Dan Kennedy

Paid waiting list

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For the first two years of this newsletter, I never made any offers.

Why?

​​Because, like Phineas Gage, who had a steel rod rammed through his eye socket, I apply a different part of my brain when I judge myself than when I judge others.

When I judge others, I yell at them if they don’t include an offer in each email. “Put something, anything, at the end of your email.”

I’ve told people to at least put a link to something free and interesting. And it’s certainly better to end your email with a link than with nothing.

Of course, it’s better still to have a paid offer, and to have the chance to get paid.

But what if you’re creating something big and heavy, something that won’t be ready yet for months or maybe a year?

​​And what if in the meantime you don’t want to get distracted by creating another offer, something quick and cheap… or by finding quality affiliate stuff to promote… or by hawking your mutton as a “consultant”?

I wanna share a story with you. It came from Dan Kennedy’s email newsletter a few weeks ago. You might know Dan as a direct marketing and copywriting genius, but he also had a background in person-to-person sales. And here’s Dan’s bit about that:

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​A story I did not have time to tell in my presentation dates back to my extensive work with a group of retirement communities in Florida. Often, their salespeople had soon-to-be-retirees and seniors on tour who were visiting from up North, had homes to sell, adult children to deal with, etc., and came over for a look while on vacation. They could not immediately be sold a home site.

We invented a series of lesser “things” they could and would buy: first, a 30, 60, or 90 day hold on a particular lot location; if not that, a 30, 60, or 90 day ‘first notification option’ on a location (meaning, if someone else wanted it, they’d be called before that new buyer was allowed to have it). Next, a 3, 6 or 12-month price lock, for a fee. All these fees were credited to purchase but non-refundable otherwise.

​​Three different ‘products’ to be sold when the product could not be sold. The conditional close is better than no close at all. A real sales pro HATES not closing.

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I don’t know about you, but I do know about me, and me was very impressed by this story.

I had heard of people taking free consults, and turning those into paid diagnostic reports.

I had heard of people taking free lead magnets, and turning them into paid front-end offers.

But I had never heard of people taking a free waiting list, and turning that into a source of income — not until Dan opened my eyes.

I tried to think about what’s really going on here, how to generalize this idea. I haven’t figured it out. Maybe you can clue me in.

The best that I came up with is that there is value to your prospect that you might not be charging for now. Access… flexibility… convenience… security… extra value, above and beyond your core offer. These are all things you can sell ahead of time, even before your main thing is ready to sell, or even pre-sell.

Or maybe what’s going on is simply what Dan says at the end. Making a sale is nicer than not making a sale. So think about what you can sell, today, even if it’s just a promise or a future option.

Fortunately, I have an offer to put at the end of my email tonight. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with anything I just told you about. ​That’s also something I would yell at other people about… but that I foolishly allow myself.

But my lack of proper selling tonight doesn’t change the fact that my offer tonight is valuable.

​​In fact, it’s most valuable, if only you spend an hour learning it, and then spend a lifetime applying it. In case you’d like to find out the full story, and maybe buy:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

On writing just to make money

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Last Friday, I organized a mastermind call of “newsletter operators.” The topic of the call was newsletter growth.

Seven people joined. Some were complete beginners, with only a few dozen subscribers. Some were further along, with a few hundred or a few thousand subscribers. And then there was one dude, with a list of 30k subscribers.

“Zero advertising spend,” he said, and he made an “all ok” sign with his hand that also doubled as a zero.

The fact is, if you read this newsletter, there’s good chance you have heard of this guy. I certainly had heard his name before we talked on this call.

During the call, we did the usual round-robin intros, and then it was a free-for-all of questions.

At some point, the 30k guy explained his position. “I’m an unrepentant capitalist,” he said. “I write just to make money.”

He largely dominated the call. Not in a bad way. He was interested in other people’s businesses. He was giving genuine advice. Even inspiration. “You gotta decide,” he said at one point, “you wanna make money or not?”

The other attendees were nodding along, saying, “Yes yes, you’re right, thanks for the tip.” Then they clammed up.

At around the 1hr mark, the 30k guy left the call without too much ceremony. And it felt felt like a sigh of relief could be heard in the virtual Zoom room.

People relaxed. Started smiling. Speaking up again.

Now, I guess there could be a lot of stuff going on here. Maybe people were intimidated. Maybe they were just absorbing this guy’s wisdom. Or maybe…

I once heard marketing guru Dan Kennedy say something like, you have to stand for something other than just making money.

You can make money. You can make lots of money. But you have to stand for something else besides, or at least, people have to feel that way about you.

And if not?

Well, you will repel most people.

Not all. The ones who are left will be people who also only want to make money.

You can certainly sell to those people, and you can do very well. But what you will get is short-term, self-interested buyers who will switch camp as soon as they’ve gotten what they can from you.

Which ties in nicely to the topic of my Most Valuable Postcard #1.

Yesterday, I promoted my Most Valuable Postcard #2. That postcard talks about the essence of marketing and copywriting. ​​That’s an important topic, but not the most important topic I could think of. That topic I covered I covered in MVP1.

​​If you’re interested in that, and if you don’t just write to make money, you can find more info here:

https://bejakovic.com/mvp1/

Mysteries of the mind

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Yesterday I started listening to a four-and-a-half hour long presentation titled, Best Life Ever. I did it because the guy speaking, Jim Rohn, has been billed, by no less an authority than genius marketer and influence expert Dan Kennedy, as being a master storyteller.

Dan says that Jim Rohn built his long and very successful career on zero practical content, great stories only.

So that’s what I expected to find. Fantastic fluff. Zero real substance.

And yet I was surprised. In the first twenty minutes, I already found the content genuinely insightful. I felt that Dan was underselling it. Take for example the following. With a smile, Rohn says:

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The day the Christian Church was started, a magnificent sermon was preached. A great presentation. And if you’re a student at all of good communication, it was one of the classic presentations of all time.

And this sermon, this presentation, was given to a multitude. Meaning a lot of people. But it was interesting.

The record says, when the sermon was finished, there was a variety of reaction to the same sermon. Isn’t that fascinating? I find that fascinating.

It said some that heard this presentation were perplexed.

Now I read the presentation. It sounded pretty straightforward to me. Why would somebody be perplexed with a good, sincere, straightforward presentation?

Best answer I’ve got: They are the perplexed. What other explanation is there? It doesn’t matter who’s preaching.

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Rohn’s point is that there are some mysteries of the mind.

Why are some people inspired to take action? Why do others never take action? Why are some people perplexed? Why do others mock and laugh?

You can try to figure it out. So did Rohn, once upon a time.

“I don’t do that any more,” he says in his talk. “I’ve got peace of mind now. I can sleep like a baby. Not trying to straighten any of this out any more.” It’s just mysteries of the mind.

Did you find that insightful?

I did. But maybe I’m just very easy to dupe into feeling like I’ve had an epiphany. Doesn’t matter who’s preaching.

Or who knows. Maybe Rohn is such a good storytellers that even in those first 20 minutes, he managed to prime me for being easily influenced.

In case you’re a student at all of good communication, this guy was one of the classic presenters of all time. To see why, watch a few minutes of the following:

 

We’re in the fiction business

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I was surprised—

Yesterday I polled readers as to what books they are reading right now.

The responses came flooding in. Lots of business books. Lots of marketing books. Lots of self-help books.

What surprised me is that out of the several dozen responses I got, fewer than five came from people who said they are reading fiction.

A few days ago, I mentioned how I’ve watched lots of Dan Kennedy seminars about marketing and copywriting, and how Dan will often poll the room about who reads fiction.

​​A few hands go up, most stay down.

“You gotta read fiction,” says Dan. “Many people make the mistake of thinking we’re in the non-fiction business. Big mistake. We’re in the fiction business.”

So read fiction. Even better, write fiction. Dan did it – a mystery novel. John Carlton did it, too — sci-fi. I guess even Gary Halbert did it, maybe romance.

You don’t have to write a novel or even a short story. An email can be it.

​​I’ve done it before in this newsletter. Sometimes I was serious about it. Lots of times it was a parody. In every case, it was valuable.

​​To read the adventures of Bond Jebakovic, secret agent, go here:

https://bejakovic.com/once-upon-a-time/

Guy rebuffs my attempt at cross-promotion

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A report from the trenches:

I’m working on growing my health email newsletter, which I launched a few months ago.

One part of what I’m doing is reaching out to other newsletters to offer to cross-promote. I’ve been contacting newsletters of a similar size to mine, who share some common elements with mine:

– sent out weekly
– news-related
– “proven” — make an emphasis on providing references or sources
– is made up of actual paragraphs of text that people read, rather than just a collection of links

I’ve had a few people take me up on my cross-promotion offer. But one guy, whose weekly newsletter is for people who want to “stay on top of the current issues and that like to read more than just bulletpoints,” was not interested in my offer. He wrote me to say:

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I don’t think this partnership would work out, basically because I’ve done it before and the clicks were very, very low. Also, I don’t think there’s a great overlap in the content of our two newsletters.

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As Dan Kennedy might say about that first reason, if we all stopped doing something if the first time was a fail, the human race would soon die out. There’d be no more babies born.

But what about that other reason? About content overlap?

It’s very sensible to only sell competitive duck herding products to competitive duck herding enthusiasts.

But most offers are not that one-dimensional.

The “world’s greatest list broker,” Michael Fishman, was once tasked with finding new lists to promote an investment newsletter.

Michael suggested a list of buyers of a product called Big Money Pro Golf Secrets. The publisher of the investment newsletter said, “We’ve tried golf lists before, they don’t work for us.”

Michael said, “No problem. It’s not a golf list. Think about who would buy a book called Big Money Pro Golf Secrets. I don’t care if it’s Big Money Pro Flower Secrets. Anybody who would respond to that language is somebody whose door we want to knock on.”

Point being, if you have something that’s not as narrow in appeal as duck herding, there are many dimensions along which you can expand your market, beyond the obvious topic or content or promise of what you’re selling. ​

​ By the way, Michael Fishman is somebody worth listening to. I’ve read and watched and listened to everything I could find online by the guy. I make a habit of occasionally searching the Internet to see if anything new has cropped up.

If you want a place to start, here’s a great interview that Michael Fishman did with Michael Senoff of Hard to Find Seminars:

https://www.hardtofindseminars.com/Michael_Fishman_Interview.htm

“There’s magic in the structure itself”

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[Clayton Bigsby removes his KKK hood to reveal he’s black. The white-supremacist rally attendees are stunned. One woman throws up. A man’s head explodes.]

There’s a reliable way to make a joke and it’s to put things in threes. You can make each subsequent thing more exaggerated, starting with normal, then moving to exaggerated, then moving to absurd.

Alternative: You can simply make the first two things straightforward, and then the third thing somehow unusual or unexpected.

Jerry: So we go into NBC, and we say we have an idea for a show about nothing?
George: Exactly.
Jerry: They say, “What’s your show about?” I say, “Nothing.”
George: There you go.
Jerry: I think you may have something here.

My point is not this triple thing. Instead, my point is something I heard marketing guru Dan Kennedy say.

Back in the 90s, Dan used to tour the country giving a rapidfire speech/sales pitch in front of tens of thousands of people in a different arena every night. As part of this speech/sales pitch, Dan said the following about his patented Magnetic Marketing 3-letter campaign:

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Our response was letter number one 7%, letter number two 8%, letter number three 3%. Total response 18%.

Now there’s two things you have to know. Number one, nobody gets 18% response from direct mail. 1.8% yes. Maybe my people, but nobody else does.

But what’s more important, if they stopped where everybody stops with letter number one, in their case, they leave 11% behind, they don’t get it. They don’t know it was there to get. Maybe they have an unsuccessful instead of a successful experience.

There’s magic in the structure itself.

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So that’s my point for you. There’s magic in the structure itself. Speaking of which, here’s another comedy triple:

“Mawwage. Mawwage is what bwings us togeva today. Mawwage, that bwessed awwangement, that dweam within a dweam.”

I’m traveling over the next several weeks. In fact, I’m writing this at the airport, while boarding is going on. I keep glancing over my shoulder, checking whether they will close the gate before I get a chance to finish and schedule this email.

Because I’m traveling, I’ll have limited time to write emails over the next few weeks, and no time to release or prerelease new offers during that time.

And since I forever closed down my Copy Riddles program last month, the only offer I have ready to go is my Most Valuable Email. If you read my newsletter regularly, you can expect to see it at end of emails where it belongs and where it doesn’t belong.

But today it belongs. Because my Most Valuable Email course is about the structure of some of my own most effective and valuable emails.

If you look over the emails I’ve sent over past several weeks, and you look at the structure, will find my Most Valuable Email trick used a dozen or more times.

There’s magic in the structure itself. In case you want my step-by-step explanation of this powerful Most Valuable Email structure, you can find it here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve

6 weeks of Times New Roman

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6 weeks ago, I switched over the font for my newsletter from some web-optimized sans serif font to ugly, old-school Times New Roman. So far, I’ve had two people write in and complain.

One reader said Times New Roman hurts his eyes when he reads my emails in dark mode. Another reader said my newsletter now reminds him of long, factual 2000s websites and the font change made him scroll to the end without really taking anything in.

Has Times New Roman hurt my newsletter?

Like I’ve written recently, I had a record month last month, so it doesn’t seem to have hurt sales. More softly, I keep getting thoughtful and courteous replies from readers, even if it’s sometimes just to say that they’re not fans of the new font.

And the point?

If you read emails from marketers who write daily emails, it’s common to read messages that effectively say, “Heh, it works for me, you can either like it or leave.”

So rather than ending my email with another “Heh it works for me” message, let me tell you the two reasons why I decided to change my newsletter to Times New Roman in the first place. This might be genuinely useful to you, beyond just the satisfaction of agreeing or disagreeing with my attitudes and my personal font choices.

Reason one I switched fonts was that I had a phrase by marketer Dan Kennedy echoing in my head. Dan was softly croaking into my ear, and saying how you want to create a sense of place for your audience, a door that they walk through, which separates your little and unique world from everything else outside.

You might think this is just another way to say, be unique, have a brand, different is better than better.

And sure, that’s a part of it. But a key part of what Dan is saying is that this sense of place should be consistent with the kind of influence you want to have on your audience, and that it should permeate everything you do, beyond just fonts, beyond logos, beyond color choices.

Still, this might sound vague and fluffy to you. You might wonder whether this kind of “sense of place” stuff has a role in the hard world of results-based marketing.

That’s for you to decide.

I’m just putting the idea out there for you, because it influenced me. If you really want an argument for it, then I can only refer you to the authority of Dan Kennedy himself, who helped guide and build up Guthy-Renker, the billion-dollar infomercial company, and who influenced and educated more direct marketers and copywriters than probably anybody else in history, and who was himself responsible for hundreds of direct marketing campaigns and many, many millions in direct sales.

So that’s reason one for the font change.

Reason two is that switching my font to Times New Roman was an instance of my Most Valuable Email trick in action. Yes, this little trick goes beyond just email copy, all the way to font choice, in the right context. If you’d like to make more sense of that, you can find out all about my Most Valuable Email course on the following page:

🦓

https://bejakovic.com/mve

First-cousin marketing incest

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A little over 100 years ago, on June 2, 1919 to be specific, a rather shabby-looking man named Albert took the hand of a fairly unattractive woman named Elsa. They looked deeply into each other’s eyes, and after a few moments of nervous calculation, each of them said “ja.”

The shabby-looking man was Albert Einstein. The rather unattractive woman was Elsa Einstein, Albert’s first cousin and second wife.

Einstein wasn’t the only famously smart person to marry his first cousin. H.G. Wells, author of some 50 books and best known today as the “father of science fiction,” also married his first cousin, Isabel Mary Smith. So did Charles Darwin, who married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood in 1839.

What’s my point?

Marketer Dan Kennedy has this routine about “marketing incest.” Here’s how Dan puts it:

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Whatever business you’re in, whatever product, service, profession — what do you pay most attention to? Everybody else in that business. If you don’t read anything else, you read your trade journal. If you go to no other meeting once a year, you probably go to your convention. If you’re traveling to another city, you look at your category in the Yellow Pages. You pay attention to everybody else who’s in your business. It’s like being Amish.

What happens with this kind of thinking — it’s a “closed” kind of thinking. It works just like real incest. Everybody gets dumber and dumber and dumber until the whole thing just grinds to a halt, and they just stand there looking at each other and nothing happens.

You’ve got to pay attention outside your little Amish community of jewelers or carpet cleaners or whatever it is that, up until tonight, you thought you were. You’ve got to pay attention to other stuff because you ain’t going to find any breakthroughs in the five other people standing in a circle looking at you. They aren’t any smarter than you are. They’re probably dumber than you are.

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My point is, “consanguineous” incest is universally reviled, and for good genetic reasons. You don’t want to marry your sister or brother — bad things happen if you do it, and that’s why most societies around the world find the practice disgusting.

On the other hand, “affinal” incest, marrying between first and second cousins and more distant relatives — well, I won’t say it has a long and glorious history, but it definitely does have a history, and much of it, including some very smart people.

I might be digging myself into an unnecessarily deep hole here, so let me state clearly that I am not advocating incest of any kind.

Well, except maybe in the marketing sense. Like Dan says, you don’t want to practice consanguineous marketing incest — copying what the five other guys who are most like you are doing. That’s likely to only produce worse and worse results with time.

On the other hand, going into a cousin industry, and copying ideas from there — well, that might just be another issue altogether. But I will write more about that in my email tomorrow, and tell you my experiences in paying a visit to a cousin industry lately.

If you’d like to read that email when it comes out, sign up to my email newsletter.

I was shamed this morning by Dan Kennedy’s disembodied voice

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I went for a walk this morning before starting work, and as I was stepping out onto the sunny street, I felt a flash of guilt.

“You won’t amount to much this way,” I heard a disembodied but familiar voice say to me.

I shrugged it off. I told myself that I was doing the right thing for me. Still, for a moment, that voice, and that tiny cloud of guilt covered up the Barcelona morning sun.

The voice belonged to marketer, copywriter, and prolific content machine Dan Kennedy, who was speaking somewhere in my head.

Dan’s voice was talking to me because I’d gotten up around 7:45am, it was now around 8:30am, and I was going out for a walk, which meant I wouldn’t get back to the apartment and to work before 9:15am.

On the other hand, as that disembodied voice reminded me, Dan trained himself to get up in the morning, go to the bathroom, and shuffle to his writing desk, all within 15 mins.

That’s one part of why Dan has been able to write dozens of books, hundreds of newsletters, thousands of “Weekly faxes” and probably millions of words of sales copy to promote his own business and the businesses of the wagonfuls of clients he has worked with — all finished each day before 4pm.

Like I say, skipping a morning walk and getting to work right away is one part of why Dan has been able to do so much. But thankfully, it’s not the only part.

Dan once said that he wrote his No B.S. Time Management book in a weekend — Saturday, Sunday, and a bit of Monday.

244 pages… fifteen chapters… hundreds of personal stories, business case studies, metaphors and analogies… all done in two-and-a half days.

How?

Turns out Dan had most of the stuff already written, either as rough chunks of content, or as stories he had used earlier, or as elements from other books, newsletters, and faxes. But not only that.

He had all this stuff organized in boxes with labels on them. I don’t know the specifics of Dan’s boxing and labeling system. It doesn’t particularly matter, since I don’t work mainly on my laptop, and I want stuff I can search and store digitally.

What does matter is that Dan’s boxes of content, and the labels on those boxes, allowed him to pull out all this material on Saturday morning… look over it… glue it all together… tweak some transitions here and there… and produce a book by Monday afternoon.

And not just any book. A career-defining book. A book that’s gone on to sell tens of thousands of copies, that has led to millions in client and product sales, and that has become Dan’s most influential, and cult-building book, if Amazon reviews are anything to go by.

It might sounds impossible, but you can do this too.

It won’t be automatic, and it will take time and work. But if you’ve decided that writing is for you, that you want to influence people, that you want to make good money doing so, then this kind of organization — whether you use a system of text files or a bunch of cardboard boxes — can make you drastically more productive. Miraculously so.

I’ve been crowing about my Insight Exposed system for the past few days, because it can help you get to this level of organization more quickly than you might do otherwise.

Insight Exposed lays out my own system for labeling, organizing, retrieving, and gluing together ingredients for written content and sales copy. There are no cardboard boxes and no post-it notes in my system. It’s all digital, but you can adapt it to whatever “technology” you like.

Insight Exposed is only available to people who are signed up to my email list. In case you are interested in it, you can sign up for my list here.

An “eery dejà vu feeling” from my Fight Club email last night

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Last night, I sent out an email about going to see Fight Club at a local movie theater. To which I got the following reply from copywritress Liza Schermann, who has been living the “barefoot writer” life in sunny Edinburgh, Scotland. Liza wrote:

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Seeing this email in my inbox provoked an eery dejà vu feeling. I had just gone over the part of Insight Exposed where you have a screenshot of this note from your journal. For a split second, I had no idea where I’d seen this before. Then I remembered.

Like an open kitchen restaurant, only for email. The email that was getting cooked right before my eyes a few minutes ago is now served. Thank you, Chef Bejakovic! 👨‍🍳

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I remember hearing marketer and copywriter Dan Kennedy say once that you shouldn’t ever let clients see you writing copy, because it’s not impressive work and it spoils the mystique.

That might be good advice, but I definitely don’t heed it Insight Exposed, my new training about how I take notes and keep journals.

Like Liza says, Insight Exposed is like an open kitchen. I smile from beneath my chef’s hat, I explain the provenance of a few recent emails, and I show you the various animal bits and pieces from which the email sausage was made.

Let me be clear:

Insight Exposed is not a copywriting training. But it shows you something that may be more important and valuable than copywriting technique. It shows you how I go from a bit of information I spotted somewhere and expand it into something that makes people buy, remember, share, and maybe even change their own minds.

I am only making Insight Exposed available to people who are signed up to my email list. In case you are interested in Insight Exposed, you can sign up for my list here.