Getting Rich

Back 7 years in time, to my lean and hungry freelancing days

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Day 3 in Lisbon. Yesterday, I ambled to a factory area outside the center, which has been converted into a bunch of restaurants and design shops. As soon as I stepped into this area, a strange feeling swept over me…

I had been here before.

I had been to Lisbon one time before, for two days, seven years ago, back in 2017.

Back then, I still drank alcohol and much of the trip was a blur — either horribly hung over, or drinking more to try to cope with the hangover.

This time, when coming to Lisbon, I tried remembering where I had been and what I had done during those two days back in 2017. I couldn’t remember. But yesterday, I knew at least one thing I had done. I had been to this factory area before.

“And there’s a Mexican restaurant somewhere around here,” I said to myself.

Sure enough, there was a Mexican restaurant right where I suspected it should be. I walked inside. It had a boxing ring right in the middle of it, with a dining table in the middle of the ring, and lucha libre decoration on the walls. I recognized this place. I had eaten here before.

Somehow, out of about 50 million restaurants in Lisbon, I had managed to accidentally stumble into the same restaurant I had been in seven years earlier.

And now for some entirely different news:

Yesterday, I asked my readers what frustration they are currently having.

I got a good number of responses including some unexpected ones:

“… son is now talking about having a PS5 despite only having had a Nintendo Switch for a matter of days.”

“Right now, I’m in Warsaw, and I’m shocked by how nice and kind the girls here are. As a result, I hate the idea of going back to [home town] and trying to date there.”

​​​”My greatest frustration is watching people who have never opened a book in their lives create million-dollar companies.”

On the other hand, many of the reported frustrations were not a surprise. They came from both business owners and copywriters, and were some variant of “I’m looking for more clients or customer or leads.”

Somehow, not very accidentally, by asking this question, I managed to stumble back into the same worry-cloud I had been in seven years earlier, back in 2017, when I was only two years into working as a freelance copywriter.

I managed to make a living from month one of starting to work as a copywriter, back in August 2015.

But it was always a hunt, and there was always a fair chance of going to bed hungry. Not literally — I could always afford food to eat and a place to sleep, and I could even take a trip now and then and waste some money on alcohol.

But I never knew quite how much money I would make by the end of the month. Half the time, it was less than I would have been okay with.

Back then, my interpretation of the problem was the same as the interpretation of a lot of the people who replied to me yesterday.

“I’d like to have more consistent money coming in… so what I need is more good leads… some new source of leads… or maybe an improved way to convert leads I already have.”

Reasonable enough. But wrong, at least in my case.

I realized something only years later, around 2021 or 2022. It’s the only regret I have with regard to my entire copywriting career, and the only thing I would change if i could go back. It’s this:

I spent way too much time looking for new clients and even working with new clients… rather than simply getting more out of the clients I already had.

And that’s my suggestion to you as well.

If you would like to make more consistent money, focus less on looking for more clients or customers. Get more out of the ones you’ve already got.

And if you say there’s nothing more to be had out of them:

You’re creative. That’s why you’re working as an entrepreneur or as a copywriter. So use that creativity.

I guarantee you there are ways, often easy and quick ways, to make new money from old customers or clients. You have everything you need already. It’s just a matter of putting together the pieces.

Of course, if you don’t want to put together the pieces, and if you actually have an email list of previous customers or clients, then write me. Maybe I can put the pieces together for you.

About all those idiots who are more successful than you…

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A reader writes in reply to my email yesterday:

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Yep I’ve been seeing pro copywriters getting away with mid copy — functional but not exceptional, well done but nothing I couldn’t have done, just basics well executed. Yet they are raking it in.

Still I’m more drawn to innovative copywriters like Daniel Throssell and you, who have the potential to produce 95-99% outcomes (as opposed to 80% outcomes). However if I’m seeking profit maximisation (not always the case…) perhaps I should consider going darkside.

===

My email yesterday wasn’t about the light side vs dark side, exceptional vs mediocre. It was about fundamental, proven, and often simple approaches… vs novel, risky, and often complex approaches.

That said, my reader’s comment above is still valuable.

It expresses a feeling that’s pretty much universal in human beings.

And that’s the feeling that “all these idiots are running around, way more successful than me. They must have some kind of angle. They have a secret, a trick, a shortcut. It’s either they have access I don’t, or they do things I won’t because I’m better than that.”

I’m not judging. I regularly feel this feeling bubble up inside me as well.

All I am telling you is that if you write sales copy, then this feeling is almost certainly there in your audience. It makes sense to use it as a sales point.

On the other hand, this belief is not useful to have yourself, not long-term.

It’s a much better to look at people you’re competing with, and figure out what you can admire about them.

This little habit alone can help you succeed. Because when you find things to admire about your competition, you will often end up adopting those characteristics. And you will improve as a result.

I did this once. I even wrote it up as an email. In case you’d like to read that:

Things “worthy of compliment” in 12 of my competitors

Your kiss is on my list

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I have this quirk of the brain where if I’ve heard a song some time in the past few days, I will often wake up in the middle of the night with that song playing on full blast in my head.

Last night, around 3am, I woke up. What I clearly heard in the darkness was the refrain to Hall and Oats’s Kiss On My List:

“Because your kiss is on my list… of the best things in liiiiiiiiife…”

The reason Kiss On My List played in my head is that I recently listened to a lot of 80s hits. And that’s because I used several 80s hits to illustrate parts of the presentation I gave to Brian Kurtz’s Titans XL group this past Thursday.

Overall, the presentation went very well. This was a surprise to me, because I was a bit desperate in the lead-up to it.

I had tried running through the presentation a couple times before the actual call. ​It seemed like a disaster each time — “these stupid songs, what was I thinking?” But apparently, I managed to pull it off at the last minute because lots of people who watched have written me to say how much they liked it.

But!

What I want to share with you today is not a bit from my presentation.

Instead, what I want to share with you is a bit that came from the other presentation inside Thursday’s Titans call. That presentation was by a guy named Charley Mann. Charley runs a coaching business for law firm owners.

I’m not sure Charley wants me to share publicly how much money he’s making. But on the call, he shared his numbers. He’s doing very well, and he will do even better soon.

Anyways, towards end of his presentation, Charley said:

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One last thing I’ll say real quick, which is the idea of making money — trying to make it boring for myself.

I have plenty of things that I love in the rest of my life. I love building the business. But fundamentally, I want the fundamentals. And so that’s the way I think about the business. The fundamentals executed in a really sound, even spectacular way, over time.

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That felt like a gentlemanly slap across the face to me. Because it made me realize I do get my kicks, or at least some fun and expression, via my work — via doing things like creating an 80s-music-themed business presentation, which refuses to come together until the very last minute.

The trouble is, such creative experiments 1) rarely make for optimal business solutions and 2) demand much more time and work than simply focusing on the proven fundamentals and performing those very well.

I’m sharing this in case you too might be like me.

If you are, then maybe it’s time to consider taking up skydiving or high-stakes roulette or perhaps drag racing as a way to get your kicks in the real world, outside your business. Or at the very least, perhaps it’s time to consider, like Charley says, focusing on just the fundamentals, and executing those very well over time.

And now, if you want the fundamentals of email copywriting, then I have a course for you.

I’m not sure I would ever have been able to prepare such a course had I only ever written emails for this newsletter, where I feel compelled to say something new and creative every day to get my small kick of excitement.

Fortunately, I’ve also worked extensively with clients, including a few clients where I had to write multiple daily emails every day for years at a time, along with tons of other copy, and where real money was on the line – $4k-$5k of actual sales coming in with each email.

If you want to learn what I learned while writing all those emails and pulling in all those sales, and if you want to implement something similar in your business, then here you go:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

The uncertain result of my Newsletter XP promo

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Yesterday, ex-Agora copywriter Thom Benny, who I met up with in Barcelona last month, texted me and asked,

“How is the Newsletter XP promo doing?”

I threw up my arms at this. “How am I supposed to know? There’s a deep fog around the Bejako household, and I can’t see past my own nose.”

The Beehiiv people don’t normally do affiliate deals for this course. I had to ask them over and over to let me promote it.

When they finally agreed, it was a bit of a technical kludge to make it happen. So there’s no affiliate portal. There’s no direct way for me to know how many sales I’ve made.

I saw a buncha clicks. Two people wrote me to say they bought. I wrote my contact at Beehiiv now to ask what the final result was.

But if I had to bet, I would bet I made 3x-4x the money for writing these 7 emails than I ever made for any equivalent campaign I wrote back in my freelance copywriting days.

So let me repeat the core idea I was selling during this whole promo, even though I won’t get paid anything for it now. It’s this:

Start a newsletter. Or start growing a list. Or find another little asset that you can invest into regularly.

It might bear no fruit today. But keep watering it. And you will be pleased and surprised one day soon.

This concludes the first of three affiliate promotions I promised to do over the next few weeks.

The next affiliate promo I will do involves a writing course for business owners who want to build an audience on social media.

I’m going through this course myself right now. And I find myself repeatedly surprised by how well-done and insightful it is.

To make this offer even sweeter, I will add in my own free bonus. It will be equal in price to the actual course I am promoting.

This bonus is a rare training I once put on, after years of research. Several people told me this training has influenced their own writing a lot. But more about all that soon.

Ramit Sethi: Brave or stupid?

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I recently listened to an interview with Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a data scientist who is perhaps most notorious for discovering, through Google Trends data, that the country of India has a unique and unholy interest in adult breastfeeding.

Less well-known is that Stephens-Davidowitz was also college roommates with Ramit Sethi, the best-selling “I Will Teach You To Be Rich” finance guru who currently has his own Netflix show.

I don’t follow Ramit, so I don’t know if the story below is well-known. But it was new to me. Stephens-Davidowitz said of Ramit and their time as roommates:

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He announces he’s going to teach everyone personal finance. So he starts plastering around the whole dorm, “RAMIT SETHI’S PERSONAL FINANCE CLASS.”

I’m just like, “Ramit, you don’t know anything about personal finance. What the hell are you talking about? Nobody’s going to show up to your stupid class on personal finance.”

He puts on this class.

​​I think two people showed up. One of them had a big crush on him.

And I felt so bad. I’m like, this poor guy has no sense of what the world wants from him. He’s making a fool of himself. What a loser.

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I read somewhere that, “Courage is knowing it might hurt, and doing it anyway. Stupidity is the same. And that’s why life is hard.”

Ramit Sethi persisting in spite of total initial failure is courage.

But we’ve never heard of the millions of unsuccessful morons who persisted and maybe persist still, in spite of clear signs telling them to stop.

And that’s why life is hard.

Except then I thought a bit more. I realized that you can make the odds better in your favor, and make life a little less hard.

It comes down to asking, does persistence here give me any meaningful accumulation?

There are fields where, if you continue to stick to it, your odds get no better, and maybe they even get worse.

Me winning the lottery is no more likely tomorrow even if I play the lottery today.

​​And me becoming a professional tennis player… that’s impossible today, and even with practice and dedication, it would only become more impossible tomorrow, as I get older, slower, and less likely to take even a point off a highly promising 14-year-old prospect.

But there are other areas where persistence does give you meaningful accumulation.

An email list is one. If you don’t do much of anything but stick around and keep emailing, your list will grow, however slowly. Eventually, you’ll cross some threshold where you have real influence.

Another area is money-making skill. You might have zero or negative money-making skills today. You might be an actual anti-talent. So was I, once upon a time.

But if you persist in learning and practicing a money-making skill, then the knowledge accumulates. Eventually, it crosses over a threshold where you have real skill at making money, first for others, then maybe even for yourself.

Life is hard if you don’t choose wisely, and if you keep investing in things that cannot or will not give you a return.

But invest in things that are almost guaranteed to pay you back, and you can wind up with your own version of the Ramit Sethi story above. Maybe some smartass who knows you today will be telling the story tomorrow of how, unbelievable but true, you weren’t always the huge success everybody now knows you as.

Anyways, enough Eat Pray Ramit.

I’ll now point you to my Most Valuable Email course today. For one, because it can help you keep emailing day after day (I personally find Most Valuable Emails most fun to write).

For another, because Most Valuable Email can help you build up an audience by doing nothing more than creating content (people will start recommending you on the strength of your emails alone).

But most importantly, because each time you write a Most Valuable Email, it accumulates a bit of money making skill in your brain. And eventually, that accumulation becomes meaningful.

If you’d like to get started today:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

The psychology of being an idiot

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In reply to my email yesterday, a puzzled reader wrote in to ask:

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How did you initially start your list? Like to get those first few people in the door. I feel like we’ve never been told your origin story to how this list became to be what it is.

Maybe I’m wrong, I’ve only been reading for 2 years, though your list is older then that. And I don’t even know how I got here.

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I’ve been reading a lot about newsletter growth lately, and the above is a frequent question that comes up.

“How did you get your first few subscribers? Your first 100? Your first 1,000?”

The most common answer I’ve read is, “Oh, at the start, I just asked people in my network if they’d like to sign up.”

That is not what I did. For one, I don’t have a network. For another, I don’t like asking anybody for anything. (They might say no, and then what!)

I started my list over 5 years ago.

​​I checked just now, and it took me 18 months and 5 days from starting daily emailing to my get my first 100 subscribers.

The background of why it took me that long is that I’m an idiot, or just very stubborn, depending on your moral compass.

For the longest time, the only thing I did was write my daily emails, and post them to my website.

I did on a few occasions post something smart and professional in copywriting groups on Facebook. I believe I managed to get two, maybe even three new subscribers that way.

But mainly, I was just grinding away, because like I said, I’m an idiot, or just very stubborn.

My plan was never really to build this email list into anything.

My only vague goal was to get better at writing emails, and to have something to show potential clients as a demonstration of my skill. That was back when I still did client work, which is something I don’t do any more.

And yet, I continue to write daily emails today.

I’m currently reading a book, The Psychology of Money.

It was published a little over three years ago. Today, it has over 43k reviews on Amazon, 32k of them being five-star.

Basically, the book tells you how your own psychology gets in the way of your making money, growing money, and keeping whatever money you’ve managed to make or grow.

None of those are topics I’m interested in at all. But I realized I could make this book more interesting to myself by switching out “money” and switching in “business” or “project.” Suddenly, the lessons became familiar and dear:

– Think long term, and let the power of compounding work for you

– Be okay with a wide range of outcomes

– Realize that you will change — what you think you will value in the future is probably not accurate

So that’s kind of the Bejako origin story, and the explanation of my motivations in driving this newsletter onwards in the way that I do, well into my 6th year with it.

Now, I can imagine that my origin story sounds entirely uninspiring. It’s kind of the opposite of wandering into the wrong room, lingering just a second too long, and getting bitten by a radioactive spider that dropped from the ceiling.

To make up for my uninspiring email today, tomorrow I will tell you a way that, while I still had practically nobody reading this newsletter, I grew another newsletter to a few thousands readers in a matter of weeks, and filled it with quality subscribers.

That’s on tomorrow’s episode of the Bejako Show.

Meanwhile, if you want lessons on success with any long-term project, consider Morgan Housel’s Psychology Of Money, and it’s 32,000 5-star reviews.

​​If you’d like to take a look, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/housel

The best presentation Rich Schefren has ever given

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On a road trip with a friend through Ireland this past August, I listened to a podcast that featured Moby, the bald, skinny, spectacled techno producer who’s sold some 20 million records worldwide.

Moby told an intimate story about a night before the 2002 MTV Awards.

I didn’t know, but Moby was apparently one of the biggest music stars in the world at that time.

For the MTV Awards, he was being housed in a fancy hotel in Barcelona — “one of the most elegant hotels I’ve ever been to,” he says — in one of the hotel’s four penthouse apartments. In the other three apartments were Madonna, Bon Jovi, and P. Diddy.

And yet, the night before the awards, Moby started to feel suicidal.

The reality was had been given everything — money, fame, appreciation — and yet he wasn’t happy. He had tried to drink his troubles away, but even that didn’t work.

So there Moby was, in his penthouse apartment, trying to figure out how to open up the big glass windows so he could jump out and end the misery. (He couldn’t figure out the windows either.)

This story struck me when I heard it. But really, if you listen a bit, you will hear the same story from a lot of people who go from absolutely nothing to absolutely everything.

It feels great for a while. A pretty short while.

But if it turns out that this is really all there is to it — living in the penthouse apartment, in an elegant hotel, with Madonna and P. Diddy as neighbors, with all the money and fame and achievement you could ever want — what follows is first emptiness, then craziness:

“Is it my fault? Am I such an idiot that I cannot appreciate all this? How messed up am I?”

Or…

“Was I so blind to pick the the wrong goal? Did I work like a dog all my life to get to the wrong destination, one I never really wanted?”

Or…

“Is it that there’s no sense in having any goals to begin with? Is all achievement and striving ultimately a race to disappointment?”

These are ugly questions. Maybe you started feeling uneasy just reading them. ​​It’s no wonder that people who find themselves ruminating on such questions often start to feel crazy or even suicidal.
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Good news:
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The answer to all three questions is ultimately, “No, that’s not it.”

I could go into the psychology and neurology of it, what I know of it, but really, it’s much better to hear a story or three about it, and to be inspired along the way.

The best and most inspiring bunch of stories I’ve found on this topic come from business coach Rich Schefren, from a talk that Rich gave a year ago.

Rich answers all the questions above, and tells you what goals really are, and what they are for.

It was new and inspiring to me when I first heard it.

I still think about Rich’s points often.

And so I want to share his talk with you once again, and remind myself of it as well. In case you’re curious, here’s Rich on stage, giving the best presentation he’s ever given:

https://pages.strategicprofits.com/rich-diamond-day-c

“The one thing all my mentors have in common”

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This past Sunday, Novak Djokovic won the French Open and his 23 Grand Slam title — a big deal in the tennis world.

​​On Monday, in an off moment, I decided to check if there were any interesting news or interviews with Djokovic following the French Open.

I automatically headed to the r/tennis subreddit on Reddit. But in place of the usual page with tennis links and videos, I was hit with a blank page and the following notice:

“r/tennis is joining the Reddit blackout from June 12th to 14th, to protest the planned API changes that will kill 3rd party apps”

Perhaps you’ve heard:

Reddit the company, which is basically thousands of different news boards, is experiencing a kind of strike. Special Reddit users — mods — who control the different news boards are protesting Reddit’s proposed policy changes. As a result, they’ve basically made the site unusable for hundreds of millions of users.

I haven’t been following the drama. But apparently, as of yesterday, Reddit’s CEO said he plans to go ahead with the policy changes. To which many mods decided to extend the strike from 2-3 days, as originally planned, to indefinite.

All this reminded me of email conversation I recently had with Glenn Osborn.
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​Glenn is a curious creature. Once upon a time, Glenn attended 15 of Jay Abraham’s $15k marketing seminars by bartering his way in.

​​He also went to one of Gary Halbert’s copywriting seminars in Key West, and watched Gary go up on stage with that “Clients Suck” hat.

​​These days, Glenn writes an email newsletter called “Billionaire Idea Testing Club” about influence tricks he spots from people like Taylor Swift and James Patterson and J.K. Rowling.

For reasons of his own, Glenn likes to reply to my emails on occasion and send me valuable ideas. A few weeks ago, Glenn wrote me with some things he had learned directly and indirectly from Clayton Makepeace and Gary Halbert and Jay Abraham.

​​Good stuff. But then, in a PS, Glenn added the following:

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P.S. -For Consulting Clients I Do ALL THE Work F-O-R them – MYSELF and thru staffers.

CONTROL is the one thing all my Mentors Have in Common. If You Don’t CONTROL what you do You Cannot Make Munny.

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That last idea definitely stood out to me.

There are so many ways to be successful in any field. And contradicting strategies will often produce equally good results.

But a very few things are non-negotiable. You could call those the rules of the system. Perhaps CONTROL is one of them.

At this point I would normally refer you to Glenn’s newsletter in case you want to read it yourself. ​​But as Glenn himself says, “My ARCHIVE Is By-Referral-Only – Too ADVANCED to Toss Strangers into.”

If you are determined, then a bit of Googling, based on what I’ve told you above, will lead you to Glenn’s optin page and his unusual but valuable newsletter.

And in case you yourself want to want to write an unusual but valuable newsletter, the following can help:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Easy way to go from a bit of a failure to a big-time success

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I have an offer for you at the end of today’s email. But first, I have a sexy marketing story that might make you want that offer. The story goes like this:

Back in the early 2000s, a guy named Andrew Wood ran an info publishing business, teaching marketing to karate schools. Wood knew what he was talking about, because he had previously created and then sold a chain of 400 karate schools.

Wood’s info publishing business was pulling in good money, around $30k each month. The trouble was, Wood’s expenses — business, car, wife — totaled $40k each month. In other words, he was losing blood like a harpooned whale.

So in a moment of desperation, Wood got in touch with Jay Abraham. The two met.

Over the course of a morning, Jay Abraham grilled Wood all about his business. After each question, Abraham came up with suggestions. And Wood replied he was already doing that — or he had tried it before but it didn’t work.

As the meeting wore on, Jay Abraham grew more and more frustrated. Eventually, he stood up from the table.

“You’re so fucking smart,” Abraham said, “figure it out for yourself.” And he walked out.

Wood sat there stunned. But before he had a chance to do anything, Jay Abraham came back and apologized. And he asked Wood to run through the numbers one more time.

“What are you taking in each month?”

“$30k.”

“How much are you spending?”

“$40k.”

“And how much do you want to make?”

“$60k would be great.”

“Okay,” Jay Abraham said. “That’s easy. Just double your prices! Find something you can add to the program to increase the value and double the price.”

And with that, Jay Abraham said goodbye.

Silence. Do you think Andrew Wood sat there thinking, “What a great insight!”

Of course not. He thought it was a total lack of advice. But on his way home, he stopped for a beer. A few of his employees joined. After the third beer, they started kicking around the “just double your prices” idea.

A couple weeks later, Wood stood on stage in front of his two hundred customers. And he announced a new monthly program.

It would cost $200, twice as much as what they were already paying. The contents were not much more than what they were already getting.

Result?

Wood says that in three months, he went from taking in $30k a month to $100k a month. More importantly, he went from losing $10k each month to making a profit of $60k. By Christmas, he was entirely debt-free and owned his first Ferrari.

So that’s the sexy story. Now here’s the offer:

A couple weeks ago I sent out an email asking who would be interested in a training about increasing your prices.

​​I got a fair number of yeses in response to that email, but not enough to make me want to put that training on. Lately been saying no to middling opportunities and putting my effort only in near sure shots.

At the same time, your first Ferrari — or whatever the equivalent moonshot proof of success might be in your own mind. That’s what can happen if you double your prices.

​​And yet people don’t double their prices.

Why? And what can you specifically do about it?

That’s what I want to address on this training. And if it’s something you’d be interested in hearing about and profiting from, then hit reply, and let me know. If it enough people say yes, then I’ll put this training on.

Not comfortable asking for more money?

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Trevor “Toe Cracker” Crook was at the front of the room, finishing his presentation, and was about to launch into the pitch for his offer.

“How many of you regularly close 5-figure copywriting contracts?” he asked.

You’re supposed to participate if you’re in the audience at a conference, and give the speaker some signs of life. So I raised my hand.

I was sitting in the front row. I glanced over my shoulder. I realized that, out of 25+ other copywriters in the room, maybe two or three also had their hand up.

I felt sheepish. I put my hand down.

The fact is, I’m not overwhelmingly confident. I’m certainly not assertive or demanding.

And yet, a couple years ago, back when I was still regularly taking on client work, I was closing 5-figure deals matter-of-factly. And if I were taking on a big project now, I wouldn’t have any trouble asking for — and probably getting — $15k or $20k, upfront, depending on what needs to be done.

In my experience, asking for more money is not a matter of confidence, in the sense of some unshakeable self-belief. Nor is it a matter of assertiveness.

It’s really about systematically putting yourself into a situation where neither of those is needed. As negotiation coach Jim Camp, who guided Fortune 100 CEOs and revamped the FBI’s hostage negotiation process, had to say:

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I’ve got wonderful non-assertive people that just do magnificent jobs in negotiation. But that’s because they have the tools. They don’t need to be assertive. Assertive is not a trait that is to be desired in negotiation by any means.

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I’m thinking about putting on a training in June about how to be comfortable charging more. This isn’t only about copywriting work. I’ve been selling courses, live presentations, and consulting to make up for the fact I rarely work with copywriting clients any more. I’ve found the same principles apply whenever money changes hands.

If such a training is something that would interest you, hit reply and let me know. In case there’s enough interest, I will put it on.