Info Products

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

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

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.

How to get a one-time course to maintain its value

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Dr. Kiran Agarwal, who is both a practicing GP in London and a stress-management coach, writes in with a legit question (or actually 3) about my ongoing promo of ChatGPT Mastery:

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Thanks for introducing Gasper – I am interested as you are supporting him.

A couple of quick questions- is this specific for chatGPT? or prompts can be used for any other AIs?

And why would you not let it write your daily emails? Is it because you like writing them or anything else?

As things are changing so fast in AI space, how will this one time course maintain its value after a couple of months?

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Kiran’s third question is really the most interesting, but let me answer the first two quickly:

1. ChatGPT Mastery is specific to ChatGPT. That said, I imagine the prompts would work in any other chat-like AI tool like Claude or Gemini.

2. I get value out of writing emails beyond just the money I make from them, or the fact that they’re sent out. Plus, I don’t think that anybody or anything can get my own tone and ideas exactly right.

That’s why I wouldn’t let AI write my emails, and why I wouldn’t hire a copywriter to write my emails either.

3. Like I said, this question is the most interesting. Sure, it’s fine to find out how to get the most out of ChatGPT today… but what about in July? Or August? Or next year?

I checked the sales page for ChatGPT Mastery, and there was nothing about this question. So I wrote to Gasper Crepinsek, the guy behind ChatGPT Mastery, to find out what he has to say.

Gasper got back to me with the exact response I was hoping for:

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If someone wants to take the course again, I will simply add them in the future run.

I want to build long-term customers. My whole goal is to keep adding to the course and people who put the trust early will get everything I add locked in at the initial price they paid.

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I think what Gasper is doing is super smart. I say that having done the same with my Copy Riddles course back when I ran it as a cohort course.

I allowed people who joined Copy Riddles in previous runs to join future runs for free. It bought me a bunch of goodwill, created customers who are still with me years later, plus it produced some great case studies and testimonials from people who got more on the 2nd or 3rd run than they did the first time around. He who has ears, let him hear.

Also, let him hear this:

The deadline to join ChatGPT Mastery is tomorrow, Thursday, at 12 midnight EST (not PST, the way I do).

If you’re on the fence, it’s time to make up your mind one way or the other, otherwise the deadline will make up your mind for you.

If you want more info to help you make up your mind, here’s my initial email, detailing why I’m endorsing and promoting ChatGPT Mastery:

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Today I’d like to recommend to you a 30-day program called ChatGPT Mastery, which is about… mastering ChatGPT, with the goal of having a kind of large and fast horse to ride on.

Here’s a list of exciting facts I’ve prepared for you about this new offer:

#1. ChatGPT Mastery is a cohort course — it kicks off and ends on a specific date — that helps you actually integrate and benefit from AI.

The idea being, things in the AI space are changing so fast that anything that came out even a few months ago is likely to be out of date.

And rather than saying “Oh let me spend a few dozen hours every quarter researching the latest advice on how to actually use this stuff” — because you won’t, just like I won’t – you can just get somebody else to do the work of cutting a path for you through the quickly regenerating AI jungle.

#2. I myself have gone through through ChatGPT Mastery, from A-Z, all 30 days, during the last cohort.

I didn’t pay for it because I was offered to get in for free.

I did go through it first and foremost for my own selfish interests — I feel a constant sense of guilt over not using AI enough in what I do — and only then with a secondary goal of promoting it if I benefited from it enough. So here I am.

#3. ChatGPT Mastery is created and run by Gasper Crepinsek. Gasper is an ex-Boston Consulting Group guy and from what I can tell, one of those hardworking and productive consulting types, the kind I look upon with a mixture of wonder and green envy.

But to hear Gasper tell it, he quit his consulting job to have more freedom, started creating info products online like everybody else, realized he had just bought himself another 70 hr/week job, and then had the idea to automate as much of it as he could with AI.

He’s largely succeeded — he now spends his mornings eating croissants and sipping coffee while strolling around Paris, because most of his work of content creation and social media and even his trip planning have been automated in large part or in full.

#4. Before I went through the 30 days of ChatGPT Mastery, I had already been using ChatGPT daily for a couple years. Inevitably, that means a good part of what Gasper teaches was familiar to me.

Other stuff he teaches was simply not relevant (I won’t be using ChatGPT to write my daily emails, thank you). The way I still benefited from ChatGPT Mastery was:

– By having my mind opened to using ChatGPT for things for things I hadn’t thought of before (just one example: I did a “dopamine reset” protocol over 4 weeks, which was frankly wonderful, and which ChatGPT designed for me, and which I got the idea for while doing ChatGPT Mastery)

– By seeing Gasper’s very structured, consulting-minded approach to automating various aspects of his business, and being inspired to port some of that to my own specific situation

– With several valuable meta-prompts that I continue to use, such as the prompt for generating custom GPTs

#5. The way you could benefit from ChatGPT Mastery is likely to be highly specific to what you do and who you are.

The program focuses on a different use case every day. Some days will be more relevant to you than others. The previous cohort covered topics like competitor analysis, insights based on customer calls or testimonials, and of course the usual stuff like content and idea generation, plus hobuncha more.

If you do any of the specific things that Gasper covers, and if you do them on at least an occasional basis, then odds are you will get a great return on both the time and money and that ChatGPT Mastery requires of you, before the 30 days are out.

Beyond that, ChatGPT Mastery can open your mind to what’s possible, give you confidence and a bunch of examples to get you spotting what could be automated in what you do, plus the techniques for how to do it (I’ve already automated a handful of things in what I do, and I have a list of next things to do).

#6. The time required for ChatGPT Mastery is about 15-20 minutes per day for 30 days. The money required is an upfront payment of $199.

I can imagine that one or the other of these is not easy for you to eke out in the current moment.

All I can say is that it’s an investment that’s likely to pay you back many times over, in terms of both time and money. And the sooner you make that investment, the greater and quicker the returns will come.

#7. If you’d like to find out the full details about ChatGPT Mastery, or even to sign up before the cohort kicks off:

https://bejakovic.com/gasper

Basic tip for doing live webinars/workshops

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A few days ago, copywriter GC Tsalamagkakis posted the following question in my Daily Email House community:

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I have a retainer for whom I’m writing paywalled articles about coding with AI, creating custom agents, etc.

Starting next week, we’re going to start doing live webinars/workshops based on those very articles.

This will be my first time presenting–except for one time for a hackathon in 2019 where we secured a podium spot because our presentation was full of memes and our app had the right amount of buzzwords like ‘blockchain’–so I was wondering if you have any basic tips or good-to-knows.

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My basic tip or good-to-know is illustrated by the fact that I’ve forbidden myself to eat chocolate, because I’m much like a dog.

I can eat chocolate until I get sick from it, and even then, I’ll keep eating.

Logic says there would be some off-switch, some kind of negative feedback loop, some mechanism to say, “No, now is enough.” But logic is wrong.

That’s really an illustration of the fundamental marketing truth, that there’s great value in selling people more of what they have already proven to buy and consume.

I think of this a little differently from the way you may have already heard the idea.

For example, and this is in answer to GC’s question above, I sell the same kind of paid content as I do free content, which people already consumed to buy the paid content.

In other words, the books I’ve written, the courses I’ve created, the live trainings I’ve put on, and charged anywhere from $10 to $1,000, are all as stuffed as I can make them with personal stories, analogies, case studies, pop culture references, jokes, profiles of interesting and influential people, and occasionally completely irrelevant but fun asides — just like my daily emails are.

Problem:

At least in my experience, it’s hard to come up with a bunch of really good stories, analogies, case studies, jokes, pop culture references in one sitting, or even two, or even 10.

Much more effective, and much faster and easier long term, at least when it comes to creating new offers, is already to have a bunch of good stories, analogies, case studies, jokes, pop culture references lying around, which you can repurpose.

The way I personally get there is writing daily emails, which have the rather magical Triforce of:

1. Converting new prospects into customers…

2. Continuing the relationship with existing customers and helping them get more value out of what they already bought, and…

3. Creating, or helping create, high quality new offers one email at a time.

That’s to say, if you want to start putting on live webinars or workshops in the near future, or if you want to create a course, or write a book, or create a pinup calendar, then start writing a daily email today.

You will have instant fodder, usually of a very high quality, when it’s time to sit down and create that other thing.

That’s my basic tip or good-to-know for today, along with the fact that, if you haven’t yet started writing daily emails, or have started but haven’t been able to stick to it, then I can help, or rather, my Daily Email Habit service can help. For more info on that:

​https://bejakovic.com/deh​

Where it’s at: Two narrow columns and a PDF

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One of the rare daily email newsletters I read more often than not is by Jason Leister.

Jason used to be a direct response copywriter. He used to write about getting and managing copywriting clients. He’s since moved into stranger waters, where he talks about raising his 10 kids, living off the grid, “unplugging from the matrix,” and manifesting your desires.

All right up my alley, minus the 10 kids.

But let’s talk turkey:

Each Monday, Jason sends an email called Monday Hotsheet. It’s a bunch of curated resources — interesting articles, tech, videos that Jason has come across.

That’s pretty normal.

What was weird is that Jason used to send the Monday Hotsheet as a PDF that he’d link to in his email. Even weirder, the PDF was formatted in two columns, like some insurance brochure.

I liked to read through Jason’s Monday Hotsheet but I always chuckled at the experience. Who does PDFs any more? And in two columns like this?

Well, I guess I manifested something myself, and I should have been more careful about what I asked for.

Because Jason for some reason recently switched Monday Hotsheet to be simply delivered in his daily email, and in just one measly column.

I found myself disappointed. From one week to the next, Jason’s Monday Hotsheet looked cheaper, much less valuable and interesting.

Suddenly, I asked myself if I need another weekly email the curates useful and interesting resources online? I feel like everybody from Arnold Schwarzenegger on down has one of those. I ain’t got time for all these curated valuable resources.

A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos once got a tin pot and a wooden spoon. He then started banging on the tin pot with the wooden spoon while jumping up and down on his couch and chanting, “Format beats copy! Format beats copy!”

(Fine. The part with the wooden spoon and the tin pot I made up. But all the rest of that story is true, except the jumping up and down.)

Parris was specifically talking about the format of sales copy.

Once upon a time, you could take a proven sales letter, format it to look like a magazine or an article or a newsletter issue (the print kind), and you might get a 2.5x bump in response. Format beats copy: Ain’t no copy in the universe that’s gonna get you that kind of a bounce, not when you already have top copywriters working for you.

This holds just as well for info products, whether you give ’em away or charge thousands of dollars for them.

Yes, people should only want the truth, and nothing but the truth. Yes, it shouldn’t matter whether you deliver the truth on a 3×5 index card, or in a 3-ring binder, or a never-to-be-repeated secret performance in an amphitheater in the middle of some remote forest.

It shouldn’t matter, but it does matter.

So my point for you today is, think about the format in which you will deliver your truth.

And if you’ve already delivered your truth, and nobody much cared, or they cared at first and then they dropped off… then think about format again.

Rather than coming up with a new message, you might be able to keep the message and simply deliver it as a 2-column PDF, or whatever else feels unique and different and valuable in your industry.

And sometimes, simple word choice is enough to change the format. Or at least be a major part of it.

Take for example my Daily Email Habit service. At bottom, it’s delivered as a daily email. I could have simply said, “Hey, would you like to sign up for a new set of daily emails, and pay me $30 a month for the privilege?”

Maybe some forward-thinking people would have taken me up on this. But i don’t think it would have worked nearly as well as calling Daily Email Habit a service, which happens to be delivered by email, for your convenience.

Speaking of Daily Email Habit, if you’d like to find out more about this valuable service, or even try it out yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

The largest copywriter in the Netherlands gives me his endorsement

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

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

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

Anyways, Robin writes:

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Hey John,

Just finished MVE and am now halfway with SME.

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

Awesome course, awesome idea.

Same for SME.

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

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

===

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

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

I find my enthusiasm for promoting those courses has dipped.

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

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

But much more important:

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

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

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

https://bejakovic.com/deh

The end of info products

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THE FOLLOWING EMAIL IS CONTROVERSIAL AND MAY BE OFFENSIVE TO SOME AUDIENCES

READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED

You might be familiar with Max Sackheim’s famous ad, “Do you make these mistakes in English?”

The ad ran for decades, unchanged, and kept bringing in profitable business better than any contender.

Thousands of pages of analysis have been written about the 7-word headline of this ad and the copy that followed.

But what about the actual product this ad was ultimately selling? What about the means by which a prospect could hope to correct his or her mistakes in English? What were prospects actually exchanging their money for?

Sackheim’s copy only teases you about the product, and calls it a “remarkable invention” and a “100% self-correcting device.”

As far as I know, nobody today actually has this remarkable invention stashed away in their garage. Whatever it was, it’s clear it was sold as some kind of tool, a device, and not just information.

This is a well-known direct marketing truth that’s been around since Sackheim’s days and before, back into the age of patent medicines.

A real, tangible, external mechanism — a fat-loss potion, a dog seatbelt, a “100% self-correcting device” — sells much easier than just good info — how to lose weight, how to be a less negligent dog owner, how to speak gooder English.

Smart modern-day info marketers have gotten hep to this fact. That’s why people like Russell Brunson and Ben Settle and Sam Ovens have put their reputation and audience to work behind tools like ClickFunnels and Berserker Mail and Skool.

The thing is, creating a tool, whether physical or software, has traditionally been an expensive, complicated, and risky business.

Take a look at Groove Funnels, another tool created a few years ago by another experienced info marketer, Mike Filsaime. Groove Funnels is a bloated, buggy, frankly unusable product. I say that as somebody who invested into a lifelong subscription in Groove Funnels.

I have a couple degrees in computer science. I also have about a decade’s worth amateur and pro software development experience. But after I quit my IT job 10+ years ago, I never once considered putting this experience to use in order to develop any kind of tool I could sell.

Until now.

Because things are changing. Today even a monkey, working alone, can create and deploy a valuable app simply by querying ChatGPT persistently enough. And there are plenty of shovels available for such would-be gold miners, tools to build tools, which will do much of the in-between work for you. Just say what you will to happen, and it will be done.

Decades ago, master direct marketer Gary Halbert said that the best best product of all is… information!

But I bet if Gary were alive today, he’d be hard at work (or maybe easy at work) creating some kind of high-margin tool to sell, in the broadest sense of the word — a thing to do some or all of the work for an audience with a problem. A few reasons why:

* Again, tools are easy to sell. They fit with innate human psychology of how we want to solve problems.

* Tools can make for natural continuity income if you license them out instead of sell them outright.

* Tools can create their own moat over time. There can be lock-in or switching cost if your users build on top of your tool.

* And now, thanks to the most remarkable invention of AI, it’s possible to create tools quickly, cheaply, and with great margins.

All that’s to say, best product of all… information? I don’t think so. Not any more. Best start adapting now.

Speaking of which, I got an offer for you:

Would you say that there are any tech issues that are keeping you from starting your own email list?

If there are, write in and let me know about them.

In turn, I’ll have something for you that you might like.

My piratin’ days

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ARRR, I be quite old, much like a giant tortoise. And to prove it, I can tell you I was there when the Internet was first becoming a thing.

Quite naturally, I was also there when a friend in high school first told me you could get music, for free, on the Internet.

For reference, this was back when the only way to listen to the music you wanted, when you wanted, was to hand over the modern equivalent of about $30 for a CD.

“No!” I told my friend in disbelief when he told me about this piracy stuff.

“Yes!” he said. “Any kind of music you want. You just type the name of the song into AltaVista, and you look for mp3 files.”

So I tried it. I remember that the first song I searched for and pirated was The Beach Boys’ I Get Around. It took about three days to download.

Now here’s the head trip:

A short while later, I actually ended up handing over the modern equivalent of about $30 for a CD, The Beach Boys’ Greatest Hits, Volume 1.

I did this even though I had already pirated several Beach Boys hits off the Internet… and even though I could probably get the other ones too, with just a bit of searching.

Now let me make it clear:

1. This email is not an invitation to pirate and salve your conscience by saying you will somehow pay for it later, when you have more money. Piracy, romantic though it may sound, is well known to lead to scurvy and hangings, among other unpleasant consequences. It’s a miracle I survived my piratin’ days and lived to tell the tale.

2. This email is also not an invitation to give away your catchy songs for free, in the hope that people will eventually pay for the album. In fact, my point is kind of the opposite of that.

My point is that format is positioning.

I don’t remember exactly what made me pay for the Beach Boys CD.

I probably rationalized it to myself. I could listen to the music on my stereo instead of the crappy computer speakers… there were songs I might not find online, and they took so long to download… I could take the music with me and play it in the car or at a friend’s house.

There was probably a bit of all that. But really, I imagine my decision was mostly irrational.

The album had a colorful, attractive cover. I had the modern equivalent of $30 burning a hole in my pocket. Plus, I had been well trained over the years to buy CDs, and this was in fact a CD for sale. So I bought, and I was even happy about it.

Here’s my takeaway for you:

If you have free content, you can legitimately repackage it and sell it for good money, even to the people who have gotten much of that stuff for free in another format.

And if you’re selling stuff but not making as much money as you like, then the same lesson applies. Change the format, and you can double, triple, decuple, or even vinguple the prices you charge. People will buy, and even be happy about it.

Because format is positioning.

And if you want my help putting this lesson into practice, well, then read on. Today is the last day I will be making the offer below, because tomorrow we weigh anchor and set sail:

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I’ve set aside time over the next month to help two business owners to quickly churn up new offers using their catalogue of existing products. The ultimate goal here is to:

* Create something new and exciting for your audience, without creating entirely new products

* Develop a new asset for yourself — a new offer you can reissue in the future with little tweaks or maybe without any tweaks

* Bring in new buyers who might then buy other stuff from you, or get deeper into your world

* Do a bit of work and make back a good deal of money as a result

If you want a specific example:

Last week, I sent three emails over two days in what I called my Shangri-La MVE event. Those three emails ended up selling 22 copies of a $297 course that I had already promoted hundreds of times over the past couple years. $6.5k or so when all the money comes in, and all it took in terms of work was a couple of hours of repackaging content I already had.

I’ve run other such promo events, ranging anywhere from 1-14 days. Some were complete duds, and brought in less money than this Shangri-La event. But others brought in more, well into the 5-figures.

Your specific numbers?

It will depend on how big your list is, the relationship you have with the people on there, and of course your offers.

But with my second pair of eagle eyes scanning over all your assets… and my experience running not only my own “reissue events” but also coaching a couple dozen copywriters who worked on these kinds of promos for clients… you will be more likely to come out of this with a result you can be happy with.

Like I said, I’m talking to a few business owners about this already.

If you’re interested in this offer in principle, hit reply and let me know a bit about your list (size, how often you write, etc.) and your back catalogue of previous hits.

I will be promoting this offer until this Thursday. I want to talk to everyone who’s interested and find the two people I think I am best qualified to help… and then we’ll kick things off.