Salesmanship

How to promote yourself with as much energy and enthusiasm as you promote other people

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I was talking to a dude today. He’s a very established, skilled, and successful copywriter who works with big clients. He also has his own personal email list and quality offers that genuinely help people.

At one point, the dude complained that, when he promotes other people’s offers, whether for clients or affiliate offers to his list, he can make his pitches for these offer amazing, incredible, stupendous.

“Why can’t I write this way about the my stuff?” he said.

It’s a legit problem, and one I’ve had in the past.

It’s not just a matter of being coy, of not wanting to brag about your own stuff.

A part of the problem is that we’re all simply too close to our own offers, and we take them for granted, or we even focus on the deficiencies, limitations, and problematic corner cases. Beyond that, there are even neurological reasons why it’s dramatically harder to promote yourself with as much energy and enthusiasm as you can muster to promote somebody else.

Well… until now.

(Get ready. I’m about to make you a pitch.)

I have a way out of this predicament, a mechanism, a “Light Bulb Mental Switch.”

It allows you to promote your own offers with the same persuasive energy that you can summon when you promote others’ offers.

It also doubles as a litmus test, a way to double-check your marketing after it’s written to make sure it passes the test. It tells you how to tweak it in order to transform it, if it doesn’t immediately pass.

This Light Bulb Mental Switch is magical, mysterious, and multifaceted.

It helps you promote your own offers the way you promote others. It also helps you promote others even more effectively than you can now.

And now, the deal:

A 24-hour disappearing bonus.

I will reveal to you this Light Bulb Mental Switch if you get my Most Valuable Email training.

Do so and you will learn my Most Valuable Email trick, which I still stand by as being most valuable, all these years after I first hit upon it, and thousands of emails later.

The Most Valuable Email trick is not stupid stories, not predictable personal reveals, and not rehashed references to Batman movies or Game of Thrones episodes.

The Most Valuable Email trick is something entirely new different, much like my Light Bulb Mental Switch.

Get Most Valuable Email, write me before tomorrow at 8:31pm CET, and ask to have the Light Bulb Mental Switch, and I will reply to you and share it with you.

(Don’t write me after the deadline. This is a 24-hour-only deal.)

24 hours from now, you can be nothing but one day older — or you can be on your way to getting rich by promoting yourself the way you really deserve. You decide.

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Coaching is dead

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I’m reading a book called Million Dollar Consulting, by Alan Weiss, in which Weiss makes the claim in a subhead that “Selling is dead.”

A few pages later, Weiss tells the story of how he got started as a consultant:

===

When I was fired and thrust out on my own with about 250,000 independent consultants around around me in the United States, I asked myself how I could stand out. I decided to write and speak, since those are my strengths and you build on your strengths.

[Weiss decided to write an article with a contrarian take on a then-popular methodology, titled, “Quality Circles Are Dead.”]

The quality movement adherents besieged the magazine. I was so stunned, I called the editor to apologize.

“Kid,” he said, “I want you to write an article like this for us every month, and I’ll pay you $50 for each one.”

“But they hated it,” I pointed out.

“They read it,” he pointed back.

I wrote for 72 months, opposing every flavor of the month and program du jour extant. I became known as “The Contrarian.” And that name has stuck to this very day.

===

I’m reading Weiss’s book because the core message of it is to stop selling your time, and to start selling the value of the outcomes you deliver.

It’s a simple enough message, and one that everybody is willing to accept with their prefrontal cortex.

But go beyond that into the other parts of the brain, and the neural activity changes.

I’ve been talking to various business owners and marketers. Almost all of them fail to sell the outcomes they provide, and instead fall into the trap of selling a 16-page PDF, or a welcome sequence, or coaching once a week, every week, for an hour over Zoom.

The trouble is, PDFs are dead. Welcome sequences are dead. And coaching is really, really dead.

Yes, I am playing along with Weiss’s contrarian thing. But I also happen to believe what Weiss says about outcomes, and specifically, that coaching really is dead.

I’ve been working with a number of people this year. Some of the outcomes I’ve promised to deliver and problems I’ve promised to solve for them:

* Build them up into a name on the Internet, and help them make $31k in the process

* Help them define a new offer that sells 3-5 times copies per month for $1k+

* Increase the money they make from their email list to $1 per subscriber per month

In all these cases, what I’m actually delivering is some Zoom calls, some support by email, some copy critiques, and a lot of listening and occasional talking.

All of that could really be bundled up and called “coaching.” But I can tell you it’s been much more enjoyable and easy to sell it not as a bunch of Zoom calls and email support and some copy critiques, but as an exciting and lucrative outcome.

Maybe you offer coaching or some other form of dead deliverable that your audience doesn’t seem to value correctly. Maybe you also have an email list. Maybe you have a problem, or things just aren’t working right, and you suspect that coaching is dead, or deliverables are dead, or email is dead.

If so, reply to this email. I don’t offer coaching, but we can talk, and maybe I have a way to solve your problem, or to help you get to an outcome that you’d be ecstatic over.

It costs you nothing to tell me about your problem. You take not the slightest risk. You cannot possibly lose anything. And you can gain much.

Fears of list rot

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Yesterday I launched a new offer, to help you launch a live workshop, delivered on a specific day that’s coming up soon, which I’m calling Most Valuable Offer.

I’ve had a few people sign up already. Among them was one list owner who said that his motivation is that he worries about list rot, and a live workshop could be a way to light a fire under his feet to combat list rot.

I dug in deeper. I asked him if he had seen signs of rot on his list. He explained:

===

Not signs necessarily.

It’s more that the handful of times I’ve solicited engagement from my list to gauge interest in a particular product I was going to make, I got pretty good response. Then, when I’d start making it, I’d get too far in the weeds, then eventually, get distracted by life or some other thing, and then set it aside.

So, my concern is that they will start thinking I’m a flake who keeps asking for feedback, and then never coming through with the finished product. Which will lead to that rot.

So, I’m seeing this as that chance to spark that life back into the list by getting this MVO launched & out there.

===

One of the chapters I was considering for my “10 Commandments of Con Men, Pickup Artists, Magicians, etc” book was, “assume rapport.”

It’s a common behavior among many influence professionals like pick up artists, sales men, and stand up comedians.

Influence professionals behave how they want you to behave.

They treat you like a lifelong friend because they want you to treat them like a lifelong friend. They trust you because they want you to trust them. They find you endlessly fascinating and charming because they want you to find them fascinating and charming.

There’s a bigger principle here:

We all take our cues for how to behave from other people.

Influence professionals know this, and that’s why they take the lead. As with many things common to influence professionals, this applies more broadly to business and life, in ways that can be perfectly ethical.

In short, the above list owner’s fears of list rot are justified.

If you yourself behave like a flake, people will in time take their cues from you.

They will say one thing and do another. They will be late or not show up at all. They will make excuses or ghost you.

The good news is, the fix is easy, and and you can get started on it today.

The fix is to be punctual, to do as you say and to follow through, to make people a clear offer and ask them for a clear yes or no answer.

The results of that are both instant and long-term.

Instant, as in sales and a spike in engagement.

Long-term, as in a stronger bond with your list, greater trust in you and what you sell, and higher perceived value of your offers.

Like I said, yesterday I offered to help you launch and deliver your own Most Valuable Offer.

You can find the full details below.

If you decide that this offer is not for you, that’s perfectly fine.

If you decide it is for you, comment on the post below if you’re a member of Daily Email House, or if you’re not a member of Daily Email House, send me an email and tell me you’re in.

Here’s the link:

https://www.skool.com/daily-email-house/would-you-like-a-chocolate-chip-most-valuable-offer

Follow up about yesterday’s follow up

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Yesterday, I sent an email telling readers to:

1. Find out who their highest-LTV customer is

2. Reach out to that customer and simply catch up

A couple hours after that email went out, I got a message from a long-time reader who runs a paid newsletter, which she sells via a $2k yearly subscription. The reader wrote:

===

What a great idea, John!

I sorted my Google spreadsheet and found 11 current subscribers stood out as paying in the 5 figs, some of whom surprised me.

Sent them each a nice note since no one in [industry] answers the phone, while they do respond to emails.

Every one of them responded within an hour. Several good convos came out of this.

Also reached out to 6 expired subs worth over 5 figs.

One is in between jobs and will sub once they land somewhere.

Two have retired and miss the blog dearly.

One is waiting for the new 2026 budget to open.

One just re-upped their subscription and thanked me for the reminder.

===

That’s-a what I’m a-talking about!

Particularly impressive I thought was the last line, about somebody who had lapsed as a customer, and who ended up making a $2k purchase after being hit with a little reconnect message.

This morning, I took this to heart and created a spreadsheet which I titled “Follow Up Systems.” It’s a more structured way to follow up with people than simply counting on a kind guardian angel to remind me to do it. My spreadsheet has following columns:

* who

* when (eg. email, Skool)

* where

* about what

* next followup date

* next followup content

I noticed that creating this spreadsheet already took a lot of anxiety around the topic of followup out of my head.

Today, I found myself following up with people just so I could fill in the spreadsheet.

Tomorrow, I figure I will add any conversations in there that have stalled in the meantime.

And then in the days that come, I will sort this spreadsheet by the “next followup date” column, and follow up with people I said I should follow up with then.

Maybe it’s worth creating a spreadsheet like this for yourself right now, if you’re looking for clients, referrals, JV partners…

… except, that’s just the structure, the scaffolding.

What about the content? The stuff you actually send to people?

I figure you have a few options:

1. You can wing it each time.

2. You can craft your own system based on what worked and didn’t work for you.

3. Or you can take somebody else’s system that works.

The Notorious Nick Bandy has a system that works, called Ghostbuster Sequence.

It’s a series of 5 mostly templatized/somewhat adaptable followup messages you can send to clients, referrals, JV partners to get them to say yes or no.

Either a yes or a no is ok. What’s not ok is not following up at all or sending one message and treating silence as a reply, and letting it eat away at your little entrepreneur heart.

Btw, when I say Nick’s system works, here’s a recent story he shared about it:

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Last year I set my eyes on an A+ potential partner, he tried ghosting me. I even wrote about him on the sales page for The Ghostbuster Sequence.

I busted the ever-loving ectoplasm out of that ghost…

Totally flipped the script…

Got HIM chasing ME.

But I got busy…went to Singapore…hibernated for a month, chillin’ with my wife and toddler.

I’m a busy and very important guy.

🦥

He kept following up…over and over again.

And today? Just sent over his entire customer and lead database.

The LIFEBLOOD of his business.

THIRTY THOUSAND CUSTOMERS.

30k!

Do you know how hard I’m rubbing my hands together right now? With an average deal size of $20k and up?

To me. Some random guy. I’m dressed like a K-Drama fanboy in my profile picture. You should not trust this dude with your business. But he did.

Why? Because I’m the best copywriter in America?

No.

Because I read this 9-page, poorly formatted PDF and I know that NO isn’t NO.

===

That 9-page PDF Nick read?

It’s Nick’s Ghostbuster Sequence, which he himself rereads and applies.

The Ghostbuster Sequence will set you back a mighty $54. But it could legit be worth tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to you if you only put it to use.

If you wanna get it, and better yet, want to start using it today, in just five minutes from now:

https://bejakovic.com/ghostbuster

Where to buy crack

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A few days ago, I saw a video on YouTube that has since been taken down, I’m guessing because of the provocative topic.

The video was by a former crack addict, now turned sobriety coach. The title of it was something like:

“I am a crack addict, I can find crack anywhere”

The dude told a story to illustrate:

He used to have a white collar job (tech sales, “always the next easy thing”). At the same time, he was also a crack addict as his true primary occupation.

One day, his boss and he flew to a sales conference in a new town, I believe Orlando.

Sales conference is fine. But the real question was, where to buy crack in this new town, and quick?

The dude couldn’t just ask other sales conference attendees. “Hey are you from here? You know a good place to buy some crack?”

But he did get the info, and from the other conference attendees, and immediately.

Of course he didn’t ask directly.

Not only would he be compromising himself, but more importantly (crack being his primary occupation and interest) he wouldn’t actually find out where to buy crack.

The other conference attendees couldn’t verbalize the answer, either because they would find the question personally threatening or offensive, or because it’s something they had never thought about, because “where to buy crack” is not the way they think about their city.

So what did the guy do?

Simple. He asked, “Hey are you local? Where should I NOT go? Which part of town am I likely to get knifed or gunned down in?”

As the dude tells it in the now-deleted video, within 15 minutes, he had taken a cab, bought a crack pipe, and was smoking. This led to a three-day crack binge, getting fired from his tech sales job, and a shameful flight back home, sitting next to his former boss.

And now, you know where and how to get crack if you ever find yourself in a new town. But if you’re not planning to travel anywhere new, let me point out how this is also relevant to you right where you are.

Forget about the crack for a minute. Put that aside.

Instead, think about trying to sell your offer.

I’ve heard sales described as “the process of getting the truth on the table.”

How do you do that, though?

You can ask, of course:

“Are you overweight by 40lbs or more?”

Sometimes that can work. But in many cases, it won’t — either because people find the question personally threatening or offensive, or simply because it’s something they had never thought about, because it’s not the way they think about their situation.

Maybe the crack-finding parallels are becoming clear now.

The fix, in both cases, is to ask your leads about symptoms. People might not know they have the problem (or in the case of crack, opportunity). But they sure do know the symptoms, and much of the time, they are willing to tell you.

Over the past few weeks, I have been helping a few folks who have email lists and who had previously tried offering coaching to their audience, only to hear an orchestra of crickets. I’m helping them package up said coaching into $1k+ offers that are easier to sell and deliver.

The kind of asking-about-symptoms I just told you about is a part of this process.

Is having a $1k+ offer, which you can readily sell to your list, something that interests you?

If so, hit reply and let me know.

You can’t buy anything here. But if you do reply, I’ll give you a 1-page overview of how this process works, so you can go do it yourself if you like.

50 ways to leave your back spasm

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Yesterday I asked readers for suggestions in dealing with an old-man back spasm that gripped me a few hours earlier.

Well I got suggestions.

Let me tell you some of ‘em, in the style of Paul Simon’s song 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover:

Limber up your hip, Chip

Take a magnesium pill, Bill

Stand more and sit less, Wes

Just listen to me

Roll on a massage ball, Paul

Become a supple leopard, Shepherd

Get some physiotherapy, Lee

And get yourself free

The people who wrote in with suggestions were not trying to sell me anything (thank God) and were just offering help.

(I appreciate everyone who took the time to write me. If I haven’t replied yet to you to say thanks, it’s only because I’m traveling today and am writing this from a plane somewhere between Vienna and Zagreb.)

That said, even though this was not a sales situation, I noticed something inside myself. It might be useful to you if you ever do try to sell people something.

Yesterday I said I’d entertain all suggestions for getting my back spasm to pass.

But today, as I was reading the suggestions my good readers sent in, I noticed I was immediately resistant to some.

It wasn’t because of the suggestions themselves, or because of the people who were giving the suggestion.

Instead it was the way those suggestions were made — with some small detail that simply didn’t fit with my actual situation.

For example:

One person mentioned lower back pain. That’s not where my pain is.

Others talked about chronic back pain. My thing is acute.

Sales trainer Dave Sandler called this “painting the seagull,” as in, forcing a seagull into your prospect’s mental vision of a beach, where the prospect doesn’t see one naturally.

Force the seagull in there, says Sandler, and you create a clash that makes the whole vision disappear. That was my experience today.

The fix to this is (switching metaphors) to play doctor. To ask more questions and get the “patient” to describe his own situation in detail.

Even if your diagnosis ultimately ends up the same, it’s much more likely to be accepted if you listen, and acknowledge the uniqueness of the person standing opposite you, and encourage their mental bubble to expand instead of doing something to make it pop.

This might be useful to you if you ever get on sales calls or anything like sales calls… with prospects for your coaching… or copywriting services… or simply your expensive-ass offer.

And if you want a new plan on how to sell or behave on sales calls, Sandler’s book is still my go-to recommendation. For more info, slip out the back, Jack:

https://bejakovic.com/sandler

The bluebird who paid a $10k bill plus travel expenses

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Recently, I had the idea to take a bunch of my previous emails on the topic of pricing and positioning, and to write a book titled “Charge More,” or something like that.

The basic idea being, charge more for what you offer.

But like “Just Do It,” “Charge More” is one of those bits of good advice that people nod their heads to in agreement, but rarely actually follow.

So rather than just repeating “Charge More” for 150 pages to no effect, I figured I would take a bunch of emails I’ve written, with distinctions and stories, to both inspire people to raise their prices, and to give them tips on how to do so in various situations.

And now that I’ve given you that intro, it seems a good time to share a story by sales trainer Dave Sandler, which I read in Sandler’s book You Can’t Teach A Kid To Ride A Bike At A Seminar. The story goes like this:

Sandler once gave a talk at a business convention, outlining his own homebrewed system for raising salesmen’s self-esteem.

Next day, Sandler flew back from the convention to his home in Baltimore.

At the time, all of Sandler’s business was local to Baltimore. He wasn’t expecting anything to come from the convention.

But the next morning, Sandler got a call from an excited business owner from Indiana, halfway around the country.

The business owner was there at convention. He said he took Sandler’s ideas back to his salespeople. He was flabbergasted at the initial results. He wanted Sandler to come out immediately and give his salespeople the full training.

While this guy talking, Sandler thought to himself, “Well! here’s a bluebird.” It’s like the guy had just flown in through an open window and landed on Sandler’s desk.

At the time, Sandler’s fee for a 2-day seminar in Baltimore was $2,500 dollars (this was in the early 1970s). He was simply waiting for the excited business owner to exhaust himself with talking, and then he’d ask for $2,500 plus travel expenses.

But the business owner kept talking, all about how much money he had spent on traditional sales training… and how happy he had been to hear Sandler speak on this topic, because Sandler was right, and others didn’t get it…

“I do have to spend the night at a hotel and away from home to teach this seminar,” Sandler thought. “Better ask for another $500 and make it an even $3k. I’ll do it once the guy stops talking.”

… but the business owner still kept on, all about the books and tapes and trainings he had purchased for his sales staff, and how none of it had worked… and how much it’s been hurting his business… and how it’s been driving him up the wall and he didn’t know what to do until now…

“I do also have to get on a plane for this,” Sandler thought. “Plus I’ll have to give up some selling time. I’ll tell him the price is $3,500, as soon as he slows down.”

… but the biz owner kept talking and talking, venting and venting, revealing and revealing. Sandler says it felt like the guy talked for an hour, even though it was probably only a few minutes.

Finally the business owner talked himself out. “By the way,” he said, “how much is this going to cost me?”

“$10,000,” Sandler said, “plus travel expenses.”

“Well that’s no problem,” the business owner replied. “How soon can you get here?”

I think there are lots of lessons in this little story. Let me just share one, right at the top, about how Sandler got a warm inbound lead, a bluebird who landed on his desk, ready to to buy without any sales call or persuasion or objection overcoming.

Sandler did it by flying across the country and getting up on stage and giving a talk.

That’s an effective way of getting warm inbound leads, if you’re willing to fly around and get up on stage and give speeches to crowds.

But the same psychology applies whenever you have a platform to speak from, even if that platform is entirely virtual, and even if speaking is really writing, like what you’re reading now.

The key is simply to build a mini-monopoly, a situation in which people in your audience have grown to trust you and to have a relationship with you and to want to work with you specifically, even if you have supposed “competition.”

All that’s to say, if you don’t consistently write daily emails yet, it pays to start. And if you want my help doing so:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

The hottest restaurant in France is its own best salesman

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Yesterday, my friend Sam and I got into a rental car in Barcelona, drove across the Spanish-French border, and found our way into the small town of Narbonne.

There we met “Rebelpreneur” Gasper Crepinsek (whose ChatGPT Mastery I promoted earlier this year) and Gasper’s quite pregnant girlfriend Marie.

The four of us then got in line to be let into the “hottest restaurant in France,” Les Grands Buffets, which we had made reservations for many months earlier.

Like its name suggests, Les Grands Buffets is an all-you-can-eat circus. It only serves traditional French cuisine, and as much of it as you can stuff into yourself across 3 hours.

There was a “lobster waterfall,” oysters by the shovelful, and all the razor clams a body can handle.

There was suckling pig, beef, and lamb (all of which I had)… pressed-duck (which I didn’t)… and vol au vent, a pastry with veal sweatbreads (aka thymus glands, quite good).

There were $25 bottles of champagne that normally sell for twice the price at the supermarket.

At the end, this being France, there was of course cheese, in fact a selection from among 900 cheeses, which, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, is the world’s largest.

I also finished everything off with two trips to the dessert room, and loaded up on multiple slices of various chocolatey cakes, which I covered with a few macaroons as garnish.

By the end, our little group got kicked out because we stayed to the end and beyond.

At midnight, some 8 hours after the lunch, not having eaten anything else for the rest of the day, I went to bed. I honestly felt a bit queasy.

But it was worth it, and I would do it again. Actually, considering how long it takes to get a place at Les Grands Buffets, maybe I will book today for the next time. I could imagine that many other visitors feel and do the same.

And all that, is in spite of the fact that Les Grands Buffets is found in a third-tier city in an out-of-the-way region of France, in an ugly municipal building built in the 1980s that also houses a bowling alley and a pool, and has a skate park outside… and in spite of the fact that Les Grands Buffets effectively does no marketing.

That’s not to say that location is not important, or that marketing is worthless as a profession or a skill.

But even the best marketers know, in the words of the original A-list copywriter and scheme man, Claude Hopkins, that:

“The product, and the mental atmosphere you create around it, should be its own best salesman.”

And on that note, let me remind you of an unusual offer I made this week regarding my Copy Riddles program:

I’ll sell you the right to sell Copy Riddles yourself and keep all the money.

There are a lot of copywriting products out there in the world, but there aren’t a lot of great products.

Copy Riddles is one of the great products, both because of the results it delivers to customers (see my emails from yesterday and the day before for that), and because of the baked-in sellability of the course (see the sales page for that).

And now, if you like, you have the opportunity to sell Copy Riddles yourself.

If you have your own list, you can sell Copy Riddles to your list and keep all the money from every sale you make, from here till eternity.

If you want to create a little cold traffic funnel, and put some lower-ticket items up front, and then use Copy Riddles (a $1k course) as the “main course” that makes it likely your funnel is breakeven or better on day zero, you can do that — and keep all the money.

If you already have lower-ticket copywriting offers, and you want to put a proven higher-ticket upsell behind them, you can put Copy Riddles into your upsell flow — and keep all the money.

Or of course, if you are an enterprising guy or gal who is not afraid to reach out to others who have lists, cold traffic funnels, or offers that are in some way related to Copy Riddles, you can partner with them so they provide the flow while you provide a valuable new offer — and split the resulting money with them, however the two of you agree on it.

Along with the right to sell Copy Riddles and keep all the money you make, I will also provide you with the marketing that has sold this course for me in the past — emails, copy angles, social proof, and promo ideas that have worked.

If you’re interested, hit reply, and we can talk in more detail.

Not reading my email today is expensive

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Yesterday, I promoted an offer called “Unstuck Sessions,” basically consult calls to help people overcome a challenge and get unstuck.

Like I wrote yesterday, that’s an offer that I first heard about from marketer Travis Sago.

I actually have a bit of swipe copy from Travis from when he promoted his own Unstuck Sessions.

An Unstuck Session by definition is pretty waffly and vague. How do you sell “getting unstuck”?

I looked at Travis’s copy. Here’s what caught my eye, from the second half of Travis’s email:

===

What’s it REALLY COSTING YOU to stay where you’re at?

(If you know all these answers, you probably aren’t stuck…LOL)

If you’re making $5k a month…and you want to making $10k…if my math is right…isn’t that a $5k a month problem? a $60k per year whopper of a problem…yeah?

And then…if I may be so bold?

What is the problem costing you in your enjoyment of life?

How much worrying are you doing now?

How much of life are you missing out on? 

I’m not trying to be a sadist.

It’s a courtesy “poke”.

Being stuck is expensive…emotionally, financially AND physically.

===

I happen to know Travis is a student of sales trainer Dave Sandler. And in Sandler’s book You Can’t Teach a Kid to Ride a Bike at a Seminar, Sandler writes:

“While you need to discuss the cost of your product or service, it’s more important to discuss the cost to your prospect if they do nothing.”

I read Sandler’s book multiple times.

I wrote down that line as a note to myself, and then transferred it to my “Library of Rare and Precious Ideas.”

And yet, this idea is something I only rarely and casually remember to apply in actual sales contexts, even though, as Sandler says, discussing the cost of doing nothing is more important than discussing the cost of your offer.

But Travis Sago doesn’t forget. And as you can see above, he actually puts this idea to use in his copy.

Lots of people read. Lots of people take notes.

But few put ideas into action.

And fewer still keep tweaking and fiddling with ideas-put-into-action until those ideas actually turn into big results.

Travis is one of those rare few.

That’s the reason why Travis is the #1 person I’ve been following and learning from for the past two years.

Actually I take that back. Travis is pretty much the only person, at least living person, in the space of marketing/copywriting/persuasion/online businesses, that I’ve been listening to and learning from.

This is also the reason why I keep promoting Travis’s Royalty Ronin membership.

As for the cost of Royalty Ronin:

Right now, you can get into Royalty Ronin for free, for 7 days, so you can test it out. After that, Ronin costs $299/month.

I guess I had to cover that. But the following is much more important:

If you are a copywriter who works with clients, then what is it costing you to not spot your client’s “trashcan assets”… or not know how to persuade your client to give you control of such asset… or how to monetize them?

In my experience, it can easily be costing you $10k this very month, and $200k feasibly over the course over the next year or two.

And if you have your own list, what is it costing you to keep “creating” new offers to put in front of your list, instead of “producing” new offers, the way Travis teaches?

Again, in my experience, it can easily be costing you hundreds of hours of unnecessary work in the coming weeks if you are working on creating a new offer.

To rub salt into the wound, it might also cost you $15k-$20k in foregone sales by the time you release that offer, both because you missed out on promoting other “produced” offers in the meantime, and because “created” offers often fail to sell as well as “produced” offers.

In other words, not being inside Royalty Ronin is expensive… in terms of time, stress, and money.

If you’d like to stop that, starting with a free trial:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

Double-checking the windows of sales escape

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A true story, I mean, analogy:

A couple weeks ago, I was walking around town when a freak thunderstorm set in. I was only about a couple hundred yards from my apartment, but there was no braving this.

First, hurricane winds picked up, then a torrential downpour, finally large hailstones started beating down.

Along with a few dozen other people, I huddled in the metro station tunnel while the gods wore out their fury.

“Good thing I closed all the windows at home,” I chuckled to myself, as ominous music swelled in the background.

I got home and sure enough—

In the middle of the living room, a ficus ginseng plant, which banker and email-writing career coach Tom Grundy had sent me last year, was lying toppled over on the floor. Soil from the plant was all over the room.

“How did this happen?” I asked, possibly out loud. I walked around the apartment and came across a large puddle. One of the bedrooms was entirely flooded, including the mattress, which had soaked through.

It turns out that the window in that room was shut, but it wasn’t shut tightly enough. The furious wind blew it open, and then the rain and hail flew in, flooding the room, soaking through the mattress, and knocking over the plant in the living room and tossing the soil everywhere.

(The plant survived, by the way. It’s looking at me right now.)

I’m about to try to spin this story of emergency and disaster into a copywriting lesson, if you can handle one of those.

Last night, I hosted one of the Q&A calls for Copy Riddles, as part of the last-ever live cohort I will run of that program.

Several skilled copywriters and marketers submitted their bullets for the weekly CR bullet contest, including the following:

“How you could double your child’s IQ with this doctor-recommended breakfast switch. Page 17”

It’s a great bullet. It’s got a big promise I imagine most parents would respond to… a simple and intriguing mechanism… and proof in that phrase “doctor-recommended.”

There’s only one niggling thing, and it’s that, to my mind at least, the reader could read this and say, “Oh, great to know such a doctor-recommended breakfast switch exists! I’ll ask my pediatrician about it the next time I take the little monster in to see him.”

In other words, there’s a small, minor, minuscule chance, however unlikely, that the reader can be sold entirely on the promise of this bullet… and still won’t buy.

And that’s my analogy for you.

“You gotta close off all the windows and doors of escape for your sale” — maybe you’ve heard that advice before.

I know I did, but it didn’t really sink in for a long time.

In any case, knowing it is not enough, because really you have to know your audience as well, and keep learning about them, and keep shutting off all their paths to escape, including new ones that pop up.

Otherwise, even a seemingly shut window (bear with me here) can blow open unexpectedly, and then you have the sales equivalent of a mess in the living room and water all over the place and a mattress that’s been soaked through.

In other words, you have a lost sale, with good work put in and nothing to show for it. So it makes sense to double-check and triple-check the windows and doors of sales escape, using everything you know already and are learning about your skeptical, guarded, and inert prospects.

All right, analogy over. As for my offer:

While this is the last-ever live cohort for Copy Riddles, this program remains alive as an evergreen training.

Several of the people currently going through it have been through it three or more times already, on their own.

I also have it from a reputable source that Copy Riddles, even without the Q&A calls, is the best way to gain the money-making skill of writing sales bullets, short of being one of Parris Lampropoulos’s copy cubs. (I heard this from Vasilis Apostolou, formerly a copywriter at Agora, and now one of Parris’s copy cubs.)

If you’d like to find out more about Copy Riddles:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/