Prince

Have you just launched a new offer?

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If so, great! Now it’s time to start working on your next offer. In the words of James Altucher, “Best way to market your first book? Write your next book.”

Maybe you don’t like that. Maybe you’ll like this better:

Yesterday, a reader forwarded me an email from Jon Morrow. It had the subject line, “How I made $171,000 selling a $1 book.”

First, I didn’t even click to open the email. What’s there to learn? I’m sure Jon didn’t make $171,000 by selling 171,000 copies of a $1 book.

But today, in the interest of writing this email, and being thorough with research, I opened Jon’s email. I even clicked through to the sales page linked at the bottom.

The sales page has the usual screenshots to prove income claims. And sure enough, there’s a screenshot that shows the $160k that Jon’s $1 book had generated at the time of screenshotting. The income breaks down like this:

$8,880 in book sales…

$151,476 in upsells.

Like I said, you might not like the idea of creating a new offer.

But how about 20x the income that you’ll make from your current offer? Do you like that?

That’s the power of a upsells, followup offers, a back end, whatever you want to call it.

Final bit of motivation:

When Prince initially released 1999 as a single, the song bombed. It stalled at #44 on the charts. Then Prince released Little Red Corvette, which made it the Top 10. He then re-released 1999, and it went to number 2 on the charts.

I think you get my point. So let me offer a tip to make your job easier:

You might not like the idea of creating a new offer. After all, you just launched one. I can understand.

Here’s a trick that I use. It’s to constantly drip out content to promote my existing offer… content which I can then turn around and repurpose into a new offer.

It’s one of the unsung benefits of daily emails, done right.

Plus of course, there’s the more sung benefit of daily emails, specifically:

With daily emails, you’ll sell way way more of your current offer than if you simply have it sitting there, and you’ll even sell more than if you simply promote it periodically without daily emailing.

But that’s really another email, for another time.

For today, if you’d like to start and stick with the habit of daily emailing, both to make sales this month, and to gradually build up a new offer you can launch next month, then take a look at my Daily Email habit service, which is designed to help you do exactly that:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Your first step to achieving natural authority

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I’ve got three quotes about celebrities for you, and then I will tell you about a hack. A hack to make you be seen as a natural-born leader — or at least a necessary ingredient for it.

But first, the quotes.

Quote 1:

“Patton believed that it was critical for a general to stand out and to be seen by his troops, a philosophy that conveniently coincided with his ego. He dressed impeccably in a colourful uniform and knee-high boots, sporting ivory-handled pistols.”

Quote 2:

“Long before ‘mumblecore’ became a film genre, critics complained about Brando’s speech patterns until it finally became clear they were an integral part of his performances.”

Quote 3:

“Prince’s handwriting was beautiful, with a fluidity that suggested it poured out of him almost involuntarily. It also verged on illegible. Even in longhand, he wrote in his signature style, an idiosyncratic precursor of textspeak that he’d perfected back in the eighties: ‘Eye’ for ‘I,” ‘U’ for ‘you,” ‘R’ for ‘are.'”

A few days ago, I started thinking about natural authority.

What makes it so that some people just seem imbued with the royal farr? So that they command obedience or respect or awe, even if they aren’t wearing a uniform… or standing on stage in front of an adoring crowd… or climbing alone, without ropes, up a 3,000-foot cliff of sheer rock?

Well, I wrote down a bunch of ideas. If you like, I’ll share them all with you in time.

Today I’ll just tell you about one. You can see it illustrated in the quotes above.

Got it? It’s just this:

Patton, Brando, and Prince all had a unique style. In some ways, a style completely beyond the pale of what was normal or acceptable.

In one case (Brando), it was probably inborn, or at least unconscious.

In another (Patton), it was clearly cultivated.

In the last (Prince), it was a bit of both.

So that’s your first step to natural authority, should you want that position in other people’s minds.

Maybe you already have your own inborn style. In that case, emphasize it.

Maybe you don’t. Then you can consciously build it.

And style can be anything. How you talk, how you write, how you dress, how you walk, how you spell. Some of them, or all. Whatever your audience can see. And maybe even stuff they can’t, because it’s somehow still likely to shine through.

It might not instantly make you a star or a king or queen. But like I said, I think it’s a necessary ingredient, at least in some form. So you might as well thinking about it now, while I write up the emails about the other bits you’ll need.

Emails? Yes, emails. I write a daily email newsletter. If you’d like to sign up for it, here’s where to go.

The original live recording of Purple Rain

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After Prince died in 2016, a bunch of Prince videos suddenly flooded onto YouTube. These included both the legit, MTV videos, which Prince wasn’t allowing on YouTube before, as well as crazy bootleg recordings of various Prince concerts.

Among these, you can now find the original live recording of Purple Rain.

​​It turns out the album version, the same one that’s in the movie, was really recorded live in 1983 at a benefit concert in Minneapolis. I find this pretty incredible — but it’s a testament to how tight of a band Prince ran and how crazy talented they all were.

I think there are a bunch of persuasion and influence lessons that could be squeezed out of this whole story and the live performance that Prince and the Revolution put on. ​​But for today, I want to give the persuasion stuff a bit of a break — something I called “persuasion bleach” in an earlier email.

Instead, I just want to share with you the original live recording of Purple Rain.

​​If you’re not a Prince fan, this probably won’t be meaningful to you and you will want to pass. ​But if you do like Prince or at least his particular song, then this original version is definitely worth a look and listen. ​​Here it is if you’re curious:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE8gScJGfa4

White jazz, the world’s deadliest hitman, and Prince’s text-speak

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I took a nap this afternoon and I never recovered.

So instead of my usual, valuable, and deadly dull post, here’s a list of 7 wonderful facts from all corners of the universe:

1. The word “jazz” was invented by white people. Many black jazz musicians in the 40s and 50s resented the term.

2. There’s an area in the Dominican Republic where men are born as girls and only transition to boys at age 12.

3. True story: A robber broke into a house, but he got distracted by a plate of brownies on the kitchen counter. He was finishing up the brownies when the family returned home. The robber ran out the back door and was never seen again.

4. The Xerox 914, the first photocopier, came with a fire extinguisher in case its heating elements set the paper alight.

5. Prince (the musician) used text-speak even when writing by hand. That’s probably how he wrote Nothing Compares 2 U.

6. The world’s deadliest hitman is thought to be one Julio Santana, a Brazilian with 500 kills to his name.

7. The fear of an electric shock is uncorrelated with the probability of receiving the shock. The mere possibility triggers the full-blown response.

You can’t make this kind of stuff up.

But you can write it down as you come across it.

And it makes sense to do so. Wonderful facts like these come in very useful during those long moments when you’re lacking any inspiration.

Anyways, if you need sales copy written, and if you need it now, then I’m afraid I can’t help you. Not at the moment, at least.

But if you want to talk about how to write advertorials to promote wonderful or even weird products, take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorials/