Authority

To all my dog trainers, pottery instructors, and professional alpaca whisperers

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Yesterday I got a question from Liza Schermann, the original “Crazy Email Lady” and current head copywriter at surging startup Scandinavian Biolabs. Liza wanted to know:

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Why so tempting??

I promised myself never to click through to the sales page of Daily Email Habit. It’s too good an offer not to buy, but I knew I wouldn’t commit. Yesterday, I gave in and clicked against my better judgement.

Anyhow, now I’m wondering:

The example you provide on the sales page is very specific to online marketing. Are most of the prompts geared towards this crowd? Or is it a mix, and people can adjust as they see fit for their own purposes?

I happen to be in this crowd, so it makes perfect sense to me. But maybe there’s a dog trainer, a pottery instructor, or a professional alpaca whisperer on your list who’s scratching their head wondering what to do with a prompt about daily emails (or something similar).

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I got variants of this question all week. In a nutshell:

Daily emails, like the kind Daily Email Habit gets you to write (including the sample prompt on the sales page) will work in any business or industry. The only caveat is you must be willing to put yourself (or some sort of avatar you write behind) as the face of that business.

In fact, that’s the point of daily emails, unpleasant though it may sound.

You’re ultimately selling yourself as the product, rather than whatever your “product” officially is. In the words of Dan Kennedy, a direct marketer who has managed to sell himself for millions and millions of dollars:

“The higher up in income you go, the more you’re paid for who you are, rather than what you do.”

So now the question becomes, are daily emails, the way Daily Email Habit helps you to write, a fit for you?

Only you can decide that.

Maybe you don’t like the business of selling you, even for a premium, and maybe you want your products or services to stand for themselves, at competitive market rates.

That’s a fine decision. In this case, don’t go the daily email route, because the relationship and authority you build up will only interfere with people buying from you on the strength of your product or price alone.

On the other hand, if you want to charge higher prices… or surround yourself with a moat that’s not easily crossed by marauding neighbors… or have a ready source of income whenever your business or personal life needs it… then daily emails work great.

And Daily Email Habit will help you write them, in an effective and (relatively) painless way, whether you are a dog trainer, pottery instructor, or professional alpaca whisperer.

But that doesn’t change the cruel truth:

The price for Daily Email Habit is going up tonight at 12 midnight PST, from a modest $30/month to an obscene $50/month.

If you’re considering getting in before the price increases for ever and ever, and you want the full info on DEH:

https://bejakovic.com/deh/

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

Am I just trying to provoke unsubscribes?

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In reply to my email yesterday, marketer and long-time customer Fred Beyer writes:

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Step 1: Tell your audience there are Mavericks who are worth serving and Gooses who are not (I refrained from using the plural geese ’cause we’re referencing a nickname here after all).

Step 2: Ask your audience which one they are, so you can ignore them appropriately according to your own suggestion in the email.

From Simple Money Emails: “What people do remember is the emotional stimulation”, and here you’re letting a large part of your subscribers know they are less desirable than the rest.

Are you just trying to provoke unsubscribes here? 😂

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My primary goal yesterday was what I wrote in the email, to find out who on my list has their own email list that’s growing at a healthy clip.

At the same time, Fred raises a good point. It’s one I thought about yesterday as I wrote the email.

I decided that yes, I’m ok if a bunch of people I don’t have any plans on working with unsubscribe from my list.

It’s not about them being “undesirable” in some global, eugenic sense. It’s simply who I want to focus on working with, and who I don’t want to focus on.

Ironically, it didn’t end up happening. I’ve had just 2 unsubscribes so far from yesterday’s email.

This I think is a lesson in itself, and probably an interesting data point around the topic of natural authority.

But that’s a topic for another place, another time.

For today, if you are wondering about the reference that Fred makes, to Simple Money Emails, it’s my course on how to write simple, daily emails, like this one, which both bring in sales today, and keep readers — the ones you want — reading tomorrow as well.

For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Still on the fence? Discover Daniel Throssell’s arguments for saying “YES” to Copy Riddles

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I’m wrapping up my “Unannounced Bonus” promo for Copy Riddles. Right now, I am partnered with Lawrence Bernstein on Copy Riddles and nobody else. In the past, though, I have had a few other affiliate partners.

One of these was Australia’s best copywriter Daniel Throssell, who had the following to say about Copy Riddles, and his experience promoting it to his list:

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There are few other courses I fully and wholeheartedly endorse as strongly as one of my own. Copy Riddles is one of them.

It’s the most brilliant course concept I’ve ever seen… literally a gamified series of sequential puzzles that teaches you copywriting.

I have literally never had so many people write to me after I start promoting something, offering unsolicited & gushing feedback on it!

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(Incidentally, that’s an illustration of round 11 of Copy Riddles, “A-list copywriter trick for amping up desire and belief at the same time.” The only difference is that I’ve taken the idea described in that lesson, and applied it not to a sales bullet but to a sales email. But emails are really just expanded bullets in my view.)

Maybe if you don’t take my word for how good and valuable Copy Riddles is, you will take Daniel’s word. Or maybe you’ll take the word of one of the two dozen or so sparkling and winking testimonials I’ve got up on the Copy Riddles sales page.

If you are still on the fence about Copy Riddles, it makes sense to take a moment or three right now, and decide whether you want to firmly come off the fence to the NO side.

If you do decide to say NO, that’s ok.

If, on the other hand, you decide to say YES to Copy Riddles before 12 midnight tonight, here’s what you are saying yes to:

#1. Copy Riddles, of course, which allows you to own A-list copywriting skills more quickly than you would ever believe

How?

By drilling into you mechanical do-or-die skill of writing sales bullets, and giving you feedback from A-list copywriters, who wrote their own sales bullets starting with the same source material as you did.

(This feedback process is why past customers have called Copy Riddles “the best course I’ve taken, bar none” and “worth every dollar/minute/page.”)

#2. A lifetime subscription to Lawrence Bernstein’s Ad Money Machine

… which sells for $997 on the rare occasions when Lawrence makes it available at all. $997 is what I paid Lawrence last year for it. (A-list copywriter Gary Bencivenga: “I would gladly have paid him ten times, even 100 times its price.”)

#3. The unique and never-to-be-repeated “Bullets With Bejako” live cohort

Many years ago, I used to run Copy Riddles as a live cohort to provide members with greater motivation, feedback, and results that an “asynchronous” content-only course frankly cannot match.

I stopped doing live cohorts for Copy Riddles because they are too much work.

I won’t ever do a live cohort in the future. But I’m doing as part of this “Unannounced Bonus” promo, so you can own those million-dollar copywriting skills in just the next few weeks, instead of never.

#4. 3-Month Copy Riddles Payment Plan

As part of this promo, until tonight only, you can break up payments for Copy Riddles over the course of three months.

Again, this “Unannounced Bonus” event ends tonight at 12 midnight PST.

If you’d like to say YES to this offer before it disappears:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Platform is magic

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I went for a walk this morning and as I was dodging the puddles from last night’s rain, I listened to a podcast, a conversation between James Schramko and Dean Jackson.

In case those names are not familiar to you, both belong to Internet marketers who have been in the business a combined 50+ years.

Both James and Dean have made many millions of dollars for themselves and many more for their clients and customers.

Whatever. The point is simply that, in the little corner of the Internet where I live, these guys are influential and established and respected. I’ve known about each for many years, and I’ve been paying attention to both intensely over the past year.

This morning, while listening to the podcast, James Schramko talked about changes he had made to his business following the advice of his friend, a guy named Kory Basaraba.

That caught my attention and maybe made me step into a puddle.

The fact is, I’ve known Kory for years. A few years ago, back when I was still doing freelance copywriting stuff, I even worked with him.

Through this experience, I know Kory is smart, successful, and established. But on hearing his name being mentioned on a podcast, by two people I follow, I felt some sort of electric jolt.

I don’t know how wide of a reach this Schramko/Dean podcast episode might get. Maybe a few thousand people, maybe tens of thousands? In any case it’s not Joe Rogan.

It doesn’t matter. My opinion of Kory, while it was positive before, suddenly jumped. He got the warm bright glow of a star in my eyes.

Of course, I’m a hardened cynic and a bit of a wizard when it comes to knowing influence spells. So I quickly shook my head to clear my mind from this strange persuasion.

But I wanted to share this story with you, such as it is, for a bit of motivation.

I don’t understand what it is about having a platform. Maybe I’ll figure it out one day.

Right now, my best answer is that having a platform is simply magic.

A few hundred or a few thousand people around the world listen to you. It’s not a tremendous amount of reach or power. But it doesn’t matter.

The very fact of having a platform, of speaking to a group of people, gives you status and authority and charisma, and even the power to transfer that to others, simply by mentioning their name. That’s magic.

The motivating part is that, if you haven’t done so already, you can do this same thing for yourself.

Nobody’s stopping you from starting a podcast, or writing an email newsletter, today.

Like I said, you don’t need a tremendous overall audience to have a tremendous influence on the people who do listen or read to what you have to say. I can vouch for that from personal experience, having been both on top of the platform at certain times, and in the audience, looking up, at other times.

I know nothing about podcasting. But I know something about newsletters. Such as for example, that the more often you send emails, the greater your influence over the people in your audience.

And with that in mind, let me point you to a service that can help make it easier to send something every day, so you can work your magic quickly:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

… we are the children

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I’ve been waiting all year for this.

Well, specifically, I’ve been waiting since April last year.

That’s when I made a note in my journal that I should write an email about the song We Are The World.

Today is January 28, the day that We Are The World was originally recorded, back in 1986. That makes today a particularly good day to talk about it.

You’ve probably heard We Are The World. Maybe you were even around when it came out.

Basically, We Are The World was a bunch of the biggest U.S. pop stars of the time, singing a simple, heartwarming/sappy, highly repetitive song to raise funds for famine relief.

Each of the pop stars sang just a line or two of the total song — a basic melody, over a background of generic pop instrumentation.

But even if you don’t watch the video, it’s remarkable how quickly you can recognize who’s singing, just by the tone of their voices, within a second or two:

Cindy Lauper — shrill and colorful

Ray Charles — smooth and swinging

Stevie Wonder — clearly from another dimension

Michael Jackson — childish and vulnerable

Bruce Springsteen — muscular and tormented

Bob Dylan — nasal and intellectual

Do you think it’s an accident that the world’s biggest pop stars, then and now, are recognizable by the tone of their voice within about a second and a half?

The last one on my list above, Bob Dylan, is a particularly good example.

Early in his career, Dylan had a much more conventional, clear, melodic way of singing.

At some point, he figured out that exaggerating his natural tendencies, or even inventing a completely new voice, gave him distinctness, memorability, immediate recognizability. The critics, who panned him for it, be damned.

Do you think there might be a valuable opportunity for you there as well? At least if you have a presence online, or want to have a presence online?

If you do, here’s a tip based on what I’ve found to be true:

You don’t have to “decide” on your unique and distinct tone and voice today. In fact, it’s almost impossible to do so.

But you can experiment with it from day to day. Introduce little quirks… make little tweaks… or go whole hog and make a big change and see if it sticks.

Do this regularly, and pretty soon, you will settle into something that both feels natural to you, and which is unique and distinct enough to win you attention even in today’s crowded marketplace.

And that’s my soft segue into my offer today, which is the same offer I’ve been promoting for a while now:

Daily Email Habit.

Daily Email Habit helps you start and stick with consistently writing daily emails so you can make sales, influence readers, and yes, even develop your own unique voice in time.

You don’t NEED Daily Email Habit to write daily emails.

But it can save you time and headache, and make it more likely you will stick with the process long-term. If that’s something you think could be valuable to you, then—

There comes a time…

When we heed a certain call…

Ok, I won’t get all sappy on you and start singing about the children. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

David Ogilvy endorses the Daily Email Habit approach

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This morning I found myself reading “Quotations of David Ogilvy,” put out in 2023 by the Ogilvy agency, on the 75th anniversary of its founding.

Here’s a quote from Ogilvy that caught my eye:

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Dr. Gallup reports that if you say something which you don’t also illustrate, the viewer immediately forgets it. I conclude that if you don’t show it there is no point in saying it. Try running your commercial with the sound turned off; if it doesn’t tell without sound, it is useless.

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I’m sharing this with you for two reasons.

One is that it’s a useful reminder, even if you never write a TV commercial. Really, it comes down to effective communication. If you don’t illustrate, the reader will forget it. If you don’t show it, there’s no point in saying it.

Reason two is that I was lucky to have somehow learned that lesson early in my copywriting career. Somebody must have shown it to me, because I also remembered it over the years.

The basic idea above — illustrate, don’t just say — is the underlying idea of pretty much everything I’ve done in the marketing space.

It’s the underlying idea of my Copy Riddles program, and its try-and-compare method of learning to write copy, instead of just a bunch of “here’s how” instruction.

It’s the underlying idea of thousands of sales emails I’ve written, both for clients and for myself, and the way I teach others to do that inside my Simple Money Emails and Most Valuable Email programs.

And it’s the underlying idea of my Daily Email Habit service.

Because on most days — not all, but most — I don’t just send a daily prompt for to help you write your own daily email. I also use that prompt in my own daily email, to show and illustrate how it can be done.

About that, I got the following feedback from Chris Howes, who runs a successful music teaching memebrship, Creative Strings Academy. Chris subscribes to Daily Email Habit, and he had this to say:

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But more importantly, I now get TWO LESSONS from you every day. And I often learn as much or more from your regular daily free emails. Together, hand in hand, they feel like someone dropped off a shopping cart from Sams Club full of gifts at my front door and said here you go…

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As David Ogilvy said, “We sell — or else.”

I don’t know what the “else” is. I don’t want to find out.

So if you’d like to buy a month’s worth of daily email puzzles, in order to write your own daily emails, and to get additional inspiration and illustration from my daily emails, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Wickedful

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I like to go see movies without knowing anything about them other than they’re playing at my local movie theater. I don’t want to know the genre, the actors in it, the plot summary, the reviews.

“Let them surprise me,” I say with a magnanimate sweep of my hand, as I hand over my 7 euro at the box office.

And so this Wednesday, I went to see Wicked. I only knew it had something to do with the Wizard of Oz. But I was surprised to find it’s three hours long, and a musical of the kind I don’t like, and a heavy-handed morality play to boot.

I emerged from the theater several years older, no wiser, and looking desesperately for something, anything, a little shred from this ordeal that I could reclaim for my daily email.

And there was something.

In between all the unendful singing, Wicked also has bits of dialogue. And the dialogue regularly makes use of a little word-trick. Each time it happened, it put a smile on my face and lightened the heavy burden of watching this movie.

I won’t spell out exactly what this word-trick is. But perhaps you can guess? I’ve tried to use it myself numerious times in this email.

My point for today is that it makes sense to make up and use your own words, terms, slang, even if it’s nonsense, or silly. It lightens the burden of reading (or watching) otherwise valuable but dry material.

You might shrug at that. Perhaps it’s because you’ve heard this advice before. Perhaps it’s because you think it doesn’t apply to you, and the serious business you are engagified in.

So there’s a bigger and to me much more interesting point I want to share with you. But I will save it for my email tomorrow. It’s not that humor is important, though it is. It’s not that it can be done in every field, even if your field is accounting for mortuary offices.

Rather, the point I want to share with you is a surprising idea I heard recently in the crypto space, which applies much more broadly, to business and perhaps to life.

Maybe you think that’s a grand claim. I can only promise to pay it off tomorrow.

Meanwhile, if you would like to learn a different trick, one that can lighten the burden of reading AND writing daily emails, you might like the enfollowing:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

The reputation benefit of a bigger list

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My own email list — this one, about marketing and copywriting and influence — is tiny. But some of the people on my list have much bigger lists than I do.

One such person is Russell Nohelty. Russell is a bestselling author of fantasy books and comics. He also writes about the business of writing, and he runs Writer MBA, a membership program to help writers make more money.

Russell’s audience on Substack is over 70,000 people.

Last week, when I started writing about my plan to grow a new list via paid traffic, Russell reached out. He offered to share his experiences spending $30k since February to grow his audience.

Russell and I got on a call this past Monday. It was interesting and valuable throughout, but one thing in particular stuck with me, something Russell said about the reputation benefits of various list sizes. In Russell’s words:

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There were a couple of break points where everything felt different.

10,000 emails felt different than 8,000.

30,000 emails felt way different than 20,000 emails.

From my experience, talking to other people, 50,000, 80,000 — there’s different break points where people go, “Oh you’ve got 45,000 people on your list! Yes, I want to get in front of them!”

Promotions become easier. When you’re a Dream 100 guy like I am, you can reach out to almost anyone and be like, “Hey, do you wanna be in front of my 35,000, 45,000, whatever the number is, people.”

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I can imagine that somebody somewhere has just crossed his arms and frowned. “Well, I’d much rather have a small but mighty list than a stupid big list that doesn’t read or buy from me.”

Sure. It’s my policy as well with my own list. That said, you can have both a large and a mighty list — Russell does.

But here’s the sneaky thing:

All of us constantly use mental shortcuts to evaluate the people around us and the choices we have.

On the one hand, a large list is an immensely valuable asset for its own sake.

On the other hand, a large list is also an immensely valuable asset because of its reputation benefit. Because people treat you differently if you get one. Because opportunities open up which would be closed otherwise.

All that’s to say, if you got a business, and a list, but it’s not quite going how you’d like… then the solution might just be to get a bigger list. Maybe if you can make it to the next break point, like Russell says above, then your problems now might just go poof.

Which brings me back to my plan to grow a new list via paid traffic.

If you like, you can join me. You can build up your own list using the same process I will be following, and get my copywriting feedback and marketing input while we work alongside each other.

I can tell you right now that the investment for this offer is $497 to get started, plus $10-$15 a day for ads. If that doesn’t deter you, hit reply and tell me so, and I can give you more information.

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.