Promotions

Waiting list hell

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Last May, I started a waiting list for a group coaching offer I was planning to run.

I promoted the waiting list with a few weeks’ worth of emails.

I hoped to use the waiting list to effortlessly fill 5 spots in the planned group coaching program.

But when I opened up the cart, a grand jumbo total of two people signed up.

I ended up canceling the group coaching program and refunding the two people who had bought.

This meant that, on top of the injury of having spent a few weeks sending emails to promote an offer that went absolutely nowhere, I also had the insult of having to pay Stripe a good amount of money to process the sizeable refunds.

Compare that to this past January.

I also created a waiting list.

I promoted the waiting list with a few weeks’ worth of emails.

I hoped to use the waiting list to effortlessly fill 5 spots in a group coaching program.

And that’s just what happened.

​​I opened up the cart. And with a couple of emails, I managed to fill the group coaching program. I even had people left over who were knocking on the doors but couldn’t get in.

What was the difference between those two waiting-list promos?

Actually there were lots of differences:

The offers promised in the emails were different… the actual coaching programs were different… the sales processes I used were different… the prices were different — the one that sold out was almost 2x the price of the one that flopped.

All that’s to say:

Are you using a waiting list for an offer right now, and is it giving you some stomach cramps?

Or have you used a waiting list for an offer before, and did it flop like an fish tossed onto the dock?

If so, then hit reply. I have an offer for you that you might like.

10 lessons from my CopyHour promo

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I finished my CopyHour promo last night. I can say it was a success.

I made a healthy number of sales and made good money. No, it’s not “buy a chateau in France” kind of money. But if I could do this every week, honestly I would.

I made a list for myself of 10 lessons learned from this promo. Maybe these lessons won’t speak to you at all. Or maybe you’ll find one interesting or valuable point inside. Here goes:

1. I was worried that there would be nobody left to buy. I mean it’s CopyHour. The program has been around for 12 years and 3,000+ people have bought so far. Plus, there’s a lot of overlap between Derek’s list and mine… plus, Justin Goff promoted CopyHour a couple months ago.

“Surely everybody knows CopyHour and has either bought or has decided not to buy…”

But I was wrong. There were people for whom CopyHour was genuinely new. And there were others who were swayed by my bonuses (more on those below).

2. As has happened before when I’ve promoted affiliate offers, people wrote in thanking me for turning them on to a good product or service they hadn’t heard of before. This is a strange phenomenon known as “people are happy to be sold as long as you sell them stuff with their best interest in mind, and you communicate that.”

3. I officially ended the promo with more subscribers on my list than I started with, in spite of sending 10 emails over 3 1/2 days. I’m ascribing that to the following…

4. The event felt lively. In fact it always feels lively when I’m promoting something I haven’t promoted before… when sales are coming in… when sales are coming in from people I had never heard from before, but who turn out to have been reading my emails for a year or more… when I’m pushing out lots of emails quickly… and when even people who are not interested in buying are writing in to comment on the event and the emails.

5. It feels great to promote a solid proven offer that really helps people. And when it feels great, I’m much more ready to work.

6. It feels really nice to promote an offer where I don’t have to do any delivery after the fact. I’m planning to take most of the day off today after I finish this email.

7. Bonuses: The fact that they added up to what CopyHour cost, and even a bit more, made it feel like buy-one-get-one-free to people. Some bought because of that, and wrote in to say so.

9. A few people wrote in to say they were persuaded to buy by a specific bonus among the five I offered. Lesson learned: Keep creating content, keep putting out offers, and even if those offers don’t become evergreen sellers like my Simple Money Emails program, they can still have value.

10. It’s often easier to write 10 emails than to write 1.

I had been really struggling writing emails the past couple days/weeks before promoting CopyHour.

I’ve been looking to make some significant changes in the way I run this newsletter and the kinds of offers I promote.

The result has been a lot of baggage in my head and feeling inhibited when I write and second-guessing myself. Promoting a solid affiliate offer and simply being able to write fun emails cleared that from my head, at least for this week.

All that’s to say:

If you bought CopyHour, thanks again for buying. I hope you will do the work and get the promised results.

And whether or not you bought, I hope my emails over the past few days were still entertaining and maybe even valuable.

I’ll be back tomorrow with something new. I have no idea what yet. But now, it’s time to go have coffee and go for a walk.

Get ready

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I’ve just had a large and rich breakfast, fit for an Olympian. Today is the last day of my CopyHour promo, and I had to make sure I had enough calories in me to run the extra laps around the daily email track.

Because the last day of an email promotion is where most of the sales come in.

​​And when I say most, I mean most — 40%-60% of total sales typically come in the last 12-18 hours, even if the promo has been running for a week or more.

That fact always blows my mind.

​​What equally blows my mind is that so many business owners and email marketers don’t take advantage of this, and don’t send out more emails on the last day to highlight that the deadline is here, that the deadline is near, and that missing it will cost their readers dear.

So that’s my advice for you today:

Get ready.

Have a big breakfast that last day of your promo. Send an alert, warning your readers that there will be more emails than usual. Make your content funny, or cute, or excessively valuable — whatever you need to do to get those extra emails out the door.

I’ll have more promo tips like that for you today.

Because I am closing my promo of CopyHour tonight at 8:31pm CET — less than 10 hours away. If you join CopyHour before then, using my affiliate link below, I’ll also give you access to the following five free bonuses, each of which I previously sold for good money:

#1. Copy Zone (price last sold at: $100). My 175-page, A-Z guide on the business side of copywriting, from getting started with no experience or portfolio, all the way to becoming an A-list copywriter. Only ever sold once before, during a flash 24-hour offer in March 2023.

#2. Most Valuable Postcard #2: Ferrari Monster (price last sold at: $100). A deep dive into a single fascinating topic — code named Ferrari Monster — which I claim is the essence of all copywriting and marketing. Get the Ferrari Monster right, and almost everything else falls into place.

#3. Copy Riddles Lite (price last sold at $99). A slice of my Copy Riddles program, proportionately priced. Try yourself against legendary A-list copywriters like Gene Schwartz, David Deutsch, and Clayton Makepeace — and in the process, implant new copywriting skills into your brain.

#4. Horror Advertorial Swipe File (price last sold at: $100). A zip file with 25 PDFs, featuring the original copy for 25 of my horror advertorials. These advertorials pulled in millions of dollars on cold Facebook and YouTube traffic, and sold everything from fake diamonds and dog seat belts, to stick-on bras and kids’ vitamins.

#5. 9 Deadly Email Sins (price last sold at: $100). 9 lessons distilled from my expensive and exclusive one-on-one coaching sessions with successful business owners and marketers.

When you add all those prices up, you get a total of $499 in free bonuses. This happens to be more than CopyHour currently sells for.

Again, the deadline to get these bonuses is tonight, 8:31pm CET. If you want ’em, you’ll have to join CopyHour before then.

For more info on that, take a look at Derek’s writeup of how CopyHour works:

https://bejakovic.com/copyhour

P.S. If you do join CopyHour, write me and say so. Also write me in case you already have bought via my affiliate link. The affiliate portal only lets me see the first name of who’s bought and not the email. So write me and say you bought, and I’ll send over your bonuses.

Announcing: Secret demand in your list

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As I’ve been teasing for the past week:

This Friday, I will hold a live presentation about how to unlock secret demand in your email list.

Once you can do this, then you can pull an extra $5k, $15k, $50k from your list — depending on who exactly you’ve got on there. And you can do it again and again, whenever you like.

I’m limiting this training to business owners. If you’re curious why, I might talk about that in the future. For now, just ask yourself:

Do you have a business?

Do you have an email list?

Does the promise of unlocking secret demand in your list sound appealing?

If so, then reply to this email. I’ll send you the full details about this training. And you can then decide if you’d like to join me on Friday.

My supplement stack

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I’m not sure why you’d want to know. But after 15+ years of obsessing over my health, and researching and experimenting with dozens of different, often exotic and possibly toxic supplements, here is my current daily supplement stack:

* Magnesium, zinc, and vitamin D (because they are important and I probably don’t get enough)

* A multivitamin and some fish oil (because why not)

* A teaspoon of glycine and a capsule of NAC (because there’s good science showing this combo actually reverses many hallmarks of aging, at least if you’re getting old)

* A teaspoon of creatine (because it helps increase energy production in both the body and the brain, and God knows I need that)

I’m sharing my supplement stack for two reasons.

Reason one is that I’ve found I like to read stuff like this in other people’s marketing-related newsletters. It makes no sense, and yet it’s there. Maybe you’re the same.

Reason two is that opening this email with my supplement stack allows me to seamlessly, like a silky fox, transition into talking about my supplement theory of email marketing.

Yesterday, I sent out an email that promoted my Copy Riddles program. I made one sale of Copy Riddles as a result, at $997. I’m actually very happy with that.

Because I gotta admit:

That’s hardly the norm. Most times that I send out a regular, daily, broadcast email to promote a familiar offer like Copy Riddles, I don’t make any sales.

As a result, I’ve come to think of daily emails that promote existing offers — buy it today, buy it tomorrow, buy it whenever — like supplements.

Yes, such daily emails will make sales. But the fact that people can buy the offer today, or tomorrow, or the month after, means such sales are unpredictable and rare.

That’s why I say such emails are supplements. Nice to have, but you can’t live off ’em. Instead, you gotta live off proper nutrition.

In email marketing terms, proper nutrition means a regular diet of email-based promotions – time-limited events that get people to ACT NOW.

This coming Friday, I will hold a live training about such promotions for a small group of business owners who have a list.

If that’s you, then my promise is that on this training, I’ll show you how how to pull extra money from your list, even if you don’t create a new offer, and even if you’re not pumping in hundreds or thousands new names to your list every week.

Of course, if you do have an entirely new offer, or you do get a big influx of new leads, these promotional events work even better.

And for the record, these kinds of email promos are something I have quite a bit of experience with. Via my own list and offers… via clients clients I’ve worked with… and most recently, via the coaching I’m doing inside Shiv Shetti’s mastermind, where I strategize on a new such promotion every week.

Maybe you’d like to benefit from my experience, and shortcut your path to a healthy and nutritious email list. If so, then read my email tomorrow, because I’ll have more info on Friday’s training.

Influence the format of my new promo training

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Very briefly:

I got a good number of replies over the past 24 hours. People wrote in to express interest in an idea I floated yesterday. A new training, on how to regularly run profitable email promotions to your list.

To everyone who replied, thanks for saving me from the dreaded multi-level marketing fate that was waiting for me.

Since there’s interest, I’ve decided I will put on this training within the next 10 days.

What I have not yet decided is the exact format for it.

You can influence that. Read the questions below. And in case you find yourself saying yes over and over, then write in an tell me so. My questions to you are:

Do you have a business?

Do you have an email list?

Do you want to learn how to create new email promotions for your own business regularly?

In other words, do you want to learn how to pull out an extra $10k, $20k, $50k from your list on demand — terms and conditions apply?

Do you even want my direct, one-on-one hand-holding and help, as you strategize and execute the first of these email promotions?

If so, then reply to this email, and tell me you’re interested. And please do so today, because by tomorrow I will have the details fixed in fast-drying concrete. Thanks in advance.

Do you want my help creating an email promotion for your business?

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Today is April 1st.

​​I was going to try to “fool” you by saying I am getting into multi-level marketing. That’s on the back of a reader reply I got last week. A reader surreptitiously tried to recruit me into her own MLM organization with:

Life-Changing Products!
Breakthrough Marketing System!
Huge Compensation Plan!

Fortunately for you, I’m about as humorous as a rock. So there will be no fooling today.

Instead, I have a 100% serious and honest question for you. I’ll write an email about this question tomorrow as well. I want to make it clear this is not some dumb April Fools stunt.

As you might know, I now have a role as hot seat coach in Shiv Shetti’s PCM mastermind.

Each week, my task is to come up with a new strategy for a new email promotion for a new business.

It’s fun work. I’ve learned a lot in just my two months there. And that’s on top of my own previous experience, creating and running such email promotions. That experience is how I got this job in the first place, via a recommendation from Australia’s best copywriter, Daniel Throssell.

So my question to you is:

Do you have a business?

Do you have an email list?

Do you want to learn how to create new email promotions for your own business regularly?

​​In other words, do you want to learn how to pull out an extra $10k, $20k, $50k from your list on demand — terms and conditions apply?

Do you even want my direct, one-on-one hand-holding and help, as you strategize and execute the first of these email promotions?

If so, then reply to this email, and tell me you’re interested.

If I can get 5-10 qualified business owners who want this, I will put it on within the next 10 days.

And if not, then I really will be joining that MLM.

Save me from that fate. Get much more out of your list than you might think is possible. Hit reply, and tell me if you’re interested in this promotion training.

What’s coming up in the next few weeks

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Over the next few weeks, I will be promoting 3 affiliate offers. I’ve never promoted any of them before. But I have personally bought, consumed, or participated in each one. They are:

#1. An actual, legit business opportunity for copywriters. This is for you if you want to get new copywriting clients who pay you a lot of money, a lot more than you are used to getting for the same work.

#2. The best source of info if you are looking to start your own Morning Brew-like newsletter. I’ve endorsed this offer multiple times already. And now, I’ve reached out and gotten the good people behind this offer. I got them to provide a special and sizeable discount while I’m promoting it.

#3. A writing course for entrepreneurs who want to build an audience on social media. I’m going through this course myself right now. And when I promote it, I will aim to make it free for you.

I’m telling you what’s coming up because if one of the above offers can benefit you, I want you know. And if you have an education or business-development budget for yourself, so that you save up. Don’t fritter away your money on other offers, just because.

I’ll promote the three offers above in the next 2-3 weeks, though the exact dates are still not fixed.

Meanwhile, if none of these three offers speaks to you, you might like my Simple Money Emails training. It shows you how to make more money from your list today and keep your readers coming back tomorrow. For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

The extra something in Daniel Throssell’s BF 2021 campaign

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A few weeks before Christmas, I bought Daniel Throssell’s course Campaign Conqueror. I’m currently on my second pass through the course.

If you’re curious why I would buy Daniel’s course now, two years after he put it out, well, that’s something I might talk about in the coming weeks.

For now, let me just bring you back to November 2021, back when Daniel had his massively successful Black Friday campaign, which was the impetus for his creating this course.

I won’t rehash the history of that campaign — odds are, you know how it went down.

And if not, let me just say that it was an affiliate promotion/competition, involving a dozen email marketers (not me), including some with big guru status and much bigger lists than Daniel.

And yet, Daniel came out on top in that affiliate promotion. And not just on top, but I believe he made as many sales as all the other expert marketers combined.

Why was Daniel’s Black Friday 2021 campaign so successful?

My answer at the time was Daniel’s relationship with his list, and the quality of his offer. And no doubt, those were both a big part.

Daniel has a much more detailed answer inside Campaign Conqueror, including things I didn’t realize he was doing.

But there’s something extra I still haven’t heard anyone talk about, including Daniel in Campaign Conqueror. (I might be wrong, and I might have missed it. That’s why I’m on the second pass through Campaign Conqueror. But since this is my own observation, I’ll go ahead and share it.)

I first noticed this extra something in my own reaction during that 2021 event. It has been sitting in my head ever since. It’s influenced how I write emails inside promotions and during off-promo periods. It’s summed up in the phrase:

“Make it feel real”

The 2021 Black Friday affiliate event was a confluence of unusual, extreme events. There was genuine bad blood, public callouts, a never-before-seen and never-to-be-repeated offer on Daniel’s part, all in the middle of a time-limited, seasonal promotion, with everybody else in this small space observing, commenting, and firing shots back and forth.

This led to drama, yes. And to high stakes. But in my mind, it did something more.

Jay Abraham said in one of his trainings that the biggest reason sales fail to happen is that people are afraid of looking dumb. Of making a mistake. Of being played for a sucker.

Daniel’s offer and copy during that 2021 Black Friday promo cut through the usual manipulation techniques and marketing automation that people in this market normally experience. It made the event feel real. It made even skeptics, jaded and guarded, say, “Ok… it’s time to act.”

“Make it feel real” might sound vague to you.

If so, it’s worth looking at Daniel’s emails from then, and remembering the campaign if you witnessed it live, to note down what made this event a unique and real occurrence rather than a repeatable promotion that could be done every Black Friday.

And in case you’re wondering:

This “make it feel real” stuff is not something that’s only useful once in your career, when all the stars align.

It’s a valuable daily practice you can start right now.

For example:

Over the past week, I polled my list a few times. I asked if readers had any good offers they would like to promote to my list… I asked if readers would like to hire me for list management.

I got responses to both of those emails. But since I didn’t want to share anything publicly about those responses, I didn’t write any followup emails about either of these polls.

After couple days of this, I realized this is a problem. If I poll my list, and then never say anything about the results of that poll, my readers might start to feel some kind of disconnect… wonder if my emails are written by a living, thinking person… or suspect that they are interacting with a malfunctioning autoresponder.

That’s why, after I got an unusual number of replies to my email on Tuesday about the “zero-handclap unsubscriber,” I knew it was time to feature a bunch of those replies publicly.

So I did so in yesterday’s email.

Sure, featuring all those replies served the purpose of recognizing those readers, and of helping sell my Simple Money Emails course.

But the bigger reason in my mind was to make it clear that a live person is on this end of these emails, that I’m actually interacting and responding to readers, that I’m writing each email new every day, including today, Thursday, January 11 2024.

This is just one easy way to make it feel real.

Ultimately, what matters is that you keep the idea in mind, and that you do things consciously and regularly to make it feel real for your readers.

And now, time for a real offer:

I’m putting on a free training on Zoom. The plan is to do it in 10 days time, around Jan 21. But I will have the full info on the time and date tomorrow.

As for the content, this training will be an overview of how I do what I do: write emails about what interests me, get people to sign up to my list, buy stuff from me, hire me, recommend me, interact with me, in a way that contributes to other parts of my business and even my life.

I’ve done a lot of stupid things over the years with this newsletter, and it’s taken me a while to get to where I am.

So this training will be framed as advice to myself when I starting out this newsletter back in 2018, still a fresh and wriggling copywriter.

This training can be relevant to you if you work with clients right now, and you’re looking to create a second stream of income, or you want access to better clients, or more stability, or amazing opportunities you can’t even imagine now, or in case you simply want to do something for yourself rather than for others all the time.

I will be promoting this training over the next few days. If you want to join, you will first have to get on my list. Click here to do so.

Business owner asks for a copy critique and I relent out of curiosity

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A couple days ago, I got an email from a new reader of my 10 Commandments book. He had signed up to my list to get the apocryphal 11th commandment. And he wrote me to say:

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I LOVED the book, John. But I need more help with my copywriting. I write a 1,000 word blog post every day. I have also written 6 best selling books. Can you give me some guidance?

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I wrote back to clarify exactly what kind of guidance he meant. He replied to ask if I would critique some of his existing copy.

I winced. What a bind.

Because I don’t do copy critiques any more. And yet…

This reader had bought my book, and then he wrote in to say nice things about it. Plus, he’s written 6 best-selling books himself. Plus (something not obvious from his message above), his books are about B2B sales.

So he can write, he knows sales, but he still needs help with copy?

I got curious.

I asked him to send over one piece of copy. He did — an email promoting a $1,500 training program.

I won’t repeat my copy critique here. It wouldn’t make much sense or have much meaning for you.

All I will say is that, yes, there were problems with the copy. But there were more important problems with the actual promotion of this offer, and the way the promo was structured.

The stuff that I told him is stuff you would know by osmosis if you read my emails regularly… that you would take for granted… that you couldn’t imagine any other way, simply because it’s always there in every promotion I ever run, to the point that I don’t even think of mentioning it because it’s so transparent and so obvious to me.

And yet, here was somebody who knows sales… and who knows how to write… and yet who missed this stuff completely.

That’s not to rag on this guy. I’m sure he could make a big corporate sale where I would lay an egg. And the stuff I know wouldn’t be hard to teach him.

But the point remains:

Don’t underestimate the legitimate value of what you know. If you know copywriting and direct marketing, even at a basic level, you have real and valuable skills that business owners can profit from.

In 2024, I’ll create some kind of offer to help business owners structure their own successful promotions.

But 2024 is such a long way away.

For now, the closest thing I can offer you is an email I wrote this past summer, after finishing my promo of Steve Raju’s ClientRaker training.

It’s far from a complete how-to run-a-promo offer. Plus, I already shared this email a few days ago.

And yet, if you sell stuff online, via email, you might get an idea here to guide you to making more money. Here’s the link if you’re curious:

https://bejakovic.com/10-lessons-from-the-clientraker-promo/