Offers

The best way to market your old course

by

In the virtual pages of this daily email newsletter, I’ve gone back over and over to an article by James Altucher, titled, I Plagiarized And You Can, Too!

I’ve written about James’s core idea several times already. I won’t repeat it today. But I will point out the interesting 12 words of advice with which James ends his article:

“The best way to market your first book? Write your next book.”

That’s how the cookie crumbles, book-wise. But what about course-wise?

For the last few days, I’ve been promoting my Copy Riddles course.

This is the third time I am promoting this course at the current price in the past 6 months.

And yet, during this run, over just a few days, I’ve made more sales of Copy Riddles than I did over several weeks of promotion earlier.

The difference is I’ve announced this is the last week to get the free bonuses that come with Copy Riddles.

At the end of this week, I will remove the free bonuses, expand them, and turn them into paid upsells.

So the best way to market your old course?

​​Take your free bonuses and convert them into an upsell funnel. And then advertise that fact well to your audience.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. The candle is burning down. The hourglass is noiselessly draining away.

The free bonuses for Copy Riddles will disappear this Saturday Jan 21, at 12 midnight PST.

The first bonus is Storytelling For Sales. The second bonus is Copywriting Portfolio Secrets.

Don’t buy Copy Riddles just for the free bonuses.

But the majority of people who bought Copy Riddles over these past few days have been on my list for a while.

That makes me think they’ve been eyeing Copy Riddles for a while.

If, like them, you’ve been weighing up Copy Riddles for a similar while, you have until Saturday to get the whole package, free bonuses included. You can do that at the link below:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Announcing: Son of Most Valuable Postcard

by

Last year — not meaning yesterday, but actually 12 months ago — I set three themes for myself.

A theme is an idea I got from James Altucher. It’s a general direction to move in, unlike a goal, which is more like a destination to arrive at by a specific time. Themes work for me, goals don’t.

Anyways, one of my 2022 themes was “offers”. And I did well with that. By my count, I made over a dozen different offers last year to this list alone.

The most unique of those offers was my Most Valuable Postcard.

Each month, for all of two months, I sent a postcard from a new place with a short greeting and a URL. The URL took you to a secret website, where you would find my in-depth treatment of one fundamental marketing or copywriting topic for that month.

Subscribers loved the Most Valuable Postcard.

I hated it.

I hated walking around in the summer sun trying to find nice-looking postcards. I hated addressing and writing them by hand.

​​I hated the pressure of finishing up the actual content each month and making it great before the first postcards started arriving.

​​I hated the fact that the postcards didn’t arrive reliably and that I had to resend many of them.

So I killed the Most Valuable Postcard off. Subscribers sighed and said they saw it coming.

But now, the Most Valuable Postcard is back. In a way.

The core concept of the Most Valuable Postcard is something I find too valuable to let go. Like I said, it’s to take a fundamental marketing idea and go deep. As copywriter Dan Ferrari wrote a while back:

===

Learning fundamentals and mastering fundamentals are two different things. Sorry to break it to you, in my experience, ~80% of copywriters NEVER reach mastery. The simple explanation is they have NO idea how much deeper they can go. That’s too bad because all it takes is a willingness to put the SCUBA gear on and explore the depths.

===

​So my plan is to go deep, write more Most Valuable Postcards, and put them inside the members-only area of my site.

There won’t be a physical postcard any more, but the website content will have the same format as before.

There also won’t be a monthly subscription, but I will sell the postcards individually, whenever I put them out.

To start, I’m selling the first Most Valuable Postcard, which so far only went out to those first 20 people who managed to sign up last summer.

But I am only selling this offer to people who are on my email list. In case you are interested in my Most Valuable Postcard, or simply want to read my emails as I write them every day, click here to sign up to my newsletter.

The old future of new newsletters

by

I’m a regular reader of Simon Owen’s Tech and Media Newsletter — it’s an insightful rag. For example:

A few weeks ago, Owens wrote a piece about the future of new media startups, and what those will look like.

He made five predictions. One of those was “niche editorial products.”

Here’s a relevant bit from Owens’s article, where he is writing about Axios, a conglomerate of email newsletters (free and paid) that sold for a thumping $525 million back in August:

What most impressed me about the company was how it simultaneously managed to be a general interest news site while also funneling its audience into niche verticals, making it much easier for it to deliver highly targeted advertising and industry-specific subscription products.

In other words, Axios offers general and free newsletters on the front-end… and specific and expensive newsletters on the back end.

When you put it like that, this ain’t nothing new:

1. Write something like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Give it away for free or sell it for $0.46 on Kindle.

2. And then, to the people who bought the book, sell something like the Dale Carnegie Institute’s High Impact Presentations corporate training, which consists of two in-person sessions, and costs $2,195.

So Owens’s prediction might not be new, but it’s still a good reminder for each new generation and each new technology.

And it’s something I’m thinking about, especially in the context of email newsletters. If you have a highly niched offer, it might be something for you to think about also.

Meanwhile, let me remind you that this basic idea is not just about offers. The same idea actually applies to copywriting, marketing, and effective communication of all types.

In fact, everything I’ve just told you is related to “chunking up”, which is the first big and new copywriting insight I had by looking at the bullets of A-list copywriters.

The way I describe it inside my Copy Riddles program, “chunking up” allows you to expand your market 3x, 5x, or more.

Which goes to show:

Once you learn the essence of effective communication — once you learn to make interesting and attractive appeals — you can then apply that from a single sales bullet all the way up to the core structure of a $525-million business like Axios.

Perhaps you’re curious to learn more. Perhaps you want specific examples from print ads, video sales letters, and paperback books.

Perhaps you even want to practice chunking up yourself, so next time you try to get your message or offer across, it comes naturally.

You can do all that, and more, if you buy Copy Riddles, which I am currently selling. For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Last chance to send $100…

by

Legend says that, once upon a time, in various Midwestern states, an enterprising carny pitchman took out ads in local newspapers that read:

LAST CHANCE TO SEND $1
to PO Box 210, 60611 Chicago, IL

There was no reason given why the reader should send in $1 or whether he would get anything for it.

And yet, the ad supposedly drew in many dollar bills before the postal service guys caught on and put a stop to it.

In other news:

Yesterday, copywriter Van Chow, who bought my Most Valuable Email course, wrote me to say:

Hey John,

I love this course, I bet some money to see if it still talks about boring stuff like AIDA or PAS.

But I was surprised, I had never heard of this concept before.

I think this would help my journey and I’ll practice more of it.

Btw, do I still have a chance to get the bonus?

The answer is yes, there is still time to get the “mystery box” bonus offer that’s inside the MVE training. But time is running out.

In fact, today is your last chance to send me $100… and to get my Most Valuable Email course, and to still get the “mystery box” bonus.

Tomorrow, the Most Valuable Email course will keep being available. But as of 9am CET tomorrow, Friday Oct 7, the bonus offer will go away.

I won’t give you reasons why you might want this mystery bonus offer, or what’s inside it.

But if you want to see what else you get for your $100 — no AIDA or PAS — you can do that at the link below. And if the core MVE offer sounds attractive to you, then it might make sense to get it before the “mystery box” bonus disappears.

​​In any case, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Post-mortem of my MVE launch

by

As I write this, it’s 11:47am in Spain, which means that some 2 hours and 47 minutes ago, I ended my Most Valuable Email launch.

Whenever I complete a project, I like to force myself to look at the dead hulk, lying there on the ground, and ask myself what I see. Sometimes this triggers insights in my little head which I can use on future projects.

So here are 10 curious things I saw during my MVE launch. Maybe one of them will give you an insight you too can use on a future project:

1. 72.5% of my buyers during this launch had signed up for my free Most Valuable Email presentation back in June. I’m not sure how many watched that free presentation. But there’s a good chance that many who bought this MVE training actually knew my MVE trick ahead of time.

2. 68% of people who bought my Most Valuable Email Swipes offer back in June bought the full MVE course now. (As I wrote earlier, I made these folks a special offer as a way of saying thanks.)

2. Around 4.7% of my entire list bought the MVE training. Is that a good number? A bad number? Does it mean anything? I wish somebody could tell me.

3. I won’t spell out the exact money I earned from this launch. But I will tell you it took me more than two years working as a freelance copywriter to make this much money in a month. And it took me three years working as freelance copywriter before I made this much money regularly each month.

4. While the money I made from this MVE launch was nothing to cough, sniffle, or sneeze at, it was still significantly less than each time I have had a Copy Riddles launch, even with drastically fewer buyers. The reasons are obvious. The MVE training is at a lower price point and has no upsell right now. Maybe there’s a lesson there.

5. For the first time ever, sales came more or less evenly throughout the launch period, and weren’t all bunched up right before the deadline. I’m not sure what that’s about.

6. I saw a spike in sales after each email I sent, even in the middle of the 9-email launch sequence. Which tells me I should have sent more emails.

7. The vast majority of people who bought MVE bought something from me previously (Copy Riddles, Influential Emails, Most Valuable Postcard). I don’t have an easy way to see the exact number, but I would say around 80%.

8. Around 1.1% of my list unsubscribed during the 4-day, 9-email launch. For reference, I had the same number of unsubscribes over the 10 days prior to the launch, so you could say my unsubscribe rate was roughly double the usual. The email that got the most unsubscribes was “Brutally discriminatory practices surrounding my Most Valuable Email launch.”

10. I ended the launch with more email subscribers than I started with. In spite of increased unsubscribes, I also saw a spike in new subscribers, on top of the usual optins.

And the really curious part starts:

Because the whole reason I created this Most Valuable Email was that I wanted evergreen offers I can end my daily emails with.

So while my launch is over, the Most Valuable Email offer continues to be available, without the launch discount.

I can tell you price will never decrease from this point, only possibly increase.

So if you didn’t buy the Most Valuable Email training during the launch period, and you’re curious what it’s about, you can find out here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Dr. Bejako the sadistic dentist goes to work on the “mystery box” bonus

by

Long-time readers of this newsletter might know I’m a big fan of screenwriter William Goldman. Goldman won two screenwriting Oscars, one for Butch Cassidy and another for All The President’s Men.

​​He also wrote The Princess Bride.

​​And of course, Goldman wrote Marathon Man, which starred Sir Laurence Olivier in the role of the sadistic dentist Dr. Szell (“Is it safe?”).

I thought of Dr. Szell because I’ve never before been compared to a dentist, but it finally happened today.

​​Author and copywriter Angie Archer, who not only took me up on my Most Valuable Email offer, but was one of the first to take me up on the free but valuable, time-limited offer included inside MVE, wrote me to say:

This feels like a trip to the dentist.

I know it’ll be good for me, but…

Here, before I talk myself out of it, is [Angie taking me up on my ‘mystery box’ offer].

You might not know what a “mystery box” offer is.

It’s an idea I got from marketer Rich Schefren. Rich once offered a “mystery box” upsell for $29. He didn’t say what was in the box, only that the buyer should trust him, and his claim that the box is worth at least 10x the asking price.

Rich’s “mystery box” upsell converted at a crazy 78% — 2x or 3x what a typical upsell will do. What’s more, Rich says the offer got zero negative chargebacks, and ended up forming a segment of his best customers.

So a mystery box might be worth experimenting with in your own marketing. You just gotta be firm, and not give in, and not tell people what’s inside the box.

That’s what I won’t tell you what my MVE “mystery box” offer is. I will just say it is very valuable, more so than the price of this course, and that it’s something I probably won’t keep up for very long.

So if you are interested in taking me up on the Most Valuable Email and the free but valuable, time-limited mystery box offer it contains, it might make sense to act now.

​​The launch period is coming to an end in a few hours time, at 12 midnight PST tonight. After that deadline, the price will go up. If you’d like to get in before then:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

My superior MVE guarantee that trumps Gary Halbert and John Carlton

by

In my email from two days ago, I shared John Carlton’s “Notorious ’20 Clicks’ Report’. This report collected, in shorthand format, 20 of Gary Halbert’s “first-choice” marketing tactics.

​​In that email, I said this report is potentially the most valuable thing I will ever share in this newsletter.

Most valuable, yes. But not necessarily new.

For example, “Click 20” in the report is pretty standard marketing advice you’ve probably heard a thousand and one times:

“Reverse the risk — you shoulder all the risk, so buyer is ‘covered'”

Gary H. advised his clients to offer longer guarantee periods… 30-day holds on checks… even double-your-money-back guarantees.

Bah, I say. That’s kids’ stuff. It pales in comparison to how much risk I am willing to shoulder with my Most Valuable Email offer. It goes like this:

1. If you like my emails, find them insightful, and want to write something similar…

2. If you already have or are willing to start an email list about marketing or copywriting…

3. If you have read or at least skimmed my sales page, or what there is of it, so you have a clear understanding of what my offer is, what the price is, and what my promises to you are at that price…

… if and only if all three of these are true… then I guarantee the Most Valuable Email is for you. You will find it both fun and valuable.

On the other hand:

If you don’t fulfil any of the above three conditions… or you don’t know me too well… or you don’t trust me too much… or you have general vague doubts or uneasy feelings about taking me up on my MVE offer… or you want to “test drive” the content to see if it’s right for you… or, best of all, if you have been studying copy for years and have seen it all and are determined that unless I show you something new within the first 2 minutes then you will demand a refund…

Then I 100% guarantee the Most Valuable Email training is NOT for you. Don’t buy it, and save yourself, and even more importantly, save me, a bit of headache and frustration.

How’s that for shouldering risk?

After all, Gary H. and John C. were willing to take on all the risk — up to but not including risking the actual sale.

On the other hand, I am willing to risk you will not buy at all from me if this offer is not right for you.

Maybe that seems silly, or counter to the basic principles of greed-gland marketing. That’s okay. I feel it will serve me well in the long run.

Anyways, now you know what I guarantee when it comes to the Most Valuable Email.

And if you meet criteria 1 and 2 above, and you are interested in this training, then all that’s left for you is to read or at least skim my sales page so you can meet criterion 3.

If you want to do that now, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

The trouble with selling prostitute interviews you gave away for free

by

About six months ago, I wrote an email about a prurient new obsession I had developed with the YouTube channel Soft White Underbelly.

Soft White Underbelly features thousands of in-depth interviews with people on the outside of mainstream society:

Drug addicts… homeless people… prostitutes… escorts… child abuse victims… inbred Appalachian families… gang members… a high-level mob boss… a strychnine-drinking Pentecostal preacher… a conman who ran real-estate frauds totaling in the tens of millions of dollars.

Then, a couple days ago, I read that YouTube had demonetized Soft White Underbelly.

​​SFU videos are still available to watch on YouTube. But they won’t come with any ads, and so they won’t make any money for Mark Laita, the photographer behind the Soft White Underbelly channel.

I tried to do some back-of-the-envelope math for how much money that actually was.

Over the past 30 days, Soft White Underbelly had a bit more than 12M views. Using the low-end rate of $3/1k YouTube views, that comes out to $36,000 over those 30 days, or about $430k per year.

That’s a sizeable chunk of cash to disappear from one day to the next.

My point?

I guess I could tell you the same old story, one you’ve probably heard a million times before:

Don’t rely on anybody else’s platform. Have your own platform — such as an email list — which you control.

The trouble is, Mark Laita already has that. He has his own site, where you can subscribe for $8/month to get all that stuff that’s on YouTube, plus some “exclusive content” in the form of more videos exactly like the stuff that’s on YouTube.

The welcome video to the SFU YouTube channel invites you to subscribe on the paid site. And in that video about being demonetized, Mark also tells people who can afford to do so to get the paid subscription.

Will that replace the income from YouTube?

I have my doubts, for several reasons. The most important reason is this:

It’s hard to sell the exact same thing you’re giving away for free. It’s even harder to sell it there’s a bunch of your free stuff still lying around.

That’s just human nature.

Laziness. Entitlement. Plus, a bit of common sense. If there are already thousands of prurient Soft White Underbelly videos on YouTube, most of which I haven’t watched, why should I pay to get a few more each month?

But here’s what I would tell Mark Laita, and maybe you, if you’re in a similar situation:

This is not really a big problem.

Because it’s easy to sell a slightly different thing to what you’re giving away for free. You can even sell almost the exact same thing, only renamed and repackaged in a sexy way.

So for example, Mark Laita has thousands of video interviews. Instead of selling more of the same, he could repackage some of that content in a different ways:

* He could sell a coffee table book of photography — stills from his videos. (He already has these photos in the videos themselves.)

* He could sell transcripts, packaged up as fancy printed books, or low-end kindle ebooks.

* He could create “themed documentaries” which are really his different videos pasted together. The effect of absentee fathers… the drug scene in east LA… massage parlor confessions.

Of course, there are also many other things Mark could sell congruently on the back end of his YouTube Channel. The above are just a few ideas for things he could sell with practically no additional thought or work.

So like I said, that’s my advice for you too, in case you create a lot of content, which isn’t making you money direct now.

Take that free content, repacakge it, rename it, and stick a (preferably large) price tag on it.

People will buy it, and get value out of it, even if you gave it away for free before.

Of course, maybe you are too close to your own content to see how it could be repackaged or renamed in the most sexy and profitable way. You might be able to find some good ideas on that in my free daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up for it.

Ben Settle’s secret three-act content strategy revealed

by

A few days ago, I sent out an email with the subject line:

“Ben Settle emergency emails in support of Copy Riddles?”

That email officially had the highest open rate of all my emails over the past 10 days. I don’t know if that was because of the subject line. But for my own reasons, I will run with it and pander to your apparent tastes, by telling you a three-act Ben Settle story:

Back in 2016, Ben released a tiny Kindle book titled, Persuasion Secrets of the World’s Most Charismatic & Influential Villains.

The villains book turned into a sleeper hit.

As I write this, the book has 286 Amazon reviews and an Amazon ranking of 42,849. From what I know of Amazon publishing, that means the book continues to sell 4-5 copies every day, six years after its publication.

I reckon the villains book didn’t make Ben a tremendous pile of cash, not directly, not compared to other parts of his business.

But it almost certainly got him a large and constant new source of highly qualified leads. And it certainly gave him positioning and exposure in the direct response industry.

For a while, everyone associated Ben with the villains concept. It truly made him unique. And this probably led many more highly qualified leads trudging towards his hut, banging on his door, and demanding to be sold something.

So what did Ben do next? Perhaps you know act two. In 2018, he released Persuasion Villains, volume II.

Act three came in 2019. That’s when Ben released Persuasion Villains, volume III.

Which brings us to the present day and a tweet I came across a few days ago.

The tweet was written by one Matt Koval, who was apparently a big face at YouTube for over 10 years. Koval was the one whipping those early and confused YouTubers into the all-consuming media machine that YouTube has become.

Anways, Koval was tweeting in response to some YouTube influencer’s new video, and he wrote:

“One of the earliest pieces of content strategy advice we used to give at @YouTube was to try and turn your viral hit into a whole series – and it’s great to see @RyanTrahan do just that. It’s a TON of work, but no doubt a huge boost to his channel.”

But really, what is Koval’s “series” idea more than the standard DR practice of testing out different sales appeals in your ads? And then doubling down on the winners, for as long as they continue to pay for themselves?

As far as I know, Ben isn’t releasing any more villains books. This probably means he has milked this franchise to the point where putting out a new villains book isn’t worth the opportunity cost.

But maybe you’ve had a hit idea that you haven’t milked dry yet. Whether in your YouTube videos, Kindle books, or email subject lines. So rather than trying to be creative and have an all-new hit, turn your proven hit into a series.

In other news:

As I write this, I only have one Kindle book out there, my 10 Commandments book.

The 10 Commandments book hasn’t been as much of a success as Ben’s original villains book. But it has sold a lot of copies, and it continues to make sales. More importantly, it continues to drive highly qualified prospects to my email list.

And who knows? Maybe I will take my own advice.

Maybe I will lumber up the mountain, get a few more stone tablets of copywriting commandments, and write a second installment in this series.

Meanwhile, if you still haven’t read volume I, here’s where you can get your very own copy:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Teach a man to fish, and he will pay you for framed photos of the lunkers you have caught

by

Over the past days and months, I keep mentioning an old talk given by IM guru Jeff Walker. At one point in the talk, Jeff says something that sounds perverse:

“Teach a man to fish… and he will ask you for a fish sandwich.”

This only sounds perverse until you realize Jeff is speaking from experience.

Specifically, he’s talking about all the business owners who bought his Product Launch Formula, realized it would take too much work to implement, but also realized the value it would bring to their businesses. These many business owners came back to Jeff and said, “Can’t you just do this for me, Jeff? I’ll pay you.”

Also over the past days and months, I’ve seen a lot of discussion in my inbox about the problem of moving the free line. Giving away your best stuff for free, instead of charging for it.

And I can imagine there really is a problem. That is, if you just sit there, wishin’ and hopin’ for people to pay you for more of what you just gave them for free.

After all, who wants to pay for the same thing that they just got for free?

On the other hand, like Jeff says, people might be ready to pay for something very much like what you just gave them, only stuck in between two slices of white bread.

That’s what Jeff did, and he did it the smart way.

First, he sold his audience a fishing guide, called The Product Launch Formula. And then he sold it to them again, repositioned as a fish-sandwich-making franchise, which he called Product Launch Manager.

I also did it. But I did it in an unsmart way. I only sold my thing once, instead of three times.

Specifically, I showed people how to fish, in different ponds, rivers, and seas, and I did this for free.

Then I made a video presentation about the best fishing strategy I have personally found. I gave that away for free as well.

Then I made a framed collection of the most impressive lunkers I’ve personally caught using that strategy, and I put that up for sale.

In case my fish metaphor is running away with me, let me bring this back into the marketing plane:

I’m talking about my Most Valuable Email presentation, which I gave last Wednesday. That free presentation was based on a bunch of emails I have sent to my list over the past few years.

At the end of that presentation, I sold a swipe file of some of my best emails, which I had written using my Most Valuable Email strategy.

A surprising number of people took me up on this offer.

That’s because I turned those emails into something new and (additionally) valuable, by doing the work of collecting all those emails… by bundling them together… and by adding in relevant explanations, some red and yellow highlighting to point out the MVE strategy in action, as well as any fun or interesting context.

So there you go:

Beware moving the free line.

Or don’t. And simply make an attractive new offer.

Speaking of which:

If you registered to watch my Most Valuable Email presentation, then I sent you a recording. You have until end of day today, Pacific time, to watch it and take me up on the offer at the end.

I will be taking both down both the presentation and the offer at 12 midnight PST tonight.

​​Based on the positive responses I’ve gotten to the presentation, and the surprising number of people who took me up on the Most Valuable Email Swipes offer, I’ve decided to bundle this up as an attractive new offer and sell it down the line.

And if you didn’t register for the MVE presentation, then you will have to wait for that attractive new rerelease. Nobody gets into this particular aquarium after the doors close.

And of course, I still have to end this email today with an offer.

If you want to catch more fish, I mean, make more sales, in the ponds and streams of your email list, then I might be able to help. You can start the process by filling out the form below. Just don’t ask me for a fish sandwich. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/consulting