Dean Jackson

How business owners can stop chasing every shiny object like a dog chasing soap bubbles

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I have a new plan. I’m trying to get in shape. I’m walking walk two hours a day as part of my plan. I’m listening to podcasts and courses to keep myself occupied while I walk.

I want to share a good idea with you that I just heard while walking around Barcelona in the rain, getting in shape, and getting wise at the same time.

The idea came up in a discussion between Dean Jackson and Frank Kern.

Both Dean and Frank are successful, influential, long-tenured Internet marketers who have made, I’m guessing, tens of millions of dollars for themselves and prolly hundreds of millions for clients and partners.

The discussion I listened to today was about focusing on what you’re irreplaceable at, and getting others to do the rest. Familiar enough stuff.

(It’s the “who not how” distinction, which Dean originated, and which his partner Dan Sullivan then turned into a best-selling book.)

At some point, Frank Kern threw out the following, less familiar thought experiment.

Imagine, says Frank, that you are a typical small business owner who has gotten to a certain level of success by working hard, and who is trying to get to the next level by working even harder.

The classic “10 million irons in the fire.”

And then imagine, in Frank’s words, that:

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… you are personally enjoined — legal term there — you are personally enjoined from doing any of this stuff yourself, except coming up with ideas.

Which means now you have to pay for the “who.”

What that would bring — and I know the listener is probably like, “okay don’t tell me I have to do this, this is horrible” — what that would bring is incredible clarity and purpose in the execution of the ideas.

If you had to pay to execute on every idea, you would immediately get yourself out of the “I’ve got 10 million irons in the fire” thing. Because you’re paying for it, right? So it’s like, well crap, if I’m paying all that…

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Maybe I found this insightful because I’m actually in the process of hiring an assistant, and maybe I’ll even end up hiring two. Always insightful hearing what you want to believe.

In any case, if you’re running your own business, particularly if you’re a “solopreneur,” one-man band, one-woman show, this might be a worthwhile thought experiment to put to yourself the next time you come across a hot new opportunity you cannot wait to jump on.

“What if I were enjoined to not do any of this myself, and I could only pay somebody to implement this for me?”

If your answer is a shudder, then consider whether this hot new opportunity, which you don’t find worth paying money to implement, is worth paying for in a different, much scarcer currency, namely your own time and energy.

On the other hand, if you find that you are okay hiring, then you’ve got options. You can still do it yourself. Or you can hire. Or you can even hire two people.

Anyways, I gotta go make popcorn and drink a beer. That is not part of my getting in shape plan. But it is important.

Meanwhile, if you want to hear Dean and Frank’s full discussion — recommended if you are more busy and less productive than you like — here’s where to go:

https://www.morecheeselesswhiskers.com/podcast/147

Once upon a time in Ohio

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Lean in so I can tell you a story I myself only heard today:

This story features a cowboy named Gary Halbert, who, as you might know, was one of the legendariest direct marketers to ever terrorize the Wild West.

The story actually takes place before Gary got into direct marketing and copywriting. I’m guessing it happened in the 1960s, in Gary’s home state of Ohio.

In those ancient days, Gary was a salesman, selling postage machines.

The company Gary worked for, Pitney Bowes, divvied up the sales area so that each salesman got to handle a certain number of zip codes.

Whenever the company hired an additional salesman, they would shrink the area of sales that each existing salesman had, in order to give the new guy a few zip codes, and to keep everyone balanced.

Each time this happened, four or five separate times, the existing salesmen bitched and moaned and felt like they’ve lost something in having their area of sales reduced.

In reality, says Gary, each time the salesmen had one of their zip codes taken away, the salesmen actually did BETTER, not worse. They made more sales BECAUSE their area of sales was reduced.

How is this possible?

Stuff like… The salesmen spent less driving and more time selling. They gained better knowledge of local conditions. They developed better relationships with prospects there. They followed up more instead of reaching out to new leads. And so on.

The lesson is clear enough, except… it could never apply to you and what you’re doing, right?

In my Daily Email House community, I heard tell of different folks who are looking to start credible-sounding new businesses:

A direct mail agency. New shopping cart software. A personal trainer business.

Each of those is credible-sounding in the sense that it can succeed, as evidenced by many other such businesses on the market.

At the same time, each of those is much more likely to succeed, or at least to survive the first year, if you narrow down and get more specific about the market you will be working in.

You can slice and dice your market in lots of ways. You might wonder how and which tiny and specific segment to choose?

My answer is to go all the way down to a single prospect. Pick somebody you feel sure you can help… and who you are therefore most likely to sell because of your conviction.

After all, if you cannot sell a specific customer on your proposed solution, and if you cannot solve a particular and definite problem that customer has, then with all due respect, what hope do you have of selling and solving problems for a bigger, more complex, more nebulous group?

I’ll have more to say about this because in 2026, in fact in January, I will be helping folks create and sell their first $1k+ offer.

For now, lemme just tell you I heard that Gary Halbert story earlier today, in a podcast by Dean Jackson and Joe Polish.

As you might know, Joe runs the biggest and (according to him) most successful mastermind for direct response entrepreneurs. (He heard the story above from Gary Halbert directly.)

As for Dean, he’s a legend in the direct marketing space, particularly online.

If you’re doing Internet marketing today in any form, odds are you are using ideas and techniques Dean invented, which have been percolating down through a series of gurus who learned from Dean or from people that Dean taught.

In the podcast I listened to today, Dean and Joe talk about 8 “Profit Activators” that all successful DR businesses are ultimately built on. (The topic of today’s email is Profit Activator #1).

Highly recommended listening:

https://www.morecheeselesswhiskers.com/podcast/268

How to stop making your job “five times more difficult”

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Yesterday, I was listening to a podcast by Joe Polish and Dean Jackson — not one of their “I Love Marketing” podcasts, but a new one that Dean recorded for his More Cheese Less Whiskers brand.

By the way, if you don’t know Joe and Dean, both are direct marketers with decades of experience, who have taught and brought up generations of other marketers, including some famous names.

For example, yesterday on the podcast, Joe and Dean reminisced about a podcast guest they’d had on a long time ago, a young man named Tim Ferriss, and how after the interview, they spent 40 minutes trying to convince Tim to start his own podcast.

Tim in the end became convinced. As a result, he now has over 1 billion podcast downloads, and 800 interviews with people like Jerry Seinfeld, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Anyways, Joe and Dean were talking yesterday about events, as in, promotional events, but also specific physical events, with chairs and a podium and dessert:

How to make such events work… how to make them good so people get what they paid for and more… how to get people to actually buy tickets.

Joe talked about the first event he ever put on, about mindset, and the following lesson learned, which he has applied to every event since:

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What I learned is it is a lot easier to run an event where people perceive it’s gonna teach them how to make more money and build their business than it is how to fix their head. This one was about mindset. It was about psychology. And it was an amazing event! It was really transformative to everyone there. But it was five times more difficult to put people in the room than it was if you’re selling “money at a discount,” as they call it.

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The key thing here is where Joe says “where people perceive.”

Fact is, mindset matters for making more money, and making more money content often talks about mindset. The two aren’t entirely interchangeable, but there’s a lot of overlap.

But how do you present such a shifting and moving bundle of information, products, or services? What single aspect of it do you trumpet for all the world to hear… and what do you quietly deliver in addition, without any fanfare, just because you are trying to do right for your customers or clients?

Getting that right or wrong means the difference between regular work, on the one hand, and making your job “five times more difficult,” on the other.

And on that note, I would like to remind you of the offer I shared yesterday, Justin Blackman’s Different On Purpose. This is an 8-week cohort to spread into the world new and different positioning for your service- or client-based businesses, if you happen to be a copywriter, coach, or agency owner.

Justin doesn’t have big income claims on his sales page for this offer. That’s because it’s the first time he’s running Different On Purpose, and big income claims are hard to make credibly before you have had the first batch of people go through the program and report on their results.

But if you are selling something woolly like “copywriting services” or “coaching” or “consulting,” there’s no doubt that a different client perception of what you do could help you work drastically less and yet make drastically more money.

If you’re curious about Justin’s Different On Purpose, I wrote up a summary of the offer yesterday, including why you might want to join now, in this very first-ever cohort. If you’d like to read that:

https://bejakovic.com/announcing-live-personal-positioning-cohort/

Dead for 34 months — now alive again

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I’ll pay off that provocative subject line in a second. First, let me set it up so it has a chance to have an impact on you:

Two days ago, I was listening to a new episode of Dean Jackson’s “More Cheese, Less Whiskers” podcast.

Dean is a legend in the marketing space. In this episode, he was basically having a live consult with a real estate agent turned coach.

The real estate agent/coach runs an 6-week cohort program, helping other agents to get their first transaction. The program features the usual recorded content plus live weekly calls. About that, here’s what Dean said:

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Part of the thing about a live cohort is that it’s kind of synchronous consumption, that they are there and they’re physically present, and it’s easier to consume than while they’re sitting and could be watching Netflix.

You know what I mean. That’s always going to be more — it’s easier when things are synchronous and scheduled to actually get them done, then even with the best of intentions, to get yourself to self-directedly take that kind of action.

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This made my pointy Vulcan ears perk up.

Because it’s a bitter pill to swallow:

You can create a really great course, with all the info inside that people need to succeed, but most people who buy will simply never even get through the first lesson. Of those who do, most won’t get all the way through to the end of the last lesson.

That makes it hard to profit from the course.

Yes, there are creative ways to encourage people to consume courses all the way to the end, or to get value even while consuming only a tiny part of the course. I’ve used many such tricks in my own courses.

But the fact is, nothing really compares to simply changing the format and not selling a “course” at all, but instead selling a live experience, happening in real time, shared with other people. In other words, running a live cohort, like Dean is talking about.

I can speak to this from my experience selling my Copy Riddles program over the years.

When I started Copy Riddles, I ran it as a cohort 2-3 times a year.

The lessons were delivered daily by email, and were necessarily synchronous.

More importantly, I had live weekly calls. Those calls where an opportunity for Copy Riddles members to come together, to see me there and feel that this is happening live, and to ask questions.

Plus, I featured a weekly “Best Bullet” contest, which was both fun for participants and also reinforced that week’s course content by showing why some bullets work better than others.

Small wonder that a disproportionate number of enthusiastic testimonials and impressive case studies I’ve gotten for Copy Riddles have come from people who went through the program in those live cohort days.

I’ve been thinking about this over the past few weeks in the lead-up to the “Unannounced Bonus” promo I’m currently doing for Copy Riddles.

The offer I’m making during this promo is already the most valuable offer I’ve made for Copy Riddles. But I decided to pull out all the stops.

I haven’t run Copy Riddles as a live cohort program since September of 2022. That’s 34 months ago. (You see where this is going?)

I also won’t ever run Copy Riddles as a live cohort in the future.

But I will resurrect the live cohort and run it one last time as part of this “Unannounced Bonus” promo.

No, I won’t be delivering Copy Riddles via email again. It still remains a course in the course area, so you can easily access it now or in the future.

But I will be doing live weekly calls for Copy Riddles members.

These calls will be an opportunity to ask me questions about writing bullets, about copy in general, or really anything else, as long as it’s interesting.

They will also be an opportunity to submit your bullets for the weekly contest and win recognition and prizes.

Most importantly, these calls act as a reason to go through the course content now, to get a bit of motivation and accountability by being a part of a group of people who are all doing the same as you, and to make it easier for you to own those million-dollar copywriting skills this program can give you — and to own them in just the next few weeks, instead of never.

Of course, the live cohort is only part two of the offer for this “Unannounced Bonus” event.

Part one is free lifetime membership to Lawrence Bernstein’s Ad Money Machine so you can get your daily direct marketing vitamin, the way A-list copywriter Gary Bencivenga advises.

Lawrence only makes this lifetime membership offer available rarely. When he made it available last year, I paid $997 for it. But you can get it for free as part of this week’s promo event, which ends this Sunday at 12 midnight PST.

If you’d like to act before the deadline takes the matter out of your hands:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

P.S. If you’re already a Copy Riddles member, the Ad Money Machine lifetime membership applies to you too. So does the offer of joining for the live cohort — just write me and tell me that you want in so I know to add you.

And about going through Copy Riddles a second (or third) time, here’s copywriter Yago Bader Galarza, who joined a couple times in the live cohort days:

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The course is amazing, I’ve completed it twice now, and I’d say the second time I learned even more than the first.

I think it’s super-valuable to go through it periodically, trying to do the exercises from different angles forces me to be more creative and I can really see my improvement from launch to launch. I would love to sign up a third time and continue to learn from it.

In a world where most courses are hard to consume (and I think almost every copywriter has a pile of unfinished courses) Copy Riddles is a breath of fresh air that I recommend to everyone I know all the time. So thanks for creating it and looking forward to doing it again.

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3 FREE Bejako gift cards

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A while back, I was listening to Dean Jackson’s More Cheese Less Whiskers podcast.

Dean, as he often does, was talking about marketing for local businesses — chiropractors, dentist offices, lingerie shops.

Says Dean, rather than discounting your services or products, simply give away gift cards. This preserves the perceived value of your offer, and yet lowers the barrier for people to try it out.

I’m sharing this in case you also pull teeth or straighten spines or sell purple panties.

But useful ideas like this not much use unless you put them to work.

And so, let me lead by example and try out Dean’s idea right here and now.

My cart software doesn’t have native support for gift cards, the way you might have at a local Target, with a total balance that gets decreased with each purchase.

But I’ve hacked it a bit and created the three following “gift cards”:

BEJAKOGIFT1

BEJAKOGIFT2

BEJAKOGIFT3

Each one of these gift cards is worth $30, one time. You use the gift card by inserting it into the “Have a gift card coupon code?” slot on any of my order pages. Once the $30 is used up, it’s used up for good. (Try one of the other two gift cards, maybe they still have money on them.)

Incidentally, $30 is just what a month of my Daily Email Habit costs. So if you’ve been curious about Daily Email Habit, and if it could help you start and stick with daily emailing, you can now try a month on me via one of the gift cards above:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Platform is magic

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I went for a walk this morning and as I was dodging the puddles from last night’s rain, I listened to a podcast, a conversation between James Schramko and Dean Jackson.

In case those names are not familiar to you, both belong to Internet marketers who have been in the business a combined 50+ years.

Both James and Dean have made many millions of dollars for themselves and many more for their clients and customers.

Whatever. The point is simply that, in the little corner of the Internet where I live, these guys are influential and established and respected. I’ve known about each for many years, and I’ve been paying attention to both intensely over the past year.

This morning, while listening to the podcast, James Schramko talked about changes he had made to his business following the advice of his friend, a guy named Kory Basaraba.

That caught my attention and maybe made me step into a puddle.

The fact is, I’ve known Kory for years. A few years ago, back when I was still doing freelance copywriting stuff, I even worked with him.

Through this experience, I know Kory is smart, successful, and established. But on hearing his name being mentioned on a podcast, by two people I follow, I felt some sort of electric jolt.

I don’t know how wide of a reach this Schramko/Dean podcast episode might get. Maybe a few thousand people, maybe tens of thousands? In any case it’s not Joe Rogan.

It doesn’t matter. My opinion of Kory, while it was positive before, suddenly jumped. He got the warm bright glow of a star in my eyes.

Of course, I’m a hardened cynic and a bit of a wizard when it comes to knowing influence spells. So I quickly shook my head to clear my mind from this strange persuasion.

But I wanted to share this story with you, such as it is, for a bit of motivation.

I don’t understand what it is about having a platform. Maybe I’ll figure it out one day.

Right now, my best answer is that having a platform is simply magic.

A few hundred or a few thousand people around the world listen to you. It’s not a tremendous amount of reach or power. But it doesn’t matter.

The very fact of having a platform, of speaking to a group of people, gives you status and authority and charisma, and even the power to transfer that to others, simply by mentioning their name. That’s magic.

The motivating part is that, if you haven’t done so already, you can do this same thing for yourself.

Nobody’s stopping you from starting a podcast, or writing an email newsletter, today.

Like I said, you don’t need a tremendous overall audience to have a tremendous influence on the people who do listen or read to what you have to say. I can vouch for that from personal experience, having been both on top of the platform at certain times, and in the audience, looking up, at other times.

I know nothing about podcasting. But I know something about newsletters. Such as for example, that the more often you send emails, the greater your influence over the people in your audience.

And with that in mind, let me point you to a service that can help make it easier to send something every day, so you can work your magic quickly:

https://bejakovic.com/deh