Traffic

Why I didn’t build a list in the copywriting/marketing space

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Yesterday I mentioned how a while back, I followed Travis Speegle’s MyPeeps program to build up a new email list of dog owners via paid ads. To which a long-time reader wrote in to ask:

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Just curious, John, how come you didn’t build a list in the copywriting/marketing space? I’m using a different process myself that will help me build a list with a combo of content + paid ads so curious to hear how come you don’t try to grow your existing list.

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Good question.

First off, I frankly don’t want to build a “copywriting” list.

I haven’t primarily been writing about copywriting for, I don’t know, the past two+ years, ever since I stopped working with copywriting clients, and maybe before then.

I have been writing about persuasion and influence and psychology on the one hand, and online businesses and marketing on the other hand, and random other stuff that I find funny or interesting on the third hand.

But the real question is why not build up this existing list, and why start a new list instead?

I thought about it. I came up with a few reasons, ranked here from most logical and therefore least likely to be true, to least logical and therefore most likely to be true:

#1. I wanted to do a demonstration for the people inside the implementation group I ran when I first promoted MyPeeps. I didn’t want people who were building up their own lists to throw up their arms and say, “Of course you can do it because you have all these assets I don’t have!” A new list would make the demonstration cleaner and more persuasive.

#2. I was genuinely thinking to do this dog list as a side business of its own (I still think it could be viable). The list building implementation group I ran seemed like a good moment to kick that off.

#3. My simple opportunity-seeking mindset, which lives at the core of my person, and which says it’s more exciting to start something new and risky than to toil away on something familiar and proven.

#4. Because it’s simpler to run ads for a new, impersonal list than an existing, personal list. About that:

Like I said, I ran a 4-week implementation group for the people who bought MyPeeps when I promoted it as an affiliate.

In that group, I could see people running ads to build up their own personal lists.

AND IT DID NOT WORK.

Not because paid ads are a scam, or because Travis Speegle’s MyPeeps course doesn’t deliver.

Travis lays out very simple and yet very proven process to make paid ads work for list building, whether it’s your own personal list or an anonymous list of dog owners.

The reason it didn’t work for many people is because they refused to follow a crucial step in Travis’s process.

In fact, even when I pointed out to people they were skipping this crucial step, they nodded at me, smiled in appreciation of my looking out for them, and then turned around and continued to do exactly what they had been doing, which was skipping this crucial step.

What is this step?

Travis’s MyPeeps course describes is very well in module 1 and again in module 5.

If you would like to build up a new list, or to grow your existing list, you can find full info on Travis’s MyPeeps below:

https://bejakovic.com/mypeeps

P.S. If you have bought MyPeeps, forward me your receipt. I’ll share with you the recordings of the calls and my own notes that I initially did inside the implementation group last year.

And if you’ve already sent me your receipt, check inside the bonuses area that I gave you access to.

I’ve added a “DO YOU MAKE THESE MISTAKES IN PAID ADS FOR YOUR PERSONAL LIST?” document in there (very subtle, I know). It highlights the crucial step so many list owners are skipping when creating ads to promote their existing personal list, and explains how you can maybe avoid doing the same.

$10-$15/day to stop being a newbie

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For the past couple days, I’ve been fielding responses about my new “work alongside me” offer.

In short, I’ve launched a new list and I’m starting to grow it by paying for ads. I’m inviting people who want to follow the same process I’m following to work alongside me and to grow their own list.

Inevitably, I’ve gotten a few timid hand-raises from folks who consider themselves beginners, like the following message:

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I don’t actually have a list yet. But I am scouting for products at the moment, which I would like to promote as an affiliate.

Would this offer be relevant for me as a newbie?

I am starting this side venture in the hopes of replacing my 9 to 5.

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And the answer is…

Yes yes, of course! This offer’s PERFECT for newbies!! Just give me your money now, and we can talk about it later.

A little more seriously:

I followed up with the dude above. I wanted to know what exactly “newbie” meant to him. Turns out, he has been studying marketing and copywriting for a year+, buying courses, preparing to jump in for real.

The fact is, I do think that this “work alongside me” offer would be relevant to him.

But whatever I write now will seem self-serving, just as self-serving as my “yes yes, just pay me” rant above.

So I won’t write anything now.

Instead, let me share something I wrote almost six years ago, specifically on Dec 29 2018, in an email with the subject line, “The salutary effect of paying for traffic.” That email was about my campaign at the time to grow my alternative health list via Facebook ads, and the positive effect it had on me:

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Well, paying for traffic doesn’t have the same salutary effect [as making cold calls].

But it does make me want to write emails every day to these leads.

What’s more, it makes me want to write emails that get read and get people stirred up.

In other words, I’m no longer just writing for the sake of being able to say I’ve done it. Instead, I’m writing to make sales.

That’s both because I’m spending money on traffic now (rather than counting on an indefinite stream of leads from Google)…

And it’s also because it becomes a game — can I make back the money that I will spend on ads, so I can do this all over again on a bigger scale?

The weird thing is, this kind of sales-first writing is something I’ve been able to do for a long time — as long as I was writing for clients. But it took paying for traffic to get me to do it in my own project as well.

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I’d like to suggest that paying for traffic could have the same salutary and head-clearing effect on you, even if you are a newbie.

Does that mean this “work alongside me” offer will give you a side venture that can replace your 9-5?

Nope. It will only give you one thing, and that’s a paid traffic system to build you an audience.

That done, you will still need to find or create offers to promote. And you will still need emails to send to people, whether you write them yourself or get someone else to do it.

At the same time, will you be 1,000,000x more likely to do those things and actually succeed if you start paying to build an audience… than if you just keep paying for courses and preparing to jump in for another year?

I absolutely believe you will, for reasons that I wrote about in that email from 2018:

The fact you will be paying money (even $10-$15 a day is very motivating)…

The fact you will be able to see quickly if it’s working or not…

The fact that it will feel like a game you want to win.

Of course, ultimately, it’s your call and your decision.

But if you want to experience the salutary effect of paying for traffic, and get some real experience, which you can then flip over and over on a bigger scale, then maybe you’d like to get my help along the way?

That’s what this “work alongside me” offer is about. In case you’re interested, hit reply, and I can give you more information.

Just another one of my industry-leading insights in this email

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A couple days ago, I started receiving a gentle barrage of email notifications like this:

“The John Bejakovic Letter: A new contact has been added to your list”
“The John Bejakovic Letter: A new contact has been added to your list”
“The John Bejakovic Letter: A new contact has been added to your list”
…

I checked where all these “new contacts” were coming from.

It turned out to be a website that promotes itself as a discovery platform for newsletters. And sure enough, on the front page of the site, there was the “John Bejakovic Newsletter” with the following nonsense description:

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“The John Bejakovic Newsletter is not simply another regular publication; it is a vibrant, information-rich tool that provides a unique entryway to the corporate and commercial worlds.”

“Pros: John Bejakovic’s newsletter provides subscribers a tactical advantage in today’s fast-paced business environment by delivering industry-leading insights.”

“Cons: Persistent follow-up emails from John Bejakovic’s newsletter may be sent to subscribers who unsubscribe, and over time these emails may start to annoy you.”

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​​In case it’s not clear:

This has nothing whatsoever to do with this newsletter you’re reading now.

​​I’m guessing the above fluff was generated by AI.

And I’m guessing the “new contacts” who subscribed to my list were all bots — based on the email addresses, the associated first names that were put in, and the behavior of the contacts after subscribing.

So that’s the bad part, the skeleton that I trotted out of the closet and made dance at the top of my email. Now here’s the good part:

These bot contacts came via Sparkloop. I’ve written about Sparkloop before. It’s a newsletter-recommendation marketplace.

​​Other newsletters (and occasional scam websites, like the above) can find you on Sparkloop and send you newsletter subscribers you pay for.

Or don’t pay for — because Sparkloop allows you to set your own criteria for who is an engaged, worthwhile subscriber, including location or activity or your own intuition.

For example:

I deleted all the contacts that came via that newsletter discovery website, prolly close to 100. This won’t cost me anything, except a bit of time, which I’m trying to recoup by writing this email.

On the other hand, I have been getting a trickle of actual engaged readers via Sparkloop. (It’s only a trickle, because I’m not using the co-reg functionality, but am only accepting leads who were sent to my optin page.) ​​

​​I’m also using Sparkloop to grow my health newsletter, and I’m getting good results there.

Point being, you gotta keep an eye on Sparkloop, because it’s a shiba inu that will eat from the trashcan from time to time.

​​But if you’re willing to keep an eye on it, then it’s as close as I’ve found to an automated way to grow your newsletter with the kinds of leads you yourself want.

If you wanna try Sparkloop out, you can find it at link below. ​​Yes, that’s an affiliate link but it’s not likely to pay me anything — not unless you also decide to use Sparkloop to make some money via promoting other newsletters, which is a topic for another email. ​​Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/sparkloop

AI bros make $4.20, I make $0.36, it’s still a win

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A couple weeks ago, I read a mostly mindboggling email from Scott Oldford, who has been buying up newsletters and newsletter-related services.

Scott’s email was all about about an AI newsletter he bought recently for some undisclosed sum.

The acquired newsletter has 22,000 subscribers. Its creators have been running Facebook ads to get new readers, and paying $1.40 per new reader.

So far, so grim. But please pay attention to the next fact, because it’s remarkable:

That AI newsletter was making 3x that ad spend right at signup time, right when people opted in, without selling anything.

Did that last line make you pull down your glasses to the tip of your nose, and look at me with suspicion? It should have.

Direct response logic says that if you can acquire a customer at breakeven or slight loss, you’re doing well.

Granted, these newsletter subscribers aren’t necessarily customers, but they are a list of people who are potential customers, and they are certainly valuable as an audience in other ways.

Now let me repeat the rather shocking point again:

These AI bros are building that list of subscribers, not at a slight loss, not at cost, but actually getting paid 3x what they put in to acquire each new reader.

What tricky flamingos. How are they doing it?

Well, that’s my offer for you today. It’s called Sparkloop. It’s basically a network of coregistration partners.

If you’ve ever signed up for a Substack newsletter, you’ve seen this approach in action. Once you opt in, a window of newsletter recommendations pops up. “Would you like some more, sir?” it says. And there on the plate are 3 or 4 or 20 different other newsletters, which you can opt into with just a click o’ the button.

That’s what Sparkloop does as well, except it’s not limited to Substack newsletters only, but it can be integrated on almost any platform.

That’s how those AI bros were making 3x their ad spend right at optin time, without selling anything. They had Sparkloop installed, and they were recommending a bunch of other Sparkloop-network newsletters.

Now a word of disclosure:

I have been using Sparkloop myself. Its little window pops up when somebody signs up to my new health newsletter. I have made money from Sparkloop. But it’s nowhere close to what this AI newsletter is making.

The fact is, I’m not making $4.20 per new subscriber… but more like $0.36, at least on day 0.

Still, money is money, and Sparkloop is helping me offset the cost of ads I’ve been running.

Plus, Sparkloop allows you to promote newsletters inside your newsletter as well, which means that if you email regularly and promote other newsletters each time you email, you can hope to make a buck or two more per subscriber in the very first month.

So there you go. If you have a newsletter, and have nothing great to promote yet… or you’re simply looking for other ways to monetize your email list… then try out Sparkloop. I’ve done it, it works, and I’m happy to recommend it to others.

You can sign up for Sparkloop at the link below. Yes, that’s an affiliate link. Yes, I will get paid if you sign up. No, you don’t have to use this link, and no, I won’t ever know if you circumvent my link and go straight to Sparkloop and sign up there. But in case you don’t want to do that:

https://bejakovic.com/sparkloop

1-2 approach to reduce Twitter ad costs by 86%

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Adventures in paid traffic:

I’m running Twitter ads to grow my Morning Brew-like health newsletter. The same batch of ads in different ad groups, using different ways of targeting people.

Terrible results. The best I could do was targeting a bunch of keywords naturally connected to the topic of my newsletter.

New subscriber cost? $14.04. Scary.

I then went and looked at a bunch of profiles of people who signed up. Their Twitter descriptions, what they were sharing. It wasn’t health. It was investing.

So I created a new ad group, targeting investing keywords entirely unrelated to my newsletter.

New subscriber cost? $1.99.

The usual caveats apply:

The quality of any of these subscribers is not clear, since I haven’t tried selling anything to them yet beyond the optin. It’s not even clear if they will stay engaged and open my newsletter in case I sell ads in the future.

Still, if you’re running paid traffic for your newsletter, consider the above 1-2 approach. It might help you find entirely new, unexpected segments of the market that might be a good fit for what you do.

Also, if you are running paid traffic to grow your newsletter or email list, and you’ve spent $500 or more, write in and let me know. I have something you might like.

Guy rebuffs my attempt at cross-promotion

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A report from the trenches:

I’m working on growing my health email newsletter, which I launched a few months ago.

One part of what I’m doing is reaching out to other newsletters to offer to cross-promote. I’ve been contacting newsletters of a similar size to mine, who share some common elements with mine:

– sent out weekly
– news-related
– “proven” — make an emphasis on providing references or sources
– is made up of actual paragraphs of text that people read, rather than just a collection of links

I’ve had a few people take me up on my cross-promotion offer. But one guy, whose weekly newsletter is for people who want to “stay on top of the current issues and that like to read more than just bulletpoints,” was not interested in my offer. He wrote me to say:

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I don’t think this partnership would work out, basically because I’ve done it before and the clicks were very, very low. Also, I don’t think there’s a great overlap in the content of our two newsletters.

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As Dan Kennedy might say about that first reason, if we all stopped doing something if the first time was a fail, the human race would soon die out. There’d be no more babies born.

But what about that other reason? About content overlap?

It’s very sensible to only sell competitive duck herding products to competitive duck herding enthusiasts.

But most offers are not that one-dimensional.

The “world’s greatest list broker,” Michael Fishman, was once tasked with finding new lists to promote an investment newsletter.

Michael suggested a list of buyers of a product called Big Money Pro Golf Secrets. The publisher of the investment newsletter said, “We’ve tried golf lists before, they don’t work for us.”

Michael said, “No problem. It’s not a golf list. Think about who would buy a book called Big Money Pro Golf Secrets. I don’t care if it’s Big Money Pro Flower Secrets. Anybody who would respond to that language is somebody whose door we want to knock on.”

Point being, if you have something that’s not as narrow in appeal as duck herding, there are many dimensions along which you can expand your market, beyond the obvious topic or content or promise of what you’re selling. ​

​ By the way, Michael Fishman is somebody worth listening to. I’ve read and watched and listened to everything I could find online by the guy. I make a habit of occasionally searching the Internet to see if anything new has cropped up.

If you want a place to start, here’s a great interview that Michael Fishman did with Michael Senoff of Hard to Find Seminars:

https://www.hardtofindseminars.com/Michael_Fishman_Interview.htm

Free chocolate traffic and distribution model

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Yesterday morning, my friend Sam and I were sitting at a cafe terrace that hangs over the waters of Lake Lucerne. We were getting a coffee while waiting for a boat to take us down the lake, to the bottom of a big mountain, which we would attempt to scale.

Of course, this being Switzerland, we each got a little chocolate next to our coffees. Well, I got a chocolate, but for some unfair reason, Sam got two.

Our three little chocolates were all the same size. Later, at much higher altitude, we would find out they were also the same flavor. But each of the three chocolates had a slightly different design on the wrapper.

One was light blue and had a picture of a locomotive. That chocolate was advertising a “guest house and games paradise.”

The second chocolate was white with an elegant font. That was advertising a rentable space to hold events.

The third chocolate was also white but a bit more flashy in its font. That was advertising a “shopping restaurant.”

Since my mind has been entirely warped by thinking and writing about marketing every day, I noticed this and I thought about the underlying model. It’s this:

1. Take an expense for other businesses (for cafes, little chocolates next to each coffee)

2. Provide that thing for free both in terms of cost and effort and risk (the chocolate tasted good, and the design was classy)

3. Use the thing for traffic/distribution/advertising for your a product or service of your own choosing (“gasthof und spielparadies” on the wrapper)

You might say this is nothing special or unusual. But you can get creative.

For example, many people used to pay a few dollars a day to read the Wall Street Journal (1). Then some guys made a free email newsletter with the most important news of the past 24 hours (2). In between the news segments they also put in ads (3). The result was Morning Brew, which sold a controlling stake for $75 million a couple years ago.

Back in the Barcelona supermarket I go to, you can get free bubble gum (1 and 2) at the store, along with various other small items, if you download an app that tracks you and serves you ads for other products (3).

Then there’s the offer I made a couple months ago, to help businesses add in a “horror advertorial” into their cold traffic funnel for free (2) — a service I would normally charge a lot of money for (1) — if they would also insert an email into their welcome sequence to promote my new newsletter (3).

And finally, there’s an idea I’m planning for the future, to offer syndicated content (1) to businesses for free (2), as a means of advertising that same new newsletter I’m working on (3).

In other words, this simple little chocolate idea has broad applicability when you start to think about it.

But there’s a bigger point, too.

The bigger point is— well, I will talk about that tomorrow. No sense in jamming two good ideas into one email.

I’m approaching the Zurich airport as I write this. It’s time to leave this rainy but beautiful country. The train I’m on will be six minutes late in arriving, and the conductor just came alive on the PA to announce that shocking delay and to apologize in German, Italian, and English.

If you want to read my email tomorrow when it comes out, you can sign up for my daily email newsletter here.

How to reduce your business’s cost-per-lead by 80%

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Assuming that you’re running ads to get leads…

And assuming that you’re running ads, say on FB or Twitter, via your business’s page or account…

Then let me share something obvious, but maybe very lucrative.

​​It comes from Dan Krenitsyn, who did growth at places like BuzzFeed, The Information, and The Telegraph, and who now leads strategy at the product, content, and operations team at Meta/Facebook. ​​Dan says:

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This might not be relevant for everybody because I worked at more traditional media companies like The Information and Telegraph.

But we tapped into the idea that people follow people. They don’t follow media companies per se.

We started running pretty much all of our acquisition ads from writers’ personal Twitter accounts and Facebook accounts.

I don’t know if the platforms still allow you to do that. For a while, that basically reduced our CPLs by something like 80%.

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I don’t know either if the platforms still allow you to run ads like this. But the basic point stands:

It’s much easier and cheaper to get quality engagement if you sell yourself first, rather than if you sell a brand or a product first.

That’s not to say selling a brand or a product is not the right thing to do in certain situations.

​​But if you’re looking for organic growth, for cheaper paid growth, for easier sales, for an audience that will keep listening to you, even if you occasionally get lazy or falter in your message, then sell yourself first.

You might say it’s ironic I’m telling you to put yourself first in an email in which I say almost nothing about myself, share zero personal stories, and point to no status-building items from my own history.

Fair point. My only answer to that is what I already said above.

​​If you regularly put yourself first in your marketing — John Bejakovic daily newsletter, issue #1586 — then you can occasionally fail and it won’t matter. You can fail to tell people how great you are, and how important your message is, and that people should stay tuned because it’s only gonna to get better. And your audience will still read, listen, click, and maybe even sign up to your daily email newsletter.

Best resource for newsletter growth ideas

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A couple days ago, copywriter and business owner Will Ward, who was in Dan Ferrari’s coaching group at the same time as me, forwarded me an email from Quiet Light, an online business broker.

This email described — without naming it – a newsletter that’s for sale right now:

“Social good and transformation” space. 300,000 total subscribers. Paid subscribers totaling almost $50,000 per month in subscription revenue. Started in May 2020. On sale now because the owner is “eager to return to her previous endeavors.” Asking price? $2.55 million.

Those numbers and dates made me wonder where the hell I was in May 2020 and what the hell I was doing then. Well actually, I can tell you almost exactly.

Right around that time, in June 2020, I sent out an email, “Expert advice on how to start an email magazine,” in which I shared an interview with Alex Lieberman.

In 2015, Lieberman started Morning Brew, a daily email newsletter with a summary of the day’s business news.

By 2020, Morning Brew was making $13 million per year in ad revenue. Later that year, in October 2020, Lieberman sold a controlling stake in Morning Brew to Business Insider for $75 million.

Like I wrote in that June 2020 email, I’d been thinking of starting a Morning Brew for X newsletter for a while, where X would be some topic I’m personally interested in.

Had I done it then, maybe today I’d be sitting on a multi-million dollar asset.

I didn’t do it then, but I did do it this past January. I started another newsletter, Morning Brew for X. X is my topic — something I’m interested in, and that I’m not sharing yet publicly. I want to grow this newsletter first and build up a bit of a moat before letting thousands of other marketers in on what I’m up to.

Anyways, as part of starting my own Morning Brew-like newsletter, I discovered there’s already a galaxy of Morning Brew-like newsletters, including many Ponziish Morning Brew-like newsletters that tell you how to grow your own Morning Brew-like newsletter.

My eyes were opened.

For years, I’d been living in the world of direct response-based, daily, Ben Settle-like emails that sell supplements or courses or dog toothbrushes. Most of those daily emails look pretty much the same, sound pretty much the same, and function pretty much the same — a good income or a nice back end.

Meanwhile, you have this cousin industry of people building $2.55 million and $13 million and $75 million businesses, using nothing other than email newsletters.

I’m not ragging on Ben Settle or his ideas. Those ideas, both for growing email lists and for monetizing them, have made me and my clients a healthy amount of money. But I do want to point out how much other stuff is happening in the world of email right now, adjacent to the little Amish world that’s centered on direct response copywriting and marketing.

Of course, this other, Morning Brew-like world has its own Amish tendencies. Also, there are literally hundreds or maybe even thousands of newsletters to choose from right now, all telling you how to make it as a creator or creative entrepreneur or a newsletter operator.

What’s worthwhile in this new world?

I can only tell you the best resource I have personally found. That’s Chenell Basilio’s Growth In Reverse.

Each week, Chenell does a deep dive into the growth strategies of a newsletter businesses — “deep” as in, it takes her 40+ hours of research to produce one of these analyses. For some reason, she does all this work and then gives it away for free.

Some of these strategies Chenell identifies I know about already. Some are new to me. Some are strategies I have no interest in trying myself myself. Some I think are very clever, and they already have me moving.

For example:

You can sign up to Chenell’s newsletter using the link below. It’s an affiliate link — though I’m not getting paid anything.

If you are curious why I’m promoting Chenell’s Growth In Reverse, beyond that it’s a great resource on how to grow your newsletter, and why I’m using an affiliate link, even though I’m not getting paid, then sign up to read her next email, which will arrive this Sunday.

​​Or sign up just because you want to grow your own newsletter and you want new ideas on how to do that. In any case, here’s that link:

https://bejakovic.com/chenell

Well, that was a total disaster

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I was lying in bed last night by the open window, enjoying the spring breeze, listening to the radio. Suddenly, the music on the radio stopped and an urgent news announcement came on—

Two tectonic plates had just shifted somewhere off the coast of Western Australia.

As a consequence, a tsunami, a massive wave hundreds of meters high, was headed towards my little beach barrio of Poblenou, Barcelona, Spain.

I immediately jumped out of bed, threw on my Tommy Bahama shirt, and rushed to find Hector Campana, the main civil engineer in Poblenou. ​​”I have to warn Hector,” I said breathlessly, “we have to somehow survive this massive wave.”

I stormed inside Hector’s offices in an old colonial building by the waterfront. But he wasn’t there. One of his unshaven and red-eyed employees looked up at me.

​​”Hector?” he scoffed. “Go check the bar.”

“It’s a matter of life and death!” I said, and I ran to the bar on the corner.

Sure enough, Hector was there, slumped on a bench against the back wall, eyes closed, five empty bottles on the table in front of him.

I yelled at him to get up and get to work. He didn’t respond.

I grabbed him by the shoulders and tried to shake him awake. But he just slumped over even more, all the way off the bench, and down to the floor.

I took a quick look around to make sure nobody was watching, and I gave Hector a healthy kick in the ribs. This finally seemed to wake the brute up.

He opened his eyes a little, grumbled, and said in a drunken drawl:

“Engineers have detected multiple services degraded. At this time, delays in processing and intermittent errors may continue to be experienced until full resolution is declared. Mar 06 2023, 14:21 CST.”

That’s pretty much exactly how it went down last night.

​​The full story is that Daniel Throssell, somewhere off or on the coast of Western Australia, sent out an email to his list. This email had my ad inside, which I had paid Daniel $1,000 for.

As a result, a traffic wave, many hundreds of visitors high, hit my little online barrio.

But Hector Campana — aka ActiveCampaign, my email service provider — was drinking on the job, completely unable to deal with the incoming wave.

For the better part of yesterday’s afternoon, evening, and night, ActiveCampaign was passed out and unresponsive.

​​Broadcast emails took hours to go out. Autoresponder emails weren’t working at all. Neither were automations — and I had set up an automation to actually deliver the promised lead magnet to people who responded to my ad.

I spent about three hours last night fixing what I could by hand, and sending emails to people who had taken me up on the paid offer on the Thank You page.

​​During the night, ActiveCampaign gradually sobered up and emails finally started going out. Even so, I still had an hour or two of cleanup this morning.

So all in all, it was a total disaster. Really, the only salvageable thing was this:

Even though ActiveCampaign was passed out last night, it was at least registering (most) people who opted in. So as of right now, a little more than 14 hours after Daniel’s email went out, I have some 410 new subscribers thanks to my ad.

More importantly, I’ve also made 37 sales of the $100 offer I was making on the optin Thank You page.

25 of those sales came from people who were already subscribed to my list, and who opted in again via the ad to get the free bonuses I promised.

But I’ve also made 12 sales of the same $100 offer to entirely new subscribers.

Which means that — twelve times one hundred, carry the four — my ad in Daniel’s newsletter has already paid for itself. In fact, it paid for itself in just 3 hours and 9 minutes — that’s how long it took for the 10th purchase from a new subscriber to come in.

So a total disaster looked at from one angle… or looked at from another angle, an unqualified success.

Meanwhile, back in Poblenou:

Later today, I will organize an emergency Town Hall meeting to discuss the firing and possible lynching of Hector Campana.

Also later today, at 3:31pm EST to be exact, I will take down the paid offer I am currently making on that Thank You page.

While I promised Daniel that my lead magnet would only be available through the ad in his newsletter, this paid offer on the Thank You page isn’t part of that promise.

So whether you just got onto my list, or whether you’ve been on my list for a while, you can take me up on this offer. But you do have to be on my list. To get on there, click here and fill out the form that appears.