Robin Timmers

Sell Copy Riddles yourself and keep all the money?

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This morning, I got a message from “the largest copywriter in the Netherlands,” Robin Timmers. Robin writes:

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Well, I’ve just finished Copy Riddles.

I have spent a lot of $$$ on copywriting training and books and programs and stuff…

But there is nothing like Copy Riddles.

Really.

I think the way you’ve designed the program is 10/10.

(Try/Write > Insight/Learn > Try/Write again > Increase copywriting IQ points > Repeat.)

The stuff you teach is 10/10, yet it is simple as hell to understand.

Even in the last bonus rounds, where most programs will probably have some throwaway-and-lame-insights to share, you’ve actually managed to give me an EUREKA moment by reminding me that, well … you want to write your bullets based on the market awareness and sophistication too.

For some reason I have never ever thought of that, yet it is a crazy good and persuasive thing to do.

Go figure.

I can honestly say that Copy Riddles is a must-have for anybody new to copywriting, or who already considers themselves, like I do, a good enough copywriter to earn good money with it.

I’ll 100% go through it again. 🙂

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I’ve had a few other folks who just wrapped up Copy Riddles in the past week say good things about the experience.

I thought this would be the perfect time to run a little promo for Copy Riddles… except I remembered that during the last promo, back in July, I (wisely) announced I will not be running any more Copy Riddles promos this year.

Still, it’s a shame to let nice testimonials and case studies go to waste.

So rather than trying to sell you Copy Riddles, I want to see if you want to sell it yourself.

I tried doing this once before, a few years ago. I didn’t really know what I was doing back then, and so my idea got bogged down in indecision and uncertainty.

My offer today is basically this:

I’ll sell you the right to sell Copy Riddles yourself and keep all the money.

If you have your own list, you can sell Copy Riddles to your list and keep all the money from every sale you make, from here till eternity.

If you want to create a little cold traffic funnel, and put some lower-ticket items up front, and then use Copy Riddles (a $1k course) as the “main course” that makes it likely your funnel is breakeven or better on day zero, you can do that — and keep all the money.

If you already have lower-ticket copywriting offers, and you want to put a proven higher-ticket upsell behind them, you can put Copy Riddles into your upsell flow — and keep all the money.

Or of course, if you are an enterprising guy or gal who is not afraid to reach out to others who have lists, cold traffic funnels, or offers that are in some way related to Copy Riddles, you can partner with them so they provide the flow while you provide a valuable new offer — and split the resulting money with them, however the two of you agree on it.

Along with the right to sell Copy Riddles and keep all the money you make, I will also provide you with the marketing that has sold this course for me in the past — emails, copy angles, social proof, and promo ideas that have worked.

If you’re interested, hit reply, and we can talk in more detail.

How I write emails and create offers using Ad Money Machine

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Yesterday I got an email from Robin Timmers, the “largest copywriter in the Netherlands”. Robin just got Copy Riddles during the current “Unannounced Bonus” promo, which comes with a lifetime subscription to Lawrence Bernstein’s Ad Money machine (normally $997). About that, Robin wrote:

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Hey John,

I got the offer, and I was wondering…

(I’ll start after finishing up CopyHour, which is +-3 weeks left.)

How do you (both in general and specifically you) use the Ad Money Machine?

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Well, it’s about time somebody asked.

I’ll tell ya, and it will be relevant whether or not you get Copy Riddles or Ad Money Machine.

It will be just as relevant if you want to do all the endless and tiring legwork yourself that Lawrence has done on your behalf, and masochistically spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of hours to find out what best direct response marketers across industries are doing.

Here are four ways I personally use Ad Money Machine:

#1. Subject lines and email hooks

Nobody has called me out on it, but all the subject lines I have so far used during this promo have come from ads and sales letters in Ad Money Machine:

* Copy Riddles customers hit jackpot with “Unannounced Bonus” scheme (“U.S. residents hit Jackpot with ‘Old Vegas’ Casino Rolls”)

* Over $1M ($1,000,000) and 20 years of loving labor went into this brilliant Unannounced Bonus (“£125,000 ($300,000) and 2 years of loving labour went into this sumptuous Centennial Edition of THE COMPLETE WORKS OF DICKENS”)

* Exposed: Gary Bencivenga’s “100x its price” marketing investment (“Exposed: Warren Buffett’s $39 Billion Black Gold Bonanza”)

* The magnificent obsession that produces A-list copywriting skills (“The Magnificent Obsession That Produced The Coffee Favored By Kings”)

* Dead for 34 months — now alive again (“Outlawed For 41 Years — Now Legal Again”)

* Copy Riddles is expensive… or maybe not (“Life is short… or maybe not.”)

* How I write emails and create offers using Ad Money Machine (“How I Make $327 Per Hour Practicing Real Estate”)

The bigger point is that good hooks, and good ways of crystalizing those hooks in words, are eternal. It makes sense to be a student of your market, and other markets, and reuse what’s worked.

#2. Marketing ideas I can port from one industry to another

Just one example: Gary Halbert’s 4 steps for turning $39.95… into $289… into $4,046.

Yes, Lawrence has the front-end ad that Gary Halbert ran in the WSJ, selling a Halley’s Comet commemorative silver coin for $39.95.

But the ad copy was not the story.

The story, which Lawrence got direct from Gary himself, is how those $39.95 front-end orders were turned into $289 sales, and how those $289 sales were turned into $4,046 sales, in 4 simple steps.

In spite of this being Gary Halbert, this 4-step process is perfectly legal and even ethical. It also applies to any field, including info products like courses and memberships. It’s something I have been using in part and will be using much more going forward with the offers I create.

#3. Uncovering core appeals in an industry

Until last year, I ran an email newsletter on the topic of longevity. I regularly went into the Ad Money Machine “Beauty and Anti-Aging” category (~100 winning direct response ads) to search out what appeals sell (“Look 10 years younger in 10 hours”), what words and phrases people respond to (“thinning hair”), and what hooks to use (the French).

#4. Curiosity, entertainment, and inspiration

Like I keep saying, Ad Money Machine is not simply a huge collection of winning direct response ads, with a new ad popping up each day.

What makes me keep going back over and over is Lawrence’s commentary, knowledge, and experience, which put these ads in their fascinating (at least to me) context.

If you’re actually interested in copywriting and marketing… if you’re intrigued by the history of the field…if you are amused by or have at least heard of some of the characters who made it what it is… then Lawrence’s site is addictive.

As just one example:

Last Sunday, I went on Ad Money Machine, looking for a headline I could repurpose for a subject line.

I came across that “U.S. residents hit Jackpot” ad.

But then I started reading Lawrence’s commentary, where he casually mentions that Vic Schwab (author of “How To Write An Advertisement,” one of the best books in the field, and the copywriter behind Dale Carnegie’s “How To Win Friends And Influence People”) helped start a gold and silver coin company.

Lawrence had a post on that as well. So I got sucked in, clicked through, and started reading that instead of writing my email. That’s ok. Not only was it fun and interesting and inspiring, but I learned something (going back to point 2 above) that I will use in the future.

The deadline to get Copy Riddles along with the “Unannounced Bonus” of Ad Money Machine is this Sunday, just two short days away.

As a reminder, I also will be running a live cohort for Copy Riddles, one last time, never to be repeated, as part of the offer for this promo, to help you actually go through the program so you benefit from it and start owning those A-list copywriting skills.

Plus, there’s a payment plan if you want to take out some of the sting of paying in one lump sum. That also goes away on Sunday.

To take advantage of all that before the deadline makes it disappear forever:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

10 reasons you might want to buy 5 paperback copies of my original 10 commandments book

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This morning, I made a rather outrageous offer, inviting people to buy five (5) paperback copies of my original 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

Why might you ever want to buy multiple physical copies of this 5-year-old book?

I tried to do the work for you, so here ere are 10 possible reasons why:

1. You want to support me in some modest way, and you want something concrete in return.

2. You make a habit of rereading books if you find them valuable. I know i do, and it’s served me very well. And a symbolic way to make rereading easier is to read a new copy each time.

3. So you can give give away copies to friends, family, colleagues, mentees who could benefit from it. (For example, marketing legend Matt Bacak recommends my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters to mentees in his Secret Email System mastermind.)

4. One of the A-list copywriters I profile in the book, Gene Schwartz, got so rich through writing copy that he lived in a Manhattan penthouse, kept a separate Manhattan office, and presumably sometimes went back to visit his parents in Montana and work there.

If, like Gene, you apply the ideas in this book diligently and you end up becoming the owner of multiple houses and work locations, you will need multiple copies on hand in different location.

Errr…. wait. If you think that’s stretching it, try the next one:

5. For ballast. Another of the A-list copywriters in my book was Claude Hopkins. Hopkins hated the sea but owned an ocean-going yacht, because when you’re effectively a billionaire, the way he was thanks to copywriting, you gotta spend your money somehow. But yachts need to be weighted down for stability, and what better way with a few extra copies of 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters?

A little more seriously:

6. As prizes for a giveaway. In fact, Robin Timmers, “the largest copywriter in the Netherlands,” has took me up on this offer earlier today. When he sent me his receipt, he said that he’s thinking of using copies of my book as giveaways, presumably in some kind of contest or game with his audience.

7. As a coffee table talking point. The physical dimensions of my book are small and if you put one copy on your coffee table, it might get ignored.

But if you lay out five copies, all next to each other, that’s sure to elicit questions from guests. “What’s that about? Why five copies of the same book?”

Good thing is, the book is filled with interesting anecdotes so you can have a ready in to become the eloquent and fascinating host for a few moments.

8. To serve as a doorstop, paperweight, kindling, or a stable platform to put your laptop on when you do Zoom calls, particularly copywriting client calls, which you are likely to have many more of when you start religiously following the commandments outlined in this book.

9. So you can rip up a few copies and take out particularly significant passages and pin them on your pinboard so they remind you while you write copy… and still maintain a fresh copy or two to sit in your library.

10. Because buying five (5) paperback copies of the 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters is my condition to get the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle, which currently includes everything listed below.

Tomorrow I will add something else to this bonus bundle. If you’ve already bought your five paperback copies and sent me your receipt, the extra stuff will appear automagically in the course area where the bonuses are hosted.

And if you haven’t yet taken me up on this offer, here are the details of what’s inside the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle, and how exactly to get it:

#1. Copywriting Portfolio Secrets ($97 value)

In this training, I show you how to build up your copywriting portfolio in the fastest and most efficient way, so you can start to win copywriting jobs even today. I show you the best way I’ve found to win 4- and 5-figure jobs I REALLY wanted, even when I wasn’t qualified for them, and how you can do it too.

I previously sold this training for $97. But it’s yours free inside the Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle, which also includes my…

#2. No-Stress Negotiation For Well-Paid Copywriters ($100 value)

This guide outlines my 7-part negotiating system, which I adapted from negotiation coach Jim Camp. This system kept me sane while I still regularly interviewed and worked with copywriting clients. Follow these seven principles, and you will end up making more money, working with better clients, and being able to stick to it for the long term.

I only offered this information before as part of the $100 Copy Zone guide, which also featured….

#3. How To Get Set Up On Upwork

This free bonus is an excerpt from a short self-published book I wrote once, How to Become a $150/Hr Sales Copywriter on Upwork: A Personal Success Story that Almost Anyone Can Replicate. It tells you how to actually get set up on Upwork — the details of your profile page, your description, your title.

If you combine this bonus with the two bonuses above — Copywriting Portfolio Secrets and No-Stress Negotiation — you have a great shot of winning a job on Upwork by the end of this week, or even today.

And finally, this first part of my Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle also includes…

#4. Dan’s Timeless Wisdom (priceless, or $25k+)

Between August of 2019 and March 2020, I was in Dan Ferrari’s coaching group. As you might know, Dan started out as a star copywriter at The Motley Fool, and went on to become one of the most successful, most winning, big-money direct response copywriters working today.

Inside his coaching group, Dan dispensed copy critiques, marketing advice, and mystical koans to help his coaching students get to the next level.

At some point, I had the bright idea to start archiving the best and most valuable things that Dan was saying. I got 25 of them down, and they are all included in this document.

(By the way, I never tallied up the exact and rather painful amount of money I paid Dan for the coaching. It was north of $25k. I do know I made it all back, and then some, in just the first two months after I stopped with the coaching, thanks to just one tip I got from Dan.)

So there you go. $197 in real-world value if you count what people have paid me for these bonuses previously… or $25,000+ in value if you count the blood, flesh, and hair it took for me to get this information to you… or ∞ in value, if you actually take these ideas and apply them, and keep applying them.

And if that’s not enough for you, my Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle will have several other bonuses as well. I will announce those over the coming days, and they will be automatically added to the bonus area if you get my offer before Thursday at 12 midnight PST.

As for what that offer is:

Like I said, it costs $50.

And it’s to get five (5) paperback copies of my original 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

Put in your order on Amazon, forward me your Amazon receipt, and I will set you up with Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle. If you’d like to do that now, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

Conditioning vs. shaping

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Robin Timmers, “the largest copywriter in the Netherlands,” writes in to say:

“I do wanna say I really enjoyed your new book, while reading it on holiday. (Left you a review on Amazon.)”

… and sure enuff, Robin’s review is now showing up on the Amazon page for my new 10 Commandments book (“Great lil’ book with lots of funny, weird and most of all valuable principles of persuasion”).

Robin’s is the 10th 5-star review my new book has gotten in the couple of weeks since being published. It’s important to me to mark and celebrate the occasion.

But what about you? I make a habit of including some tidbit in each email which is either fun or valuable, whether you choose to buy or not.

So let me tell you something interesting but entirely unrelated, which might be valuable to you.

I’m reading a book about neuroplasticity called The Brain That Changes Itself. One story in that book is of a scientist named Edward Taub, who experimented on monkeys to simulate the effects of stroke.

The long and short of it is, Taub worked to get monkeys that were effectively paralyzed in say, their left arm, to regain use of that arm.

Taub tried giving the monkeys rewards for performing regular monkey actions with their left arm, such as reaching for food. Behaviorists call this approach conditioning. Conditioning didn’t work. Paralyzed monkeys stayed paralyzed.

But then Taub started a different approach known as shaping, which involved rewarding the monkeys for even very small steps along the way to the big movement. (I’m guessing here, but imagine rewarding the monkey for just wiggling his left pinky finger at first.)

The effect of shaping was the monkeys eventually regained full function of their previously paralyzed arms.

On the one hand, this is kind of Obvious Adams — of course you want to break up a big task into component pieces and master the component pieces one by one.

On the other hand, people have been having strokes for thousands of years, and many have been paralyzed for life as a result.

Taub translated this monkey shaping research into a simple and structured program for humans, which relies on no fancy modern equipment, that has allowed stroke victims to regain use of paralyzed limbs, often years after their stroke.

Obvious yes, but somehow nobody else thought to follow this basic idea to this powerful conclusion, for thousands of years, until a few decades ago.

This distinction of conditioning vs shaping is something to keep in mind whether you’re in the business of teaching people stuff, or encouraging behavior (eg. buying and consumption), or simply trying to manage the primate known as yourself better, so you can get yourself to accomplish stuff you cannot accomplish now.

Break up the big action into tiny component pieces, often so tiny as to seem useless or irrelevant to task at hand. Master each of those tiny components. Reward yourself for doing so.

And that, in a way, does tie into the top of my email, about celebrating my 10th testimonial. And now, if you haven’t yet read my “funny, weird, and most of all valuable” new book, you can find it here:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

The largest copywriter in the Netherlands gives me his endorsement

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Comes a message from Robin Timmers, whose website bills him as the “grootste copywriter van Nederland.”

Google informs me that, translated from Dutch, this works out to “the largest copywriter in the Netherlands.”

I guess a more elegant translation might be, “the greatest copywriter in the Netherlands.” Though as Robin told me, the tagline is meant to be ambiguous, since he stands over 2 meters tall.

Anyways, Robin writes:

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Hey John,

Just finished MVE and am now halfway with SME.

Man … MVE is so simple, so easy-ish to implement, but such a strong concept and format.

Awesome course, awesome idea.

Same for SME.

Really simple, really powerful and easy to implement, and model with your own ideas.

I’m very happy with both courses, and can’t wait to start with Copy Riddles.

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In case you don’t know… MVE is my course Most Valuable Email. SME is my course Simple Money Emails.

You might not know that because I haven’t promoted either course in a few months, ever since I started selling my Daily Email Habit service.

I find my enthusiasm for promoting those courses has dipped.

In part, it’s because Daily Email Habit is not just a daily prompt to write an email… but a distillation of the best ideas in both SME and MVE, as well as ideas I don’t have in either of those courses, particularly around building up status and authority.

And Daily Email Habit presents all this to you as an easy and manageable drip-drip of information, in your inbox, every day… rather than as a course, one which you may go through once or maybe not even once, which then sits behind some forgotten login or in some folder you never check.

But much more important:

Unlike those two course of mine — or any other courses, by me or anybody else — Daily Email Habit is really built around the idea of daily, practical, real-world implementation, rather than simply passive consumption of information.

Because even things that are easy-ish to implement, like Robin says the MVE trick is, tend not to get implemented, not without a lot of stubborn nudging and reminders from the outside.

That’s what Daily Email Habit is for. If you’d like to find out more about this “grootste e-mailservice”:

https://bejakovic.com/deh