Dan Kennedy

Secret offer knowledge that’s too valuable to trumpet loudly

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I’ve been going through Dan Kennedy’s Opportunity Concepts seminar recordings.

There are two great, truly great, Dan Kennedy seminars.

One is Influential Writing, in which Dan explains how to create a cult of personality in your writing. Basically, it’s what everybody with a personal daily email newsletter is doing or should be doing.

The other great Dan Kennedy seminar is Opportunity Concepts. It tackles the other side, not the copy but the offer.

Opportunity Concepts teaches you how to repackage, reinvent, recreate what you offer as an opportunity — something so new, so distracting, and so sexy that people want it based on its own merits, even if they don’t know you, even if it sounds preposterous, even if it’s expensive.

So today I’m going through Dan Kennedy’s Opportunity Concepts, maybe for the fifth time ever.

The seminar sold for $10k when Dan put it on live back in 2011.

The recordings sold for $1,500 after that, but are no longer available anywhere, including eBay or Dan Kennedy’s site.

(Don’t ask me how I got ’em, but I got ’em a long time ago, for free, though legally.)

So I’m going through Dan Kennedy’s Opportunity Concepts. And I decide on a whim to google “Opportunity Concepts.” There’s not much out there. but…

… there is a page on the Dan Kennedy’s website, saying that Opportunity Concepts has been turned into a book called Selling Opportunity.

The only way to get Selling Opportunity is to sign up to the Diamond Level of Dan Kennedy’s membership/newsletter.

The Diamond Level costs $297/month.

Much better than either $10,000 or $1,500, and really a drop in the bucket considering the value of this info.

But then, on one last hunch, I decide to go to Amazon.

I search for “Selling Opportunity.”

And there it is.

A recording of Dan Kennedy’s Opportunity Concepts, sold as an audiobook published by Nightingale-Conant… for $15.

I bought it immediately, even though I already have it.

I skipped around through it, just to see if it really is the Opportunity Concepts training.

It is.

Some parts are missing (a couple guest presentations, for example).

But most of it is there.

If you like, you can get Opportunity Concepts, reinvented as Selling Opportunity, below.

I won’t trumpet it any more. You either know or you don’t know what this is worth. If you don’t, that’s okay. If you do:

​https://bejakovic.com/opportunity-concepts

I promoted Dan Kennedy’s $0.99 audiobook but when the results rolled in!…

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This past Wednesday, I was moving my stuff from my old apartment, in the peripheral “Williamsburg of Barcelona,” to my new apartment, in the very heart of Barcelona.

It’s stressful to move, even though I have little stuff.

I found some movers on the Spanish version of Craigslist. They showed up unprepared, possibly drunk, and clearly determined to take as much advantage as they could of the fact they were being paid per hour, rather than per completed job.

It took 3 and 1/2 hours for them to move a few plants and a few trashbags’ worth of stuff 3 miles across town.

My day was eaten up with preparing for this move… with witnessing the move in all its glacial fury… and then with recovering from the move ie. hiding the trashbags of stuff in places around my new apartment where I cannot see them and don’t have to think about them for a while.

All that’s to say, on Wednesday I really had no time or brain power to write my daily email.

So I took post from my Daily Email House community, in which House member Anthony La Tour shared how it’s now possible to get get several super valuable, multi-thousand dollar Dan Kennedy seminars for the cost of an Audible audiobook, and I basically sent that out as my email.

Results:

$306 in Audible bounties so far, plus about a dozen readers writing in to say “thank you” for cluing them into this offer.

Conclusions:

#1 Audible can be a legit “in-between” offer to promote

The regular Amazon affiliate program pays peanuts, but the bounties when somebody signs up for Audible are generous — $10 for a $0.99 trial, whether the customer sticks or not.

When you add it all up, and add up some other bounties Amazon is giving to affiliates, you get the $306 I made with my email on Wednesday.

$306 is not “pay for a house” money.

But I wasn’t in the middle of promoting anything anyhow. $306 is a decent return for spending about 15 mins to “write” and schedule an email in the middle of moving apartments.

Of course, in order for this to be a repeatable thing, it would take other unique audiobook deals — either something not available in other formats, or only available for drastically more in other formats, like the Dan Kennedy thing.

#2. There’s great value in telling people something new

On Wednesday, I had no idea whether talking about this Audible deal would make me any money.

I knew it was still a good thing to share this deal in my email.

Because much more than the direct money from the sales you might make, there’s value in telling people something new.

Genuine news hooks readers on opening your emails in the future as well, and at least checking out you future offers also. After all, they might miss out! And few new things are as interesting as a legit new deal on something people already want.

#3. “How can they afford this???”

Audible pays out $10 bounties for somebody signing up for a $0.99 trial.

That connected in my mind to Internet Marketer Igor Kheifets’s pretty irresistible offer to affiliates:

Igor is currently paying out a $30 commission for each affiliate sale of his $3.99 book.

How can Amazon (and Igor) afford to do this?

They can afford to do it because:

1. They know their numbers ie. what a new customer in this funnel is worth to them, and

2. They have high-enough numbers, because they make new customers all kinds of additional offers in the form of order bumps, upsells, downsells, and cross-sells.

And that’s just in that one funnel.

After the customer buys, Amazon and (Igor) own the customer relationship. They can then simply make new backend offers from now till doomsday. As Igor wrote to me as I was promoting his book, “I only need one backend sale to cover everything.”

I’ve long been guilty of not having either of the 2 items above.

#1 (not knowing what a new customer in a funnel is worth to me) is fairly easy and quick to fix.

#2 (not having two dozen other offers to make in one funnel) is less so.

But I’m working on both of them. And I’m sharing what I’m learning, and I’m trying to take some people along for the ride. If you wanna go for that ride as well:

https://bejakovic.com/house

“The Bible of persuasion” (was $1,997, now $0.99)

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Boy I got something hot for you.

Super hot.

It sells for $1,997 right now… is worth millions if you apply it thoroughly… but you can get it today for $0.99.

Thanks to Daily Email House member Anthony La Tour, I got clued into an amazing fact earlier this morning. In Anthony’s words:

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So recently, I’ve been getting things ready for a road trip from Oregon to California tomorrow for Thanksgiving with my wife and the kids (wish me luck… this is their first time). As I was scrolling around Audible for something to pass the time on the road, I came across two new “audiobooks” from Dan Kennedy:

Mind Hijacking & Magnetic Story Selling

These are NOT audiobooks. They are recordings from the seminars he gave. In the case of Magnetic Story Selling (which is HIGHLY useful for writing emails), multiple seminars.

Magnetic Story Selling is currently being offered at $1,997 just for the physical book. The price of the seminar ticket alone for Mind Hijacking was over $7,000.

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For the purposes of this email, I just wanna focus on that Magnetic Story Selling book (print version) that Anthony mentions.

I checked, and sure enough, it’s selling for $1,997 online right now.

Also included as bonuses are several Dan Kennedy seminars, including one called Influential Writing.

I first heard about that training some five years ago from Internet Marketer Rich Schefren, who said it was one of Dan Kennedy’s two best trainings.

I got my hands on it after that (don’t ask how).

I’ve since gone through Influential Writing many, many times.

It’s on my phone and I used to listen to it while walking on the beach. It’s shaped my ideas about writing an email newsletter more than just about anything else has, outside Ben Settle’s initial advice to get started and to make your emails “infotaining.”

And now, if what Anthony says is right, you can get the recording of the Influential Writing seminar as part of the Magnetic Story Selling audiobook… not for the ~10k that it cost initial attendees… nor for the $1,997 that it costs as part of the “multimedia book” being sold on Russell Brunson’s site… but for $33 on Audible, or for $0.99 if you sign up to an Audible subscription.

I wish I had known about this last week, because I would have definitely included it inside my Black Friday Bundle Collector’s Edition of amazing and secret deals. As it is, it’s too late, and too good for me not to share.

If you want to influence people via the written word, then Influential Writing is, as one of the testimonials says, “the Bible of persuasion.” Nothing else comes close. And if you wanna get this audiobook version, which apparently includes it:

https://bejakovic.com/mss

To all my dog trainers, pottery instructors, and professional alpaca whisperers

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Yesterday I got a question from Liza Schermann, the original “Crazy Email Lady” and current head copywriter at surging startup Scandinavian Biolabs. Liza wanted to know:

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Why so tempting??

I promised myself never to click through to the sales page of Daily Email Habit. It’s too good an offer not to buy, but I knew I wouldn’t commit. Yesterday, I gave in and clicked against my better judgement.

Anyhow, now I’m wondering:

The example you provide on the sales page is very specific to online marketing. Are most of the prompts geared towards this crowd? Or is it a mix, and people can adjust as they see fit for their own purposes?

I happen to be in this crowd, so it makes perfect sense to me. But maybe there’s a dog trainer, a pottery instructor, or a professional alpaca whisperer on your list who’s scratching their head wondering what to do with a prompt about daily emails (or something similar).

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I got variants of this question all week. In a nutshell:

Daily emails, like the kind Daily Email Habit gets you to write (including the sample prompt on the sales page) will work in any business or industry. The only caveat is you must be willing to put yourself (or some sort of avatar you write behind) as the face of that business.

In fact, that’s the point of daily emails, unpleasant though it may sound.

You’re ultimately selling yourself as the product, rather than whatever your “product” officially is. In the words of Dan Kennedy, a direct marketer who has managed to sell himself for millions and millions of dollars:

“The higher up in income you go, the more you’re paid for who you are, rather than what you do.”

So now the question becomes, are daily emails, the way Daily Email Habit helps you to write, a fit for you?

Only you can decide that.

Maybe you don’t like the business of selling you, even for a premium, and maybe you want your products or services to stand for themselves, at competitive market rates.

That’s a fine decision. In this case, don’t go the daily email route, because the relationship and authority you build up will only interfere with people buying from you on the strength of your product or price alone.

On the other hand, if you want to charge higher prices… or surround yourself with a moat that’s not easily crossed by marauding neighbors… or have a ready source of income whenever your business or personal life needs it… then daily emails work great.

And Daily Email Habit will help you write them, in an effective and (relatively) painless way, whether you are a dog trainer, pottery instructor, or professional alpaca whisperer.

But that doesn’t change the cruel truth:

The price for Daily Email Habit is going up tonight at 12 midnight PST, from a modest $30/month to an obscene $50/month.

If you’re considering getting in before the price increases for ever and ever, and you want the full info on DEH:

https://bejakovic.com/deh/

Sneaky guru model for getting the most out of a pool of prospects

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If you’re the enterprising sort, here’s a direct-response recipe for getting the maximum value out of a pool of prospects:

1. Run a campaign featuring a guru who is promising an outcome, say, big stock market returns.

2. Make sales of your offer to people who respond to that campaign.

3. Take all the people who didn’t buy (or who bought once, but then canceled a subscription offer) and put in front of them another, entirely different-seeming offer, with a different guru, which actually makes the exact same promise as the offer in step 2.

4. Go back to step 2, and keep going back, with still another guru and another different-seeming offer, repeating until everyone has bought.

I once heard direct marketing expert Dan Kennedy talking about this sneaky multiple-guru model, which is actually very common among high-level direct response operators.

This strategy is obvious enough that in what behemoths like Agora are doing, but it happens in less obvious ways in many other businesses.

Some direct response businesses have low/mid/high variants of the same underlying product, all behind different brands that are impossible for prospects to see through.

Other businesses simply partner with related businesses who make the same promise but with a different feel, tone, or face to their message.

The point being, some people might not like you or your style. But if they’ve raised their hands to say they want the outcome you promise, that’s real value.

Sooner or later, somebody somewhere will sell these folks an offer to help them get that outcome. That somebody might as well be you, and that somewhere might as well be right here, right now, using the recipe above.

And with that, let me remind you one final time of the free training that email marketer Chris Orzechowski is putting on tomorrow, Monday, October 6, at 6pm CET/12 noon EST/9am PST.

Chris is gonna be sharing his “5 Steps To A Million Dollar List.”

I haven’t seen Chris’s training, but I do know his business model and his philosophy.

The fact is, it’s very similar to what I do, to what I preach in these emails, and to what I sell in my offers.

But — maybe you don’t want to hear this from me. Or maybe you have heard it from me, for a long time, and while you like hearing it, maybe it still hasn’t clicked, or hasn’t moved you to action.

In that case, Chris’s free training — and the 8-week coaching program he will be launching on the back of it in the coming weeks — might just be the fix.

If an email-based, flexible, profitable, and even fun business is an outcome you would raise your hand for, then here’s a free offer to help you get there:

https://bejakovic.com/mdl

Ben Settle & Dan Kennedy both said it — but who was the original source?

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Here’s the history of the men who influenced me to be where I am today, writing you this email:

Patient readers know my susceptibility and fondness for the phrase, “The only real security is your ability to produce.”

I read that idea in a Ben Settle email back in 2017, which got me to sign up to Ben’s Email Players newsletter, which eventually convinced me to start sending daily emails myself.

As Ben wrote in that email, he himself got the “ability to produce” idea from an even older Dan Kennedy newsletter. I thought it stopped there, even though I always felt that “ability to produce” is an odd phrase for Dan Kennedy to invent. (Perhaps that’s why it stuck in my mind so.)

But, as I found out only last week, this phrase is not a strange Dan Kennedy construction.

The quote about “ability to produce” actually goes back to Douglas MacArthur, one of only five 5-star generals in the history of the United States.

MacArthur’s quote, such as I could trace it, was “Security lies in our ability to produce.” MacArthur was speaking quite literally, about national security and the importance of industry and agriculture to that.

But I’m not here to talk tariffs. I’m telling you this because this is a newsletter about ideas, specifically insightful ideas, even more specifically, insightful ideas that you can apply and bring into reality and profit from.

And on that note, I have a new offer for you. It’s a $3.99 ebook called Click Send Earn.

This book is written by Igor Kheifets. I’ve known Igor for a while. Back in 2021, I gave a presentation inside his List Building Lifestyle mastermind, which eventually turned into my Simple Money Emails course.

I bought Igor’s book last week because, frankly, I was curious about the funnel he was using to sell it.

But I read the book as well. And I was surprised, in a very positive sense.

As Igor said somewhere (in private, not inside this book) he could charge $97-$297 for the info that’s inside. And I believe it. So I reached out to him and asked to promote his book, for the following three reasons:

First off, this book is very clearly written by Igor, not by AI, not a ghostwriter.

Second, it lays out how Igor walked the familiar rags-to-riches route — which in his case was literal, because he used to clean toilets at a hotel once upon a time, and now makes millions a year via email.

The book lays out lessons learned along the way and gives you the business blueprint that Igor uses today, and which he teaches others, for how to build and grow and monetize email lists.

Third, this book has ideas in it that were new and insightful for me. For example, it was early in Igor’s book (p. 11) that I learned that that “ability to produce” quote is not from Ben Settle or even Dan Kennedy, but from Douglas MacArthur.

Like I said, when I bought Igor’s book, I bought it out of curiosity around the marketing.

But I thought my audience — “MY audience is different” — is too sophisticated when it comes to email marketing to profit from a book titled Click Send Earn.

Well, like I said, I’ve since read the book. I’ve learned new things and gotten value from it. I can get behind and endorse everything he teaches inside this book. That’s why I asked Igor to promote it.

And that’s what I’m doing right now, recommending it to you.

If you’re looking for a proven (by Igor, and his students) blueprint for a successful email-based business, then buy this book, read it, apply it, and profit. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/clicksendearn

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

The fiction business

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The last week or so, I’ve been spending a lot of time obsessively checking how my new book is doing on Amazon. This morning, in a bout of such checking, Amazon offered to show me its “Movers and Shakers: Our biggest gainers in sales rank over the past 24 hours. Updated frequently.”

This is something I had long wished for but didn’t know existed — a kind of first derivative of sales, what’s selling better lately, what’s moving up in the ranks quickly?

I checked the Kindle store. Unfortunately, there are just two pages of movers and shakers for the entire Kindle store, as opposed to movers and shakers across subcategories.

And what is moving and shaking in the Kindle store?

The same damn stuff as always.

Out of the 100 top movers and shakers, 99 are fiction books, mostly romance novels and literotica. Exactly one is a non-fiction book, Mark Manson’s Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, which, based on its promise alone, might as well be classified as fiction.

This made me think of something I heard Dan Kennedy say in one of his closed-door, multithousand-dollar, info marketing seminars. Said Dan:

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Many people make the mistake of thinking we’re in the non fiction business. Big mistake. We’re in the fiction business. First of all, remember that most of your customers never do anything with most of what they buy from you, therefore, their experience is fictional, not non-fictional. [The small audience of top info marketers laughs, but Dan continues.] Laugh if you want. I’m being very serious. They’re having a fictional experience. They actually believe they’re doing something. they are not, but they think they are doing something.

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If you sell information online, this is a very bitter pill to swallow, and in fact, it’s one that I keep refusing to swallow.

Which is dumb, because why argue against Dan Kennedy, who basically made everybody who has been successful in the info publishing business?

But I keep hoping and in fact working on getting people to not just buy my stuff, but to actually consume it, and ultimately, to put it to use and to benefit from it. It’s slow going, but it gives me hope and a goal to look forward to.

Anyways, as I say in the conclusion of my new 10 Commandments book, I hope you will apply the 10 principles I share in that book in your own business and personal life.

I’ve worked hard to make the book both interesting and practical, with new distinctions to help you actually get traction, putting to work good ideas that you may have heard of before but haven’t done anything with. Of course, you might also come across commandments that are entirely new to you. Put those to work as well.

And on that note, I’ve gotten a few more reviews after writing my dirge about having just one review a few days ago. Here’s a review from Maliha Mannan, who writes over at The Side Blogger:

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As someone who makes an offer almost daily via email, it’s essential that people like me, and also buy from me. This book is full of ideas for doing just that. I read it too quickly, so I plan to read it again soon (it’s a tiny book but packed with curious ideas that you should take a minute to fully comprehend, appreciate, and implement). I see it becoming one of those books I read at least once a year. It’s that good!

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In case you too would like to get a copy of my new non-fiction book:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

The death of infotainment

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A few days ago, an interesting comment popped up in my Daily Email House community. Gasper Crepinsek, who helps entrepreneurs adopt AI, wrote about his current content strategy:

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“So for now… whenever I feel like sharing value, I just share it with my audience directly (despite the current thinking on X that VALUE is bad, INSIGHT is king). I have actually found that people are converting even when I do make a “value / tutorial” sequence paired with soft selling approach. But that is the topic of another post.”

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This caught my owlish eye. It made me think back to the old Dan Kennedy chestnut — whatever becomes a norm leads to normal, average results… and normal, average results put you right at the poverty line.

There’s no denying that infotainment — stories, analogies, insight — has become the norm. Maybe not in every niche just yet, but among course creators, coaches, Internet marketers most definitely yes.

Curious fact:

Gasper is not the only one defying the infotainment norm with success.

As another example, take marketer Derek Johanson, the creator of the CopyHour course.

Derek has been at the Internet marketing thing for a long while, 12+ years.

I know for a fact Derek can write typical infotaining emails because he has done it in the past.

But a while back, he moved to writing very how-to, practical, almost tutorial-like daily emails, which run in series that cover different topics from week to week. I’m guessing it’s because it’s working better for him.

My own consumption of newsletters and marketing advice bears out this move from infotainment.

I’ve noticed I practically never read the infotainment part in the newsletters subscribe to any more. Instead, I just scroll down to see the practical takeaway, and maybe the offer.

Granted, I’m a rather “sophisticated” consumer of email newsletters (meaning, I’ve been exposed to a ton of them, particularly in the copywriting and marketing space, over the past 10+ years of working in this field). Still, that just makes me a kind of owl-eyed canary in a coalmine, and maybe points to a bigger trend that will be obvious to others soon.

But I hear you say, “A craving for fun and entertainment is a fundamental of human psychology! It can’t ever die, you silly canary!”

No doubt. Just because infotainment is dead, or at least dying at the moment, doesn’t mean it won’t come back, like a feathery fiend out of its own ashes.

From what I’ve seen, the mass mind moves in a pendulum, a swing between two poles, in this case infotaining and how-to content. Right now, I think we’re on a down-swing away from the infotainment pole.

That said, I realize I have been violating the very point I’m trying to share with you, by telling you this observation in the context of a story and my own predictions, instead of telling you how to to write how-to content yourself.

Old habits die hard.

I will fix that tomorrow. For real. I’ll tell you how to write a how-to email in an age where ChatGPT can adequately answer any how-to question.

Meanwhile, I would like to remind you of my ongoing, but not for long, promotion of Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin membership.

It’s finally time to bring this promotion to a close. I will end it this Sunday, April 6, at 12 midnight PST.

I will certainly promote Royalty Ronin again in the future, maybe even every month. So you might wonder what exactly this Sunday deadline means.

I have been giving a bonus bundle to people who signed up for a week’s free trial of Ronin. After Sunday, this bonus bundle will go away, or rather, it will go behind the paywall. I will no longer give it to people who do the free trial, but who end up signing up and paying for Ronin.

If you’d like to kick off a week’s free trial to Ronin before the the trial bonuses disappear, you can do that at the following link:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

P.S. My bonus bundle, which I have decided to call the “Lone Wolf and Cub” bonus bundle, to go with the “ronin” theme, currently includes the following:

1. My Heart of Hearts training, about how to discover what people in your audience really want, so you can better know what to offer them + how to present it.

2. A short-term fix if your offer has low perceived value right now. Don’t discount. Sell for full price, by using the strategy I’ve described here.

3. Inspiration & Engagement. A recording of my presentation for Brian Kurtz’s $2k/year Titans XL mastermind.

I say “currently includes” because I will probably add more bonuses to this bundle, once I remove it as a bonus for the Ronin free trial and make it a bonus for actual Ronin subscription.

But if you sign up for trial now and decide to stick with Ronin (or you’ve already joined based on my recommendation), I’ll get you the extra bonuses automatically in the course area.

The Bejakovic principle

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“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure ought and six, result misery.”

I recently finished reading David Copperfield, a book written some 175 years ago by Charles Dickens.

I read David Copperfield based on the strength of that quote, which is spoken by a character named Wilkins Micawber, and has become popularly known as the Micawber principle.

The Micawber principle pretty much sums up my own attitude to money, try as I have to care more about getting rich for the sake of getting rich.

But today’s email is not about money. Rather, it’s about influence.

Dickens introduces Wilkins Micawber by saying the man had “no more hair upon his head (which was a large one, and very shining) than there is upon an egg.”

Micawber’s clothes were shabby, but he carried a “jaunty sort of a stick” and a quizzing-glass (something like a monocle) on the outside of his coat. (“For ornament, I afterwards found,” Dickens adds, “as he seldom looked through it, and couldn’t see anything when he did.”)

As becomes clear throughout the book, Mr. Micawber loves pompous language… swings between despair and perfect cheerfulness in the span of a meal… and is always in debt, and is always running away from his lenders. Hence the Micawber principle, which Micawber advises others to live by, but cannot follow himself.

But let me get to the point of this email:

I hadn’t realized this before, but Charles Dickens is famous for his characters. In fact, he might be the most famous novelist of all times, in all languages, when it comes to distinct, memorable characters.

Besides Mr. Micawber, there’s Ebenezer Scrooge, Oliver Twist, Tiny Tim, the Artful Dodger — dozens and dozens of famous characters, many of who have passed into popular culture and even the English language.

So what?

So I’m telling ya, read Dickens for character… and then apply the lessons to yourself.

As Dan Kennedy said once, the basis for influence is invention.

Specifically, Dan said that people who write for great influence — he was talking about people who write for business purposes, as he does — turn themselves into personas, into fictional characters.

And by the way, Dan adds:

“The good copywriters are frustrated fiction writers and read fiction.”

So read Dickens. Or read some other fiction, which is built around distinct, memorable characters.

And then, add a quizzing glass to your outfit, even if you seldom look through it and cannot see anything when you do… and even if it’s only there in your writing, and not in reality.

Now here’s the Bejakovic principle:

“Twenty four hours, one email written and sent out, result happiness. Twenty four hours, no emails written or sent out, result misery.”

Only difference is, unlike Mr. Micawber, I manage to live by my own principle. And if you’d like my help in achieving lasting happiness, and maybe in turning yourself into a fictional character in your emails:

https://bejakovic.com/deh