end the presentation, in a way that will make it more likely for folks to actually consume and implement some of what I will share, which is good for them, and which is good for me too (more likely they will become clients or at least to share somewhere how they’ve learned something useful from me).

I don’t normally sell 3rd Conversion. When I sold it last, I sold it for $197.

Since I’ve just been reminded of how valuable this training is to me personally, I want to open up a narrow window where you have the chance to get 3rd Conversion yourself.

I making the following offer good for 36 hours only:

You can get 3rd Conversion for just $97 today, and another $100 in one month’s time. That’s as attractive a deal as I can make to you today, while still respecting the people who have bought 3rd Conversion in the past.

This offer is good until this Thursday at 11:15 pm PST, 36 hours from the time this email goes out.

If you’d like to take me up on this offer, hit reply and tell me so, and I will set you up with the payment link.