For sale

Today I’d like to tell you about my Daily Email Habit service.

I’ve been promoting this offer for a couple weeks now, usually at the tail end of my emails.

But from time to time, it’s good to stop the infotainment and just sell. So.

Daily Email Habit is for you if you’ve been convinced over the years that:

– a regular online presence is valuable

– email, ancient though it is, is more resilient and independent than social media platforms

– there’s a good number of people out there who actually enjoy receiving and reading emails, even daily, as long as those emails are not just drily and selfishly selling, the way this email is

Daily Email Habit is a new service I’ve come up with to help you take advantage of these facts, by helping you start and stick with your own consistent daily email habit.

Daily Email Habit is delivered as a daily email, with a new prompt each day — a specific “puzzle” to mull over and answer in your own email, along with a few “hints” if you need them.

I choose each day’s puzzle based on my experience writing this newsletter for the past 6+ years, my work with clients over the past almost decade, and the totality of close to 3,000 sales emails I’ve written in that time.

Each daily email puzzle is chosen both to make your emails interesting and different day after day, and to slowly but surely flip the many small switches that ultimately lead to a sale.

My initial guess at why Daily Email Habit would be useful to people was “time saving.” And it has been that way for some subscribers, but the major benefit seems to have been something else.

Here’s James Carran, a published author, poet, ghostwriter, the owner of a Twitter account with 100k+ followers, and the writer of several email newsletters, including the daily Carran’s Cabin. James subscribes to Daily Email Habit, and he said about it:

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I really enjoyed the email prompt today and it did indeed lead to a very different email than I’d have written otherwise. And some useful thinking.

I can already sense this is going to be a great process. Perhaps not so much for reducing time (though it will do that) as making it more interesting for my readers. I wrote a better email than I otherwise might have done.

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One final thing that can be curious, useful, or motivating to you if you join Daily Email Habit. Here, let me give it in James’s words again:

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And as a bonus, you get to watch John Bejakovic eat his own cooking by using the prompts in the emails and seeing how he applies it… Which is another round of education right there.

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I’m not guaranteeing the fact, but most days I myself use my own daily email puzzle to kick off my own email.

In that way, Daily Email Habit is like the “riddles” in my Most Valuable Email and Copy Riddles programs, if you know those.

Basically, Daily Email Habit, in combination with this newsletter, serves as a series of prompts to get you to practice and implement, and then an opportunity to compare what you’ve done to what somebody with a lot of experience would do based on the same prompt.

This is not a way of playing, “Mine is better than yours.” It’s simply a way of learning, getting new ideas, and being inspired to try different things.

At the moment, I’m still offering Daily Email Habit for the Charter Member investment of $20/month. At some point, I’ll increase that, but if you join now, you’ll be grandfathered in even when others have to pay more.

If you have any questions about Daily Email Habit, hit reply + ask away.

Otherwise, if you would like to see an example daily email puzzle as delivered each day in Daily Email Habit, or to have the opportunity to sign up for this service:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

If your open rates are excellent but your sales suck

Yesterday, I wrote an email about a magical, far-off place called Affiliate World. I even invited you to meet me there.

​​To which, I got a reply from James “Get Paid Write” Carran, whose newsletter I am a reader of. James wrote:

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I’m obviously not in the right crowd because I spent this entire email thinking affiliate world was a thing you were making up for the email until I got to the end and realised it was a conference 😂

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James is right — i didn’t explain Affiliate World at all.

I didn’t mention it was a conference, or that it was in Budapest until halfway through the email, or anything about the dates. I figured there was no point — either people are already going and they know, or there’s no way I will persuade them to go with this one email.

Lazy?

Maybe.

Self-defeating?

Maybe.

But I remember hearing something about this a long time ago in an interview with marketer Travis Sago.

Travis a kind of nice-guy Ben Settle. Like Ben, Travis is an expert email copywriter and direct marketer. Like Ben, he has a cult-like following. And like Ben, he has made millions with his own online businesses and has helped others make millions too. One curious thing:

Travis says he writes his email subject lines like he has to pay for each open.

Rather than trying to get everyone to open, and hoping to somehow persuade or convince or explain to them why it’s in their interest to take the next step before they click away… Travis uses each email to select from the audience a tiny pocket of highly qualified people.

There’s a broader approach here – efficiency as a business principle. It’s how Travis has been able to build up a multimillion business selling little $39 ebooks… and how he was later able to build up a second multi million business, selling $5k and $10k and $25k programs and masterminds.

I don’t practice Travis’s subject line approach with this newsletter, not every day. But maybe it’s something for you to think about on this Sunday, particularly if your open rates are excellent but your sales suck.

And in case you’d like to know what to write once people open your emails, so your emails not only get opened, not only get read, but also make sales, you might like:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

I flipped the script and had it flipped on me

Yesterday, I reached out to a biotech company that’s doing some exciting work, which I’d written up in my health newsletter.

I wrote them an email to say I want to help them publicize their work. I said I have a newsletter in the space, and I’d like to be put on the list to get their press releases in the future.

All of which is 100% true and was said entirely in earnest.

I sent this email to the communications officer at the biotech company.

I didn’t hear back from the communications officer. But a couple hours later, I did hear back from the CEO.

He thanked me for covering their research in my newsletter… said my newsletter is great… and that he would keep me up to date with the newest results of his company’s research.

That reply came from his official company email address. A bit later, I saw that he also signed up to my newsletter with his private Gmail address.

I’m not telling you this as an effective but entirely unscalable newsletter growth strategy, though it certainly is that.

Instead, I’m sharing it as an example of “flipping the script.”

I in fact did reach out to this biotech company with the thought of getting my newsletter better known, and even with the idea of growing my list.

I wasn’t sure my email would get the CEO to sign up for my newsletter, but I had certainly hoped for something similar.

The thing is, I went about it entirely indirectly. There was no ask in my email except to be notified of the company’s future work.

In my email, I did mention the lead researcher’s name… I mentioned my own newsletter… I included a link to it.

​​It so happened that if anybody from the company clicked that link, they would see my post about the company’s latest research front and center at the top of my newsletter archive.

Maybe you think that by telling you this, I’m trying to make myself out into some kind of would-be Professor Moriarty, a scheming keyboard puppetmaster, always two steps ahead.

​​That’s hardly it. And to prove it, let me admit that I myself am susceptible to the same form of influence.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote an email about 7 Twitter content strategies, which I was sharing even though I had never successfully grown a Twitter following.

Then earlier this week, I got a reply to that email from a guy named James Carran. James wrote:

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From someone who HAS done it, more than once, these are pretty much on the money.

The biggest thing is when you can combine more than one in a personal story. “How I built a million dollar newsletter using these 7 tips” tends to work better just now than “7 tips to build a newsletter” etc.

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Hmmm… a compliment about my content, plus a meaningful extension, and all from somebody who’s grown multiple Twitter accounts to some number?

I was curious. I asked James what his story is. He replied:

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I’m @getpaidwrite on Twitter, 105k there.

And at one point I was ghostwriting for 4 others. It’s definitely gotten more difficult to grow though.

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At this point, I naturally checked on Twitter to see if James’s claims are true.

Sure enough. I saw he has 106.1K followers on Twitter… along with a link to his newsletter.

Still curious, I signed up for his daily emails.

Now, I can’t imagine what kind of direct, head-on appeal, bribe, bonus, begging, or threatening could get me to sign up for daily emails from somebody who had just replied to one of my own emails.

​​​And yet, there I was, signed up, after a total of 80 words of influence from James.

Now, maybe James set me up in this way intentionally. Probably not though. But you can still learn from it.

And you can start to think about how to create the conditions where people themselves hit upon the idea of doing just what you want them to do.

Last point:

I wrote to James to say I had signed up for his newsletter, and to ask if I could include his message in an email. He wrote:

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Of course, go ahead!

And thank you for joining my list, that’s an honour. I’m trying to get into the swing of daily emails and improving my email marketing game. Reduce my reliance on “X”.

MVE was a huge help, bending my brain to think of how to apply it effectively from a more general writing perspective…

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You probably know what James is referring to by MVE. But in case you don’t know yet, and you would like to know, then you can find out here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/