Direct Marketing

How to use an involvement device to win customers for the long term

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Yesterday, I got on three calls with three people who expressed interest in my new daily email prompts service.

The last of these three calls was with a media buyer named Sean (not sure he wants me to share his last name), who works at an agency in Colorado.

Sean has bought pretty much every training and course I’ve put out, starting with Copy Riddles back in 2021.

As were getting started with the call, Sean explained how it started:

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What I really liked about Copy Riddles was that little involvement piece where you have to read the source material and come up with your own bullet that’s close to what the copywriter came up with.

And that involvement advice kept me going through the entire course. It’s probably the coolest course that I’ve done in terms of copywriting. I’ve been dabbling in the copywriting space for 20 years, since I was 15.

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You can do something like this as well.

Instead of just giving people information, add in an involvement device. In other words, give your customers some sort of safe opportunity to actively practice, not just consume.

The reason to go to this trouble is because your customers will end up going through what you sell them, and will get more out of it as a result.

That’s good for them, and it’s good for you. By my entirely made-up math, an involvement device makes it an estimated 13.471x times more likely customers will buy something from you again. And I think Sean’s custom with my little online business is a good example of that.

If you have Copy Riddles, you know how the involvement device in that program works. And if you don’t have Copy Riddles yet:

I’ve never done a Black Friday promotion, and I won’t be changing that this year.

But I will have a “White Tuesday” special offer on Copy Riddles, starting tomorrow and lasting through Tuesday November 12.

Why White Tuesday?

I just thought it was a funny-sounding zag to everybody’s constant zigging with “Black Friday.”

I did try to find some kind of historical event to tie White Tuesday into… but I only came upon a decree from November 12, 1938, in Nazi Germany, excluding Jews from participating in the economy.

This is most definitely NOT the kind of White Tuesday I have in mind.

Instead, I just mean this event to be a fun, little, completely Nazi-free promo, hopefully with an irresistible offer to get you to try Copy Riddles if have been curious about it but have not jumped in yet. But more on all that tomorrow.

The end of info products

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THE FOLLOWING EMAIL IS CONTROVERSIAL AND MAY BE OFFENSIVE TO SOME AUDIENCES

READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED

You might be familiar with Max Sackheim’s famous ad, “Do you make these mistakes in English?”

The ad ran for decades, unchanged, and kept bringing in profitable business better than any contender.

Thousands of pages of analysis have been written about the 7-word headline of this ad and the copy that followed.

But what about the actual product this ad was ultimately selling? What about the means by which a prospect could hope to correct his or her mistakes in English? What were prospects actually exchanging their money for?

Sackheim’s copy only teases you about the product, and calls it a “remarkable invention” and a “100% self-correcting device.”

As far as I know, nobody today actually has this remarkable invention stashed away in their garage. Whatever it was, it’s clear it was sold as some kind of tool, a device, and not just information.

This is a well-known direct marketing truth that’s been around since Sackheim’s days and before, back into the age of patent medicines.

A real, tangible, external mechanism — a fat-loss potion, a dog seatbelt, a “100% self-correcting device” — sells much easier than just good info — how to lose weight, how to be a less negligent dog owner, how to speak gooder English.

Smart modern-day info marketers have gotten hep to this fact. That’s why people like Russell Brunson and Ben Settle and Sam Ovens have put their reputation and audience to work behind tools like ClickFunnels and Berserker Mail and Skool.

The thing is, creating a tool, whether physical or software, has traditionally been an expensive, complicated, and risky business.

Take a look at Groove Funnels, another tool created a few years ago by another experienced info marketer, Mike Filsaime. Groove Funnels is a bloated, buggy, frankly unusable product. I say that as somebody who invested into a lifelong subscription in Groove Funnels.

I have a couple degrees in computer science. I also have about a decade’s worth amateur and pro software development experience. But after I quit my IT job 10+ years ago, I never once considered putting this experience to use in order to develop any kind of tool I could sell.

Until now.

Because things are changing. Today even a monkey, working alone, can create and deploy a valuable app simply by querying ChatGPT persistently enough. And there are plenty of shovels available for such would-be gold miners, tools to build tools, which will do much of the in-between work for you. Just say what you will to happen, and it will be done.

Decades ago, master direct marketer Gary Halbert said that the best best product of all is… information!

But I bet if Gary were alive today, he’d be hard at work (or maybe easy at work) creating some kind of high-margin tool to sell, in the broadest sense of the word — a thing to do some or all of the work for an audience with a problem. A few reasons why:

* Again, tools are easy to sell. They fit with innate human psychology of how we want to solve problems.

* Tools can make for natural continuity income if you license them out instead of sell them outright.

* Tools can create their own moat over time. There can be lock-in or switching cost if your users build on top of your tool.

* And now, thanks to the most remarkable invention of AI, it’s possible to create tools quickly, cheaply, and with great margins.

All that’s to say, best product of all… information? I don’t think so. Not any more. Best start adapting now.

Speaking of which, I got an offer for you:

Would you say that there are any tech issues that are keeping you from starting your own email list?

If there are, write in and let me know about them.

In turn, I’ll have something for you that you might like.

Behind the scenes of my affiliate deal-making

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Over the past few weeks I’ve been approached to promote three affiliate offers, and uncomfortable thought it was, I turned all three down.

All three of these offers were solid. They had good info at a fair price. There’s no doubt each of them can be very valuable to the right person.

Also, all three offer owners who approached me I already had previous relationships with. I had already done some projects with them, or at least we had exchanged some non-business emails and had some sort of rapport going.

Finally, all three offer owners were paying out generous affiliate commissions. In theory, I could make some good money here.

And yet, like I said, I turned down the opportunity to promote any of the three offers.

The reason was simply I personally couldn’t get excited about them. I took a look at these offers and my personal reaction was “Hm, I see.”

I imagined writing emails to promote these offers. How? I’d have to do some jumping jacks before, in order to simulate a bit of life in my copy.

I also imagined taking myself out of the equation altogether. I imagined saying, “Hey this isn’t for me, but don’t let me get in your way, maybe it’s for you.”

That still didn’t sit right. After all, with that approach, where do I stop? Do I end up promoting $3.45 pork chops on sale at Target, because somebody somewhere might want them?

I’ve made the point many times before that I don’t look at this newsletter as a business first. I look at it as my own personal playground, an opportunity to experiment and practice, a reflection of my own interests and tastes.

I can’t blame you if you shrug off everything I’ve said above as just my perverse attitude, something that I do because I apparently don’t care enough about money to reach out and grasp it when it’s offered to me.

Still, I remembered something while thinking about this rather unpleasant issue.

Ben Settle, who I think treats his email newsletter as much more of a business than I treat mine, shared almost the same attitude in an email a couple years ago. In fact it’s possible I got my attitude from Ben.

Ben wrote that the best affiliate offer to sell, at least for him, is one that’s personally fun. And when an offer is not personally fun for him… well, here’s Ben’s report on one such campaign:

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No matter how much time I spent writing those emails, no matter how much time I spent strategizing the campaign, and no matter how much time I spent interviewing the creator of the product (and I did) it did not matter, and the sales were lackluster at best.

The reason?

Not because the offer was bad.

It was extremely valuable, especially for the price.

No, one main reason why was because it was not fun.

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I’m telling you this because over the next few days, until Tuesday to be specific, I’m promoting Tom Grundy’s Subtraction Method.

In fact, I’m promoting it as an affiliate, even though it’s a free training.

There was was the option to simply promote the paid workshops that Tom will be running in the coming weeks, on the back of the (free) Subtraction Method training.

But Tom and I both agreed that the best and happiest way to promote this was simply offer the free training first, one where Tom would reveal all the concepts underlying the Subtraction Method.

It’s Tom’s job to sell the group implementation workshops, following the free training, just to those who want help working through those concepts with Tom’s guidance.

Point being, the real reason I’m telling you to go sign up to Tom’s Subtraction Method is that I’m personally interested and even excited by what Tom has to teach. The promise of an affiliate payout alone wouldn’t do it.

But maybe you don’t even know what I mean by the Subtraction Method. If so, here are the details from my Al Pacino-themed email yesterday:

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Tom’s story is that he quit his high-powered London banking job in order to seek enlightenment. Enlightenment found, Tom ended up going back to the bank.

Curious, right?

The first time around at the bank was miserable, says Tom. The second time around has been enjoyable, stress-free, and even fulfilling.

What made the difference is what Tom calls the Subtraction Method.

The Subtraction Method is not about the kind of minimalism that involves living in a hut in the backwoods of Montana, shooting and skinning rabbits, and melting snow for drinking water.

Rather, it’s about a different kind of minimalism, one that has to do with ideas and attitudes.

The end result can be that you achieve all the external success you think you want now, and you do it on such terms that you’re not eaten out from inside like Michael Corleone or Al Pacino.

Or the end result can be you don’t achieve the external success you think you want now, and you find out that that’s perfectly fine, because what you thought you wanted is not what you actually want.

Here is where I start waving my hands and waffling and mumbling a little too much. Because the Subtraction Method is not my area of expertise. Rather it’s Tom’s area of expertise.

That’s why I’d like to invite you to sign up to his training. The training is free. It’s happening next Wednesday, Nov 6, at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. I’ll be there. If you’d like to be there as well, you can register to get in at the link below:

https://bejakovic.com/subtraction

A critical look at Daniel Throssell, part III

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In the unlikely case that my newsletter is the only direct marketer-y list you subscribe to, let me tell you some news:

Last week, there was an affiliate contest.

That means that a bunch of marketers all fought to promote the same affiliate offer, all at the same time. Beyond bragging rights, I assume there were also generous prizes for the best-performing affiliates, above and beyond the usual affiliate commissions.

I did not participate in this contest, and I didn’t even pay very close attention.

But I do know that among the people who did participate, there was a selection of A-list copywriters and top-flight industry gurus, with decades or maybe centuries of experience among them, and with big communities and hefty email lists at their disposal.

And yet:

The person who won this contest was a young guy, who apparently lives in the slums of a second-tier city in Australia… who nobody knew of before he started to build his legend online some five years ago… and who only has a modest-sized email list of his own.

That young guy is a certain Daniel Throssell.

I’m on Daniel’s list, and so I can share with you what Daniel wrote about the final results of this affiliate contest:

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As of the final cart close, I think I had something like 60% of the TOTAL sales (thus meeting my usual goal of ‘more than everyone else put together’) … and somewhere between 8-10x the sales of the second-place affiliate.

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How did Daniel do it?

I’ve already written a couple emails in past years with my thoughts on Daniel’s successful strategies (hence the “part III” in today’s subject line).

As for this most recent success of Daniel’s, my guess is it has to do with all three elements of the old 40/40/20 formula.

40% of your results comes down to your list…

… 40% down to your offer…

… and the remaining 20% down to the least important part, your copy. But it’s that least important part, the copy, that I want to talk about today.

In fact, I just wanna talk about one aspect of copy, a very mechanical aspect. Because even without paying close attention to this affiliate contest, one thing was notable to me:

Daniel sent 28 emails to his list to promote this affiliate offer.

He sent at least one email each day, as he does every day of the year, and many more emails as the deadline neared.

I’m not on the lists of all the other people who participated in this contest.

But from what I can see, most of the big names who did participate do not write daily emails to their lists outside of this promo. Some of them, including some who said they really really wanted to win the contest, chose not to send daily emails even during the actual promo.

To my Elmer Fudd mind, the conclusion is simple:

Email more, and you’ll make more sales, even if you don’t change a d-d-d-damned thing else.

But that’s not all.

Because if you email more, it’s gonna have a positive effect on that next 40% of your success, meaning your offers.

I defy anybody in the world to argue honestly that Daniel’s high-priced courses — which he gave away as free bonuses for this affiliate promo — would have the perceived value they have if Daniel didn’t send daily emails to build up desire for them… to justify the premium prices they sell for… to highlight all the other people who have bought these courses and praised them.

Anybody can say their course costs a thousand dollars. But that does nothing, unless people believe it, and unless they want it.

As for that other final 40%, your list:

I imagine that most everyone on Daniel’s list is also on at least one other list of someone who participated in this contest.

And yet, the odds are two-to-one (or actually better) that if such a person bought this affiliate offer, they bought it via Daniel.

In part, that comes back to the offer. But in part, it’s about the fact that daily emailing trains and transforms the people on your list.

The people on your email list are not simply “buyers” or “not buyers” — like it’s some God-given caste system you have no control over.

Relentless email followup, done well, takes disinterested or skeptical people and turns them into followers, converts, and partners. Not just anybody’s followers, converts, and partners — yours. That’s a moat that protects your business, even if some other business owner can somehow get the names and email addresses of everyone on your list.

So yeah.

Copy is the least important part of your success.

But in a way, it’s also the most important, via its effect on the perceived value of your offers, and via the transformation it creates in the people on your list. And I think Daniel’s results prove that.

All that’s to say… I don’t know? Email more? Maybe daily?

Yesterday, I announced a new service I’ll be launching over the next 30 days that gives you a new daily email prompt each day. The goal here is to make sending daily emails faster by an hour or two a week, and easier to start with and stick with for the long term.

I can tell you that my email today was based on one such prompt, one that I set myself a few days ago. Yes, I eat my own dog food.

I will be offering first access to this service to a small number of people on my list, based on who I think will be most likely to get value from it.

But my offer from last night still stands:

If you feel daily email prompts are something that could be useful to you, then hit reply and tell me what you like about this idea (do tell me why, because simply replying and saying “yes!” won’t do it). If you do that, I will add you to the priority list, so you have a chance to test this service out sooner rather than later.

Solid as a rock

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I was on the Barcelona metro yesterday, bouncing along, keeping my eye out for potential assailants, and listening to a podcast — James Schramko interviewing Ryan Lee.

In case those names don’t mean much to you, both guys are highly successful, highly influential Internet marketers.

Both James and Ryan have been at it for decades.

Both have made many millions for themselves, and probably hundreds of millions for their various coaching clients.

For example, Ryan has coached multimillionaire fitness marketers like Mike Geary (PaleoHacks, Truth About Abs) and Jeff Cavaliere (Athlean-X, 14M subscribers on YouTube).

James on the other hand has coached multimillionaire info marketers like Ryan Levesque (ASK Method) and Kevin Rogers (Copy Chief).

Point being, both Jeff and Ryan are the real deal when it comes to knowledge of Internet marketing and to getting actual results.

At the end of the interview, just as I was nearing my stop, James summed up the takeaways of their call, with Ryan jumping in:

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JAMES:

1. Find a way to get recurring income

2. Keep it as simple as possible

3. YouTube is a strong front-end driver and potentially a good income earner

4. Email is still solid as a rock

RYAN: No matter what you do, whatever social platform you pick…

JAMES: … build an email list.

RYAN: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram — get ’em on your list, because at the end of the day, you control it.

JAMES: That’s the simple advice that people ignore.

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I’m telling you all this because there are still people who say they don’t have time to email.

Maybe that’s you too.

I’m sure you’re busy, and you have lots of stuff to do. Work, family, dog, cat.

I can completely understand.

I just wanted to share the point of view of James and Ryan above, because they are both very experienced… because they both make very nice money by working something like 10-15 hours a week… and because they are not in the business of selling email marketing or email copywriting.

And yet, both agree that there are only a few needed ingredients for long-term success… and that email is one non-negotiable part of that. (By the way, they both practice what they preach, and write emails, as Ryan says, dailyish.)

If you want to follow their simple advice, and you also want to see how to write dailyish emails faster, in as little as 15-20 minutes a day, without being particularly creative or inspired, then take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

No response

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Here’s an idea that I’ve found to be true:

If you do a good job getting people to consume and digest your content all the way through, it’s much easier to get great testimonials, ones you can actually feature because they say something substantive, and because they have a real shot of converting others as well.

I bring this up because last night, a copywriter named Pete, who’s been on my list for a while and who has already bought a few of my previous offers, signed up for my 3rd Conversion training, all about consumption and digestion.

When I asked Pete why, and what he’s hoping to get from the training, he replied:

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Reason I joined is, because I’ve done a few workshops in the past few months that I’ve repurposed as content to sell.

Some people bought, but when I send emails to them to get feedback I get no response.

Which I’m assuming is because they haven’t gone through it.

If they thought it sucked, I’m certain I would hear about it. As negative people usually have something to say lol

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I’m not sure if people who think an offer sucked usually have something to say about it. I know I like to keep my mouth shut and just go elsewhere.

I’m not saying that’s what happened in Pete’s case, and there’s no reason to think so based on his message.

But I do know what I told you above:

If you do a good job getting people to consume and digest your content, it becomes much easier to get great testimonials, or at least feedback and response of some sort.

And as an example of that, I can tell you that last month, Pete bought my Most Valuable Emails and the stripped-down version of Simple Money Emails. When I wrote to him to deliver the courses, he replied:

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I stayed up last night to binge read everything in MVE…

And all I have to say is, you’re not charging enough, dude.

After going through Copy Riddles and now MVE, and I’ll likely do the same with SME…

Everything you sell is solid.

Always grateful when I see one of your emails roll in.

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Today, I’m not selling either Copy Riddles or MVE or SME, though of course if you’d like to give me money for those, you can.

Today, I’m simply trying to tell you it’s the last day to sign up for the 3rd Conversion training.

On the training, I will cover a small number of techniques, ones I’ve used and ones I’ve had used on me, to get people to actually go through your paid courses and ebooks and programs, ideally to the end.

I’m only charging $100 for this training. It’s probably not enough, but I’m doing it because frankly I want to organize this knowledge in my own head.

Doing it live, in front of an audience of people who are genuinely interested and can profit from it, is a good motivator for me.

In other words, money and sales are not main reason why I’m putting this training on.

That said, money and sales can be the main reason why you might want to join me on this training.

Everything in your business — from your ads to your emails to your sales pages (hello testimonials) — becomes much easier if people get value from what you deliver.

And in order for them to have any chance of getting value from what you deliver — beyond just the thrill of spending money on something — they have to consume and digest what you’re selling them.

The deadline to sign up for the 3rd Conversion training is tonight, Wednesday, at 12 midnight PST.

The training itself will happen on Zoom tomorrow, Thursday, at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. There will be a recording which I will send out after the call, though if you can make it live, you and I both are sure to benefit more from it.

If you’d like to get in before the doors close:

​https://bejakovic.com/3rd-conversion​

How and why I started this newsletter

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For some reason, many people seem fascinated by the obscure origins of this newsletter.

“How did you get started? What was your initial motive? Is it true that you were once a Pinterest star?”

If none of that interests you, I can’t say I blame you.

But if you are curious, here’s my origin story, in all its Peter Parker awkwardness:

1. In 2015, with my savings dwindling and with the thought of going back to an office job being absolutely repulsive to me, I anointed myself a “direct response copywriter” and started selling myself as such to anybody who had $5 to spend.

2. I soon decided to focus on email copywriting, because my Spidey-sense told me this would be a “thing.”

3. After a couple months and a dozen random clients, a suspicion started to creep into my mind. “Maybe I should learn a little bit about email copywriting if I’m going to be selling it?”

4. So I signed up to Ben Settle’s email list, because frankly there was not all that much free and ongoing information at the time about email besides Ben.

Each of Ben’s emails seemed to follow the same format: a teasing promise, maybe dressed up with some pop-culture reference, and a link to sign up to Ben’s $97/month Email Players print newsletter.

5. For years, I didn’t sign up to Email Players, though I was tempted by Ben’s teasing. At first, I didn’t sign up because why pay $97 a month for a newsletter?

“I never pay for information,” I told myself. Instead of paying, I preferred to go on working for years without getting any improvement in my results.

Later, when that changed, I still didn’t sign up for Email Players because of Ben’s policy of telling people not to sign up unless they are fit to be an Email Player, and his threats that if you ever sign up and quit, you can never come back.

6. Eventually, in 2017, Ben’s teasing and mind games wore me down. I signed up to Email Players. (I also finally read the free issue of Email Players that Ben gives away on his site, and which I had gotten years earlier, when I signed up to his list.)

7. I started using some things Ben teaches in my client work, and I got good results. But I was still struggling personally to make consistent good money as a copywriter because client work was unreliable.

8. Ben started selling a new course which was called something like Client Cash Machine, all about how to get clients. I bought it, rationalizing the $297 price by saying that if I got a bit of extra client work as a result, it would pay for the course.

9. A few weeks later, Ben’s client-getting course arrived. I opened it with trembling fingers. It was a flash drive with the audio version, and a printed-out transcript.

10. An hour or so after that, I had gone through the course. It said, in a nutshell, “Start an email list and write it daily.” Disappointing. I knew that already. It was all over Ben’s emails for free, and I had hoped Ben would tell me something exciting and new.

11. Still, some time later, I followed Ben’s advice and finally started an email list, with the distant future goal of getting clients, and with the immediate goal of fooling around in my own sandbox each day, putting into practice things I was learning from books and courses, and demonstrating my growing skills to anybody who would bear witness.

12. Ta-da! A successful personal brand, authority in the field, and a 6-figure-a-year income, just from writing one daily email, or actually more like writing 3,000 daily emails.

THE END.

I’m telling you this riveting story because I’m putting on a training this Thursday. It’s called 3rd Conversion. It’s about getting your buyers to consume and digest the information you sell.

If you read my story above carefully, it can give you lots of clues about effective strategies to increase consumption and digestion.

If you want me to spell out actual lessons, you can get that on Thursday’s training.

This 3rd Conversion training can be useful to you if you’re after long-term customers and fans… rather than one-off transactions with buyers who hand you a bit of money once and then never benefit from what you sold ’em… never buy from you again… never build up your brand by writing up an email like I’ve just written about Ben Settle.

And in case you’re wondering:

My training on Thursday won’t just be about rehashing Ben Settle’s strategies, and using Ben as a good example of effective consumption and digestion techniques. Because Ben can also serve as a cautionary tale.

Like I’ve written before, I ended up unsubscribing from Ben’s Email Players after a few years — even with Ben’s threats of never being allowed back in. The reason again was consumption and digestion. I felt Ben’s newsletter had simply become a chore to read, so I took my money and my custom elsewhere.

The 3rd Conversion training will happen this Thursday at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. There will be a recording which I will send out after the call, though if you can make it live, you and I both are sure to benefit more from it.

If you’d like to sign up for 3rd Conversion now, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/3rd-conversion

Announcing: 3rd Conversion

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This coming Thursday, October 24, I will put on a live training, called 3rd Conversion.

The ticket to get inside is $100.

3rd Conversion is intended for forward-thinking online business owners and info marketers… those who have realized that selling to one person, ten times over, is easier, more enjoyable, and more profitable than selling to ten people, one time.

Specifically, 3rd Conversion will show you techniques — ones I’ve used with my own products, and ones I’ve had used on me — to turn one-time buyers into long-term customers… by getting buyers to consume and enjoy the info products they bought.

But why? Why worry? Why worry if people consume and enjoy your info products?

Because if people consume and enjoy what you sell them, they are more likely to benefit from it… and they are more likely to come back for seconds, and thirds.

And the third time you sell a buyer something something — the “3rd Conversion” — you cross a kind of threshold.

The research shows, and I got no reason to doubt it, that at this third conversion, for the first time, the customer finally becomes more likely than not to keep buying from you, over and over, year after year.

On Thursday, I’ll give you specific techniques to get to this magic point yourself, and turn your own one-time buyers into long-term customers, by making your info products more consumable and enjoyable.

You don’t have to decide to sign up for the 3rd Conversion training right now. I’ll keep talking about it until Thursday, when I will close the cart down.

But if you’re the kind of forward-thinking person that I think can benefit from this information… and if you already know that you want this info, because you care about getting more customers for the long term… and if you think $100 is a fair price for the promise I’m making… then here’s where to get your ticket for the show on Thursday:

https://bejakovic.com/3rd-conversion

Why so stubborn?

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My life for the past two decades has been shaped in many ways by information I’ve come across on one single website.

I’ve made health decisions, career decisions, and even decisions about personal beliefs, all thanks to this one website, or rather, to resources I’ve found via this website.

That website is Google no just kiddding.

That website is Hacker News, a kind of precursor to Reddit, which, unlike Reddit, has managed to keep its quality by refusing to go after quantity.

Lately, for some reason, I’ve found myself not going on Hacker News as much as normal.

So this morning, right after correctly guessing the Wordle of the day (in five guesses, Which worldle informs me is “GREAT”), I purposefully went to see what’s new on Hacker News.

And as often happens, I was rewarded. Because one of the top posts on Hacker News today is a link to an article with the headline:

“The feds are coming for John Deere over the right to repair”

In a nutshell:

x1. Tractor maker John Deere has made its new computerized tractors largely unrepairable by customers. This means the tractor has to go back to the factory for repairs. This is nice for John Deere, but expensive for customers, both in terms of time and money.

x2. As a result, John Deere customers have been complaining… the market for used tractors has been booming as farmers seek an alternative to buying new John Deere tractors… and now, even the federal government is after John Deere, for possibly violating Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, about deceptive or unfair practices in commerce.

And yet, in spite all this, John Deere continues to refuse to make its tractors easily repairable by the buyer.

Which really begs the question, why?

Why be so stubborn, and work against what both the market and the very powerful federal government want you to do?

The only answer that comes to my limited mind is:

Because locking in customers in this way is good for John Deere.

In fact, if you look at the stock price of the company since the early 2010s, when customers first started complaining about John Deere’s unreparaiable tractors, the company’s stock price has been, not on a steady rise, but on what looks to my non-expert eyes like an exponential increase.

I bring this up because last year, I asked folks on my list what continuity or subscription offers they buy – the info product version of what John Deere is doing, locking in customers for more than a single purchase.

I got a bunch of responses to that email last year. But I did nothing with those responses, not until a couple days ago. That’s when I went back to the responses I got, summed them up, looked for patterns and exceptions. Some patterns:

x* Out of the 40 or so continuity or subscription offers my readers reported paying for, the majority were primarily personality-based, rather than primarily promise- or interest-based.

x* Out of those personality-based subscriptions, the majority were primarily paid newsletters of some sort, with the rest being paid communities or memberships built around a guru.

x* The prices for personality-based newsletters seem to depend largely on the format. Digital newsletters were priced lower (around $50-$70/month) while print newsletters were priced higher ($97-$199/month).

And then the exception, which caught my eye:

x* One digital newsletter — in fact, just an email sent once a month — bucked the price trend above by selling for $99 a month. In fact, this subscription is not even buyable in a one-month increment — the shortest subscription you can get is three months, with extra inducements also available for 6-month and 1-year subscriptions.

I found this interesting because this subscription seems to be working. Not only was I clued into it directly from readers who pay for it, but I remember hearing a friend mention subscribing to it since.

So let’s get to the deal:

I’d like to update my database of continuity or subscription offers that my readers susbcribe to.

After all, things may have changed in the past 12 months, since I last collected such data.

And so my offer for you today is, hit reply and tell me which subscription or continuity offers you pay for.

It could be a paid newsletter, community, membership, magazine, book-of-the-month club, whatever.

In return, I’ll reply and tell you which digital newsletter I had in mind above, the one delivered by email that bucks the pricing trend, and still seems to do well.

Plus, I will also tell you what one particular thing I thought was very clever and effective on the sales page for this offer, which I think helps this offer convert, even though it’s just a stupid email, which costs a whopping $99 a month.

Do we got a deal?

My piratin’ days

by

ARRR, I be quite old, much like a giant tortoise. And to prove it, I can tell you I was there when the Internet was first becoming a thing.

Quite naturally, I was also there when a friend in high school first told me you could get music, for free, on the Internet.

For reference, this was back when the only way to listen to the music you wanted, when you wanted, was to hand over the modern equivalent of about $30 for a CD.

“No!” I told my friend in disbelief when he told me about this piracy stuff.

“Yes!” he said. “Any kind of music you want. You just type the name of the song into AltaVista, and you look for mp3 files.”

So I tried it. I remember that the first song I searched for and pirated was The Beach Boys’ I Get Around. It took about three days to download.

Now here’s the head trip:

A short while later, I actually ended up handing over the modern equivalent of about $30 for a CD, The Beach Boys’ Greatest Hits, Volume 1.

I did this even though I had already pirated several Beach Boys hits off the Internet… and even though I could probably get the other ones too, with just a bit of searching.

Now let me make it clear:

1. This email is not an invitation to pirate and salve your conscience by saying you will somehow pay for it later, when you have more money. Piracy, romantic though it may sound, is well known to lead to scurvy and hangings, among other unpleasant consequences. It’s a miracle I survived my piratin’ days and lived to tell the tale.

2. This email is also not an invitation to give away your catchy songs for free, in the hope that people will eventually pay for the album. In fact, my point is kind of the opposite of that.

My point is that format is positioning.

I don’t remember exactly what made me pay for the Beach Boys CD.

I probably rationalized it to myself. I could listen to the music on my stereo instead of the crappy computer speakers… there were songs I might not find online, and they took so long to download… I could take the music with me and play it in the car or at a friend’s house.

There was probably a bit of all that. But really, I imagine my decision was mostly irrational.

The album had a colorful, attractive cover. I had the modern equivalent of $30 burning a hole in my pocket. Plus, I had been well trained over the years to buy CDs, and this was in fact a CD for sale. So I bought, and I was even happy about it.

Here’s my takeaway for you:

If you have free content, you can legitimately repackage it and sell it for good money, even to the people who have gotten much of that stuff for free in another format.

And if you’re selling stuff but not making as much money as you like, then the same lesson applies. Change the format, and you can double, triple, decuple, or even vinguple the prices you charge. People will buy, and even be happy about it.

Because format is positioning.

And if you want my help putting this lesson into practice, well, then read on. Today is the last day I will be making the offer below, because tomorrow we weigh anchor and set sail:

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I’ve set aside time over the next month to help two business owners to quickly churn up new offers using their catalogue of existing products. The ultimate goal here is to:

* Create something new and exciting for your audience, without creating entirely new products

* Develop a new asset for yourself — a new offer you can reissue in the future with little tweaks or maybe without any tweaks

* Bring in new buyers who might then buy other stuff from you, or get deeper into your world

* Do a bit of work and make back a good deal of money as a result

If you want a specific example:

Last week, I sent three emails over two days in what I called my Shangri-La MVE event. Those three emails ended up selling 22 copies of a $297 course that I had already promoted hundreds of times over the past couple years. $6.5k or so when all the money comes in, and all it took in terms of work was a couple of hours of repackaging content I already had.

I’ve run other such promo events, ranging anywhere from 1-14 days. Some were complete duds, and brought in less money than this Shangri-La event. But others brought in more, well into the 5-figures.

Your specific numbers?

It will depend on how big your list is, the relationship you have with the people on there, and of course your offers.

But with my second pair of eagle eyes scanning over all your assets… and my experience running not only my own “reissue events” but also coaching a couple dozen copywriters who worked on these kinds of promos for clients… you will be more likely to come out of this with a result you can be happy with.

Like I said, I’m talking to a few business owners about this already.

If you’re interested in this offer in principle, hit reply and let me know a bit about your list (size, how often you write, etc.) and your back catalogue of previous hits.

I will be promoting this offer until this Thursday. I want to talk to everyone who’s interested and find the two people I think I am best qualified to help… and then we’ll kick things off.