Offers

10 lessons from my CopyHour promo

by

I finished my CopyHour promo last night. I can say it was a success.

I made a healthy number of sales and made good money. No, it’s not “buy a chateau in France” kind of money. But if I could do this every week, honestly I would.

I made a list for myself of 10 lessons learned from this promo. Maybe these lessons won’t speak to you at all. Or maybe you’ll find one interesting or valuable point inside. Here goes:

1. I was worried that there would be nobody left to buy. I mean it’s CopyHour. The program has been around for 12 years and 3,000+ people have bought so far. Plus, there’s a lot of overlap between Derek’s list and mine… plus, Justin Goff promoted CopyHour a couple months ago.

“Surely everybody knows CopyHour and has either bought or has decided not to buy…”

But I was wrong. There were people for whom CopyHour was genuinely new. And there were others who were swayed by my bonuses (more on those below).

2. As has happened before when I’ve promoted affiliate offers, people wrote in thanking me for turning them on to a good product or service they hadn’t heard of before. This is a strange phenomenon known as “people are happy to be sold as long as you sell them stuff with their best interest in mind, and you communicate that.”

3. I officially ended the promo with more subscribers on my list than I started with, in spite of sending 10 emails over 3 1/2 days. I’m ascribing that to the following…

4. The event felt lively. In fact it always feels lively when I’m promoting something I haven’t promoted before… when sales are coming in… when sales are coming in from people I had never heard from before, but who turn out to have been reading my emails for a year or more… when I’m pushing out lots of emails quickly… and when even people who are not interested in buying are writing in to comment on the event and the emails.

5. It feels great to promote a solid proven offer that really helps people. And when it feels great, I’m much more ready to work.

6. It feels really nice to promote an offer where I don’t have to do any delivery after the fact. I’m planning to take most of the day off today after I finish this email.

7. Bonuses: The fact that they added up to what CopyHour cost, and even a bit more, made it feel like buy-one-get-one-free to people. Some bought because of that, and wrote in to say so.

9. A few people wrote in to say they were persuaded to buy by a specific bonus among the five I offered. Lesson learned: Keep creating content, keep putting out offers, and even if those offers don’t become evergreen sellers like my Simple Money Emails program, they can still have value.

10. It’s often easier to write 10 emails than to write 1.

I had been really struggling writing emails the past couple days/weeks before promoting CopyHour.

I’ve been looking to make some significant changes in the way I run this newsletter and the kinds of offers I promote.

The result has been a lot of baggage in my head and feeling inhibited when I write and second-guessing myself. Promoting a solid affiliate offer and simply being able to write fun emails cleared that from my head, at least for this week.

All that’s to say:

If you bought CopyHour, thanks again for buying. I hope you will do the work and get the promised results.

And whether or not you bought, I hope my emails over the past few days were still entertaining and maybe even valuable.

I’ll be back tomorrow with something new. I have no idea what yet. But now, it’s time to go have coffee and go for a walk.

Daniel Throssell offers a thought on my CopyHour promo

by

This morning, I started my final-day email barrage promoting CopyHour. In reply to my last day’s first email, I got a message from Australia’s best copywriter, Daniel Throssell, who wrote:

===

Can I offer a thought?

If it were me I’d make more of a big deal of how little a burden your extra training will add to the not insignificant time burden of doing CopyHour.

I get the feeling one of the big objections to a program like CopyHour is the massive time & work commitment it entails, and buyers will (justifiably or not) use that as a reason to excuse themselves from the promo. I think a five-bonus stack does you no favours in that regard. But it looks like mostly small, punchy stuff … so you might do well to emphasise each time that it only adds (say) 1 hour of total time to get the benefit of all those bonuses.

Of course it may be presumptuous of me to say that to you, but it was just a thought I had when reading this.

Good luck!

===

As Daniel tends to do, he makes a good point above.

There are two costs to any kind of product. One is the price you pay up front. The other is the effort and time to actually consume or use the beast.

Info product owners often think that the more mere tonnage they pile onto their offer, the better it will sell. But I have personally been turned off by offer smorgasbords that made me think, “Ugh, who’s got the stomach to swallow all those mixed meats…”

So let me take and apply Daniel’s advice:

The core promise for CopyHour is “write six & seven figure copy in the next 90 days.”

Yes, getting there will require work. It’s there in the name — CopyHour.

I encourage you to sign up to CopyHour if you plan to do the work, since that’s the only way to actually get the promised benefits in those 90 days.

If you do decide to join CopyHour today, and you do so before 8:31pm CET using my link below, I will also give you a free bonus, which I’ve taken to calling Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets. This is a bundle of five bite-sized offers which I’ve previously sold for a total of $499.

I won’t overwhelm you now by talking about what each of the five offers is about. I will say that you can use three of these offers as references, meaning you reach for them when you need to, at a cost of just a minute or two of your time.

The remaining two offers inside Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets will take you under an hour total to consume and benefit from — and I have worked hard to make those trainings entertaining as well as valuable.

And now the deadline, always the deadline…

Less than 5 hours remain before I close down my CopyHour promo. If you’d like to get in before then, take a gander now at the CopyHour landing page:

https://bejakovic.com/copyhour

P.S. If you do join CopyHour, write me and say so. Also write me in case you already have bought via my affiliate link. The affiliate portal only lets me see the first name of who’s bought and not the email. So write me and say you bought, and I’ll send over your bonuses. Like a reader named Esat who just wrote:

===

Hey John!

Just finished buying the CopyHour program by using your affiliate link. Thanks for this – I’d have never seen it if I wasn’t a big fan of you & read your emails.

Please send over my bonuses when you get a chance, thanks.

===

 

Announcing: Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets

by

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.

The heart and soul of great copywriting

by

Last night, I announced the new “Secret Demand” training I’ll hold on Friday.

This live training will be all about unlocking secret demand in your list. Once you can do that, you can pull an extra $5k, or $15k, or $50k from your list, in just 3-5 days, whenever you so decide.

A good number of people raised their hand to express interest in Secret Demand. I sent them the full details. And this morning, I woke up to the first notifications from ThriveCart that sales had come in.

That’s nice.

Still…

Based on the number of people who had raised their hand, I expected more sales to come in by now.

Maybe that’s greed. Maybe it’s impatience. Maybe it’s simply that I know how valuable what I will teach can be to the right person.

What to do in a situation like that? When some sales are coming in… but you suspect you can do better?

I’ll just share the following quote with you, from marketing legend Gary Halbert, who once wrote:

===

Hark unto me, Buckwheat: Writing “copy” is less than 1/10 as important as learning to think about new offers and getting them down on paper as I just did. I can’t say it often enough or strongly enough…

It Is The Deal… The Offer… The Proposition
You Are Making That Is The Heart And Soul
Of Great Copywriting!

===

This is why the largest of the Secret Demand training will be devoted to the offer. Writing copy is fairly straightforward once you have the right offer in place.

Anyways, signups for the Secret Demand training are now open. If you’re interested, you’ll have to raise your hand by tomorrow, Wednesday night at 12 midnight PST.

That’s because I’m not sending people straight to a sales page. I first want to find out if you’re in a situation where this training can possibly help you. And that will take a couple of emails back and forth.

So ask yourself:

Do you have a business?

Do you have an email list?

Does the promise of unlocking secret demand in your list sound appealing?

If so, then reply to this email.

I’ll have a couple questions for you. And if it sounds like a fit, I’ll send you the full details about this training. You can then decide if you’d like to join me on Friday.

Test the offer or just launch the damn thing?

by

During yesterday’s Write and Profit call, which I host every Thursday night, I got a question from one of the members, Tom Grundy.

During the day, Tom works as a high-powered banker in London.

But ​once night falls and the moon comes out, Tom howls as a sign that his transformation is beginning. He sits down at his computer. And he starts to write one of his very good daily emails, to promote his personal brand as a self-development and career coach.

Right now, Tom is considering taking a mindset workshop he is currently giving live to his colleagues at Lloyds Bank, and turning that into something he could offer to his list as well.

He’s considering it… but he’s not decided yet. As he asked me:

“How should I think about testing the idea first by asking my list if they’re interested in a training like this in the first place. When would you test first rather than just launch the offer?”

It’s a good question. My thoughts are these:

It makes sense to simply launch an offer if 1) it won’t cost you anything to do so or 2) you want to create the offer for its own sake.

For example, my upcoming promo training — still don’t have a better name than that — fits both of these criteria.

​​This training will be delivered live, and won’t cost me anything to launch. If nobody signs up, I don’t have to spend any time, money, or effort preparing it or delivering it.

But the fact is, I will prepare it and deliver it even if I’m only doing so for myself.

That’s because this training has value to me long term — as a template for my own work, as a potential future product to sell, as a way of getting consulting or even DFY clients, if I can find that needle in a haystack.

On the other hand, it makes sense to test out an offer idea if 1) it will cost you to launch it and 2) you don’t want to just create it for its own sake. This is also the case if you have multiple good options for a new offer to create.

For example, I’m considering creating a little ebook or lead magnet to talk about the FREE Formula I describe in part 3 of my Age of Insight training.

The content is largely already there. Still, it would take me some more time to pull it all together, polish it up, and provide extra examples. Also, this FREE Formula idea is hardly the only thing I could create to work as a lead magnet.

So over the next couple of days, I’ll run some ads to see if the thing has any legs, or if it doesn’t, like a viper waiting in the grass to spring on me.

So there you go:

I’ll have more info on the promo training for sure, and maybe a better name, soon.

I might also have more info on FREE Formula soon. Or I might not.

​​And now you know why, and maybe that can help you if you too are considering launching a new offer.

Meanwhile, I can only point you to the one lead magnet I currently have.

This lead magnet has worked very well for me for years now. It’s brought and continues to bring in a small but steady and valuable stream of new leads, many of whom have become great customers.

​​If you’d like to get it yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Announcing: Copy Riddles Lite

by

Starting today, and ending this Thursday, I am offering something I’m calling Copy Riddles Lite.

Before I tell you the what of Copy Riddles Lite, let me tell you the why:

I realize that $997 — the price of Copy Riddles — is a big investment. Even if you have the money, it can be an obstacle. And if you don’t have the money, then it’s a real obstacle.

So my goal is twofold. First, to show you the Copy Riddles way, so you can experience it yourself, and see for yourself that Copy Riddles is a worthwhile investment, if you have any ambition of owning high-level copywriting skills.

Goal two is that Copy Riddles Lite is supremely valuable as a standalone training. If you cannot afford the full Copy Riddles course, or you can afford it but you decide for some unfathomable reason that you do not want it, then Copy Riddles Lite has value on its own, and much more than what I am charging.

Now we get to the what:

Copy Riddles Lite includes one of the 20 rounds included in the full Copy Riddles program.

I specifically chose a round that comes early in the full Copy Riddles program, on a copywriting topic that most people know of… but very few do well.

The round is composed of two parts, in which you practice writing sales bullets, and compare what you wrote to what an A-list copywriter wrote starting with the same prompt.

In the first part of the round, I also give you my analysis of the fine points of how A-list copywriters do their magic.

In the second part, I show you this aspect of copywriting in real practice, in real live ads, headlines, body copy, emails, content.

Two more things inside Copy Riddles live:

The full Copy Riddles program also includes 3 bonus lessons. I included one of those bonus lessons in Copy Riddles Lite as well.

The full Copy Riddles program also includes references to some of the best places I’ve found for the A-list sales letters and the source material they were selling. I’ve included that in Copy Riddles Lite as well.

So if after going through Copy Riddles Lite, you don’t wanna pay me for the full Copy Riddles program, and you want to cobble it together yourself, you can.

I only want to sell you the full Copy Riddles if 1) you experience the value in Copy Riddles Lite and you want more and 2) you value your time and my expertise enough to pay me the remainder, rather than attempt to replicate it yourself.

And now for the price:

Copy Riddles Lite contains a little less than 10% of the total content of the full Copy Riddles program, so I’ve priced it at a little less than 10% of the total price.

You can get Copy Riddles Lite for $97 today, tomorrow, or on Thursday.

If you go through and decide you want the full Copy Riddles program, I also include a coupon code, good for a limited time, for the full value of Copy Riddles Live to apply to the full Copy Riddles program.

I’m launching this offer today on a whim. I will close it this Thursday, Feb 1, at 8:31pm CET.

​​I have no idea if I will ever open it again. I may or I may not. That’s not just a bluff. If you’ve been on my list a while, you’ll know I have had plenty of one-off offers, never to be repeated, for reasons of my own.

All that’s to say, if you’re interested, you can buy Copy Riddles Lite below. The link will take you to a bare order form, and no sales page. If that don’t deter you:

https://bejakovic.com/crl

Learning from hecklers and refunders

by

Comedian Norm MacDonald once started a standup show when a heckler in the audience yelled out:

“Hey, you’re not very funny!”

The crowd, all of whom where there to see Norm, started booing the heckler. One guy yelled, “Toss the asshole out!”

Norm calmed the crowd down. “Now hold on,” he said. He wanted to understand what exactly happened. And he started talking to the heckler.

“So you go, ‘I’m gonna pay money to go see this dude…’ I want to understand what exactly happened. At some point in your life, you thought I was funny.”

The past couple days, I promoted Andrew Kap’s book, 3 Words I Used To Sell 100,000 Books. I even gave away a couple free bonuses to people who bought that book.

A lot of people took me up on the offer. They wrote in to say thanks for turning them on to Andrew’s book, and to ask for the bonuses I had promised.

Among all these people was one guy who first wrote me with proof of buying the book and then, before I could reply with the bonuses, wrote me a second message to say:

===

I gave back the title, I’m sorry. Didn’t really apply to me. Don’t want to scam you for the bonuses.

Sorry, really like your stuff though.

===

It’s standard daily email operating procedure to shame people who refund stuff or who say they can’t get value out of a valuable offer. It’s even common to toss them off your list.

But I thought, good on this guy for realizing eventually this doesn’t apply to him… and even more so for having the decency to write me and say so.

Still, just like Norm, I told myself, I want to understand what exactly happened here.

My email went out at 8:34pm.

My reader read my email and got excited. He bought the book immediately. By 9:00pm, he got the confirmation email from Amazon, forwarded it to me, and asked for the bonuses. Even though, as he realized over the next few minutes, this book or the bonuses or the promises didn’t really apply to him.

How exactly does this happen?

Clearly, the promo nature of my email had something to do with it. The deadline… the disappearing bonuses… the exciting, opportunity-like promises of it all.

But here’s the point, the message from this email:

Those things — deadlines, bonuses, exciting promises — are rooms in the house of persuasion. The house itself is built on a foundation. And that foundation is either stable and strong, or shifting and weak.

The foundation is trust. In my case, trust built up by daily emailing.

That’s how people find out in the first place about offers I create and deadlines I set. That’s how they get excited about the disappearing bonuses I announce and exciting promises I make.

Getting people to trust you like this is nothing mysterious or difficult.

It’s just a matter of consistency.

Like I said, in my case, that’s via daily emails. For years now. And though my offers change, and daily email topics change, and even my own attitudes change, there’s still some consistent core that people can rely on and trust.

You can do the same.

The longer you do it, the better. But it doesn’t have to take years to build up trust. It can be done in months, weeks, days, or sometimes even hours, if you say the right things.

But it all starts with saying something, and then doing so again, in some regular, consistent way.

My introductory offer — the least expensive course I offer — is an introduction to writing daily emails, called Simple Money Emails.

I’ve used the techniques in this course to write quick emails for clients that made lots of money.

But more importantly, I’ve used them for myself to create long-running relationships that lead to trust, engagement, and urgent sales like the above.

If you’d like to find out how you can do something similar, then take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Fish finder business Cinderella story

by

Here’s a Cinderella story you might like and even profit from:

A guy named Yank Dean (yes, real name) started a new company called Hummingbird.

Hummingbird sold an innovative product — a sonar-based fish finder for recreational fisherman. Previously, such fish finders were only available to commercial fishermen.

Quickly, sales shot up to $6 million a year.

Dean estimated the market for his product was $50 million a year. But Hummingbird couldn’t get past that $6 mil limit.

They interviewed and observed customers. They came up with nine new, better variations of the fish finder. The spent time and money on marketing.

And sales still wouldn’t budge. This drove the company close to bankruptcy.

And then one day, a woman working for Hummingbird, Sue Symon, was hanging out at a Bass Pro Shop. She saw another woman reaching for Hummingbird’s fish finder.

“Excuse me,” Symon asked, “what are you buying?”

The other woman replied:

“I don’t care. My husband takes me and the kids out on the boat on the weekends and it’s boring as hell. The kids go crazy. I thought maybe one of these would at least keep them entertained.”

Symon went back to her fish finder overlords and suggested that maybe they are in the wrong business. They thought they were in the fish-finding business. Maybe they are in the entertaining-kids-and-wives business.

The fish finder execs were convinced to give it a go. After all, the company was all but bankrupt.

So they stripped out lots of features from their product. They made it easier and more fun to use. They started selling where kids and wives might see it.

Result:

The first year after the change, Hummingbird went from selling $6 million of its sonar fish finder to selling $75 million of its wife and kid entertainment stations. At the peak, they sold $120 million in a year.

​​The end.

Nice story, right?

​​One of those inspirational and yet useless business case studies.

The conclusion to such case studies is usually one of:

​​Think outside the box…

​​You might not be in the business you think you’re in…

​​Give a man a fish, you feed yourself for a day… teach him how to keep his kids from screaming and his wife from nagging, and you feed yourself for a lifetime.

But how do you possibly recreate something like the Hummingbird story in your own business?

I don’t know. But I know somebody who might know.

His name is Merrick Furst. Once upon a time, he was the dean of the computer science school at Carnegie Mellon. Now he is the Director of the Center for Deliberate Innovation at Georgia Tech.

Basically, using his large brain and his mathematical and CS skills, Furst tries to answer such questions as, “Is this a good idea? And if not, could it be a good idea somewhere else? And if not, what might be a better idea? And how can we systematize this?”

Here’s why I’m telling you this:

Along with a few other smart, oversuccessful people, Furst has written a new book. That’s where I got the story above.

I haven’t read more of this book yet except this story (the book was published 3 days ago).

But if you’re in business… if you create innovative offers… if you want to maximize your chances of making something like $120 million with a change of approach that might be systematizeable… then the following book might be worth a read:

https://bejakovic.com/furst

Announcing: pre-Black Friday Copy Riddles stable price

by

Day 2 of The Copywriter Club live event in London.

​​I’m trying to finish all my work — this newsletter, plus my health newsletter which goes out each Thursday — before 9am so I don’t have to lug my laptop to the conference venue.

​​Fortunately, a reader writes in:

===

Hi John,

Greetings!

Are you planning to make a Black Friday/Cyber Monday offer, especially of your Copy Riddles course?

The reason I ask is so that I can start saving for it and blissfully ignore other offers.

===

The grand answer is no, I’m not planning any kind of Black Friday offer on Copy Riddles or any of my other courses. In case you’re curious, here are two reasons why:

For one thing, I don’t know when Black Friday falls. Maybe there are ways around this significant obstacle. But even if there are, the following obstacle remains…

Black Friday typically means discounts. And several years ago, I copied and adopted, without shame or remorse, Daniel Throssell’s policy of not running sales or discounting offers down from an established price.

My reasoning is simple:

I sell expensive offers to a small batch of dedicated buyers. I never want one of these buyers to open a new email from me and be faced with a cheerful message, informing them that a course they bought from me now costs hundreds of dollars less — “Haha, sucks for you, shoulda waited for Black Friday!”

I’ve consulted clients who run regular discounts to large lists. They say they’ve never ever gotten a complaint from earlier buyers about a new sale.

I can believe it. But I still won’t do it. I can imagine that if I found myself on the other end of such a deal, I wouldn’t complain either, but I would still feel soured. And I would think twice when buying the next time.

One of the greatest copywriters of all time, Robert Collier, once said that the most effective appeal he knew to get people to buy is to say, “The price is going up.”

Well, the price of Copy Riddles is not going up, at least today. (It’s also not going down, today, tomorrow, or ever.)

So the only urgency I can appeal to today is if you actually plan to go through this course and profit from it.

The sooner you buy it, the sooner you can go through it, and the sooner you will take your copywriting skills to a new level. If you do this honestly, it will be worth much more to you than any discount on this course that I could offer. In case you would like to get started now:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

You don’t want to sell to a hobbit like me

by

Last week, I, Bejako Baggins, was minding my own business, tanning my large and hairy hobbit feet by the fireside, when a wizard burst through the doors of my hobbit-hole and announced in his deep voice:

“Bejako Baggins — You are experiencing a huge deliverability problem my friend!”

Now we hobbits are peace-loving creatures. We shy away from noise and adventure.

Besides, only a week earlier I had sent another such wizard away from my doorstep.
​
​I’d even written a little circular letter, which I sent to my readers all over Middle Earth, explaining how I take no thought for deliverability beyond writing interesting stuff that other hobbits and elves and men want to read.

But this wizard would not be denied. He towered over me, his peak hat reaching to the ceiling, his arms above his head. And he thundered:

===

Listen mate, I love your copywriting style!

I subscribed because of that, but this problem is stopping you from more envelope opens & a higher number of return letters

Therefore, wiping out thousands of silver coins to be made from your work

I discovered this deliverability problems out of curiosity as your intro circular letter got delayed

Now, I’m 100% confident I can fix this problem for you… and I will NOT be charging you! (FREE)

Instead, Once I fixed this issue for you, and you’re satisfied with my service. I would hope if you can refer me (at any time) to someone else who’s facing a deliverability problem

===

I have to admit that my little hobbit heart started pounding. Not because of the threat that my letters were not getting delivered or opened — I have reason to believe I’m doing well.

But I was intrigued by the wizard’s offer — free, fixed for me, no risk or effort required by my peace-loving hobbit body.

I thought for a moment. Then I smiled and I said, “Ok wizard, you are on. If you can improve my letter deliverability, I will happily promote you to anyone who comes asking for such services.”

The wizard immediately suggested we schedule a council meeting, tomorrow morning, down by the large oak tree, to discuss what our adventure will entail.

I frowned at this. It sounded like it would eat into second breakfast. “Just tell me what you have to tell me now,” I asked him.

So he tried. “First,” he said, “you will have to get a new address from which to send your circular letters. You can still live and write in this hobbit-house, but your letters will be sent as though they are coming from somewhere else.”

“That’s more trouble than I need,” I told him.

The wizard nodded and then stroked his beard. “Well, you can keep your address, but you can go and find a new letter-delivery fellowship.”

“Yeah that’s not gonna happen either,” I said.

The wizard was starting to get concerned. “Well, there’s one last thing you could do. You could pay for a dedicated letter-delivery satchel, to make sure your letters aren’t getting stuck to any other letters, or maybe getting thrown out with them.”

I got up from the fireside, and escorted the wizard to the door.

I appreciated the effort he had put in. But all of this sounded like work. It also sounded risky, and like it might create a problem where I really didn’t have one, or at least where I didn’t worry about one.

I could hear the wizard muttering into his beard as he stepped outside into the night. “Fool of a hobbit…”

But what to do? That’s how my race is.

That’s why I say you don’t want to sell to a hobbit like me. Even if you have a solid sales message (“HUGE deliverability issue, costing you many silver coins!”) and a great offer (“free and fixed for you”), you will most probably just end up wasting your time.

In the Shire we like to sing an old hobbit tune:

“First is the list, then comes the offer,
Last good copy, and then a full coffer”

So if you don’t yet have a good list and offer handled, then my advice is to focus on those first, in that order.

But if you have both a good list and a good offer… then you know what else we hobbits like, besides peace and comfort?

The only kind of excitement and challenge we are ever really after?​​

​​Maybe you guessed it. And if not, well, you can get the answer at the following page:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/