Direct Marketing

Do you want my help creating an email promotion for your business?

by

Today is April 1st.

​​I was going to try to “fool” you by saying I am getting into multi-level marketing. That’s on the back of a reader reply I got last week. A reader surreptitiously tried to recruit me into her own MLM organization with:

Life-Changing Products!
Breakthrough Marketing System!
Huge Compensation Plan!

Fortunately for you, I’m about as humorous as a rock. So there will be no fooling today.

Instead, I have a 100% serious and honest question for you. I’ll write an email about this question tomorrow as well. I want to make it clear this is not some dumb April Fools stunt.

As you might know, I now have a role as hot seat coach in Shiv Shetti’s PCM mastermind.

Each week, my task is to come up with a new strategy for a new email promotion for a new business.

It’s fun work. I’ve learned a lot in just my two months there. And that’s on top of my own previous experience, creating and running such email promotions. That experience is how I got this job in the first place, via a recommendation from Australia’s best copywriter, Daniel Throssell.

So my question to you is:

Do you have a business?

Do you have an email list?

Do you want to learn how to create new email promotions for your own business regularly?

​​In other words, do you want to learn how to pull out an extra $10k, $20k, $50k from your list on demand — terms and conditions apply?

Do you even want my direct, one-on-one hand-holding and help, as you strategize and execute the first of these email promotions?

If so, then reply to this email, and tell me you’re interested.

If I can get 5-10 qualified business owners who want this, I will put it on within the next 10 days.

And if not, then I really will be joining that MLM.

Save me from that fate. Get much more out of your list than you might think is possible. Hit reply, and tell me if you’re interested in this promotion training.

I just wanted to help

by

Today, I found myself watching a YouTube underwater livestream from the bottom of a murky river. 993 other viewers were watching along with me.

The YouTube livestream showed impenetrable green water, with the only change being the digital clock in the upper right corner, which counted away:

2024-03-26 12:52:28… 12:52:29… 12:52:30…

I was on the fish doorbell site.

Apparently, every spring, fish migrate upstream through the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands.

But there’s a river lock in the city. The fish cannot swim past it.

For reasons of their own, the Utrecht city government created this YouTube livestream, and allowed people to press a digital button once they see a fish on the livestream. This I suppose will somehow cause the river lock to open and will let the fish through.

Like I said, I and another 993 bipedal simians were intently watching this unchanging livestream of murky river water, hoping to be the one to press the stupid fish doorbell and the let fish through on its way.

I thought my willingness to sit and stare at nothing was notable because I am currently in the middle of preparing my presentation for Brian Kurtz’s Titans XL mastermind this Thursday.

I’m scheduled to talk about writing emails that elicit engagement — that get people to hit reply and write you something in return to your daily emails.

Eliciting engagement might seem like a foolish endeavor — “sales emails are there to make sales, bro.” But in my experience, writing for engagement does in time boost sales, plus it has lots of other good knock-on effects.

So how do you write for engagement?

The fish doorbell gives a clue. One big reason that people will engage with you is simply to feel helpful.

Just ask people for help. Give them the opportunity to feel smart and useful. More often than not, you will get engagement.

This can be taken to extremes or exploited to make people do foolish things, such as, for example, getting them to watch a livestream of nothing, in order to press a button that does nothing, with the ultimate goal being something completely absurd or intangible — “swim on little fish, godspeed.”

Of course, this is a newsletter about influence and persuasion.

​​And so you can bet that my conclusion is that appealing to people’s better sides, their desire to feel helpful or useful, is not the only way to go, or the most effective way to create engagement.

Maybe I will one day turn this Titans XL presentation into some kind of training on how to write for engagement, and make this info available more broadly.

Maybe. Or maybe not.

Whatever may happen, if you would like more ideas here and now about how to write for engagement, plus see specific examples of it in action, you can find that in my Most Valuable Email Swipes #8, #9, #11, #23, #24, #27, #31, #42, and #48.

MVE Swipes is a swipe file I include with my Most Valuable Email training. This training shows you how to help your readers understand and experience abstract ideas in first-hand, intuitive ways, which stick with them for years to come. For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

How do you turn skim milk into butter?

by

A question comes in about turning skim milk into butter:

===

I have a question about your Simple Money Email course.

I’ve been writing an email to my list six days a week (or occasionally five) for the past month and a half or so, since about the beginning of February. At first, sales came in, but since about the beginning of March, they’ve declined by a lot, by over 50%. Will your course help me to figure out what’s going wrong so that I can set things to rights?

===

The answer in short is “probably no.”

If you’ve never emailed your list regularly, then what you have yourself is a pail of rich whole milk, with the cream at the top. You simply go in there, use a ladle to skim the cream off the top, and with a bit of additional processing, you get yourself some delicious Kerrygold.

But once you’ve pretty much skimmed all the cream off top, the butter creation becomes harder.

It’s still possible to occasionally turn skim milk into butter — I had one guy on my list for 775 days, reading 775 emails, before he decided to buy something from me.

​​But it’s never as easy as right at the start.

​​And assuming you’ve been doing a decent job of cream collection, no kind of magical spoon, skimmer, or ladle will really make that much of a difference after a while.

So what do you do?

You got a couple options.

One, you can add new whole milk to your pail — ie. add new people to your list.

Or — and this is where my butter analogy breaks down — you can create new offers. There’s no law saying you can only sell people things once. Or stretching the analogy, there’s no law saying you can only ever make butter from your pail of milk, as opposed to also making cheddar, ice cream, and quark.

I’ll have more to say about cheddar creation, specifically, about churning up new offers that don’t involve creating whole new products. That’s something I have been thinking about a lot as part of my new “hot seat coach” role within Shiv Shetti’s PCM mastermind.

But that’s for the future.

For now, I do have a very high-quality ladle to sell you.

It will skim off the cream from your list if you’ve never emailed regularly before… it might pull in occasional sales even if you never do anything more to grow your list… and it will be an indispensable part of launching new offers, in case you ever do decide to do so.

For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

Hamilton

by

No, I didn’t go to see Hamilton on Broadway. But I am in New York City.

Last night, I went to dinner with my friend Sam and his girlfriend Olivia.

Olivia has a background in musical theater.

So while we sat in a very dim restaurant and ate sweet potatoes and Japanese-style chicken wings, Olivia enthused about Hamilton, the sung-and-rapped musical that’s broken all kinds of Broadway records.

Olivia won the Hamilton ticket lottery when the show was just opening. She had to actually quit her job to go see it. She loved Hamilton then, she loves it now, and she wanted to share it with Sam and me.

Sam and I were skeptical. But all right.

Last night was pouring rain. Tickets to Hamilton are generally impossible to get. So of course we didn’t go see the live show. Instead, we went back to Sam’s apartment and watched Hamilton, the recording of the Broadway production.

And it turned out to be… one damn musical number after another.

Sam and I kept dutifully quiet and stared at the projected images on the wall. After an hour, Sam paused it to go to the bathroom. This was an opportunity for Olivia to ask if we were enjoying it.

No. And no.

“I knew it,” said Olivia. “I could feel the energy in the room.”

With Hamilton, the recording, you are supposedly seeing and hearing the show just as it was when it was live. But the reality is that it’s impossible.

There’s the missing excitement of going somewhere live, and feeling that you’re participating.

Then of course there’s the intangibles of an actual live 3D presentation, the sound and vision that cannot be reproduced at home on a 2D surface and with a little speaker.

Plus in the theater, there are hundreds or thousands of other people there, all set to enjoy the show, all infecting each other with their enthusiasm.

All of this is just one more reason to do things live whenever possible.

To do in-real-life musicals rather than sell DVDs…

To offer live trainings over prerecorded ones…

To write live emails rather than send canned autoresponders.

No, I’m not saying a freshly written daily email will have the same impact as a live Broadway show. But in its own small way, a freshly written email feels live and real in a way that an autoresponder email cannot replicate. And over time, that effect builds up.

If you want to write fresh emails — new ones every day, which feel live and real as opposed to flat, canned, and stale — then you can find that in my Simple Money Emails training.

​​Simple Money Emails shows you how I do it, and how you can do it too, starting today. For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

10 minutes to get big Twitter accounts to follow you

by

Once every 24 hours or so, I get asked a variant of the following question:

“How did you build up an email list without being on social media?”

My answer is always the same. I did it by being stubborn and stupid, by sending daily emails into the void, without anybody reading what I was writing. I did this for years before things slowly started to turn around.

The problem, by the way, was not that I was not on social media.

The problem was that I was and continue to be unsociable. Even in the world of email newsletters, even among people whose emails I read every day, I never thought to speak up, get introduced, put myself on the radar or sonar of a person with an audience bigger than mine.

Until the end of today, I am promoting Kieran Drew’s High Impact Writing. That’s Kieran’s course to teach you how to write for influence and growth on Twitter and LinkedIn.

But here’s the truth:

As with email, you can write for years on social media without anyone taking notice. The shortcut to success on social media, the royal road, is the same as in the world of email.

You gotta start making connections. You gotta start engaging with people who are more successful than you are. And you gotta do it in a way where they actually take notice and respond.

People often reply to my emails and write things like,

“Loved it!”

“😍”

“Great email!”

While I appreciate any and all reader feedback, there’s really nothing for me to reply to here. There’s nothing for me to grab onto, nothing to get curious about, nothing to make the reader stand out.

So what to do instead?

Back to Kieran’s High Impact Writing. Sure, he teaches you writing for social media. But he also teaches you the other stuff, the connecting and network building in a way that actually works.

In the one of the bonus modules (Social Media Made Simple), Kieran gives you an example of a twitter DM that got him to start following a smaller account. And then he gives you a step-by-step template that he’s since used to get his favorite accounts to start following him.

It takes all about 10 minutes to do this.

And I can tell you, it works in the world of email as well. I know, because people have written me similar things, and I’ve taken notice and then got on their list. (I still remain unsociable and I rarely reach out to anyone, even in email. And I’m paying a price for it. I don’t encourage anyone to do like I do.)

High Impact Writing goes offline today at 12 midnight PST. After that, when it does come back, the price will be explosively higher.

Also, if you act now and get High Impact Writing before the deadline via my affiliate link below, you get the recordings of my Age of Insight.

Age of Insight was a training I put on about a year ago and sold for $297. It shows you how to write in an insightful sounding way, even if you have nothing very insightful to say. Simply forward me your invoice for High Impact Writing and I will get you the recordings of Age of Insight.

Assuming, that is, that you decide High Impact Writing is right for you, and that you act before the deadline. In case you’re intrigued, go here for more details:

https://bejakovic.com/hiw

Meet me in New York/Baltimore/Palm Beach?

by

Last weekend, I ran the first in-real-life meetup of my readers in Barcelona, where I live. That meetup went great. It definitely made me want to do one again.

Over the next few weeks, I will be traveling to the U.S. for the first time in 5 years.

So maybe you would like to meet me somewhere along the way?

I’ll be in New York City between March 5th and 10th… in Baltimore between March 10th and 14th… in Palm Beach between March 14th and and 17th. If you will be around any of those places on those dates, write me a note and we can see about meeting up.

In other news, thank you in case you used my link to sign up to Dan Kennedy’s free “Shutdown Livestream” yesterday.

A buncha people wrote me, some asking for the free trifle with their name on it that I promised as a bonus… others just to wish me good luck in the affiliate contest, which has seized my body and mind like a low-grade fever.

There’s no public leaderboard for the affiliate contest behind this marketing campaign, so I cannot say how I am doing after yesterday’s push. But I will keep you posted when I find out.

And in case you didn’t sign up or you don’t know what’s up:

The free livestream will happen tomorrow, Fri March 1st. It will feature marketing legend Dan Kennedy, being interviewed in his basement, where he works, by Russel Brunson of ClickFunnnels. The topic will be why Dan has decided to cut off new signups to his No B.S. Letter “for the foreseeable future.”

It’s sure to be entertaining — Dan does a very good curmudgeon act.

​​More importantly, this livestream is sure to be valuable. Dan knows more about direct marketing, personal promotion, and influential writing than probably anybody else on the planet.

If would like to sign up to this free livestream before it disappears into the night:

https://bejakovic.com/no-bs-scarcity

Exciting update about my No B.S scarcity emails

by

Three weeks ago, I wrote three emails making fun of Dan Kennedy’s ongoing, scarcity-mongering “Shutdown livestream” campaign.

At the end of those emails, I included an affiliate link for you to sign up to that campaign.

In part, I did this because the campaign had been effective on me (I signed up both to the livestream and to Dan’s newsletter).

In part, I also did it because I’ve learned a ton from Dan Kennedy, and I would promote his stuff for free, and I have in the past.

But let’s get back to the present.

I sent out those three emails three weeks ago. I had a good chuckle with readers who wrote me back about Dan’s scarcity tactics. And then, I forgot all about it.

Until last night.

Because last night, I got an email with the subject line, “Exciting Update: NO BS Shutdown Campaign Leaderboard Revealed!”

The inside of that exciting email said:

===

Now let’s dive into the current top 5 on our Leaderboard:

1. Tim Hewitt
2. Travis Lee
3. John Bejavoic
4. Frank Buddenbrock
5. Frank Andrews

===

I don’t know if there’s a French-Canadian marketer out there named John Bejavoic. I’m guessing not. Instead, I reckon this is only time #64,171 in my life that somebody’s mangled my last name.

No matter. Because it means that, for the first time in my life, and in spite of my absolute lack of effort and my three tongue-in-cheek emails, I am now in the running of an affiliate competition.

The email described the prizes for the top 3 affiliates:

* Third place is a 6 months free of Dan Kennedy’s newsletter
* Second prize is a box of Dan Kennedy faxes
* First is a ticket to the No B.S. Superconference in May

The first two prizes I don’t need. The third prize I don’t want (who wants to travel around the world from Barcelona to Dallas TX).

And yet…

As I read through this “Exciting update” email last night, I found myself paranoid, spinning around, and looking over my shoulder.

Would somebody swoop in and take my 3rd place position?

I was like a dragon, guarding my wealth, suspicious somebody will take it away from me, and slyly thinking how I could increase my gold stash — even though I don’t really want the gold.

It brought to mind the following passage by another master of direct response marketing, Claude Hopkins. Hopkins wrote a hundred years ago:

===

Many send out small gifts, like memorandum books, to customers and prospects. They get very small results. One man sent out a letter to the effect that he had a leather-covered book with a man’s name on it. It was waiting for him and would be sent on request. The form of request was enclosed, and it also asked for certain information. That information indicated lines on which a man might be sold.

Nearly all men, it was found, filled out that request and supplied the information. When a man knows that something belongs to him – something with his name on it – he will make the effort to get it, even though the thing is a trifle.

===

So now I’d like to invite you once again to sign up to Dan Kennedy’s free livestream campaign.

The livestream will happen March 1st, two days from now. It will feature Dan Kennedy, being interviewed in his basement, where he works, by Russell Brunson of ClickFunnnels. The topic will be why Dan has decided to cut off new signups to his No B.S. Letter “for the foreseeable future.”

I’d like to invite you to sign up for this livestream for three reasons:

First, because like I said already, I have learned a ton from Dan Kennedy. Odds are good that you too will learn something valuable, if only you sign up, and even more so if you actually watch the free livestream.

Second reason is that you would help me do better in this stupid affiliate contest, which I am participating in against my better judgment, simply out of loss aversion and blind greed.

Third, because I have a trifle with your name on it.

It really is a trifle. But it’s yours.

​​It has your name on it.

And you can claim it, if only you sign up to the Dan Kennedy free livestream campaign, forward me your confirmation email, and tell me a physical address where I can mail your trifle.

And in the spirit of this entire No B.S. scarcity campaign, I have to mention this named trifle is only for the first 15 people who take me up on this offer.

To get started, here’s the first step, where you can sign up for Dan’s free livestream:

https://bejakovic.com/no-bs-scarcity

How to grow a newsletter by 15k subs in one day

by

Today is the last day of my promotion of Newsletter XP, the star-studded course on how to build, grow, and monetize a successful newsletter.

So let me give you a case study from that course. It comes from one Jenny Rothenberg. Jenny was the head of growth at Morning Brew as Morning Brew’s audience scaled from 100k to 2.5M.

Jenny then started her own newsletter growth agency, Smooth Media. She now works with big creators brands. One of these are Colin and Samir. I’d never heard of them but apparently they are big on YouTube. Jenny worked with them to create a video that drove 15k subs to their newsletter in one day.

“Aw that’s just great!” you say. “They probably have millions of followers on YouTube! Come on!”

Sure.

But Colin and Samir didn’t simply create a video that said, “Hey we have a newsletter, come sign up.” Even with a big audience, that won’t drive 15k subscribers in one day.

Instead, they used fundamental human psychology, which you too can use, even if you don’t have a million YouTube subscribers.

There was scarcity (“We’re gonna delete this video in 24 hours”)… a giveaway… a partnership with another big creator… and a completely on-brand, value-prop match between their YouTube channel and what their newsletter was about.

You can do this too, even if you have a following of 99 people. But what if you have no other audience to tap into at all?

Inside the same module of Newsletter XP, you can hear Jenny talk about other ways to benefit from people who do have audiences — on YouTube, TikTok, Twitter.

​​This is part of a bigger discussion that happens inside the course between Jenny, Tyler Denk (CEO of Beehiiv), Alex Lieberman (former CEO of Morning Brew), and Dan Krenitsyn (previously BuzzFeed, now Facebook).

They all have war stories, and they all have unique answers to the question that this module is built around, which is:

“What is your playbook for taking a newsletter from 100→10,000 subscribers in a year?”

If you’d like to hear that discussion and profit from it, I suggest you act now.

I’ve managed to claw out a $200 discount for you from the usual price that Newsletter XP sells for. That discount is good until tonight, Monday Feb 26, at 12 midnight PST. If you’d like to take advantage of this, here’s what to do:

1. Go to the Newsletter XP sales page at https://bejakovic.com/nxp

2. If you decide you want to get Newsltter XP, then use coupon code JB20 at checkout.

3. Make sure the coupon code works — that you see the price drop by $200. This is not my funnel, and if you end up buying at full price, there’s nothing I can do about it.

Stale autoresponders

by

A personal confession:

I’m a compulsive salad buyer. I buy those prewashed and precut bags of mixed greens, and I stack them in my fridge. I eat them too, but not at the speed that I buy them at.

This often means that, like this morning, I’ll peek into an already opened bag of salad and evaluate critically whether it’s too wilted to consume. Meanwhile, other, perfectly fresh, new bags of salad sit in my fridge, waiting until they too become old enough and unfresh enough to deserve my attention.

Do you maybe sense an analogy in the making? Something to do with marketing? Well, here goes:

On last week’s Write & Profit coaching call, I asked one question to three of the five people who are in that group. The question was:
​
​”What’s the strategy behind your autoresponder?”

There are good reasons to have an email autoresponder. And then there are bad reasons.

One bad reason is, “Everybody says I should.” Another bad reason is, “Because it’s a functionality of my ESP.”

Here are a few of the problems I saw with the autoresponders among my coaching students:

#1. They were out of date. They did not represent the current philosophy or positioning or main offers of the person writing.

#2. They were not as good as their more recent emails.

#3. They did not feel fresh or real, because they were not fresh or real.

#4. They did not allow new subscribers to get to the most current and exciting offers.

If you have nothing else to eat in your fridge but wilted salad, then that makes your choice of dinner easier.

Likewise, if you don’t write fresh emails, then having a stale autoresponder is better than sending no emails at all.

On the other hand, if you are writing fresh emails, then you need to have good reasons for also having an autoresponder.

And in the absence of such good reasons, it’s better to just throw the old salad, I mean old emails, out, and serve up what’s fresh and new.

Fresh and new is not hard to do. And if you want my recipe book for fresh emails, on demand, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

The anti-subscription high-ticket community

by

I’ve recently noticed an interesting new pricing model. As an example, take Codie Sanchez’s Contrarian Community.

As you might know, Codie is an ex-private-equity, Goldman Sachs woman. She quit the corporate world and started using her PE background to buy boring, cash-flow businesses. Laundromats, RV parks, and the like.

Codie also started an info publishing business, Contrarian Thinking, teaching players with money to do the same as she’s doing.

Codie writes a free Contrarian Thinking newsletter, in which she gets her audience of 200,000 readers hyped up on the opportunity of buying boring businesses.

And once they get hyped up enough, she sells them training teaching them how to actually buy a boring businesses, plus ongoing support and networking, inside what she calls Contrarian Community.

So far, so standard.

The part that got me is that Codie doesn’t charge for access to Contrarian Community monthly. She doesn’t charge for it yearly either. Instead, she charges a one-time fixed fee of $10k. And she’s built a 8-figure business out of Contrarian Thinking this way.

I’ve noticed this pricing model in a few other successful info publishing and coaching businesses recently. At first, this had me surprised — because I’ve been trained to think continuity offers are where it’s at.

But a one-time, large fixed ticket to join a community makes a lot of sense. It means:

1. More money per member, today instead of tomorrow.

2. Better quality of member.

3. Better results for members, and therefore easier sales down the line, and a more attractive offer.

4. A better community. Rather than people constantly churning, there’s stability. There are more members contributing, and more successful members supporting and encouraging those who aren’t as successful yet.

So this is something to consider.

If you too offer ongoing coaching, training, or a community of some sort, you can do this too.

Figure out what your LTV is per customer… round that up… or double it or triple it. And then charge people a one-time fee, instead of leaving them to constantly wonder if it’s worth sticking around and renewing for another cycle.
​
​Do this, and you might end up producing a better community, getting better results for your customers, and making a lot more money yourself.