Persuasion

Anti-proof #1A

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Yesterday, I wrote an email wondering about a strange social proof conundrum:

Why do endorsements and testimonials sometimes act as powerful proof elements… while at other times they act as a red flag that signals the offer itself is unproven and iffy?

I didn’t have an answer I was convinced by, beyond shrugging my shoulders and saying, “because readers can basically sniff out if you’re coming from a position of power or not.”

I got a number of replies to yesterday’s email, from readers who both disagree with me and agree with me. For example, reader John McDermott thinks it all comes down to gut feelings:

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It obviously depends on the audience to a certain extent, but I think people make buying decisions largely from ‘gut feelings.’ That is, whether the offer invokes their defenses on some ‘spidey senses’ level. Or not.

Just as a salesman shouldn’t actually wear blue suede shoes, an ad shouldn’t show any ‘tells’ that the audience will perceive.

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On the other hand, a reader named Devd thinks it’s about structuring your copy in the right way:

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I think towards the end of the book, Gene Schwartz talked about something related to this in Breakthrough Advertising.

Like being the mind reader, and amply supplying the copy with claim-proof and other stuff as required.

And not blabbering about just proof or claims alone for too long, and having the right thinking process to switch as needed based on the thought process of your prospect after reading each line you write.

That’d probably help avoid the copy feeling too needy, I guess.

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A mysterious French copywriter or marketer, who keeps buying my offers under different names but goes by “Bro in Arms” in his emails, thinks it might not have anything to do with social proof at all:

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Or maybe it’s just a great product.

And like Elon Musk says in his biography, great products sell themselves through word of mouth.

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On the other hand, marketer Sean McCool, whose Persuasion by the Pint podcast I appeared on last Friday, thinks it’s the framing of the endorsement that matters:

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I think the speaker in the letter matters. If a “publisher” is talking about the guru and then shares testimonials about the guru in the letter, that is much more powerful and accepted than if the guru is the voice in the letter.

Thats why so many Agora promos use a publisher.

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And Maliha Mannan, who writes dailyish emails and sells courses over at The Side Blogger, offers an insider’s perspective:

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I have a hard time believing in testimonials, but I know I’m an outlier.

In most cases, as a buyer, a testimonial only works on me, regardless of whether it’s a testimonial about the person making the offer or the offer itself, when I have already developed a positive view of the seller. In that case, a testimonial of the offer itself comes off stronger than that of the person (because I already like the person?)…

On the other hand, as a seller of offers, I usually work with what I have. Since I’m pretty bad at asking for testimonials, most of what I have are things people have said in the passing, and most of these tend to be comments about me.

For example, “I like how you teach,” is an email after someone has taken a course. But it’s not exactly about the course itself.

On a more curious note, I get the best testimonials from fellow info-entrepreneurs. Maybe because we understand what it means to have a really good testimonial, we tend to give out the best testimonials ourselves.

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So? Are we any closer to unraveling this mystery?

I personally still don’t have an answer that convinces me. But perhaps some of the above comments gave you a good idea, maybe even one you can run with in your own marketing.

In any case, it was important to share these reader perspectives. That’s because daily emails should feel as much as possible as a dinner party, rather than as a sermon or a university lecture.

Since I end all my emails by promoting something, let me now point you to my Daily Email Habit service, which helps you write daily emails that feel like a dinner party, while at the same time getting people at the party to pay the tab at the end of the night.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have a good number of “fellow info-entrepreneurs” as subscribers to Daily Email Habit. I’ve got testimonials on the sales page from some of them, saying things like:

#1. “Fourth day in DEH. Turned the Elvis bullet into an email. Got a sale to my £170 course. So I’d say the investment has paid for itself.”

#2. “Within 5 minutes of getting your first ‘prompt’ in my inbox, I was cranking out my first email. Zero resistance.”

#3. “10 minutes going from sheer panic about what to write to a finished email building my expertise and selling my stuff.”

#4. “Exactly what I needed to get me thinking about my list.”

#5. “My best Black Friday yet… your service contributed to this result.”

If you’d like to find out more about Daily Email Habit, and see if it might make sales for you too:

https://bejakovic.com/deh/

Anti-proof #1

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A couple days ago, I wrote an email about an unused form of proof, namely testimonials and endorsements for the person selling, rather than for the product being sold.

I first spotted that in the super successful infomercial for the George Foreman Grill. Half the testimonials in the infomercial are for the grill itself. But the rest are for George Foreman himself, like this:

“If George is behind anything, that will be the best thing for America. George would never advertise nothing that’s not good for America.”

After I wrote that email, I got message from copywriter GC Tsalamagkakis, who wrote:

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I’ve seen a lot of people doing it. And I’m sure it works.

But it would have to be executed in a natural way.

Looking at my own reaction (and I may very well be the only one), when I just see those 2 types of testimonials mixed together, it makes me think that the person is desperate to add more social proof and will use any remotely-related testimonials they can find.

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GC’s comment made me think. He’s definitely not the only one to feel like this.

I have myself seen sales pages where only a few lukewarm testimonials are for the offer itself (“quite an acceptable sandwich”)… while the rest of the sales page is padded with other testimonials either for other products by same person (“amazing French fries!”), or just endorsements for the person selling (“the greatest fast-food visionary of our generation”).

On sales pages like this, extra endorsements don’t help much and can even hurt.

I know I have personally felt that such extra endorsements act as a kind of anti-proof element, as a red herring that’s more likely to put questions into my head than lull me into buying.

I asked myself what makes the difference. Why do “seller endorsements” work in the George Foreman infomercial… and don’t work on many sales pages?

I don’t have a clear answer. My best guess is that in one place the extra testimonials are coming from a position of strength, and in the other they are coming from a position of weakness, and that’s something we humans are good at sniffing out.

Maybe you have a better answer. If you do, I hope you will hit reply and enlighten me.

And if you want one more example to help you make you delve inside this profound mystery, I can point you to an effective sales page that features seller endorsements along with product testimonials.

The sales page in question is one for my Most Valuable Email course, and I say it’s effective because I’ve sold many, many copies of this course via this sales page.

The endorsements on this sales page, for me as someone who writes daily emails, come from people like Joe Schriefer of Agora Financial, Bill Mueller of Story Sales Machine, and Daniel Throssell of the Australia Throssells.

On the other hand, there are also a dozen product testimonials, which I’ve picked from a larger batch of positive customer feedback.

I’ve chosen to feature those specific testimonials either because they are particularly enthusiastic (“amazing,” “incredible,” and “more importantly, writing an MVE is fun”) or because the copywriter or marketer benefited from applying the MVE trick in their own or their client’s emails. A sample:

“My inbox is flooded with applause”

“The highest-converting single-email campaign sent to the non-buyers of all time”

“… made me make 5 times more the investment in MVE”

If you wanna see how I integrate both kinds of testimonials into my MVE sales page, take a look below. Just be careful that you don’t get sucked into buying the course itself. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Two Hungarian con men go after my mom

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True story, one that happened two days ago, and that I heard from my mom on the phone last night:

My mom lives in a brutalist high-rise building in Zagreb, Croatia.

She goes outside the building two days ago to throw out the trash.

A car pulls up. There are two guys inside. They roll down the window and start speaking to my mom as she is throwing out the trash.

They explain they are Hungarian. And indeed, they are speaking Croatian with the CHAR-acteristic HUN-garian ACC-ent.

“Are you retired?” one of the guys asks.

My mom says yes.

“Great,” he says. “In that case we have a gift for you.” He hands my mom a brochure. It shows fancy sets of kitchenware.

As my mom is looking over the brochure, the other guy gets out and opens up the trunk of the car. “Come take a look” he says.

It’s like a treasure chest in there. There are silver-plated pots, pans, cutlery, knives, all in opened boxes.

The Hungarians explain they were just showing off their wares at a trade show at the big fairgrounds across the street.

“Now we are going to the airport,” they say. But before they go, the boss has tasked them with giving away the samples before they fly out, and to give them away to retired people.

“Would you like?” they ask. “It’s our gift to you. The only condition is you cannot sell these expensive pots and pans, but just use them yourself. By the way, the boxes are heavy. We can take them to the elevator for you.”

My mom is wary. But it looks like treasure.

And here the con men get ahead of themselves. “It’s all free,” they repeat. Just as a token, as something they can show to their boss to prove they have given the stuff away as promised to someone retired, all they ask for in exchange is any bit of old gold. An earring, a small gold chain.

My mom says she has no gold. (I happen to know this is a lie. She has some gold earrings.)

The con men say how one woman in the neighborhood has just given them some gold teeth from her dead husband. They take out a little medicine bottle and actually show the gold teeth.

“I don’t have any gold,” my mom repeats, “and I don’t need the pots and pans.”

“Everything is ok,” the guys insist. “This is a wonderful present!”

“Why not give it to somebody else?” my mom asks.

“We don’t have time,” the con men say. “We have to get to the airport. If you don’t have any gold, do yo you have any new euro? Just one green one? Just so we can prove to our boss that we’ve given the samples away?”

My mom says she’s not interested. She turns and leaves. One of the Hungarians curses under his breath. And the two drive off.

When I talked to my mom, she was mystified by this encounter. “I don’t understand the logic of this offer,” she said.

I don’t either. I don’t know whether these guys were really looking to trade pots and pans for gold… or if they were just looking to rob people of gold without giving over anything… or if they were using this “wonderful present” as a kind of in to get into people’s houses and to properly rob them, way beyond just an old necklace or some gold teeth.

Clearly, this con is a little ham-fisted, and it didn’t work.

But a lot of the elements of a successful con are there. You can find them with a careful reading of the story above, and if you are enterprising, you can apply them to a successful and legitimate business. In the words of David Maurerer, author of The Big Con, the authoritative record of the golden age of con men:

“If confidence men operate outside the law, it must be remembered that they are not much further outside than many of our pillars of society who go under names less sinister. They only carry to an ultimate and very logical conclusion certain trends which are often inherent in various forms of legitimate business.”

Maybe you find this idea shocking or repulsive.

If so, the best I can tell you is to stop reading now. Because I agree with Mauerer. I think there’s a lot to be learned from con men, without crossing over into the illegal or immoral territory in which they operate. A lot that can be applied, profitably, to various forms of legitimate business.

In fact, that’s one of the core ideas behind my new 10 Commandments book, which deals with the commonalities to be found among con men… pickup artists… door-to-door salesmen… copywriters… hypnotists… stage magicians…. and more.

For 10 logical conclusions extracted from all these disciplines:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Sneaky guru model for getting the most out of a pool of prospects

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If you’re the enterprising sort, here’s a direct-response recipe for getting the maximum value out of a pool of prospects:

1. Run a campaign featuring a guru who is promising an outcome, say, big stock market returns.

2. Make sales of your offer to people who respond to that campaign.

3. Take all the people who didn’t buy (or who bought once, but then canceled a subscription offer) and put in front of them another, entirely different-seeming offer, with a different guru, which actually makes the exact same promise as the offer in step 2.

4. Go back to step 2, and keep going back, with still another guru and another different-seeming offer, repeating until everyone has bought.

I once heard direct marketing expert Dan Kennedy talking about this sneaky multiple-guru model, which is actually very common among high-level direct response operators.

This strategy is obvious enough that in what behemoths like Agora are doing, but it happens in less obvious ways in many other businesses.

Some direct response businesses have low/mid/high variants of the same underlying product, all behind different brands that are impossible for prospects to see through.

Other businesses simply partner with related businesses who make the same promise but with a different feel, tone, or face to their message.

The point being, some people might not like you or your style. But if they’ve raised their hands to say they want the outcome you promise, that’s real value.

Sooner or later, somebody somewhere will sell these folks an offer to help them get that outcome. That somebody might as well be you, and that somewhere might as well be right here, right now, using the recipe above.

And with that, let me remind you one final time of the free training that email marketer Chris Orzechowski is putting on tomorrow, Monday, October 6, at 6pm CET/12 noon EST/9am PST.

Chris is gonna be sharing his “5 Steps To A Million Dollar List.”

I haven’t seen Chris’s training, but I do know his business model and his philosophy.

The fact is, it’s very similar to what I do, to what I preach in these emails, and to what I sell in my offers.

But — maybe you don’t want to hear this from me. Or maybe you have heard it from me, for a long time, and while you like hearing it, maybe it still hasn’t clicked, or hasn’t moved you to action.

In that case, Chris’s free training — and the 8-week coaching program he will be launching on the back of it in the coming weeks — might just be the fix.

If an email-based, flexible, profitable, and even fun business is an outcome you would raise your hand for, then here’s a free offer to help you get there:

https://bejakovic.com/mdl

The hottest restaurant in France is its own best salesman

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Yesterday, my friend Sam and I got into a rental car in Barcelona, drove across the Spanish-French border, and found our way into the small town of Narbonne.

There we met “Rebelpreneur” Gasper Crepinsek (whose ChatGPT Mastery I promoted earlier this year) and Gasper’s quite pregnant girlfriend Marie.

The four of us then got in line to be let into the “hottest restaurant in France,” Les Grands Buffets, which we had made reservations for many months earlier.

Like its name suggests, Les Grands Buffets is an all-you-can-eat circus. It only serves traditional French cuisine, and as much of it as you can stuff into yourself across 3 hours.

There was a “lobster waterfall,” oysters by the shovelful, and all the razor clams a body can handle.

There was suckling pig, beef, and lamb (all of which I had)… pressed-duck (which I didn’t)… and vol au vent, a pastry with veal sweatbreads (aka thymus glands, quite good).

There were $25 bottles of champagne that normally sell for twice the price at the supermarket.

At the end, this being France, there was of course cheese, in fact a selection from among 900 cheeses, which, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, is the world’s largest.

I also finished everything off with two trips to the dessert room, and loaded up on multiple slices of various chocolatey cakes, which I covered with a few macaroons as garnish.

By the end, our little group got kicked out because we stayed to the end and beyond.

At midnight, some 8 hours after the lunch, not having eaten anything else for the rest of the day, I went to bed. I honestly felt a bit queasy.

But it was worth it, and I would do it again. Actually, considering how long it takes to get a place at Les Grands Buffets, maybe I will book today for the next time. I could imagine that many other visitors feel and do the same.

And all that, is in spite of the fact that Les Grands Buffets is found in a third-tier city in an out-of-the-way region of France, in an ugly municipal building built in the 1980s that also houses a bowling alley and a pool, and has a skate park outside… and in spite of the fact that Les Grands Buffets effectively does no marketing.

That’s not to say that location is not important, or that marketing is worthless as a profession or a skill.

But even the best marketers know, in the words of the original A-list copywriter and scheme man, Claude Hopkins, that:

“The product, and the mental atmosphere you create around it, should be its own best salesman.”

And on that note, let me remind you of an unusual offer I made this week regarding my Copy Riddles program:

I’ll sell you the right to sell Copy Riddles yourself and keep all the money.

There are a lot of copywriting products out there in the world, but there aren’t a lot of great products.

Copy Riddles is one of the great products, both because of the results it delivers to customers (see my emails from yesterday and the day before for that), and because of the baked-in sellability of the course (see the sales page for that).

And now, if you like, you have the opportunity to sell Copy Riddles yourself.

If you have your own list, you can sell Copy Riddles to your list and keep all the money from every sale you make, from here till eternity.

If you want to create a little cold traffic funnel, and put some lower-ticket items up front, and then use Copy Riddles (a $1k course) as the “main course” that makes it likely your funnel is breakeven or better on day zero, you can do that — and keep all the money.

If you already have lower-ticket copywriting offers, and you want to put a proven higher-ticket upsell behind them, you can put Copy Riddles into your upsell flow — and keep all the money.

Or of course, if you are an enterprising guy or gal who is not afraid to reach out to others who have lists, cold traffic funnels, or offers that are in some way related to Copy Riddles, you can partner with them so they provide the flow while you provide a valuable new offer — and split the resulting money with them, however the two of you agree on it.

Along with the right to sell Copy Riddles and keep all the money you make, I will also provide you with the marketing that has sold this course for me in the past — emails, copy angles, social proof, and promo ideas that have worked.

If you’re interested, hit reply, and we can talk in more detail.

Not reading my email today is expensive

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Yesterday, I promoted an offer called “Unstuck Sessions,” basically consult calls to help people overcome a challenge and get unstuck.

Like I wrote yesterday, that’s an offer that I first heard about from marketer Travis Sago.

I actually have a bit of swipe copy from Travis from when he promoted his own Unstuck Sessions.

An Unstuck Session by definition is pretty waffly and vague. How do you sell “getting unstuck”?

I looked at Travis’s copy. Here’s what caught my eye, from the second half of Travis’s email:

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What’s it REALLY COSTING YOU to stay where you’re at?

(If you know all these answers, you probably aren’t stuck…LOL)

If you’re making $5k a month…and you want to making $10k…if my math is right…isn’t that a $5k a month problem? a $60k per year whopper of a problem…yeah?

And then…if I may be so bold?

What is the problem costing you in your enjoyment of life?

How much worrying are you doing now?

How much of life are you missing out on? 

I’m not trying to be a sadist.

It’s a courtesy “poke”.

Being stuck is expensive…emotionally, financially AND physically.

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I happen to know Travis is a student of sales trainer Dave Sandler. And in Sandler’s book You Can’t Teach a Kid to Ride a Bike at a Seminar, Sandler writes:

“While you need to discuss the cost of your product or service, it’s more important to discuss the cost to your prospect if they do nothing.”

I read Sandler’s book multiple times.

I wrote down that line as a note to myself, and then transferred it to my “Library of Rare and Precious Ideas.”

And yet, this idea is something I only rarely and casually remember to apply in actual sales contexts, even though, as Sandler says, discussing the cost of doing nothing is more important than discussing the cost of your offer.

But Travis Sago doesn’t forget. And as you can see above, he actually puts this idea to use in his copy.

Lots of people read. Lots of people take notes.

But few put ideas into action.

And fewer still keep tweaking and fiddling with ideas-put-into-action until those ideas actually turn into big results.

Travis is one of those rare few.

That’s the reason why Travis is the #1 person I’ve been following and learning from for the past two years.

Actually I take that back. Travis is pretty much the only person, at least living person, in the space of marketing/copywriting/persuasion/online businesses, that I’ve been listening to and learning from.

This is also the reason why I keep promoting Travis’s Royalty Ronin membership.

As for the cost of Royalty Ronin:

Right now, you can get into Royalty Ronin for free, for 7 days, so you can test it out. After that, Ronin costs $299/month.

I guess I had to cover that. But the following is much more important:

If you are a copywriter who works with clients, then what is it costing you to not spot your client’s “trashcan assets”… or not know how to persuade your client to give you control of such asset… or how to monetize them?

In my experience, it can easily be costing you $10k this very month, and $200k feasibly over the course over the next year or two.

And if you have your own list, what is it costing you to keep “creating” new offers to put in front of your list, instead of “producing” new offers, the way Travis teaches?

Again, in my experience, it can easily be costing you hundreds of hours of unnecessary work in the coming weeks if you are working on creating a new offer.

To rub salt into the wound, it might also cost you $15k-$20k in foregone sales by the time you release that offer, both because you missed out on promoting other “produced” offers in the meantime, and because “created” offers often fail to sell as well as “produced” offers.

In other words, not being inside Royalty Ronin is expensive… in terms of time, stress, and money.

If you’d like to stop that, starting with a free trial:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

The structure of a $995 course that sells itself

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Yesterday was the first day of a new course I’m taking, “Ultraspeaking Fundamentals L1.”

It’s a cohort-based course, delivered live over Zoom, which gets you better with public speaking in 15 sessions over 5 weeks, 3 to a week.

There are two parallel cohorts. I’m in cohort 34A, which has over 50 people inside. I’m guessing the other cohort has similar numbers.

The price tag for this course is $995. If you assume 100 students for the 5 weeks, that’s $100k in revenue, I’m guessing 95% of which is profit.

Sounds like a pretty nice education business. And if you ask me, it all comes down to the unique way it’s organized and run:

1. After a bit of waffling up front by a team of two coaches — really previous students who are probably getting paid something, but not much — the 50+ attendees are broken up into small “pods” of 3 participants each.

2. The pod members self-organize so one of the participants becomes a “pod leader.” The pod leader basically shares on his or her screen the day’s instructions from the Ultraspeaking course area, keeps time, and hits play on a couple of videos that walk through key concepts.

3. The pod members then take turns playing little games that build up core public speaking skills.

For example, yesterday mainly consisted of “rapid fire analogies”:

You get a sequence of randomly generated analogies — “a bicycle is like ice cream because…” — and you have a few seconds to both read out the prompt and to complete the analogy in some way before the new prompt pops up.

The point is not to come up with a clever analogy (“because they make childhood sweet?”) but to develop the core speaking skill of staying in character, and to authoritatively say whatever stupid thing you have to say (“because they both have wheels”) so that it looks like you know what you’re talking about, even if you don’t.

4. The two coaches who waffled at the start roam around the pods and offer occasional “expert” feedback.

5. But really, this entire experience is largely prerecorded, almost entirely student-run, and from what I can tell so far, fantastic.

I’m sharing this with you in case you also sell information, or rather, transformation.

The fact is, regardless of how good the information you sell is, it’s 100% useless unless your students put it into practice in some form.

If on the other hand you’re looking to sell transformation, it makes sense to think about how to bake that into your product. As Ultraspeaking shows, this doesn’t have to spend a ton of your money or time to make this happen. But it’s not just about making the course more transformative.

In my case, after I heard how Ultraspeaking was organized, it was a very easy sell, even at that $995 price tag. Also, I imagine most of the 100+ people who are going through it with me right now will be very happy with the investment, and will go on to proselytize for the company.

Compare that with a $995 pure information course, which typically takes a lot of selling, both before and after, and which even so the majority of buyers will not complete or do anything with, and will only think back on with a mixture of guilt and regret, regardless of how good the info inside is.

That’s something to think about, again, if you sell information or transformation.

In entirely related news:

My offer for you today is Most Valuable Email, about an email copywriting trick that is not stories… not personal reveals… not controversy… not conflict… not contrarian points of view.

Instead, the Most Valuable Email trick is something entirely different, something that I would do from here til doomsday, every day, if the email marketing gods forced me to use just one kind of email without ever changing.

Part of Most Valuable Email is a set of Most Valuable Email Riddles in the end of the course, in which I give you a prompt, invite you to apply the Most Valuable Email trick, and then compare your answer to an answer I provide.

That set of riddles is a bit of experience and transformation that I baked into the course. But really, the whole point with Most Valuable Email is that the value of it is when you take the MVE trick and apply it to your own emails, every day, or every week, or however often you want to charm your audience and make yourself into a more valuable marketer.

As course creator and email marketer Rafa Casas wrote after going through Most Valuable Email the first time:

“Thanks for the course. It’s true that it can be read in an hour, but it needs more resting time and practice to get the full potential out of it. Which is a lot.”

If you’d like the full info on Most Valuable Email:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Why I write such soft CTAs

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On last Thursday’s Copy Riddles Q&A call, Matt Cascarino, Chief Creative Office at marketing agency FARM, asked about the unusual calls-to-action in my emails.

“You don’t just not close hard,” Matt said. “You go the exact opposite way.”

It’s true. Most of the calls-to-action in my emails are “soft,” as in not dramatic, not black and white, without any of the “You are either in NOW or you will be left behind!” that is common in direct response circles.

That’s something I do consciously. I suppose it emerged because I’ve historically sold a lot of evergreen offers.

When there’s no baked-in urgency — and even when there is — I figured I’d treat my readers’ intelligence with due respect. That’s why I don’t make up stuff or use overly dramatic wording that simply cannot be backed up with anything resembling reality.

That said, I’m not above “manipulating” readers into acting now.

But rather than yelling at my readers or threatening them or lying, I’ve learned to use what I know about human psychology. A few words of inspiration can work. So can an appeal to our universal need for sovereignty and control.

Sometimes, such a “soft” CTA has driven in sales that wouldn’t have happened otherwise (I know because people have written in to tell me so).

Other times, the effect was cumulative — a few such emails built up and people ended up buying.

And in all cases, or at least I hope so, it kept my readers reading, without feeling that I lied to them, or pressured them, or treated them as if they were idiots.

Also on Thursday’s Copy Riddles Q&A call was Shawn Cartwright, who runs the online martial arts school TCCII.

Shawn asked if I have or ever will create some kind of product about such soft and psychological CTAs.

The idea sounds cool, but the fact is, even the most subtle and effective CTA matters less than a good headline, and the best headline matters less than a real deadline.

That’s part of the reason why I have been moving away from clever copywriting to sell my existing evergreen products… and why I have instead been promoting lots of new and solid offers, often not my own, which have legit inbuilt timed deadlines.

And on that note, let me remind you of a legit deadline. It’s for the the free live training, which is happening tomorrow, Monday, September 22, 2025, at 9pm CET/3pm EST/12 noon PST.

Mentalist-turned-marketer Kennedy will share email copywriting and marketing secrets that took him from selling $27k of his flagship info product… to selling $544k of the same, to the same audience.

If this interests you, it might make sense to sign up now. You know how Mondays are.

If you don’t sign up now, there’s a good chance this training will slip your mind in the crush of things tomorrow, and the next thing you know… you’ve missed the opportunity.

On the other hand, if you sign up now, you still have time tomorrow to decide whether you really want to attend.

If you find that persuasive, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/kennedy

Why my landing page says very little about me

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A new reader, who signed up to my list yesterday, asks why he should listen to me:

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Hey John, why does your landing page say very little about yourself. What makes you different from other copywriters atleast tell me how much money you have generated for your clients.

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Fair question. Here’s a fair answer:

First off, if I ever identified as a copywriter, I don’t any more. it’s been three years since I last had a client hire me to write for them. I don’t expect that to change soon.

As for money, I made some for clients back when I had them. Not enough money to buy Greenland… just enough to brag a bit.

But that was long enough ago that putting it front and center on my site would make me feel a little like Al Bundy, reminiscing about his glory days as a high school quarterback.

In short, I don’t list past client results on my optin page — or the endorsements I’ve gotten for this newsletter, or the money I personaly make via these emails, or my religious or sexual affiliation — because I don’t wanna, and also because it would be misleading.

None of those things is really what this newsletter is about.

The only consistency in this newsletter, the only thing you can expect, is ideas I discover and find interesting, which I then curate and polish to make sure they are relevant and interesting to you as well.

Well, there is one added step I take sometimes, beyond just writing about interesting and relevant ideas.

I call this extra step the Most Valuable Email trick.

The Most Valuable Email trick does set me apart from most other people who write daily emails, including in the copywriting and marketing worlds.

I have some authority and standing now in that space. But the Most Valuable Email trick worked for me even when I was brand new, and nobody knew me, and I had even less to brag about than I have now.

If you wanna find out more about the Most Valuable Email trick, or even have me pull back the curtain and teach you how I do it, you can do so at the sales page below.

I wrote this sales page back in 2022.

It features as much authority flexing as you’re likely to find anywhere on my site.

If you wanna get a few external reasons why you might want to read my emails, you can find them there.

Or if you want to understand the internal reason that makes many of my emails more interesting than what you might read elsewhere, and how you can do the same, in less than an hour from now, then:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

Double-checking the windows of sales escape

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A true story, I mean, analogy:

A couple weeks ago, I was walking around town when a freak thunderstorm set in. I was only about a couple hundred yards from my apartment, but there was no braving this.

First, hurricane winds picked up, then a torrential downpour, finally large hailstones started beating down.

Along with a few dozen other people, I huddled in the metro station tunnel while the gods wore out their fury.

“Good thing I closed all the windows at home,” I chuckled to myself, as ominous music swelled in the background.

I got home and sure enough—

In the middle of the living room, a ficus ginseng plant, which banker and email-writing career coach Tom Grundy had sent me last year, was lying toppled over on the floor. Soil from the plant was all over the room.

“How did this happen?” I asked, possibly out loud. I walked around the apartment and came across a large puddle. One of the bedrooms was entirely flooded, including the mattress, which had soaked through.

It turns out that the window in that room was shut, but it wasn’t shut tightly enough. The furious wind blew it open, and then the rain and hail flew in, flooding the room, soaking through the mattress, and knocking over the plant in the living room and tossing the soil everywhere.

(The plant survived, by the way. It’s looking at me right now.)

I’m about to try to spin this story of emergency and disaster into a copywriting lesson, if you can handle one of those.

Last night, I hosted one of the Q&A calls for Copy Riddles, as part of the last-ever live cohort I will run of that program.

Several skilled copywriters and marketers submitted their bullets for the weekly CR bullet contest, including the following:

“How you could double your child’s IQ with this doctor-recommended breakfast switch. Page 17”

It’s a great bullet. It’s got a big promise I imagine most parents would respond to… a simple and intriguing mechanism… and proof in that phrase “doctor-recommended.”

There’s only one niggling thing, and it’s that, to my mind at least, the reader could read this and say, “Oh, great to know such a doctor-recommended breakfast switch exists! I’ll ask my pediatrician about it the next time I take the little monster in to see him.”

In other words, there’s a small, minor, minuscule chance, however unlikely, that the reader can be sold entirely on the promise of this bullet… and still won’t buy.

And that’s my analogy for you.

“You gotta close off all the windows and doors of escape for your sale” — maybe you’ve heard that advice before.

I know I did, but it didn’t really sink in for a long time.

In any case, knowing it is not enough, because really you have to know your audience as well, and keep learning about them, and keep shutting off all their paths to escape, including new ones that pop up.

Otherwise, even a seemingly shut window (bear with me here) can blow open unexpectedly, and then you have the sales equivalent of a mess in the living room and water all over the place and a mattress that’s been soaked through.

In other words, you have a lost sale, with good work put in and nothing to show for it. So it makes sense to double-check and triple-check the windows and doors of sales escape, using everything you know already and are learning about your skeptical, guarded, and inert prospects.

All right, analogy over. As for my offer:

While this is the last-ever live cohort for Copy Riddles, this program remains alive as an evergreen training.

Several of the people currently going through it have been through it three or more times already, on their own.

I also have it from a reputable source that Copy Riddles, even without the Q&A calls, is the best way to gain the money-making skill of writing sales bullets, short of being one of Parris Lampropoulos’s copy cubs. (I heard this from Vasilis Apostolou, formerly a copywriter at Agora, and now one of Parris’s copy cubs.)

If you’d like to find out more about Copy Riddles:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/