Mental Shortcuts

Magic words that bring you status

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Yesterday, I went on Twitter in search of my own name.

What I found was a photo somebody had posted of a densely scribbled page, containing the text of one of my emails.

I squinted and leaned in so far my nose almost touched the screen. It was true.

People are actually copying out my emails by hand as a way to learn email copywriting.

It was a bizarre moment. It reminded me of the first time I printed a black-and-white photograph in my high school’s darkroom.

Take a normal-looking piece of paper, expose it to light for a second, then dump it into a bit of clear, water-like liquid. A picture emerges of something you had photographed days or weeks ago.

It feels like magic, because the ingredients seem so ordinary — paper, light, a bit of water-like liquid.

I’ve been writing this daily email newsletter for 5+ years. At first, I was writing mostly just to practice and then sending my emails out into the void.

After a while, I created an offer. I sent out an email just like the ones I had been sending out. Except this time, money came back at me.

It felt like magic, because it was still the same ordinary ingredients — a bare-bones text editor, ActiveCampaign, the blue “send” button.

Since then, I’ve continued sending the same text-only emails, just words in a text editor. And that’s been good enough to give me status and authority in this field. I got into copywriting some ten years ago by hand-copying issues of Gary Halbert’s newsletter. Today people are copying my newsletter issues by hand.

A few days ago, I announced I’m looking for five beta testers for a 3-month group coaching program.

The goal for this group coaching program is to implement the techniques and ideas I talked about on the “How I do it” call I held on Monday. Write interesting emails… build a list… grow your status… make money.

I announced this group coaching program to the people who were there for the live “How I do it” call, and to the people who signed up for the recording.

And in spite of the fact I once again managed to muck up the tech, so that some people never got the link to join the live call, and others never got the recording, I’ve so far filled three of those five spots. I also have a few people who’ve expressed interest in the remaining two.

But I want to get this sign-up process wrapped up now, so I can kick the group coaching off.

So if you’re interested, hit reply and let me know a bit about who you are and what you do.

I will send you a doc with the full info on this 3-month program, and you can decide if it’s for you or not.

If not, no problem. But if yes, then you can join us, and we will start next week.

How to get drug-dealer levels of cash without selling drugs

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Last Monday, I wrote an email about Pinky Cole, the founder of Slutty Vegan, a fast-food brand with 11 locations, valued at $100M.

I’ve been traveling in the days since, so I didn’t get a chance to finish the New Yorker article where I first read about Pinky Cole.

I was reading that article again this morning. I found out that when Cole first launched Slutty Vegan back in 2018, she did so without a physical location, just on a bunch of food-delivery apps.

The first day, Cole sold exactly one slutty, meat-free hamburger.

Things inched and middled and crawled along at this pace until Cole hired Ludacris’s manager, Chaka Zulu. Zulu helped Cole get a bunch of rappers, including Snoop Dogg, to endorse Slutty Vegan. Result:

===

From there, demand exploded. “I felt like a drug dealer,” Cole said. “We had, like, trash bags of money, because we only took cash.”

===

Along with reading the New Yorker, today I’ve been preparing intensely for the live training that I will host this coming Monday, about how I write and profit from this newsletter.

I’ve been collecting ideas for that training over the past couple weeks, and today I also made a big brain dump.

I realized I will have to significantly pare back all the valuable ideas I could share, in order to have a training that makes sense and that doesn’t go on forever.

But one thing I’m sure to keep is the point of the Pinky Cole story above.

It should be obvious enough. But if you want me to spell it out, and show you how it fits into making money with a newsletter, particularly if you also work with clients at the same time, then join me for the training on Monday.

This training will be free.

It will happen on Monday January 22, 2024 at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. But you will have to be on my list first. Click here to sign up.

The beginning and the end of copywriting

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Today being January 1st, I find it an excellent opportunity to wish you a happy New Year and to point out the surprising significance of January.

As I learned when I was still young and very stupid, January is named after the Roman god Janus, the two-faced deity of doors, gates, and more broadly, beginnings and endings.

I say I was still very stupid when I first learned this, because my reaction was, “A god of doors? How lame. What’s next? A god of faucets?”

It was only later, after I read a book or two, that I found out just how fundamental the idea of a door — an entry point, an exit point — really is to the human mind.

Because all human perception, down at the most basic neurological level, is based on difference, contrast.

Right now, bunches of your neurons are frantically working to determine where they can draw a line, and call everything before it one thing, everything after it another, and convince you these are somehow meaningfully separate, and discard the many other details that don’t fit into that picture of the world.

Without this Januarial work of drawing lines and creating doors to come up with discrete concepts, we couldn’t really have any higher-level thinking.

That’s why it makes sense that January, the month of doors, comes before, say March, named after the Roman god of war, Mars.

“That’s truly fascinating,” I hear you saying. “I had no idea of the depth of your classical learning or your smattering of popsci neuroscience. But what does this have to do with marketing or making money or really anything else I might actually care about on January 1st?”

Everything. It has everything to do with it.

This basic observation, of the outsized importance of beginnings and endings, repeats itself at every level of the sales job.

At the level of entire sales campaigns, where the opening of the campaign and the closing of the campaign bring in almost all the sales…

At the level of individual sales letters, where the headline and lead on the one end, and the offer and close at the other end, represent 80%-95% of the effectiveness or sales pull of that letter…

At the level of individual sales claims or promises, such as the following:

“The simple 12-word-sentence that will make you the #1 candidate more often than you would ever believe.”

That’s a bullet written by A-list copywriter Gary Bencivenga, considered by many to be the greatest of the greats because he won so often against other A-list copywriters.

You might think Gary’s bullet is just a simple, direct response promise. But there’s a surprising amount of subtle psychology that goes into this bullet, with a particular emphasis on what Gary chooses to put first in this bullet, and what to put last.

I won’t explain that subtle psychology here, but I will tell you the following:

Wouldn’t it be nice to start this New Year acquiring a new skill, a truly valuable skill, a skill that few others possess?

Wouldn’t it be nice to acquire one of the greatest skills you can have as a copywriter, whether you write for clients or for your own business?

Wouldn’t it be nice to acquire a skill that ultimately all effective copy comes from?

You probably know what I’m talking about.

But if you’d like to make 100% sure, or if you’d actually like to use this January 1st to get yourself this skill and the associated bump in fortune that this skill can bring, then take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Unsexy, neglected, mistreated email lists

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Yesterday I was listening to a Dan Kennedy seminar where Dan says, in his typically tactful fashion:

===

There is no magazine out there — you can check the newsstand — there is no magazine called, Wives In Sweatpants and Sneakers.

There’s all sorts of unimaginable fetishes. But that is not one of them. There’s just not a lot of interest in that.

That’s their business.

===

Dan’s point is that what business owners have gotten used to, they no longer find exciting. It also means they also don’t notice the bad stuff any more.

The past week, I was promoting a done-for-you newsletter service.

I figured no qualified leads would respond, since I write so much about email marketing and making money from email. If there’s one thing I’m known for, it’s probably that.

Surely, business owners who manage to track down my email list — in spite of my best efforts to hide it — surely such business owners also think email marketing is sexy and are already doing sophisticated email stuff in their own businesses.

I was wrong.

I got readers reaching out to me who have large, successful businesses.

Some of them have email lists of tens of thousands of people, made up of customers, who have never been mailed.

Others send out an email here and there… make good money each time they send out that lonesome email… and don’t think or know to do it more often.

And one person, who wasn’t replying to the done-for-you newsletter service, but who did take me up on the Newsletter Consult I did last month, followed up yesterday to say:

===

Thought I’d follow up after our recent discussion, which was much appreciated.

So went ahead and ran a one-month birthday sale for a 2-YR subscription at a $1K discount. Don’t think we have done a sale in 5 years, nor one for a 2 year sub duration.

With 4 days yet to run, we have so far generated $18K in sales with 4 people subscribing for the 2-YR plan and 1 other taking up a (full priced) annual sub.

Not bad considering I only mentioned it as a PS in the twice a week email alerts, plus December is historically a slow month for sales here. This has been our best December to date!

I plan to send two more such alerts this week and have been pondering what to write in case we might be able to tip one more cheerful soul over the edge.

===

The results above are clearly not common.

The person who wrote me offers a yearly subscription costing multiple thousands of dollars… has lots of credibility built up over a long time… and can now make an extra $18k with an “oh by the way” casual throwaway in a PS, after a 5-year promo hiatus.

But uncommon details aside, the point still stands:

You might have that beautiful email list, wearing sweatpants and sneakers around you. Maybe you’ve been looking at it for years, and maybe you’ve stopped appreciating how just how sexy it really can be.

I figure that’s as much my fault as yours.

Clearly, I’m not doing a good job putting forward offers to help you get more value out of your email list.

I’ll work on fixing that in 2024.

Meanwhile, it’s mid-December. It’s almost the holiday season. Who the hell wants to work?

I do. So I have a quick, band-aid offer for you right now:

If you have a business and are making sales… if you have an email list and have been neglecting and mistreating it for too long… then I offer you my 1-hour “Extreme Makeover For Email Lists” session.

One hour, to hear what your business is about, who your customers are, what you offer them, how you currently mail them.

I will then tell you the quickest and easiest buttons to push to make money from your list, in the future as well as now. Maybe I can even help you pull out some thousands of dollars from your email list by the end of this month.

I’m limiting this offer to three people, the first three qualified people who reply.

Price is $300.

I will not be offering this again, at least not at this price.

In case you are interested, hit reply, tell me who you are, and I can send you the payment link.

Two main chain cutters that delink price from product

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The past few days, I’ve been reading the eye-opening “No B.S. Marketing To The Affluent” by marketing coach Dan Kennedy.

​​​​As you can imagine, one of Dan’s main points is that you should charge a lot, and that you can, because with a bit of thought and preparation, it’s easy to break the heavy chain that links product to price in most people’s minds.

Dan suggests two main ways to do it:

“The two biggest chain cutters that delink price from product are 1) who is buying and 2) the context in which the product is presented, priced, and delivered.”

There’s a lot in that one sentence. So let’s get specifical. Let me tell you just one specific way to create a high-price selling context.

It’s to assume authority.

In the olden days, this meant getting a soapbox… walking to the the northeast corner of Hyde Park… putting your soapbox down on the ground among the chestnut leaves… stepping onto the soapbox… and starting to talk.

The modern-day version of this is creating your own digital platform of any kind and using it to communicate.

Because there’s some shortcut in the human brain, so that when you speak from a platform, the rest of us listen.

Sure, some of those listening will walk away after a time. But others will continue to stand there, transfixed, nodding their heads.

And if you, the speaker, ever deign to directly address me, the transfixed audience member, I’ll get a flush of excitement. I’ll look around to make sure others saw it too. “Did you catch that? He spoke to me! He made me an offer, directly! It’s expensive, but what else would you expect? He’s an authority!”

I know I react like this. I imagine that if you are honest with yourself, you will find you react like this too.

All that’s to say, get your own soapbox if you haven’t got one yet. Or get me to create one for you. ​​

And on that note, today is the last day I’ll be talking about my done-for-you newsletter service.

​​Your own newsletter is good for business, good for authority, and great for delinking price from product.

So if you have a business, but you haven’t got a newsletter, then take a look here for more information on this service:

https://bejakovic.com/announcing-done-for-you-newsletter-service/

One word, out of 495, that drew a bunch of replies

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Last week I sent out an email, “Write 10 books instead of 1,” that got a good number of replies. The curious thing was the replies split neatly into two camps.

One camp was people who liked the core message in the email and felt inspired to start or finish their own book or books.

But the other camp, in fact the majority of people who replied to that email, had nothing to say about the core message.

Instead, this second group replied because of a single word of that email. A single word that was hidden, between two commas, in position 408 in an email of 495 words.

Would you like to know what that word was?

​​Good, then I’ll tell ya.

That word was inshallah.

Inshallah, as you might know, is a saying used in Muslim societies. It means “God willing.” It expresses both hope for a future event and resignation that the future is not in our control.

But why??? Why would I use this word in the tail end of my email?

Is it because I myself am Muslim?

Is it some kind of incredibly clever personalization based on the reader’s IP address?

Was it a joke or irony?

Readers wanted to know. And from my religious profiling based on these readers’ names, almost all the people who wrote me to ask about inshallah were either Muslim or came from Muslim societies.

I’ll leave the mystery of why I used inshallah hanging in the air. Instead, let me tell you a story that this reminded me of, from legendary marketer Dan Kennedy.

Dan used to travel the country on the Peter Lowe Success Tour, a modern-day speaking circus that featured former U.S. presidents and Superbowl quarterbacks as speakers.

Dan would go up on stage at the end of the night and deliver a rapid-fire comedy routine/sales pitch to sell his Magnetic Marketing program.

I highly recommend tracking down Dan Kennedy’s Magnetic Marketing speech and listening to it. ​​I’ve listened to it multiple times myself.

But one thing I never noticed, in spite of the multiple times listening, is that Dan somewhere mentions that he used to stutter as a kid.

Again, this speech is rapid-fire. It lasts maybe 50 minutes. It contains thousands of words. And among those words, there are a few — maybe a dozen, maybe a half dozen — that refer to the fact that Dan Kennedy stuttered as a kid.

It’s very easy to miss. Like I said, I’ve listened to this speech multiple times and I’ve never caught it.

But there’s a group of people who don’t miss it.

And that’s people who themselves stutter or who have kids who stutter.

Dan said somewhere, in one of his seminars, how he’d regularly finish his speech and try to get out of the room, only to be faced with an audience member, holding a brand new $197 copy of Magnetic Marketing in their hands, and ready to talk about stuttering and how Dan overcame his stutter and how he now performs on stages in front of tens of thousands of people.

That’s something to keep in mind, if you’re missing a word to put into the 408th position in your sales message… or if, like me, you suffered from epileptic seizures as a kid.

All right, moving on.

I got nothing to sell you today. But I do have something to recommend.

Well, I recommended something already, and that’s Dan Kennedy’s Magnetic Marketing speech. Dan has said that this speech is the best sales letter he’s ever written.

It’s worth listening to if you want to learn how to write an interesting, indirect, and yet effective sales message.

On the other hand, if you want to learn how to do marketing that gets you really rich — who to target, how to reach them, what offers to create — then I can recommend a book I’m reading right now. It’s also by Dan Kennedy. It’s more relevant now than ever before. You can find it here:

https://bejakovic.com/reallyrich

The third-hottest release of 2023 closes after just one night

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Last night, with crowds of paparazzi pushing outside the velvet rope, and a few stars making their way from their limos down the red carpet to the doors of the classy old theater, my Influential Emails show had its grand opening.

The show ran for exactly one night.

And then this morning, I locked and chained the theater doors, removed the “INFLUENTIAL EMAILS” letters from the marquee, and took out an ad in the local paper to announce this show is now over.

As I announced in the lead up and during the grand opening of Influential Emails, this promotion would go until Sunday at the latest, and I might close it down sooner.

Well, that sooner is today, about 12 hours after the initial grand opening. I would have closed it earlier but I was asleep.

The reason why I did this is that made up my mind, before I launched this promo, what a nice sum of money would be to make from it.

I’ve now made that money and more. And so the cart is now closed.

If you managed to squeeze in to the Influential Emails show, I hope you will get value out of it in a way pays for itself, and soon.

If you wanted to get in but didn’t manage to, then all I can say is — if you’re not too angered by this experience, then maybe you will have better luck next time.

And if you were not interested in buying Influential Emails, then I can share the following valuable truth with you:

You can choose who you sell to, and how much of something you sell. There’s no law against it. And it’s ultimately good for business, in many different ways.

Now here’s a little sneak peek behind the scenes:

This promo didn’t really run for 12 hours.

It ran for about 36 hours.

I opened it up a day earlier for a private showing, just for people who were on the waiting list and who had already bought something from me in the past.

I also gave them an inducement to buy within the first 24 hours.

Many did.

That’s how I managed to make more money with this one-and-a-half-day promo than I used to make in a whole month, the first few years of my copywriting career.

Some of the folks who were invited for this private showing had bought pretty much all of my offers in the past.

Some had bought just one of my courses.

And some only bought my little $5 Kindle book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

It didn’t matter.

They are all valued and ongoing customers, and I wanted to say thanks with this special opportunity.

All that’s to say, if you have not yet bought my 10 Commandments book, then consider doing so.

It might teach you a thing or two about copywriting. And it might just prove to be a ticket to an exclusive future show, and a walk down the red carpet. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Take your likes to the bank

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A couple days ago, I sent an email about an email trick to get more engagement. To which, I got a response — an engagement!

The response came from Jakub Červenka, who runs an info publishing business in the men’s sexual health niche.

First, Jakub just replied to tell me he liked that email about engagement. Then we got into a bit of an email conversation. Then he told me about the trouble he was having with his Facebook ad agency.

And then he wrote:

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So I learnt I am decent marketer and cannot let go of this part in my company.

Also, started writing daily emails again recently and looking at the mails I am writing now and I did year ago… it is as if 2 different people wrote them and that makes me happy.

And this is the main reason I am writing this to you, John, I think me improving so much is lot thanks to you. Yours is the only newsletter that I read almost daily and is amongst the 3 that survived my brutal opt-out-from everything. I don’t mean this to sound bad, I bought your Copy Riddles, Most Valuable email, your 2 pump-postcard newsletter and your latest Sales emails training.

I like all your courses, a lot, probably best spend money in copywriting courses, but still I think I learn most from your daily emails – probably due to the fact that it does not seem like I am working, I enjoy reading your stuff and it is small bites daily.

Keep up the good work,

Your grateful student and zealous reader,

Jakub

===

I once had a reader write in to tell me he always skips the quoted parts of my emails, the parts in italics that start with ===.

In case you also skipped what Jakub wrote, I can tell you it was a testimonial, with good things to say about my courses and in particularly about these emails.

And here’s something I’ve noticed about getting nice testimonials like this:

It rarely happens that somebody writes in just because they want to tell me how great they think one of my courses is, or how great I am.

Yes, it does happen from time to time. But it’s kind of like finding a Black Lotus in hundreds and hundreds of packs of Magic The Gathering cards — valuable yes, but also rare.

A little more common is when I explicitly ask for feedback on a course or training, and offer an incentive to reply.

People then reply in a pack. But even then, it’s not an overwhelming number of responses, and not everything I get is a great testimonial I can feature.

Really, the bulk of the good testimonials I’ve gotten, and that I’ve featured in emails and on sales pages, came like Jakub’s message above.

They came as an “oh by the way” that people tacked on when replying to one of my emails that had to do with an entirely unrelated matter. It’s been a steady drip-drip over the years that’s eventually filled up several buckets.

It’s popular to say in the direct response world that only sales mean anything, and that you can’t take your likes to the bank.

Except you kind of can.

True, a great testimonial like Jakub’s above is not cash. I can’t go and buy cans of beans and bags of rice with it today.

But a good testimonial is like a check, and eventually it will clear. Somebody somewhere will eventually be converted into a new and loyal customer because of testimonials like Jakub’s above. We all look to others when making our own decisions.

So my point is, if you work to increase engagement with your emails, you will get more testimonials, and you will be able to take those to the bank, in time.

Of course, for that to happen you do have to feature your testimonials so people can see them.

Sales pages are one place.

But really, emails are the main place, because emails are kind of the headlines for your sales pages.

Which brings me to the my latest Sales emails training, as Jakub put it, aka my Simple Money Emails course.

I’m probably giving away too much in these emails and I’m probably killing some sales for my courses like Simple Money Emails.

Maybe I will fix that in time.

For now, if you want to see how I’ve used emails to make (up to) tens of thousands of dollars in sales per day, and still kept readers coming back tomorrow, then Simple Money Emails will show you, and will show you how you can do it too. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Take a look at this

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Maybe you’ve heard that last month, marketer Todd Brown assembled a gathering called Copy Legends:

A bunch of top copywriters, in a mansion in Palm Beach. Sitting around a big table. Talking openly for a day, while cameras and microphones record it all.

What did these legendary copywriters have to say?
​​
Well, for example, during a discussion of headlines, Copy Legend Kyle Milligan, who used to be a copy chief at financial publisher Agora and who made a name for himself by analyzing sales letters on YouTube, said the following:

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I believe everyone way overcomplicates what needs to be done at the start of a promotion. They’re looking for this whiz-bang tactic to grab attention.

Yet, there are these tried-and-true openers which continue to work like crazy. Like, a visual pattern interrupt that just says ‘look at this’ and gets the prospect to sort of adjust and focus for a second is like one of the most timeless, time-tested methods there is.

If you don’t know what else to do for an opener, go with ‘Take a look at this.’ It’s like old faithful.

===

Kyle’s comment got a lot of people nodding their legendary heads around the Copy Legends table.

I found this amusing.

Because it’s a kind of anti-proof element for the whole concept of Copy Legends. As Todd says himself in the headline for the Copy Legends sales page, that concept is:

​“NEW Copy Techniques Working Like Crazy Today”

As in, they didn’t exist yesterday, and they will probably change by tomorrow.

It makes good sense to position an offer like this.

Like Kyle said around the Copy Legends table, people want that promise. They want whiz-bang tactics. And they will pay good money for such whiz-bangery, even though the really effective methods, as Kyle said at the actual Copy Legends event, are things that keep working year after year, decade after decade.

Todd Brown will soon release upon the world his Copy Legends recordings.

I won’t be buying it. But I certainly won’t tell you not to buy if you are after “new copy techniques.”

On the other hand, perhaps you are looking for timeless, time-tested copywriting techniques.

​​Technique that worked 50 years ago, 5 years ago, 5 months ago… and that will continue to work into the future, because they are based on fundamental human psychology and the competitive research of history’s greatest copywriters.

If that’s what you’re looking for, then… take a look at this:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

It’s not funny if they’re laughing

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I got a testimonial. I’m very excited. I want to share it with you.

I know, I know. You can’t wait.

But there’s a point to the testimonial, beyond just the self-promotion. Trust me.

New reader Kameron Bryant, who just got my Simple Money Emails course yesterday, asked me for the link to Monday’s storytelling presentation, which is a disappearing bonus if you get Simple Money Emails right now.

After I sent the link over, Kameron wrote:

===

Thanks for sending over and I’m loving the course.

In my eyes it’s more than a course. I see it as a money making email road map.

I’ll be re-reading for the foreseeable future.

Thanks

P.S

I’m a newbie in the email copy space and the testimonial from the guy who said he finally felt comfortable getting client work is what pushed me over… and he was right.

===

Now, there is no doubt I am telling you this in a kind of blindingly obvious way to promote Simple Money Emails. But if you want or need a marketing lesson as well, consider the following bit of science:

There was a study in Australia once upon a time. They made university students listen to a recording of a comedian, along with the laugh track provided by an audience.

In one scenario, the students believed the audience on the recording is students from the same university.

In another scenario, the students believed the audience are members of the far-right One Nation party.

In a third scenario, the students just got the recording of the comedian, without the audience laughter.

Result?

The laugh track made the comedian 400% funnier in the “just like us” case… 0% funnier in the “despicable them” case.

As the authors of the study put it, “It’s not funny if they’re laughing.”

Same goes with sales:

People who are just like your prospect is the strongest form of social proof, stronger even than getting a thumbs-up from a Tony Robbins or a Bill Clinton or whoever is the star in your industry.

That’s the lesson you can draw from the last line of Kameron’s testimonial above, beyond the fact that you should buy Simple Money Emails.

But back to self-promotion:

Tomorrow at 4pm CET/10am EST/7am PST, Kieran Drew and I will host a free presentation on storytelling.

The presentation is free as in, you gotta have Simple Money Emails to get in for free. If you have SME before the presentation starts, you get the presentation link and the subsequent recording. Otherwise no.

This is the last email I will send before tomorrow’s presentation. So if you’d like to get in, the time to move is now.

The sales page is at the link below, where you can find testimonials from a book editor… a career coach… a freelance copywriter… an in-house copywriter.

I haven’t yet added the testimonial by an online entrepreneur, Kieran Drew himself, who wrote recently that Simple Money Emails is the the best email writing course he’s ever taken.

If you’d like to join us tomorrow:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/