Maliha Mannan

Is your list too small for list swaps?

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For several decades now, I’ve been recommending list swaps as a way to grow your email list.

(List swap = you promote somebody else to your list, in exchange for them promoting you to theirs.)

The #1 objection I hear is:

“My list is too small to make it worth anybody’s while.”

How small is too small?

4 people?

100 people?

200 people?

I was recently on a call with a list owner who has a list of 1,500 entrepreneurs. He said he’s worried his list is too small to do list swaps!

That dude asked for my advice about approaching people for list swaps. What I told him is:

1. A fantastic lead magnet and solid emails will go a long way.

Right now, I’m doing a list swap with somebody who has a list of 150 people… because he’s willing to custom create a lead magnet I know my audience will get value from. Plus his emails are solid.

2. You can always offer to make things right.

If somebody’s list is bigger than yours, you can offer to promote them multiple times, now and then again in 6 months or in a year etc. (In the end, that’s the deal I ended up striking with the guy in point 1.)

3. Money can plug the gap. You can always offer to both promote the other person AND to pay them something to make the exchange more equitable.

So?

Are you convinced now?

Are you gonna rush out and start doing list swaps?

I hope so.

But if not, I gotta tell you my dark-psychology conclusion here:

I don’t think list size is really what’s holding people back from doing list swaps.

Rather, I think it’s the same old culprit that holds back pretty much everybody, pretty much all the time:

Fear of rejection.

Putting yourself out there… and having somebody tell you no or ignore you… and feeling so small and worthless because of it.

If that’s your situation, then I’d suggest, in the words of business coach Rich Schefren, that you put your business goals ahead of your personal development goals.

It would be great to not care about being rejected, or to just do stuff in spite of this fear.

But while you work on that, it can make sense to look for alternate routes to achieve your business goals.

I’d like to point you to an opportunity to do so right now.

Maliha Mannan, who runs the Side Blogger and who is a member of my Daily Email House community, has a list of 9,000 online creators and business owners and people who want to become such.

Maliha is auctioning off a classified ad spot in every Sunday edition of her newsletter… FOR THE REST OF THIS YEAR.

Bidding starts at $2.

More info here:

https://www.skool.com/anthill-club-6065/your-official-invitation-to-my-basementbackyard-party

I’m jealous of this lead gen funnel

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Last August, I promoted Igor Kheifets’s $3.99 book, Click Send Earn, as an affiliate.

$3.99? As an affiliate?

Yes. Because Igor pays out a $30 affiliate commission for each $3.99 sale.

The result was I sent two emails, and made Igor 69 sales, while making a little short of $2100 in commissions for myself.

Igor has got a super smart lead gen funnel here, and the offer he makes — $3.99 sale, $30 CPA — has gotten a buncha other list owners besides me interested in promoting.

Maliha Mannan of the Side Blogger promoted, as did Csaba Borzasi, as did Lawrence Bernstein of Ad Money Machine, with a promo that did so well last October that he is reprising it right now, just three months later.

The reason Igor can offer to pay all these folks $30 for each $3.99 sale is that he has a half dozen order form bumps and a long list of upsells once people buy the book.

Igor knows what a new customer in this funnel is worth to him, and I suspect it’s over $30. Of course, each new customer becomes worth much more when they get on Igor’s email list and are getting exposed to Igor’s back-end offers, many of them high-ticket, which Igor knows to convert.

I am frankly jealous of Igor for this funnel. I would love to have affiliates jostling and clamoring to promote either of my two books, or the new book I’m planning to publish this year.

But who’s got time and energy enough to create and dial in all these order bumps… and upsells… and copy… and funnels… and back-end offers?

Igor does, apparently.

And he does it while working 4 hours a day, 5 days a week, and having a family, and two kids, and writing and publishing comic books, and playing video games, and watching Netflix.

It wasn’t always like this.

Igor used to work 70+ hour weeks on his biz. He was grinding and hustling and making $130k a year. That might sound like a dream to you except it really wasn’t, considering how much he was working, and how little he was able to enjoy it. Plus he was making literally 3% of the $4.3 million he makes a year now.

Today, Igor works much less, gets much more done, makes much more money, and enjoys his free time without thinking about working or feeling guilty for not working.

I’m telling you this because this past November, Igor did a masterclass covering his system for getting more done in less time. He documented the exact productivity system that took him from A to B, from overworked and underpaid to having lots of free time and making a lot of money and publishing comic books.

I’ve been through Igor’s masterclass. I’m taking ideas from it. I’m applying them to what I do.

And starting tomorrow, since it’s the fresh start of a New Year, I will be promoting this system to you as well.

Of course, there will be a special deal.

Of course, there will be bonuses.

Of course, there will be a bit of a party theme, it being only a few days after New Year’s Eve. But party theme or not, the promise here is serious:

Work less, get more done, and feel zero guilt when you’re not working.

If that’s something that makes your subtle body tingle, then read my email tomorrow.

Anti-proof #1A

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Yesterday, I wrote an email wondering about a strange social proof conundrum:

Why do endorsements and testimonials sometimes act as powerful proof elements… while at other times they act as a red flag that signals the offer itself is unproven and iffy?

I didn’t have an answer I was convinced by, beyond shrugging my shoulders and saying, “because readers can basically sniff out if you’re coming from a position of power or not.”

I got a number of replies to yesterday’s email, from readers who both disagree with me and agree with me. For example, reader John McDermott thinks it all comes down to gut feelings:

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It obviously depends on the audience to a certain extent, but I think people make buying decisions largely from ‘gut feelings.’ That is, whether the offer invokes their defenses on some ‘spidey senses’ level. Or not.

Just as a salesman shouldn’t actually wear blue suede shoes, an ad shouldn’t show any ‘tells’ that the audience will perceive.

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On the other hand, a reader named Devd thinks it’s about structuring your copy in the right way:

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I think towards the end of the book, Gene Schwartz talked about something related to this in Breakthrough Advertising.

Like being the mind reader, and amply supplying the copy with claim-proof and other stuff as required.

And not blabbering about just proof or claims alone for too long, and having the right thinking process to switch as needed based on the thought process of your prospect after reading each line you write.

That’d probably help avoid the copy feeling too needy, I guess.

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A mysterious French copywriter or marketer, who keeps buying my offers under different names but goes by “Bro in Arms” in his emails, thinks it might not have anything to do with social proof at all:

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Or maybe it’s just a great product.

And like Elon Musk says in his biography, great products sell themselves through word of mouth.

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On the other hand, marketer Sean McCool, whose Persuasion by the Pint podcast I appeared on last Friday, thinks it’s the framing of the endorsement that matters:

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I think the speaker in the letter matters. If a “publisher” is talking about the guru and then shares testimonials about the guru in the letter, that is much more powerful and accepted than if the guru is the voice in the letter.

Thats why so many Agora promos use a publisher.

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And Maliha Mannan, who writes dailyish emails and sells courses over at The Side Blogger, offers an insider’s perspective:

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I have a hard time believing in testimonials, but I know I’m an outlier.

In most cases, as a buyer, a testimonial only works on me, regardless of whether it’s a testimonial about the person making the offer or the offer itself, when I have already developed a positive view of the seller. In that case, a testimonial of the offer itself comes off stronger than that of the person (because I already like the person?)…

On the other hand, as a seller of offers, I usually work with what I have. Since I’m pretty bad at asking for testimonials, most of what I have are things people have said in the passing, and most of these tend to be comments about me.

For example, “I like how you teach,” is an email after someone has taken a course. But it’s not exactly about the course itself.

On a more curious note, I get the best testimonials from fellow info-entrepreneurs. Maybe because we understand what it means to have a really good testimonial, we tend to give out the best testimonials ourselves.

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So? Are we any closer to unraveling this mystery?

I personally still don’t have an answer that convinces me. But perhaps some of the above comments gave you a good idea, maybe even one you can run with in your own marketing.

In any case, it was important to share these reader perspectives. That’s because daily emails should feel as much as possible as a dinner party, rather than as a sermon or a university lecture.

Since I end all my emails by promoting something, let me now point you to my Daily Email Habit service, which helps you write daily emails that feel like a dinner party, while at the same time getting people at the party to pay the tab at the end of the night.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have a good number of “fellow info-entrepreneurs” as subscribers to Daily Email Habit. I’ve got testimonials on the sales page from some of them, saying things like:

#1. “Fourth day in DEH. Turned the Elvis bullet into an email. Got a sale to my £170 course. So I’d say the investment has paid for itself.”

#2. “Within 5 minutes of getting your first ‘prompt’ in my inbox, I was cranking out my first email. Zero resistance.”

#3. “10 minutes going from sheer panic about what to write to a finished email building my expertise and selling my stuff.”

#4. “Exactly what I needed to get me thinking about my list.”

#5. “My best Black Friday yet… your service contributed to this result.”

If you’d like to find out more about Daily Email Habit, and see if it might make sales for you too:

https://bejakovic.com/deh/

Yesterday didn’t work out as I planned

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Yesterday I left Stockholm, Sweden, around 10am, with plans to fly and arrive, after a layover in Belgrade, Serbia, to my home town of Zagreb, Croatia, by about 2:30pm.

Things didn’t work out as I planned.

First, I didn’t make my connecting flight in Belgrade (I blame Nikola Tesla Airport for this).

Second, there were no other flights from Belgrade to Zagreb yesterday, so I decided to take the bus, which left at 4:15pm. The drive is about four hours, but factor in about an hour for the border crossing, and we should be in Zagreb by 10pm?

Again, things didn’t work out as I planned.

I had many adventures last night, including…

– Walking through the corn fields for hours alongside the 3-mile-long border-crossing queue…

– Seeing an old Serbian man on my bus watching two-black-dudes-and-a-blonde hardcore porn on his phone…

– Border police openly asking for a bribe of two beers and 50 euro to allow the bus to skip the line and cut down the wait by an hour and a half…

– Stumbling around an Orthodox cemetery in the dark, in no man’s land, between the Serbian and Croatian border, at the witching hour…

– Driving out of the way to some small village to swap bus drivers, Le Mans style, after our bus driver became too exhausted to drive in his 10th hour behind the wheel…

… but I really can’t go into any of that in tremendous detail. That’s because my bus, which was supposed to arrive around 10pm, ended up arriving at 4:05am, almost 12 hours after it set out.

I dragged my carcass to the nearest hotel and had a lousy and short night of sleep.

Right now, as I write this, I’m exhausted. And in any case, it’s soon time for me to get back on the bus and head for the Croatian coast, so I can meet up with the rest of the numerous and warlike Bejakovic clan in the seaside resort town of Opatija.

So without further ado, let me just get to my offer. It’s my Simple Money Emails course, which I’ve promoted a few times over the past week, and made sales of each time I promoted it.

In one email this week I featured a testimonial I got for SME from online creator Kieran Drew. Yesterday, I got another high-profile testimonial, this one from Maliha Mannan, founder of The Side Blogger, who helps people monetize their skills via blogging and newsletters. Says Maliha:

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So… since you’re promoting SME, thought I’d share this…

Like Kieran Drew, I too, go through this course… often… haven’t really counted, but often… and yet, I forget stuff. Today, I was re-reading the 12 rules of emails and when I came across #6, I was like… Oookaayyy… I just violated rule #6… inside a promo email no less!

Anyway. Good stuff. One of my more underrated investments of all time.

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For more information on this underrated investment, or if you’d like to help support my daily bus habit:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

The fiction business

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The last week or so, I’ve been spending a lot of time obsessively checking how my new book is doing on Amazon. This morning, in a bout of such checking, Amazon offered to show me its “Movers and Shakers: Our biggest gainers in sales rank over the past 24 hours. Updated frequently.”

This is something I had long wished for but didn’t know existed — a kind of first derivative of sales, what’s selling better lately, what’s moving up in the ranks quickly?

I checked the Kindle store. Unfortunately, there are just two pages of movers and shakers for the entire Kindle store, as opposed to movers and shakers across subcategories.

And what is moving and shaking in the Kindle store?

The same damn stuff as always.

Out of the 100 top movers and shakers, 99 are fiction books, mostly romance novels and literotica. Exactly one is a non-fiction book, Mark Manson’s Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, which, based on its promise alone, might as well be classified as fiction.

This made me think of something I heard Dan Kennedy say in one of his closed-door, multithousand-dollar, info marketing seminars. Said Dan:

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Many people make the mistake of thinking we’re in the non fiction business. Big mistake. We’re in the fiction business. First of all, remember that most of your customers never do anything with most of what they buy from you, therefore, their experience is fictional, not non-fictional. [The small audience of top info marketers laughs, but Dan continues.] Laugh if you want. I’m being very serious. They’re having a fictional experience. They actually believe they’re doing something. they are not, but they think they are doing something.

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If you sell information online, this is a very bitter pill to swallow, and in fact, it’s one that I keep refusing to swallow.

Which is dumb, because why argue against Dan Kennedy, who basically made everybody who has been successful in the info publishing business?

But I keep hoping and in fact working on getting people to not just buy my stuff, but to actually consume it, and ultimately, to put it to use and to benefit from it. It’s slow going, but it gives me hope and a goal to look forward to.

Anyways, as I say in the conclusion of my new 10 Commandments book, I hope you will apply the 10 principles I share in that book in your own business and personal life.

I’ve worked hard to make the book both interesting and practical, with new distinctions to help you actually get traction, putting to work good ideas that you may have heard of before but haven’t done anything with. Of course, you might also come across commandments that are entirely new to you. Put those to work as well.

And on that note, I’ve gotten a few more reviews after writing my dirge about having just one review a few days ago. Here’s a review from Maliha Mannan, who writes over at The Side Blogger:

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As someone who makes an offer almost daily via email, it’s essential that people like me, and also buy from me. This book is full of ideas for doing just that. I read it too quickly, so I plan to read it again soon (it’s a tiny book but packed with curious ideas that you should take a minute to fully comprehend, appreciate, and implement). I see it becoming one of those books I read at least once a year. It’s that good!

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In case you too would like to get a copy of my new non-fiction book:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

My new personal best: 2,030 days

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Yesterday, I got a notification from Gumroad to report on a new sale of Gasper Crepinsek’s ChatGPT Mastery program, which I’ve been promoting for the past few days.

(The deadline for ChatGPT Mastery is tonight, in less than 12 hours, at 12 midnight EST.)

A bit of behind the scenes:

I have an “LTV” spreadsheet, in which I write down every bit of money that comes in via my newsletter, so I can keep track of which of my readers are responsible for my income.

The email address of the person who bought yesterday was familiar to me… but I didn’t know their name.

I searched in Gmail. It turned out this person signed up to my list back in 2019.

(That’s why I remembered the email address. I probably had 5 people on my list total at that time, and I was obsessively checking who opened my email each day.)

Since then, this person (whose name I still don’t know) never replied to any of my emails, and never bought anything that I promoted.

Until now, almost 6 years later.

I previously had a case study — a previous personal best — of 775 days from the time somebody signed up to my list to the first time they bought something I was promoting.

2,030 days definitely beats it, and makes for a new personal best.

I’m telling you this for two reasons.

First reason is a bit of kick, if you still need it, to start or stick with daily emailing. Maybe you haven’t gotten started yet. Or maybe you are now, like I was then, checking your email opens, and finding that, yeah, maybe people read, but they never reply, and they certainly don’t buy nothing.

They will, in time, if you only keep at it.

Second reason is that I shared this new personal best inside my Daily Email House community yesterday. And Maliha Mannan, who writes over at The Side Blogger, and who is also promoting Gasper’s ChatGPT Mastery, wrote:

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Funny coincidence: yesterday I made a sale and the person who bought has been a subscriber since 2021 and never bought anything from me until yesterday 🤘

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Coincidence… or maybe not?

Maybe ChatGPT Mastery is just an exciting offer at the right time, which is attracting even people who have been quiet for a long time?

You can decide for yourself, if you like. (If you don’t, the deadline will decide for you.) To help you do that, here’s my original email, explaining why I’m endorsing and promoting ChatGPT Mastery:

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Today I’d like to recommend to you a 30-day program called ChatGPT Mastery, which is about… mastering ChatGPT, with the goal of having a kind of large and fast horse to ride on.

Here’s a list of exciting facts I’ve prepared for you about this new offer:

#1. ChatGPT Mastery is a cohort course — it kicks off and ends on a specific date — that helps you actually integrate and benefit from AI.

The idea being, things in the AI space are changing so fast that anything that came out even a few months ago is likely to be out of date.

And rather than saying “Oh let me spend a few dozen hours every quarter researching the latest advice on how to actually use this stuff” — because you won’t, just like I won’t – you can just get somebody else to do the work of cutting a path for you through the quickly regenerating AI jungle.

#2. I myself have gone through through ChatGPT Mastery, from A-Z, all 30 days, during the last cohort.

I didn’t pay for it because I was offered to get in for free.

I did go through it first and foremost for my own selfish interests — I feel a constant sense of guilt over not using AI enough in what I do — and only then with a secondary goal of promoting it if I benefited from it enough. So here I am.

#3. ChatGPT Mastery is created and run by Gasper Crepinsek. Gasper is an ex-Boston Consulting Group guy and from what I can tell, one of those hardworking and productive consulting types, the kind I look upon with a mixture of wonder and green envy.

But to hear Gasper tell it, he quit his consulting job to have more freedom, started creating info products online like everybody else, realized he had just bought himself another 70 hr/week job, and then had the idea to automate as much of it as he could with AI.

He’s largely succeeded — he now spends his mornings eating croissants and sipping coffee while strolling around Paris, because most of his work of content creation and social media and even his trip planning have been automated in large part or in full.

#4. Before I went through the 30 days of ChatGPT Mastery, I had already been using ChatGPT daily for a couple years. Inevitably, that means a good part of what Gasper teaches was familiar to me.

Other stuff he teaches was simply not relevant (I won’t be using ChatGPT to write my daily emails, thank you). The way I still benefited from ChatGPT Mastery was:

– By having my mind opened to using ChatGPT for things for things I hadn’t thought of before (just one example: I did a “dopamine reset” protocol over 4 weeks, which was frankly wonderful, and which ChatGPT designed for me, and which I got the idea for while doing ChatGPT Mastery)

– By seeing Gasper’s very structured, consulting-minded approach to automating various aspects of his business, and being inspired to port some of that to my own specific situation

– With several valuable meta-prompts that I continue to use, such as the prompt for generating custom GPTs

#5. The way you could benefit from ChatGPT Mastery is likely to be highly specific to what you do and who you are.

The program focuses on a different use case every day. Some days will be more relevant to you than others. The previous cohort covered topics like competitor analysis, insights based on customer calls or testimonials, and of course the usual stuff like content and idea generation, plus hobuncha more.

If you do any of the specific things that Gasper covers, and if you do them on at least an occasional basis, then odds are you will get a great return on both the time and money and that ChatGPT Mastery requires of you, before the 30 days are out.

Beyond that, ChatGPT Mastery can open your mind to what’s possible, give you confidence and a bunch of examples to get you spotting what could be automated in what you do, plus the techniques for how to do it (I’ve already automated a handful of things in what I do, and I have a list of next things to do).

#6. The time required for ChatGPT Mastery is about 15-20 minutes per day for 30 days. The money required is an upfront payment of $199.

I can imagine that one or the other of these is not easy for you to eke out in the current moment.

All I can say is that it’s an investment that’s likely to pay you back many times over, in terms of both time and money. And the sooner you make that investment, the greater and quicker the returns will come.

#7. If you’d like to find out the full details about ChatGPT Mastery, or even to sign up before the cohort kicks off:

https://bejakovic.com/gasper

A free tip to minimize unsubscribes

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A few days ago, Maliha Mannan, who writes dailyish emails over at The Side Blogger, posted something interesting inside my little Daily Email House community.

Apparently, Maliha was trying a HARO-like service – HARO, which stands for Help A Reporter Out, basically being a service where industry experts can provide answers and quotes for reporters, in exchange for attribution or a link.

On a whim, Maliha decided to ask for a marketing specialist’s thoughts on daily email newsletters. She put her request out into the ether, and like a lightning bolt, an answer crashed upon her:

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Hi, this is C S Sultan, an experienced marketer for over 14 years and doing email marketing for over 5 years now.

As per our data, the highest you should send in a week are 2 emails. But the best would be to send only 1. Then moment we send more that 2, the unsubscribe rate goes up by 70%.

Our email list consists of marketers, content creators, bloggers, and small-to-medium businesses.

Even so, the highest response we get is when we send a single email every week at a fix time and day (for us, usually that’s Tuesday 8AM EST for one segment, and Thursday 8AM EST for another segment).

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So there you go. An excellent tip to keep your unsubscribe rates really low. Though I imagine if C S Sultan only emailed his list every month, or maybe not at all, he might do even better with the unsubscribes.

Of course, there are other possible goals in the world than minimizing unsubscribes. For example, maximizing opens, clickthroughs, sales, or better yet, lifetime sales.

Or, something more wooly but still important, such as maximizing the quality of people who are buying from you… maximizing the results you get for customers or clients or even readers who don’t buy from you… or maximizing your own sensation of the influence and respect you get in your niche, and the satisfaction with which you run your business and life.

For all those, here’s another free tip:

Email daily.

Yes, people will unsubscribe. But people will read also, and way more than if you just email once a week or once an ice age.

And more people will buy, more will recommend you, more will look to you for entertainment, guidance, or simply the habit that they’ve formed of taking a few minutes each day (gasp!) to consume something fun or thoughtful you’ve put out into the world. Plus you might even grow to like the process. I know I’ve gotten there.

Like Maliha wrote, maybe C S Sultan should sign up for my Daily Email Habit service. I doubt that he will.

But maybe you are not playing to lose, but are playing to win. In that case, Daily Email Habit might be a fit for you. For more info, before the next puzzle has come and gone:

https://bejakovic.com/deh