Opportunity Marketing

“Way too biz oppy”

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For the past few days, I’ve been promoting a webinar in which a guy named Josh Rosenberg — previously a big-time ClickBank seller, then a fractional CMO for direct response businesses — lays out his new offer, “AI Super Agent,” which builds out entire info product funnels, all the research, production creation, and copy included.

Lots of people have clicked through to Josh’s offer. A fair number have signed up for the webinar. Some have bought the “AI Super Agent.”

But a good number of people are also skeptical. Here’s a comment I got from a reader:

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Yeah I had the same reaction to his offer. Sounds way too biz oppy. Like every other offer in the “AI gold rush” … seems like only the shovel sellers are making any money.

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There’s no doubt that Josh’s “AI Super Agent” is presented as a business opportunity, starting with the fact it’s sold via webinar, and then continuing to how it’s positioned, argumented, and priced.

Maybe you’ve been burned by a biz opp before, and have simply decided that anything that looks like that is not for you. Fair enough, and I certainly won’t try to change your mind if that’s the case.

If you’re a little less decided, I can repeat what I wrote in an email back in May.

On the one hand, jumping from biz opp to biz opp, in a chase after “passive income” or “almost passive income,” is a sure recipe for staying broke, stressed, and working too hard.

On the other hand, legitimate business opportunities do exist. You won’t know one for sure until you try it and succeed with it.

I’ve personally been sold on biz opps like copywriting, revshare deals with clients, and starting and writing an email list. Each one has ended up making me lots of money and making my life significantly more free.

How to decide if a biz opp has a chance to win you money and freedom, or is likely to keep you further away from them?

In that email back in May, I gave three questions to help you evaluate business opportunities. Let me repeat those now with Josh’s “AI Super Agent” in mind:

#1. “Is this a 5-month plan or are you ok if it turns into a 5-year plan?”

#2. “Are you building up some kind of asset regardless?”

#3. “What happens if the opportunity disappears?”

The only of those questions I can answer for you is #2.

Josh’s gizmo definitely builds up assets for you as long as you keep using it. It gives you info products you can sell that in smart ways, by partnering with clients or audience owners, the way I’ve been talking about the last few days.

But even if you don’t do that, you can sell these info products by running ads to them, or simply publishing them on Amazon and seeing which ones sell on their own.

As for the other two questions, they are yours to decide on.

Will info products as a business opportunity disappear?

Weirder things have happened, and the very tech (AI) that’s making this biz opp possible might in the end also kill it.

(My personal feeling is that people will still be paying for information for at least a few years to come.)

But even if info products do stick around for years, are you ok sticking around info products for years?

Do topics like email lists and sales pages and traffic interest you, or are you hoping to run away from them as soon as possible so you can jump into another biz opp, or into something else entirely?

I cannot answer that for you.

But if you believe that info products have a future, and if you decide it’s a future you are interested in being part of, then Josh’s thing is worth a look, in spite of its “gold rush” biz opp marketing style. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/aisuperagent

Ben Settle: “How to make money in the make money online space”

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Yesterday, I wrote an email in which I quoted email marketer Ben Settle, in order to help me sell Igor Kheifets’s new book Click Send Earn.

Today, I’ll quote Ben again, to the same end:

“Make money online is not an easy market to consistently make money in the way Igor does. If you want to learn from someone how to make money in the make money online space, I can’t recommend Igor enough.”

If you’re eager to find out how Igor makes money consistently in the the “make money online” market — to the tune of several million a year — you can find that laid out in his book Click Send Earn.

I bought and read this book myself before reaching out to Igor and asking to promote it.

I endorse everything he teaches inside, plus I learned new and valuable things myself.

And in case you are not in the “make money online” market, the ideas and personal experiences that Igor shares in his book can be just as profitable for you, whether you’re offering coaching, or selling info products in another niche, or simply looking to grow and monetize an email list as a core part of whatever it is you do.

Igor’s Click Send Earn sells for a mighty $3.99.

Igor has said in private he could sell this info for $97-$297. Having read the book myself, I agree with him, and that’s why I asked him to promote it.

If you would like to grab a copy, so you can read it, and apply it, and profit from it:

https://bejakovic.com/clicksendearn

How to turn $99 courses into $999 offers

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Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a magic spell that turns plain, small, $29 or $99 courses into shiny, exciting, $299 or $999 offers?

The past week, I’ve been trawling the Royalty Ronin community, of which I am a paying member.

I found a curious and old post inside. A lightbulb came on. I had actually written an email on the exact same topic, back in 2021, as a kind of joke, talking about repositioning physical products.

Here’s what I wrote back then:

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If you sell dog clippers today and nobody’s buying, then bundle your clippers with a video. Tell people how to set up their own dog grooming business in their back yard in their spare time.

Charge 10x what the clippers cost… and find yourself in a marketplace of one, instead of a commodity market.

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I suffer from what is known as “copywriter brain,” which is limited in its thinking and reach.

It takes “marketing and business brain” to take the above idea seriously and see its full potential, particularly when applied to info products.

And that’s exactly what I found in that post inside Royalty Ronin. This post talked about this same idea, and it gave a real example involving Travis Sago (the guy who runs Royalty Ronin).

Travis took a course that sold well for $99 and transformed it, successfully and ethically, into a $999 offer that also sold well.

The point being, you don’t have to start from scratch.

If you want to create a big-ticket offer, this doesn’t mean you need big new course content, a big new topic, a big new mechanism.

You can take what you already have, even if it’s only selling now for $29 or $99 or whatever, and reposition it so it becomes a genuine big-ticket offer.

But what if you don’t have even a $29 or $99 offer right now?

That’s ok. Millions of other people do have such offers. And you can start a profitable repositioning business, with your own home as headquarters, by helping such people turn their $29 offers into $299 offers and their $99 offers into $999 offers.

If you want more info or advice or support on how to do all this, then you might be a good fit for Royalty Ronin.

You can sign up for a trial below and see for yourself if it’s for you.

If you do sign up, forward me your welcome email (the one that says “Vroom” in the subject line). I’ll then tell you where to find the post I mentioned above, which lays out how Travis repositions his $99 courses into $999 offers. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

How to evaluate business opportunities

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Last week, I read an article about Samuel Langhorne Clemens, alias Mark Twain. I found the article hard going but I forced myself to push on through. And boy am I glad I did.

Because towards the end, when summing up Twain’s life, the author of the article wrote about all the time Twain spent not-writing, and instead investing in and losing money on various hare-brained business opportunities. Says the article:

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Why did a talent like Twain waste so much time on extraliterary pursuits? The question assumes a distinction he scarcely countenanced between writing and other forms of commercial activity. If there is a constant in his life, it’s his labored obsession with labor-saving. He poured his earnings into schemes meant to spin off money like a perpetual-motion machine.

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That phrase, “labored obsession with labor-saving,” really got to me. It hit home.

So one possible conclusion to this email would be to say that the constant human drive for “labor-saving,” for “almost passive income,” for business opportunities, is what keeps so many people broke, stressed, and working too hard.

Reasonable conclusion.

And yet, business opportunities do exist.

I got into copywriting 10+ years ago because getting paid thousands of dollars to write a sales letter sounded pretty good. And it turned out to be pretty good.

Working on commission with clients and getting paid a share of their profits sounded even better. So I started doing that. It turned out to be even better that straight-up copywriting.

Creating a course that people had already paid for and that I could keep selling sounded still better than working on commission with clients. It turned out to be exactly that way.

So, how do you evaluate possible business opportunities? How do you decide that something is worth diving into? How do you avoid wasting your time, money, and self-respect?

I thought about it. I came up with three questions to ask myself, which maybe you can ask yourself as well:

1. “Is this a 5-month plan or are you ok if it turns into a 5-year plan?”

For example, I hate the very idea of checking charts doing “technical analysis” or trading stocks or other financial vapor. I might be able to force myself to do it for 5 months. There’s no way I could do it for 5 years without throwing myself under a fast-moving train. But the chances that I would be so successful with trading in 5 months’ time that I never have to do it again are nil. Therefore trading, profitable bizopp though it might be, is out for me.

2. “Are you building up some kind of asset regardless?”

I recently thought of running ads to promote affiliate offers. Solid business opportunity, if you have good offers to promote, a good source of traffic, and copywriting skills to bridge the gap.

But what if it still doesn’t work? I have then just spent time and money to run ads to somebody else’s offer, without making money.

The solution in my mind is simple – get those people on a list first before sending them to the affiliate offer. For one, it increase the chances they will buy the affiliate offer in time. But more than that, it turns a black/white business opportunity into a gradually growing asset (an email list) that has value on its own, regardless of whether the direct business opportunity pans out.

3. “What happens if the opportunity disappears?”

I currently have a community on Skool. I was even thinking of starting another one. A lot of people are doing the same. After all, Skool already has a lot of users, plus they make it easy in some ways to run a group in a profitable way.

But what happens when Skool becomes a dumpster fire like Facebook? Or when it shuts down like Clubhouse? Or when it introduces new rules that specifically say, “no Bejakos,” like the r/copywriting subreddit already did?

In that case, I also have the email addresses of everyone in my community. I can simply send them an email and tell them that the community has been moved to a different URL. It would be an inconvenience, but not any kind of failure.

And with that, I have a hot new business opportunity to tell you about, specifically a bridge to sell you.

Well not really. Not even figuratively. All I have is my $4.99 new 10 Commandments book.

The underlying business opportunity there is more effective communication skills.

I don’t know if you’re ok with “more effective communication skills” as a 5-year business plan.

But if you are, it’s an asset that’s only going to build on itself, and one that will never disappear, as long as there are humans and as long as there is business. If you’d like to start investing now:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Magic Cave of Money-Making Opportunities

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I have a new offer for you today.

It’s an affiliate offer, which I’m calling the Magic Cave of Money-Making Opportunities, because it’s been that for me over the past year.

I’ll have more to say about this offer over the coming days.

For now, I’ve recorded a video to try to tempt you into giving it a whirl.

If you’re curious, take a look here:

Magic Cave of Money-Making Opportunities

Pay-what-you-want for a new business opportunity for copywriters

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Last year, I promoted an unusual offer, called ClientRaker, by Steve Raju.

Steve was once a whizbang software engineer, who reinvented himself as a successful direct response copywriter, and who then reinvented himself as an AI consultant.

Steve now charges big businesses good money to tell them how to better use AI. But he does more than that.

Steve is actually using AI to set up commission-only deals with businesses that get tons of lead flow. He sends his little AI minions to reactivate the dormant leads of these businesses, and he gets paid on performance, in amounts that would make a Bond villain take note.

Steve hasn’t put on any kind of training since last year’s ClientRaker — he makes his money in different ways. But this next Wednesday, at 10am Pacific, Steve is putting on a workshop called the Word Is Not Enough (he has a habit of naming offers after Bond movies).

Steve announced this new workshop by teasing some of the content:

* Why most traditional high-ticket offers don’t make sense anymore in the age of AI

* Why most service providers are struggling nowadays

* What you should pivot to

* What hands down the best offer at the end of 2024 actually is

* All the tools you need to offer that

* How to outsource it if you can’t be bothered to do even that

* How to structure deals for the very highest return

I am vaguely interested in learning more about how to use AI.

I am significantly more interested in learning about hot new business opportunities.

I am very interested in hearing Steve talk about what he is doing, particularly how he is positioning himself, how he is adapting to the current market, and how he is finding and structuring new deals.

The copywriting world tends to attract smart people who think different. But there are few copywriters I know who think like Steve does, and who have his credentials for smarts (the man was a legit child progidy, I mean, prodigy).

Steve’s training next week is pay-what-you-want. I’ve signed up, and I’ve paid the suggested $47.

I would like to invite you to sign up as well. I’ll even throw in a bonus, which I’m calling The Secret of the Magi. (If Steve likes to name offers after Bond movies, I name mine after Robert Collier books.)

I don’t know the details of what-all Steve will share in his workshop. But I imagine if you get a new offer you can make to businesses, you will need businesses to make the offer to.

My Secret of the Magi bonus will tell you just one secret related to that — how to open up conversations with people you don’t know, even if they are busy, even if they are rich and successful, and even if they are way above you in status.

Of course, The Secret of the Magi will not work in 100% of cases.

But after observing other people cold contacting me… and after spending this past summer cold contacting a bunch of other people… I’ve had one big takeaway for how to open the door to conversations that can lead to those business partnerships.

I will tell you this takeaway, illustrate it with a few examples, and give you specific instructions on how you can apply it too.

All that inside my Secret of the Magi, which is yours, if you sign up for Steve’s workshop and forward me your receipt by tomorrow, Friday Sep 20, at 12 midnight PST.

Sign up after that, or forward me your receipt after that, and you will be in for Steve’s intriguing workshop, but you won’t get no bonus.

If you wanna get both, the time is now:

​https://bejakovic.com/the-word-is-not-enough​

What color is your Lambo?

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Let’s play a game. But first, let me get the hardcore, XXX marketing lesson out of the way:

One of the crucial parts of an effective sales letter is where you get people to “grasp the advantage.” That’s when you get them to understand what your offer will really do for them, in their own lives, in terms that mean something to them.

In a way, it’s a matter of translation.

For example, let’s take a promise I’ve been making lately, of getting 10-15 new subscribers to your email list each day.

Sounds nice, but really, who cares?

Let’s translate what that could really mean in your own life.

Get 10-15 new subscribers per day, every day, for a year… and you would be sitting on a list of exactly 4,562 and 1/2 human beings who said they want to hear from you.

What’s that worth?

Nobody really knows. I can tell you that an individual subscriber to my own email list has been worth $0 in the months when I didn’t make any offers… all the way to $5-$10+ in months when I had exciting offers and went hard on the promotion.

I’m sure many people have much higher numbers still.

But we gotta pick something. So let’s say $1/month for every subscriber on your list. That’s a kind of rule of thumb for email marketing in general.

What could you do with an extra $4,562.5 per month?

Of course, you could do the classic things, like work less… pay down debt… save more for yourself or your family… reinvest to make still more money.

Those are all reasonable and respectable options.

But like I said at the start, let’s play a game.

What fun, unexpected, thrilling gifts to yourself could you spend and splurge $4,562.5 on each month? Just as a thought experiment?

How about this:

You could hire a personal chef to cook every meal for you and your family, day in and day out. Groceries, chopping, sauteing, cleanup, all included.

Rates for personal chefs start at around $150 a day. You might have to pay more if you live in London or LA, or if you want someone with Michelin-star experience. I don’t know, maybe just do the weekdays in that case, instead of every day?

Or take option 2:

You could get a membership at Carbone, a private club in NYC that allows you access to Carbone Privato, a members-only restaurant frequented by other members, such as Rihanna, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Jay Z.

Membership at Carbone is $30,000 per year, but I’m guessing you can break it up monthly.

Even if the monthly rate ends up a bit higher in total, it would still leave you money to travel to New York and afford a steak or two at Carbone Privato each month… while you toast Leo across the room with a glass of champagne, in that way he does in The Great Gatsby.

Or of course, there’s the third and final option:

You could simply go the Tai Lopez route, and lease a Lamborghini month by month. The question is, what color? Black? Yellow? Grigio Telesto?

A Lambo Galardo lease starts at $1,700/month. At that rate, you could just get two, so you don’t have to choose between your favorite colors. And you’d still have money left over for gas.

Maybe none of these is exactly what you would want to spend $4,562.5 on each month… but maybe I gave you some ideas?

If I did, this might help you make those ideas a reality:

Until this Sunday, 12 midnight PST, I am promoting Travis Speegle’s myPEEPS list-building course. In a nutshell, Travis shows you how to build your email list using ads, so you can put in $10-15 a day and get 10-15 subscribers out.

You can find out more about Travis’s course at the link at the bottom.

For now, I’ll just say I’ve personally gone through myPEEPS, and I will be following it myself to build up a new list I’ve started.

That’s why I am also offering a “Shotgun Messenger” bonus if you buy myPEEPS through my affiliate link below.

Basically, you can build your list while I build mine, and get my marketing feedback and copywriting input along the way.

I’ll ride shotgun alongside you as you implement the program Travis lays out in myPEEPS. I’ll shoot down any dangerous or distracting ideas that pop up out of the bushes… I’ll read the map if you feel you’ve lost the way… and I’ll help you protect the valuable cargo you are transporting — meaning the money to spend on ads, but more importantly, your enthusiasm and your will to keep going.

I will deliver the “Shotgun Messenger” part of this offer over the next month via Zoom and via Skool (already live for a group of people who signed up early).

If you must have the full, dry details of how this bonus offer will work in order to decide whether or not to invest in myPEEPS, then write me, and I will get the details to you.

Or if you want to find out more about the core offer, myPEEPS, and what it could do for you, and maybe your garage:

​https://bejakovic.com/mypeeps​

Announcing: Attentive human vending machine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The next big business opportunity

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Yesterday I talked to my friend Will, who recently started writing a newsletter for a prediction market.

Prediction market?

You know… go online, and stake a little bit of money on the outcome of the U.S. presidential election, or the chance of war between Israel and Iran.

​​If your prediction comes true, you get paid, just like if you had bet on red and that’s how the roulette table ended up.

Will and I were spitballing content ideas for the newsletter. I told him to interview the “super forecasters,” the guys making the most right bets on the marketplace.

Turns out Will had already done that. He said that one of the top guys on the platform was making $70k per month forecasting the future.

So here’s my own forecast:

We will see a successful business opportunity offer in the next 6 months, featuring a “super forecaster” as a guru, telling you how to collect up to $2,333 each day, from the comfort of your own couch, by watching CNN and Fox News.

I realize I am perhaps influencing the future, and helping make it happen, by giving away this idea and sending it out to thousands of readers of this newsletter, many of who are marketers and offer owners.

But I really do think this has a unique shot to be successful.

Many business opportunities out there are clouded by the fundamental unfamiliarity of the core thing.

Commodities trading? VR content creation? Direct response copywriting?

“I don’t know… maybe it’s legit and maybe there’s even good money to be made there, but it sounds complicated. I don’t really get it.”

Compare that to real estate… or vending machines… or yelling at the TV.

Everybody can understand that. That’s why real estate and vending machines are bizops that have been around for a century or longer… and that’s why I think that future forecasting has legs as well.

Perhaps you’re wondering why I’m giving this idea away instead of running after it myself, since I think it’s so hot. It’s a fair question. My answer is long and distinguished, so I’ll save it for another email.

Meanwhile, if you are reading this newsletter, I can only assume you have already been pre-sold on the business opportunity that is copywriting, or at least on owning fundamental copywriting skills, whether you use them for your own business or for a client.

And so I have a little bizop brochure I’d like to show you. Here’s the top of the brochure, a quote by A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos, who only works on 2-3 projects each year, but still makes millions:

“So do what Gary says. You [will possess one of the greatest skills you can have as a copywriter]. And you’ll make lots of money.”

If you want to read the rest of this brochure, and understand what Parris is saying will make you lots of money, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

What a day to fly

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“Oh what the f—”

I arrived to the airport today around 8:45am to be faced with a giant, hideous snake, made up of people and luggage, starting at the check-in counters, folding in on itself a dozen times, and finally stretching its tail some hundred yards into the depths of the terminal.

I immediately made my way for the “last call” line. Even that took almost 45 minutes before I finally made it to the check-in counter.

​​I handed my id to the woman behind the counter. ​​She wasn’t interested.

“I need proof of your booking,” she said.

“What?”

“I need to see proof that you’ve bought a ticket.”

“The proof’s there in the computer,” I said. I helpfully pointed to her computer monitor for her.

She flipped it around so I could see. It showed a booting-up window. It was frozen.

“The computers aren’t working,” she said. “I need proof that you’ve bought a ticket.”

Maybe you’ve heard. There was some giant IT crash all around the world today. America. Australia. Europe. Hospitals. Banks. Airlines.

I produced proof of booking in the end.

​​And in return, I got a flimsy piece of paper, written out by hand, with my name on it and the code for the flight. That was my boarding pass today.

I won’t go into the details of all my adventures today.

Suffice to say, the situation was a huge mess, everywhere, all at once.

As I stood there at the airport, in a crowd of thousands of people, all of us burdened with luggage, all confused, all indecisive and yet unhappy to stay where we were, I thought that this was a little sampler of what Porter Stansberry has been predicting for 15 years or more.

“End of America.” Total social collapse. A world in which things stop working, and we’re suddenly exposed and helpless.

I don’t know if Stansberry’s predictions will ever come true.

But I do know that predictions like that always get attention.

Fear works. So does greed, if you can tie it into the fear, and make a claim like copywriter Gary Halbert once did:

“How You Can Profit From The Coming Stock Market Crash And Financial Blood-Bath That Is Going To Be Caused By Cash-Rich Drug Dealers And Other Criminal Scum!”

The thing is, fear and greed can be good at getting buyers. But they might not be very good at getting repeat buyers, the buyers who actually build a direct response business.

There has to be something more.

And to find out what that something more is, today I’ll invite you to read an essay that has been ringing in my head for years.

This essay explains why the “End of America” sales letter was such a huge success, when hundreds of similar sales messages, all making the same predictions and claims, didn’t even come close.

And this analysis comes from a man who should know, because he got the sales numbers of all these hundreds of sales letters, and he got the copy to compare. Plus, he’s a master copywriter himself, who has coached and guided dozens of other master copywriters.

If you’re interested in copywriting, at all, then this essay is worth a read:

https://www.markford.net/2019/12/09/