Dan Ferrari

Justifying your existence

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Over the past couple months, I’ve been invited to join, for free, a mastermind that normally costs $50k/year.

The mastermind meets weekly on Thursdays.

I have been dutifully attending every week… until this last Thursday.

I didn’t really have anything new to crow about. I had made no progress on what I was working on the Thursday prior. I felt reluctant to go on the call and maybe have to admit that.

So I told myself I’m tired and I deserve a break, and I simply skipped the mastermind call, even though it’s a warm & welcoming environment, even though it’s filled with big-time marketers, and even though I have learned crazy things each time had I attended, and it seemed crazy to miss the opportunity to learn more.

I know this same feeling from when I had hired A-lister Dan Ferrari as a copywriting coach back in 2019-2020.

I felt pressure each week to come and show some sort of progress. It didn’t really impact what I did — I was doing my work already, and an additional weekly deadline couldn’t change that — but it definitely created extra stress for days in advance of each week’s call.

The weird thing is, I know this same feeling from the other side too.

I have in the past offered 1-1 coaching to people and charging them multiple thousands of dollars per month.

I ended up working with a few folks who already had successful email-based businesses. They were convinced that better email copy would help their business grow even more. They hired me to critique their emails regularly.

After two weeks of this, it inevitably came to pass that I had pointed out any technical issues with their emails, and they had plugged up these few copywriting holes.

But my coaching clients had hired me, liked me, and wanted ongoing feedback from me, or so I assumed. And so we kept getting on weekly hour-long calls, where I kept looking over their really very good emails, because I felt I had to justify my existence, because they had paid me.

It doesn’t have to be like this.

I don’t do copy critiques any more, and I don’t get on weekly coaching calls with people just because they paid me.

You don’t have to promise weekly 1-hour calls either… or offer 24/7 access to you over WhatsApp… or give away a year of your life to anybody just because you’re out of better ideas for what to offer.

You don’t have to justify your existence, or crack the whip to “motivate” people who are already stressed that they are not doing enough.

You can go from telling yourself you are good at what you do and you like the work, and that money is secondary… to telling yourself that you help motivated and resourceful people in your audience reach an outcome they want, and that you get paid accordingly.

Over the past couple weeks, I have been talking indirectly about repackaging your “coaching,” which you might be struggling to sell, into a $1k+ offer which is both easier to sell and deliver.

It’s time to get more direct.

Would you like to use your knowledge and skill to help people in your audience get results?

Would you like to have a $1k+ offer, which you can sell 3-5 times a month, and which you can deliver in 6 or fewer hours to start, and in less and less time with each subsequent sale?

Would you like my help in getting there?

If you would, hit reply. No pressure, and no commitment. We can simply see if it makes sense to work together, and if it does, you can make your decision then.

How I ended up paying an inconcievable price for coaching

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The date was July 17, 2019. I remember exactly where I was, walking in the old 18th century part of my home town of Zagreb, Croatia, where I was living at the time.

I pulled out my phone and saw that I had a new email from Dan Ferrrari.

In case you don’t know, Dan is an A-list copywriter. I profiled him in Commandment IV of my first 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters, because he has string of winning sales letters that few if any copywriters over the past 10 years can match. As just one example, Dan once wrote a sales letter that tripled sales over the previous control and sold out the entire stock of a longevity supplement.

In July 2019, my connection to Dan was extremely tenuous and unlikely.

I had gotten on his email list years earlier, but he never sent any emails.

Then, in the spring of 2019, while I was on a short trip to visit a friend in Baltimore — my first trip back to the U.S. in over five years — Dan finally sent an email to his list. Is anybody in the Baltimore/Washington area who wants to meet?

I replied yes. I don’t know exactly why or what I was hoping for. I just had a sense I was stuck with copywriting as a career. I had only heard stellar things about Dan. I thought if I met him in person maybe it would lead to something.

Aaaand… it turned out no. Our schedules didn’t fit, and we never ended up meeting in Baltimore.

I went back to Croatia, and Dan went back to his non-emailing.

And then, a few weeks later, Dan wrote me to ask whether I might be interested in his coaching program? I said yes.

To which, Dan replied with nothing. No response, first for a few days, then a week, then a month.

I forgot about Dan, and started fishing around for a different copywriting coach. But crazy as it might seem today, nobody in 2019 was offering coaching for copywriting.

And then, over a month after our last email exchange, Dan did reply. We got on a call to discuss his coaching program. I asked about everything but the price because I didn’t want that to cloud my judgment. The coaching sounded like the exact thing I had been looking for. I told Dan I’m in, and I figured I’d make the price work for me somehow.

The day after the call, Dan sent me an email with a PayPal payment link and the actual per month price for the coaching.

That was the email I got while walking around the old town in Zagreb. The reason I remember exactly where I was is that 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 decided that, as long as I had some money in the bank, I was willing to give it a go. I mean, everything seemed to be building up to here — my stagnation with copywriting as a career, the near misses I’d had in meeting with Dan, the constant drum beating of “get a mentor” that was popular at the time.

So I took a deep breath, PayPaled Dan the money, and the coaching started.

I’ve written before about the actual coaching I got from Dan. I won’t repeat that here. Here I just want to focus on the price of the coaching, which, as I said, took my breath away when I first saw it.

Had anybody sat me down a few days prior and asked me whether I would pay, each month, what I ended up paying Dan, I would have just stared at them bug-eyed. “Absolutely not” would be my answer, and I would have meant it 100%.

Here’s the fundamental dilemma of setting prices:

Nobody knows what anything is truly worth. You don’t know what your offer is truly worth to your customers. They don’t know either. You can ask them, but they cannot and will not tell you the truth. The only way to know is to put an offer in front of them and see if they will buy.

I ended up buying Dan’s coaching at a price that would have been inconceivable to me only days earlier. Your customers or clients might end up buying your offers at prices that seem inconceivable to you now.

The only way to know is to put your offer in front of them, and see if they will buy.

That said, you can be a little more strategic about your price than simply throwing darts at a dartboard now and then. And on that note, I’d like to remind you of a mini-course I released yesterday, called Modified Depoorter Pricing.

This mini-course is about a pricing strategy I’ve used in the past to sell both services (back when I was working as a sales copywriter) and, later, my own courses.

This pricing strategy was elegant and worked very well when I used it.

My one regret is, I haven’t been consistent enough or thorough enough about using this pricing strategy. So I’ve created a mini-course outlining this pricing strategy, both for your benefit and for mine.

This is a “mini-course,” because I didn’t fill it with a lot of fluff or infotainment. You can consume it in 10 minutes if you so choose.

As such, I still don’t have a sales page for it. But if you’d like to get it nonetheless, you can do so at the link below.

The reason you might want to act now is that I will soon use the Modified Depoorter Pricing strategy to increase the price of this mini-course from its current modest level. To get it before then:

https://bejakovic.com/depoorter

A tabloidy factoid about Dan Ferrari and Ning Li

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A few weeks ago, copywriter Tom Baines wrote me to say:

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Anyway, I’m excited for your new book, and here’s an interesting tabloidy factoid you may already be aware of: Dan Ferarri and Ning Li have both talked openly about how they first connected in a pickup artist subreddit, where Dan initially mentored Ning as a pick-up artist before eventually bringing him over into copywriting and helping him build his career here… I think it’s a fun little overlap.

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I’m sharing this as a bit of gossip in case you have connections to the copywriting industry. Ning and Dan are both well-known figures there. I never knew the background of how they met, even though I was in Dan’s small and intimate coaching program 5+ years ago.

Beyond gossip, anything worthwhile here?

I heard direct marketing legend Dan Kennedy say on multiple occasions how the top copywriters he knows all have years of “nose to nose, toes to toes” sales experience. And if you look at the famousest copywriters, from Claude Hopkins to Gary Halbert on down to Dan Kennedy himself, all started out in direct or door-to-door sales.

But I think today the “nose to nose, toes to toes” connection has weakened, in large part because door-to-door sales has become a much rarer endeavor.

On the other hand, I know more successful copywriters who have experience with pickup than I can count on my two hands and 10 sticky fingers.

In part, that’s because equivalent social shifts — things like the Internet — which caused d2d selling to drop have also made info about pickup and seduction available to a large pool of eager men.

But it’s more than that.

There are ideas, skills, and attitudes that translate from pickup to copywriting, and vice versa, same as from copy to d2d sales, and vice versa.

All to say:

1. You might have valuable skills and experiences you are not aware of right now.

2. If you want to find out some of the connections between copywriting and d2d sales and pickup, and also seemingly unrelated but deeply connected fields like hypnosis and stage magic and standup comedy, then you might like:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

How much things cost now

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A couple days ago, I announced I’ll be increasing the price of my Daily Email Habit service from $20/month to $30/month. I got a reply to that announcement from copywriter and brand strategist Chavy Helfgott, who has subscribed to Daily Email Habit since day 1. She wrote:

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Just chiming in to say that even at $30, you will be vastly undercharging.

I honestly feel that the 40+ days of daily email prompts + knowledge gained in the community, have so far have been at least as valuable for me than the $10,000 personal business coaching I paid for a few years ago.

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I’ll get back to those numbers in a second.

But first, let me tell you that, also a couple days ago, marketer Ross O’Lochlainn, who I guess was in Dan Ferrari’s little coaching group right before me, shared how much some things cost now.

Ross was at an in-person mastermind. A couple who was also in attendance shared the details of their business.

Their business is dream interpretation.

Their current low-ticket offer is $3k. Their premium dream interpretation offer, for a small “bleeding neck” segment of their audience, sells for $35,000 a pop. (People have bought.) The couple think they could get the price up to $75k, or maybe $100k.

Says Ross, this has now replaced his previous best story of premium offerings, which was a dude who charges $10,000 to help people do handstands.

I’m not sharing this to shake my head at the greedy Martin Shkrelis of the dream interpretation and handstand industries.

I’m sharing this to open your mind and maybe mine.

The same “stuff” can be packaged up in a different way and presented inside of a different experience to sell not for 2x, 10x, or even 40x… but even 500x, like Chavy says above.

Or 333x if you sign up tomorrow.

Because today is the last day, ever, in the history of mankind, I will be offering the Charter Member price for Daily Email Habit.

Tonight at 12pm midnight, the price goes up to $30/month.

(Apparently, there is still a lot of room for the price to increase beyond that, too.)

Also, Daily Email House, the community that Chavy refers to above, goes away as a free bonus, at the chime of midnight, just like an ordinary pumpkin that magically turns into its own beautiful paid offer.

If you would like to join Daily Email Habit before these vastly underpriced privileges disappear:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

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/