Derek Johanson

The one ring to rule them all, until it doesn’t

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A few weeks ago, Derek Johanson of CopyHour wrote an email with an inspiring idea:

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Most often all that an online business needs to go from zero to 6 figures is to focus on ONE simple business model and ONE marketing channel for growth.

One Business Model: If you sell courses, only sell courses. That’s your one business model. Don’t add coaching or do freelancing too.
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One Marketing Channel For Traffic: If you’ve picked LinkedIn to drive traffic, don’t think about YouTube or paid ads at all.

That’s it. Going deep into ONE business model and ONE marketing channel is how you double a small business.

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When I read this, I had a double reaction:

1. Whoa this makes sense
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2. Hold on, this can’t be right — it’s just another manifestation of the human desire for “the one thing”

“The one thing,” as you might know, is a popular hook in direct response advertising.

It manifests itself in different guises — “the one thing,” “the ancient secret,” “the real reason” — but ultimately, it taps into to our brains’ desire to melt down the complexity and messiness of the world into just one magic ring of power to rule them all.

Rings like that exist in fantasies, but they don’t exist in real life.

Except, that’s not really what Derek was saying in his email. He was saying something more nuanced, and not-one-thingy.

I wasn’t quite sure how to stickily sum up what Derek was saying. Fortunately, somebody did it for me, in a paid private group (the only paid private group) that I’m a member of. The person in that group summed it up like this:

1. Test until it works
2. Scale until it stops working

Many things can work — for example, as sources of traffic.

The thing is, most things won’t work right out the gate. It will take some time and tweaking for them to produce results.

That’s step 1. Most people quit before they complete this step, and instead they jump to back to the beginning, to another supposed ring of power, hoping that it will work right away.

Derek’s email was about step 2. Going deep into one thing and scaling until it stops working. Which is a worthwhile idea, and like I said, quite not-one-thingy.

I thought about how to apply this to my own business. And I’m not really sure.

In terms of marketing channels to get people reading these emails, my number one source has been referrals and word-of-mouth, which I did absolutely nothing to encourage beyond writing daily and sharing novel ideas and illustrations. Maybe I should just keep writing.

As for the one business model, I still haven’t quite figured out one that I’m happy with. Which is why, over the past few months, I’ve sent out so many emails that ultimately link to $4.99 books on Amazon, or interesting articles you might find valuable, or—

Well, let me get to it now.

You remember I mentioned the paid private community I’m a member of? The only one?

I personally find it very valuable — and interesting.

Maybe you will too. But you will have to decide for yourself. I’m not promoting this community as an affiliate, and I’m not pushing you to join it. But if you’re curious to find out more:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

High-ranking Tinder profiles

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I met a friend for dinner last night. As we sat over tacos gobernador, he told me about an acquaintance of his, who has cracked the Tinder code.

My friend explained:

Apparently, Tinder puts its users into castes of a sort. Based on how attractive you are, you get a score. And your profile is only ever shown to other people who are at your score or lower.

In other words, the caste of 6’s are allowed to gaze up and admire the caste of 9’s. On the other hand, the 9’s don’t even know the 6’s exist. Let them eat cake.

But!

My friend’s acquaintance has supposedly figured out a way to game the system. He can now create profiles that get a Brad Pitt score at will. And he’s selling these profiles.

Of course, once you update your Brad Pitt profile with your Ed Norton photos, the profile won’t stay inside the top caste forever.

But it will stay there for some time. And who knows, maybe that’s enough time to find true love? With somebody high-caste?

“Interesting,” I said out of the side of my taco-filled mouth. “So how is he selling these?”

“That’s the problem,” my friend said. “Facebook won’t let him run ads. So I suggested he could pay for an agency Facebook ad account. He could then cloak it. And who knows, after a while, he might figure out how to run these cloaked ads to sell his Tinder profiles.”

One way or another, this is the route many people take when they have something new to sell.

“I have the product. It’s great, or at least I think so. Now how in the hell do I build an audience, or create a marketing system, so that I can sell my great product?”

It can be done. But it’s a difficult and expensive path to go.

A much easier and cheaper route is to find people who have already built an audience or a working marketing system.

Example:

When I had the idea to create my Copy Riddles program, before I built it out, I reached out to Derek Johanson of CopyHour.

​​I explained my idea, and asked Derek if he would like to be my first affiliate.

​​Derek said yes, even though he had never met me before, and even though I had zero credentials as a course creator.

Example two:

I told my friend last night to tell the Tinder code-cracker to find people who are already running Facebook ads for Tinder offers.

You know, $37 ebooks with the magic 3-word Tinder opening line etc.

Reach out to these people, and see if they would be interested in selling their buyers on the opportunity to get seen on Tinder, so they can actually use their magic opening lines.

And that’s my suggestion to you too.

It’s not just if you have a new offer. It’s not just if you’re a newbie.

You can go at anything alone. You might make it. Or you might falter and collapse by the side of the road.

On the other hand, there are plenty of people who have already bought or built various bicycles, buses, or helicopters. Many of them might be willing to give you a ride. You just have to ask.

But back to my Copy Riddles program.

After Derek Johanson said he would be my first affiliate, I did end up creating the actual program. And Derek did end up promoting it as an affiliate. As did Daniel Throssell. Daniel had this to say about it (spliced together from a few of his emails):

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

It’s the most brilliant course concept I’ve ever seen… literally a gamified series of sequential puzzles that teaches you copywriting.

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

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Maybe Copy Riddles can help you sell your own $37 ebook? Or maybe it can help you craft a sexy pitch that gets others interested in selling it?

If you’d like to find out more about Copy Riddles:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

10 lessons from my CopyHour promo

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I finished my CopyHour promo last night. I can say it was a success.

I made a healthy number of sales and made good money. No, it’s not “buy a chateau in France” kind of money. But if I could do this every week, honestly I would.

I made a list for myself of 10 lessons learned from this promo. Maybe these lessons won’t speak to you at all. Or maybe you’ll find one interesting or valuable point inside. Here goes:

1. I was worried that there would be nobody left to buy. I mean it’s CopyHour. The program has been around for 12 years and 3,000+ people have bought so far. Plus, there’s a lot of overlap between Derek’s list and mine… plus, Justin Goff promoted CopyHour a couple months ago.

“Surely everybody knows CopyHour and has either bought or has decided not to buy…”

But I was wrong. There were people for whom CopyHour was genuinely new. And there were others who were swayed by my bonuses (more on those below).

2. As has happened before when I’ve promoted affiliate offers, people wrote in thanking me for turning them on to a good product or service they hadn’t heard of before. This is a strange phenomenon known as “people are happy to be sold as long as you sell them stuff with their best interest in mind, and you communicate that.”

3. I officially ended the promo with more subscribers on my list than I started with, in spite of sending 10 emails over 3 1/2 days. I’m ascribing that to the following…

4. The event felt lively. In fact it always feels lively when I’m promoting something I haven’t promoted before… when sales are coming in… when sales are coming in from people I had never heard from before, but who turn out to have been reading my emails for a year or more… when I’m pushing out lots of emails quickly… and when even people who are not interested in buying are writing in to comment on the event and the emails.

5. It feels great to promote a solid proven offer that really helps people. And when it feels great, I’m much more ready to work.

6. It feels really nice to promote an offer where I don’t have to do any delivery after the fact. I’m planning to take most of the day off today after I finish this email.

7. Bonuses: The fact that they added up to what CopyHour cost, and even a bit more, made it feel like buy-one-get-one-free to people. Some bought because of that, and wrote in to say so.

9. A few people wrote in to say they were persuaded to buy by a specific bonus among the five I offered. Lesson learned: Keep creating content, keep putting out offers, and even if those offers don’t become evergreen sellers like my Simple Money Emails program, they can still have value.

10. It’s often easier to write 10 emails than to write 1.

I had been really struggling writing emails the past couple days/weeks before promoting CopyHour.

I’ve been looking to make some significant changes in the way I run this newsletter and the kinds of offers I promote.

The result has been a lot of baggage in my head and feeling inhibited when I write and second-guessing myself. Promoting a solid affiliate offer and simply being able to write fun emails cleared that from my head, at least for this week.

All that’s to say:

If you bought CopyHour, thanks again for buying. I hope you will do the work and get the promised results.

And whether or not you bought, I hope my emails over the past few days were still entertaining and maybe even valuable.

I’ll be back tomorrow with something new. I have no idea what yet. But now, it’s time to go have coffee and go for a walk.

Announcing: Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets

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I’m excited to announce my new offer, Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets.

​​I’ll tell you about this new offer in a moment, but first I want to share a valuable marketing tip with you. Here goes:

Back in the 1990s, Gary Bencivenga, widely believed by marketing experts to be the greatest living copywriter, sold a little offer of his own.

Gary’s offer was a book of tips for winning jobs. He sold it via ads in USA Today, like this:

Headline — “Do you make these mistakes in job interviews?”

Offer — The core book, “Interviews that Win Jobs,” for $49.95. There was also a free bonus, which Gary said was “selling nationally for $49.95,” called “How to Answer the 64 Toughest Interview Questions.”

So far, so standard.

Except, I am a bit of an amateur advertising sleuth.

And so I happen to know that Gary also ran a second ad for a second book about job and interview tips.

He sold this second offer via ads USA Today, like this:

Headline — “Job hunting? How well can YOU answer these 64 toughest interview questions?”

Offer — The core book, “How to Answer the 64 Toughest Interview Questions,” for $49.95. There was also a free bonus, which Gary said was “selling nationally for $49.95,” called “Interviews that Win Jobs.”

So that’s my little tip for you today:

Do what Gary did, and double your front-end offers by selling both your bonus and your core offer.

This will force you to make both offer and bonus sexy and appealing.

​​And it will add legitimacy and authority when you say that the bonus sells for $49.95, as opposed to the mealy-mouthed alternative of so many marketers, valued at $49.95.

I don’t bring up this Gary Bencivenga tip by accident.

I bring it up because I discovered this tip back in the decade of the 2010s, when I spent 100+ hours copying old and successful ads by hand, including both of Gary’s jobs ads.

I doubt that I would have spotted Gary’s doubled-up offer had I simply “read” Gary’s first ad, skimmed past that “selling nationally for $49.95” at the very end, and tossed the ad aside.

That to me is the value of hand-copying ads and sales letters.

Other people ascribe magic to the actual neurology of copying stuff out by hand.

I’ve personally never experienced that. But I have found the process of copying ads immensely valuable because it forced me to sit and really examine ads carefully, and spot many of the valuable details that make them work, which I would have missed otherwise.

Which brings me to my new offer. It’s a special, one-time bundle called Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets. Inside this unique bundle, you can find the following:

#1. Copy Zone (selling nationally for $100). My 175-page, A-Z guide on the business side of copywriting, from getting started with no experience or portfolio, all the way to becoming an A-list copywriter.

#2. Most Valuable Postcard #2: Ferrari Monster (selling nationally for $100). A deep dive into a single fascinating topic — code named Ferrari Monster — which I claim is the essence of all copywriting and marketing. Get the Ferrari Monster right, and almost everything else falls into place.

#3. Copy Riddles Lite (selling nationally for $99). A slice of my Copy Riddles program, proportionately priced. Try yourself against legendary A-list copywriters like Gene Schwartz, David Deutsch, and Clayton Makepeace — and in the process, implant new copywriting skills into your brain.

#4. Horror Advertorial Swipe File (selling nationally for $100). A zip file with 25 PDFs, featuring the original copy for 25 of my horror advertorials. These advertorials pulled in millions of dollars on cold Facebook and YouTube traffic, and sold everything from fake diamonds and dog seat belts, to stick-on bras and kids’ vitamins.

#5. 9 Deadly Email Sins (selling nationally for $100). 9 lessons distilled from my expensive and exclusive one-on-one coaching sessions with successful business owners and marketers.

The trainings inside Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets sell nationally for a total of $499.

But you can get this bundle at a discounted price of just $497 — if you act by this Thursday at 8:31pm CET, using the link below.

Plus, if you get Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets before the deadline, I’ll also add in a free bonus, membership in Derek Johanson’s CopyHour program.

​​CopyHour sells nationally, and internationally, for $497. But it’s yours free when you get Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets.

​​To get both before the doors close:

https://bejakovic.com/copyhour

P.S. If you do get Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets, write me and say so. Due to the quirks of the above sales cart, I can only see the first name of who’s bought, and not the email. So write me and say you bought, and I’ll make sure you get both Red-Hot Copywriting Secrets and access to CopyHour.

How CopyHour changed my life (no joke)

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This week, until Thursday at 8:31pm CET, I am promoting Derek Johanson’s CopyHour program. I’ve never gone through CopyHour myself. And yet it changed my life.

By the time I found out about CopyHour, around 2017, I had already been handcopying successful ads and sales letters on my own.

That’s what CopyHour is about, and it’s a worthwhile exercise.

Maybe I can say more about hand copying ads in a future email. But not now, because that’s not how CopyHour changed my life.

Back in 2017, there was not the the glut of copywriting courses and education that there is now. So I eagerly joined the CopyHour group Facebook group to see if I could maybe learn something on the sly.

Back then, the Facebook group was where Derek delivered the trainings that go with the handcopying work. I could see Derek was legit, had experience and expertise, and had put in time and effort to make CopyHour a really great program.

For example, this group was where I first got exposed to the book Great Leads. It’s a valuable book. But more importantly, it turned on some light in my dim brain and turned me on to the idea that maybe I should find some classic books about copywriting and read those.

This led me down a deep rabbit hole of reading and research which helped make me a drastically better copywriter in time.

But that still not how CopyHour changed my life.

How CopyHour changed my life is that I got on Derek’s email list.

During the next launch of CopyHour, Derek sent a bunch of emails to promote the program. One of those emails was actually not written by him but by a copywriter named Dan Ferrari.

At the time, Dan was a star copywriter at financial publisher Motley Fool. Dan’s story is classic bizopp rags to riches — from subsisting on four teaspoon of olive oil for breakfast because that’s all he could afford, to writing a control with his second sales letter at Motley Fool and soon pulling in millions of dollars in copywriting royalties.

“Hm,” I said, “maybe I should see if this dude has his own email list.”

I found Dan’s site. I signed up to his list. And what followed was… nothing. No emails. Not for almost two years.

Long story even longer, one day in 2019, Dan finally sent out an email asking his list if anyone was in the Baltimore-Washington area at the moment. As luck would have it, I was there at the time.

That email led to me joining Dan’s small coaching group a few months later… learning directly from Dan… hitching my wagon in part to Dan’s rising star… and making, as a direct consequence of a few words of Dan’s advice inside that coaching program, some hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But let’s wrap this story up:

The program that Dan credits for taking him from the olive oil subsistence breakfast to being a control-beating star copywriter at Motely Fool is — CopyHour.

The reason I found Dan and ended up learning copywriting from him is — CopyHour.

That’s my story.

Yours, I don’t know? Maybe it can start today.

Derek has opened the doors to CopyHour today. He will close them on Sunday because CopyHour is a real-time program.

But while Derek’s doors will stay open until Sunday, I will give you a reason to act now. If you join CopyHour before this Thursday at 8:31pm CET, and you do so using my affiliate link below, I will give you the following five free bonuses:

#1. Copy Zone (price last sold at: $100). My 175-page, A-Z guide on the business side of copywriting, from getting started with no experience or portfolio, all the way to becoming an A-list copywriter. Only ever sold once before, during a flash 24-hour offer in March 2023.

#2. Most Valuable Postcard #2: Ferrari Monster (price last sold at: $100). A deep dive into a single fascinating topic — code named Ferrari Monster — which I claim is the essence of all copywriting and marketing. Get the Ferrari Monster right, and almost everything else falls into place.

#3. Copy Riddles Lite (price last sold at $99). A slice of my Copy Riddles program, proportionately priced. Try yourself against legendary A-list copywriters like Gene Schwartz, David Deutsch, and Clayton Makepeace — and in the process, implant new copywriting skills into your brain.

#4. Horror Advertorial Swipe File (price last sold at: $100). A zip file with 25 PDFs, featuring the original copy for 25 of my horror advertorials. These advertorials pulled in millions of dollars on cold Facebook and YouTube traffic, and sold everything from fake diamonds and dog seat belts, to stick-on bras and kids’ vitamins.

#5. 9 Deadly Email Sins (price last sold at: $100). 9 lessons distilled from my expensive and exclusive one-on-one coaching sessions with successful business owners and marketers.

In the past, I’ve sold each of these trainings at the prices listed. When you add all those prices up, you get a total of $499 in free bonuses. This happens to be more than CopyHour currently sells for.

That said, don’t join CopyHour just to get my free bonuses. Join because you decide that you will do the work involved in CopyHour, and that you will benefit from it.

For more info on that, take a look at Derek’s writeup of how CopyHour works:

https://bejakovic.com/copyhour

The “2-sentence persuasion secret” that A-list copywriters know and you don’t

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I’ve got a “2-sentence persuasion” secret I’d like to tell you, which I extracted straight from the head of John Carlton, and which will help you write killer sales copy, for more sales in less time.

Interested?

If you say yes, then I say… I’m not surprised. Hear me out.

I took my own advice from a few days ago. And I looked at the top three guys in the “copywriting course” space. I wanted to see how they sell their stuff.

And by the top three, I mean Stefan Georgi with his RMBC course… Ben Settle with his Copy Slacker course… and Derek Johanson with his Copy Hour course.

(If your blood pressure just shot up because you believe these three are NOT the top guys in the “copywriting course” market… fine. You’re probably right. I just feel that, for people who might be potential customers for my bullets course — name still TBD — the above three are my top competitors.)

Anyways:

I looked at their sales pages. And I told my brain to search for commonalities. Here’s what it came back with:

1. Mechanism. All three sales letters prominently feature a mechanism — it’s actually the name of all three courses.

2. Authority. Beyond mechanism, all three rely on authority to wow you. Stefan’s page is all about his own authority and the massive sales he’s made… while Ben and Derek defer to A-list copywriters for their implied or direct endorsement of the mechanism.

3. The promise. Both Stefan and Ben basically say, “More sales in less time.” Derek’s promise is more vague — killer sales copy, and ultimate success. Perhaps he’s just targeting a slightly different audience than Ben and Stefan.

So my point for you is:

This kind of research is something you too can do… and it might prove valuable in helping you define your promise and your positioning.

Or it might not.

I’m not sure if I will really go with “2-sentence persuasion” and all that other stuff when promoting my bullets course. Because even though Ben, Stefan, and Derek are all successful in selling their courses… I bet the copy is not a major part of why those courses sell.

Instead, I think it’s about the relationships those guys have with their lists… their reputation in the market… their word-of-mouth endorsements.

That’s why you can’t really trust most online copy. Sure, it can give you good ideas. But it’s worth testing anything you find, and making sure it actually works for you.

By the way, if you are interested in killer copy and more sales and less time, and you’re curious about my 2-sentence persuasion approach… then sign up for my newsletter. That’s where I will send out announcements once this offer becomes available.

BEJ cage match: Derek Johanson vs. John Carlton

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Over the past 24 hours, I got two interesting emails in conflict with each other.

The first email is from Derek Johanson, the guy who created Copy Hour. Derek’s email is about how much of direct response copy is “over-the-top bad,” with claims of “effortless” results. Or as Derek puts it, “pop a pill, overnight success type stuff.”

Derek’s message is that we can and should do better.

Then there’s an email that John Carlton sent. Carlton probably needs no introduction. But if you’re new to direct response, then know that John Carlton is one of the most successful and influential copywriters of all time. He writes:

“Most humans are a walking shrink session, with all their deepest and most humiliating secrets just spewing off of them all the time. […] Most folks just stumble through life half-asleep. Too caught up inside their own heads to realize what’s actually going on at the meta-level. […] Knowing this, you automatically have an enormous advantage in all negotiations. Something to put in your tool kit, anyway.”

Of course, both Derek and John are right. Most direct response copy is pretty awful. And that’s because, if it works, it probably speaks to your prospect’s deepest and darkest insecurities.

Prod at somebody’s insecurities… and you’ll see him at his most grateful, passionate, engaged, hopeful, and willing to spend money.

But are you doing your prospect a service in this way?

You can claim you are. Obviously he responds intensely… and you might be able to help.

Or you can claim you are not. After all, you are poking into a wound and making sure it never heals.

So what’s the conclusion?

I think it’s a personal choice you have to make. And I think it runs deeper than just how ugly and hard-hitting you are willing to make your copy.

Should we look for acceptance and gratitude of what we have, like a cow on a pasture? Or is there value in endless striving, like a hamster in a wheel?

I have my own esoteric opinion on this matter. But that’s getting into quirky stuff… and it’s probably not why you signed up for these emails.

Still, this topic is something to keep in the back of your mind as you navigate your own career. If you come clean to yourself with your own feelings about it, you might find yourself both more successful and more at peace with what you’re doing. “Something to put in your tool kit, anyway.”

Anyways, maybe you want more stuff like this. Maybe you are afraid to miss out on good ideas. Or you just want to always improve, and are looking for any good way to do so.

In that case, you might like to subscribe to my email newsletter on persuasion and marketing. Here’s where you can do that.

The story behind my first successful sales letter

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A couple of years after I started copywriting, I got the chance to write my first full-blown video sales letter.

This was for a product called The Kidney Disease Solution.

At that time, The Kidney Disease Solution had already been available on Clickbank for around 10 years, and it was a top-50 Clickbank product. My job was to rewrite the front-end VSL to make it less hypey — and yet to increase sales.

An impossible order?

Not at all. In fact, it was fairly straightforward. The VSL I wrote increased sales by 30% while removing all the typical “Clickbanky” hype. It only took two ingredients:

1) An emphasis on proof

2) A solid, proven structure for the sales letter itself

The first ingredient wasn’t hard to come by. Duncan Capicchiano, the guy behind The Kidney Disease Solution, had hundreds of almost-miraculous success stories from people who had followed his program. Plus, he had a legit background as a practicing naturopath, and he had done everything he could to make the program itself useful and complete.

But what about the structure?

I was still fairly green as a copywriter, so I reached for the most successful VSL I knew of:

Mike Geary’s Truth About Abs, written by Jon Benson.

I knew this VSL well because I had copied it out by hand several months earlier. I did this while following along on the sidelines with a course called CopyHour.

Derek Johanson, the guy who runs CopyHour, finds successful sales letter (like the Truth About Abs VSL).

He then sends the copy to you to actually copy out by hand, one sales letter each day, for 60 days.

And then he gets on a video call to explain all the fine points of what you just copied, and why it works.

It’s a solid (and proven) way to get much better at writing copy, and to do so quickly.

The thing is, you can’t join CopyHour most of the time. Because of the “live” nature of the course, Derek only opens it up for enrollment a few times a year.

Right now is one of those times. So in case you’re new to copywriting and you want to get better quickly, CopyHour might be worth a  look while enrollment is open. If you’re interested, here’s the link:

http://copyhour.com/