Matt Giaro

My Prime Directive for writing this email newsletter

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A few weeks ago, marketer Matt Giaro interviewed me for his podcast.

Maybe because Matt also writes daily emails, or maybe because he’s into direct marketing, but he asked me questions I actually enjoyed answering and had something to say about.

The result is that this podcast appearance is one of my less horrific ones.

At one point, Matt asked me how I think about tying up my emails into the offers I’m making.

I told Matt how I think about that. But then I told him something that I think is much more important.

​​In fact, it’s my Prime Directive for writing this email newsletter.

It has never been to make money.

Maybe you think I’m signaling how good of a guy I am by telling you that. That’s not it. Consider this:

My Prime Directive also hasn’t been to provide value for my readers, or even to entertain them.

Nope.

My Prime Directive for this newsletter is very unsexy, very uninspiring, and a bit inhuman, almost Borg-like.

It’s simply… to keep this newsletter going day after day.

I’m writing this email from the Athens airport, waiting for my flight to Barcelona.

I’ve been in Greece for the past 5 days. It’s a kind of vacation, though each day I found a break in my “vacation time” to write this daily email.

Perhaps that’s because I’m a bit of a obsessive-compulsive beaver.

Or perhaps it’s a perfectly logical, rational decision. In the words of Morgan Housel, the author of The Psychology of Money:

“What I want to have is endurance. I want to be so unbreakable financially in the short run to increase the odds that I will be able to stick around as an investor for the stocks that I do own to compound for the longest period of time. If you understand the math of compounding, you know that the big gains come at the end of the period.”

… and I’d add, it’s not just stocks. This is also true for other assets, such as skills you’re building, knowledge you’re stacking up, content you’re creating, or email subscribers you’re attracting.

That said, just because my Prime Directive is rather inhuman — “resistance is futile, another email will follow tomorrow” — doesn’t mean I can’t on occasion try to make these emails valuable to you.

So let me take this moment to remind you of the old chestnut, which is no less true because it’s preached so often:

The best time to finally start something you have been putting off for an eternity — is today.

It doesn’t have to be an email list you write to daily.

There are plenty of other good investments out there, which you can start investing a nickel’s worth of time, energy, or money into right now.

But if you don’t hate writing… and if you happen to like flexibility and independence… then an email list of engaged readers is a good investment to start today.

And if you want some practical tips about how to do that in a way that meshes with your sense of self, assuming you’re not a natural-born salesman, then the podcast I did with Matt might be worth listening to.

The topic for that podcast was “How to send daily emails that make money without selling.”

The topic came up because I heard from a few people that it never seems I’m selling in these emails.

Of course, that can be because there are times I’m not actually selling anything, like today. (The Borg can subsist for months without food.)

On the other hand, there were also unbroken periods — stretching for years at a time — when each email I sent ended with a CTA to buy a paid product I was selling.

And yet, people somehow didn’t find it salesy… and they wanted to know how I do that.

If you’re curious too, I break it down in the interview with Matt. The link is here:

Sizzling tracks at the gay nudist beach of death

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Yesterday, I was walking on the train tracks. It’s how you get to Dead Man’s Beach.

It turns out Dead Man’s Beach is a nudist beach. In fact, it turns out it’s a gay nudist beach.

I didn’t know any of this yesterday. I showed up, pretty straight, in my usual city slicker outfit of blue jeans and converse.

I looked down from the cliff that leads to the beach at all the nudity and gayness. There wasn’t very much of either — just two couples and a couple naked dogs.

But back to the train tracks.

In order to get to Dead Man’s Beach, you have to cross the train tracks, because the train runs right along the sea.

Also, in order to get from one part of Dead Man’s Beach to the other, you actually have to walk on the train tracks for a stretch.

Problem:

Every couple of minutes, a speeding train from Barcelona appears out of nowhere and zooms by on the tracks. This is not how Dead Man’s Beach got its name, but the trains really could be deadly.

Solution:

You can actually hear the train coming a good minute before it appears out of nowhere. Not because it’s ringing a bell or hooting a horn or loudly chugging along, but because the train tracks vibrate.

Even when the train is a mile away, the tracks start to give off a sizzling sound that warns you it’s time to move to the side.

Can you hear it now? You should be able to.

Because until tonight, Saturday, at 12 midnight PST, I have a special, free bonus if you buy my Simple Money Emails course.

The bonus is the “lite” version of Matt Giaro’s $397 course Subscribers From Scratch. It will show you how Matt grew his email list, with high-quality subscribers who paid for themselves, via little newsletter ads.

Right now, the deadline is speeding along, and it will come bursting out of its dark tunnel soon.

When that happens, you won’t be able to get Matt’s course any more — not for free in any case.

I won’t be sending any more emails before tonight. But you still have time.

The tracks are sizzling. It’s a warning. You can probably hear it. It’s giving you a chance to get the jump on the deadline. If you’d like to do it right now, before it’s too late:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

You are most probably a cat person

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Yesterday at 3:55pm, I stacked two books under my laptop for a more flattering camera angle, did one final check of my hair, and fired up Zoom.

I was doing a call with Kieran Drew for people who bought his High Impact Writing course.

​​This part of Kieran’s birthday bash series, where he interviewed five people who make their living by writing, including 8-figure course creator Olly Richards, email marketer Chris Orzechowski, and A-list copywriter David Deutsch. And me. ​​

The conversation with Kieran ran for more than an hour. I really enjoyed it.

I will tell you one bit that came up early, and kept coming up in various guises, because it’s probably relevant to you.

Kieran said how social media, in spite of the success it’s given him, drives him crazy.

​​I said how I, in spite of managing my little email business without the help of social media, get pangs of envy when I see how well Kieran’s doing thanks to Twitter and LinkedIn.

And so it goes.

I know agency owners who want to become high-ticket coaches. High-ticket coaches who want to become course creators. Course creators who want to start up an agency.

Legendary curmudgeon Dan Kennedy once summed it up by saying, “People are like cats. They always want to be in the other room.”

At this point, you might expect me to get all preachy and say, ​​”You gotta be happy with whatchu got… you gotta keep your nose down and persist at what you’re doing… you gotta stop yourself from getting distracted by the greenness of your neighbors lawn…”

But like another famous curmudgeon, William Shakespeare, once said, “There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

There’s nothing inherently bad about the fact we’re always looking for new opportunities, improvements, or simply a change from what we already have.

It’s just a part of life.

And rather than saying that’s not how it should be, it makes more sense, to me at least, to accept it adjust to it. To be aware of the drive to go into the other room, to be selective about when you respond to that drive, and to realize that the same drive will most probably crop up even in that other room.

And if you want, you can start practicing that right now.

Because until tomorrow, Saturday, at 12 midnight PST, I have a special, free, other-room bonus if you buy my Simple Money Emails course.

The bonus is the “lite” version of Matt Giaro’s $397 course Subscribers From Scratch. It will show you how Matt grew his email list, with high-quality subscribers who paid for themselves, via little newsletter ads.

I’ve tried this strategy myself in the past, and it worked great for me. I got hundreds of new subscribers, and most often they paid for themselves on day zero.

So if you are sick of social media as a means of growing your list, or if you never wanted to get on social media to start with, then Matt’s course can show you a real alternative.

That said, this newsletter ad approach has its own downsides as well.

Like all other means of growing your list, it will require some work to set up.

Like all other means of growing your list, it will require some work to keep going.

And unlike many other means of growing your list, say Facebook ads or even social media, newsletter ads won’t ever get you tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

But if you want to get a few dozen or a few hundred new subscribers at a time, and you want to get subscribers who actually read your stuff and buy your offers, then newsletter ads can be a good option.

And Matt’s course will show you how to do it.

Again, you get it as a free bonus if you get Simple Money Emails by the deadline, tomorrow, Saturday, at 12 midnight PST. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/​​

P.S. ​​If you bought Simple Money Emails previously, this offer applies to you as well. So does the deadline.

​​You should have gotten an email from me with instructions on how to claim Matt’s Subscribers From Scratch Lite. If you didn’t get the email, then write me and I will sort it out.

The course I wish I had created

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Just a few moments ago, I sent an email to marketer Matt Giaro, telling him he’s free to use the following line and to attribute it to me:

“You took the information I gave you and ran with it much further than I did, and developed a complete system for it and got repeatable results from it, unlike me. I wish I had done what you did, but now that you’ve done it, there’s no need for me to do it on my own and duplicate the work.”

The background:

Some time last fall, Matt contacted me.

​​He saw that, earlier in the year, I had run a $300 classified ad in Josh Spector’s newsletter. He was thinking about doing the same, and he wanted to know my experiences.

So we did a quick little one-hour paid consult.

I told Matt how I ran a few successful newsletter ads (Josh Spector, Daniel Throssell), where I got hundreds of new subscribers who paid for themselves, usually on day zero.

I also told him about the unsuccessful newsletter ads I ran, which just cost me money and probably sender reputation (I’m looking at you, Udimi).

And that was that. Matt said thanks, and we went our separate ways.

Until this March. That’s when I saw that Matt was launching a new course, called Subscribers From Scratch. It was all about how he was getting high-quality newsletter subscribers by running little ads in other newsletters.

The fact is:

The way I was running newsletter ads required a good deal of work. It wasn’t something that I wanted to do every month, much less every week or two.

And since I have plenty of other shiny gewgaws to distract me, I never bothered to figure out how to run newsletter ads repeatably and to still get good results.

But Matt did figure it out.

He took what I told him and ran with it. He developed his own system that allowed him to get a few dozen or a few hundred subscribers each time he ran a newsletter ad.

But much more importantly, he figured out how to get quality subscribers, subscribers who ended up paying for the ad, often in a matter of days.

So like I said to Matt, his Subscribers From Scratch is the course I wish I had created.

I wish I had taken the trouble to figure out a repeatable, scalable system for running newsletter ads. I wish I had packaged it up and sold it.

But I didn’t. And now that he’s done it, I won’t have to.

Right about now, you might expect me to plop in an affiliate link for Matt’s Subscribers From Scratch.

That won’t happen.

Subscribers From Scratch normally sells for $397. But I got Matt to agree to give away a “lite” version of it — all the training and how-to information, minus the bonuses and templates — for free.

Well, for free if you’ve already bought my Simple Money Emails course. Or if you buy it before this Saturday, June 1, at 12 midnight PST.

If you’ve already bought Simple Money Emails, you should have gotten an email from me already with the instructions on how to claim Subscribers From Scratch Lite.

And if you haven’t yet bought it, but you want to learn how to write effective daily emails that make sales, and get Matt’s Subscribers From Scratch Lite for free, and learn how to get readers who actually buy from the emails you write, then here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/