Direct Marketing

The inspiration for my concluded “Buy 5 paperbacks” promo

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This morning at 9am Central Europe Time, I concluded my Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle promo, which has been running since Monday.

As a result of this promo, I sold a couple hundred paperback copies of my original 10 Commandments book. I had multiple people who bought tell me they will use the books as giveaways to their own lists. I got a big jump in Amazon rankings.

Altogether, I call it a success.

I did this promo as a bit of an experiment. I wanted to see if it would work for me. I’m happy with how it went, so I will repeat it, some time down the line, with new bonuses, for my new 10 Commandments book.

Over the past few days, a few people wrote me to say this was an original and interesting promo and offer. And one reader wrote in to ask, “Are you doing a version of Daniel Throssell’s book launch?”

No, Daniel was not the inspiration for this promo. For one thing, it was hardly a book launch — my original 10 Commandments book has been out for 5+ years. More importantly, I don’t even know what Daniel’s book launch strategy is.

That said, my book promo/offer was not original. I copied it exactly from what I saw another marketer doing.

I knew odds were excellent it would to work for me also, because I saw it worked very well for this other marketer.

In fact, this other marketer got me to buy five paperback copies of his book, which are still sitting in their Amazon box, collecting dust, on a shelf right across from the couch where I’m writing this email right now.

I bought those five copies in exchange for a bonus that the marketer was offering, which got me intrigued and which I wanted to get.

And that’s my meta-lesson for you today:

Lots of people are out there sharing marketing how-tos and tutorials and ideas, including in free newsletters like this one.

Maybe all those tutorials and ideas are proven advice. Or maybe they’re not.

But there is a whole other class of marketing and money-making education, which is 100% proven, and which you’ve already paid for, so you might as well get use out of it.

I’m talking about all the offers — books, courses, back scratchers — that got you to buy, and the process by which some marketer or business owner got you to buy them.

Keep a track of those offers and those sales processes. And ask yourself, what did it? Get to the core. Then apply it to what you do. Odds are excellent it will work for you as well.

In case you’re curious, I can tell you that the marketer I imitated for my Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle was Travis Sago.

Some time last year, Travis made people an offer to buy five paperback copies of his book Make ‘Em Beg To Buy From You on Amazon. In return, he would give you a bonus called Shogun Traffic Method, about a source of traffic that converts for any niche or offer, starting at $50 or less.

I had a pretty good idea already of what the Shogun Traffic Method was. But I’ve learned a ton from Travis before, and I decided it was a worthwhile investment. Plus, he piled bonuses on top of his bonuses — including some that were even more intriguing than the core Shogun Traffic Method itself.

As far as I know, Travis ran this promo only within his Royalty Ronin community.

It’s another good reason to be inside Royalty Ronin. Not only is this a community of 500+ Internet marketers who are doing creative deals, often starting from nothing… not only do you get Travis’s ongoing education and inspiration and advice in the community… not only is there a library of Travis’s expensive courses and bonuses (including the Shogun Traffic Method)… but you get to see Travis running creative new promos himself.

The bad news is, that means Travis might get you yet again, so you pay him for something on top of the already expensive $299 that Royalty Ronin costs each month.

The good news is, if you do find yourself paying Travis for something new, you’ve likely just learned a valuable new way to sell (most of Travis’s promos are creative and new in some form or another). You now have a new strategy you can profit from, if you only apply it to what you do.

That’s likely to pay for that new offer you just bought, and maybe even for a few months of Royalty Ronin itself.

If you want to find out more about Royalty Ronin, or maybe give it a try yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

Last call for Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle

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“To gain a fortune, marriage must be dared.”

I read that quote in a book that’s a couple thousand years old. I thought it was funny. I am sharing it with you now because it ties into my message tonight:

To gain a fortune in bonuses, a crazy Amazon purchase must be dared.

This is the last email I will send to promote the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle, which I have been promoting since Monday.

The deadline for this offer is tonight, 12 midnight PST.

In case you have successfully evaded or ignored or misunderstood all my emails about this offer, here’s the gist:

1. Get five (5) paperback copies of my original 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

2. Forward me your Amazon receipt

Do this crazy thing — buy five paperback copies of the same book — and I will give you the following bonuses:

#1. Copywriting Portfolio Secrets (Price last sold at: $97)

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

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

#2. No-Stress Negotiation For Well-Paid Copywriters (Price last sold at: $100)

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

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

#3. How To Get Set Up On Upwork

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#5. Copy Riddles Lite (Price last sold at: $97)

Copy Riddles Lite includes one of the 20 rounds included in my full Copy Riddles program. The round is composed of two parts, in which you practice writing sales bullets, and compare what you wrote to what Mel Martin (as well as several other A-list copywriters) wrote starting with the same prompt.

Do this, and you very quickly realize how much skill went into Mel Martin’s bullets. Fortunately, you also very quickly manage to leech some of that skill from Mel Martin, without spending the months and years of agony it took him.

And once you get a taste for Martin’s skill, then the next step is natural:

#6. “How to Turn Fascinations into Fortunes: Copywriting Secrets To Fascinate, Captivate, And Dominate” (Price last sold at: $97)

Lawrence Bernstein, “the world’s most obsessed ad archivist,” once hunted down a collection of all of Mel Martin’s million-dollar ads for Boardroom, along with other control-beating ads Martin had written for the New York Times book division.

Lawrence then printed out the ads, stuffed them in an envelope, and mailed the collection to Marty Edelston, the founder and CEO of Boardroom.

Did Edelston get a kick out of seeing those old ads that helped build up Boardroom? He sure did.

Marty Edelston was so grateful for these ads that he sent Lawrence a thank-you note, along with a check for $2,000.

If you’d like to see these ads yourself, and study them, and model them for selling your own products, then Lawrence put them together into a collection he called “Turn Fascinations Into Fortunes.”

Lawrence got $2,000 as a thank you for putting together this collection of ads. He then sold this collection for $97.

But you don’t have to pay $2,000, or even $97 for “Fascinations Into Fortunes.”

I’ve made a special deal with Lawrence so you can get “Fascinations Into Fortunes” free, along with Copy Riddles Lite, as part of the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle.

#7. “How I made an extra $1404.53/month in Amazon royalties at the push of a button”

This report outlines a hack, which involves the push of a button — literally, that’s all there is to it — and which made me an extra ~$1.5k per month in Amazon royalties. I used this hack once, over the span of a few months, or rather a few weeks. I made money with it. And I never used it again.

I’m not saying anybody else should use this hack. I’m not saying anybody else should NOT use it either.

All I’m willing to do is to tell you what this hack is, why I’m no longer using it myself, and how you can try it out yourself, if you so choose, to make easy money off Amazon.

And that’s it.

Those seven bonuses, with a real-world value of $386, counting just what they sold for previously, are yours if you take me up on the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle offer.

Once again, if you want this, here’s what to do:

1. Get five (5) paperback copies of my original 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

2. Forward me your Amazon receipt.

I will then set you up with the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle.

The deadline is tonight at 12 midnight PST. After that, no more bonuses — I am merciless about this. To get in while the doors are still open:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

This kind of email drives more sales than the average

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Here’s a free marketing tip for you:

If people are buying, it makes sense to advertise the fact.

In the many promos I’ve run within this email newsletter, I’ve always found that when I write an email in which I share a message from someone who’s just taken me up on the promo offer, it drives more sales than your average sales email.

As an example:

Since Monday, I have been running a little promo, the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle, for my original 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

That promo is ending today at 12 midnight PST.

The whole idea behind the promo has been to pile on the bonuses. The little time I’ve had to write emails has been eaten up by spelling out what exactly people get inside the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle.

And so, though people have been buying, I haven’t had time to advertise that fact. Lemme fix that now. Here are a few messages I got from readers who took me up on this offer over the past 24 hours.

First, from email marketer Logan Hobson, who lives in Japan:

===

Alright John,

I got 5 copies of “Book” coming to Japan.

Yes, even though I could have ordered them from Japanese Amazon and gotten free shipping with Prime (which is cheaper here than in the US), rankings and sales on the US Amazon have more impact for you so I ordered them from my US Amazon account.

===

Second, from copywriter and marketing consultant Chuck Gibson:

===

John,

Receipt attached.

I, of course, already have the book, but not printed copies. But it’s the bonus intrigue that hooked me. Very interesting offer.

And a cool way to get your Amazon sales up. Now I have copies to give to certain protégés.

===

And third, from a reader who I’m guessing doesn’t want me to share his name:

===

Alright, you got me. This is the worst possible time for me to spend any more money since I have to go on a multi-country trip in 45 days and gotta save as much as possible.

Frankly I don’t even KNOW what I’ll do with every book, Maybe leave one in every Airbnb I stay at as a parting gift? That would be funny but anyway, your bonuses are always amazing and they will be great companions for all the travels.

===

As a result of the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle and of dedicated readers and customers like the above, the paperback copy of my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters has jumped from an Amazon book ranking of 1,016,096 at the start of the promo to a current ranking of 75,795.

In the process, it’s leapfrogged such industry standards as Mark Ford and John Forde’s Great Leads, Brian Kurtz’s Overdeliver, and Dan Kennedy’s No B.S. Direct Marketing.

So much for the education/demonstration part of this email. Now for the sales.

Like I said, the chance to get the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle ends tonight. If you have taken me up on this offer, check the bonus area I gave you access to, and you will find the following:

#1. Copywriting Portfolio Secrets (Price last sold at: $97)

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

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

#2. No-Stress Negotiation For Well-Paid Copywriters (Price last sold at: $100)

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

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

#3. How To Get Set Up On Upwork

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#5. Copy Riddles Lite (Price last sold at: $97)

Copy Riddles Lite includes one of the 20 rounds included in my full Copy Riddles program. The round is composed of two parts, in which you practice writing sales bullets, and compare what you wrote to what Mel Martin (as well as several other A-list copywriters) wrote starting with the same prompt.

Do this, and you very quickly realize how much skill went into Mel Martin’s bullets. Fortunately, you also very quickly manage to leech some of that skill from Mel Martin, without spending the months and years of agony it took him.

And once you get a taste for Martin’s skill, then the next step is natural:

#6. “How to Turn Fascinations into Fortunes: Copywriting Secrets To Fascinate, Captivate, And Dominate” (Price last sold at: $97)

Lawrence Bernstein, “the world’s most obsessed ad archivist,” once hunted down a collection of all of Mel Martin’s million-dollar ads for Boardroom, along with other control-beating ads Martin had written for the New York Times book division.

Lawrence then printed out the ads, stuffed them in an envelope, and mailed the collection to Marty Edelston, the founder and CEO of Boardroom.

Did Edelston get a kick out of seeing those old ads that helped build up Boardroom? He sure did.

Marty Edelston was so grateful for these ads that he sent Lawrence a thank-you note, along with a check for $2,000.

If you’d like to see these ads yourself, and study them, and model them for selling your own products, then Lawrence put them together into a collection he called “Turn Fascinations Into Fortunes.”

Lawrence got $2,000 as a thank you for putting together this collection of ads. He then sold this collection for $97.

But you don’t have to pay $2,000, or even $97 for “Fascinations Into Fortunes.”

I’ve made a special deal with Lawrence so you can get “Fascinations Into Fortunes” free, along with Copy Riddles Lite, as part of the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle.

#7. “How I made an extra $1404.53/month in Amazon royalties at the push of a button”

This report outlines a hack, which involves the push of a button — literally, that’s all there is to it — and which made me an extra ~$1.5k per month in Amazon royalties. I used this hack once, over the span of a few months, or rather a few weeks. I made money with it. And I never used it again.

I’m not saying anybody else should use this hack. I’m not saying anybody else should NOT use it either.

All I’m willing to do is to tell you what this hack is, why I’m no longer using it myself, and how you can try it out yourself, if you so choose, to make easy money off Amazon.

And that’s it.

Those seven bonuses, with a real-world value of $386, counting just what they sold for previously, are what you get if you’ve already taken me up on the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle.

And if you haven’t yet taken me up on it, here’s how you can:

1. Get five (5) paperback copies of my original 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

2. Forward me your Amazon receipt.

I will then set you up with the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle.

The deadline is tonight at 12 midnight PST. After that, no more bonuses — I am merciless about this. To get in while the doors are still open:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Announcing: Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle

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

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

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

#1. Copywriting Portfolio Secrets ($97 value)

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

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

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

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

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

#3. How To Get Set Up On Upwork

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As for what that offer is:

Like I said, it costs $50.

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

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

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

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

It’s an excellent question.

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

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

How to get my highly coveted Infostack bonuses

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

===

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

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

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

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

Best,

Richard

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

===

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

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

But about that proposal:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, inspiration struck.

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

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

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

When not to use stories in your emails

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Stories in emails are great, except when they’re not. Here are five situations when not to use stories in your emails:

#1. If you’re in a marketplace of one (as far as your prospects are concerned), or in a marketplace where nobody else is sending regular, conversational emails.

It might seem like there are no such marketplaces any more, but there are plenty, particularly in various local service businesses — think lawyers, doctors, morticians.

In such marketplaces, no need to go nuclear by telling stories in emails, and it might even seem tryhard or unprofessional. (“Why is my lawyer writing me about his grandfather again? Why is he not working on my divorce settlement?”)

#2. If you’re in a marketplace that’s driven by current news. For example, if you are selling anything to do with finance or investing.

#3. If you’re selling done-for-you vs done-with-you or do-it-yourself.

Stories, particularly personal stories, are really there to allow the reader to identify with you and align with you, so you can congruently tell them what to do and how to live their lives.

But if you are providing a DFY solution and you aren’t asking people to change who they are, then you have better options than telling stories — and so you shouldn’t use stories as your go-to.

#4. If you have a hot new offer or some other important message and you don’t want to bury it under a drawn-out story that most people will not read.

#5. The inverse of #1 above: if you are in a crowded marketplace where everybody else is telling stories, where storytelling has become the norm, and where your audience is likely to be hearing from a bunch of your competitors.

In such a marketplace, you end up in an arms race of storytelling. Your stories have to be more vulnerable, more shocking, more engagingly told. And yet, readers are glutted and paying less and less attention, and they’re looking for the signal among the storytelling noise. As I wrote in an email a couple months ago:

===

I’ve noticed I practically never read the infotainment part in the newsletters subscribe to any more. Instead, I just scroll down to see the practical takeaway, and maybe the offer.

Granted, I’m a rather “sophisticated” consumer of email newsletters (meaning, I’ve been exposed to a ton of them, particularly in the copywriting and marketing space, over the past 10+ years of working in this field). Still, that just makes me a kind of owl-eyed canary in a coalmine, and maybe points to a bigger trend that will be obvious to others soon.

===

All that’s to say, story emails are bett, but other kinds of emails can be even better.

And for that, may I remind you of my Daily Email Habit service, which sometimes prompts you to send a story email, but most days (like today), it does not.

For more information on Daily Email Habit:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

rsvp

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Do you have a scalable offer that’s selling for $500 or more?

By scalable I mean a course, mastermind, group coaching, software, etc.

In case you do, hit reply. I have something you might like. And no, it’s not email marketing.

Ideas are cheap, here’s how to sell them for good money

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A couple days ago I got a message from Alex Popov, who works as a copywriter (he had a couple controls for an Agora affiliate) and as an NLP trainer. Alex read my new 10 Commandments book and wrote me with some qualified praise:

===

Hey Bejako!

Your new book is quite simply fascinating.

I know most, not all, of the big persuasion ideas inside, yet I’m learning them in all new mind-expanding ways.

Your book is changing my thinking about these persuasion principles for the better.

Thanks!

Only one, negative, though. The price is ridiculously low. So low in fact, I almost didn’t buy it.

Anyway, I’m glad I did.

Real thanks and use this if you like.

===

I’ve been saying it for a long time:

Ideas are cheap. Even good, profitable, proven ideas.

The real value lies not in sharing an idea. Odds are excellent people have heard it all before, even if you feel you thought it up yourself. (You may have, but others have thought it up before you.)

Instead, the real value lies in:

1. Presenting an idea in a way that has a chance to penetrate the defenses your reader’s mind is sure to throw up (“I don’t get it,” “I’ve heard this before,” “I’m busy,” “I could never do this”)

2. Presenting an idea in a memorable way so that it sticks with your reader long after he’s finished reading

3. All the surrounding stuff besides the idea or even its presentation — all the encouraging, taunting, goading, shaming, motivating your reader to actually do something with the idea you’re sharing other than just squirrel it away

And that’s what you can find in my new 10 Commandments book:

Grifters, suckers, the “World’s Youngest Hypnotist,” an openly racist “comic’s comic,” a couple of tophat-wearing magicians, a pickup artist who describes himself as “average, with a serious tilt towards ugly,” the “world’s most feared negotiator,” the last Russian Tsar, the first black mayor of a major U.S. city, Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams, Ronald Reagan, and much, much more.

They are all in the book so you see the underlying ideas in a new light in case you know them already, so you remember them in case you don’t, and so you put them to work in your business and personal lives, and profit from them.

As for the ridiculously low price, it’s there for a reason, which has nothing to do with the value of what’s inside. Don’t let it dissuade you:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

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

The fiction business

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The last week or so, I’ve been spending a lot of time obsessively checking how my new book is doing on Amazon. This morning, in a bout of such checking, Amazon offered to show me its “Movers and Shakers: Our biggest gainers in sales rank over the past 24 hours. Updated frequently.”

This is something I had long wished for but didn’t know existed — a kind of first derivative of sales, what’s selling better lately, what’s moving up in the ranks quickly?

I checked the Kindle store. Unfortunately, there are just two pages of movers and shakers for the entire Kindle store, as opposed to movers and shakers across subcategories.

And what is moving and shaking in the Kindle store?

The same damn stuff as always.

Out of the 100 top movers and shakers, 99 are fiction books, mostly romance novels and literotica. Exactly one is a non-fiction book, Mark Manson’s Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, which, based on its promise alone, might as well be classified as fiction.

This made me think of something I heard Dan Kennedy say in one of his closed-door, multithousand-dollar, info marketing seminars. Said Dan:

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Many people make the mistake of thinking we’re in the non fiction business. Big mistake. We’re in the fiction business. First of all, remember that most of your customers never do anything with most of what they buy from you, therefore, their experience is fictional, not non-fictional. [The small audience of top info marketers laughs, but Dan continues.] Laugh if you want. I’m being very serious. They’re having a fictional experience. They actually believe they’re doing something. they are not, but they think they are doing something.

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If you sell information online, this is a very bitter pill to swallow, and in fact, it’s one that I keep refusing to swallow.

Which is dumb, because why argue against Dan Kennedy, who basically made everybody who has been successful in the info publishing business?

But I keep hoping and in fact working on getting people to not just buy my stuff, but to actually consume it, and ultimately, to put it to use and to benefit from it. It’s slow going, but it gives me hope and a goal to look forward to.

Anyways, as I say in the conclusion of my new 10 Commandments book, I hope you will apply the 10 principles I share in that book in your own business and personal life.

I’ve worked hard to make the book both interesting and practical, with new distinctions to help you actually get traction, putting to work good ideas that you may have heard of before but haven’t done anything with. Of course, you might also come across commandments that are entirely new to you. Put those to work as well.

And on that note, I’ve gotten a few more reviews after writing my dirge about having just one review a few days ago. Here’s a review from Maliha Mannan, who writes over at The Side Blogger:

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As someone who makes an offer almost daily via email, it’s essential that people like me, and also buy from me. This book is full of ideas for doing just that. I read it too quickly, so I plan to read it again soon (it’s a tiny book but packed with curious ideas that you should take a minute to fully comprehend, appreciate, and implement). I see it becoming one of those books I read at least once a year. It’s that good!

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In case you too would like to get a copy of my new non-fiction book:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments