List Building

Mysteries of the mind

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Yesterday I started listening to a four-and-a-half hour long presentation titled, Best Life Ever. I did it because the guy speaking, Jim Rohn, has been billed, by no less an authority than genius marketer and influence expert Dan Kennedy, as being a master storyteller.

Dan says that Jim Rohn built his long and very successful career on zero practical content, great stories only.

So that’s what I expected to find. Fantastic fluff. Zero real substance.

And yet I was surprised. In the first twenty minutes, I already found the content genuinely insightful. I felt that Dan was underselling it. Take for example the following. With a smile, Rohn says:

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The day the Christian Church was started, a magnificent sermon was preached. A great presentation. And if you’re a student at all of good communication, it was one of the classic presentations of all time.

And this sermon, this presentation, was given to a multitude. Meaning a lot of people. But it was interesting.

The record says, when the sermon was finished, there was a variety of reaction to the same sermon. Isn’t that fascinating? I find that fascinating.

It said some that heard this presentation were perplexed.

Now I read the presentation. It sounded pretty straightforward to me. Why would somebody be perplexed with a good, sincere, straightforward presentation?

Best answer I’ve got: They are the perplexed. What other explanation is there? It doesn’t matter who’s preaching.

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Rohn’s point is that there are some mysteries of the mind.

Why are some people inspired to take action? Why do others never take action? Why are some people perplexed? Why do others mock and laugh?

You can try to figure it out. So did Rohn, once upon a time.

“I don’t do that any more,” he says in his talk. “I’ve got peace of mind now. I can sleep like a baby. Not trying to straighten any of this out any more.” It’s just mysteries of the mind.

Did you find that insightful?

I did. But maybe I’m just very easy to dupe into feeling like I’ve had an epiphany. Doesn’t matter who’s preaching.

Or who knows. Maybe Rohn is such a good storytellers that even in those first 20 minutes, he managed to prime me for being easily influenced.

In case you’re a student at all of good communication, this guy was one of the classic presenters of all time. To see why, watch a few minutes of the following:

 

Guy rebuffs my attempt at cross-promotion

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A report from the trenches:

I’m working on growing my health email newsletter, which I launched a few months ago.

One part of what I’m doing is reaching out to other newsletters to offer to cross-promote. I’ve been contacting newsletters of a similar size to mine, who share some common elements with mine:

– sent out weekly
– news-related
– “proven” — make an emphasis on providing references or sources
– is made up of actual paragraphs of text that people read, rather than just a collection of links

I’ve had a few people take me up on my cross-promotion offer. But one guy, whose weekly newsletter is for people who want to “stay on top of the current issues and that like to read more than just bulletpoints,” was not interested in my offer. He wrote me to say:

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I don’t think this partnership would work out, basically because I’ve done it before and the clicks were very, very low. Also, I don’t think there’s a great overlap in the content of our two newsletters.

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As Dan Kennedy might say about that first reason, if we all stopped doing something if the first time was a fail, the human race would soon die out. There’d be no more babies born.

But what about that other reason? About content overlap?

It’s very sensible to only sell competitive duck herding products to competitive duck herding enthusiasts.

But most offers are not that one-dimensional.

The “world’s greatest list broker,” Michael Fishman, was once tasked with finding new lists to promote an investment newsletter.

Michael suggested a list of buyers of a product called Big Money Pro Golf Secrets. The publisher of the investment newsletter said, “We’ve tried golf lists before, they don’t work for us.”

Michael said, “No problem. It’s not a golf list. Think about who would buy a book called Big Money Pro Golf Secrets. I don’t care if it’s Big Money Pro Flower Secrets. Anybody who would respond to that language is somebody whose door we want to knock on.”

Point being, if you have something that’s not as narrow in appeal as duck herding, there are many dimensions along which you can expand your market, beyond the obvious topic or content or promise of what you’re selling. ​

​ By the way, Michael Fishman is somebody worth listening to. I’ve read and watched and listened to everything I could find online by the guy. I make a habit of occasionally searching the Internet to see if anything new has cropped up.

If you want a place to start, here’s a great interview that Michael Fishman did with Michael Senoff of Hard to Find Seminars:

https://www.hardtofindseminars.com/Michael_Fishman_Interview.htm

If you consider yourself a paid traffic expert

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If you consider yourself to be something of a paid traffic expert, or you want to be seen as such, I’ve got a lead gen/business idea for you.

​​I’m giving away this idea. You’re free to use it. In fact, I hope you do.

Here goes:

1. Start a newsletter. Call it “Classified Growth” or something sexy like that.

2. Go around, finding other newsletters that sell classified ads. There are hundreds or thousands of such newsletters, but they are not organized, and they often do not make it known they sell ads. You might have to email them and ask or suggest it.

By the way, I’m not talking about big featured ads like you can find inside Morning Brew, which have a big photo and hundreds of words of copy, and which are really intended for rich brand advertisers. Databases of newsletters offering those kinds of ads already exist.

​​I’m talking about small, classified-like ads, 100 words max, no picture, which can be integrated into the content of a newsletter, which are likely to cost a few hundred to maybe a thousand or so dollars, and which are perfect for advertising to get dedicated newsletter readers. As far as I know, there’s no source to tell you where to find those.

3. Each week, send out a new issue of your newsletter. Publish the latest classified ad opportunities you’ve found, and link to a page where you keep a running list of all the previous classified ad opportunities you’ve found.

4. Add in a little intro paragraph to each issue with your own voice so people know who you are. Casually mention any status-building things that happened to you or to your newsletter over the past week.

5. To grow your newsletter, do a good job implementing 1-4 above for four weeks, then email me and I will promote your newsletter to my list for free. I’ll also give you the contacts of 10 other people with sizable email lists who are likely to promote your new newsletter for free.

6. After you start getting people onto your newsletter, to monetize, sell your own consulting services or products or community, or sell ads, or sell affiliate offers.

The cons of this:

You’re likely to attract people who are at the early stage of newsletter growth. This means they are unproven and uncommitted — they might fail or quit.

​​And if they do succeed, they are likely to outgrow your newsletter and focus on other newsletter growth strategies that are easier to scale. That’s why I say this makes sense if you want to offer services or products around paid traffic and can use this as a lead-gen method.

The pros:

There is clearly demand. I would subscribe and read this newsletter each week, and others would too.

​​There are literally thousands of people with newsletters hoping to grow, and hundreds more joining every day. And since we’re talking about paid traffic, you’re likely to attract a serious segment of that audience, who might even have some money to spend.

So that’s my business idea for you. Again, I hope you run with it, because I would love to see it happen.

I’m currently working on growing two newsletters — the one you’re reading, and a second one that’s still in a bit of stealth mode, about a health topic.

In the past, to grow various newsletters I’ve had or have, I’ve run Facebook ads, solo ads, Twitter ads, paid “recommendations” like they have on Substack, banner ads, and classified ads in other newsletters.

The classified ads in other newsletters win in terms of quality of traffic.

The problem is, classified ads take time and are not scalable, but a resource like the one I describe above could help.

​​At the same time, it could help you build your own list, quickly, with highly qualified and valuable leads, that you could then monetize into submission.

Speaking of which, if you do launch the above newsletter, you’re likely to have more success selling your services or products if you drive your readers to a second, daily email newsletter like the one I write each day.

If you’d like to see how I do that each day, so you can model what I’m doing to make money, you can sign up to my newsletter here.​

How and why I might write a Substack newsletter

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Got a question three nights ago:

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You’ve written about the “newsletter economy” over the last couple of months. I’m on a few Substacks. Substack has this inbuilt mechanism where if you subscribe to a Substack then you get a pop-up which says, “Oh you might like these three or four as well.”

I’ve come at my newsletter growth from a sort of copywriting angle. I’m on Aweber which doesn’t have that functionality. I can see how that would be quite useful to have because it instantly gets people on your list.

Quite a lot of Substacks are growing quite quickly because of it. I’m thinking, is there a way to replicate that functionality somehow outside of Substack? How should I be thinking about growth more generally? Am I missing a trick perhaps by not being on Substack?

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My feelings: it’s absolutely worth getting on Substack. You can get free, large-scale access to readers… email readers… recent and eager email readers.

In fact, I’ve been thinking about getting on Substack myself. But I feel there’s a right way and wrong way to do it.

The wrong way is to write a bunch of daily emails like the one you’re reading right now.

Daily emails like this one definitely work — people will gladly read them and buy from them. But it’s not how I would go about writing a Substack newsletter, at least if I were going for massive organic growth.

I suspect — based on previous experience — that emails like this would lead to blowback from Substack readers and other Substack newsletters, or worse yet, to simply being ignored.

So that’s what I would not do.

If you are curious what I would do, and what I might actually end up doing, both to grow my list on Substack and to monetize it, you can find that out if you sign up to my Insights & More Book Club. Because the question above came up on the last Insights & More call, which I recorded and posted inside the members area.

The doors to the Insights & More Book Club closed tonight. I only open them every couple of months at the start of a new book, because it doesn’t make sense to have people join midway. If you’d like to be advised the next time the doors open, sign up to my email list, because it’s the only place where I make my book club available.

How to reduce your business’s cost-per-lead by 80%

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Assuming that you’re running ads to get leads…

And assuming that you’re running ads, say on FB or Twitter, via your business’s page or account…

Then let me share something obvious, but maybe very lucrative.

​​It comes from Dan Krenitsyn, who did growth at places like BuzzFeed, The Information, and The Telegraph, and who now leads strategy at the product, content, and operations team at Meta/Facebook. ​​Dan says:

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This might not be relevant for everybody because I worked at more traditional media companies like The Information and Telegraph.

But we tapped into the idea that people follow people. They don’t follow media companies per se.

We started running pretty much all of our acquisition ads from writers’ personal Twitter accounts and Facebook accounts.

I don’t know if the platforms still allow you to do that. For a while, that basically reduced our CPLs by something like 80%.

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I don’t know either if the platforms still allow you to run ads like this. But the basic point stands:

It’s much easier and cheaper to get quality engagement if you sell yourself first, rather than if you sell a brand or a product first.

That’s not to say selling a brand or a product is not the right thing to do in certain situations.

​​But if you’re looking for organic growth, for cheaper paid growth, for easier sales, for an audience that will keep listening to you, even if you occasionally get lazy or falter in your message, then sell yourself first.

You might say it’s ironic I’m telling you to put yourself first in an email in which I say almost nothing about myself, share zero personal stories, and point to no status-building items from my own history.

Fair point. My only answer to that is what I already said above.

​​If you regularly put yourself first in your marketing — John Bejakovic daily newsletter, issue #1586 — then you can occasionally fail and it won’t matter. You can fail to tell people how great you are, and how important your message is, and that people should stay tuned because it’s only gonna to get better. And your audience will still read, listen, click, and maybe even sign up to your daily email newsletter.

Why good customers hate going to museums

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I was reading an article a few days ago about the oldest living aristocratic widow. Just my kind of material:

Lady Anne Glenconner is 90 years old. She served as maid of honor at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, and was lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret, Queen Elizabeth’s sister. She was also wife of Colin Tennant, 3rd Baron Glenconner, who seems to have been a rich, eccentric, and volatile man.

This insight from Lady Anne about her husband caught my eye — it might be interesting if you are ever trying to sell yerself, or something you created:

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“He couldn’t bear to be static,” Glenconner told me. “He always wanted to be rushing around changing things, buying things. We had thirty Lucian Freuds at one point, and he sold them all. I once said to him, in a rather pathetic way, ‘You don’t seem to mind making these collections and then selling them. I like the things I have collected.’ And he said, ‘Oh, no! Once I’ve had them, and the opportunity to look at them, I want to be on to something else.’ “Tennant “hated going to museums,” Glenconner added. “Do you know why? Nothing’s for sale.”

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I think the point is clear, so I won’t insult you by spelling it out all over the place. Instead, let me tell you something personal:

I have nothing for sale today. It’s worse than a museum around here.

I’m changing, revamping, restructuring, and repositioning what I do with this newsletter.

Notice I don’t say, “with this business.” As I’ve said many times, and will continue to say, I’ve never looked at this newsletter as a business first, even though it’s gotten to a place of making me a neat and tidy source of income.

Today, I closed off my Copy Riddles program. I made more money with it over the past 24 hours than in any 24-hour span since I launched it. That’s because it’s never coming back as a standalone course.

So nothing for sale today. But I do have an offer. And it’s to get onto my email newsletter. Yes, it’s a little like a museum on there right now. But I will have new things for sale again one day soon, and my email newsletter will be the only place where you can get that. If you’d like to be in the right place at the right time, sign up now for my newsletter.

The disciplined, professional, hard-working beggar

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On my way to the gym, there’s a Mercadona, a local Spanish supermarket. In front of the entrance to the Mercadona, kneeling on the ground, looking serious and professional, there is almost always one specific beggar.

This man is large and strong. He has a neatly trimmed mustache. I guess he’s around 45 years old.

He usually wears a button-down shirt. He also has a little sponge down on the ground so he can kneel more comfortably. Sometimes, he has a drink next to him — from what I can tell, ice coffee.

When old women go inside Mercadona, this man will kneel and hold on to their dogs while they do their shopping. When the old women come out, they give him their loose change. One time, an old woman gave him a whole packaged chicken.

This man shows up early. When I go for my morning walk before work, he’s already on a bench next to Mercadona, waiting for the store to open up. He also seems to have a little part-time job setting up the chairs, tables, and parasols of the bar next to the Mercadona.

If you’re wondering how it is I know so much about this man, it’s because he is there most days, and for many hours a day. If I ever walk outside my house and around the corner to the Rambla del Poblenou, I inevitably see this man and what he is up to — which is usually waiting stoically for somebody to give him money, and for the workday to end.

I don’t know this guy’s history. I also don’t know how much loose change or raw chicken he manages to pull in a given week. I guess he’s doing okay since he keeps showing up. Still, I can’t believe he’s doing GRRRREAT.

And if you need some sort of takeaway from that, then let me come back to a fundamental point I’ve already made, over and over, year after year in this newsletter. And that’s the fact that you can pretty much do the same work, and get paid drastically different amounts of money for it.

The Mercadona beggar is disciplined and professional. He puts in the hours. He provides a real service to people — an opportunity for charity, plus the bonus of dog-sitting. He even hustles a little. He’s not satisfied simply coasting on his knees, ice coffee in hand, so he’s struck some sort of deal for extra work with the bar next door.

You might think I’m joking. I’m really not.

​​This guy works as hard and as long as most office workers. And many office workers work as hard and as long as most self-employed service providers. And many self-employed service providers work as hard and as long as most business owners.

And yet, there’s a vast difference between what people in each of those groups tend to earn. And vice versa. There’s a vast difference between what you can earn if you cater to people in each of those groups.

Maybe this makes no sense to you, or maybe you think it’s entirely impractical.

In that case, you will almost certainly not be interested in my offer today, which is my Most Valuable Email training. This training is only right for you if:

1. You’re willing to write an email to your list most days, preferably every day

2. You are interested in writing about marketing and copywriting

And by the way, just because Most Valuable Email requires that you write about marketing or copywriting, it in no way requires that you write to people who primarily define themselves as marketers or copywriters. In fact, it might be better to think of another group that you could write those same emails to, and get paid much more money as a result.

In any case, if you are interested in Most Valuable Email, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

The royal way to grow a list

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Yesterday, King Charles III and Queen Consort Camila went for a drive to Bolton Town Hall in London. Birds chirped, armed guards looked on tensely, and crowds of well-wishers and paparazzi pushed around the fences, trying to catch a geek of the aged couple.

Nothing really remarkable there. It’s just another pebble in the mountain of news coverage about the British royal family over the past year.

The news coverage continues, because people look at the royals as a symbol of something ancient, enduring, quintessentially British.

That’s kind of amazing if you think about it.

Charles III is the fourth English monarch from the house of Windsor, which is only 105 years old. Before that, it was called the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, in reference to its original German domains. The name was changed during World War I. The image of a bunch of goose-stepping Germans running the UK was too threatening.

How did the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha get to rule the UK? Well, they replaced another German house that ruled the UK, the House of Hanover.

The history of Europe, and really of the world, has seen this pattern over and over. Conquerors and adventurers, foreign princes and stranger kings, appear from somewhere far away and take control of a large and well-trained population.

I read about this in David Wengrow and David Graeber’s Dawn of Everything. The two D’s say the key is that a population has been well-trained and disciplined to obey rule. Who rules doesn’t matter very much at all.

You might be starting to feel a little uncomfortable, and worry that I’m about to preach anarchy, or talk about political revolution.

Quite the opposite. I’m preaching monarchy, and talking about long-term business stability.

Via your list. Specifically, via growing your list with the best prospects, the kind who will buy and read and do what you tell them to do.

I listened to a Dan Kennedy seminar yesterday. Dan said how his best customers were always the martial arts guys — because they had been trained and selected over years to be disciplined.

I remember when pick-up coach RSD Tyler did a list swap with the dreamy fitness coach Eliott Hulse. Eliott said how the buyers he got from the RSD list were fantastic customers, because Tyler’s whole message was self-improvement and taking responsibility and putting in the work.

I’ve even experienced this same phenomenon myself. Back in 2021, I did a list swap with Daniel Throssell. I couldn’t believe how many sales I got from new subscribers who came from Daniel’s list. And that’s with a hidden sales page I had at the time, and without pitching anything myself. It was simply because Daniel has trained and prepared his audience so well.

So there you go. If you want the best leads and future customers, do it the royal way.

Find a market — or an audience — that’s already been disciplined.

It sure beats the hard work of taking an unruly mass, devising new laws, and trying to beat those laws in over the course of generations.

Ok, so much for monarchy.

Now, let’s talk old-time religion. Specifically, my 10 Commandments book. To find out more about that, or maybe even to spend $5 and get some valuable discipline in return, go here:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

The sales secret of Man on Wire

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Last night, in a desperate hunt for a movie to watch, I turned to the Rotten Tomatoes 100% Club. That’s a list of some 370 movies that have had uniformly positive reviews — a perfect 100% Rotten Tomatoes score.

This led me to Man On Wire, a 2008 documentary about a man named Philippe Petit. In case you haven’t seen this movie, the gist is:

Petit was a tightrope walker. And obsessive.

Back in 1968, when he was just 18 years old, Petit hit upon the idea of walking on a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center.

Problem:

The towers hadn’t been built yet. So Petit spent the next six years scheming, practicing, and waiting in preparation for his audacious August 7, 1974 walk between The South and North Towers, which lasted 45 minutes.

But here’s a question that maybe immediately pops into your head, as it did into mine when I heard about this stunt:

How exactly do you stretch a wire across the two towers? The wire weighed 200 kilograms, or about 450 lbs. Petit was doing his setup clandestinely, in the middle of the night, while hiding from security guards, so helicopters and cranes were out of the question.

So what the hell do you do?
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​​You can’t just hoist the wire up from the ground — it’s a 400 meter drop (over 1,300 feet). You can’t just toss the heavy wire across the 40 meters (130 feet) that separate the corners of the two towers.

A hint comes early in the movie.

You see a silhouette of a man packing things into a bag. It’s supposed to represent Petit.

Along with other unrecognizable equipment, the silhouette gives away something familiar — an arrow.

The fact is, one of Petit’s henchmen shot an arrow with a bow from one tower to the another. And that arrow had a fishing line attached to the end of it.

They used that first fishing line to pull across a slightly sturdier string.

Then they used that string to pull across a strong rope.

And finally, they used the rope to pull across the actual wire, which like I said, weighed as much as an adult melon-headed whale.

Maybe see where I’m going with this.

Because when I saw this in the movie, a lightbulb went off in my head.

“I know this technique!” I shouted in the darkness.

But not from tightrope walking. I know this technique from sales. I first read about it in one of Gary Bencivenga’s Marketing Bullets. Gary called it one of the “the most powerful master strategies I ever learned.”

You can find the explanation of this sales technique below. But not just that.

You can also find lots of inspiring personal stuff about Gary at the page below. Such as for example, that for a long time, Gary was such a bad copywriter that he considered giving up and becoming a mailman. He even went to the post office to pick up a job application.

The only reason Gary stuck with copywriting, the only reason he persevered and eventually became so successful, the only reason we know of him today, was that he was told at the post office that they are not hiring at the moment, and when they do start hiring again, thousands of prior applicants will be ahead of Gary in line.

So Gary stuck with copywriting and marketing.
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And one of the biggest things that Gary learned in the years that followed, and used in all his copy and marketing, from his sales letters to his olive oil business, was this “Man On Wire” sales technique. In case you are interested:

http://marketingbullets.com/bullet-15/

Do you have an email list in the health space?

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If you have an email list in the health space, then I’d like to talk to you.

I’m starting a new project/email list, something to do with health. I’m looking to get people onto that list, and relatively fast.

So yesterday, I made a list of 10 ideas to do just that.

I got through the first 9 ideas pretty easy, just by thinking about assets I already have or paid traffic channels I would be interested in trying.

But then I paused for a moment. And I thought, “What about my marketing and copywriting list? How could they help me with this project?”

This really should have been my #1 idea. But as we non-native English speakers like to say, better to late than never to happen.

So if you have a health list, then I would like to talk to you and maybe strike some sort of deal.

My offer isn’t fully formed, but some of the options include:

1. You promote my new list for free because you love me so much. (Just kidding. I wouldn’t expect that, nor would I want it.)

2. I pay you for a solo ad or a mention in your newsletter or something like a classified ad.

3. I run a promo to your list where I sell something and I give you all the money I earn, and I just keep the names. (I saw Bob Bly promoting this idea once.)

4. We do some kind of barter. I give you consulting, coaching, or even (gulp) copywriting in exchange for traffic from your list.

5. I give you an IOU. Say you agree to drive people to my list now. In exchange, we could agree that I drive people to your list when I get to 5k people on my list, and then again when I get to 10k or 20k names.

Or really, I’m open to other arrangements if you have something in mind. It will depend on how big and engaged your list is, how you would be willing to help me promote, and how good of a fit I imagine it would be for the project I am starting.

But what about urgency? You gotta have urgency, right? Why should you act now?

I don’t have any urgency for you.

This health project is something I am invested in mentally right now. If anything, it’s urgent for me and not for you.

Maybe you can take advantage of that.

Because the fact is, I will stay open to these kind of deals as long as I continue this health newsletter project. But I might get more selective about who it makes sense for me to do these kinds of deals with, and on what terms.

But that’s all in the future. Right now, I am very, very open to any kind of suggestion or proposal.

So if you have a health list, and you are curious whether we could do some kind of deal together, then write me an email and we can start a conversation.