Promotions

Announcing: Done-for-you promo strategy (and implementation)

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Last week, I was working on the promo strategy for a direct response business that:

1. Has one core offer, at $4k and $12k tiers

2. Sends daily emails

3. Makes north of $150k per month.

So far, so good. ​​But then it gets less good:

1. Every day, they promote this one same offer to their list, and there’s nothing about the offer that changes or disappears, so there’s no incentive to act now

2. The list is saturated with the one offer, and even though 33k people get the emails, a negligible part of that $150k per month actually comes via email

3. People on the list stop reading after a while since all the emails take the form of, “Hey look at how well this client is doing, buy now.”

The promo strategy I came up with should help with all that.

​​Basically, instead of sending daily emails to promote the same tired offer, using email copy that the list has been trained to ignore…

… the idea is to come up with a time-limited, exciting, one-off offer… a credible reason why that offer is only being made now… and emails that people will actually read and act on.

We’ll see how well it works. But I’m optimistic.

While working on this promo strategy, I had a true Obvious Adams moment.

I like designing these promo strategies. Plus it’s definitely valuable for the businesses who run these kinds of promos.

Of course, results depend on the size of the list is, the relationship with the list, and what’s being sold.

But I’ve seen a promo go out to a list of 5k people, selling a $1k offer, and bring back $35k in sales over 4-5 days.

I’ve seen a promo to 6k people, selling a $6k offer, and bring in $18k over a week.

Hell, even when I’ve run promos to my own tiny list, the one you’re reading now, and sell offers for a few hundred bucks, I typically bring in $12k-$16k in sales in 3-4 days.

So I had a thought. If I like coming up with the strategies for these promos… and if they are valuable… why don’t I offer them to the people on my list?

Let me try it now. If you:

1. Have an email list, and get at least 1,000 opens when you send an email…

2. Have an offer that you have successfully sold before for $500 or more…

… then my offer is to design a promo strategy for you. Basically, I’ll tell you what to sell… when to sell it… and how to sell it, in order to make a bunch of sales over a limited period of a few days, via email.

I’ll tell you how to repackage and reposition what you already have, so you don’t have to create whole new products… I’ll give you the outlines of email copy to get your readers’ emotional pendulum swinging… and I’ll sprinkle in some human psychology to get people on your list to act now.

And then what?

Well, if you write your own copy for your own business, you can take this promo strategy and turn it into a promo within a few hours. I’ll gladly coach you along the way to make sure it turns out well.

Or…

If you have a copywriter working for you, you can hand this strategy to your copywriter, crack the whip, and have the copywriter do it all for you. Again, I will gladly coach your copywriter directly to give you the best chance the promo is a success.

Or…

​If you neither write your own copy nor have a copywriter, I can get a skilled and hungry copywriter for you, working on commission only.

And who knows, maybe I myself will offer to do the entire promo for you, also on commission only, if your situation sounds particularly promising (kind of like business I described up at the top).

As you can imagine, I will not be doing hundreds of these promo strategies — they take time, and I got plenty of other obligations. But I’m willing to do a couple over the next few weeks.

​​If you are interested, then it makes sense to act now. Hit reply, tell me who you are in case I don’t know you, and we can take it from there.

Sideways webinar

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This morning, I was preparing for the PCM hot seat, which is my main task within Shiv Shetti’s PCM mastermind.

Each week, I get on a call with a different copywriter. I advise the copywriter on a new email promo he or she is writing on a performance-only basis for some client or another.

The guy I’m talking to today has managed to bag a great client — a 41k-subscriber email list, lots of success stories, a high-priced offer, and marketing that’s already working, including a front-end webinar.

This is the first email promo the copywriter will be writing for this client.

So one of my suggestions to him was to minimize his work, and maximize the odds of success for both himself and his client. For example, just take the existing webinar, which is already working, and turn that into an email promo.

That’s hardly a new idea.

It goes back at least 20 years, at least back to Jeff Walker and his Product Launch Formula.

I can’t say for sure, but PFL might be the most successful and influential Internet marketing training of all time? At least if you look at the number of customers, the sales generated by those customers, and the resulting money that Jeff has made from it.

At heart, PFL is based on a very simple idea, and that’s the “sideways sales letter”:

​Take a working sales letter and turn it on its side, so it becomes a series of emails that you can send out as a time-limited promo. Chan-ta-ta-chan! Money in the bank, where yesterday there was none.

Of course, it doesn’t just have to be the sideways sales letter. It can be the sideways webinar, like I told the PCM copywriter today. Or it can be the sideways 1-on-1 sales call. Or the sideways stage presentation. And so on.

If you have a sales message that’s working for you in one long-form format, odds are good it will work as an email promo as well. In the words of Jim Rohn and John Bejakovic:

1. Have something good to say
2. Say it well
3. Say it often
4. Say it in a new format
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Now let me ask you:
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Do you have a working webinar?

​​Does the idea of turning it sideways, and making extra sales sound attractive?

​​Do you have zero interest in doing this work yourself?

​​If so, hit reply, and let’s talk. Maybe I can get it done for you.

The green beret of direct marketing calls out my sloppy campaign

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For the past week, I’ve been promoting the Daily Email Fastlane workshop I’m putting on this Thursday… in a slightly sloppy way.

I have been promoting this workshop without a promise, without a sales page, without even any detail about what you’re getting or how it’s going to look.

And yet, I’ve made a solid number of sales so far. There may be a lesson there.

But now, the deadline is nearing. In fact, the deadline is tomorrow, Wednesday May 22, at 8:31pm CET, less than 24 hours from now.

This means it’s time to stop fooling around.

Fortunately, last night I got a buffet of questions from Dr. Ivan Carney.

Doc Carney has been described by people in the know as a “green beret of direct marketing and a consummate direct mail mind.”

He was not sold by my promotion over the past week. And he wrote me to ask:

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John, I’m unclear

Is this a one time deal or a weekly deal?

How long is it going to be in this session?

Is there going to be a Q and A?

Do we get any PDF’s or formulas?

This is a group setting right?

Is there a guarantee?

What if I don’t do daily emails?

What if I do daily emails and they haven’t worked?

Is this easy?

Can I do it?

Will it work for me?

Dr. Carney 🙂

===

I’m not sure whether Doc Carney has these questions for real, or if he’s just trying to point out the gaps in my marketing. In any case, I’m grateful for his message.

As for his questions, which might be of interest to you as well:

1. Daily Email Fastlane is a one-time workshop, delivered live on Zoom, this Thursday, hopefully with a live audience though that’s yet to be proven. (There will be a recording and some people have written me to say they won’t be able to attend live.)

2. The workshop will last between an hour and as long as it takes to cover the material I want to share and to answer questions that come up.

​​I’m guessing around 2 hours total but I’m willing to stay as long as even one person in audience, should there be one, remains standing.

3. There will be no PDFs, formulas, magic incantations, charms, amulets, or fairy dust given away as part of this workshop.

​​I will however share practical information and aim to inspire you to actually go out and apply it to your own daily emails for your own personal brand.

4. There is no guarantee for this workshop, beyond the fact I guarantee that I have and will continue to put in work to make it useful and entertaining for you.

5. If you don’t do daily emails, then ask yourself whether you can see the value in sending emails daily to an audience that’s come to know, trust, and perhaps even like you a little, however grudgingly.

If the answer is no, then this workshop is not for you.

If the answer is yes, then this workshop might be for you. I will share ideas and techniques to help you get successful with sending daily emails for your personal brand, even if you have tried doing so before and all that happened was a loud explosion with some black smoke seeping out.

6. “Is this easy?”

It’s as easy as paying me $100 and showing up to a Zoom call.

7. “Can I do it? Will it work for me?”

Let’s see. The payment link below has worked for a bunch of other people so far. I believe you too can successfully use it, as long as you act before the deadline.

Maybe try it out for yourself now? Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/daily-email-fastlane

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.