Learning

My ape-like positioning fail

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“With our millions of subscribers and your skills,” he wrote me, “I’m sure we can have a big win-win.”

Here’s a bit of revelation about my secret client life:

Over the past month and a half, I’ve been talking to a business owner named Abdul.

Abdul runs an 8-figure business selling online courses. He wanted to start a daily email newsletter to both influence and sell the thousands of new subscribers who join his list every day.

Abdul’s front-end copywriter, who happens to read my newsletter (hi Ross!) recommended me as the expert email copywriter for the job.

So Abdul and I talked and made a deal. It’s all being glued and assembled as we speak, and once it launches for real, we will see how big of a win-win it turns out to be.

But here’s where this story gets a little wobbly.

A few days ago, Abdul texted me to say he’s thinking of hiring Dan Ferrari to write the front-end copy for an upcoming course.

A bit of context:

Dan Ferrari is a copywriter with a long string of controls for both financial and health offers. And Dan has what you might call the Midas touch when it comes to direct response.

I know this because a few years ago, I was one of a handful of guys in Dan’s coaching group, and I could see it first hand.

So when Abdul texted me he’s thinking of hiring Dan, I wrote in response,

“If you do end up hiring him, tell him I’ll gladly work as his assistant, just for the experience.”

I wrote that. But I didn’t send it. Instead, my index finger lingered over the send button. I then slowly brought that finger to my lips, like a gorilla considering his next meal.

“Maybe it’s not a smart thing to say?” I asked myself, while looking at the bananas on my kitchen counter. “I mean, I’m supposed to be the expert copywriter here. How will it look if I offer to work as another copywriter’s assistant?”

I shrugged my powerful ape shoulders. And I clicked to send Abdul the message after all.

Result:
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I haven’t yet been fired. And who knows, maybe I’ll end up working with Dan and learning something new.

So my point, in case it’s not obvious:

As I’ve written before, there’s big value to positioning yourself as a wizard… standing on a tall cliff… and, in a booming voice, letting the world know you wield secret knowledge and mystical skills…

But there’s also value in being driven to get better at the actual wielding.

And if I have to choose between the two, like in the case above, I will personally choose the second. It might be the slower path to success. But it’s worked well for me over the long term.

I’m not sure whether this fact can benefit you also.

Perhaps it can make you feel better, if like me, you are also a little skill-hoarder.

Or maybe it can remind you there’s always more to learn, and that there’s usually long-term profit in doing so.

Either way, here’s a possibly related tip:

Two days ago, after I announced I’m reopening my Copy Riddles program, I had a bunch of people who already went through Copy Riddles ask to be added to this new run as well. (One of the perks is lifetime access.)

And I noticed something interesting.

​​Many of the people who want to go again were among the most engaged when they first went through Copy Riddles.

They were the ones who consistently participated in the weekly bullet contests… who attended Q&A calls… who asked thoughtful questions… and generally, who seemed to get the most out of the course.

And here they are again, ready for more. Maybe there’s something to it… something you can use for your own success also.

Or maybe not.

In any case, enrollment for Copy Riddles closes Sunday. If you’d like to find out more about it:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

If they pirate, they pay attention

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Here’s a confession from a once-broke, today-very-rich Internet marketer:

I was living in an apartment that cost $250 a month.

And I had about a month’s worth of living expenses left.

So I couldn’t afford to shell out the $2k it cost to buy any of Dan’s courses.

So I did something I’m not very proud of these days – I went to the dark parts of the web and torrented his stuff.

I found his advanced sales letter course…

His Wealth Attraction course…

Lastly I downloaded his holy grail – Influential Writing – which in my mind is the greatest information marketing course ever made.

I went through all of these on repeat for months.

Anytime I was working, I’d be listening to a Dan Kennedy course.

Maybe you know who wrote this. It’s Justin Goff.

Justin wrote that email a couple years ago, the day the whole direct response world thought that Dan Kennedy had died.

Justin also thought Dan was dead. So he wrote an ode to Dan, and said Dan was his “greatest mentor.”

And I can believe it.

I can also believe that it was Dan’s stuff that helped Justin get successful. That without it, Justin might not have made it, at least not as quickly and as richly.

In the marketing world, it’s popular to say, “If they pay, they pay attention.”

It’s also popular to mock those who pirate, steal, and share paid content. Here’s a recent bit from Ben Settle on the matter:

These criminals all end up fetching peoples’ coffee or begging for change for a living eventually. Bums to the end. Irony is, if they spent half as much time working on themselves & a legit business as they do pirating products, they’d be multi-millionaires many times over.

Writing this makes good business sense for Ben.

But obviously, not everybody who pirates stuff winds up begging for change (see Justin above). And vice versa.

Many people who honestly pay for stuff get nothing from their purchase except the rush of handing over their money.

And in case you’re wondering what I’m getting at, let me tell you a personal story:

A few days ago, while surfin’ the Internet, I surfed upon a membership site that claims to have the recordings of the Influential Emails training I held last November.

I don’t know whether this site actually has a copy of the recordings and resources I shared with people after the training ended… or whether they just copied my sales page and are baiting people into handing over their credit cards.

And I don’t really care much to find out.

Because I feel I’ve done right by the people who paid to join me for Influential Emails. Those who joined me, who paid attention, and who end up implementing the ideas I revealed… will profit much more than what they paid me.

At the same time, I respect the fact that they gave me their money. That’s why I don’t entertain requests for free copies of my paid stuff… or even offer discounts on the current price.

But on the other hand, if there is somebody out there who does pirate my stuff… and ends up profiting from it also… well, I won’t set my hair on fire about it.

​​In fact, I imagine I will still somehow benefit from it, in some unseen or indirect way, somewhere down the line.

So my point for you is:

Pirate all you want.

No, wait, that’s not actually my point. My point is:

Pay attention to the good information out there, whether it’s available to you for free or whether you have to pay for it. And then — key point — put that information to work.

Or don’t. Because maybe you’re ok with fetching other people’s coffee. Of course, maybe that won’t happen to you.

In any case, let me make you a free offer right now:

My Copy Riddles program will be re-launching later this month. I’m trying to get a few more people to find out about it before it gets pirated and shared into oblivion.

And if you help me get the word out, I’ll give you something in return.

This free thing will only benefit you if you consume it… and then put it to work.

But if you do that, it could lead you to self-respect, ongoing client work, and thousands of dollars in your pocket. For the full details:

https://bejakovic.com/free-offer-niche-expert-cold-emails/

Boiler rooms in Tirana

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A couple weeks ago I was in Tirana, Albania. I got to talking with one of the locals and it turned out he works in a boiler room.

“We do forex,” he explained. “We invest their money for them. Actually, we just take their money.” He shrugged. “Which country are you from?”

“Croatia,” I said.

“Ah. We don’t have any clients there. But Germany, Italy, France, Poland, Hungary — yes. I manage the sales team for the Hungarian market. It’s a very good market.”

I couldn’t believe it. “You have a team here of Hungarian forex sales people?”

“No no, all Albanians,” he said. “They learn a few phrases in Hungarian, the rest is in English. But it’s ok. These lawyers and doctors we call all speak good English.”

“Greed is universal,” I said to myself. “But how do you know who to call? How do you get their number?”

He looked at me like I’m an idiot. “They see an ad on the Internet. They click. They fill out the form with their info. Then one of our sales guys calls them. Then they give us all their money.”

Now I’m not an expert on boiler room tactics. But from what I know, it sounds like the same stuff that worked in 1972 works still in 2022. It’s just that the base of operations shifted from Chicago and Jersey City to other, less regulated locations like Tirana.

But the same system continues to work.

Of course, you don’t have to be a scammer. This basic funnel works even if you’re selling a legit, high-ticket offer, which can genuinely benefit your customers or clients. The sales system doesn’t care what you’re selling.

And equally as of course, this is not the only way to sell.

For example, the type of daily emails I write. Very hot right now. Many businesses want to do something similar. The promise is that you can build a relationship with your marketplace… without hard-selling… and instead, based on trust, influence, and personality.

Which is all true. But it ain’t new.

It goes back to Matt Furey… who probably got it from Dan Kennedy, who was sending weekly faxes, very similar in tone and content to what you’re reading now, but 20 and 30 years ago.

And if you asked Dan — if you could get him on the fax — I’m sure he would say that what he was doing then wasn’t new either. Somebody in the 70s and 50s and probably 1920s was probably doing the same long-form, personality-infused, frequent-contact marketing — just in a slightly different format.

So my point for you is that there’s a lot of value in knowing the history of your industry. Don’t be a scammer — I’m not advising that. But there’s almost nothing new under the sun, and it pays to know what came before you.

Which brings me to my offer, in case you didn’t take me up on it yesterday.

It’s to get a free copy of my Niche Expert Cold Emails training.

Because in my early days of working as a freelance copywriter, I hit upon two cold emails that got me client work.

​​Both of them were different from other cold email techniques out there. But I doubt they were truly new.

​​Had I been a better student, I probably would have found these ideas sooner, instead of having to wait to discover them on my own.

Whatever. You can do better than I did. Take advantage of my experience instead of fumbling around in the dark. Especially now that it’s free — well, free in money terms. For the full details:

https://bejakovic.com/free-offer-niche-expert-cold-emails/

Things “worthy of compliment” in 12 of my competitors

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I recently finished reading a book called NLP about NLP by two NLP experts, Steve Andreas and Charles Faulkner.

I’m interested in somehow patching a few Y2K-sized bugs in my own brain software, and so this kind of neural programming stuff is right up my alley and then through a little door.

Anyways, at one point in the book, Andreas and Faulkner advise the following:

“Find what’s worthy of compliment in your competition. Since you have been encouraging yourself to be complimentary to others, your senses have been opened and relaxed. You will have undoubtedly found yourself acquiring the skills of others without directly concentrating on them.”

Too easy? Who knows. I decided to try it out.

But then right at the start, I hit a snag. I had trouble coming up with my “competition.”

There’s nobody I really think of in that way. That’s the whole point of writing daily emails and creating unique offers like Copy Riddles.

But ok — ultimately, I am competing for people’s attention, for space in their inbox, for their hearts and minds, and possibly for their learning and growth dollars.

So I made a list of 12 such competitors. They all either write daily emails or have something to do with direct marketing.

For each competitor, I listed the first thing that came to mind — stuff they do, which I admire.

​​It turned out to be a surprisingly fun and eye-opening exercise. I suggest it to you — whether you’re a business owner, marketer, or freelancer.

Perhaps you’re curious about my list. You can find it below, with the names stripped out. After all, my goal today isn’t to name drop in bulk or to call people out.

But perhaps you can still guess who I have in mind — all are people I’ve mentioned previously in my newsletter. And here’s what’s worthy of compliment in each:

1. Willingness to get on camera regularly in spite of having the charisma of a bag of lentils
2. Community management
​3. High-priced offers
​4. A business built around a single core product that’s been running for years
​5. Emotional copy in spite of being very emotionally flat as a person
​6. Personality-based emails
​7. Writing fast
8. Surprising historical anecdotes
9. List building
10. Self-aggrandizement
11. A deep trove of personal experience and interests
​12. A really unique viewpoint

If you’re in the marketing and copywriting space, all these people will probably be familiar to you.

​​Except perhaps #8. He is well-known, but is not in the marketing space.

A​nd #12. He was once a direct marketer, but is today something… not quite definable. If you’re curious, I’ll tell you more about him, including his name, in my email tomorrow. You can sign up here to read that.

The smart way to discover secret new opportunities

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I have a friend visiting from out of town, so last night I took him to a unique restaurant.

The entrance is hidden. You have to walk in off the street, through a dark and smokey hallway that doubles as a cafe, at the end of which, a door opens up into a series of large rooms.

The restaurant itself is bright and full of people, all eating large platters of veal and lamb… and then stuffing forkfuls of chocolate mousse down their throats and washing it down with red wine.

It’s one of the better places to eat in town. And yet it’s so easy to miss when you’re walking down the street. The only reason I know it is because my dad took me here many years ago.

Lots of things in life can be like this.

For example, I first read the 4-Hour Workweek some time in 2011. It got me intrigued about the idea of online businesses.

“Wouldn’t it be nice,” I thought, “if there were more info like this?”

It took me years to discover that, yes, there is a ton of info out there about copywriting and marketing and making money online. I found it eventually by poking around the Internet and following clues and reading and exploring. But I wasted a lot of time.

That’s one way to discover restaurants, too.

You can go online, look over dozens or hundreds of restaurant listings on Yelp or Trip Advisor…

Read a bunch of reviews for the ones that look interesting…

Then try out the best candidates one by one.

It’s one way. But the more I go through life, the more I realize it’s a slow and wasteful way.

A much better way is to have somebody knowledgeable take you by the hand and say, “Here, there’s this incredible opportunity right behind this dark and smokey hallway.”

​​And just in case you’re wondering… it’s easier to have this happen than you might think. All you really have to do is to talk to people… be interested… and be open to new suggestions.