Productivity

I proactively unsubscribe my second reader ever

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Ten days ago, after I sent out an email where I compared the British royal family to marketers building a list, I got this punctuation-free reply:

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Can you send something on writing advertorials

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Last night, after I sent out an email about personal positioning with a story featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Larry King, I got a reply from the same guy:

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Hello can you do more advertorials more on

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Now here are a couple of intimate facts about me that you may or may not care to know:

1. I like hearing from my readers.

​​My cold heart always warms up a few degrees above absolute zero whenever I see a reader reply sitting in my inbox.

2. At the same time, I’m easily influenced — that’s why I study influence.

So when I get a nagging, ungrammatical, 7-word reader reply that seems to shout over top of me by completely ignoring the content of the email that I sent out — that annoys me.

​​Not only that, but it stays in my head for a good while interfering with other work.

I recently started a journal on the topic of fast writing.

Fast writing for me doesn’t mean typing more words per minute.

It doesn’t even mean writing my daily email in 15 minutes instead of 55 minutes.

Instead, fast writing for me is all about ways to change how I work so as to get more done at the end of the month, while keeping the same adequate level of quality, and while spending less time at the damned computer than I do now.

The first idea in my fast writing journal is to eliminate distractions.

So I unsubscribed the guy above from my list.

​​He was a distraction. And I don’t need a third email from him in another two weeks, saying, “Hey can you advertorials more more”

John Cleese of Monty Python fame has this tiny book on creativity. In it, Cleese, who I would consider a very creative person — not only Monty Python, but A Fish Called Wanda, Fawlty Towers — says the number one enemy of creativity is distractions.

Writing, even sales copy, even a daily email, takes a certain amount of creativity.

If writing is what you do, then help yourself out and make a habit of eliminating distractions that interfere with your work.

And if you happen to write a daily email, and if you happen to also be an easily influenced person, then you might like what I’ve figured out with my Most Valuable Email.

​​It’s a way to influence and feel good in the process. You can find out more about that here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Jerry Seinfeld’s serious joke about the news

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Today I watched a clip of Jerry Seinfeld on the Johnny Carson Show. Jerry smiles his precocious-boy smile and says:

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To me the most amazing thing about the news is that whatever goes on in the world, it exactly fits the number of pages that they’re using in the paper that day. [Johnny Carson chuckles off screen. Jerry continues:]

They must stand around after each edition going, “I don’t believe we just made it again! If one more thing happens, we’re screwed. There’s no more room in this paper!”

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This is a joke if you hear Jerry Seinfeld tell it, or imagine him with his mannerisms, or if you include that exaggeration at the end.

It’s not a joke if you just read the first sentence of that quote. It really is amazing that the day’s news always just fit the newspaper.

Of course, who reads newspapers any more — but the underlying point still stands:

The news was and is just a constant drip of telling you what to think, how to feel, how to react.

The news is not what’s worth knowing. At least that’s the way I look at it.

If you’re still reading, you might wonder what I think is worth knowing. I call it anti-news.

I’ve written before of my policy of not reading books that were published in just the last year.

I’ve been informed this has a clever name, “the Lindy effect,” after some long-surviving deli in New York.

The idea is, if something is worthwhile, it will still be worthwhile in a year from now. More generally, the longer something has been around, the more likely it is to keep being around.

This simple but powerful idea impacts everything I do, from the books I read to the emails I write to the offers I create. And since it’s time to start promoting:

It also lies behind my Copy Riddles program.

Copy Riddles is built on examples of winning copywriting that have been around for three, four, five, six decades or more.

But I’d take it still further back:

I believe Copy Riddles is really about the principles of effective communication, going back thousands of years. That might sound high-heeled, but it’s really what direct response marketing is — a merciless distillation that purifies and concentrates the evergreen principles of effective communication.

These principles were relevant yesterday, last year, a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago.

And if you are looking to influence or manipulate people, these principles are your best bet for what will continue to be relevant tomorrow.

As marketing consultant Khaled Maziad wrote me to say after going through Copy Riddles:

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Man, this’s the best course on bullets I have ever seen. And believe me, I have seen a lot. I loved that you didn’t include bullet templates but went deep into the psychology behind each bullet. This course is not just about the “how-to” of writing bullets but understanding the artistry and the deep psychology behind them… Plus, when and where to use them.

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As you might know already:

This is the last week I am giving away two free bonuses with Copy Riddles. The first bonus is Storytelling For Sales. The second bonus is Copywriting Portfolio Secrets.

Don’t buy Copy Riddles just for the free bonuses.

But if you decide you want to get Copy Riddles, you have until tomorrow, Saturday Jan 21, at 12 midnight PST to get Storytelling for Sales and Copywriting Portfolio Secrets as free bonuses.

After then, Copy Riddles will remain available, but the free bonuses will disappear.

To get the whole package:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Free quiz: See if you should give up on that dream

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A while back, I came across an insightful analogy by a guy named Jeremy Enns. I don’t know Enns from Adam’s off ox, but the man seems to run a successful marketing agency.

Anyways, Enns had this to say (I’ve cherrypicked the most insightful bits):

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Podcasting Is Like Investing

I’ve had the opportunity to work alongside and talk with dozens of podcasters about how their shows have grown and when the effort finally started to feel like it was worth it.

The most common response is that it took at least two years before the investment really started to pay dividends.

I like to say that you can podcast for a year and it will feel like a massive waste of time. Podcast for three years and it can completely change your life.

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This ties into a little quiz I devised last year, while writing my never-released Copy Zone project, about the business side of copywriting.

The quiz is a way to decide if any dream project is worth embarking on.

The quiz is simply this. Ask yourself:

“Would I be ok working on this for the next five years?”

If your answer is, “No way!” or “Really, I want to do this for a year or max two and get out,” then quit now.

And when you do quit, send me a thank-you note for saving you months or maybe years of your life, dabbling on the sidelines, and possibly wasting thousands of dollars on books and courses and seminars. Because the fact is, this project, dreamy though it sounds, is just not for you.

And if by chance your dream project involves an email newsletter, take my little quiz above.

If you find yourself thinking, “I’m willing to write this newsletter for the next year so I can then move on to something else,” then you know what to do. Don’t even get started.

But if your answer is a grudging but honest yes — yes, you’d be willing to work on this for the next five years — then I can tell you that:

1. After one year of writing the newsletter you’re reading right now, I had nothing to show for it — at least nothing in the way of money or recognition or red panties being thrown my way

2. After two years, this newsletter started to pay dividends

3. After three years, and and now moving on to four and more, it has completely changed my life

If you are willing to stick with it for the long term, then it makes sense to start. Even today.

Now for my pitch:

If you want to discover the one type of email I would write every day if I had to — the one I would choose above stories, or personal reveals, or how-to, or pop culture illustrations, or shock and controversy — then you can find that in a little course I’ve called Most Valuable Email.

For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Announcing: Son of Most Valuable Postcard

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Last year — not meaning yesterday, but actually 12 months ago — I set three themes for myself.

A theme is an idea I got from James Altucher. It’s a general direction to move in, unlike a goal, which is more like a destination to arrive at by a specific time. Themes work for me, goals don’t.

Anyways, one of my 2022 themes was “offers”. And I did well with that. By my count, I made over a dozen different offers last year to this list alone.

The most unique of those offers was my Most Valuable Postcard.

Each month, for all of two months, I sent a postcard from a new place with a short greeting and a URL. The URL took you to a secret website, where you would find my in-depth treatment of one fundamental marketing or copywriting topic for that month.

Subscribers loved the Most Valuable Postcard.

I hated it.

I hated walking around in the summer sun trying to find nice-looking postcards. I hated addressing and writing them by hand.

​​I hated the pressure of finishing up the actual content each month and making it great before the first postcards started arriving.

​​I hated the fact that the postcards didn’t arrive reliably and that I had to resend many of them.

So I killed the Most Valuable Postcard off. Subscribers sighed and said they saw it coming.

But now, the Most Valuable Postcard is back. In a way.

The core concept of the Most Valuable Postcard is something I find too valuable to let go. Like I said, it’s to take a fundamental marketing idea and go deep. As copywriter Dan Ferrari wrote a while back:

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Learning fundamentals and mastering fundamentals are two different things. Sorry to break it to you, in my experience, ~80% of copywriters NEVER reach mastery. The simple explanation is they have NO idea how much deeper they can go. That’s too bad because all it takes is a willingness to put the SCUBA gear on and explore the depths.

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​So my plan is to go deep, write more Most Valuable Postcards, and put them inside the members-only area of my site.

There won’t be a physical postcard any more, but the website content will have the same format as before.

There also won’t be a monthly subscription, but I will sell the postcards individually, whenever I put them out.

To start, I’m selling the first Most Valuable Postcard, which so far only went out to those first 20 people who managed to sign up last summer.

But I am only selling this offer to people who are on my email list. In case you are interested in my Most Valuable Postcard, or simply want to read my emails as I write them every day, click here to sign up to my newsletter.

It may be a long time since you read this subject line

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I was standing in the kitchen this morning, making coffee for myself, when I had the idea for this email. I had to stop the coffee making and go write the idea down. Here it is:

A few weeks ago, a science paper went viral on the internet. It was titled, “Consciousness as a memory system.”

The paper gives a new theory of consciousness:

We don’t experience reality directly, the paper claims. We’re not looking out through any kind of window onto the reality outside.

We don’t even experience reality in any kind of real-time but transformed way. We’re not looking at a colorful cartoon that’s generated live, based on what’s going on outside right now.

Instead, we only have conscious experiences of our memories and of our imagined memories.

What you’re really looking at, right now, is a sketchbook, full of shifting drawings and notes of things that happened some time ago, or that never happened at all.

Maybe this new theory turns out to be false or obvious. Maybe it turns out to be profound and true. I personally find it interesting because it speaks to a practical experience I keep having:

If you don’t remember it, it might as well never have happened.

​​That’s why I had to stop the coffee making and go write down my idea for this email.

I’ve been writing newsletter for four years.

It’s more difficult than it might seem to write a 500-600-word email like this every day.

There are lots of stops, starts, discarded sentences and paragraphs.

To make it more complicated, my best ideas don’t happen while standing at my desk and trying to work. My best ideas often happen in a dim flash, while I’m in the shower, while driving, while trying to make coffee. Sometimes entire phrases, arguments, outlines for things I want to say, names, product concepts, inspired analogies, light up in my head. A moment later, that dim flash fades away.

You’ve probably heard the advice that, if you’re trying to make a habit of writing, then take notes all the time of interesting thoughts or observations you have.

It’s good advice, so let me repeat it:

If you’re trying to make a habit of writing, then take notes all the time of the interesting thoughts or observations you have.

And then, figure out a way to organize and store those notes into something that will be useful tomorrow, a month from now, even a year from now.

Now, get ready, because you’re about to have a conscious experience of a memory of a sales pitch:

I write a daily email newsletter. Many people say it’s interesting and insightful.

Search your memory banks right now. See whether you have a conscious experience of a memory of wanting to read more of my writing. If you find the answer is yes, then click here and fill out the form that appears.

Money don’t love Spruce Goose

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On a beautiful day exactly 75 years ago, Howard Hughes smiled for the camera, hung up the in-cockpit telephone, and took hold of the controls.

He was piloting the largest “flying boat” ever built.

I’m talking about the Hughes H-4 Hercules, aka the Spruce Goose.

In spite of the nickname, The Goose was mostly birch.

That didn’t stop it from being enormously expensive for the time. And with good reason. As Hughes put it:

“It is over five stories tall with a wingspan longer than a football field. That’s more than a city block. Now, I put the sweat of my life into this thing. I have my reputation all rolled up in it and I have stated several times that if it’s a failure, I’ll probably leave this country and never come back. And I mean it.”

Well, I guess Hughes didn’t mean it all that seriously. Because he didn’t leave the country, even though, by all practical measures, the Goose turned out to be a colossal failure.

After all, once Hughes lifted The Goose above the sparkling waters off Long Beach, CA, it flew for less than a minute, for less than a mile.

That was its one and only flight.

And even this one lousy flight came well after the end of World War II, even though The Goose was designed to be a war transport plane, and even though the whole point of building The Goose out of spruce (or birch) was the wartime restriction on materials such as aluminum.

So yeah, the Spruce Goose remains the best illustration of a massive, drawn-out, and ultimately useless project.

The point being, don’t be like this. Don’t roll “the sweat of your life”, your name and reputation, and possibly your country of residence into one drawn-out project which won’t get a chance for even a test flight until years from now.

Because money don’t love Spruce Goose.

Money loves speed.

I’ve tried to track down who coined that saying, but I don’t have a definitive answer. I’ve heard Dan Kennedy say it often. Joe Vitale has got a book by that title. But I bet it goes back a century or more, in some slightly different phrasing, with the same basic idea. Maybe you can enlighten me.

Anyways, let me take my own advice, and wrap up this post:

My email newsletter is now available for you to join. In case you’d like a chance to get copywriting, marketing, and persuasion ideas into your head — so you can start getting that money that speed promises — here’s where to go.

Play and game are not the same

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Today is October 25, the 58th anniversary of the biggest mistake in NFL history.

Now, I really don’t care about American football, or any other nation’s football, but this mistake was pretty spectacular. Let me tell you about it quickly:

The date, like I said, was October 25.

The year was 1964.

The place was San Francisco.

The teams were San Francisco 49ers and the Minnesota Vikings.

During a play, the 49ers quarterback fumbled the ball.

If you don’t know anything about American football — it’s much like any other football. Each team is trying to advance the ball towards one, and only one, end of the field. A fumble is when one team drops the ball midfield — a bad thing.

But what happened next was much worse.

Jim Marshall, a Vikings player, picked up the fumbled ball, and started running down the field.

The problem was, Marshall was running the wrong way.

He triumphantly ran all the way to the end zone, unopposed by anybody, thinking he had just scored a touchdown for his team. But in fact, he had scored a couple points for the other guys.

A 49ers player was the first to run up to Marshall and say, “Thanks Jim.” Marshall stood there frozen as his teammates stared at him in disbelief, as the opposing team’s players laughed, and as tens of thousands of 49ers fans erupted in cheers around the stadium.

I watched an interview with Marshall about the incident. It was recorded decades later.

Marshall still seemed sheepish. The memory clearly still brought him pain.

But in time, he turned his mistake into something positive. He kept playing the game, and playing well. He said fans and other players have given him a lot of respect for continuing to do his best even after such a colossal mistake.

But hold on.
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Colossal mistake? That still stings decades later? Football is just a game, isn’t it?

Here’s why I’m telling you about all this. One idea that’s been rattling around my skull for several years is a quote by Claude Hopkins:

“All the difference lies in a different idea of fun. The love of work can be cultivated just like the love of play.”

The “difference” Hopkins was talking about is the difference between success and failure, riches and poverty. And maybe something more. Maybe the difference between feeling good about how you spend a large part of your life, and feeling miserable.

But even though I’ve done a lot of trying, I have not yet been able to cultivate the idea that work is fun.

​​Sure, there are moments when I enjoy what I do. And sometimes I even find it hard to tear myself away from what it is I’m working on. But never, not once, in the 7+ years of working as a copywriter and marketer, have I woken up in the morning and jumped out of bed because I was so eager to open up my laptop and start working.

Maybe like Hopkins says, this can be cultivated. It certainly seems worthwhile.

And that’s why I’ve been thinking and collecting ideas about what work really is, and what play is, and how the two are different.

​​That’s why I was interested in the Jim Marshall story above. It shines a bit of a light on how consequential and work-like mere games can become, and how perhaps a game is something different from the play that Hopkins was talking about.

I’m not sure if this is of any use to you. It probably isn’t, not unless you’re like me, and you have to force yourself to work each day.

if that’s how you are, well—

You might get some more ideas about how to make your work more play-like, and how to get to riches and success, in other emails and essays that I write. In case you would like to read those as they come out, sign up to my daily email newsletter.

Breaking News: I have an email surplus

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Yesterday, I was sitting on the couch trying to work.

The girl who was sitting next to me had her phone out. Suddenly, it started blaring with an English woman’s voice:

“I came into office at a time of great economic and international…”

I waited for a second, hoping that the noise would die down. The phone continued to blare:

“… instability. Families and businesses were worried about how to pay their…”

I frowned, both at the level of noise and the level of fluff. “What is this?” I asked the girl.

“It’s breaking news,” she said. “The UK’s Prime Minster just resigned.”

“Who cares?” I asked, hoping she would get the hint and turn the noise down.

“It’s breaking news!” she repeated.

I’m telling you this not to highlight how little I care for breaking news, though that’s certainly true.

I’m telling it to you to set up the fact that yesterday, when the UK’s Prime Minister resigned, was Thursday October 20.

Today, as I write this email, is Friday October 21.

And tomorrow, when this email will actually be sent out so you can read it, will be Saturday October 22.

In other words, I am a day ahead in my emails. I have an extra email written and scheduled — for the first time in something like 18 months.

The last time this happened was during my trip to Colombia in January 2021.

​​I was traveling with friends, and I was unsure that I’d have time each day to sit down and write a new email. So when I did find time to sit down, I’d write several emails at a time. By the end of that trip, I ended up with a surplus of a few days’ worth of emails.

The same thing happened this time.

​​I was traveling to London with a friend this past weekend. ​​Again, I was unsure when I might have time to sit down and write. Again, as a result of this, I wound up with an email surplus.

Which brings me to the paradoxical mathematics of email copywriting:

I find it’s often easier to write two, three, or 10 emails than to write one.

I can think of a few diff reasons why this is:

* More time spent on research…

* Less time spent on fiddling…

* And an overall tighter, clearer, faster structure for the emails in a batch of 10 than for a lone, lonely, and possibly bloated single email.

So my takeaway for you is, if you’re having a hard time writing a single email, set yourself the goal to write 10. Paradoxically, you might have an easier time of it.

And now, here’s some real breaking news:

Next week, I will be releasing my amazing Copy Riddles program for all the world to marvel at. I’m planning to throw a big and loud launch party in this newsletter, starting next Thursday and ending next Sunday. Maybe it will be a costume party, and if it is, I’ll dress up as Po the Kung Fu panda.

In case you’d like to be invited to that party, you can sign up for my daily email newsletter. Click here for the application.

So stubborn they can’t ignore you

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Yesterday, I spent an hour on Google, trying and failing to find good affiliate health offers to promote for my new health list.

Sure, there are millions of “Bates Motel” health offers out there. They will gladly pay you a large commission if you send a gullible victim their way.

There are also millions of worthwhile health offers out there. But they either have no affiliate program, or they demand that you have a list of ~2M names if you want to become their affiliate.

On the other hand:

Last week, I found myself participating in a “JV Mixer”.

This was an affiliate deal-making event. It was in the Internet marketing and personal development niches, but I’m sure equal things exist in the health space.

This JV mixer consisted of people with 7-, 8-, and possibly 9-figure businesses, including big names that I recognized, all pitching themselves and trying to make their best case for attracting new affiliates to promote their stuff.

My point being, it’s surprisingly hard to find good affiliate offers to promote, at least if you’re starting out. On the other hand, there are big and hungry businesses who can’t find enough affiliates to promote their offers.

See the strange contradiction there?

It’s actually the same thing with copywriting clients.

When I got started as a freelance copywriter, I heard that businesses are starving for copywriters. Business want to throw money at copywriters. But businesses don’t know where to find copywriters to throw money at, or there are just not enough copywriters around who want money thrown at them.

Maybe you’ve heard the same claim. And if you’re a freelance copywriter, maybe you’ve been around long enough to call BS.

And why not? I mean, I got decent copywriting work in those first few years. But I never once saw a desperate business owner, running down the street, grabbing random passersby and pleading, “Are you a copywriter? God I need a copywriter right now! If only I knew where to find a copywriter!”

But as I’ve written before, I eventually discovered that yes, that incredible claim really is true.

I discovered it when I suddenly became to go-to guy for a specific format of copy (VSLs) in a very specific niche (real estate investing). It turned out there really are dozens of business owners, running successful businesses, ready to throw money at a good copywriter, if only they could find one. Fortunately, they found me.

So then the question becomes:

How do you go from one to the other? How do you go from being a scrub searching for affiliate offers on Google… to being part of JV mixers where owners of multi-million businesses try to recruit you as an affiliate?

How do you go from being a starving copywriter mass-applying to jobs on Upwork… to sitting back, and having potential clients emailing you every day, and asking politely if you have some time to talk to them?

There are tricks and tactics to do it. Some are common sense.

Some you can pay for.

Some you can extract from your own experience, if you’ve gone down this road before, like I have in my freelance copywriting career, and now in my marketing and copywriting influencer career.

But the thing is, all those tricks and tactics are secondary.

Because there is just one primary resource if you want to go from scrub to success, from starving to satisfied.

This resource is very plain. Very unsexy. And it’s lying all around you.

But with this resource, you can do without any tricks and tactics.

On the other hand, without this resource, no tricks and tactics will help you.

I’m talking about time. Simple stubbornness. Still being at it tomorrow, and the next month, and in a year from now.

Which is why, if you ask me, it’s not worth even starting a new project if you’re not okay with still being at it in two-three years’ time.

All right, so much for my plea for stubbornness. For today, at least. Tomorrow, I will be back at it, with another daily email.

In case you think if you think my years of experience working with 7- and 8-figure direct response businesses could be valuable for you… you can sign up to my daily emails by clicking here.

 

 

How I might repurpose this email

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I don’t watch a lot of movies that have come out in the past 30 years, but when I do watch ’em, I like the ones that are low-brow.

For example, I loved Knocked Up.

Knocked Up is a Judd Apatow comedy in which a bunch of aimless bros are working to launch fleshofthestars.com. That’s a website where you can go look up the exact timestamp when different Hollywood stars appear naked in a movie. Presumably, so you can go and see your favorite actress’s nipples for a fraction of a second.

Knocked Up came out in 2007. Boy, how the world has changed in just those 15 years.

For example, this morning I found out that something like the reverse of fleshofthestars.com exists today.

It’s called Unconsenting Media. It’s a website that allows you to look up which movies feature which type of sexual assault. Presumably, so you can avoid watching the movie and being traumatized or re-traumatized.

And it’s not just for humans and sex.

Another modern site, Does The Dog Die, tracks movies in which, as you might guess, the dog dies. Enough people find such movies traumatic that Does The Dog Die gets an estimated 414,000+ visitors each month in an attempt to avoid dog-dying movies.

And now, you’re probably looking at me through the screen expectantly.

“Ok that’s kind of curious,” you’re probably saying. “So what exactly is your point with the above?”

To tell you the whole truth and a few things besides the truth, there is no point. That’s because I already had a fixed idea in mind today, a valuable point I wanted to share with you. And it’s something completely unrelated:

Reuse work you do.

It’s hard to get rich if you are creating one-off custom work, unless you are Pablo Picasso.

Likewise, it’s hard to get productive if, say, you spend hours researching and then writing an email, which is consumed in just a minute or two by your readers, and then you throw it away and start all over the next day.

But the trouble is, it usually takes me a lot of time and effort just to present a valuable idea in an appealing and surprising way.

​​Sometimes, like today, I fail at even that. Sometimes I can’t connect the fun/new/interesting thing I want to tell you, with the valuable point I want to make.

So if on top of that, I add in the requirement to create something which I can reuse… well, I often get completely locked up before I even write anything.

The good news is, the two parts of “info” and “tainment” don’t really need to be tightly linked.

And more good news:

​Content doesn’t have to created with reuse in mind… in order to be reusable. So, you could say that my point today is really:

Do work you can reuse, and reuse work you have done.

That’s what I did with my 10 Commandments book a couple years ago. Some of the book was repurposed content I had written already for this newsletter, with the book in mind.

But some of the book was entirely new. Still, I repurposed it later for this newsletter. For example, I reused Commandment III within a daily email a few days ago. To which a reader named Phil Butler wrote in to say:

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Hey John,

I bought and read your book last night.

It’s a great read, and this commandment was by far my favourite. Although I’ve heard it a million times before, it didn’t click properly until I read your IOU analogy.

Thanks a ton…

Best $4 I’ve spent in ages.

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The fact is, I’ve used and reused the content from this book so much that, if you have the time and energy, you can search around my newsletter archive on my website, and you will be able to piece together almost all my 10 Commandments book.

Or, if you have $4.99, you can find the whole collection packaged up beautifully for you at the link below. Some people say it’s a great read. In case you’re curious:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments