Direct Marketing

The “magazine model” for your paid membership or continuity offer

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A couple days ago marked the 1-year anniversary that my Daily Email Habit service has been going out, day after day after day, to members all around the world.

Following that announcement, a new subscriber to Daily Email Habit wrote in and asked:

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Wow. Happy Bday to your DEH!

I am curious to see the first seven. Any chance to send them to me?

===

My response was some icy staring across the Internet, a bit of finger tapping on my desk, followed finally by a cold hard NO.

Like I’ve been telling people since I launched Daily Email Habit:

I don’t send out previous puzzles to new subscribers. The idea is Daily Email Habit works like a magazine subscription — you get the issues that go out from the time you subscribed, and not before. It’s a way to encourage people to sign up now rather than later.

After hearing my cold hard no, the DEH subscriber above replied to say:

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I know. I was just curious to see how it started. I respect your answer. It sounds fair and smart.

===

I’m a-telling you this because this week, I launched a new 1:1 coaching program.

On Tuesday, I got on the first call with one of the coaching clients who already signed up. Let’s call her Ms. X.

Ms. X runs a paid membership and wants to increase the number of paying subscribers and reduce churn.

But like lots of other people who run memberships, she has so far been promising new subscribers access to everything inside her membership, including all the stuff that happened before they subscribed.

But what’s the incentive to join today… when joining tomorrow will give you everything you get if you join today, plus some more stuff… plus you get to hold on to your money for an extra 24 hours?

Not much incentive.

Fortunately, Ms. X already came to that conclusion before she even got on this coaching call with me.

At this point, her bottleneck is technical. Her membership software makes it hard to restrict/allow access to different members like this.

My Yoda-like suggestion was, “Many simple option you fail to see.”

I suggested some low-tech ways to deliver content that’s only available to current members. Ways that make it easy to test out this idea for impact. If this magazine model makes a difference, as it most likely will, then Ms. X can worry about the long-term tech later.

A magazine model is something to think about if you too are running or are thinking of launching a paid membership, or really any kind of continuity offer.

Not only will treating your membership like a magazine give people a legit reason to sign up today rather than tomorrow… but it will give them a reason to stay signed up instead of churning (thinking they can always come back later and get everything they missed in the meantime)…

… and if your subscribers are anything like my subscribers, when you introduce and stick to this “magazine” rule, you might hear them say, “I respect your answer. It sounds fair and smart.”

In other news, I have already signed up a few coaching students since launching this coaching program a few days ago. I am also looking for a few more.

The coaching I’m offering is specifically about list monetization, or as I say, about using your email list to pay for a house.

The coaching is 1:1, and runs for a year.

It’s also reasonably low-cost, because accountability and whip-cracking are not a part of it.

In order for me to be useful to you at all with this coaching program, I need to see you have some runway already.

In case you’re interested, hit reply and tell me a bit about your situation with your list.

Specifically, I’m interested in things like how many people you have on your list… how many new people you’re getting in an average week… what kinds of offers you’ve made so far… and how that’s gone for you.

3 conclusions from the Black Friday Bundle

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Yesterday concluded the magnificent and possibly final Black Friday Bundle.

In case you weren’t following along, there was a bundle of courses for sale by 11 copywriters and marketers, supposedly masters of persuasion and selling, myself included.

The bundle was capped at 349 copies (because scarcity, and because that’s what the last such bundle sold). But if you go to the finalized sales page right now, you will see…

“349 292 seats remaining”

… and you will hear a few lonesome crickets chirping, and a melancholy wind blowing through the trees.

Clearly, the bundle under-performed. What done it? And what does it mean for me, or you, if you want to do something like this in the future?

After every promo, I like to sit down and make a list of conclusions. I did so today. Here are 3 big ones:

#1. “Only two ways to make money…”

My friend Sam, who reads these emails, yesterday sent me a quote by Jim Barksdale, former CEO of Netscape. Says Barksdale:

“There are only two ways I know of to make money. You can bundle, or you can unbundle.”

Whether it’s time to bundle or unbundle will depend, as all other things in business do, on where the market is, and what they’ve grown to expect.

“Bundle a buncha random copywriting courses at a discount” worked great at the start of this decade, during the corona and post-corona surge in interest for online side hustles or business opportunities, back when there were fewer copywriting courses and course creators on the scene than today.

Today, that basic approach is clearly no longer working.

Of course, bundles can still work.

I wrote just last week how I happily spent $495 on a bundle of courses. And earlier this year, a bunch of bundled trainings on AI in copywriting sold those now-impossible-seeming 349 copies.

In other words, a copywriting or marketing bundle can still work today if it has either 1) an exciting concept (the AI thing from earlier this year) or 2) a convincing reason why (eg. a clearance bundle due to the business shutting down, like that bundle I happily bought last week, though that was not about copywriting).

This Black Friday Bundle didn’t have either an exciting concept nor a convincing reason why, and given the fact that copywriting is no longer HOT, the bundle did as it did. And yet, my conclusion is…

#2. I should participate in more bundles

In spite of the milquetoast performance of this bundle, it was still a good deal for me.

I made a bit of money promoting the bundle directly. Not enough to pay for a house, but also not terrible for four emails and no obligations to deliver anything after the promo.

But much more important, I got 50+ new subscribers, most of those buyers of a $299 offer, and a few $598 buyers (who got both the front end and upsell).

At least some of those people are likely to spend thousands of dollars with me down the line.

That’s why, even though I recently wrote that promos featuring a bunch of affiliates make no sense for me to participate in, I’ve concluded I should do more of these bundles. The new subscribers and new buyers on my list make it worthwhile.

That said…

#3. I should have had an immediate offer for new buyers

I read this in a book before bed last night:

“Every touch point your prospect or customer has with your business should be monetized. Every page your customer lands on, every response to a support ticket, every action a prospect or customer takes (or doesn’t take) must be monetized. If not, you’re hemorrhaging money and it’s only a matter of time before you bleed out and die.”

I felt a little faint after I read this.

The fact is, I should have had a special offer for people as soon as they sign up, and a second offer after that, in the welcome email in which I told them they are in for Daily Email Habit, or in the delivery of the offer itself.

I should have, but I didn’t, and I still don’t.

The fact is, I am launching new offers, but it’s largely happening inside my Daily Email House community, and even there, behind the scenes.

Daily Email house is my free community where the mission is, “Use your email list to pay for a house.”

(Much more doable than you might think, since the monthly mortgage or rent payment is around $3k on average).

If you’d like to get inside this community, the front door is at the link below. But beware, because once you’re inside, one day, when you least expect it, I might make you an offer, one which you will be free to accept or reject.

If that doesn’t turn you off:

https://bejakovic.com/house

Sex and copywriting?

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I got a question or two from a reader yesterday:

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I am looking to help people have a better sex life! I don’t have as much experience helping people with this issue as I would like. Curious if this copyrighting work will be useful for me due to the sex topic nature?

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I wasn’t 100% sure what this reader was asking — it sounded like there were two questions there:

QUESTION 1: “Is copywriting relevant if you sell ‘teach you a better sex’?”

The stock answer is that the brain is the biggest sex organ in the human body.

If you wanna take control of the brain, whether of your partner or your coaching client, then sweet, seductive words, including written words, are the way to do it.

And that’s why:

Back when I had copywriting clients, I actually wrote a good deal of copy for businesses in the sex and relationships niche on ClickBank, including sexy daily emails and sexy sales letters.

I also know of a coach on my list who has a high-ticket coaching program to make women’s sex lives better. She writes sexy daily emails.

I also know a coach on my list who has a high-ticket coaching program to make men’s sex lives better. The last I heard, he was also writing sexy daily emails, and was spending a lot of time fussing over his sexy Facebook ad copy and his sexy sales page copy.

So sex and copywriting?

Yes, sex and copywriting.

QUESTION 2. “What if I’m a coach but I don’t have a lot of experience?”

In that case, my best advice is to make a truly irresistible offer to prospects. Specifically, I’m thinking of an offer I will cleverly code name “Truly Irresistible Coaching Offer.”

The Truly Irresistible Coaching Offer is so irresistible it works even if you have little experience. The deal is simply too good for people to pass up, even if they aren’t 100% sold on you yet.

The Truly Irresistible Coaching Offer has worked to make sales for thousands of coaches, even those with little experience or credibility, across niches ranging across spiritual, business, relationships, and health. (Maybe even sex???)

But the real benefits of the Truly Irresistible Coaching Offer are:

1) The nice and quick income it provides, which translates good money even for an established coach,

2) An opportunity to upsell people into still nicer income,

3) Rapport and bonding and work with your clients and prospects, which in time overcomes that sticky problem of “I don’t have that much experience.”

This probably sounds fuzzy to you, and it is, because I don’t want to give away too much. I’m teasing this Truly Irresistible Coaching Offer, as part of my ongoing promotion of the Black Friday Bundle.

I wrote about that bundle yesterday.

11 offer creators, including moi, are bundling their offers, totaling $13 million in value (approximately), but selling for only $299.

I figure the real benefit of such a bundle is the thrill of buying a bunch of stuff, which has established real-world value, at a steep discount.

And since I figure that thrill of buying at a discount is the real benefit, rather than piling on free bonuses, which give no satisfaction, I am giving you four opportunities to buy more stuff, with established real world value, at a thrilling discount.

Yesterday’s opportunity:

1. “$25 Classified Ads.” A behind-closed doors opportunity to get in front of about 20,000 relevant prospects… advertise and test out your offers… get clients and partners… and grow your list… for what works out to $25 a pop.

Today’s opportunity:

2. Truly Irresistible Coaching Offer. A course that lays out how to make the Truly Irresistible Coaching Offer I teased above.

This course costs $997. That might not sound like any kind of a bargain, but if you consider that this Truly Irresistible Coaching Offer you make itself sells for $997, and is truly irresistible, then even one client, and this course will pay for itself.

Two clients, you will double your money.

Three clients, you will triple your money.

Four clients, I could keep going, but I suspect you see the pattern. And the pattern is that this is basically buying money at a discount.

Tomorrow and Sunday:

3 + 4. I will have more great deals to tease you with.

Of course, if you buy today, I will also tell you the other deals as I tease them out to the rest of my list.

In any case, if you wanna buy the Black Friday Bundle and get a great deal, and then have the opportunity to buy more stuff and get even more great deals:

https://bejakovic.com/greatdeals

Don’t count on people remembering you

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Cautionary tale:

A few days ago, a dude joined my Daily Email House group. The description in his Skool bio sold that he had recently sold a media company and that he is now building a newsletter business.

I got curious. I wanted to look him up, and find more about this media company and newsletter business.

But the dude’s name is very common. I won’t say it here, but it’s on the commonness level of “Ben Johnson.”

In other words, it’s hopeless to find this guy online with a quick search, and there’s no link in his Skool profile. I shrugged, and had I not needed a topic for today’s email, I would have forgotten all about him.

Yesterday, I talked about how to make a long-term bet on list growth, which is to pick a platform you believe in, and then invest either your time or your money into it.

But there’s quick and cheap stuff you can do also.

Putting a link to your optin page in all your online profiles one of ’em. This probably won’t get you thousands of subscribers. But it might get you a few, and you never know who might be hiding among those few (me, for example).

There’s a bigger point here, which is not to count on other people to do the work of remembering you and seeking you out.

That’s one of the main benefits of an email list.

An email list gives you a chance to be the one who gets in touch with others, when it suits you, as often as it suits you, rather than hoping and waiting for them to think of you.

Of course, if you have more than one channel to reliably get in touch with people on your own terms, even better. which is one of the reasons I have set up my Daily Email House group.

Daily Email House is another way for me to connect and bond more deeply with readers. As you can imagine, I have to give people value and even fun in order to make it worth their while to get and stay inside the group.

If you would like to make this deal with me yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/house

2 simplifying questions to ask yourself

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I was waiting in the line at the coffee shop this morning. The barista was making a latte with oat milk for another customer, and she looked up at me.

“Coffee?” she asked.

I nodded and said yes.

“Well?” she said with a bit of frustration in her voice, waving her hand to indicate I should be a bit more specific than that.

I’m telling you this fascinating story because I want to set up something email-marketing related.

I’ve been running my revived Daily Email House group for a few weeks. I invited people to post about problems they are having, and see if the group can help. Came the following problem:

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How do I grow my list? That’s my biggest problem.

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“Well?” I said when I read this question, waving my hand to indicate that the question-asker should be a bit more specific than that.

If you’re reading this right now, odds are excellent that you already know two dozen perfectly good ways to grow an email newsletter. Maybe more.

The fact is, there are hundreds and possibly thousands of ways to grow an email list. Many of them can work great. What’s more, there’s a ton of good and free information online about how to put most of them into practice.

And I guess therein lies the trouble. There are simply too many choices, including too many good choices, when it comes to growing an email list.

It paralyzes people, the same way that a choice of two dozen sourced coffees from around the world… prepared with two dozen different techniques including V60s and aeropresses and pretentious pourovers… resulting in two dozen final products like lattes and batch brews and cortados and americanos… can paralyze people, if they don’t already know exactly what they want.

To help with that (not the coffee, but the list growth), let me propose two simplifying questions:

1. “Which platform do I believe in?”

A “platform” is any technology or site or organization that’s already got the attention of some humans. Here are few examples:

– Facebook

– YouTube

– Substack

– Google

– Amazon

– Pinterest

– Email newsletters

– Yellow Pages

– AM radio

– your local Chamber of Commerce

…

Pick a platform from the list above, or some other platform you believe in. You can believe in it because you believe it has staying power… because you feel some affinity for it… because you think that the kinds of people you want to attract are there… or ideally all three.

2. “Do I prefer to pay with money or time?”

You have to pay, unfortunately.

The question is whether you’d rather pay with a dozen hours a month spent creating content, or reaching out to people one-on-one, or building yourself up to be a more attractive and fascinating person…. or whether you’d rather spend a few hundred dollars a month to get the platform owners to push your message out for you.

There are pros and cons to both paying with money or time, including ones which are nonobvious.

For now, just go with your gut. You probably have a sense of which one is a less painful cost to you to pay each month — a dozen hours of your time, or a few hundred dollars from your wallet.

Once you have your two answers to the question above, the path will be clear. You will know what to do — again, most of the details are out there on the Internet, and it’s just a matter of committing to it and following through.

But what if you pick the wrong platform, or you start to pay with one currency and you realize you made a mistake, and you want to switch?

It’s not really a big problem. Anything you do will be infinitely better than doing nothing, and pivoting to a new platform, or switching from paid in time to paid in money, or vice versa, is pretty straightforward.

Did this help?

I hope so.

But if not, my Daily Email House community is still there, waiting to help people who want to use their email list to pay for a house.

Over the next few days, I will be releasing a Daily Email Habit Starter Pack, including a proven way to grow your email list, which is based on my own personal answers to the two questions above.

If you’d like to get inside Daily Email House in time to get this Starter Pack:

https://bejakovic.com/house

How to get me to pay you $500 in 90 seconds flat

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Today I was on Facebook — don’t ask why — and I saw a post from a dude whose email list I’ve been on for the past two years.

The dude was announcing that he’s shutting down his info publishing business and that he’s making all his courses available in one heavily discounted bundle, which will presumably go away some time soon.

About 90 seconds later, I had entered in my credit card details and paid the dude $500 for this heavily discounted bundle.

Point being:

Discounting works great — IF people already value what you’re selling at the full value.

The dude above has been emailing for years, practically every day.

I didn’t read all his emails, but I read a good number.

He has been building up the case for buying his various courses.

He made the case over and over for the value of knowledge inside… he showed results that people who were applying this knowledge were getting… he kept digging and prodding into soft spots in my flesh, making me suspect that I’m missing out on something really important.

I grew to believe what the dude was saying, and I grew to want what he was selling.

My “no thank you” defenses were good enough to resist his sales pitches while I thought I still had time, while the offer was basically “Get started today OR tomorrow OR the day after if tomorrow doesn’t work.”

But once this became a last-chance matter, and once there was also a significant discount over what these courses had been selling for previously, I saw myself involved in an instant, almost involuntary action to pay the guy $500.

So discounting can work great.

As can launches, promos, and special offers.

But none of them will work unless people in your audience have grown to want the thing you have, and have grown to value it above and beyond the offer you will be making on it.

How do you get people to that point?

Well, I told you above.

Email every day, or practically every day. Make the case, over and over, for people buying what you’re selling. Tease, provide proof, and dismiss alternatives.

Do this over and over, and then, when you make a special deal and you give a deadline for it — you don’t have to close down your entire business, or bundle all your stuff for $500 — people will buy, instantly.

And on that note, let me remind you:

The price for my Daily Email Habit service is going up this Thursday at 12 midnight PST, from a modest $30/month to the Martin Shkreli-like $50/month.

Daily Email Habit helps you start and stick with consistent daily emailing, so you can gradually move people to wanting what you have to sell, and so you can get them to value it at the price you sell it for.

If you wanna get started today, and start moving people to where you want them to go, before the price goes up:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Announcing: Martin Shkreli-like price increase for Daily Email Habit

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This Thursday, at 12 midnight PST, I will be increasing the price of my Daily Email Habit service to an unheard-of $50/month.

Daily Email Habit puts an email “puzzle” in your inbox each day, to help you start and stick with sending daily emails.

Daily Email Habit currently sells for $30/month, which means you can get a daily email prompt and ongoing education in how to expand that prompt into a fun and valuable email for just $1/day.

On Thursday, I’ll be increasing the price of Daily Email Habit to $50/month because my accountant, warehouse manager, and mother-in-law have all been beating me over the head and yelling at me to do it for days now.

Apparently the price of digital paper and digital ink have risen dramatically over the past few years, as have the labor costs of the little elves we use deliver Daily Email Habit puzzles to inboxes worldwide.

The fact remains that the price of Daily Email Habit, old or new, is a tiny fraction of what you can make regularly, each month, if you do start and stick with the habit of daily emailing.

Maybe a higher price will lead to higher commitment, at least in some people (a lower price certainly won’t). And ultimately, more commitment and more consistency is the goal of this entire service.

If you are currently signed up to Daily Email Habit, of course you will not be impacted by this dramatic and shameless price increase. You will keep being grandfathered in at whatever price you signed up at.

And if you are not yet signed up to Daily Email Habit, the same is true for you if you sign up today. The price goes up on Thursday for others… but you only have to pay the current rate, and the same in the future, whenever I decide to hike up the price again (say, in case the elves unionize).

If you want the full details on Daily Email Habit — including a sample of the fine printing job we do, which explains why we are so sensitive to rising digital paper and digital ink costs — so you can decide whether you want to join before price goes up:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Info publishing lesson from A24 Films

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I like to look at creative industries — where people are churning out and packaging up ideas and turning them into real world value. Maybe they can teach me something about the info publishing world as well.

Today, I wanna tell you about the movie industry, or rather, a different perspective that’s emerged in the movie industry over the past decade.

As you might know, the classic 20th century Hollywood movie studio is a home-run business.

A movie studio experiences lots and lots of strikeouts, which are offset and then some by one big hit, which can gross $100M or $1B or $100B (ok, maybe not $100B, not yet).

But there’s a subtle cost to this way of doing business, as you’ve probably seen at the local theater:

All Hollywood movies eventually become comic book movies.

The reason is both that comic book franchises already have proven stories and characters, with a built-in fan base that can be sold to…

… and that comic book movies make low demands on the viewer, and therefore have mass-market potential (this comes from someone who has spent 6 hours of his past 2 evenings rewatching two of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies).

But there’s another way to make movies.

Perhaps you have heard of A24 Films. A24 is a film and TV production company that got started in 2012. They are best known for making arty, creative movies, often with very small budgets. Some A24 movies have become hits. Some barely managed to recoup their small budgets. But all are cool, unique, and beloved by fans and critics alike.

I read an article about A24 recently. A top executive was quoted in the article with something that struck me:

“To use a baseball metaphor, we hit singles and doubles. And when you set up movies to hit singles and doubles you can let your partner—in the best version of this—really take creative risks. We don’t need to gross a hundred million dollars. We don’t need to gross forty million dollars to actually have a successful financial outcome.”

Here’s how I interpret this translates into the info publishing world:

If you’re only creating a few offers a year, each needs to be a big hit if you’re gonna be a long-term successful as a business.

And that means that over time, you will experience “audience capture” the way that Hollywood has experienced with comic book movies. In other words, you will find that you’re forced to create stuff because the mass mind of your audience dictates it, whether you genuinely believe in it or not, whether you enjoy creating it or not.

This can be fine — you might care about other things in life and get your kicks there.

But if creating cool stuff you’re proud of is something that matters to you, then there’s a lesson in what that A24 exec says. That lesson is to work on hitting lots of doubles and singles, both to cover your nut, and to give you the freedom to keep doing what you want, how you want, when you want.

So much for cross-pollination.

Now I’d like to remind you of my Daily Email Habit service, which gives you a daily email “puzzle” to help you start and stick with sending daily emails.

Daily Email Habit currently sells for $30/month, which means you can get a daily email prompt and ongoing education in how to expand that prompt into a fun and valuable email for just $1/day.

In a few days, I will be jacking up the price of Daily Email Habit to Martin Shkreli levels. If you want to get in before the price increases, or better yet, if you simply want to start writing your own daily email habit today, so you can start hitting singles and doubles regularly:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Affiliate contests suck, so here’s an alternative

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I sat down just now and tried to write a list of 10 reasons why affiliate contests suck.

(Affiliate contest = Person X is selling an offer during a time-limited launch. Persons Y, Z, and Q are promoting it as affiliates. Whoever sells the most gets bragging rights and additional prizes, beyond just the affiliate commissions.)

I feel internally that affiliate contests suck, and so I was sure that I could come up with 10 good reasons to back up my feeling.

So I started writing and… I realized that my arguments were not really arguments against affiliate contests, but about mass launches with a bunch of affiliates who promote the same offer.

Mass affiliate launches devalue the core offer… they force each affiliate to come up with a new and unique offer (bonuses or bundles or whatever) if they hope to sell anything, which to me defeats the main point of promoting affiliate offers… they cut into sales since people on your list are likely to be on 5 other lists that are promoting the same.

I realized affiliate contests are actually a way of getting around all these negatives of mass affiliate launches.

List owners (persons Y, Z, and Q above) know that promoting an offer at the same time as a dozen other people sucks… and offer owners (Person X above) try to draw them back by promising additional prizes for the best performers, above and beyond the affiliate commissions.

Does it work?

People do affiliate contests all the time, so I’m guessing it works, at least for somebody out there.

At the same time, I can speak from personal experience that I avoid affiliate contests like I avoid the metro at rush hour on an August afternoon, both because I don’t like being in a sweaty crowd, and because I don’t like directly competing against people for one of a few available seats.

I imagine there are others who are like me, who are in fact turned off by the competitive aspect of winner-takes-most contests.

I’m telling you all this because today I announced a new campaign inside my Daily Email House.

The goal of the campaign is to grow the community.

I’m asking existing members to help me do so. Beyond the altruistic reasons of helping me out or building a more thriving community, I’ve also announced prizes:

Prize #1: For anyone who refers anyone to the group, whether this referred person ends up getting inside or not (I’m picky, and I don’t let just anyone inside)

Prize #2: for anyone who refers 10 people who end up getting inside

Prize #3: For the entire group, once we reach the magic number of new members I’ve set as the target for this campaign

It’s a different kind of incentive scheme to overcome the problem of multiple people promoting. Rather than an “affiliate contest,” this is an “affiliate challenge.”

In the affiliate challenge, people are not competing with each other (or are competing directly to a much smaller extent). They are primarily competing with themselves.

They are not falling behind each other, and not giving up because they feel it’s hopeless to win, or even refusing to engage altogether.

They are encouraged to participate and to achieve a manageable goal.

And at the end of it, the group benefits, and is hopefully stronger, rather than divided or deflated.

Maybe an “affiliate challenge” is something you can consider as an alternative to an affiliate contest, when running an offer or a promo or a launch where you’re hoping to get a bunch of referrals or affiliate sales from different people.

“Yeah but does this work?” I hear you ask.

Fair enough. I have no idea. I’m just testing out this campaign, and it’s likely that there will be hiccups or missteps along the way.

If you’d like to find out how it does, or participate to get yourself one of the prizes I’m offering, or you simply want to join a community with the shared goal of using your email list to pay for a house, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/house

Would you bid $1 to have me promote you to my list?

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Inside my Daily Email House group, I recently started a discussion about list swaps.

(“List swap” = cross-promotion with another list owner. You send an email to drive your readers to my list… and I do the same for you.)

One big objection that lotsa people raised was “my list is too small to be interesting to anyone for a list swap.”

I don’t agree with this — there are ways out and around it, even with a small list.

But of course, there’s also an entirely different approach to doing something like a list swap, one which is much more direct, and which can lead to results much more quickly.

That other way is simply to pay somebody to promote you, instead of offering to do a quid pro quo with them. Which brings me to an idea I had recently.

I have long been itching to try running an auction, the way marketer Travis Sago teaches and practices.

An auction works just how you think:

Different people bid what they are willing to pay… the winning bidder takes the prize.

In this case, the prize would be a solo ad in my newsletter. Basically, a single email I’d send to my list, dedicated completely to building you up and to promoting your unique offer.

I would also work with you directly to define and refine the offer in your ad… so as to entice the greatest number of qualified subscribers or buyers to go to your page and sign up or buy…

… and I’d work with you to come up with a back-end offer you could offer right away, so you could liquidate your ad cost, and maybe then some, on DAY ZERO.

I’ve never offered an ad in my newsletter before.

I also don’t have a huge list.

But when I did run a list swap with Alin Dragu a few months ago — basically the same kind of thing I’m offering here, but getting paid in cross-promotion instead of cash — I drove about 200 clicks and got Alin about 120 new subscribers.

When I did something similar with Lawrence Bernstein last year, and promoted Lawrence’s $7 offer as part of a list swap, I drove 157 buyers to Lawrence’s list.

If those kinds of numbers get you interested even a tiny bit, here’s my question to you:

If I were to make this offer, and make a monkey out of myself by running an auction to sell it… would you bid at least $1?

If you would, hit reply and let me know.

(If you’ve already let me know inside Daily Email House, no need to write again.)

If there’s enough interest… I will put this auction on, and you will have a chance to bid $1 or more on a solo ad in my newsletter, and on getting my help to make it profitable immediately.

My goal is to help you create a little break-even funnel so you can turn around and run your ad again immediately, in another newsletter, and another newsletter after that, and so on… quickly growing your list with buyers and high-quality readers… and making yourself much more interesting as a list swap partner in the future.

On the other hand, if there’s not enough interest in my little auction idea, that’s fine. Really. You won’t hurt my feelings. I will simply go and sulk, and pretend like I never even considered making this offer.

Your choice. If you’re interested, you know what to do.