Direct Marketing

Looking for 20 beta-testers to pay an unthinkable amount for my new book

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I’m looking for 20 beta-testers for a pre-publication “email draft” of my new book.

The background:

Yesterday, I made my plans for this coming month. My goal #1 in October is to finish writing my new book, titled The 10 Commandments of Con Men, Pick Up Artists, Comedians, Copywriters, Hypnotists, Door-To-Door Salesmen, Professional Negotiators, Storytellers, Propagandists, and Stage Magicians.

I already have the first 3 commandments/chapters of this new book largely done.

Still, getting the remaining 7 written by the end of this month is ambitious, considering I’ve been working on this book for more than a year now.

In my favor, most of that time has gone to research and outlining. I’ve only been writing for the past few months, on and off. But still — I realized yesterday there’s a good chance that I won’t make it by the end of this month, not unless I change my approach.

I got to thankin’…

I’m good at writing emails, much better than at writing book chapters. Maybe there’s an opportunity there?

And so I thought up a new offer to 1) help me get this book done on time, and 2) entertain and maybe reward a small number of dedicated readers of this newsletter.

So here’s my offer to you:

If you like, you can join a small group of beta-testers for my new book. The price to get inside this exclusive and elite club is an unthinkable $10. That $10 will get you:

1. An extra email with extra content from me, each day this month, starting this Sunday, October 6, and ending Wednesday, October 30, with content that’s intended for the new book.

2. A chance to influence the final content in the book. I hope you you will hit reply when I send you these content emails and share your thoughts. If all goes well, I will have more content at the end of this month than I will need for the book. I will decide what to keep and what to toss based on your feedback.

3. An acknowledgement in the book when I do publish it, because you were there at the start, and because you helped me get it done.

4. A free paperback copy once I publish the book. My current 10 Commandments book sells for $9.99, plus shipping. This new 10 Commandments book will also be priced at $9.99, plus shipping. But join me for this beta tester group, I’ll send you a paperback copy for free when it’s published, and I’ll also cover the shipping.

If you’d like to join, you can do so at the link below. But before you do, a few caveats:

I encourage you to only join if you’re a dedicated reader of these emails… if you’re already interested in getting my new book when it comes out… and if you will have the time to read yet another email over the coming month, and maybe even to hit reply to tell me what you think of what I wrote.

Again, these “new book” emails will start this Sunday. The deadline to sign up for them is this Friday at 8:31pm CET (I want a couple days buffer), though there’s a fair chance I will turn off this offer sooner than that, maybe as soon as tomorrow morning.

If you know you want in right now, here’s where to go:

​https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments​

Last notice: “ONE-TIME Inflation-BUSTING Sale”

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Today is the last day to get a copy of Lawrence Bernstein’s “How To Turn Fascinations Into Fortunes,” which normally sells for $97, for just $7.

Lawrence has been good enough to make this deal available to you, because you happen to be a subscriber of this newsletter.

And… to fight against inflation?

Well maybe. But today’s subject line is one I wrote because I’m a regular subscriber of Lawrence’s Ad Money Machine monthly subscription. Lawrence recently wrote about a successful renewal letter that used that “Inflation-BUSTING” headline, so I’m trying it out today.

If you’d like to get a sense for extensive direct marketing knowledge, expertise, and archive that Lawrence brings to what he does, without signing up for a Lawrence’s monthly subscription offer, then “How To Turn Fascinations Into Fortunes” is a great way to get started.

It can teach you a lot about writing sexy leads, angles, and hooks for your sales letters, emails, advertorials, ads, and pretty much any other piece of copy you might have to write.

To get this guide before the price goes back up to $97, the link is below. The deadline is less than 3 hours from now, and I won’t be writing any more emails about it.

Final word about “How To Turn Fascinations Into Fortunes”:

I’m not an affiliate for this offer. I don’t get paid whether you buy it or not. I can tell you I did buy this offer myself, for my own purposes, several weeks ago, before I ever had any plans on promoting it to you.

If you’d like to grab it also, before the price shoots up 13-fold in just a few short hours:

​​https://bejakovic.com/fascinations​​

The only marketing subscription I pay for each month

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I don’t pay for any copywriting newsletter, print or digital.

I don’t pay for any marketing mastermind.

I don’t pay for any monthly coaching, community, or support built around an industry guru or expert.

Nothing wrong if you pay for any of these. I’ve paid for all of them in the past. But it’s been at least a couple years since I paid for any kind of marketing info subscription each month.

Well, except one.

I pay for it now.

I’ve been doing so for a little over a year.

I keep paying for it each month because I find it 1) interesting and 2) valuable. And because I find it interesting and valuable, I find time most days to at least give a quick glance to the latest daily edition, and often I have a thorough sit-down read.

This marketing info subscription is Lawrence Bernstein’s Ad Money Machine.

As you might know, Lawrence a direct marketing expert who’s been in the game for a few decades.

Lawrence also happens to have a passion for research and archiving and detail. And his Ad Money Machine basically gives you interesting and valuable ads, ranging over the past 100+ years of direct marketing… plus Lawrence’s expert commentary on the why and how and who and who else behind each ad.

It’s as good of a source for marketing insight and inspiration as I’ve been able to find.

Ad Money Machine costs $97/month. You can go sign up for it now. But maybe, probably, you’re not ready to “go steady” with Lawrence based on just my quick and surface description of what he offers.

So I’d like to suggest a “coffee date.”

Lawrence has put together a guide called “How To Turn Fascinations Into Fortunes.” It gives you a perfect flavor for what Lawrence does – a collection of fascinating and effective ads from the past, all tied together with a common theme, along with Lawrence’s commentary and analysis, which you can’t find anywhere else on the Internet.

“How To Turn Fascinations Into Fortunes” normally sells for $97, the same as a month of Lawrence’s Ad Money Machine subscription.

But for the next day or so (the clock’s ticking), Lawrence is making this guide available to you, just because you happen to be a reader of this newsletter, for only $7.

Final word:

I’m not an affiliate for this offer. I don’t get paid whether you buy it or not. I can tell you I did buy this offer myself, for my own purposes, several weeks ago, before I ever had any plans on promoting it to you.

If you’d like to find out more about it, while Lawrence’s sizable discount is still live:

​https://bejakovic.com/fascinations​

How to offer discounts without discounting your offer

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I once went to buy a pair of RayBan sunglasses. When I went to pay, the woman at the counter leaned in conspiratorially.

“Would you like to buy this cleaning kit for your new sunglasses?” she asked.

Before I had a chance to tell her that in fact I work in direct marketing, and that she should try her useless upsell on somebody else, she continued:

“The cleaning kit is only 9.95 euro, but we have a special promotion, where if you buy it you get a 20% discount on anything in the store. That’s a 50 euro savings on your sunglasses.”

What happened next is what I believe they call “cognitive dissonance”:

The twin angels of Refusing To Be Upsold and of A Perfectly Rational Argument vied for supremacy of my soul.

After a brief but fierce struggle, the Angel of A Perfectly Rational Argument won out.

“Uhh… I guess I’ll take the cleaning kit?” I said, still trying to figure out how I was being scammed, and how this made any sense for the sunglasses store.

I never really did figure it out, except to think that maybe it allowed them to discount their sunglasses and make people feel like they were getting a bargain… without actually discounting their sunglasses.

I though of this this morning when, in my usual rounds of snooping on other marketers, I checked out Ryan Lee’s current offer.

I don’t really understand what exactly Ryan is selling — he’s helping people publish a “micro book,” whatever that is.

I do know that the cost for his 2-week “Micro Book Accelerator” is $895. Included in the price are a number of bonuses, one being a book cover designed by Ryan’s personal crack designer (“a $999 value”).

So far, so normal.

But then you get down to the bottom of the sales page, where the checkout links are.

There’s a full pay option for $895…

There’s a 3-pay for $319 per month…

And then there’s an option to “join and get the full MBX experience (only without the cover design) for a BIG discount (almost $600).”

I have no doubt that most people who join are joining Ryan’s full experience, cover included.

But I thought this last option was interesting:

A way to discount the offer… by not discounting the offer. By respecting the people who buy the full package, and by making everyone else a different offer, and a credible reason why that new offer is significantly discounted (that’s what connected this in my mind to the sunglasses story above).

Maybe you say this is just a downsell. Maybe. But I’ve never seen it done like this, and to me at least, it was new.

Anyways, since I very much like to take interesting ideas and apply them in this newsletter, I decided to put this one to work as well.

So if you like, you can now sign up to get my Simple Money Emails training (minus the swipe file and the bonus 7 Deadly Email Sins and Quick and Dirty Emails trainings) at a significant “Perfectly Rational Argument” discount from the usual $197 price.

This new offer is only $77, $120 off the price that the complete Simple Money Emails program sells for.

Since this is an experiment, and kinda makes me uncomfortable, I am restricting it to only the first 20 people who take me up on it. And one way or another, I will close down this offer this Saturday at 8:31pm CET.

If you want the “Perfectly Rational Argument” discount, here’s where to take me up on this new offer while it’s still live:

https://bejakovic.com/sme77/

How to 3x your readership and give the right people an excuse to say hi

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A couple weeks ago I sent out an unusual email using my Most Valuable Email trick.

I got a response to that from a former client/partner, the owner of a successful direct marketing agency, somebody who had at one point paid me a sizable monthly retainer to advise on emails and advertorials. He wrote:

===

At first, I thought the [censored] was just a gimmick and part of your email strategy.

But then I wasn’t sure (new CK account and all that).

Finally, on my 3rd read I figured this was actually you being clever and not an issue with your CK setup.

What it DID do is make me pay attention. (Been a loooooong time since I read anyone’s email THREE times).

So I’m voting for “brilliant” vs “haha mistake!”

Also, using this as an excuse to say hi. Hope all is good.

You still doing the coaching gig?

===

The [censored] bit above was my use of the MVE trick in that email.

It’s a new form of Most Valuable Email, one I have started playing with from time to time.

It’s still the same old Most Valuable Email trick, but applied in a new way, one I wasn’t comfortable doing before.

It’s getting results like the above:

People paying more attention… leaning in more… even rereading my emails 3x… and reaching out to reopen dropped business conversations.

If all this sounds abstract, it’s probably because you don’t know what my Most Valuable Email trick is.

You can get it below and find out.

I also have a disappearing bonus to motivate you to act now. The disappearing bonus is simply an explanation of my new way of using the MVE trick, like in the email that drew the response from the agency owner above, and how you can do this too.

If you’d like this disappearing bonus, here’s what to do:

1. Get my Most Valuable Email training at the link below

2. Send me an email by tomorrow, Wednesday Sep 25, by 8:31pm CET, saying you want the disappearing bonus. (After that, no bonus.)

And if you already have Most Valuable Email?

This disappearing bonus is of course open to you too – but the same deadline applies.

Here’s the link to get Most Valuable Email:

​https://bejakovic.com/mve/​

P.S. You might say, “Oh but I want my copy to be crystal-clear like glass, and not to require rereading three times.”

There is something to that.

At the same time, I personally don’t ever want to make what I write scrollable, skippable, and disposable.

If what I write makes people stop, scratch their head, read all the way to the end, reread, I’m good with that.

And in terms of results generated:

Six months ago, the agency owner above and I were talking about working together again.

At that time, I had just started as a coach in Shiv Shetti’s PCM mastermind, and I didn’t have the time to take on a new project.

The new-style MVE email above got the agency owner to reach out and pick up the thread of that conversation… a win in my book, particularly since, as of last week, I am no longer working with Shiv’s PCM mastermind.

Pay-what-you-want for a new business opportunity for copywriters

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Last year, I promoted an unusual offer, called ClientRaker, by Steve Raju.

Steve was once a whizbang software engineer, who reinvented himself as a successful direct response copywriter, and who then reinvented himself as an AI consultant.

Steve now charges big businesses good money to tell them how to better use AI. But he does more than that.

Steve is actually using AI to set up commission-only deals with businesses that get tons of lead flow. He sends his little AI minions to reactivate the dormant leads of these businesses, and he gets paid on performance, in amounts that would make a Bond villain take note.

Steve hasn’t put on any kind of training since last year’s ClientRaker — he makes his money in different ways. But this next Wednesday, at 10am Pacific, Steve is putting on a workshop called the Word Is Not Enough (he has a habit of naming offers after Bond movies).

Steve announced this new workshop by teasing some of the content:

* Why most traditional high-ticket offers don’t make sense anymore in the age of AI

* Why most service providers are struggling nowadays

* What you should pivot to

* What hands down the best offer at the end of 2024 actually is

* All the tools you need to offer that

* How to outsource it if you can’t be bothered to do even that

* How to structure deals for the very highest return

I am vaguely interested in learning more about how to use AI.

I am significantly more interested in learning about hot new business opportunities.

I am very interested in hearing Steve talk about what he is doing, particularly how he is positioning himself, how he is adapting to the current market, and how he is finding and structuring new deals.

The copywriting world tends to attract smart people who think different. But there are few copywriters I know who think like Steve does, and who have his credentials for smarts (the man was a legit child progidy, I mean, prodigy).

Steve’s training next week is pay-what-you-want. I’ve signed up, and I’ve paid the suggested $47.

I would like to invite you to sign up as well. I’ll even throw in a bonus, which I’m calling The Secret of the Magi. (If Steve likes to name offers after Bond movies, I name mine after Robert Collier books.)

I don’t know the details of what-all Steve will share in his workshop. But I imagine if you get a new offer you can make to businesses, you will need businesses to make the offer to.

My Secret of the Magi bonus will tell you just one secret related to that — how to open up conversations with people you don’t know, even if they are busy, even if they are rich and successful, and even if they are way above you in status.

Of course, The Secret of the Magi will not work in 100% of cases.

But after observing other people cold contacting me… and after spending this past summer cold contacting a bunch of other people… I’ve had one big takeaway for how to open the door to conversations that can lead to those business partnerships.

I will tell you this takeaway, illustrate it with a few examples, and give you specific instructions on how you can apply it too.

All that inside my Secret of the Magi, which is yours, if you sign up for Steve’s workshop and forward me your receipt by tomorrow, Friday Sep 20, at 12 midnight PST.

Sign up after that, or forward me your receipt after that, and you will be in for Steve’s intriguing workshop, but you won’t get no bonus.

If you wanna get both, the time is now:

​https://bejakovic.com/the-word-is-not-enough​

3 takeaways from my long-gone MyPEEPS promo

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For much of this month I’ve been promoting Travis Speegle’s MyPEEPS course as an affiliate. My promo finished two days ago in a flurry of emails that left me in a kind of mental blackout.

As a result, yesterday I ended up writing an email that made zero reference to the promo.

Today though, I sat down and made a list of 10 takeaways for myself from this promo. I want to share three that might be of interest to you:

#1. Who bought?

I sat down and looked at the people who ended up taking me up on this offer. Most of them fell into one of the following categories:

– People who sell others info about how they sell others info (no hate, I count myself among this group)

– Copywriters with niche lists outside copywriting

– Service providers looking for a fountain of steady clients

– People with existing businesses who are getting leads in some other way but want more/steadier/easier

– Service providers looking to package up knowledge into an offer that they can sell to a list

I’m sharing this list because it might be interesting if what you do is similar to what I do.

Or maybe this list can simply remind you that it’s a good idea to sit down and look over people who are buying from you, and see what they have in common.

It’s eye-opening, and it can help with your positioning, your offers, and your lead gen.

#2. Ac-cent-tchu-ate the negative and forget about the positive

It’s a well-worn fact that human brains love to focus on the negative and largely ignore the positive. That’s why typical copywriting advice is to dig in on the pain.

But copy advice is not what I have in mind here.

Instead, I want to show you how this “ac-cent-tchu-ate the negative” stuff applies to me as well.

At one point last week, I sent out an email asking people their objections to buying.

Fine. I got some useful info in response to that email, and it probably helped me drive in a few more sales.

But at the same time, I forgot to do something much much more important.

And that’s to follow up with people who were buying, and ask them, why? What really did it? What was the main thing that got them?

Because it’s much better to focus on the white hot core of the star of desire… than to collect motes of interest, far away, in cold outer space.

#3. Improvisation is inadequate

Yes, it’s a good idea to test out new approaches to things. But testing needs to be done against a core of what’s known and proven. Otherwise, odds are good you descend into chaos. Free jazz… and frankly I hate free jazz.

More specifically, it’s smart to follow a proven format for your promo structure, your offer, your bonuses.

This also applies to copy angles — before, during, and after the promo.

In fact, that’s why I’m writing this post-promo email, highlighting lessons learned, even now, two days after the promo ended.

Because I’ve noticed repeatedly that this is the type of email I always make time for, following email promos by other people with online businesses.

I imagine it’s interesting and valuable for my audience also. Not just because I share takeaways from personal experience… but because this kind of email wraps up an intense period of promotion, and puts a kind of cap on it.

So there you go. Three takeaways from almost two weeks of emailing.

If you took me up on my MyPEEPS offers — well, you’re inside Skool already, and I’m there to help you.

If you didn’t take me up on MyPEEPS and the bonus I was offering, then maybe you found this email insightful in some way.

And in case you were not interested in the core promise of list growth… maybe you’d be interested in conversion? In making sales to your list? In a simple mechanism to take leads from inside your email software, and turn them into buyers inside your cart software?

That’s what my Simple Money emails course is about. For more info on that:

​https://bejakovic.com/sme/​

Who wins the fight: Viral posts or paid traffic?

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I’ll tell ya, or actually, I’ll defer to a person with more authority on the matter:

Russell Nohelty.

As I wrote once last week, Russell is a bestselling author of fantasy books and comics. He also writes about the business of writing, and he runs Writer MBA, a membership program to help writers make more money.

Over the past 6 months, Russell spent $30k on paid ads to beef up his email list, which now stands at over 70,000 subscribers.

Russell and I did a call last Monday about his experiences spending all that money on ads.

On the call, Russell said something interesting — that advertising democratizes virality. Says Russell, advertising allows people who were not “blessed by the magic audience fairy” to build an audience for their work.

Sounds great, right?

Except… do you really wanna go viral? Here’s another thing that Russell said:

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I have never heard somebody say, “I went viral and got all the best people subscribing to me!”

It’s always some version of “Wow, lots of bigots in the comments who hate everything about me.”

If you are attracting the wrong crowd organically, you could end up in a way worse place than running ads. I know because I’ve been there.

Both are bad and both are good. The difference is the quality of the traffic source, how you nurture the leads you generate, and whether you are paying in time or money.

===

This isn’t about trumpeting paid traffic over organic traffic, or vice versa. The point is simply this:

Where you get your subscribers matters… how you get them matters… what you promise them matters… how you treat them when they’re on your list matters.

This is not any kind of inspirational woo-woo, but very practical dollars-and-cents calculus, borne out by sales, spam complaints, and the number of interesting or annoying reader replies.

And this is one of the reasons why I liked Travis Speegle’s paid list-building approach, the one he teaches in his MyPEEPS course, which I’ve been promoting all week long.

Travis’s system is not about paying to inflate your subscriber count with people who hate you or never want to hear from you. It’s also not about getting the cheapest traffic simply because it’s cheap.

Instead, Travis’s approach is about building a quality list, with paid ads, sustainably, with the goal of having a valuable relationship with the people on that list for the long term. That in fact is why the course is called MyPEEPS, and not “8-Figure A-List Media-Buying Secrets.”

The deadline to get MyPEEPS is tonight at 12 midnight PST, less than 12 hours from now.

The reason to get MyPEEPS before then is my Shotgun Messenger bonus — my personal support and insight as you work through MyPEEPS and implement it to grow your own list.

As an extra bonus, I’m also including the call on which I interviewed Russell Nohelty about his experiences with paid traffic to grow his personal brand…, as well as a series of articles that Russell wrote on the topic, which are normally reserved for his paid subscribers.

If you’d like the full details on MyPEEPS and my bonus offer, or if you want in before the deadline strikes:

​https://bejakovic.com/shotgun​

Getting hooked on the hamster wheel

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Back in 2009, before social media really transformed the world, a Dutch scientist named Johanna Meier set up revolutionary experiment in her back yard:

She put an open cage in an ivy-tangled corner of the yard. Inside the cage, she put some food pellets and a running wheel. She then trained a motion-activated camera on the scene.

Sure enough:

Wild mice started arriving during the night. They entered the cage to get the food pellets. But they also tried out the running wheel — and they got hooked.

Meier recorded more than 12,000 different animals getting on the running wheel night after night. Her point was proven — even perfectly wild, free animals would willingly enter a cage and run around on the wheel, going nowhere.

Once the mice got habituated, Meier could even take the treats away. The mice still kept coming night after night, to run around in place, doing what they had gotten used to.

I bring this up because in the 15 years since that experiment, social media has often unflatteringly been compared to a hamster wheel.

I’ve never really used social media so I can’t say if that’s true.

But maybe it resonates with you. Maye you have experience getting lured into social media by the promise of treats — a huge free audience — only to have the treats pulled away from you, while you keep running in place.

If so, I’d like to present an alternative:

Building up a modest, engaged, scalable email list by paying for ads. Sure, ads cost money. But so does the wasted opportunity of weeks, months, or years of running in place on social media, without getting anywhere.

If this speaks to you, I’d like to remind you of the deadline to get MyPEEPS, tonight at 12 midnight PST.

In a food pelletshell, MyPEEPS shows you how to build your email list with paid traffic — putting in $10-$15, and getting out 10-15 new subscribers a day — so you can in time have a proper audience of people who want to read what you write, and buy what you sell.

Plus, the free Shotgun Messenger bonus I’m offering gets you my direct help and input as you actually put the MyPEEPS process into practice.

If you want the full details on that, or to sign up for before the deadline strikes:

​​https://bejakovic.com/shotgun​​

How to stop being seen as a milquetoast

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Today is the last day to sign up for MyPEEPS and get my free “Shotgun Messenger” bonus. You can expect me to send many more emails about this offer today. And on that note, I wanna tell you a quick story of rejection:

I first discovered marketer Travis Sago thanks to a podcast interview back in 2019. I was super impressed by everything Travis said, and so I got on his email list right away.

Travis had an automated welcome email that ended with, “I’m curious… What business are you in?”

I wrote back. I told Travis that I loved his interview, I gave some specifics of what I loved, and I said my business was copywriting.

And what I got back was… nothing. No smiley face, no “good on ya,” not a single word.

I figured then and in all these intervening years that either Travis didn’t check the reply email regularly, or he simply didn’t think me important enough to reply to.

Then this very morning, Sunday September 15 2024, I was listening to a short recording that Travis did for the people in his community.

Travis was talking about how persistent he is in following up with his prospects, particularly the “movers and shakers.” And he said the following:

“In fact, in my business, if a copywriter reaches out to me, my typical M.O. is not to respond back. I wanna get rid of all the milquetoasts, because I’m looking for people who want to get things done in the face of a challenge.”

Point being:

You might know that followup can get the attention of those who forgot about you or never even noticed you.

You might also know followup can build more desire.

But I imagine you never thought of followup as a kind of proof element.

And yet it is. Because who follows up?

People who believe in what they are doing and selling, including themselves.

The milquetoasts drop away.

So send regular emails, preferably daily… and if you got a deadline coming up, send a bunch.

You’ll catch people’s attention… you’ll remind them of what they want and how you can help… and you will convince them you have something worthwhile, just because you keep following up about it. And now, since you’ve read this email, you are a few minutes closer to the deadline for my MyPEEPS offer. The deadline will come in a flash, tonight at 12 midnight PST.

In a nutshell, MyPEEPS shows you how to build up your email list with paid traffic — putting in $10-$15 and getting out 10-15 new subscribers a day — so you can in time have a proper audience of people who want to read your emails and buy from you.

And the free Shotgun Messenger bonus I’m offering gets you my direct help and input as you actually put the MyPEEPS process into practice.

If you want the full details on that, or to sign up for before the deadline strikes:

​https://bejakovic.com/shotgun​