Salesmanship

How to create value from a broke, flaky, uncommitted audience

by

This week, I’m promoting Newsletter XP, a course on how to build, grow, and monetize a successful newsletter.

The undeniable star of the Newsletter XP show is co-host Alex Lieberman.

​​In 2015, Lieberman started Morning Brew, an email newsletter covering the day’s business news. Within five years, he built up Morning Brew into a 9-figure company. In 2020, he sold a controlling stake in Morning Brew for $75 million.

There’s a bit in the monetization section of Newsletter XP where Alex is asked to give an example of how he pitched big brands like IKEA on buying six-figure ad packages in Morning Brew.

​​Alex obliges.

He delivers a 1 min 24 second masterclass — the pitch he performed 10 times a day, every day, for three years.

​​His pitch is truly impressive because what he is really selling is an audience of 18-30 year olds, largely broke, uncommitted, and flaky — not an audience any serious business would be excited to advertise to.

And yet, Alex does it with such enthusiasm, cleverness, and conviction, that by the end of his pitch, I bet the IKEA marketing execs were begging him to run their ad, versus the other way around.

Once again, this pitch was how Morning Brew got to tens of millions of dollars a year in ad revenue, before Alex cashed out for $75 million.

You can use Alex’s IKEA pitch to inform your own sales strategy if you want to start a newsletter and you’re bent on selling ads to big brands for a lot of money.

Or, you can use Alex’s pitch to guide where you take your newsletter.

Because you might not be getting into the newsletter business to hang out on LinkedIn and pitch marketing managers 10 times a day.

​​The good news is, Newsletter XP gives you real options for both the ad-supported path to monetizing your newsletter, as well as the no-ad path, where you simply create content you love and get paid well to do it.

It’s all there inside the course.

​​I’m promoting Newsletter XP until Monday, Feb 25, at 12 midnight PST. During this promotion, you can get $200 off the usual price of Newsletter XP. Here’s how:

1. Go to the Newsletter XP sales page at https://bejakovic.com/nxp

2. If you decide you want to get Newsltter XP, then use coupon code JB20 at checkout.

3. Make sure the coupon code works — that you see the price drop by $200. This is not my funnel, and if you end up buying at full price, there’s nothing I can do about it.

The seedy underbelly of every industry ever

by

This past Wednesday, the BBC ran an article with the headline:

“The seedy underbelly of the life coaching industry”

The article features the story of a woman named Angela Lauria, age 50. Lauria went in search of weight loss and she wound up with a life coach who charged her $100k and got her to spend thousands more on trainings by other life coaches.

We don’t actually find out what happened to Angela in the end, but presumably she did not make her $100k back via new and bigger successes in her life.

I guess the BBC published this article because life coaching is a booming industry and because it’s still relatively new.

The point, the article says, is not to discourage people from seeking a life coach’s services — because there are good life coaches. But it’s the Wild West out there.

I personally think it’s the Wild West everywhere, and always has been.

My estimate — based on having seen behind the curtain at hundreds of businesses while I was a for-hire copywriter — is that 80% of people doing any job are at best mediocre, and more likely, they are actively bad.

Only 20% of people in any industry are genuinely dedicated, skilled, and get good results on any kind of consistent basis.

So what to do? Well, if you’re looking for a life coach, the BBC article has the following good advice:

“Ask the coach how much of their business is referral, call at least three former clients and don’t buy from anyone who won’t do a call with you directly beforehand. And don’t buy from anyone who needs an answer now – scarcity and urgency is made up.”

Meanwhile, if you want to write a personal email newsletter — to distinguish yourself, to prove your credibility, to promote your products and services — then look at my Simple Money Emails program.

​​Most of the sales for that program came via referrals. And if you’d like to see what a few previous customers had to say, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Dating and business advice to a needy blackbird

by

A few days ago, I was minding my own business, washing the dishes. The weather was warm so I opened the window.

Just as I was in the middle of scrubbing the salad bowl, a little blackbird landed on my windowsill.

“CHEEP,” said the blackbird.

“Oh hello there,” I said. “How do you do?”

The blackbird paced for a moment and then sat down on the windowsill. He seemed to be getting comfortable, which made me frown and pause my dishwashing. And then the blackbird spoke:

===

Interesting that you ask that. Very interesting.

Something I am really struggling with at the moment is securing a mate.

I can’t get a mate for my familybuilding services. Even when I catch the eye of female blackbirds, they seem to smell my neediness from a mile away even if I don’t reveal it intentionally.

I wanted to ask:

How would you go about getting a mate if:

===

… and then the blackbird listed his unique mate-getting situation, which happens to be the same unique situation faced by all single blackbirds, crows, and seagulls, as well as by all individuals, whether human or avine, who are hoping to go from zero to one in any endeavor that involves selling yourself.

I’ve long ago decided that I don’t want to be in the business of taking people or birds from zero to one.

So I just nodded to the blackbird in understanding, picked him up, placed him on the outside window sill, and closed the window shut.

That said, I do have one piece of advice.

I’m only sharing it because it applies to anybody who is looking to do anything new and frightening, whether they are beginners or much more advanced.

It applies to newbie copywriters looking for their first client… to experienced copywriters looking to send their first email to their own list… to business owners looking to go into a drastically more upscale market and charge 2x or 3x or 10x of what they are charging now.

It also applies to securing a mate. In fact, this piece of advice is something I heard from the infamous pick-up coach Owen Cook, aka RSD Tyler, the villain in Neil Strauss’s book The Game.

Owen was talking about the horrifying prospect of flying up to an attractive and unfamiliar female blackbird, in the middle of a park with lots of other blackbirds around, and striking up a fun and natural interaction.

Perfectly easy if you have total belief in yourself and your worth.

Perfectly impossible if you are overwhelmed by fear and self-doubt.

So here’s Owen’s observation:

“The halfway point between fear and total belief is indifference.”

You can’t go from fear and neediness to total belief and confidence.

But you can go from fear and neediness to indifference.

One way to do it is repeat exposure in a short enough period of time.

Go and cheep at seven attractive and unfamiliar blackbirds today. Each of those interactions might go horribly, though they probably won’t.

But whatever the outcome of the interactions, by the end of the seven, you will realize you are still alive. In fact, you are perfectly fine.

Do this a few days in a row, and those innate survival mechanisms, which underlie both fear and neediness, will begin to get habituated and calm down. You will start to get indifferent. And that’s the halfway point to total belief and confidence.

In other words, if you think you have a neediness problem… what you really got is an activity problem.

That’s all the free advice from Bejako’s windowsill for today.

If you’d like to buy something from me, I can recommend my Simple Money Emails training.

​​No, Simple Money Emails won’t replace the need to actually write and send emails, whether for your own business or for a client business.

But Simple Money Emails can teach you my effective one-two system for writing emails, much like this one, that make sales, keep readers reading, and keep birds chirping. If that’s an outcome you’d like as well:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

Two main chain cutters that delink price from product

by

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/

Discipline in print

by

Last night, I got a 4-word reply to my email about how quickly memory fails. A reader with a pseudonymous email address replied with just the following aimless question:

===

John How r u?

===

I got out my 3-ring binder of previous reader replies. I flipped through the pages in search of this reader’s email address. Sure enough, at the bottom of page 22, I found it. This reader had written me before. On January 24 of this year, in response to an email about teaching people to value your offer, this reader had written me to say:

===

Who the fuck do you think you are?

===

Now I remembered. I even wrote an email about that reply back in January.

Back then, I decided to keep this guy or gal on my list because 1) I don’t get many abusive replies from readers, and I’m more amused than bothered when it does happen and 2) I thought this reader might provide me fodder for an email in the future. That’s just what happened.

I proactively unsubscribed my “How r u” reader last night. Again, not because I was annoyed or bothered by the pointless reply.

“How r u” reader simply became a noble sacrifice to demonstrate an immensely important and fundamental point about all marketing, and in particular, about email marketing.

I honestly cannot overstate the importance of the following point. Even more so if you’re somebody like me — far from a born marketer, salesman, or promoter, and coming from a rather permissive and lax family background.

The point is this:

A key to all marketing, and perhaps the key to email marketing, is to train your audience.

Once upon a time, when I was very naive, I thought marketing was simply about getting the word out about what you have. “Whole frozen turkey, 16 lbs., $25.91. Walmart.”

Later, I figured out that marketing actually changes people — creates new desires, habits, beliefs. “Welcome to Marlboro country.”

But for some reason — again, I’m far from a born marketer or salesman – it took me a long, long while to connect the fact that 1) if you are creating marketing and 2) since marketing changes people then 3) you should consciously create marketing that changes people in a way that suits you.

This is what I mean when I say, train your audience. Tell ’em what to do. Reward those who do it. Punish those who don’t. And make an example of ’em.

100 years ago, John E. Kennedy said marketing is salesmanship in print.

Today, John E. Bejakovic is telling you, marketing is discipline in print.

Of course, maybe you don’t agree with me. Maybe you think I’m saying something offensive or crude or just wrong. In that case, I invite you to write in and tell me so. I promise to read what you write me, and to reply as politely and thoughtfully as I know how. Perhaps publicly.

In any case, let’s get on to the discipline:

For the past couple days, I’ve been talking about a group coaching program I’m planning for the future. The goal of this coaching program is to get people writing daily emails, regularly and well.

Right now, if you’re interested, you can get on the waiting list for that program. The waiting list is the only place I will make this program available.

And as I say on the optin page for the waiting list:

If you do sign up to the waiting list, you will get automated email from me with a few questions. Answering those questions will take all of two minutes, but it will give me valuable information to see whether this group coaching could actually be right for you. Please reply to that email within 24 hours with your answers. I will take anyone who doesn’t do this off the waiting list.

So far, a good number have signed up for the waiting list and have written me in reply to that automated email. I wrote back to each of them individually to say thanks.
​
​But a few people have signed up to the waiting list, and then failed to reply to the automated email within 24 hours.

Maybe they changed their minds about the coaching. Maybe they simply forgot. Maybe they were testing me.

Whatever the reason may be, I took them off the waiting list, and I prevented them from getting back on. They might be fine people, but they are clearly not good prospects for a strict coaching program, which is what I intend for this program to be.

If you’re interested in this coaching program, then the first step is to get on my email list. Click here to do so.

Maybe this email will finally melt away your resistance

by

I was talking to a girl a few days ago, and she was complaining about an annoying guy who had hounded her at a club.

The guy stopped her on the way out of the bathroom. Then he came up to her at the bar. Later he sidled up to her on the dance floor.

“Why are some guys annoying like that?” she asked me.

I shrugged. “Because it works.”

My ex-girlfriend once told me her perspective on why she decided to go out with me. I’d gotten her phone number once, during a brief interaction. And then, for about 6 weeks, I texted her every few days. Each time, she had some reason not to meet. She never said no flat out, so I kept texting her. “You were very persistent,” she mused later.

“Yeah sure,” you might say, “but there’s a big difference between being persistent and hounding somebody in an annoying way.”

Maybe so. But based on what I’ve seen, that’s a line that’s often drawn after the fact — after somebody decides either to give you a hard “no” or to take you up on your offer.

In the second case, the person who took you up on your offer will often say that it was your persistence that really won them over, that they found most attractive.

I took a break just now to check Google Analytics. Right now, as I write this, somebody’s on the third and final page of my Copy Riddles sales letter, and two more people are on the first page.

I don’t know if any of these people will decide to buy in the next few minutes. But I have noticed a trend.

I usually promote my existing offers in one-week stretches. For example, last week it was my Most Valuable Email, this week Copy Riddles.

Early in those week-long stretches, I get some sales. But I’ve noticed it takes a few days to get the wheel rolling, to get momentum built up, to get sales coming in unexpectedly and at odd hours and in bunches.

Today is day six of my Copy Riddles promo period. I’ll see if my theory about sales bunching up will be borne out.

In any case, the basic idea stands. As copywriter Gary Bencivenga said once, persistence melts away resistance.

Incidentally, this is something that ties into the very first big a-ha moment I got while following the road that eventually led me to creating Copy Riddles. In case you’d like to read more about that a-ha moment, you can find it on the sales page bwlo, which I’ve shared previously many times, and which I will continue to share:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

I’m either a cold-traffic wizard, or a warm-traffic chucklehead

by

It was the best of responses, it was the worst of responses. I’ll share the numbers with you below. But if numbers aren’t your thing, then I just want you to spot the puzzling contrast between these two sales events:

Earlier this week, I made 21 sales of my Copy Zone offer during 24 hours, to a coldish audience of about 460 people.

That’s roughly a 4.6% conversion rate, at $100 per sale.

So you can either argue that I’m a wizard at cold sales, since the standard conversion rate on cold traffic is 2%, or you can argue that this was not entirely cold traffic, since these folks came from my ad in Daniel Throssell’s newsletter, which ran with Daniel’s endorsement.

Still, most people who bought from me had never even heard of me minutes before they decided to send me money, and had never before heard of Copy Zone. And yet, 4.6% take rate among these people, at $100.

On the other hand, take a less inspiring example:

At the end of Influential Emails, a training I put on in late 2021, I made a 24-hour-only offer for people to pre-order Copy Zone for $50.

Result:

I had one taker out of around 50 people.

These were highly engaged, current customers who had paid $237 for this Influential Emails training. They had spent hours on the training with me, listening to me talk, and interacting with me. Most of them had also bought other other products from me.

So… that’s a 2% conversion rate, at $50, to a warm or even hot audience.

You can say this is an apples to pineapples comparison. Different sizes of audience… pre-selling versus actually selling… and maybe other intangible, untouchable, and impalpable factors.

But I believe I know exactly what the difference comes down to. And unlike in many situations, I don’t believe it’s a matter of offer, of list, of price point, of selling environment, of prestige.

Instead, it’s a rare instance where it’s really about sales copy, about copywriting technique.

I spent a couple weeks in February going for my morning walk while listening, for the third time, to a course by the “21.7 Billion Dollar Man,” Jay Abraham.

This course sums up Jay’s entire marketing and business approach, from getting more customers and clients, to getting more out of your current customers and clients, to enjoying the process more.

Jay talks about salesmanship throughout, and towards the end, he also talks about copywriting.

There’s one commandment Jay keeps repeating over and over. He then illustrates it with a fanciful example of trying to sell a $100,000 Ferrari with a custom paint job.

Jay’s commandment is not new, and it’s really not a secret. But it was ringing in my ears while I was writing the copy to sell Copy Zone a few days ago.

And it made all the difference, at least if you ask me, between a 4.6% conversion rate to coldish traffic and a 2% conversion rate to warm or even hot traffic. The commandment is simply this:

“Layers upon layers of comparable value, of contrast, of measurable ways you could see the benefit, the intrinsic value, and the worth it had to you.”

Jay uses his characteristic “tripled-up” way of making his point above. For me, the first six words are what really matter and what kept ringing in my head:

“Layers upon layers of comparable value.”

Like I say, that’s not new. It’s not a secret. And everybody should really know it, at least if they pretend to call themselves a marketer or a copywriter.

And yet, you have the fact I didn’t “know” it, not so long ago. Even after I had made millions in sales for my clients, even after I had spent tens of thousands on copywriting trainings and courses, and even after I was billed by others, who should have known better, as an A-list copywriter.

It comes down to the difference between having heard something and really knowing it. You can hear a thing once, twice, 10 times. But it doesn’t mean you really know it.

So now I have a recommendation for you. My Most Valuable Email training.

This training is valuable because of what it can do for you — endorsements and authority and even sales. In fact, by applying the Most Valuable Email trick just once at the end of January, I got a completely unnecessary and unexpected windfall of about $2,900 in sales, with zero work. But that’s a story for another time.

For now, I just want to say that the Most Valuable Email is most valuable because of what it does to you. And that’s to inch you closer to mastery, to really knowing, with each email you write using the Most Valuable email trick.

In case you’re interested:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Spewing inappropriate things at Kim Krause Schwalm

by

A while back, I asked my readers which of my emails first came to mind. One reader (not sure he wants me to share his name) had this to say:

===

The first one that jumped out of my memory was “How Copywriters can avoid ham-handed segues that get them eaten alive.”

The first time I read this email, I printed it out.

And to this day, I read it frequently.

Sometimes even multiple times.

It pretty much shaped the way I write now.

The other day I was reading an email from Kim Krause Schwalm that started with a fascinating story.

It sucked me in and kept me scrolling down, begging for more.

And as you might expect now, she jumped into a straight pitch with no transition whatsoever.

Man, I was spewing…

“No, Kim. No, not you. Why?”

I found myself saying some inappropriate things to a person whom I highly respect.

And gues what? I went to reread your email and laugh like a maniac.

The way I see it… It’s like conducting an instant hypnotic induction, then smacking the sh!t out of the person and forcing him to snap out of it.

===

That “ham-handed segues” email is archived on my website. You can find it and read it if you like.

It talks about how copywriters often perform a clumsy bait-and-switch from their fascinating story to their self-interested sales pitch.

Even the best fall into this trap sometimes.

In my ham-handed email, I told a story of an unnamed A-list copywriter who did this bait-and-switch on me, and had me yelling at my laptop. And my reader above had the same frustrating experience with Kim Krause Schwalm.

So how to avoid ham-handed segues?

Get ready. Because the sales pitch is coming. Let me build it up for you. Here it is:

You can find out about that in my Most Valuable Email training.

Because the “ham-handed segues” email uses my Most Valuable Email trick. (And I’m not using that trick in today’s email, in case you’re wondering.)

If you want an explanation of how and where the “ham-handed segues” email uses the Most Valuable Email trick, you can find that in the Most Valuable Email Swipes. That’s a collection of 50 of my best MVEs, which I give you along with the core training of the course.

Look up #10 in that swipe file, and you get an explanation of the trick in action.

Plus as an added benefit, you will learn how to avoid ham-handed segues that get you eaten alive, or worse, spewed upon.

To get Most Valuable Email now:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

4 stories

by

Story 1. John Carlton was interviewing a copywriting client. After hours of ho-hum information, the client casually mentioned how the TorsionFlex Super Saiyan MiracleT golf swing he was teaching was something he learned from a golfer who had lost a leg, possibly in a whaling accident.

​​”Huh?” said Carlton as he leaned in. This turned into John Carlton’s most famous headline:

“Amazing Secret Discovered By One-Legged Golfer Adds 50 Yards To Your Drives, Eliminates Hooks And Slices… And Can Slash Up To 10 Strokes From Your Game Almost Overnight”

Story 2. Dan Ferrari struggled as a copywriter for the first year of his career, only getting work from freelance sites.

​​Things only changed when saw an job listing from the Motley Fool, which I believe he applied to just because it was down the street from where he was living at the time.

These days, he’s known as the number 1, most successful, how-does-he-do-it direct response copywriter out there. ​​

Story 3. Dan Kennedy once had a car repossessed during a seminar he was giving.

​​The seminar was in an office park building with big windows. All the attendees could see Dan go out to the parking lot, knock on the window of his own car, and hand the repo man a $20 tip, as though he was taking the car to get detailed.

4. My mom threw a slipper at me once out of frustration and fear. I was going through a teenage melancholy phase, looking wilted and sad for days, possibly ready for self-harm.

​​My mom kept asking me what’s wrong but I just sighed and turned away. Eventually the slipper came at my head. I managed to dodge it, but it did wake me up.

My point?

I heard recently that door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen were taught to first tell four stories before they go for a trial close.

Now, I’m selling an encyclopedia or an A-Z guide to copywriting. Rather, I’m selling a collection of wisdom that’s been handed from people who made it to the very top of the copywriting mountain.

I’m talking about my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

The three A-list copywriters above, plus me, all feature in the book. No, none of the stories above are in the book. But many others are. In case you would like to read those stories, and maybe obtain some wisdom in the process:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Be grateful you read my newsletter

by

This past weekend I finished removing the free bonuses from my Copy Riddles program. I sent out an email to previous buyers to tell them 1) they will continue to get access to bonuses and 2) when I flesh out those bonuses into paid courses, they will be automatically upgraded to those new courses.

To which I got a response from a Copy Riddles member:

===

Thanks for the update, John. You’ve been treating us OG buyers very well and fairly, and I think you deserve a bit of appreciation!

===

I really do. I really do deserve a bit of appreciation.

I’m telling you I deserve appreciation for two reasons. One is that it’s self-serving — I’m a good guy, and others say so about me. I treat my customers well and fairly, and you should keep that in mind the next time I make an offer.

There’s a second reason also:

If you run any kind of business, chances are you’re doing good stuff that you’re not getting credit for.

That means you’re shirking your duties really. As “guru to the gurus” Rich Schefren likes to say, marketing is teaching prospects to value your offer.

The thing is, valuing stuff at what it’s worth is not something we humans are good at. If you want proof of that, go on Amazon, and look at the thousands of gratitude journals for sale, and the hundreds of inspirational guides telling you how important gratitude is, and how you should practice it regularly.

None of that would be necessary if appreciation came easy to humans.

Oh well. that just means you have to do the work for your prospect, and teach him to appreciate what you do.

So be grateful you read my newsletter. Because I always make a point to share something valuable and interesting, usually something you can take and apply right away, if you only think for a second or two.

Now on to my interesting and valuable offer. It’s my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters book.

The fact is, I could take the content of this book, change absolutely nothing except the format, and sell it as a $100 course instead of $5 Kindle book.

Or I could take that same content, deliver it over in a series of 5 Zoom calls, and charge $500 for it.

And people would pay, and they would get great value from it.

And yet, you can get all this value for just $5.

Perhaps you can guess my reasons why. And if not, that’s a topic for another interesting and valuable email.

Meanwhile, if you still haven’t read my 10 Commandments book, you’re shirking your duties as a marketer. Here’s where you can fix that:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments