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Solid as a rock

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I was on the Barcelona metro yesterday, bouncing along, keeping my eye out for potential assailants, and listening to a podcast — James Schramko interviewing Ryan Lee.

In case those names don’t mean much to you, both guys are highly successful, highly influential Internet marketers.

Both James and Ryan have been at it for decades.

Both have made many millions for themselves, and probably hundreds of millions for their various coaching clients.

For example, Ryan has coached multimillionaire fitness marketers like Mike Geary (PaleoHacks, Truth About Abs) and Jeff Cavaliere (Athlean-X, 14M subscribers on YouTube).

James on the other hand has coached multimillionaire info marketers like Ryan Levesque (ASK Method) and Kevin Rogers (Copy Chief).

Point being, both Jeff and Ryan are the real deal when it comes to knowledge of Internet marketing and to getting actual results.

At the end of the interview, just as I was nearing my stop, James summed up the takeaways of their call, with Ryan jumping in:

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JAMES:

1. Find a way to get recurring income

2. Keep it as simple as possible

3. YouTube is a strong front-end driver and potentially a good income earner

4. Email is still solid as a rock

RYAN: No matter what you do, whatever social platform you pick…

JAMES: … build an email list.

RYAN: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram — get ’em on your list, because at the end of the day, you control it.

JAMES: That’s the simple advice that people ignore.

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I’m telling you all this because there are still people who say they don’t have time to email.

Maybe that’s you too.

I’m sure you’re busy, and you have lots of stuff to do. Work, family, dog, cat.

I can completely understand.

I just wanted to share the point of view of James and Ryan above, because they are both very experienced… because they both make very nice money by working something like 10-15 hours a week… and because they are not in the business of selling email marketing or email copywriting.

And yet, both agree that there are only a few needed ingredients for long-term success… and that email is one non-negotiable part of that. (By the way, they both practice what they preach, and write emails, as Ryan says, dailyish.)

If you want to follow their simple advice, and you also want to see how to write dailyish emails faster, in as little as 15-20 minutes a day, without being particularly creative or inspired, then take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

20-lbs of ground beef worth of relaxation and security

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I have many fond memories of driving with my friend Sam to Costco, both for the $1.50 hot dogs and to stock up on 36-packs of Newcastle brown ale for our college apartment.

Costco, as you might know, is a chain of retail stores that operates through a membership club.

Costco has hangar-sized stores all around the North American continent, filled with everything you might ever need for your home — couches, outdoor saunas, gardening equipment, car tires, hot tubs, jugs of liquor, 72-lb wheels of Parmesan cheese, and 4-gallon buckets of mayonnaise.

Whatever you buy at Costco is always huge, and always at a huge discount over what you might pay elsewhere.

Now that you have that background, perhaps you can appreciate how chuffed I was to find out, after all these years, that Costco also has an in-house magazine, which goes out to more subscribers across the United States than Better Homes & Gardens, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic combined.

Sure, you might say, but who reads it.

Not only do people read the Costco magazine, but celebs fight to get on the cover of it.

Example:

Jimmy Kimmel, late-night talkshow host and four-time tuxedo-clad host at the Oscars, begged his publicity team to get him on the cover of Costco magazine.

Why?

“Because I love Costco,” said Kimmel in a recent NY Times article. Kimmel described the deep happiness he experiences when he comes home with 20 pounds of ground beef. “I go there for relaxation. I don’t like to run out of things.”

Think about it a little. How crazy is that?

I mean, we know people like security, that it’s one of our most basic needs. But 20 pounds of ground beef at Costco, to fill a need for security?

If you were ever tasked with writing an ad for Costco, I imagine you might emphasize the convenience, the money-savings, maybe even the club aspect of it.

But Costco as a salve for existential angst?

For me, the only way I would ever think of this as a selling point for Costco is to hear it from Jimmy Kimmel’s mouth.

Point being, the right sales angle can sell the strangest things (a four-time Oscar host, begging to be on the cover of Costco magazine, because security).

But how do you find the right sales angle?

You can get there by experimentation, by throwing spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks… though that might take more time than universe has before it turns into a cold and empty shell.

Or you can get there by research, going to your market, and really talking to them. I mean REALLY talking.

Again, do you think that if you ask somebody at the Costco parking lot why they come to Costco, that their first response would be, “Because I’m terrified by the scale and unpredictability of the universe?”

Or last, you can go and look at 3-5 top competitors in your market, particularly ones who are running long-form direct-response advertising.

See what they appeals they are making. Because those people have already done steps 1 and 2 above, and what’s floated to the top of that milk pail by definition is rich cream.

And now my offer, my old war horse, Copy Riddles.

I won’t pretend I planned to promote Copy Riddles today. I mainly wanted to share the above story of Costco magazine, and I didn’t think too much about how it would sell Copy Riddles.

But regarding research, or at least looking at top competitors in your market:

Take a source text such as a brochure describing some vitamins or hams or potato salad at Costco. Write your own sales pitch for that. Then look at what a top A-list copywriter, like Gary Bencivenga or Gene Schwartz or David Deutsch did with the same.

What you will find is, sometimes the A-list copywriters really will just make an appeal to money-saving or convenience.

But often they will do more than that. They will appeal to deeper, more fundamental psychological drives.

This is something you can train yourself to look out for, and even to do instinctively.

In fact, that’s what Copy Riddles is all about, using the approach I just laid out for you.

I don’t know what market you’re in, but odds are good that you’ll find examples of source material from your market inside Copy Riddles, along with bullets written to sell that source material by some of the greats.

There’s even a section inside Copy Riddles I call the Dirty Dozen, where I lay out some of the deeper, stranger psychological motivations that go beyond the convenience and money-savings, appeals that most B-level sales copy defaults to.

If you would like to get more info about Copy Riddles, and maybe find a bit of safety and control in this massive and incomprehensible world, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

A newsletter I’ve been fascinated by for years

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Last week, I awarded the Best Daily Email Awards, and the first of those went to Josh Spector of the For The Interested newsletter.

I’ve been fascinated by Josh’s FTI for years. In fact, I wrote about it last year under the subject line, “The opportunity of the two-sentence newsletter.”

Every day but Sunday, Josh sends a daily email that typically clocks in at under 50 words. That makes each day’s email easy to read, I’m assuming easy to write, and yet indisputably profitable.

(Josh monetizes his newsletter by promoting his own offers and by running classified ads. I don’t know the inside of Josh’s info publishing and coaching business, and how much that’s making. But the classified ads alone bring in close to $10k each month.)

I’m telling you about this because it puts the lie to the idea that effective daily emails have to be hundreds of words long, or have to take hundreds of minutes of your life to write each week.

And by the way, Josh’s emails cover topics like marketing and creativity and online businesses. But his ultra-brief daily email model could be replicated as-is in other niches like health, parenting, or investing.

If you’re curious to see how all of this works, and maybe even get hooked on Josh’s daily emails, the link is below. I’ve been a reader for years. If you’d like to give FTI a try yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/fti

What comes after email promos?

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Last week, I got an email with the subject line, “quick question John.” I opened it up to read:

“I’ve been following your work since you’ve launched Simple Money Email – love your stuff!”

Mhm, sure you do. It’s Simple Money Emails, with an s, in the plural.

I skimmed over the rest of the guy’s message, which tried to be clever and funny. Finally, I got to the offer at the end:

“Would you be interested in re-launching Simple Money Email (or any other one of your courses) – to make $25k, $50k–and depending on your list size–even $100k… by the end of May?”

I would absolutely love that — especially since this cold email pitch hit my inbox on June 3rd, three days after the end of May.

But whatever. My point here is not to take apart this guy’s cold email and all the problems in it.

My point is simply to highlight that I, John Bejakovic, who am currently a hot seat coach in Shiv Shetti’s Performance Copywriter Method mastermind, where we teach people how to do email promos, am being pitched by copywriters I’ve never met, who want to run an email promo to “relaunch” my course for me.

All of which makes me wonder what’s coming in the future.

​​​Not necessarily as a replacement for email promos. Email promos work, the same way that email marketing works, the same way that marketing works.

No, what I’m wondering about is what will be the next business opportunity.

​​What will copywriters latch onto next as a thing to pitch to business owners?

​​What will business owners latch onto as the next business opportunity to pitch to people, copywriters included?

I have my own ideas about this.

​​But I’d like to hear yours as well.

​​If you’d like to share them with me, hit reply.

​​I’m not promising anything in return. But who knows, maybe we can get into an interesting conversation, and figure out something valuable for the future.

Too busy NOT to send daily emails

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Next Thursday, May 23, I will hold a live workshop. I still haven’t decided on the final name for it. For now, I’m just using the exciting placeholder, “Daily emails for your personal brand.”

Since yesterday, I’ve been having conversations with people who expressed interest in this workshop.

Many people brought up the same problem over and over, in different words:

“I’m too busy to send daily emails.”

“No capacity.”

“Time constraints.”

About that:

Many moons ago, in the unsteady and unreliable pre-daily-email era of my career, I had to write a sales letter for an ebook about meditation.

It was a formulaic sales letter, one of those built around 4 myths.

One of the myths I attacked was, “I’m too busy to meditate.”

My claim back then was, you’re too busy NOT to meditate. If you make a habit of meditation, you will get tasks completed more quickly and you will free up more leisure time.

I’ll make the same claim for sending daily emails.

There are many days when the only thing I get done, business-wise, is to write and send an email to this list.

I write about some idea that excites me or that I find fun. Sometimes it takes an hour. Sometimes it takes 20 minutes.

At the end of the month, I’ve written some 30 emails, which I can reuse, resell, or resend as I see fit.

I’ve also inevitably made sales due to those emails, which add up to a reliable 5-figure income each month.

Plus, in the process, I’ve gotten a bit better at selling. And I have 30 days’ worth of data from my list, which I can use to inform future offers or future marketing.

These daily emails aren’t the only thing I do. But they are the one thing I do every day.

Because ultimately, these daily emails have freed up lot of time for me. Personally, I use that time to take a walk, go to the gym, meet with friends, read a book, or simply stare off into space and think.

You might have better leisure-time preferences than I do.

But if you don’t have enough time to enjoy them now… well, to me that’s just an argument for sending daily emails.

Like I said, the workshop on actually doing so will happen next Thursday, May 23. It will be quick. That’s because I aim to make it very concentrated with practical info.

The cart for this workshop is open now, and it will remain open until I close it, next Wednesday, May 22nd, at 8:31pm CET.

I’ll have more to say about this workshop over the coming days. So if you’d like to hold off from making the decision whether or not to join this workshop, you can.

On the other hand, if you know already you want to join me next Thursday, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/daily-emails-workshop

P.S. Yesterday, I ran a contest for a free ticket to this workshop. I chose the winner at random from the people who replied to express interest. The winner this time around turned out to be Tom Render, of the Southwick Renders.

Tom, if you’re listening to this message, please come down to the DJ booth to claim your prize.

On the other hand, if you’re not Tom, then the only way to get inside this workshop is via the link above.

How to get customers to consume your info products

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In short, you give them a kick in the pants. In long:

Many years ago, in a country far, far away, I was reading one of Ben Settle’s print newsletters.

In that newsletter, Ben was preaching the importance of “consumption.” Not the disease, but actually getting your buyers to go through the book, course, or program they bought from you.

It’s consumption, Ben claimed, that turns buyers who buy once into customers who buy from you over and over.

That’s why Ben preached creating your offers with a view to consumption… pricing your offers with a view to consumption… and selling your offers with a view to consumption.

I was reading this, and I had what I thought was a bright idea. I thought I had spotted something that Ben had missed. So I wrote him an email and asked about it:

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Have you ever used email to encourage consumption of an info product (or another product) after the sale?

… like sending out regular elBenbo emails to people, except changing the CTA to say, “If you wanna find out what the secret is, you’re in luck, because it’s right there on page 72 of the book you just bought.” I feel like the direct response standard is to say, “Thank you, you’ve made a great decision” and then to move on to selling the next product in line.

===

Ben wrote back an hour later with a message that just said:

“I think that’d be an excellent idea for anyone motivated enough to do so.”

I was a little disappointed that Ben wasn’t more keen on my brilliant idea. ​​But that’s because I’m a little dense. A little slow on the uptake.

The fact is, Ben does send followup emails getting people to consume his books and courses. He just doesn’t do it right away, but in a few weeks or months time, when it’s time to promote the same offer to his list again.

Of course, I do this too, and so can you.

Sell something, and then keep selling it in plain sight of people who have already bought. Keep it up until you get people to consume what they’ve bought and until you turn buyers into customers.

But does this really work?

Here’s a message I got last night from Howard Shaw of Chester Toys, a UK toy wholesaler that’s been in business for 60 years. Howard wrote:

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What I like about your emails, John…

Is there is usually something that resonates, and then when I notice the offer link, they serve as a kick-in-the-pants reminder to go and read that course again, as each time I go through one of the multiple items I have purchased from you, I always find something new, fresh and relevant to use.

===

Again, you can do this too. A swift kick in the pants a day, reminding your customers of the value they already own and can benefit from right now.

Of course, that same kick in the pants might also motivate a new buyer to try you out for the first time. It certainly happened with my email yesterday.

If you too would like to get started with this powerful habit today, here’s a resource that might help you out:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

The solemnization of your union to your…?

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Dearly beloved—

We are gathered here today so that I may call out a few honourable and dishonourable names:

– Brian Kurtz calls his customers his “online family”

– Dan Kennedy calls his customers his “herd”

– Ben Settle calls his customers his “horde”

Why does this matter? I’m not sure, but it does.

The human brain likes to think in metaphors. It likes to leech emotional context from one thing to another. It likes to take vague and inhuman concepts like “email addresses in a database” and turn that into something more familiar and concrete, like a family or a herd of cattle.

Therefore I require and charge you to think about the kind of metaphor you are using or not using. This will solemnize your union to your audience. I mean, to your tenants. I mean, to your parishioners.

Clearly, my own mixed metaphor still needs some work. But I’m experimenting with it.

Wilt thou experiment as well? Then take a look at the page below, because it might be helpful:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

My advice about starting a new health publishing business

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A reader replies to my email yesterday and asks about starting a NEW project:

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I’ve taken a break for a while from all emails and only just resubscribed. So I was wondering how your health project that you mentioned a while back is going.

I ask as I’m thinking of starting an affiliate content site in the sleep market but the clickbank Spark program kind of advises against pursuing health related topics unless you’re a health professional due to Google’s bias towards sites of professionals and organisations.

I was just wondering if this is good advice in your experience. I find picking a topic harder than the process of internet marketing itself.

===

I can only share my personal experiences and observations, based on writing and running a health newsletter.

As I said in my email from a couple days ago, I am no health expert.

​​But my health newsletter is growing and has good engagement.

​​There seems to be solid content-to-audience fit.

​​In spite of writing it pseudonymously, I am even building up a kind of authority in the field.

And yet, I am very seriously considering shutting down my health newsletter, soon, unless something drastic changes.

My trouble is the offers I’m making to my audience.

As I said during “How I do it” presentation back in February, about how I write and profit from this daily newsletter about marketing:

​One of the big lessons I’ve learned is you want to have a high-ticket offer as the bedrock of your email newsletter. ​Something that is reliably worth hundreds, or preferably thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to you.

I don’t have any such offer for my health newsletter. As for affiliate offers, at least in my corner of the health market, they will never pay out that kind of money.

I still have not given up on my health newsletter. I’ve witnessed over the past couple days at the conference in Palm Beach how much interest and frankly money there is in the space.

I’m just not sure that building up an email newsletter, and then trying to figure out how to monetize it a few nickles or dimes at a time, is the right way to go.

So if you don’t have your own high-priced info product that you’ve created or licensed… if you don’t have a service that you charge thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for… if you don’t have some kind of owned subscription that you know will on average net you hundreds or preferably thousands of dollars for each new customer…

… then my advice is to get that sorted first.

On the other hand, if you do have a good offer — your own services, or high-ticket products, or membership in a cult — then an email newsletter can be immensely valuable.

But you probably already know that, because I keep repeating it.

And you probably also know about my Simple Money Emails course, and how it can help you write an email newsletter, because I keep repeating that.

But if you could benefit from Simple Money Emails, and you still haven’t done so, you can get more info about this training here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Ben Settle or Gary Bencivenga could hardly charge this much for emails

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As I write this, I’m at Baltimore Washington International, the “Best Airport in North America,” as the wifi popup window will tell you.

I’m waiting for my flight to West Palm Beach. I will spend the next few days there at a conferences related to my health newsletter.

My last day in Baltimore means it’s the last day for a while that I will promote Shiv Shetti’s Performance Copywriter Method.

Not because PCM is going away or because I am done being part of it.

It’s not. And I’m not.

I continue to work inside PCM as Shiv’s “hot seat coach.” And from what I can see with my inside perspective, Shiv will only grow PCM bigger, and soon.

So I will promote PCM again in the future. And if you are interested in PCM in the future, you will be able to join then.

I am telling you this because I am trying to tamp down any urgency on purpose.

Joining PCM is a big decision. This is not simply another copywriting community you should join or another product you should buy — and then do nothing with.

On the other hand, PCM can be right for you if you are frustrated with your copywriting business now, and you’re legitimately looking for something different.

And on that note, let me share a totally different result from Luiz, one of the copywriters inside PCM reported a few weeks ago. Luiz wrote:

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I already knew the PCM model was amazing and today I got proof.

Last month I wrote a promo for a client that generated $38k in sales.

My commission was 20% so I made $7,600 from one client!

If I tried asking for this amount of money without using the PCM model clients probably would look at me like I’m insane.

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For reference, Luiz wrote 9 emails for the promo — 2 warmup emails and 7 promo emails.

That’s $7,800 for 9 emails, or $866 per email.

I don’t care if you’re Ben Settle or Gary Bencivenga, you won’t have an easy time trying to charge that much for writing emails without the PCM model.

Does this mean that everybody inside PCM makes this kind of money each time they write an email?

No.

Does it mean that everybody inside PCM has a giant success with their very first client?

No.

But does it mean that results like this are possible, for reasonably skilled and experienced copywriters, who are willing to follow the PCM model, and take advantage of the resources inside this community?

Well, yes.

So if you’d like to find out more about PCM today, head over to page at the link below.

Opt in, and you will see Shiv’s video explaining in detail how PCM works, why he created it, and what to do as the next step in case you’re interested. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/pcm

Scarcity as a performance art

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I got a lot of replies to my “No B.S. scarcity” email on Saturday.

That email was about Dan Kennedy’s decision to close down signups to his No B.S. Marketing Letter. The email linked to an optin page for a livestream from Dan’s basement — hosted by Russell Brunson — in which Dan would explain his inexplicable decision to stop taking on new subscribers.

Here’s what a few people wrote me in response:

#1 “I’m enjoying how you managed to critique the probably fake scarcity while still using it on us all… 😅“

#2 “I registered for the livestream, John. I appreciate your integrity of not promoting since you hadn’t signed up. :-)”

#3 “If you tell me it’s worth it, I’ll probably subscribe too. If not, I will continue to read and reread Master Dan’s books.”

And then, there was one reader who replied to simply say:

“If Russell Brunson is involved, it’s fake.”

I followed up to ask if this reader had some previous experience with Russell. To which my reader replied:

“He embodies the worst of direct marketing and fake urgency/scarcity. But, it seems to be working so not sure where that leaves me.”

Legendary 19th-century conjurer Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin once wrote that a conjurer is an “actor playing the part of a magician.”

And legendary 21-st century marketer Dan Kennedy once wrote:

“This gets to a view of selling as a performance art. As such it is to be planned, scripted, physically choreographed, rehearsed, and ultimately performed. Most sales professionals unfortunately view the presentation as something that they should just be able to do.”

I’m not sure if this makes anybody in Dan’s audience — or in the audiences of all the marketers who are descended from him — feel better about the experience of witnessing scarcity as a performance art.

But it might clear things up, and explain where that leaves you — and that’s participating in a show.

One thing’s for sure:

Both Dan Kennedy and Russell Brunson are sales professionals of the highest caliber.

If you want to see them in action, there’s that free livestream from Dan’s basement in a few weeks’ time, explaining why Dan has decided to shut down new signups “for the foreseeable future.”

So if you’d like to learn something about effective marketing or simply watch two wonderful actors put in a great performance, you can sign up below.

And DO IT NOW — before all the free tickets have sold out and the infinite Zoom attendee limit has been exhausted and the deadline sirens start to blare. Here’s the link, which will self-destruct after you click on it:

https://bejakovic.com/no-bs-scarcity