Personal Change

How I changed myself from lazy and aimless to disciplined and motivated

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I was talking to my mom a few days ago, and right before we got off the call, she paused.

​​”You know,” she said, “it’s really great you’ve become so disciplined and self-motivated.”

I grunted.

“I remember this one time,” she continued, “when you were 18 years old. And you said that the only hope for you is either the army or prison. That you needed that kind of outside structure.”

I don’t remember ever saying that, but it sounds about right.

For the longest time in my life, well beyond age 18, I was aimless, floating about from place to place, from habit to habit, as the days flipped by.

To top it off, I’m very lazy by nature. My big ambition in life was not to work. No wonder I concluded my only hope was either the army or prison.

So. How did I go from there to where I am today, being relatively disciplined, hard-working, even successful… with no army or prison along the way?

Honestly, I don’t know. ​​Time, small steps, and seeing the example of others definitely helped. Like I wrote a few days ago, when we’re unsure, we ping our environment for references.

I’ll say more about that in a second, but first, on to work:

Yesterday I started promoting the Infostack copywriter bundle. 14 ebooks and courses and trainings by copywriters, about various aspects of copywriting. The reason I’m promoting it is because I’m participating in it — my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters is one of the 14.

I said yesterday I will go through the bundle myself and tease the best individual content.

What in the hell was I thinking?

It takes a ton of time to do that, or at least to do it well. Gene Schwartz took weeks to build his “vocabulary” — to go through the book he was promoting and to underline all the interesting bits.

I have no time to do that with all these books and courses, and certainly not by Friday, which is when I’m ending this promotion. So I will just tell you the following, and then you can make up your own mind.

Much of the bundle, about half, is real newbie stuff:

Four Weeks to Freelance Writing… Stop Aspiring, Start Writing… How To Become A 6-Figure Content Writer… Get Paid To Become A Freelance Copywriter…

Sure, these guides have specific advice for you. How to motivate yourself, how to get going, how to get your first client, how to get paid that first $100 or $1,000.

But really, if you are a newbie, then I figure the actual value in this bundle is likely to be the example of a dozen different copywriters who have made it, who are doing what you would like to do, showing you that it’s possible, and maybe getting you to finally take that first step yourself.

Do you need to pay $49 for this encouragement or motivation?

Certainly not.

On the other hand, if that finally does click in your head because one of these copywriters connects with you, and encourages you to take that first step, and the step after that, then it will be worth much more than $49.

As for the how-to info in this bundle, again, I cannot speak to any of it because I haven’t gone through it. But I can speak to the four free bonuses I am offering if you do get this bundle.

I want to guarantee this bundle is worth your $49 even if you don’t go through a single one of the participating trainings, courses, or ebooks (except my 10 Commandments of course, do read that because it’s great). And so I’m offering you the following four bonuses:

1. Copywriting Portfolio Secrets ($97 value)

In this training, I show you how to build up your copywriting portfolio in the fastest and most efficient way, so you can start to win copywriting jobs even today. I show you the best way I’ve found to win 4- and 5-figure jobs I REALLY wanted, even when I wasn’t qualified for them, and how you can do it too.

I previously sold this training for $97. But it’s yours free if you take me up on my Infostack offer, which also includes my…

2. No-Stress Negotiation For Well-Paid Copywriters ($100 value)

This guide outlines my 7-part negotiating system, which I adapted from negotiation coach Jim Camp. This system kept me sane while I still regularly interviewed and worked with copywriting clients. Follow these seven principles, and you will end up making more money, working with better clients, and being able to stick to it for the long term.

I only offered this guide once before, as part of the $100 Copy Zone guide, which also featured….

3. How To Get Set Up On Upwork

This free bonus is an excerpt from a short self-published book I wrote once, How to Become a $150/Hr Sales Copywriter on Upwork: A Personal Success Story that Almost Anyone Can Replicate. It tells you how to actually get set up on Upwork — the details of your profile page, your description, your title.

If you combine this bonus with the two bonuses above — Copywriting Portfolio Secrets and No-Stress Negotiation — you have a great shot of winning a job on Upwork by the end of this week, or even today.

And finally, my bonus stack also includes…

4. Dan’s Timeless Wisdom (priceless, or $25k+)

Between August of 2019 and March 2020, I was in Dan Ferrari’s coaching group. As you might know, Dan started out as a star copywriter at The Motley Fool, and went on to become one of the most successful, most winning, big-money direct response copywriters working today.

Inside his coaching group, Dan dispensed copy critiques, marketing advice, and mystical koans to help his coaching students get to the next level.

At some point, I had the bright idea to start archiving the best and most valuable things that Dan was saying. I got 25 of them down, and they are all included in this document, which has until now only been shared with Dan and his coaching students.

(By the way, I never tallied up the exact and rather painful amount of money I paid to Dan for the coaching. It was north of $25k. I do know I made it all back, and then some, in just the first two months after I stopped with the coaching, thanks to just one tip I got from Dan.)

So there you go. If you want the Ultimate Copywriter’s SUPER Stack for its $555.86 worth of value and inspiration, yours for just $49…

… or if you want my add-on bonuses for their $25,197/∞ value, yours free…

… then here’s what to do:

1. Buy the Ultimate Copywriter’s SUPER Bundle at https://bejakovic.com/infostack

2. You will then get an automated email from ThriveCart with a link to a special, members-only page on my site where you can access the four free bonuses above.

Important:

Infostack’s bundle offer is live now and will go on for a week, but I will only be promoting it until this Friday at 8:31pm CET.

That’s how long my offer with the bonuses above is good for. Your gotta buy this bundle before Friday at 8:31pm CET to get my bonuses. So if you know you want them, why not get them now?

Getting praise for promoting failure

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Yesterday, I threatened to send you a testimonial in my email today. And when I get into a threatening mood, it’s hard to get me out of it.

So here’s what long-time customer Lucus Allerton wrote me a few days ago, in the wake of the Copy Riddles relaunch and the recent promo that Daniel Throssell did for it:

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This might be weird to say, but hopefully comes across as more sincere than sycophantic.

I’ve honestly been delighted at all the positive (even gushing) testimonials I’ve seen for your Copy Riddles course. Not just the ones showcased by you, but by Daniel Throssell as well.

I think your (growing?) recognition is well-deserved. You deliver insights via your usual understated way, but from the numerous courses I’ve seen, your course belongs in the gold-standard. The time you clearly took to prepare the materials has made a direct impact on the structure and quality of your examples and riddles. I think it’s really important that you promote ‘failure’ too. We often learn more from our mistakes than our successes. It was fascinating to see Daniel say even he was stumped, going through your course, and got some things ‘wrong’ by overcomplicating it.

I know from my own experience from trying my own bullets through your course, then seeing how much better the real ‘answer’ was sometimes, made it a much more impactful and helpful experience. It helped test how much I understood the concept, instead of only recognising it.

And it’s far better than only seeing the solutions upfront, as most courses might do.

But at this point I’m only stating things you already know.

I’m glad you’ve brought it back, because I honestly believe it elevates the overall quality of the copywriting course industry. There are far worse courses at much higher prices. Copy Riddles shows how good a copy course can be, and I hope it raises everyone else’s standards too.

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I have this long-running rule for my newsletter not to share obvious, bland insights, things that are true but have been said a thousand times before.

​​If I ever find myself wanting to say something like this, I have 3-4 different strategies to camouflage it, dress it up, make it at least somewhat new rather than the oldest of old hats.

Well, you gotta fail in order to get better… you learn more from your mistakes than your successes… there’s no more worn-out truths than that. And yet, it doesn’t make it any less true. Maybe the fact you read it today in Lucus’s words rather than my own can make it sink in finally.

And if that’s the case, and you want to learn copywriting via the “gold standard” — exercises that gets you comparing what you do (including making mistakes) to what A-list copywriters have done, starting from the exact same prompt — then go here:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

I failed in my quest for the gift of the gab

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Yesterday I tried to win the gift of the gab. I didn’t manage it.

What surprised me was that I found I had really hoped for it. I was almost desperate to get it.

Background:

I’ve been vacationing in Ireland for a week. Yesterday was the last full day. It was supposed to be the climax — going to Blarney Castle outside Cork, to kiss the Blarney Stone.

Legend says that anyone who kisses the stone will be blessed with the “gift of the gab” — the skill of talk, palaver, flattery, “the ability to deceive without offending.”

But the kissing didn’t happen for me. The line to kiss the stone was impossibly long, down the stairs, out the castle, into the gardens.

My friend Sam and I had spent too much time idling around the Blarney Castle grounds, inspecting and enjoying the fern garden, the bee observatory, the lake with the gold treasure at the bottom of it, the horse paddock with no horses, the impressive botanical garden, the wish-granting magic stairs.

What a waste of time.

Because the line for the actual castle was building up in the meantime, putting a bigger and bigger barrier between me and the gift of the gab.

My point:

We all want something external, outside ourselves, a talisman, a magic spell, a divine approval, something to believe in as cause and guarantee for our success, and as a motivator to action.

Regarding my failed quest for the gift of the gab:

The last time I was in Ireland, 10+ years ago, was because I was competing at the European University Debate Championships, even though I had only taken up debating months earlier.

In the decade since, I met two of my long-term girlfriends — relationships that lasted multiple years — when I ran up to an unfamiliar girl on the street and started gabbin’ away.

And today, I have this gabbin’ email newsletter, which is read regularly by some thousands of people, and which provides me everything I ever wanted in life, at least as far as business goes.

Meaning, I shouldn’t really be desperate for a magic stone to grant me the ability to chat, chatter, and use words to connect with people.

And yet, yesterday I found myself scheming to get back to Cork at the very next opportunity, book a hotel near the Blarney Castle, and be the first person in line in the morning to kiss the stone and get that magic gift of the gab.

So I’m writing this email to tell myself as much as to tell you that power and responsibility aren’t in the Blarney Stone or really anywhere else you need to travel to. As Tolstoy wrote, the Kingdom of God is within you.

It can be valuable to remember that.

On the flip side, there’s no denying that something external to believe in will sell, and will sell big. It’s the allure of a new mechanism, as copywriters like to call it.

But let’s get off the ethereal plane and descend to a more mercenary plane:

Specifically, the plane of my Most Valuable Email course.

I’ve made sure that course contains a mysterious and magical mechanism, the “Most Valuable Email trick.” It’s a big part of the reason why many people have bought this course.

But as I make clear on the MVE sales page, what’s really most valuable is the process of applying this Most Valuable Email trick to yourself, which makes you a better marketer and copywriter every day, and which as a side-effect produces interesting and influential and even sellable content.

Or in the words of Spanish A-list copywriter Rafa Casas, who bought MVE right when I put it out:

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Thanks for the course. It’s true that it can be read in an hour, but it needs more resting time and practice to get the full potential out of it. Which is a lot.

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So if you want to develop and nurture and even cherish the gift of the gab that’s already in you, and learn to sell daily without offending, here’s the full info on Most Valuable Email:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

I’ve caught James Bond stealing, and I would coach him to do it all over again

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I recently watched several old Bond movies, including the first one, Dr. No.

I was surprised by the scene that introduces the debonair Bond, which only happens 10+ minutes into the movie.

Of course, it’s at a high-end casino, at a baccarat table surrounded by women in gowns and men in tuxedos. A beautiful, aristocratic brunette is playing against a man not yet shown on camera. She keeps losing, getting more and more angry, and insisting on playing again.

Her off-camera opponent drawls with a Scottish accent. “I admire your courage, miss…?”

“Trench,” she says with a touch of irritation. “Sylvia Trench. I admire your luck, mister…?

The camera finally shows the handsome secret agent. He’s lighting a cigarette and looking immensely bored. “Bond. James Bond.”

Did you catch that?

“Bond. James Bond.” The most iconic item of Bond legend, along with the 007 designation and the stupid martini.

But even though it’s the main catch phrase people have associate with Bond for decades, it wasn’t his in the first place.

Mister Bond, James Bond, was simply mirroring what he had just heard from miss Trench, Sylvia Trench. You can even say he stole the cool introduction from the poor woman, along with her heart, and then made it his own.

And why not?

Over the past week, I’ve been lucky to draw the attention of a very successful and accomplished business owner, investor, and marketer.

He replied to one of my emails and gave me surprising encouragement and advice, including about creating high-ticket offers. $5k. $10k. $25k. Here’s a bit of what he wrote me:

“High-ticket copy offers are everywhere. I say the best artists steal from everyone to create completely new things that bring great value to the world. You might do just that as you create your value ladder, which I hope you are doing as you read this now.”

I read that yesterday morning, thought about it through the day, and started to apply it last night.

Today, I want to share it with you, in case you too have a list, and maybe even some offers, but nothing yet in what you might consider the high-ticket range.

Maybe like me, you’ve been thinking and waiting to create an offer in those higher price ranges. But like that very successful business owner wrote me, such offers are everywhere. You can mirror them, model them, and make them your own. Starting right now.

And if you want my help with that:

I offer coaching. I promote it as being coaching on writing daily emails. I do that because there’s something sexy to people about the idea of copywriting and email.

But the fact is, with the people I’ve coached so far, the coaching has been as much about creating new offers, or lead magnets, or ads, as it has been about writing emails. But don’t tell anybody that, because for some reason, email copywriting is really the thing that people want to be sold, and anything else might distract them.

I don’t often advertise this coaching program. I don’t often take on new students. I also don’t accept most people who express interest in this coaching.

But in case you are interested, reply to this email. Tell me a bit about yourself — who you are, what you do, who you do it for.

I’ll tell you if I think you’re in a place to benefit from the coaching. And if I think you are, we’ll get on a call to see if it’s a fit. A real fit.

Why I fired the same reader for the second time

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A couple weeks ago, before I even released my Simple Money Emails course, I got a reply to one of my daily emails, all in bold:

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Hi John,

How’s Simple Money Emails different from Most Valuable Email?

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Hm. A reasonable question. But I found something a little grating, a little accusatory in the specific phrasing of those 9 words. Maybe it was just the unnecessary boldface.

I looked at the name of the reader who had sent me the question. Familiar… definitely familiar.

I looked it up to confirm.

Aha. I knew him. And well.

Turns out, I had banned this guy from my list two years ago. He was the first reader I ever proactively unsubscribed, and has been only one of three readers I’ve banned in my five years of writing daily emails.

Somehow, he had made his way back to my list. And he announced his return with a subtly annoying question, all in bold.

No problem. I unsubscribed him again.

Because as I’ve written before, daily emailing is really about the long term. In order for that to happen, you have to be happy to come in to work every day. And if that means firing a particularly toxic reader once every few years, then so be it.

But you know what?

His question really is kind of appropriate, specifically now that I have had a large influx of new readers, and since these new readers know my new Simple Money Emails course, but they might not know Most Valuable Email, my workhorse offer.

So here’s the answer:

Simple Money Emails is just that. It’s a course that shows you how to write quick emails, often basic, but effective in making sales and keeping people reading.

On the other hand, Most Valuable Email is a course about an advanced email copywriting technique.

​​It’s based on a trick I have used repeatedly, which has gotten me exposure, built up my status and authority, and even led to a one-time random windfall of a few thousand dollars (a story for another time).

But all those nice results are not not why Most Valuable Emails are most valuable. They are most valuable because each time I use the Most Valuable Email trick, it makes me a tiny bit better at marketing and copywriting and influence.

I don’t recommend Most Valuable Email for every market. But if you’re in a small and chosen band of niches, then this trick can be most valuable for you too.

For the complete info, take a look below…

https://bejakovic.com/mve

… and if you look up Most Valuable Email Swipe #12, included in the course, you can find out the story of the guy above, and why I fired him from my list in the first place.

The good, the coulda been better, the ugly of my Josh Spector promotion

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Last night, I finished the promotion I was running over the past week, which started when I ran a classified ad in Josh Spector’s newsletter last Sunday.

I had a free offer in the actual ad, Simple Money Emails, and a paid upsell, 9 Deadly Email Sins, for people who opted in.

I turned off both offers last night, as I said I would, once the deadline passed.

For my own benefit, I wrote up my conclusions about this experience.

If you like, you can read some of my conclusions below. It might be interesting to you if you’re looking to grow your list, monetize your list, run classified ads, or put on quick and simple offers that your readers appreciate and buy.

But as FBI negotiator Chris Voss likes to say, the last impression is the lasting impression. So let’s leave the good for last, and let’s start with the ugly first.

THE UGLY:

I haven’t made back my money on the Josh Spector ad.

I mean, I made a bunch of sales over the past week, but not enough from new subscribers, who came via the classified ad, to cover the $350 I gave to Josh to run the ad.

There’s a fair chance I will make back my money in time. But of course, there’s also a chance I won’t.

I have various hypotheses as to why it hasn’t happened yet. I might write about those down the line, but some include options in the next, coulda been better section.

THE COULDA BEEN BETTER:

I made a nice number of sales of the paid upsell last week — but at only $100 per sale.

The promotion I did last month, for Steve Raju’s ClientRaker, ended up with a comparable number of sales, but at 3x the price.

Had I raised the price higher, I prolly woulda made more money — there’s a lot of elasticity in info products. Maybe that way I would have already recouped my money on the Josh Spector ad.

But maybe it wasn’t the price. Maybe it was the copy, the core appeal.

Simple Money Emails is something I thought about carefully. I planned out that name, and the core appeal. The number of people who took me up on that offer confirms it’s something attractive.

On the other hand, as I’ve written already, the upsell, 9 Deadly Email Sins, wasn’t something I carefully planned or thought about — at least as far as the packaging goes, because the content is thought-through and very valuable.

I might have packaged up that same valuable content into a different-patterned box with a different-colored bow, and sold 50% or 80% or maybe 100% more.

THE GOOD:

One good thing was that I got a buncha new subscribers.

In fact, I grew my list 7% list over past week. From what I can see from new subscribers who have custom domains, these are high-quality prospects. Whether I manage to convert them in time is probably up to me.

The other good thing was I made a buncha sales to existing readers.

One of those sales came from somebody who joined my list back in 2019 (my guess is I had ~80 subscribers at the time). Several sales came from people who joined my list in 2020… and lots came from people who joined 2021, in 2022, and earlier this year.

Most people who bought 9 Deadly Email Sins bought multiple offers from me before.

The fact they are still with me is encouraging. It means I’m doing something right both with the products I’m selling, and with this marketing, the email that you’re reading right now. It must be engaging enough to keep people around, and reading, and buying, years down the line.

THE AMAZING:

I tell myself I have to have an offer at the end of each email. My offer at the end of this email is my Most Valuable Email course, which is amazing. But don’t take it from me. Reader James Harrison bought MVE last month, and wrote me about it last week to say:

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Also, a few days ago I finished going through your MVE course. I thought it was amazing. I especially loved what you did at the end, with the MVE Riddles. Not enough courses get their students actively using their brains.

Thank you for all that you do.

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Maybe actively using your brain isn’t something you’re into. But maybe it is. In that case, if you’d like an amazing way to do it, and to win bigly in the process:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

How to write emails that won’t embarrass you and show off your lack of skill

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Last week, I got an email from a marketer with a big-promise subject line:

“How to hook your reader in 5 seconds…”

Oh, the ironing. It took me all about 1 second to swipe left and get rid of that email without ever opening it.

Clearly, whatever techniques that guy was selling inside his email, they weren’t helping him personally.

That would never happen had he known about my Most Valuable Email trick, which is all about preventing ugly and embarrassing situations like the above from happening.

I last promoted Most Valuable Email 10 days ago. Due to the phase of the moon, I pulled in a surprising number of new buyers then. One was email marketer Illya Shapovalov, who wrote me soon after buying to say:

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Oh. My God.

After slightly more than 2 hours, I still haven’t gone fully through MVE. I’m a tedious notetaker. My head is literally spinning. I feel like Ned Stark (assuming you’ve watched GOT) when he pieced together that the “Baratheon” kids are bastards. I’m gonna take a break and continue where I left off (the riddles)

Even though I’m fairly new to copywriting (7 months in), I’ve been gnawing at this idea of “telling without telling”. For example, how to not have a lead magnet, but make so everyone who lands on the signup form can’t help but join. Basically “show don’t tell”. Because. as you point out in MVE too, stories are getting commoditized. Everyone can spin a story. This however … this answers so many seemingly unanswerable questions I had, or didn’t even know I have.

Easily the best $100 I ever invested in something. This is something I can apply not only to email but to my website copy, to my LinkedIn profile/posts, to name a few examples …

Bottom line: Huge thank you for making this course – and for seriously underpricing it. In hindsight, it’s worth way more than a measly $100. And I haven’t even checked the swipe file yet.

P.S. Yesterday’s email looks completely different – in fact, it did so right after your response. That, and the whole MVE trick … something so pointedly simple, yet so fucking powerful.

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The MVE trick takes less than an hour to learn. (Or more than two hours, depending on how many notes you take.) Point being, it’s quick to grasp.

You can then apply the MVE trick in your subject lines, in your email copy, in your personal positioning, in the way you price your offers, in your funnels, as I’ve done, over and over, a dozen times or more in my emails just this month, and many more times over the past months and years.

Each time I have applied the MVE trick, I have profited, either with sales that I made directly, or indirectly, by learning, and becoming better at what I do, every day, a small but significant step each time.

If you’d like to do the same:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

“So where are we all supposed to go now?”

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A couple days ago, an article on The Verge by David Pierce picked up steam and then really started chugging along, tearing through any obstacles in its path, and demanding the attention and concern even of slack-jawed layabouts who were minding their own business just moments earlier. The title of Pierce’s article:

“So where are we all supposed to go now?”

Pierce was writing about how social media — first Facebook, then Twitter, now Reddit — are dying. And what, he wanted to know, will be next?

I know all about this because I’m a painfully contrary person. After about 20 years of resisting social media, I am now getting on social media full on.

First, I got on Twitter a couple months ago (under a pseudonym). That’s how I came across that runaway Verge article. And I will also most probably get on LinkedIn in the next few days (under my own name).

I figure what others, smarter than I am, have already figured out:

Maybe social media is a cesspool, and maybe it’s now dying to boot. But there are still billions of people on there. I only need a small and select fraction of those people to do very well.

My ultimate goal — as you can probably guess — is to get these people onto my email lists, either this one that you’re reading now, or my new health newsletter. That’s how I can write to them regularly, with something interesting or valuable, and build a relationship, and even do business and exchange money for my offers.

So what will come after Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit? Where are we all supposed to go now?

I don’t know, and I don’t particularly care. Because I use a mental shortcut known as the Lindy Law, which says that you can expect technology to survive on average as long as it’s already been around.

Email has been around for 52 years, longer than the Internet as we know it.

Will email still be around 52 years from now? Who knows. I figure its odds are better than any new technology that comes out today or tomorrow.

But you probably knew all this before. What you might not know — something that surprised me yesterday — is that there’s an email platform called Beehiiv.

I promoted Beehiiv in my email yesterday, and I gave people a bit of a carrot-and-stick to sign up for a free account on Beehiiv using my affiliate link.

I got lots of people taking me up on the offer, and I got lots of people thanking me for cluing them in to Beehiiv. That’s the part that was surprising to me — so many people had not heard of Beehiiv before.

I personally use Beehiiv, I’m very happy with it, and that’s why I’m happy to recommend it. As for why you might want to try it for your new newsletter or project, here’s my best case for that:

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Beehiiv is slick and it has a buncha tools that other email providers don’t have. Like a nice-looking website, straight out of the box, that doubles as your email archive. A referral program. Recommendations from and to other newsletters. An ad network if you want to monetize your newsletter that way.

Just as important:

More than any other email platform I’ve directly used or indirectly heard about, Beehiiv is stable and reliable. It doesn’t crash. It doesn’t lock up. It doesn’t fail to send out emails you meant to send and it doesn’t sneakily send out emails you didn’t mean to send.

But really, try it out for yourself and see. Maybe it’s not for you. Or maybe you will love it.

There’s no risk either way. Because Beehiiv is free to start using and to continue using indefinitely — for sending emails and for the website.

You only have to pay something if you wanna upgrade to some of the fancier growth and monetization tools — which I’ve done, because it’s well-worth the money for me, and because I’ve decided to stick with Beehiiv for the long term.

So like I said, I encourage you to give it a try. But—

I know that encouragement, and good arguments, and lists of shiny features, are often not enough to get people to move.

So I’ll give you a bit of a carrot-and-stick too.

Over the past two months, I’ve grown my new newsletter from 73 subscribers to 1,109 subscribers.

And if you try out Beehiiv using my affiliate link, I will send you a recording in which I talk about all the stuff I’ve done to grow that newsletter — what’s worked, what hasn’t, what I plan to do going forward. (I’ll even tell you some stuff I’m planning to do to grow this daily marketing newsletter that you’re reading right now.)

Also, here’s another thing I promise to give you:

I had some deliverability problems early on with my new newsletter. It turned out not to be Beehiiv’s fault. Rather it was that I had failed to set up my DNS right. I fixed that, and my deliverability problems got fixed. But I went one further.

I also came up with a little trick to increase my deliverability going forward and even to increase my open rates.

This trick has nothing to do with DMARC or DKIM records. It has nothing to do with trying to game Gmail. It’s just plain old marketing and psychology. And it’s allowed me to actually increase my open rates while my list has grown quickly and sizeably.

This trick is not complicated — it takes all of five minutes to implement.

And if you take me up on my offer and try out Beehiiv, I will send you a quick writeup of exactly what I did, and how you can do it too, to have the kinds of deliverability and reader engagement that other newsletters can only wonder at.

So that’s the carrot. The stick, or the threat of it, is that there’s a deadline, 24 hours from now, at 8:31pm CET on Thursday, July 6.

If you’re interested, here’s what to do:

1. Head to Beehiiv using this link: https://bejakovic.com/beehiiv

2. Sign up for a free account. You don’t have to sign up for anything paid. I am counting on Beehiiv’s quality and service to convince you to do that over time.

3. Once you’ve signed up, forward me the confirmation email you get from Beehiiv — and I will reply to you with 1) the recording listing all the things I’ve done and will be doing to grow my new newsletter and 2) a write up of my little deliverability and email open trick. Do it before the deadline — 8:31pm CET on Thursday, July 6 — and you get the carrot, and not the stick. ​​

I saw a funambulist yesterday and I suspect I can do what he does

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Yesterday, I found myself in the middle of a hushed crowd. Everyone was looking up.

Then the crowd collectively gasped, started clapping, and cheered. My girlfriend turned around and started to jokingly shush the people closest to her. “Let the man concentrate!”

Yesterday, a funambulist — a tightrope walker — made his way some 200 meters from one corner of Plaça de Catalunya, the central square in Barcelona, across Passeig de Gracia, the main shopping street in Barcelona.

Halfway across, about 120 feet in the air, the man stopped. He sat down cross-legged on the tight-rope. After a few moments of what looked like comfortable meditation, with the his shirt rippling in the wind, he stood up and kept walking.

Instead of stopping at the end, he turned around and decided to walk back to the start. The crowd underneath was following him like a shadow on the ground.

The funambulist came back to the midpoint of the tight-rope. Slowly and carefully, he lay down on his back on the rope, his arms out to the sides.

This lying down, and the bit of cross-legged sitting before it, looked kind of tricky.

The rest of the time though, the guy was just walking.

He didn’t have one of those balancing poles. Instead, he just kept his arms up and used them to balance. He steadily put one bare foot in front of the other, occasionally shifting his weight a bit, moving his arms a little. That’s it.

I wouldn’t like to be up that high in the air. But really, this tight-rope walking, which I’ve never attempted in my life, looks pretty easy.

Of course, that’s because I know nothing about it. Odds are, if I ever tried to walk on a tight-rope slung two feet off the ground between two trees, I would find it very hard to pull off, very tiring, requiring enormous balance. I would probably find myself falling off over and over, after just a step or two.

Still, it looks easy.

In my email yesterday, I made an unusual offer. I’m trying to get rid of my Copy Riddles course. I’m no longer selling it myself, so I’m looking to find a person who would like to take it from me, along with all the rights to it, and sell it, change it, do whatever with it.

Copy Riddles ties into that tightrope walker’s act. A-list level sales copy looks easy. A bit of intrigue, balanced with a benefit or two, steadily marching towards the order form.

If, like me when I first started writing copy, you think you can do what A-list copywriters do, then you should try to do it yourself.

That’s what Copy Riddles is all about. You get to write copy, starting from the same prompt that A-list copywriters started from. And you find out very quickly how much skill and effort and tricks are involved in producing what they produce.

Surprisingly, I got multiple serious responses to my offer yesterday. I got back to everyone. We will see if any of these negotiations bear fruit.

But I’ve found that, whenever I get several responses to a new offer with just one email, there are inevitably people who didn’t see that email, or meant to reply but didn’t get to it. Plus, since this is an unusual sale, the final details of it are likely to be fluid — depending on who the eventual buyer is and what his or her goals and current situation are.

For all those reasons, I’m writing you again with the same offer. If you are interested in owning the rights to Copy Riddles, so you can sell it and profit from it, then write me, and we can start talking about how that might work.

How the mosquito built Rome

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In my email yesterday, I wrote about my home town’s curious plan to stop the coming mosquito hordes by importing a hundred thousand sterile mosquito males. To which I got a mosquito-themed reply from an Insights & More member named Jordan (not sure he wants me to share his last name):

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The talk about mosquitoes and books reminds me of the… mosquito book.

The Mosquito – Timothy Winegard

It’s actually very very interesting and showcases:

How the mosquito Built Rome
How the mosquito bested one of the greatest conquerors
How the mosquito ended slavery

(hows that for bullet point build out)

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I found this intriguing so I looked it up and yes — it turns out there’s a credible case to be made for the mosquito having built Rome.

​​In its early days, Rome was surrounded by hundreds of square miles of wetland, called the Pontine Marshes. Perfect for mosquitos. Perfect for malaria. Perfect for dying. Says Winegard:

“Armies coming to attack Rome — beginning with Hannibal and the Carthaginians, and then the Visigoths, Attila and his Huns, and the Vandals — couldn’t essentially either take or hold Rome because of this malarial shield.”

Based on a quick search, it seems Winegard’s Mosquito book gives you:

1. Lots of surprising or even contrary ideas like the one above

2. A credible, well-researched reinterpretation of history

3. A new context for familiar things

… all of which means it might make a perfect choice for the Insights & More Book Club in the future.

Speaking of, the same Jordan who wrote me about the Mosquito book earlier wrote me about the last Insights & More book, the one we just finished. He said:

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The book was mind blowing (even thought I havent finished it yet)

Can’t wait for my first call experience and the next book

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It’s unfortunately too late to join for the next round of the Insights & More Book Club, because the doors have closed. But if you’d like to have the chance to join in the future, get on my email list. It’s the only place where I actually advertise and open up my book club.