Direct Marketing

Getting hooked on the hamster wheel

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Back in 2009, before social media really transformed the world, a Dutch scientist named Johanna Meier set up revolutionary experiment in her back yard:

She put an open cage in an ivy-tangled corner of the yard. Inside the cage, she put some food pellets and a running wheel. She then trained a motion-activated camera on the scene.

Sure enough:

Wild mice started arriving during the night. They entered the cage to get the food pellets. But they also tried out the running wheel — and they got hooked.

Meier recorded more than 12,000 different animals getting on the running wheel night after night. Her point was proven — even perfectly wild, free animals would willingly enter a cage and run around on the wheel, going nowhere.

Once the mice got habituated, Meier could even take the treats away. The mice still kept coming night after night, to run around in place, doing what they had gotten used to.

I bring this up because in the 15 years since that experiment, social media has often unflatteringly been compared to a hamster wheel.

I’ve never really used social media so I can’t say if that’s true.

But maybe it resonates with you. Maye you have experience getting lured into social media by the promise of treats — a huge free audience — only to have the treats pulled away from you, while you keep running in place.

If so, I’d like to present an alternative:

Building up a modest, engaged, scalable email list by paying for ads. Sure, ads cost money. But so does the wasted opportunity of weeks, months, or years of running in place on social media, without getting anywhere.

If this speaks to you, I’d like to remind you of the deadline to get MyPEEPS, tonight at 12 midnight PST.

In a food pelletshell, MyPEEPS shows you how to build your email list with paid traffic — putting in $10-$15, and getting out 10-15 new subscribers a day — so you can in time have a proper audience of people who want to read what you write, and buy what you sell.

Plus, the free Shotgun Messenger bonus I’m offering gets you my direct help and input as you actually put the MyPEEPS process into practice.

If you want the full details on that, or to sign up for before the deadline strikes:

​​https://bejakovic.com/shotgun​​

How to stop being seen as a milquetoast

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Today is the last day to sign up for MyPEEPS and get my free “Shotgun Messenger” bonus. You can expect me to send many more emails about this offer today. And on that note, I wanna tell you a quick story of rejection:

I first discovered marketer Travis Sago thanks to a podcast interview back in 2019. I was super impressed by everything Travis said, and so I got on his email list right away.

Travis had an automated welcome email that ended with, “I’m curious… What business are you in?”

I wrote back. I told Travis that I loved his interview, I gave some specifics of what I loved, and I said my business was copywriting.

And what I got back was… nothing. No smiley face, no “good on ya,” not a single word.

I figured then and in all these intervening years that either Travis didn’t check the reply email regularly, or he simply didn’t think me important enough to reply to.

Then this very morning, Sunday September 15 2024, I was listening to a short recording that Travis did for the people in his community.

Travis was talking about how persistent he is in following up with his prospects, particularly the “movers and shakers.” And he said the following:

“In fact, in my business, if a copywriter reaches out to me, my typical M.O. is not to respond back. I wanna get rid of all the milquetoasts, because I’m looking for people who want to get things done in the face of a challenge.”

Point being:

You might know that followup can get the attention of those who forgot about you or never even noticed you.

You might also know followup can build more desire.

But I imagine you never thought of followup as a kind of proof element.

And yet it is. Because who follows up?

People who believe in what they are doing and selling, including themselves.

The milquetoasts drop away.

So send regular emails, preferably daily… and if you got a deadline coming up, send a bunch.

You’ll catch people’s attention… you’ll remind them of what they want and how you can help… and you will convince them you have something worthwhile, just because you keep following up about it. And now, since you’ve read this email, you are a few minutes closer to the deadline for my MyPEEPS offer. The deadline will come in a flash, tonight at 12 midnight PST.

In a nutshell, MyPEEPS shows you how to build up your email list with paid traffic — putting in $10-$15 and getting out 10-15 new subscribers a day — so you can in time have a proper audience of people who want to read your emails and buy from you.

And the free Shotgun Messenger bonus I’m offering gets you my direct help and input as you actually put the MyPEEPS process into practice.

If you want the full details on that, or to sign up for before the deadline strikes:

​https://bejakovic.com/shotgun​

3-step plan to create “Electrical Socket Offers” out of thin air

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Last week I did a presentation inside Thom Benny’s Copyjitsu coaching group. Thom coaches 6 guys, all with good copy chops already, and he invited me, John Bejakovic, to come and pontificate on how to write emails.

One of the guys in Thom’s group asked me the following:

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I have this thing where I’m writing daily emails. I’m getting in reps. I wouldn’t be writing all this stuff if I didn’t believe I could help somebody.

But also, I don’t have any sales pages or digital products. All this that I’m offering, every day, is still consulting.

Do you have any way to think about that, when you’re at that stage, don’t have digital products, but you’re just pitching consulting?

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This is a great question. I bring it up now because earlier today, I asked what objections people had to buying MyPEEPS, a course I’m promoting until Sunday, on building up your email list with paid traffic.

Along with the usual objections — don’t need it, can’t afford it, already bought it — I got some surprises. For example, a few people wrote to say, “What can I do with an email list when I ain’t got no offers!”

So let me address that now.

If you got no offers, you can always decide to offer… consulting.

That’s Step 1 of my “Electrical Socket Offers” plan.

The problem is, “consulting” is a horrible, horrible offer. I say that without restraint because I’ve been guilty of offering “consulting” myself. I’ve also been guilty of making other horrible offers, like “coaching,” or “copywriting services.”

These offers are all horrible because they put the burden on the prospect. They say, “How am I supposed to know what I can help you with? I do have some knowledge and skill… but you tell me how you can use them.”

So Step 2 of my “Electrical Socket Offers” plan is to take the burden off the shoulders of your prospects.

You take the burden off by figuring out what problems your prospects have.

This is much easier to do than you might think. You simply ask. You can do it by digging around online. You can do it via email. Or, if you have the stomach for it, you can even do it over the phone.

Ask your prospects where they’re at… where they hope to go… what’s keeping them from getting there. Do this a few times, until you find a specific problem you can actually suggest a solution to.

BLAM!!

Suddenly, you’ve taken your horrible, horrible “consulting” offer, and you’ve transformed it into something wonderful and valuable — a solution to a specific problem that your prospects have.

Because really, when my laptop is running out of battery, I look for an electrical socket.

Once I find an electrical socket, I don’t stop and ask, “What manner of electricity does this socket supply? Was it electricity generated by a windmill? A hydroelectric dam? Solar?”

I really don’t care. I just want my laptop charged. Any socket I can plug into will do.

Same thing with people and their problems. People don’t care if you solve their problem via a digital course, consulting, or even a done-for-you service. Really, what they are after is a solution to their specific problem. They’re looking for a socket to plug into.

Step 3 of my plan is optional but highly valuable.

It’s to give your consulting offer a name, such as, for example, “Electrical Socket Offers.”

Because there is magic in giving things a name. It relieves any remaining burden on your prospects, and gives them just a simple, light word or three to hold in their mind.

So that’s the 3-step plan to create “Electric Socket Offers” out of thin air.

I imagine few people will take the above advice seriously.

I imagine even fewer will actually choose to implement it.

But if by chance, you’ve had the the light come on in your head… and you’ve realized that there is in fact nothing stopping you from selling attractive offers, starting today… then maybe it makes sense to build up an email list? You know, so you have people to sell your attractive offer to?

You decide. And if you decide that the answer is yes, then maybe take a look at the MyPEEPS offer I’m promoting. It comes with my free “Shotgun Messenger” bonus, which is live until this Sunday at 12 midnight PST. For the full details on this offer:

​https://bejakovic.com/shotgun​

The curious case of the 7,730-word Facebook ad

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“My new husband is disabled, yet he manages to wear me out every night”

… I’m sitting in a busy cafe, full of other expats, because my cleaning woman Flor has taken command of my apartment.

A few moments ago, I was discreetly and quietly digging through the Facebook ad library, looking for what I knew I would soon find.

And I did — a 7,730-word ad, which starts with a teaser:

“Her groom ran away from wedding to pursue his first love. Heartbroken, she randomly found a disabled man who was also abandoned to get married. Unexpectedly, he turned out to be a billionaire!”

This Facebook ad goes on for two chapters of dense literotica, before informing me that “Available chapters here are limited, click the button below to install the App and enjoy more exciting chapters.”

Sure enough I did click, a website opened up, and the above line, about my new disabled husband and his nightly staying power, blared out of my laptop speakers and throughout the cafe, as I scrambled to find the mute button.

So now, rather than raising my eyes from the keyboard and meeting the curious gaze of all the other cafe goers, I am focusing intently on writing this email.

I don’t know the full story of this ad or the business behind it. Maybe it’s some sort of scam.

Or maybe it’s just what it says it is:

A mobile app with a subscription for literotica books… which is being sold via dozens of Facebook ads that run for 5k+ words each.

I bring this up because last night, during the interview I did with Travis Speegle on list building via paid traffic, a question came in:

“Do you feel that attention spans are getting shorter and marketers have to get more sophisticated and learn ‘vsl’ or video ads for more engagement?”

Attention spans aren’t as short as you may have been led to believe.

And video ads are not required for anything, though they can be a good option for many tyings.

More generally, the eternal truth still holds. You reap what you sow.

If you create advertising inviting people to be distracted, gullible, greedy, scared, cheap — or to consume pages and pages of disabled billionaire literotica — that’s what you’re going to get.

On the other hand, if you create advertising inviting people to be good customers or email list subscribers, well, it works in that direction also.

And on that note:

This week, I’m promoting Travis Speegle’s MyPEEPS course, which gives you the core of Travis’s ~20 years of media buying and list-building experience for a one-time investment of $495.

Travis actually walks you through, in real time, how he creates ads in Facebook and what he puts in them to get the right kinds of people onto his email lists and the list of the big DR clients he accepts as clients.

Plus, if you get MyPEEPS via my affiliate link before this Sunday at 12 midnight PST, I will also include a bonus, which I’m offering for free, only this once, and which I would normally charge $500 or more for.

The free bonus is that I’ll ride shotgun as you build up your own list following the process in MyPEEPS, and give you my copywriting feedback and marketing input along the way.

For the full details on how this will work, or to get MyPEEPS and my free bonus as well:

​​https://bejakovic.com/shotgun​

What color is your Lambo?

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Let’s play a game. But first, let me get the hardcore, XXX marketing lesson out of the way:

One of the crucial parts of an effective sales letter is where you get people to “grasp the advantage.” That’s when you get them to understand what your offer will really do for them, in their own lives, in terms that mean something to them.

In a way, it’s a matter of translation.

For example, let’s take a promise I’ve been making lately, of getting 10-15 new subscribers to your email list each day.

Sounds nice, but really, who cares?

Let’s translate what that could really mean in your own life.

Get 10-15 new subscribers per day, every day, for a year… and you would be sitting on a list of exactly 4,562 and 1/2 human beings who said they want to hear from you.

What’s that worth?

Nobody really knows. I can tell you that an individual subscriber to my own email list has been worth $0 in the months when I didn’t make any offers… all the way to $5-$10+ in months when I had exciting offers and went hard on the promotion.

I’m sure many people have much higher numbers still.

But we gotta pick something. So let’s say $1/month for every subscriber on your list. That’s a kind of rule of thumb for email marketing in general.

What could you do with an extra $4,562.5 per month?

Of course, you could do the classic things, like work less… pay down debt… save more for yourself or your family… reinvest to make still more money.

Those are all reasonable and respectable options.

But like I said at the start, let’s play a game.

What fun, unexpected, thrilling gifts to yourself could you spend and splurge $4,562.5 on each month? Just as a thought experiment?

How about this:

You could hire a personal chef to cook every meal for you and your family, day in and day out. Groceries, chopping, sauteing, cleanup, all included.

Rates for personal chefs start at around $150 a day. You might have to pay more if you live in London or LA, or if you want someone with Michelin-star experience. I don’t know, maybe just do the weekdays in that case, instead of every day?

Or take option 2:

You could get a membership at Carbone, a private club in NYC that allows you access to Carbone Privato, a members-only restaurant frequented by other members, such as Rihanna, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Jay Z.

Membership at Carbone is $30,000 per year, but I’m guessing you can break it up monthly.

Even if the monthly rate ends up a bit higher in total, it would still leave you money to travel to New York and afford a steak or two at Carbone Privato each month… while you toast Leo across the room with a glass of champagne, in that way he does in The Great Gatsby.

Or of course, there’s the third and final option:

You could simply go the Tai Lopez route, and lease a Lamborghini month by month. The question is, what color? Black? Yellow? Grigio Telesto?

A Lambo Galardo lease starts at $1,700/month. At that rate, you could just get two, so you don’t have to choose between your favorite colors. And you’d still have money left over for gas.

Maybe none of these is exactly what you would want to spend $4,562.5 on each month… but maybe I gave you some ideas?

If I did, this might help you make those ideas a reality:

Until this Sunday, 12 midnight PST, I am promoting Travis Speegle’s myPEEPS list-building course. In a nutshell, Travis shows you how to build your email list using ads, so you can put in $10-15 a day and get 10-15 subscribers out.

You can find out more about Travis’s course at the link at the bottom.

For now, I’ll just say I’ve personally gone through myPEEPS, and I will be following it myself to build up a new list I’ve started.

That’s why I am also offering a “Shotgun Messenger” bonus if you buy myPEEPS through my affiliate link below.

Basically, you can build your list while I build mine, and get my marketing feedback and copywriting input along the way.

I’ll ride shotgun alongside you as you implement the program Travis lays out in myPEEPS. I’ll shoot down any dangerous or distracting ideas that pop up out of the bushes… I’ll read the map if you feel you’ve lost the way… and I’ll help you protect the valuable cargo you are transporting — meaning the money to spend on ads, but more importantly, your enthusiasm and your will to keep going.

I will deliver the “Shotgun Messenger” part of this offer over the next month via Zoom and via Skool (already live for a group of people who signed up early).

If you must have the full, dry details of how this bonus offer will work in order to decide whether or not to invest in myPEEPS, then write me, and I will get the details to you.

Or if you want to find out more about the core offer, myPEEPS, and what it could do for you, and maybe your garage:

​https://bejakovic.com/mypeeps​

[firstname], here’s what’s working in email NOW

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Hey [firstname]!

Last week, I switched my email software from ActiveCampaign to ConvertKit. It’s largely been a smooth transition. The only thing I have to gripe about is ConvertKit’s overly enthusiastic UX, which greets me like a robot cheerleader each time I send a new email, and shows me a drawing of confetti and tells me congratulations. It makes me feel a bit like an imbecil.

I have this theory that, today more than ever, we all want something that feels real.

Or at least I do, and I notice how quickly I dismiss anything that gives off subtle hints that it’s not real:

Stale weeks-long autoresponders…

Merge fields…

Or just a fake emotional tone or connection, where there clearly cannot be any, like with a piece of email software that pretends to be my friend. You know what I mean, [firstname]?

A few days ago, I talked to a very smart and enterprising young marketer named Shakoor. He asked me if I think the email business model — build an email list, send emails, make money — will ever disappear.

I’m personally bullish on the email business model. But if it does ever disappear in its current form, I figure it will be replaced by something that works in basically the same way. Relationships with other humans will keep having value, as long as anything humans do still has any value.

And on that note:

Let me remind you that tomorrow, Wednesday, at 8pm CET/2PM EST/11am PST, I will host a “fireside council” with Travis Speegle.

Travis been selling online since 1996, and has been working as media buyer for 7- and 8-figure direct response brands for a good amount of time. He has seen things come and go.

Tomorrow, Travis and I will talk about paid traffic to grow an email list.

I imagine that nothing we discuss will be stuff that’s working NOW, in the sense that it wasn’t also working yesterday and won’t also work tomorrow, or next week, or next year.

But maybe that’s exacly the kind of information you’re looking for.

If you’d like to join Travis and me on the call tomorrow, you’ll have to be on my list first. Click here to make that happen.

This Wednesday: Fireside council with a list-building wizard

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This Wednesday at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST, I, Bejako Baggins, will sit down with one of the great list-building wizards of Middle Earth, Travis the White, aka Travis Speegle.

Who:

Travis started his first business online in 1996, during the First Age of Middle Earth. Today, Travis is the media buyer for a handful of big and profitable direct response brands. He figures has generated over 7.5+ million leads in his career.

Why:

Because recently, I went through Travis’s myPEEPS program, which lays out his process for building lists with paid traffic. I will be promoting myPEEPS this week, and I will be following it next week to start growing my own list with paid traffic.

What:

If you’re interested in growing your list… in running paid traffic more generally… or in running a successful online business for the long term, then you are invited to join Travis and me to sit down around a virtual fireside on Zoom, and listen in as I ask about:

Exciting list building quests Travis is embarking on this year

Magical spells working in paid traffic right now (hint: I expect it’s pretty much what’s worked since Isildur was king of Gondor)

Where Travis is buying traffic, and how he chooses among the options based on the monsters he has to fight

I will also open the council floor for questions, as long as they are interresting, useful to the entire council body, and not already covered inside travis’s paid program.

If you’d like to join us, you will need to be inside my hobbit hole, I mean on my list, first. Press this magical link to have a chance to get inside.

Last call for tonight’s mystery bonus

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One of the pros of working as a freelance copywriter is that, along with getting paid, you basically get a free MBA.

I knew nothing about business before I got started as a copywriter.

But offer to write a sales page for somebody… and they will take you behind the curtains of their business and tell you everything — how they get their customers… what they sell them… what they really sell them, after that first sale… how much they charge… what has worked… what hasn’t.

You can ask whatever you want, however intrusive, and the client will answer, in detail, and truthfully.

I don’t miss much about working with clients, but this ongoing business education is one thing I do miss.

Good thing is, coaching people — successful business owners, or copywriters working with successful businesses — is almost as good.

So for example:

A few months ago, one of the copywriters I coached inside Shiv Shetti’s PCM mastermind was writing an email promo for a business coach.

The business coach was selling a $5k program. You had to get on a sales call to get in the program.

So far, so standard.

The one unusual thing was that the business coach offered a sexy bribe just to get people onto the sales call.

Whether or not that’s a smart thing to do is a question for another time.

For now, all I’ll say is that, thanks to coaching the copywriter in charge of this promo, I actually got to look inside the sexy bribe. It was a “plug-and-play email funnel” to 1) generate passive income and 2) get more qualified leads on your email list.

I can tell you this:

* The strategy was really far from being anything NEW

* Calling it “passive income” was a bit of a stretch, or at least creative repackaging

But the truth remains, this little email “funnel” was highly valuable for this business coach and her clients.

And it also happens to be something I have used myself, on multiple occasions, for years now, to offset the cost of ads I was running to various email lists, or even to remove those costs altogether.

I will be revealing this little “funnel” in a mystery bonus that will disappear at 12 midnight PST tonight.

In case you are interested, the time to move is now. And in case you have successfully managed to avoid all my emails about this offer until now, the details are below:

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The background:

I will be building up a new list I’ve launched via paid ads, starting at $10-$15 a day, and aiming to get 10-15 subscribers for that money.

If you like, you can follow the same process I will be following (a course by an expert list builder, which costs $495), plus you can get my live copywriting feedback and marketing insight as a free bonus.

Like I wrote yesterday, I will be promoting this offer for another week.

But if you decide you want to jump in by the end of today, at 12 midnight PST, I will do two things:

1. I will put you into the Skool community as soon as I open it up on Monday

2. I’ll give you a special mystery bonus to say thanks. This special mystery bonus is about a strategy that’s not covered in the list-building blueprint I will be following… but a strategy that I’ve used in the past to offset the cost of running ads, and in some cases even eliminate it

Of course, don’t decide now if want to join me or not. Simply decide if this sounds interesting to you, and and if it does, hit reply and say so. I can get you the full details, and you can decide then, and maybe even in time for today’s mini-deadline.

Sunday morning startler

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This morning I went out for my usual walk, and as I stepped out the elevator at the bottom of my building, I felt something odd inside my shoe, right at the toe.

Probably just my sock crumpled up? Or maybe a pebble?

I sat down on the stairs to investigate.

I took off my shoe and shook it. Nothing fell out.

I looked inside. Nothing.

I reached to straighten out my sock and— GAH!! — I instinctively threw something away.

In the dim light of the building lobby, I took a closer look at what I had just touched and tossed.

It turned out to be a live gecko that had been stuck to my sock. It must have crawled into my shoe during the night and gone to sleep.

It’s no big mystery how the gecko got inside my shoe.

The Mediterranean house gecko is endemic to the Barcelona area.

I’ve often seen the little guys inching their way up the outside walls of my building.

For the record, I live on the 9th floor.

It must take a whole evening for a gecko to slowly make his way up the wall to where I live. But I guess it doesn’t matter to them. They like high places… time is passing anyhow… and so they might as well climb.

Now that I’ve opened up this fascinating topic, let me go full-gecko:

You might know the Geico Gecko slogan, “15 minutes could save you 15% on your car insurance.”

Well, I got an update for you:

“$10-$15 could get you 10-15 new subscribers on your email list.”

For the past few days, I’ve been promoting a new offer with that promise. The background:

I will be building up a new list I’ve launched via paid ads, starting at $10-$15 a day, and aiming to get 10-15 subscribers for that money.

If you like, you can follow the same process I will be following (a course by an expert list builder, which costs $495), plus you can get my copywriting feedback and marketing insight as a free bonus.

10-15 new subscribers a day is not exactly a rocket launch.

But like my shoe gecko shows, a bit of progress, repeated consistently, gets you up to high places, and sooner than you might think.

Like I wrote yesterday, I will be promoting this offer for another week.

But if you decide you want to jump in by the end of today, at 12 midnight PST, I will do two things:

1. I will put you into the Skool community as soon as I open it up on Monday

2. I’ll give you a special mystery bonus to say thanks. This special mystery bonus is about a strategy that’s not covered in the list-building blueprint I will be following… but a strategy that I’ve used in the past to offset the cost of running ads, and in one case even eliminate it

Of course, don’t decide now if want to join me or not. Simply decide if this sounds interesting to you, and and if it does, hit reply and say so. I can get you the full details, and you can decide then, and maybe even in time for today’s mini-deadline.

A favor?

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Would you do me a favor?

As you might know, for the past few days I’ve been promoting a new “work alongside me offer.”

In short, I’ve launched a new list and I’m starting to grow it by paying for ads. I’m inviting people who want to follow the same process I’m following to work alongside me and to grow their own list, while getting copywriting feedback and marketing input from me.

A part of how I will deliver this feedback and input will be via a Skool community.

Which brings me to the favor:

I will be promoting this “work alongside me” offer for another week.

But I want to open up the Skool community early, and start interacting with people and giving them feedback. The reason for this is both to take the load off that’s sure to come with a bunch of people signing up at the final deadline… and also to get a sense of where people are at, and inform the marketing I will do during this last week.

So if you’ve been interested in this offer but you have been holding off, would you let me know now?

I can then share the full details of how this “work alongside me” offer will work. And if you decide to join early, by tomorrow, Sunday, at 12 midnight PST, instead of waiting for final deadline in one week’s time, then I will do two things:

1. I will put you into the Skool community as soon as I open it up on Monday

2. I’ll give you a special mystery bonus to say thanks. This special mystery bonus is about a strategy that’s not covered in the list-building blueprint I will be following… but a strategy that I’ve used in the past to offset the cost of running ads, and in one case even eliminate it

So if you’re interested in this offer, would you let me know? I’ll be checking my inbox throughout the weekend, but maybe it’s best to do it now, while it’s fresh on your mind. Thanks in advance.