Intro – You / Me

A few days ago, I got an email with the subject line:

“Intro – John / Matt”

I’ve gotten emails like this before, and I always open them eagerly. They normally come from one person, who I know, and introduce me to a second person, who I don’t know.

Not so in this case.

This email was from a guy named Matthias, who I don’t know, introducing me to himself (Matthias aka Matt), who I still don’t know.

That was a little subject line trick I wanted to share with you.

It reminded me of how Gary Bencivenga used to get get a great “endorsement” for his offer by having the offer owner say something about his own product, and then having that formatted like a testimonial.

I don’t know if I would use this “Intro You / Me” trick myself, but there’s no doubt it put me into a different, more favorable state of mind, at least right when opening the email, than I would have been in otherwise.

The bigger point is is that it matters immensely how you first position yourself when you try to open up 1-1 conversations with people.

One option is the above approach, to position yourself as a helpful and disinterested bystander, connecting the person you are reaching out to with a valuable new contact.

That’s not bad, but it’s not great either.

What’s much better is to adopt the positioning I talked about during a live workshop I put on a few years ago, called Water Into Wine.

On that workshop, I talked about positioning I had used to open up conversations (and eventually do deals) with business owners who wouldn’t have even opened my email had I come in presenting myself as a copywriter or a service provider.

I charged $197 for Water into Wine when I ran it. I haven’t made it available since. I am making it available now, and as part of my “Hogwarts of Influence” event, specifically in the “Dumbledore” tier. For more info on that:

https://bejakovic.com/core-promise-pwyw/

Gary Bencivenga’s ultra secret A-list offer tactic

Today I want to share with you an ultra secret A-list tactic I spotted legendary copywriter Gary Bencivenga using.

This tactic is not about copy. It’s in the offer.

I found it many years ago, back when I was learning copywriting by hand-copying ads. I spotted the following:

Gary once ran an ad to sell report A.

He also offered a free bonus, report B, which he said was “selling nationally” for the same price that report A was selling for.

Ok, so far, so standard.

But because I’m a bit of a direct response sleuth, I found that Gary was also running a second ad.

This second ad sold report B.

In that ad, Gary also offered a free bonus, report A, which he said was “selling nationally” for the same price that report B was selling for.

With this one tactic, Gary doubled his front-end offers. Plus, his bonuses were perceived as more valuable because he could say “selling nationally for $19.99” rather than “valued at $19.99, by my mother.”

So the offer tactic is to do like Gary, and sell your free bonuses in addition to your main front-end offer. It will force you to make a better, more attractive bonus, which will have higher perceived value than a bonus that you never officially sold. Plus you might actually make sales and get more customers.

“YAAAAWN,” I hear you say. “Bejako, you might not realize this, but I am an extremely loyal reader of your newsletter. That’s how I know that you already shared this ‘ultra secret A-list tactic’… let me check my notes… aha, yes, you shared it back on February 21, 2021. Don’t you have anything NEW for me today?”

Fine. I do have a NEW corollary to Gary Bencivenga’s ultra secret A-list offer tactic.

It is this:

If you do ever offer free stuff, for whatever reason, then sell it afterwards.

What? Yes. That’s it. It’s pretty basic, but powerful. The principles and reasons why are the same. I just want to highlight that:

1. Just because you offered something for free once, that doesn’t mean you cannot sell it later.

2. You probably have a ton of stuff that you’ve given away for free in the past, and are dismissing the real value of that.

Anyways, that’s my NEW marketing tip for today. It’s a marketing tip I myself am going to apply. Because tomorrow, I am putting on a FREE Core Promise Workshop and Q&A Call.

Free Free Free…

… if you decide to be there live tomorrow.

Not so free immediately afterwards, for all the reasons I listed above.

If you need a reminder of what this is all about, here are the details:

Tomorrow, Tuesday, at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST, I will hold a Core Promise Workshop and Q&A call.

It’s free & you can ​Register Here​.

I’ll share the most important parts of:

* What makes a good promise

* The importance of being clear over clever

* Choosing a promise that sounds credible

And we’ll end with a Q&A session to answer your Core Promise questions.

Don’t forget to register so I can send you the details.

See you there.

Daily Money Vitamin

A-list copywriter Gary Bencivenga once prescribed an “Ad-A-Day Vitamin”:

Every day, no matter what, read a great ad.

Gary said this was a recipe to get 1% better every week.

Which is nice except it doesn’t work. Because reading alone won’t make you better, or cause any kind of a lasting change in you or your life.

(I speak here from personal experience, as a person who has read things in the past, often with great interest.)

Instead, I have something different for you.

Something that creates lasting change, not only in you but in your life, business, and bank account.

It’s the Daily Money Vitamin:

Every day, no matter what, implement one great idea.

Put the idea into action, Apply it. Don’t just read about it, don’t just nod at it, don’t just savor it like a connoisseur.

Instead, think about what the idea is telling you to do, and then do that.

Within a week you will be 1% richer. Within a year, you’ll be 67.8% richer. Within two years, you will be 2.81 times richer. After that, it really begins to compound.

Excellent. Except where do you find great ideas to implement?

Ultimately, great ideas are everywhere. In conversations with people you trust… in old books… in expensive courses… in free email newsletters like this one (ahem, I shared one with you just a few lines above, the Daily Email Vitamin).

If you start keeping track of great ideas like this today, within a year, you’re likely to have hundreds of them.

I myself have been keeping such an archive for years. At last count, it was 937 great ideas long. Here’s a very small sample:

* “To build fascination and rapport, keep asking deeper, more enthusiastic questions” (from James Altucher via his podcast)

* “Use the same link text as the subject line to get clicks” (something Ian Stanley said somewhere)

* “Trialibility is the no. 1 factor affecting adoption of an innovation” (from Jonah Berger’s Catalyst)

I once created a collection of all these great ideas which I called The Shangri La Library Of Rare And Priceless Ideas.

If you want to stock your own library of great ideas, and if you want to taking your Daily Money Vitamin today rather than never, then I’ll make you a deal.

For the next 24 hours, until tomorrow, Tuesday Apr 28 2026, at 8:31pm CET, you can get your little claws on The Shangri La Library Of Rare And Priceless Ideas, for free, if you get my Most Valuable Email program.

For more information on Most Valuable Email before the day runs out:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

The 6 most costly offer launch mistakes

Tragically, you may be making two or three of these mistakes costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars:

#1. Building your offer without a killer proof element at its core

Credit goes to A-list copywriter Gary Bencivenga for this. Says Gary, “Salespeople sell more when they’re true believers, and so do copywriters.”

Good news: If you’re launching your own offer, you can make sure you become a true believer by building your offer around a killer proof element. (It will help persuade your prospects, too.)

#2. Failing to tie the offer into money in multiple ways

We all need to be able a story we can tell ourselves for why we do what we do, including why we spend money. So make it easy for your prospects to tell themselves the story, “This will make me more money than I spend, in multiple ways, possibly even as soon as I buy.”

(By the way, this doesn’t apply just to “make money” offers.)

#3. Putting too much into the offer

It can dilute the offer and can lower its perceived value. But also…

#4. Omitting an upsell

… unless your front end offer will extract as much money as you ever hope to get out of your prospects, then you need something else to sell them.

Better do it now, when people have told you that they are motivated to solve a specific problem, rather then later, when that problem either becomes too big or too familiar for them to do anything about any more.

This coming Wednesday, I will kick off what I’m calling Most Valuable Offer.

In a nutshell, I will help a small group of list owners launch and sell a paid live workshop to their lists before the end of April.

I’ll help the folks who join me avoid the mistakes above, as well as other mistakes like #5 – Making your upsell irrelevant to the launch offer and #6 – Committing to the launch without validating demand first.

If you’re interested in getting my help avoiding these costly mistakes and launching your own Most Valuable Offer, here’s where to get more information:

https://bejakovic.com/mvo

Direct mail interest rising

A bit of behind-the-scenes of my newsletter:

Last Wednesday, a guy signed up to my email list.

As they always do, my minions went to work, figuring out who this guy is.

Turns out he has an interesting business and a book I could relate to. I sent him a 1-1 email to connect more personally.

He replied.

We got into a bit of an email conversation about what we’re each working on. We got on the topic of auctions, which I’m offering to run for people who have offers and an audience.

It turns out this guy has an email list of 99,000 living souls, mostly buyers, and a proven $10k offer he has been selling to that list.

He was interested in the idea of having me run an auction with his audience and offer.

He sent me a Loom with his questions about auction stuff. And at the end of it, he added:

===

I’m wondering if you would be open to running this as a direct mail campaign as well.

Cause I’ve got 99,000 people on the list and they’re hit with emails, but direct mail is something I haven’t done yet to them.

===

My eyes lit up. Direct mail is a separate topic from auctions, but it’s one I’m very, very interested in.

I tend to glamorize direct mail because its golden days happened before I came onto the scene.

All the legends of the direct response biz, from Halbert to Bencivenga to Schwartz to Caples to Collier, worked in direct mail, honed their chops on direct mail, and praised direct mail as the most reliable, most profitable, most practical medium of salesmanship multiplied.

“Come on Bejako,” I hear you say, “that was centuries ago, back in the time of Margaret Thatcher and Bill Shakespeare. Ancient history!”

No, not really. The fact is, while direct marketing definitely moved online over the past 20 years, direct mail never went away.

Some businesses continued to rely on it…

… and now, like my new reader’s comment shows, interest in direct mail is bubbling up again, among savvy business owners who might never have considered direct mail 10 years ago.

Interest in direct mail is not bubbling up because these business owners glamorize direct mail the way I do.

It’s bubbling up because direct mail today is a great investment. How great? I’ve heard one smart marketer say that for every $100 he spends on direct mail, to a highly targeted list of buyers, with a proven high-ticket offer… he makes 3 grand in return.

Those are the kinds of numbers that should make your furry ears perk up with interest.

I’m putting this idea out there so you start seeing mention of direct mail, and maybe get curious about this opportunity.

I’m also doing it as an information gathering mission.

Have you done direct mail campaigns in your own biz? Have you done direct direct mail for a client? Or do you have interest in having direct mail campaigns run for you… or learning how to do them for others?

12 sticky disciples to get your message out into the world

If I ever launch my AIDA University, a 4-year, overpriced curriculum teaching people how to persuade, the mandatory reading for the first semester will include the book Made To Stick.

In that book, authors Chip and Dan Heath tell you how to create a message that sticks.

Basically, they say that you should turn your message into a simple, unusual, concrete, and emotional story.

Which is all good and fine but— are simple, dramatic stories really the only kinds of sticky messages?

Clearly no. I imagine that, in the interest of making their own message sticky, that is, simple and concrete, the Heath brothers decided to stick to teaching just one sticky format.

But I’ve been keeping track of different kinds of sticky messages. Today, I’d like to share them with you.

If you have an idea you want to go out into the world, then here are 12 ways, 12 little disciples, that can preach your message from the housetops:

1. Story, particularly drama

Well ok, yes, this is familiar enough, and it’s what Chip and Dan Heath talk about as well. (Bear with me. I have different ones after this one.)

2. High stakes

Classic example: Stansberry’s “The End of America” video sales letter, which was one of the two or three biggest direct response campaigns of all time, bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars through a single VSL.

3. Visuals

Here’s one that made Rich Schefren’s Internet Business Manifesto stick:

Rich Schefren's Internet Manifesto | Tyrone Shum | Flickr

4. Exercises

The first thing that comes to my mind is the following old chestnut, used as a sticky message to illustrate lateral thinking or the absence of it:

Say we have a pen and a piece of paper with 9 evenly spaced dots (as shown). How do we draw 4 straight lines through the 9 dots, without ever lifting our

5. Quizzes

Is your “fat loss type” an I, G, C, or T? What’s your Myers-Briggs? Are you a Pisces or a killer whale? Take our quiz to find out what this says about you as a marketer.

6. Metonyms

A metonym, as I learned once but keep forgetting, is “a figure of speech in which one word or phrase is substituted for another with which it is closely associated, as in the use of Washington for the United States government.”

A great pop culture example of using a metonym to get the point across and to persuade the other side comes from the movie Ford v. Ferrari.

In that movie, Matt Damon, playing car designer Carroll Shelby, is explaining to Henry Ford III why Ford’s sports driving team sucks.

Damon points to a little red folder that one of Ford’s underlings is currently thumbing through (the folder is the metonym, albeit nonverbal) and says:

“As I sat out there in your lovely waiting room, I watched that little red folder, right there, go through four pairs of hands before it got to you. Course that doesn’t include the 22 or so other Ford employees who probably poked at it before it made its way up to the 19th floor. All due respect, sir, you can’t win a race by committee.”

7. Parallel case studies

… which are a subset of dramatic stories, but which occur often enough and are successful often enough compared to regular stories, that they warrant including.

A famous example is the Wall Street Journal “Two Young Men” sales letter, though wise marketers (eg. Andre Chaperon) have been using the same format online as well.

8. Authority (scientific research)

Scientists from MIT report that this kind of message is very sticky, in fact 38% stickier than the average.

9. Demonstration

“It slices, it dices, it makes julienne fries.” Good if you get to see the demonstration on TV… better yet if you see it live… best if you can actually experience it directly on yourself.

10. Outrage/saying the “wrong” thing/playing against type

This is what a huge chunk of classic direct response headline complexes are about. Think “Lies Lies Lies” by Gary Bencivenga… “What THEY Don’t Want You To Know” by Eric Betuel… or “Why Haven’t TV Owners Been Told These Facts” by Gene Schwartz.

11. Rhyme, alliteration, or co-opting phrases that already exist in the mind

This is a broad category but it all comes down to wordplay of one sort or another that our brains seem to enjoy:

– “If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit”

– The “Big Black Book” series of big Boardroom blockbusters

– “The Plague of the Black Debt,” which along with the End of America above, is another of the two or three biggest direct response campaigns of all time

12. Metaphor or analogy

An analogy is like a listicle, in that it organizes under one umbrella a number of related points, some of which are strong, and others, which can be disguised and hidden among the stronger ones.

If you have other good categories of sticky messages, write in and let me know. I am putting together a new book in which this kind of stuff will feature. I will appreciate your help, and maybe what you send me will wind up in the book.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t done so yet, you might enjoy my most recent book,

“10 Commandments of Con Men, Pickup Artists, Magicians, Door-to-Door Salesmen, Hypnotists, Copywriters, Professional Negotiators, Political Propagandists, Stand Up Comedians, and Oscar-Winning Screenwriters”

In that book, you can find lots of simple, unusual, concrete, and emotional stories.

But you can also find demonstrations (check out the very first sentence of the intro)… outrage (that’s the whole point of featuring con men and pickup artists in the title)… co-opting phrases that already exist in the mind (“10 Commandments”)… authority… quizzes… high stakes… and even visuals, at least such as can be done with words (specifically, the opening of Commandment V).

For all that, and more:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

All these years, I thought I just liked living up high with a view of water

I’m reading a book called Yoga And The Search For The True Self — don’t ask — and last night I came across a passage that said:

“Anthropologists have shown that the favorite territory of human beings is high ground above water.”

“How did you know?” I said to the book. A couple facts:

#1 When reading another book (Psycho-Cybernetics), I tried imagining a kind of ideal refuge. I imagined a house on a hillside, overlooking a lake in the valley below.

#2 I currently live on the 9th floor, with a bit of a view of the sea (I wish I had more).

Upon reading that my unique personal fantasies and preferences are the same as those of the rest of mankind, I felt a little bit like Dave Chappelle when he walked into a Mississippi diner and found out what everyone there already knew, that “blacks and chickens are quite fond of one other.” Says Dave:

“All these years, I thought I liked chicken because it was delicious. Turns out, I’m genetically predisposed to liking chicken. I got no say in the matter.”

A-list copywriter Gary Bencivenga once said, “As a marketer you only have one power, and that’s to anticipate what people are going to think.”

We all have unique experiences and reactions, in the sense that we and only we experience them.

The strange thing, or maybe not so strange, is that other people have experiences and reactions that are very similar to ours. And if you take the time to learn and prepare and anticipate those, then, as Gary says, that becomes power.

This is the core idea of my new 10 Commandments book, published earlier this year in May.

I checked just this morning and it seems my book has gotten its first 3-star rating. Unfortunately, it’s just a 3-star rating and no written review I could lampoon.

All the written reviews I have gotten so far are 5-star and say things about this book like, “life changing,” “practical,” “packed with curious ideas,” “really fun,” “playful but legit,” “highly entertaining,” “the sharpest material I’ve come across on the subject,” “funny, weird, and most of all valuable.”

If you’d like to find out more about the unique reactions of others, and how you can anticipate those:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

A billionaire’s personal positioning test

A few days ago, a new reader and Copy Riddles member named Tim wrote me an email with the subject line, “a billionaire’s bullet idea.” Tim’s email said:

“This guy, Jason Cohen, founded a few billion dollar companies. Anyways, he wrote an article you might like and seems relevant to Copy Riddles.”

Tim linked to Cohen’s article, “The Opposite Test,” the gist of which was the following:

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So here’s my Opposite Test: For each feature/benefit bullet point, construct its negative and see if that statement is ridiculous. Would anyone be able to construct a rational strategy with that negative? Perhaps a competitor already has! If the negative is indeed ridiculous, if it would be impossible to have a product or positioning or strategy that included the negative, it means this bullet point is trivial, obvious, mandatory, or at least undifferentiating from the competition.

===

This one of those ideas that is not 100% true but is 100% useful. Try it yourself and see. Take any well-established promise or positioning idea in your industry, even one that seems unassailable, and turn it around:

“Get rich quickly” => “Get rich slowly” [worked for Gary Bencivenga]

“How to Win Friends and Influence People” => “Winning Through Intimidation” [worked for Robert Ringer]

“Getting to Yes” => “Start with No” [worked for Jim Camp]

The underlying psychology here is that we don’t just align ourselves to certain people and ideas. Just as often, or probably more often, we align ourselves in opposition to certain people and ideas. The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t… unless you’ve really grown to hate the devil you know, in which, case any other devil, no matter how bad, will do.

I’m telling you this because I’m thinking of the next book I want to write, about personal positioning, and I’m testing out ideas for that.

In the meantime, I can point you to my new 10 Commandments book in case you still haven’t read that. My book has been on sale since May and has slowly accumulated 26 reviews, all of them 5 star. Here’s one from the same Tim who wrote me about the Opposite Test:

===

“A new favorite”

You know, I’ve read a lot of books in this space and this is one of my favorites. He skips over the common knowledge and dives into really eye opening insights.

He condenses lots of research into a really fun book. I’ll be rereading this one soon.

===

If you want to read probably the best thing I’ve written to date, in a fun and small package, for just $4.99:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

The magnificent obsession that produces A-list copywriting skills

This morning, I sent an email about a great endorsement for Lawrence Bernstein’s Ad Money Machine. That endorsement came from the world’s greatest living copywriter, Gary Bencivenga.

(Gary: “I would gladly have paid him ten times, even 100 times its price.”)

A lifetime subscription to Ad Money Machine costs $997, but I’ve made a deal with Lawrence so I can offer it for free as bonus for my Copy Riddles program for this week only. Except…

It’s nice for Lawrence and Ad Money Machine to get this great endorsement from Gary Bencivenga.

But what about Copy Ridddles? Where’s the shining endorsement there?

Unfortunately, I cannot count Gary Bencivenga as a Copy Riddles member. (Gary, if you’re reading, hit reply and we’ll fix that.)

I therefore do not have a glowing testimonial for Copy Riddles the way Lawrence does for Ad Money Machine.

However, I do have the following curious story from Gary.

Once upon a time, a young Gary had to compete against Gene Schwartz, the legendary copywriter and author of the cult book Breakthrough Advertising.

Gary wrote up a first draft to try to beat Gene’s control sales letter. But when Gary compared what he had written to the control, he got depressed — his bullets were so much weaker than Gene’s.

So what did he do? In Gary’s own words:

===

I said, the only way I’m going to have a way of competing with Gene is if I figure out what he’s done to get these bullets.

So wherever his bullets came from, I would read the same page. I would learn from him just by mimicking what he had done.

So I said, “This bullet that he came up with came from chapter 3, page 4. What is the original source of this?”

And he taught me so much, just by studying his copy and by looking at the product itself.

I was able to beat him, but it was really his package too in a way, because I learned the technique.

===

That process Gary describes is exactly what Copy Riddles is about.

Copy Riddles gets you competing with A-list copywriters, starting with the original source material they used, and allows you to compare your final result with their final result.

The goal is not to match word-for-word what the A-listers did. It’s certainly not to get depressed about how your copy is so much weaker than theirs.

The goal is to find out what A-list copywriters zoom in on, what they chose to leave out, how they take a dry and technical fact and make it sexy and exciting.

Do this over and over, starting with different source materials, and subtly and quickly, the A-listers’ instincts become your instincts, their tricks your tricks, their skills your skills.

Of course, you don’t need Copy Riddles to do this. You can follow the process and do all the work yourself. Start by digging around the Internet and collecting A-list sales letters…

… then stalk Amazon, eBay, used book sites, and online repositories to find the books and courses they were selling, most of them out of print…

… and when you finally get both the sales letter and the out-of-print book in your possession… go bullet by bullet… and tease out how the A-list copywriter turned lead into gold.

This magnificently obsessive process will 100% work.

I know because I’ve done it. All in all, it took me about three months of time and maybe 100 hours of work.

Of course, if you these results but you want them more quickly and more easily, then that’s what Copy Riddles is for.

Copy Riddles is a fast, fun, mostly-done-for-you ride that allows you to own A-list copywriting skills, following this Gary Bencivenga-approved process.

It’s a process also approved by the couple hundred people who have been through Copy Riddles before you, who say things like:

#1: “There are very few copywriting courses that offer this level of practical value”

#2: “The best course I’ve ever taken, bar none”

#3: “I literally use what I learned in Copy Riddles every day”

#4: “I think most people should start learning about copywriting this way”

#5: “One of the best copywriting courses I’ve done”

#6: “The entire course is an a-ha moment”

#7: “Worth every dollar/minute/page”

If you’d like more info on Copy Riddles, or to grab it before the Ad Money Machine “Unannounced Bonus” disappears:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Exposed: Gary Bencivenga’s “100x its price” marketing investment

I once heard Gary Bencivenga say—

But wait. First, let me do things properly, and first tell you who Gary is, in the odd case you don’t know, or remind you of the man’s accomplishments, in case you do.

Gary Bencivenga is widely regarded as the world’s greatest living copywriter.

That praise is based not on subjective impressions, but on hard numbers.

An executive at Rodale Press, a big direct response publisher, said that Gary never lost a split-run test when going up against other top copywriters.

An executive at Phillips publishing, another major direct response company, said that Gary had more winners than anybody else.

Gene Schwartz, a legendary copywriter and the author of the bible in the field, Breakthrough Advertising, summed it up by saying there are only four or five true masters of copywriting — and Gary is one of them.

With that intro, let me tell you what I heard Gary say once.

Gary said he advised a client, a publishing company, to purchase a small financial newsletter, lock stock and two smoking barrels, simply because of an enthusiastic testimonial the newsletter had gotten. (The author of that testimonial was a certain Warren Buffett.)

So great, says Gary, is the value of really convincing proof.

Going by that logic, I am hereby putting in my offer to buy Lawrence Bernstein’s Ad Money Machine — the entire site, all the content, and the domain. I am doing this based simply on the following testimonial, which comes from Gary Bencivenga himself:

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One of the secrets I teach copywriters and marketers who want to be more successful is to be sure they read a great direct response ad every day.

But where do you find an almost limitless supply of great ads to be inspired by?

The best source I have ever found is Lawrence’s site. I’ve been writing copy for more than 40 years now, and I still do my ‘ad-a-day’ thing, just to keep sharp.

I never fail to be inspired with new ideas when browsing through Lawrence’s collection of ads. I would gladly have paid him ten times, even 100 times its price. Investing in your own knowledge is always the greatest investment you can make, and this is one of the smartest ways to do it.

===

I don’t know how much Gary paid to get Lawrence’s daily serving of a great response ad.

I do know I paid Lawrence $97 per month for it for a long time, and then I paid him $997, last year, in one lump sum, for a lifetime subscription.

You, however, can get the same lifetime subscription I paid $997 for, the same subscription that Gary says is “one of the smartest ways” to invest in yourself, and you can get it for free.

You can get it for free as part of the “Unannounced Bonus” promo I am doing for my Copy Riddles program this week, which runs until this Sunday at 12 midnight PST.

For more info on Copy Riddles, or to invest in yourself before this deal disappears:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/