Direct Marketing

Why I no longer wear my prices on my sleeve

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I learned a pricing lesson at the local market today.

This market is a large open terrace, with about 100 stalls, each of which is packed with similar goods:

Nectarines… watermelons… potatoes… lettuce… grapes… zucchini…

At each stall, a different fruit and vegetable peddler holds court.

I went up to one of these women today to buy arugula. But she was in the middle of a heated discussion. A customer had commented her cucumbers were expensive, so she was explaining all the reasons behind the price.

When the customer walked away, unimpressed, she turned to me, and continued her rant.

“Last week, I had a woman come and buy figs for 20 brass guilders. ‘Oh they are so expensive,’ she complained. The next day, I had no more figs. But I saw the same woman buying figs from the next stall over at 40 brass guilders! When I asked her about it, she said, ‘What can I do, I really love figs!'”

She paused to give me time to react. I had nothing to contribute. So she continued:

“That f****** mother of a c*** and snake w****! And she was complaining about my prices!”

Yep, my arugula peddler, pricing is a mystery. And you’ll never make everyone happy.

That’s why for a long time I simply wore my prices on my sleeve.

“7 emails? 900 silver florins. Take it or leave it.”

I had this attitude for a long while, and it served me well. But I’m slowly starting to change this policy.

Not because I want to start haggling with clients, or charging them 40 brass guilders when I would also do the work for just 20.

Instead, I’m trying to do away with prices altogether.

I’m starting to realize that, whether I am cheap or expensive, whether I deliver a great service or not, most clients will still see me as an item in the “expenses” column — even if my copy makes them good money.

That puts a cap on how much money I can make.

And it puts a cap on the kind of relationship I can have with clients.

That’s why I am maneuvering the services I offer out of the “expenses” column and into the “profits” column.

And if you too offer services or products in exchange for money, then this simple shift in thinking might create a breakthrough in your business.

Anyways, if you’re looking for some other breakthroughs in your business, specifically on the front end, before you’ve even converted somebody to buy your own brand of arugula, then you might like the following offer:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorials/

The 4 pillars of a pee-worthy relationship

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Tony was happy to see me back.

I had just returned to Baltimore to stay at my friend’s house for a few days.

My friend’s large German shepherd, Tony, was so excited to see me back that he ran to my room, jumped in my lap, jumped out of my lap, and then peed on the hardwood floor.

That’s excitement.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you too could create a similar reaction in your customers or clients?

Well, it might be possible.

To show you how, let me refer to an interview that I listened to recently. It was with multi-millionaire Internet marketer Travis Sago.

Travis has been in the marketing and copywriting business for close to 20 years. He has sold everything from Little Giant Ladders to business coaching.

But his first really big success came from selling relationship advice — specifically, “how to get your ex back” guides for suddenly single women.

So when a guy like Travis talks about creating a bond that lasts, it makes sense to listen.

​​According to Travis, it ain’t hard to do. A strong bond requires just 4 ingredients:

#1. Frequency of interaction. Think of your closest friends, most of whom you’ve probably known since high school or college.

#2. Depth of shared emotional experience. Think of the attachment that kidnappees form for their kidnappers.

#3. Vulnerability. Think of Tony and me. He almost tore my head off the first time I met him.

#4. Proximity. Think of Jim and Pam in The Office.

Maybe it’s not immediately obvious, but all of these real-life relationship pillars can be imitated in the cold world of  digital marketing.

And if you want to see just how to use principles #2 and #3 above to make your front-end marketing pee-worthy, then check out the following:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorials/

Claude Hopkins and Gary Halbert meet over a barrel of whiskey

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Back in a village in 19th-century Michigan, there lived an influential man.

He was the leader of his community.

Head of the school board.

Couldn’t read or write.

Here’s his secret to achieving influence in spite his handicap:

Following a ship wreck some years earlier, a large barrel of whiskey washed ashore Lake Michigan.

This man found the barrel, and he put it in the corner of his living room.

He was generous with the whiskey. Folks started dropping by his house. They would sit on soap boxes next to the barrel and discuss local gossip.

In time, his house became the headquarters of the local community. And he became the leader.

I read this story in My Life in Advertising by Claude Hopkins.

It made me think of something I’d heard in a long-lost recording of another influential marketer, Gary Halbert.

Says Gary: marketing is a process, not an event.

In other words, when businesses buy (or luck upon) a big barrel of whiskey…

They often use it to throw a one-day party for the whole village.

The next day, everybody’s groggy, but a few villagers say, “Bro, that was awesome.”

A week later, however, nobody remembers or cares who threw the big party. And all the whiskey’s gone.

It’s better to keep the drip of whiskey coming, evening after evening…

All the while listening to what folks are saying as they sit around your living room…

While gradually gaining their respect and trust, and nudging them towards seeing you as the village elder.

That’s a process.

Of course, you need to start somewhere. Such as by sending out invitations to your whiskey barrel that get the attention of whiskey lovers within a country mile of your living room. And if you want to see one effective way of doing this, check out the following:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorials/

The 2019 Nobel Prize in email marketing

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Two years ago, a bunch of smart guys got the Nobel Prize for discovering how the circadian rhythm works.

As you might know, that’s our body’s internal clock.

It’s what keeps you awake during the day, sleepy at night, and in a zombie state after you change time zones.

These scientists wanted to figure out how this happens.

They found that there’s a protein that builds up in our cells during the night…

And gets depleted during the day.

It’s kind of like an hourglass. During the night the sand gets put in at the top, and during the day it runs out. When it runs out, you’re knocked out.

This is pretty similar to the classical view of email marketing.

“You don’t want to mail sales pitches too frequently,” the conventional argument goes. “If you do, you’ll deplete your ‘goodwill hourglass’ and people on your list will unsubscribe.” It sounds reasonable, just like the circadian rhythm story.

But it’s contradicted by a new discovery.

Just look at the work of email scientists like Matt Furey, Ben Settle, and Travis Sago.

Their attitude is not, “How often can I sell something to my list?”

Instead, they focus on selling something every day — and having their list love them for it.

It’s a super powerful change in perspective.

Worthy of a Nobel Prize in email marketing.

If you have an email list, then this “sell every day” approach opens up grand vistas of untapped profits.

And if done right, it also creates better, longer-lasting relationships with your customers and your audience.

But this won’t be much use to you unless you have an email list. Filled with people who are in your target market. And hungry for what you sell.

There are lots of ways to build such a list. If you want to know a fast way, here’s one option:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorials/

The foolish tale of two cities

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Today I am in Bucharest, the 1.8-million-soul capital of Romania.

From what I’ve seen so far, Bucharest is the same as every other place.

The same Irish pubs. The same kebab shops. The same escape rooms.

Yes, it’s a bit more run down. A bit cheaper. And free of the hordes of beautiful women who plague other eastern European destinations.

But otherwise, it’s the same. Which makes me not want to travel any more. At least here.

Not that I have a special gripe against Bucharest.

Last year, I was in Minsk, the capital of Belarus.

Minsk is NOT the same as everywhere else.

There are very few if any bars or restaurants. The locals are polite but not interested in dealing with foreigners. The main attractions are large socialist monuments, which you can see in a day and a half. All of which makes me not want to travel to Minsk again, either.

Maybe you think I’m just a spoiled tourist. And you’re probably right. But I bring these two cities up to illustrate a marketing point.

Lots of gurus out there advise one of two things:

1) Be yourself and find your quirky and unique voice, or

2) Follow a proven marketing process, and just fill in the blanks

It’s almost always one or the other. Either you need to be doggedly unique… Or you need to follow a proven, cookie-cutter approach.

I think this is foolish.

It’s the marketing equivalent of Minsk and Bucharest, both cities that are unlikely to draw a lot of my repeat tourist business.

The answer, at least as I see it, is you need both.

You need to have your own unique ideas and voice…

And you need to follow a marketing approach that’s been proven to work for many other people.

Maybe you already do this.

If so, good on ya.

But maybe you need some help to make your business the hot attraction that you know it can be. In that case, here’s one place to start your marketing efforts:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorials/

The Flipper shortcut to getting rich on the Internet

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When I was around 8 or 9, one of the rare American TV shows we used to get was Flipper.

Flipper is a dolphin. He’s got a couple of kids for friends and they all get into trouble together.

Such as for example, in the episode of the white dolphin:

Flipper’s been missing for a few days. The kids are worried. Flipper finally shows up, and he signals through clicking and chortling that the kids should follow.

It turns out a handsome but unscrupulous local fisherman, wearing a striped pirate shirt, has been trying to net a rare white dolphin.

Long story short, the kids convince the fisherman to leave the white dolphin alone.

But the real twist comes at the end, when it turns out the white dolphin is a female — and Flipper and she have made a baby dolphin together.

Which begs the question… When?

After all, Flipper’s only been gone a few days. Could he have seduced the white dolphiness and knocked her up in such a short time?

Must be.

And this reminded me of something I heard from Internet marketer Travis Sago.

“How do idiots get rich?” Travis asks.

How do they swoop into established markets — without credibility, without building relationships, without tons of free content — and make massive sales right away?

The answer, according to Travis, is that they have the right offer for that marketplace.

If you have the right offer, you don’t need kung fu copywriting, intricate sales funnels, or lots of wooing.

In fact, with the right offer, you should be able to make the sale with a description sent in a Notepad file.

So if you are wondering how idiots are getting rich even though they aren’t as deserving as you, think like smooth Flipper, and look at the offers you’re making.

And now I have a smooth offer to make you. But it won’t make me rich. To find out what I have in mind, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorials/

The truth about daily emails

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I’ve been on a learning kick lately, reading and watching and slurping up everything I can find by a guy named Travis Sago.

I won’t list his resume here.

Suffice to say he’s an Internet marketer who’s been around for I guess close to two decades.

​​He’s made many millions of dollars.

What’s more, he’s done this profitably (ie. without building up a giant organization, but just him and a couple of elfin helpers).

So if you are a person like me, who doesn’t dream of starting a 100-person company, but who does dream of having a 7-figure income by dabbling in marketing, then you might find what Travis has to say interesting. So I’ll share one Travis thing with you.

It’s one of his 6 secrets for successful email campaigns.

Says Travis:

“Make your email campaign an EVENT”

Now maybe this sounds trivial to you.

But I think it’s a crucial lesson for a lot of businesses today who are hopping onto the daily email bandwagon.

As you might know, I’m also a big fan of Ben Settle. I believe Ben is responsible for the bandwagonification of daily emails. The way he was able to do this was by writing daily emails himself — promoting his own methodology, building his own brand, and refining his ideas and strategies. In other words, there’s definitely a lot of value to writing daily emails.

They help you get positioned as a leader in your market…

They distill your own selling and marketing approach…

They help you create valuable content.

But here’s one thing that they are not likely to do:

They don’t make sales.

Not lots of them anyways. Not in my experience.

For sales, you need an EVENT, just like Travis Sago says.

And to be fair, this is something Ben Settle teaches and lives as well. He’s constantly running events and promotions. And even his core offer — his paid monthly newsletter — is basically an event that comes to an end at the end of each month.

Still, a lot of people who only follow Ben on the surface, and who are bouncing along merrily on the daily email bandwagon, miss this important point.

And that’s why, if you are writing daily emails, and you aren’t getting the results you want, maybe try creating some EVENTS.

As for me, it’s back to work, toiling away at an upcoming event. While that’s not complete, you might like the following free offer — even without an EVENT to promote it:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorials/

The bland conspiracy behind the Great Awokening

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I saw some statistics today about the use of certain phrases in the New York Times.

Woke terms and concepts such as “patriarchy,” “mansplaining,” “Islamophobia,” and “toxic masculinity.”

The trend is best illustrated by the term “racism,” which has been in widespread use for much longer than the others.

Various NYT articles referenced racism at a fairly even clip throughout the 80s, 90s, 2000s, and up to the early 2010s.

And then, there was a sharp spike.

So for comparison, in 2010, there were on average 5-6 articles in the NYT each day that mentioned racism.

Since 2016, it’s been more like 20-30.

What explains this explosion?

Well, there’s a conspiracy theory floating around that’s straight out of the 70s movie Network.

It says that the rich got nervous about all the attention being given to economic disparities in US society (remember Occupy Wall Street?). So godlike business magnates called in their big-media lackeys, and they said,

“Why do we pay you? So you can report on the growing revolt of the hundreds of millions of poor people in this country? No! Do something else and do it now. Focus on the blacks or the gays or the Mexicans, but not the poor!”

So there’s that explanation. And then there’s the much more bland non-conspiracy theory:

Throughout the 2000s, the print circulation of the NYT was steadily dropping.

At the same time, the newspaper was moving more of its content online.

But unlike a bunch of sheets of paper, a website will happily speak up and tell you what people read and what they respond to.

And just like with Faye Dunaway’s character in Network, it probably took only one intelligent, ambitious, and ruthless editor to take this information and conclude, “Give the people what they want! Give them polarizing stories. Reinforce their already-held beliefs. That’s how we’ll quadruple our digital subscribers.”

Whichever theory is true, I think there are lots of lessons here for you if you’re doing any kind of marketing online.

Particularly if you’re in anything resembling a mass or commodity market. Which is what I’ve been doing a lot of lately. And if you want my insights on how to write polarizing copy that quadruples your mass-market buyers, you might like the following:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorials/

Climbing the customer palm tree to pick one coconut

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I recently heard from an ongoing client in the ecommerce space.

He has a couple of different brands selling niche physical products (I won’t say exactly what because that’s part of his success).

Anyways, the branded physical products seem to offer steady but limited profits.

And so he is looking to launch a few “one-off” products. These are popular, trendy things, the likes you can see on FB or Amazon all the time (think wifi repeater). He wants to launch one of these campaigns each week, in hope of scoring some quick wins to pad out the income from ongoing branded product sales.

Which is ok for me, because it means I get ongoing work writing copy for all these products, as well as feedback on what’s working and what’s not.

At the same time, I feel it’s a bit like climbing a tall palm tree to gather some coconuts, one at a time.

Getting up to the top of a palm tree is rough, scary, and dangerous work.

And so imagine you somehow climb all the way up to the top, where there are about a dozen ripe coconuts.

You roll one back and forth in your hand until it comes loose…

You let it fall to the ground…

And then you start your own scary and dangerous descent, ignoring all the other coconuts in the canopy, to repeat the same thing over at the next coconut palm.

You can see where I’m going with this.

Getting a customer to buy something from you is rough, dangerous, and expensive work.

So once you’ve climbed that palm tree, it doesn’t make sense NOT to pick all the coconuts that are up there.

In part, my client is already doing this, by offering day-zero upsells.

But there’s more he could do.

Specifically, he could keep trying to sell other things to these same customers, days or weeks after that first sale.

That might seem blindingly obvious to you. But what’s really obvious is that some otherwise smart and successful businesses — like my client’s — aren’t actually doing it.

Perhaps the reason is that they really don’t know how.

Or they simply don’t have the resources to do it.

That’s why I’m making my client a risk-free offer — either he will get some “free” sales or he won’t. But either way, there’s no cost to him.

And I’ll make the same offer to you right now. If you’ve got a customer list that’s sitting idle after the initial sale, get in touch with me and we can talk about how you can get some “free” profits out of your customer list — with zero cost to you.

6 sneaky ways to use reciprocity in marketing, part 2

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… continuing on from yesterday, here are 3 more ways to “give with the one hand while holding the other hand ready”:

#4 Take ’em out to a banquet

Claude Hopkins was at it again, selling Cotosuet, the fake butter. This time, he showed up at a client’s doorstep and said, “I’d like to take you to a banquet tonight.” The client pointed to his dusty work clothes and said he wasn’t dressed for a banquet. “No matter, I’m also going in my plain clothes,” Hopkins told him, and whisked the man away to the banquet.

The client had a great time. “Please don’t come to my office on Monday, he begged Hopkins when it was done. “I can’t refuse you anything after tonight and I’m loaded with your product already.”

But come Monday, there was Hopkins again — not to talk about Cotosuet, but about how he could help the client with his regional advertising. Which, incidentally, included buying more wagonloads of Cotosuet.

#5 Take a bet on ’em

I have one more Claude Hopkins story, and if you’re wondering why I keep going back to that guy, it’s because he worked so hard and did so much. In his career, he profitably advertised chicken incubators, automobiles, cough medicines, felt boots, beer, tires, soap, oatmeal, toothpaste, “germicides” (for people, not plants), plus probably a hundred other products.

And each time old Claude had to advertise something, his go-to method would be to offer a free sample — preferably a cut-out newspaper coupon, which could be redeemed for the full-price item at a local grocery store or pharmacy. In other words, the advertiser would actually pay retail to have prospects try the product.

Crazy? Likely to lead to ruin? Not if you think long term, says Claude:

“Try to hedge or protect yourself, and human nature like to circumvent you. But remove all restrictions and say, “We trust you” and human nature likes to justify that trust. All my experience in advertising has shown that in general people are honest.”

#6 Take an interest in ’em first

Zooming forward to 2019, here’s one I saw from email marketer Josh Earl. Josh has his own email list where he talks about marketing and copywriting. But at one point recently, he turned off his automated welcome email that people get first thing when they subscribe.

​​Instead, Josh goes in, does a bit of Internet sleuthing about the new subscriber based on the email address, and then writes a custom welcome email just to that new subscriber.

Costly? Yes. Not scalable? Yes. Likely to kick off the relationship on a much stronger note? Yes.

And there you go — 6 ways to use the principle of reciprocity in your marketing: give them your trust first. If you take a bit of time and put in a bit of thought, you should be able to apply at least one of these ways to make your current marketing more effective. And a couple of points to wrap it up:

In many of the stories above, the reciprocity happens before (and not instead) of the actual selling job. In other words, after you do something that elicits reciprocity, you don’t talk about your product or ask for the sale. Instead, you say, “I have this plan for how to help your business be more profitable…”

And finally: Don’t get needy. Yes, reciprocity by definition means you are taking the first step. That doesn’t mean you have to become needy — about being liked, about getting a response, about getting the sale, about getting a yes.

Instead, come up with your plan, carry it out, and move on with your life. If it works, great. if it doesn’t, that’s ok, because you now know you should make your great offer to other prospects instead.

And of course, if you want to know about other ways to make your business more profitable or to make more sales, then I have this plan that might help you. It involves writing emails to your prospects and clients along the following lines:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/