List Building

$10-$15/day to stop being a newbie

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For the past couple days, I’ve been fielding responses about my new “work alongside me” offer.

In short, I’ve launched a new list and I’m starting to grow it by paying for ads. I’m inviting people who want to follow the same process I’m following to work alongside me and to grow their own list.

Inevitably, I’ve gotten a few timid hand-raises from folks who consider themselves beginners, like the following message:

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I don’t actually have a list yet. But I am scouting for products at the moment, which I would like to promote as an affiliate.

Would this offer be relevant for me as a newbie?

I am starting this side venture in the hopes of replacing my 9 to 5.

===

And the answer is…

Yes yes, of course! This offer’s PERFECT for newbies!! Just give me your money now, and we can talk about it later.

A little more seriously:

I followed up with the dude above. I wanted to know what exactly “newbie” meant to him. Turns out, he has been studying marketing and copywriting for a year+, buying courses, preparing to jump in for real.

The fact is, I do think that this “work alongside me” offer would be relevant to him.

But whatever I write now will seem self-serving, just as self-serving as my “yes yes, just pay me” rant above.

So I won’t write anything now.

Instead, let me share something I wrote almost six years ago, specifically on Dec 29 2018, in an email with the subject line, “The salutary effect of paying for traffic.” That email was about my campaign at the time to grow my alternative health list via Facebook ads, and the positive effect it had on me:

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Well, paying for traffic doesn’t have the same salutary effect [as making cold calls].

But it does make me want to write emails every day to these leads.

What’s more, it makes me want to write emails that get read and get people stirred up.

In other words, I’m no longer just writing for the sake of being able to say I’ve done it. Instead, I’m writing to make sales.

That’s both because I’m spending money on traffic now (rather than counting on an indefinite stream of leads from Google)…

And it’s also because it becomes a game — can I make back the money that I will spend on ads, so I can do this all over again on a bigger scale?

The weird thing is, this kind of sales-first writing is something I’ve been able to do for a long time — as long as I was writing for clients. But it took paying for traffic to get me to do it in my own project as well.

===

I’d like to suggest that paying for traffic could have the same salutary and head-clearing effect on you, even if you are a newbie.

Does that mean this “work alongside me” offer will give you a side venture that can replace your 9-5?

Nope. It will only give you one thing, and that’s a paid traffic system to build you an audience.

That done, you will still need to find or create offers to promote. And you will still need emails to send to people, whether you write them yourself or get someone else to do it.

At the same time, will you be 1,000,000x more likely to do those things and actually succeed if you start paying to build an audience… than if you just keep paying for courses and preparing to jump in for another year?

I absolutely believe you will, for reasons that I wrote about in that email from 2018:

The fact you will be paying money (even $10-$15 a day is very motivating)…

The fact you will be able to see quickly if it’s working or not…

The fact that it will feel like a game you want to win.

Of course, ultimately, it’s your call and your decision.

But if you want to experience the salutary effect of paying for traffic, and get some real experience, which you can then flip over and over on a bigger scale, then maybe you’d like to get my help along the way?

That’s what this “work alongside me” offer is about. In case you’re interested, hit reply, and I can give you more information.

The Shoshal Media Redemption

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In my 13+ years of trying to make money online, I have had precisely ZERO success in creating an audience on social media. But I do know somebody who’s had a lot of success with it.

It’s my friend Kieran Drew. Since 2021, Kieran has built up an enviable one-man business on the back of a 250,000-person audience across Twitter and LinkedIn.

A couple days ago, Kieran launched a new product, and in promoting it, he wrote:

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Because I don’t know about you, but I became an entrepreneur for freedom.

I want to spend my days doing what I love because I choose to.

But social media?

It’s a prison in disguise

You have to post every damn day and slave away in the comments. And if you stop, you fade into obscurity within weeks.

You’ve basically made an algorithm your boss.

And the crazy part?

You don’t even own your audience. You rent it. And they can rip away the keys whenever they’d like.

===

Maybe, like Kieran, you’ve had success on social media.

In that case, maybe you can empathize with what he says. Maybe you’ve had your fill of constant posting and replying… and fighting off dwindling reach… and crack-like addiction to notifications.

Or…

Maybe you haven’t yet had success on social media. Maybe you’re hoping to build an audience there, and you are looking up to people like Kieran.

In that case, maybe Kieran’s message above gives you a taste of what’s waiting for you in case you get what you think you want.

But let me pay off the Shoshal Media Redemption subject line.

If social media is a kind of Shawshank Prison for Kieran, with its loss of autonomy and control… then what’s the equivalent of the little fishing village on the Pacific coast of Mexico, where you can live life on your own terms?

Like Kieran says in his new promo, it’s having your own engaged email list.

Sounds great, except… how do you build up an email list if you don’t use social?

I’d like to propose a way that doesn’t involve years of hammering through the thick wall of indifference on LinkedIn… or crawling through a mile-long sewage pipe on Twitter.

That way is to pay, specifically for ads, more specifically for engaged subscribers to grow your email list.

Sure, ads cost money. But wouldn’t you pay money to stay out — or get out — of prison?

If you’re at least open to the idea, I’d like to remind you that I have started a new list. And in the next few days, I’ll start building it up via ads.

If you like, you can join me. You can build up your own list using the same process I will be following, and get my copywriting feedback and marketing input while we work alongside each other.

I can tell you right now that the investment for this offer is $497. If that doesn’t totally deter you, hit reply and tell me so. I can get you the full details of my daring escape plan, and you can decide if you want to join me, or if Shawshank Prison doesn’t sound so bad after all.

Announcing: Attentive human vending machine

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In Hangzhou, China, there’s a vending machine that sells live crabs. The machine has a 3x-your-crabs guarantee — if it ever spits out a dead crab, you will be compensated with three live ones.

Significantly higher up the prestige totem pole, there is the gold bullion vending machine in Dubai. It holds up to 520kg of gold, and prices are updated every 10 minutes via an Internet feed.

And then, higher still, all the way at the top, with diamond-level prestige, there is the attentive human vending machine.

That’s what I want to talk to you about today.

The attentive human vending machine takes in $10-$15 in coins or credit, and dispenses 10-15 attentive humans.

More specifically, it dispenses 10-15 readers for your email list.

You can then email these new readers, so they read whan you wrote… recommend you to other attentive humans… and buy from you when you choose to sell them something.

And if you like, you can go back to the attentive human vending machine whenever you like, even every day, and put in more coins and get more attentive humans out.

As you can probably guess, the attentive human vending machine is paid traffic. Ads. A system that takes in money, and gives you readers in return.

I’ve started a new list and I will start building it up via ads.

I will be following the how-to blueprint of a master list builder and media buyer I’ve had the good fortune to come across.

If you like, you can join me. You can build up your own list using the same process I will be following, and get my copywriting feedback and marketing input while you put your attentive human vending machine together.

I can tell you right now that the investment for this offer is $497.

That happens to be the price of the blueprint I mentioned above, the course that lays out the how-to of the master list builder.

Depending on your perspective, that means you can either invest $497 to tap into my ~10 years of professional copywriting experience, and get my help with your ad copy and landing pages, and get the how-to blueprint for free…

Or you can pay $497 for the blueprint, and get to work alongside me, and see how I do it, and get my help and advice, for free.

In either case, the way forward is to reply to this email and express your interest.

I’ll send you more details about how this project work. You can then decide if you want to join me… or if you’d rather go spend your money on a bunch of possibly dead crabs.

Using pendulum swings to predict opportunities

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I read today that SpaceHey just reached 1 million users. In case you don’t know, as I didn’t —

​​SpaceHey is an ugly and basic social media network that’s meant to recall the web of the early 2000s.

SpaceHey was started four years ago by a German 18-year-old with no budget. Last week, SpaceHey reached 1 million users. It still has no budget, except occasional donations from users who love the service.

Point being:

In pop culture as in politics, there are pendulum swings. A big part of how we humans define ourselves is in opposition to what came before, or in opposition to what’s here now that we don’t like.

The result of this are pendulum swings, from polished to rough, crowded to sparse, materialistic to spiritual, conservative to liberal.

It makes sense to keep an eye on what the pendulum is doing. It can give you clues about what’s coming in the future, and where opportunities might lie.

And on that note, I would like to announce that starting tomorrow, I will be promoting a $497 course called myPeeps, put together by Travis Speegle.

Travis is an expert list builder and media buyer, who has built up email lists totaling some 7.5 million subscribers for big brands (BowFlex, Thrive Market, Truth About Cancer) as well as for big non-profits (Surfrider Foundation and Well.org).

Travis’s myPeeps course lays out his how-to of buying ads to grow an email list. It’s based on Travis’s experience and philosophy, which is to keep things simple, fast, and effective.

I’ve gone through Travis’s myPeeps myself. I’m planning to follow it to the letter to grow a new list I have started.

And if you like, you can work alongside me, follow Travis’s process also, and build up your own list with my help and feedback.

I’ll have more info on how this “work alongside me” component will look. For now, I’ll just say this will be a free bonus I’ll be offering to encourage you to buy myPeeps through my affiliate link.

And in case you’re wondering, Why? Why this? Why now?

It’s because I’m feeling a pendulum swing away from Twitter and social and free means of list building in general.

I’m feeling it in myself. I’m feeling it in the people I talk to.

This includes some people who have actually been successful in the past in growing a free audience on social. In spite of their success, they are feeling fed up. And they are looking for an alternative that costs less time, that’s more reliable, and that doesn’t require them to build their house on a platform that could be pulled out from under them on a whim.

But more about all that tomorrow. Meanwhile, if you want to know what the future looks like:

https://spacehey.com/

The Golden Triangle of Success

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In software development, a field in which I spent the salad days of my life, there’s a meme known as the Iron Triangle. It’s about how software is developed, and it says:

“Fast, cheap, good — pick two”​​

Yesterday, I fielded interest in a new offer, “Work alongside me to launch or build up your list via paid traffic.”

In a nutshell, I’m about to start building up a new list via paid traffic. And if you like, you can work alongside me to launch or build up your own list… follow the same process I’m following… plus get my feedback and input on your ad copy and lead magnets etc.

I got a good number of people expressing interest in that.

But inevitably, I also had a few people write in, saying they are not sure if they have the money.

To which I thought up a kind of Golden Triangle of Success, similar but different to the Iron Triangle above. The Golden Triangle says:

“Time, effort, money — pick two”

This is similar to the Iron Triangle — because you pick any two for guaranteed success. One will not do.

But it’s also different to the Iron Triangle because this is about requirements on inputs, rather than constraints on outputs.

​​In other words, pick two — or three. You can have all three corners of the Golden Triangle.

But what if you don’t?

What if you don’t have the money corner, specifically?

No shame in that. Was a time when I was in the same situation. You can get up and out of it with enough effort and time.

On the other hand, if you’re simply not sure whether you have the money to invest in an asset like an email list, then the Golden Triangle of Success might give you a different way to look at your situation.

In any case, if you’re interested in the offer I made yesterday, to work alongside me to build up your list, write in and let me know. I want to hear your situation and get your feedback as I decide on the final form of how this will work.

Work alongside me to launch or build up your list?

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I’ve launched a new email list. I’m planning to grow it via paid traffic, starting in the next few weeks.

I’m not a media buying expert. But I did my research, and I did find a media buying expert, someone who specifically builds up email lists via paid traffic. I will be following his process to grow my list.

So my questions to you:

Do you have a list?

Do you want to grow it?

Are you open to using paid traffic to grow it? ($10-$15 a day is fine, that’s what I’ll be starting with.)

Would you like to work alongside me to launch or build up your list… follow the same process I’m following… plus get my feedback and input on your ad copy and lead magnets etc.?

If so, hit reply and let me know.

The course I wish I had created

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Just a few moments ago, I sent an email to marketer Matt Giaro, telling him he’s free to use the following line and to attribute it to me:

“You took the information I gave you and ran with it much further than I did, and developed a complete system for it and got repeatable results from it, unlike me. I wish I had done what you did, but now that you’ve done it, there’s no need for me to do it on my own and duplicate the work.”

The background:

Some time last fall, Matt contacted me.

​​He saw that, earlier in the year, I had run a $300 classified ad in Josh Spector’s newsletter. He was thinking about doing the same, and he wanted to know my experiences.

So we did a quick little one-hour paid consult.

I told Matt how I ran a few successful newsletter ads (Josh Spector, Daniel Throssell), where I got hundreds of new subscribers who paid for themselves, usually on day zero.

I also told him about the unsuccessful newsletter ads I ran, which just cost me money and probably sender reputation (I’m looking at you, Udimi).

And that was that. Matt said thanks, and we went our separate ways.

Until this March. That’s when I saw that Matt was launching a new course, called Subscribers From Scratch. It was all about how he was getting high-quality newsletter subscribers by running little ads in other newsletters.

The fact is:

The way I was running newsletter ads required a good deal of work. It wasn’t something that I wanted to do every month, much less every week or two.

And since I have plenty of other shiny gewgaws to distract me, I never bothered to figure out how to run newsletter ads repeatably and to still get good results.

But Matt did figure it out.

He took what I told him and ran with it. He developed his own system that allowed him to get a few dozen or a few hundred subscribers each time he ran a newsletter ad.

But much more importantly, he figured out how to get quality subscribers, subscribers who ended up paying for the ad, often in a matter of days.

So like I said to Matt, his Subscribers From Scratch is the course I wish I had created.

I wish I had taken the trouble to figure out a repeatable, scalable system for running newsletter ads. I wish I had packaged it up and sold it.

But I didn’t. And now that he’s done it, I won’t have to.

Right about now, you might expect me to plop in an affiliate link for Matt’s Subscribers From Scratch.

That won’t happen.

Subscribers From Scratch normally sells for $397. But I got Matt to agree to give away a “lite” version of it — all the training and how-to information, minus the bonuses and templates — for free.

Well, for free if you’ve already bought my Simple Money Emails course. Or if you buy it before this Saturday, June 1, at 12 midnight PST.

If you’ve already bought Simple Money Emails, you should have gotten an email from me already with the instructions on how to claim Subscribers From Scratch Lite.

And if you haven’t yet bought it, but you want to learn how to write effective daily emails that make sales, and get Matt’s Subscribers From Scratch Lite for free, and learn how to get readers who actually buy from the emails you write, then here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

10 minutes to get big Twitter accounts to follow you

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Once every 24 hours or so, I get asked a variant of the following question:

“How did you build up an email list without being on social media?”

My answer is always the same. I did it by being stubborn and stupid, by sending daily emails into the void, without anybody reading what I was writing. I did this for years before things slowly started to turn around.

The problem, by the way, was not that I was not on social media.

The problem was that I was and continue to be unsociable. Even in the world of email newsletters, even among people whose emails I read every day, I never thought to speak up, get introduced, put myself on the radar or sonar of a person with an audience bigger than mine.

Until the end of today, I am promoting Kieran Drew’s High Impact Writing. That’s Kieran’s course to teach you how to write for influence and growth on Twitter and LinkedIn.

But here’s the truth:

As with email, you can write for years on social media without anyone taking notice. The shortcut to success on social media, the royal road, is the same as in the world of email.

You gotta start making connections. You gotta start engaging with people who are more successful than you are. And you gotta do it in a way where they actually take notice and respond.

People often reply to my emails and write things like,

“Loved it!”

“😍”

“Great email!”

While I appreciate any and all reader feedback, there’s really nothing for me to reply to here. There’s nothing for me to grab onto, nothing to get curious about, nothing to make the reader stand out.

So what to do instead?

Back to Kieran’s High Impact Writing. Sure, he teaches you writing for social media. But he also teaches you the other stuff, the connecting and network building in a way that actually works.

In the one of the bonus modules (Social Media Made Simple), Kieran gives you an example of a twitter DM that got him to start following a smaller account. And then he gives you a step-by-step template that he’s since used to get his favorite accounts to start following him.

It takes all about 10 minutes to do this.

And I can tell you, it works in the world of email as well. I know, because people have written me similar things, and I’ve taken notice and then got on their list. (I still remain unsociable and I rarely reach out to anyone, even in email. And I’m paying a price for it. I don’t encourage anyone to do like I do.)

High Impact Writing goes offline today at 12 midnight PST. After that, when it does come back, the price will be explosively higher.

Also, if you act now and get High Impact Writing before the deadline via my affiliate link below, you get the recordings of my Age of Insight.

Age of Insight was a training I put on about a year ago and sold for $297. It shows you how to write in an insightful sounding way, even if you have nothing very insightful to say. Simply forward me your invoice for High Impact Writing and I will get you the recordings of Age of Insight.

Assuming, that is, that you decide High Impact Writing is right for you, and that you act before the deadline. In case you’re intrigued, go here for more details:

https://bejakovic.com/hiw

How to grow a newsletter by 15k subs in one day

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Today is the last day of my promotion of Newsletter XP, the star-studded course on how to build, grow, and monetize a successful newsletter.

So let me give you a case study from that course. It comes from one Jenny Rothenberg. Jenny was the head of growth at Morning Brew as Morning Brew’s audience scaled from 100k to 2.5M.

Jenny then started her own newsletter growth agency, Smooth Media. She now works with big creators brands. One of these are Colin and Samir. I’d never heard of them but apparently they are big on YouTube. Jenny worked with them to create a video that drove 15k subs to their newsletter in one day.

“Aw that’s just great!” you say. “They probably have millions of followers on YouTube! Come on!”

Sure.

But Colin and Samir didn’t simply create a video that said, “Hey we have a newsletter, come sign up.” Even with a big audience, that won’t drive 15k subscribers in one day.

Instead, they used fundamental human psychology, which you too can use, even if you don’t have a million YouTube subscribers.

There was scarcity (“We’re gonna delete this video in 24 hours”)… a giveaway… a partnership with another big creator… and a completely on-brand, value-prop match between their YouTube channel and what their newsletter was about.

You can do this too, even if you have a following of 99 people. But what if you have no other audience to tap into at all?

Inside the same module of Newsletter XP, you can hear Jenny talk about other ways to benefit from people who do have audiences — on YouTube, TikTok, Twitter.

​​This is part of a bigger discussion that happens inside the course between Jenny, Tyler Denk (CEO of Beehiiv), Alex Lieberman (former CEO of Morning Brew), and Dan Krenitsyn (previously BuzzFeed, now Facebook).

They all have war stories, and they all have unique answers to the question that this module is built around, which is:

“What is your playbook for taking a newsletter from 100→10,000 subscribers in a year?”

If you’d like to hear that discussion and profit from it, I suggest you act now.

I’ve managed to claw out a $200 discount for you from the usual price that Newsletter XP sells for. That discount is good until tonight, Monday Feb 26, at 12 midnight PST. If you’d like to take advantage of this, here’s what to do:

1. Go to the Newsletter XP sales page at https://bejakovic.com/nxp

2. If you decide you want to get Newsltter XP, then use coupon code JB20 at checkout.

3. Make sure the coupon code works — that you see the price drop by $200. This is not my funnel, and if you end up buying at full price, there’s nothing I can do about it.

So long, Sparkloop

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Last year, I wrote several emails in which I recommended Sparkloop, a paid newsletter-recommendation platform.

As you might know, the promise of Sparkloop is quality newsletter subscribers, who will actually engage with your newsletter, all in a completely hands-off manner.

That’s the promise. Here’s the reality:

Sparkloop did grow my list, with a bunch of previous newsletter subscribers, who in theory should have been a good match for my health newsletter.

Plus, Sparkloop allows you to screen for subscribers engage with your newsletter via either clicks or opens, and to get rid of everyone else. As a result, my open rates stayed consistently high.

Sounds good, right?

But around December, cracks started to appear.

I regularly ran in-newsletter polls in my health newsletter. They weren’t getting a lot of participation. I also ran a survey outside the newsletter, on my website. Exactly one person filled that out. I put out a relevant, low-ticket offer. I got no buyers.

Everything I just told you happened with my health newsletter. But it’s backed up by an experiment I ran with Sparkloop on this marketing newsletter.

That experiment was small but perhaps indicative.

It involved newsletter subscribers that I vetted even more closely than I was doing for my health newsletter, both for source and for engagement. And yet, none of those vetted Sparkloop subscribers have bought anything from me, in spite of being on my list for months. None of them has even opted in for the free training am putting on at the end of this month.

The point I want to make is something that’s easy to forget if you’re a marketer:

A name is not just a name. An email address is not just an email address.

It matters how people find you, first interact with you, with what intent, and in what frame of mind.

Of course, this matters for whether they choose to engage with you in the first place. But it also persists over time, even if they somehow decide to give you a bit of their attention to start with. That’s obvious as water in the real world, but it’s easy to forget in the marketing world.

Conclusion:

So long, Sparkloop. Like everything else in life that sounds too good to be true, you were in fact too good to be true.

You might wonder what I will do to grow my list now that I have axed Sparkloop.

I have special plans for my health newsletter.

But for this marketing newsletter, I plan on going back to the three warhorses that have gotten me probably 80% of my total subscribers, and probably 99% of my best subscribers.

If you would like to know what those three warhorses are, come join me for that free training at the end of this month. On the training, I will talk about how I write and even profit from this newsletter, and how you can do it too if you’d like to do something similar.

The training will happen on Monday January 22, 2024 at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. I will send out a recording if you cannot make it live, but you will have to be signed up to my list first. Click here to sign up.