Direct Marketing

The disciplined, professional, hard-working beggar

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On my way to the gym, there’s a Mercadona, a local Spanish supermarket. In front of the entrance to the Mercadona, kneeling on the ground, looking serious and professional, there is almost always one specific beggar.

This man is large and strong. He has a neatly trimmed mustache. I guess he’s around 45 years old.

He usually wears a button-down shirt. He also has a little sponge down on the ground so he can kneel more comfortably. Sometimes, he has a drink next to him — from what I can tell, ice coffee.

When old women go inside Mercadona, this man will kneel and hold on to their dogs while they do their shopping. When the old women come out, they give him their loose change. One time, an old woman gave him a whole packaged chicken.

This man shows up early. When I go for my morning walk before work, he’s already on a bench next to Mercadona, waiting for the store to open up. He also seems to have a little part-time job setting up the chairs, tables, and parasols of the bar next to the Mercadona.

If you’re wondering how it is I know so much about this man, it’s because he is there most days, and for many hours a day. If I ever walk outside my house and around the corner to the Rambla del Poblenou, I inevitably see this man and what he is up to — which is usually waiting stoically for somebody to give him money, and for the workday to end.

I don’t know this guy’s history. I also don’t know how much loose change or raw chicken he manages to pull in a given week. I guess he’s doing okay since he keeps showing up. Still, I can’t believe he’s doing GRRRREAT.

And if you need some sort of takeaway from that, then let me come back to a fundamental point I’ve already made, over and over, year after year in this newsletter. And that’s the fact that you can pretty much do the same work, and get paid drastically different amounts of money for it.

The Mercadona beggar is disciplined and professional. He puts in the hours. He provides a real service to people — an opportunity for charity, plus the bonus of dog-sitting. He even hustles a little. He’s not satisfied simply coasting on his knees, ice coffee in hand, so he’s struck some sort of deal for extra work with the bar next door.

You might think I’m joking. I’m really not.

​​This guy works as hard and as long as most office workers. And many office workers work as hard and as long as most self-employed service providers. And many self-employed service providers work as hard and as long as most business owners.

And yet, there’s a vast difference between what people in each of those groups tend to earn. And vice versa. There’s a vast difference between what you can earn if you cater to people in each of those groups.

Maybe this makes no sense to you, or maybe you think it’s entirely impractical.

In that case, you will almost certainly not be interested in my offer today, which is my Most Valuable Email training. This training is only right for you if:

1. You’re willing to write an email to your list most days, preferably every day

2. You are interested in writing about marketing and copywriting

And by the way, just because Most Valuable Email requires that you write about marketing or copywriting, it in no way requires that you write to people who primarily define themselves as marketers or copywriters. In fact, it might be better to think of another group that you could write those same emails to, and get paid much more money as a result.

In any case, if you are interested in Most Valuable Email, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

The case against reading books

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One of the first-ever emails I wrote for this newsletter, back in August 2018, was about magician Ricky Jay. Jay was widely considered one of the best sleight-of-hand artists in the world.

Why write about a magician in a marketing and copywriting newsletter?

My feeling is that magic, as practiced by top performers like Ricky Jay, is about controlling the audience’s attention, about painting mental pictures, about entertaining, about building curiosity, all the while guiding people to a tightly controlled desired outcome — the magician’s desired outcome.

​​With some small tweaks, that also sounds like the job of a copywriter, or more broadly, any persuader.

Back in August 2018, Ricky Jay was still alive. He died a few months later. He left behind an enormous collection of magic artifacts — posters, books, handbills, paintings, personal letters — from some of the most bizarre, mystical, and skilled magicians, jugglers, acrobats, learned animals, con men, and sideshow freaks of all time.

After Ricky Jay died, his collection was broken up into four parts. Just the first part, auctioned off in 2021, brought in $3.8 million.

Today, I came across a little video of Ricky Jay talking about the books in his collection. And he had this to say:

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There are probably more books written about magic than any other art form. Literally thousands and thousands of books. And I’ve collected thousands of books in my life about magic technique.

But I believe that the real key to learning is personally. It’s almost like the sensei master relationship in the martial arts. That the way you want to learn is by someone that you respect showing you something.

There’s a level of transmission and a level of appreciation that’s never completely attainable just through the written word.

===

I agree. If you can find somebody you respect, and you can get them to agree to teach you personally, you will learn things, and at a level of depth that you could never learn otherwise.

So go find a  sensei. But—

What if you can’t find one?

Or worse, what if you find a sensei, and, in spite of your best pleading and cajoling and stubbornly hanging around, he just says no? What if he’s too busy, too cranky, too secretive?

In that case I suggest being your own sensei.

Because books are great. I’ve read two or three of them, so I know. But there’s a level of understanding that’s never completely attainable through the written word.

Anyways, that’s my entire message for you for today. Except, if you want some help becoming your own sensei, take a look at my Most Valuable Email course.

​​Yes, Most Valuable Email is a bit of a how-to guide to a specific technique of email copywriting. But more than that, it’s a framework, a magical one in my experience, for becoming your own sensei. More info here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Take “selling your own knowledge” off its pedestal

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Last Friday, while I was selling my Most Valuable Postcard #2, I got a message from a new buyer, Joseph Robertson. Joseph is a marketer and copywriter who, for more than a decade now, has also been publishing Extracted, a magazine for coffee fanatics.

Joseph’s message was very thoughtful. I am reprinting it in full below because it might be useful to a few people, especially to copywriters working with clients:

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Thanks for this opportunity. My first purchase from you. Impressive work.

Several realizations for me…

I’ve come to the point in my personal copywriting-as-career journey where I finally feel like I know myself and what I’m doing, to the point where I don’t feel moved to understand the secret… I’m not searching for a new way to do something, or a new answer, but rather looking for insightful perspectives to augment/enhance my own understanding and work.

And seeing your work has given me the odd realization that there is indeed great value in productizing one’s own understanding of fundamentals, if that presentation helps bring valuable new perspective/ideas to someone else.

I say odd because I think until this point I put “selling my own knowledge” on a pedestal, and just settled into good consistent client work (I haven’t needed a new client in a long time). But that client work has given me an enormous amount of context for developing my way of doing and understanding.

Before you announced this new offer, I’d been thinking deeply and incorporating a new understanding/perspective on structural tension. What you share here fits right in with that very well, naturally, but in a way and with a perspective I don’t think I’d come across on my own. Maybe in time (i’ve been finding the longer I let myself sit with an unknown or a question, the more MY interpretation of the understanding emerges, which is quite valuable).

Anyway. Just felt like I ought to share and express my thanks for your work.

===

Here are my two added shekels:

If you’re a copywriter working with clients, but you don’t yet have your own email list, start one today.

If you have your own list but you haven’t sold anything to it, do like Joseph says above. Productize your own knowledge, and sell that to your list.

There’s little new under the sun. But if you present proven ideas in a way that manages to reach someone, that they resonate with, that they finally benefit from even if they might have heard the idea 1001 times before, then there’s real value in that.

And beyond the money:

I’ve personally found that whenever I sit down to put together a course or a training, I do so because I feel I know that subject fairly well. But by the end of the process, I realize how confused or shallow my previous understanding was, and how much cool stuff I figured out simply by forcing myself to put the course together.

All that’s to say, if you do package up and sell your own knowledge, the benefit can often be way beyond the actual money people might send you.

But of course, the money. Always the money. I gotta get back to work:

Today, I’m still promoting my coaching program on email marketing and copywriting. I include offer creation in that.

In fact, I previously called this coaching program Income at Will, because that’s the ultimate pleasure island that I want this coaching program to take people. But after I wrote an email a few weeks ago about taking out the poetry from what you’re doing, I decided to be more blunt and and simply call this “coaching on email marketing and copywriting.”

The goal of my coaching program is to help you sell more and more easily via email, and who knows, maybe even deepen your understanding of things you thought you knew well.

This coaching program is only right for two kinds of people:

1. Business owners who have an email list and want to use email to both build a relationship with their customers and to sell their products (or their productized knowledge)

2. Copywriters who manage a client’s email list, and who have a profit-share agreement for that work

If you fit into one of the two categories above and you’re interested in my coaching program, write me an email and say so. Also tell me who you are and what your current situation is, including which category above you fit into. We can then talk in more detail, and see if my coaching program might be a fit for you.

Announcing: Most Valuable Postcard #2

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This Monday, I got two probing questions from copywriter Kay Hng Quek:

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1) From Copy Zone — “Sometimes that meant following somebody else’s A-Z system. That’s how I got good at meeting and talking to girls — after 30 years of being shy and pretty useless in that department.”

Ha, was this Rules Of The Game?

2) MVP #1 was so game-changing for me that I’ve been salivating at the fantasy of being sold card #2. Not so much a question then, but just an indication of demand.

===

The answer to Kay’s first question is no, it was not the Rules Of The Game.

The answer to Kay’s second question, or indication of demand, is this:

As you might know, last year I ran a subscription offer, limited to just 20 people, called Most Valuable Postcard. It lasted all of two months.

Each month, I sent a postcard from a new place with a short greeting and a URL. The URL took you to a secret website; there you would find my in-depth treatment of one fundamental marketing or copywriting topic for that month.

Subscribers loved the Most Valuable Postcard.

I hated it.

I hated walking around in the summer sun trying to find nice-looking postcards. I hated writing the postcards by hand, and I hated licking the stamps by tongue.

I hated the pressure of finishing up the actual content each month and making it great before the first postcards started to arrive.

I hated the fact that the postcards didn’t arrive reliably and that I had to resend many of them.

So I killed the Most Valuable Postcard off. Subscribers sighed and said they saw it coming.

But the core concept of the Most Valuable Postcard is something I find too valuable to let go. So I decided to write more Most Valuable Postcards, on no fixed schedule, and put them inside the members-only area of my site. While there are no physical postcard any more, the website content is the same format as before.

To start with, this past January I re-released Most Valuable Postcard #1: Nota Rápida. I got feedback on that like that “so game-changing” from Kay above.

Now I’m re-releasing Most Valuable Postcard #2: Ferrari Monster, again in the same format.

As you can guess, it’s a deep-dive into a fundamental topic. In fact, I make the case it’s about the essence of copywriting and marketing.

That’s a big claim. To back it up, I can say it took me three weeks of research — including a book about Hollywood marketing, a bunch of John Forde’s promos for Agora, and a science paper about strip clubs — to produce this 5-page postcard.

You can now get Most Valuable Postcard #2, and for $50 off, but only if you sign up to my email newsletter first. This is an offer only for people on the “inside.” To get there yourself, click here and follow the instructions.

66 1/2 minutes of getting your money’s worth

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At the start of the evening, the mustached gentlemen at the Boston Athletic Association held on to their top hats and leaned forward in their seats, their eyes wide open, all of them focused on the same point at the front of the room.

It’s not every day that you see a living man voluntarily handcuffed, wrapped in chains, placed inside a coffin, and then sealed inside like a corpse.

It was novel and dramatic.

But after a few minutes of intense staring at the unmoving coffin, the audience’s attention started to drift. The members of the athletic club began lighting up fine cigars, talking about sports, the news, and business, chuckling and chattering and catching up.

And then, 66 1/2 minutes after the show started, the coffin crashed open.

The living corpse inside sat up and then stood up, panting, sweat running down his temples, his hair in a mess, his frock coat rumpled. He held the handcuffs in one hand and the chains in the other — he was free.

The gentlemen in the audience broke into applause and cheers. Harry Houdini had done it again. Another amazing and improbable escape.

So far, so familiar. But here’s what gets me:

66 1/2 minutes of sitting and watching a coffin. Many of Houdini’s sold-out shows were like this. They were long — often many hours’ long — and for much of it there was nothing to see, because Houdini performed his handcuff and manacle and chain escapes in a closed cabinet or behind a curtain or inside a coffin.

66 1/2 minutes of nothing happening on stage. What was going on with the audience during all that time?

Was it just a pre-TikTok era, and were audiences happy to sit and zone out for an hour or three, like a cat staring at a blank wall?

Or did people just enjoy being close to danger and death, and was that palpable even if it couldn’t be seen?

I’m sure there was a bit of both to it.

But what gets me in the above story is how the gentlemen of the athletic club started lighting up cigars and having friendly chats about sports, business, and the news.

Maybe that was really what they had come for.

Maybe Houdini’s spectacular escape was really just an occasion to mark out the rest of the audience’s lives. Maybe it was just an excuse to get out of the house, to do what they like to do anyhow — which is to chat and chuckle and gossip — but to do it in a slightly novel and exciting setting.

There’s a good chance you aren’t sold on this point yet. That’s okay. I have more to say about it to try and persuade you. And if you do get persuaded, I have some novel and exciting advice for how to apply this to copywriting and marketing, even today, in the TikTok era, without engaging in daring feats that risk danger and death.

But more about that in a couple days’ time.

For today, I just have a very simple offer for you. It’s my little Kindle book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

​​I used to refer to this as my “10 Commandments book.” I’ll have to stop that since I’m working on a second 10 Commandments book, and I have to distinguish between the two.

Anyways, Commandment III from ties into what I’ll talk about in two days’ time. It’s also the easiest commandment of the lot in my book.

​​This Commandment III takes just 5 minutes to follow, but it can suck your reader all the way to the sale, without him realizing what happened. It was first unearthed during an exclusive, closed-door seminar, which cost almost $7,700 in today’s money.​​

In case you’re curious, the secret behind this and all the other A-list commandments in my book are behind the locked door below. The ticket to unlock the door is but $4.99. If you feel you’re ready, step right behind this curtain:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Announcing: Horror Advertorial Swipe File

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A couple weeks ago, right after I ran a classified ad in Daniel Throssell’s newsletter, I got an email from a new reader:

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I just joined your list from Daniel Throssell’s classified ad and really love your Quick and dirty email training, especially because the companies you talk about pertain to ecom.

Was wondering, do you have any other ecom focused resources? Will gladly pay for them.

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I wrote back to ask the guy what he is doing and what specifically he is looking for.

It turns out he has a Shopify jewelry store in the affirmation niche. And he asked:

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Do you have a swipe file of story-based advertorials? Will gladly pay for it!

I noticed you talked about you using the story based advertorials in your story sells bonus as well.

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The background, as you might know, is, that between 2018 and 2021, I wrote dozens of front-end advertorials — basically mini sales letters — all following the same “horror story” structure. These advertorials were parts of cold-traffic funnels that, by my best estimate, brought in over $15 million in cold-traffic ecommerce sales.

The funnels that featured those horror advertorials are no longer running. Of course, I do still have the original copy. I haven’t ever sold it or shared it before. But I’m no longer taking on clients to write advertorials. So I asked myself, why not sell what I got?

I wrote back to the guy to say he could have a collection of my horror advertorials for $100.

He agreed and PayPaled me $100. Later that night, I drove to an empty parking lot behind an abandoned factory, and I dropped off a leather bag filled with my advertorials for him to pick up.

​​Well, not really. I just sent them to him via email.

But then, sitting on my couch with pen in hand, I had one of those Obvious Adams moments. If one person believes he can get value from a swipe file of story-based advertorials… maybe a second person also might? Or maybe even a third?

I’ll see.

Because right now I am making a collection of 25 of my horror advertorials for $100 to people on my email list.

The offers promoted by these advertorials include everything from anti-mosquito bracelets, bamboo fiber paper towels, fake diamonds, dog seat belts, stick-on bras, and kids’ vitamins.

Is it worth buying this horror-filled swipe file?

​​It depends.

A few days after I clandestinely dropped off the leather bag of advertorials in the abandoned factory parking lot, the jewelry store owner wrote me to say:

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I’ve been going through your advertorials and they’re incredible to study. Off the top of your head, do you have an idea of which ones stood out in terms of sales/performance?

===

The fact is, success in these horror advertorial funnels was due more to the offer than the copy. A good/scary advertorial couldn’t reliably sell a bad/bland offer for very long. On the other hand, a good offer worked even without an advertorial, with an ad that went straight to the product page.

But combine a good offer with a good advertorial and the result was often a big success, and one that could last for years.

I don’t have exact sales numbers for any of these advertorials. But I definitely do know which ones ran for a long time, which ones sold well both on the front end to Facebook and YouTube traffic, and and on the back end via email.

So if you get this swipe file of 25 advertorials, I’ll also sense you a little welcome letter where I describe which of these advertorials were part of long-running successes, which advertorials I think are particularly strong, and which ones might be worth modeling for other reasons.

In this same letter, I also included a quick description of the overall structure of these horror advertorial funnels.

Speaking of funnels:

I encourage you NOT to buy this swipe file if you are simply looking for more swipe file content to hoard, or if you have no experience running cold traffic and are looking for a miracle in that department.

It only makes sense to buy this if you already have a functioning cold-traffic funnel — either for your own business or for a client’s business.

In that case, dropping in a horror advertorial into your existing funnels can help you get much more out of that cold traffic. That’s what happened with that kids’ vitamins advertorial I mentioned above. That client managed to profitably scale from $2k/day to $12k/day in daily ad spend by adding in one of my horror advertorials to their existing funnel.

Last thing:

If you do buy this swipe file, I have a special free (“free” as in no money) mystery offer for you. I will tell you about that offer in the email that delivers the zip file with the advertorials. Again, this offer will only be relevant if you already have a working cold-traffic funnel. In that case, even though this offer is free, it might easily be worth a few thousand dollars to you.

I am making this swipe file available until this Sunday, March 27 2023, at 12 midnight PST. After that I will take it down.

If it turns out there’s not much interest in this swipe file, I will drag the beast to the back of the house and quickly put it out of its misery. On the other hand, if it turns out there is interest, I will think about how to expand this and charge more for it.

In any case, if you want this swipe file, you will have to be on my list first, and before the deadline. To get on there in time, click here and fill out the form that appears.

Best resource for newsletter growth ideas

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A couple days ago, copywriter and business owner Will Ward, who was in Dan Ferrari’s coaching group at the same time as me, forwarded me an email from Quiet Light, an online business broker.

This email described — without naming it – a newsletter that’s for sale right now:

“Social good and transformation” space. 300,000 total subscribers. Paid subscribers totaling almost $50,000 per month in subscription revenue. Started in May 2020. On sale now because the owner is “eager to return to her previous endeavors.” Asking price? $2.55 million.

Those numbers and dates made me wonder where the hell I was in May 2020 and what the hell I was doing then. Well actually, I can tell you almost exactly.

Right around that time, in June 2020, I sent out an email, “Expert advice on how to start an email magazine,” in which I shared an interview with Alex Lieberman.

In 2015, Lieberman started Morning Brew, a daily email newsletter with a summary of the day’s business news.

By 2020, Morning Brew was making $13 million per year in ad revenue. Later that year, in October 2020, Lieberman sold a controlling stake in Morning Brew to Business Insider for $75 million.

Like I wrote in that June 2020 email, I’d been thinking of starting a Morning Brew for X newsletter for a while, where X would be some topic I’m personally interested in.

Had I done it then, maybe today I’d be sitting on a multi-million dollar asset.

I didn’t do it then, but I did do it this past January. I started another newsletter, Morning Brew for X. X is my topic — something I’m interested in, and that I’m not sharing yet publicly. I want to grow this newsletter first and build up a bit of a moat before letting thousands of other marketers in on what I’m up to.

Anyways, as part of starting my own Morning Brew-like newsletter, I discovered there’s already a galaxy of Morning Brew-like newsletters, including many Ponziish Morning Brew-like newsletters that tell you how to grow your own Morning Brew-like newsletter.

My eyes were opened.

For years, I’d been living in the world of direct response-based, daily, Ben Settle-like emails that sell supplements or courses or dog toothbrushes. Most of those daily emails look pretty much the same, sound pretty much the same, and function pretty much the same — a good income or a nice back end.

Meanwhile, you have this cousin industry of people building $2.55 million and $13 million and $75 million businesses, using nothing other than email newsletters.

I’m not ragging on Ben Settle or his ideas. Those ideas, both for growing email lists and for monetizing them, have made me and my clients a healthy amount of money. But I do want to point out how much other stuff is happening in the world of email right now, adjacent to the little Amish world that’s centered on direct response copywriting and marketing.

Of course, this other, Morning Brew-like world has its own Amish tendencies. Also, there are literally hundreds or maybe even thousands of newsletters to choose from right now, all telling you how to make it as a creator or creative entrepreneur or a newsletter operator.

What’s worthwhile in this new world?

I can only tell you the best resource I have personally found. That’s Chenell Basilio’s Growth In Reverse.

Each week, Chenell does a deep dive into the growth strategies of a newsletter businesses — “deep” as in, it takes her 40+ hours of research to produce one of these analyses. For some reason, she does all this work and then gives it away for free.

Some of these strategies Chenell identifies I know about already. Some are new to me. Some are strategies I have no interest in trying myself myself. Some I think are very clever, and they already have me moving.

For example:

You can sign up to Chenell’s newsletter using the link below. It’s an affiliate link — though I’m not getting paid anything.

If you are curious why I’m promoting Chenell’s Growth In Reverse, beyond that it’s a great resource on how to grow your newsletter, and why I’m using an affiliate link, even though I’m not getting paid, then sign up to read her next email, which will arrive this Sunday.

​​Or sign up just because you want to grow your own newsletter and you want new ideas on how to do that. In any case, here’s that link:

https://bejakovic.com/chenell

My secret admirer tries to emotionally blackmail me

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This past Monday, I woke up to find a love letter at the top of my inbox. It wasn’t signed, and it came from a pseudonymous email account. It started:

“Firstly, I want to tell you I love you.”

“I knew it!” I said to myself. “I always had a suspicion that I’m lovable.” I greedily jumped on the next sentence:

“And a very Big thanks to you for sending me daily emails. Those emails are inspiring and motivating. I’ve learnt a lot from them, from copywriting down to productivity and lot more.”

“Of course,” I thought, “those are all topics I write about often. No wonder my secret admirer loves me.”

​​I continued to read. More expressions of admiration followed. My ego blossomed and bloomed. But then, I got to the kicker:

“That’s why I decided to ask you this questions and I need your honest answers. Here are my questions…”

What followed was a series of five very broad “business of copywriting” questions, which it would take me about 175 pages to answer properly.

The fact is, I am a sucker for praise and admiration and inbox-based love. And I appreciated my reader’s message, even though it bordered on emotional blackmail.

But how to answer those very, very broad questions?

I pointed my secret admirer to my blog, which is the archive of these daily emails I send. The fact is, my best answers to all those big questions all out there on my blog, spread out across many pages. But I assume not one person in a thousand will go to my site and read through the 1,490+ emails I have archived there.

That’s not any kind of criticism. Most people have stuff to do and are not irrationally obsessive.

So my marketing takeaway for you is there’s value in simply packaging up what you already have, and organizing it neatly for other people to consume. People will pay good money for a sealed and bow-tied bag of figs at the market, even if those figs come from trees on public land two hills distant.

Which brings me to my Copy Riddles program. One day after I got the above declaration of love from my secret admirer, I got an email from copywriter Esat Akan. Esat wrote:

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I just wanted to let you know I’m having a BLASTTT with copy riddles. It’s so fun and I’m feeling like I’m becoming a better copywriter with each lesson I do. I’m only at lesson 3A I think (intrigue bullets) but I look forward to EVERY lesson hahaha.

===

As I say on the sales page for Copy Riddles, much of what’s inside Copy Riddles is available for free on the Internet.

You can find most of the A-list sales letters I reference inside various free swipe files. And as for the books those sales letters sold, you can find many of them online in free online depositories with a bit of digging.

Once you have both the sales letters and the books they sold, you can compare the two, to find out the hidden tricks and secrets of A-list copywriters — tricks and secrets they might not even be consciously aware of using. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, and in time you will get an incredible copywriting education.

I’m an irrationally obsessive person, so I did this exact thing. It took me about three months of my life and maybe 100 hours of work.

It was very much worth it to me, because I discovered copywriting ideas I hadn’t heard of anywhere else, in spite of having previously spent thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars sharpening my copywriting chops.

Doing the same might be equally worth it to you.

On the other hand, if you don’t feel like spending 100 hours digging up these copywriting secrets, I’ve packaged them up and bow-tied them for you inside Copy Riddles.

Looked at one way, Copy Riddles is expensive. It costs $400 right now.

Looked at another way, Copy Riddles is not so expensive. For one thing, Copy Riddles is sure to go up in price, and maybe soon. Plus, if you think of it as some 80 hours of your life saved, it comes to $5/hr, which is less than the minimum wage in the Czech Republic.

Of course, the question is whether you would want these copywriting secrets in the first place. My best argument is that it took dozens of top copywriters years of experimentation, and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tested advertising, to invent the tricks and techniques that are inside Copy Riddles.

Plus, as Esat says above, the experience of going through Copy Riddles won’t just make you into a better copywriter… but is actually fun.

Is fun self-improvement and education worth paying for? Well, that’s for you to decide. For help making that decision, here’s the full info on Copy Riddles:

​https://bejakovic.com/cr/​

Going where no one has gone before?

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I have this unfortunate flaw in that I wake up every day, thanks to some internal alarm clock, which always rings earlier than I want.

Today it was 6am. I sat around in the dark for a while and then, at around 7, I went out for my morning walk.

At 7am on a Saturday in Barcelona, two worlds overlap.

I walked down the street, turned a corner, and saw a flash of naked ass. A girl was pulling up her leather pants, on the curb next to a small tree and some recycling containers. I guess she had just peed. Her friend stood guard but was facing in the wrong direction, away from where I and a few other people were coming and witnessing the shame. Pants up, the two oblivious girls staggered off drunkenly towards home.

That world, of people who hadn’t yet gone to bed by 7am, is one world.

I kept walking and the beach opened up before me. And the second world, the world of early-rising people, was already busy at work there.

A woman was holding her dog on a leash and yelling at her other dog to stop fooling around because it was time to go home. Two boys were kicking around a ball in the sand. And in the water, thanks to the large and rolling waves — not a common sight in Barcelona — there were some surfers.

Maybe you’re wondering whether there will be any hard “point” to today’s email. The point is this:

Down by the concrete pier that juts out into the Mediterranean, there was a clump of maybe a half dozen surfers. They were all bunched up. The waves were steady there and every 30 or so seconds, one of the surfers would catch a wave.

Meanwhile, further away from the pier, there was another surfer by himself. Every few minutes a small wave crested where he was waiting. The surfer would make an effort at catching it, but it was too small. As far as I saw, he never caught a wave, but he made a show at it.

And then further still, in the middle of the beach, there was yet another solitary surfer. He was bobbing up and down as the sea swelled underneath him. But he didn’t even have a wave to pretend to catch.

I think my point is clear, but if not:

It’s good to be different and distinct. It helps people make up their minds quickly about you. But if you rely on natural forces for motion — waves, money, desire — then you want to put yourself in a place where those things are moving.

It might seem clever and easy to go where nobody else has thought to go. Maybe you will get lucky. More likely, you will just bob around stubbornly in the cold water, while others, just a few feet away from you, have all the fun.

That’s most of my motivational message for you for today. And then there’s still the following promotional material:

My offer for you today is my Copy Riddles program. As I have said before, this program is really about going where the waves are:

– It’s about a proven way to write winning copy that’s been endorsed by A-list copywriters like Gary Halbert, Parris Lampropoulos, and Gary Bencivenga

– It features a bunch of examples from sales letters written to perennial markets, including finance, health, and personal development

– It gets you working alongside some of the top copywriters of all time who, whether by instinct or by design, knew how to tap into human desire where it was flowing

If any of that moves you:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Serves me right for soliciting wishes

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Last month, I sent out an email about a training I want to put together, on how copywriters can create their own offers. I’m still planning to put that training together, and I will have it out later this month.

Anyways, in that email, I asked for input. What’s your current situation… what’s holding you back from creating your own offer… what questions would you wish that I answer if I put this training together.

I got some good responses. But one reader got greedy. He decided to treat me like the genie of the lamp, and he wished the forbidden wish:

“Tell me how to create an offer that’s guaranteed to be irresistible!”

Upon hearing this, I bounced around like an angry djinn, exploding into a million little exasperated stars. “That’s like wishing for more wishes! ‘Guaranteed’? ‘Irresistible’? It cannot be done!”

But then I rematerialized into my human form. I scratched my blue genie head, pulled on my genie beard, and thought for a moment. I reached back into my ancient genie memory, spanning thousands of years, thousands of copywriting books, and thousands of sales campaigns.

I realized there is a way that’s almost guaranteed to produce irresistible offers.

​​At least, I found there’s a common element to all the offers I’ve created which ended up successful. On the flip side, I also found this element was lacking in all the offers which fizzled.

I won’t spell out what this magical element is — not here. It’s something I will reserve for my Mystical Cave of Secrets, aka that training about offers I will put on later this month.

But I can give you an idea of what this element is, using my most successful offer to date, Copy Riddles. If you pay close attention to what I’m about to say, you can figure out what I have in mind.

Here goes:

Copy Riddles is built around a simple bit of advice by the legendary, multimillionaire copywriter Gary Halbert.

Gary’s bit of advice has been endorsed by A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos. Parris said that if you follow Gary’s bit of advice, you’ll learn to write copy and make lots of money. And Parris should know — because he himself followed Gary’s advice, applied it, and made lots of money.

Parris isn’t the only one. Marketer Ben Settle also admitted that he followed Gary’s advice and profited as a result.

And another Gary — Gary Bencivenga, who has been called America’s greatest living copywriter, said he managed to beat a control by Gene Schwartz as a result of following this same approach that Gary Halbert advised, though he arrived at it independently of Gary Halbert.

And what is that bit of advice?

It’s​​ simply to look at sales bullets from successful sales letters, and to compare those bullets to the source in the book or the course or whatever that the sales letter was selling. That’s how you can spot the “twists” that top copywriters use to turn sand into glass, water into wine, lead into gold.

So that’s what I did.

I tracked down both the source material, and the bullets that sold that source material. But not just any bullets. Bullets written by A-list copywriters — including the two Gary’s, including Parris, including many more like David Deutsch and John Carlton — who were all competing against each other in the biggest big-money arenas of sales copywriting and direct marketing.

And then, rather than just creating a how-to course based on the tricks and tactics that I saw these A-list copywriters using in their sales bullets, I created a fun, immersive, exercise-based experience that I summed up in the title of the course, Copy Riddles.

Result? Here’s marketer Chew Zhi Wei, who went through Copy Riddles a while back:

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By the way just wanted to thank you for such an amazing course. This might be one of the most valuable courses that I have ever have the privilege to attend. So much so that I even feel that you’re underselling how much value you’re actually gifting away. Thank you so very very much.

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Is it clear now how to make an almost irresistible offer? I hope it is. And if not, you can find it discussed in more detail in rounds 6-12 of Copy Riddles, with round 11 being particularly relevant.

If you’re curious about all that, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/cr