Direct Marketing

Wanted: Competent human to do some monkey work

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Today, I have a job offer for you. Before you get excited, here are a couple of negative striplines to start:

First, this is not copywriting work.

Second, this not an ongoing, or even very large-scale job.

The job is this:

I have a course, Copy Riddles, which was previously delivered entirely by email. I am now converting that course, Copy Riddles, to be delivered entirely inside a members-only area of my website.

So the job involves taking the content of Copy Riddles, delivered in 45 very long-form emails, and making and properly and nicely formatting 45 WordPress pages out of it.

This is time-consuming, monkey work. That doesn’t mean I’m looking for a monkey. I’m looking for a competent human being.

I want this job done well, with minimal management or later fixing from me.

At the start of this job, I will provide detailed guidance on the technical stuff of what there is to do. I have also gone through the monkey work of converting one of these 45 pages the way I want it done, to serve as a reference.

Using these two resources, and a bit of God-given intelligence and reason, a competent person who has the minimal requirements below should be able to complete this job the way I myself would do it.
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As for those minimal requirements, they include:

1. Experience with WordPress. Knowing how to create a page, and use the built-in editor.

2. Knowledge of basic HTML and CSS. Knowing what a div is, and how to add a class to it.

3. Patience. There are 45 pages to do, and each page involves multiple rote, repetitive, and sometimes finicky formatting tasks.

So far, I have tried to make this job sound as unattractive as it is, and maybe more so.

So now the question becomes, why might you want to take on this monkey work? I can offer you two and a half good reasons:

1. Money. Name your own price, or your own hourly rate. I estimate this job would take me 6-8 hours of mind-numbing work to complete. You might be faster or you might be slower than me. If you can convince me you will do the job well, and if I think your price is fair for the work involved, I will hire you and pay you what you ask.

2. Copy Riddles. I guess that’s obvious since you will be working with the actual content of the course. But I will also give you free access to the course when it is complete, including the bonuses you won’t see otherwise. The last price I sold Copy Riddles for was $350, and that’s the lowest price I will be selling it for going forward. If you are interested in copywriting — and if you are on my list, I imagine you are — then Copy Riddles might be very valuable to you, and more so than the $350 I would charge you for it otherwise.

2 1/2. Access and connection to me. The reason I am not going on Fiverr or Upwork to hire a VA to do this job is that ideally, I would love to find a competent and trustworthy person who also has the ability to write. I’m not making any promises, but there is the odd chance that if you do a good job on this, there will be other tasks, including writing tasks, that I might hire you for, and in the near future.

So if you are interested in this job offer, then:

1. Write me an email
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2. Tell me why I should believe that you have the minimal requirements 1-3 above, and that you would do this job well

​3. Name your price

When I get your email, I will write back to confirm I have gotten it. No need to follow up with me after that. Once I make a decision and go with somebody, I will also send out an email to everyone who applied so you’re not left hanging.

That’s it. Thanks for reading to the end. Let the Battle Royale begin.

Last chance to send $100…

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Legend says that, once upon a time, in various Midwestern states, an enterprising carny pitchman took out ads in local newspapers that read:

LAST CHANCE TO SEND $1
to PO Box 210, 60611 Chicago, IL

There was no reason given why the reader should send in $1 or whether he would get anything for it.

And yet, the ad supposedly drew in many dollar bills before the postal service guys caught on and put a stop to it.

In other news:

Yesterday, copywriter Van Chow, who bought my Most Valuable Email course, wrote me to say:

Hey John,

I love this course, I bet some money to see if it still talks about boring stuff like AIDA or PAS.

But I was surprised, I had never heard of this concept before.

I think this would help my journey and I’ll practice more of it.

Btw, do I still have a chance to get the bonus?

The answer is yes, there is still time to get the “mystery box” bonus offer that’s inside the MVE training. But time is running out.

In fact, today is your last chance to send me $100… and to get my Most Valuable Email course, and to still get the “mystery box” bonus.

Tomorrow, the Most Valuable Email course will keep being available. But as of 9am CET tomorrow, Friday Oct 7, the bonus offer will go away.

I won’t give you reasons why you might want this mystery bonus offer, or what’s inside it.

But if you want to see what else you get for your $100 — no AIDA or PAS — you can do that at the link below. And if the core MVE offer sounds attractive to you, then it might make sense to get it before the “mystery box” bonus disappears.

​​In any case, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

High-quality content is a bad investment for most businesses

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In a recent newsletter, media watcher Simon Owens wrote that high-end, narrative podcasts are a bad investment for most businesses. Cheap, conversational podcasts are a much smarter bet. This made my long and I believe quite attractive ears perk up.

Why is producing high-production-value, valuable content such a bad idea? Simon shares his own experience:

But here we are just two years later, and most of the narrative shows are gone from my own podcast feed. The transition occurred gradually. I’d find myself looking forward to new episodes of the conversational podcasts, whereas listening to the scripted ones just felt like homework. My mind would drift during crucial plot points, which meant skipping back several minutes so I could regain my narrative foothold. In many cases, the narrative series I listened to died off after a single season, and I just didn’t have the energy to try out new ones. Today, only four out of the 23 shows I regularly listen to hinge on a storytelling structure.

Simon says, of course there is still some space for fancy narrative podcasts like Serial, and there will always be some audience. But for most businesses, investing in this kind of content is a losing game.

Like I said, my ears were very perky after reading this.

“What if it’s not just podcasts?” I said to myself. The question is not about complex storytelling versus unscripted conversations. The question is whether your content feels like homework or not.

Or maybe the question is really this:

Is the high production value you put into your content helping your case — or actually hurting it? This might be something to think about if you have a podcast, or a YouTube channel, or — an email newsletter.

But here’s something else to think about:

People don’t just sign up to conversational podcasts. Not just like that. Nobody sets out looking for a random and unknown person to listen to.

No, people initially start listening to conversational podcast because the podcast is recommended by somebody… or because a snippet of it is surprising or fun… or, most likely, because the podcaster has some kind of standing, authority, or status.

Which brings me to my Most Valuable Email training.

It’s about an email copywriting trick. This trick produces surprising content. Content which gets recommended and shared by readers to other potential readers. And which builds up your perceived standing, authority, and status, by you doing nothing more than writing valuable emails regularly… which don’t feel like homework to read.

In case you have an email newsletter around marketing or copywriting, or want to start one, this Most Valuable Email training might be a good investment. To find out more about it:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Post-mortem of my MVE launch

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As I write this, it’s 11:47am in Spain, which means that some 2 hours and 47 minutes ago, I ended my Most Valuable Email launch.

Whenever I complete a project, I like to force myself to look at the dead hulk, lying there on the ground, and ask myself what I see. Sometimes this triggers insights in my little head which I can use on future projects.

So here are 10 curious things I saw during my MVE launch. Maybe one of them will give you an insight you too can use on a future project:

1. 72.5% of my buyers during this launch had signed up for my free Most Valuable Email presentation back in June. I’m not sure how many watched that free presentation. But there’s a good chance that many who bought this MVE training actually knew my MVE trick ahead of time.

2. 68% of people who bought my Most Valuable Email Swipes offer back in June bought the full MVE course now. (As I wrote earlier, I made these folks a special offer as a way of saying thanks.)

2. Around 4.7% of my entire list bought the MVE training. Is that a good number? A bad number? Does it mean anything? I wish somebody could tell me.

3. I won’t spell out the exact money I earned from this launch. But I will tell you it took me more than two years working as a freelance copywriter to make this much money in a month. And it took me three years working as freelance copywriter before I made this much money regularly each month.

4. While the money I made from this MVE launch was nothing to cough, sniffle, or sneeze at, it was still significantly less than each time I have had a Copy Riddles launch, even with drastically fewer buyers. The reasons are obvious. The MVE training is at a lower price point and has no upsell right now. Maybe there’s a lesson there.

5. For the first time ever, sales came more or less evenly throughout the launch period, and weren’t all bunched up right before the deadline. I’m not sure what that’s about.

6. I saw a spike in sales after each email I sent, even in the middle of the 9-email launch sequence. Which tells me I should have sent more emails.

7. The vast majority of people who bought MVE bought something from me previously (Copy Riddles, Influential Emails, Most Valuable Postcard). I don’t have an easy way to see the exact number, but I would say around 80%.

8. Around 1.1% of my list unsubscribed during the 4-day, 9-email launch. For reference, I had the same number of unsubscribes over the 10 days prior to the launch, so you could say my unsubscribe rate was roughly double the usual. The email that got the most unsubscribes was “Brutally discriminatory practices surrounding my Most Valuable Email launch.”

10. I ended the launch with more email subscribers than I started with. In spite of increased unsubscribes, I also saw a spike in new subscribers, on top of the usual optins.

And the really curious part starts:

Because the whole reason I created this Most Valuable Email was that I wanted evergreen offers I can end my daily emails with.

So while my launch is over, the Most Valuable Email offer continues to be available, without the launch discount.

I can tell you price will never decrease from this point, only possibly increase.

So if you didn’t buy the Most Valuable Email training during the launch period, and you’re curious what it’s about, you can find out here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Dr. Bejako the sadistic dentist goes to work on the “mystery box” bonus

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Long-time readers of this newsletter might know I’m a big fan of screenwriter William Goldman. Goldman won two screenwriting Oscars, one for Butch Cassidy and another for All The President’s Men.

​​He also wrote The Princess Bride.

​​And of course, Goldman wrote Marathon Man, which starred Sir Laurence Olivier in the role of the sadistic dentist Dr. Szell (“Is it safe?”).

I thought of Dr. Szell because I’ve never before been compared to a dentist, but it finally happened today.

​​Author and copywriter Angie Archer, who not only took me up on my Most Valuable Email offer, but was one of the first to take me up on the free but valuable, time-limited offer included inside MVE, wrote me to say:

This feels like a trip to the dentist.

I know it’ll be good for me, but…

Here, before I talk myself out of it, is [Angie taking me up on my ‘mystery box’ offer].

You might not know what a “mystery box” offer is.

It’s an idea I got from marketer Rich Schefren. Rich once offered a “mystery box” upsell for $29. He didn’t say what was in the box, only that the buyer should trust him, and his claim that the box is worth at least 10x the asking price.

Rich’s “mystery box” upsell converted at a crazy 78% — 2x or 3x what a typical upsell will do. What’s more, Rich says the offer got zero negative chargebacks, and ended up forming a segment of his best customers.

So a mystery box might be worth experimenting with in your own marketing. You just gotta be firm, and not give in, and not tell people what’s inside the box.

That’s what I won’t tell you what my MVE “mystery box” offer is. I will just say it is very valuable, more so than the price of this course, and that it’s something I probably won’t keep up for very long.

So if you are interested in taking me up on the Most Valuable Email and the free but valuable, time-limited mystery box offer it contains, it might make sense to act now.

​​The launch period is coming to an end in a few hours time, at 12 midnight PST tonight. After that deadline, the price will go up. If you’d like to get in before then:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

My superior MVE guarantee that trumps Gary Halbert and John Carlton

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In my email from two days ago, I shared John Carlton’s “Notorious ’20 Clicks’ Report’. This report collected, in shorthand format, 20 of Gary Halbert’s “first-choice” marketing tactics.

​​In that email, I said this report is potentially the most valuable thing I will ever share in this newsletter.

Most valuable, yes. But not necessarily new.

For example, “Click 20” in the report is pretty standard marketing advice you’ve probably heard a thousand and one times:

“Reverse the risk — you shoulder all the risk, so buyer is ‘covered'”

Gary H. advised his clients to offer longer guarantee periods… 30-day holds on checks… even double-your-money-back guarantees.

Bah, I say. That’s kids’ stuff. It pales in comparison to how much risk I am willing to shoulder with my Most Valuable Email offer. It goes like this:

1. If you like my emails, find them insightful, and want to write something similar…

2. If you already have or are willing to start an email list about marketing or copywriting…

3. If you have read or at least skimmed my sales page, or what there is of it, so you have a clear understanding of what my offer is, what the price is, and what my promises to you are at that price…

… if and only if all three of these are true… then I guarantee the Most Valuable Email is for you. You will find it both fun and valuable.

On the other hand:

If you don’t fulfil any of the above three conditions… or you don’t know me too well… or you don’t trust me too much… or you have general vague doubts or uneasy feelings about taking me up on my MVE offer… or you want to “test drive” the content to see if it’s right for you… or, best of all, if you have been studying copy for years and have seen it all and are determined that unless I show you something new within the first 2 minutes then you will demand a refund…

Then I 100% guarantee the Most Valuable Email training is NOT for you. Don’t buy it, and save yourself, and even more importantly, save me, a bit of headache and frustration.

How’s that for shouldering risk?

After all, Gary H. and John C. were willing to take on all the risk — up to but not including risking the actual sale.

On the other hand, I am willing to risk you will not buy at all from me if this offer is not right for you.

Maybe that seems silly, or counter to the basic principles of greed-gland marketing. That’s okay. I feel it will serve me well in the long run.

Anyways, now you know what I guarantee when it comes to the Most Valuable Email.

And if you meet criteria 1 and 2 above, and you are interested in this training, then all that’s left for you is to read or at least skim my sales page so you can meet criterion 3.

If you want to do that now, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Announcing MVE 2: Judgment Day

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Today I am opening the cage and unleashing upon the world my Most Valuable Email training.

I expect this beast to set things on fire, crush kids’ bikes, and maybe have the SWAT Team called in against it.

I will have more to say about this training over the past few days. Such as, for example, answering the question:

“But Bejako, didn’t you already release something like this Most Valuable Email? It sounds familiar.”

It should soound familiar. I will deal with that question in more detail soon. For now, you can think of this training as the impossibly shiny, hyper-intelligent, and unstoppable T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgment Day, compared to the dumb and brutish T-800 from the first Terminator film.

Also, here are a few organic facts you might like to know:

1. I will be promoting the Most Valuable Email until this Sunday, October 2

2. Well, really, I will be promoting it pretty regularly even after this Sunday, but—

3. If you do decide to buy this training before the clock chimes at 12 midnight PST on Sunday, you will get a 25% discount off the not-too-expensive, not-too-cheap regular price which will kick in on Monday

4. You can get a bit more detail about this offer at the page below, but—

5. This sales page is incomplete.

Yep, it’s incomplete. I will be filling it out over the coming days.

Still, if you trust me and you already know you want this training… or if you’re curious what an incomplete sales page looks like, and want to spy on how I will develop it it over the next few days… then you have one reasonable course of action. Take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

FREE REPORT BY RENO AD WIZARD REVEALS 20 AMAZING SECRETS THAT CAN MAKE YOUR BUSINESS GROW LIKE CRAZY ALMOST OVERNIGHT!

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A couple days ago, I sent out an email about the “Man on Wire” sales technique. Even though I saw that technique in a movie, I remembered reading about it in one of Gary Bencivenga’s Marketing Bullets. I searched online, and found that bullet.

But I also remembered reading about this sales technique in a drug- and sex-filled tabloid, or tabloid-like publication, which formed my first shock exposure to direct marketing about 10 years ago.

I searched online, but I couldn’t find the relevant issue.

No matter. Because as part of this search, I did find something else. It’s potentially the most valuable thing I will ever share in this newsletter.

Here’s a fact you might or might not know:

“The REAL money in most projects comes from the strategy… and not just from clever copy.”

That comes from a Reno, NV ad wizard who is best know as a high-octane, A-list copywriter. But as he will be the first to admit, “The best copywriters remain in demand and at the top of the ‘A List’ because they are also savvy marketers.”

So today I want to share with you a 15-page free report by this Reno ad wizard. This free report can make your business – or your client’s business — grow like crazy almost overnight.

Ignore this report and suffer.

On the other hand, read it and apply it and — well, here’s the deal:

If you want this free report, then sign up to my daily email newsletter. And when my welcome email gets to you, hit reply and tell me you want the report. I will then send you the link. Here’s where to get started.

The sales secret of Man on Wire

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Last night, in a desperate hunt for a movie to watch, I turned to the Rotten Tomatoes 100% Club. That’s a list of some 370 movies that have had uniformly positive reviews — a perfect 100% Rotten Tomatoes score.

This led me to Man On Wire, a 2008 documentary about a man named Philippe Petit. In case you haven’t seen this movie, the gist is:

Petit was a tightrope walker. And obsessive.

Back in 1968, when he was just 18 years old, Petit hit upon the idea of walking on a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center.

Problem:

The towers hadn’t been built yet. So Petit spent the next six years scheming, practicing, and waiting in preparation for his audacious August 7, 1974 walk between The South and North Towers, which lasted 45 minutes.

But here’s a question that maybe immediately pops into your head, as it did into mine when I heard about this stunt:

How exactly do you stretch a wire across the two towers? The wire weighed 200 kilograms, or about 450 lbs. Petit was doing his setup clandestinely, in the middle of the night, while hiding from security guards, so helicopters and cranes were out of the question.

So what the hell do you do?
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​​You can’t just hoist the wire up from the ground — it’s a 400 meter drop (over 1,300 feet). You can’t just toss the heavy wire across the 40 meters (130 feet) that separate the corners of the two towers.

A hint comes early in the movie.

You see a silhouette of a man packing things into a bag. It’s supposed to represent Petit.

Along with other unrecognizable equipment, the silhouette gives away something familiar — an arrow.

The fact is, one of Petit’s henchmen shot an arrow with a bow from one tower to the another. And that arrow had a fishing line attached to the end of it.

They used that first fishing line to pull across a slightly sturdier string.

Then they used that string to pull across a strong rope.

And finally, they used the rope to pull across the actual wire, which like I said, weighed as much as an adult melon-headed whale.

Maybe see where I’m going with this.

Because when I saw this in the movie, a lightbulb went off in my head.

“I know this technique!” I shouted in the darkness.

But not from tightrope walking. I know this technique from sales. I first read about it in one of Gary Bencivenga’s Marketing Bullets. Gary called it one of the “the most powerful master strategies I ever learned.”

You can find the explanation of this sales technique below. But not just that.

You can also find lots of inspiring personal stuff about Gary at the page below. Such as for example, that for a long time, Gary was such a bad copywriter that he considered giving up and becoming a mailman. He even went to the post office to pick up a job application.

The only reason Gary stuck with copywriting, the only reason he persevered and eventually became so successful, the only reason we know of him today, was that he was told at the post office that they are not hiring at the moment, and when they do start hiring again, thousands of prior applicants will be ahead of Gary in line.

So Gary stuck with copywriting and marketing.
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And one of the biggest things that Gary learned in the years that followed, and used in all his copy and marketing, from his sales letters to his olive oil business, was this “Man On Wire” sales technique. In case you are interested:

http://marketingbullets.com/bullet-15/

The trouble with selling prostitute interviews you gave away for free

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About six months ago, I wrote an email about a prurient new obsession I had developed with the YouTube channel Soft White Underbelly.

Soft White Underbelly features thousands of in-depth interviews with people on the outside of mainstream society:

Drug addicts… homeless people… prostitutes… escorts… child abuse victims… inbred Appalachian families… gang members… a high-level mob boss… a strychnine-drinking Pentecostal preacher… a conman who ran real-estate frauds totaling in the tens of millions of dollars.

Then, a couple days ago, I read that YouTube had demonetized Soft White Underbelly.

​​SFU videos are still available to watch on YouTube. But they won’t come with any ads, and so they won’t make any money for Mark Laita, the photographer behind the Soft White Underbelly channel.

I tried to do some back-of-the-envelope math for how much money that actually was.

Over the past 30 days, Soft White Underbelly had a bit more than 12M views. Using the low-end rate of $3/1k YouTube views, that comes out to $36,000 over those 30 days, or about $430k per year.

That’s a sizeable chunk of cash to disappear from one day to the next.

My point?

I guess I could tell you the same old story, one you’ve probably heard a million times before:

Don’t rely on anybody else’s platform. Have your own platform — such as an email list — which you control.

The trouble is, Mark Laita already has that. He has his own site, where you can subscribe for $8/month to get all that stuff that’s on YouTube, plus some “exclusive content” in the form of more videos exactly like the stuff that’s on YouTube.

The welcome video to the SFU YouTube channel invites you to subscribe on the paid site. And in that video about being demonetized, Mark also tells people who can afford to do so to get the paid subscription.

Will that replace the income from YouTube?

I have my doubts, for several reasons. The most important reason is this:

It’s hard to sell the exact same thing you’re giving away for free. It’s even harder to sell it there’s a bunch of your free stuff still lying around.

That’s just human nature.

Laziness. Entitlement. Plus, a bit of common sense. If there are already thousands of prurient Soft White Underbelly videos on YouTube, most of which I haven’t watched, why should I pay to get a few more each month?

But here’s what I would tell Mark Laita, and maybe you, if you’re in a similar situation:

This is not really a big problem.

Because it’s easy to sell a slightly different thing to what you’re giving away for free. You can even sell almost the exact same thing, only renamed and repackaged in a sexy way.

So for example, Mark Laita has thousands of video interviews. Instead of selling more of the same, he could repackage some of that content in a different ways:

* He could sell a coffee table book of photography — stills from his videos. (He already has these photos in the videos themselves.)

* He could sell transcripts, packaged up as fancy printed books, or low-end kindle ebooks.

* He could create “themed documentaries” which are really his different videos pasted together. The effect of absentee fathers… the drug scene in east LA… massage parlor confessions.

Of course, there are also many other things Mark could sell congruently on the back end of his YouTube Channel. The above are just a few ideas for things he could sell with practically no additional thought or work.

So like I said, that’s my advice for you too, in case you create a lot of content, which isn’t making you money direct now.

Take that free content, repacakge it, rename it, and stick a (preferably large) price tag on it.

People will buy it, and get value out of it, even if you gave it away for free before.

Of course, maybe you are too close to your own content to see how it could be repackaged or renamed in the most sexy and profitable way. You might be able to find some good ideas on that in my free daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up for it.