Competition

Revealed: MVE contest winners

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Yesterday, I concluded my first-ever prize-giveaway contest. The prizes totaled $1,088. The condition to enter was to submit 50-150 words about any email I’ve written using my Most Valuable Email trick.

My goal for this contest was to find out whether the MVE trick makes my emails more sticky and effective, and also how my readers are using the MVE trick for their own benefit.

Only one problem:

Now that the contest’s over, I don’t really want to reveal which Most Valuable Emails the winners picked.

There’s value in keeping the mystery around what the MVE trick is. And if I gave five distinct examples of Most Valuable Emails, odds are good that the trick would be easy to spot.

But a deal’s a deal. So I’m announcing the contest winners, the prizes they got, and my reasoning for why they won:

#1 Gold medal

The first prize of $250 goes to Shakoor Chowdhury, a marketer and copywriter from Mississauga, Ontario.

Shakoor picked a Most Valuable Email I wrote over the past week, the same email I referenced yesterday, which drew lots of positive responses from other readers also.

But the real reason Shakoor gets first prize is because he also wrote me to say:

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John, this is by far my favorite of your programs and really kickstarted my email marketing.

When I bought this course I was very inconsistent, but you gave me direction and I started writing daily and grew a list of 470 subscribers in less than a month of implementing.

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This is the #1 winning entry, because it matches the #1 reason I find Most Valuable Emails so valuable. And that’s that that Most Valuable Emails make it interesting for me personally to stick with daily emailing day after day. And it seems for Shakoor also.

#2 Silver medal

The second prize of $200 goes to Tom Grundy, a high-powered London banker who also happens to write excellent emails about self development.

Tom picked three of my old Most Valuable Emails as his favorites, going back to 2021. But the real reason Tom won a prize is that he also applied the MVE trick in one of his LinkedIn posts. And the result, in Tom’s words:

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I thought I’d share the attached LinkedIn post I made a while ago. Great thing about this post was that people replied with their own “MVE style” replies and it turned into a fun thread.

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Like I keep saying, the MVE trick makes your emails engaging and fun for your audience. Same goes for your LinkedIn posts, if that’s your bag.

#3 Bronze medal

Finally, three third prizes — three $197 tickets to my upcoming Water Into Wine workshop — go to:

1. Carlo Gargiulo, an Italian copywriter working in-house at Metodo Merenda.

Besides working in-house, Carlo also writes his own email newsletter. He’s been selling his own services and coaching for years to his list. But recently, Carlo made his first-ever affiliate sales to his list, via an idea I shared in the MVE swipe file.

Point being, the MVE training has value beyond simply teaching you the MVE trick.

2. Alex Ko, senior copywriter at KooBits in Singapore.

Alex won because he picked a Most Valuable Email I wrote more than a year ago, and he pointed out how this email still has an impact on my business every day.

In other words, Alex rightly highlighted that writing Most Valuable Emails is not just about sales or engagement. Instead, it can actually transform you and your business in time.

3. Jeffrey Thomas, a DR copywriter from St. Paul, Minnesota, who works in-house at Marketing Profs.

Jeffrey has previously written me to say nice things about Most Valuable Emails I’ve written. But he won this time because he applied the MVE trick himself — to the description of a live presentation he’ll be giving at a major conference this November.

So there you go. The MVE contest winners, and the reasons why they won.

If you’re one of the winners above, I’ll be in touch about how to get you your prize.

And if you’re not one of the winners above, you now have 5 good dimensionalizations of what the MVE program can do. Not just for me, but for other marketers, copywriters, and even one business owner, in a range of situations, applications, and formats.

If you already have my Most Valuable Email program, this might encourage you to revisit it, apply the trick yourself, and benefit.

And if you don’t have my MVE program, I can only assume it’s because you found the prize contest cheesy and crass. Because you’re above such flat-out manipulation. Because you don’t want your name to be used to sell stuff online.

I can completely understand. I feel the same way about many marketing stunts.

That said, maybe this email has given you some new arguments for why you can benefit from discovering the Most Valuable Email trick and inserting it into your marketing. If you’d like to get started now:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

MVE contestants hit me with the stupid Swedish Chef routine

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My Most Valuable Email, $1088-prize contest continues. ​More on that below. ​​But first, a true personal story:

I hated high school. More than anything, I hated English class.

I hated it so much that I refused to read the books we were to read or write the papers we were to write.

I remember Mr. Sherman, my 11th-grade art teacher, calling my mom late one evening.

He told her I wouldn’t be able to go on tomorrow’s field trip to Washington DC. The fact was, I was currently failing English class, and there was a law about taking badly behaving inmates out of prison.

The reason I managed to not fail English completely was that I went to a pretty progressive school. English class wasn’t just about taking tests and writing papers. It would sometimes involve creative assignments — you know, to make school fun.

For example, in 12th grade, we had to read Beowful. Of course I didn’t.

Fortunately, to prove we had read Beowful and thought about it deeply, we had to do one of those creative assignments. In other words, we were free to do anything and present it to the class, as long as it had to do with Beowulf.

My turn came. I walked up to the front of the class and popped in a tape to a little portable stereo. (Yes, this was a long time ago.) I pressed play.

First, a bit of music came on. As that faded out, my voice came on, trying to sound as smooth and hip as a radio DJ:

“Good evening and thanks for tuning in to another episode of late-night early-English classics. Tonight, we have sections seven through nineteen of the greatest epic poem ever written in the English language. You know it and I know it — of course, I’m talking about Beowful. And as always, we have our local old-English expert, professor Bjorn Bejakoffson of St. James University, to read this masterpiece for us in the original. Take it away professor Bejakoffson…

… and at this point, I transitioned into my best impression of the Swedish Chef from the Muppets.

I used to be good at mimicking the accents of other languages. But here, I was really just making up gibberish and making it sound like what I imagined old English sounded like.

In that 12th-grade English class, in part because I was always so unprepared, I had developed a reputation as the class clown.

My classmates were all eager to see what I had done for this creative assignment. As soon as the stupid Swedish Chef routine came on, everybody started laughing.

I stood there at the front of the class, beaming with cleverness as the tape played.

But then I spotted the English teacher. He was standing in the back, shaking his head, and scribbling down something in his notes. As I found out later, it was a C- for me.

I dredged up this story from my failing memory because of the Most Valuable Email contest I launched yesterday. There was just one condition to enter this contest:

“Write me an email and tell me which of my Most Valuable Emails has been most useful or interesting to you, and why.”

I’ve gotten a bunch of entries so far.

Many of them warmed my cold heart.

But I also got a few entries from people who clearly do not know what my Most Valuable Email trick is. Instead, they were just picking emails at random, including ones that don’t use the Most Valuable Email trick, and flattering me in hopes that they will guess right and have a shot at a prize.

I’m telling you this for two reasons:

1. Because, while I keep using the Most Valuable Email trick over and over, it remains subtle and surprising to people. Even people who regularly read my emails often can’t guess what it is.

2. Because I have somehow grown up and become like those dreaded teachers I hated so much in high school. And when I see someone trying to fake or buffoon their way through this contest, I just shake my head and scribble down in my notes: C-.

If you’d like to participate in this contest, you can find the prizes, rules, and deadline below.

And if you want to have a decent shot of winning any of the prizes, it will help to know what the Most Valuable Email trick is, and to make reference to it when you submit your entry. To help you do that, here’s where you can find the actual Most Valuable Email training:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

And here’s more details about the contest, from yesterday’s email:

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First prize — $297.

Second prize — $200.

And three third prizes — a $197 ticket to my upcoming Water Into Wine workshop, on repackaging your offers for more sales.

If you’re interested, here are the rules for this competition:

1. Entries must be submitted in the form of an email from 50 to 150 words. Simply tell me which of my Most Valuable Emails has been the most useful or insightful or entertaining for you, and why. You don’t have to be clever, fancy, or unique in what you say — simply tell me what comes to mind.

2. The deadline for this competition is this Wednesday, June 19th, at 8:31pm CET. I’ll announce the prizes the day after, on Thursday, June 20th. The competition is open to anyone on my list, whether or not you have bought my Most Valuable Email training.

3. You can submit as many entries as you like, and I will consider all of them. But you can only win one prize.

4. What I want primarily is to find out how my readers have been using my Most Valuable Email trick to benefit themselves, as well as how this trick has made certain of my emails more sticky and available in their minds.

Like I say on the sales page for Most Valuable Email, if I had to choose just one type of email to write each day, I’d choose Most Valuable Emails. That’s why I want to hear about the real-world effects these emails have had on my readers.

5. The decision about which competition entry wins which prize will be made by me, based on my personal reaction and surprise. As one MVE buyer wrote me after going through the course:

“I’m looking back at your old emails with new eyes. You know that moment people get epiphanies and the entire world looks different? I’m feeling that way about your writing now. You’ve helped me unlock something I didn’t know existed. So incredible.”

$1088 in prizes to Bejako readers

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First prize — $297.

Second prize — $200.

And three third prizes — a $197 ticket to my upcoming Water Into Wine workshop, on repackaging your offers for more sales.

I’m 100% serious about this competition.

To enter, simply write me an email and tell me which of my Most Valuable Emails has been most useful or interesting to you, and why.

Most Valuable Emails = any of my emails that use the Most Valuable Email trick.

I write a new Most Valuable Email every few days. In fact, I wrote 3 over the past week alone.

If you’ve been on my list for a while, you probably know what I mean by the Most Valuable Email trick.

And if you don’t know, you can watch me pull back the curtain and reveal the trick inside my Most Valuable Email training.

Plus, inside that training you can find a swipe file of 51 Most Valuable Emails that I selected as being particularly successful, effective, or influential for me personally. Any of those is eligible for this competition as well.

That means that, if you buy Most Valuable Email today, and then enter this competition, you have a fair shot of making your money back within two days, and to get the course to boot. There’s no telling how many people will enter this competition, and you might win first prize simply by virtue of showing up.

Plus, just for entering the competition, I will send you an additional valuable marketing idea, which you can use today to make more sales.

If you’re interested, here are the rules for this competition:

1. Entries must be submitted in the form of an email from 50 to 150 words. Simply tell me which of my Most Valuable Emails has been the most useful or insightful or entertaining for you, and why. You don’t have to be clever, fancy, or unique in what you say — just tell me what comes to mind.

2. The deadline for this competition is this Wednesday, June 19th, at 8:31pm CET. I’ll announce the prizes the day after, on Thursday, June 20th. The competition is open to anyone on my list, whether or not you have bought my Most Valuable Email training.

3. You can submit as many entries as you like, and I will consider all of them. But you can only win one prize.

4. What I want primarily is to find out how my readers have been using my Most Valuable Email trick to benefit themselves, as well as how this trick has made certain of my emails more sticky and available in their minds.

​​Like I say on the sales page for Most Valuable Email, if I had to choose just one type of email to write each day, I’d choose Most Valuable Emails. That’s why I want to hear about the real-world effects these emails have had on my readers.

5. The decision about which competition entry wins which prize will be made by me, based on my personal reaction and surprise. ​​As one MVE buyer wrote me after going through the course:

​​”I’m looking back at your old emails with new eyes. You know that moment people get epiphanies and the entire world looks different? I’m feeling that way about your writing now. You’ve helped me unlock something I didn’t know existed. So incredible.”

Announcing: The winner of the “Send me your feedback on my Simple Money Emails course” contest

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Two weeks back, I announced the winner of the “Influence my Simple Money Emails course” contest, only 3 months behind schedule.

Well, today I have another contest winner to announce, this time for the “Send me your feedback on my Simple Money Emails course” contest.

I told everyone who had gotten Simple Money Emails to send me their feedback, their praise, their blame, their outrage.

The most useful bit of feedback, determined by a select three-part panel composed of myself, plus a Shire hobbit named Bejako Baggins, and top-secret agent Bond Jebakovic, would win a ticket to my upcoming Authority Emails training, valued somewhere north of $500.

I ran that contest a little over a month ago.

Today I would like to announce the winner (fanfares please):

Career coach Tom Grundy. (Tom, if you’re listening, come by the DJ booth to pick up your prize.)

Tom wrote me with the following bit of feedback on Simple Money Emails, specifically about a tiny section at the bottom of page 2:

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I really enjoyed SME. A few parts which were refreshers, a few which were a new take on stuff I’d already come across, and some stuff which was brand new to me.

I actually found the most useful part of the course to be the small section at the bottom of page 2. The eight bullet points to me were gold. I came into copywriting through a Stefan Georgi course, so I learnt his RMBC method and only then came onto daily emails, which I found to be much more my thing. I always struggled to see how daily emails “fit” with other copywriting models (RMBC, PAS, AIDA etc) and this section has made it super clear for me. Now when I sent my daily emails I use this list, and make sure I’m ticking off at least one in each email (and ticking them all off over time).

So if you had pages which delved into each of these 8 bullets in more detail (just like you have already for the openers and closers) I’d also find this super valuable.

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The reason it’s taken me this long to announce Tom’s the winner was because it’s taken me this long to take his advice and expand this section of the course a bit with some illustrations.

I’ve done that now.

So if you have Simple Money Emails already, you will the find the updates automagically present inside your course area.

And if don’t have Simple Money Emails yet, you can get it at the page below, and start benefiting from it in under an hour from now:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Announcing: The winner of the “Influence my Simple Money Emails course” contest

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It’s 6:45pm as I write this, which means it’s about 8 hours later than I normally write these emails. I’ll tell you in a sec why that’s significant.

But first, let me tell you why I’m writing so late:

I’ve spent much of the day wandering the streets of Budapest, my once-adopted but then renounced home.

​​I lived here for 11 years but then left. This trip is the first time I’ve been back in over 4 years.

The last few days were all about meeting up with old friends.

Today is my last day. I spent it by doing a full tourist circuit, up to the renovated City Park, with its new hot air balloon and its convex garden-covered museum of ethnography… and then, via the oldest metro in continental Europe (1896)… up to the Castle District with its panoramic views of the various bridges over the Danube right below.

Oh, and when I stopped in along the way at different Starbuckses to order my decaf latte, I used my faded but still passable Hungarian and kept introducing myself as János. Nobody realized I’m not a local.

All that’s to say, it’s been a nice and nostalgic day.

But now it’s night. And night is when I find it impossible to write anything sensible or quick.

In fact, I have no idea how I can possibly tie the above Budapest opener with any kind of offer I sell, except to say that I was so strapped for ideas for this email that I started rooting around my journal for this newsletter… and going far, far back.

So far back, that I found that I had still not announced the winner of the “Influence my Simple Money Emails course” contest, which I ran back in July, before I released the course.

For that contest, I asked readers to write in and tell me what has them bothered when writing simple sales emails. What they would like to learn, and why they haven’t been able to learn it yet.

The best such response — as chosen by me — got a free ticket to my 9 Deadly Email Sins training, which cost $100 to attend.

So let me do what I should have done months ago:

The winner — fanfare please — of the “Influence my Simple Money Emails course” contest is Richard Terry, owner of Accolade Kitchen and Bath, a construction and remodeling company in St. Louis, Missouri.

​​Richard won himself the free ticket to the Email Sins training by writing in with the following:

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I’m told that a sales email should be in a story format that tells the story about the client’s fears, concerns, what keeps them up at night etc. Your product or service should solve your prospects problem. My challenge is not being creative enough to produce these emails on a consistent basis with relevant content.

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Even though I didn’t announce Richard as the winner publicly until now, I gave him access to 9 Deadly Email Sins when I put it on.

​​I also used his comment a guiding light when I actually the Simple Money Emails course.

My goal for the course was to demystify email copywriting, and show that writing effective daily sales emails is not a matter of unusual creativity — but a matter of preparation, and a willingness to follow a few simple rules, which I laid out in the course.

In case you’d like to write sales emails on a consistent basis, but you have not been able to, then my Simple Money Emails course can help you get started.

​​I even included the 9 Deadly Email Sins training as a free bonus.

​​If you’d like to get the whole package now, go here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

How to effectively divide and rule

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Legend says that in the early days of Rome, the city was made up of two races — the Romans and the Sabines.

The Sabines felt like second-class citizens, and hated the Romans.

The Romans didn’t trust the Sabines and worked hard to keep the Sabines down.

Tension threatened to tear the young city apart.

So the leading men of Rome — Romans and Sabines both — elected a new king in the hope of getting out of this crisis.

The new king’s name was Numa. He was a Sabine by birth. And he fixed the problem.

Numa eliminated Roman-Sabine strife. He united the two races into manageable citizens of Rome. He set the ground for what was the become the great Roman empire.

The question is how?

How do you take two groups that hate each other, and unite them into a cohesive, ruleable whole?

Well, here’s one thing Numa did:

He created new guilds based on occupation.

There was a guild for the musicians, one for goldsmiths, another for shoemakers. Each guild had special privileges, rituals, even their own unique patron god. And crucially, each guild cut across racial lines – each included both Romans and Sabines.

It worked.

This illustrates an idea from Eric Hoffer’s book True Believer. Writing about the idea of “divide to rule,” Hoffer had this to say:

“An effective division is one that fosters a multiplicity of compact bodies — racial, religious, or economic — vying with and suspicious of each other.”

Maybe you’re not sure exactly what this means. So let me give you another, more modern example.

Have you heard of Josh Wardle, the guy who made the viral game Wordle? Which, by the way, was so much fun to play until the failing New York Times ruined it?

Well, before making Wordle, Wardle worked at Reddit. And one project he had there was called Orangered vs Periwinkle.

As you might know, Reddit is a bunch of separate and sometimes antagonistic communities.

But on April Fool’s in 2013, every Reddit user was automatically assigned to one of two made-up teams. Team Orangered or team Periwinkle.

The outcome was a ton of engagement and activity on the site. New bonds being formed across subreddits. In Wardle’s words:

“Uniting people through difference is easy. Essentially what we did is we just put people on separate teams. And it turns out people are really really good at creating stuff when they say, ‘I’m part of this group, I’m not part of that group.'”

Wardle has a vision of using this “divide to unite” trick to stir creativity and create greater unity on a big scale.

But I’m not recommending anything like that to you. This email is not my call for the greater brotherhood of man, or for an ever-expanding union through the clever use of new divisions.

That’s because I believe that size is evil, or at least inhuman. After all, the Roman empire, like all other empires that came after it, crushed and destroyed to serve its own ends of growth. And Reddit is kind of a sewer on most days.

So I have no clear takeaway for you today. I just wanted to point out this curious technique of dividing to unite.

You will have to decide how you want to use it. Whether to unite people, hopefully in a good cause… or to be aware of it, so you can resit being co-opted into a new divisive group, because you don’t want to contribute to anybody else’s inhuman ends.

Not convinced?
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Well, maybe you want to read more about my idea that size is evil. If so, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/the-most-dangerous-idea-in-america/

Virtue selling

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Because you are an independent thinker, I believe you will appreciate the following:

​​A few nights ago, I was walking along the riverside when a series of loud explosions went off all around me.

I didn’t flinch. Not because I’m so brave. But because I knew what was going on.

The explosions were firecrackers, fireworks, or possibly cannon fire, set off in celebration. They were followed by mass cheering that broke out from balconies, bars, and cafes all over the city.

Because it’s the Euro Cup now. And the national soccer team had just scored a goal.

I say national team, but that’s not what they are called. Not officially.

Instead, government officials, TV pundits, and newspaper editors now use the terms “we,” or more commonly, “Croatia.”

“Croatia was magnificent”

“Croatia needs to try harder”

“Croatia rises from the ashes”

My point is that soccer here is a kind of new state religion.

I’m not kidding about that.

Once upon a time in this part of the world, belonging to the official church and being a good citizen were two sides of the same personal identity coin.

Today, the church has lost much of its pull.

But soccer has gained where the church has lost.

So today, billboards, TV, and newspapers all repeat a hundred versions of the same two-sided message:

“Croatia is soccer! And soccer is Croatia!”

But let me step off my 1984 pulpit. And let me get to the money-making shot at the open goal.

This official push for soccer fandom brought to mind something I’ve heard from two successful marketers.

The marketers in question are Chris Haddad and Ben Settle. And independent of each other, they both said the same thing:

You want to make buying from you a virtue.

Sure, people want to get rich, get laid, and get swole.

But maybe not as much as you think. Maybe not enough to pull out their wallets, to overcome their fears, and to set aside the bad memories of previous purchases that went nowhere. Maybe not enough to buy.

So you link buying from you to a virtue:

Your prospect is a rebel. Or a patriot. Or a visionary.

And by virtue of buying from you… he is making the world a better place… and reaffirming that he is in fact a deserving person.

And when your prospect starts wondering if that’s really something he wants, you remind him:

He still gets rich/laid/swole as part of the bargain. A good deal, no? 1-0 for your business.

And now the pitch:

Since you are an independent-thinking person, you might want to sign up to my email newsletter. By signing up to my email newsletter, you will be exposed to novel ideas, making you an even more independent-thinking person. Plus you might make some money in the process.

Humans are not savages, but they can be made so on demand

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Yesterday, I read a fantastic yet true story, a kind of real-life Lord of the Flies. Except the outcome was very different from the book:

As you might know, Lord of the Flies is a story about a bunch of boys who get shipwrecked on an island.

Pretty soon, they become mean, thuggish, and destructive. Some of the boys are killed by the others. Half the island is burned down.

What can you do? People are savages, and kids even more so. Except maybe not:

The real-life version of this story involves six boys from the island kingdom of Tonga.

They were bored stiff at their English boarding school.

So they decided to steal a local fisherman’s boat and sail away to adventure, and maybe even make it to New Zealand.

They didn’t make it.

After months of search, the boys were declared dead back home. Funerals were held for them.

And then, 15 months later, they were discovered by an Australian adventurer fishing in the waters around an uninhabited island named ‘Ata. The boys had shiprecked there and survived, alone all that time.

And here’s the real-life twist:

All six boys were happy, healthy, and harmonious.

They had survived by eating fish and coconuts and drinking rainwater collected in hollowed-out tree trunks.

They had broken up their chores, such as gardening, cooking, and guard duty, and they took turns doing them.

They built a gym and a badminton court, and they played a makeshift guitar made out of the wreckage of the boat.

When one of the boys fell down a ravine and broke his leg, the others climbed down after him, brought him back up, then set his leg using sticks and leaves. He recovered while the other boys took turns doing his chores.

So is this really the true nature of human beings?

​​And if so, why does your typical junior high school look nothing like it?

​​Why does Lord of the Flies resonate with us instead?

The answer comes from another real-life variant of the Lord of the Flies theme. A bunch of people stranded on an uninhabited island… with a TV crew and a prize to be won.

I’m talking about the TV show Survivor. I’ve never watched it, but I know the basic setup:

Direct competition for something scarce.

It’s all you need to turn people into savages. A finding that’s been repeated in different settings, not just on reality TV.

So let me leave off today by saying I can see two options:

One is to disconnect as much as possible from the doctrine of healthy competition. This might require moving to a deserted island, or at least turning off the TV.

The other option is not to disconnect from anything, but to profit from it. Because creating scarcity, even when there is none, and encouraging competition, or at least reminding people of it, is a great means of control.

Marinate on that for a bit. And if you want more real-life stories on the topic of profit and control, you might like my email newsletter. But better be quick, because spots are limited and others are taking them as you read this. Click here to sign up.