How to become a millionaire on Five-grand-err

I read something mindblogging via Codie Sanchez’s newsletter:

A freelance designer by the name of Brett Williams is making $120,000 per month. Not per year. Per month. All from client work.

How?

Williams has a unique business model. He charges all his clients a flat fee, $5k per client per month. Clients can quit or pause their “design-as-a-subscription” at any time. They can only make one request at a time, but as soon that is fulfilled — usually within 30 minutes to 48 hours — they can make another.

It might sound impossible that this could work. But Williams has ~20 clients at any time. He seems to be alive. He doesn’t seem to be working superhuman hours.

Again, how?

My guess is he works with good clients, does good work, and delivers it in a reasonable timeframe.

Clients are happy with what they get, and happy with what they don’t get — no full-time payroll burden, no hassle of finding a new freelancer, no opportunity cost of reaching a new agreement with a known freelancer, each time they have some niggling design request to make.

Do you think you might do something similar?

Of course not. It’s outlandish. But just pretend.

Think of a Fiverr-able skill you have. And instead of offering it for $5 on Fiverr, imagine offering it for $5k on your own site.

If you have Williams’s kind of luck, you will be able to make a cool million in under a year. If you’re less lucky, it might take you two or even three years to get there.

But still, what else you got right now? If that’s not so hot, might as well start moving towards that million-dollar service business today.

In related news, the deadline for my 9 Deadly Email Sins training is nearing. The training happens next Monday, August 7, the deadline is the day before, Sunday the 6th.

I’ve given away a lot of valuable info over the past few days, in the form of hundreds of copies of my new Simple Money Emails course.

Simple Money Emails shows you how to write effective sales emails.

9 Deadly Email Sins shows you… how to avoid writing ineffective no-sales emails.

I realize that might sound like a promise nobody wants. The only thing I can say in my defense is that I have been paid to critique 100+ emails over past year. Including by people who have had all the email marketing and copywriting education in the world… including pro copywriters… including people whose entire businesses run on email.

​​And yet I find these people, who should know better, repeatedly commit these sins, and repeatedly pay for it, in the form of lower sales, bored readers, and shrinking engagement.

You might wonder how this 9 Deadly Email Sins offer is possibly related to the Brett Williams thing I told you above.

I can think of two ways:

You can use Simple Money Emails + 9 Deadly Email Sins to actually learn how to write effective sales emails, and avoid the mistakes that plague others. There’s plenty of demand for that at Fiverr, and might be legit demand for it on Five-grand-err. I’ve personally been paid much more than five grand per month by some clients, just to write effective daily emails for them.

Or if you have no interest in selling email copywriting services, but you have another skill that clients might want, then you can use daily emails to sell that. The only real difference I imagine between Fiverr and Five-grand-err is the Five-grand-err clients are likely to need a bit more trust and softening up, and daily email is the perfect format for that.

But you make the choice. If you decide that effective daily emails are something that’s worth knowing, and knowing well, then here’s where you can sign up for my training next Monday:

https://bejakovic.com/sme-classified-ty/

Name your own price: how about free?

In 1998, Priceline went from nothing to being worth $23 billion. They did it thanks to radio ads starring William Shatner and ending with the famous appeal:

“Priceline. Name your own price.”

In 2010, Fiverr launched. Their basic appeal was fixed freelance services, all for just $5. No need to haggle, negotiate over scope, or pay a lot. Fiverr went public in 2019, and is worth a little over $7 billion today.

Eventually, both Priceline and Fiverr backed off from their original appeals. You can’t name your own price on Priceline any more. And most services on Fiverr will cost you much more than a fiver today.

But those initial appeals were powerful. They made those companies worth billions of dollars.

Why?

What was so good about those two original appeals?

Direct marketer Fred Catona, who ran those Priceline ads in the 1990s, said that Priceline’s appeal was an “empowering statement.”

People felt in control, Catona argued, because they could name their own price. And so they took action and jumped on the Priceline website.

There might be something to that.

But Fiverr’s appeal was just the opposite. No control. Not only could you not name your own price… but you couldn’t even name the service you wanted. Five dollars. Fixed services off a menu. Take it or leave it.

And like I said, both appeals worked great.

So here’s my feeling:

Both Priceline and Fiverr appealed to simple greed.

“Name my own price? Hell yeah! I’ll take a ticket to Maui for $10, please!”

“$5 for an email sequence? Hell yeah! I’ll become an Internet marketing millionaire without doing any work!”

So my takeaway for you is to come up with new packaging for “cheap.” It might make you a billion dollars. Or 7. Or 23. And you don’t have to keep making the same “cheap” appeal forever.

Speaking of which:

There’s a new marketing funnel company in town, aiming to rival the $2B-valued ClickFunnels. The upstart is called GrooveFunnels.

GrooveFunnels does everything ClickFunnels does… and more. But while ClickFunnels costs hundreds of dollars a month to use… GrooveFunnels is free. For up to three websites… and for now, until they grab their share of the market.

Can you say cheap?

Of course, with cheap comes a whole host of headaches. I’ll tell you about a few of them tomorrow. And I’ll also tell you why it still makes sense to try out GrooveFunnels… and to even pay to get lifetime access for it, for more than three websites. Hell, I’ll even give you an incentive to do it.

But that’s tomorrow. For now, if you want to find out more about (FREE!) GrooveFunnels, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/groove

My first ever copywriting job

Today I paid somebody $25 to photoshop a corona mask onto a picture of Samuel L. Jackson.

Now I’m no Jack the Photoshopper, but this doesn’t sound like a tremendous task. And $25 for it seems neither a little nor a lot.

The interesting thing is this all happened on Fiverr. That’s where I got my start in copywriting, back when Obamas still roamed the West Wing. My first job was a 7-part autoresponder sequence, Andre Chaperon-style, about an ebook on disciplining your cat.

I had no trouble getting work on Fiverr. But back then, the default was still $5 for a task. In spite of all the people hiring me, I couldn’t make that work. After 2-3 months, I moved on to Upwork.

If you’re a newbie freelancer and you have no other avenues for getting your first client, Fiverr might be a more viable option. If that’s what you want to do, how do you get started?

I shared 6 tips for succeeding on Fiverr with my email subscribers. These were based on my time on the platform, and I think they are pretty unique. Unfortunately, you missed that boat. But if you like, you can still subscribe to my email newsletter, so you don’t miss out again in the future.