Dan Kennedy

There will never be a moment as perfect as right now to read this email

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I recently got a print subscription to the New Yorker so I can sit on the balcony in the morning and read a few pages of well-written fluff about something totally random.

I like the New Yorker because it exposes me to topics outside my usual horse-blindered view of copy, marketing, and influence.

Except, the article I’m reading right now is square in the center of my horse blinders. It’s about Sam Taggart, a new prophet of door-to-door sales.

I’ve never done door-to-door selling myself, but the techniques of the work are near and dear to me. For example:

The New Yorker article reports how one day, Taggart went a-selling solar panels in Salt Lake City.

He approached a house, and stood away from the porch as a woman opened the door.

Taggart adopted a matter-of-fact contractor’s tone when talking. For a bit, this made the woman believe he was somehow with the utilities company. Once it became clear Taggart was selling solar panels, the woman locked up:

“My husband won’t do it, because we’re faced the wrong way.”

Taggart had a very clever and calculated response to this. It immediately made me sit up and pay attention, because it sounded very familiar. From the article:

“Here’s the thing,” Taggart said. He leaned against the doorway, and the woman leaned against its opposite side — a signal that she felt more comfortable. “What’s your name?”

“Kay.”

“Every kiss begins with ‘K’!” They both laughed. “So, actually, your house is perfect for it!” He hadn’t even glanced at her roof.

Like I said, this technique was very familiar to me.

It might be used in D2D sales, but it is also used in copywriting and marketing.

I’ve heard Dan Kennedy preach it. And when I was in Dan Ferrari’s coaching group, Dan F. even had a very concise name for it which has stuck with me since. In fact, Dan uses this technique not just as a way of handling objections, but more generally, as a way of organizing and structuring his promos.

And now, since it so happens that the Pisuerga flows through Valladolid, I’d like to tell you that I’ve been thinking about podcasts lately.

Specifically, I’ve been thinking about getting onto some podcasts. I got on a couple last year, and gave me a lot of exposure and attention. I also have plans to get on another podcast in a few weeks’ time. But after that, what? I feel podcasts are something I should be doing more regularly, and not just once or twice a year.

So I’ve got an offer for you:

Maybe it’s 100% clear to you what Sam Taggart’s technique above is.

Maybe it’s also 100% clear to you how to use this at the low-level of your copy… or, like Dan Ferrari, even to organize your entire promo.

But if you’re not 100% sure, if you’re more like 98% or 97% sure, or even less, then get onto my email newsletter. When you get my welcome email, hit reply. And let me know the most recent podcast episode you listened to.

Just tell me one. The most recent one.

And if it has nothing to do with copy or marketing, that’s perfectly fine. Don’t lie to me and say you’ve been listening to David Garfinkel if you haven’t. There’s no need to. I want to genuinely know the most recent podcast you listened to, whatever that may be.

And in return:

I will spell out Taggart’s technique above. And I will tell you what Dan Kennedy and Dan Ferrari have to say about the same, and how they use it in their marketing and copy.

Are you game? Then do it now.

It’s the perfect moment while it’s still fresh on your mind. It will only take you a second, and you will avoid the risk that you put it aside for a minute and forget about it among all the distractions of the Internet. Here’s where to get started.

“Email Marketing: A Lecture by Rowan Atkinson”

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Here’s a quick checklist of elements that make for engaging, effective, and influential emails:

1. Conflict, outrage. We seem to take a constant delight in seeing or participating in a fight. The more real it is, the more engaging it is. The more status the fight participants have, the more engaging it is.

2. Surprising connections between unrelated things, or surprising distinctions in things that seemed simple and unified.

3. Metaphors, analogies, and “transubstantiation.”

4. Angst. All good copy is rooted in angst. As Dan Kennedy likes to say, “The sky is either falling or is about to fall.”

5. Imitation and parody.

6. An engaging character. As Matt Furey didn’t but should have said, “For the email marketer, nothing transcends character.” The email of personality, rather than the email of “value.” Email is not about sharing valuable information. It’s about writing about normal things in a valuable and interesting way. It’s about accuracy of human observation and precision of the observation.

7. All right, enough of this. Let me come clean:

Everything I’ve just told you actually comes from a video titled “Visual Comedy: A Lecture by Rowan Atkinson.”

Atkinson you might best know as the clumsy priest from Four Weddings and a Funeral.

I watched Atkinson’s Visual Comedy guide a few days ago, expecting to be entertained. And I was that. But I found the video surprisingly full of deep analysis of what actually makes for visual comedy. It was like a prehistoric episode of the Every Frame a Painting series, if you’ve ever seen that.

And not only was this video insightful.

I realized that much, or maybe all, of what makes for good visual comedy can be ported very easily to email marketing.

For example, point #1 above is really about slapstick. As the Visual Comedy video says, “We seem to take a constant delight in seeing people hurt and humiliated. The more real it is, the funnier it is. The more dignified the victim, the funnier it is.”

And that Matt Furey non-quote in point #6?

​​It actually comes from Charlie Chaplin. “For the comedian, nothing transcends character.”

If you like, I’ve linked the entire Rowan Atkinson video below. You can watch it and try to figure out which techniques of visual comedy I mapped to each of my email marketing points above.

Of course, there’s more in this video than just what I’ve written above. The list of connections between visual comedy and email marketing is long and distinguished, and doesn’t just stop at 6″.

As just one example:

Maybe the most valuable part of this video is the detailed discussion of what exactly makes for an engaging character in visual comedy. I found almost all of this applied to email marketing directly, without the need for even the smallest bit of translation. Now that I think about it, maybe it’s a lesson I should apply myself.

So to wrap up:

​If you’re a goofy and thoughtless person who enjoys laughing when somebody slips on a banana peel…

​Or if you’re a deep and serious thinker who is interested in uncovering the hidden structure of things most people take for granted…

​Then I believe you will get value out of this video. Or maybe you’ll just get some pointed human observation. You can find it below. Before you click to watch it, you might want to sign up for my daily email newsletter, and get more insightful things like the essay you’ve just read.

It’s okay to open this email

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Here are some intimate facts about my personal life right now:

I have two friends visiting and staying with me. Two nights ago, the three of us went out to dinner. The food wasn’t great. But it sure was toxic.

At least that’s how I explain the sudden onset of nausea and high fever that hit me a few hours later, when I got home and went to bed.

Each time I turned between the sheets, I thought I might throw up. I also burned feverishly throughout the night, and got almost no sleep.

I spent most of the following day on the couch, taking cat naps, only eating paracetamols to bring my body temperature back into normalish range.

Maybe you say this doesn’t sound like a typical case of food poisoning.

Maybe you are right.

But what still makes me suspect the dinner was that within another 24 hours, I was completely fine.

No more fever. No more frightened stomach. Nothing except a little lingering tiredness.

In fact, I was so fully fine that by the end of that second day I considered going to the gym.

Sure, I wasn’t thrilled at the idea. I hardly ever am. But I felt guilty at already missing a day.

“I will do it,” I said to one of my friends, who was sitting on the couch next to me. “I will go to the gym.”

This friend, a dominant Turkish girl, looked at me crossly.

“What! Don’t go to the gym. Your body needs to recover. Besides, you didn’t really eat anything for the past 24 hours. You need fuel if you will go to the gym!”

I smiled and nodded at how right she is. I concluded that I should follow her wise advice and skip the gym. Which was convenient, because it’s what I wanted to do all along.

You might see how this story lends itself to persuasion and influence. As Dan Kennedy likes to say, “There is power in issuing permission slips.”

Speaking of which:

I found that bit of “persuasion slip” wisdom on the bottom of page 47 of a huge 270-page document called,

“Dan Kennedy’s Million Dollar Resource & Sample Book”

I don’t know how much Dan originally sold this “Million-Dollar Sample Book” for. But I do know that it’s available for free as a bonus to Brian Kurtz’s very affordable book Overdeliver.

But in case you are quickly backing away from me right now, let me reassure you:

You might legitimately feel that buying Brian’s Overdeliver, and getting access to a few metric tons of high-quality marketing advice in the form of bonuses, has both its good and bad sides.

The good side is that it’s clearly an attractive offer. Brian’s book costs something like $12. And the bonuses that Brian gives away have sold for tens of thousands of dollars.

That’s the good side. The bad side is that:
​​
Almost certainly, you already have a mountain of good marketing advice sitting on your laptop right now, unconsumed, unloved, and unimplemented.

If that bothers you, I can telly you that I have the same. I have a ton of marketing content I have paid for but still haven’t done anything with.

Even so, I still encourage you to check out Brian’s Overdeliver collection.

In part, that’s because it is such a valuable hangarful of information. And because it is such an incredible deal.

And also, because I will make it easy for you to get value out of Brian’s offer. Here’s the deal:

1. Get Overdeliver

2. Get the bonuses using the form on Brian’s page below

3. Open up the Dan Kennedy Sample Book and go to page 47, where it says “There is power in issuing permission slips”

4. Send me an email, with the sentence immediately preceding that “permission slips” sentence

I will then tell you the most valuable and interesting thing I have personally learned out of that entire 270-page sample book, and possibly out of entire Overdeliver collection. Because I have gone through the entire massive collection, each part of it, and I have taken notes.

So here’s the link to get started. ​​Go ahead. ​​It’s okay:

https://overdeliverbook.com/

I was doing “massive action” all wrong

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I just spent an hour sending out about a dozen emails to random people on random topics.

Some of them were personal.

Some were to connect those who might get value out of knowing each other.

Some had to do with my own little publishing business, of which you are reading the marketing right now.

The total time to send all those emails was under an hour. The total work, in terms of effort and brainpower, was nothing.

I don’t know what’s gonna come out of all those emails.

But I bet that out of those 12 emails, at least one big and positive thing will emerge that’s not anywhere near to the surface today. Perhaps it will be some totally new and fantastical beast, with bat wings, a cat tail, and maybe a donkey head… ready to entertain me, or make me some money, or maybe open up doors I don’t even know exist right now.

All this brought to mind something I overheard once during the Q&A part of a Dan Kennedy seminar. Somebody in the audience mentioned the “principle of massive action.”

I’ve known about “massive action” for a long while.

In fact, at different times in my life, I’ve been a devotee to the idea. But I always took it to mean something in a kind of Grant Cardonish sense – work harder than you’re working now, 10x harder, and quit complaining.

But this person in Dan Kennedy’s audience gave a different meaning to massive action. One that seems to exist within the Dan Kennedy galaxy.

Yes, “massive action” still involves taking action, and maybe even doing work.

But the key thing, according to what I read from Dan Kennedy, is to take action in a bunch of different dimensions.

Think up 12 different ways to solve a problem. And get going on all of them, all at once.

“Err Bejako,” I hear you say, “are you telling me to grind 12 times harder? How is this an improvement over Grant Cardone’s 10x fluff?”

Nope. Grinding is not required.

Of course, some of those 12 possible solutions might be hard to move forward.

But some may be easy.

Some may require you to do real work. Many won’t.

Some might require sitting and thinking, or writing and editing. Others might just require a quick email to someone you know.

You never know which one approach will end up being the one to solve your problem. And if my experience is any guide, it usually won’t be the most difficult and time-consuming one, the one that requires Grant Cardonish grinding. Plus, there’s seems to be some multiplicative magic when you take different approaches to solve a problem, beyond simple addition.

Anyways, I’m not sure if this helps you in any way.

But if you want more ideas like this, ideas I’ve pilfered from people like Dan Kennedy, applied, and benefited from, then sign up for my daily email newsletter.

Drop your phone in the toilet, grab a cup of coffee, and read this whole email word for word

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About two weeks ago, I got a surprise:

Dan Kennedy started sending me emails.

I’m not 100% how this happened. In the past, I’ve signed up for email newsletters on various DK websites.

​​As I’ve written before, I’m a big Dan Kennedy fan and I had high hopes.

But it always turned out the emails were not written by Dan. They were just random pitches for various DK stuff. Each time, I eventually ended up unsubscribing.

And yet, two weeks ago, I suddenly started getting emails from Dan again. And they are great.

I don’t think these new emails are actually written by Dan either, not now, not as emails. It’s probably just old Dan content, repurposed for the email format by some marketing monkey working under Russell Brunson, who has bought up Dan’s entire business.

Still, it’s great stuff, full of humor and valuable ideas. For example, here’s one bit from a recent DK email which caught my eye:

One of the great litmus tests of a newsletter is when yours arrives, are people so excited about it that they drop whatever they’re doing, take their phone and lock it in the trunk of their car, get a cup of coffee, then eagerly sit down to go through it? At least a quick skim to see what’s there and then say, “Tonight, when I have more time, I’m gonna read the whole thing word for word.” Is that how they react?

This caught my eye because last month, I launched my Most Valuable Postcard.

​​MVP is not a newsletter — really, it’s an un-newsletter. It covers tried-and-proven marketing principles rather than new techniques and tactics.

I was wondering how people would react to this approach, and to the format of the postcard. Well, initial reactions are starting to filter in.

One MVP subscriber, who shall remain unnamed, said that in the excitement of receiving her postcard, she ended up dropping her phone into the toilet (the phone survived).

​​Sure, a house is not a home, and a toilet is not a trunk. But it may be even better.

And as for reading the whole postcard word for word, MVP subscriber Jakub Červenka just wrote me to say:

Hey John,

Just wanted to let you know I just got your postcard. I am only half-way through your horror stories, but I am already sure you over-delivered on value.

And I have a feeling that your postcard newsletter thingie is case-in-point study in putting in work up front for your prospects.

I don’t have yet enough money / business big enough to be able to afford you, but you making this whole thing so personal, I cannot think of anyone I’d rather work with once I am launching my funnel in English market..

But in the meantime, I am pre-sold already on any copywriting course you may sell in future.

And my mind is already spinning trying to come up with ways I could use what I am learning from you into my business.

Thank you for inspiration, it is awesome!

Jakub has only read half the postcard so far. That’s hardly word-for-word reading… but as far a testimonial for MVP, I don’t think I could ask for anything better.

Still, I’m still not sure what to do with this project.

Like Jakub says, it’s very personal… but also very unscalable.

If I ever reopen this offer to new subscribers, I might tweak the format, and I will certainly increase the price.

But if that doesn’t turn you away, and you want the chance to lock your phone in your trunk or at least fumble it into the toilet when you get a postcard in the mail from me, you can sign up for my (free) daily email newsletter, so you can get notified if I reopen MVP again.

The trick to getting away with a bunch of self-promotion and hard, hard teaching in your email marketing

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A few days ago, I got a question from reader Faith Ndangi. Faith was responding to an email in which I had a little thought bubble – a fantasy sequence in which I imagined being interviewed on CNN, before having my thought bubble pop. To which Faith wrote:

Okay John!

I love this story of you fantasizing being interviewed.

Personal yet you still keep your distance.

Was entertaining and fun too.

I would love to know the tricks and strategies you used to have that effect.

I guess Faith doesn’t like sharing personal details about herself on the Internet. So as a deal, I promised to tell her my “tricks and strategies” if she’d let me use her name and question in a newsletter email.

I also warned her it’s not much of a trick at all, though it is simple, and it is something you can use to make your copy, and really all your writing, much better.

Faith agreed.

So I will tell you my trick — even though it’s not much of a trick. ​​But first…

Have you heard about the new ‘Menstrual Dignity Act’?

Oregon Governor Kate Brown pushed it through recently. It’s a new law that will install tampon machines in boys’ bathrooms in Portland public schools. Each tampon machine will cost $400 and will dispense free tampons to boys.

The Governor says this will increase “menstrual equity” and will reduce the shame and stigma surrounding menstruation.

Opponents furiously disagree. They say this is a waste of public money, an invitation for mischief and bullying, and an attempt to push an LGBTQ agenda and destroy Oregon.

How do you feel?

Are you with the Governor, hopeful that laws like this, after some birthing pains, will bring about a new and better world? Or are you genuinely furious and outraged? Or, like me, are you just shaking your head and chuckling about how stupid people can be and how crazy the world has gotten?

Think about that for a moment. In the meantime, let’s get back on track.

The simple trick/strategy I used in that CNN email was to ask myself, how can I make the reader feel something?

After all, the rest of that email was a bunch of subtle self-promotion and hard teaching. Neither of those really stirs the body.

So I asked myself, how can I make the reader experience and feel something, anything?

​​In response, my brain popped up with that ridiculous CNN sequence — combining the feelings of vanity, foiled ambition, and familiarity.

It seems to have worked. It stirred something, in Faith’s case at least. And it didn’t matter those feelings weren’t particularly related to anything else I was talking about. In the words of Dan Kennedy:

Great copy agitates, and it doesn’t matter what the agitation is — you just need to agitate.

So that’s really what that whole Menstrual Dignity stuff above was about. Whatever your reaction was, I hope you felt something.

​​And now that I’ve hopefully agitated you through the feelings of curiosity, pride, or maybe insight, I want to get to the real point of this email.

Two days ago, I made an offer of consulting for the first time.

In spite of “consulting” not being a great offer, I’ve had a surprising number of people take me up on it already.

As a result, my consulting offer is becoming a little sharper, because it’s becoming clear there is demand for an email marketing audit. You know, where I look at your entire email funnel critically, from start to finish, and tell you what I would do to make more sales and get more engagement.

Do you feel this could be valuable for you? Or do you think it might increase dignity and equity, at least when it comes to your bottom line?

​​If you say yes, you can get started by filling out the form below:

https://bejakovic.com/consulting​​

The fallout of my “rape” subject line

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3 days ago, I sent out an email with the subject line, “Don’t rape your audience.”

That hook came from a quote from screenwriter William Goldman (Princess Bride, Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid), who compared gradually seducing your audience (movie screenplays) to raping them (TV writing).

Like I said at the start of that email, rape is a shocking metaphor. In today’s society, it’s borderline impermissible.

So sure enough, when I checked my unsubscribe count for this email, it showed I disappointed, offended, or perhaps triggered a lot of people. ​​My unsubscribes proved it. I had 7 unsubscribes total, which might not sound like a lot, but is 5.8x my norm for the past 90 days.

I did the hard work of checking who all those unsubscribes were.

Some were new — they signed up only a few weeks ago for my “Analysis of Daniel Throssell” presentation.

Others had been on my list for a while.

Either way, none of them had ever bought anything from me… replied to any of my emails… played along with any of the engagement bait I regularly put out… or even opened and read my emails very often.

So there’s that, the hard and toxic fallout.

On the other hand, I also had a dozen thoughtful replies to my email, both about the subject line and the idea in the body. Almost all these replies came from successful marketers and copywriters. For example, copywriter Robert Smith, who runs his own CRO agency, wrote in to say:

Yo.

Yesterday I was on a zoom call with the team.

It was about our marketing emails.

I shared my screen and opened my email app to talk about a thing.

Instead of talking about our email stuff, we spent the next 10 minutes admiring your subject line.

It’s tier-1.

At first, I had a thought like:
“In a non-DR market this would get super-high Opens, but just as many Spam complaints.”

Addendum to original thought after opening:
“…Only if the body doesn’t deliver.”

3rd addendum after reading body:
“And… It delivered.”

Kick ass! And super inspiring to see. Really got me thinking: “my subject lines suck!”

Robert pretty much spelled out everything I wanted to say about this crisis.

Shocking subject lines, and shocking topics in general, will polarize your audience.

But if you can somehow back up your shocking stuff in a congruent way, you will only scrub away the barnacles clinging to the gleaming white hull of your magnificent ship.

At the same time, you will engage and bond more deeply with successful, thoughtful people, the kinds of people you want to associate yourself with, whether as customers, clients, or just readers.

You might say I am not telling you anything new here.

And you’re right. Ben Settle and Dan Kennedy before him have both been preaching this kind of repulsion marketing for years.

But fundamentals like this work. And so they are worth repeating from time to time. Until maybe the right time, when it all clicks for you and you decide to try it out for yourself.

Anyways, if you have a business, and you’re worried your subject lines suck, then you might want to hire me to help with that.

Because as of now, I’m offering consulting. And one of the things I’m highly qualified to consult on is email marketing and copywriting. And not just the shocking and repelling kind. And not just to my own email list.

If case you are interested, fill out the form below, and I’ll be in touch:

https://bejakovic.com/consulting

“Awful Awful Waste of Money”

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Some time ago, I got tempted into buying Dan Kennedy’s book, “The Phenomenon: Achieve More In the Next 12 Months than the previous 12 Years.”

Does that make me possibly the stupidest person on the planet?

Probably. After all, check out one review on Amazon, which I read before I decided to get the book:

Awful Awful Waste of Money

I seriously think this is the biggest waste of money and quite possibly the biggest waste of time I have ever spent. This is nothing but a pitch for Dan Kennedy and everyone of his student’s products. There isn’t a single how to trigger the Phenomenon. This is an even worse type of push that Tony Robbins does where he at least gives a little info before trying to sell you on spending 10K for a seminar. Do not pay for this.

And yet… I did pay and I got myself a used copy. For one thing, because I love DK’s stuff. For another, because the promise just sounded so appealing I couldn’t resist.

Result:

There is nothing new in The Phenomenon. In fact, the book is mostly not written by Dan, but by a bunch of his coaching students hyping themselves up. And like the review above says, there’s no how to.

Well, there is a checklist of “rules” right at the start. I jumped on it yesterday, my greedy opportunity seeker eyes shining in the dark. Rule #1 said:

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

My head sank to my chest. “That’s the one thing I didn’t want to hear,” I said to Dan, who couldn’t hear me.

This rule is certainly something I have known for years. It’s one of the pillars of Ben Settle’s email system, which Ben inherited from Matt Furey and ultimately Dan himself.

Whenever I’ve worked with clients on their email marketing, I’ve always insisted we put an offer at the end of each email.

For one thing, you’re never going to make money without an offer.

For another, engaged readers actually like buying, or at least having the choice to buy.

And yet, I don’t consistently have an offer in my own emails.

Sure, I promote trainings like my Copy Riddles on occasion, and I will do so again in the future. (The next run of Copy Riddles will be in June.)

But I have no default offer I can always go to, even when I’m not in the middle of doing a launch of relaunch of a product.

So it turns out Dan’s Phenomenon book is hardly a waste of money or of time, even though it’s mostly slapped-together self-promotion.

And yet,​​​ I remain possibly the stupidest person on the planet.

After all, if I had a client like myself, I would have either forced him to include some kind of offer each day in his emails, or I would have fired him long ago.

So take it from Dan to me to you:

If you are doing email marketing, or really any kind of marketing, make people an offer. With each of your messages. It might turn you into a phenomenon.

But what about me?

Still no offer.

I have to have something. So I decided to offer…

C​onsulting.

Now, I fully expect absolutely nobody to take me up on this offer, at least today.

That’s because I’ve gotten pretty good at coming up with offers over the past couple of years, working both with clients and on my own projects.

And “consulting” is an awful offer. It’s vague — what exactly does it mean? There’s no sexy name. And who would possibly want it?

Like Agora founder Bill Bonner said, nobody wakes up in the middle of the night, heart pounding, wet pajamas stuck to his back, face to face with the awful truth — “We’re out of newsletters.”

Well, likewise, nobody wakes up at 3am thinking, “I gotta have some more consulting.”

I’ll fix some of those problems in the coming days and emails.

I’ll sharpen up the offer. I’ll tell you what exactly I can consult you about, and why it would make good sense for you to pay me to do so.

I’ll tell you some case studies of clients who have hired me for consulting, and what they got out of it (and what they didn’t).

Maybe will even come up with a sexier name than “consulting.”

But all that in future emails.

For now, if you do want my guidance or advice on marketing and copywriting problems, and you want it before others get to me, then fill out the form at the link below, and you will hear from me soon:

https://bejakovic.com/consulting

Make money opening emails from your favorite marketing influencers!

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A couple days ago, I got an email about an event called “How To Make Money Sharing Videos”.

Just to be very very clear: I am not promoting this event, and I am not in any way encouraging you to join it.

But I have to admit it did get me intrigued.

How exactly do you make money by sharing videos?

Maybe you can guess. If not, I’ll tell you the answer in just a sec. But first, let me tell you a curious little story this reminded me of.

Last year, after listening to Dan Kennedy talk about opportunity marketing in his Opportunity Concepts seminar, I started being on the lookout for all things business opportunity.

And so I came across an intriguing ad, which ran repeatedly in bizopp magazines and tabloid newspapers in the early 90s. The headline ran:

Get Paid To Watch Your Favorite TV Shows!
Profits Up To 10,000.00 A Day Possible!

“Yeah yeah yeah,” I panted with my tongue hanging out, “how do I get paid? I like Seinfeld for example, how much can I make with that? I want to know! Or what about Peep Show? Does that pay even better?”

The ad doesn’t say. You had to mail in a “Get Paid Application Form” plus $21.95 to find out.

And depending on which week’s Weekly World News you were reading, you had to mail in your check to different-named businesses in:

Colorado City, AZ (Nov 6, 1990)
Bellingham, WA (Sep 24, 1991)
New York, NY (Nov 19, 1991)
…

In other words, it’s very likely that this offer was a scam. A new fly-by-night mailing address each month… a bunch of angry and ashamed new customers… and then on to the next place before anyone could catch whoever was behind this bizopp.

Sorry to break it to you, but this probably means you cannot get paid, as the ad promised, to “sit back, relax, and watch television.”

Still, the marketing and persuasion idea back of this scheme is sound. You can use it even if you are running a more legit business.

For example, that “sharing videos” thing is really about affiliate marketing. The videos you would be sharing are webinars for affiliate offers.

Of course, that’s not what the very top of the sales funnel sells you.

Instead, it sells you something more simple, more easy, more familiar. Something you are already doing and probably enjoying.

It’s only once your interest and greed are aroused, once you click through, opt in, watch the webinar, do you find out the cold, hard truth.

So what about making money by opening emails? The promise in my subject line?

The cold hard truth is, open those emails, read them, apply any good and free ideas you come across. Or even pay for some good ideas that those emails advertise, and then apply those.

Do this consistently, and you’re sure to make money in time.

Maybe that’s not what you were hoping to hear.

Maybe you’re disappointed and hurt to hear that, while it’s certainly possible to make good money online, it will take some work, some time, some effort and maybe even creativity on your part. It will never be fully automated, and there’s no secret shortcut to get around that.

If you find that truth repulsive, then my newsletter is not for you.

But if like me, you are a panting, hanging-tongue bizopp seeker at heart… but in time you learned to control yourself and even put in some work… then stick around. I might have some good ideas to share with you.

Also, you might like my Most Valuable Postcard.

This offer is not open right now — I got all the subscribers I wanted during the launch two days ago. But there is a waiting list.

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Anatomy of a penis pill business success

by

In early March of this year, I was listening to some Dan Kennedy seminar when Dan casually mentioned a penis pill company, out of Scottsdale, Arizona, that Gary Halbert used to write for, and that got busted by the Feds in the early 2000s.

I did some research.

​​I couldn’t find evidence connecting GH.

​​But I did find an NBC News article that said there was a company, called C.P. Direct, out of Scottsdale, Arizona, that sold “more than $74 million worth of pills that it claimed would enlarge penises or breasts, make the consumer taller or hairier — even sharpen his or her golf game.”

C.P. Direct got busted in 2002.

But they didn’t get busted for bogus claims, ineffective product, or lack of proof or evidence.

Instead, they got because of forced autoship and not giving people refunds.

The NBC News article concluded that “C.P. Direct would likely still be selling its pills today if it hadn’t illegally charged customers’ credit cards without reauthorization.”

Well, maybe.

Or maybe not.

Maybe if C.P. Direct had run a more legit business, at least in terms of not actually stealing from people, then there wouldn’t have been much of a business at all.

Maybe they would have had such high refunds and low reorders that even Gary Halbert’s magic front-end copy couldn’t save them.

And vice versa.

Just because Gary Halbert, if he did write the front-end copy for C.P. Direct, did create $74 million worth of sales of herbal supplements — “guaranteed to induce gross physical alterations of the human body” — well, that doesn’t mean that the copy was any good.

​​Maybe Gary’s copy was a total flop, but the fact that C.P. Direct could milk hundreds or maybe thousands of dollars from every naive customer, against the customer’s will, made the business profitable nonetheless.

My point being, there’s a lot of number porn out there, people who (truthfully) claim their copy has sold millions of this and trillions of that.

Or you can see ads that keep running in Newsmax or on Taboola, month after month.

But the fact is, the advertising you might be copying and studying from might not be great advertising after all. Even if it’s got hard numbers to back it up.

​​Well, at least it’s not great, unless you are also willing to copy the rest of the business, shady and illegal practices included.

And now the big question?

Are you happy with your size? Breasts or penis? If you’d like to increase and improve what you have, completely naturally, then join thousands of other satisfied readers and sign up for my email newsletter.