List Building

Why I didn’t build a list in the copywriting/marketing space

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Yesterday I mentioned how a while back, I followed Travis Speegle’s MyPeeps program to build up a new email list of dog owners via paid ads. To which a long-time reader wrote in to ask:

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Just curious, John, how come you didn’t build a list in the copywriting/marketing space? I’m using a different process myself that will help me build a list with a combo of content + paid ads so curious to hear how come you don’t try to grow your existing list.

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Good question.

First off, I frankly don’t want to build a “copywriting” list.

I haven’t primarily been writing about copywriting for, I don’t know, the past two+ years, ever since I stopped working with copywriting clients, and maybe before then.

I have been writing about persuasion and influence and psychology on the one hand, and online businesses and marketing on the other hand, and random other stuff that I find funny or interesting on the third hand.

But the real question is why not build up this existing list, and why start a new list instead?

I thought about it. I came up with a few reasons, ranked here from most logical and therefore least likely to be true, to least logical and therefore most likely to be true:

#1. I wanted to do a demonstration for the people inside the implementation group I ran when I first promoted MyPeeps. I didn’t want people who were building up their own lists to throw up their arms and say, “Of course you can do it because you have all these assets I don’t have!” A new list would make the demonstration cleaner and more persuasive.

#2. I was genuinely thinking to do this dog list as a side business of its own (I still think it could be viable). The list building implementation group I ran seemed like a good moment to kick that off.

#3. My simple opportunity-seeking mindset, which lives at the core of my person, and which says it’s more exciting to start something new and risky than to toil away on something familiar and proven.

#4. Because it’s simpler to run ads for a new, impersonal list than an existing, personal list. About that:

Like I said, I ran a 4-week implementation group for the people who bought MyPeeps when I promoted it as an affiliate.

In that group, I could see people running ads to build up their own personal lists.

AND IT DID NOT WORK.

Not because paid ads are a scam, or because Travis Speegle’s MyPeeps course doesn’t deliver.

Travis lays out very simple and yet very proven process to make paid ads work for list building, whether it’s your own personal list or an anonymous list of dog owners.

The reason it didn’t work for many people is because they refused to follow a crucial step in Travis’s process.

In fact, even when I pointed out to people they were skipping this crucial step, they nodded at me, smiled in appreciation of my looking out for them, and then turned around and continued to do exactly what they had been doing, which was skipping this crucial step.

What is this step?

Travis’s MyPeeps course describes is very well in module 1 and again in module 5.

If you would like to build up a new list, or to grow your existing list, you can find full info on Travis’s MyPeeps below:

https://bejakovic.com/mypeeps

P.S. If you have bought MyPeeps, forward me your receipt. I’ll share with you the recordings of the calls and my own notes that I initially did inside the implementation group last year.

And if you’ve already sent me your receipt, check inside the bonuses area that I gave you access to.

I’ve added a “DO YOU MAKE THESE MISTAKES IN PAID ADS FOR YOUR PERSONAL LIST?” document in there (very subtle, I know). It highlights the crucial step so many list owners are skipping when creating ads to promote their existing personal list, and explains how you can maybe avoid doing the same.

My advice on actually building an email list

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A diligent reader writes in with a familiar question:

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Hi John,

From what I’ve seen, Daily Email Habit helps you with your already existing email list, right?

My question is, do you have any course or advice on actually building an email list first. Correct me if I’m wrong about the Daily Email Habit.

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The diligent reader above is absolutely right. Daily Email Habit is about emailing your existing list.

List building is not my forte or my focus, and therefore I don’t sell a course on it.

But last year, I did promote Travis Speegle’s MyPeeps course, all about how to build a large, engaged email list.

I bought Travis’s course myself before promoting it. I thought the content was great. I ended up promoting it to my list and even running an “implementation group” on the back of it over 4 weeks.

As part of this implementation group, I started a new list (dog owners, since I’d done a lot of client work in this space once upon a time)… I went through Travis’s training… and I followed what Travis advised to the letter.

The result for me personally were new, qualified email susbcribers at about $0.60 a name.

If you are looking to build a list, then MyPeeps is my recommendation for how to do it quickly, on a budget of $10-$20 a day, so you end up with subscribers who actually want to read what you have to write and buy what you have to offer.

If you’d like to find out the full details on MyPeeps, or start building an engaged email list today:

https://bejakovic.com/mypeeps

P.S. Within that implementation group, I did three live calls with the participants.

I also had an 8-page document of notes I personally took from Travis’s course.

If you do decide to sign up for MyPeeps, forward me your receipt, and I will hook you up with the recordings of those calls and my own notes, to help you get more out of this course and to do it more quickly.

Why I collect personalization data I never use

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Bridget Holland, a marketer out of Sydney, Australia, who runs a content marketing agency called NoBull Marketing, writes in with a question:

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I did a presentation for a business networking group yesterday about email marketing, and I used one of your emails as an example. (Frequency, formatting and results more than content. I was comparing it to a nicely formatted monthly email with stacks of articles, and arguing that either could work but you have to find out what was right for you and your market.)

For the first time ever – oops, embarrassing – I realised that you don’t use those first names you collect when people subscribed. (I had to go check that you collected them!) That you have no opening greeting at all.

So the question is:

* Why don’t you use greetings? Did you ever? If you did and you’ve stopped, has it made a difference? Either for the entire list, or for new subscriber behaviour?

* Why don’t you use personalisation? And since you don’t, why do you collect first names?

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I never used personalization in my emails because, like I wrote a few days ago in the context of calibration, it feels fake to me.

I don’t like it when people do it in emails I read, particularly in the body of the email. You know what I mean, [firstname]?

In the words of David Ogilvy, “The customer is not a moron. She’s your wife.” Or your mom, or your college roommate from UC Santa Cruz, or your ex-flatmate from Budapest, or an ex-girlfriend.

(The only person I’ve seen using personalization well is Daniel Throssell, who gets creative with it. However, in order to make that work, you have to police new subscribers to make sure they put in their real name when they sign up, which I don’t feel like doing.)

So like Bridget asks, why still ask for a name, if I’m never going to use it in an email?

Two reasons:

1. Most people do fill it out, and honestly. I make an occasional habit of doing a bit of detective work on new subscribers, and this bit of info can be helpful.

2. Filling in a first name is a commitment and give for those who choose to make it. It’s a tiny commitment, but I figure it’s important. The work of training strangers of the internet to become dedicated readers and customers starts early, with such baby steps.

With all that said:

I remember the early days of my own marketing education. I put a lot of time and thought into topics like “First name on optin form, or no first name???” I now largely feel it doesn’t matter much one way or the other. Really, it’s just personal preference, and then inertia.

I’m not sure if anybody will profit from this in-depth discussion. But Bridget wrote in to ask, and I figured others might be wondering the same. In any case, I’m grateful to Bridget for sending in her question, and I wanted to highlight it here.

And since I’m busy writing my upcoming and new and still highly unfinished book, and since my self-imposed March 24 deadline is nearing, I would like to invite further reader questions.

Because answering reader questions makes for particularly easy and yet engaging emails.

So if you got small questions, big questions, questions about influence, copywriting, or how to style your hair, then I invite you to hit reply and let me know.

There’s a fair a chance I will answer your question in one of these emails over the next week or so, and will be grateful to you in any case.

Grow your list with relevant people who will eventually buy from you

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I have a special, very time-limited offer for you today. But first, let me give you the background:

Last week, in my Daily Email House community, I ran a “JV Outreach Challenge.”

Basically, the goal was to open up a conversation with somebody who could turn into a potential business partner, however light and temporary.

As part of this, I asked House members to think about their own problems/wants/frustrations.

Not everybody shared publicly. But some did.

Among all the different problems/wants/frustrations, there was one common thread in everyone’s lists, always near the top. That was some variant of:

“Not enough subscribers/list is not growing fast enough/not enough of the right prospects who actually have money to spend”

… ie, the old problem of high-quality list building.

Of course, this problem came up with people who are just starting out. But it also came up even with people who are established and successful, and who already have lists of thousands of subscribers.

A fact that won’t shock you is that I’m no expert in list building.

In fact, I have been very casual about building my own list.

Like I’ve written before, I spent the first couple years of this newsletter writing to fewer than 100 people.

These days, my list remains small by industry standards, though it’s much bigger than it was. It’s also big enough that I can make a 6-figure income from it. I’ve also made a public and definite choice not to focus on list growth, but rather on list profitability.

All that said, I have learned a few things about list growth over the years. And ever since I started Daily Email House, I have been writing a series of posts about 6 techniques that have actually grown my list.

I jokingly called these techniques, “Magic List-Growing Secrets That Big Email Doesn’t Want You To Know.”

That’s because they are no secrets at all. They’re not hacks. They’re not something that is working today because of a glitch on TikTok and will be gone tomorrow.

They’re certainly not something that worked just for me because I was the first to exploit it, and with each subsequent person who tries it after, the results turn more meager and meager.

Instead, these 6 techniques of list growth have worked for me, and will work for anyone else, if you only apply them consistently.

In fact, there’s a good chance they will work better and faster for you than they did for me.

That’s because, when I wrote up these 6 techniques, I didn’t just list them.

For each one, I also included my own case study, along with a few key takeaways based on my experience, so you can get results more quickly and consistently than I did, since you can learn from my mistakes and successes.

So here’s the special time-limited offer I’m making you:

I have put together a guide, which I’m calling “What’s Grown My List Over The Years, Vol. 1-6.”

I guess I could try to sell this guide for a million dollars a copy. I doubt anybody would buy at that price.

I believe I could sell it for $500 dollars, particularly if I delivered it on a live call or two. I can imagine I might get a few people to take me up on that.

I could certainly sell this guide for $100, as it is now, a shiny and platform-independent PDF of 27 pages (single-column). I bet I could get a good number of people to take me up on that.

But instead, I am making this guide free, as a time-limited bonus for my Daily Email Habit service.

A month of Daily Email Habit puzzles currently costs $30.

I figure $30 is a no-brainer price for 6 proven list growth ideas, which can shave months or possibly years off your climb up the list-growth mountain, so you can get to a place where you have a basic number of good customers and clients on your list.

Once you get to this basic number, it gives you room to decide what you want to do — focus more on list growth, like a lot of people, or like me, on building a business that suits you.

So that’s what you get for $30. Plus, of course, you get a month’s worth of daily email puzzles via Daily Email Habit, so you actually have a chance to convert the people on your email list into long-term customers or clients.

If you’re writing emails already, Daily Email habit can help you write them more consistently, and faster. Even one extra email you send over the next month can easily be worth 10x the $30 of the Daily Email Habit subscription.

And if you’re not writing daily emails already, then this might be your moment.

If you have been faced with the chicken-and-omelette problem of “Why should I write if I have nobody reading?” and “Why should anybody read since I never write?” then consider what would need to happen for you to change what you’re doing.

Maybe you’ll find it’s the opportunity I’m offering today.

As with all opportunities, this one won’t be around long.

I’m making this free bonus offer available only until this Saturday, February 22, at 12pm midnight PST.

Sign up for Daily Email Habit before then, and I’ll send you a copy of “What’s Grown My List Over The Years, Vol. 1-6.” (I’ll be as quick about it as I can be, but I’ll be sending it out personally and one-by-one, so bear with me.)

If you would like to get started now, and not allow this opportunity to pass you by:

​https://bejakovic.com/deh​

PS. If you’re signed up for Daily Email Habit but you’re not in Daily Email House, this free bonus offer applies to you as well. So does the deadline.

In other words, write me an email before Saturday at 12 midnight PST to say you want “What’s Grown My List Over The Years, Vol. 1-6,” and I’ll send it to you. Don’t write me after that, because I will have closed the offer, and I am strict with deadlines.

Free vs. low-ticket

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Comes a question from a long-time reader, Shakoor Chowdhury, about list building:

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OPINION: Free Offers are dead with how saturated and “information bloated” someone is, it’s like offering someone who is full of french fries and big macs another “free big mac”; sure he’ll take it but that’s the last you’ll see of him

+ I’ve noticed even on a GOOD DAY, with lead costs at less than 30 US cents, and 7% Link CTR, my email open rates are NEVER higher than 30%

VS: someone who buys a low ticket offer

I kind of haphazardly published my first book on amazon,

I’m not sure HOW, but this guy found it, bought it, messaged me on Telegram, followed me on instagram, and reads every single one of my emails…

any thoughts on this?

My sample size is too small to make any DEFINITIVE prediction, but it seems to me that I’ll be switching PERMANENTLY away from “free lead magnets” to low ticket PAID offers for listbuilding

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Shakoor’s food analogy is actually a good way to think about this.

If you’re stuffed with french fries and big macs, would you accept and eat another free big mac?

You might, or you might not.

But by the same token, would you accept and eat an extra big mac if you had to pay $1.99 for it?

You might, or you might not.

On the other hand, what if you were offered free ice cream… or a free beer… or better yet, a tour of 4 local microbreweries, which normally costs $200, where you get to be educated and entertained by the brewers, and you get to sample their beers, all for free?

Again, depending on your tastes, and the kind of guy or gal you are, you might accept or you might not.

In case you’re wondering what I’m getting at:

Free and low-ticket are both as old as the art of fishing. Neither method will be going away while humans continue to fish, or for that matter, to do business.

The way I see it, it’s not about price. It’s about perceived value.

Low-priced lead magnets force the prospect to put some value on what you’re offering, because it’s baked into the offer.

But zero-cost lead magnets don’t have to have zero perceived value. Free lead magnets can have great perceived value, if you take the time and trouble to make it so.

Which brings me to another of the unsung benefits of daily emails.

Daily emails increase the perceived value of your offers.

Because anybody can print out a price tag, stick it on the side of a cardboard box, and yell once or twice about how there’s $1,000 worth of value inside.

And yes — this will have some effect. It will make the cardboard box, and whatever is inside it, more valuable than a box without a price tag. It will make it easier to give it away for free, or even to charge a few dollars for it.

BUT.

Take the time over and over to reiterate the value of the stuff in the box… to highlight the attractive things inside… to explain how they can benefit the prospect… to quantify those benefits in as many ways as you can… to bring up previous buyers and their success stories and endorsements… to repeat and justify the price… and do this day after day, repeating your message until both the desire and the credibility pile up via simple persistence…

… and the perceived value of your cardboard box, and what’s in it, doesn’t just rise to a few dollars. Or even to a thousand dollars.

The perceived value can go to many thousands of dollars, so people happily give you $1k for your cardboard box, and feel like they are getting a steal in the process.

And if you ever decide to give that box away for free… suddenly there’s a stampede.

That is what happens when you send an interesting and yet self-promotional email every day.

And on that note:

I have a service that helps you you send daily emails consistently, called Daily Email Habit. Shakoor, who wrote the question above, actually subscribes to Daily Email Habit. He had this to say about it:

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Daily Email Habit is the best thing I ever purchased PERIOD.

It really gets past the first hurdle of “what to write”…

And I love the accountability that comes with it.

While snapchat uses “streaks” for pointless time-wasting, you actually used gamification for something awesome and beneficial

I’m starting to enjoy the habit of daily writing. And, I write more for MYSELF these days than my subscribers.

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If you would like my help consistently writing daily emails, so you can increase the perceived value of your offers, free or paid:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Build your list by… writing

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Last Wednesday, I got a message from Chavy Helfgott, who is a copywriter and brand strategies, and who also happens to subscribe to my Daily Email Habit service. Chavy wrote:

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At least for the beginning, I’m posting my emails on LinkedIn as well (as I have a large following there) and – I got 8 new subscribers from today’s post! This is after neglecting my LinkedIn account and rarely posting for quite a while.

Thank you for this. It feels amazing to have had a concrete result so fast.

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Yesterday, I wrote that I’ll one day have an official launch for Daily Email Habit, but that day is not today, or any time soon.

I also invited people to reply if they are interested in Daily Email Habit, so I can send them the full details. A good number of people did reply.

I sent the folks the details… and then I asked myself, what exactly am I doing? What is my purpose in creating this extra obstacle for others and work for myself?

And so I’ve decided to open up Daily Email Habit to my entire list, both to stop myself from fielding these one-on-one messages, and to make Daily Email Habit available to people who might benefit from it.

If you’re interested in Daily Email Habit, and how it might possibly help you, the full info is at the link below.

I can tell you that the core promise of Daily Email Habit is a daily nudge to write your own daily email.

The effect of consistent nudging is consistent daily emails. And the effect of consistent daily emails is that they grow your expertise and authority… create or deepen your relationship with your audience… build up a stockpile of interesting content can reuse as you see fit… and make you better at writing, in all formats.

Plus, you can do like Chavy is doing, and simply post your daily email to LinkedIn or wherever and get people to opt in for your list. And yes, it does work — she sent me a screenshot of 8 shiny new subscribers from last Wednesday to prove it.

For full info on Daily Email Habit:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

The biggest secret to building a big audience

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I’ll tell you about the biggest secret in a second. But I feel I should sneak up on it a little, so it has more impact.

So let me ask you:

Have you ever heard of Leroy Smith? The former pro basketball player, with the story in his past?

Smith attended the University of North Carolina at Charlotte from 1981 to 1985, and he played for the UNC team.

After that, Smith turned pro and played for various prestigious basketball teams, including Hemel & Watford Royals, the Westchester Golden Apples, and Kumagai Gumi Bruins.

Yes, those are all real basketball teams. I did not make them up.

In many instances, Smith led these no-name, fourth-tier teams that nobody cares about in various important categories, including scoring, rebounds, and blocked shots.

No? None of this sounds familiar? You haven’t heard of Smith or his accomplishments?

Honestly I’m not surprised.

Really the only reason anybody today has heard of Smith, and that includes me, is that back in 1978, Smith got picked for his high school varsity team over his childhood friend Michael Jordan.

Smith and Jordan were both 15 at the time. But Smith already stood at 6’7, or 201 cm, while Jordan was only 5’10, or 180cm.

When Michael Jordan was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame, Smith was there in the audience. Jordan said of Smith, “He’s not any bigger, his game is about the same.”

Meanwhile, Jordan became Jordan. It helped that he had a rhinoceros-sized chip on his shoulder.

“It all started when Coach Herring cut me,” Jordan said. “It was embarrassing, not making that team.”

Jordan spent his sophomore year working hard on basketball. He became more skilled and confident. More importantly, he developed the habits of obsessive self-improvement and discipline and training.

These habits, combined with a growth spurt that saw him add another 8 inches in height, landed Jordan not just on the high school varsity team… not just on the college basketball team… not just in the pros… but made him into the greatest basketball player of all time.

“Business,” I hear you saying, “talk business, Bejako! Michael Jordan is all well and good, but don’t you realize my time is money…”

Fine. Let me hurry my analogy along. I’d like to present to you an idea I heard from marketer Travis Sago:

“The biggest secret to building a big audience is knowing how to monetize a small one.”

Travis’s point is that if every visitor you could drive to your sales page was worth a thousand bucks to you… would you really have a traffic problem?

Would you have any trouble buying traffic?

Would it be hard to get other people as affiliates for your offer?

Would you need to get motivated to write and send another email, knowing that 10 or 12 people – “only 10 or 12 people!” — will click through to your sales page?

I doubt it.

Maybe a thousand bucks per visitor to your sales page sounds ambitious or even unrealistic.

Fine. But if you’re constantly looking for new traffic, or if you think that more traffic will solve all your problems, then I bet you have some room to develop the habit of obsessive list monetization.

Figure out how to monetize your current list better… and not only will it become way easier to kick off that audience growth spurt… but when the growth spurt happens, you’ll have a shot at a Michael Jordan-like career, instead of a Leroy Smith-like career.

And on that note, I’d like to remind you of my ongoing hand-raiser campaign. Here are the details on that, from my email yesterday:

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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.

Who wins the fight: Viral posts or paid traffic?

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I’ll tell ya, or actually, I’ll defer to a person with more authority on the matter:

Russell Nohelty.

As I wrote once last week, Russell is a bestselling author of fantasy books and comics. He also writes about the business of writing, and he runs Writer MBA, a membership program to help writers make more money.

Over the past 6 months, Russell spent $30k on paid ads to beef up his email list, which now stands at over 70,000 subscribers.

Russell and I did a call last Monday about his experiences spending all that money on ads.

On the call, Russell said something interesting — that advertising democratizes virality. Says Russell, advertising allows people who were not “blessed by the magic audience fairy” to build an audience for their work.

Sounds great, right?

Except… do you really wanna go viral? Here’s another thing that Russell said:

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I have never heard somebody say, “I went viral and got all the best people subscribing to me!”

It’s always some version of “Wow, lots of bigots in the comments who hate everything about me.”

If you are attracting the wrong crowd organically, you could end up in a way worse place than running ads. I know because I’ve been there.

Both are bad and both are good. The difference is the quality of the traffic source, how you nurture the leads you generate, and whether you are paying in time or money.

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This isn’t about trumpeting paid traffic over organic traffic, or vice versa. The point is simply this:

Where you get your subscribers matters… how you get them matters… what you promise them matters… how you treat them when they’re on your list matters.

This is not any kind of inspirational woo-woo, but very practical dollars-and-cents calculus, borne out by sales, spam complaints, and the number of interesting or annoying reader replies.

And this is one of the reasons why I liked Travis Speegle’s paid list-building approach, the one he teaches in his MyPEEPS course, which I’ve been promoting all week long.

Travis’s system is not about paying to inflate your subscriber count with people who hate you or never want to hear from you. It’s also not about getting the cheapest traffic simply because it’s cheap.

Instead, Travis’s approach is about building a quality list, with paid ads, sustainably, with the goal of having a valuable relationship with the people on that list for the long term. That in fact is why the course is called MyPEEPS, and not “8-Figure A-List Media-Buying Secrets.”

The deadline to get MyPEEPS is tonight at 12 midnight PST, less than 12 hours from now.

The reason to get MyPEEPS before then is my Shotgun Messenger bonus — my personal support and insight as you work through MyPEEPS and implement it to grow your own list.

As an extra bonus, I’m also including the call on which I interviewed Russell Nohelty about his experiences with paid traffic to grow his personal brand…, as well as a series of articles that Russell wrote on the topic, which are normally reserved for his paid subscribers.

If you’d like the full details on MyPEEPS and my bonus offer, or if you want in before the deadline strikes:

​https://bejakovic.com/shotgun​

Getting hooked on the hamster wheel

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Back in 2009, before social media really transformed the world, a Dutch scientist named Johanna Meier set up revolutionary experiment in her back yard:

She put an open cage in an ivy-tangled corner of the yard. Inside the cage, she put some food pellets and a running wheel. She then trained a motion-activated camera on the scene.

Sure enough:

Wild mice started arriving during the night. They entered the cage to get the food pellets. But they also tried out the running wheel — and they got hooked.

Meier recorded more than 12,000 different animals getting on the running wheel night after night. Her point was proven — even perfectly wild, free animals would willingly enter a cage and run around on the wheel, going nowhere.

Once the mice got habituated, Meier could even take the treats away. The mice still kept coming night after night, to run around in place, doing what they had gotten used to.

I bring this up because in the 15 years since that experiment, social media has often unflatteringly been compared to a hamster wheel.

I’ve never really used social media so I can’t say if that’s true.

But maybe it resonates with you. Maye you have experience getting lured into social media by the promise of treats — a huge free audience — only to have the treats pulled away from you, while you keep running in place.

If so, I’d like to present an alternative:

Building up a modest, engaged, scalable email list by paying for ads. Sure, ads cost money. But so does the wasted opportunity of weeks, months, or years of running in place on social media, without getting anywhere.

If this speaks to you, I’d like to remind you of the deadline to get MyPEEPS, tonight at 12 midnight PST.

In a food pelletshell, MyPEEPS shows you how to build your email list with paid traffic — putting in $10-$15, and getting out 10-15 new subscribers a day — so you can in time have a proper audience of people who want to read what you write, and buy what you sell.

Plus, the free Shotgun Messenger bonus I’m offering gets you my direct help and input as you actually put the MyPEEPS process into practice.

If you want the full details on that, or to sign up for before the deadline strikes:

​​https://bejakovic.com/shotgun​​

The curious case of the 7,730-word Facebook ad

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“My new husband is disabled, yet he manages to wear me out every night”

… I’m sitting in a busy cafe, full of other expats, because my cleaning woman Flor has taken command of my apartment.

A few moments ago, I was discreetly and quietly digging through the Facebook ad library, looking for what I knew I would soon find.

And I did — a 7,730-word ad, which starts with a teaser:

“Her groom ran away from wedding to pursue his first love. Heartbroken, she randomly found a disabled man who was also abandoned to get married. Unexpectedly, he turned out to be a billionaire!”

This Facebook ad goes on for two chapters of dense literotica, before informing me that “Available chapters here are limited, click the button below to install the App and enjoy more exciting chapters.”

Sure enough I did click, a website opened up, and the above line, about my new disabled husband and his nightly staying power, blared out of my laptop speakers and throughout the cafe, as I scrambled to find the mute button.

So now, rather than raising my eyes from the keyboard and meeting the curious gaze of all the other cafe goers, I am focusing intently on writing this email.

I don’t know the full story of this ad or the business behind it. Maybe it’s some sort of scam.

Or maybe it’s just what it says it is:

A mobile app with a subscription for literotica books… which is being sold via dozens of Facebook ads that run for 5k+ words each.

I bring this up because last night, during the interview I did with Travis Speegle on list building via paid traffic, a question came in:

“Do you feel that attention spans are getting shorter and marketers have to get more sophisticated and learn ‘vsl’ or video ads for more engagement?”

Attention spans aren’t as short as you may have been led to believe.

And video ads are not required for anything, though they can be a good option for many tyings.

More generally, the eternal truth still holds. You reap what you sow.

If you create advertising inviting people to be distracted, gullible, greedy, scared, cheap — or to consume pages and pages of disabled billionaire literotica — that’s what you’re going to get.

On the other hand, if you create advertising inviting people to be good customers or email list subscribers, well, it works in that direction also.

And on that note:

This week, I’m promoting Travis Speegle’s MyPEEPS course, which gives you the core of Travis’s ~20 years of media buying and list-building experience for a one-time investment of $495.

Travis actually walks you through, in real time, how he creates ads in Facebook and what he puts in them to get the right kinds of people onto his email lists and the list of the big DR clients he accepts as clients.

Plus, if you get MyPEEPS via my affiliate link before this Sunday at 12 midnight PST, I will also include a bonus, which I’m offering for free, only this once, and which I would normally charge $500 or more for.

The free bonus is that I’ll ride shotgun as you build up your own list following the process in MyPEEPS, and give you my copywriting feedback and marketing input along the way.

For the full details on how this will work, or to get MyPEEPS and my free bonus as well:

​​https://bejakovic.com/shotgun​