Dan Ferrari

How CopyHour changed my life (no joke)

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This week, until Thursday at 8:31pm CET, I am promoting Derek Johanson’s CopyHour program. I’ve never gone through CopyHour myself. And yet it changed my life.

By the time I found out about CopyHour, around 2017, I had already been handcopying successful ads and sales letters on my own.

That’s what CopyHour is about, and it’s a worthwhile exercise.

Maybe I can say more about hand copying ads in a future email. But not now, because that’s not how CopyHour changed my life.

Back in 2017, there was not the the glut of copywriting courses and education that there is now. So I eagerly joined the CopyHour group Facebook group to see if I could maybe learn something on the sly.

Back then, the Facebook group was where Derek delivered the trainings that go with the handcopying work. I could see Derek was legit, had experience and expertise, and had put in time and effort to make CopyHour a really great program.

For example, this group was where I first got exposed to the book Great Leads. It’s a valuable book. But more importantly, it turned on some light in my dim brain and turned me on to the idea that maybe I should find some classic books about copywriting and read those.

This led me down a deep rabbit hole of reading and research which helped make me a drastically better copywriter in time.

But that still not how CopyHour changed my life.

How CopyHour changed my life is that I got on Derek’s email list.

During the next launch of CopyHour, Derek sent a bunch of emails to promote the program. One of those emails was actually not written by him but by a copywriter named Dan Ferrari.

At the time, Dan was a star copywriter at financial publisher Motley Fool. Dan’s story is classic bizopp rags to riches — from subsisting on four teaspoon of olive oil for breakfast because that’s all he could afford, to writing a control with his second sales letter at Motley Fool and soon pulling in millions of dollars in copywriting royalties.

“Hm,” I said, “maybe I should see if this dude has his own email list.”

I found Dan’s site. I signed up to his list. And what followed was… nothing. No emails. Not for almost two years.

Long story even longer, one day in 2019, Dan finally sent out an email asking his list if anyone was in the Baltimore-Washington area at the moment. As luck would have it, I was there at the time.

That email led to me joining Dan’s small coaching group a few months later… learning directly from Dan… hitching my wagon in part to Dan’s rising star… and making, as a direct consequence of a few words of Dan’s advice inside that coaching program, some hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But let’s wrap this story up:

The program that Dan credits for taking him from the olive oil subsistence breakfast to being a control-beating star copywriter at Motely Fool is — CopyHour.

The reason I found Dan and ended up learning copywriting from him is — CopyHour.

That’s my story.

Yours, I don’t know? Maybe it can start today.

Derek has opened the doors to CopyHour today. He will close them on Sunday because CopyHour is a real-time program.

But while Derek’s doors will stay open until Sunday, I will give you a reason to act now. If you join CopyHour before this Thursday at 8:31pm CET, and you do so using my affiliate link below, I will give you the following five free bonuses:

#1. Copy Zone (price last sold at: $100). My 175-page, A-Z guide on the business side of copywriting, from getting started with no experience or portfolio, all the way to becoming an A-list copywriter. Only ever sold once before, during a flash 24-hour offer in March 2023.

#2. Most Valuable Postcard #2: Ferrari Monster (price last sold at: $100). A deep dive into a single fascinating topic — code named Ferrari Monster — which I claim is the essence of all copywriting and marketing. Get the Ferrari Monster right, and almost everything else falls into place.

#3. Copy Riddles Lite (price last sold at $99). A slice of my Copy Riddles program, proportionately priced. Try yourself against legendary A-list copywriters like Gene Schwartz, David Deutsch, and Clayton Makepeace — and in the process, implant new copywriting skills into your brain.

#4. Horror Advertorial Swipe File (price last sold at: $100). A zip file with 25 PDFs, featuring the original copy for 25 of my horror advertorials. These advertorials pulled in millions of dollars on cold Facebook and YouTube traffic, and sold everything from fake diamonds and dog seat belts, to stick-on bras and kids’ vitamins.

#5. 9 Deadly Email Sins (price last sold at: $100). 9 lessons distilled from my expensive and exclusive one-on-one coaching sessions with successful business owners and marketers.

In the past, I’ve sold each of these trainings at the prices listed. When you add all those prices up, you get a total of $499 in free bonuses. This happens to be more than CopyHour currently sells for.

That said, don’t join CopyHour just to get my free bonuses. Join because you decide that you will do the work involved in CopyHour, and that you will benefit from it.

For more info on that, take a look at Derek’s writeup of how CopyHour works:

https://bejakovic.com/copyhour

Three bits of Dan Ferrari’s timeless wisdom

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A couple days ago, A-list copywriter Dan Ferrari, who was my copywriting coach once upon a time, sent one of his once-every-ice-age emails.

I’ll tell you an idea from that email that caught my eye. But first, a quick story to set it up:

I was talking to my friend Marci a few days ago. Marci has started a quick, daily, general-interest AI newsletter. He asked me if I had any suggestions for him.

I told him to consider picking a specific audience and niching down to writing about AI for that audience.

Marci’s brother Krisz was in the room and listening to the conversation. At this point he jumped in and said, “For me the newsletter is perfect as it is. It’s short, it’s interesting, it keeps me in the loop even if I’m not so much into AI.”

So who’s right? Should Marci niche down his newsletter? Should he keep it broad?

Or more relevant to you:

Should you go with one product name or a second product name? One segment of the market or another? One headline or a second one?

To answer that, let’s go back to that Dan Ferrari email from a couple days ago. In it, Dan wrote the following:

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Something that none of the gurus will ever say publicly… direct response is largely dictated by luck.

No one knows exactly which offers are going to work and more importantly, how successful they will be.

No one.

Some of us are better at guessing than others but make no mistake, we’re still guessing. There are too many variables at play. Many of them are not within your control or even the business’ control. They are external and completely unknowable.

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That might sound discouraging. And it’s true that “testing” AKA regular failure is an essential part of the direct response game.

But as Dan says in the same email, you can improve your luck by upping your skills.

​​Better skills help you come up with better ideas that are more likely to work… and they give you access to better opportunities that are more likely to succeed a priori.

And now, let me ease into my sales pitch.

There’s a third thing Dan said, not in this email, but on one of those exclusive coaching calls, talking to a small number of copywriting mentees, me among them:

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You can use a fascination/bullet midway through a story to get people to stick… or in a lead… or anywhere in the copy.

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Dan wasn’t talking about jamming in actual (*) sales bullets anywhere or everywhere in your copy. He was simply saying, if a bit of copy would make for a great sales bullet, it can work as an exciting, surprising, momentum-building sentence of copy, anywhere you need it.

So that’s one reason to learn sales bullets. Here are a few others:

Email marketer Ben Settle has said that, “when written correct everything ‘comes’ from the bullets, including non-bullet copy or ads where there are no bullets.”

Copywriting legend John Carlton has said that the sale often comes down to a single bullet.

And Stefan Georgi, who charges something like $50k for a single sales letter, has said that one of the biggest jumps he made as a copywriter came when he discovered bullets.

Ok, so much for the sales pitch.

Now, here’s my offer:

If you’d like to up your copywriting skills… double or triple your chances of success… put yourself in the path of better opportunities… and make your own luck long-term… then get Copy Riddles, my training that forces you write A-list sales bullets that are so important to all kinds of copy. You can find it here:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Ultimate SUPER offer

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I got a deal for you today. A SUPER deal. In fact, an ultimate SUPER deal.

A few days ago, I got an email with the subject line, “Hey John.”

“Hello,” I whispered, and I opened up the email. It read:

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Hi John, how’s it going?

I wanted to see if there’s a way we could collaborate and share your work with an audience of over 250,000 copywriters and marketers.

My name is Nicole; I’m the head of partnerships at Infostack.io.

I love what you’re doing, and I wondered if we could talk about including 10 Commandments Of A-List Copywriters in an upcoming writing bundle we’re putting together (titled: The Ultimate Copywriter’s Super Stack)?

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First, let me admit these Infostack people have a smart business model. Years ago, I was actually thinking to start the exact same thing—

Bring together a bunch of people who sell offers online… create a bundle of their offers… get all of them to drive traffic to your event… promote to your own existing and growing list built up via previous events… rinse and repeat as the whole thing becomes more profitable and easier to run.

“Sure,” I told Nicole. “I would love to collaborate and share my work with your audience of over 250,000 copywriters and marketers.”

So that’s what I’m doing today. I am participating in and promoting the Ultimate Copywriter’s SUPER Stack.

The Ultimate Copywriter’s SUPER Stack features a grand total of 14 ebooks… courses… trainings… even two “masterclasses.”

The collected value of the whole bundle is $555.86.

But the actual price it’s selling for during this special event is — well, you guessed it — not $555… not $455… not even $454… but just $49.

Now, I’ll be honest with you:

Aside from Ning Li (Dan Ferrari’s first coaching student and currently the copy chief at Paleo Hacks), I’ve never heard of a single one of these participating copywriters.

They are probably all fine people and very successful at what they do. I’m sure they have lots of value to share. The fact I’ve never heard of them probably just speaks to my crab-like ability to avoid networking.

What I can tell you is that I myself will get the SUPER Ultimate Stack today (the first day it’s available, even to me). I will be going through it over the next few days and selling you on what I believe to be standouts among the included trainings.

Still, you might think that’s a weak and wobbly pitch. So let me get to the meat of this email:

If you do decide to get this Ultimate SUPER stack, I want to guarantee it’s worth your $49 even if you don’t go through a single one of the participating trainings, courses, or ebooks (except my 10 Commandments of course, do read that because it’s great).

And so I’m offering you four FREE and yet SUPER-valuable bonuses. Specifically, I’m offering my:

1. Copywriting Portfolio Secrets ($97 value)

In this training, I show you how to build up your copywriting portfolio in the fastest and most efficient way, so you can start to win copywriting jobs even today. I show you the best way I’ve found to win 4- and 5-figure jobs I REALLY wanted, even when I wasn’t qualified for them, and how you can do it too.

I previously sold this training for $97. But it’s yours free, SUPER free, if you take me up on my Infostack offer, which also includes my…

2. No-Stress Negotiation For Well-Paid Copywriters ($100 value)

This guide outlines my 7-part negotiating system, which I adapted from negotiation coach Jim Camp. This system kept me sane while I still regularly interviewed and worked with copywriting clients. Follow these seven principles, and you will end up making more money, working with better clients, and being able to stick to it for the long term.

I only offered this guide once before, as part of the $100 Copy Zone guide, which also featured….

3. How To Get Set Up On Upwork

This free bonus is an excerpt from a short self-published book I wrote once, How to Become a $150/Hr Sales Copywriter on Upwork: A Personal Success Story that Almost Anyone Can Replicate. It tells you how to actually get set up on Upwork — the details of your profile page, your description, your title.

If you combine this bonus with the two bonuses above — Copywriting Portfolio Secrets and No-Stress Negotiation — you have a great shot of winning a job on Upwork by the end of this week, or even today.

And finally and most spectacularly, my SUPER Ultimate bonus stack also includes…

4. Dan’s Timeless Wisdom (priceless, or $25k+)

Between August of 2019 and March 2020, I was in Dan Ferrari’s coaching group. As you might know, Dan started out as a star copywriter at The Motley Fool, and went on to become one of the most successful, most winning, big-money direct response copywriters working today.

Inside his coaching group, Dan dispensed copy critiques, marketing advice, and mystical koans to help his coaching students get to the next level.

​​At some point, I had the bright idea to start archiving the best and most valuable things that Dan was saying. I got 25 of them down, and they are all included in this document, which has until now only been shared with Dan and his coaching students.

(By the way, I never tallied up the exact and rather painful amount of money I paid to Dan for the coaching. It was north of $25k. I do know I made it all back, and then some, in just the first two months after I stopped with the coaching, thanks to just one tip I got from Dan.)

So there you go. If you want the Ultimate Copywriter’s SUPER Stack for its $555.86 worth of value, yours for just $49…

… or if you want my add-on bonuses for their glorious $25,197/∞ value, yours free…

… then here’s what to do:

1. Buy the Ultimate Copywriter’s SUPER Bundle at https://bejakovic.com/infostack

2. You will then get an automated email from ThriveCart with a link to a special, members-only page on my site where you can access the four free bonuses above.

Important:

​​Infostack’s bundle offer is live now and will go on for a week, but I will only be promoting it until this Friday at 8:31pm CET.

That’s how long my offer with the bonuses above is good for. Your ultimate SUPER purchase of this bundle has to come before Friday at 8:31pm CET to get my bonuses. So if you know you want them, why not get them now?

10 of my email ideas you are free to use

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I’ve spent the past hour preparing and attempting to write this email. Here are some of the ideas I approached and then discarded:

1. The strange, 100-year-old, menage-a-trois history that inspired Wonder Woman

2. How even classic comic books like Superman had woke politics behind them

3. A demonstration of an idea I heard during a Dan Kennedy seminar, that the opening of your writing should set the emotional tenor even if everything else is discarded

4. An email in which I pretend to promote the Brent Charleton offer that’s currently being promoted by Ian Stanley, Dan Ferrari, and Justin Goff, but then I come clean that I am in fact not promoting it (there was a point there, really)

5. Something like in the movie Fight Club, where they splice in a frame from a porn movie, but where I would do something similar but in an email? (I have no idea how)

6. Running a lottery within the actual email, with money bets and money prizes (I realized this is probably illegal)

7. Kicking off a P.T. Barnum-like hoax

8. Telling a personal story about myself and purposefully holding back key information

9. Writing up an email using the FREE framework I devised during my Age of Insight training (FREE is my alternative to the AIDA framework)

10. Thinking up some way to illustrate the following quote by legendary music producer Rick Rubin, who said, “Never judge an idea based on the description of the idea, show it to me”

I played around with all 10 of these ideas. Somehow, they didn’t come together. Maybe they will in the future. But even if they don’t, that’s fine, because at least I have my email for today.

The point I want to make to you today is something I read in John Cleese’s book Creativity.

​​Cleese, as you might know, was one of the members of comedy sketch troupe Monty Python. Later he had one of the most successful British sitcoms of all time, Fawlty Towers. He also made some very funny movies, including A Fish Called Wanda.

All that’s to say, Cleese is a creative guy. And in his book Creativity, about creativity, Cleese writes:

“You can’t have a new idea until you’ve gotten rid of an old one.”

That might seem obvious, but maybe seeing my discarded ideas above will make it stick in your head better. And the next time you are struggling to come up with one good idea, maybe will remember to quickly discard 10 bad ideas first, so you don’t end up taking an hour+ to write an email like I just did.

Anyways, all this was really just a build up to a little promotional plug I am about to make.

It’s for my Most Valuable Email course. What might not be obvious is that each of those 10 discarded ideas above was my unsuccessful attempt to put the Most Valuable Email trick in action.

It normally doesn’t take that long. But even if it does, it’s almost always worth it, at least in my experience.

In any case, if you would like to find out Most Valuable Email trick, and even start putting it in action (you can use any of my 10 ideas above if they work for you), here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Best resource for newsletter growth ideas

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A couple days ago, copywriter and business owner Will Ward, who was in Dan Ferrari’s coaching group at the same time as me, forwarded me an email from Quiet Light, an online business broker.

This email described — without naming it – a newsletter that’s for sale right now:

“Social good and transformation” space. 300,000 total subscribers. Paid subscribers totaling almost $50,000 per month in subscription revenue. Started in May 2020. On sale now because the owner is “eager to return to her previous endeavors.” Asking price? $2.55 million.

Those numbers and dates made me wonder where the hell I was in May 2020 and what the hell I was doing then. Well actually, I can tell you almost exactly.

Right around that time, in June 2020, I sent out an email, “Expert advice on how to start an email magazine,” in which I shared an interview with Alex Lieberman.

In 2015, Lieberman started Morning Brew, a daily email newsletter with a summary of the day’s business news.

By 2020, Morning Brew was making $13 million per year in ad revenue. Later that year, in October 2020, Lieberman sold a controlling stake in Morning Brew to Business Insider for $75 million.

Like I wrote in that June 2020 email, I’d been thinking of starting a Morning Brew for X newsletter for a while, where X would be some topic I’m personally interested in.

Had I done it then, maybe today I’d be sitting on a multi-million dollar asset.

I didn’t do it then, but I did do it this past January. I started another newsletter, Morning Brew for X. X is my topic — something I’m interested in, and that I’m not sharing yet publicly. I want to grow this newsletter first and build up a bit of a moat before letting thousands of other marketers in on what I’m up to.

Anyways, as part of starting my own Morning Brew-like newsletter, I discovered there’s already a galaxy of Morning Brew-like newsletters, including many Ponziish Morning Brew-like newsletters that tell you how to grow your own Morning Brew-like newsletter.

My eyes were opened.

For years, I’d been living in the world of direct response-based, daily, Ben Settle-like emails that sell supplements or courses or dog toothbrushes. Most of those daily emails look pretty much the same, sound pretty much the same, and function pretty much the same — a good income or a nice back end.

Meanwhile, you have this cousin industry of people building $2.55 million and $13 million and $75 million businesses, using nothing other than email newsletters.

I’m not ragging on Ben Settle or his ideas. Those ideas, both for growing email lists and for monetizing them, have made me and my clients a healthy amount of money. But I do want to point out how much other stuff is happening in the world of email right now, adjacent to the little Amish world that’s centered on direct response copywriting and marketing.

Of course, this other, Morning Brew-like world has its own Amish tendencies. Also, there are literally hundreds or maybe even thousands of newsletters to choose from right now, all telling you how to make it as a creator or creative entrepreneur or a newsletter operator.

What’s worthwhile in this new world?

I can only tell you the best resource I have personally found. That’s Chenell Basilio’s Growth In Reverse.

Each week, Chenell does a deep dive into the growth strategies of a newsletter businesses — “deep” as in, it takes her 40+ hours of research to produce one of these analyses. For some reason, she does all this work and then gives it away for free.

Some of these strategies Chenell identifies I know about already. Some are new to me. Some are strategies I have no interest in trying myself myself. Some I think are very clever, and they already have me moving.

For example:

You can sign up to Chenell’s newsletter using the link below. It’s an affiliate link — though I’m not getting paid anything.

If you are curious why I’m promoting Chenell’s Growth In Reverse, beyond that it’s a great resource on how to grow your newsletter, and why I’m using an affiliate link, even though I’m not getting paid, then sign up to read her next email, which will arrive this Sunday.

​​Or sign up just because you want to grow your own newsletter and you want new ideas on how to do that. In any case, here’s that link:

https://bejakovic.com/chenell

I made $1,100 so I decided to spend $6,000 more

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Two weeks ago, I was talking to copywriter Vasilis Apostolou, and he told me of a direct marketing conference that’s happening in May in Poland.

The conference is small but features some people I very much respect, foremost among them A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos and marketer Matt Bacak.

I asked Vasilis how much it costs to get in. He told me. I groaned.

$3,000 just for the ticket. And then there’s travel, a place to stay, plus 3-4 days lost from work.

This past Thursday, I got on a podcast-like interview with Jen Adams from the Professional Writers Alliance. Last December, I wrote some articles for PWA about my 10 Commandments book, and I got paid $1k for those articles. I got paid an extra $100 for this podcast-like appearance.

​​Getting paid $1,100 is a nice way to do self-promotion – but it’s not enough.

Last summer, I paid $1,200 for the Dig This Zoom calls. I found out about the PWA writing opportunity through the Discord channel for people who bought those Dig calls. So far, I’ve made back $1,100 of that $1,200 via this PWA thing. That means I still have $100 to make up somewhere.

I’ve written before how I have made back all the money I’ve paid for specific copywriting and marketing education.

​​Tens of thousands on coaching with Dan Ferrari… thousands on newsletters and books with Ben Settle… $297 for the Parris Lampropoulos webinars back in 2019. That last one, by the way, is my most winning investment. When I add up all the extra money I can directly trace back to Parris’s training, I estimate it to have been about a 300x return.

The thing is, all those returns turned out to be unconscious, after-the-fact, well-would-you-look-at-that results.

​​But I’ve since told myself not to make this into a matter of coincidence or luck. I’ve since made it a matter of attitude. I now put in thought and effort to make sure any investment, regardless of how small or large, has to eventually pay for itself.

That’s an outcome that’s impossible to control if you are buying stocks or bonds or race horses. But it’s quite possible to control if you are buying education, opportunities, or connections.

I will see what happens once those PWA articles get published and once interview goes live. Maybe one of those PWA people will join my list, buy something from me, and pay me that missing $100. Unless I can track $100 of extra sales to that, I will have to think what else I can do to make those Dig Zoom calls pay for themselves.

Likewise with that Poland conference. ​I decided to go. I budgeted $6k total for it — actual groan-inducing cost plus opportunity cost.

​​In other words, I will have to figure out a way to make the event pay me at least $6k. And I set myself the goal to have it happen within the first seven days after conference ends. I’m a little nervous about achieving that, but to me that signals that it’s possible.

So now I have three calls-to-action for you:

1. If you are planning to be there in Poland in May, let me know and we can make a point of meeting there and talking.

2. If you somehow already got on my list via PWA, hit reply and let me know. I’m curious to hear what you’re up to and why you decided to join. And if you’re thinking of writing a book like my 10 Commandments book, I might be able to give you some inspiration or advice.

3. If neither of the above applies to you, then my final offer is my Copy Riddles program. It costs $400. If you do decide to buy it, I encourage you to think of how you can make this investment directly and trackably pay for itself, and then some.

You might wonder if that’s really possible.

​​It is.

​​So today, instead of pointing you to the Copy Riddles sales page, let me point you to an email I wrote last year about a Copy Riddles member named Nathan, who doubled his income as an in-house copywriter, and who credits Copy Riddles for a chunk of that increase. ​​In case you’re curious:

https://bejakovic.com/how-to-bombard-copywriting-clients-with-extra-value-at-no-extra-effort/

4 stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My point?

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

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

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

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

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Announcing: Son of Most Valuable Postcard

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Last year — not meaning yesterday, but actually 12 months ago — I set three themes for myself.

A theme is an idea I got from James Altucher. It’s a general direction to move in, unlike a goal, which is more like a destination to arrive at by a specific time. Themes work for me, goals don’t.

Anyways, one of my 2022 themes was “offers”. And I did well with that. By my count, I made over a dozen different offers last year to this list alone.

The most unique of those offers was my Most Valuable Postcard.

Each month, for all of two months, I sent a postcard from a new place with a short greeting and a URL. The URL took you to a secret website, where you would find my in-depth treatment of one fundamental marketing or copywriting topic for that month.

Subscribers loved the Most Valuable Postcard.

I hated it.

I hated walking around in the summer sun trying to find nice-looking postcards. I hated addressing and writing them by hand.

​​I hated the pressure of finishing up the actual content each month and making it great before the first postcards started arriving.

​​I hated the fact that the postcards didn’t arrive reliably and that I had to resend many of them.

So I killed the Most Valuable Postcard off. Subscribers sighed and said they saw it coming.

But now, the Most Valuable Postcard is back. In a way.

The core concept of the Most Valuable Postcard is something I find too valuable to let go. Like I said, it’s to take a fundamental marketing idea and go deep. As copywriter Dan Ferrari wrote a while back:

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Learning fundamentals and mastering fundamentals are two different things. Sorry to break it to you, in my experience, ~80% of copywriters NEVER reach mastery. The simple explanation is they have NO idea how much deeper they can go. That’s too bad because all it takes is a willingness to put the SCUBA gear on and explore the depths.

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​So my plan is to go deep, write more Most Valuable Postcards, and put them inside the members-only area of my site.

There won’t be a physical postcard any more, but the website content will have the same format as before.

There also won’t be a monthly subscription, but I will sell the postcards individually, whenever I put them out.

To start, I’m selling the first Most Valuable Postcard, which so far only went out to those first 20 people who managed to sign up last summer.

But I am only selling this offer to people who are on my email list. In case you are interested in my Most Valuable Postcard, or simply want to read my emails as I write them every day, click here to sign up to my newsletter.

Story of coaching with Dan Ferrari continued

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Yesterday, I promised to share with you how I paid off 6 months of very expensive coaching in less than 60 days.

The story is this:

Back in 2019, I’d been working with an ecommerce company for about a year, writing their entire sales funnels, including advertorials and Facebook and YouTube ads.

At the height of it, we were making 2,000 sales every day to entirely cold traffic.

And then the next day, it was time to make 2,000 new sales to entirely cold traffic.

Meanwhile, the previous buyers’ data went off to some cold storage facility in a bunker at the bottom of the Pacific ocean.

Over and over, I proposed to the ecomm guys to start sending emails to these previous buyers. “It’s free money,” I kept saying. “Let me do it. I’ll do all the work. Just pay me a part of the money I’ll make for you.”

I did this maybe five times over the course of the year we had been working together. Each time, the ecomm guys had some excuse, and they said no. The reality was they were simply making way too much money on the front end, and they didn’t feel like bothering with the setup.

In the meantime, I joined Dan Ferrari’s coaching group.

I also realized that, even though I was getting paid $150/hr to write “horror advertorials” for dog toothbrushes and strapless bras, there was not any opportunity here to reach the next level as a copywriter. And frankly, I was bored with writing advertorials day in and day out.

I decided it was time to cut off the relationship with the ecommerce company, and in that way, to force myself to look for better clients.

“What about writing emails for them on a rev-share basis?” Dan asked me.

“I tried selling them that,” I said. “Each time, they dragged their feet and eventually said no. They obviously don’t want to do it. I’m done with them.”

“Sure,” said Dan. “But try it one last time.”

So I did.

Because one pact I made with myself during this very expensive coaching with Dan was to do whatever he said — even if it seemed futile, even if it felt repulsive, even if I knew better.

So one last time, I made the rev-share email pitch to the ecomm guys. And whaddya know. They finally agreed, for whatever reason.

A few days later, I started writing and sending emails to one of their buyer lists, made up of 40k+ people.

It wasn’t an immediate win. But within a month, I figured out what worked.

And then, the ecomm guys opened up a second 40k+ buyer list for me to mail. And that’s when the money really started rolling in, both for the ecomm guys, and also for me.

Like I said yesterday, this new source of income paid off 6 months of Dan Ferrari’s coaching in under 60 days.

That was not the only bump in income and opportunity that I got from Dan’s coaching. There were others, where he had a much more direct and involved role. But though valuable, those other opportunities don’t compare to the money I made as a result of this simple piece of advice. “Sure. But try it one last time.”

I wanna highlight two things:

You might say that Dan’s contribution was trivial in this case. Maybe so.

But without his trivial piece of advice, I’m 100% sure I would have ended that ecomm relationship early, and I would today be out a large sum of money, and a large amount of experience with email marketing at a very high level.

You might also say the stars had to align for Dan’s comment to have the impact it did.

I mean, how many businesses making 2,000 sales a day are dumb enough to never try to sell another thing to previous customers? It’s easy to make money in that situation.

Again, maybe so. But many businesses, even successful businesses, have marketing cracks like this. But often they can’t see or can’t fill those cracks themselves, and it takes somebody from the outside to force a change.

The same is true of people.

If you’re smart, like Dan is, then you set yourself up to coach people who have a lot of the pieces in place already. People who just need an outside perspective on plugging up cracks, or a push at the right time in the right direction for those existing pieces to click and fuse together.

Because getting somebody from 0 to 1 can be impossibly hard work.

Getting somebody from 1 to 10 might be less hard but isn’t much more rewarding.

But if somebody already has a half-dozen 17’s in hand… then you don’t need to show them how to go from 17 to 30. You don’t even have to show them how to add up their half-dozen 17’s to make 102.

You just have to show them something like the “multiplication trick”, and suddenly, their half-dozen 17’s click and fuse and are suddenly worth over 2 million.

I hope I didn’t lose you with that mathematical analogy. Because it’s time for my pitch, and I’d like your full attention.

As I wrote two days ago, I’m starting my own coaching program. The focus is entirely on email marketing. How to send more emails. How to make those emails more interesting. How to sell more, and at higher prices, using email.

If this is something that interests you, and if you suspect you have a lot of the pieces in place already, then I’d like to talk to you. As the first step, you will have to be on my email list. Click here to sign up.

The price took my breath away

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Back in 2019, I had been talking to Dan Ferrari about joining his coaching program. Dan and I exchanged some emails. We got on the phone to talk — I asked him a dozen questions I had prepared in advance, and he patiently answered.

At the end of the call, I told Dan I’m in. Even though we still hadn’t talked price.

Dan then sent me an email with a PayPal link, and the actual per-month cost of his coaching.

I still remember exactly where I was in the city when I took out my phone and saw Dan’s email. Like I said, the price took my breath away.

I expected the coaching to be expensive. But not this expensive. I won’t say exactly how expensive it turned out to be. I’ll just say it was as high as my total income on many months at the time.

Still, I had some savings. I figured as long as I had some money in the bank, I was willing to give it a go. So I took a deep breath, PayPaled Dan the money, and the coaching started.

Months passed. Dan delivered on his end. He gave me feedback on my copy. He made introductions to potential high-level clients. He showed me some A-list secrets.

And yet, it wasn’t paying off. I was burning through my savings. And I still wasn’t making that filthy lucre that I was hoping for.

Six months into the coaching, I told Dan that I didn’t want to keep going. I felt I didn’t have enough high-level copy projects for him to critique. I didn’t have any promising new leads who might change that. And I was getting very nervous because my savings had all but evaporated.

So I quit.

And then, the very next month, I had my biggest-ever month as a copywriter. I made about double what I had made on my best month to that point.

The month after that even bigger.

The month after that, bigger still.

And it kept going.

In just the first two months after I quit Dan’s coaching, the extra money I made paid for all the coaching I had gotten from Dan.

Over the next year or so, I made more money than I had made in the previous five years total.

My work and and skill and dedication where an undeniable part of that jump in income. But so were a few things I can directly trace to Dan and his coaching program.

I’d like to tell you the biggest one of those. It was a throwaway piece of advice I got from Dan around month four in the coaching program. But today’s email is getting long, so I will tell you that tomorrow, in case you are interested.

For now, let me restate my offer from yesterday:

I’m starting up a coaching program, focused specifically on email marketing.

You might think I told you the above story to encourage you to jump in, price be damned, because it will end up paying for itself somehow.

That’s not it at all.

Yes, my goal is for this coaching program to pay for itself for the right person.

But I am not nearly as willing to gamble with other people’s money as I am with my own. And since this is the first time I am offering coaching like this, I want to kick it off on a positive note, with people who have the best chance to make this coaching pay for itself, and soon, rather than in seven or eight months.

If you think that might be you, then my first requirement is that you join my email newsletter. Click here and sign up. That done, we can talk.