Persuasion

A grateful reader succeeds in making me blush

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Last night, I got an email from marketer and copywriter Shakoor Chowdhury, who wrote:

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Hello John,

I wanted to take a moment of my day to say “thank you”!

Besides Dan Kennedy, you have played the most impactful role in growing my revenues every single day

most of my NEW cashflow can be directly attributed to you and your courses “MVE” & “influential emails”…

I write emails daily now and they always bring more money or book appointments with high ticket clients…

This year I decided to focus on building relationships with my customers and not just ‘direct selling’ one time…

And I have to say, nobody is able to teach the concepts of email marketing better than you have…

It is simple, straightforward and teaches the FUNDAMENTALS of what it takes to be an email copywriter

I am a lifelong fan and customer.

Hope many more people and great things find their way to you, you are a bit of a ‘best kept secret’ in the copy world

which is perhaps why you are the best… the mystic ‘guru at the top of the mountain’

I found you because OTHER copywriters spoke so highly of you

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Like I said in the subject line, Shakoor succeeded in making me blush, and I’m blushing now having to write about it. So let me change the topic immediately.

I recently heard business coach Rich Schefren say that he often gives presents to his mentor Mark Ford, because Mark doesn’t like to be in anybody’s debt, and so he always gives presents in return.

Let me do the same with Shakoor:

Based on what little I know of him, he sounds like a guy who gets things done and would probably have been successful one way or the other.

Last October when Shakoor and I first exchanged a couple emails, he was already working with a number of clients as a kind of full-service marketer for ecom businesses.

With just one of those clients working on a performance deal, Shakoor was taking in $10k+ per month. Overall, at that time, he was driving $300k+ in sales for his clients each month.

Somewhere along the line, Shakoor also had time to run his own dropshipping businesses, one of which got up to 100k+ buyers.

All that’s to say, after Shakoor decided to build up his personal brand and to start writing daily emails, I’m guessing he would have been successful with Dan Kennedy or without Dan Kennedy, with me or without me.

That said, I do appreciate Shakoor’s kind words.

​​I also do appreciate that I have been able to help occasional people learn something about direct marketing and copywriting… and even make transformations in their lives, whether that meant making more money, or getting going with daily emailing so they can build a personal brand and stop relying on cold outreach.

And on that topic:

I’m not currently selling the Influential Emails program that Shakoor was referring to. But I still am selling my Most Valuable Email program.

Most Valuable Email pulls back the curtain and shows you, in less than an hour, how to perform a specific email copywriting trick, one I use regularly in my own emails.

Emails using this trick are different from emails you might be familiar with, like story emails, or “hot takes,” or how-to emails, or personal reveals.

Unlike those other kinds of emails, Most Valuable Emails happen to work well whether you have authority or not, whether you’re just getting started with your personal brand or you have had a following for years.

And yet, none of that is the reason why these kinds of emails are most valuable.

The real reason is that Most Valuable Emails make daily emailing fun and educational for me personally, and easy to stick with for the long term.

And it seems for others like Shakoor also.

Maybe for you too?

I don’t know. But if you’d like to find out more about MVE, and see if it makes sense for you:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

How to hide secrets in plain sight using an ordinary razor

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Sleight-of-hand artist Ricky Jay studied card cheats, because cheating at cards is a sister discipline to close-up magic.

Jay once did an entire evening for a few friends, showing various card-cheating techniques. At the end of it, he also told a story.

The story involved a poker player who, when it was his turn to deal, reached into his coat and took out a straight razor.

He opened up the razor, made it glint in the light to show how sharp it is, and put it down in front of him on the poker table.

He then slowly looked around the table at every other player. And he said, with menace in his voice, “There will be no cheating in this game.”

Newsflash:
​​
I don’t like playing poker. I’m also not a magician. I can’t do even do a single basic card trick.

I got interested in magic, and by extension card cheating, because I felt there was something about a magician’s misdirection that’s common to copywriting and effective communication in general.

When most people think misdirection, they think somebody waving a red scarf somewhere in the corner of your eye so you look away, and so you don’t see the secret action.

And that is one kind of misdirection. But there are many more kinds.

A good card cheat, magician, or just effective communicator, can do his secret trick right in front of you, without ever diverting your gaze. In fact, he can even make a big deal of the mechanism behind the secret trick, drawing your attention to it.

Which brings us back to the razor on the table. It’s an old card cheater’s trick known as “the shiner.”

The shiner can be a razor, like in the story above, or a large flat ring on the hand, or even a smart phone in more modern times, lying on the poker table.

The key is simply that the it’s an object that makes sense in that given context. It also has to be shiny, so the cheater can use it to get a quick glimpse of the underside of each card as he deals.

So now you know how to hide secrets in plain sight using an ordinary razor… or hairbrush (Parris Lampropoulos)… or gold necklace (Gary Bencivenga).

In other news, voting for the Best Daily Email Awards continues furiously. Today’s email will be the last email I send out before the deadline to cast your vote, tomorrow at 8:31pm CET.

If you know what I’m talking about, get voting so you don’t miss the deadline. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, here are the details from my email yesterday:

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I would like to announce the formation of the Best Daily Email Awards.

This is a new yearly award for merit in the daily email format.

Each year, the Best Daily Email Awards are selected by the prestigious and exclusive Daily Email Academy, which you are a member of by virtue of being a reader of this newsletter.

If you would like to nominate a particular daily email for a Best Daily Email Award, simply forward it to me before this Sunday, July 28, at 8:31pm CET.

Any daily email by any brand or person, in any market or niche, is eligible. You don’t need to explain your reasoning for nominating this particular email. The only restriction is you may only submit one entry, and that it’s actually a daily email.

And then, I, as the current acting Director of the Daily Email Academy, will collect the results, and announce the winners at the inaugural prize ceremony next week.

And yes, I’m 100% serious about this. So start forwarding now.

Announcing: Best Daily Email Awards

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Over the past few months, I’ve gotten addicted to listening to a Japanese woman’s YouTube channel, on which she puts out collections like, “1963 Billboard Top 100 Countdown.”

These collections feature hit songs I know, and are also a good way to discover something new, or at least new to me.

But the real reason I’m listening to this woman’s YouTube channel, as opposed to a million other YouTube song collections and playlists, is that her collections feel somehow authoritative, vetted.

After all, the included songs were all hits at the time they came out. People loved each of these songs then, even if some of the songs fell into obscurity later. The Billboard rankings prove it.

My own addiction reminded me of something I read in the Robert Collier Letter Book.

At one point, Collier was selling a subscription to the Review of Reviews, a monthly magazine that I guess was similar to Reader’s Digest.

The problem was few people really like committing to a subscription.

The solution of course was a series of attractive bonuses, which could appear and disappear on command.

But how to make a bonus instantly attractive?

One solution was to again defer to authority and vetting by others. The winning bonus was a little book that collected 64 stories that won the O. Henry prize for the best short story of the year.

Result? ​

​​​30,000-40,000 new subscribers with one sales letter, bundling a stupid magazine subscription with this sexy bonus.

You can do the same, by the way.

Maybe your niche already has some objective measure of authority to it — best-selling books, top-ranked ClickBank offers, investors who made the most money.

Or if there is no such objective measure, you can always invent a new prize or award.

You can use this authoritative or vetted status to create an attractive bonus or offer, and of course, to put yourself in the middle of the action.

And with that, I would like to announce the formation of the Best Daily Email Awards.

This is a new yearly award for merit in the daily email format.

Each year, the Best Daily Email Awards are selected by the prestigious and exclusive Daily Email Academy, which you are a member of by virtue of being a reader of this newsletter.

If you would like to nominate a particular daily email for a Best Daily Email Award, simply forward it to me before this Sunday, July 28, at 8:31pm CET.

Any daily email by any brand or person, in any market or niche, is eligible. You don’t need to explain your reasoning for nominating this particular email. The only restriction is you may only submit one entry, and that it’s actually a daily email.

And then, I, as the current acting Director of the Daily Email Academy, will collect the results, and announce the winners at the inaugural prize ceremony next week.

And yes, I’m 100% serious about this. So start forwarding now.

The one ring to rule them all, until it doesn’t

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A few weeks ago, Derek Johanson of CopyHour wrote an email with an inspiring idea:

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Most often all that an online business needs to go from zero to 6 figures is to focus on ONE simple business model and ONE marketing channel for growth.

One Business Model: If you sell courses, only sell courses. That’s your one business model. Don’t add coaching or do freelancing too.
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One Marketing Channel For Traffic: If you’ve picked LinkedIn to drive traffic, don’t think about YouTube or paid ads at all.

That’s it. Going deep into ONE business model and ONE marketing channel is how you double a small business.

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When I read this, I had a double reaction:

1. Whoa this makes sense
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2. Hold on, this can’t be right — it’s just another manifestation of the human desire for “the one thing”

“The one thing,” as you might know, is a popular hook in direct response advertising.

It manifests itself in different guises — “the one thing,” “the ancient secret,” “the real reason” — but ultimately, it taps into to our brains’ desire to melt down the complexity and messiness of the world into just one magic ring of power to rule them all.

Rings like that exist in fantasies, but they don’t exist in real life.

Except, that’s not really what Derek was saying in his email. He was saying something more nuanced, and not-one-thingy.

I wasn’t quite sure how to stickily sum up what Derek was saying. Fortunately, somebody did it for me, in a paid private group (the only paid private group) that I’m a member of. The person in that group summed it up like this:

1. Test until it works
2. Scale until it stops working

Many things can work — for example, as sources of traffic.

The thing is, most things won’t work right out the gate. It will take some time and tweaking for them to produce results.

That’s step 1. Most people quit before they complete this step, and instead they jump to back to the beginning, to another supposed ring of power, hoping that it will work right away.

Derek’s email was about step 2. Going deep into one thing and scaling until it stops working. Which is a worthwhile idea, and like I said, quite not-one-thingy.

I thought about how to apply this to my own business. And I’m not really sure.

In terms of marketing channels to get people reading these emails, my number one source has been referrals and word-of-mouth, which I did absolutely nothing to encourage beyond writing daily and sharing novel ideas and illustrations. Maybe I should just keep writing.

As for the one business model, I still haven’t quite figured out one that I’m happy with. Which is why, over the past few months, I’ve sent out so many emails that ultimately link to $4.99 books on Amazon, or interesting articles you might find valuable, or—

Well, let me get to it now.

You remember I mentioned the paid private community I’m a member of? The only one?

I personally find it very valuable — and interesting.

Maybe you will too. But you will have to decide for yourself. I’m not promoting this community as an affiliate, and I’m not pushing you to join it. But if you’re curious to find out more:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

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

What a day to fly

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“Oh what the f—”

I arrived to the airport today around 8:45am to be faced with a giant, hideous snake, made up of people and luggage, starting at the check-in counters, folding in on itself a dozen times, and finally stretching its tail some hundred yards into the depths of the terminal.

I immediately made my way for the “last call” line. Even that took almost 45 minutes before I finally made it to the check-in counter.

​​I handed my id to the woman behind the counter. ​​She wasn’t interested.

“I need proof of your booking,” she said.

“What?”

“I need to see proof that you’ve bought a ticket.”

“The proof’s there in the computer,” I said. I helpfully pointed to her computer monitor for her.

She flipped it around so I could see. It showed a booting-up window. It was frozen.

“The computers aren’t working,” she said. “I need proof that you’ve bought a ticket.”

Maybe you’ve heard. There was some giant IT crash all around the world today. America. Australia. Europe. Hospitals. Banks. Airlines.

I produced proof of booking in the end.

​​And in return, I got a flimsy piece of paper, written out by hand, with my name on it and the code for the flight. That was my boarding pass today.

I won’t go into the details of all my adventures today.

Suffice to say, the situation was a huge mess, everywhere, all at once.

As I stood there at the airport, in a crowd of thousands of people, all of us burdened with luggage, all confused, all indecisive and yet unhappy to stay where we were, I thought that this was a little sampler of what Porter Stansberry has been predicting for 15 years or more.

“End of America.” Total social collapse. A world in which things stop working, and we’re suddenly exposed and helpless.

I don’t know if Stansberry’s predictions will ever come true.

But I do know that predictions like that always get attention.

Fear works. So does greed, if you can tie it into the fear, and make a claim like copywriter Gary Halbert once did:

“How You Can Profit From The Coming Stock Market Crash And Financial Blood-Bath That Is Going To Be Caused By Cash-Rich Drug Dealers And Other Criminal Scum!”

The thing is, fear and greed can be good at getting buyers. But they might not be very good at getting repeat buyers, the buyers who actually build a direct response business.

There has to be something more.

And to find out what that something more is, today I’ll invite you to read an essay that has been ringing in my head for years.

This essay explains why the “End of America” sales letter was such a huge success, when hundreds of similar sales messages, all making the same predictions and claims, didn’t even come close.

And this analysis comes from a man who should know, because he got the sales numbers of all these hundreds of sales letters, and he got the copy to compare. Plus, he’s a master copywriter himself, who has coached and guided dozens of other master copywriters.

If you’re interested in copywriting, at all, then this essay is worth a read:

https://www.markford.net/2019/12/09/

The light at the end of the tunnel

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“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and the thing is, I love you.”

“What?”

“I love you.”

“How do you expect me to respond to this?”

“How about, you love me too?”

“How about: I’m leaving.”

That’s the start of the last scene of the 1989 romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally. In case you haven’t seen it, the movie goes like this:

The first time Harry and Sally meet, they hate each other. The second time they meet, Harry doesn’t even remember who Sally is. The third time they meet, Harry and Sally become friends. Then they sleep together, and things go south and they stop being friends.

And then one New Year’s Eve, Harry finally realizes he loves Sally, and he runs to meet her, and he declares his love. And she says, “I’m leaving.”

The fact is, screenwriter Nora Ephron and director Rob Reiner both felt that movie should end like this.

​​No way should it end with Harry and Sally winding up together. That’s not how the real world works. People in those kinds of relationships don’t end up together.

That’s how the first two drafts of the movie actually went. The bitter truth.

But in the third draft, Ephron wrote this final scene, and Reiner shot it. After Sally’s “I’m leaving,” Harry delivers a speech about all the little things he loves about her, and they kiss and they wind up together, forever, in love.

And that’s how the movie was released, and it was a big, big hit.

So what’s the point?

Well, maybe it’s obvious, but you can go negative and cynical and sarcastic for the whole movie, but you gotta end on an inspiring, positive note.

​​It’s gotta make sense to people and give them a feeling of hope, at least if you want to create something that has a chance to be a big big hit, something that can appeal to a wide swath of the market.

Or in the words of screenwriter and director David Mamet:

“Children jump around at the end of the day, to expend the last of that day’s energy. The adult equivalent, when the sun goes down, is to create or witness drama — which is to say, to order the universe into a comprehensible form.”

But now I have a problem:

I’ve just pulled back the curtain. And what’s behind the curtain is not so nice. So how can I end this email on an inspiring, positive note?

Well, I can admit to you that the world is a large and complex and often unjust place. But it does have its own structure. And just by reading these emails, you’re finding out bits and pieces of that structure, and that helps you make more sense of the world you live in, and it helps you shape and influence the world for the better.

I can also tell you that the above bit, about Harry and Sally and Nora and Rob, is part of a book I’m working on, the mythical “10 Commandments of Hypnotists, Pick Up Artists, Comedians, Copywriters, Con Men, Door-To-Door Salesmen, Professional Negotiators, Storytellers, Propagandists, and Stage Magicians.”

I’ve been working on this book for a long time. But there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

In the meantime, do you know about my other 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters?

It also collects bits and pieces of the structure of the world, and it can help you understand and shape that world for the better. In case you’d like to find out more:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

3 women come to my rescue

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Yesterday, I wrote about a female reader who accused me, along with the rest of the 4 billion males on this planet, of being sexist.

I did my best — it wasn’t much — to defend myself against the accusation.

But when you’ve been charged with a serious thought crime, what you really want is some good third-party witnesses to corroborate your own defense.

Fortunately, I got a few responses from women to my email yesterday. I won’t name names here — that’s against thought court protocol — but here’s what they wrote.

​​First, from a PhD scientist and business owner:

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Bwahahahaha I noticed all 5 were men and thought – oh my, some woman is gonna write in and whine about this…

Couldn’t see that one coming *cough*

Watcha gonna do?

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Second, from a fundraising copywriter for NGOs:

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I’m a woman and I almost lost an eyeball when rolling my eyes as I was reading allaboutme’s comment.

It’s the saddest, most annoying, most passe rebuke to resort to when you’ve got nothing else to throw at a man.

It’s plain lazy.

Thanks for the good work, John.

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Third, from an MD and science fiction author:

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Pretty impressed by the link at the end. I was a bit suspicious about the sexism, but it really helps that you clarify that everyone who entered the contest was a man. More chicks should step up, I guess! XD

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errr… yeah. About that. I actually also got one reply yesterday, which just said:

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Hey John,

Just read your email and I wanted to let know I am a woman (and from India).

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Uh-oh.

This reply came in a thread of one of the Most Valuable Email contest submissions I got last week — the contest that triggered this entire sexism affair.

​​Only men ended up as winners of the contest because — so I thought — only men ended up submitting any entries.

Except apparently not.

It turns out I did get at least one submission for the MVE contest from a woman. But I didn’t recognize her as such because of her Indian name/nickname. That means two things:

1) My defense in my sexism trial has suddenly been dealt a serious, possibly fatal blow, and…

2) I might now be charged with racism to boot, or at the very least, with involuntary cultural obtuseness.

My life just got a lot more complicated.

Clearly, my slapdash self-defense won’t be enough to handle this any more.

I’ll have to call in some serious help.

The help of a master communicator.

​​Someone who hasn’t lost a legal argument in over 40 years, while fighting in dozens of big criminal and civil cases.

Perhaps you know who I mean.

Perhaps you don’t.

If so, I’m willing to tell you. But be warned. This person is too male, too pale, and too stale.

Maybe he can still teach you something though.

If you’re interested:

https://bejakovic.com/criminal

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.

===

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.”