Bonuses

Free 3-step plan to get more testimonials, perform an X-ray of your market, have buyers recommit to what they just bought from you, and possibly even drive more sales

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Here’s a 3-step plan to get more testimonials, perform an X-ray of your market, have buyers recommit to what they just bought from you, and possibly even drive more sales:

STEP 1. Sell an offer.

STEP 2. Offer people a bonus if they buy the offer now.

STEP 3. When people buy, send them an email with the promised bonuses. At the top of that email, paste in the following mystical, secret, wizard-like spell:

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Thanks for taking me up on [the name of your offer].

I’m curious, what made you do it?

===

Yes, that’s it.

Yes, I can see your jaw drop and your eyes roll back in your head from mock amazement.

All I can say is, don’t knock it till you try it.

I’ve been doing this all week long with people who took me up on my recommendation for the 1-Person Advertorial Agency.

As usual when I interact directly with people on my list, I’ve been blown away by how little I know, how pale my own imagination, and how rich and surprising it is to go out to my market and talk to them.

You want examples?

I’ve gotten a dozen responses so far, with varying answers to “What made you do it.” Three categories have been prevalent so far:

A. The opportunity of the beast

This being a biz-in-a-box offer, it’s inevitable that people would cite the opportunity of it. Ok, that’s not surprising. But still, it’s different and more insightful to hear it in people’s own words:

#1. “I still don’t plan on leaving my job which I like no matter how successful it is though I might stop working overtime and do this instead once it starts paying. In the meantime it’s not that much of a time commitment that I can’t do both.”

#2. “I like Travis [Sago]’s model of working other’s lists but this method looks equally profitable but might be more helpful in expanding my skills.”

B. A point of differentiation

I hadn’t thought of this one at all, and I didn’t talk about it in my emails. And yet, multiple people brought up the uniqueness of advertorials as opposed to other things copywriters can offer:

#1. “It’s also a point of differentiation since it seems that everyone who hasn’t firmly planted their flag in the email copywriting camp (i.e. most copywriters/marketers) has rebranded themselves as a creative strategist overnight (soon-to-be most copywriters/marketers).”

#2. “Clients who are willing to spend money on advertorials are more serious overall. Meta ads is the bright shiny object that everyone and their dog in law wants rn. But advertorials have been around way longer and sophisticated clients like them a lot.”

C. Because of me

1-Person Advertorial Agency is a great offer, I think its value is self-contained.

And yet, the fact that my readers know and trust me (and maybe even like me???) definitely helps sell the offer, and makes it more credible — even when I say I haven’t used this system myself:

#1. “Plus, as a previous buyer of yours, products you recommend carry more weight than other offers.”

#2. “The fact that you are promoting it. Especially your honesty in saying you have not been taken the course yourself.”

So there you go. Sell something. Then ask people why they bought, and you shall receive.

And now, an important announcement:

The opportunity to get 1-Person Advertorial Agency + the bonuses I am offering is ending tonight at 12 midnight PST.

Along with the core 1-Person Advertorial Agency offer (full details at the sales page below), I am offering the following bonuses:

#1 Horror Advertorial Swipe File, which you can feed to the AI beast so it produces better, or rather, more horrifying advertorials

#2. 26 Rules of Client Management for Copywriters, taken from my Copy Zone guide to the business side of copywriting

#3. Most Valuable Postcard #1: Nota Rapida, which digs into the topic of building long-term relationships with copywriting clients much more deeply

#4. Ghostbuster, Nick Bandy’s 5-stage sequence for reactivating (reanimating?) dead clients or prospective clients

If you wanna get that, you will have to act today. But why not act now, while it’s on your mind? Here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorial-agency

Over $1M ($1,000,000) and 20 years of loving labor went into this brilliant Unannounced Bonus

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This week, I’m running an “Unannounced Bonus” promotional event for my Copy Riddles program.

Copy Riddles, as you might know, uses a clever mechanism to download A-list copywriting skills into your brain, over the course of a few short weeks.

I’ve been selling Copy Riddles since 2021. I have had a lot of customers go through the program. I have had only glowing feedback.

But I’ve been talking about all that for years. Odds are, you know it already.

So today, I want to share with you the special “Unannounced Bonus” I’m making available if you join Copy Riddles before this Sunday, July 20, at 12 midnight PST.

That bonus is a lifetime subscription to Lawrence Bernstein’s Ad Money Machine.

I’ve written about Lawrence lots of times in my newsletter — he’s “the world’s most obsessed ad archivist.”

Ad Money Machine is Lawrence’s subscription service where, each day, he shares direct response winners from the past and the present. Two points to highlight about that:

First off, these are not just random screenshotted ads from newspapers.com. As Lawrence says on the Ad Money Machine site:

“I’ve invested over a million bucks on subscriptions and products to keep my name (and aliases!) seeded on direct mail lists.”

The vast majority of these ads, packages, and promos are not available online — anywhere, except inside Lawrence’s membership site.

The reason is that he’s spent the time, effort, and money to get himself on the lists of the biggest and most successful direct marketing companies, so he can see all their marketing — the front ends, being mailed out to specialized direct mail lists, as well as all the mysterious stuff that goes on in the back, to customers only.

Because of this, Ad Money Machine is effectively a collection of “businesses in a box” — the winning ad copy, offers, and funnels across a range of markets, from health, wealth, self-help, along with a bunch of quirky ones thrown in (fishing, stamps, “grass plugs”).

Second off, Lawrence isn’t “just some guy,” and Ad Money Machine is not even his primary business.

For over two decades now, Lawrence has been working as a direct response copywriter and operator, focusing on direct mail.

That means that, when it comes to Ad Money Machine, Lawrence doesn’t just share winning ads and promos. He also puts them in context, using his own decades of experience, and he explains why these ads worked and how they connect to deeper principles of copywriting and direct marketing.

A few bits of feedback Lawrence has gotten about that, from top direct response copywriters and marketers who have paid him thousands of dollars for his ad archives and commentary:

“Brilliant examples, great commentary. This one just gave me an idea for a newsletter we’re about to launch that I think will hit large. I don’t know where you find this stuff, but I’m glad you do.”

— John Forde, A-list copywriter and co-author of Great Leads

“My jaw is literally black and blue from hitting the floor over and over again as I got to see the techniques you’ve uncovered. I never dreamed many of these things were even possible, let alone how easy you’ve made them. The word ‘miraculous’ comes to mind.”

— Ken McCarthy, founder, System Seminar

“If Lawrence has got a product for sale, you should get it!”

— Marty Edelston, founder, Boardroom Inc.

About that last comment from Marty Edelston:

Ad Money Machine normally sells for $97/month. I subscribed to it at that price for over a year, starting in 2023. At that time I even promoted it to my list, for free, without being an affiliate, simply because I thought it’s such a valuable service.

Then back in 2024, Lawrence offered a rare opportunity to buy a lifetime subscription to Ad Money Machine for $997 one-time. I knew I’d keep paying Lawrence monthly for a long time, so it was a no-brainer to take him up on this offer. I paid the $997 and bought the lifetime subscription.

Now, I’ve partnered with Lawrence so people who buy Copy Riddles during this week also get a FREE lifetime subscription to Ad Money Machine, the same subscription I paid $997 for. I also got him to agree to extend the same benefit to previous Copy Riddles buyers.

(If you’re wondering why Lawrence would possibly agree to this, it’s because I’ve made the same deal to his lifetime subscribers — they can get Copy Riddles for free. Being a savvy direct response guy, Lawrence knows the value of growing his list with a bunch of people who are 1) interested in direct response copywriting and 2) have paid $997 to get better at it.)

Over the course of the coming week, I’ll have much more to say about Copy Riddles, about Ad Money Machine, and about Lawrence himself.

But frankly, I’ve never offered a deal this good before, at least if you too are interested in direct response copywriting and want to get better at it. In case you already know you want this deal, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

P.S. If you are already a Copy Riddles member, I sent you an email about how to claim your free lifetime subscription to Ad Money Machine. In case you didn’t get that email, write me and I’ll get you set up.

Copy Riddles customers hit jackpot with “Unannounced Bonus” scheme

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If you are a Copy Riddles customer, I sent you an email earlier today. That email talks about an unannounced bonus you can get right now. I personally paid $997 for this offer last year. But thanks to my threatening and cajoling and deal-making on your behalf, you can now get this same offer for absolutely free.

The chance to grab this unannounced bonus for free is valid until next Sunday, July 20, at 12 midnight PST. So if you haven’t yet seen that email I’ve sent you or acted on it, it might be worth doing so now.

And if you are not yet a Copy Riddles customer, I’d like to share something that can be useful if you sell your own courses or create your own offers.

I have a long-standing policy of doing right by previous customers. It has worked well for me — customers stick around, are always grateful and excited when I run a new promo to promote an offer they already bought, keep reading my emails and buying new offers.

But this “Unannounced Bonus” scheme has developed into a sales argument as well.

Because I promote my courses with special events and special new bundles of bonuses, and because I make those available to previous customers, the sooner somebody decides to buy, the more they end up benefiting in time.

For example, had you bought Copy Riddles a couple years ago, you would now also have:

* Copywriting Portfolio Secrets (which I later sold for $97)

* Horror Stories For Sales (which I later sold for $200)

* $2k Advertorial Consult (which a business owner paid me $2k for, and which lays out my entire process for writing advertorials that drove tens of millions of dollars in ecom sales)

So if you have offers of your own, it might be worth considering implementing an “Unannounced Bonus” policy like this, and then announcing it loudly, not only your customers, but also to your prospects, and using it as a sales tool.

Of course, that’s exactly what I’m doing here.

I will be running a promo for Copy Riddles over the next week. I will talk in great detail about that $997 bonus which will be available for free during the promo, plus I will give you a couple other good reasons why you might want to get Copy Riddles now rather than later.

But why might you want to get Copy Riddles at all? I mean, at $997, it’s a very, very expensive course.

My claim is that Copy Riddles allows you to own A-list copywriting skills more quickly than you would ever believe. If you want to find out how Copy Riddles does this, the mechanism behind why people say it’s “the best course I’ve ever taken, bar none” and “the most brilliant course concept I’ve ever seen,” I’ve written it all up here:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Announcing: Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle

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Starting today, and ending this Thursday at 12 midnight PST, I’m selling a $50 offer and offering a bundle of bonuses I’m calling the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle.

(That’s in honor of a reader named Richard, who tried to butter me up to get me to offer the first part of these bonuses. If you want the full back story, read my email from yesterday.)

The first part of the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle, and the part I am announcing today, are four bonuses I offered in 2023 as part of a four-day promotion for the Infostack copywriting bundle. These are:

#1. Copywriting Portfolio Secrets ($97 value)

In this training, I show you how to build up your copywriting portfolio in the fastest and most efficient way, so you can start to win copywriting jobs even today. I show you the best way I’ve found to win 4- and 5-figure jobs I REALLY wanted, even when I wasn’t qualified for them, and how you can do it too.

I previously sold this training for $97. But it’s yours free inside the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle, which also includes my…

#2. No-Stress Negotiation For Well-Paid Copywriters ($100 value)

This guide outlines my 7-part negotiating system, which I adapted from negotiation coach Jim Camp. This system kept me sane while I still regularly interviewed and worked with copywriting clients. Follow these seven principles, and you will end up making more money, working with better clients, and being able to stick to it for the long term.

I only offered this information before as part of the $100 Copy Zone guide, which also featured….

#3. How To Get Set Up On Upwork

This free bonus is an excerpt from a short self-published book I wrote once, How to Become a $150/Hr Sales Copywriter on Upwork: A Personal Success Story that Almost Anyone Can Replicate. It tells you how to actually get set up on Upwork — the details of your profile page, your description, your title.

If you combine this bonus with the two bonuses above — Copywriting Portfolio Secrets and No-Stress Negotiation — you have a great shot of winning a job on Upwork by the end of this week, or even today.

And finally, this first part of my Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle also includes…

#4. Dan’s Timeless Wisdom (priceless, or $25k+)

Between August of 2019 and March 2020, I was in Dan Ferrari’s coaching group. As you might know, Dan started out as a star copywriter at The Motley Fool, and went on to become one of the most successful, most winning, big-money direct response copywriters working today.

Inside his coaching group, Dan dispensed copy critiques, marketing advice, and mystical koans to help his coaching students get to the next level.

At some point, I had the bright idea to start archiving the best and most valuable things that Dan was saying. I got 25 of them down, and they are all included in this document.

(By the way, I never tallied up the exact and rather painful amount of money I paid Dan for the coaching. It was north of $25k. I do know I made it all back, and then some, in just the first two months after I stopped with the coaching, thanks to just one tip I got from Dan.)

So there you go. $197 in real-world value if you count what people have paid me for these bonuses previously… or $25,000+ in value if you count the blood, flesh, and hair it took for me to get this information to you… or ∞ in value, if you actually take these ideas and apply them, and keep applying them.

And if that’s not enough for you, my Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle will have several other bonuses as well. I will announce those over the coming days, and they will be automatically added to the bonus area if you get my offer before Thursday at 12 midnight PST.

As for what that offer is:

Like I said, it costs $50.

And it’s to get five (5) paperback copies of my original 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

Put in your order on Amazon, forward me your Amazon receipt, and I will set you up with Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle.

(The paperback for my 10 Commandments book sells for $9.99. If you have Amazon Prime, which everyone except me has, then shipping is free, so the total for five paperback copies adds up to $50, or actually $49.95.)

You might wonder why you might possibly want to get five (5) paperback copies of the same book, particularly one which you might already own.

It’s an excellent question.

I will address that in my next email. For now, If the above bonus bundle is attractive to you, and you have $49.95 to invest, you can get my 10 Commandments book (five of them actually) at the following link:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

How to get my highly coveted Infostack bonuses

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Last month, right after I announced the publication of my new 10 Commandments book, I got a message from a reader named Richard:

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Your book is a masterpiece and a gem on its own, no doubt about it.

But if you ever want to throw in a lil somethin’ extra … the 4 bonuses you gave away in 2023 for the InfoStack affiliate promo would perfect, IMO.

(Specially, since I missed them, and have beaten myself up ever since. Ha.)

Big congrats, John — you slammed it outta the park once more!

Best,

Richard

P.S. Just bought my copy today, can’t wait to dive in.

===

My ego, which had been quickly inflating upon reading that my book was a “masterpiece” and a “gem,” deflated when I got to the PS, and realized that Richard apparently hadn’t even read the book he was giving me such over-the-top praise for.

That made me immediately resistant to his proposal. Maybe there’s a lesson there.

But about that proposal:

Back in 2023, I participated in something called the “Infostack Copywriting Bundle.” For $50, you could get a copy of my original 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters, plus 13 other ebooks and courses by various other copywriters.

Frankly, I couldn’t vouch for all those other books and courses, and if they are worth $50 in aggregate.

And so, to make sure that anybody who took me up on this bundle got their money’s worth, I also offered four free bonuses. Those bonuses had a total real-world value of either $197 or ∞, depending on how you add it up.

The bonuses were apparently highly desirable. Not only did I end up selling a healthy number of copies of the “Infostack bundle” to satisfied buyers, based mainly on the strength of the bonuses, but I had people like Richard writing me about the bonuses even a couple years later.

Anyways, I replied to Richard to say that it makes little sense to me to give away the Infostack bonus bundle with the new 10 Commandments book.

Like I wrote above, I was turned off by the fact he was buttering me up without even reading my new book.

More importantly, my new 10 Commandments book is not primarily about copywriting or primarily intended for copywriters. Plus the new book is only $5 in ebook format and $10 in paperback, so the on $197/∞ in bonuses is a bit of an overkill.

But — I have learned not to shrug off suggestions from readers, even if I don’t follow those suggestions as given.

So I asked myself, why don’t I do something with that Infostack bonus bundle?

I paced up and down my laboratory, asking myself what I could do.

Finally, inspiration struck.

And so, starting tomorrow and ending on Thursday, I will have a $50 offer, along with which I’ll be giving away the Infostack bonuses. I’ll also included several other real-world bonuses, for a total bonus bundle that adds up to $386 or ∞ in real-world value, depending on how you add it up.

In Richard’s honor, I will call this the “Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle.”

As for what the core offer will be, and what exactly is inside the Infostack bonuses I will be including inside my “Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle” — full details on that tomorrow.

Why I ignore a great way of selling more monthly memberships

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A long-time reader writes in with a great marketing suggestion, which I won’t be applying any time soon:

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Yesterday, on my lunch break, I watched this great YouTube video: “Storytelling & Marketing for Musicians & Teachers w/ Master Copywriter John Bejakovic.”

I found it very interesting.

Then, a suggestion occurred to me: you could add a monthly bonus (such as a 30-minute video, a written lesson in the form of an article or a podcast episode, etc.) to all Daily Email Habit subscribers.

The subscription could be even more attractive.

It’s just an idea and I wanted to tell you about it because in the company where I work – every time we add an exclusive bonus to the monthly memberships – the number of subscribers grows.

===

Like I said, adding bonuses to a recurring offer is a great marketing suggestion. If I were working with clients, which I’m not, I would advise them the same.

That said, I have no plans and even less interest in committing to creating more content on a schedule.

I like writing this free daily email. That’s about where it stops.

I don’t want to promise prospects a regular paid newsletter, podcast, weekly call, monthly article, video, or really anything else, even if gets me more subscribers and pays me more money.

(I’ve done it before — a paid monthly newsletter, a group coaching offer with a weekly call — and I quickly ran away.)

Does that mean I’ve renounced creating new content?

Clearly no, as I happen to be writing a book, and I have plans to start writing a new one as soon as this one is finished.

Does it mean I’ve given up on selling recurring offers?

Again no. My Daily Email House community, small as it is, doesn’t make any promises beyond being a meeting place for business owners who write more or less daily emails. (More generally, there are ways to make recurring offers that aren’t built on content of the person selling them.)

I’m not sure whether this email can be useful to you in any way, except maybe to validate how you yourself might be feeling.

And about that:

Over the past week, I’ve been promoting Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin membership. One of the reasons I’m personally inside Ronin, and willing to 100% endorse it to others, is that I feel validated by the underlying philosophy of Ronin. As Travis wrote inside the Royalty Ronin community a few days ago:

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Ronin have one focus:

Stop selling our life.

We have many tools to do it, but don’t forget what we are building.

A life that is our OWN.

Not one owned by a banker, clients, expectations of others, or even the squeals of the lil dipshit that sits on our shoulders:-)

===

Incidentally, you might be interested to know that Travis makes most of his money via his “back-end agency,” and not by teaching others how to do Internet marketing.

He teaches inside the Ronin community, without a schedule and without obligations, because he enjoys it (that’s the reason for the chatty, three-hour Zoom calls he puts on from time to time).

If you resonate with the philosophy above, you might get value from the many tools inside Royalty Ronin to help you live life on your own terms. For more info on that:

​https://bejakovic.com/ronin​

P.S. If you’ve already signed up for a trial of Royalty Ronin via my link above, forward me Travis’s welcome email — the one with “Vroom” in the subject line.

I have a small but growing bundle of bonuses, including my Heart of Hearts and my Inspiration & Engagement trainings, which are waiting for you as a way of saying thanks for taking me up on my recommendation.

937 days’ worth of email ideas, free

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A couple days ago, after I complained that there’s still a reader on my list, Vivian, who hasn’t bought my Most Valuable Email program, another reader on my list, Bridget, who also hasn’t bought my Most Valuable Email program, wrote in to point out where I’m falling short:

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Key point – where you are falling short is you are not answering the questions:

* Where am I going to get interesting ideas every day?

* How am I going to make the ideas I do have interesting enough to send without making 99% of my current subscribers want to unsubscribe?

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Bridget is absolutely right. I don’t make the “where to get interesting ideas” part clear on the MVE sales page.

It actually is there in the course — I have a little section where I list four sources where I regularly find interesting ideas for Most Valuable Emails.

The reason I don’t make a bigger deal out of it is that I feel interesting ideas are cheap. They are everywhere, and it’s more a matter of how freshly and insightfully they are presented. And that’s what MVE is about.

I wrote back to Bridget to tell her that. And she replied:

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You may believe interesting ideas are cheap. They may well be. But Vivian’s afraid she’ll run out, and that’s more important to her buying decision than objective reality.

===

Again, Bridget is absolutely right. So now what?

Let it never be said that I am more stubborn than Andrew Jackson.

And that’s why, I’d now like to announce I am adding one more bonus to my Shangri La MVE event. I’m calling this bonus the Shangri La Library Of Rare and Priceless Ideas.

For years now, I’ve been collecting interesting ideas I come across, whether in books, newsletters, podcasts, or courses.

For each such idea, I write it down, along with the source of where I got it. Sometimes I also add in my own observations as well.

I checked just now and so far I have 937 such interesting ideas. Here’s a sample:

* “To build fascination and rapport, keep asking deeper, more enthusiastic questions” (from James Altucher via his podcast)

* “Use the same link text as the subject line to get clicks” (something Ian Stanley said somewhere)

* “Toil shared becomes no toil at all” (from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives)

* “Trialibility is the no. 1 factor affecting adoption of an innovation” (from Jonah Berger’s Catalyst)

* “Pick out a fun and relevant theme for email promotion events” (from Travis Sago, on some ancient podcast appearance)

Rare? Priceless? You decide. In any case, it’s my contention you still have to do something to these ideas to turn them into fresh and insightful emails. MVE shows you what to do, and it even gets you doing it.

But so you can say you will never ever run out of ideas for Most Valuable Emails, I’m making available my entire Library Of Rare And Priceless Ideas as part of this Shangri La event.

I collected all these rare and priceless ideas and put them into a type of endless scroll known as a PDF file.

If you have the stamina, you can read through them from beginning to end. If you don’t, you can pick off an idea each day, apply the Most Valuable Trick, and turn that idea into a fresh and insightful email that 1) pulls in readers, 2) builds your authority, 3) makes you just a tiny bit better as a writer and a marketer, 4) maybe even makes a sale or 10.

My Shangri La MVE event ends tonight at 12 midnight PST. If you need a reminder of what it’s about:

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I’m calling this offer the “Shangri La” MVE offer. And that’s because like Shangri La, the two three parts of this offer only appear once every fifty years. Specifically:

1. I normally don’t offer a payment plan for Most Valuable Email. I did offer a payment plan for MVE once, as a joke, for one day only. Well, like Shangri La, the payment plan is back, and not as a joke.

You can get MVE for $99 today and then two more monthly payments of $99. This payment plan is there to make it psychologically easier to get started — in my experience, people take up payment plans not because they cannot afford to pay in full, but simply because it feels like a smaller commitment.

2. I am also offering a bonus, which I’m calling Shangri La Disappearing Secrets.

Over the past years, I have periodically sent out emails where I teased a secret, which I then turned into a disappearing, one-day bonuses for people who took me up on an offer before the deadline.

Inside this Shangri La Disappearing Secrets bonus, I have collected 12 emails that teased 12 secrets — and I have revealed the secrets themselves. These include:

* An email deliverability tip that is so valuable I decided not to share it publicly, but only with buyers of MVE. This tip is something that multiple people have told me I should turn into a standalone course or training — which I most probably will do one day.

* Stage Surprise Success. Step-by-step instructions for creating effective surprise in any kind of performance, whether thieving, magicking, comedy, drama, or simply writing for impact and influence. And no, it’s not just shocking people with something they weren’t expecting. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite of that.

* A daring idea to grow your list and build up your authority at the same time. I have not yet had the guts to put it into practice, even though I have lots of reasons to believe it would work great to build my own authority, and get me more high-quality leads than I’m getting now.

* A persuasion strategy used by con men, pick up artists, salesmen, even by legendary copywriters. I ran a little contest in an email to see if anybody could identify this strategy based on a scene from the movie The Sting. Out of 40+ people who tried to identify the strategy, only 2 got it right.

* An incredible free resource, filled with insightful and proven marketing and positioning advice. This resource comes from a man I’ve only written about once in this newsletter, but who has influenced my thinking about marketing and human psychology more deeply than I may let on — maybe more deeply than anybody else over the past few years.

* Magic Box calls-to-action. Use these if you don’t have a product or a service to sell yet, or if you only have a few bum offers, which your list has stopped responding to every day. Result of a “magic box” CTA when used by one of my coaching clients: the first hand-raiser ever for an under-construction $4k offer.

* A new way to apply the Most Valuable email trick, one I wasn’t comfortable doing until recently. Now that I’ve started using it, it’s gotten people paying more attention… leaning in more… even rereading my emails 3x… and reaching out to reopen dropped business conversations.

* Steven Pressfield (the author of the War of Art and the Legend of Bagger Vance) used to write scripts for porn movies. He once shared two porn storytelling rules. I’ll tell you what they are, and how smart marketers, maybe even me on occasion, use one of these rules in their own sales copy and marketing content.

* A list of 14 criteria of truthful stories. I’m not saying to get devious with this — but you could use these criteria to jelly up a made-up story and make it sound absolutely true. More respectably, you can use these criteria to take your true but fluffy story and make it sound 100% gripping and real.

* Why I drafted US patent application 16/573921 to get the U.S. Government to recognize my Most Valuable Email trick as novel, non-obvious, and having concrete, practical applications.

* Two methods for presenting a persuasive argument, as spelled out by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. I illustrate these two methods with a little public debate that Daniel Throssell and I engaged in via our respective email newsletters. Daniel and I each adopted opposing methods, just as described by Kahneman.

* An infotainment secret I stole from Ben Settle. As far as I know, Ben doesn’t teach this secret in his books or newsletters — I found it by tracking Ben’s emails over a 14-day period and spotting Ben using it in 8 of those 14 emails. And no, I’m not talking about teasing, or telling a story, or stirring up conflict. This is something more fundamental, and more broadly useful, even beyond daily emails.

3. The Shangri La Library Of Rare And Priceless Ideas. 937 interesting ideas I’ve collected over the years from books, podcasts, newsletters, courses. Reach into this library to never again run out of ideas for your Most Valuable Emails.

So there you go. My Shangri La MVE offer:

A payment plan for Most Valuable Email that only appears twice in a century… 12 bonus persuasion secrets… and all the email ideas you will ever need.

This offer is good until tonight, Friday Oct 11, at 12 midnight PST.

If you’re at all interested, the time to act is now. That’s because of that simple certainty I wrote about yesterday — there won’t ever be a better time.

I won’t be running big promo events for Most Valuable Email, because it doesn’t fit my policy of treating previous customers with respect.

On the other hand, if you get MVE now, you will also be eligible for any future disappearing bonuses I might offer with it, or any other special offer or real I will make to new buyers also.

If you’d like to take me up on this Shangri La offer, before it disappears:

​​https://bejakovic.com/mve/​​

P.S. And yes, if you have already bought MVE, you also get the Shangri La Disappearing Secrets and the Shangri La Library Of Rare And Priceless Ideas. No need to write me for them. I’ll add them straight inside the MVE course area.

MVE cancelled

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No, not Most Valuable Email.

The MVE that’s been cancelled is the Most Vivian Event, the big promotion I announced yesterday.

I had hoped to use this event to pull every remaining non-buyer on my list and get him to buy Most Valuable Email, will-he, nill-he.

My plan was to use I know about promos inside the Most Vivian Event — structure, copy, and most importantly offer:

An “Italian lottery,” giving new buyers a good chance to get MVE free…

A stack of free bonuses that I’ve sold for good money before, totaling the price of MVE and more, so even if somebody didn’t win the “Italian lottery,” they would still feel like they’re getting a steal…

An entirely new bonuses as well, which would reveal all the thinking that went into this promo — basically a little promo course built around a specific case study, to make this MVE offer so valuable that if you ever send any kind of emails, the investment would pay for itself with this one new bonus alone.

I had grand plans to make this event fun, epic, and undoubtedly immensely successful. Except…

It’s all been cancelled.

Reason why:

Each time I got near to settling on the final offer for the Most Vivian Event, I kept bouncing into one problem:

“What do I do with previous buyers?”

I have a long-standing policy to reward early buyers for buying for me. That means I grandfather previous buyers into any upgrades, new runs of a course, or bonuses I end up offering in the future. It also means I don’t feature discounts.

Yesterday, when I had the initial idea for this new promo, I shrugged this question off.

I told myself I’d figure out some way to incentivize new buyers… to reward previous buyers… and to have this promo make business sense for me personally.

But no matter how I structured this offer, there was always one end of the triangle — new buyers, old buyers, me — that was left high and dry.

I realized it’s not a matter of what bonuses or incentives I end up offering. It’s simply a consequence of my “reward previous buyers” policy, and the fact that I have hundreds of previous buyers of MVE.

That’s why I’ve actually never run a bonus- or discount-based promo for any of my offers, outside of a launch. I just never realized it until yesterday.

You might say I’m being stubborn to stick to this policy. And that’s exactly right. Because I want people to believe a few simple certainties when they think of me.

One of those simple certainties is that I won’t screw over previous buyers. I don’t ever want my buyers to think, even in passing, “Huh, maybe I should have waited to buy this, this new deal is better than what I got.”

Yesterday, I wrote that I had clearly been falling short by continuing to sell MVE on its merits alone.

Some people who could benefit from MVE — like Vivian, who wanted something for “coming up with interesting ideas and presenting it in a concise and compelling way” — never even considered buying.

Frankly, that falling short will most likely continue.

But if you have been on the fence about MVE for a while, I do have a special offer for you today. It’s nothing like the spectacle I was planning on. But you can decide whether it’s enough to get you to take me up on Most Valuable Email today.

I’m calling this offer the “Shangri La” MVE offer. And that’s because like Shangri La, the two parts of this offer only appear once every fifty years. Specifically:

1. I normally don’t offer a payment plan for Most Valuable Email. I did offer a payment plan for MVE once, as a joke, for one day only. Well, like Shangri La, the payment plan is back, and not as a joke.

You can get MVE for $99 today and then two more monthly payments of $99. This payment plan is there to make it psychologically easier to get started — in my experience, people take up payment plans not because they cannot afford to pay in full, but simply because it feels like a smaller commitment.

2. I am also offering a bonus, which I’m calling Shangri La Disappearing Secrets.

Over the past years, I have periodically sent out emails where I teased a secret, which I then turned into a disappearing, one-day bonuses for people who took me up on an offer before the deadline.

Inside this Shangri La Disappearing Secrets bonus, I have collected 12 emails that teased 12 secrets — and I have revealed the secrets themselves. These include:

* An email deliverability tip that is so valuable I decided not to share it publicly, but only with buyers of MVE. This tip is something that multiple people have told me I should turn into a standalone course or training — which I most probably will do one day.

* Stage Surprise Success. Step-by-step instructions for creating effective surprise in any kind of performance, whether thieving, magicking, comedy, drama, or simply writing for impact and influence. And no, it’s not just shocking people with something they weren’t expecting. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite of that.

* A daring idea to grow your list and build up your authority at the same time. I have not yet had the guts to put it into practice, even though I have lots of reasons to believe it would work great to build my own authority, and get me more high-quality leads than I’m getting now.

* A persuasion strategy used by con men, pick up artists, salesmen, even by legendary copywriters. I ran a little contest in an email to see if anybody could identify this strategy based on a scene from the movie The Sting. Out of 40+ people who tried to identify the strategy, only 2 got it right.

* An incredible free resource, filled with insightful and proven marketing and positioning advice. This resource comes from a man I’ve only written about once in this newsletter, but who has influenced my thinking about marketing and human psychology more deeply than I may let on — maybe more deeply than anybody else over the past few years.

* Magic Box calls-to-action. Use these if you don’t have a product or a service to sell yet, or if you only have a few bum offers, which your list has stopped responding to every day. Result of a “magic box” CTA when used by one of my coaching clients: the first hand-raiser ever for an under-construction $4k offer.

* A new way to apply the Most Valuable email trick, one I wasn’t comfortable doing until recently. Now that I’ve started using it, it’s gotten people paying more attention… leaning in more… even rereading my emails 3x… and reaching out to reopen dropped business conversations.

* Steven Pressfield (the author of the War of Art and the Legend of Bagger Vance) used to write scripts for porn movies. He once shared two porn storytelling rules. I’ll tell you what they are, and how smart marketers, maybe even me on occasion, use one of these rules in their own sales copy and marketing content.

* A list of 14 criteria of truthful stories. I’m not saying to get devious with this — but you could use these criteria to jelly up a made-up story and make it sound absolutely true. More respectably, you can use these criteria to take your true but fluffy story and make it sound 100% gripping and real.

* Why I drafted US patent application 16/573921 to get the U.S. Government to recognize my Most Valuable Email trick as novel, non-obvious, and having concrete, practical applications.

* Two methods for presenting a persuasive argument, as spelled out by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. I illustrate these two methods with a little public debate that Daniel Throssell and I engaged in via our respective email newsletters. Daniel and I each adopted opposing methods, just as described by Kahneman.

* An infotainment secret I stole from Ben Settle. As far as I know, Ben doesn’t teach this secret in his books or newsletters — I found it by tracking Ben’s emails over a 14-day period and spotting Ben using it in 8 of those 14 emails. And no, I’m not talking about teasing, or telling a story, or stirring up conflict. This is something more fundamental, and more broadly useful, even beyond daily emails.

So there you go. My Shangri La MVE offer:

A payment plan for Most Valuable Email that only appears twice in a century… and 12 bonus persuasion secrets.

This offer is good until tomorrow, Friday Oct 11, at 12 midnight PST.

If you’re at all interested, the time to act is now. That’s because of that simple certainty I wrote above — there won’t ever be a better time.

I won’t be running big promo events for Most Valuable Email, because it doesn’t fit my policy of treating previous customers with respect.

On the other hand, if you get MVE now, you will also be eligible for any future disappearing bonuses I might offer with it, or any other special offer or real I will make to new buyers also.

If you’d like to take me up on this Shangri La offer, before it disappears:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

P.S. And yes, if you have already bought MVE, you also get the Shangri La Disappearing Secrets. No need to write me for it. I’ll add it straight inside the MVE course area, right under the MVE Swipes document.

Announcing: Best Daily Email Awards

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Over the past few months, I’ve gotten addicted to listening to a Japanese woman’s YouTube channel, on which she puts out collections like, “1963 Billboard Top 100 Countdown.”

These collections feature hit songs I know, and are also a good way to discover something new, or at least new to me.

But the real reason I’m listening to this woman’s YouTube channel, as opposed to a million other YouTube song collections and playlists, is that her collections feel somehow authoritative, vetted.

After all, the included songs were all hits at the time they came out. People loved each of these songs then, even if some of the songs fell into obscurity later. The Billboard rankings prove it.

My own addiction reminded me of something I read in the Robert Collier Letter Book.

At one point, Collier was selling a subscription to the Review of Reviews, a monthly magazine that I guess was similar to Reader’s Digest.

The problem was few people really like committing to a subscription.

The solution of course was a series of attractive bonuses, which could appear and disappear on command.

But how to make a bonus instantly attractive?

One solution was to again defer to authority and vetting by others. The winning bonus was a little book that collected 64 stories that won the O. Henry prize for the best short story of the year.

Result? ​

​​​30,000-40,000 new subscribers with one sales letter, bundling a stupid magazine subscription with this sexy bonus.

You can do the same, by the way.

Maybe your niche already has some objective measure of authority to it — best-selling books, top-ranked ClickBank offers, investors who made the most money.

Or if there is no such objective measure, you can always invent a new prize or award.

You can use this authoritative or vetted status to create an attractive bonus or offer, and of course, to put yourself in the middle of the action.

And with that, I would like to announce the formation of the Best Daily Email Awards.

This is a new yearly award for merit in the daily email format.

Each year, the Best Daily Email Awards are selected by the prestigious and exclusive Daily Email Academy, which you are a member of by virtue of being a reader of this newsletter.

If you would like to nominate a particular daily email for a Best Daily Email Award, simply forward it to me before this Sunday, July 28, at 8:31pm CET.

Any daily email by any brand or person, in any market or niche, is eligible. You don’t need to explain your reasoning for nominating this particular email. The only restriction is you may only submit one entry, and that it’s actually a daily email.

And then, I, as the current acting Director of the Daily Email Academy, will collect the results, and announce the winners at the inaugural prize ceremony next week.

And yes, I’m 100% serious about this. So start forwarding now.

Announcing: Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets

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I’m excited to announce my new offer, Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets.

​​I’ll tell you about this new offer in a moment, but first I want to share a valuable marketing tip with you. Here goes:

Back in the 1990s, Gary Bencivenga, widely believed by marketing experts to be the greatest living copywriter, sold a little offer of his own.

Gary’s offer was a book of tips for winning jobs. He sold it via ads in USA Today, like this:

Headline — “Do you make these mistakes in job interviews?”

Offer — The core book, “Interviews that Win Jobs,” for $49.95. There was also a free bonus, which Gary said was “selling nationally for $49.95,” called “How to Answer the 64 Toughest Interview Questions.”

So far, so standard.

Except, I am a bit of an amateur advertising sleuth.

And so I happen to know that Gary also ran a second ad for a second book about job and interview tips.

He sold this second offer via ads USA Today, like this:

Headline — “Job hunting? How well can YOU answer these 64 toughest interview questions?”

Offer — The core book, “How to Answer the 64 Toughest Interview Questions,” for $49.95. There was also a free bonus, which Gary said was “selling nationally for $49.95,” called “Interviews that Win Jobs.”

So that’s my little tip for you today:

Do what Gary did, and double your front-end offers by selling both your bonus and your core offer.

This will force you to make both offer and bonus sexy and appealing.

​​And it will add legitimacy and authority when you say that the bonus sells for $49.95, as opposed to the mealy-mouthed alternative of so many marketers, valued at $49.95.

I don’t bring up this Gary Bencivenga tip by accident.

I bring it up because I discovered this tip back in the decade of the 2010s, when I spent 100+ hours copying old and successful ads by hand, including both of Gary’s jobs ads.

I doubt that I would have spotted Gary’s doubled-up offer had I simply “read” Gary’s first ad, skimmed past that “selling nationally for $49.95” at the very end, and tossed the ad aside.

That to me is the value of hand-copying ads and sales letters.

Other people ascribe magic to the actual neurology of copying stuff out by hand.

I’ve personally never experienced that. But I have found the process of copying ads immensely valuable because it forced me to sit and really examine ads carefully, and spot many of the valuable details that make them work, which I would have missed otherwise.

Which brings me to my new offer. It’s a special, one-time bundle called Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets. Inside this unique bundle, you can find the following:

#1. Copy Zone (selling nationally for $100). My 175-page, A-Z guide on the business side of copywriting, from getting started with no experience or portfolio, all the way to becoming an A-list copywriter.

#2. Most Valuable Postcard #2: Ferrari Monster (selling nationally for $100). A deep dive into a single fascinating topic — code named Ferrari Monster — which I claim is the essence of all copywriting and marketing. Get the Ferrari Monster right, and almost everything else falls into place.

#3. Copy Riddles Lite (selling nationally for $99). A slice of my Copy Riddles program, proportionately priced. Try yourself against legendary A-list copywriters like Gene Schwartz, David Deutsch, and Clayton Makepeace — and in the process, implant new copywriting skills into your brain.

#4. Horror Advertorial Swipe File (selling nationally for $100). A zip file with 25 PDFs, featuring the original copy for 25 of my horror advertorials. These advertorials pulled in millions of dollars on cold Facebook and YouTube traffic, and sold everything from fake diamonds and dog seat belts, to stick-on bras and kids’ vitamins.

#5. 9 Deadly Email Sins (selling nationally for $100). 9 lessons distilled from my expensive and exclusive one-on-one coaching sessions with successful business owners and marketers.

The trainings inside Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets sell nationally for a total of $499.

But you can get this bundle at a discounted price of just $497 — if you act by this Thursday at 8:31pm CET, using the link below.

Plus, if you get Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets before the deadline, I’ll also add in a free bonus, membership in Derek Johanson’s CopyHour program.

​​CopyHour sells nationally, and internationally, for $497. But it’s yours free when you get Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets.

​​To get both before the doors close:

https://bejakovic.com/copyhour

P.S. If you do get Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets, write me and say so. Due to the quirks of the above sales cart, I can only see the first name of who’s bought, and not the email. So write me and say you bought, and I’ll make sure you get both Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets and access to CopyHour.