Dan Kennedy

Collapse the time

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Later today, I will host the first call of my Write & Profit coaching group.

I launched that on the back of the “How I do it” live presentation did a couple weeks ago.

I had the idea for that presentation in the middle of January, and I tacked on the group coaching offer simply because I have a policy to put an offer at the end of everything I do.

I’ve been thinking about a change I’ve made recently to how I work.

I simply started starting things faster.

I don’t put as many ideas in a todo list. I don’t ponder as much. I don’t prepare. My default has become, just do it now.

Lots of things have been happening for me over the past couple months. I believe this change in behavior is a big reason why.

Yesterday, I got an email from direct marketing coach Dan Kennedy, who expressed the same idea. Dan wrote:

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I taught myself the habit of collapsing the time between each idea and acting on it. This has created a lot of messes and a few catastrophes but also made possible a lot more successes than occur at a normal pace.

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So that’s my bit of advice for today. Collapse the time. Messes will happen. Maybe catastrophes, too. But overall, you will still come out way ahead of where you would have been otherwise.

Time to go.

I still have things to prepare for tonight’s coaching call. Meanwhile, since I have a policy to make an offer at the end of everything I do, consider my Simple Money Emails course. It can help you collapse the time between wishin’ and hopin’ to write daily emails and actually writing them regularly.

For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

Sell the summer, not the seed

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I’m making my way through an old issue of The New Yorker, from Mar 2023. I’m reading an article about seed and garden catalogues, which offer different strains of cabbage or beet for purchase by mail.

Fascinating, right?

Well, hold on. These seed and garden catalogues are mail-order businesses, and some have survived since the 19th century.

If you’re doing any kind of online marketing today, there’s probably something fundamental and (ahem) perennial to learn from businesses that have sold in a similar way for 100+ years.

So I pushed through the first page of the article. And I was rewarded. I read the following passage about what these seed catalogues really sell:

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Seed and garden catalogues sell a magical, boozy, Jack-and-the-beanstalk promise: the coming of spring, the rapture of bloom, the fleshy, wet, watermelon-and-lemon tang of summer. Trade your last cow for a handful of beans to grow a beanstalk as high as the sky. They make strangely compelling reading, like a village mystery or the back of a cereal box. Also, you can buy seeds from them.

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This is a great though unexpected illustration of something I read in Dan Kennedy’s No. B.S. Marketing of Seeds And Other Garden Supplies:

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As a marketer, you have a choice between selling things with ham-handed, brute force, typically against resistance, or selling aspirations or emotional fulfillments with finesse, typically with little resistance.

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Perhaps you will say that’s obvious.

Perhaps it is.

But how many businesses insist on selling seeds, or even the promise of large or fruitful plants, when in reality what their customers want is a village mystery, the coming of spring, or the tang of summer?

It’s all gotta mean something. Whatever you sell has got to go in a gift-box, and I’m not talking about cardboard or paper.

And now it’s time to sell something.

My offer to you today is my Most Valuable Email training. The seeds inside this training are a copywriting technique you can use every day to create more interesting and engaging content than you would otherwise.

But what I’m really selling is something else — a path to mastery. The feeling of growing competence with each email you write… the joy of looking and seeing patterns others don’t… the ability to transform yourself at will, from what you are right now into anything you want to be, in an instant, like Merlin in Disney’s Sword in the Stone.

For more information:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

I tried to cover up my failures, but a loyal reader caught me

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In reply to my January 1st email, which had little to say about New Year’s resolutions, goals, or themes, I got a reply from long-time reader, occasional co-hostess of my live trainings, and infamous Crazy Email Lady, Liza Schermann. Liza wrote:

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What happened to your annual New Year’s email where you look back at the old year and set goals for the new one? I always look forward to reading it, especially this year.

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As Liza says, the past four years, on January 1, I always sent some kind of email about how my past year has been, what I managed to accomplish, what I am planning for the next year — all fit inside the latest personal development hack I’d fallen in love with.

But this year, I quietly decided to skip it.

The fact is, I had three themes for the past year.

A theme is like a vague and fuzzy goal, a general direction to move in rather than a destination to arrive to and a time to arrive there by.

Themes worked well for me in years past.

​​But in 2023, even with fuzzy themes in place of hard goals, I found that I had only made any meaningful progress in one half of one of my three themes. And that’s in spite of regularly revisiting those themes, and putting in thought and work into pushing each of them forward.

One half of one out of three is not something I particularly wanted to crow about. And I was sure nobody would notice, until Liza called me out on it.

Now, here’s a bunch of personal stuff that you may or may not want to read. It explains how I got to where I am, and what I’m thinking for the future.

I started as a freelance copywriter in 2015.

I worked for years with the aim of building up my skills, creating a name for myself in the industry, and making the kind of money that AWAI sales letters promise you.

And the crazy thing is, I got there. It took me about five years.

Then I decided that really, I don’t like to work with copywriting clients. Wouldn’t it be great if I could just do something on my own like create courses or do coaching and consulting?

And I managed to do that as well. It took me about two years.

Last year, back in March 2023, I had my best-ever month in terms of income.

Over the course of the entire calendar year of 2023, I also had my second-best-ever year in terms of income, only following 2020, when I was neck-deep in client work, and when obscene amounts of money were flowing in to me via commissions and royalties.

But last year, I had practically no client work. I was free to do what I want, when I want, with who I want, and I still made good money.

And yet, in spite of my apparent success in reaching my goal of independence…

… a few months ago, around September or so, I found myself working for much of the day, every day, and not getting a lot of work done.

It wasn’t because I was overwhelmed with the heavy burdens of the online solopreneur.

All I really had to do was to write a daily email, do a bit of research and work for my health newsletter, and do something to actually make money — put together some sort of new training, or course, or promotion.

And yet, the work stretched from morning to night, and projects barely inched forward.

To make it worse, it felt like things had been that way forever, and would go on forever.

I believe the technical term for this condition is boredom, or maybe aimlessness, or sloth.

Perhaps it was initiated by my actually achieving what I was working towards for so long.

I tried to fight it via willpower, and that’s how I ended up working pretty much the whole day, without getting much done.

And then, some time in late November, I was listening to Dan Kennedy’s Opportunity Concepts, where Dan talks about the hidden psychology of the people he sells to. Says Dan:

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Most small business owners are doing enough not to go out of business. That’s where their level of ambition has settled.

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I realized that’s exactly where I am. I also realized that it was the cause of my feeling of malaise, my struggle to move things forward in spite of working.

And I realized the fix for it, which is simply — ambition.

Because it’s more fun and enjoyable to have ambition, rather than to do just enough to not go out of business.

So in case you’re curious, that’s my theme for 2024. Ambition.

I invite you to keep reading my future emails to see how exactly this will play out over 2024, and then in a year’s time I can have another recap.

For now, I can tell you that things have already started moving. New offers, new partnerships, new sources of income — and most importantly, a new feeling of being motivated and optimistic.

This email is getting overly long. The only reason I allowed myself to write this much and this intimate is because 1) it helps me sort out my thoughts and 2) as business coach Rich Schefren likes to say, what’s most personal is most general. ​​So maybe you’ve found some worthwhile ideas in what I just wrote.

A few weeks ago, I said I would create a page on my site where I collect all my current offers for sale. I’ve done that.

In the future, I might even create a Dean Jackson-style “super signature” where I link to this in every email.

But for now, if you’re wondering what I have for sale, and why you might want it, and how it can help you in 2024, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/showroom/

The business of selling “feeling good”

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This morning before heading out for coffee, I thumbed through the pages of my Kindle and read a passage of Dan Kennedy’s No B.S. Marketing to the Affluent.

​​Dan was talking about those colorful patterned dress shirts, the ones with a second colorful print on the inside of the cuff. And he said:

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The shirts are very popular in the Southwest with the rodeo crowd, rich oil men — one of whom has “collected 130 different designs” and spent so much money, the 2014 “collection” includes a design named after that customer, and quite a few GKIC members. The shirts go for $225.00 to over $500.00, and are sold direct, in catalogs, at Nieman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, high-end country western shops, and in several Las Vegas stores.

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“I wanda,” I said to myself as I raised my nose in the air, “I wanda if this brand of shirts is the one that Parris Lampropoulos buys.”

As you might remember if you were reading my emails back this past May, I went to a copywriting conference. Multimillionaire A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos was the star there.

The first night, Parris worked the room. As he did, he kept showing off his colorful, patterned shirt. “It’s a Robert Graham,” Parris would say to anyone who expressed interest. “I put his kids through college.”

I brought my nose back down to the pages of Marketing to the Affluent. Sure enough, Dan Kennedy was talking about Robert Graham shirts. And he had this to say:

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The brand’s owner, Robert Stock, calls customers “connoisseurs.” He says he is in the business of selling “feeling good” — getting favorably noticed, getting compliments, getting bragging rights.

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My point is that old chestnut, that you are not in the business that you think you are in. At least, that is, if you want people bragging about how much money they spent on a collection of your stuff, instead of treating your offer like a commodity or at best a necessary occasional expense.

That’s all I got for you today. Except for an encouragement to read No B.S. Marketing to the Affluent if you haven’t done so.

It’s a valuable book, and I wish I had read it earlier.

If you wish to read it now, here’s where you can get it:

No B.S Marketing for the Affluent

Unsexy, neglected, mistreated email lists

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Yesterday I was listening to a Dan Kennedy seminar where Dan says, in his typically tactful fashion:

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There is no magazine out there — you can check the newsstand — there is no magazine called, Wives In Sweatpants and Sneakers.

There’s all sorts of unimaginable fetishes. But that is not one of them. There’s just not a lot of interest in that.

That’s their business.

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Dan’s point is that what business owners have gotten used to, they no longer find exciting. It also means they also don’t notice the bad stuff any more.

The past week, I was promoting a done-for-you newsletter service.

I figured no qualified leads would respond, since I write so much about email marketing and making money from email. If there’s one thing I’m known for, it’s probably that.

Surely, business owners who manage to track down my email list — in spite of my best efforts to hide it — surely such business owners also think email marketing is sexy and are already doing sophisticated email stuff in their own businesses.

I was wrong.

I got readers reaching out to me who have large, successful businesses.

Some of them have email lists of tens of thousands of people, made up of customers, who have never been mailed.

Others send out an email here and there… make good money each time they send out that lonesome email… and don’t think or know to do it more often.

And one person, who wasn’t replying to the done-for-you newsletter service, but who did take me up on the Newsletter Consult I did last month, followed up yesterday to say:

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Thought I’d follow up after our recent discussion, which was much appreciated.

So went ahead and ran a one-month birthday sale for a 2-YR subscription at a $1K discount. Don’t think we have done a sale in 5 years, nor one for a 2 year sub duration.

With 4 days yet to run, we have so far generated $18K in sales with 4 people subscribing for the 2-YR plan and 1 other taking up a (full priced) annual sub.

Not bad considering I only mentioned it as a PS in the twice a week email alerts, plus December is historically a slow month for sales here. This has been our best December to date!

I plan to send two more such alerts this week and have been pondering what to write in case we might be able to tip one more cheerful soul over the edge.

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The results above are clearly not common.

The person who wrote me offers a yearly subscription costing multiple thousands of dollars… has lots of credibility built up over a long time… and can now make an extra $18k with an “oh by the way” casual throwaway in a PS, after a 5-year promo hiatus.

But uncommon details aside, the point still stands:

You might have that beautiful email list, wearing sweatpants and sneakers around you. Maybe you’ve been looking at it for years, and maybe you’ve stopped appreciating how just how sexy it really can be.

I figure that’s as much my fault as yours.

Clearly, I’m not doing a good job putting forward offers to help you get more value out of your email list.

I’ll work on fixing that in 2024.

Meanwhile, it’s mid-December. It’s almost the holiday season. Who the hell wants to work?

I do. So I have a quick, band-aid offer for you right now:

If you have a business and are making sales… if you have an email list and have been neglecting and mistreating it for too long… then I offer you my 1-hour “Extreme Makeover For Email Lists” session.

One hour, to hear what your business is about, who your customers are, what you offer them, how you currently mail them.

I will then tell you the quickest and easiest buttons to push to make money from your list, in the future as well as now. Maybe I can even help you pull out some thousands of dollars from your email list by the end of this month.

I’m limiting this offer to three people, the first three qualified people who reply.

Price is $300.

I will not be offering this again, at least not at this price.

In case you are interested, hit reply, tell me who you are, and I can send you the payment link.

Two main chain cutters that delink price from product

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The past few days, I’ve been reading the eye-opening “No B.S. Marketing To The Affluent” by marketing coach Dan Kennedy.

​​​​As you can imagine, one of Dan’s main points is that you should charge a lot, and that you can, because with a bit of thought and preparation, it’s easy to break the heavy chain that links product to price in most people’s minds.

Dan suggests two main ways to do it:

“The two biggest chain cutters that delink price from product are 1) who is buying and 2) the context in which the product is presented, priced, and delivered.”

There’s a lot in that one sentence. So let’s get specifical. Let me tell you just one specific way to create a high-price selling context.

It’s to assume authority.

In the olden days, this meant getting a soapbox… walking to the the northeast corner of Hyde Park… putting your soapbox down on the ground among the chestnut leaves… stepping onto the soapbox… and starting to talk.

The modern-day version of this is creating your own digital platform of any kind and using it to communicate.

Because there’s some shortcut in the human brain, so that when you speak from a platform, the rest of us listen.

Sure, some of those listening will walk away after a time. But others will continue to stand there, transfixed, nodding their heads.

And if you, the speaker, ever deign to directly address me, the transfixed audience member, I’ll get a flush of excitement. I’ll look around to make sure others saw it too. “Did you catch that? He spoke to me! He made me an offer, directly! It’s expensive, but what else would you expect? He’s an authority!”

I know I react like this. I imagine that if you are honest with yourself, you will find you react like this too.

All that’s to say, get your own soapbox if you haven’t got one yet. Or get me to create one for you. ​​

And on that note, today is the last day I’ll be talking about my done-for-you newsletter service.

​​Your own newsletter is good for business, good for authority, and great for delinking price from product.

So if you have a business, but you haven’t got a newsletter, then take a look here for more information on this service:

https://bejakovic.com/announcing-done-for-you-newsletter-service/

One word, out of 495, that drew a bunch of replies

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Last week I sent out an email, “Write 10 books instead of 1,” that got a good number of replies. The curious thing was the replies split neatly into two camps.

One camp was people who liked the core message in the email and felt inspired to start or finish their own book or books.

But the other camp, in fact the majority of people who replied to that email, had nothing to say about the core message.

Instead, this second group replied because of a single word of that email. A single word that was hidden, between two commas, in position 408 in an email of 495 words.

Would you like to know what that word was?

​​Good, then I’ll tell ya.

That word was inshallah.

Inshallah, as you might know, is a saying used in Muslim societies. It means “God willing.” It expresses both hope for a future event and resignation that the future is not in our control.

But why??? Why would I use this word in the tail end of my email?

Is it because I myself am Muslim?

Is it some kind of incredibly clever personalization based on the reader’s IP address?

Was it a joke or irony?

Readers wanted to know. And from my religious profiling based on these readers’ names, almost all the people who wrote me to ask about inshallah were either Muslim or came from Muslim societies.

I’ll leave the mystery of why I used inshallah hanging in the air. Instead, let me tell you a story that this reminded me of, from legendary marketer Dan Kennedy.

Dan used to travel the country on the Peter Lowe Success Tour, a modern-day speaking circus that featured former U.S. presidents and Superbowl quarterbacks as speakers.

Dan would go up on stage at the end of the night and deliver a rapid-fire comedy routine/sales pitch to sell his Magnetic Marketing program.

I highly recommend tracking down Dan Kennedy’s Magnetic Marketing speech and listening to it. ​​I’ve listened to it multiple times myself.

But one thing I never noticed, in spite of the multiple times listening, is that Dan somewhere mentions that he used to stutter as a kid.

Again, this speech is rapid-fire. It lasts maybe 50 minutes. It contains thousands of words. And among those words, there are a few — maybe a dozen, maybe a half dozen — that refer to the fact that Dan Kennedy stuttered as a kid.

It’s very easy to miss. Like I said, I’ve listened to this speech multiple times and I’ve never caught it.

But there’s a group of people who don’t miss it.

And that’s people who themselves stutter or who have kids who stutter.

Dan said somewhere, in one of his seminars, how he’d regularly finish his speech and try to get out of the room, only to be faced with an audience member, holding a brand new $197 copy of Magnetic Marketing in their hands, and ready to talk about stuttering and how Dan overcame his stutter and how he now performs on stages in front of tens of thousands of people.

That’s something to keep in mind, if you’re missing a word to put into the 408th position in your sales message… or if, like me, you suffered from epileptic seizures as a kid.

All right, moving on.

I got nothing to sell you today. But I do have something to recommend.

Well, I recommended something already, and that’s Dan Kennedy’s Magnetic Marketing speech. Dan has said that this speech is the best sales letter he’s ever written.

It’s worth listening to if you want to learn how to write an interesting, indirect, and yet effective sales message.

On the other hand, if you want to learn how to do marketing that gets you really rich — who to target, how to reach them, what offers to create — then I can recommend a book I’m reading right now. It’s also by Dan Kennedy. It’s more relevant now than ever before. You can find it here:

https://bejakovic.com/reallyrich

The two kinds of newsletters

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It’s late — I’ve been working until now on a new daily newsletter that I will launch tomorrow. It’s connected to my weekly health newsletter, which I tease occasionally but never reveal.

Inevitably, whenever I launch something new like this, a million and one little niggling things pop up that need to be done.

That’s why it’s late. And that’s why I somehow still haven’t written this daily email.

So let me just share something I wish somebody had shared with me a long, long time ago.

Had somebody told me this, it would have cleared up many confused days and nights of my marketing education.

It would have taken away some worries.

And maybe it would have even made me some money.

Here’s the big “secret”:

There are two fundamental styles of direct marketing/businesses/newsletters.

The first style I will call the Marty style, as in Marty Edelston.

Edelston was the founder of Boardroom, a $100M direct response publisher. He hired the bestest and A-listest copywriters out there, including Gary Bencivenga, Parris Lampropoulos, and David Deutsch.

The second style I will call the Dan style, as in Dan Kennedy.

Dan was at one point the highest-paid copywriter on the planet. He is also somebody who has shaped generations of direct marketers, including Russell Brunson, Ben Settle, and, on a much more modest level, me.

Marty style: intriguing, benefit-oriented, impersonal.

Dan style: intimate, personality-oriented, opinionated.

The Marty style of newsletter features cool how-to insider tips, such as how to ouwit a mugger in a self-service elevator, along with references to outside authorities who revealed that info.

The Dan style of newsletter features a personal rant by Dan about how the sky is falling or is about to fall. It features no outside references because what other authority could you ever need besides Dan himself.

So which style is better?

Or rather, why are there two styles, and not just one, the way we would all prefer?

You guessed it. Because each style can work well, and each style has its drawbacks.

Dan style means you can sell much more easily, and at much higher prices, and people will stick with you for longer.

But your audience is much more limited, and your product is really you.

Marty style means you can reach a much broader audience much more quickly, plus you don’t have to grow out mutton chop mustaches and share photos of yourself sitting on a bull.

But your audience is much less attached to you, and they will pay $39 instead of $399 for the same info.

So which style you choose to follow is really up to you and the kind of marketing/business/newsletter you can stomach for an extended period of time.

Of course, you can also stomach both, which is basically what I’m doing.

I have this newsletter, more on the mutton-chop-mustache, Dan Kennedy side. On the other hand, my health newsletter, including the daily newsletter I’m launching tomorrow, is fully on the “what never to eat on an airplane,” Marty Edelston side.

You gotta figure out what you want to do.

Final point:

If you do decide to go the Marty Edelston, impersonal, benefit-oriented route, then you will likely need copy chops, above and beyond what you will need if you are really selling yourself.

And if you do need copy chops, specifically the kinds of copy chops that people like Gary Bencivenga, Parris Lampropoulos, and David Deutsch have, then take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

The best argument against money-back guarantees on the Internet

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I was just listening to an interview with Vic Conant, the president of Nightingale-Conant.

As you might know, Nightingale-Conant is a big info publishing company. For decades, they dominated the self-help and sales audiotape market, with lots of big-name gurus on their roster. Their original guru was Earl Nightingale, who influenced Dan Kennedy and everyone on down.

One question posed to Conant was about the most profitable idea he’s used to market his products online or offline. Here’s what Conant replied:

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It’s been this ‘open accounts’ idea. When we advertise, we typically say, “Try this product for 30 days on ‘open account,’ or at our risk for free, basically. We’ll send it out to you, you try it, and we have the risk on our side.”

My dad came up with that idea back in about 1978. We were asking at that time for people to send in $50 and we’d send them the product. And that just wasn’t working to a great degree. We tried this and it worked very well and because of that our business exploded.

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The interviewer, Michael Senoff, asked a clarifying question:

“When someone orders, do they put a credit card down, but it’s not charged until 30 days later?”

Conant shook his head. “No. Typically it’s nothing. Just strictly bill-me-later.”

I thought this was very interesting. Because I don’t offer money-back guarantees on my expensive courses, like Copy Riddles.

​​I certainly don’t give them away for free for 30 days and then work to collect my money.

So should I start? For that… let’s go on with the interview.

Michael Senoff asked the obvious followup question. “They responded well, but how is it on the side of your collections? What percentage have you found you have to go chase money?”

Vic Conant replied:

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We have a very sophisticated collection effort, but it’s basically using guilt. And we’re very sophisticated in picking lists.

In direct marketing, in mail, you pick a list and you test that list. And if you test a list that returns all the products or doesn’t pay, then you don’t use that list any more.

So we tend to use very strong lists like Business Week subscribers, or people that don’t have time to screw around.

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So there you go. That’s the best argument I’ve heard against money-back guarantees on the Internet, at least the way business is typically done.

On the Internet, you’re not testing in slowly to very strong lists of buyers.

Instead, most businesses, including mine, have an open-door policy. Pretty much anybody can find my website, join my list, have the opportunity to buy. There’s no way to know if that’s a serious business owner with no time to screw around… or an unserious opportunity seeker with all the time in the world for screwing both me and himself around.

But still.

If you’re anything like me, your ears perked up at that original question, “most profitable idea,” and Conant’s reply “open account.”

I thought for a bit. Is there any way to do something like that on the Internet?

I realized I already am doing it.

Really, that’s the point of free daily emails such as these.

​​My courses such as Copy Riddles are very expensive.

​​The point of my free daily emails is to demonstrate — expertise, trustworthiness, valuable or interesting ideas. That’s the open account. And then, once you feel comfortable, you have the opportunity to buy into the next level.

I realize that might take a while, maybe much longer than 30 days. That’s okay. I have time, and I have additional arguments and email ideas. Here’s one I will close with today, from automotive copywriter Kevin Cochrane, who bought into Copy Riddles a while back:

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Copy Riddles was a measuring stick for me as a copywriter. John charted a course through the persuasion pathways that separate the pros from the posers. The structure is clear. The examples tie direct response history to present applications. The exercises offered a practical way to test and implement the lessons.
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I write for the automotive retail space, which is watered down by legal teams, compliance guidelines, and plenty of regulation. The course has helped me plunk the guts of what makes a solid bullet into more and more of my work.​​

If you’re hemming and hawing about whether to join, read a week’s worth of John’s daily newsletter as a trial run. You’ll know what to do after. (Hint: the paid stuff in Copy Riddles is even better somehow.) This is the kind of course you’ll refer back to again and again.

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For when you’re ready:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Magic boxes

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Last year, specifically on May 29 2023, I wrote an email about Dan Kennedy’s book The Phenomenon. In that book, Dan says:

“There will always be an offer or offer(s).”

I sighed, hung my head, and finally started adding an offer at the end of each email I sent out to my list.

Not surprisingly, I made more money from my list over the past year than I had in the four years prior.

You probably know to put an offer at the end of your emails. After all, everybody does it, and it’s kind of the point of sending out daily emails.

But what if you don’t have a product or a service to sell yet? Or what if you only have a few bum offers, which your list has stopped responding to every day? Should you still insist on a call-to-action at the end of each email?

I covered one aspect of this earlier this week. I gave you a great Dan Kennedy idea about selling “options” on your shiny future offer.

But what if, for whatever reasons of your own, you don’t even want to sell future options?

Here’s what I’ve found:

There are many ways to drive people to valuable action, even if you have nothing good to sell today.

Example:

My first ever one-on-one coaching student sells a $4k training for dental practices. While she was preparing that training, she was writing emails to a list of dentists. And her emails were falling into a void — zero response or engagement.

On our first call, I told her to make a tweak to her next email, and to put in a “magic box” CTA at the end of the email. The result, in her own words:

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Haha, I like that.

Better ingredients, better emails.

I got my first response to an email today from an owner of a fairly large dental practice here in Melbourne.

Thanks for pushing me in this new direction re trying to wrap things up in magic boxes instead of just getting them nodding along.

Excited for the year ahead 🙂

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I don’t know if that dentist ended up buying my student’s $4k training. But when people do respond, you can start a conversation with them. You can get into their world. You can build a stronger relationship. Often, that translates into sales down the line.

That might be something to keep in mind if you have valuable prospects on your list, but you haven’t yet built much of a relationship with them yet.

Meanwhile, if you’re curious about “magic box” CTAs, I’ll make you a deal:

Reply and tell me the size of your email list. If you haven’t got a list, that’s fine, no judgment, you can write in and tell me that. On the other hand, if you do have a list, or if you have multiple, or if you manage a list on behalf of somebody else, write in and tell me how big your list or lists are.

In return, I’ll tell you how a “magic box” CTA works. There’s a good chance you’ve figured out how it works, but you might still learn a tip or two from me that you hadn’t thought of. And besides, maybe we can get into an interesting conversation.