Daniel Throssell

Daniel Throssell offers a thought on my CopyHour promo

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This morning, I started my final-day email barrage promoting CopyHour. In reply to my last day’s first email, I got a message from Australia’s best copywriter, Daniel Throssell, who wrote:

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Can I offer a thought?

If it were me I’d make more of a big deal of how little a burden your extra training will add to the not insignificant time burden of doing CopyHour.

I get the feeling one of the big objections to a program like CopyHour is the massive time & work commitment it entails, and buyers will (justifiably or not) use that as a reason to excuse themselves from the promo. I think a five-bonus stack does you no favours in that regard. But it looks like mostly small, punchy stuff … so you might do well to emphasise each time that it only adds (say) 1 hour of total time to get the benefit of all those bonuses.

Of course it may be presumptuous of me to say that to you, but it was just a thought I had when reading this.

Good luck!

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As Daniel tends to do, he makes a good point above.

There are two costs to any kind of product. One is the price you pay up front. The other is the effort and time to actually consume or use the beast.

Info product owners often think that the more mere tonnage they pile onto their offer, the better it will sell. But I have personally been turned off by offer smorgasbords that made me think, “Ugh, who’s got the stomach to swallow all those mixed meats…”

So let me take and apply Daniel’s advice:

The core promise for CopyHour is “write six & seven figure copy in the next 90 days.”

Yes, getting there will require work. It’s there in the name — CopyHour.

I encourage you to sign up to CopyHour if you plan to do the work, since that’s the only way to actually get the promised benefits in those 90 days.

If you do decide to join CopyHour today, and you do so before 8:31pm CET using my link below, I will also give you a free bonus, which I’ve taken to calling Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets. This is a bundle of five bite-sized offers which I’ve previously sold for a total of $499.

I won’t overwhelm you now by talking about what each of the five offers is about. I will say that you can use three of these offers as references, meaning you reach for them when you need to, at a cost of just a minute or two of your time.

The remaining two offers inside Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets will take you under an hour total to consume and benefit from — and I have worked hard to make those trainings entertaining as well as valuable.

And now the deadline, always the deadline…

Less than 5 hours remain before I close down my CopyHour promo. If you’d like to get in before then, take a gander now at the CopyHour landing page:

https://bejakovic.com/copyhour

P.S. If you do join CopyHour, write me and say so. Also write me in case you already have bought via my affiliate link. The affiliate portal only lets me see the first name of who’s bought and not the email. So write me and say you bought, and I’ll send over your bonuses. Like a reader named Esat who just wrote:

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Hey John!

Just finished buying the CopyHour program by using your affiliate link. Thanks for this – I’d have never seen it if I wasn’t a big fan of you & read your emails.

Please send over my bonuses when you get a chance, thanks.

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Do you want my help creating an email promotion for your business?

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Today is April 1st.

​​I was going to try to “fool” you by saying I am getting into multi-level marketing. That’s on the back of a reader reply I got last week. A reader surreptitiously tried to recruit me into her own MLM organization with:

Life-Changing Products!
Breakthrough Marketing System!
Huge Compensation Plan!

Fortunately for you, I’m about as humorous as a rock. So there will be no fooling today.

Instead, I have a 100% serious and honest question for you. I’ll write an email about this question tomorrow as well. I want to make it clear this is not some dumb April Fools stunt.

As you might know, I now have a role as hot seat coach in Shiv Shetti’s PCM mastermind.

Each week, my task is to come up with a new strategy for a new email promotion for a new business.

It’s fun work. I’ve learned a lot in just my two months there. And that’s on top of my own previous experience, creating and running such email promotions. That experience is how I got this job in the first place, via a recommendation from Australia’s best copywriter, Daniel Throssell.

So my question to you is:

Do you have a business?

Do you have an email list?

Do you want to learn how to create new email promotions for your own business regularly?

​​In other words, do you want to learn how to pull out an extra $10k, $20k, $50k from your list on demand — terms and conditions apply?

Do you even want my direct, one-on-one hand-holding and help, as you strategize and execute the first of these email promotions?

If so, then reply to this email, and tell me you’re interested.

If I can get 5-10 qualified business owners who want this, I will put it on within the next 10 days.

And if not, then I really will be joining that MLM.

Save me from that fate. Get much more out of your list than you might think is possible. Hit reply, and tell me if you’re interested in this promotion training.

My confessions as Shiv Shetti’s hot-seat coach

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Last Dec, Australia’s best copywriter, Daniel Throssell, wrote me an email asking if I wanted an intro to Shiv Shetti, who was looking for a new coach for his program.

I had no idea what being a coach inside somebody else’s program entailed, but I was willing to find out.

It turned out Shiv has a new program to coach copywriters, called Performance Copywriter Method.

Normally, I would not be interested. For the past year, I have been consciously working to move away from coaching, selling, or marketing to copywriters.

But this was something different.

Shiv was looking for a “hot seat coach.” Each week, I would have to give a different copywriter a strategy for a new email promotion. The copywriters were working with solid, successful clients, and were writing email promos for them on performance-only deals.

I told Shiv I am interested in this. So we agreed I’d start a 2-week trial period at the end of January.

In the meantime, I got to work preparing.

I bought Daniel Throssell’s Campaign Conqueror course, because Shiv was explicitly looking for someone who knew how to do promos in that style. I went through Campaign Conqueror twice.

Second, I went through Shiv’s trainings inside PCM. They talked about mindset… about Shiv’s system for finding these PCM clients… about writing promos themselves.

Third, I looked over previous hot seats that Shiv had delivered himself, all of which surprised me in how thoughtful and thorough they were.

Fourth, I joined the PCM Skool community, where I first started lurking and then contributing bit by bit.

Long story short:

I was impressed by Shiv’s program… impressed by the copywriters inside… impressed by Shiv and his team.

I guess they liked me as well, because my trial period came and went, and now we continue to work together.

My main job is, as I said, to take in a bunch of info each week, and come up with the strategy for a new email promo, much in the style of Daniel Throssell’s Campaign Conqueror. The strategy includes a promo offer, a theme, and email hooks.

For example, tomorrow I have call set up with an Australian copywriter who’s working with a music coach. He’s supposed to send emails over 5 days to promote the coach’s $2,800 offer to the coach’s list of 12,000 names.

I will prepare the strategy. I will go over it with the copywriter over Zoom. He will then go off and write the implement the strategy some time in April.

If all goes well, the client will make a bunch of money without doing any work. The copywriter will end up getting paid much more for those emails than he ever could if he were getting paid up front. And then next month, he and the client will do it all again, with a new offer and a new theme.

So far, I’ve done five or six of these hot seats, one per week. Most of the promos are set to run in the next few weeks, so I can’t report on any impressive wins yet. I imagine those will come.

The other part of my work as a hot seat coach is participate in the PCM Skool community, fielding questions every day.

Those tend to range from technical questions to client acquisition questions to copy and promo questions.

Fortunately, this community is nothing like r/copywriting or the various Facebook copy groups. The people inside are all normal, are all looking for results, are all actually working copywriters with solid copy chops.

All that’s to say, i continue to work with Shiv and his PCM community.

I can tell you from the inside that this program is 100% legit.

​​Not only is it well-designed and well-delivered, with care and effort, but the copywriters inside are getting these performance deals going with quality clients, and from what I’ve seen of the results so far, they are making bank.

If you’re interested, you can find out more about PCM below.

But before you go there, you might notice the curious fact that I am not in any way creating a promo out of this offer.

There’s no deadline.

There’s no disappearing offer, or a bonus, or a discount.

That’s because I don’t want to create any additional urgency about this, beyond what you might already feel as a copywriter dissatisfied or worried with the status quo.

But if you are dissatisfied or worried, and if you’re looking for a new way to work as a copywriter, then PCM is definitely worth a look. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/pcm

Don’t be like me

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For the past two days, I’ve been running a kind of flash offer I’ve called Copy Riddles Lite.

In order to promote that, I have finally done something I should have done months ago, and that’s to go through the emails that Australia’s best & world’s most provocative copywriter, Daniel Throssell, wrote to promote Copy Riddles back in September.

Daniel’s emails are filled with gold I could and should have been using to promote Copy Riddles ever since. Such as, for example, the following quotes:

“There are few other courses I fully and wholeheartedly endorse as strongly as one of my own. Copy Riddles is one of them.”

“I have literally never had so many people write to me after I start promoting something, offering unsolicited & gushing feedback on it!”

“It’s the most brilliant course concept I’ve ever seen … literally a gamified series of sequential puzzles that teaches you copywriting.”
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So don’t be like me — lazy, careless, and self-defeating when it comes to promoting your own good offers.

Instead, when people write nice things about you and what you sell, save those comments… cherish them… casually drop hints about them over tea or coffee… and every Sunday or even more often, stand up on a soapbox, and openly and dramatically read out those flattering endorsements to everyone who might be interested and many of those who are not.

The Copy Riddles Lite offer is closing down tonight, in another 8 hours, specifically at 8:31pm CET.

Copy Riddles Lite is not a gamified series of sequential puzzles. That’s the full Copy Riddles course, which contains 20 such sequential puzzles.

Copy Riddles Lite contains just one such puzzle.

But it’s a puzzle that stands alone, without the rest of the Copy Riddles program. And if you can guess the right answer — or even if you don’t, but you put in the effort — it will teach you something very valuable about copywriting, in a very short period of time.

Copy Riddles Lite is priced lightly, according to its lite nature. And if you buy it and decide you want to upgrade to the full Copy Riddles program, I will credit you the price you paid for Copy Riddles Lite.

So if you’d like to get this piece of a highly endorsed training before I close down the cart, here’s where to go (no sales page, just an order page):

https://bejakovic.com/crl​​

The extra something in Daniel Throssell’s BF 2021 campaign

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A few weeks before Christmas, I bought Daniel Throssell’s course Campaign Conqueror. I’m currently on my second pass through the course.

If you’re curious why I would buy Daniel’s course now, two years after he put it out, well, that’s something I might talk about in the coming weeks.

For now, let me just bring you back to November 2021, back when Daniel had his massively successful Black Friday campaign, which was the impetus for his creating this course.

I won’t rehash the history of that campaign — odds are, you know how it went down.

And if not, let me just say that it was an affiliate promotion/competition, involving a dozen email marketers (not me), including some with big guru status and much bigger lists than Daniel.

And yet, Daniel came out on top in that affiliate promotion. And not just on top, but I believe he made as many sales as all the other expert marketers combined.

Why was Daniel’s Black Friday 2021 campaign so successful?

My answer at the time was Daniel’s relationship with his list, and the quality of his offer. And no doubt, those were both a big part.

Daniel has a much more detailed answer inside Campaign Conqueror, including things I didn’t realize he was doing.

But there’s something extra I still haven’t heard anyone talk about, including Daniel in Campaign Conqueror. (I might be wrong, and I might have missed it. That’s why I’m on the second pass through Campaign Conqueror. But since this is my own observation, I’ll go ahead and share it.)

I first noticed this extra something in my own reaction during that 2021 event. It has been sitting in my head ever since. It’s influenced how I write emails inside promotions and during off-promo periods. It’s summed up in the phrase:

“Make it feel real”

The 2021 Black Friday affiliate event was a confluence of unusual, extreme events. There was genuine bad blood, public callouts, a never-before-seen and never-to-be-repeated offer on Daniel’s part, all in the middle of a time-limited, seasonal promotion, with everybody else in this small space observing, commenting, and firing shots back and forth.

This led to drama, yes. And to high stakes. But in my mind, it did something more.

Jay Abraham said in one of his trainings that the biggest reason sales fail to happen is that people are afraid of looking dumb. Of making a mistake. Of being played for a sucker.

Daniel’s offer and copy during that 2021 Black Friday promo cut through the usual manipulation techniques and marketing automation that people in this market normally experience. It made the event feel real. It made even skeptics, jaded and guarded, say, “Ok… it’s time to act.”

“Make it feel real” might sound vague to you.

If so, it’s worth looking at Daniel’s emails from then, and remembering the campaign if you witnessed it live, to note down what made this event a unique and real occurrence rather than a repeatable promotion that could be done every Black Friday.

And in case you’re wondering:

This “make it feel real” stuff is not something that’s only useful once in your career, when all the stars align.

It’s a valuable daily practice you can start right now.

For example:

Over the past week, I polled my list a few times. I asked if readers had any good offers they would like to promote to my list… I asked if readers would like to hire me for list management.

I got responses to both of those emails. But since I didn’t want to share anything publicly about those responses, I didn’t write any followup emails about either of these polls.

After couple days of this, I realized this is a problem. If I poll my list, and then never say anything about the results of that poll, my readers might start to feel some kind of disconnect… wonder if my emails are written by a living, thinking person… or suspect that they are interacting with a malfunctioning autoresponder.

That’s why, after I got an unusual number of replies to my email on Tuesday about the “zero-handclap unsubscriber,” I knew it was time to feature a bunch of those replies publicly.

So I did so in yesterday’s email.

Sure, featuring all those replies served the purpose of recognizing those readers, and of helping sell my Simple Money Emails course.

But the bigger reason in my mind was to make it clear that a live person is on this end of these emails, that I’m actually interacting and responding to readers, that I’m writing each email new every day, including today, Thursday, January 11 2024.

This is just one easy way to make it feel real.

Ultimately, what matters is that you keep the idea in mind, and that you do things consciously and regularly to make it feel real for your readers.

And now, time for a real offer:

I’m putting on a free training on Zoom. The plan is to do it in 10 days time, around Jan 21. But I will have the full info on the time and date tomorrow.

As for the content, this training will be an overview of how I do what I do: write emails about what interests me, get people to sign up to my list, buy stuff from me, hire me, recommend me, interact with me, in a way that contributes to other parts of my business and even my life.

I’ve done a lot of stupid things over the years with this newsletter, and it’s taken me a while to get to where I am.

So this training will be framed as advice to myself when I starting out this newsletter back in 2018, still a fresh and wriggling copywriter.

This training can be relevant to you if you work with clients right now, and you’re looking to create a second stream of income, or you want access to better clients, or more stability, or amazing opportunities you can’t even imagine now, or in case you simply want to do something for yourself rather than for others all the time.

I will be promoting this training over the next few days. If you want to join, you will first have to get on my list. Click here to do so.

What’s wrong with affiliates?

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Story time:

10 years ago, my friend Sam and I naively decided to become Internet marketing millionaires.

Somehow we found Andre Chaperon’s Tiny Little Businesses course.

We rubbed our hands together, and envisioned that in six months’ time, we’d be sitting at the beach, drinking margaritas, occasionally leaning over to our laptops to see how many more thousands of dollars had rolled in over the past 15 minutes.

Andre’s TLB told us to pick a niche, find a product we could promote as an affiliate, then build a list using that affiliate product as the offer.

Sam and I followed this recipe to a T and beyond.

We spent weeks picking out the perfect niche (hard gainers, skinny guys who want to put on muscle but can’t).

We did market research to find out the pain points, motivations, and language used by our target market (it helped that both Sam and I were both in our target market, tall and hopelessly skinny).

We found the perfect affiliate offer to promote, a quality program, fairly expensive, with a good sales page. It would make it easy to pay for ads with even a few sales.

I had seen that the owners of this offer had previously worked with affiliates.

But when the time came to promote them, I couldn’t find the form on their site to sign up as an affiliate.

I wrote to the owners to ask about it. A reply came back:

“Thanks for the interest. But we’ve actually paused taking on new affiliates at the moment. It doesn’t really work for our business.”

First, there was a moment of shock. Then my blood pressure shot up.

I may or may not have fired back an email, explaining to this guy that he doesn’t know how business is done online… that this is free money that he’s saying no to… that a new customer is the most valuable thing a business could ever get, and that’s what I’m offering to bring him.

Very rightly and very wisely, the offer owner did not respond to my stupid email.

Those were the early days of my marketing career. I couldn’t wrap my mind around the fact that a businesses would not want to sell offers (particularly info products, with no marginal cost) to somebody new, with no effort involved.

“What’s wrong with affiliates?” I asked myself. My newbie brain simply couldn’t handle it.

As you can guess, Sam and I never recovered from this setback. Our dreams of a drunken 4-hour workweek on the beach vanished like receding waves in the sand.

But that was a long time ago. I’ve learned a lot about marketing and online businesses since then. I’ve heard and seen many other successful marketers say they do not work with affiliates. And today, I can tell you…

I still don’t really get it.

I mean, what could possibly be wrong with affiliates? Why would anybody ever say no?

Over the past few months, I have had two affiliates promote my stuff.

Daniel Throssell promoted my Copy Riddles course back in September.

Right now, Kieran Drew is promoting Simple Money Emails.

During both promos, I rolled out of bed each morning to find thousands of dollars worth of new sales, dozens or hundreds of new subscribers, and somebody with standing in the industry going out of his way to say nice things about me and my products. Here’s a few bits from Kieran’s email yesterday:

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SUBJECT: The best email writing course I’ve ever taken

B – E -J – A – K – O – V – I – C

The reason I’m shouting letters over Zoom like a Croatian spelling bee is because my friend asked for my favourite newsletters.

I always recommend this guy. People always sound skeptical. It’s not quite the standard Ben Settle or Justin Welsh you hear chucked around in our space.

But out of the hundreds of lists I’m lurking on, John Bejakovic’s emails glue me to the screen the most, and keep me coming back for more.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say he’s the best email copywriter you’ve probably never heard of.

[… Kieran goes on to explain the offer, course plus two free bonuses, and then he says:]

Yes, this is an affiliate link.

But I’ve taken his course 5 times in 5 months. It’s an hour read yet every time I come out noticeably better at copy. Few courses have that effect – which is why I’m promoting it.

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Who would not want endorsements like this?

​​Aren’t affiliates just the greatest thing in the world?

But maybe you are wiser and more perceptive than I am.

“Kinda cherrypicking there, ain’t you John? Both Kieran and Daniel are pretty atypical cases.”

Maybe.

They do both have a list that they email regularly. They have both built a bond with that list, and authority and trust. And more.

They both cultivate discipline in their readers, rather than preaching the gospel of the 4-hour workweek. They both, explicitly or implicitly, repel people who aren’t down with their message.

In short, both Kieran and Daniel have spent time building up a quality list and emailing themselves into a healthy, respect-filled relationship with that list. And now I get to benefit from it.

I’m not sure what my point is, except:

1) Great affiliates are great, and

2) If you want to be a great affiliate, start a list today. And if you already have one, email it more often, starting today.

And if you don’t want to be anybody’s affiliate, but you simply want to have the opportunity to sell any reasonable and helpful offer you decide to create, start a list today. And if you already have one… well, you know where I’m going with this.

In fact, you probably knew all this before. But if hasn’t clicked yet, or if something is still holding you back, here’s a course that has helped others before you:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Announcing: pre-Black Friday Copy Riddles stable price

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Day 2 of The Copywriter Club live event in London.

​​I’m trying to finish all my work — this newsletter, plus my health newsletter which goes out each Thursday — before 9am so I don’t have to lug my laptop to the conference venue.

​​Fortunately, a reader writes in:

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Hi John,

Greetings!

Are you planning to make a Black Friday/Cyber Monday offer, especially of your Copy Riddles course?

The reason I ask is so that I can start saving for it and blissfully ignore other offers.

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The grand answer is no, I’m not planning any kind of Black Friday offer on Copy Riddles or any of my other courses. In case you’re curious, here are two reasons why:

For one thing, I don’t know when Black Friday falls. Maybe there are ways around this significant obstacle. But even if there are, the following obstacle remains…

Black Friday typically means discounts. And several years ago, I copied and adopted, without shame or remorse, Daniel Throssell’s policy of not running sales or discounting offers down from an established price.

My reasoning is simple:

I sell expensive offers to a small batch of dedicated buyers. I never want one of these buyers to open a new email from me and be faced with a cheerful message, informing them that a course they bought from me now costs hundreds of dollars less — “Haha, sucks for you, shoulda waited for Black Friday!”

I’ve consulted clients who run regular discounts to large lists. They say they’ve never ever gotten a complaint from earlier buyers about a new sale.

I can believe it. But I still won’t do it. I can imagine that if I found myself on the other end of such a deal, I wouldn’t complain either, but I would still feel soured. And I would think twice when buying the next time.

One of the greatest copywriters of all time, Robert Collier, once said that the most effective appeal he knew to get people to buy is to say, “The price is going up.”

Well, the price of Copy Riddles is not going up, at least today. (It’s also not going down, today, tomorrow, or ever.)

So the only urgency I can appeal to today is if you actually plan to go through this course and profit from it.

The sooner you buy it, the sooner you can go through it, and the sooner you will take your copywriting skills to a new level. If you do this honestly, it will be worth much more to you than any discount on this course that I could offer. In case you would like to get started now:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

How Edward Bernays manipulated me, and how he might do it again

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I once wrote an email with the subject line, “How I manipulated you, and how I might do it again.”

​​That email was all about the strategic use of inflammatory words — like “manipulated” — to get people reading stuff they might not read otherwise.

Well, Edward Bernays manipulated me, and I guess he manipulated millions of other people, too.

Right now, I’m reading Bernays’s book Propaganda. It’s been in print for the past 100 years, and it’s still discussed today, though I suspect few people who discuss it have ever read it.

Why do people know and discuss Propaganda? Because of that title. Propaganda. It’s like manipulated. On the one hand repulsive, on the other hand fascinating.

Imagine that Bernays had titled his book Public Relations — which is really what his book is about. Would we be talking about it today, much less reading it?

The answer is no. The proof is that Bernays did in fact write a book called Public Relations. Result?

Propaganda: 2,700+ reviews on Amazon
Public Relations: 74 reviews on Amazon — and I bet most of those only came via Bernays’s Propaganda fame

All that’s to say, hooks matter. And unless you hook someone right away, then all the other thousands of words you might have written won’t matter much.

But you knew that. It’s the oldest bit of advice traded around the copywriting bonfire.

What you might not know is how to write a great hook. How to make it sensational and inflammatory — propaganda for the rest of what you have to say.

About that. As Daniel Throssell wrote recently:

​The skill of coming up with a great hook, and the skill of making it sensational, are almost exactly the same as a tiny, mechanical, supposedly “niche” copywriting skill you probably do not yet possess.

​​But it’s a skill you can find out more about, and even acquire quickly, via the following page:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Getting praise for promoting failure

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Yesterday, I threatened to send you a testimonial in my email today. And when I get into a threatening mood, it’s hard to get me out of it.

So here’s what long-time customer Lucus Allerton wrote me a few days ago, in the wake of the Copy Riddles relaunch and the recent promo that Daniel Throssell did for it:

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This might be weird to say, but hopefully comes across as more sincere than sycophantic.

I’ve honestly been delighted at all the positive (even gushing) testimonials I’ve seen for your Copy Riddles course. Not just the ones showcased by you, but by Daniel Throssell as well.

I think your (growing?) recognition is well-deserved. You deliver insights via your usual understated way, but from the numerous courses I’ve seen, your course belongs in the gold-standard. The time you clearly took to prepare the materials has made a direct impact on the structure and quality of your examples and riddles. I think it’s really important that you promote ‘failure’ too. We often learn more from our mistakes than our successes. It was fascinating to see Daniel say even he was stumped, going through your course, and got some things ‘wrong’ by overcomplicating it.

I know from my own experience from trying my own bullets through your course, then seeing how much better the real ‘answer’ was sometimes, made it a much more impactful and helpful experience. It helped test how much I understood the concept, instead of only recognising it.

And it’s far better than only seeing the solutions upfront, as most courses might do.

But at this point I’m only stating things you already know.

I’m glad you’ve brought it back, because I honestly believe it elevates the overall quality of the copywriting course industry. There are far worse courses at much higher prices. Copy Riddles shows how good a copy course can be, and I hope it raises everyone else’s standards too.

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I have this long-running rule for my newsletter not to share obvious, bland insights, things that are true but have been said a thousand times before.

​​If I ever find myself wanting to say something like this, I have 3-4 different strategies to camouflage it, dress it up, make it at least somewhat new rather than the oldest of old hats.

Well, you gotta fail in order to get better… you learn more from your mistakes than your successes… there’s no more worn-out truths than that. And yet, it doesn’t make it any less true. Maybe the fact you read it today in Lucus’s words rather than my own can make it sink in finally.

And if that’s the case, and you want to learn copywriting via the “gold standard” — exercises that gets you comparing what you do (including making mistakes) to what A-list copywriters have done, starting from the exact same prompt — then go here:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

My frustrating experience shipping alcohol overseas

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This morning, I wired money to Daniel Throssell for his share of the Copy Riddles sales made over the past week. But I wanted to send Daniel something more than just an email notification of a wire transfer.

I know Daniel has this message in his signoff:

“Fan mail, death threats and gifts of expensive whisky can be dispatched via messenger kangaroo to:”

“All right,” I said. As a first step, I found an article, “24 Best Alcohol Delivery Services in Australia.”

I went to the website of one of those 24 best alcohol delivery services in Australia.

I added a bottle of Oban to my cart.

Five years ago, I visited the Oban distillery in Oban, Scotland. It was a rare highlight of an otherwise miserable trip, plagued by cold, food poisoning, and a terrifying ride in a van down the wrong side of the road.

Those memories flooded back as I filled out the form with Daniel’s PO Box and my billing details. I clicked the “Is this a gift?” option, and I wrote a little note to Daniel, explaining why exactly this whisky.

​​I pressed the button to get to the final order page… and… and… loading… almost there… still loading… loading…

I tried again. No.

I tried from beginning. Same thing.

I tried a different browser. It wouldn’t work.

I contacted their support. But nothing I did or they advised would get the order complete or my bottle of 14-year-old Oban on the road.

I exhaled to calm myself. I’d wasted a good 40 minutes fighting with one of the best alcohol delivery services in Australia. “It’s okay,” I told myself in a cheery tone. “I’ve learned something!” I made my way down the list.

The next among Australia’s 24 best alcohol delivery services also sold Oban. But since this was a site that specializes in “business gifts,” the bottle cost 40 dollars more.

I stared hard at the screen. I grunted. Fine.

I filled everything out once again, including the gift message about why exactly this whisky.

Only, once I’d written that message out, I got a notification that it would cost me an extra $5.95 to have the gift card with the message included. I stared in confusion at this notification, and then I got furious. “Oh no you don’t!” I roared. “That’s the straw that broke this donkey’s back!”

I closed down this second website, and I moved on to number 3 on list of the 24 best alcohol delivery services in Australia. My nerves were starting to fray.

The third site did not sell Oban at all. So much for my carefully crafted note to Daniel, explaining why exactly this whisky. But at this point I didn’t care. I was entirely fixated on shipping something brown, in a bottle, with alcohol in it, to Daniel’s PO Box.

This website did not have a “Is this a gift?” option. So not only would there be no note, but perhaps the receipt would go along with the present.

Tacky?

“Efficient!” I told myself, my teeth clenched together, my eyes darting from side to side.

I entered my credit card details, cackled as I watched the order go through, wiped the sweat off my brow, and started to finally relax. And only then did I realize the sun was starting to go down — and I still hadn’t written my daily email.

So no point or takeaway to today’s email. Who’s got time for a takeaway?

Only thing I can perhaps highlight is how dogged I was in making this purchase, in spite of obstacles put in front of me — frustration, time, effort, and even insults by that “business gifts” website.

My point is not that I’m a uniquely determined personality. My point is that this is how people normally shop for stuff they want.

If you haunt copywriting lists, you will hear expert and non-expert copywriters tell you how important it is to reduce friction… to spend time crafting your headline… how good copy matters! And it’s true, at the margins, and at scale, hundreds of sales per day, or thousands, or tens of thousands.

If you play at that level, you will have to get everything right.

But odds are good you are not playing at that level. And so you don’t have to get everything right. You just have to get basic psychology right, and apply it correctly and consistently. People will still buy.

And on that note, consider my Most Valuable Email training. It won’t teach you basic psychology directly, but it will give you a framework for getting basic psychology downloaded into your brain, day after day, by applying the Most Valuable Email trick correctly and consistently.

This might sound confusing, but I can’t explain it better without giving away stuff that I charge for in the course.

All I can tell you is that lots of people have gone through this Most Valuable Email training before, many have praised the approach, and quite a few have benefited from actually implementing it. In case you’d like to learn more:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/