Guruship

The final bit of Jim Camp gossip

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This past Tuesday, I wrote a behind-the-curtain email about negotiation coach Jim Camp.

​​Camp is widely respected and cited as a negotiation authority. His ideas are quoted in books and on TV and by dudes like me.

But if you dig a bit, it seems most of Camp’s advice about negotiation was swiped, often verbatim, from sales trainer David Sandler.

Problem:

The claim that Camp swiped Sandler’s ideas is based on textual analysis, by looking at Camp’s book side by side with Sandler’s book. It could be just one hell of a coincidence, or maybe there’s some kind of other explanation than plagiarism.

Solution:

I got a reply to my email on Tuesday from a reader named Ron, with some first-hand experience. ​​I’m reprinting it here in full because it’s juicy, and because there’s an interesting bit of human psychology hiding on the surface of it.

​​Take it away Ron:

===

Thank you John, I’ve tried to tell the same stories to the IM crowd for years and no one seemed to notice.

For a backstory, I took his Camp Negotiation coaching program back in 2009 and it was pretty silly, just a guided text followed by a quiz website (basically rereading the book to you), and my “advisor” was Jim’s oldest son.

At the end of the course, ironically, the module was “no closing” and it was on how closing sales was so 1950’s and you should just ask what do we do next and the prospect should tell you they’re in.

Well after finishing the course, his son called me to show me their new software (which was just a clunky CRM and with little negotiating tips pop-ups to remind you of the techniques) and after the demo, he tried to get me to buy it and I said no thanks.

He goes all weird and tells how I’m going to miss out on all these profitable deals and blah blah blah, and he’s getting pretty aggressive. I chuckled and said “so, no closing right?” He got all butthurt and hung up.

Anyways, I later found out Jim Camp was a franchisee for Sandler (the sales training business was sold city to city as a franchise model) and when his contract was up, Jim just rewrote the book and made up his own terms and sold his programs that way.

===

So there you go. That’s the gossip. I can’t confirm or deny the franchisee part of it. All I can say is it makes sense to me personally. And with that, I’ll leave off this Sandler/Camp drama.

But what about that interesting bit of psychology I promised you? It’s there in Ron’s first sentence:

“I’ve tried to tell the same stories to the IM crowd for years and no one seemed to notice.”

This is a curious human quirk that I’ve noticed a few times before.

For example, back in the 1970s, a man named Uri Geller seemed to be blessed with the supernatural powers of telekineses and telepathy. Geller was making the rounds of TV talk shows, bending spoons and reading the insides of sealed envelopes.

Audiences watched with their mouths agape, certain that Geller was living proof that there’s more to life than we see, and that there are enormous untapped powers latent in all of us.

Then Geller was exposed as a fraud by a magician named James Randi.

Randi replicated Geller’s act completely. He also worked with TV producers of the Tonight Show to devise a scenario where Geller couldn’t do of his supposed telekinesis or telepathy.

Geller came on the show, unaware of what was going on. And for 20 awkward minutes, while Johhny Carson patiently smoked his cigarette and waited, Geller tried and failed to do his usual routine.

And the result?

Nothing. Geller’s fame, and people’s belief in his supernatural powers, remained untarnished.

You can draw your own conclusions from this, in particular about how it relates to marketing and money-making and persuasion.

I’ve drawn my own conclusions. And the most important and valuable one is the one I wrote about in the inaugural issue of my Most Valuable Postcard, two years ago. If you’d like to find out what that is:

https://bejakovic.com/mvp1/

Jewish terrorists in Palestine

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On today’s date, July 22 to be exact, a bomb went off in King David Hotel in Jerusalem, in what was then British-controlled Mandatory Palestine.

The year was 1946.

In other words, if you were hoping to hear me take some sort of stance on the current Israel/Palestine conflict, and either to be propped up or outraged in your beliefs, then I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed by this email.

Maybe best stop reading now.

On the other hand, if you want to be exposed to something new and different, then maybe read on.

Still here? All right:

The King David Hotel was the administrative headquarters of the British colonizers. In the attack, 91 British, Jewish, and Arab soldiers died. 46 more were injured.

The bombing was carried out by a Zionist paramilitary organization called Irgun Zvai Leumi, which called for the use of force to establish a Jewish state.

And regarding that terrorist label:

That’s not me making the judgment.

​​Irgun were labeled terrorists by the United Nations, The US and and UK governments, the New York Times, the 1946 Zionist Congress, and the Jewish Agency.

If that’s not enough, Albert Einstein wrote a public letter in 1948 which he compared Irgun to Nazi and fascist parties.

In spite of all this, I had never heard about Irgun until yesterday, when I did a bit of research in preparation for today’s email.

Encyclopedia Britannica described Irgun as “extremely disciplined and daring.” I was curious what that meant in practice, so I looked it up.

​​In brief:

Those wishing to join Irgun had to know somebody in the organization to have any chance to get in.

The initial interview took place in a darkened room.

The novice had a light shined into his eyes, and was quizzed on his motivations, “to weed out romantics and adventurers and those who had not seriously contemplated the potential sacrifices,” as per Wikipedia.

If the novice passed the initial interview, a 4-month indoctrination followed. This was designed to further eliminate the impatient and “those of flawed purpose” who had slipped through the initial screening.

Only if the recruit passed all these preliminary steps did he start a lengthy and arduous training program in weapons use and and military tactics and bomb-making.

The thing that struck me was that Irgun never had more than 40 members at a time.

And yet, with such a small force, they carried out a number of deadly attacks (such as the King David Hotel bombing) or daring exploits (such as capturing Acre prison, a medieval fortress that not even Napoleon had managed to take with army of thousands).

But bringing all this back to the topic of this newsletter, specifically, direct marketing and what it can tell us about human psychology.

What I read of Irgun reminded me of direct marketing authority Dan Kennedy.

Dan once said that there are large commonalities between those who join mass movements, such as Irgun, and direct response customers, particularly those who follow a guru or leader or expert, on whatever topic, whether copywriting or health or investing.

By telling you this, I don’t meant to trivialize or endorse killing people or other terrorist activity. But I do mean to tell you something about human psychology.

The little that I’ve written above about Irgun’s recruiting and training process all applies, pretty much verbatim, to the effective recruiting and training of long-term direct response customers.

If you find that a little shocking… or a little vague… or you’d just like to find out more about the psychology of those who join mass movements, and how that might be relevant in the more mundane, safe, and profit-oriented world of direct marketing… then there’s a kind of manual on the topic.

Dan once gave out copies of this manual to his own small and select group of fanatical followers, who had made it into the room only after a long period of selection and indoctrination.

If you’d like to pick up a copy of the same manual today:

https://bejakovic.com/true-believer

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:

===

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.

===

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/

The seedy underbelly of every industry ever

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This past Wednesday, the BBC ran an article with the headline:

“The seedy underbelly of the life coaching industry”

The article features the story of a woman named Angela Lauria, age 50. Lauria went in search of weight loss and she wound up with a life coach who charged her $100k and got her to spend thousands more on trainings by other life coaches.

We don’t actually find out what happened to Angela in the end, but presumably she did not make her $100k back via new and bigger successes in her life.

I guess the BBC published this article because life coaching is a booming industry and because it’s still relatively new.

The point, the article says, is not to discourage people from seeking a life coach’s services — because there are good life coaches. But it’s the Wild West out there.

I personally think it’s the Wild West everywhere, and always has been.

My estimate — based on having seen behind the curtain at hundreds of businesses while I was a for-hire copywriter — is that 80% of people doing any job are at best mediocre, and more likely, they are actively bad.

Only 20% of people in any industry are genuinely dedicated, skilled, and get good results on any kind of consistent basis.

So what to do? Well, if you’re looking for a life coach, the BBC article has the following good advice:

“Ask the coach how much of their business is referral, call at least three former clients and don’t buy from anyone who won’t do a call with you directly beforehand. And don’t buy from anyone who needs an answer now – scarcity and urgency is made up.”

Meanwhile, if you want to write a personal email newsletter — to distinguish yourself, to prove your credibility, to promote your products and services — then look at my Simple Money Emails program.

​​Most of the sales for that program came via referrals. And if you’d like to see what a few previous customers had to say, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Certifiable genius invents magical client-getting apparatus

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Once upon a time, I heard an A-list copywriter say there are only two valid archetypes for a guru who is the face of a direct response offer:

1. A bumbling loser who somehow lucks into secret knowledge that opens the path to success and riches, and…

2. A certifiable genius who invents some magical apparatus that the rest of us mere mortals can now profit from, just by pressing a button.

I’ve been promoting Steve Raju’s ClientRaker for the past week. Steve fits the second archetype, the certifiable genius.

Consider the following:

Steve was an actual child prodigy. At age 3, he was tested and retested and found to have the intellectual abilities of kids twice his age.

He could read fluently. He aced all the numeracy tests. He probably knew how to use the word “whom” and where to use it. All at age 3.

As you prolly know, IQ stands for “intelligence quotient.” That’s because the original definition was a quotient — intellectual age divided by chronological age, multiplied by 100.

So if you take Steve’s intellectual age back then, say 6 or 7… divide that by his actual, chronological age of 3… multiply it by 100… well, you get a really big IQ.

At one point, it was predicted Steve would end up proving string theory or fully explaining the quantum realm.

Instead, he skipped university and went to work at a Fortune 500 corporation that makes hydraulics. That’s how it goes.

Steve worked there for 19 years as a kind of independent one-man IT team, implementing entire systems on his own, left alone to do his magic and getting paid big sums of money for his work.

I’m telling you all this to highlight that Steve is not just some dude.

He has the brains and the mental makeup to spot and invent stuff that the rest of us might not ever figure out.

​​That’s probably why I was so amazed with the things that Steve told me when I first talked to him. There were things he took for granted, little tricks he had figured out, which I would look for blankly and never see on my own.

Steve eventually changed countries, moved from his native UK to his adopted Canada. And he decided that he’d spent enough nights drinking Pepsi and coding for 16 hours straight.

So he reinvented himself as a copywriter and direct response marketer.

​​He was a success at that also. Clients hired him after watching a paid webinar he put on. Businesses profited because of him. Stefan Georgi reached out and asked Steve to be one of the coaches for Copy Accelerator.

But let’s talk turkey:

Steve and his large brain decided to reinvent themselves yet again. This past January, he fired all his copywriting and marketing clients. He took a two-month vacation, came back, and started looking for bigger, better, brandier clients using a system he had cooked up himself, which he now calls ClientRaker.

Steve wrote me this morning with an update on his own client-getting activities, using the ClientRaker system:

===

Hi John

If you want to use them, no mentioning of any companies because I’m about to sign NDAs etc

Steve

###

1. It’s for about 3 days work, of which most of that I’ll be sat around watching other people present.

Proposed fees: $150-200k plus expenses split: four-ways between facilitators with additional fees to ________ for admin.

2. Potential JV partner, don’t mention the niche

===

Frankly, I have no idea what the hell Steve is talking about here — chalk that up to my more ordinary intelligence. But I do understand the $150-200k numbers, and the fact he won’t have to work hard to get those.

Like me, you might not be a certifiable genius.

You can still profit from Steve’s ClientRaker system.

I’ve gone through the trainings myself, and Steve has made them push-button easy to implement. Half of it is feeding Steve’s prompts into ChatGPT. The other half is clicking buttons on LinkedIn and using more AI trickery that I’d only heard about from Steve.

The deadline to sign up for ClientRaker is in less than 24 hours, specifically, tomorrow at 8:00 CET/11am PST.

​​If you want this magical client-getting apparatus before it disappears:

https://bejakovic.com/clientraker

Secret lineage to mysterious gurus

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I got in the cab. I was in front, copywriter Vasilis Apostolou and business guru Barry Randall were in back.

There were lots of conceivably smart and valuable questions I could have asked Barry. I could have asked for a business tip. I could have asked for connections to partners. I could have asked for mindset advice.

But I was not so disciplined. Instead, I turned around and said:

“Hey Barry. Today when Parris Lampropoulos got on stage, he said that he and you and Toe Cracker all have the same coach right now. But he didn’t say who. If it’s not a secret, who is it?”

Would you like to know who the mysterious coach is behind these legendary 8- and 9-figure copywriters and marketers?

Well I’m not surprised.

Yesterday I sent out an email, promoting my Most Valuable Email training, along with a 24-hour disappearing bonus. The disappearing bonus had 3 parts:

1) A freely available resource with several valuable marketing ideas
​
2) One specific idea that caught my eye in that resource, and my advice on how to implement it today

​3) The man behind this resource, who I have only written about once before, but who has influenced my thinking on a deep level

Yesterday’s email was a big success. It made me more sales of MVE in a single day than I have had since the last day of the initial launch, last September.

Since the disappearing bonus was open to anyone who bought MVE previously (and not just last night), I also got dozens of responses from previous buyers.

The number #1 specific thing people said was they wanted to know part 3) the mysterious man behind the resource, who had influenced me so deeply.

So that’s my conclusion:

People are curious about secret lineage to mysterious gurus. And you can use that to drive action.

That disappearing bonus has now fully disappeared. The mysterious guru who influenced me will retreat to the shadows.

But if you’re curious about my lineage to several other gurus, you can find that inside my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

Bonus — this book doesn’t just tell you the name of each guru.

​​I found out the name of Barry Randall’s coach. And I got nothing from it — because the guy hasn’t written a book, doesn’t have a newsletter, doesn’t tweet. Unless you have $20k per month to join his mastermind, his name alone won’t do you any good.

​On the other hand, my little 10 Commandments book gives you a bunch of specific and valuable answer to questions about business, mindset, and marketing. All from some of the most smartest, most successful, and most influential people in this space that I’m in. All available here:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Bud Light boycott keeps getting worse, but I can fix it

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Bud Light is in a tailspin. You may have heard the news.

On April 1, transgender TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney announced that Bud Light had sent her personalized cans to celebrate her one-year anniversary living as a trans woman.

A boycott of Bud Light started as a result. In the weeks and months since, sales of Bud Light have plummeted close to 30%. The stock price of Anheuser-Busch is down by almost 20% compared to April 1. This fiasco has erased over $22 billion worth of market value.

Brand boycotts normally blow over in a couple weeks. The Bud Light boycott is getting stronger after 3 months. Sales of Bud Light are trending lower and lower each week. Data out In June showed Mexican lager Modelo replacing Bud Light as America’s best-selling beer.

Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth issued a peacemaking statement, saying the company never meant to be “part of a discussion that divides people.”

​​Bud Light continues to sponsor Major League Baseball and has a new summer campaign, “easy to drink and easy to enjoy.”

None of this is making an impact.

At this point, I’d like to step in. ​​Anheuser-Busch is an American institution, as is Bud Light. Also, some 18,000 people’s jobs are directly on the line.

At the same time, it’s clear that this is not an issue of beer or jobs only, but really about values and identity.

Where Brendan Whitworth and the billion-dollar marketing agencies that Anheuser-Busch employs have failed, I will succeed.

Using the almost mystical influence powers I have gained through repeated use of my Most Valuable Email Trick trick, I will realign Bud Light’s public positioning so it once again fits its core market’s values and identity. At the same time, I will do so in a way that leaves the progressive community impressed and content.

If I were to start now, I could have Bud Light back on top, ahead of Modelo, getting more Americans slightly buzzed without feeling bloated, well before Labor Day. All Anheuser-Busch has to do is get Whitworth to write me and ask. My email address is publicly available.

In other news, I have a disappearing bonus for you for today.

This morning I came across an incredible resources, filled with insightful and proven marketing and positioning advice.

It comes from a man I’ve actually written about once in this newsletter, but who has influenced my thinking about marketing and human psychology more deeply than I may let on — maybe more deeply than anybody else over the past few years.

Among a dozen or more great ideas in that resource I found today, one stood out to me.

So here are the details of my disappearing bonus offer:

1. Get a copy of my Most Valuable Email training at https://bejakovic.com/mve/

2. Then reply to this email and say you want the disappearing bonus offer.

3. I will write you back and tell you 1) That resource I found this morning, and where you can get it for free 2) the particular idea that struck me, and how you can apply it in your own marketing and 3) why the man behind this resource has been so influential to me personally.

4. This disappearing bonus offer is good until tomorrow, Tuesday July 11, at 8:31pm CET.

5. And of course, if you’ve bought MVE already, this is open to you as well. Write in and ask away, and I will tell you. But the same deadline applies.

Anonymous personal guru

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“It’s anonymous,” he said. “They never see me or find out who I am.”

I took my face out from the little plate filled with different cheeses. I leaned back in my seat. “So how do you deliver it?”

“It’s just audio of me talking. They don’t see me. And I never say what my name is.”

I was getting excited. “But what about your high-end coaching clients, the ones who are paying you a grand?”

“Yeah, we get on a Zoom call. They do see my face, and I tell them my first name. But they still don’t know who I am.”

During the Gdansk conference, I met a copywriter who’s kind of a big thing on copywriting Twitter. But his Twitter account is anonymous. He only goes by Mercure.

A couple months ago, he launched a couple coaching offers.

The quirky sales page for these offers reads and looks like a detective pulp novel. It’s red font on black background and there’s an mp3 clip at the top, hosted on Soundcloud, that sets the mood with a kind of film noir soundtrack.

The “beginner copy camp” offer sold on this page is 200 euro. The “intermediate copy camp” is 1000 euro.

A bunch of people have bought, at both levels. And they keep buying. Even so, they don’t get to find out who Mercure is.

I’m telling you this for two reasons.

One, because Twitter might not be the meme-filled sewer I always assumed it was. I spent much of the farewell dinner at the Gdansk conference grilling this guy about what he does on Twitter and how. It all sounded very positive.

Reason two is, to remind you that you can do things your own way, and it can still work.

This guy never shares his name online, either on Twitter or to his customers. He never shares anything personal about himself, beyond the fact that he’s a successful copywriter. He says he also never engages in drama or mud-slinging or taking sides.

He has a sales page that looks like it was made by a teenager in 2001 using raw HTML… he makes people submit proof they are actually intermediate copywriters if they want to join his higher-tiered thing… he kicks people out of the coaching if they don’t do the work, and he doesn’t refund them — it’s part of the deal.

And yet, it works.

Maybe you don’t want to get on Twitter. Maybe you have no problem sharing your personal life online. Maybe you like engaging in drama.

All that’s fine. I’m just telling you there really are options. Lots of things can work, as long as you get some of the basics down.

If you want to see some of that in action, then I’ll point you to Mercure on Twitter.

He and I didn’t talk about doing any kind of cross-promotion. He doesn’t know I am writing about him. In fact, we haven’t talked since the farewell Gdansk dinner.

I’m just telling you about him because I think you might benefit from knowing about the guy — either directly, via what he does, or just as inspiration, via how he does it. In case you are curious:

https://twitter.com/MercureCopy

A mystery about people who willingly live in hell

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A few months ago, I was reading a New Yorker article about foreign nationals — Americans, Frenchmen, Kiwis — who volunteered to fight in Ukraine.

I found the article fascinating. I mean, ask yourself:

What makes someone willing to go halfway around the world, into a war zone, to live in a basement and crawl through mud and huddle in icy trenches, as constant explosions blow out his eardrums and traumatize his nervous system?

What makes a person willing to expose himself to getting shot at and wounded and possibly killed? And what makes him willing to shoot and wound and possibly kill others, who have never done any harm to him or his kind?

Most incredibly, what makes a person do all this voluntarily, without any promise of reward or even any real chance at glory, and without the usual government coaxing or propaganda or impressment?

“Maybe,” you say, “these foreign fighters are fighting for freedom, for justice, for the right thing. Maybe they feel they are doing their duty, as soldiers and as human beings.”

No doubt.

​But taking a page from Frank Bettger’s book, let me ask you one further:

In addition to doing the right thing, what other reason might these foreign fighters have to willingly put themselves in what most people would consider a living hell?

Take a moment to think about that. And when you’re done, read about it from the horse’s mouth, or rather, from the Turtle’s mouth. Here’s a bit from the New Yorker article, about a New Zealander fighting in Ukraine, code name Turtle:

===

In New Zealand, he’d been “planning out the rest of my life with a girl.” Before coming to Ukraine, he’d ended the relationship, quit his job, and sold his house and car. “In hindsight, it was very selfish,” he acknowledged. Although he may have suggested to his friends and relatives that Russian atrocities — in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha and elsewhere — had instilled in him a sense of obligation, such moral posturing had been disingenuous. “It was just an excuse to be in this environment again,” Turtle said.

===

Turtle had spent a large and formative part of his life fighting in war zones — he was first sent to Afghanistan in 2002, when he was 17.

Today, a generation later, he’s left his house, his car, his job, and Mrs. Turtle back in the Shire, and he’s decided to trade all that in for an environment he is more familiar with — an army unit in Mordor.

​​“In the end, it’s just that I love this shit,” Turtle said. “And maybe I can’t escape that — maybe that’s the way it’s always gonna be.”

All that’s to say:

Never underestimate how powerful the pull of the familiar, the known, the status quo is on people, even if that status quo is hell on earth.

And that’s it. That’s my possibly sobering psychological insight for you for today. Think about how it might apply to you and the people you deal with regularly, and maybe you can get some value out of it.

As for me, the time has come for my once-in-a-blood-moon pitch for my coaching program on email marketing and copywriting.

It might seem tacky to put a sales pitch at the end of an email about extreme self-sacrifice, or extreme self-immolation. I do it because extreme cases uncover the everyday cases. In any case, here’s my pitch.

I’ve only let in two kinds of people into my coaching program so far:

1. Business owners who want to use email to build a stronger, longer-lasting relationship with their prospects and customers, in order to sell more and to sell more easily

2. Copywriters who have a profit-share agreement with a client to manage an email list, allowing a large degree of control and an upside when things go well

There are multiple reasons why I restrict my coaching program to only those two groups of people. If you’re curious, I’ll tell you one reason, which is that my coaching program is expensive. I only want the kinds of people to join who can quickly get much more out of this coaching than what they pay me.

So if you fit one of the two categories above, and if you’re interested in my coaching program, then hit reply, tell me about yourself, and we can talk in more detail.

And in case you’re wondering whether a coaching program is something you possibly need:

I can tell you that personally, in most areas of life where I’ve had success, I didn’t have and didn’t need any kind of coach. Instead, I either figured it out myself, or I followed a book or a course to the letter, and got results that way.

On the other hand, there have been a few areas where I hired a coach, and even paid that coach lots and lots of money.

As I’ve written before, some of the value I got from coaching was genuine technical feedback. Some of the value was added confidence, via getting an experienced second pair of eyes to look over what I was doing.

But the majority of the value I got from expensive coaching — I would say 75% — came from having to justify the price to myself. From finally being forced to abandon the status quo, and to do things I should have been doing already, but found excuses not to do.

Maybe you say that’s stupid or illogical. All I can say is that this get-out-of-the-status-quo motivation made coaching absolutely worth it to me, and made it pay for itself many times over.

So do you need coaching?

Only you can decide if you’re stuck in the status quo, and if you find that unacceptable. If you decide the answer is yes, then like I said, write me an email, and we can talk in more detail to see whether my coaching program and you could be a good fit.

I’ve written about this before, but you probably missed it

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This morning, I talked to a business owner who is interested in joining my email coaching program. Interested… but also wary.

“I was talking to my husband,” she told me. “And I realized, John writes good emails. But who is he? I don’t really know anything about him.”

About that:​​

I’ve been writing this email newsletter for four years. I’ve shared plenty of personal stories.

I’ve also shared plenty of specifics from my copywriting career — lessons learned, successes earned, endorsements spurned, like the one I wrote about yesterday.

And yet, people still don’t know almost anything about me. Because the problem is this:

I shared all those stories and successes and endorsements once, or twice, or maybe frice.

That ain’t enough.

So here’s my message to you. It’s a message I’ve shared before, multiple times. But you probably missed it, even if you’ve been reading my emails for a while.

You have to repeat yourself over and over and over. And if you want people to “know” you, you have to create a legend – a simplified cartoon version of your life, and you have to hammer that home, week in and week out.

“I was a blessed child born into a billionaire family… but a tragic and violent attack left me an orphan… and then one day, I fell into a cave full of bats.”

You tell that story. And then next week, you tell it all over again.

“I was made an orphan after my parents were brutally gunned down… I was lost, and all the billions I had inherited meant nothing… until one day, when I fell into a cave full of bats.”

You might wonder why I don’t take the opportunity here to talk about my own background, instead of that fantasy with the cave and the bats.

That’s because these emails are not primarily about selling, or even about building authority where you look at me as a leader in my little niche.

You might wonder what these emails are primarily about in that case. I’ve actually written about that in the past, and multiple times, but you probably missed that too.

​​No matter. I will probably write about it again one day.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, there are certain messages that I cannot allow to slip through the cracks of your awareness.

​​For example, last week, while I was promoting that coaching program for which I’m interviewing prospects now, I got the following fat-fingered reply from a reader:

What annout copyriddles John? Still selling?

Of course I’m still selling. In fact, I spent a good amount of time just a couple months ago, writing and sending a sequence of two dozen emails to sell Copy Riddles.

And yet people forget, and quickly.

So if you’d like to join Copy Riddles, let me repeat you can do that at the page below. And let me repeat the following, even though I’ve said it before—

Everything I’ve just told you is actually part of a fundamental copywriting technique. It’s a technique covered in Copy Riddles Round 4, with riddles based on bullets by Clayton Makepeace, Gary Halbert, and Parris Lampropoulos.

For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/