Ben Settle

The end of info products

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THE FOLLOWING EMAIL IS CONTROVERSIAL AND MAY BE OFFENSIVE TO SOME AUDIENCES

READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED

You might be familiar with Max Sackheim’s famous ad, “Do you make these mistakes in English?”

The ad ran for decades, unchanged, and kept bringing in profitable business better than any contender.

Thousands of pages of analysis have been written about the 7-word headline of this ad and the copy that followed.

But what about the actual product this ad was ultimately selling? What about the means by which a prospect could hope to correct his or her mistakes in English? What were prospects actually exchanging their money for?

Sackheim’s copy only teases you about the product, and calls it a “remarkable invention” and a “100% self-correcting device.”

As far as I know, nobody today actually has this remarkable invention stashed away in their garage. Whatever it was, it’s clear it was sold as some kind of tool, a device, and not just information.

This is a well-known direct marketing truth that’s been around since Sackheim’s days and before, back into the age of patent medicines.

A real, tangible, external mechanism — a fat-loss potion, a dog seatbelt, a “100% self-correcting device” — sells much easier than just good info — how to lose weight, how to be a less negligent dog owner, how to speak gooder English.

Smart modern-day info marketers have gotten hep to this fact. That’s why people like Russell Brunson and Ben Settle and Sam Ovens have put their reputation and audience to work behind tools like ClickFunnels and Berserker Mail and Skool.

The thing is, creating a tool, whether physical or software, has traditionally been an expensive, complicated, and risky business.

Take a look at Groove Funnels, another tool created a few years ago by another experienced info marketer, Mike Filsaime. Groove Funnels is a bloated, buggy, frankly unusable product. I say that as somebody who invested into a lifelong subscription in Groove Funnels.

I have a couple degrees in computer science. I also have about a decade’s worth amateur and pro software development experience. But after I quit my IT job 10+ years ago, I never once considered putting this experience to use in order to develop any kind of tool I could sell.

Until now.

Because things are changing. Today even a monkey, working alone, can create and deploy a valuable app simply by querying ChatGPT persistently enough. And there are plenty of shovels available for such would-be gold miners, tools to build tools, which will do much of the in-between work for you. Just say what you will to happen, and it will be done.

Decades ago, master direct marketer Gary Halbert said that the best best product of all is… information!

But I bet if Gary were alive today, he’d be hard at work (or maybe easy at work) creating some kind of high-margin tool to sell, in the broadest sense of the word — a thing to do some or all of the work for an audience with a problem. A few reasons why:

* Again, tools are easy to sell. They fit with innate human psychology of how we want to solve problems.

* Tools can make for natural continuity income if you license them out instead of sell them outright.

* Tools can create their own moat over time. There can be lock-in or switching cost if your users build on top of your tool.

* And now, thanks to the most remarkable invention of AI, it’s possible to create tools quickly, cheaply, and with great margins.

All that’s to say, best product of all… information? I don’t think so. Not any more. Best start adapting now.

Speaking of which, I got an offer for you:

Would you say that there are any tech issues that are keeping you from starting your own email list?

If there are, write in and let me know about them.

In turn, I’ll have something for you that you might like.

Behind the scenes of my affiliate deal-making

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Over the past few weeks I’ve been approached to promote three affiliate offers, and uncomfortable thought it was, I turned all three down.

All three of these offers were solid. They had good info at a fair price. There’s no doubt each of them can be very valuable to the right person.

Also, all three offer owners who approached me I already had previous relationships with. I had already done some projects with them, or at least we had exchanged some non-business emails and had some sort of rapport going.

Finally, all three offer owners were paying out generous affiliate commissions. In theory, I could make some good money here.

And yet, like I said, I turned down the opportunity to promote any of the three offers.

The reason was simply I personally couldn’t get excited about them. I took a look at these offers and my personal reaction was “Hm, I see.”

I imagined writing emails to promote these offers. How? I’d have to do some jumping jacks before, in order to simulate a bit of life in my copy.

I also imagined taking myself out of the equation altogether. I imagined saying, “Hey this isn’t for me, but don’t let me get in your way, maybe it’s for you.”

That still didn’t sit right. After all, with that approach, where do I stop? Do I end up promoting $3.45 pork chops on sale at Target, because somebody somewhere might want them?

I’ve made the point many times before that I don’t look at this newsletter as a business first. I look at it as my own personal playground, an opportunity to experiment and practice, a reflection of my own interests and tastes.

I can’t blame you if you shrug off everything I’ve said above as just my perverse attitude, something that I do because I apparently don’t care enough about money to reach out and grasp it when it’s offered to me.

Still, I remembered something while thinking about this rather unpleasant issue.

Ben Settle, who I think treats his email newsletter as much more of a business than I treat mine, shared almost the same attitude in an email a couple years ago. In fact it’s possible I got my attitude from Ben.

Ben wrote that the best affiliate offer to sell, at least for him, is one that’s personally fun. And when an offer is not personally fun for him… well, here’s Ben’s report on one such campaign:

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No matter how much time I spent writing those emails, no matter how much time I spent strategizing the campaign, and no matter how much time I spent interviewing the creator of the product (and I did) it did not matter, and the sales were lackluster at best.

The reason?

Not because the offer was bad.

It was extremely valuable, especially for the price.

No, one main reason why was because it was not fun.

===

I’m telling you this because over the next few days, until Tuesday to be specific, I’m promoting Tom Grundy’s Subtraction Method.

In fact, I’m promoting it as an affiliate, even though it’s a free training.

There was was the option to simply promote the paid workshops that Tom will be running in the coming weeks, on the back of the (free) Subtraction Method training.

But Tom and I both agreed that the best and happiest way to promote this was simply offer the free training first, one where Tom would reveal all the concepts underlying the Subtraction Method.

It’s Tom’s job to sell the group implementation workshops, following the free training, just to those who want help working through those concepts with Tom’s guidance.

Point being, the real reason I’m telling you to go sign up to Tom’s Subtraction Method is that I’m personally interested and even excited by what Tom has to teach. The promise of an affiliate payout alone wouldn’t do it.

But maybe you don’t even know what I mean by the Subtraction Method. If so, here are the details from my Al Pacino-themed email yesterday:

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Tom’s story is that he quit his high-powered London banking job in order to seek enlightenment. Enlightenment found, Tom ended up going back to the bank.

Curious, right?

The first time around at the bank was miserable, says Tom. The second time around has been enjoyable, stress-free, and even fulfilling.

What made the difference is what Tom calls the Subtraction Method.

The Subtraction Method is not about the kind of minimalism that involves living in a hut in the backwoods of Montana, shooting and skinning rabbits, and melting snow for drinking water.

Rather, it’s about a different kind of minimalism, one that has to do with ideas and attitudes.

The end result can be that you achieve all the external success you think you want now, and you do it on such terms that you’re not eaten out from inside like Michael Corleone or Al Pacino.

Or the end result can be you don’t achieve the external success you think you want now, and you find out that that’s perfectly fine, because what you thought you wanted is not what you actually want.

Here is where I start waving my hands and waffling and mumbling a little too much. Because the Subtraction Method is not my area of expertise. Rather it’s Tom’s area of expertise.

That’s why I’d like to invite you to sign up to his training. The training is free. It’s happening next Wednesday, Nov 6, at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. I’ll be there. If you’d like to be there as well, you can register to get in at the link below:

https://bejakovic.com/subtraction

How and why I started this newsletter

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For some reason, many people seem fascinated by the obscure origins of this newsletter.

“How did you get started? What was your initial motive? Is it true that you were once a Pinterest star?”

If none of that interests you, I can’t say I blame you.

But if you are curious, here’s my origin story, in all its Peter Parker awkwardness:

1. In 2015, with my savings dwindling and with the thought of going back to an office job being absolutely repulsive to me, I anointed myself a “direct response copywriter” and started selling myself as such to anybody who had $5 to spend.

2. I soon decided to focus on email copywriting, because my Spidey-sense told me this would be a “thing.”

3. After a couple months and a dozen random clients, a suspicion started to creep into my mind. “Maybe I should learn a little bit about email copywriting if I’m going to be selling it?”

4. So I signed up to Ben Settle’s email list, because frankly there was not all that much free and ongoing information at the time about email besides Ben.

Each of Ben’s emails seemed to follow the same format: a teasing promise, maybe dressed up with some pop-culture reference, and a link to sign up to Ben’s $97/month Email Players print newsletter.

5. For years, I didn’t sign up to Email Players, though I was tempted by Ben’s teasing. At first, I didn’t sign up because why pay $97 a month for a newsletter?

“I never pay for information,” I told myself. Instead of paying, I preferred to go on working for years without getting any improvement in my results.

Later, when that changed, I still didn’t sign up for Email Players because of Ben’s policy of telling people not to sign up unless they are fit to be an Email Player, and his threats that if you ever sign up and quit, you can never come back.

6. Eventually, in 2017, Ben’s teasing and mind games wore me down. I signed up to Email Players. (I also finally read the free issue of Email Players that Ben gives away on his site, and which I had gotten years earlier, when I signed up to his list.)

7. I started using some things Ben teaches in my client work, and I got good results. But I was still struggling personally to make consistent good money as a copywriter because client work was unreliable.

8. Ben started selling a new course which was called something like Client Cash Machine, all about how to get clients. I bought it, rationalizing the $297 price by saying that if I got a bit of extra client work as a result, it would pay for the course.

9. A few weeks later, Ben’s client-getting course arrived. I opened it with trembling fingers. It was a flash drive with the audio version, and a printed-out transcript.

10. An hour or so after that, I had gone through the course. It said, in a nutshell, “Start an email list and write it daily.” Disappointing. I knew that already. It was all over Ben’s emails for free, and I had hoped Ben would tell me something exciting and new.

11. Still, some time later, I followed Ben’s advice and finally started an email list, with the distant future goal of getting clients, and with the immediate goal of fooling around in my own sandbox each day, putting into practice things I was learning from books and courses, and demonstrating my growing skills to anybody who would bear witness.

12. Ta-da! A successful personal brand, authority in the field, and a 6-figure-a-year income, just from writing one daily email, or actually more like writing 3,000 daily emails.

THE END.

I’m telling you this riveting story because I’m putting on a training this Thursday. It’s called 3rd Conversion. It’s about getting your buyers to consume and digest the information you sell.

If you read my story above carefully, it can give you lots of clues about effective strategies to increase consumption and digestion.

If you want me to spell out actual lessons, you can get that on Thursday’s training.

This 3rd Conversion training can be useful to you if you’re after long-term customers and fans… rather than one-off transactions with buyers who hand you a bit of money once and then never benefit from what you sold ’em… never buy from you again… never build up your brand by writing up an email like I’ve just written about Ben Settle.

And in case you’re wondering:

My training on Thursday won’t just be about rehashing Ben Settle’s strategies, and using Ben as a good example of effective consumption and digestion techniques. Because Ben can also serve as a cautionary tale.

Like I’ve written before, I ended up unsubscribing from Ben’s Email Players after a few years — even with Ben’s threats of never being allowed back in. The reason again was consumption and digestion. I felt Ben’s newsletter had simply become a chore to read, so I took my money and my custom elsewhere.

The 3rd Conversion training will happen this Thursday at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. There will be a recording which I will send out after the call, though if you can make it live, you and I both are sure to benefit more from it.

If you’d like to sign up for 3rd Conversion now, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/3rd-conversion

MVE cancelled

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No, not Most Valuable Email.

The MVE that’s been cancelled is the Most Vivian Event, the big promotion I announced yesterday.

I had hoped to use this event to pull every remaining non-buyer on my list and get him to buy Most Valuable Email, will-he, nill-he.

My plan was to use I know about promos inside the Most Vivian Event — structure, copy, and most importantly offer:

An “Italian lottery,” giving new buyers a good chance to get MVE free…

A stack of free bonuses that I’ve sold for good money before, totaling the price of MVE and more, so even if somebody didn’t win the “Italian lottery,” they would still feel like they’re getting a steal…

An entirely new bonuses as well, which would reveal all the thinking that went into this promo — basically a little promo course built around a specific case study, to make this MVE offer so valuable that if you ever send any kind of emails, the investment would pay for itself with this one new bonus alone.

I had grand plans to make this event fun, epic, and undoubtedly immensely successful. Except…

It’s all been cancelled.

Reason why:

Each time I got near to settling on the final offer for the Most Vivian Event, I kept bouncing into one problem:

“What do I do with previous buyers?”

I have a long-standing policy to reward early buyers for buying for me. That means I grandfather previous buyers into any upgrades, new runs of a course, or bonuses I end up offering in the future. It also means I don’t feature discounts.

Yesterday, when I had the initial idea for this new promo, I shrugged this question off.

I told myself I’d figure out some way to incentivize new buyers… to reward previous buyers… and to have this promo make business sense for me personally.

But no matter how I structured this offer, there was always one end of the triangle — new buyers, old buyers, me — that was left high and dry.

I realized it’s not a matter of what bonuses or incentives I end up offering. It’s simply a consequence of my “reward previous buyers” policy, and the fact that I have hundreds of previous buyers of MVE.

That’s why I’ve actually never run a bonus- or discount-based promo for any of my offers, outside of a launch. I just never realized it until yesterday.

You might say I’m being stubborn to stick to this policy. And that’s exactly right. Because I want people to believe a few simple certainties when they think of me.

One of those simple certainties is that I won’t screw over previous buyers. I don’t ever want my buyers to think, even in passing, “Huh, maybe I should have waited to buy this, this new deal is better than what I got.”

Yesterday, I wrote that I had clearly been falling short by continuing to sell MVE on its merits alone.

Some people who could benefit from MVE — like Vivian, who wanted something for “coming up with interesting ideas and presenting it in a concise and compelling way” — never even considered buying.

Frankly, that falling short will most likely continue.

But if you have been on the fence about MVE for a while, I do have a special offer for you today. It’s nothing like the spectacle I was planning on. But you can decide whether it’s enough to get you to take me up on Most Valuable Email today.

I’m calling this offer the “Shangri La” MVE offer. And that’s because like Shangri La, the two parts of this offer only appear once every fifty years. Specifically:

1. I normally don’t offer a payment plan for Most Valuable Email. I did offer a payment plan for MVE once, as a joke, for one day only. Well, like Shangri La, the payment plan is back, and not as a joke.

You can get MVE for $99 today and then two more monthly payments of $99. This payment plan is there to make it psychologically easier to get started — in my experience, people take up payment plans not because they cannot afford to pay in full, but simply because it feels like a smaller commitment.

2. I am also offering a bonus, which I’m calling Shangri La Disappearing Secrets.

Over the past years, I have periodically sent out emails where I teased a secret, which I then turned into a disappearing, one-day bonuses for people who took me up on an offer before the deadline.

Inside this Shangri La Disappearing Secrets bonus, I have collected 12 emails that teased 12 secrets — and I have revealed the secrets themselves. These include:

* An email deliverability tip that is so valuable I decided not to share it publicly, but only with buyers of MVE. This tip is something that multiple people have told me I should turn into a standalone course or training — which I most probably will do one day.

* Stage Surprise Success. Step-by-step instructions for creating effective surprise in any kind of performance, whether thieving, magicking, comedy, drama, or simply writing for impact and influence. And no, it’s not just shocking people with something they weren’t expecting. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite of that.

* A daring idea to grow your list and build up your authority at the same time. I have not yet had the guts to put it into practice, even though I have lots of reasons to believe it would work great to build my own authority, and get me more high-quality leads than I’m getting now.

* A persuasion strategy used by con men, pick up artists, salesmen, even by legendary copywriters. I ran a little contest in an email to see if anybody could identify this strategy based on a scene from the movie The Sting. Out of 40+ people who tried to identify the strategy, only 2 got it right.

* An incredible free resource, filled with insightful and proven marketing and positioning advice. This resource comes from a man I’ve only written about once in this newsletter, but who has influenced my thinking about marketing and human psychology more deeply than I may let on — maybe more deeply than anybody else over the past few years.

* Magic Box calls-to-action. Use these if you don’t have a product or a service to sell yet, or if you only have a few bum offers, which your list has stopped responding to every day. Result of a “magic box” CTA when used by one of my coaching clients: the first hand-raiser ever for an under-construction $4k offer.

* A new way to apply the Most Valuable email trick, one I wasn’t comfortable doing until recently. Now that I’ve started using it, it’s gotten people paying more attention… leaning in more… even rereading my emails 3x… and reaching out to reopen dropped business conversations.

* Steven Pressfield (the author of the War of Art and the Legend of Bagger Vance) used to write scripts for porn movies. He once shared two porn storytelling rules. I’ll tell you what they are, and how smart marketers, maybe even me on occasion, use one of these rules in their own sales copy and marketing content.

* A list of 14 criteria of truthful stories. I’m not saying to get devious with this — but you could use these criteria to jelly up a made-up story and make it sound absolutely true. More respectably, you can use these criteria to take your true but fluffy story and make it sound 100% gripping and real.

* Why I drafted US patent application 16/573921 to get the U.S. Government to recognize my Most Valuable Email trick as novel, non-obvious, and having concrete, practical applications.

* Two methods for presenting a persuasive argument, as spelled out by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. I illustrate these two methods with a little public debate that Daniel Throssell and I engaged in via our respective email newsletters. Daniel and I each adopted opposing methods, just as described by Kahneman.

* An infotainment secret I stole from Ben Settle. As far as I know, Ben doesn’t teach this secret in his books or newsletters — I found it by tracking Ben’s emails over a 14-day period and spotting Ben using it in 8 of those 14 emails. And no, I’m not talking about teasing, or telling a story, or stirring up conflict. This is something more fundamental, and more broadly useful, even beyond daily emails.

So there you go. My Shangri La MVE offer:

A payment plan for Most Valuable Email that only appears twice in a century… and 12 bonus persuasion secrets.

This offer is good until tomorrow, Friday Oct 11, at 12 midnight PST.

If you’re at all interested, the time to act is now. That’s because of that simple certainty I wrote above — there won’t ever be a better time.

I won’t be running big promo events for Most Valuable Email, because it doesn’t fit my policy of treating previous customers with respect.

On the other hand, if you get MVE now, you will also be eligible for any future disappearing bonuses I might offer with it, or any other special offer or real I will make to new buyers also.

If you’d like to take me up on this Shangri La offer, before it disappears:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

P.S. And yes, if you have already bought MVE, you also get the Shangri La Disappearing Secrets. No need to write me for it. I’ll add it straight inside the MVE course area, right under the MVE Swipes document.

I’m not OK — you’re not OK

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Here’s a story I’ve been told but don’t remember:

When I was little, maybe around 2 or 3, I was in the dining room with my grandfather, who I loved better than life itself.

I started dragging a large chair around the dining room.

My grandfather told me to stop, I guess because the dragging was making noise and because the chair could topple and flatten 3-year-old Bejako.

But I didn’t stop. I kept dragging the chair around.

My grandfather again told me to stop.

I still didn’t.

So my grandfather gave me a light swat on the hand, not enough to hurt me, but enough to get my attention.

It worked. I let go of the chair. I started wailing instead. And in my childish fear and confusion, I turned to the only natural place of comfort, and that was back to my grandfather. I ran to him and hugged him and wailed away. My grandfather said later he felt so guilty that he wished for his hand, the one he had swatted me with, to dry up and fall off.

I’m reading a book now called, I’m OK — You’re OK. I’m reading it because:

I’ve learned the most about email marketing and copywriting from Ben Settle…

Ben frequently recommends a book called Start With No, by negotiation coach Jim Camp, which I’ve read a half dozen times…

Start With No is largely a rehash of ideas in a book called You Can’t Teach a Kid to Ride a Bike at a Seminar, by sales trainer Dave Sandler, which I read for the first time earlier this year…

Sandler’s book and sales system are a mix of classic sales techniques, his own personal experimentation, and ideas coming from transactional analysis, specifically as described in the book I’m OK — You’re OK, by psychiatrist Thomas Harris.

(There’s value in working backwards like that.)

Here’s a passage in I’m OK — You’re OK that stuck out to me:

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The predominant by-product of the frustrating, civilizing process is negative feelings. On the basis of these feelings the little person early concludes, “I’m not OK.” We call this comprehensive self-estimate the NOT OK, or the NOT OK Child. This permanent recording is the residue of having been a child. Any child. Even the child of kind, loving, well-meaning parents. It is the situation of childhood and not the intention of the parents which produces the problem.

===

Like I said, this stuck out to me. Because some people had happy, stable childhoods. But even those people have a reservoir of childhood memories that make them feel not OK today. And maybe those people wonder what the hell is wrong with them. Says Harris, nothing. That’s life.

On the other hand, other people had genuinely troubled or traumatizing childhoods. They might suspect their childhood left them somehow uniquely warped and deformed, and the fact they feel not OK today proves it. But that logic is wrong, says Harris, because again, we are all not OK.

“I’m not OK — You’re not OK” is not a very inspiring message. Fortunately, the above passage is not how the book ends. In fact it only comes in chapter two. After all, the book is titled I’m OK — You’re OK.

If you’d like to know how to get out of the impulsive, frustrating, and maybe painful web of childhood memories and patterns, at least according to Thomas Harris, you can check out I’m OK — You’re OK below, and maybe learn a thing or two about sales and negotiation and copywriting in the process:

​https://bejakovic.com/ok​

If your open rates are excellent but your sales suck

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Yesterday, I wrote an email about a magical, far-off place called Affiliate World. I even invited you to meet me there.

​​To which, I got a reply from James “Get Paid Write” Carran, whose newsletter I am a reader of. James wrote:

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I’m obviously not in the right crowd because I spent this entire email thinking affiliate world was a thing you were making up for the email until I got to the end and realised it was a conference 😂

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James is right — i didn’t explain Affiliate World at all.

I didn’t mention it was a conference, or that it was in Budapest until halfway through the email, or anything about the dates. I figured there was no point — either people are already going and they know, or there’s no way I will persuade them to go with this one email.

Lazy?

Maybe.

Self-defeating?

Maybe.

But I remember hearing something about this a long time ago in an interview with marketer Travis Sago.

Travis a kind of nice-guy Ben Settle. Like Ben, Travis is an expert email copywriter and direct marketer. Like Ben, he has a cult-like following. And like Ben, he has made millions with his own online businesses and has helped others make millions too. One curious thing:

Travis says he writes his email subject lines like he has to pay for each open.

Rather than trying to get everyone to open, and hoping to somehow persuade or convince or explain to them why it’s in their interest to take the next step before they click away… Travis uses each email to select from the audience a tiny pocket of highly qualified people.

There’s a broader approach here – efficiency as a business principle. It’s how Travis has been able to build up a multimillion business selling little $39 ebooks… and how he was later able to build up a second multi million business, selling $5k and $10k and $25k programs and masterminds.

I don’t practice Travis’s subject line approach with this newsletter, not every day. But maybe it’s something for you to think about on this Sunday, particularly if your open rates are excellent but your sales suck.

And in case you’d like to know what to write once people open your emails, so your emails not only get opened, not only get read, but also make sales, you might like:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

$12k bargain that’s working now

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I just finished an interesting hot seat for a copywriter within the PCM mastermind.

This copywriter is working with a business that’s selling a $4k offer and a $12k offer.

The two offers are largely the same, except the $12k offer is more done for you and comes with a stronger guarantee. Result:

The $4k offer gets about 5 sales each month. The $12k offer gets about 8-10 sales each month.

This reminded me of a Gary Halbert quote:

“Fundamentals never change but current variations of how to best use those fundamentals are something you must always stay on top of. In other words: It’s not enough to know that everybody wants a bargain… you must also know what people currently consider a bargain.”

It’s no big mystery that an offer that’s more done for you is easier to sell, and can sell for significantly more. That’s a fundamental that never changes.

What might be a surprise is that today, people apparently consider $12k a bargain.

And on that note:

I’m considering putting together something new, about unique offers working now.

I’m interested in offers that are 1) actually selling well right now, and that are 2) selling with zero or very little appeal to authority.

The way I figure, that intersection is where the most interesting and effective offers can be found.

Ben Settle could probably sell a closetful of old shoes to his list if he wanted to. That’s not because old shoes are a great offer. It’s because Ben has spent 15 years disciplining and punishing his list to do as he says.

Maybe you don’t want to go through that, or maybe you don’t have the time.

But even if you have authority or a strong relationship with your list, a sexy, unique, effective offer, one that will stand independent of you, will make your life easier and your wallet heavier.

Like I said, I’m considering creating something new about such unique, independent offers.

Can you do me a favor?

Simply hit reply and let me know if such information could be valuable to you in what you do. If it wouldn’t be valuable to you, let me know that as well.

Or of course, if you know an offer that is both 1) working now and 2) selling without authority, then let me know, and I will add it to the list of specimens to feature. Thanks in advance.

Why I won’t use BerserkerMail

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Yesterday I wrote about an “unwilling unsubscribe” issue that’s been haunting me for a few years. I asked readers for suggestions on how I can keep good subscribers from getting accidentally kicked off ActiveCampaign.

Lots of people replied with lots of good ideas.

But a fair number of people also pitched me on switching from ActiveCampaign to Ben Settle’s BerserkerMail service.

From what I can tell, many of those people don’t actually use BerserkerMail themselves. Instead, they just berserk on behalf of Ben about how great BerserkerMail is.

I’ve never used BerserkerMail and have no plans to switch. I thought somebody out there might want to know why. Three reasons:

#1. Switching would be a pain in the ass.

One reader wrote me yesterday to say how easy it is to switch over to BerserkerMail “in just a few clicks.” That sounded like a kid trying to sell his parents on a weeklong trip to Disneyland by saying “it’s only a 4-hour flight away.”

Looking at the flight time only ignores all the packing… the booking of the hotel… the taking of the dog to the dog kennel and watching his big eyes as he accuses you of abandoning him… and the fallout at work after a week away and a few thousand accumulated small fires that have gone untended.

In less Disneylandy terms:

I have a few dozen automations set up in ActiveCampaign that run a large part of my product delivery.

I have a few dozen integrations with my website membership software… with optin forms in various places… with my cart software.

And I suspect that, in spite of the “just a few clicks” to switch my contact list to BerserkerMail, I would still be left with days of prep work and weeks or months of things breaking and me having to fix them.

​​And if that’s not enough…

#2. BerserkerMail has the same problems I want to run away from.

A couple people tried to sell me on how “simple” BerskerMail is to use. But I’ve never had a problem with ActiveCampaign because it’s complex.

I have had a problem with ActiveCampaign when it crashed right when I ran a classified ad and got hundreds of new subscribers in a matter of hours.

I’ve had a problem with it when I scheduled an email that never got sent out — still my one missed day of emailing in the past 5+ years.

In other words, I’ve had a problem with ActiveCampaign because of occasional reliability and tech issues.

But BerserkerMail has its own reliability and tech issues. I know, because people who use BerserkerMail have told me so, and because Ben has written about BerserkerMail’s tech issues in his own emails.

It’s kind of like that famous Disneyland commercial on TV:

“Are you tired of your kids screaming at home? Take them for a weeklong vacation to Disneyland and have them scream here! It’s only a 4-hour flight away and buying the tickets is super simple.”

(By the way, as for unsub issue I wrote about yesterday, it seems the most likely culprit is simply Gmail and Apple Mail unsubscribe features. If that’s the case, it would affect BerserkerMail emails the same as those sent from any other service.)

#3. I already have an easy-to-use, technically reliable alternative to ActiveCampaign.

It’s not BerserkerMail.

​​Instead, it’s Beehiiv, which I used for my health newsletter.

I loved everything about Beehiiv so much that I actually thought about switching this newsletter to use Beehiiv. I decided against it because of point 1 above.

However, if I do ever start any new newsletters, they will go on Beehiiv by default.

If you want to start a new newsletter, you can try out Beehiiv at the link below.

I won’t try to sell you on Beehiiv, beyond saying it’s free — not just during a 30-day trial period like BerserkerMail, but forever — as long as you’re below 2,500 subscribers, and you don’t start coveting advanced features like the referral program and the ad network.

If you want to try out just how simple it is to sign up to Beehiiv, and how pleasant, and how short of a flight it is:

https://bejakovic.com/beehiiv

Ooooo, child!

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Last weekend, my friend Sam and I went to Savannah. On the drive there, we started started listening to an audiobook of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

That was a 1994 non-fiction book that stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for a remarkable 216 weeks.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil consists of a bunch of character studies of various eccentrics who lived in Savannah in the 1970s and 80s. The book cuts through Savannah society, from the rich and established to the poor and fringe.

Among the poor and fringe was Miss Chablis, “The Empress of Savannah.”

Chablis was a black drag queen.

The narrator of the audiobook, who normally speaks with a neutral accent, voiced Chablis, like all other Savannah locals, with a kind of southern drawl.

Except that in the case of Miss Chablis, the narrator, who sounded solidly white and male otherwise, also had to awkwardly act out dozens of draq-queeny, Black-English phrases such as:

“Ooooo, child!”

“Oh, child, don’t you be doin’ that!”

“Y-e-e-e-s, child! Yayyiss… yayyiss… yayyiss!”​​

I had flashbacks to this earlier today.

I got back to Barcelona yesterday. I checked my mailbox and found a stack of New Yorkers waiting for me.

This morning, I sat on my balcony and flipped open the latest one. The first feature story is about Ru Paul.

“Ooooo, child!” I said, “No more drag queens, honey, please!”

But as I often do, I forced myself to read something I had no inclination to read. I often find valuable things that way.

Today was no exception. I found the following passage in the first page of the article. Jinkx Monsoon, a 36-year-old drag queen who won two seasons of Ru Paul’s reality competition TV show, explained the power of drag:

===

It’s armor, ’cause you’re putting on a persona. So the comments are hitting something you created, not you. And then it’s my sword, because all of the things that made me a target make me powerful as a drag queen.

===

If you have any presence online, this armor-and-sword passage is good advice. It’s something that the most successful and most authentic-seeming performers out there practice.

I once saw a serious sit-down interview with Woody Allen. I remember being shocked by how calm, confident, and entirely not Woody-Allen-like he was.

Closer to the email world, I remember from a long time ago an email in which Ben Settle basically said the same thing as Jinkx Monsoon above. How the crotchety, dismissive persona he plays in his emails is a kind of exaggeration and a mask he puts over the person he is in real life.

So drag is good advice for online entrepreneurs.

But like much other good advice, It’s not something I follow in these emails.

I haven’t developed an email persona, and I’m not playing any kind of ongoing role to entertain my audience or to protect me from their criticism.

That’s because I don’t like to lie to myself. Like I’ve said many times before, I write these emails for myself first and foremost, and then I do a second pass to make sure that what I’ve written can be relevant and interesting to others as well.

This is not something I would encourage anybody else to do. But it’s worked out well enough for me, and allowed me to stay in the game for a long time.

That said, I do regularly adopt various new and foreign mannerisms in these emails.

I do this because i find it instructive and fun, and because it allows me to stretch beyond the person/writer I am and become more skilled and more successful.

I’ve even created an entire training, all about the great value of this approach.

In case you’d like to become more skilled and successful writing online, then honey, I am serious! You best look over here, child:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Write 10 books instead of one

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A few months back, I made an offer to help people on my list write a book — if they already had a catalogue of content such as daily emails, blog posts, or secret diary entries.

Some people who expressed interest had too little such content.

Not good. That means too much writing for me personally, and I’m not interested in becoming a full-time ghostwriter.

But some people had too much good content. A million words written or more, across thousands of emails.

Where do you possibly start with that? Or where do I?

I don’t have a great answer. But I will claim one thing:

It’s often easier to write a series of ten books than to write a single, one-off book.

Hear me out.

First off, it’s important to remember that the definition of what makes up a book in today’s world has changed.

A collection of words no longer has to be as much of a blunt weapon as Gone With The Wind in order to count as a book.

My own 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters book, which has brought me hundreds of high-quality readers and tens of thousands of dollars in new sales, runs all of 12,266 words.

Ben Settle’s first Villains book, the book I believe has done the most for his positioning, has 118 tiny pages, and that’s with a giant font and US-national-debt-sized margins.

And yet, I never had nobody complain that my book is too short. I doubt Ben has either.

Today, in books as in sales letters, it’s not really length that makes the difference either way. Rather, it’s the concept, the headline or title, the “big idea”.

That’s why I say it’s easier to write, or at least honestly commit to write, 10 books rather than one.

Writing 10 rather than one forces you to be more specific, concrete.

It forces you pump out more decent ideas, rather than trying to come up with a single brilliant breakthrough.

And of course, it forces you to keep each of your ten books, including that crucial first one, short and manageable, rather than trying to squeeze in too much out of some subconscious guilt or worry.

Anyways, something to keep in mind if you want more influence via book publishing.

It definitely helps to have a big catalogue of previous writing, which you can then shape into a new book, or perhaps more easily, into five or ten.

In other news about influence:

Tomorrow, inshallah, I will make available my Influential Emails training. That training reveals some of the tricks I use to make my emails more interesting and influential than the average email writing bear.

It’s how I’ve produced content that could easily fill 10 tiny but effective Kindle books.

If you’re interested in Influential Emails, you will want to get on my email list first. Click here to do so.