List Building – Desert Kite

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

November 12, 2026 by John Bejakovic

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.

One weird trick to grow your paid community

November 8, 2026 by John Bejakovic

“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

Two excellent reasons to get on Csaba Borzasi’s list today

October 26, 2026 by John Bejakovic

Last month, I interviewed email marketer and copywriter Csaba Borzasi. That was part of a new initiative I have to do regular interviews with people who have email lists of 5k+ subscribers.

As I found out during that interview, Csaba:

– Has a list of approximately 5,250 subscribers (pruned regularly from a much bigger list, since much of Csaba’s list growth comes from cold traffic)

– Makes on average $15,000-$25,000 per month from his list

– Works on average 2-3 hours a day on his business

– Went through a personal rough patch during this summer, didn’t really send many broadcast emails during the month of July (autoresponders were working), and still made $10,000 for the month

The universe of people who write daily emails and make a living from it is, in my experience, filled with flighty and impulsive people.

(Maybe that has been my experience because I am myself a flighty and impulsive person, though I have found ways of correcting and covering for that over the years.)

Flightiness and impulsivity have their benefits — they can be charming characteristics, particularly in a 4-year-old child — but they also have their downsides. Bad decisions made… instability… a ceiling to how high you can go, even if you want to go higher.

Csaba, even though he writes (almost) daily emails and makes a good living from it, is not a flighty or impulsive person. Quite the contrary. He is a dedicated and systematic person. His results show it. His offers show it. In fact, everything about his business and his marketing, his positioning, and his lead generation, shows it.

If you’re on my list but not on Csaba’s list, I encourage you to get on his list, for two excellent reasons.

Not only because you can see how Csaba does his marketing, and how he makes steady and good money from his list, even without writing emails all that time… not only because you can learn directly from him and profit from his offers… but because I believe his vibe and approach are a valuable complement to the flighty and impulsive approaches of people like me.

Call that “excellent reason number one.”

Excellent reason number two is that Csaba has prepared a free gift aka bribe to entice you onto his list.

I will talk more about that free gift tomorrow, and sell it on its own merits. For now, I will simply point out:

1. This free gift has a valuable and deliberate marketing system built into it (again, more on this tomorrow)

2. This free gift is delivered in a clever and systematic way. It is not information, but a living, breathing, feeling organism that Csaba has created, much like Dr. Frankenstein, to serve you and only you. It is worth unleashing into action even if you don’t want its services directly, just to see what a cool 2026 lead magnet can actually be like.

To get on Csaba’s list, and to get access to his valuable, deliberate, and clever free gift for you:

https://bejakovic.com/csaba

Particular case study of profitable list growth

October 25, 2026 by John Bejakovic

“A large acquaintance with particulars often makes us wiser than the possession of abstract formulas.”

— Wiliam James

For the past several days, I have been promoting, hyping up, and teasing Maliha Mannan’s Secret List-Building Technique Workshop. Today is the last day I’ll do that.

The Secret List-Building Technique is one that Maliha has used, most recently, to get 140 new subscribers to her list, while making $1600 in sales as well.

During the workshop, happening tomorrow, Maliha is gonna lay out how she does it and how you can do it too.

Good, I thought… but would be gooder with more concrete examples, more “particulars,” as William James says.

Fortunately, copywriter Robin Timmers put Maliha’s technique into practice earlier this week for his own list.

The results for Robin were 316 new subscribers and $2,631 in sales.

I had a bright, or perhaps obvious, idea yesterday.

Maliha is gonna share her Secret List-Building Technique and her templates and her SOP in the workshop tomorrow.

It would also be nice to get the full details of how Robin implemented Maliha’s system.

Chances are, he did something slightly different.

And even if what he did is exactly what Maliha ends up laying out on tomorrow’s workshop… a second case study, a second particular, can give you a better understanding of how Maliha’s system works, plus the belief that it can work for you too. This can all translate into you actually putting Maliha’s Secret List-Building Technique into action, and getting yourself hundreds of new buyers and possibly thousands of dollars of unexpected income in the next few weeks.

I wrote Robin yesterday and asked if he would agree to have me interview him on the full details of how he grew his list and made himself money using Maliha’s Secret List-Building Technique.

Robin agreed.

We will do that interview Tuesday, and I will then share it as a free bonus with anyone who signs up for Maliha’s workshop. That training is happening tomorrow, and the deadline to sign up for it is midnight Eastern Time tonight. Tonight. TONIGHT. If you want to get in before the doors close:

https://www.skool.com/daily-email-house/secret-list-building-technique-live-workshop

How I’d sell unsellable affiliate offers

October 24, 2026 by John Bejakovic

I’ll pay off the subject line in a second, but first let me give you an example of what I mean by an “unsellable affiliate offer”:

A couple weeks ago, I asked my list for intros to people who have good offers I haven’t heard of, which I could promote as an affiliate.

I offered, along with my lifelong gratitude and knight-like service, to pay out 10% of what I make on my first affiliate promo as a finder’s fee.

I got a response to that from a copywriter I’ve known for a long while. One of his clients is currently selling a mid-ticket membership ($500/quarter), helping people improve their close rates on sales calls. The copywriter wrote me:

“I assume some people on your list are coaches and consultants who take their own sales calls, or freelancers who take their own sales calls. If you’re in that group and you can improve your close rate by even 5%, it can add 20K-60K/year to your income.”

Yes but—

From what I’ve seen, people on my list really don’t want to learn to sell in person. If anything, they want the opposite — how to make selling superfluous, as hopeless as that is.

For another thing, I’ve found it super difficult to promote other people’s subscription offers. I think there’s a transfer of trust there that’s almost impossible to make, at least for me.

I told this to the copywriter. He came back and said:

“Makes sense, thanks for the explanation. If you were in my shoes, trying to figure out how to use affiliate marketing to grow [client’s offer], what would you do?”

At the time, my best suggestion was to make a completely different front-end offer — a $300 or $500 course that has some sexy mechanism that makes me believe I can get good at selling (or get equivalent results) in spite of my own limiting beliefs on the topic.

That’s something I could possibly, maybe, squint-so-hard-tears-come-out imagine promoting as an affiliate.

Another option would be to create a complete book funnel, get that working (meaning, testing and figuring out the right book title, sales page copy, bumps, upsells, etc.), collect proof that it all works, and then approach affiliates with that.

I now have a third suggestion, which I would sooner make than either of the two above, because it’s easier to do and more likely to succeed.

And that is to do what Maliha Mannan is going to be teaching this Monday, just two short days from now, inside her Secret List-Building Technique workshop.

Specifically, I’d make list owners the offer that Maliha will be teaching inside of this workshop.

I know that, if somebody made me this offer, even somebody who is looking to promote something like a paid community about person-to-person sales, I would most likely agree to it, for three reasons:

1. Because it would make me look good to my audience

2. Because I wouldn’t have to do any extra work

3. Because I would have a real chance of getting paid

Like I said, Maliha’s workshop is nigh. There if still some time to sign up for it. For more details:

https://www.skool.com/daily-email-house/secret-list-building-technique-live-workshop

Announcing: “Secret List-Building Technique” Workshop

October 21, 2026 by John Bejakovic

Earlier today, TMZ broke the story that Maliha Mannan, who runs The Side Blogger and has an email list of close to 10k readers, and Robin Timmers, “the largest copywriter in the Netherlands,” who has much expertise but an email list that is not as big as his expertise warrants, successfully teamed up.

Maliha shared with Robin a secret list-building technique she has been successfully using this year.

This secret technique is not “run ads,” or “run cross-promotions,” or “write SEO posts,” or “post on LinkedIn 9 times a week.”

Whatever Maliha’s secret is, Robin found out what it is, and then implemented it. And the results, as originally unearthed by TMZ and then published inside my Daily Email House community, of which Maliha and Robin are both active members:

===

The *system* is still ongoing, but within just two days of this 6-day implementation, Robin is up 139 opt-ins and €2641 in total sales.

By the end (this Thursday), if things keep at the current rate, he expects 300-400 opt-ins and €5-6K in revenue generated (potentially).

===

Says Maliha, this secret list-building technique works for everyone, but is particularly good if you’re an expert who is new to list-building, or you do not have a big enough list to collaborate (for swaps and such) with other big shots quite yet.

If you’d like to learn Maliha’s secret or even implement it yourself, she will be running a live workshop about it next Monday.

Maliha will share her secret mechanism itself plus give you templates, swipes, and a checklist — in case you’re like me, impatient and hard-of-focusing.

Maliha is making her Secret-List Building Technique workshop, and all associated assets, available right now for the astronomical price of $97.

I don’t know what results you might get if put this secret technique into action. If your results are anything like Robin got or is likely to get, this will be the best and highest-yielding bet you will make this year.

For more info or to sign up, before this opportunity disappears:

https://www.skool.com/daily-email-house/secret-list-building-technique-live-workshop

My results on cold traffic vs. email

August 19, 2026 by John Bejakovic

This morning I woke up and checked my email to find a new sale notification. Daily Emails 101, $5. “Damn it,” I said.

For the past week, I’ve been running my “Daily Emails 101” offer to cold Meta traffic. Results as of this morning, when I shut the campaign down:

Outbound clicks: 195

Sales: 6

Conversion rate: 3.07%

I was doing this because I wanted to test if this offer had legs on cold traffic. It apparently does — only barely.

I was told that 3% to an ugly, unoptimized page, selling a $5 offer, is the minimum you should get if have any hope of eventually having the optimized funnel break even on cold traffic.

With today’s sale, I managed to squeeze in right at the buzzer. (I was going to run the campaign until 200 clicks and then stop.)

Compare that to the results I had when I made the exact same offer to my list about a month ago:

Outbound clicks: ~470

Sales: 155

Conversion rates: ~33%

The same dude whose “offer validation” process I’m following said that if you’re testing an offer to warm traffic like your email list, you should get at least a 20% conversion rate.

I got over 30%, which I think is a reflection of the quality of my list and the relationship I have with that list, thanks to emailing daily.

My point today is not about how wizardly I am at email marketing. My point is how email marketing, even when done at an average level, completely transforms the math of selling.

Same offer. Same copy. Only difference is cold audience vs. an audience that’s gotten a bunch of emails from you… and the result is 3% vs 20% conversion rate in the average case, or more if you’re willing.

This morning, when the 6th sale came in via cold traffic and I realized that my offer still has legs, I said “damn it” because it means I will now have to do all the work of building out the cold traffic funnel for real:

Better copy… order form bumps… upsells… more ads… constantly monitoring results… watching money drain out of my account and then maybe get replenished, maybe not… family drama… increased blood pressure… rising oil prices… basically pandemonium.

All that sounded exciting before I got started. Of course, now that I’m in it, it just seems like a ton of drudge work.

I’ll still do it, primarily because of ego. Because after being in direct marketing for 10+ years, it bothers me that I’ve never really “mastered traffic,” whatever that might mean.

But logically — logically — things are just so much easier and better on the back end.

It’s 10x easier to a sell a $5 offer to your email list than it is to cold traffic.

It’s perfectly legitimate to sell a $5k offer to your list with just a few emails (I’ve done it multiple times this year), while it’s impossible to do on cold traffic, at least directly (yes, you can do it as an upsell, but even that’s likely to require sales calls).

And the back end is just more fun — not everything needs to be a “template,” “swipe,” or “AI prompt,” the way it does on cold traffic.

It all starts by emailing your list regularly. Actually, not regularly. Daily. I don’t want to shortchange you.

You can get average results by emailing regularly, but you get top-tier results simply by showing up every day.

It’s not hard to do. In fact it’s even fun and after a while, liberating. You can get started today if you like, and if you want my help, there’s my Daily Email Habit service, which gets you writing daily emails, daily. For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/deh