Persuasion

The moat of asking for help

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A few months ago got an email from copywriter Suraj Punjabi. I know Suraj from the PCM community I worked in as a coach last year.

Suraj and I exchanged a couple emails, in one of which Suraj opened up and shared some pretty personal stuff. I’m reprinting it below, with Suraj’s permission. It’s a long message but worth reading in detail if you are looking for clients, copywriting or otherwise. Says Suraj:

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I’ve been on a dry spell since April, but I finally landed a gig thankfully.

It turns out I was busy doing cold outreach that didn’t bother looking at my own data.

So in January, I did just that. Gave cold outreach a break and looked at my own data hard.

And I noticed that literally 100% of my clients for the past 5 years came from referrals through connections I made from Facebook.

I felt pretty dumb for abandoning such a proven strategy in favor of cold emailing.

So, when I went back to leveraging this strategy, I immediately started getting inbound leads.

One of them, a 9-figure powerhouse in the keto space, just became a client.

In fact, I’m starting with them TODAY.

Oh and another gig I got was working under a senior copywriter who currently has his plate full and needed help with emails.

I’ll never forget the lesson life just taught me.

Some coaches swear by cold outreach, others by Upwork, LinkedIn, or X.

They might be right in their own way.

But nothing beats looking at your own past data to see where most of your clients have come from and doubling down on that.

Of course, this is not exactly newbie stuff. You need to have solid data. And I have 5 years worth.

Since PCM until today, I have sent at least 5000 cold outreaches using different strategies.

I have done PCM, I have tried sending conversation starters…

I have tried sending personalized Looms to show them how they can get more subscribers to their list…

I have pitched low risk offers like helping them write a blog just to get my foot in the door.

I made a LinkedIn profile and paid monthly for the premium subscription.

I even went back to Upwork to compete against $10/email copywriters! 🤢🤢🤢🤢

And none of those strategies held a candle to simply reaching out to my Facebook network and asking for help.

Not saying those other strategies don’t work. Perhaps they do work for some people (I know PCM works for A LOT of people), but it didn’t work for me.

Felt like a fish being told to fly. haha.

I felt so stupid when I realized it.

But oh well.

Lesson learned.

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Two things to point out:

The first is the obvious — expert opinion doesn’t mean much compared to your own direct experience.

The second is less obvious, and it’s where Suraj says, “And none of those strategies held a candle to simply reaching out to my Facebook network and asking for help.”

Asking for help.

Most people don’t have a problem asking for the time, or for directions, or for a book to borrow.

But asking for help finding work — something that suggest genuine unokayness on your part — is something that few people are willing to do.

I never really did it when I was a freelance copywriter, and in need of work, except tentatively, with a few previous clients. (Even that rare and hesitant asking for help got me new leads.)

All that’s to say:

Asking for help works. People like feeling helpful, useful, and important.

At the same time, most people won’t ever ask for help, not in things like getting work, because it’s too threatening to the ego.

That just means that, if you can get over your own hesitations about asking for help, then you’ve just created a kind of moat around yourself and your success, which the hordes of others in your industry are not able to swim, jump, or walk across.

That’s my message for you today.

My offer to you today is my new 10 Commandments book, because this asking for help is actually Commandment I in the book.

It’s easy to read this book and think, “Oh these are interesting ideas, maybe I could use one of them in an email or a headline.”

But the fact is, each of the commandments in this book deals with the fundamentals of effective communication, and each is applicable to pretty much any problem you might be facing, whether personal or business. If you haven’t yet gotten your copy:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

“Don’t tell me what to think!”

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I got on a plane a couple days ago. As we were waiting on the tarmac following boarding, a typically incomprehensible announcemnt came on over the PA:

“Good afternooon ladies and gentleWAGGG this is your caBTANG Daniel GWOCKXHYHY BHGGeaking. Due to a HSINGLT BNT XXXOXFFWGDDDEDDELOXHGGGHRE, BBBNJDIO YDIOW NCHUNFI SX KNNI 30 minutes. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

The woman sitting in front of me flagged down a stewardess. “What did the captain say? That we will be late?”

The stewardess nodded. “We will be 30 minutes late taking off because we lost the slot. We have the next slot in 30 minutes. But it’s ok, it’s not a big deal.”

“Not for you!” said the woman in front.

The stewardess tightened her lips. “It is for ME,” she said. “But it isn’t for YOU.” And she marched off.

I wrote this down because it made me chuckle. Such a commonplace interaction. One person says something designed to offer consolation or advice… the other person bristles at this… the first person bristles at the bristling.

As you might already know, you can’t tell anyone anything.

Even helpful or benevolent statements can and will be twisted into their opposites. It’s a reflex that’s as reliable as a kick when you tap on somebody on the knee. And if you don’t agree with me, that just proves my point.

All of this raises the question, how can you possibly communicate with others, when you can’t tell them anything?

I have much to say about that, but I can’t tell you about it — at least not here. Like I said, that wouldn’t work.

Instead, what I’ve done is I’ve written it up in a colorful book, my new 10 Commandments book.

The topic of reactance — of people bristling whenever they feel somebody is telling them something, or trying to influence them or steer them — is one of the main currents that runs through this book. Eventually, it bubbles up to the surface in Commandment VIII, “Thou shalt tell nothing.”

If you’d like to find out what thou canst do, since telling is off the table:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

A mystery on today’s date

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At 10am on July 2, 1937, precisely 88 years ago, the following happened:

An overloaded plane, 5,000lbs over its normal weight, rumbled down a grass runway.

Observers at the airport thought the plane had actually fallen down the cliff at the end of the runway, but a few moments later, the plane reappeared, apparently airborne, and gradually rose up into the clouds.

Aboard, there were only two passengers: a navigator, named Fred Noonan, and the most famous female aviatress of all time, Amelia Earheart.

Earheart and Noonan were completing the final leg of their round-the-world flight, crossing the Pacific from Melanesia back to the U.S.. If successful, Earheart would become the first woman to fly all the way around the world.

But Earheart and Noonan never made it to the next stop. Some 20 hours later, also on July 2 (thanks to crossing the international date line), they disappeared somewhere over the Pacific, never to be heard from or seen again.

Except… maybe they were heard from or seen again?

A woman in Texas picked up an SOS radio transmission the next day, in which she heard a woman who claimed to be Earheart, and a man groaning in background. The two were supposedly stranded on an uninhabited island in the Pacific.

Then again, a Japanese woman on the island of Saipan claimed she had personally witnessed Earheart and Noonan, following their crash on the island, being executed by the Imperial Japanese Army.

There were also claims that Earheart was captured but not executed by the Japanese. In this scenario, she was forced to work as Tokyo Rose, an English-speaking radio broadcaster used to spread Japanese propaganda during WWII.

And finally, there was the theory that Earheart completed her flight as planned but immediately chose to go into obscurity, only to reappear years later as a New Jersey banker.

All in all, around 100 books have been written about Earheart and what really happened to her.

Organizations and well-funded expeditions have been established to really get to the bottom of it.

Numerous TV shows and documentaries have tried to shine light on the mystery. I’m surprised Angelina Jolie never made a movie about Earheart.

Now I think you will agree with me, because I happen to be right about the matter, that none of this would have happened had Earheart simply crashed and burned in a certain death, or had she even managed to complete her round the world tour as expected.

There’s something about the mystery of not knowing what really happened, a lack of closure, which drives intense attention or even obsession, which cannot be created in any other way.

If you have basic knowledge of copywriting, you are familiar with this human quirk, and you probably even exploit it via “open loops” in your copy.

What you might not be familiar with is the underlying neurology of why we feel the need for closure so strongly, or how the same neurology can be exploited by magicians (if you ever hear a magician tell a corny joke, that’s why), by negotiators (Jim Camp’s advice to “negotiate in the bathroom”) or by hypnotists (to perform a rapid induction that gets 5 weeks’ worth of hypnosis down into 3 minutes).

If any of that sounds intriguing to you, take a look at Commandment X of my new 10 Commandments book, waiting patiently for you here:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Abe Lincoln’s historic mistake at Gettysburg

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Today is the last day to get Shaina Keren’s course Get A Raise, at a special Bejako-only $50 discount.

If you work at a 9-5, I believe this course has the clearest and surest ROI of any course I have sold, bought, or even seen.

If you’re interested in taking advantage of this opportunity before it disappears, the full details on how to claim it are at the bottom of this email.

And now, with that important announcement out of the way, let me tell you that I have recently taken to memorizing stuff by heart.

First came a few famous poems by Williams Blake and Shakespeare.

After that, I memorized Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which I’d never even read before, even though it’s one of the most famous speeches of all time, and certainly the most famous by an American president.

Thing is, I found something frankly wrong inside the Gettysburg Address, which I wanted to share with you. After the famous “Four score and seven years ago” opening, Lincoln says the following:

“The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they [the soldiers who fought and died at Gettysburg] did here.”

I don’t know whether this is just humility or a lack of historical perspective.

But the fact is that the world greatly noted and has long remembered what Lincoln said at Gettysburg.

On the other hand, the world has largely forgotten what the soldiers did at Gettysburg. Was it a big battle? A small battle? Who won? Was it pivotal in the war or just a waste of human life?

And if you don’t agree with me, then think of the dozens of other major Civil War battles that didn’t have their own address by Lincoln. Unless you’re a Civil War buff, odds are you cannot name any of them.

Same goes for the thousands of major battles that have raged throughout history — completely nameless and forgotten, if they didn’t have a Lincoln or a Caesar or a Thucydides to write or speak about them.

My point is that Lincoln, in that statement that “the world can never forget what they did here,” fell into the usual trap of thinking that the act is ultimately what matters, rather than the presentation, the transferable image, the meme of the thing.

What I’m telling you is, if you build it, they will NOT come — not unless you do a good job telling the story of it. That’s true in history. It’s true in business. And it’s true equally in your own personal career.

Which brings me back to Shaina’s course. Because maybe you’re working at your job and you’re thinking, “I shouldn’t have to ask for a raise. They should just give me one based on how hard I work and the value I bring here. And certainly they will figure it out, in time. My boss will little note nor much appreciate my asking directly for more money, but he can never forget what I do at this company.”

If that’s what you’re secretly thinking, I’d like to tell you that history is not on your side. And if you want to take fate into your own hands, and make sure your boss notes and remembers what you do, and pays you accordingly, then here’s my suggestion:

1. Head on over to ​https://bejakovic.com/raise​ and get Shaina’s course. There’s no sales page for this baby, just an order form with a few testimonials (eg, “I still can’t believe I get to keep the job I love and feel well compensated.”)

2. Put in the code BEJAKOVIC50 at checkout. Make sure the price drops from $197 to $147 before you buy.

3. Go through the 1 hour or so of training, then apply it in the next few days or weeks, and profit, hopefully to the tune of tens of thousands of new dollars in salary.

The deadline for this offer is today, Thursday, June 26, at 12 midnight PST. After that, this special discount, of the people, by the people, for the people, shall perish from the earth.

This kind of email drives more sales than the average

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Here’s a free marketing tip for you:

If people are buying, it makes sense to advertise the fact.

In the many promos I’ve run within this email newsletter, I’ve always found that when I write an email in which I share a message from someone who’s just taken me up on the promo offer, it drives more sales than your average sales email.

As an example:

Since Monday, I have been running a little promo, the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle, for my original 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

That promo is ending today at 12 midnight PST.

The whole idea behind the promo has been to pile on the bonuses. The little time I’ve had to write emails has been eaten up by spelling out what exactly people get inside the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle.

And so, though people have been buying, I haven’t had time to advertise that fact. Lemme fix that now. Here are a few messages I got from readers who took me up on this offer over the past 24 hours.

First, from email marketer Logan Hobson, who lives in Japan:

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Alright John,

I got 5 copies of “Book” coming to Japan.

Yes, even though I could have ordered them from Japanese Amazon and gotten free shipping with Prime (which is cheaper here than in the US), rankings and sales on the US Amazon have more impact for you so I ordered them from my US Amazon account.

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Second, from copywriter and marketing consultant Chuck Gibson:

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John,

Receipt attached.

I, of course, already have the book, but not printed copies. But it’s the bonus intrigue that hooked me. Very interesting offer.

And a cool way to get your Amazon sales up. Now I have copies to give to certain protégés.

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And third, from a reader who I’m guessing doesn’t want me to share his name:

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Alright, you got me. This is the worst possible time for me to spend any more money since I have to go on a multi-country trip in 45 days and gotta save as much as possible.

Frankly I don’t even KNOW what I’ll do with every book, Maybe leave one in every Airbnb I stay at as a parting gift? That would be funny but anyway, your bonuses are always amazing and they will be great companions for all the travels.

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As a result of the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle and of dedicated readers and customers like the above, the paperback copy of my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters has jumped from an Amazon book ranking of 1,016,096 at the start of the promo to a current ranking of 75,795.

In the process, it’s leapfrogged such industry standards as Mark Ford and John Forde’s Great Leads, Brian Kurtz’s Overdeliver, and Dan Kennedy’s No B.S. Direct Marketing.

So much for the education/demonstration part of this email. Now for the sales.

Like I said, the chance to get the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle ends tonight. If you have taken me up on this offer, check the bonus area I gave you access to, and you will find the following:

#1. Copywriting Portfolio Secrets (Price last sold at: $97)

In this training, I show you how to build up your copywriting portfolio in the fastest and most efficient way, so you can start to win copywriting jobs even today. I show you the best way I’ve found to win 4- and 5-figure jobs I REALLY wanted, even when I wasn’t qualified for them, and how you can do it too.

I previously sold this training for $97. But it’s yours free inside the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle, which also includes my…

#2. No-Stress Negotiation For Well-Paid Copywriters (Price last sold at: $100)

This guide outlines my 7-part negotiating system, which I adapted from negotiation coach Jim Camp. This system kept me sane while I still regularly interviewed and worked with copywriting clients. Follow these seven principles, and you will end up making more money, working with better clients, and being able to stick to it for the long term.

I only offered this information before as part of the $100 Copy Zone guide, which also featured….

#3. How To Get Set Up On Upwork

This free bonus is an excerpt from a short self-published book I wrote once, How to Become a $150/Hr Sales Copywriter on Upwork: A Personal Success Story that Almost Anyone Can Replicate. It tells you how to actually get set up on Upwork — the details of your profile page, your description, your title.

If you combine this bonus with the two bonuses above — Copywriting Portfolio Secrets and No-Stress Negotiation — you have a great shot of winning a job on Upwork by the end of this week, or even today.

#4. Dan’s Timeless Wisdom (priceless, or $25k+)

Between August of 2019 and March 2020, I was in Dan Ferrari’s coaching group. As you might know, Dan started out as a star copywriter at The Motley Fool, and went on to become one of the most successful, most winning, big-money direct response copywriters working today.

Inside his coaching group, Dan dispensed copy critiques, marketing advice, and mystical koans to help his coaching students get to the next level.

At some point, I had the bright idea to start archiving the best and most valuable things that Dan was saying. I got 25 of them down, and they are all included in this document.

(By the way, I never tallied up the exact and rather painful amount of money I paid Dan for the coaching. It was north of $25k. I do know I made it all back, and then some, in just the first two months after I stopped with the coaching, thanks to just one tip I got from Dan.)

#5. Copy Riddles Lite (Price last sold at: $97)

Copy Riddles Lite includes one of the 20 rounds included in my full Copy Riddles program. The round is composed of two parts, in which you practice writing sales bullets, and compare what you wrote to what Mel Martin (as well as several other A-list copywriters) wrote starting with the same prompt.

Do this, and you very quickly realize how much skill went into Mel Martin’s bullets. Fortunately, you also very quickly manage to leech some of that skill from Mel Martin, without spending the months and years of agony it took him.

And once you get a taste for Martin’s skill, then the next step is natural:

#6. “How to Turn Fascinations into Fortunes: Copywriting Secrets To Fascinate, Captivate, And Dominate” (Price last sold at: $97)

Lawrence Bernstein, “the world’s most obsessed ad archivist,” once hunted down a collection of all of Mel Martin’s million-dollar ads for Boardroom, along with other control-beating ads Martin had written for the New York Times book division.

Lawrence then printed out the ads, stuffed them in an envelope, and mailed the collection to Marty Edelston, the founder and CEO of Boardroom.

Did Edelston get a kick out of seeing those old ads that helped build up Boardroom? He sure did.

Marty Edelston was so grateful for these ads that he sent Lawrence a thank-you note, along with a check for $2,000.

If you’d like to see these ads yourself, and study them, and model them for selling your own products, then Lawrence put them together into a collection he called “Turn Fascinations Into Fortunes.”

Lawrence got $2,000 as a thank you for putting together this collection of ads. He then sold this collection for $97.

But you don’t have to pay $2,000, or even $97 for “Fascinations Into Fortunes.”

I’ve made a special deal with Lawrence so you can get “Fascinations Into Fortunes” free, along with Copy Riddles Lite, as part of the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle.

#7. “How I made an extra $1404.53/month in Amazon royalties at the push of a button”

This report outlines a hack, which involves the push of a button — literally, that’s all there is to it — and which made me an extra ~$1.5k per month in Amazon royalties. I used this hack once, over the span of a few months, or rather a few weeks. I made money with it. And I never used it again.

I’m not saying anybody else should use this hack. I’m not saying anybody else should NOT use it either.

All I’m willing to do is to tell you what this hack is, why I’m no longer using it myself, and how you can try it out yourself, if you so choose, to make easy money off Amazon.

And that’s it.

Those seven bonuses, with a real-world value of $386, counting just what they sold for previously, are what you get if you’ve already taken me up on the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle.

And if you haven’t yet taken me up on it, here’s how you can:

1. Get five (5) paperback copies of my original 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

2. Forward me your Amazon receipt.

I will then set you up with the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle.

The deadline is tonight at 12 midnight PST. After that, no more bonuses — I am merciless about this. To get in while the doors are still open:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

How to get my highly coveted Infostack bonuses

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Last month, right after I announced the publication of my new 10 Commandments book, I got a message from a reader named Richard:

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Your book is a masterpiece and a gem on its own, no doubt about it.

But if you ever want to throw in a lil somethin’ extra … the 4 bonuses you gave away in 2023 for the InfoStack affiliate promo would perfect, IMO.

(Specially, since I missed them, and have beaten myself up ever since. Ha.)

Big congrats, John — you slammed it outta the park once more!

Best,

Richard

P.S. Just bought my copy today, can’t wait to dive in.

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My ego, which had been quickly inflating upon reading that my book was a “masterpiece” and a “gem,” deflated when I got to the PS, and realized that Richard apparently hadn’t even read the book he was giving me such over-the-top praise for.

That made me immediately resistant to his proposal. Maybe there’s a lesson there.

But about that proposal:

Back in 2023, I participated in something called the “Infostack Copywriting Bundle.” For $50, you could get a copy of my original 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters, plus 13 other ebooks and courses by various other copywriters.

Frankly, I couldn’t vouch for all those other books and courses, and if they are worth $50 in aggregate.

And so, to make sure that anybody who took me up on this bundle got their money’s worth, I also offered four free bonuses. Those bonuses had a total real-world value of either $197 or ∞, depending on how you add it up.

The bonuses were apparently highly desirable. Not only did I end up selling a healthy number of copies of the “Infostack bundle” to satisfied buyers, based mainly on the strength of the bonuses, but I had people like Richard writing me about the bonuses even a couple years later.

Anyways, I replied to Richard to say that it makes little sense to me to give away the Infostack bonus bundle with the new 10 Commandments book.

Like I wrote above, I was turned off by the fact he was buttering me up without even reading my new book.

More importantly, my new 10 Commandments book is not primarily about copywriting or primarily intended for copywriters. Plus the new book is only $5 in ebook format and $10 in paperback, so the on $197/∞ in bonuses is a bit of an overkill.

But — I have learned not to shrug off suggestions from readers, even if I don’t follow those suggestions as given.

So I asked myself, why don’t I do something with that Infostack bonus bundle?

I paced up and down my laboratory, asking myself what I could do.

Finally, inspiration struck.

And so, starting tomorrow and ending on Thursday, I will have a $50 offer, along with which I’ll be giving away the Infostack bonuses. I’ll also included several other real-world bonuses, for a total bonus bundle that adds up to $386 or ∞ in real-world value, depending on how you add it up.

In Richard’s honor, I will call this the “Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle.”

As for what the core offer will be, and what exactly is inside the Infostack bonuses I will be including inside my “Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle” — full details on that tomorrow.

“Amputees needed”

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“Amputees needed” was the newspaper ad that neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran ran to recruit subjects for his phantom limb research back in the 1990s.

I’ve written about Ramachandran lots in these emails before. I read about him again last night, in a book about neuroplasticity. The story clicked with something I’ve been thinking about a lot, which seems very important to me, and which I wanted to share with you. In case you’re with me:

As you might know, “phantom limb” is a strange condition where people who have had a limb amputated, say, an arm, keep feeling that arm as being there. They can even feel the arm doing stuff like reaching out to pick up the phone.

Kind of weird already, but where it gets uncomfortable is that, for many amputees, these phantom limbs don’t move. Instead, the phantom limbs feel like they are paralyzed, frozen.

What’s worse, phantom limbs often cause agonizing pain, out in space, where there’s nothing, and where nothing can be done. Patients often contemplate suicide because it’s such an painful and maddening condition.

Phantom limb has been known as a phenomenon since the American Civil War, but it probably goes back to the beginnings of time, as long as humans, and their animal ancestors, were losing limbs.

Phantom limbs, weird and uncomfortable as they are, get at the core of being a living, thinking being. They make it very clear that we have no direct experience of what’s happening in our body or in the world outside us, but only mental representations of such.

But back to Ramachandran. Back in the 1990s, he managed to cure — eliminate — the phantom limb in a large number of amputees, and he done it in a curious, extremely low-tech way.

Basically, Ramachandran had the amputees view an image of their (still attached) arm, reflected in a mirror, doing stuff.

The crazy thing is, this was good enough to convince the amputees’ brains their amputated arm was somehow back.

The neurology isn’t 100% clear to me, but I guess the feedback these patients were getting, visually via the mirror and neurally from their (real, non-mirrored) arm, was somehow enough to rewire the maps in their brain that represent body image.

In other words, the phantom limb first stopped being paralyzed and in pain. The paralysis and pain gone, the phantom limb was finally free to wave goodbye and move on to Valhalla.

Once again, phantom limb is a condition that’s been around for as long as humans have been around, and probably longer. It’s been ruining the lives of those afflicted by it for thousands of years. The fix was so simple, and yet nobody thought of it until a few decades ago.

But there’s still a deeper point, and one I find myself thinking about a lot lately.

A hundred years ago, a psychologist named Jean Piaget found that children’s thinking is black and white, magical, absolute.

To children, ideas are the same as things, with the same concreteness and reality. An idea, if it pops up in a kid’s head, must be true, has always been true, will always be true, isn’t made false by evidence or by previous ideas that contradict it.

In time, we grow up, and we learn that an idea can be false, or a little bit true, or that there’s nuances and gradations, that we should look for support and proof.

But I’d like to claim, the kind of black-and-white, imagined-is-real thinking of children stays inside us forever. We learn to work with it and cover it up to ourselves, but it remains the baseline of how our brains work, how we perceive the world and ourselves.

If you doubt me, think of Ramachandran’s amputee patients. They weren’t idiots.

The “adult” part of them knew, while watching a mirror reflection of their real arm, that they hadn’t regrown their amputated arm. But it didn’t matter. The “child” part of the brain saw the phantom arm reappear, and could work with it, and stop it from being paralyzed and in pain.

As I write in my new 10 Commandments book, the human brain and the reality it creates for us are far stranger than we admit to ourselves on a daily basis. If you want to read some more ways about how to work with the “child” part of your prospect’s minds, and maybe even your own, for good and for profit, then you might like:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

How to push-pull prospects on your list

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A few days ago, long-time reader and personal development coach Miro Skender sent me a message with a highlighted passage from my new 10 Commandments book which says:

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Expose human beings to anything constant — even incontestably good things like compliments, security, or money — and people soon stop responding. Like Macknick and Martinez-Conde say, we need contrast to see, hear, feel, think, and pay attention. Otherwise the world becomes literally invisible.

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Miro then said how he knows this fact of human psychology well. He knows how to apply it in his work with coaching clients. But he doesn’t know how to put it to use with prospects on his list. Do I have any ideas?

It’s a good question.

Prospects get bored and leave if you expose them to a constant stream of the same — even if it’s good, valuable, well-written same. But not only that. You make fewer sales with the prospects who stay, because your emails are simply less persuasive than they could be.

I thought of how best to answer Miro’s question in an email. Should I give an example from my own previous emails? Or from a sales letter written by an A-list copywriter? Or would a metaphor be needed to really get the point across?

There are benefits to doing each, I thought. So why choose among them and risk doing a sub-optimal job?

I soon realized that answering Miro’s question properly would involve a ton of work, way too much for a daily email.

Fortunately, I remembered I had done it all already, and more, inside my now-retired Most Valuable Postcard #2, code name “Ferrari Monster.”

The background on the Most Valuable Postcard is that it was a short-lived, paid, monthly newsletter I ran back in the summer of 2022.

It was short-lived because I found it was way too much work and stress to write up something as in-depth and researched as I wanted to make each of these monthly guides to be.

I pulled the plug on Most Valuable Postcard after the second issue, but not before I got glowing reviews from a group of initial subscribers that I let in.

For example, email marketer Daniel Throssell, who was one of those early subscribers, wrote me to say after the first issue:

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Seriously though, dude, I know it’s issue #1 but this program you’ve created is amazing. You’ve honestly made me pause and reconsider some ideas about how I want to do my own newsletter because this is just so excellently executed. I love pretty much everything about how you’ve done this, from the format to the content to the value you deliver in your insights. Really impressed.

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I don’t make back issues of Most Valuable Postcard available regularly. Most Valuable Postcard #2 wasn’t available yesterday. It won’t be available tomorrow. But it is available today.

If you’d like to find out more about what’s inside, and how you can use it to push-pull the prospects on your list:

https://bejakovic.com/mvp2/

A tabloidy factoid about Dan Ferrari and Ning Li

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A few weeks ago, copywriter Tom Baines wrote me to say:

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Anyway, I’m excited for your new book, and here’s an interesting tabloidy factoid you may already be aware of: Dan Ferarri and Ning Li have both talked openly about how they first connected in a pickup artist subreddit, where Dan initially mentored Ning as a pick-up artist before eventually bringing him over into copywriting and helping him build his career here… I think it’s a fun little overlap.

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I’m sharing this as a bit of gossip in case you have connections to the copywriting industry. Ning and Dan are both well-known figures there. I never knew the background of how they met, even though I was in Dan’s small and intimate coaching program 5+ years ago.

Beyond gossip, anything worthwhile here?

I heard direct marketing legend Dan Kennedy say on multiple occasions how the top copywriters he knows all have years of “nose to nose, toes to toes” sales experience. And if you look at the famousest copywriters, from Claude Hopkins to Gary Halbert on down to Dan Kennedy himself, all started out in direct or door-to-door sales.

But I think today the “nose to nose, toes to toes” connection has weakened, in large part because door-to-door sales has become a much rarer endeavor.

On the other hand, I know more successful copywriters who have experience with pickup than I can count on my two hands and 10 sticky fingers.

In part, that’s because equivalent social shifts — things like the Internet — which caused d2d selling to drop have also made info about pickup and seduction available to a large pool of eager men.

But it’s more than that.

There are ideas, skills, and attitudes that translate from pickup to copywriting, and vice versa, same as from copy to d2d sales, and vice versa.

All to say:

1. You might have valuable skills and experiences you are not aware of right now.

2. If you want to find out some of the connections between copywriting and d2d sales and pickup, and also seemingly unrelated but deeply connected fields like hypnosis and stage magic and standup comedy, then you might like:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Reader tells me to give up on the 10 Commandments

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A couple weeks ago, after I wrote an email in which I announced the imminent release of my new 10 Commandments book, a reader decided to reply with:

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Some advice… give up on the Book of 10 and take hold on the Promise of 1 – just as you so neatly summarised in this email. 1 is so much better than 10 in that, that single promise fulfils all the old hat laws you could ever throw at it.

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I never bothered to reply to this, and the reader has since unsubscribed from my list.

That’s just as well. What follows wouldn’t be useful to him, but maybe you can benefit from the advice I was silently thinking of for this reader, which I couldn’t share for reasons that will be obvious if you read on:

Don’t tell people they’re wrong.

Particularly, don’t tell people they’re wrong if they are a couple of years into a project, the way I was with my now-released 10 Commandments book.

Even if you’re right, people have to find out on their own. And in telling them, you will only antagonize them.

Ironically enough, the very first commandment of my new 10 Commandments book is directly related to this issue.

That first commandment (of 10) goes beyond keeping mum when you’re sure somebody is making a mistake, and tells you some proactive and positive things to do in order to take advantage of the underlying human psychology, which makes people so resist being told that they are wrong.

My ex-reader won’t profit from the advice in that commandment. But you can:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments