Direct Marketing

Announcing: Secret demand in your list

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As I’ve been teasing for the past week:

This Friday, I will hold a live presentation about how to unlock secret demand in your email list.

Once you can do this, then you can pull an extra $5k, $15k, $50k from your list — depending on who exactly you’ve got on there. And you can do it again and again, whenever you like.

I’m limiting this training to business owners. If you’re curious why, I might talk about that in the future. For now, just ask yourself:

Do you have a business?

Do you have an email list?

Does the promise of unlocking secret demand in your list sound appealing?

If so, then reply to this email. I’ll send you the full details about this training. And you can then decide if you’d like to join me on Friday.

My supplement stack

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I’m not sure why you’d want to know. But after 15+ years of obsessing over my health, and researching and experimenting with dozens of different, often exotic and possibly toxic supplements, here is my current daily supplement stack:

* Magnesium, zinc, and vitamin D (because they are important and I probably don’t get enough)

* A multivitamin and some fish oil (because why not)

* A teaspoon of glycine and a capsule of NAC (because there’s good science showing this combo actually reverses many hallmarks of aging, at least if you’re getting old)

* A teaspoon of creatine (because it helps increase energy production in both the body and the brain, and God knows I need that)

I’m sharing my supplement stack for two reasons.

Reason one is that I’ve found I like to read stuff like this in other people’s marketing-related newsletters. It makes no sense, and yet it’s there. Maybe you’re the same.

Reason two is that opening this email with my supplement stack allows me to seamlessly, like a silky fox, transition into talking about my supplement theory of email marketing.

Yesterday, I sent out an email that promoted my Copy Riddles program. I made one sale of Copy Riddles as a result, at $997. I’m actually very happy with that.

Because I gotta admit:

That’s hardly the norm. Most times that I send out a regular, daily, broadcast email to promote a familiar offer like Copy Riddles, I don’t make any sales.

As a result, I’ve come to think of daily emails that promote existing offers — buy it today, buy it tomorrow, buy it whenever — like supplements.

Yes, such daily emails will make sales. But the fact that people can buy the offer today, or tomorrow, or the month after, means such sales are unpredictable and rare.

That’s why I say such emails are supplements. Nice to have, but you can’t live off ’em. Instead, you gotta live off proper nutrition.

In email marketing terms, proper nutrition means a regular diet of email-based promotions – time-limited events that get people to ACT NOW.

This coming Friday, I will hold a live training about such promotions for a small group of business owners who have a list.

If that’s you, then my promise is that on this training, I’ll show you how how to pull extra money from your list, even if you don’t create a new offer, and even if you’re not pumping in hundreds or thousands new names to your list every week.

Of course, if you do have an entirely new offer, or you do get a big influx of new leads, these promotional events work even better.

And for the record, these kinds of email promos are something I have quite a bit of experience with. Via my own list and offers… via clients clients I’ve worked with… and most recently, via the coaching I’m doing inside Shiv Shetti’s mastermind, where I strategize on a new such promotion every week.

Maybe you’d like to benefit from my experience, and shortcut your path to a healthy and nutritious email list. If so, then read my email tomorrow, because I’ll have more info on Friday’s training.

My ex doesn’t know what she wants, but she sure knows what she doesn’t want

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I have this friend. Actually an ex-girlfriend. We’ve been friends for 15 years after breaking up.

I talked to her yesterday on the phone. As usual, she’s having problems at work.

“I feel so stuck,” she said. “I think I should go get an MBA in entrepreneurship.”

Huh?

Bear with me for a brief moment while I run through my ex’s troubled work history. I promise to give you a valuable takeaway as a result of it.

My ex graduated some 15 years ago with a master’s degree in economics. Such a degree prepares you to do absolutely nothing in life. I know, because I too graduated with the same degree.

In spite of the worthless economics degree, my ex managed to get a job at General Electric, in what was effectively another graduate program.

After a few years of that and a few years off to raise a kid (not mine), my ex decided she wanted to change careers.

So she went back to school to study UX design. After graduating with her second master’s degree, she started working as a UX researcher.

She’s been doing that for the past several years, in a series of maybe a dozen jobs.

In each job, she very quickly discovers this is not what she had imagined. And within the first week or two, she starts planning and scheming to do something new, different. Now it’s an MBA in entrepreneurship. Anything, as long as it’s not what she’s doing now.

That’s the valuable takeaway I promised you. It’s a powerful sales principle.

It applies to most all of us. Definitely to my friend… definitely to me… probably to you and most probably to your customers.

That sales principle is that people can see with much more clarity and intensity what they have and do not want, rather than what they do not have but do want.

One consequence of this:

Rather than spending a huge amount of time coming up with clever positioning and sales arguments for your offer, it’s often much better to simply position what you have as NOT what your prospect is doing now.

Example:

My Copy Riddles program. It’s not a copywriting course in any traditional sense. It’s not good information. It’s something else.

For more info on this training program that’s unlike anything you’ve seen before:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Test the offer or just launch the damn thing?

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During yesterday’s Write and Profit call, which I host every Thursday night, I got a question from one of the members, Tom Grundy.

During the day, Tom works as a high-powered banker in London.

But ​once night falls and the moon comes out, Tom howls as a sign that his transformation is beginning. He sits down at his computer. And he starts to write one of his very good daily emails, to promote his personal brand as a self-development and career coach.

Right now, Tom is considering taking a mindset workshop he is currently giving live to his colleagues at Lloyds Bank, and turning that into something he could offer to his list as well.

He’s considering it… but he’s not decided yet. As he asked me:

“How should I think about testing the idea first by asking my list if they’re interested in a training like this in the first place. When would you test first rather than just launch the offer?”

It’s a good question. My thoughts are these:

It makes sense to simply launch an offer if 1) it won’t cost you anything to do so or 2) you want to create the offer for its own sake.

For example, my upcoming promo training — still don’t have a better name than that — fits both of these criteria.

​​This training will be delivered live, and won’t cost me anything to launch. If nobody signs up, I don’t have to spend any time, money, or effort preparing it or delivering it.

But the fact is, I will prepare it and deliver it even if I’m only doing so for myself.

That’s because this training has value to me long term — as a template for my own work, as a potential future product to sell, as a way of getting consulting or even DFY clients, if I can find that needle in a haystack.

On the other hand, it makes sense to test out an offer idea if 1) it will cost you to launch it and 2) you don’t want to just create it for its own sake. This is also the case if you have multiple good options for a new offer to create.

For example, I’m considering creating a little ebook or lead magnet to talk about the FREE Formula I describe in part 3 of my Age of Insight training.

The content is largely already there. Still, it would take me some more time to pull it all together, polish it up, and provide extra examples. Also, this FREE Formula idea is hardly the only thing I could create to work as a lead magnet.

So over the next couple of days, I’ll run some ads to see if the thing has any legs, or if it doesn’t, like a viper waiting in the grass to spring on me.

So there you go:

I’ll have more info on the promo training for sure, and maybe a better name, soon.

I might also have more info on FREE Formula soon. Or I might not.

​​And now you know why, and maybe that can help you if you too are considering launching a new offer.

Meanwhile, I can only point you to the one lead magnet I currently have.

This lead magnet has worked very well for me for years now. It’s brought and continues to bring in a small but steady and valuable stream of new leads, many of whom have become great customers.

​​If you’d like to get it yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Influence the format of my new promo training

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Very briefly:

I got a good number of replies over the past 24 hours. People wrote in to express interest in an idea I floated yesterday. A new training, on how to regularly run profitable email promotions to your list.

To everyone who replied, thanks for saving me from the dreaded multi-level marketing fate that was waiting for me.

Since there’s interest, I’ve decided I will put on this training within the next 10 days.

What I have not yet decided is the exact format for it.

You can influence that. Read the questions below. And in case you find yourself saying yes over and over, then write in an tell me so. My questions to you are:

Do you have a business?

Do you have an email list?

Do you want to learn how to create new email promotions for your own business regularly?

In other words, do you want to learn how to pull out an extra $10k, $20k, $50k from your list on demand — terms and conditions apply?

Do you even want my direct, one-on-one hand-holding and help, as you strategize and execute the first of these email promotions?

If so, then reply to this email, and tell me you’re interested. And please do so today, because by tomorrow I will have the details fixed in fast-drying concrete. Thanks in advance.

Do you want my help creating an email promotion for your business?

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Today is April 1st.

​​I was going to try to “fool” you by saying I am getting into multi-level marketing. That’s on the back of a reader reply I got last week. A reader surreptitiously tried to recruit me into her own MLM organization with:

Life-Changing Products!
Breakthrough Marketing System!
Huge Compensation Plan!

Fortunately for you, I’m about as humorous as a rock. So there will be no fooling today.

Instead, I have a 100% serious and honest question for you. I’ll write an email about this question tomorrow as well. I want to make it clear this is not some dumb April Fools stunt.

As you might know, I now have a role as hot seat coach in Shiv Shetti’s PCM mastermind.

Each week, my task is to come up with a new strategy for a new email promotion for a new business.

It’s fun work. I’ve learned a lot in just my two months there. And that’s on top of my own previous experience, creating and running such email promotions. That experience is how I got this job in the first place, via a recommendation from Australia’s best copywriter, Daniel Throssell.

So my question to you is:

Do you have a business?

Do you have an email list?

Do you want to learn how to create new email promotions for your own business regularly?

​​In other words, do you want to learn how to pull out an extra $10k, $20k, $50k from your list on demand — terms and conditions apply?

Do you even want my direct, one-on-one hand-holding and help, as you strategize and execute the first of these email promotions?

If so, then reply to this email, and tell me you’re interested.

If I can get 5-10 qualified business owners who want this, I will put it on within the next 10 days.

And if not, then I really will be joining that MLM.

Save me from that fate. Get much more out of your list than you might think is possible. Hit reply, and tell me if you’re interested in this promotion training.

I just wanted to help

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Today, I found myself watching a YouTube underwater livestream from the bottom of a murky river. 993 other viewers were watching along with me.

The YouTube livestream showed impenetrable green water, with the only change being the digital clock in the upper right corner, which counted away:

2024-03-26 12:52:28… 12:52:29… 12:52:30…

I was on the fish doorbell site.

Apparently, every spring, fish migrate upstream through the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands.

But there’s a river lock in the city. The fish cannot swim past it.

For reasons of their own, the Utrecht city government created this YouTube livestream, and allowed people to press a digital button once they see a fish on the livestream. This I suppose will somehow cause the river lock to open and will let the fish through.

Like I said, I and another 993 bipedal simians were intently watching this unchanging livestream of murky river water, hoping to be the one to press the stupid fish doorbell and the let fish through on its way.

I thought my willingness to sit and stare at nothing was notable because I am currently in the middle of preparing my presentation for Brian Kurtz’s Titans XL mastermind this Thursday.

I’m scheduled to talk about writing emails that elicit engagement — that get people to hit reply and write you something in return to your daily emails.

Eliciting engagement might seem like a foolish endeavor — “sales emails are there to make sales, bro.” But in my experience, writing for engagement does in time boost sales, plus it has lots of other good knock-on effects.

So how do you write for engagement?

The fish doorbell gives a clue. One big reason that people will engage with you is simply to feel helpful.

Just ask people for help. Give them the opportunity to feel smart and useful. More often than not, you will get engagement.

This can be taken to extremes or exploited to make people do foolish things, such as, for example, getting them to watch a livestream of nothing, in order to press a button that does nothing, with the ultimate goal being something completely absurd or intangible — “swim on little fish, godspeed.”

Of course, this is a newsletter about influence and persuasion.

​​And so you can bet that my conclusion is that appealing to people’s better sides, their desire to feel helpful or useful, is not the only way to go, or the most effective way to create engagement.

Maybe I will one day turn this Titans XL presentation into some kind of training on how to write for engagement, and make this info available more broadly.

Maybe. Or maybe not.

Whatever may happen, if you would like more ideas here and now about how to write for engagement, plus see specific examples of it in action, you can find that in my Most Valuable Email Swipes #8, #9, #11, #23, #24, #27, #31, #42, and #48.

MVE Swipes is a swipe file I include with my Most Valuable Email training. This training shows you how to help your readers understand and experience abstract ideas in first-hand, intuitive ways, which stick with them for years to come. For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

How do you turn skim milk into butter?

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A question comes in about turning skim milk into butter:

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I have a question about your Simple Money Email course.

I’ve been writing an email to my list six days a week (or occasionally five) for the past month and a half or so, since about the beginning of February. At first, sales came in, but since about the beginning of March, they’ve declined by a lot, by over 50%. Will your course help me to figure out what’s going wrong so that I can set things to rights?

===

The answer in short is “probably no.”

If you’ve never emailed your list regularly, then what you have yourself is a pail of rich whole milk, with the cream at the top. You simply go in there, use a ladle to skim the cream off the top, and with a bit of additional processing, you get yourself some delicious Kerrygold.

But once you’ve pretty much skimmed all the cream off top, the butter creation becomes harder.

It’s still possible to occasionally turn skim milk into butter — I had one guy on my list for 775 days, reading 775 emails, before he decided to buy something from me.

​​But it’s never as easy as right at the start.

​​And assuming you’ve been doing a decent job of cream collection, no kind of magical spoon, skimmer, or ladle will really make that much of a difference after a while.

So what do you do?

You got a couple options.

One, you can add new whole milk to your pail — ie. add new people to your list.

Or — and this is where my butter analogy breaks down — you can create new offers. There’s no law saying you can only sell people things once. Or stretching the analogy, there’s no law saying you can only ever make butter from your pail of milk, as opposed to also making cheddar, ice cream, and quark.

I’ll have more to say about cheddar creation, specifically, about churning up new offers that don’t involve creating whole new products. That’s something I have been thinking about a lot as part of my new “hot seat coach” role within Shiv Shetti’s PCM mastermind.

But that’s for the future.

For now, I do have a very high-quality ladle to sell you.

It will skim off the cream from your list if you’ve never emailed regularly before… it might pull in occasional sales even if you never do anything more to grow your list… and it will be an indispensable part of launching new offers, in case you ever do decide to do so.

For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

Hamilton

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No, I didn’t go to see Hamilton on Broadway. But I am in New York City.

Last night, I went to dinner with my friend Sam and his girlfriend Olivia.

Olivia has a background in musical theater.

So while we sat in a very dim restaurant and ate sweet potatoes and Japanese-style chicken wings, Olivia enthused about Hamilton, the sung-and-rapped musical that’s broken all kinds of Broadway records.

Olivia won the Hamilton ticket lottery when the show was just opening. She had to actually quit her job to go see it. She loved Hamilton then, she loves it now, and she wanted to share it with Sam and me.

Sam and I were skeptical. But all right.

Last night was pouring rain. Tickets to Hamilton are generally impossible to get. So of course we didn’t go see the live show. Instead, we went back to Sam’s apartment and watched Hamilton, the recording of the Broadway production.

And it turned out to be… one damn musical number after another.

Sam and I kept dutifully quiet and stared at the projected images on the wall. After an hour, Sam paused it to go to the bathroom. This was an opportunity for Olivia to ask if we were enjoying it.

No. And no.

“I knew it,” said Olivia. “I could feel the energy in the room.”

With Hamilton, the recording, you are supposedly seeing and hearing the show just as it was when it was live. But the reality is that it’s impossible.

There’s the missing excitement of going somewhere live, and feeling that you’re participating.

Then of course there’s the intangibles of an actual live 3D presentation, the sound and vision that cannot be reproduced at home on a 2D surface and with a little speaker.

Plus in the theater, there are hundreds or thousands of other people there, all set to enjoy the show, all infecting each other with their enthusiasm.

All of this is just one more reason to do things live whenever possible.

To do in-real-life musicals rather than sell DVDs…

To offer live trainings over prerecorded ones…

To write live emails rather than send canned autoresponders.

No, I’m not saying a freshly written daily email will have the same impact as a live Broadway show. But in its own small way, a freshly written email feels live and real in a way that an autoresponder email cannot replicate. And over time, that effect builds up.

If you want to write fresh emails — new ones every day, which feel live and real as opposed to flat, canned, and stale — then you can find that in my Simple Money Emails training.

​​Simple Money Emails shows you how I do it, and how you can do it too, starting today. For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

10 minutes to get big Twitter accounts to follow you

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Once every 24 hours or so, I get asked a variant of the following question:

“How did you build up an email list without being on social media?”

My answer is always the same. I did it by being stubborn and stupid, by sending daily emails into the void, without anybody reading what I was writing. I did this for years before things slowly started to turn around.

The problem, by the way, was not that I was not on social media.

The problem was that I was and continue to be unsociable. Even in the world of email newsletters, even among people whose emails I read every day, I never thought to speak up, get introduced, put myself on the radar or sonar of a person with an audience bigger than mine.

Until the end of today, I am promoting Kieran Drew’s High Impact Writing. That’s Kieran’s course to teach you how to write for influence and growth on Twitter and LinkedIn.

But here’s the truth:

As with email, you can write for years on social media without anyone taking notice. The shortcut to success on social media, the royal road, is the same as in the world of email.

You gotta start making connections. You gotta start engaging with people who are more successful than you are. And you gotta do it in a way where they actually take notice and respond.

People often reply to my emails and write things like,

“Loved it!”

“😍”

“Great email!”

While I appreciate any and all reader feedback, there’s really nothing for me to reply to here. There’s nothing for me to grab onto, nothing to get curious about, nothing to make the reader stand out.

So what to do instead?

Back to Kieran’s High Impact Writing. Sure, he teaches you writing for social media. But he also teaches you the other stuff, the connecting and network building in a way that actually works.

In the one of the bonus modules (Social Media Made Simple), Kieran gives you an example of a twitter DM that got him to start following a smaller account. And then he gives you a step-by-step template that he’s since used to get his favorite accounts to start following him.

It takes all about 10 minutes to do this.

And I can tell you, it works in the world of email as well. I know, because people have written me similar things, and I’ve taken notice and then got on their list. (I still remain unsociable and I rarely reach out to anyone, even in email. And I’m paying a price for it. I don’t encourage anyone to do like I do.)

High Impact Writing goes offline today at 12 midnight PST. After that, when it does come back, the price will be explosively higher.

Also, if you act now and get High Impact Writing before the deadline via my affiliate link below, you get the recordings of my Age of Insight.

Age of Insight was a training I put on about a year ago and sold for $297. It shows you how to write in an insightful sounding way, even if you have nothing very insightful to say. Simply forward me your invoice for High Impact Writing and I will get you the recordings of Age of Insight.

Assuming, that is, that you decide High Impact Writing is right for you, and that you act before the deadline. In case you’re intrigued, go here for more details:

https://bejakovic.com/hiw