Niche Expert Cold Emails

I grinned when I sat down in the metro but when the doors closed!~

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A few days ago, I got on the metro here in Barcelona and I spotted a rare empty seat. I jumped into it, grinning with satisfaction. But in the very next moment, my face sank.

“Oh no…”

A trio of busking musicians — a guitar, a fiddle, and a drum — had entered the metro car right after me. They were getting ready to play and make me listen.

In a panic, I looked to the doors.

​​​They had just closed.

​​There was no escape.

I sighed and settled in. There must be something worthwhile I can get from this, I said to myself. And there was.

The metro started rumbling and the musical trio started their act. A song about love and flowers, from what little I could understand.

Most of the passengers ignored the music and stared at their phones. A few people looked on and smiled. And the guy sitting next to me, he even clapped along silently.

After all, the buskers were singing and playing well.

They kept playing through the next stop. As the stop after that neared, they wrapped up their act.

​​Hat in hand, they walked up and down the car, modestly asking for money.

From where I was sitting, it looked like they didn’t get a single euro cent.

Not a cent. Not from any of the dozens of passengers who paid or didn’t pay attention… not from my clapping neighbor… and not from me, certainly.

Sad? Not sad? Serves them right? The trio made their way to the next car. And they got ready to do the whole act all over again.

​​Now let me tie this up to something you might care about if you are a copywriter or for-hire marketer:

A lot of service providers in this field, including myself at an earlier day, do something similar to those metro car buskers.

They naively think that if they provide a good service – copywriting, ad management, singing and playing the fiddle — then, in a big enough group of random and disinterested people, they are sure to hit upon at least a few who will want to pay for that service.

So these service providers collect a bunch of emails of business owners… they craft the perfect cold email… maybe they even take the time to put on a little song and dance, in the form of a custom sample.

But there’s a problem with this kind of thinking. It doesn’t take into account the disastrous “buying context” that’s working against them:

Prospects who are in the wrong headspace… negative positioning/social proof… technical problems… a suspicious odor of pushiness and neediness… the time, work, and emotional toil of putting on a show, over and over, for people who don’t want to hear it, and who give you no feedback, encouragement, or money in return.

That’s not to say that cold email cannot or will not ever work.

I mean, millions of buskers around the world do well, much better than those guys on the metro.

Just one day after that metro performance, I was sitting in Madrid, and I watched a busking duo — a guitar and an accordion this time — clean up a pedestrian street filled with bars and restaurants. They must have made a hundred euro or more, for about five minutes of playing.

These guys were providing pretty much the same service as those Barcelona metro buskers. But in a different context. With different positioning.

And it’s the same with cold email.

In spite of giving it a good go a few times, I’ve never had success with “standard” cold email, the way it’s talked about online.

But I have had success with cold email a few times, in a different context, with different positioning.

After some thinking, I even formalized this into a system, one I call Niche Expert Cold Emails. And I’ve prepared a training all about it.

And it’s free. ​​

Well, free as in, it won’t cost you one euro cent.

But there is a catch. In case you are curious, you can read more about it here:

https://bejakovic.com/free-offer-niche-expert-cold-emails/

Cold email to future email marketing work in 10 days

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11 days ago, a marketer named Jon Williams wrote in to take me up on my Niche Expert Cold Emails offer. I sent Jon the promised training video. Yesterday, he wrote back with the following result (edited slightly):

Hi John!

That didn’t take long at all.

I just got your reply with a better email if possible technique for cold outreach and it gained me some future email marketing work as a kind of white label service for a guy in my hometown of all places lol.

How it worked out:

I downloaded his video making guide and got onto his list. I actually just wanted the guide and was all good with it as it helps me out making educational videos to attract more clients.

Anyhow, I noticed I didn’t actually get the link to download the template.

Worse than that, the email went to spam folder immediately.

After checking, I found it and emailed a reply to him directly saying it went to spam and after running in a quick diagnostic, I found out what was causing that error & told him how to fix it, for free.

(I know it’s a little different than your technique)

He was thrilled to hear about that because he’s needed to fix it and just hadn’t taken the time to fix it before I replied to his email.

After he’d emailed me back a working link the conversation just went from there when he asked “do you specialize in email marketing?”

We just had our first a conversation / intro call yesterday over zoom!

Here’s an ugly truth from my lean-and-hungry freelancing days:

Back when I was hunting for clients, I tried cold emailing on a few different occasions.

Each time, I found it a frustrating waste of time and effort.

But like Jon’s story above shows, cold email can sometimes produce good results, and it can even do so quickly.

The key in my experience is not to get invested in any one lead. Either in terms of your emotions… or in terms of the work you put in to reach out to them.

I know that goes against a lot of cold email “wisdom” out there.

​​”Wisdom” says you should separate yourself by researching your lead’s family history and his dog’s name… writing a short novel, for free, featuring the lead’s ancestors and his dog… then publishing the novel on Amazon under your cold email lead’s name… then emailing a screenshot of your ghostwritten book along with any earnings the book has made and a message that says, “If this message happens to reach you, can we please please for the love of patience please get on a call?”

On the other hand:

I’m also not suggesting you just spam every potent client with the same canned cold email, regardless of how drunkenly clever you make it. I tried that also. It doesn’t work either, or at least it never did for me.

So how exactly do you make cold emails work?

One possible strategy is described up there in Jon’s comment.

Another two strategies are what I talk about in the Niche Expert Cold Email training. These are the only two cold email strategies that led me to client work (both led to sizeable clients).

​​And if for some reason I absolutely had to win a client today via cold email… or alternately have an anvil dropped on my head like Wile E. Coyote… then these two strategies are what I would reach for and use.

So here’s the deal:
​​
Niche Expert Cold Emails is a free training I put out last January.

But it’s really only “free” as in “direct-response free.” Meaning you still gotta do something to get me to send it to you.

​​But if you do want this training, and you want to see what you would have to do, then here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/free-offer-niche-expert-cold-emails/

My fruitful first Clickbank failure

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This year marks the 10th anniversary of the publication of my first-ever book. Well… book might be a bit grandiose.

It was more like an 85-page pdf. And by publication, I really just mean I put it up on Clickbank for sale.

The title of this thing was the Salary Negotiation Blueprint. The background was this:

10 years ago, I was a dissatisfied office drone working at an IT company. Day after day, I’d sit at my computer, drumming my fingers on the desk, looking out the window as the sun set at 4pm. “And I still have to sit here and pretend to work for 2 more hours!” I wanted to get free.

And then I heard about Mike Geary. Mike was making a million dollars a month selling his own 85-page pdf, The Truth About Abs, on Clickbank.

How could I do the same?

Fortunately, the same source who clued me in to Mike Geary (Tim Ferriss) also clued me in to that most highly revered and valuable guide to direct marketing:

Gary Halbert’s Boron Letters.

Being the bookish type that I am, I got the Boron Letters and I read them. At the time, I wasn’t sure what exactly was so great about them. But I did get one thing from Gary, and that’s when he talks about how to create an info product:

1. Pick a topic
2. Read 5 of the best books on the topic and take notes
3. Write up your own book/85-page report with the best information taken from those other books
4. Make millions!

And here we get to the crossroads.

Because in an unusual move for me… I actually put the Boron Letters down… stared at the void for a bit… and then took a hesitating, first step forward.

In other words, I stopped reading and actually did what Gary was telling me to do. I followed his steps 1-3.

The outcome was the Salary Negotiation Blueprint. I put it up on Clickbank. And then, I rubbed my hands together in anticipation of step 4 aaaand…

Total sales? 0. Total money made? $0. Total learning experience?

Well, with 10 years of hindsight and about 6 years of working as a direct response copywriter, let me highlight a few of the mistakes I made with this first project:

1. Name. I went with Salary Negotiation Blueprint just because every other info product at the time was “something something blueprint.”

But what exactly was the promise in my name? That with my blueprint, you could… negotiate? Not very tempting.

2. “Affiliates will love it!” No, they won’t.

You can see public lists of what Clickbank affiliates love to promote, and salary negotiation guides are not it. This was a lesson I could have learned from the Boron Letters — sell to a starving crowd.

3. My market. What profile of person is going to buy an ebook on salary negotiation?

I can’t say, because I never managed to sell a single copy. But my guess is, these aren’t exactly players with money. More likely to be schlubs on a budget — much like me at the time.

6. The back end. What can you sell to somebody who bought a guide on salary negotiation? A course on networking over the water cooler? Or a guide on Slack tips and tricks, maybe? It feels like grasping at straws.

Ultimately, salary negotiation is a one-time need. Which is bad — because the profits come on the back end.

7. The price. I can’t remember the price. I think I started out at $37, and when I failed to make any sales there, I moved it down to $17, where I continued to fail to make sales.

But whether at $37 or at $17, my price was completely disconnected to the value of my offer. There was zero thought or strategy to it.

So there you go. Maybe you can learn a bit about direct marketing from my mistakes above. Or maybe you knew all this simple stuff before.

Either way, you’re in a good place.

Because there are mountains of people out there who don’t know even these basics of direct marketing and copywriting.

​​And not all these people are as clueless and unsuccessful as I was 10 years ago. Some of them have working businesses — even thriving businesses — in spite of awful, self-defeating marketing.

But you’ve probably heard this claim before.

I know I heard it for a long time. And all I could say is, “Well, where are all these mountains of business owners who could benefit from my growing marketing knowledge? I’m ready to help them out!”

The perverse truth is, they seem to pop up the most when you no longer need them.

A part of it is simply your level of skills. But a part of it is the exposure you give yourself.

In other words, you can shortcut the process somewhat, by giving yourself more exposure. Which brings me to my ongoing offer:

You can get a free copy of my Niche Expert Cold Emails training.

This training covers two cold email strategies that got me in touch with a couple of business owners, one with a working business, and the other with a thriving business.

All in all, these cold emails led to $16k worth of copywriting work. Not Mike Geary money, but an important step on my journey away from office dronedom. And I’m sure I could have gotten more work from these emails, had I just used them more consistently.

The training is yours free right now, as part of a promotion I’m trying out. For the full details, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/free-offer-niche-expert-cold-emails/

Boiler rooms in Tirana

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A couple weeks ago I was in Tirana, Albania. I got to talking with one of the locals and it turned out he works in a boiler room.

“We do forex,” he explained. “We invest their money for them. Actually, we just take their money.” He shrugged. “Which country are you from?”

“Croatia,” I said.

“Ah. We don’t have any clients there. But Germany, Italy, France, Poland, Hungary — yes. I manage the sales team for the Hungarian market. It’s a very good market.”

I couldn’t believe it. “You have a team here of Hungarian forex sales people?”

“No no, all Albanians,” he said. “They learn a few phrases in Hungarian, the rest is in English. But it’s ok. These lawyers and doctors we call all speak good English.”

“Greed is universal,” I said to myself. “But how do you know who to call? How do you get their number?”

He looked at me like I’m an idiot. “They see an ad on the Internet. They click. They fill out the form with their info. Then one of our sales guys calls them. Then they give us all their money.”

Now I’m not an expert on boiler room tactics. But from what I know, it sounds like the same stuff that worked in 1972 works still in 2022. It’s just that the base of operations shifted from Chicago and Jersey City to other, less regulated locations like Tirana.

But the same system continues to work.

Of course, you don’t have to be a scammer. This basic funnel works even if you’re selling a legit, high-ticket offer, which can genuinely benefit your customers or clients. The sales system doesn’t care what you’re selling.

And equally as of course, this is not the only way to sell.

For example, the type of daily emails I write. Very hot right now. Many businesses want to do something similar. The promise is that you can build a relationship with your marketplace… without hard-selling… and instead, based on trust, influence, and personality.

Which is all true. But it ain’t new.

It goes back to Matt Furey… who probably got it from Dan Kennedy, who was sending weekly faxes, very similar in tone and content to what you’re reading now, but 20 and 30 years ago.

And if you asked Dan — if you could get him on the fax — I’m sure he would say that what he was doing then wasn’t new either. Somebody in the 70s and 50s and probably 1920s was probably doing the same long-form, personality-infused, frequent-contact marketing — just in a slightly different format.

So my point for you is that there’s a lot of value in knowing the history of your industry. Don’t be a scammer — I’m not advising that. But there’s almost nothing new under the sun, and it pays to know what came before you.

Which brings me to my offer, in case you didn’t take me up on it yesterday.

It’s to get a free copy of my Niche Expert Cold Emails training.

Because in my early days of working as a freelance copywriter, I hit upon two cold emails that got me client work.

​​Both of them were different from other cold email techniques out there. But I doubt they were truly new.

​​Had I been a better student, I probably would have found these ideas sooner, instead of having to wait to discover them on my own.

Whatever. You can do better than I did. Take advantage of my experience instead of fumbling around in the dark. Especially now that it’s free — well, free in money terms. For the full details:

https://bejakovic.com/free-offer-niche-expert-cold-emails/