Royalty Ronin

Going it on your own

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Yesterday, in a restaurant in Barcelona’s Eixample district, I organized a “direct response dinner.”

6 people (ok, 6 guys) where there, all of whom work in direct response.

There was a copywriter for an ecom retention agency… there was the owner of a big dropshipping business… there was the head of ops for a lead gen agency… there was the owner of a dating info biz… there was Thom Benny’s business partner Elmo… and there was me.

Over fish curry and ground beef, we talked about what’s up in life and business.

Halfway through the dinner, we switched seats to switch up the conversation.

At the end, everybody stood around outside the restaurant and talked some more and exchanged contacts. I announced I would make this a regular event.

A few years ago, I gave a presentation in Brian Kurtz’s Titans XL group. After that presentation, Brian and I exchanged a couple emails, and he invited me to join Titans myself.

I wrote Brian to say thanks, that I can see Titans is a good group, but that I know from past experience that I don’t function well or last long in groups. I said that even though I know it’s not smart, I always end up going it alone. To which Brian replied:

“Not that I need to teach you anything, John…but whether it’s my group or someone else’s (or one you manufacture on your own), “going it on your own” is a huge mistake.”

That has stuck with me for years. It was a key motivator for why I decided to create my Daily Email House community, and later, why created the Monetization Mastermind. It’s also why decided to organize the dinner last night.

I’m kind of weird and awkward whenever I’m invited to other people’s stuff. I don’t really participate. I look for any excuse to skulk out.

I could tell myself that’s silly, and wait for myself to change and become a better, more sociable, more well-adjusted person.

Or I could simply work with what I’ve got, and figure out how to do something with it. In my case, that’s meant following Brian’s advice, and “manufacturing” groups and communities of my own.

I’m telling you this because maybe it applies to you as well.

Maybe what applies is the specific idea that, if you don’t function well in other people’s groups, then you should manufacture one of your own.

Or maybe what applies is the broader idea to stop waiting for yourself to become a better person in order to get what you want. (Business coach Rich Schefren phrases this as, “Put your business goals ahead of your self-development goals.”)

Final point:

I personally knew everybody I invited to dinner last night, with the exception of James, the head of ops for a lead gen agency.

I had never met James before or interacted with him in any way. I invited him because he is inside Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin group, and I figured anybody who is in Ronin is ok in my book and is worth meeting. (James turned out to be great.)

Royalty Ronin is the only group I’m a member of in any meaningful way, and the only group I’ve managed to stick around in for more than a few weeks. (I’ve been in Ronin for over two years now.)

That’s not because there’s magic inside Ronin that makes me into a chipper and regular participant. (I rarely post and I comment even more rarely.)

Rater, I stay inside Ronin and I keep lurking there because I’ve learned so much from Travis Sago, both via the ton of expensive trainings that he makes available for free inside Ronin… and via observing Travis and what he does. (This is stuff that might or might not make it into future expensive trainings, but it’s yours free if you only pay attention.)

If you wanna see if Ronin could work for you, whether you participate in groups or not:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

P.S. If you do make it past free trial and stay inside Ronin, write me an email and let me know. I have some bonuses with your name on them.

Emotional reactivity in email promos

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Last Wednesday, I started a new, possibly doomed email promo.

My goal was to get 5 people into the 1-Person Advertorial Agency Cohort.

My offer was help with copywriting, help with getting clients, up to and including making $10k from advertorial work.

My price was $5k.

Like I said, I started promoting this on Wednesday.

By about Friday, I was hating it.

A few dozen people had responded to express interest, most of them before I had publicly announced the price.

After several days of email back-and-forth, nobody had signed up. Some people had opted out. Some had stopped responding. The others had questions, doubts, or concerns. The nerve!

I spent a part of my Friday fantasizing of simply closing down this whole thing, and focusing on writing my own advertorials rather than trying to persuade anybody to join me. “I’ll show them!”

Fortunately, I have been here before.

Instead of lashing out at the world, I simply kept promoting the offer to my list, answering questions from the people who had expressed interest, and honing the 1-1 sales process bit by bit.

On Saturday, one person joined. Yesterday, four more people joined, including one guy (a long-time reader and buyer) who only responded to the “Final Call” email I sent out.

In sum:

I wanted 5 people. I got 5 people. $10k collected over the past two days, with another $15k due when I get people to the result I promised.

I’m telling you this because, besides running this advertorial cohort, I’m also coaching several business owners on how to make money with their email list. And making money with your email list means email promos.

I’ve recently seen, on a couple different occasions, people getting frustrated due to a lack of results, shutting down their promo after just a day or two, and scrapping the offer.

I know how it feels. I’ve been there. In fact, like I just told you, I was there last week, ready to shut down my own promo and scrap the offer.

Maybe now that I’ve told you that it happens to me, you will be able to recognize it in yourself as well.

It’s helpful to label it. (“Emotional reactivity” is not a very elegant term, but it’s what I call it.)

It’s also helpful to remind yourself that, now that you’re in the middle of the promo, it’s probably not a good time to make dramatic decisions, like killing the offer, or slashing the price, or promising tons of new deliverables that you hadn’t planned on initially.

Rather, the middle of the promo is a time for talking to your audience, clarifying your offer and your positioning, and making the best out of what you’ve already got.

From time to time, I like to promote Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin community. From time to time, I like to reiterate that Travis’s Ronin is the best deal in Internet Marketing right now. From time to time, I cite some cool or fundamental thing I’ve learned from Travis.

The fact is, this entire “advertorial cohort” promo wouldn’t have happened without the many things, big and small, I’ve learned from Travis and the courses and trainings and regular posts he puts up inside Royalty Ronin.

Everything, from the very concept of this promo, to the offer structure, to the pricing, to how I promoted it, to the fact that I didn’t give up in frustration after a few days of no results… all of that comes from stuff I can trace directly to Travis.

Travis offers a week-long free trial for Royalty Ronin. I’ve gotten a metric ton, and 100k+ worth of income, due to what’s inside Ronin. Maybe you will too. If you wanna give it a try:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

P.S. If you do make it past free trial and stay inside Ronin, write me an email and let me know. I have some bonuses with your name on them.

Solopreneurs suck

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Before you get out your pitchforks, tar, and feathers, maybe hear me out:

A few years ago, I joined the paid membership of a business coach.

I won’t say the guy’s name, but he’s well established in the DR world, he’s been in business for decades, and he’s somebody I’ve mentioned in this newsletter on a few occasions. (Though if you think you know who it is, you probably don’t.)

My first day in the membership, I was scrolling through some of the posts. In one of them, another member was getting advice on a new business he was setting up.

The business coach asked who the target audience was.

The member replied it was solopreneurs.

To which the biz coach replied:

“Solopreneurs suck.”

I felt a bit hurt this, being a solopreneur myself for 12+ years now, and generally determined not to hire.

The business coach gave his explanation, that solopreneurs make for bad customers, and that it’s much better to go after people who have a small team of two or maybe three people.

There was truth to it. I forget exactly what the coach’s arguments was, but as a solopreneur myself, I can tell you that solopreneurs…

1. Are too tightly controlling

2. Are paradoxically willing to accept lower quality on many things in their business (design, copy, marketing, customer service) as long as they do it themselves

3. Are slow to implement big and important changes thoroughly

4. Are fickle, and will change direction and follow new whims and ideas, but since they have no ballast, will often change direction too quickly, and then change again

Put all these things together and you find that solopreneurs have serious limits to income, limits to growth, limits to the value can get out of anything you sell to them, and therefore the money they can pay you.

On top of which, the fact that solopreneurs have no employees makes it easier for them to simply up and leave from one day to the next, particularly in today’s world, where most solopreneurs’ tangible assets consist of a Macbook and maybe a Nespresso machine.

I’m just putting this idea out there.

Like I said, I myself am a solopreneur.

I don’t know if that will change.

Maybe it will. (I’ve convinced myself with my own emails before.)

Maybe it won’t. (Even with all the arguments above, I find myself resistant going back to point 1 above.)

In any case, I will tell you something I have figured out as a stepping stone out of the solopreneur swamp.

It’s the idea of partnering with the right people, rather than hiring.

I’ve done it already with one major project.

I’m very likely do more partnerships as I spin up my new “advertorial agency.”

If partnering with people resonates with you, and you want to find people to partner with, and you want more advice on how to do it right, both from an “inner game” and an “outer game” perspective, then I have a recommendation for you.

It’s Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin community.

Travis’s Royalty Ronin is made up of a bunch of people who have the solopreneur mindset, who want the simplicity and freedom of solopreneursip, but who at the same time have realized that you can only do so much and go so far by doing every damn thing alone, and that there are real costs to solopreneurship, in terms of both income and free time.

(Btw, Travis is not the biz coach I talked about at the start of this email.)

If you wanna find out more about Ronin, there’s a free 7-day trial here:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

P.S. If you do make it past free trial and stay inside Ronin, write me an email and let me know. I have some bonuses with your name on them.

Off-market affiliate deals

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I’ve been lurking on Facebook lately, doing research for my low-ticket funnel. That’s how I came across an interesting new offer for coaches and consultants:

1. We will build out a low-ticket funnel for you, for free

2. We will run traffic to it, for free, using our own money

3. We will drive buyers who come through this funnel to a sales call for your high-ticket coaching or consulting offer

4. We only take a cut when you close a deal

I don’t know how well these guys are doing.

But I do know another company that effectively has this same business model.

It’s a company I used to write copy for back in the day.

They didn’t advertise that this was their business model, but since I was a copywriter for them, I know that that’s what they did.

They started out with real estate investing gurus who had high-ticket coaching programs, and then graduated to more general bizopp coaching offers.

I happen to know that they were making a killing back when I was working with them. They only seem to have gotten bigger since.

My point for you is:

Affiliate marketing is great.

It allows you to promote and profit from offers, without having to go through the massive trouble of creating and delivering those offers.

Affiliate marketing also sucks.

Most of the available affiliate offers are no good, and the few good ones have a ton of other people promoting them.

The solution to this dilemma is to roll your own off-market affiliate offers, like the guys above.

In other words, to find people who have good offers, or the makings of good offers, but who aren’t promoting them adequately, and who certainly don’t have affiliate programs…

… and then make some sort of a deal with them to promote them adequately, using your own skills and resources.

(And better yet, to put yourself in toll position, so you get the unique right to promote this off-market affiliate deal, while others only look on with wonder and envy.)

If this is something that interests you, you can go off on your own right now and start doing.

I really hope that’s what you will do.

But if you want some support and help for this kind of stuff, my best recommendation is the Royalty Ronin community, which in many ways is a community of people who are rolling their own off-market affiliate deals, using various techniques and approaches.

In case you wanna find out more, you can sign up for a free 7-day trial here:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

P.S. If you sign up for Ronin and make it past the first 7 days, write me and let me know. I’ve got some bonuses with your name on them.

Public service announcement

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Every few months or so, I like to promote an affiliate offer that doesn’t make me much money, but that I still promote as a kind of chirpy public service announcement.

Today it’s time to do so again.

Because yesterday, in my Daily Email House community, I wrote about an email I sent out recently, which did well for me in terms of sales. That email was based on an idea I got from marketer Travis Sago, who I’ve mentioned often in this newsletter.

After I wrote about that, I got a DM on Skool from a Daily Email House member, who works as a freelance copywriter, and who also has his own email list and a few products he sells to that list.

Here’s that DM interaction:

===

FREELANCE COPYWRITER: Hey John, how are you? I keep seeing you mention Travis Sago, and I wonder… how much of an influence does he have on you? It looks like he is the brain behind a lot of campaigns you do and sales

BEJAKO: Yep, I’ve learned a ton from the dude. Highly recommended if you are looking to do more with your email list and audience

FREELANCE COPYWRITER: As somebody who’s pretty fed up with client work and wants the email based business lifestyle, that might make sense. So is his Skool page the only way to see what it’s all about? Or is there a TSL/VSL?

BEJAKO: Pretty much everything he’s doing now is inside that Skool group. He had courses before that you can still buy separately, but they are also inside Skool if you sign up for that

FREELANCE COPYWRITER: Cool. I’ll have a look

===

I figure if this guy is interested, maybe you too will be. I’m not holding my breath though.

I’ve promoted Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin Skool group a dozen times in these emails.

I promoted it before Travis made it available to affiliates, because I was in it, and because I saw it from the inside, and because it made me money.

I promoted it after after Travis set up the affiliate program last year, because I’m still in it, and I can still see it from the inside, and it’s still making me money.

Over the past year that I’ve been promoting Ronin as an affiliate, I have made about $6k in commissions.

That might sound like real money to you, and it is pretty good money for sending a dozen or so emails, but it’s also much much less than I’ve made by promoting much less valuable affiliate offers that I’m much less personally involved with and less enthusiastic about.

It’s also much much less than I’ve made by applying Travis’s teachings inside Ronin. As for that, I can directly trace about $135k in income to Ronin:

* ~35k+ from auctions, following Travis’s “24 Hour FUN Auction” course

* ~60k+ from Daily Email Habit, which I created by following step-by-step Travis’s “Passive Cash Flow Mojo” course, about creating continuity offers

* ~$40k+ from three tiny promos, which were based around ideas I got from Travis’s “$1k a day in 1 Hour a Day” training and his “Big Ticket Email Mojo” course

On top of that, I’ve made much more money indirectly thanks to the ideas and people inside Ronin:

Copy hacks I’ve seen Travis and nobody else use (like the email I mentioned at the start)…

… affiliate offers I’ve promoted from other Ronin members…

… changes I’ve made to the way I create my own offers, which I’ve picked up both from Travis’s trainings and by looking at what he does.

So eat your vegetables.

Brush your teeth.

Don’t smoke.

And sign up to Royalty Ronin, and then start applying the ideas inside, one by one.

I figure that just like other public service announcement, most people will shrug this one off.

But maybe you won’t, at least if you too are fed up with client work and are looking for a way out. If so, I have believed for years and continue to believe this is the best deal on the Internet:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

P.S.. Travis offers a free 7-day trial. If you sign up for Ronin and make it past the first 7 days, write me and let me know. I’ve got some bonuses with your name on them.

If you’d like to partner with businesses on the back end…

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A couple weeks ago, I wrote about a new “back end” partnership I was testing out.

A business owner, who spends $700 a day on Facebook ads to generate leads, is converting a minuscule share of these leads to clients, while doing no ongoing followup with the rest.

After 2 minutes of talking to this guy over Zoom, we made a preliminary partnership deal:

1. He’d give me control of his email list.

2. I’d see what I could do.

3. If I could do something, we’d keep working together and split the profits.

4. If I could not, I’d have spent a bit of time writing a few emails for this guy for nothing, and he’d have spent a bit of time to talk to me over Zoom, also for nothing.

After I sent out that email, I got a reply from a Spanish copywriter, who wrote:

===

I’m not sure if you’ll read this email, since I assume you’ll receive a lot.

But what you mentioned today really interests me. In my country (Spain), I don’t see the practice of sending a daily email as a very common one. Often, they don’t even use email as a sales channel.

In my niche (trading and finance), I see a lot of people with large social media followers who don’t follow up via email.

And that’s a service I’d like to offer: using other email lists and earning a commission on the sales those emails generate. But the question is…

How do you know for sure how many sales the list owner is making thanks to emails?

How do you know how many of those sales come from emails?

Should we trust the list owner?

Can they somehow give you access so you can see the sales generated yourself?

Thank you. I love your writing and job!

===

Maybe I’m projecting here, but the underlying frame I see in this reader’s questions is, “Will I get screwed? Will the owner not pay me for some sales I made him? Will there be INJUSTICE, perpetrated against ME?”

That’s the wrong way to look at it.

If you ask me, the right way to look at it is, does this make good sense for me to do now, and to keep doing?

When the topic of doing work on commission comes up, people often get hung up on revshare percentages, splits, tiers, contracts, agreements, and the technology of tracking, reporting, and checking whether sales you made were correctly attributed to you or not.

Ultimately none of that matters.

What matters is, are you happy with the money that ends up coming in as a result of the investment that you made?

If that works for you, then my advice is to stop stressing about the possible injustice — that somebody somewhere failed to pay you what you are due.

Travis Sago, who runs a “back end agency” that does exactly these kind of back-end partnerships, once proposed a thought experiment.

Imagine betting $1 on a coin flip. You put in $1, and then flip a coin. If the coin comes up heads, you lose your $1. If it comes up tails, you win $100.

Travis’s point was, keep putting in your $1, and keep flipping the coin. Even if the odds aren’t exactly 50-50, soon enough, you will be more than rich.

So much for a new perspective. Now for the offer.

If you are interested in partnering with businesses on the “back end” and maximizing your chances of success at every step, then Travis has an entire course about this, called BEAMER.

That course sells for $2,900. (It’s actually what I paid for it last year.)

$2,900 is a good deal for BEAMER, because if BEAMER leads you to even one modestly successful, one-time partner deal, it will pay for its $2,900 price tag, and then some.

And maybe you’ll have more than just one modestly successful, one-time partner deal.

Maybe you can take it as far as Travis has taken it, and make a few million dollars each year, simply partnering ongoing with people who aren’t really doing much with their email lists.

Now at this point, I could simply link to the BEAMER sales page, except…

There’s also another way to get BEAMER, at 1/10th (one-tenth) the price that it sells for via Travis’s site.

Travis also gives away BEAMER as a free bonus for those who sign up to his Royalty Ronin community, and who stay signed up past the free 7-day trial.

A month of Royalty Ronin will cost you $290.

That’s not exactly $1. But to me, it’s a reasonable investment — a reasonable wager to stake — to get set up with with inside knowledge on running back-end agency from someone who’s made millions from doing so… and to see if you are happy with the money that ends up coming to you as a result of this knowledge.

If you’d like to start a “back end agency” and you want to learn from an expert who’s done it before:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

10 things I regret doing (or not doing) in my business

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Yesterday, I asked for questions I can answer in emails while I’m traveling, and questions I got.

Let me start from the beginning, from the first question that landed in my inbox yesterday, asked by a reader named Moeed:

===

What are some things you regret doing in your business?

From when you started out till now.

It’d be great to know, like a list of things to avoid, no matter what.

And hi John, I love your daily emails, including all the promotions.

Thank you for all that you’ve done, you’ve helped me a lot as someone who’s young and obsessed with the world of Direct Response.

===

On the one hand, I don’t really regret nothing, because I pretty much get to do what i want when I want, and I guess all the mistakes I’ve made got me here. But that’s not a fun email.

So let me regret some stuff. Here’s a list of 10 things I regret doing doing or not doing in my business:

1. Not continuing to find more revshare partners after I realized how much money one good revshare partner could make me, and after running into a bit of an obstacle finding more such partners

2. Not repurposing my content better

3. Not charging higher prices or capping the prices I was willing to charge (both for services and for info products)

4. Setting prices based on what I felt comfortable charging, rather than on what this could be worth to the buyer or what they would be willing to pay

5. Not listening to Travis Sago ideas sooner, or paying him to find out his full systems like Phoneless Sales Machine and BEAMER, and applying that to what I was doing both for myself and for others

6. Thinking that the only way I can communicate with my readers is via broadcast, or maybe over 1-on-1 email, instead of regularly reaching out to some of them to suggest getting on a call

7. Launching stuff without validating demand

8. Launching stuff after I attempted to validate demand and was told explicitly by the market that there was no demand for what I wanted to launch

9. In general, coming upon obstacles and saying, let me turn back or simply sit here instead of looking for ways over, under, through, or around the obstacle

10. Thinking that the only options are either do everything myself or hire others to do it for me.

And now, for my offer:

In regret 5 above, I say I regret not listening to Travis Sago or paying him earlier.

The fact is, the remaining 9 of my 10 regrets would have been reduced or maybe even eliminated had I not only stalked Travis Sago online for years, but had I gladly and unquestioningly paid him a few thousand dollars for his programs, and had I started implementing those programs in my “business” earlier.

All of that is a warm introduction to and endorsement for Travis Sago’s community, Royalty Ronin, which I am member of, and which gives you access to all of Travis’s programs, along with contact with Travis himself, plus over 500 online business owners, investors, and marketers.

At the moment there’s even a free 7-day trial for Royalty Ronin. If you want to avoid making the same mistakes I made, I highly recommend Ronin:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

What everybody ought to know… about this online investor business

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This morning, I was sitting in a noisy cafe with music playing and coffee machines steaming away and a lampshade swinging above my head in the breeze. Amid all this confusion, I was trying to focus. I was looking for offers to promote.

I have several new and interesting offers slated for the next days and weeks. But what for today?

One of my go-tos on days like today is Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin community, which I lurk, learn, and even occasionally participate in.

Being in Ronin and following Travis’s advice has made me tens of thousands of dollars over the past 18 months that I’ve been subscribed to it, via new offers I’ve made, and via making me more money out of offers I already have. That’s why I keep recommending Ronin in my emails whenever I have a bit of a chance.

So this morning, I went to check out the Ronin front page.

In the past, Travis ran a free trial offer for Ronin. It makes sense to do a free trial because Ronin is 1) expensive ($299/month) and 2) a monthly charge (which everyone hates, including people who can afford it).

For a long time, that free trial offer was the norm.

But then, at odd times, including times when I promoted Ronin previously, it turned out that the free trial had disappeared. Then it came back. Then it disappeared again. Then the price dropped. Then it went back to normal. I guess Travis is constantly experimenting with the offer.

Today, when I thought of promoting Ronin, I went to check what the current front page looks like.

At first, I was confused. Then shocked.

It turns out there’s no free trial at the moment. Ok.

It turns out the price is the usual $299/month. Ok.

What had me confused and shocked is that right now, the entire Ronin community is open.

You can see all the members inside, read all their posts, as well as the comments.

You can see the “Welcome! START HERE!” post, which links to the “8-Day New Ronin Action Plan,” which is also currently open to everyone. You can see Travis’s advice on topics like partner getting, licensing, and “coffee dates,” and how to do that in just the next few days.

The only stuff that remains restricted, unless you’re actually a paying Ronin member, is the courses area, which contains about a dozen specialized trainings. Plus you don’t get access to the Royalty Ronin bonuses, which is a library of Travis’s courses that adds up to $12k in real-world value. And of course, you can’t participate or post in the community, but only observe and read.

This extra stuff is definitely worth paying for. But even without it, there’s enough valuable info inside the freely available Ronin community to fill a few airplane hangars with.

At least for the moment.

The current “everything in the open” offer might be a glitch. Maybe it will disappear very soon.

Maybe. Or maybe it’s just old-school marketing.

I remember a long time ago Andre Chaperon talking about lead magnets you didn’t have to sign up for.

Andre would simply lay out the entire, high-value lead magnet on his web site as a web page. He would then have an optin at the end of all that for the people who had gone to the trouble of reading the whole thing, which, unsurprisingly, turned out to be very high-quality leads.

Of course, there’s nothing new under the sun, and Andre didn’t invent this strategy.

It goes back millions of years, back to when brontosauruses ran direct-response weight-loss offers in the Jurrasic Times.

A little more seriously, it goes back at least to the 1940s, and the famous “What everybody ought to know… About This Stock and Bonds Business” ad.

That ad ran in major newspapers across the country. It featured 6,000 densely packed words of info and education about stocks and bonds, and a buried offer at the end, which drew tons of highly qualified leads for Merryl Lynch for over 10 years.

I thought about how to adapt that headline to the currently open Royalty Ronin community.

“What everybody ought to know about…”

I tried out different angles.

Eventually I remembered something Travis repeats over and over in Ronin, about how he really doesn’t have any ambition to be an entrepreneur or business owner. Running a business day after day is not for him, he says.

Rather, his goal is to be an investor, somebody who makes small bets that don’t cost much if they don’t pay off, but that have unlimited upside and the potential to pay him for years to come if they do work out.

Specifically, Travis talks about about how to be an online investor, making small bets on your own online products or audiences, or those of others.

And if you have no money to invest? That’s okay. Travis also talks about how you can invest other things, like your resourcefulness, your willingness to make connections, or your skills and expertise.

In any case, if you want to know what everybody ought to know about this online investor business, here’s an incredible free resource for you:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

Millionaire math used by the wealthiest people, but not me

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Yesterday morning, my time, I concluded the “Unannounced Bonus” promo I had been running all past week.

As usual, the final day of the promo was an exhausting barrage of emails.

The last thing I wanted to do yesterday was to think or write more about that promo or how it went.

But today, I did what I usually do and looked at my “Unannounced Bonus” promo — how it went, how it compared to previous promos, what I can learn.

Let me shoo the elephant out of the closet right away, and make the gray beast dance:

This “Unannounced Bonus” promo made fewer sales of Copy Riddles, across 7 days, than I made last year during the last promo I ran for CR, which I called the “White Tuesday” promo, and which lasted just 2 days.

Before you either feel too bad for me or start to maliciously gloat, let me say that the “White Tuesday” promo surprised even me by how well it did.

And though the “Unannounced Bonus” promo did less than that, it still made more in a week than I would likely be making in a month if I had a proper job. It also paid me an effective per-email rate that’s many hundreds of dollars higher than I was making back at the peak of my freelance copywriting career.

But, with all that self-reassuring done, the fact remains I made fewer sales now, over 7 days, than last year, over 2 days.

What’s going on?

I made a list of 10 possible explanations for myself. All of them are legit, and all possibly contributed. But there’s one big one that stands out to me, and that I want to highlight to you too:

During the “White Tuesday” promo last year, part of the offer was a payment plan for Copy Riddles.

95% of people who bought during that promo took the payment plan.

During the “Unannounced Bonus” promo that just ended, part of the offer was once again a payment plan for Copy Riddles.

But just 33% of people who bought during this promo took the payment plan.

The difference is that this time, I was partnering with Lawrence Bernstein, and offering a lifetime subscription to his Ad Money Machine as a bonus for Copy Riddles. (And vice versa — Lawrence was also promoting the offer to his list.)

Due to the uniqueness of this arrangement, I agreed with Lawrence we’d offer the same payment plan as he offered the last time he made the offer of a lifetime subscription for Ad Money Machine…

… which, as I said, 33% of buyers ended up finding enticing.

On the other hand, last year, I followed a very specific payment plan philosophy. 95% of people found that payment plan enticing, and much more importantly, a greater total number of sales came out of it.

Maybe you remember what the payment plan was that I offered for White Tuesday. If not, my emails are all archived on my site, and you can find the campaign there. You can look it up, and see what the exact payment plan was.

But I’ll tell you one thing:

Even if you know the specifics of what I did publicly, you’re unlikely to glean the underlying payment plan philosophy, or the most exciting and valuable marketing trick resulting from that philosophy, which is applied behind the scenes.

I’ll tell you a second thing:

The payment plan philosophy I followed last year came from a 13-minute video by Travis Sago, titled “Millionaire Math Used by the Wealthiest People.”

If you’ve already taken me up on my recommendation to sign up for Travis’s Royalty Ronin community (I myself am a paying member), then you can find this 13-minute video as a bonus inside the Phoneless Sales Machine course, which normally sells for $2,000, and which Travis gives away as a free bonus for those who are in Royalty Ronin.

If you haven’t taken me up on my recommendation to sign up for Travis’s Royalty Ronin community, then I can only tell you Royalty Ronin is expensive. Very expensive. Particularly if you sign up and do nothing with the information.

On the other hand, if you are selling offers online — specifically, info products like courses or ebooks — and if you apply just this one idea from Travis about payment plans, it could well be worth thousands of dollars to you by the end of this week alone, and much, much more in the coming weeks, months, and years.

If you want to invest in a month of Ronin, and see how quickly and thoroughly you can make your money back:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

How to turn $99 courses into $999 offers

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Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a magic spell that turns plain, small, $29 or $99 courses into shiny, exciting, $299 or $999 offers?

The past week, I’ve been trawling the Royalty Ronin community, of which I am a paying member.

I found a curious and old post inside. A lightbulb came on. I had actually written an email on the exact same topic, back in 2021, as a kind of joke, talking about repositioning physical products.

Here’s what I wrote back then:

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If you sell dog clippers today and nobody’s buying, then bundle your clippers with a video. Tell people how to set up their own dog grooming business in their back yard in their spare time.

Charge 10x what the clippers cost… and find yourself in a marketplace of one, instead of a commodity market.

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I suffer from what is known as “copywriter brain,” which is limited in its thinking and reach.

It takes “marketing and business brain” to take the above idea seriously and see its full potential, particularly when applied to info products.

And that’s exactly what I found in that post inside Royalty Ronin. This post talked about this same idea, and it gave a real example involving Travis Sago (the guy who runs Royalty Ronin).

Travis took a course that sold well for $99 and transformed it, successfully and ethically, into a $999 offer that also sold well.

The point being, you don’t have to start from scratch.

If you want to create a big-ticket offer, this doesn’t mean you need big new course content, a big new topic, a big new mechanism.

You can take what you already have, even if it’s only selling now for $29 or $99 or whatever, and reposition it so it becomes a genuine big-ticket offer.

But what if you don’t have even a $29 or $99 offer right now?

That’s ok. Millions of other people do have such offers. And you can start a profitable repositioning business, with your own home as headquarters, by helping such people turn their $29 offers into $299 offers and their $99 offers into $999 offers.

If you want more info or advice or support on how to do all this, then you might be a good fit for Royalty Ronin.

You can sign up for a trial below and see for yourself if it’s for you.

If you do sign up, forward me your welcome email (the one that says “Vroom” in the subject line). I’ll then tell you where to find the post I mentioned above, which lays out how Travis repositions his $99 courses into $999 offers. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin