Direct Marketing

The bigger point of the rising AI flood

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Yesterday, Australia’s best copywriter, Daniel Throssell, wrote an email with the subject line, “John Bejakovic is wrong.”

​​Daniel’s email was about my email two days ago, in which I said that nobody really wants a newsletter.

I would like to respond to Daniel’s email, and I will. But a promise is a promise.

And yesterday I promised that today I would continue and finish my email from yesterday, and reveal the bigger point.

My smaller point was that there’s already a ton of fluff on the Internet, and it will only get worse now that anybody can write quickly, cheaply, and convincingly thanks to AI.

You can choose to take advantage of the current moment, which is what my email yesterday was about.

But there’s also the bigger point I promised you yesterday. It’s this.

Last month, over the course of two weeks, an estimated five billion people gathered in bars and on street corners all around the world, or squeezed in on the couch at home next to their friends and family, while watching opposing groups of 11 grown men desperately chasing a rubber ball around a grassy field.

The reason why billions of people engaged in this strange ritual is the same reason why I sent a physical postcard last year as part of my Most Valuable Postcard project.

Because it’s something real.

All those people around the world, hanging out with friends, tuning in to a live football game that everybody else is watching at exactly the same time, with the result still unknown and even uncertain — that’s real.

On a much smaller scale, so was my physical, handwritten postcard.

So that’s my bigger point for you.

The world will soon be flooded by AI-generated and AI-augmented content. This content will be warm, sweet, and inviting.

​​That means the flood will stay, and it will cover and absorb all the other warm, sweet, and inviting content that’s being created by the last generation of well-meaning human influencers and personality-based content marketers.

But islands in the flood will form, created by people who want some actual real experience of human connection to complement all the time spent being plugged into the solipsistic AI heaven.

So start thinking now, about how to create something real, and how to give that to people.

At least that’s my advice if you want influence and impact in the nearly developing future, or maybe just a better society to live in.

Anyways, I had a special, time-limited, free offer today for people who are subscribed to my email newsletter. You missed that, since you are not subscribed, but are only reading an archived version of this email.

In case you’d like to keep this from happening in the future, you can sign up to my email newsletter, and get my emails as they come out, in real time. To do so, click here and fill out the form that appears.

Threats and shaming in early-morning emails

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Two mornings ago, I found myself on the street outside my house, in the dark. There were no cabs because it was 4:30am on New Year’s morning. I took my phone out to rent a city bike as the first step of catching my 7am flight, but instead of opening the bike app, I automatically opened my email inbox.

“Hello,” I said. “This will be useful.”

It turns out I’d gotten a new email from marketer Ben Settle. The subject line read:

“Why my ‘no coming back’ policy will inevitably be the new normal”

Ben was talking about his policy of never allowing people who unsubscribe from his paid newsletter to resubscribe.

I have no doubt that Ben’s prediction is right, and that this policy will become more and more common.

After all, newsletters are the Ford Edsel of the information publishing industry.

As Agora founder Bill Bonner, who has sold billions of dollars’ worth of newsletters, supposedly said once, nobody wakes up in the middle of the night, heart racing, pajamas wet from sweat, with the sudden realization, “Good God… we’re all out of newsletters!”

Newsletters are something that the marketer dreamed up, because they provide continuity income, automatically, without the need to keep getting credit card details.

Newsletters are something the market doesn’t really want, not without a huge amount of bribes, indoctrination, and in Ben’s case, threats and shaming. From his email about his “no coming-back” policy:

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“Plus, practically speaking, if the trash lets itself out why take it back in?”

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Whatever. People will justify anything to themselves out of self-interest.

Fortunately, my self-interest isn’t aligned with selling you a newsletter, because I tried it and found I hate it, even before I had to give a single thought to retention.

The good news of that is, I don’t have to threaten you or shame you, which is something I find personally distasteful.

The bad news is, I don’t ever hear the satisfying sound of shopping-cart notifications telling me I’ve made a bunch of sales on autopilot.

Instead, I have to keep sending emails, writing sales letters, and doing my best to tempt you into buying the offers I’m selling.

That’s okay. Like I keep saying, I’m okay with working a bit, regularly, and for the long term.

And I’d rather have my freedom, both from the fixed schedule of publishing a paid newsletter, and from the psychological toll of barking at my subscribers and cracking my whip at them.

Perhaps you also value freedom over automatic shopping cart notifications. Perhaps you can understand where I am coming from. In that case, you might like to sign up to my (free) daily email newsletter.

You can try it… find it doesn’t work for you… unsubscribe… and later, if you change your mind, you can subscribe again. No threats or shaming.

To get started, click here and fill out the form.

Announcing: Son of Most Valuable Postcard

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Last year — not meaning yesterday, but actually 12 months ago — I set three themes for myself.

A theme is an idea I got from James Altucher. It’s a general direction to move in, unlike a goal, which is more like a destination to arrive at by a specific time. Themes work for me, goals don’t.

Anyways, one of my 2022 themes was “offers”. And I did well with that. By my count, I made over a dozen different offers last year to this list alone.

The most unique of those offers was my Most Valuable Postcard.

Each month, for all of two months, I sent a postcard from a new place with a short greeting and a URL. The URL took you to a secret website, where 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 addressing and writing them by hand.

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

​​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 now, the Most Valuable Postcard is back. In a way.

The core concept of the Most Valuable Postcard is something I find too valuable to let go. Like I said, it’s to take a fundamental marketing idea and go deep. As copywriter Dan Ferrari wrote a while back:

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Learning fundamentals and mastering fundamentals are two different things. Sorry to break it to you, in my experience, ~80% of copywriters NEVER reach mastery. The simple explanation is they have NO idea how much deeper they can go. That’s too bad because all it takes is a willingness to put the SCUBA gear on and explore the depths.

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​So my plan is to go deep, write more Most Valuable Postcards, and put them inside the members-only area of my site.

There won’t be a physical postcard any more, but the website content will have the same format as before.

There also won’t be a monthly subscription, but I will sell the postcards individually, whenever I put them out.

To start, I’m selling the first Most Valuable Postcard, which so far only went out to those first 20 people who managed to sign up last summer.

But I am only selling this offer to people who are on my email list. In case you are interested in my Most Valuable Postcard, or simply want to read my emails as I write them every day, click here to sign up to my newsletter.

The old future of new newsletters

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I’m a regular reader of Simon Owen’s Tech and Media Newsletter — it’s an insightful rag. For example:

A few weeks ago, Owens wrote a piece about the future of new media startups, and what those will look like.

He made five predictions. One of those was “niche editorial products.”

Here’s a relevant bit from Owens’s article, where he is writing about Axios, a conglomerate of email newsletters (free and paid) that sold for a thumping $525 million back in August:

What most impressed me about the company was how it simultaneously managed to be a general interest news site while also funneling its audience into niche verticals, making it much easier for it to deliver highly targeted advertising and industry-specific subscription products.

In other words, Axios offers general and free newsletters on the front-end… and specific and expensive newsletters on the back end.

When you put it like that, this ain’t nothing new:

1. Write something like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Give it away for free or sell it for $0.46 on Kindle.

2. And then, to the people who bought the book, sell something like the Dale Carnegie Institute’s High Impact Presentations corporate training, which consists of two in-person sessions, and costs $2,195.

So Owens’s prediction might not be new, but it’s still a good reminder for each new generation and each new technology.

And it’s something I’m thinking about, especially in the context of email newsletters. If you have a highly niched offer, it might be something for you to think about also.

Meanwhile, let me remind you that this basic idea is not just about offers. The same idea actually applies to copywriting, marketing, and effective communication of all types.

In fact, everything I’ve just told you is related to “chunking up”, which is the first big and new copywriting insight I had by looking at the bullets of A-list copywriters.

The way I describe it inside my Copy Riddles program, “chunking up” allows you to expand your market 3x, 5x, or more.

Which goes to show:

Once you learn the essence of effective communication — once you learn to make interesting and attractive appeals — you can then apply that from a single sales bullet all the way up to the core structure of a $525-million business like Axios.

Perhaps you’re curious to learn more. Perhaps you want specific examples from print ads, video sales letters, and paperback books.

Perhaps you even want to practice chunking up yourself, so next time you try to get your message or offer across, it comes naturally.

You can do all that, and more, if you buy Copy Riddles, which I am currently selling. For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

3 Tuesday bland breakthroughs (Dec 20 edition)

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In preparing to write this email, I dug up my notes for a high-priced consult I did this past summer. For that consult, I looked over the email marketing of a running and profitable business, and I came up with little-known, highly technical, A-list email copywriter secrets to skyrocket conversions.

Since I am now promoting a new coaching program with a focus on email marketing, I’ve decided to give you a sneak peek into that high-priced consult, and reveal some of the behind-the-velvet-rope ideas I conjured up in there. Here are the three most exciting ones:

– email more often
– inject more curiosity and intrigue
– add some personality to it

Those exciting ideas might remind you of the “bland breakthroughs” of a marketer I’ve code name Gavin Juff.

And maybe these bland breakthroughs make you glad you never hired me for an email marketing consult. After all, is this anything worth paying for?

Well, Camille Clare, the business owner who hired me for that consult last summer, wrote me some time later to say:

Just so you know, since your feedback, we have tripled our sales via email. So that’s pretty awesome and thank you 🙂

Why don’t people email more? Add some intrigue? Inject a bit of personality into their copy?

It’s beyond me. But the fact is, there are plenty of businesses that don’t execute on the basics of email marketing — even if they’ve been hearing about those basics since Saddam Hussein was in office.

Enter my new coaching program.

As genuine A-list copywriter David Deutsch might say, I’m not promising that this coaching program will triple your sales from email.

But I am promising I won’t just tell you the obvious “what to do” — email more, you dummy — but I will give you specific one-on-one ideas, tailored to your business, for how to implement those “what to dos.”

The truth is, that’s actually what I did with Camille in that consult last summer. The extra thing I will do within my new coaching program is work with people week-by-week, and make sure they actually implement these ideas in their email copy and their email marketing.

Is this anything worth paying for?

No, it’s not. Not for most people.

But if you have a running and profitable business, or at the very least, an email list of some size and quality, then it might be worth paying for. Because it might end up making you much more money than you pay me.

My new coaching program will kick off in January. I will be promoting it until tomorrow. If you think you might be a good fit for it, then the first step is to sign up for my email newsletter. Click here to do that. After that, we can talk in more detail.

Story of coaching with Dan Ferrari continued

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Yesterday, I promised to share with you how I paid off 6 months of very expensive coaching in less than 60 days.

The story is this:

Back in 2019, I’d been working with an ecommerce company for about a year, writing their entire sales funnels, including advertorials and Facebook and YouTube ads.

At the height of it, we were making 2,000 sales every day to entirely cold traffic.

And then the next day, it was time to make 2,000 new sales to entirely cold traffic.

Meanwhile, the previous buyers’ data went off to some cold storage facility in a bunker at the bottom of the Pacific ocean.

Over and over, I proposed to the ecomm guys to start sending emails to these previous buyers. “It’s free money,” I kept saying. “Let me do it. I’ll do all the work. Just pay me a part of the money I’ll make for you.”

I did this maybe five times over the course of the year we had been working together. Each time, the ecomm guys had some excuse, and they said no. The reality was they were simply making way too much money on the front end, and they didn’t feel like bothering with the setup.

In the meantime, I joined Dan Ferrari’s coaching group.

I also realized that, even though I was getting paid $150/hr to write “horror advertorials” for dog toothbrushes and strapless bras, there was not any opportunity here to reach the next level as a copywriter. And frankly, I was bored with writing advertorials day in and day out.

I decided it was time to cut off the relationship with the ecommerce company, and in that way, to force myself to look for better clients.

“What about writing emails for them on a rev-share basis?” Dan asked me.

“I tried selling them that,” I said. “Each time, they dragged their feet and eventually said no. They obviously don’t want to do it. I’m done with them.”

“Sure,” said Dan. “But try it one last time.”

So I did.

Because one pact I made with myself during this very expensive coaching with Dan was to do whatever he said — even if it seemed futile, even if it felt repulsive, even if I knew better.

So one last time, I made the rev-share email pitch to the ecomm guys. And whaddya know. They finally agreed, for whatever reason.

A few days later, I started writing and sending emails to one of their buyer lists, made up of 40k+ people.

It wasn’t an immediate win. But within a month, I figured out what worked.

And then, the ecomm guys opened up a second 40k+ buyer list for me to mail. And that’s when the money really started rolling in, both for the ecomm guys, and also for me.

Like I said yesterday, this new source of income paid off 6 months of Dan Ferrari’s coaching in under 60 days.

That was not the only bump in income and opportunity that I got from Dan’s coaching. There were others, where he had a much more direct and involved role. But though valuable, those other opportunities don’t compare to the money I made as a result of this simple piece of advice. “Sure. But try it one last time.”

I wanna highlight two things:

You might say that Dan’s contribution was trivial in this case. Maybe so.

But without his trivial piece of advice, I’m 100% sure I would have ended that ecomm relationship early, and I would today be out a large sum of money, and a large amount of experience with email marketing at a very high level.

You might also say the stars had to align for Dan’s comment to have the impact it did.

I mean, how many businesses making 2,000 sales a day are dumb enough to never try to sell another thing to previous customers? It’s easy to make money in that situation.

Again, maybe so. But many businesses, even successful businesses, have marketing cracks like this. But often they can’t see or can’t fill those cracks themselves, and it takes somebody from the outside to force a change.

The same is true of people.

If you’re smart, like Dan is, then you set yourself up to coach people who have a lot of the pieces in place already. People who just need an outside perspective on plugging up cracks, or a push at the right time in the right direction for those existing pieces to click and fuse together.

Because getting somebody from 0 to 1 can be impossibly hard work.

Getting somebody from 1 to 10 might be less hard but isn’t much more rewarding.

But if somebody already has a half-dozen 17’s in hand… then you don’t need to show them how to go from 17 to 30. You don’t even have to show them how to add up their half-dozen 17’s to make 102.

You just have to show them something like the “multiplication trick”, and suddenly, their half-dozen 17’s click and fuse and are suddenly worth over 2 million.

I hope I didn’t lose you with that mathematical analogy. Because it’s time for my pitch, and I’d like your full attention.

As I wrote two days ago, I’m starting my own coaching program. The focus is entirely on email marketing. How to send more emails. How to make those emails more interesting. How to sell more, and at higher prices, using email.

If this is something that interests you, and if you suspect you have a lot of the pieces in place already, then I’d like to talk to you. As the first step, you will have to be on my email list. Click here to sign up.

Income at will

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Tonight, as this email goes out, I will be finishing up the third and final call of the Age of Insight core training.

That done, I still have a few bonuses to deliver.

But pretty soon, I will be finished with everything I promised as part of this offer.

I will have the recordings of all the trainings. With a bit of polishing and tweaking, these will turn into assets I can sell down the line.

I will also have a better and deeper relationship with the group of people who went through Age of Insight, most of whom have bought stuff from me before.

​​If these people got insights from this course, if they got good ideas, if they got value they can use to make themselves more successful, odds are good they will want to come back for more in the future.

A few days ago, Dan Kennedy wrote:

If you’re in a position that at almost any time you can come up with an offer that your customers, clients, patients, donors, followers, or fans list will like, then you have the ability to create income at will.

This position should be a big priority for people to get themselves into. Because in harsh reality, this is actually the only financial security there is. Because one way or another, what you already have can be wiped out. So the only real financial security you ever have is being in the income-at-will position and able to replace disappeared wealth.

I got started with income-at-will very hesitantly last year.

After sitting on the idea of my Copy Riddles program for a few months, I finally got up the nerve to presell it. I then delivered it over the course of a month, while creating it day-for-day.

Then came Influential Emails, also last year. I had the idea for that training one morning. By the afternoon, I had a sales page up and an email went out to drive traffic to that sales page. Again, I presold this training. I delivered it over the next few weeks, and made a nice sum of money as a result.

Next was the Most Valuable Postcard. I sat on that idea for a while, but when I did decide to do it, up went a minimalist sales page. Later that day, a few hours after my one and only email about this offer, I had filled the quota I wanted for this experiment.

Then there was the Most Valuable Email this past September. And then Age of Insight last month. And that brings me to today, and my new offer.

It’s no secret that the reason I’ve been able to create income at will has been this very email newsletter.

I have done precious little to promote myself other than writing a daily email.

I have also done precious little to sell my offers other than writing a daily email.

I’m not telling you anything new here. You probably know the value of email marketing. But the question is not whether you know it.

​​The question is whether you yourself are in that desirable position, where you can write some emails and create income at will.

Enter my new offer.

My new offer is a coaching program, focused specifically on email copy and email marketing. It will kick off in January.

The primary goal for this coaching program is not to make you into the Michelangelo of email copywriters.

The primary goal is to make this coaching program pay for itself, and for much more.

The main mechanism to do that is getting you to send out consistent, interesting, influential daily emails, which you can tack an offer onto whenever you want.

In case you’re interested, the first pre-requisite is to be on my email list. You can sign up for that here.

AI wants you to take its job

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Yesterday, the waning gibbous moon in Leo opposed Saturn in Aquarius. That’s the only way I can explain the fact that a half dozen marketers all independently and yet simultaneously decided to send emails with their thoughts about AI and what it means for copywriters.

But in spite of the AI barrage yesterday, the most interesting thing I’ve read about AI for copywriters came not from a marketer, but a guy named Sam Kriss.

​​Last week, Kriss published a long article, putting ChatGPT into a surprising historical context, and making the claim that AI writing is getting worse rather than better.

Worse, because earlier versions of GPT were weird, sometimes useless, but sometimes new and wonderful.

Meanwhile, the most recent version of GPT has simply gotten very good at approximating the current state of writing on the Internet, which is bad and getting worse — clickbait and fluff, optimized for skimming, for nodding along, for other AI like search engines and front-page algorithms. Kriss makes a prediction:

If you write the keyword-laden babble for Emily’s Scrummy Kitchen, or monetised blog posts angling for answerboxes, or bludgeon-headed political takes that go viral every weekday, or flatly competent student essays, or little inspirational poems in lowercase, or absolutely anything to do with cryptocurrency — if your writing can be done by a machine because it is already machinelike — then ChatGPT will take your job. If you do screenplays for Netflix, it may have already done so.

At this point, the standard email marketing formula calls for saying something hopeful, about how there’s still time to up your skills and build the right relationship with your audience, so you can insulate yourself from the coming AI purges.

But I won’t follow the standard formula. In part, because I’d just be helping the AI obsolete me sooner.

In part, because rather than hopeful, I feel mostly curious. I feel we’re on the verge of a big moment, not just for copywriters, but as a society. I’m curious what what that moment will look like, and what’s waiting on the other end of it.

And now, even though I probably haven’t done a good job preparing you for it emotionally, I’m still going to tempt you with an offer. That’s one part of the standard email marketing formula I’m not willing to forgo.

So here goes:​​

Maybe you yourself are curious why exactly I found the Sam Kriss article so interesting, and why I decided to share a quote from it with you.

Really, I told you above. But maybe you want it spelled out a little more clearly, or maybe you want some more examples.

If you do, or if you want to write things that get shared on your behalf, by actual humans, then the secret is here, in Chapter 8:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Looks like I’ve won a $1,000 copywriting gig!

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About two months ago, I found out about an exciting copywriting gig:

An online publication was looking for content writers. The pay was $250 per article of about 750 words. Articles could come in a thematic series of 4.

I came up with an idea for a 4-part series, wrote up a nice little proposal, and sent it off to the editor of the publication.

And then, as nothing seemed to be happening, I forgot all about it.

Fast forward to two weeks ago:

The editor wrote back to me to say my idea sounds wonderful. And if I can get her the first drafts by December 16, my articles could be published as soon as January. And once my articles are published, inshallah, I will get paid $1k!

There once was a time, not even so many years ago, when I would have gladly taken on this kind of work without any ulterior motive.

But today, it takes a little something extra to get me excited.

So here’s the something extra:

This online publication is The Professional Writers’ Alliance. From what I understand, PWA is a paid community of freelance copywriters, somewhere under the umbrella of AWAI.

Are you getting a glimpse of my devious scheme?

I write some interesting and valuable content for PWA, and include a byline and a link to my site…

Some freelance copywriter out there reads my content and decides to get on my email list to read more…

I send him a few more well meaning emails and then—

BAM! I sell him one of my offers that might be interesting to freelance copywriters.

All right, writing guest content as a means of self-promotion is probably not new to you. What might be new to you is the following suggestion:

Look for ways to get paid for your self-promotion.

Of course, it’s not always possible, but it is more possible than you might at first think.

For example, did you know it’s possible to get paid to send out your sales letters to your audience, either online or by mail?

In other words, rather than having to pay either the USPS to deliver your stuffed-and-enveloped sales letter… or having to pay Facebook to get eyeballs that will look at your sales page… you can actually get paid each time a high-quality prospect reads your sales pitch?

It’s true, and it’s actually what I will be writing about for the PWA in January.

If you’ve been reading my emails for a while, you probably know this get-paid-to-advertise trick. And if not, I might write more about it in the coming weeks.

To get on my email list so you can read that (beware, I might try to sell you something), click here and fill out the form that appears.

I’m not worried about my email from last night — really

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My email last night about James Altucher drew a surprising number of thoughtful and emotional responses…

#1 “If that’s what got James Altucher to stop, that’s really sad. I too enjoyed his writing.”

#2 “Great email. I always enjoyed James Altucher’s writing, too. It’s so quirky and off-beat.”

#3 “So… your email couldn’t have had better timing.”

#4 “I appreciate you sharing the email you never sent and hope he finds his confidence again someday.”

… but what my email yesterday did not do is get any sales. And in fact, it also didn’t get almost any clicks to the sales page – not compared to what I’m used to seeing.

To which, all which I can do is give a Gandhi-like smile, shrug gently, and then hiss through clenched teeth:

“Come on people, don’t you realize I’m trying to run a little business here? Buy something or move on.”

But a little more seriously, such is the world of not-really direct response marketing in daily emails.

Last night’s email drew a lot of engagement, but seems to have been worthless for business. But maybe not.

I’ve sent similar emails to this list that made me multiple thousands of dollars. In fact, I might collect all such emails into a course one day, which I will call:

“Multiple-Thousand-$$$ Emails I Sent Right Before A Deadline — And You Can Too”

The truth is, if you have a daily email list, and you’re not just spamming people with random affiliate offers, then it’s often the cumulative effect that makes people buy.

And even when people are mostly “sold” by a single email, it’s often not the email from which they clicked through to the sales page.

So the way I see it, it doesn’t make too much sense to stress over an email that seems to have been worthless for business.

Likewise, it doesn’t make too much sense to celebrate the emails that did make sales (except my “Multiple-Thousand-$$$ Emails I Sent Right Before A Deadline” — more info on that exciting course coming up soon).

So what does make sense?

I can only tell you the four things I do:

1. Keep an eye on sales over a longer time – like a month. Things tend to average out over a month, and hidden effects become less hidden.

2. Do worry if the total sales over that longer period are not going up. (If the total sales are going up, then still worry, but less.)

3. Do make new offers — again, keep your eyes peeled for my “Multiple-Thousand-$$$ Emails I Sent Right Before A Deadline — And You Can Too”

4. Follow Gary Bencivenga’s advice about getting 1% better each day. Except 1% better each day seems like a lot to me. So I aim for more like 1% better each week.

Which brings me to my offer:

It’s not new. And it’s certainly not the only way to get 1% better each week. But maybe it will be the difference that allows you to get better, regularly. Sign up for my email newsletter, and get more emails like this, every day.