Direct Marketing

Free chocolate traffic and distribution model

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Yesterday morning, my friend Sam and I were sitting at a cafe terrace that hangs over the waters of Lake Lucerne. We were getting a coffee while waiting for a boat to take us down the lake, to the bottom of a big mountain, which we would attempt to scale.

Of course, this being Switzerland, we each got a little chocolate next to our coffees. Well, I got a chocolate, but for some unfair reason, Sam got two.

Our three little chocolates were all the same size. Later, at much higher altitude, we would find out they were also the same flavor. But each of the three chocolates had a slightly different design on the wrapper.

One was light blue and had a picture of a locomotive. That chocolate was advertising a “guest house and games paradise.”

The second chocolate was white with an elegant font. That was advertising a rentable space to hold events.

The third chocolate was also white but a bit more flashy in its font. That was advertising a “shopping restaurant.”

Since my mind has been entirely warped by thinking and writing about marketing every day, I noticed this and I thought about the underlying model. It’s this:

1. Take an expense for other businesses (for cafes, little chocolates next to each coffee)

2. Provide that thing for free both in terms of cost and effort and risk (the chocolate tasted good, and the design was classy)

3. Use the thing for traffic/distribution/advertising for your a product or service of your own choosing (“gasthof und spielparadies” on the wrapper)

You might say this is nothing special or unusual. But you can get creative.

For example, many people used to pay a few dollars a day to read the Wall Street Journal (1). Then some guys made a free email newsletter with the most important news of the past 24 hours (2). In between the news segments they also put in ads (3). The result was Morning Brew, which sold a controlling stake for $75 million a couple years ago.

Back in the Barcelona supermarket I go to, you can get free bubble gum (1 and 2) at the store, along with various other small items, if you download an app that tracks you and serves you ads for other products (3).

Then there’s the offer I made a couple months ago, to help businesses add in a “horror advertorial” into their cold traffic funnel for free (2) — a service I would normally charge a lot of money for (1) — if they would also insert an email into their welcome sequence to promote my new newsletter (3).

And finally, there’s an idea I’m planning for the future, to offer syndicated content (1) to businesses for free (2), as a means of advertising that same new newsletter I’m working on (3).

In other words, this simple little chocolate idea has broad applicability when you start to think about it.

But there’s a bigger point, too.

The bigger point is— well, I will talk about that tomorrow. No sense in jamming two good ideas into one email.

I’m approaching the Zurich airport as I write this. It’s time to leave this rainy but beautiful country. The train I’m on will be six minutes late in arriving, and the conductor just came alive on the PA to announce that shocking delay and to apologize in German, Italian, and English.

If you want to read my email tomorrow when it comes out, you can sign up for my daily email newsletter here.

Two proven ways to run a city or a newsletter

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I was sitting by the Seine two days ago, part of a trip to Paris with friends. One of my friends looked up and said, in a kind of mock frustration, “All the buildings around here are so beautiful. Don’t they ever get tired of making beautiful buildings?”

Apparently they do. In fact, that same day, we went to visit something very ugly.

In the middle of Paris, on a square lined by elegant, classical architecture, sits the Pompidou Center.

If you look at the back of your refrigerator, where the coils and pipes and wires collect cobwebs and dust, scale that up to a building the size of a sports stadium, paint the different pipes and coils blue and green and red, then you get the Pompidou.

The Pompidou is a cultural center — exhibition spaces and galleries and stages and a huge public library.

It looks shockingly ugly today. ​I suspect it looked much worse to the eyes of Parisians who saw it being built in the 1970s. One of them called it the “incinerator absorbing all the cultural energy and devouring it — a bit like the black monolith in 2001.”

And yet, people stream into the Pompidou.

In its first two decades, the place attracted 145 million visitors. ​​Five years ago, in 2017, the last year I could find numbers for, the art museum inside the Pompidou had 3.3 million visitors. Untold millions more rode the free escalators to the top of the building to look at the Eiffel tower and Notre Dame and Montmartre, all nicely visible from the roof.

In other words, the Pompidou, ugly though it may be, is also a full-blown success. It’s doing what it’s designed to do, giving masses of people access to art, serving as a kind of new focal point in the city, renewing Paris as a cultural destination.

All that’s to say, there’s two ways to run your city:

One is to give visitors what they want – what they are expecting and demanding, what they have seen on postcards, what they initially came for.

The other is to do something shocking and new — because you have a new agenda for your city, or simply because you got bored of doing the same stuff you’ve done in the past.

The first of course is the more safe, more proven way. But both can work — as proven by the Pompidou.

As I mentioned above, I’m traveling right now. I’ll be away from home for next couple weeks, until May 19.

When I get back home after my trip, I will most likely open up enrollment for the group coaching on email copywriting I announced last month.

Which brings me to my point for this email. The two ways to run a destination city are also the two ways to run a profitable email newsletter.

One is to give readers more of what they came for, what they say they want, or that your research says they want.

The other is to do what you yourself want, what serves your purposes, your desires.

Both can work. But it’s good to be clear with yourself as to what you specifically are doing. This makes your job easier and makes you more effective over the long term.

When I do open up enrollment for the group coaching, I will only do so to people who have signed up to get (and stay) on the waiting list.

If you’ve done this already, there’s nothing more you need to do right now.

On the other hand, if you are curious about this group email coaching, then the first step is not to get on my waiting list, but to get on my main email list. That’s the first requirement I have for all people enrolled in this coaching. To sign up, click here and fill out the form that appears.

The next era for freelancers, full-time writers, and solo creators

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I woke up this morning, the sun shining into my eyes, an eager French bird chirping outside my window because it was almost 7am.

I groaned and realized it’s time to get up and get to work. In a few hours’ time, my friends, still asleep in various bedrooms around this cave-like Paris AirBnb, will wake up too. And by then, I will have to have this email finished.

I can tell you now, it won’t be easy.

I struggled during the night with a comforter that was too hot, a mosquito that wouldn’t shut up, and the effects of the first glass of alcohol I’ve had in months. The result is I’m tired this morning, and my brain is more foggy than usual.

“Let me read some stuff on the Internet,” I said. “Maybe that will help.” And lo — the email gods rewarded me with an article full of valuable and relevant ideas I can share with you today.

The article came from Simon Owens, somebody I’ve written about before in these emails. Owens is a journalist who covers the media landscape in his Substack newsletter.

Two interesting bits from Owens’s article:

1. The recent collapses of new media companies like Buzzfeed and Vox have left thousands of journalists, writers, and clickbait creators without a job. It’s not unlike the situation in the direct response space a few years ago, after Agora got into legal trouble and it put a chill on the whole industry.

2. The owners of media outlets and info businesses are realizing that freelancers just aren’t worth it. From Owens’s conversation with one such business owner: “Not only were they expensive to hire, but he also had to waste a lot of time editing their work so it met his quality standards.”

So if traditional employee-based companies that pump out content are failing… and if entrepreneurs are starting to realize that freelancers are a bum deal… where does that leave us?

You might say it leaves us with the creator economy — with all those unemployed journalists, writers, and clickbait creators going out and starting their own Substack or TikTok or OnlyFans.

​​Maybe so. But it’s harder to make that work than your Twitter feed might make you believe. From Owens’s article again:

“I’m on record as being an optimist about the future of the Creator Economy; I think we’re at the very early stages of an entrepreneurial media explosion. But at the same time, I’m a realist about how damn hard it is to launch and build a sustainable bootstrapped media business, especially as a solo operator. Not only can it require years of financial runway, but it’s also difficult for a single person to juggle a variety of tasks that include content creation, marketing, and business development.”

So? Where does all this really leave us?

Owens says it leaves us in a brave new world of partnerships, cooperatives, and jointly-created products. He gives examples of how each of these is already being done by people who create content and have an audience, and who are trying to monetize that content and audience, beyond just the work they can do themselves.

If you are running or want to run an info publishing businesses, or your own creator studio, then Owens’s article is worth a read. It might give you an idea that might mean the difference between failure and success in what you do.

And if you are currently a freelancer, or even a full-time employee at a marketing-led business, then Owens’s article is worth a read also, if only for an uncomfortable but possibly life-saving glimpse into what the future might bring unless you adapt.

In either case, if you are interested, here’s the link to Owens’s piece:

https://simonowens.substack.com/p/the-next-era-for-bootstrapped-media

How and why I might write a Substack newsletter

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Got a question three nights ago:

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You’ve written about the “newsletter economy” over the last couple of months. I’m on a few Substacks. Substack has this inbuilt mechanism where if you subscribe to a Substack then you get a pop-up which says, “Oh you might like these three or four as well.”

I’ve come at my newsletter growth from a sort of copywriting angle. I’m on Aweber which doesn’t have that functionality. I can see how that would be quite useful to have because it instantly gets people on your list.

Quite a lot of Substacks are growing quite quickly because of it. I’m thinking, is there a way to replicate that functionality somehow outside of Substack? How should I be thinking about growth more generally? Am I missing a trick perhaps by not being on Substack?

===

My feelings: it’s absolutely worth getting on Substack. You can get free, large-scale access to readers… email readers… recent and eager email readers.

In fact, I’ve been thinking about getting on Substack myself. But I feel there’s a right way and wrong way to do it.

The wrong way is to write a bunch of daily emails like the one you’re reading right now.

Daily emails like this one definitely work — people will gladly read them and buy from them. But it’s not how I would go about writing a Substack newsletter, at least if I were going for massive organic growth.

I suspect — based on previous experience — that emails like this would lead to blowback from Substack readers and other Substack newsletters, or worse yet, to simply being ignored.

So that’s what I would not do.

If you are curious what I would do, and what I might actually end up doing, both to grow my list on Substack and to monetize it, you can find that out if you sign up to my Insights & More Book Club. Because the question above came up on the last Insights & More call, which I recorded and posted inside the members area.

The doors to the Insights & More Book Club closed tonight. I only open them every couple of months at the start of a new book, because it doesn’t make sense to have people join midway. If you’d like to be advised the next time the doors open, sign up to my email list, because it’s the only place where I make my book club available.

How to reduce your business’s cost-per-lead by 80%

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Assuming that you’re running ads to get leads…

And assuming that you’re running ads, say on FB or Twitter, via your business’s page or account…

Then let me share something obvious, but maybe very lucrative.

​​It comes from Dan Krenitsyn, who did growth at places like BuzzFeed, The Information, and The Telegraph, and who now leads strategy at the product, content, and operations team at Meta/Facebook. ​​Dan says:

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This might not be relevant for everybody because I worked at more traditional media companies like The Information and Telegraph.

But we tapped into the idea that people follow people. They don’t follow media companies per se.

We started running pretty much all of our acquisition ads from writers’ personal Twitter accounts and Facebook accounts.

I don’t know if the platforms still allow you to do that. For a while, that basically reduced our CPLs by something like 80%.

===

I don’t know either if the platforms still allow you to run ads like this. But the basic point stands:

It’s much easier and cheaper to get quality engagement if you sell yourself first, rather than if you sell a brand or a product first.

That’s not to say selling a brand or a product is not the right thing to do in certain situations.

​​But if you’re looking for organic growth, for cheaper paid growth, for easier sales, for an audience that will keep listening to you, even if you occasionally get lazy or falter in your message, then sell yourself first.

You might say it’s ironic I’m telling you to put yourself first in an email in which I say almost nothing about myself, share zero personal stories, and point to no status-building items from my own history.

Fair point. My only answer to that is what I already said above.

​​If you regularly put yourself first in your marketing — John Bejakovic daily newsletter, issue #1586 — then you can occasionally fail and it won’t matter. You can fail to tell people how great you are, and how important your message is, and that people should stay tuned because it’s only gonna to get better. And your audience will still read, listen, click, and maybe even sign up to your daily email newsletter.

Why good customers hate going to museums

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I was reading an article a few days ago about the oldest living aristocratic widow. Just my kind of material:

Lady Anne Glenconner is 90 years old. She served as maid of honor at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, and was lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret, Queen Elizabeth’s sister. She was also wife of Colin Tennant, 3rd Baron Glenconner, who seems to have been a rich, eccentric, and volatile man.

This insight from Lady Anne about her husband caught my eye — it might be interesting if you are ever trying to sell yerself, or something you created:

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“He couldn’t bear to be static,” Glenconner told me. “He always wanted to be rushing around changing things, buying things. We had thirty Lucian Freuds at one point, and he sold them all. I once said to him, in a rather pathetic way, ‘You don’t seem to mind making these collections and then selling them. I like the things I have collected.’ And he said, ‘Oh, no! Once I’ve had them, and the opportunity to look at them, I want to be on to something else.’ “Tennant “hated going to museums,” Glenconner added. “Do you know why? Nothing’s for sale.”

===

I think the point is clear, so I won’t insult you by spelling it out all over the place. Instead, let me tell you something personal:

I have nothing for sale today. It’s worse than a museum around here.

I’m changing, revamping, restructuring, and repositioning what I do with this newsletter.

Notice I don’t say, “with this business.” As I’ve said many times, and will continue to say, I’ve never looked at this newsletter as a business first, even though it’s gotten to a place of making me a neat and tidy source of income.

Today, I closed off my Copy Riddles program. I made more money with it over the past 24 hours than in any 24-hour span since I launched it. That’s because it’s never coming back as a standalone course.

So nothing for sale today. But I do have an offer. And it’s to get onto my email newsletter. Yes, it’s a little like a museum on there right now. But I will have new things for sale again one day soon, and my email newsletter will be the only place where you can get that. If you’d like to be in the right place at the right time, sign up now for my newsletter.

Last day ever to buy Copy Riddles

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Today is the last day ever to buy Copy Riddles. At 2:31 EST tomorrow, Tuesday April 18, I will turn off the shopping cart for Copy Riddles and stop making this program available for purchase.

In the future, depending on interest, I will from time to time offer 2-month group coaching around the content inside Copy Riddles, the way I did for a small number of people last year.

The price for that future group coaching, if it does happen, will be at least $1,000 higher than the price for current self-study Copy Riddles course. This coaching will also only be only available to a few people at a time when it is available at all, since my personal time and attention will be required.

All that’s to say, if you’ve already gone through Copy Riddles, or you never had any interest in doing so, then unfortunately I have nothing for sale to offer you in this email. I promise to do better in the future.

On the other hand, if you have been thinking about Copy Riddles but you’ve been on the fence — an uncomfortable and jagged place — then today is the last day to buy Copy Riddles as a standalone, self-study course.

And if you somehow managed to miss the dozens of emails I’ve sent about Copy Riddles over the past days, months, and years, and you’re wondering what this program is really about, you can read the full details, including the experience of many people who have gone through Copy Riddles already, at the link below:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Invest in your 1000 true high-paying fans

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On February 1st, I got an email with the subject line, “Invest in your newsletter.”

“I sure like the sound of investing,” I said to myself. “And I do have a newsletter.”

The background is this:

I had recently signed up for Beehiiv, which is something like Substack, only you have to pay a monthly fee for it.

Beehiiv was created by Tyler Denk, who was an early employee at Morning Brew. Morning Brew is now a $75+ million business, based around a daily email that covers the day’s business news.

I signed up for Beehiiv because I’ve started a Morning Brew-like newsletter. It has nothing to do with marketing or copywriting, and it’s in a different format than what you are currently reading.

So that’s the background. Now that we’re caught up, let’s get back to that February 1st “Invest in your newsletter” email.

Tyler of Beehiiv was writing me that email to give me the opportunity to pay him $499 for his course on starting a newsletter.

So I did.

​​I sent Tyler $499 and I got access to this course, called Newsletter XP. And I got to listen to a bunch of big people in the newsletter space, including Morning Brew’s founder and CEO, share their ideas experiences on content strategy and growth and newsletter monetization.

People in this “newsletter operator” space don’t seem to be as miserly as people in the direct marketing space about sharing ideas that are normally behind a paywall. In fact, Tyler encouraged people to tweet the most valuable ideas they got from his Newsletter XP course.

I don’t tweet, so let me email you the most valuable idea I got from this course.

This most valuable idea came in the next-to-last session. One of the guests in that session was Codie Sanchez.

​​Codie runs Contrarian Thinking, a newsletter with some 250,000 subscribers, about buying and selling businesses. She’s built an eight-figure info business off the back of that newsletter, plus maybe several other 7-figure businesses also, plus I guess even the newsletter itself pays her well since she can promote relevant money-related offers.

And maybe most impressive of all, Codie has done all this since corona started.

Anyways, here’s what Codie said that I found most valuable:

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I sort of believe your 1000 true fans — Kevin Kelly talks about this — they’re actually the fans you should charge the most to. Because they are your biggest fans. And where most people screw up when they do paid products is they launch their first product for $10 a month. Their 1000 true fans buy it for 10 bucks. They have cultivated this group of people who buy too low priced of products, which doesn’t allow you to create a real business which can further serve them.

===

That’s it. That’s the most valuable idea that stuck with me from the first time going through Newsletter XP.

I’m thinking about it as I work on building up, and monetizing my other newsletter.

Maybe it’s something you too can think about if you are creating an audience, a list, a newsletter, whatever. Maybe you can think of it as the difference between salting the soil in your garden, just because salt is cheap and easy to get, or investing a bit of time to plant a walnut tree that actually takes root and provides shade and fruit for you and yours for years to come.

But enough of the Magic of Channeling Warren Buffett.

Unrelated to the core of this email, if you want to invest in copywriting skills, which can help if you are building up an audience or an email newsletter, I have a quick, compact, exercise-based course on that. For more info on it:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

I fly to Sevilla to meet Sean D’Souza

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I’m on the plane as I write this, wedged into the middle seat, surrounded by dozens of conversations in Catalan and Spanish, waiting for the plane to take off. ​​I’m flying from Barcelona to Sevilla. The occasion is a meet-up organized by Sean D’Souza.

Sean is literally a legend in my world. Because Sean is an online marketer, and because he was already successful back when I was just getting started and knew nothing about nothing — except that there are successful people like Sean.

But even now that I know something more, Sean is still worth looking to and learning from. Because he does things differently from everybody else.

I remember a talk Sean gave for Ken McCarthy’s System Club. Over the course of an hour, Sean laid out his counterintuitive but effective, consumption-over-conversion way to run his info publishing business.

At the end of the presentation, somebody in the audience raised his hand. “This all sounds great Sean,” the audience member said. “But do you have any numbers to show your consumption-first approach works better than what we are all doing already?”

Without any bluster, Sean said, “I’m not trying to prove anything to you. If you find this consumption idea works for you, use it. If it doesn’t work for you, no problem.”

By the way, I’ve found that to be a great attitude to take whenever people ask me to explain myself. It doesn’t have to be confrontational, and it doesn’t have to be stated explicitly. ​​But anyways, let me get back on track:

I’ve largely taken Sean’s consumption-first message to heart.

​​It informs how I write this newsletter and how I run my own little info publishing business.

​​And it’s part of the reason why today, some five years after I first heard Sean’s System Club talk, I am willing to get on a plane and fly to another city, just because I like the idea of having coffee with Sean and having a person-to-person conversation with him.

Maybe, like that guy in Sean’s audience, you say that sounds great — for me. But maybe you prefer hard conversion rates and sales numbers and certainty that what you are doing is the proven way to success in marketing.

In that case, let me point you to my Copy Riddles program. It’s all about proven sales numbers and hard conversion rates.

Copy Riddles is the pinnacle of the Darwinian evolution of direct response copywriting, reached through millions of dollars in tested advertising, and boiled down to improbable but highly potent combinations of just a few dozen words, also known as bullets.

If you feel like running a numbers-based, conversion-first marketing business, Copy Riddles can quickly get key copywriting skills into your head.

On the other hand, if you like running a fuzzy, numbers-optional, consumption-first marketing business, it also make good senses to get those key copywriting skills into your head, and early.

It’s what I’ve done, and it’s what Sean did also. If you read his his blog or his paid products, you will see frequent reference to and use of copywriting principles and ideas, taken from A-list copywriters and marketers.

In any case, I’m not here to prove anything to you. But if are interested in Copy Riddles and in getting copywriting skills into your head, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Old reader asks new question about copywriting self-challenge

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Last week, I wrote an email about how during the month of March, I got some surprising sales of existing offers, like Copy Riddles and Most Valuable Email.

​​​​Many of those sales came from long-standing readers, who had heard the pitch for these courses dozens of times before, but somehow only decided to buy now.

To which I got a reply from reader Christian Calderan, who’s been on my list for going on two years:

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I was one of those people who finally bought Copy Riddles (Been wanting to pull the trigger on it for ages), and it just finally clicked.

Speaking of which, it’s a fantastic course! I’m absolutely loving it and the breakdown of each technique when you reveal it is freakin’ awesome. I’m definitely the type of person who needs to repeat things over and over, but I’m genuinely looking forward to doing this course again.

===

Christian and I exchanged a few more followup emails. He asked in addition:

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If you’ve got a product and the sales letter in hand, would you recommend trying to break down bullets and then rewrite them yourself as your own “extra” riddles?

I’ve got a few of Ben Settle’s books and his sales letters are 98% bullets. It would be challenging, but I think it’d be kinda fun.

Surely someone’s asked you this before? 😅

===

The fact is, no one’s ever asked me this before. Perhaps other Copy Riddles members have done it on their own without writing me to ask.

​​Or perhaps Copy Riddles is just so comprehensive that nobody ever felt the need to go beyond it.

​​Or perhaps, people pay for convenience, clarity, and a sense of comradeship. Copy Riddles gives them that, and the extra return on following the Copy Riddles process on their own doesn’t pay for itself.

If you create offers, of you’re thinking of it, that past paragraph might have something valuable to marinate upon.

But maybe you’re not thinking offers at the moment. Maybe you’re thinking copywriting skills.

In that case:

If you currently only have lint and a few breadcrumbs in your pockets, and you have no prospect of making money — nothing you can sell, or nobody to sell it to — then you can still follow the Copy Riddles process. Christian describes it above. I describe it even more on the Copy Riddles sales page.

​​You will just have to do all the work yourself, instead of having me package it up for you. But it will be free, except for the time you put in.

On the other hand, if you have some money, or the prospect of making money — potential customers or clients willing to pay you something, at least if you do a good job making your case with your copy — then Copy Riddles might be worth much more to you than the money I ask for it.

​​Y​​ou might even get value from going through it, like Christian says above, over and over again.

If you’d like to find out more about Copy Riddles or the process behind it:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/