Personal Change

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.

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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

Ooooo, child!

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Last weekend, my friend Sam and I went to Savannah. On the drive there, we started started listening to an audiobook of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

That was a 1994 non-fiction book that stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for a remarkable 216 weeks.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil consists of a bunch of character studies of various eccentrics who lived in Savannah in the 1970s and 80s. The book cuts through Savannah society, from the rich and established to the poor and fringe.

Among the poor and fringe was Miss Chablis, “The Empress of Savannah.”

Chablis was a black drag queen.

The narrator of the audiobook, who normally speaks with a neutral accent, voiced Chablis, like all other Savannah locals, with a kind of southern drawl.

Except that in the case of Miss Chablis, the narrator, who sounded solidly white and male otherwise, also had to awkwardly act out dozens of draq-queeny, Black-English phrases such as:

“Ooooo, child!”

“Oh, child, don’t you be doin’ that!”

“Y-e-e-e-s, child! Yayyiss… yayyiss… yayyiss!”​​

I had flashbacks to this earlier today.

I got back to Barcelona yesterday. I checked my mailbox and found a stack of New Yorkers waiting for me.

This morning, I sat on my balcony and flipped open the latest one. The first feature story is about Ru Paul.

“Ooooo, child!” I said, “No more drag queens, honey, please!”

But as I often do, I forced myself to read something I had no inclination to read. I often find valuable things that way.

Today was no exception. I found the following passage in the first page of the article. Jinkx Monsoon, a 36-year-old drag queen who won two seasons of Ru Paul’s reality competition TV show, explained the power of drag:

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It’s armor, ’cause you’re putting on a persona. So the comments are hitting something you created, not you. And then it’s my sword, because all of the things that made me a target make me powerful as a drag queen.

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If you have any presence online, this armor-and-sword passage is good advice. It’s something that the most successful and most authentic-seeming performers out there practice.

I once saw a serious sit-down interview with Woody Allen. I remember being shocked by how calm, confident, and entirely not Woody-Allen-like he was.

Closer to the email world, I remember from a long time ago an email in which Ben Settle basically said the same thing as Jinkx Monsoon above. How the crotchety, dismissive persona he plays in his emails is a kind of exaggeration and a mask he puts over the person he is in real life.

So drag is good advice for online entrepreneurs.

But like much other good advice, It’s not something I follow in these emails.

I haven’t developed an email persona, and I’m not playing any kind of ongoing role to entertain my audience or to protect me from their criticism.

That’s because I don’t like to lie to myself. Like I’ve said many times before, I write these emails for myself first and foremost, and then I do a second pass to make sure that what I’ve written can be relevant and interesting to others as well.

This is not something I would encourage anybody else to do. But it’s worked out well enough for me, and allowed me to stay in the game for a long time.

That said, I do regularly adopt various new and foreign mannerisms in these emails.

I do this because i find it instructive and fun, and because it allows me to stretch beyond the person/writer I am and become more skilled and more successful.

I’ve even created an entire training, all about the great value of this approach.

In case you’d like to become more skilled and successful writing online, then honey, I am serious! You best look over here, child:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

I teased, promised, and threatened, and yet it’s not here

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I woke up this morning, confused about where I am and what time it might be.

It’s day one of my U.S. trip. I’m only just beginning the adjustment to the time zone change from Europe. I expect the adjustment to continue until it’s time for me to fly back to Barcelona.

In my confusion this morning, I checked my inbox and saw the many dozens of emails that had accumulated since yesterday. One email stood out.

“Uh-oh,” I said to myself. “That’s a problem.”

Because yesterday, I teased, promised, and threatened that today I would start promoting an exciting and legit business opportunity for working copywriters.

Well, as that email informed me, this promo has now been postponed.

As with most legit business opportunities, you gotta get on a call before you can buy. And as I found out this morning, the guy who does these calls is “taking a step back for urgent personal reasons.”

So I will not be promoting this exciting and legit business opportunity in my email today. Instead, my teasing of this business opportunity continues, and I will be promoting it in the future.

Meanwhile, since I had to adapt my plan for today, I’d like to share the following quote with you. It’s from one of the most successful direct marketers of all time, Joe Sugarman, of BluBlockers fame.

​​Joe was talking about a glaring objection in a product he was selling once. And he wrote:

“I recognized this as a problem that had to be addressed in our copy. And since I look at problems as opportunities, I wondered, ‘Where is the opportunity in this serious and rapidly growing problem?'”

I read this in the early days of my business and marketing education. And that “problems as opportunities” bit has stuck with me ever since.

Here’s a second quote I read only yesterday. It comes from Brad Jacobs, who started 7 billion-dollar companies so far in his life, and who recently published a book about his experiences, titled How to Make a Few Billion Dollars. Jacobs writes:

“Embrace everything that comes your way, the good and especially the bad. And don’t just accept adversity — figure out how to capitalize on it.”

So there you go. My tip for you for today, via Joe Sugarman and Brad Jacobs:

Train yourself. Change your mind. And the next time you come across a problem — big or small — tell yourself to look at it as an opportunity. In time, this attitude may lead you to a few billion dollars.

In my case, the fact that my planned affiliate offer for today fell through is an opportunity to promote something of my own.

So let me remind you of my Simple Money Emails course. It’s all about writing easy and fast emails that you can use day after day to adapt to problems and opportunities in your business, and even to use them to build credibility and trust with your audience.

For more information on Simple Money Emails:

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.

Collapse the time

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Later today, I will host the first call of my Write & Profit coaching group.

I launched that on the back of the “How I do it” live presentation did a couple weeks ago.

I had the idea for that presentation in the middle of January, and I tacked on the group coaching offer simply because I have a policy to put an offer at the end of everything I do.

I’ve been thinking about a change I’ve made recently to how I work.

I simply started starting things faster.

I don’t put as many ideas in a todo list. I don’t ponder as much. I don’t prepare. My default has become, just do it now.

Lots of things have been happening for me over the past couple months. I believe this change in behavior is a big reason why.

Yesterday, I got an email from direct marketing coach Dan Kennedy, who expressed the same idea. Dan wrote:

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I taught myself the habit of collapsing the time between each idea and acting on it. This has created a lot of messes and a few catastrophes but also made possible a lot more successes than occur at a normal pace.

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So that’s my bit of advice for today. Collapse the time. Messes will happen. Maybe catastrophes, too. But overall, you will still come out way ahead of where you would have been otherwise.

Time to go.

I still have things to prepare for tonight’s coaching call. Meanwhile, since I have a policy to make an offer at the end of everything I do, consider my Simple Money Emails course. It can help you collapse the time between wishin’ and hopin’ to write daily emails and actually writing them regularly.

For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

How to fix bad habits

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Yesterday, I was ellipting on the elliptical and to make the process less maddening, I listened to a podcast, which turned out to be surprisingly valuable.

It was a health podcast. The guest was a psychotherapist, a certain Dr. Glenn Livingston, PhD.

That name was familiar to me.

Turns out it was the same Dr. Glenn Livingston, PhD, who was also a successful direct marketer a while back.

​​I checked for his name in my inbox just now. He has at different times partnered with or been named-dropped by direct marketing rhinos and mammoths like Terry Dean, Ryan Levesque, Ken McCarthy, and Perry Marshall.

But back to the podcast. Like I said, it was a health podcast, about how to quit overeating.

Turns out Dr. Glenn is an expert on the matter.

Not only has he battled overeating his whole life, but he has written a bunch of books on the topic. The best selling one, Never Binge Again, has 19,224 reviews on Amazon.

Perhaps you’re wondering whether this email will ever get to a point. The point is this:

For years, Dr. Glenn used his psychotherapeutic training to try to quit overeating.

Never worked.

After years of therapy, introspection, and digging into his family history, Dr. Glenn finally unearthed the surprising root cause of why he was overeating his whole life (mommy issues).

And it still didn’t fix a damn thing. If anything, it made his overeating worse, because he now had a legit excuse, where he didn’t have one before.

And yet, Dr. Glenn did manage to get his eating under control.

​​I’ll tell you how:

He isolated, named, and in fact shamed the part of his mind that was craving and reaching for chocolate, for chocolate was his weakness.

Dr. Glenn told himself, “That is my Inner Pig talking. The Inner Pig wants its slop. But I am not one to be ruled by farm animals.”

The effect wasn’t immediate — few things outside direct marketing promises are. But the effect was there, and after a bit of time, this inner-piggization cured Dr. Glenn Livingston, PhD, of his overeating habit, making him a healthier, happier, better person.

The bigger point, as Dr. Glenn says on the podcast, is that identity is stronger than will power.

You can use this truth if you’re trying to influence and persuade others.

Or you can use it to fix your own bad habits.

I’ve just told you the main highlight of this surprisingly valuable podcast with Dr. Glenn Livingston. But there are more good things inside that podcast. And there’s more development of that core idea, that identity is stronger than will power, in a way that might help it actually sink into your head.

If you want to influence and persuade others better… or if you want to improve your own life and control your mind better, this podcast is worth a listen. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/bad-habits

If you want to learn to pray, raise your prices

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I live in Barcelona, have been for almost two years now. In order to find out a little about this city, I picked up a book, called Barcelona. It talks about the history and the architecture of the place.

Since Barcelona is on the sea, the culture has been influenced big time by sea and sailing.

​​One of the oldest churches in the city is Santa Maria del Mar.

​​The patron saint of Barcelona is St. Eulalia, also the patron saint of sailors.

​​And according to the book I’m reading, the locals have a saying:

“If you want to learn to pray, learn to sail.”

I wrote that down when I read it. It’s very practical advice, even if you don’t want to learn to pray.

It reminded me of my attitude from day zero of my copywriting career, back in 2015.

I started out charging $15/hour.

I told myself that after five jobs completed at that rate, I would raise my rate to $20/hr.

And I did so.

Then I repeated the process, over and over. $20, $25, $40.

While I was still on Upwork, around 2018, I eventually got to $150/hr.

Then I got off Upwork, and started charging clients still higher effective fees for the work I was doing.

At every step of the way, my mindset was lacking. I had zero inner game. I was emotionally sure that the work I was doing would not be worth the new price I wanted to charge.

And yet I raised my prices. My mindset and my skills and my deliverables caught up. They had to. I was working with clients who were suddenly paying me lots more money.

So if you want to learn to pray, learn to sail. And if you want confidence and the skills to back it up, raise your prices.

This applies beyond copywriting, and beyond client work. ​​

That’s why pricing will be something I will talk about on the free presentation I will host tomorrow, about how I write and profit from this newsletter that you are reading now. But that training is only open to people who are signed up to my list. If you’d like to get on there, click here.

Wherever you go, there you are

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Earlier today, I found myself at Europa Point at the tip of Gibraltar.

It was a sunny afternoon, with a few clouds rolling across the sky.

The massive rock of Gibraltar was to my back.

In front of me, to the south, across the Strait of Gibraltar, I could see Africa.

To the right was the Atlantic with a breeze blowing across to the left, where the Mediterranean started.

There was almost nobody at Europa Point today, except for one American couple walking a small black Scottish terrier.

As the three of them passed by, the woman looked down, smiled, and said hello. Her guy, who had the dog on the leash, paused for a moment. He grinned and said, “Where you guys from?”

“I’m from Croatia,” I said. I gestured to the girl next to me. “She’s from Ukraine.”

“Ukraine!” the guy said in shock. “We’re giving you a lot of money!”

The Ukrainian girl stared at him for a moment. “We appreciate it,” she said.

But he didn’t seem to hear her. “… billions of dollars! Billions!” The dog started pulling on the leash. They walked off into the breeze, but I could still hear the guy muttering to himself. “All my tax money!”

That made me chuckle and then think. And what popped into my head was, “Wherever you go, there you are.”

That’s the title of a book on meditation. The author of that book wanted to point out that the present moment is all you really have.

But it’s true the other way around also.

Most people go through their lives thinking, feeling, and reacting in the same automatic ways. Wherever they go, there they are. Nothing ever changes. Of course, it doesn’t have to be that way.

You might wonder what this has to do with copywriting or marketing. I won’t try to stretch it there. But I can tell you this:

Even though copywriting and marketing are why most people sign up to my list, I find the most response I get is when I write about topics that have little or nothing to do with making money. Such as the reply I got to yesterday’s email from a reader named Vivian:

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I just finished rereading your SME course, jotting down notes, and planning my own newsletter in these few days.

As I read more and more emails daily, I’m really getting all these vibes that I’m learning new stuff from you, not just copywriting wise.

And this email, along with other emails, make me so excited and anticipated for your free training. Even though I can’t make it live, because it’ll be 3am here in Malaysia, but I know for sure that I will instantly watch the whole recording and jot down the notes, and do everything I did about SME as to this training.

Can’t wait!

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That training that Vivian mentions will cover how I write and profit from this newsletter that you are reading now.

It will also talk about some fluffier, less tangible stuff that’s allowed me to stick with my newsletter for years, and to get to a place where I can pretty much write about whatever interests me, and still have people reading my writing and taking me up on my offers.

This training will be free. It will happen on Monday, January 22, 2024, at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. But you will have to be signed up to my email list first. Click here to do so.

Matrix Denier rejoins my list and is promptly fired

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A couple days ago, I wrote an email in which I used the Matrix as a pop culture illustration. To which I got a reply from a guy who said, yea that’s great and all but “what if your reader hasn’t seen the movie and therefore doesn’t have a clue what the h*ll you’re talking about?”

A reasonable question… but something about the tone of it — it’s amazing how that comes through — made my terrier ears perk up.

I looked up this Matrix Denier to see if I’d had any previous email interactions with him.

And oh boy. Here’s the sorry story:

Two years ago, I ran a launch for my Copy Riddles program.

The Matrix Denier was signed up to my list at the time.

​​He replied on the last day of the launch to tell me that I name-drop famous copywriters a lot… that he wouldn’t be buying my course because my emails aren’t good enough to impress him… and that, rather than create my own offers, I should go back and study the work of people like Andre Chaperon and Ben Settle.

I shrugged, and I used this reply for a new email that I sent out to my list to promote my Copy Riddles course.

The Matrix Denier didn’t like this, and he wrote me in an offended and hurt tone to say so. Which I again turned into an email, and sent it out to my list as part of a sequence of emails about the different types of denial we all engage in.

This was the straw that broke the Denier’s back. He unsubscribed from my list, and as the reason why, he fired this farewell shot:

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“You’re simply too dumb to be helped. I tried twice & you can’t tell the difference between a troll & someone with advice. Good luck. You’ll need it.”

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Like I said, now he’s back on my list. Well, he was, until yesterday, when I unsubscribed him. No sense in wasting perfectly good Matrix analogies on someone who would rather complain than go see a movie I specifically recommended as great marketing fodder.

The point of this being that a couple years have passed.

I’m still writing… my status in the industry has grown… and so has the number of people who recommend me and point new readers to my newsletter.

Meanwhile, I don’t know what the Matrix Denier has gained in those two years. Going by the tone of his replies, and by the fact he even took the time to write me, just so he could complain and say “But what about me?” makes me think he hasn’t gone far from where he was two years ago.

In other words, you might as well get going now.

Time passes unstoppably. It’s a trite observation, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

Whatever it is that you’re doing or want to do, if you start now, and start accumulating a bit of something valuable every day — whether of skills or money or subscribers — then you can be in much better position in a couple of years, while those around you are left standing still.

And on that note, my Copy Riddles was and remains a great program, the best thing I sell. If you’d like to find out more about it or use it to start accumulating your copywriting skills, starting today:

https://bejakovic.com/cr