Direct Marketing Archives - Page 4 of 68

Will the advertorial opportunity get saturated?

January 13, 2026 by John Bejakovic

Yesterday, I started promoting 1-Person Advertorial Agency, which I claim is the hottest opportunity for copywriters in 2026.

Today, I made some sales. I also got some questions. Here’s a layup:

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My furry little mittens are intrigued, enough to make me interested in creating a lucrative side hustle so I don’t have to rely on overtime from work to pad my pay packet. I am not working in the business or copywriting space but if this works for beginners then I think it would work for me. My question though, is do you think this would get saturated given places aren’t capped?

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“Will it get saturated” is a natural question to ask with any “hot” business opportunity, even a niche one like this.

The glib answer is to do some back of napkin math:

There are an estimated 280 million ecommerce businesses worldwide. Even if only 1% are a good fit for this (it’s likely more), and if a staggering 1,000 people end up buying and applying this program (probably way less), there will still be 280 clients to go around for everybody who gets in on this opportunity.

That’s all probably true and even an underestimate. But who was ever persuaded by numbers? For sure not me.

So lemme tell you a better way to look at this situation, meaning my way to look at this situation.

The real opportunity here is not to get dozens or hundreds of clients, and to keep hunting after more and more clients.

The real opportunity here is that advertorials that increase front-end conversions are a way to get your foot in the door with two or three really good long-term partners, who are able and willing to pay you hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars over the long-term.

I speak to this from experience. Five+ years ago, I was actually writing lotsa advertorials for ecommerce clients.

The results were just like the sales page for 1-Person Advertorial Agency claims:

Dramatic boosts in conversion rates and ability to scale on cold traffic. A lot of demand.

All in all, it was fine work, and well paid, even though it took me 4-5 days to do what can now be done in 45 minutes.

But even at the nice rate I was getting paid per advertorial, the vast majority of the money I made with those clients, and in fact the vast majority of the money I’ve ever made from copywriting — I’m guessing over 90% — came via commission-only emails I wrote to the buyers’ lists of those clients.

You don’t have to write emails if you don’t want to.

My point is simply, once again, to get yourself into a place where “saturation” becomes completely irrelevant to you, because you have formed a tight and codependent bond with a few clients. Once you’re making them and yourself a lot of money, you really don’t care what everybody else might be doing because your clients/partners would never think to go somewhere else.

To help you get there, I have decided to add in a few bonuses to the already overflowing cup of value that’s included inside 1-Person Advertorial Agency. Specifically:

#1. 26 Rules of Client Management for Copywriters, taken from my Copy Zone guide to the business side of copywriting.

Inside Copy Zone, I put the section on Client Management before Client Acquisition. As I explain in there:

“It might seem like we’re jumping ahead. But in my copywriting career so far, the biggest mistakes I’ve made and the biggest opportunities I’ve squandered were not due to being ignorant of some secret technique for client acquisition. Instead, they were due to choosing the wrong clients.”

#2. Most Valuable Postcard #1: Nota Rapida, which digs into the topic of building long-term relationships with copywriting clients much more deeply.

#3. Ghostbuster, Nick Bandy’s 5-stage sequence for reactivating (reanimating?) dead clients or prospective clients. As Nick says on the sales page for Ghostbuster:

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I’ve been ghosted after:

* The client replies

* I reveal my rates

* The client sends a job offer

* The client funds the first milestone

* And even AFTER getting paid and receiving a review from the client!

And it really doesn’t matter how good of a salesperson you are, or how amazing your first message was. People. Just. Ghost. It happens to everybody. But it doesn’t have to KEEP happening.

===

… and while Ghostbuster can certainly help you turn interested but ghosty prospects into actual clients, it’s even more valuable in that last case, where you’ve already done some work for a client, it went great, and then they ghost you for reasons of their own (it happens).

That’s all if you get 1-Person Advertorial Agency.

Like I said, there’s a sales page for that offer, but rather than send you there, I’ll send you to an email-style advertorial, a piece of sales copy masquerading as content, which I wrote about this offer yesterday, and which will allow you to get a good idea if this offer is for you or not:

https://bejakovic.com/announcing-son-of-sams-1-person-advertorial-agency/

Taking credit for your rock star clients’ results

January 11, 2026 by John Bejakovic

A few days ago, I was on a call with “Rebelpreneur” Gasper Crepinsek.

Over the past couple years, Gasper built an online brand teaching people AI. He’s still doing that, but this year he is going broader, using his background as an ex-Boston Consulting guy to help people build actual and sustainable businesses online.

I helped Gasper launch a $1k+ offer last month.

We worked on it together for a couple weeks, then Gasper went out and sold it to three people in his audience in a matter of days. He then started delivering the actual offer.

Result: One of Gasper’s clients already closed his own sales and is making money as a result of working just a few weeks with Gasper.

About that, Gasper said, “He’s attributing it to me, but I told him, ‘It’s all you.'”

My message to Gasper on our call, and maybe to you now, is to take credit where you’ve earned it.

Sure, it’s smart to sell to people who would succeed with or without you. When they do inevitably succeed, there’s a glow on you as well.

That doesn’t mean you can’t take some of the credit, and legitimately.

Even if somebody is an absolute rock star, you can inspire them… you can push them a bit… you can guide them through a process so they get results faster, sooner, easier, more enjoyably than they might have done otherwise.

In Gasper’s case, his client might have done something similar in another 3 or 6 months. But because of working with Gasper, he’s got another, say, $5k in the bank, today.

That’s pretty much what my situation is with Gasper as well.

The dude was succeeding and would have succeeded more, one way or another, with or without me.

But I helped him come up with a simple, attractive offer that, from the looks of it, will be his main, high-ticket, backend money-maker for the coming year. (Gasper says, “It’s crazy how much people like it,” meaning the offer).

Is having a $1k+ offer, which you can readily sell to your list, something that interests you?

If so, hit reply and let me know.

You can’t buy anything here. But if you do reply, I’ll give you a 1-page overview of the process that I guided Gasper through, so you can go do it yourself if you like.

I’m jealous of this lead gen funnel

January 4, 2026 by John Bejakovic

Last August, I promoted Igor Kheifets’s $3.99 book, Click Send Earn, as an affiliate.

$3.99? As an affiliate?

Yes. Because Igor pays out a $30 affiliate commission for each $3.99 sale.

The result was I sent two emails, and made Igor 69 sales, while making a little short of $2100 in commissions for myself.

Igor has got a super smart lead gen funnel here, and the offer he makes — $3.99 sale, $30 CPA — has gotten a buncha other list owners besides me interested in promoting.

Maliha Mannan of the Side Blogger promoted, as did Csaba Borzasi, as did Lawrence Bernstein of Ad Money Machine, with a promo that did so well last October that he is reprising it right now, just three months later.

The reason Igor can offer to pay all these folks $30 for each $3.99 sale is that he has a half dozen order form bumps and a long list of upsells once people buy the book.

Igor knows what a new customer in this funnel is worth to him, and I suspect it’s over $30. Of course, each new customer becomes worth much more when they get on Igor’s email list and are getting exposed to Igor’s back-end offers, many of them high-ticket, which Igor knows to convert.

I am frankly jealous of Igor for this funnel. I would love to have affiliates jostling and clamoring to promote either of my two books, or the new book I’m planning to publish this year.

But who’s got time and energy enough to create and dial in all these order bumps… and upsells… and copy… and funnels… and back-end offers?

Igor does, apparently.

And he does it while working 4 hours a day, 5 days a week, and having a family, and two kids, and writing and publishing comic books, and playing video games, and watching Netflix.

It wasn’t always like this.

Igor used to work 70+ hour weeks on his biz. He was grinding and hustling and making $130k a year. That might sound like a dream to you except it really wasn’t, considering how much he was working, and how little he was able to enjoy it. Plus he was making literally 3% of the $4.3 million he makes a year now.

Today, Igor works much less, gets much more done, makes much more money, and enjoys his free time without thinking about working or feeling guilty for not working.

I’m telling you this because this past November, Igor did a masterclass covering his system for getting more done in less time. He documented the exact productivity system that took him from A to B, from overworked and underpaid to having lots of free time and making a lot of money and publishing comic books.

I’ve been through Igor’s masterclass. I’m taking ideas from it. I’m applying them to what I do.

And starting tomorrow, since it’s the fresh start of a New Year, I will be promoting this system to you as well.

Of course, there will be a special deal.

Of course, there will be bonuses.

Of course, there will be a bit of a party theme, it being only a few days after New Year’s Eve. But party theme or not, the promise here is serious:

Work less, get more done, and feel zero guilt when you’re not working.

If that’s something that makes your subtle body tingle, then read my email tomorrow.

The most ironic, hypocritical, and ridiculous business model of all time?

January 2, 2026 by John Bejakovic

Here’s a fun 3-act parable for you:

ACT 1: A guy starts a business to help you cancel subscriptions to services you don’t use any more. Think AOL, or the home security at you old house, or getting milk delivered to your doorstep.

ACT 2: The guy gets a bunch of users interested in the service he is offering, but he struggles to make money with it. He tries charging a one-time fee. He tries doing affiliate deals. He briefly considers selling user data. All of it is no-go.

ACT 3: Wrestling against the irony of it all, the seeming hypocrisy, the sheer ridiculousness, he finally decides to change his business model and starts to charge… a monthly subscription. For a service that helps you cancel subscriptions.

EPILOGUE:

The guy’s company takes off. I mean, takes OFF.

Several years later, it is sold for over $1B.

ONE BILLION SHINING AND CRINKLING DOLLARS.

(True story, by the way. Look it up. The guy’s name is Haroon Mokhtarzada and the company was called TrueBill.)

Lots of lessons in this little parable I think.

I want to highlight just one today, because it is the core of the entire direct marketing business. It’s this:

Sell people more of what they have already bought, preferably earlier this month.

Seems crazy at first, but the best prospect for a tennis racket is someone who has bought a bunch of tennis rackets already, maybe even yesterday.

Same is true for books… supplements… courses… sneakers… coaching… and apparently, subscription services.

Which gets me to wondering.

It’s January 2nd. I mean, just the second day of the year.

What significant purchases have you made already this year? Write in and let me know. I’m… curious.

Did I live up to my 2025 “themes”?

January 1, 2026 by John Bejakovic

Each January 1, I write an email reviewing my (usually failed) goals of the past year, and setting several new goals for the year to come, which I will then… well, let’s take it one step at a time.

Rewind back to January 1 2025. I wrote then that I’m kind of over goal setting, but for the sake of an interesting email, I chose 3 goals, or rather “themes,” for 2025:

#1. Recurring income (it’s clear enough what that means)

#2. Less of me (meaning, getting better at making offers that don’t rely entirely on my personal authority and charm to sell)

#3. Tech (developing software tools that I could sell or give away or use myself)

How did I do?

On the tech front, absolutely nothing. If anything, I’ve become even more of a Luddite than I was a year ago.

Once upon a time, I worked as a software engineer, but I’ve realized dabbling in programming and software development a waste of my time now. Instead, if a good opportunity comes along, I will partner with people who want to fiddle around with code.

As for my other two themes, I actually did pretty good.

I had a good chunk of my income this year in the form of recurring income (both via payment plans on high-ticket offers, and via continuity products like Daily Email Habit).

As for “less of me,” I’ve learned a lot and implemented a good amount about making offers that are attractive even to people who don’t really know me and love me via these emails. Ironically, I think the success of my “I endorse YOU” auction, with the $31k winning bid, was proof of that.

Now fast forward back to the future, specifically, to today. What about the coming year, 2026?

Over the past days and weeks, no clear theme or two or three for 2026 came to my mind. So this morning, I sat down and made a list of 10 things I want to get done with my Bejako Business in 2026. Here they are:

1. Publish a new book

2. Make $1M in auction revenue (selling my stuff and others’ stuff, to my audience and to other audiences)

3. Develop a series of high ticket offers that actually sell, like [censored] etc.

4. Stick to a monthly schedule of 1) newsletter ad or list swap, 2) in-house offer, 3) zero-delivery offer

5. Keep building up Monetization Mastermind (my invite-only group of list owners who want to partner up on various deals)

6. Keep experimenting with Daily Email House

7. Grow the list to 8k

8. Build up my status more

9. Partner with more people

10. Keep uncovering new bubbles of people and connecting them to each other

That’s a lot. Some of it is pretty reachable, or at least has fuzzy enough criteria of success to sound like it.

Some of it is ambitious, or even very ambitious.

Is it all possible to do it all, or a large part?

I believe it is. I’ll tell you how:

Double up and triple up. In other words, make everything do double or triple work, and feed into other things that I want to do.

For example, the new book I want to publish is directly connected to the high-ticket offer I am currently working on. The two will feed off each other.

Having a new book, as well as a high-ticket offer that sells well (inshallah), will be status-boosting.

And all this can feed into more auctions and partners and connections… and and so on.

You might say this sounds like the best-case scenario, and not like the worst- or even likely-case scenario.

I agree. So how to improve my chances?

How to actually double up and triple up, consistently, throughout the year, as I keep working on different projects, and as life starts getting in the way, and I as a person change?

My answer to this, which is the one point of today’s email, finally, which can be relevant to you, is:

More planning and research and preparation.

Specifically, I heard somebody smart and successful recommend recently to schedule “regular thinking time,” and to treat it like a non-negotiable meeting with yourself.

So if there is a theme to my 2026, “thinking time” is it.

And as for whether I will reach my 10 goals… or fail on most or on all counts… stay tuned, and maybe you will have the opportunity to nod and smirk in case you see me struggling… or nod and smile if you see me succeed.

Also, I got an offer for you today:

On the one hand, I believe “thinking time” is best done alone.

On the other hand, it’s inevitably true that other people can help keep us accountable in ways that we cannot keep ourselves (well, most of us, Daniel Throssell is an exception).

Maybe more importantly, other people can immediately spot and point out blind spots in our own thinking that we might never spot.

So here’s my offer to you:

Would some kind of organized and shared “thinking time” be useful to you?

I’m imagining it as a regularly scheduled call with myself and other people, where we can all share what we’re working on and how we’re thinking about proceeding.

But it doesn’t have to be like that, and maybe you have better ideas.

In any case, if organized, structured, regular, and shared “thinking time” might be useful to you, write in and let me know to say so, and what it could help you with, and how you imagine it looking.

Thanks in advance.

Dude quietly bows out of Monetization Mastermind

December 22, 2025December 21, 2025 by John Bejakovic

This past summer I created an invite-only group called Monetization Mastermind. To start, I invited a small group of list owners I have done affiliate deals and list swaps with. The idea for the group is to make more such partnerships possible.

Initially, the group featured mainly list owners who sell courses around copywriting or email marketing, since that’s what kinds of offers I’ve promoted a lot in the past.

Over time, the group has grown, either by my invitation or by recommendation of the people inside. As a result, the profile of people inside has gotten more diverse, and has gone beyond course creators in the copywriting space.

So far, everybody who has joined this group has stayed inside, though some participate more and some less. But now I have the first person who has left the group. It happens to be one of the first people I invited inside the group. Two days ago, this dude wrote me to say:

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I think I’m going to quietly bow out of Monetization Mastermind. I’ve been making an effort to network outside of copywriting groups and focus on a different audience. While I appreciate what you’ve built here and have tremendous respect for you and the folks in here, I need to put my energy elsewhere.

Thanks for putting it together. You’re doing a lot of good here. I appreciate you letting me be a part of it.

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I don’t know the full details of this dude’s business.

On the one hand, it’s a tried and true strategy to take yourself and your offers to a new market, particularly one that is willing to pay you more.

On the other hand, based on what little I know of this dude and his business, my diagnosis is that his is an issue of offers.

Specifically, I think it comes down to a classic mistake, one I see others making all the time, and one I have made myself plenty of times too.

Internet Marketer Travis Sago, who is either unable or unwilling to speak other than in metaphor, calls this mistake “selling the hammer.”

The alternative being, selling the birdhouse, or the patio deck, or the chicken coop.

As Travis says, “Nobody is ever just buying a hammer. There’s an outcome they’re looking to get with that hammer”

Do I hear you groaning, or are you rolling your eyes right now?

I mean, this is really just that old chestnut about how nobody wants a quarter-inch drill, but a quarter-inch hole, except with other hardware, right?

Right.

But people find it surprisingly difficult to apply this super obvious and familiar lesson when it comes to their own hammers, ones that they have spent weeks or months designing and sourcing and forging.

Folks keep selling the hammer for years, or for as long as they stand, making new versions and crowing about the latest improvements… until they either wise up and start promising birdhouses and patio decks and chicken coops… or until they quietly bow out of the market, because their hammers are just not selling enough.

This got me curious.

Are you planning to launch an offer in 2026, an offer you need to be a success?

If so, I’m curious what offer you’re planning.

And I’m curious how you came up with your plan.

If you like, hit reply, unburden yourself, and tell me about your upcoming offer.

I’m not promising anything but to listen and maybe to ask some follow up questions.

But who knows, sometimes that can be the most valuable thing you can get, and can lead to insights that can make all the difference when you make the intimidating decision to actually go live.

How do you auction off a self-paced video course?

December 19, 2025 by John Bejakovic

Yesterday I wrote about 10 reasons why auctions can legitimately beat product launches.

I got a bunch of responses to that from people, including some big name course creators, who were planning on doing a launch soon but are now considering doing an auction, thanks to the magical power of written words, the ones I sent out yesterday via this newsletter.

I also got a number of questions from people who don’t understand how an online auction in course/info product/coaching space works, or what its purpose truly is.

No shame there.

I was equally as confused when I first heard of auctions. It made no sense to me why or how they work, or what their ultimate purpose is.

In the interest of effective email copy, let me take on one specific question I got. A reader writes in:

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You have certainly got me thinking how I could do an auction like you did last week.

Was a lot of fun watching you do your thing.

What I am wondering about is whether an action can have more than one winner.

Like you say I want to launch a new course.

I don’t want to sell that course to one person even if its for 31000 dollars. And who in their right mind would buy a self paced video course for that?

Yours wasn’t that. You sold something very special and unique. I could try and do the same, but I am still wondering how this applies to launching a course.

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In the words of Oprah, “YOU get a car… YOU get a car… YOU get a car…. EVE-RY-BO-DY GETS A CAR!!!”

This new auction way of selling is ultimately two things:

1. A price discovery mechanism

2. A handraiser campaign

The price discovery part is pretty obvious — people bid, and you find out what the market will pay.

The handraiser campaign might be less obvious.

Thing is, people who are raising their hands by bidding in an auction aren’t really raising their hands for your course, coaching, or even for the “something very special and unique” that’s being auctioned.

Nobody ultimately wants a course or a coaching program or even a DFY service. Instead, people want some OUTCOME.

If you take the time to discover what outcome people in your audience ultimately want, then you can auction off “something very special and unique” which promises to deliver the outcome with ease, speed, and style.

(Oprah: “YOU get a car! And it’s an ultra-rare and luxurious Rolls-Royce Boat Tail!!!”)

Of course, you can also make less unique or special offers to people who bid but didn’t win — offers that promise the same outcome, though maybe with more time, effort, or uncertainty.

(OPRAH: “YOU get a car! And it’s a very functional and efficient Renault Clio…”)

Does that make things clearer?

I hope so.

If not, and if running an auction is something that interests you, then I can tell you how I myself grokked how an auction works and how to run one with success:

I went through several trainings by Internet marketer Travis Sago, who invented this new form of selling courses and coaching and services and software.

Travis’s auction-related trainings cost about ~$4k in total and take several days of watching to get through.

Even so, they can be well worth it if you actually do run an auction or two or three.

But maybe paying $4k up front… only to have to go through hours upon hours of Travis talking… just to be faced with the prospect of all the work of finally putting this information into practice and running an auction yourself… is not really the OUTCOME you want?

Maybe the OUTCOME you want is simply to make a bunch of sales of your new course or coaching… to have your audience thrilled with the experience of buying from you and from the spectacle you organized for them… and to still have your eyes clear and your limbs full of energy, because you basically had nothing to do while this auction was going on?

Like I said, I’m talking to several course creators about running an auction for them in place of the launch they were planning.

But I am still interested in talking to more people.

If you have an audience, and if you have solid offers to put in front of them, then my offer is to run an auction for you, including:

– Creating excitement and buzz up front with your audience…

– Defining your offers (from the Renault to the Rolls-Royce)…

– Managing the actual auction process…

– Making sales to all those people who raised their hands by bidding.

And of course, I ask for nothing up front, Only a share of sales made, once the money is sitting in your Stripe or PayPal.

If you’re interested, hit reply and let’s talk.

Why not skip the product launch?

December 19, 2025December 18, 2025 by John Bejakovic

A bit of anonymized industry gossip for ya:

A course creator I know approached me recently about promoting his upcoming product launch. It’s a productized Version 2 of a successful live training that sold out a few months back.

(I won’t say who this course creator is exactly, but maybe you can guess.)

The course creator in question is planning the launch of this V2 for some time in January.

Somebody else I know, Chris Dyson, who I’ve taken to calling “the wizard of auctions,” got wind of this news. And yesterday, Chris threw up an idea:

Why not skip the product launch… and run an auction instead?

Why not indeed?

This morning, I sat down and wrote up 10 reasons why auctions can legitimately beat product launches:

#1. Auctions have inbuilt social proof of demand and desire.

This is something you have to work hard to generate in a launch, and even then it’s not 1/100th as credible or powerful as in an auction.

#2. With an auction, instead of guessing what price the market is willing to pay for your offer, you find out directly.

Often, it’s much, much more than you might sell the same offer for in a launch (eg. the $31k winning bid in my auction last week).

#3. If the price the market is willing to pay for your offer is lower than you thought, an auction allows you to adjust on the fly.

On the other hand, a launch of an offer that’s priced too high is likely to be a total flop. (Trying to lower the price in an underperforming launch is likely to put a kind of stink on the offer, and make things even worse.)

#4. Auctions allow you to skip creating the funnel (sales copy, upsell pages, etc).

All you need is a post that lays out the offer, along with possibly some goofy wrapper around it to make it even more fun (eg. my “POOL PARTY” theme from the auction last week).

#5. Running an auction forces you to think about the real (and sexy) outcome your audience really wants.

Yes, it’s still possible to botch this or skip it altogether. But the very structure of an auction at least forces you to think about it, however fleetingly. A launch does nothing similar, which is why so many people launch such crap offers.

#6. An auction allows you to make much more money overall.

Not only is the price likely to be higher (point 1 above) but auctions allow customers to pay for and buy much higher offer packages, even if they are not interested in the lowest-ticket, “front end” offer you are selling, as is typical in a product launch.

#7. Auctions are fun and exciting and audience-building.

That was my main conclusion from my recent auction. Yes, launches sometimes work out like this too, but more often than not, launches are neutral or even negative, if you do them the way most do them.

#8. Auctions are hot and new.

They won’t always be, but they are right now. And there’s value in hot and new.

#9. An auction allows you to successfully sell the same core product, to the same audience, a few days or weeks later, for another boost in sales.

That’s much less likely with a launch.

#10. Auctions can, or so I hear, be repeated more frequently to get the same results.

I can’t confirm this directly. But the experts on online auctions say, you can run the same auction every quarter, and it will work just as great. On the other hand, from what I’ve experienced and seen, run the same launch every 3 months, and you will get dramatically lower results.

I talked to the course creator who was planning the January launch.

He said he’s definitely open to the idea of skipping the launch, and doing an auction instead. We’ll talk some time in the next few days in more details, and we’ll see what happens.

What about you?

Are you planning a launch?

Did any of my 10 reasons above make you get a bit jealous about the idea of running an auction… and a little wary of doing your planned launch?

If so, hit reply. Tell me a bit about what you’re planning, and I can tell you if I think you might have a winning auction on your hands.