Direct Marketing

Don’t count on people remembering you

by

Cautionary tale:

A few days ago, a dude joined my Daily Email House group. The description in his Skool bio sold that he had recently sold a media company and that he is now building a newsletter business.

I got curious. I wanted to look him up, and find more about this media company and newsletter business.

But the dude’s name is very common. I won’t say it here, but it’s on the commonness level of “Ben Johnson.”

In other words, it’s hopeless to find this guy online with a quick search, and there’s no link in his Skool profile. I shrugged, and had I not needed a topic for today’s email, I would have forgotten all about him.

Yesterday, I talked about how to make a long-term bet on list growth, which is to pick a platform you believe in, and then invest either your time or your money into it.

But there’s quick and cheap stuff you can do also.

Putting a link to your optin page in all your online profiles one of ’em. This probably won’t get you thousands of subscribers. But it might get you a few, and you never know who might be hiding among those few (me, for example).

There’s a bigger point here, which is not to count on other people to do the work of remembering you and seeking you out.

That’s one of the main benefits of an email list.

An email list gives you a chance to be the one who gets in touch with others, when it suits you, as often as it suits you, rather than hoping and waiting for them to think of you.

Of course, if you have more than one channel to reliably get in touch with people on your own terms, even better. which is one of the reasons I have set up my Daily Email House group.

Daily Email House is another way for me to connect and bond more deeply with readers. As you can imagine, I have to give people value and even fun in order to make it worth their while to get and stay inside the group.

If you would like to make this deal with me yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/house

2 simplifying questions to ask yourself

by

I was waiting in the line at the coffee shop this morning. The barista was making a latte with oat milk for another customer, and she looked up at me.

“Coffee?” she asked.

I nodded and said yes.

“Well?” she said with a bit of frustration in her voice, waving her hand to indicate I should be a bit more specific than that.

I’m telling you this fascinating story because I want to set up something email-marketing related.

I’ve been running my revived Daily Email House group for a few weeks. I invited people to post about problems they are having, and see if the group can help. Came the following problem:

===

How do I grow my list? That’s my biggest problem.

===

“Well?” I said when I read this question, waving my hand to indicate that the question-asker should be a bit more specific than that.

If you’re reading this right now, odds are excellent that you already know two dozen perfectly good ways to grow an email newsletter. Maybe more.

The fact is, there are hundreds and possibly thousands of ways to grow an email list. Many of them can work great. What’s more, there’s a ton of good and free information online about how to put most of them into practice.

And I guess therein lies the trouble. There are simply too many choices, including too many good choices, when it comes to growing an email list.

It paralyzes people, the same way that a choice of two dozen sourced coffees from around the world… prepared with two dozen different techniques including V60s and aeropresses and pretentious pourovers… resulting in two dozen final products like lattes and batch brews and cortados and americanos… can paralyze people, if they don’t already know exactly what they want.

To help with that (not the coffee, but the list growth), let me propose two simplifying questions:

1. “Which platform do I believe in?”

A “platform” is any technology or site or organization that’s already got the attention of some humans. Here are few examples:

– Facebook

– YouTube

– Substack

– Google

– Amazon

– Pinterest

– Email newsletters

– Yellow Pages

– AM radio

– your local Chamber of Commerce

…

Pick a platform from the list above, or some other platform you believe in. You can believe in it because you believe it has staying power… because you feel some affinity for it… because you think that the kinds of people you want to attract are there… or ideally all three.

2. “Do I prefer to pay with money or time?”

You have to pay, unfortunately.

The question is whether you’d rather pay with a dozen hours a month spent creating content, or reaching out to people one-on-one, or building yourself up to be a more attractive and fascinating person…. or whether you’d rather spend a few hundred dollars a month to get the platform owners to push your message out for you.

There are pros and cons to both paying with money or time, including ones which are nonobvious.

For now, just go with your gut. You probably have a sense of which one is a less painful cost to you to pay each month — a dozen hours of your time, or a few hundred dollars from your wallet.

Once you have your two answers to the question above, the path will be clear. You will know what to do — again, most of the details are out there on the Internet, and it’s just a matter of committing to it and following through.

But what if you pick the wrong platform, or you start to pay with one currency and you realize you made a mistake, and you want to switch?

It’s not really a big problem. Anything you do will be infinitely better than doing nothing, and pivoting to a new platform, or switching from paid in time to paid in money, or vice versa, is pretty straightforward.

Did this help?

I hope so.

But if not, my Daily Email House community is still there, waiting to help people who want to use their email list to pay for a house.

Over the next few days, I will be releasing a Daily Email Habit Starter Pack, including a proven way to grow your email list, which is based on my own personal answers to the two questions above.

If you’d like to get inside Daily Email House in time to get this Starter Pack:

https://bejakovic.com/house

How to get me to pay you $500 in 90 seconds flat

by

Today I was on Facebook — don’t ask why — and I saw a post from a dude whose email list I’ve been on for the past two years.

The dude was announcing that he’s shutting down his info publishing business and that he’s making all his courses available in one heavily discounted bundle, which will presumably go away some time soon.

About 90 seconds later, I had entered in my credit card details and paid the dude $500 for this heavily discounted bundle.

Point being:

Discounting works great — IF people already value what you’re selling at the full value.

The dude above has been emailing for years, practically every day.

I didn’t read all his emails, but I read a good number.

He has been building up the case for buying his various courses.

He made the case over and over for the value of knowledge inside… he showed results that people who were applying this knowledge were getting… he kept digging and prodding into soft spots in my flesh, making me suspect that I’m missing out on something really important.

I grew to believe what the dude was saying, and I grew to want what he was selling.

My “no thank you” defenses were good enough to resist his sales pitches while I thought I still had time, while the offer was basically “Get started today OR tomorrow OR the day after if tomorrow doesn’t work.”

But once this became a last-chance matter, and once there was also a significant discount over what these courses had been selling for previously, I saw myself involved in an instant, almost involuntary action to pay the guy $500.

So discounting can work great.

As can launches, promos, and special offers.

But none of them will work unless people in your audience have grown to want the thing you have, and have grown to value it above and beyond the offer you will be making on it.

How do you get people to that point?

Well, I told you above.

Email every day, or practically every day. Make the case, over and over, for people buying what you’re selling. Tease, provide proof, and dismiss alternatives.

Do this over and over, and then, when you make a special deal and you give a deadline for it — you don’t have to close down your entire business, or bundle all your stuff for $500 — people will buy, instantly.

And on that note, let me remind you:

The price for my Daily Email Habit service is going up this Thursday at 12 midnight PST, from a modest $30/month to the Martin Shkreli-like $50/month.

Daily Email Habit helps you start and stick with consistent daily emailing, so you can gradually move people to wanting what you have to sell, and so you can get them to value it at the price you sell it for.

If you wanna get started today, and start moving people to where you want them to go, before the price goes up:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Announcing: Martin Shkreli-like price increase for Daily Email Habit

by

This Thursday, at 12 midnight PST, I will be increasing the price of my Daily Email Habit service to an unheard-of $50/month.

Daily Email Habit puts an email “puzzle” in your inbox each day, to help you start and stick with sending daily emails.

Daily Email Habit currently sells for $30/month, which means you can get a daily email prompt and ongoing education in how to expand that prompt into a fun and valuable email for just $1/day.

On Thursday, I’ll be increasing the price of Daily Email Habit to $50/month because my accountant, warehouse manager, and mother-in-law have all been beating me over the head and yelling at me to do it for days now.

Apparently the price of digital paper and digital ink have risen dramatically over the past few years, as have the labor costs of the little elves we use deliver Daily Email Habit puzzles to inboxes worldwide.

The fact remains that the price of Daily Email Habit, old or new, is a tiny fraction of what you can make regularly, each month, if you do start and stick with the habit of daily emailing.

Maybe a higher price will lead to higher commitment, at least in some people (a lower price certainly won’t). And ultimately, more commitment and more consistency is the goal of this entire service.

If you are currently signed up to Daily Email Habit, of course you will not be impacted by this dramatic and shameless price increase. You will keep being grandfathered in at whatever price you signed up at.

And if you are not yet signed up to Daily Email Habit, the same is true for you if you sign up today. The price goes up on Thursday for others… but you only have to pay the current rate, and the same in the future, whenever I decide to hike up the price again (say, in case the elves unionize).

If you want the full details on Daily Email Habit — including a sample of the fine printing job we do, which explains why we are so sensitive to rising digital paper and digital ink costs — so you can decide whether you want to join before price goes up:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Info publishing lesson from A24 Films

by

I like to look at creative industries — where people are churning out and packaging up ideas and turning them into real world value. Maybe they can teach me something about the info publishing world as well.

Today, I wanna tell you about the movie industry, or rather, a different perspective that’s emerged in the movie industry over the past decade.

As you might know, the classic 20th century Hollywood movie studio is a home-run business.

A movie studio experiences lots and lots of strikeouts, which are offset and then some by one big hit, which can gross $100M or $1B or $100B (ok, maybe not $100B, not yet).

But there’s a subtle cost to this way of doing business, as you’ve probably seen at the local theater:

All Hollywood movies eventually become comic book movies.

The reason is both that comic book franchises already have proven stories and characters, with a built-in fan base that can be sold to…

… and that comic book movies make low demands on the viewer, and therefore have mass-market potential (this comes from someone who has spent 6 hours of his past 2 evenings rewatching two of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies).

But there’s another way to make movies.

Perhaps you have heard of A24 Films. A24 is a film and TV production company that got started in 2012. They are best known for making arty, creative movies, often with very small budgets. Some A24 movies have become hits. Some barely managed to recoup their small budgets. But all are cool, unique, and beloved by fans and critics alike.

I read an article about A24 recently. A top executive was quoted in the article with something that struck me:

“To use a baseball metaphor, we hit singles and doubles. And when you set up movies to hit singles and doubles you can let your partner—in the best version of this—really take creative risks. We don’t need to gross a hundred million dollars. We don’t need to gross forty million dollars to actually have a successful financial outcome.”

Here’s how I interpret this translates into the info publishing world:

If you’re only creating a few offers a year, each needs to be a big hit if you’re gonna be a long-term successful as a business.

And that means that over time, you will experience “audience capture” the way that Hollywood has experienced with comic book movies. In other words, you will find that you’re forced to create stuff because the mass mind of your audience dictates it, whether you genuinely believe in it or not, whether you enjoy creating it or not.

This can be fine — you might care about other things in life and get your kicks there.

But if creating cool stuff you’re proud of is something that matters to you, then there’s a lesson in what that A24 exec says. That lesson is to work on hitting lots of doubles and singles, both to cover your nut, and to give you the freedom to keep doing what you want, how you want, when you want.

So much for cross-pollination.

Now I’d like to remind you of my Daily Email Habit service, which gives you a daily email “puzzle” to help you start and stick with sending daily emails.

Daily Email Habit currently sells for $30/month, which means you can get a daily email prompt and ongoing education in how to expand that prompt into a fun and valuable email for just $1/day.

In a few days, I will be jacking up the price of Daily Email Habit to Martin Shkreli levels. If you want to get in before the price increases, or better yet, if you simply want to start writing your own daily email habit today, so you can start hitting singles and doubles regularly:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Affiliate contests suck, so here’s an alternative

by

I sat down just now and tried to write a list of 10 reasons why affiliate contests suck.

(Affiliate contest = Person X is selling an offer during a time-limited launch. Persons Y, Z, and Q are promoting it as affiliates. Whoever sells the most gets bragging rights and additional prizes, beyond just the affiliate commissions.)

I feel internally that affiliate contests suck, and so I was sure that I could come up with 10 good reasons to back up my feeling.

So I started writing and… I realized that my arguments were not really arguments against affiliate contests, but about mass launches with a bunch of affiliates who promote the same offer.

Mass affiliate launches devalue the core offer… they force each affiliate to come up with a new and unique offer (bonuses or bundles or whatever) if they hope to sell anything, which to me defeats the main point of promoting affiliate offers… they cut into sales since people on your list are likely to be on 5 other lists that are promoting the same.

I realized affiliate contests are actually a way of getting around all these negatives of mass affiliate launches.

List owners (persons Y, Z, and Q above) know that promoting an offer at the same time as a dozen other people sucks… and offer owners (Person X above) try to draw them back by promising additional prizes for the best performers, above and beyond the affiliate commissions.

Does it work?

People do affiliate contests all the time, so I’m guessing it works, at least for somebody out there.

At the same time, I can speak from personal experience that I avoid affiliate contests like I avoid the metro at rush hour on an August afternoon, both because I don’t like being in a sweaty crowd, and because I don’t like directly competing against people for one of a few available seats.

I imagine there are others who are like me, who are in fact turned off by the competitive aspect of winner-takes-most contests.

I’m telling you all this because today I announced a new campaign inside my Daily Email House.

The goal of the campaign is to grow the community.

I’m asking existing members to help me do so. Beyond the altruistic reasons of helping me out or building a more thriving community, I’ve also announced prizes:

Prize #1: For anyone who refers anyone to the group, whether this referred person ends up getting inside or not (I’m picky, and I don’t let just anyone inside)

Prize #2: for anyone who refers 10 people who end up getting inside

Prize #3: For the entire group, once we reach the magic number of new members I’ve set as the target for this campaign

It’s a different kind of incentive scheme to overcome the problem of multiple people promoting. Rather than an “affiliate contest,” this is an “affiliate challenge.”

In the affiliate challenge, people are not competing with each other (or are competing directly to a much smaller extent). They are primarily competing with themselves.

They are not falling behind each other, and not giving up because they feel it’s hopeless to win, or even refusing to engage altogether.

They are encouraged to participate and to achieve a manageable goal.

And at the end of it, the group benefits, and is hopefully stronger, rather than divided or deflated.

Maybe an “affiliate challenge” is something you can consider as an alternative to an affiliate contest, when running an offer or a promo or a launch where you’re hoping to get a bunch of referrals or affiliate sales from different people.

“Yeah but does this work?” I hear you ask.

Fair enough. I have no idea. I’m just testing out this campaign, and it’s likely that there will be hiccups or missteps along the way.

If you’d like to find out how it does, or participate to get yourself one of the prizes I’m offering, or you simply want to join a community with the shared goal of using your email list to pay for a house, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/house

Would you bid $1 to have me promote you to my list?

by

Inside my Daily Email House group, I recently started a discussion about list swaps.

(“List swap” = cross-promotion with another list owner. You send an email to drive your readers to my list… and I do the same for you.)

One big objection that lotsa people raised was “my list is too small to be interesting to anyone for a list swap.”

I don’t agree with this — there are ways out and around it, even with a small list.

But of course, there’s also an entirely different approach to doing something like a list swap, one which is much more direct, and which can lead to results much more quickly.

That other way is simply to pay somebody to promote you, instead of offering to do a quid pro quo with them. Which brings me to an idea I had recently.

I have long been itching to try running an auction, the way marketer Travis Sago teaches and practices.

An auction works just how you think:

Different people bid what they are willing to pay… the winning bidder takes the prize.

In this case, the prize would be a solo ad in my newsletter. Basically, a single email I’d send to my list, dedicated completely to building you up and to promoting your unique offer.

I would also work with you directly to define and refine the offer in your ad… so as to entice the greatest number of qualified subscribers or buyers to go to your page and sign up or buy…

… and I’d work with you to come up with a back-end offer you could offer right away, so you could liquidate your ad cost, and maybe then some, on DAY ZERO.

I’ve never offered an ad in my newsletter before.

I also don’t have a huge list.

But when I did run a list swap with Alin Dragu a few months ago — basically the same kind of thing I’m offering here, but getting paid in cross-promotion instead of cash — I drove about 200 clicks and got Alin about 120 new subscribers.

When I did something similar with Lawrence Bernstein last year, and promoted Lawrence’s $7 offer as part of a list swap, I drove 157 buyers to Lawrence’s list.

If those kinds of numbers get you interested even a tiny bit, here’s my question to you:

If I were to make this offer, and make a monkey out of myself by running an auction to sell it… would you bid at least $1?

If you would, hit reply and let me know.

(If you’ve already let me know inside Daily Email House, no need to write again.)

If there’s enough interest… I will put this auction on, and you will have a chance to bid $1 or more on a solo ad in my newsletter, and on getting my help to make it profitable immediately.

My goal is to help you create a little break-even funnel so you can turn around and run your ad again immediately, in another newsletter, and another newsletter after that, and so on… quickly growing your list with buyers and high-quality readers… and making yourself much more interesting as a list swap partner in the future.

On the other hand, if there’s not enough interest in my little auction idea, that’s fine. Really. You won’t hurt my feelings. I will simply go and sulk, and pretend like I never even considered making this offer.

Your choice. If you’re interested, you know what to do.

The “gold standard” of course design

by

From the annals of effective course design:

I recently read about real-life Dr. House competitions, aka “clinicopathological conferences.”

C.P.C.s work like this:

A doctor is given a case study of a real patient.

The would-be Dr. House is told the patient’s initial symptoms and lab results.

The doctor can then follow up with more questions, and if the data is known (eg. more lab results or more background info is available), then he or she is told what those are.

The doctor probes and narrows in.

Eventually, the goal is to make the right diagnosis of what actually ailed the patient.

The key thing is, since these are real-life case studies, the right diagnosis is known, because pathologists on the case actually found it, often in an autopsy.

(I checked just now and some of the correct diagnoses in these Dr. House competitions included “tertiary syphilis with mercury poisoning,” “intestinal anthrax,” and “wrong-site surgery.”)

In this way, the doctor is either proven right, meaning the diagnostic process was on point, or wrong, in which case the diagnostic process was lacking in some way, and there’s learning opportunity.

The article I read about this called C.P.C.s “the gold standard of diagnostic reasoning; if you can solve a C.P.C., you can solve almost any case.” Because of their design, C.P.C.s have become so popular as a teaching tool that the New England Journal of Medicine has been publishing transcripts for more than a century.

This caught my attention because I recently asked myself about other domains where I could apply the mechanism behind my Copy Riddles program.

The basic mechanism behind Copy Riddles is the same as the one behind the C.P.C.:

There’s starting data… there’s a nonobvious final result… which is in some way validated or proven.

In the case of Dr. House competitions, the starting data is symptoms and lab results. The nonobvious final result is the correct diagnosis, as validated by pathologists.

In Copy Riddles, the starting data is dry and factual source material, from a course or a how-to book. The nonobvious final result is a sexy sales bullet, as validated in a sales letter by an A-list copywriter, with sales across millions of households, often following an A/B test against other top copywriters.

I had a few ideas for other domains in which the same kind of mechanism could work:

– Comedy writing (take a premise, then come up with a punchline, compare it to one that got laughs)…

– Subject line writing (obvious enough)

– “Influence Riddles” (a setup where you have to convince someone to do as you want, given severe constraints, and then compare your answer to how it was done for real, in a real-life situation)

Apparently, medical diagnosis is another field.

If you have more examples or ideas for me of how to use this same mechanism in other domains, write in and let me know.

Or, if you are thinking of creating a course of your own, and are wondering how to best organize it, then consider the above “gold standard” approach.

Or, if you are simply interested in the gold standard among courses that teach you how to write sales copy, you can read the full story of Copy Riddles here:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

If nobody wants your profit-making offer, give it away

by

Yesterday I organized a Zoom call for a few list owners.

One of these, a successful copywriter and marketer, was asking how to price, or how to persuade businesses to take him up on, his newfangled sales machine.

“Is $15k a year a good offer? The sales machine is super valuable, and has produced great results for the businesses who have used it. But it’s been a hard sell.”

I thought it was instructive that a successful copywriter and marketer was asking this question.

My answer was, if this thing produces sales so well, why not package up the results into a nice gift box, and sell that gift box instead?

In other words, instead of persuading business owners to buy a gizmo that costs $15k a year and promises to produce sales… why not persuade them to accept new money in the bank, which they can pay you a finders fee for?

In the words of marketing legend Claude Hopkins, who became the modern equivalent of a billionaire using little more than a typewriter:

“In every business expenses are kept down. I could never be worth more than any other man who could do the work I did. The big salaries were paid to salesmen, to the men who brought in orders, or to the men in the factory who reduced the costs. They showed profits, and they could command a reasonable share of those profits. I saw the difference between the profit-earning and the expense side of a business, and I resolved to graduate from the debit class. “

“Yes,” I hear someone saying in the back, “but business owners should already know that a sales gizmo isn’t really an expense, because it will help them make money. They should be smart enough to see a profit-generating solution when they see one. They should they should they should.”

Yes, they should.

But they don’t, just in the same way that the successful copywriter above should have remembered the century-old lesson that turned Claude Hopkins into a billionaire, but he didn’t.

The fact is, we have limited time and attention and energy, and doing the work of translation — of turning what we have into what we could possibly have, of what we buy into what it could do for us, of what we sell into what people really want — requires time and effort.

You can argue against this aspect of reality. Or you can work with it, and simply translate what you sell into a result that people care about, and that they can take you up on without risk.

Moving on.

I recently got a bunch of feedback from my readers, and I found that a large number of people list, as their #1 goal, getting consistent with emailing daily.

Maybe you too feel you should should should be writing consistent daily emails. But you still don’t do it.

If it’s not happening, and if it’s important to you, maybe it’s time for to take a different tack:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

How to 3x your price and have clients say it’s still too cheap

by

Inside my recently resurrected Daily Email House community, I ran a poll asking folks if they have ever made an offer for $1k+.

I got a response to that from Jordan Parker, who owns Parker Labs, which from what I understand is a kind of boutique agency that provides operations support for online creators. Jordan wrote:

===

I have the dumbest story on this from 2 years ago:

Decided I want to practice downsells… but in sales calls.

And I SUCK at sales calls.

(I’m too eager to solve problems and forget to, you know, sell)

So, I intentionally threw a few extra things in & offered my typical $10k offer for $30k – planning to have this cool moment where I scratch the extra features off on one side as I scratch off the price & write a lower price on the other.

Perfect plan. Perfect visual anchor for the downsell.

Except…

The person just said “yes” instantly, and I didn’t even get to try my plan.

(he actually said it’s too cheap)

Sure, $30k isn’t that much for most businesses (and my IT agency’s usual deals had at least 1 more zero), but for some reason when I was the person closing it felt like a LOT. I was pretty surprised after.

(and just mildly annoyed that I didn’t get to test my system 😅)

But if you want to up your prices, give it a shot – list a bunch of stuff and get ready to cross out some of it. Many people will want everything. Getting everything feels nice.

And you always have an out and your old price as a “backup”

===

Upsells — addons you make to your core offer — are often seen as allowing your customers to spoil themselves, or maybe a play to their inertia.

The typical example is buying a new car, when a customer ends up agreeing to the the “nitrogen-filled tires” or “key replacement insurance,” simply because they are not thinking right at the moment.

But that exploitative way is not the only way to do upsells.

There’s a good chance people need your upsells to actually get value out of your core offer.

Your prospects can sense this on their own. Or maybe, they are simply eager to solve their problem completely, and so they put themselves into your hands, since they have decided to trust you.

My point being:

Rather than asking “What’s the amount I’m most likely to get my customer to pay,” ask yourself, “What’s the amount that’s most likely to fix their problem fully?”

If you ask yourself that, and if you bundle all of the resulting upsells and downsells and crosssells into a single sale, you can 3x your price, like Jordan did above, and still have your prospect say it seems too cheap.

In other news:

When people ask to join Daily Email House, I ask them what their #1 goal is right now.

A buncha people have replied something along the lines of writing emails consistently, even daily:

#1. “Learn to write engaging and persuasive daily emails”

#2. “Get back to writing consistently”

#3.”Mail daily”

#4. “Consistency”

If writing emails better and consistently is your goal, then I have my simple Daily Email Habit to offer you.

Every day, you get a prompt to write a daily email, which is based on my own experience writing thousands of sales emails, both for clients and for myself.

Every day, you also get 2-3 “hints,” which are really a steady drip of how-to info on influential and persuasive writing.

When you combine this with any email software (​Beehiiv​ works fine) and the ongoing support inside ​Daily Email House​ (free), you have most of what you need to succeed.

One thing that’s still needed is your own commitment. Only you can provide that.

If you have it, and you want my help in getting consistent with writing daily emails:

https://bejakovic.com/deh