Direct Marketing

Why I didn’t collect my $10.5 million

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Today I found a tantalizing email in my spam folder. The sender was Mrs. Mary J. Parker. The subject line read:

“FROM THE UNITED NATIONS POLICE (UNPOL)”

The email explained UNPOL was contacting me because of some money I’d wired to Nigeria.

This is a bit embarrassing. But a while back, I got another email. It described a unique opportunity to help somebody and get rich at the same time. At least that’s how it seemed.

I wired the money as that first email asked. And I waited to get rich. But I never heard back from anybody, or saw my money again.

Anyways, the email from Mrs. Parker informed me that a bunch of organizations, including “Scotland Yard Police, Interpol, Federal Bureau of Investigation, (FBI) United States of America, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) of Nigeria and all the African Crime fighter leaders” have been working hard to capture the fraudsters who grabbed my money and the money of other people like me.

These law protection agencies caught a bunch of these “Internet rats.” They retrieved billions of dollars.

And now, to make it up to me, they wanted to send me $10.5 million so I could start a new life. All I had to do was furnish a certain Dr Richard Kelly with $450 and also my correct and valid details.

Now here’s something that might shock you:

I decided to pass up this offer. Even though I’d previously wired money to unknown persons in Nigeria. And even though $10.5 million was on the line. Why I did this is the subject of this post.

Let me set things up by telling you about two direct mail campaigns. The first campaign was written by Gary Bencivenga. It made a generous offer:

Six free issues of Boardroom’s Bottom Line/Personal newsletter, plus a premium book. All for free, no strings attached.

It was such a generous offer that Gary thought it needed a reason why. So he used the idea of a survey.

“Fill out this survey,” Gary’s letter basically said, “and send it back to us. As thanks, we’ll send you six free issues and the book.”

This campaign was a massive success. A bunch of people sent in their surveys and got their trial six months of Bottom Line/Personal.

The trouble is, they didn’t subscribe much when the trial expired. And those who did subscribe didn’t buy much of Boardroom’s other books or offers.

But a control is a control. And so this survey offer kept running.

Until the second campaign. Which was was also written by Gary Bencivenga. And which also made the same generous offer.

But instead of using the free survey, the second campaign sent a 64-page booklet, titled The Little Black Book of Secrets.

This booklet had the most interesting secrets from different issues of Bottom Line/Personal… along with occasional calls-to-action to get your six free issues + bonus.

Result?

The second campaign pulled in only HALF the number of responses of the survey campaign. But twice as many of those people actually paid to subscribe when their trial ended. Plus, these non-gimmick customers bought way more of Boardroom’s other products.

In the long term, the second campaign was the winner, and became the new control. Which brings me back to the email I got from UNPOL.

The people at UNPOL did right by giving me a second opportunity to wire money to Nigeria. That’s standard direct marketing — it’s called having a back end. But here’s the thing:

I’m a greedy and opportunistic person.

Sure, I liked the big promise of being able to get rich quickly. That’s why I wired my money over the first time. But my interest was fleeting, and I’ve already moved on. That’s why I didn’t reply to Mrs. Parker’s offer today.

It’s pretty much the same as those people who filled in a 2-minute survey to get something free from Boardroom. Because hype and impulsiveness can get you lots of buyers… but those buyers can make a wobbly foundation for your business.

As Michael Fishman said once:

“Your selling copy in the prospecting process can actually impact the longevity of a customer with the company. So what I mean by that is if you make very, very big promises for a self-help product, a health or investment product… if you make very, very big promises for that about quick results and overnight success, etc… the kinds of people that will find that believable and ultimately will buy turn out to be folks that are not very committed in the long run to your company.”

But you’ve stuck with me for over 750 words now. Do you feel yourself becoming a bit committed to reading my stuff for the long run? In that case, you might like to subscribe to my daily email newsletter. It’s free, now and in six months’ time. Here’s the optin.

My takeaways from yesterday’s informal survey now that I’m out from under a mountain of virtual mail

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I’m way behind schedule today because I spent much of the day buried under a virtual mountain of virtual mail. And each time I clawed my way to the surface, gasped for air, and pulled out a stray bit of virtual paper from my throat, another batch of virtual messages landed on top of my head and buried me again.

The context:

Yesterday, I asked my list what the most recent podcast they listened to is. I also offered a little bribe to get people to respond.

An arenaful of people took me up on my offer and wrote in with their most recent listened-to podcast. As a result, I found out some interesting things about my readers:

1. They listen to more business-related podcasts than purely fun or general-interest podcasts. It was about a 60-40 split.

2. The podcasts that came rolling in were extremely diverse. In spite of all the responses I got, there were very few duplicates.

3. The one marketing podcast that did pop up multiple times was the Chris Haddad Show, in particular the episode with David Deutsch.

4. The general interest/purely fun category was broken up into three main groups: 1) self improvement (by far biggest), 2) comedy (second biggest but relatively small), and 3) truly off the wall stuff. A few examples of the last category:

“I’ll be honest — it was Words In The Air, a spoken-word poetry podcast that’s completely useless to you”

“Something to Wrestle with by Conrad Thompson and Bruce Prichard. It’s an insiders view of the WWE from the days of Hulk Hogan, through Stone Cold, up to today.”

“Recently, while on a five hour drive… My wife made me listen to this podcast where women tell their birthing stories. It was horrible.”

There are two takeaways I can make from this. Maybe they will be useful to you also:

The first is that if you keep writing daily emails long enough, then people on your list begin to be a composite of you and your interests.

After all, points 1,2, and 4 above describe me and interests pretty well (except for the birthing thing).

​​As for #3, I’ve listened to an episode of Chris Haddad’s podcast once, though that was the episode in which my name and my 10 Commandments book were mentioned.

My second takeaway is that Ben Settle might be right.

Ben said somewhere, probably in one of his emails, that he never surveys his list about what products to create next. He doesn’t ask people or about their tastes either. Or their preferences.

​​The only worthwhile survey question, says Ben, is what people bought last.

That was why yesterday I asked for just one podcast, and the most recent one you listened to. I believe this produced a much more honest and insightful survey than had I asked, “What are some of your favorite podcasts?”

Anyways, I now have a lot of good info for when I do decide to make a podcast push.

That won’t be right away. I still want to put out some new offers first.

I also plan to convert some of the offers I’ve launched already into offers I can promote all the time.

All of which means, I might not be offering my Email Marketing Audit much longer.

If you have your own email list, and it’s making you some money, then my quick and easy audit could be worth a lot more to you than I charge for it.

You can find out more about it at the link below. And if you are curious about it, then I can repeat yesterday’s message:

The perfect moment is now. The moment never was this good. It might never be this good again. So to get started while this window of opportunity is open:

https://bejakovic.com/audit

Join me today on Clubhouse!… err… never mind just read this email

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Do you remember, in the olden days way back at the start of this decade, there was a thing called Clubhouse?

I certainly remember, when the lockdowns came hard and heavy, that many big-name marketers were enthusing about Clubhouse. “The future of marketing!” they said.

I never got it, but from what I could understand, Clubhouse:

1. Required an invite to get in, and therefore had a velvet rope effect

2. Was some kind of app that allows group video chat in different-themed rooms, kind of like a big conference center

Clubhouse was very cool until it was not. It didn’t take long. From a peak of 13.5M monthly users in July 2021, Clubhouse quickly started turning into a ghost town.

Last December, I read an article in Business Insider about the “Rise and Fall of Clubhouse.” It said that Clubhouse is mostly dead but will linger on as a zombie for years, thanks to its $100M of VC money. That was the last I heard of Clubhouse until a couple days ago, when I read that the company is trying to pivot in an effort to regain some of its lost coolness.

I personally couldn’t care one Euro cent if Clubhouse succeeds or fails in recooling itself. I’m just writing you about it because of a trending Internet conversation over the past couple weeks. It all started with article with the headline:

“Sunset of the social network”

The argument in the article ran, Facebook is changing its algorithm to be more like Tik Tok. So say goodbye to updates from your friends, family, and business contacts. Instead, say hello to addicting content from around the world, whether you have any “social” connection to those people or not.

According to the article, so-called “social networks” like Facebook have basically become giant, impersonal media platforms. On the other hand, messaging takes care of properly intimate and personal communication. The article concludes by saying:

“All this leaves a vacuum in the middle — the space of forums, ad-hoc group formation and small communities that first drove excitement around internet adoption in the pre-Facebook era.”

So the point I’d like to suggest is, maybe you shouldn’t be looking at the next cool tech solution for your marketing. Not the next velvet-rope app… the next “AI” algorithm update… the next “new” and sexy way of delivering content.

The fact is, the technology that’s been around for the past 30 or more years — websites, forums, email — continues to work, and work well. And if you want proof of that, then I can tell you that that trending “Sunset of the social network” article appeared on Axios, an email newsletter I wrote about a few days ago, which recently sold for more than a half billion dollars.

So if it’s not technology that will make or break marketing, then what?

My bet is on interesting and engaging content, along with a feeling of community, peppered with some subtle human psychology to actually drive sales.

It can be on a website. Or a forum. Or even in email.

And on that note:

If you do have an email list, and if you want to make it more interesting, and more engaging, and even more community-like, so you can drive more sales, then I might be able to help.

​​In case you are curious:

https://bejakovic.com/audit

The real secret to how I survive the biggest mistake you are making the fastest way

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Yesterday evening, I got an odd email from a reader. The subject line read:

“About your email subject lines”

There was nothing in the body of the email. There was just an attached file, “7 Tested and Proven Email Subject Lines that Get Your Emails Opened.” Among them:

1. How to survive _____
2. The biggest mistake _____ make
3. The fastest way to ______

I have this Chateau Heartiste policy of keeping my replies to readers no longer than what the reader wrote me. And since this reader didn’t even include a hello, I couldn’t, according to my policy, reply to ask him why he was sending me this guide to subject lines.

Was he displeased with my subject lines in general?

​​Was he impressed with my subject line yesterday? ​​Did he think it fit one of these molds in some way?

​​I guess I’ll never know.

But since this reader did send me tested and proven subject line ideas, I squeezed a bunch of them into my subject line today.

After all, why not? I don’t think it will make a molehill of difference. Here’s a story on that matter:

Last year, I wrote an email with the subject line, “More real than real.” That email was about some slightly esoteric stuff. I purposefully didn’t want a DR-style subject line for it, one that might attract the wrong kind of attention.

A bunch of people wrote in response to that email to tell me how much they liked the story and the lesson I was sharing.

I also got a response from a smart and successful marketer. He warned me that he almost missed my email, which he thought was valuable once he read it, because my subject line didn’t catch his eye at all. He even rewrote my subject line to show me how it’s done.

And then, the next week, he wrote in with a similar message, again pointing out that my subject line is suboptimal and that he almost missed another valuable email from me. As far as I can tell, he continues to read my emails to this day.

I am not pointing fingers or making fun of anybody.​ I’m just pointing a finger at something obvious:

A lot of standard copywriting wisdom, which was extracted from cold-traffic tests, isn’t particularly relevant to warm daily emails, which people mainly open because they’ve learned that you have something fun or interesting to say. In warm emails, the “headline” is really your name, and not your subject line.

Maybe you say I can be cavalier about this, because I still don’t sell regularly in this email newsletter, and I certainly don’t A/B test my subject lines here.

Fine.

But I have been in situations where I was actively selling in email, and where I was actively testing. I’ve managed two 70,000-person email lists, which were made up of buyers, and which produced millions of dollars of sales, thanks to emails I wrote. And yes, thanks to subject lines I wrote.

And you know what?

I once ran a little test to find out how our email open rates influenced our sales.

​​Result?

Experts were shocked. Literally. I mean, I, an email marketing expert, was shocked.

And that’s why I want to warn you about the biggest mistake that email marketers make when it comes to subject lines. And that’s to follow “Tested and proven subject lines that get your emails OPENED.” If you want to read the real secret of why this is a big problem, here’s the fastest way to do that:

https://bejakovic.com/why-ecommerce-list-owners-should-beware-high-open-rates/

An email business worth $0.52 billion (yes, billion)

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Never give away your best stuff for free, right?

Instead, use your free emails to sell high-priced products and subscriptions, right?

That’s certainly one way to run an email-based business. And it’s proven to work well for many people.

But is it the only way?

Let’s reach into the archives of this very newsletter, to a breaking story I wrote about two years ago.

Back then, I reported that the Morning Brew, a daily email newsletter without any backend offers, had sold a controlling stake for $75 million.

That’s not too shabby for a project that was started in a college dorm, by just one dude, some five years earlier.

Today I’ve got some similar, but even more greedy news for you.

It’s about Axios.

Axios is basically a collection of email newsletters on topics like politics, the economy, and technology. For example, I’ve been subscribed to their “Axios World” newsletter for a couple years.

Axios was launched in 2017 by three ex-Politico journalists.

And get this:

Axios, an email-based business that was started five years ago, just got sold for $525 million.

$525 million.

From my back-of-the-envelope math, that’s $25 million more than a half billion dollars. For a bunch of email newsletters. At a moment when everybody seems to be panicking about a recession.

So yes. Never give away your best stuff for free in your emails… not unless… you want a pool filled with gold coins in which you can go swimming like Scrooge McDuck.

Now of course, you can make the claim that Axios is much more than just a bunch of email newsletters.

You can make the claim that it’s a business like any other, with VC funding, a team of employees, and extensive advertiser relationships.

That’s absolutely true.

And it brings me to my offer for today.

It’s also something from the archives of this very newsletter, also from two years ago. Back then, I called this offer my “cash buyers list.”

It works like this:

I have certain skills at a high level, mainly around copywriting and content creation. I also have a simmering, lingering desire to start an email-based equivalent of a magazine, newspaper, or morning talk show that could grow grow into something cool and valuable in a few years’ time.

But I can’t do all that myself. Nor do I want to.

So if you have 1) money to invest or 2) complementary skills to mine, then I’d like to talk to you.

I’m not promising anything and I don’t have any project kicking off right now. But if the idea of something Axios-like or Morning Brew-like gets you excited… and you have something to contribute besides enthusiasm and an “eagerness to learn”… then write me an email and let me know what you can contribute.

If it turns out to be a fit in some way, and I manage to put the other pieces in place… then who knows where you and I and our email-based business might be in five years’ time.

“So cringe”: Content creators get rich without anyone knowing who they are

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I sat down just a few minutes ago, my hotdog + espresso soup at the ready, and I watched 8 minutes of:

* A hot girl putting a live fish down her sweatpants

​* A man walking up the side of a 30-foot light pole

​* A motorcyclist’s head falling off

​* Pigtails being cut by office scissors and meat cleavers

​* Cheating wives and husbands caught in the act and running for cover

​* A leech up somebody’s nose

The backstory is all these videos were produced by Network Media, a video content mill that’s gotten 200 billion views on Facebook and Snapchat over the past two years.

200.

Billion.

Let me repeat that number so that it perhaps has a chance to sink into your brain. If each of those video views were a hotdog, that means that you and everybody else on the planet would have eaten 25 Network Media hotdogs each over the past two years.

Network Media was started by Rick Lax, who looks a little like a young Mickey Rourke.

Lax ​​has a law degree.

But Lax’s primary passion was never law. It was always magic.

Lax wasn’t popular as a kid. To make things worse, he never could quite make it at the highest levels of the magic business.

He was apparently hurt to be excluded even from this community of misfits.

So Lax went outside the magic establishment, and started posting videos on Facebook, iterating, optimizing, and cranking out content. At first, his videos showed magic tricks. Later, they showed random stuff Lax figured out to be popular.

It got so Lax’s Facebook videos were easily getting 100 million views each.

Lax started to monetize his videos with Facebook’s “paid creator” ad share as soon as that became available. Immediately, he started making six figures a month.

What’s more, Lax realized the demand for his bizarre videos, which applied his insights from magic, was endless. So he brought on more people, often broke actors and singers, who were making minimum wage before Lax found them.

Lax turned many of his anonymous content creators into millionaires. By late 2021, Lax’s Network Media was pulling in $5 million a month across all its different videos.

I’d like to tell you more of Lax’s story, but I’ve just finished my hotdog + espresso soup and my time is up. So I’ll make you an offer instead.

Check out article below. It’s where I learned about Rick Lax and his $5M/month viral video business. The article contains lots of titillating facts, plus some useful techniques.

In fact, if you read the article below, you can find out why almost all of Lax’s video feature something surreal, such as tampons in the fridge or a dirty hairbrush as part of a cooking video.

​​Maybe that will even explain why I’m eating hotdogs in espresso sauce as I write this email.

So my offers is, read the article below, find out the technical term for this “tampons in the fridge” technique, sign up to my email newsletter, and then write me an email to tell me the name of this technique.

In return, I will share with you something else interesting, valuable, and related. It’s something that I might share with my entire list down the line, but that I will share with you first, and for certain, if you only take me up on my offer.

In case you want to do that, here’s the link to get started:

https://bejakovic.com/lax

About that Dig.This.Zoom course

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Today is Tuesday, which means it’s time for the next Dig.This.Zoom call.

I’ve written about this course a few weeks ago.

​​I paid $1,200 to listen to mysterious, reclusive, but highly successful copywriter Aaron Winter talk over 12 consecutive Tuesdays. Well, I paid to listen to Aaron and also to participate in the “nebulous community benefits” promised.

But the fact is, I’m finding myself falling behind with this course. I’m even dreading tonight’s call a little.

One reason is the time difference. Where I am, it will be 10:30pm by the time tonight’s call starts. That’s a time of day when I’m really only suited for a warm glass of milk and a bedtime story, if there would be anyone out there kind enough to read me one.

The other reason is that, from what I’ve seen of these calls so far, they are very loosely structured, very jokey (and I’m quite humorless, at least at 10:30pm), and each week’s content seems to mainly be one or two big metaphors.

I’m telling you all this because several people have written to ask me what I think about the Dig calls, and whether the course is worth getting now that the price has been slashed to $600 — if you don’t get the calls live and if you don’t get to participate in those “nebulous community benefits.”

I can tell you this:

Aaron is apparently setting up an affiliate program, so all the folks who signed up initially can promote these new $600 recordings.

I thought about it for about 2 secs. And then I decided I won’t be selling these Dig calls as an affiliate.

After all, if I am struggling to get value out of this thing myself, how can I congruently sell it to you? And you know what they say about daily email newsletters. It only takes one sip of spoiled milk to turn you off the stuff for years.

Perhaps at this point, you are getting ready to take a big sigh of relief. Perhaps you were debating whether to invest your $600 in the Dig tapes. And here I am telling you not to buy the stuff.

Except I’m not telling you anything of the sort. Because here was my response to everyone who contacted me asking whether to buy or not:

1. Apparently a big part of this is a recruiting play for the Dig agency and the people associated with Dig. So if you are looking for a full-time gig, it might be worthwhile just for that opportunity, even if you don’t get those “nebulous community benefits” — whatever they will turn out to be.

2. There are worthwhile ideas and insights in the course, but it’s as much what you bring to it as what’s in the actual content. If you are smart and ambitious, you can probably get a lot of value out of this training. But then again, if you are smart and ambitious, you can probably get a lot of value out of most anything.

So I am not endorsing the Dig tapes. And I am not issuing a fatwa against it either. You will have to make up your own mind. If you are curious, here’s where you can get the full details:

https://dig-lolz.myshopify.com/

And if you decide not to buy the Dig tapes, or even if you do, you might want to read my email tomorrow.

​​I will tell you the most valuable thing I have personally gotten from this Dig.This.Zoom course so far. All for free. If you want to read that, you can sign up for my email newsletter here.

The future of continuity offers for publishing businesses

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I have this friend who makes a lot of money but leads a very isolated and dull life. As a result, he spends much of his money on ridiculous, overpriced purchases.

For example, a while ago, he bought a $2,000 Japanese smart toilet. He had it shipped from Japan and installed in his house in Baltimore.

This morning, I thought of my friend and his foot-massaging, storybook-reading, life-coaching toilet. I imagined him going to his master bathroom… using his smart toilet for its core functionality… and attempting to flush. But instead of hearing the satisfying rush of water, a soothing female voice would say:

“Thank you for using SmartAsshin! Your subscription to the Flusshi® function has now expired. To renew your Flusshi® subscription, please visit smartasshin.com.”

That might sound ridiculous. But it’s not entirely out of the realm of the possible.

A couple days ago, I read that BMW has been trying out subscriptions for things like heated car seats.

The idea is that each new BMW comes fully equipped with all the extras. But in order to activate any of the extras, you have to pay. Monthly.

As the folks at BMW argue it, this system actually makes a lot of sense.

It allows people to try out functionality before committing.

It allows buyers to upgrade their car as they can afford to do it.

Plus it makes the resale value of the car greater. The functionality of the car no longer depends on the choices of the initial buyer.

Of course, BMW buyers don’t see it that way. They are furious, and there is a lot of backlash. I guess see it as a variation of my scenario above, with the Japanese smart toilet.

And now to get deadly serious.

Smart marketers, in particular smart direct marketers, have long known:

Continuity offers are where it’s at.

Of course, BMW story shows it ain’t so simple. Put a part of your usual service behind a paywall, and you can face indifference, or perhaps backlash.

It will be interesting to see what happens with BMW and their heated seats by the month.

Meanwhile, if you have a business… and your offer is not inherently a subscription like a streaming service or a newsletter… then it’s past time to start thinking how to integrate subscriptions into your offers.

And if you are looking for ideas for how to do it, without triggering a backlash, then check out the article below.

It comes from Simon Owens, somebody I’ve written about before. Owens publishes a Substack newsletter, covering media and publishing businesses.

In the article below, he talks about three subscription models he has seen. None of them involves hiding more of your content behind a paywall.

Of course, you don’t have to check out Owens’s article.

You can also just stay put.

In time, I will probably take Owens’s ideas… pad them out with a few other good things I find… and repackage them into a product, which I will offer to you later. Perhaps inside some kind of continuity offer.

But in case you don’t want to wait for that, you can do some of that work yourself right now. Here’s the link:

https://simonowens.substack.com/p/thinking-outside-the-box-with-paid

Email tweaks that typically triple sales

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My recent batch of book recommendation emails stimulated more responses than I usually get. One person who wrote in was Camille Clare, who, along with her husband Dustin, founded shelter.stream.

​​Shelter is a kind of high-class Netflix. It’s a streaming service, which only features architecture and design films and series.

Last month, with the goal of increasing subscriptions for Shelter, Camille took me up on my Email Marketing Audit. And not only that.

As soon as we finished the consult last month, I could see Camille actually put my recommendations to work. (I’m signed up to her list.)

So when she replied to one of my emails a few days ago, I asked Camille how her own tweaked emails are doing. Here’s what she wrote:

“Emails are going great! Just so you know, since your feedback, we have tripled our sales via email. So that’s pretty awesome and thank you :)”

Tripled sales… within a few weeks… thanks to some small-to-modest changes in email strategy.
​​
That’s too good of a testimonial not to share right away, without the usual infotaining jiggery-pokery. Because for the moment, I am in a rare position:

I only started offering the Email Marketing Audit last month. And since Camille is the first consulting client to get back to me with her results, I can honestly say that “tripling sales is a typical result following my consult.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean my Email Marketing Audit will also triple your sales within a month, like it did for Camille.

But if, like Camille, you have a great offer… if you have a source of high-quality leads… and if you’re doing email marketing already… then my Email Marketing Audit could be worth much more to you than my consulting fee.

Of course, that’s assuming you actually implement what I suggest.

But in case you’re ready, eager, and determined to make more sales via email, you can start the process here:

https://bejakovic.com/audit

Ben Settle’s secret three-act content strategy revealed

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A few days ago, I sent out an email with the subject line:

“Ben Settle emergency emails in support of Copy Riddles?”

That email officially had the highest open rate of all my emails over the past 10 days. I don’t know if that was because of the subject line. But for my own reasons, I will run with it and pander to your apparent tastes, by telling you a three-act Ben Settle story:

Back in 2016, Ben released a tiny Kindle book titled, Persuasion Secrets of the World’s Most Charismatic & Influential Villains.

The villains book turned into a sleeper hit.

As I write this, the book has 286 Amazon reviews and an Amazon ranking of 42,849. From what I know of Amazon publishing, that means the book continues to sell 4-5 copies every day, six years after its publication.

I reckon the villains book didn’t make Ben a tremendous pile of cash, not directly, not compared to other parts of his business.

But it almost certainly got him a large and constant new source of highly qualified leads. And it certainly gave him positioning and exposure in the direct response industry.

For a while, everyone associated Ben with the villains concept. It truly made him unique. And this probably led many more highly qualified leads trudging towards his hut, banging on his door, and demanding to be sold something.

So what did Ben do next? Perhaps you know act two. In 2018, he released Persuasion Villains, volume II.

Act three came in 2019. That’s when Ben released Persuasion Villains, volume III.

Which brings us to the present day and a tweet I came across a few days ago.

The tweet was written by one Matt Koval, who was apparently a big face at YouTube for over 10 years. Koval was the one whipping those early and confused YouTubers into the all-consuming media machine that YouTube has become.

Anways, Koval was tweeting in response to some YouTube influencer’s new video, and he wrote:

“One of the earliest pieces of content strategy advice we used to give at @YouTube was to try and turn your viral hit into a whole series – and it’s great to see @RyanTrahan do just that. It’s a TON of work, but no doubt a huge boost to his channel.”

But really, what is Koval’s “series” idea more than the standard DR practice of testing out different sales appeals in your ads? And then doubling down on the winners, for as long as they continue to pay for themselves?

As far as I know, Ben isn’t releasing any more villains books. This probably means he has milked this franchise to the point where putting out a new villains book isn’t worth the opportunity cost.

But maybe you’ve had a hit idea that you haven’t milked dry yet. Whether in your YouTube videos, Kindle books, or email subject lines. So rather than trying to be creative and have an all-new hit, turn your proven hit into a series.

In other news:

As I write this, I only have one Kindle book out there, my 10 Commandments book.

The 10 Commandments book hasn’t been as much of a success as Ben’s original villains book. But it has sold a lot of copies, and it continues to make sales. More importantly, it continues to drive highly qualified prospects to my email list.

And who knows? Maybe I will take my own advice.

Maybe I will lumber up the mountain, get a few more stone tablets of copywriting commandments, and write a second installment in this series.

Meanwhile, if you still haven’t read volume I, here’s where you can get your very own copy:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments