Dan Ferrari

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:

===

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.

===

​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.

Buy my 10 Commandments book

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This past November, copywriter Dan Ferrari sent out an email with 38 lessons to mark his 38th birthday. Lesson number 9 read:

9. People love commandments. A little copy “trick” I don’t see used often enough is to create a commandment and then repeat it over and over again, like the chorus to a song. Here’s an example… “remember: commandments always equal higher conversions.” If this were a sales letter, that would be the chorus line.

I haven’t promoted my 10 Commandments book for a while. So let me do it now.

Buy my 10 Commandments book.

​​Why? Because it’s great. Here’s a testimonial — or more specifically, a four-star review, which is as negative of a review as I’ve gotten so far:

“Short and very pertinent. Loaded with the names of hugely successful giants of the copywriting world and the titles of their successful books. I read the book on Kindle and highlighted many great bits of advice and the names of the great writers sharing advice. If you write ad copy for a living or hope to do so, buy this book.”

As the reviewer above says at the end of his 4-star review:

Buy my 10 Commandments book. At least if you write ad copy for a living or hope to do so.

Maybe you’re still not convinced.

​​So let me tell you that the book contains a commandment by Dan Ferrari. Dan is one of the smartest and most successful people in the copywriting world right now.

Over the past decade, Dan has made himself a lot of money by writing copy for some of the biggest direct response publishers. He has a long string of controls, even when going up against other top pros. As a result, he was voted the no. 1 direct response copywriter in a recent ranking some dude put together.

So that’s another reason why you should buy my 10 Commandments book.

Maybe, maybe you’re still not convinced.

In that case, I can tell you my 10 Commandments book costs only $5. It’s by far the cheapest of my offers, and outside of any future Kindle books I may one day write, it’s also the only thing I will ever sell for under $100, at least outside special launch prices.

Are you starting to feel the refrain coming on? I’m feeling it. And it goes like this…

Buy my 10 Commandments book.

​​You can do it at the link below:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

“Why would you ever say anything that’s not awesome?”

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This past summer, I wrote an email about how I was struggling to get through the Dig.This.Zoom course, in spite of having paid $1,200 for it.

Maybe it will turn out the course wasn’t an entire waste of money, because it did provide me with the following quick story:

In one Dig.This.Zoom lesson, Aaron Winter, former copy chief at Motley Fool and guru to super successful Dig copywriters like Dan Ferrari and Austin Lee, was talking about headlines.

​​”So there’s headlines,” Aaron said, “and then there’s… stuff? Content? We reject that. Ideally, they’re all headlines. Why would you ever say something that’s not awesome?”

In slightly clearer words, Aaron was saying that each line of your copy should have as much pull — as much emotional weight and curiosity and benefit, all fused together — as your headline has.

This is the kind of inspirational but vague mysticism that made me start to tune out the entire Dig.This.Zoom course.

Fortunately, Austin Lee, who was on this particular Dig.This.Zoom call, chimed in at this point with some practical advice:

“One of the most fun and educational exercises you encouraged me to do was write a headline for every little section of my outline. I really wrote an entire promo of maybe 26 or 32 headlines all the way down through the offer.”

I bring this up (spoiler alert) because I am promoting my Copy Riddles program. Whenever I do promote this program, I always get some form of the following question:

Is Copy Riddles just about bullets OR about about copywriting in general?

The answer is yes.

As Aaron says above, copywriting is really about your best headlines. And your best headlines are really just your best bullets. Or as Ben Settle put it once:

“Bullets still work, never stopped working, and will always work — When written correct everything ‘comes’ from the bullets, including non-bullet copy or ads where there are no bullets.”

Copy Riddles is now open and ready to turn you into somebody who writes stuff that’s awesome. Whether that’s awesome bullets, awesome headlines, or awesome body copy.

​​In case you’re interested:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Announcing: Membrane Theory

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Frankly, I’m a little filled with dread as I sit down to write this email. I mean, just a moment ago, I realized it was time, but I had nothing. No ideas to write about. In a last-ditch attempt to put off work, I decided to check my own inbox.

​​And whaddya know?

There was something interesting in there:

My monthly report from Google Search Console, telling me which pages on my site have gotten the most visits.

So what are my most visited pages? And how are people finding me? Here are my top 3 Google queries:

1. Dan Ferrari copywriter
2. Evaldo Albuquerque
3. Daniel Throssell

Is this fair?

​​I mean, I’ve written way more emails/posts in the categories of motivation, positioning, and insight marketing than about any of those three guys.

But as the numbers show, that doesn’t matter.

​​What does matter is a really fundamental and very valuable idea — valuable if you are ever trying to influence people and get them to change their minds. I’ve previously summed this up as:

Sell people, not ideas.

Ideas are smoke.

But people have meat to them.

It’s just something about the human brain. In any pile of random data points, we are pre-progammed to search for human actors, for faces, for names.

This is just one example of something I call “membrane theory.”

Rather than dealing with a bunch of loose stuff, people want to put a membrane around it, and deal with it as a unit.

That’s why we love clearly defined scenes and events, with a ritualized beginning and an end.

That’s why we love to get a medical diagnosis, as bad as it may be, rather than keep living with a bunch of vague, threatening, on-and-off symptoms.

That’s why we love to categorize ourselves and others. We want to stop the world from being fluid and flexible, and instead we want to see ourselves as an INTQ while the other guy is an EFBJ and so of course we cannot work well together.

But you know what?

I’m not applying my own lesson here.

Because “Membrane Theory” is a horrible-sounding and abstract idea.

So let me stop talking about that. And let me talk about myself instead.

As I finish up writing this email, I’m a lot less filled with dread than I was just 20 minutes ago.

I’m looking out my large balcony doors, to yet another sunny and hot day in Barcelona. A scooter just drove up my street. Man those things make a lot of noise.

As soon as I finish up here, I’ll get back to work on my Most Valuable Email project. I’m turning that into its own complete course, and it should be ready soon.

Also, a bit later in the month, I will convert my Copy Riddles program from being delivered by email, only a few times a month, to a standalone, web-based, evergreen course.

In the meantime, if you want to help me get the word out about 1) myself and 2) Copy Riddles, I created an optin page/too-valuable post for that.

And if you share that optin page publicly, I’ve got a little bribe for you. It might be of interest in case you are a freelancer — it can help you get clients.

For the full details on that offer, which I have membranized under the name Niche Expert Cold Emails, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/free-offer-niche-expert-cold-emails/

The next “greatest living copywriter”

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In response to my “Long-form copy is finally dead” email yesterday, a reader named David wrote in:

So Gary is the Greatest “Living” Copywriter rn. And that’s great. I agree with you.

But I couldn’t help but wonder, if he dies (and I’m not wishing that he does), who’s going to become the Greatest?

I’m thinking top contenders are Stefan, Evaldo, Ferrari and Haddad.

But I have no clue what the metrics are for choosing these kind of things. It’s just a thought that ran across my mind.

Anyhow thank you for your emails. I enjoy my time reading them.

Rather than who will be the next greatest, I can think of a more interesting and useful question:

Why would any person not named Brian Kurtz possibly think that Gary Bencivenga is the “greatest living copywriter?”

After all, it’s not there in the copy. There’s no way to rank “copywriting greatness” by staring at a bunch of sales letters.

It’s also not about results. Again, unless you are Brian Kurtz, who had a chance to compare the sales made by Gary’s copy to that of some other copywriters, you have no direct knowledge of Gary’s results.

So what is it?​​

Well, if you’re anything like me, and I imagine David above, you believe Gary is so great…

Because you’ve heard people like Brian Kurtz say so…

… because you’ve heard of Gary’s farewell seminar, which cost something $5k to attend and which brought together 100 successful DR marketers and copywriters, people like Gary Halbert and John Carlton, to sit and listen to Gary for three days…

… because thanks to email newsletters like this one, you’ve heard Gary’s name mentioned a million times, often with the attached tag line, “greatest living copywriter.”

And if I had to speculate on the rather fruitless question of who the next greatest copywriter will be, I think it will be something similar. Just as something similar applies to you.

Whether you’re a copywriter or a marketer who sells on authority and personality… whether you’re self-employed or under somebody else’s thumb… whether you’re new at the game or been at it for a while…

Your positioning and ultimately your success are much less about any metrics you can point to, and much more about the legend that emerges around you, or that you create for yourself.

That might be something that’s worth thinking about.

I’ve done some thinking about it myself. And I’ve concluded that, at least for the moment, I’m not in the “being a legend” business.

That’s why I’m happy to contribute to Gary’s legend instead of building up my own.

As befitting Gary’s legend as “greatest living copywriter,” I put him first in my 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters book.

​​If by some chance managed to miss or resist my continued attempts to sell you that $4.99 book, here’s where you can find it, along with Gary’s irresistible commandment:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments​​

Persuasion world: Men wanted for hazardous journey

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A couple years ago, I got an email from a successful copywriter who had just signed up to my list. He wrote me to say hello.

​​He also mentioned he found my site because he was studying Dan Ferrari’s sales letters in detail. (I had written some stuff about Dan and about being in Dan’s coaching program.)

The copywriter and I got to email-chatting a bit. I mentioned a presentation Dan once gave, where he broke down one of his most successful promotions. I offered to send successful copywriter #1, the guy who had written me, this presentation.

But he was reluctant. It seemed he had gotten what he wanted from Dan’s sales letters alone… and he didn’t want or need to hear Dan’s take on it.

And you know what? I can understand.

I liken it to going to see a movie versus reading a review of that same movie. The review might be good, might be bad… but even if it was written by the director himself, it’s certainly going to be a very different experience than seeing the actual movie itself.

The review won’t stimulate the same random pathways in the brain. It won’t trigger the same emotions. And it won’t allow for much independent thought.

This applies to you too. Right now, you may be reading books… going through courses… skimming emails like this one. Fine. They can give you the lay of the land when you’re new to a topic.

But the map, as they say in NLP, is not the territory.

Somebody else’s second-order interpretation of what persuasion is all about can only take you so far.

The good news is there’s a whole wild and dangerous world of TV shows, movies, current events, tabloids, political propaganda, real-life experiences, and yes, even books and articles, just waiting for you to start exploring and asking — why do I think this is compelling?

If you find that argument compelling, then I’ve got a contradictory bit of advice for you:

G​o and read my 10 Commandments book.

​​Not for any persuasion lessons it might contain… but rather, as an example of content that you can dissect and analyze yourself.

After all, a lot of people have found this book interesting and even valuable. If you want to see why, and maybe even how you can do something similar yourself, take a look here:

​​https://bejakovic.com/10commandments