Urgency

Learning from hecklers and refunders

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Comedian Norm MacDonald once started a standup show when a heckler in the audience yelled out:

“Hey, you’re not very funny!”

The crowd, all of whom where there to see Norm, started booing the heckler. One guy yelled, “Toss the asshole out!”

Norm calmed the crowd down. “Now hold on,” he said. He wanted to understand what exactly happened. And he started talking to the heckler.

“So you go, ‘I’m gonna pay money to go see this dude…’ I want to understand what exactly happened. At some point in your life, you thought I was funny.”

The past couple days, I promoted Andrew Kap’s book, 3 Words I Used To Sell 100,000 Books. I even gave away a couple free bonuses to people who bought that book.

A lot of people took me up on the offer. They wrote in to say thanks for turning them on to Andrew’s book, and to ask for the bonuses I had promised.

Among all these people was one guy who first wrote me with proof of buying the book and then, before I could reply with the bonuses, wrote me a second message to say:

===

I gave back the title, I’m sorry. Didn’t really apply to me. Don’t want to scam you for the bonuses.

Sorry, really like your stuff though.

===

It’s standard daily email operating procedure to shame people who refund stuff or who say they can’t get value out of a valuable offer. It’s even common to toss them off your list.

But I thought, good on this guy for realizing eventually this doesn’t apply to him… and even more so for having the decency to write me and say so.

Still, just like Norm, I told myself, I want to understand what exactly happened here.

My email went out at 8:34pm.

My reader read my email and got excited. He bought the book immediately. By 9:00pm, he got the confirmation email from Amazon, forwarded it to me, and asked for the bonuses. Even though, as he realized over the next few minutes, this book or the bonuses or the promises didn’t really apply to him.

How exactly does this happen?

Clearly, the promo nature of my email had something to do with it. The deadline… the disappearing bonuses… the exciting, opportunity-like promises of it all.

But here’s the point, the message from this email:

Those things — deadlines, bonuses, exciting promises — are rooms in the house of persuasion. The house itself is built on a foundation. And that foundation is either stable and strong, or shifting and weak.

The foundation is trust. In my case, trust built up by daily emailing.

That’s how people find out in the first place about offers I create and deadlines I set. That’s how they get excited about the disappearing bonuses I announce and exciting promises I make.

Getting people to trust you like this is nothing mysterious or difficult.

It’s just a matter of consistency.

Like I said, in my case, that’s via daily emails. For years now. And though my offers change, and daily email topics change, and even my own attitudes change, there’s still some consistent core that people can rely on and trust.

You can do the same.

The longer you do it, the better. But it doesn’t have to take years to build up trust. It can be done in months, weeks, days, or sometimes even hours, if you say the right things.

But it all starts with saying something, and then doing so again, in some regular, consistent way.

My introductory offer — the least expensive course I offer — is an introduction to writing daily emails, called Simple Money Emails.

I’ve used the techniques in this course to write quick emails for clients that made lots of money.

But more importantly, I’ve used them for myself to create long-running relationships that lead to trust, engagement, and urgent sales like the above.

If you’d like to find out how you can do something similar, then take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

I got burned by a deadline, don’t let it happen to you

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This past Tuesday I got an email with the subject line,

“We’re funding your newsletter growth”

The body of the email explained that Beehiiv, the Substack competitor I use for my new health newsletter, was offering to match any money I might put into its Beehiiv Boosts service, up to $2,500.

Boosts are basically a coregistration service for various Beehiiv newsletters – you subscribe to one newsletter, you immediately get a bunch more paid recommendations you can subscribe to with just one click.

I had already used Boosts before. I knew it worked fine and delivered quality subscribers.

So taking advantage of this new “deposit matching” offer to the max was a no brainer. I understood fully that it translated into 1,000-1,250 extra subscribers for free.

To seal the deal, later in the day I got an email from my friend Will Ward. Will wrote:

===

Hey you are using beehiv for your [health] newsletter right? This seems like a pretty good offer. Am considering switching over to max out the matching.

Are you on the $99 / month plan?

===

I smiled and nodded to myself with satisfaction. I’m all over it already, Will.

The next day, Wednesday, I went to check the deadline for this matching offer — by when do I have to deposit the money to get Beehiiv to match my deposit?

My eyes got wide, then shot forward out of my skull, and snapped back into their sockets.

It turned out the deadline had already passed. The offer was only good until end of day, Tuesday. I hadn’t noticed this in the one and only email about the offer.

As that realization sank in, that self-satisfied smile left my face.

“Well,” I said to myself, “I never really wanted this offer anyhow.”

I even meant it in that moment. Of course, it wasn’t true. It was just my brain trying to cover up a screw-up with a tolerable emotion rather than anger or frustration.

The fact is, I got burned by the deadline. But it doesn’t have to happen to you.

Because three hours still remain before I will retire my Most Valuable Postcard #2, at 8:31pm CET tonight.

The reason why I’m retiring this offer, in case you’re curious:

As the name of it suggests, MVP #2 is really just the remains of my short-lived subscription offer, the Most Valuable Postcard, which I ran last summer.

MVP #2 should be a standalone course, with clearer positioning, with its own sexy name, with a bit more bulk, and with an extra zero or two in the price.

So I will retire it. Maybe I will bring the content back in the future, changed slightly and priced much higher.

But if you would like to get it before it disappears, at the current very affordable price, you can buy it today, of your own choosing, at the link below:

https://bejakovic.com/mvp2/

Sympathy for the deadline

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Please allow me to introduce you to someone:

She’s a woman of great beauty and fame.

She’s been around for a long long year, and stole many a man’s chance at happiness, wealth, and even life.

She was there on the bridge of the Titanic, smiling sadly while the warnings of oncoming icebergs, which had long reached the radio operators on the ship, failed to catch the captain’s attention.

She was in the royal palace in Belgrade in the summer of 1914, watching with glee as the crown prince pulled at his hair and yelled “I can’t make up my mind!” and the clock ticked down on the ultimatum from the furious and threatening Austrians.

She stuck around Moscow in late October of 1812, wearing a great big fur, as Napoleon kept waiting and waiting in the abandoned city for a peace offer that never came, while the days flew away, the food supplies dwindled, and the temperature dropped below freezing.

Perhaps you’ve guessed this beautiful woman’s name. But even if not, she’s pleased to meet you.

And now:
​
If you’d like to sign up for my 9 Deadly Email Sins training, the last moment to do so is just three short hours from now, at 8:31pm CET/2:31pm EST/11:31am PST.

After that I will close the cart down, and no amount of screaming, pleading, or clawing on the doors will make it open up again.

This is the last email I will send before then. To get in while there’s still time:

https://bejakovic.com/sme-classified-ty/

Last day ever to buy Copy Riddles

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Today is the last day ever to buy Copy Riddles. At 2:31 EST tomorrow, Tuesday April 18, I will turn off the shopping cart for Copy Riddles and stop making this program available for purchase.

In the future, depending on interest, I will from time to time offer 2-month group coaching around the content inside Copy Riddles, the way I did for a small number of people last year.

The price for that future group coaching, if it does happen, will be at least $1,000 higher than the price for current self-study Copy Riddles course. This coaching will also only be only available to a few people at a time when it is available at all, since my personal time and attention will be required.

All that’s to say, if you’ve already gone through Copy Riddles, or you never had any interest in doing so, then unfortunately I have nothing for sale to offer you in this email. I promise to do better in the future.

On the other hand, if you have been thinking about Copy Riddles but you’ve been on the fence — an uncomfortable and jagged place — then today is the last day to buy Copy Riddles as a standalone, self-study course.

And if you somehow managed to miss the dozens of emails I’ve sent about Copy Riddles over the past days, months, and years, and you’re wondering what this program is really about, you can read the full details, including the experience of many people who have gone through Copy Riddles already, at the link below:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

The best way to market your old course

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In the virtual pages of this daily email newsletter, I’ve gone back over and over to an article by James Altucher, titled, I Plagiarized And You Can, Too!

I’ve written about James’s core idea several times already. I won’t repeat it today. But I will point out the interesting 12 words of advice with which James ends his article:

“The best way to market your first book? Write your next book.”

That’s how the cookie crumbles, book-wise. But what about course-wise?

For the last few days, I’ve been promoting my Copy Riddles course.

This is the third time I am promoting this course at the current price in the past 6 months.

And yet, during this run, over just a few days, I’ve made more sales of Copy Riddles than I did over several weeks of promotion earlier.

The difference is I’ve announced this is the last week to get the free bonuses that come with Copy Riddles.

At the end of this week, I will remove the free bonuses, expand them, and turn them into paid upsells.

So the best way to market your old course?

​​Take your free bonuses and convert them into an upsell funnel. And then advertise that fact well to your audience.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. The candle is burning down. The hourglass is noiselessly draining away.

The free bonuses for Copy Riddles will disappear this Saturday Jan 21, at 12 midnight PST.

The first bonus is Storytelling For Sales. The second bonus is Copywriting Portfolio Secrets.

Don’t buy Copy Riddles just for the free bonuses.

But the majority of people who bought Copy Riddles over these past few days have been on my list for a while.

That makes me think they’ve been eyeing Copy Riddles for a while.

If, like them, you’ve been weighing up Copy Riddles for a similar while, you have until Saturday to get the whole package, free bonuses included. You can do that at the link below:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

sold out

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Just a heads up, nearly half of all the artificially restricted copies of Copy Riddles have sol—

Relax. I won’t go there.

A couple days ago, I tapped into a rich vein of discontent by writing about Justin Goff’s “sold out” email, which tried to push an unattractive offer that had “sold out” fewer than half of all available copies.

Many readers wrote in to say they found this kind of marketing sneaky and misleading (“This email had me screaming at my phone”).

And then, among the many “you tell ’em!” replies, I got a message by a reader named Andre, who wrote in with a suggestion for me:

Your email about no real urgency on infinite+ digital copies reminded me of what Tony Shepherd used to do.

Because he had a fairly large suite of digital products…

He ripped a page out of Disney’s marketing book.

What he did was promote a product for a set amount of time and then…

Put it back into the “vault” where it was unavailable until the next time he promoted it.

It’s an interesting strategy to use for digital products.

Not sure if that would ever work for you, or even a creative variation, but hey, there it is.

The fact is, this model is exactly what I was doing with my Copy Riddles program — until yesterday.

I presold and launched Copy Riddles last year in April. I dripped the content out by email day by day — because I was creating it live, day by day.

After that initial launch finished, I placed Copy Riddles inside a heavy trunk and had the trunk locked and brought inside the Bejakovic Cave of Treasures.

​​I then had the cave sealed with a large boulder and guarded by a large man with a large sword, who only ever said one thing, “Hassan chop.”

It was only every few months that I had Hassan move the boulder and open up the cave. Only for a few days at a time did I let people inside to partake of Copy Riddles treasures.

This model worked well. Each time I made Copy Riddles available for a few days, I had new people sign up. And I made good money.

Plus there were other benefits, too.

For example, many people who had signed up during earlier runs signed up again, since they got lifetime access.

​​On that second or third run, some of them finally consumed all the content, which made it so they could finally get the promise of the course — A-list copywriting skills, implanted into your brain.

​​That was good for them and good for me. Because, promise delivered, they were now that much more likely to become my long-term customers.

Anyways, like I said, that’s the model I used — until yesterday.

As of yesterday, Copy Riddles is now an evergreen course. It’s available year-round, and not just during a few launch periods. And it’s delivered through a members-only area of my site (which I might rename The Cave of Treasures) and not through email.

I’m telling you all this because of the ongoing Copy Riddles “launch.”

All the current “launch” really means is that if you do decide to get Copy Riddles before this Sunday, Oct 30 2022, at 12 midnight PST, you will pay less than if you join Copy Riddles after this “launch” period ends. I will increase the price to $400 on Monday as a first step.

But there’s a second reason why I’m telling you about my course model switch. And that’s in case you ever create and want to sell courses of your own.

How you package up and deliver those courses will have a big impact on how those courses are perceived, sold, and consumed — independent of the content and value inside.

But if you are creating your own courses, don’t assume that just because I changed from the launch to the evergreen model that this is the way to go.

The fact is, this switch wasn’t a decision about money or about the number of sales made.

I simply wanted offers I could promote regularly at end of my daily emails. Copy Riddles is now one of those offers.

But this switch means I’ve lost some of the benefits of the launch model. I’ve had to think up ways to try to reproduce at least a part of them.

We will see if the price increase on Monday will work to stimulate the same kind of urgency as Hassan rolling back the boulder on the mouth of the cave.

And as for those other benefits of the launch model — like people actually consuming the content and getting value out of the course — well, I’ve had to think up other things.

I’ll talk about those in future emails during this “launch” period. Meanwhile, if you want to get Copy Riddles now, before the price goes up, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

“sold out”

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Yesterday, marketer Justin Goff sent out an email with the subject line “sold out”. The body copy immediately explained what was sold out:

Just a heads up, nearly half of the 250 swipe files that are available in the special sale going on today have already been taken…

So they will be sold out soon.

Here are a few things I, and probably many other people who are on Justin’s list, know after this email:

1. Justin has been promoting this affiliate offer for a few days.

2. So have several other marketers with large lists, including some with the largest lists in the copywriting/IM niche.

3. After several days of steady emailing by all those marketers, going out to tens of thousands of people in total, fewer than 125 sales of the affiliate offer have been made. That probably translates to a less than 0.1% conversion rate — and maybe as low as 0.025%.

I don’t know how many sales, and more importantly, how much money, Justin made with this “sold out” email. Maybe he did great. And maybe I will look like a fool for sticking my nose into things that I don’t know anything about.

With that in mind, let me say that Justin’s email is a violation of a fundamental rule of copywriting.

Perhaps the most fundamental rule of them all.

It’s a rule I was exposed to in the mythical webinar training that A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos put on back in 2018. Parris repeated this rule, over and over, while talking about how he evaluates his own copy, and while critiquing many pieces of student-submitted copy. The rule is this:

“Does it help your case, hurt your case, or is it neutral? Only keep it in if it helps your case.”

This rule might seem blindingly obvious. But as Justin’s email above shows, even smart and successful marketers will break this rule — because they get rushed, careless, or greedy.

When I read Justin’s email, my first impression was, “Fewer than 125 copies sold? This must not be a very attractive offer.” My second impression was, “Even if it’s a fine offer, I’ve got plenty of time to get it, since at this rate it won’t sell out soon — in spite of Justin’s alarmist subject line.”

Again, I might be sticking my hoof in my snout by talking about a promotion where I don’t know the actual sales numbers, and one which is still going on.

But the bigger point stands. Does it help your case, hurt your case, or is it neutral?

Anyways, on to my own promotion:

Nearly half of the infinity+ digital copies of my Most Valuable Email course have already been sold.

The remaining infinity+ copies are sure to sell out soon. So starting tomorrow, I will turn my great eye elsewhere, and start promoting my twice-born Copy Riddles program.

That means you might not hear from me about my Most Valuable Email program for a while, even though it will continue to be available for sale.

But hold on—

Is this any kind of way to do urgency? Should the fact that I won’t be pitching MVE for a while make you want to buy it today?

No. Not unless you’re the type to get activated by “sold out” subject lines and other transparent scarcity tactics.

On the other hand, if you like the basic promise of Most Valuable Email — “turn ordinary and rather boring emails into something clever and cool” — then today is as good a day as any to start down that path. ​​And maybe even better than any later day — because if you get going now, you will start seeing the benefits of this little trick in action sooner.

Whatever the case, if you are interested, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

How to create blacker-than-black urgency without a deadline

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This morning, I closed down the Copy Riddles cart and ended the promotion for this run. It’s now time for all the people who signed up to see how I deliver on the promises I’ve made.

Like I wrote in my last promo email for Copy Riddles, 76.7% of those people — well, 76.7% of my total sales — all rolled in the last day. I had more coming in after I wrote that email, so the final number for last-day sales was even higher.

That’s because, like I wrote in that email, deadlines are black magic. In the words of Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap:

“It’s so black. Like how much more black could this be? And the answer is… none. None more black.”

Well, for Nigel’s benefit and maybe yours, I want to tell you that there is a form of persuasion wizardry that might be blacker than black. Let me quickly get my cloak and peak hat on, and tell you what I have in mind.

Over the past few days, while preparing to write my second Most Valuable Postcard, I started reading Rich Schefren’s 12 Month Marketing Blueprint.

I’m a big fan of Rich and just about everything I’ve seen him do. But I have to say the name of this particular offer is misleading. It’s hardly a blueprint. Really, it’s a fully built, furnished condo with pictures of Rich’s family inside.

In other words, what you get inside the “Blueprint” is 310 pages of actual emails, slides, sales letters, and free reports that Rich created back in 2006 and 2007 and sent out to his list and to his JV partners.

If you wanna reverse engineer a blueprint out of this, that’s gonna be on you. You have to do it yourself.

​​But it might be a worthwhile exercise. Because here’s the result of all these hundreds of pages of marketing, from the front page of the Blueprint:

Over 830,000 downloads
Over 1,895 one-way links
$960,000 in the first 2 hours and 15 minutes
From unkown – to known – to well known. From 20 clients to 2,070 clients. From 2 employees to 12.
How I Got Attention and Leveraged it to 7.4 Million a Year company.

I won’t spell out the many smart strategies that Rich uses in this 310-page collection of marketing. (A few of the most interesting ones are going to people who are subscribed to receive my Most Valuable Postcard later this month.)

What I will reveal to you is that blacker-than-black wizardry I mentioned above.

Here it is, right at the top of Rich’s sales page for his consulting offer — the offer that sold out in 2 hours and 15 minutes, and generated close to a million dollars:

“Warning: 32,543 want to know more about my coaching. 4,507 are on a waiting list to get early access (to this page) and 4,284 marketers registered for a teleseminar to get the details of this program. In addition, my joint venture partners will be sending out roughly 1,300,000 emails directing their subscribers to this offer. Consequently, there are only 1000 of 1000 seats available. Many of them are being taken as you read this. Scroll down to secure your spot!”

So there you go. that’s how you create blacker-than-black magic, without a deadline. Right there, in that salad of numbers.

What?

​​You want a blueprint?

A salad is not enough?
​​
Pff… fine.

​​Here’s the actual formula, phrased the way Rich likes to phrase it:

Social proof + Scarcity = Urgency

And now, on to unrelated promotional materials:

If you are interested in my Most Valuable Postcard offer, I have an update for you.

I initially only opened this offer to 20 people, when I first made it available, back in May. All 20 of those 20 are still subscribed to get the postcard.

Later this month, I will reopen my Most Valuable Postcard for the first time, to 20 new subscribers. I’ll limit it again because I’m making some changes to the offer and I want to control how that will go.

My joint venture partners will be sending out roughly 0,000,000 emails directing their subscribers to this offer.

But this email is going out to over 1,300 people who read my daily emails.

And almost 140 of these readers have already expressed interest in signing up for the Most Valuable Postcard. They have joined the waiting list, so they can be the first to get notified and the first to have a chance to sign up when I reopen the Most Valuable Postcard.

In case you’re interested in blacker-than-black persuasion magic, and you’d like to have the best chance to sign up to my Most Valuable Postcard when it reopens, you’ll have to be on my email list first. Here’s where to sign up.

Torture-free deadline for Copy Riddles is near

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Perhaps you don’t care that the deadline to sign up for Copy Riddles is approaching in a few hours. Such is the society we live in.

But it wasn’t always so. For example, Julius Caesar once wrote about a curious urgency tactic used by his enemies, the Gauls:

“By Gallic intertribal law all adult males are obligated to attend the muster under arms; and the last to come is tortured to death in sight of the host.”

Ah the good old days… when a deadline really meant something.

But again, we live in a modern and a civilized society. So the only torture I can inflict upon you is to say:

Come 12 midnight PST tonight (Sunday), I will close the doors to Copy Riddles.

And no amount of pleading about how your car was in the shop, or how the kids were sleeping, or how you only had cash on hand (all excuses I’ve gotten before) will make me crack those doors open a single inch.

​​Not until some uncertain future date, at least a few months down the line, when or if I decide to reopen Copy Riddles.

Again, perhaps you don’t care. But if you do, there’s still a bit of time. Here’s the link:

https://copyriddles.com/

The case against deadlines in your marketing

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Now, the ant may have a fault or two
But lending is not something she will do.
She asked what the cricket did in summer.
“By night and day, to any comer
I sang whenever I had the chance.”
“You sang, did you? That’s nice. Now dance.

Imagine a squat little ant and a tall, lanky cricket, waving to each other across an empty field.

That’s how the sales graph looked for the Influential Emails offer I ran last week.

On the first day, I had a squat but reasonable number of sales. That’s the ant on one side of the empty field. That ant — or rather, the proactive ants who took me up on my offer early — made up 15% of the total sales I got in terms of revenue.

For the next 6 days, I made some sales each day, But really, it was nothing to sing or dance about.

And then, on the very last day, just as I was ready to wrap it up and hunker down for a long and hungry winter, I got a bunch of orders. A tall and crickety spike in the sales graph. Totaling 47% percent of the whole.

So what’s the conclusion?

You might think this is a classic example of why nothing in the world ever gets done without a deadline. And that it’s foolish to allow people to buy your stuff whenever they want, because your garden variety of wanting is not enough to get crickets to act.

That’s one way to look at it.

Another way is that perhaps some of those come-lately crickets would have bought earlier had I not made this into a time-limited offer. Maybe they know they tend to put things off, and they would have acted to prevent this from happening.

Perhaps others would have bought over the coming weeks and months, had I kept reminding them and teasing them with regular, interesting emails.

And perhaps still others would have bought in time who will NOT buy now, because the offer is no longer available.

All those are reasonable arguments against putting a deadline on your offer, at least if you’ve got a good way to stay in touch with your prospects.

The fact is, we will never know.

I run time-limited offers with deadlines because I like it that way. Because it motivates me, and because it’s in line with my own cricket-like nature. And because I’m happy enough with the results, even if those results perhaps could have been higher through some other way of doing business.

Marketer Sean D’Souza was once asked if he has any data to show his contrarian business model works. He replied:

Do we have any data? No, we don’t.

The customers are using this every single day. I’m not actually here to prove anything to you.

What I’m asking you, when you go to a restaurant, does it work for you? When you go on a dating thing, does it work for you? When you go on the Apple site, does it work for you?

If you don’t think it works for you, don’t put it into place. I don’t have data. I started out as a cartoonist, I moved to marketing, and this has allowed us to take three vacations, buy houses, travel, do all the things we really wanted to do. We earn more money than we need.

The point is, if you think it works for you, put it in place. If you don’t think it works for you, that’s not a problem.

I heard this early in my marketing education. It’s stuck with me ever since. Both Sean’s attitude of, “Do we have any data? No, but it works for us.” But also the contrarian view of marketing that Sean was talking about.

Perhaps you don’t know what that contrarian view is. That’s a shame.

Because like Sean says, his way of marketing… well, it allowed him to achieve everything he wanted, on his own terms.

It might give you some good ideas as well. So if you’re curious, little cricket, check out my email tomorrow. That’s where I’ll tell you about the “it” that allowed Sean those vacations and those houses and that money. And you can then see if it might work for you, too.