Direct Marketing

“Way too biz oppy”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will info products as a business opportunity disappear?

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

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

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

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

I cannot answer that for you.

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

https://bejakovic.com/aisuperagent

Endless traffic partners for an “info product” funnel factory

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Yesterday, I promised to tell you how I would find endless traffic partners for your “info product” funnel factory, starting from nothing.

But before you spend time reading this long and lionhearted email, let me warn you:

What I’m about to share is speculative rather than proven.

It’s what I would do, but the fact is, the one and only time I tried anything like this, it didn’t produce any results.

I’m guessing that’s because I gave up after just one outreach message… because I prolly picked a bad person to reach out to… plus, my offer wasn’t as tempting as I would know to make it now.

I do still think this process has lots of promise, whether or not you’re starting from nothing. That’s why I’m sharing it with you.

Still with me? If you are, let me open up:

Last year, I read a post inside the Royalty Ronin community with the title:

“I will BRIBE you to do this deal!”

The “deal” was:

Go on YouTube… find people with big audiences in hobby niches like dogs or woodworking… and offer to produce a newsletter for them for free.

The guy making this post was James Foster, one of the more active and successful people inside the Royalty Ronin. James was so confident this would produce good results that, as a joke incentive to get people to try this out, he offered a $2 Dogecoin bill to people who actually put the idea into to action.

James’s reasoning:

1. Most YouTubers live and die with the popularity and reach of their next video

2. Of course, most YouTubers don’t have a newsletter, and depend entirely on the whims of YouTube algorithm

3. You can offer to create a newsletter for such people for them, for free.

The offer is, the YouTube Channel owner drives their viewers to the newsletter, and in turn, you produce emails that drive their own viewers back to their new videos (something that YouTube won’t reliably do).

You profit by also using the newsletter to promote other relevant stuff. (You can even offer to split the profits with the YouTube owner, or you don’t have to.)

I am a bit of a monkey-see-monkey-do kind of monkey. Plus I liked the idea of getting rewarded for running a little experiment.

So when I read James’s idea, I decided to give it a go.

I went on YouTube and, after a bit of snooping, found a YouTube channel with Qigong videos, delivering vague instructions over B-roll footage of mountains.

The channel had hundreds of videos, over a million followers, and of course no newsletter.

Sidebar:

In the past, I’ve experimented with cold outreach. And I’ve learned that cold outreach is drastically more likely to get a response if I put in the work up front to do something for people… instead of simply offering to do so only after gotten a green light from them.

So what to do here?

I set up a new free Beehiiv account… branded it with the branding from the YouTube channel… created an email to simulate how a regular weekly email would look, with a screenshot of their latest video… and signed up the owner of the YouTube account to my newsletter.

All this took like 20-30 minutes, because really I just repurposed stuff from their YouTube channel.

I then wrote the owner a separate email, to explain what’s going on and to make my partner proposition.

And like I said… I never heard back from the guy.

I never followed up or pursued this further, the $2 Dogecoin bill be damned.

The reason is, I had other things that are already bubbling on the stove for me, and this idea, cool and tempting though it sounded, failed to produce an immediate win for me.

That might be because the person I was writing to was a 16-year old Chinese boy who didn’t speak English who was just playing with AI (I don’t know this for a fact, but it is quite possible, based on the email address on the YouTube channel).

Or maybe it was that my offer, no risk and all reward though I tried to make it, still seemed confusing and unattractive. My reasoning:

If you read my emails, you’re likely to know that an email newsletter is immensely valuable. But the majority of the world has never heard of email marketing and cannot believe it is as effective as it actually is.

And so explaining to YouTube channel owners how they will drive traffic to a newsletter I create… and I will drive their viewers back to them… and how this is good for you and for them — that’s already complicated and not clear. And not-clear offers often don’t get takers.

That’s why I think a much better, much clearer offer would be to create NOT a custom newsletter, but a custom info product, along with a sales page, branded with the YouTube channel’s identity, on some topic that their audience already has shown to care about.

I speculate this kind of offer would be much easier for YouTube channel owners to be interested in and to say yes to partnering on. “I made this product that your people want, send them here and we split the profits.” Much clearer, no?

Plus, the nice thing in this case is, you’re still building an email list, except an email list of info product buyers, instead of just random newsletter subs.

So that’s my idea for finding endless traffic partners for all the info product funnels you could stomach to create.

Of course, creating an info product and a surrounding funnel is nowhere as trivial as signing up for Beehiiv and creating a welcome email.

Except… it can be, thanks to the “AI Super Agent” I’ve been talking about the past couple days. This “AI Super Agent” does market research to figure out which info product ideas are likely to be a hit… it creates the product based on the winningest ideas… plus it generates all the sales copy.

I wouldn’t use this “AI Super Agent” for creating info products for personality-based list like my own.

But for partnering with people who already have large audiences… in hobby niches where much of the info is already out there, but just needs to be synthesized and pacakaged up… I think this AI gizmo could be very a very useful and lucrative tool.

If you wanna find out more about this “AI Super Agent,” then the guy who created it has a webinar in which he demoes it and explains how it works:

https://bejakovic.com/aisuperagent

Info product niches you never would believe

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Yesterday, I wrote an email promoting Josh Rosenberg’s “AI Super Agent”, which researches and builds out an entire info product funnel for you in minutes, including the product to sell and all the copy to sell it. To which, an interested reader wrote in reply:

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I had a quick look and couldn’t find any examples of Josh Rosenberg’s system in action, but I am very interested in what kind of results other people are getting from this kind of approach.

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I’m guessing you won’t find many results of Josh’s customers online yet, because this offer is new.

Josh does have case studies inside the webinar I linked to and am linking to today as well.

But also I talked to Josh before I decided to promote this gizmo. I asked him, what have people actually done with his thing? He sent me back a sample list of what people are doing. Some of these info product niches are familiar, but others, specifically the trees, you might never believe:

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One user is creating a course on vibe coding for their site https://www.lindy.ai/.

Another created funnels for copywriting/branding for startups and another for SMEs.

Someone else created funnels for prophylactic trimming of large, wind-damage prone trees and a social media posting guide.

Someone else is working on a funnel for local dentists.

Another user is creating offers for the survival niche.

Someone else is creating a funnel to help people start their own trucking company.

Someone else created multiple funnels for car salesmen.

Someone else is doing a funnel on pay per call affiliate marketing.

And someone created funnels for pickleball, real estate agents, parenting and Adobe creative cloud. This person got the agency license, so they are probably doing this for their clients.

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(For the record, a big part of what Josh’s “AI Super Agent” does is market research. It comes up with a score predicting the likely success of various info product ideas. I’m guessing that means that “prophylactic trimming of large, wind-damage prone trees,” bizarre though it sounds, is actually a promising info product niche.)

As for that agency license Josh mentions:

Apparently, about 50% of people buying his “AI Super Agent” are taking the agency license. I don’t know the exact details of how that license works, but the broad picture is it allows you to make unlimited info product funnels, for as many different clients as you want, as opposed to just doing ones your own businesses or for one client you’re working with.

On that note, tomorrow I’ll tell you how I would find endless partners for such an “info product funnel” agency, even if you have no clients yet that you’re working with right now.

Meanwhile, if you’re interested in Josh’s “AI Super Agent,” and if you want to see if it could be a good fit for your current biz or clients, Josh has prepared a webinar where he demos and explains how it works:

https://bejakovic.com/aisuperagent

How I’d transform existing ecom clients into my own info business(es)

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A couple days ago, I wrote email about how I’d eat ecom copywriters’ lunch… with some fava beans, and a nice chianti.

That email was based on my own experience from a few years back, writing lots and lots of advertorials and revshare emails for ecom clients.

Today, I got another idea for you along the same lines, an idea I was very excited about at the time. This idea could have made me a profitable info publishing business on day 0, but it never happened, because I committed a classic persuasion blunder.

First a bit o’ background:

Like I wrote on Monday, I got ecom clients by writing advertorials. Then, I offered those same clients to write emails on a revshare basis, which made me much more than working as a per-hour copywriter.

But there was one ongoing problem, and that was a lack of good offers to promote in those daily emails.

The clients I worked with had a half-dozen or so live dropshipping offers. Some worked great, some ok.

Ideally, I’d promote each of those offers only twice every month, because otherwise I noticed the response dropped off.

What to promote all those other days?

There were affiliate networks that specialized in “viral” ecom products like the ones my clients were selling. But no matter how supposedly “viral” these offers were, my tests showed that only a handful were worth promoting, and even those underperformed our in-house offers.

Beyond the affiliate ecom products, there were a few ClickBank info products that we could sell to our audience. But since our audience (dog owners and kitchen and household gadgets buyers) was outside the popular and cutthroat ClickBank niches like dating and weight loss, the only ClickBank offers I could find had awful marketing and sold poorly.

So I had an idea.

What if I were to simply create custom info products to sell to my clients’ list?

I had a good sense of what offers could sell well based on my emails, plus I could research what’s selling on Amazon, what’s getting views on YouTube, searches on Google.

I could create some ebooks, simple sales pages for those ebooks, maybe some upsells. It didn’t need to be perfect, just attractive and quality enough to put confidently in front of our list, and to complement the physical products we were selling.

I pitched the idea to my clients. I said I will do ALL THE WORK and split the money with them.

They liked the idea, and said they would talk about it at “the partners next meeting.” Aaand… they came back a few days later, with the results of their partner deliberations:

“We discussed it extensively last meeting and decided it’s not exactly the direction we want to go (although we do see the huge potential there).”

… in other words, they said no because my “no work and no-risk offer” still sounded like some work, some risk, or at least some uncertainty or obligation.

That’s the classic persuasion blunder I told you about at the start. It goes back to the old Dean Jackson “Would you like a cookie” analogy.

Says Dean, imagine you have a guest at your house, and you know she loves oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.

You could sit there with your guest in the living room and then suddenly jump up and say, “Hey how about I go in the kitchen and bake you up a tray of those cookies you love? It won’t take a minute, really!”

Do this, and odds are great your guest will think, frown, and say, “Oh no, don’t worry about it.” She might even look at you a bit weird for offering to go out of your way like that.

But what if you preemptively bake those cookies?

And then, when your guest settles in on the couch, what if you come out of the kitchen with a trayful and say, “Would you like a cookie? It’s one of those chocolate chip oatmeal ones I know you love.”

… in this case, odds are excellent your guest will wolf down the whole trayful.

Same thing here.

I could have done the work ahead of time. Created an ebook, a sales page, and even some upsells.

That done, I could have simply told my clients that I have a custom new info product offer I’ve special-made for our audience.

If they’re ok with it, I will send out a day’s email to it to test it out. I’ll also set up an affiliate account for them so they can track the sales, and give them 50% (or whatever) of the sales. If it works well, I can keep promoting it and keep splitting the profits with them.

Had I done this, there’s an excellent chance they would have said, “Sure go ahead.” After all, I was testing out new offers all the time. Many turned out to be duds, while a rare few turned out ok and became regular sellers.

Of course, I never did this. You can probably guess why.

Creating an info product, even a generic one like a dog-training ebook, takes time.

Creating a sales funnel for said ebook, even a basic one, takes time.

Creating upsells? Time.

Plus, there’s still a chance it won’t work, even though my intuition said it would.

Which brings me to my offer for you for today.

Everything I’ve just told you about happened back in 2021. The world has changed a tad since then.

If I were doing this today, well — take a look at the link below.

It’s a webinar. it demos an “AI Super Agent” that does everything I just talked about — the market research, the product creation, and the funnel building. It does it in a matter of minutes, instead of a matter of weeks/never that it would have taken me.

The guy behind this AI gizmo is Josh Rosenberg. A couple decades ago, Josh used to be a copywriter. Then a decade ago, he became a big ClickBank seller in the “teach you a guitar” and “sex & dating” spaces. Then towards the end of the 2010s, he went on to work behind-the-scenes CMO for a bunch of big direct response clients, to the tune of over $150M in sales.

A couple years ago, Josh started focusing aggressively on creating AI tools for direct response businesses.

He says he’s taken his knowledge and expertise from the various stages of his career, and baked them into this “AI Super Agent,” so it does 95% of the work of creating an effective info product funnel for you.

I haven’t used the thing myself, and so I cannot vouch for it. The reason for this is I don’t think this “AI Super Agent” is a fit for the kind of personality-based, “let me tell you something new” approach that I offer via this newsletter.

But I think this “AI Super Agent” can be very tempting if you’re in a situation like I was back in 2021. In case you’re interested in spinning up and testing out a new info business in a few clicks and taps, this might be worth a watch:

https://bejakovic.com/aisuperagent

“A little scary”: X-ray goggles revealed

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In an email last week, I teased a pair of “X-ray goggles” that let you peer into places you maybe shouldn’t be peering, like your prospect’s wallet.

I thought these goggles might be particularly relevant for people who do lots of sales calls. They allow you to only get on calls with people who can afford what you’re selling, so you minimize the time you spend on the phone while maximizing the actual sales you make.

Last week, I talked to a few such people to find out more about their situation. At the end, I revealed to them what these goggles are, plus where to get ’em. Here are a few responses I got:

“I didn’t know such a tool existed, and I’m sure people on my list would like to have a pair.”

“That is interesting (and a little scary). Thanks for sharing that, John.”

“Damn! I WISH I could use that! I ran it on myself and it blew me away! That’s a killer app. Have you used it? Has it helped you?”

I have not used these X-ray goggles myself because frankly I don’t do sales calls. I am also not running lots of paid or affiliate traffic to generate leads I have to wade through.

But maybe you do?

Or maybe you have a sales team that does?

Or maybe you work with such a client?

If so, these X-ray goggles are worth a look:

https://bejakovic.com/xray

17 ideas to salvage a huge cold list

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Yesterday, I sent out an email asking for advice on what to do with a huge cold list that someone I know is in secret possession of.

This list is not only huge, not only cold, but there are also a bunch of other strange restrictions. Can anything be done?

After asking for advice yesterday, I got a buncha responses, including from people who manage email lists as a job (one guy for 20 years) and from others who have been in similarish situations and shared their experiences and suggestions.

I was honestly grateful to get so many thoughtful, detailed, and helpful responses. I read them all. I selected the ones that sounded feasible to me, and boiled related ones to get 17 separate ideas, most of which were new to me. I then organized them in three categories:

1. Technical ideas (how to email)

2. Content ideas (what to email)

3. Out-of-the-box ideas (how not to email)

I don’t know a better way to say thanks to everyone on my list who wrote me than to “pay it forward” and share the total collection of ideas with my whole list. You can find it below.

If you yourself are in secret possession of a list that’s huge, cold, possibly dead but maybe not, then read these ideas, and if you find them valuable, pass them on.

And in case you take any of these ideas and apply them, let me know — I’d love to hear about it and update the doc. Here it is:

https://bejakovic.com/salvage

Your advice on salvaging a huge email list?

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One big lesson I learned long ago, from a former client in the real estate investing space, is that your email list can do much more for you than simply provide you with income.

The email addresses on your list stand for, more often than not, real, living, intelligent people, with experiences and skills and connections.

These people can help you with all sorts of stuff, including partnerships, referrals, and advice.

So let me ask you for advice on the following email list puzzle:

I’ve been talking to a FB ad agency owner who happens to read these emails. She has been patiently sitting on an email list, which was part of her payment for a revshare deal with a client (ie. she has full rights to use this list).

The bad/terrible:

– This email list hasn’t been emailed in the past 1-18 months (depending on when they bought)

– The guru who was the face of the offer is no longer involved

– His name or his offers cannot be used or even mentioned

– Emails can’t be sent from his account/domain

Bad, right?

Yes. There are only two positives to offset the four negatives I’ve just listed:

– There are 115k email addresses on this list

– All are buyers, with some spending as little as $27 and some as much as $15k (it’s a finance list)

So do you have any experience or advice with something like this?

If these were physical mail addresses, we could mail a small segment of the list as a test and see what happens.

Is that the thing to do here as well? Is our best bet to set up a new domain, and start slowly spamming people and see where it leads us?

Or should we throw away the whole list?

Or is there some third option I’m not seeing?

If you have any advice for me, or even better if you’ve been in a situation like this before and can share your experience, please let me know. Thanks in advance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://bejakovic.com/clicksendearn

Ben Settle & Dan Kennedy both said it — but who was the original source?

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Here’s the history of the men who influenced me to be where I am today, writing you this email:

Patient readers know my susceptibility and fondness for the phrase, “The only real security is your ability to produce.”

I read that idea in a Ben Settle email back in 2017, which got me to sign up to Ben’s Email Players newsletter, which eventually convinced me to start sending daily emails myself.

As Ben wrote in that email, he himself got the “ability to produce” idea from an even older Dan Kennedy newsletter. I thought it stopped there, even though I always felt that “ability to produce” is an odd phrase for Dan Kennedy to invent. (Perhaps that’s why it stuck in my mind so.)

But, as I found out only last week, this phrase is not a strange Dan Kennedy construction.

The quote about “ability to produce” actually goes back to Douglas MacArthur, one of only five 5-star generals in the history of the United States.

MacArthur’s quote, such as I could trace it, was “Security lies in our ability to produce.” MacArthur was speaking quite literally, about national security and the importance of industry and agriculture to that.

But I’m not here to talk tariffs. I’m telling you this because this is a newsletter about ideas, specifically insightful ideas, even more specifically, insightful ideas that you can apply and bring into reality and profit from.

And on that note, I have a new offer for you. It’s a $3.99 ebook called Click Send Earn.

This book is written by Igor Kheifets. I’ve known Igor for a while. Back in 2021, I gave a presentation inside his List Building Lifestyle mastermind, which eventually turned into my Simple Money Emails course.

I bought Igor’s book last week because, frankly, I was curious about the funnel he was using to sell it.

But I read the book as well. And I was surprised, in a very positive sense.

As Igor said somewhere (in private, not inside this book) he could charge $97-$297 for the info that’s inside. And I believe it. So I reached out to him and asked to promote his book, for the following three reasons:

First off, this book is very clearly written by Igor, not by AI, not a ghostwriter.

Second, it lays out how Igor walked the familiar rags-to-riches route — which in his case was literal, because he used to clean toilets at a hotel once upon a time, and now makes millions a year via email.

The book lays out lessons learned along the way and gives you the business blueprint that Igor uses today, and which he teaches others, for how to build and grow and monetize email lists.

Third, this book has ideas in it that were new and insightful for me. For example, it was early in Igor’s book (p. 11) that I learned that that “ability to produce” quote is not from Ben Settle or even Dan Kennedy, but from Douglas MacArthur.

Like I said, when I bought Igor’s book, I bought it out of curiosity around the marketing.

But I thought my audience — “MY audience is different” — is too sophisticated when it comes to email marketing to profit from a book titled Click Send Earn.

Well, like I said, I’ve since read the book. I’ve learned new things and gotten value from it. I can get behind and endorse everything he teaches inside this book. That’s why I asked Igor to promote it.

And that’s what I’m doing right now, recommending it to you.

If you’re looking for a proven (by Igor, and his students) blueprint for a successful email-based business, then buy this book, read it, apply it, and profit. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/clicksendearn

How to stay off Reddit and improve your productivity

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In short, sign up to my Daily Email Habit service. Explanation plus proof:

I put in a funny image or meme at the top of each DEH email, to make it fun to keep opening up these emails day after day, and to put you in the right frame of mind to write your own daily email.

At least that was my reasoning for putting the funny image or meme in each DEH email. But apparently there are other benefits too. From email marketer Logan Hobson, who subscribes to Daily Email Habit:

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I find the daily meme an extra benefit to DEH. I started noticing that I recognized some of your images from reddit, and I wanted your images feel fresh, so I stopped browsing reddit as much and have improved my productivity, knowing I will receive a high-quality curated meme each day in your email without having to endlessly scroll to find one in the wild.

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Of course, the goal of Daily Email Habit goes beyond just improving your productivity and keeping you off Reddit. The real goal is to get you writing your own daily emails consistently, both so you make sales today, and so you build up a relationship with your audience, so they open and read your email tomorrow.

And about that, here’s marketing strategist Nick Bandy, who also subscribes to Daily Email Habit, and who has been emailing his list of buyers daily:

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DEH is the biggest ROI I’ve ever gotten on any course or product I’ve ever purchased. It’s incalculable.

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I have a bunch more testimonials from subscribers who praise Daily Email Habit. I also give away a sample 0th Daily Email Habit email, so you get a sense of what it looks like and what you’d be signing up for, including the funny image/meme up top. For all that:

https://bejakovic.com/deh