Speaking

The structure of a $995 course that sells itself

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Yesterday was the first day of a new course I’m taking, “Ultraspeaking Fundamentals L1.”

It’s a cohort-based course, delivered live over Zoom, which gets you better with public speaking in 15 sessions over 5 weeks, 3 to a week.

There are two parallel cohorts. I’m in cohort 34A, which has over 50 people inside. I’m guessing the other cohort has similar numbers.

The price tag for this course is $995. If you assume 100 students for the 5 weeks, that’s $100k in revenue, I’m guessing 95% of which is profit.

Sounds like a pretty nice education business. And if you ask me, it all comes down to the unique way it’s organized and run:

1. After a bit of waffling up front by a team of two coaches — really previous students who are probably getting paid something, but not much — the 50+ attendees are broken up into small “pods” of 3 participants each.

2. The pod members self-organize so one of the participants becomes a “pod leader.” The pod leader basically shares on his or her screen the day’s instructions from the Ultraspeaking course area, keeps time, and hits play on a couple of videos that walk through key concepts.

3. The pod members then take turns playing little games that build up core public speaking skills.

For example, yesterday mainly consisted of “rapid fire analogies”:

You get a sequence of randomly generated analogies — “a bicycle is like ice cream because…” — and you have a few seconds to both read out the prompt and to complete the analogy in some way before the new prompt pops up.

The point is not to come up with a clever analogy (“because they make childhood sweet?”) but to develop the core speaking skill of staying in character, and to authoritatively say whatever stupid thing you have to say (“because they both have wheels”) so that it looks like you know what you’re talking about, even if you don’t.

4. The two coaches who waffled at the start roam around the pods and offer occasional “expert” feedback.

5. But really, this entire experience is largely prerecorded, almost entirely student-run, and from what I can tell so far, fantastic.

I’m sharing this with you in case you also sell information, or rather, transformation.

The fact is, regardless of how good the information you sell is, it’s 100% useless unless your students put it into practice in some form.

If on the other hand you’re looking to sell transformation, it makes sense to think about how to bake that into your product. As Ultraspeaking shows, this doesn’t have to spend a ton of your money or time to make this happen. But it’s not just about making the course more transformative.

In my case, after I heard how Ultraspeaking was organized, it was a very easy sell, even at that $995 price tag. Also, I imagine most of the 100+ people who are going through it with me right now will be very happy with the investment, and will go on to proselytize for the company.

Compare that with a $995 pure information course, which typically takes a lot of selling, both before and after, and which even so the majority of buyers will not complete or do anything with, and will only think back on with a mixture of guilt and regret, regardless of how good the info inside is.

That’s something to think about, again, if you sell information or transformation.

In entirely related news:

My offer for you today is Most Valuable Email, about an email copywriting trick that is not stories… not personal reveals… not controversy… not conflict… not contrarian points of view.

Instead, the Most Valuable Email trick is something entirely different, something that I would do from here til doomsday, every day, if the email marketing gods forced me to use just one kind of email without ever changing.

Part of Most Valuable Email is a set of Most Valuable Email Riddles in the end of the course, in which I give you a prompt, invite you to apply the Most Valuable Email trick, and then compare your answer to an answer I provide.

That set of riddles is a bit of experience and transformation that I baked into the course. But really, the whole point with Most Valuable Email is that the value of it is when you take the MVE trick and apply it to your own emails, every day, or every week, or however often you want to charm your audience and make yourself into a more valuable marketer.

As course creator and email marketer Rafa Casas wrote after going through Most Valuable Email the first time:

“Thanks for the course. It’s true that it can be read in an hour, but it needs more resting time and practice to get the full potential out of it. Which is a lot.”

If you’d like the full info on Most Valuable Email:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Platform is magic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Mysterious showman’s unnatural advice

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For the past four days, I’ve been promoting my new coaching program, but maybe I should stop.

Days one and two produced a lot of response.

Day three produced less response.

Day four has so far produced no response.

It might turn out somebody will still respond to yesterday’s email. After all, I sent it out less than 12 hours ago.

Or it might turn out I’ve genuinely tapped out demand. Especially since I’ve been trying to disqualify people pretty hard in my copy.

Or it might just be that my audience is getting weary of my recent barrage of long, charged, promise-heavy emails.

In connection to that last possibility:

I want to share a tip with you from the mysterious Derren Brown.

Brown is a hypnotist and illusionist and mentalist who has spent a lot of time on stage performing to big crowds, and a lot of time on UK’s Channel 4, making mindbending TV specials for audiences of millions.

Writing once about his experience playing to crowds, Brown gave this advice:

The lesson I quickly learned, which goes against every natural instinct when you are on stage showing off to people, is that if they are losing interest and starting to cough, you must become quieter.

Let me test out Brown’s advice.

So no benefits of my coaching program today. No man-or-mouse copy. Not even any deadline countdown.

I will just quietly remind you that I will be offering a coaching program with a focus on email marketing, starting in January. In case that interests you, the first step is to get on my email list. Click here to do so. After that, we can talk in more detail.

The top 3 factors to your success in life, ranked

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This morning, following a walk down to the beach, I rushed back to my apartment, jumped onto the couch, and started clapping my hands in excitement.

It was a close call, but I made it in time!

The next episode of my favorite new show was about to start. I wouldn’t want to miss it for the world.

The show is soooo good. You should definitely check it out. It’s called “How to Speak” and it stars a very funny and charming guy named Patrick Winston.

“How to Speak” was recorded in 2018. And really, it consists of only one episode, or maybe episode is the wrong term.

“How to Speak” is really the recording of a talk, given by Winston, at MIT, the university where he was a professor for over 40 years. For most of those 40+ years, Winston gave his “How to Speak” talk, each year to bigger and more enthusiastic crowds.

So fine. You got me. The only “true” bit of my story above is that I keep watching “How to Speak” over and over, like a favorite new TV show.

I watched it once already… now I’m on episode 2, I mean, the second rewatch… and I will probably keep bingeing on it until nausea sets it.

Why watch some MIT professor like he’s Seinfeld?

Well, Winston gives you a good reason right at the start of his talk. Your success in life, he says, will be determined by:

1. How well you speak…
2. How well you write…
3. The quality of your ideas…

… in that order. This “in that order” part is super important.

Yesterday, I talked about Stefan Georgi and a recent email he sent out about a $500k project he just finished.

The point that stuck out to me was that, here was Stefan, one of the best copywriters in the world, full of relevant samples and industry status… repeatedly writing unanswered emails to a business owner he had never met, trying to follow up and close a copywriting project.

Crickets. No response.

And then there was Stefan again, some time later, running into the same business owner at a conference, and instantly, deal gets closed, and for much more money than before.

In my mind, this is part of what Winston is saying above with that “Speaking, writing, ideas — in that order” stuff.

Of course, Stefan wasn’t at that conference to give a job talk, or to present his new research paper on “The Unreasonable Effectiveness Of The Unique Problem Mechanism.”

But the story still shows the power of personal, high-definition, warm interactions over even the most effective “cold” marketing and networking techniques.

That’s something to keep in mind, whether you are looking for success in your own product business… or as a copywriter working with clients.

All right, I gotta get back to bingeing on my cool new show. So my offer for you today is simple.

A few days ago, I sent out the first Most Valuable Postcard to my first 20 subscribers.

The premise of MVP that it’s an un-newsletter. Rather than telling you sexy secrets that sell for a lot but aren’t really worth much… MVP is all about fundamental factors to your success, which need to be regularly practiced, but which are guaranteed to produce big results.

The Most Valuable Postcard is not open to new subscribers right now. And given the amount of work it took me to produce the first one, I’m not sure it ever will be reopened.

But in case I do reopen it, and you would like to be notified, you can sign up to my email newsletter. The next episode of that particular show airs tonight.