Kieran Drew

I stand accused of pulling the prat-out on a reader

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A few months ago, I wrote an email about the “prat out,” a technique used by con men to get their marks salivating and eager for larceny.

​​I sent that email out and then also put it on my bare-bones, zero-images, black-and-white website. And I forgot all about it.

Until this morning that is, when I got the following message from a new reader, who wrote:

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Im now about six years into designing and developing websites.

Your website just fucked my mind.

I was reading a book by Iceberg Slim, he talked about the prat out.

I had no idea wtf that was and found your article.

After reading, i realized that you just pulled the prat-out on me and I’m now much more ready to give you my money. You sneaky fucker.

But i forgive you because you just taught me how much can be done with just words.

I haven’t left your website for an hour. I’m fascinated by what you do with just words. Nothing else is needed. The words create the colors, images and shapes in my head.

As a designer, its blowing my mind how much can be done with words alone and it has opened my mind to all kinds of new possibilities.

Thank you man.

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No, thank you, kind anonymous reader who wrote in with a testimonial.

I bring this up 1) to feature a flattering testimonial and to encourage more of the same from other readers, and 2) to explain why I have not really been selling much of anything over the past couple weeks.

There are multiple reasons actually.

One is that I made enough money for my modest standards very early this month, thanks to the affiliate promo that Kieran Drew did of my Simple Money Emails course, and the new readers who came in the wake of that promo.

Another reason is that I have found that most of my sales do come via promotion events, whether that be a new launch, or me promoting an affiliate offer for a limited time, or somebody else promoting my offers for a limited time.

So one lesson I’ve learned is to regularly have such events if I hope to keep paying for rent and my daily supply of lentils and canned sardines.

At the same time, I’ve learned to cut myself some slack, and not force myself to shoehorn every daily email into a promotion of one of my existing offers.

​​Linking to something like an Amazon book (yesterday) or simply inviting a response (Sunday) keeps more of my readers reading to the end, and makes it more interesting for me since I can write about a broader set of stuff.

So in case you were curious why I’m linking to random stuff recently, now you know.

That said, it is important to remind readers of my offers from time to time so they can’t use the excuse, “Oh I didn’t even know!” to not buy.

And today, following a testimonial in which a reader says I pulled the prat-out on him, is a particularly good time to remind you of my best selling course, in terms of copies sold at least.

In case you’re curious, you can find out all about it here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

The ONE thing to know about storytelling

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The ONE thing to know about storytelling is that, like cooking, plumbing, and robbing a bank, storytelling is really a collection of skills and strategies rather than a single unifying rule to follow.

I know you probably don’t want to hear that. But look at this:

– How do I know when I’m using too much detail?

– ​How do you know where to stop?

– ​How to add twists to a story?

– ​Making up stories… When might you want to do this?

A few days ago, I asked readers what questions they have about storytelling. Above are a few of the replies I got.

All fair questions. All require separate answers. Any answer that could possibly answer all of them, such as tension! or surprise! or delight!, is so vague as to be useless.

But wait, there’s more.

The real thing I want to share with you in this email is not the discouraging message above.

Rather, I wanna tell you something interesting I read yesterday in a book about magic and showmanship. The author of that book says the best performers, magicians, and showmen practice something he calls conservation.

Conservation: the ability to do more and the will to refrain.

From the book: “If we try to give any routine more importance than it will bear, we destroy the illusion and may reveal the secret.” Hence, conservation. The willingness to hold back the full might of your armory of magic tricks.

Same goes for storytelling.

There are lots of tricks if you really break down what the best storytellers do.

But in order to tell an interesting and effective story, you definitely do not need all of these tricks. In fact, one or two tweaks to what you might normally do are all it takes to turn a bland story into something memorable and exciting.

And on the other hand, making use of more than just one or two tricks per story is likely to destroy the illusion and may reveal the secret.

What secret?

Well, for that (drumroll) I invite you to join me for the free presentation on storytelling that Kieran Drew and I will host on Monday, specifically at 4pm CET/10am EST/7am PST (yes, I know).

This presentation is a bonus for those who get Simple Money Emails before the presentation goes live. After that, no free bonus.

If you already have Simple Money Emails, you should have gotten an email from either Kieran or me with the Zoom link to join Monday’s presentation.

And if you don’t yet have Simple Money Emails, you can get it at the link below. ​​I could try for some callback humor right now to wrap up this email, but instead I will conserve and refrain. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

What’s wrong with affiliates?

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Story time:

10 years ago, my friend Sam and I naively decided to become Internet marketing millionaires.

Somehow we found Andre Chaperon’s Tiny Little Businesses course.

We rubbed our hands together, and envisioned that in six months’ time, we’d be sitting at the beach, drinking margaritas, occasionally leaning over to our laptops to see how many more thousands of dollars had rolled in over the past 15 minutes.

Andre’s TLB told us to pick a niche, find a product we could promote as an affiliate, then build a list using that affiliate product as the offer.

Sam and I followed this recipe to a T and beyond.

We spent weeks picking out the perfect niche (hard gainers, skinny guys who want to put on muscle but can’t).

We did market research to find out the pain points, motivations, and language used by our target market (it helped that both Sam and I were both in our target market, tall and hopelessly skinny).

We found the perfect affiliate offer to promote, a quality program, fairly expensive, with a good sales page. It would make it easy to pay for ads with even a few sales.

I had seen that the owners of this offer had previously worked with affiliates.

But when the time came to promote them, I couldn’t find the form on their site to sign up as an affiliate.

I wrote to the owners to ask about it. A reply came back:

“Thanks for the interest. But we’ve actually paused taking on new affiliates at the moment. It doesn’t really work for our business.”

First, there was a moment of shock. Then my blood pressure shot up.

I may or may not have fired back an email, explaining to this guy that he doesn’t know how business is done online… that this is free money that he’s saying no to… that a new customer is the most valuable thing a business could ever get, and that’s what I’m offering to bring him.

Very rightly and very wisely, the offer owner did not respond to my stupid email.

Those were the early days of my marketing career. I couldn’t wrap my mind around the fact that a businesses would not want to sell offers (particularly info products, with no marginal cost) to somebody new, with no effort involved.

“What’s wrong with affiliates?” I asked myself. My newbie brain simply couldn’t handle it.

As you can guess, Sam and I never recovered from this setback. Our dreams of a drunken 4-hour workweek on the beach vanished like receding waves in the sand.

But that was a long time ago. I’ve learned a lot about marketing and online businesses since then. I’ve heard and seen many other successful marketers say they do not work with affiliates. And today, I can tell you…

I still don’t really get it.

I mean, what could possibly be wrong with affiliates? Why would anybody ever say no?

Over the past few months, I have had two affiliates promote my stuff.

Daniel Throssell promoted my Copy Riddles course back in September.

Right now, Kieran Drew is promoting Simple Money Emails.

During both promos, I rolled out of bed each morning to find thousands of dollars worth of new sales, dozens or hundreds of new subscribers, and somebody with standing in the industry going out of his way to say nice things about me and my products. Here’s a few bits from Kieran’s email yesterday:

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SUBJECT: The best email writing course I’ve ever taken

B – E -J – A – K – O – V – I – C

The reason I’m shouting letters over Zoom like a Croatian spelling bee is because my friend asked for my favourite newsletters.

I always recommend this guy. People always sound skeptical. It’s not quite the standard Ben Settle or Justin Welsh you hear chucked around in our space.

But out of the hundreds of lists I’m lurking on, John Bejakovic’s emails glue me to the screen the most, and keep me coming back for more.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say he’s the best email copywriter you’ve probably never heard of.

[… Kieran goes on to explain the offer, course plus two free bonuses, and then he says:]

Yes, this is an affiliate link.

But I’ve taken his course 5 times in 5 months. It’s an hour read yet every time I come out noticeably better at copy. Few courses have that effect – which is why I’m promoting it.

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Who would not want endorsements like this?

​​Aren’t affiliates just the greatest thing in the world?

But maybe you are wiser and more perceptive than I am.

“Kinda cherrypicking there, ain’t you John? Both Kieran and Daniel are pretty atypical cases.”

Maybe.

They do both have a list that they email regularly. They have both built a bond with that list, and authority and trust. And more.

They both cultivate discipline in their readers, rather than preaching the gospel of the 4-hour workweek. They both, explicitly or implicitly, repel people who aren’t down with their message.

In short, both Kieran and Daniel have spent time building up a quality list and emailing themselves into a healthy, respect-filled relationship with that list. And now I get to benefit from it.

I’m not sure what my point is, except:

1) Great affiliates are great, and

2) If you want to be a great affiliate, start a list today. And if you already have one, email it more often, starting today.

And if you don’t want to be anybody’s affiliate, but you simply want to have the opportunity to sell any reasonable and helpful offer you decide to create, start a list today. And if you already have one… well, you know where I’m going with this.

In fact, you probably knew all this before. But if hasn’t clicked yet, or if something is still holding you back, here’s a course that has helped others before you:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Next Monday: My free presentation about storytelling

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Heads, tails, and possibly possibly other body parts up:

A few days ago, I announced I will hold a free presentation on the topic of, “Next-level storytelling tricks for emails that sell (no hero’s journey, thank you).”

Well, that presentation will happen next Monday, November 6, at 4pm CET/10am EST.

Now about the free part:

Some time ago, Kieran Drew, the bloodthirsty dentist turned gentle yet successful online entrepreneur, asked if he could promote my Simple Money Emails course.

I said sure.

Kieran also asked if we could work together to create a special, one-time bonus to entice his readers to buy.

I again said sure. But I also said this special, one-time bonus will go to my previous buyers of the course as well.

So that’s what this storytelling webinar is about.

I solicited questions about storytelling a few days ago.

I got several tons of replies and several hundred tons of questions.

I will be answering the most interesting ones on the webinar. I will also have some of my best storytelling techniques and tricks to share.

If you already have Simple Money Emails, you should have gotten an email from me earlier today with the instructions on joining this webinar. You can join live, or I will send out the recording after.

If you do not yet have Simple Money Emails, you can get it at the link at the end of this email.

And if you decide to get it before the time of the webinar, next Monday at 4pm CET, you will also get this storytelling webinar as a free bonus. After that, no free bonus for you.

So if this storytelling info is something you care about and want, I’d suggest taking care of it right now, while’s it’s on your mind.

​​As you might know already, I am strict about deadlines, and not even Kieran’s teeth-pulling wiles could get me to change my mind about that.

​​Here’s that link:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Kieran Drew offers me some feedback

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A few days ago, I got an email from Kieran Drew with the subject line, “Feedback.”

As you might know, Kieran is a bit of a star in the creative entrepreneur space. He has something like 187k followers on Twitter. He also has a big and growing email newsletter, with over 25k readers.

This past May, Kieran launched his writing course, High Impact Writing. He sold $140k worth of it in five days.

Then in September, Kieran relaunched his writing course… and made over $180k from it.

Clearly, the guy knows a thing or two about online businesses, course creation, and keeping audiences engaged.

And with that preamble, let me now share a paragraph from that email Kieran sent me. He wrote:

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I sat with MVE last night and (I don’t say this lightly), it’s one of my favourite courses. Maybe because it’s written, and super relevant to me, but I haven’t enjoyed something like that since Andre chaperon auto responder.

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An early chapter from the Saga of Bejako:

The reason I got into online marketing and then copywriting was that a long time ago, I saw marketer Hollis Carter stand up on stage at Mindvalley and talk about his business, which was publishing books for people on Kindle.

In the middle of his talk, Hollis said as a throwaway how his goal is to get book readers onto an email list, and then give them the “Soap Opera Sequence” from Autoresponder Madness by Andre Chaperon.

I took note of that.

So Andre Chaperon’s Autoresponder Sequence became the first copywriting course I ever went through.

And a “7-part Soap Opera Sequence” became the first copywriting service I ever offered the world, back in 2015, on Fiverr, for $5. (I charge even more now.)

Anyways, it’s gratifying to hear my Most Valuable Email course being compared to Andre’s course. But it’s much more gratifying to have people like Kieran going through MVE multiple times, and getting real value from it.

But about that:

Most Valuable Email is not for everyone.

You need to 1) have an email list and be willing to write to it regularly and 2) write about marketing and copywriting topics, because the Most Valuable Email trick will not work in all markets and niches.

But if you fit those two criteria, and you want to see what’s so enjoyable about MVE as a course and about the results it creates, then take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

Deadline for MVE before price triples like Amazon in 1999

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Three hours from now is the deadline to get my Most Valuable Email course before the price goes up from $100 to $297.

That will happen tonight, as surely as fortune is a woman, at exactly 8:31pm CET.

If you’ve been on the fence and wondering whether MVE is worth getting, and whether it’s worth the price I ask of it and more, consider the follow testimonial I got a few days ago:

“Just retook your courses mate – so good. V underpriced IMO.”

If that seems like a rather brief testimonial to crow about, let me explain. It came as a throwaway comment, a part of a longer email exchange I recently had w/ Kieran Drew.

As you might know, Kieran is a bit of a star in the creative entrepreneur space:

​​He has something like 182 thousand followers on Twitter. He has a big and growing email newsletter. But perhaps most impressively, he has his own course on writing, High Impact Writing. He launched that this past May, to his own audience, at $297.

Result?

A few halting sales the first day… some more the next day… many more still the day after… still more the day after…

​All in all 487 people bought.

​​Kieran took in a cool $140k with his first product launch over 5 days.

So when Kieran makes a throwaway comment that my courses are so good (he has Most Valuable Email and my recent 9 Deadly Email Sins), I take notice and make a point of telling the world. And when Kieran says my offers are very undepriced, I take notice and take action also.

Which us brings us back to that deadline. It’s almost here. And it really is deadly. If you’d rather be safe, here’s where to get MVE before the price triples:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/