Shiv Shetti

How to 3x your readership and give the right people an excuse to say hi

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A couple weeks ago I sent out an unusual email using my Most Valuable Email trick.

I got a response to that from a former client/partner, the owner of a successful direct marketing agency, somebody who had at one point paid me a sizable monthly retainer to advise on emails and advertorials. He wrote:

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At first, I thought the [censored] was just a gimmick and part of your email strategy.

But then I wasn’t sure (new CK account and all that).

Finally, on my 3rd read I figured this was actually you being clever and not an issue with your CK setup.

What it DID do is make me pay attention. (Been a loooooong time since I read anyone’s email THREE times).

So I’m voting for “brilliant” vs “haha mistake!”

Also, using this as an excuse to say hi. Hope all is good.

You still doing the coaching gig?

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The [censored] bit above was my use of the MVE trick in that email.

It’s a new form of Most Valuable Email, one I have started playing with from time to time.

It’s still the same old Most Valuable Email trick, but applied in a new way, one I wasn’t comfortable doing before.

It’s getting results like the above:

People paying more attention… leaning in more… even rereading my emails 3x… and reaching out to reopen dropped business conversations.

If all this sounds abstract, it’s probably because you don’t know what my Most Valuable Email trick is.

You can get it below and find out.

I also have a disappearing bonus to motivate you to act now. The disappearing bonus is simply an explanation of my new way of using the MVE trick, like in the email that drew the response from the agency owner above, and how you can do this too.

If you’d like this disappearing bonus, here’s what to do:

1. Get my Most Valuable Email training at the link below

2. Send me an email by tomorrow, Wednesday Sep 25, by 8:31pm CET, saying you want the disappearing bonus. (After that, no bonus.)

And if you already have Most Valuable Email?

This disappearing bonus is of course open to you too – but the same deadline applies.

Here’s the link to get Most Valuable Email:

​https://bejakovic.com/mve/​

P.S. You might say, “Oh but I want my copy to be crystal-clear like glass, and not to require rereading three times.”

There is something to that.

At the same time, I personally don’t ever want to make what I write scrollable, skippable, and disposable.

If what I write makes people stop, scratch their head, read all the way to the end, reread, I’m good with that.

And in terms of results generated:

Six months ago, the agency owner above and I were talking about working together again.

At that time, I had just started as a coach in Shiv Shetti’s PCM mastermind, and I didn’t have the time to take on a new project.

The new-style MVE email above got the agency owner to reach out and pick up the thread of that conversation… a win in my book, particularly since, as of last week, I am no longer working with Shiv’s PCM mastermind.

Sideways webinar

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This morning, I was preparing for the PCM hot seat, which is my main task within Shiv Shetti’s PCM mastermind.

Each week, I get on a call with a different copywriter. I advise the copywriter on a new email promo he or she is writing on a performance-only basis for some client or another.

The guy I’m talking to today has managed to bag a great client — a 41k-subscriber email list, lots of success stories, a high-priced offer, and marketing that’s already working, including a front-end webinar.

This is the first email promo the copywriter will be writing for this client.

So one of my suggestions to him was to minimize his work, and maximize the odds of success for both himself and his client. For example, just take the existing webinar, which is already working, and turn that into an email promo.

That’s hardly a new idea.

It goes back at least 20 years, at least back to Jeff Walker and his Product Launch Formula.

I can’t say for sure, but PFL might be the most successful and influential Internet marketing training of all time? At least if you look at the number of customers, the sales generated by those customers, and the resulting money that Jeff has made from it.

At heart, PFL is based on a very simple idea, and that’s the “sideways sales letter”:

​Take a working sales letter and turn it on its side, so it becomes a series of emails that you can send out as a time-limited promo. Chan-ta-ta-chan! Money in the bank, where yesterday there was none.

Of course, it doesn’t just have to be the sideways sales letter. It can be the sideways webinar, like I told the PCM copywriter today. Or it can be the sideways 1-on-1 sales call. Or the sideways stage presentation. And so on.

If you have a sales message that’s working for you in one long-form format, odds are good it will work as an email promo as well. In the words of Jim Rohn and John Bejakovic:

1. Have something good to say
2. Say it well
3. Say it often
4. Say it in a new format
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Now let me ask you:
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Do you have a working webinar?

​​Does the idea of turning it sideways, and making extra sales sound attractive?

​​Do you have zero interest in doing this work yourself?

​​If so, hit reply, and let’s talk. Maybe I can get it done for you.

What comes after email promos?

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Last week, I got an email with the subject line, “quick question John.” I opened it up to read:

“I’ve been following your work since you’ve launched Simple Money Email – love your stuff!”

Mhm, sure you do. It’s Simple Money Emails, with an s, in the plural.

I skimmed over the rest of the guy’s message, which tried to be clever and funny. Finally, I got to the offer at the end:

“Would you be interested in re-launching Simple Money Email (or any other one of your courses) – to make $25k, $50k–and depending on your list size–even $100k… by the end of May?”

I would absolutely love that — especially since this cold email pitch hit my inbox on June 3rd, three days after the end of May.

But whatever. My point here is not to take apart this guy’s cold email and all the problems in it.

My point is simply to highlight that I, John Bejakovic, who am currently a hot seat coach in Shiv Shetti’s Performance Copywriter Method mastermind, where we teach people how to do email promos, am being pitched by copywriters I’ve never met, who want to run an email promo to “relaunch” my course for me.

All of which makes me wonder what’s coming in the future.

​​​Not necessarily as a replacement for email promos. Email promos work, the same way that email marketing works, the same way that marketing works.

No, what I’m wondering about is what will be the next business opportunity.

​​What will copywriters latch onto next as a thing to pitch to business owners?

​​What will business owners latch onto as the next business opportunity to pitch to people, copywriters included?

I have my own ideas about this.

​​But I’d like to hear yours as well.

​​If you’d like to share them with me, hit reply.

​​I’m not promising anything in return. But who knows, maybe we can get into an interesting conversation, and figure out something valuable for the future.

I asked for ideas to fail, and I got ’em

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The results are in. Well, some of the results.

Yesterday, I wrote an email asking my readers for ideas. On how I could make more money. And I offered a $100 reward — if I run with the idea and it fails.

Result:

I got a small number of replies so far. Almost all the replies were thoughtful, serious ideas that could legitimately make me more money.

I’ve decided to try out an idea sent to me by Modern Maker Jacob Pegs. I’ll report on the final result of that — $100 or glory — by the end of this month.

The thing is, I would like to do more. Try out two, three, all of the ideas people sent me. All at the same time.

I’d also like to finish that book I’ve been working on for a while. Plus I’d like to go through my existing emails and package those up into even more books.

I’d like to create a couple new courses, or maybe a half dozen. I have ideas for a few workshops as well. Plus I’ve been toying with the idea of creating a community for a while.

I’d like to find new affiliate offers to promote… I’d like to come up with some sort of continuity program… I’d like to build up my list with more people with money.

And that’s just for this little info publishing business.

There’s a whole big world of money-making opportunities out there that regularly calls my attention and tempts me with the thought of cool new projects using skills and assets I already have.

All that’s to say:

I’m a moderately successful dude. And I have a moderately infinite list of possible projects to do, all of which sound cool, all of which which could make me a ton of money, all of which could be good for me in other ways.

But there are people out there who are vastly more successful than I am. And those people have vastly infinite lists of possible projects to do, all of which sound cool, all of which could make them a ton of money, all of which could be good for them in other ways.

You see the problem:

Infinite opportunities…

Finite time. Finite energy. Finite head space.

And that’s pretty much the argument for going to business owners and saying, “Hey. You. How about I just do this for you? Don’t pay me anything. Don’t stress about this at all. I’ll handle all of it. Just, if it makes money, you give me a share?”

These kinds of offers work. I know, because I’ve made them, and I’ve had them accepted.

I can vouch first hand that these offers can collect you — as the party doing the work — a lot of money.

You can go out now and start reaching out to business owners and saying “Hey. You.”

If that works, great.

But if not, then consider Shiv Shetti’s PCM mastermind.

Shiv’s got a whole system for how to find business owners to partner with… how to approach them… what to say to them… and how to deliver on work that makes the business owner free money, which they are then happy to share with you.

Oh, and there’s also coaches inside PCM to help you along. I’m one of those coaches.

If you’d like to find out more about PCM:

https://bejakovic.com/pcm

The allure of ecom

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Today, I’m preparing a hot seat for one of the copywriters inside Shiv Shetti’s PCM mastermind.

So far, the dozen or so hot seats I have done were all for info products — high-ticket coaching, courses, a live event.

This hot seat is not for an info product. Instead, it’s for an ecom product, a strange $1,200 metal contraption that’s apparently selling well to an audience of middle-aged men.

As so often happens, this ecom business has a list of tens of thousands of past buyers and prospects.

And yet these guys never, ever, ever get an email from this business.

It makes me think I should go back to what I was doing a few years ago, and simply seek out such businesses, and write their emails on commission only.

It’s an alluring thought, but one to pursue another day.

Anyways, in situations like this, when a business has not been emailing their list for a while or at all, it’s common practice to send out a few warmup emails before a full-blown sales promo.

Those warmup emails typically deliver “value” — as in, they make it impossible for the prospect to buy anything.

It’s not my favorite approach. But in the case of info products, I am willing to run with it.

However, in the case of these ecom buyers, my recommendation as the resident promo expert will be to sell something even in those warmup emails, even in the very first email after a silence of who knows how many months or years.

My reasoning:

Unlike with info product lists, where the intent is often vague and shadowy, the intent for this ecom list is hard and concrete.

The only thing we know for sure about these guys is that they are in the market to buy this physical gadget or something like it. And so I will recommend to give them opportunity to buy something physical in every single email.

Of course, this won’t go out in a typical ecom email, with a big red coupon or even a picture of the product.

I’ve written and sent hundreds of ecom emails.

​​They’ve all looked and sounded very much like the email you’re reading now. And those emails have sold a few million dollars of physical stuff, from shoe insoles to weight loss pills to dog harnesses.

Do you have have an ecom business?

If you do, and you want to see how I wrote such emails, including a few dozen examples of the ecom emails that brought in the most sales, then take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

My supplement stack

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I’m not sure why you’d want to know. But after 15+ years of obsessing over my health, and researching and experimenting with dozens of different, often exotic and possibly toxic supplements, here is my current daily supplement stack:

* Magnesium, zinc, and vitamin D (because they are important and I probably don’t get enough)

* A multivitamin and some fish oil (because why not)

* A teaspoon of glycine and a capsule of NAC (because there’s good science showing this combo actually reverses many hallmarks of aging, at least if you’re getting old)

* A teaspoon of creatine (because it helps increase energy production in both the body and the brain, and God knows I need that)

I’m sharing my supplement stack for two reasons.

Reason one is that I’ve found I like to read stuff like this in other people’s marketing-related newsletters. It makes no sense, and yet it’s there. Maybe you’re the same.

Reason two is that opening this email with my supplement stack allows me to seamlessly, like a silky fox, transition into talking about my supplement theory of email marketing.

Yesterday, I sent out an email that promoted my Copy Riddles program. I made one sale of Copy Riddles as a result, at $997. I’m actually very happy with that.

Because I gotta admit:

That’s hardly the norm. Most times that I send out a regular, daily, broadcast email to promote a familiar offer like Copy Riddles, I don’t make any sales.

As a result, I’ve come to think of daily emails that promote existing offers — buy it today, buy it tomorrow, buy it whenever — like supplements.

Yes, such daily emails will make sales. But the fact that people can buy the offer today, or tomorrow, or the month after, means such sales are unpredictable and rare.

That’s why I say such emails are supplements. Nice to have, but you can’t live off ’em. Instead, you gotta live off proper nutrition.

In email marketing terms, proper nutrition means a regular diet of email-based promotions – time-limited events that get people to ACT NOW.

This coming Friday, I will hold a live training about such promotions for a small group of business owners who have a list.

If that’s you, then my promise is that on this training, I’ll show you how how to pull extra money from your list, even if you don’t create a new offer, and even if you’re not pumping in hundreds or thousands new names to your list every week.

Of course, if you do have an entirely new offer, or you do get a big influx of new leads, these promotional events work even better.

And for the record, these kinds of email promos are something I have quite a bit of experience with. Via my own list and offers… via clients clients I’ve worked with… and most recently, via the coaching I’m doing inside Shiv Shetti’s mastermind, where I strategize on a new such promotion every week.

Maybe you’d like to benefit from my experience, and shortcut your path to a healthy and nutritious email list. If so, then read my email tomorrow, because I’ll have more info on Friday’s training.

Do you want my help creating an email promotion for your business?

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Today is April 1st.

​​I was going to try to “fool” you by saying I am getting into multi-level marketing. That’s on the back of a reader reply I got last week. A reader surreptitiously tried to recruit me into her own MLM organization with:

Life-Changing Products!
Breakthrough Marketing System!
Huge Compensation Plan!

Fortunately for you, I’m about as humorous as a rock. So there will be no fooling today.

Instead, I have a 100% serious and honest question for you. I’ll write an email about this question tomorrow as well. I want to make it clear this is not some dumb April Fools stunt.

As you might know, I now have a role as hot seat coach in Shiv Shetti’s PCM mastermind.

Each week, my task is to come up with a new strategy for a new email promotion for a new business.

It’s fun work. I’ve learned a lot in just my two months there. And that’s on top of my own previous experience, creating and running such email promotions. That experience is how I got this job in the first place, via a recommendation from Australia’s best copywriter, Daniel Throssell.

So my question to you is:

Do you have a business?

Do you have an email list?

Do you want to learn how to create new email promotions for your own business regularly?

​​In other words, do you want to learn how to pull out an extra $10k, $20k, $50k from your list on demand — terms and conditions apply?

Do you even want my direct, one-on-one hand-holding and help, as you strategize and execute the first of these email promotions?

If so, then reply to this email, and tell me you’re interested.

If I can get 5-10 qualified business owners who want this, I will put it on within the next 10 days.

And if not, then I really will be joining that MLM.

Save me from that fate. Get much more out of your list than you might think is possible. Hit reply, and tell me if you’re interested in this promotion training.

Ben Settle or Gary Bencivenga could hardly charge this much for emails

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As I write this, I’m at Baltimore Washington International, the “Best Airport in North America,” as the wifi popup window will tell you.

I’m waiting for my flight to West Palm Beach. I will spend the next few days there at a conferences related to my health newsletter.

My last day in Baltimore means it’s the last day for a while that I will promote Shiv Shetti’s Performance Copywriter Method.

Not because PCM is going away or because I am done being part of it.

It’s not. And I’m not.

I continue to work inside PCM as Shiv’s “hot seat coach.” And from what I can see with my inside perspective, Shiv will only grow PCM bigger, and soon.

So I will promote PCM again in the future. And if you are interested in PCM in the future, you will be able to join then.

I am telling you this because I am trying to tamp down any urgency on purpose.

Joining PCM is a big decision. This is not simply another copywriting community you should join or another product you should buy — and then do nothing with.

On the other hand, PCM can be right for you if you are frustrated with your copywriting business now, and you’re legitimately looking for something different.

And on that note, let me share a totally different result from Luiz, one of the copywriters inside PCM reported a few weeks ago. Luiz wrote:

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I already knew the PCM model was amazing and today I got proof.

Last month I wrote a promo for a client that generated $38k in sales.

My commission was 20% so I made $7,600 from one client!

If I tried asking for this amount of money without using the PCM model clients probably would look at me like I’m insane.

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For reference, Luiz wrote 9 emails for the promo — 2 warmup emails and 7 promo emails.

That’s $7,800 for 9 emails, or $866 per email.

I don’t care if you’re Ben Settle or Gary Bencivenga, you won’t have an easy time trying to charge that much for writing emails without the PCM model.

Does this mean that everybody inside PCM makes this kind of money each time they write an email?

No.

Does it mean that everybody inside PCM has a giant success with their very first client?

No.

But does it mean that results like this are possible, for reasonably skilled and experienced copywriters, who are willing to follow the PCM model, and take advantage of the resources inside this community?

Well, yes.

So if you’d like to find out more about PCM today, head over to page at the link below.

Opt in, and you will see Shiv’s video explaining in detail how PCM works, why he created it, and what to do as the next step in case you’re interested. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/pcm

What’s the problem with retainers?

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I woke up this morning to a bang.

I’ve been staying at my friend’s Adams-family-like mansion in the Bolton Hill area of Baltimore.

I have an entire floor of the house to myself.

It’s been great. Except each morning I’ve been here, I’ve been woken up in the same way.

Bang. Against my window. Then a few seconds later, another bang. On and on and on.

A robin – a strange, possibly idiot bird — keeps flying against the window all morning long. After it hits its head against the window, it flies to a nearby branch. It resets. And then it flies at the window again.

And like that until I wake up, get up, and leave the room so I don’t have to listen to him any more.

This week, in fact ever since I got to Baltimore, I’ve been promoting Shiv Shetti’s Performance Copywriter Method.

I’ve been getting a lot of comments from readers who have good things to say about Shiv, and who are happy to hear I’m working with him.

I’ve also gotten a few questions, including the following from Dr. Liza Schermann, formerly the Crazy Email Lady, now a full-time copywriter with an ecommerce brand. Liza wrote:

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So cool you are now one of the coaches in Shiv’s programme!

I was actually considering his retainer coaching a few years ago because I figured that if I was going to quit my job at the time, it would have to be for a retainer or retainers. Which is pretty much what I ended up doing without him, only a couple of years (and a lot of sweat and blood) later.

Out of curiosity: what’s the problem with retainers? (If it’s public info.)

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The answer to Liza’s question is really Shiv’s territory, and he goes into it in detail in his video in which he makes the case for the Performance Copywriter Method.

That said, here’s a few possible issues with retainers:

From the copywriter’s side, it’s typically a lot of work, for not all that much money…

​​It’s a lot of stress because the client could decide at any moment to sack you…

​It’s not too scalable because you can only have so many of these retainers before you run out of hours in the day…

​​Plus it’s hard to sell clients on the retainer agreement to start with.

On the other hand, from the client’s view, it feels like an ongoing expense and a need to find stuff for the copywriter to do to make it worth while. And that means they keep wondering whether they should keep it going or sack you before the next retainer payment.

I’m sure not all retainer deals end up like that. Liza has a retainer-like gig. And it’s going well for her.

At the same time, I’ve had a couple retainer-like deals myself. I could never make them work, so I can believe retainers do go bad often.

And yet, for many copywriters, retainers remain some kind of enchanted castle, a magical destination they keep hoping to reach.

Perhaps i could tie that up to that robin beating his head against my window each morning.

Or perhaps I can just tell you there is a legitimate new opportunity for copywriters, a way to make great money, in a scalable way, without the storm and stress of retainers.

It’s called the Performance Copywriter Method. If you’d like to find out more about it:

https://bejakovic.com/pcm

My confessions as Shiv Shetti’s hot-seat coach

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Last Dec, Australia’s best copywriter, Daniel Throssell, wrote me an email asking if I wanted an intro to Shiv Shetti, who was looking for a new coach for his program.

I had no idea what being a coach inside somebody else’s program entailed, but I was willing to find out.

It turned out Shiv has a new program to coach copywriters, called Performance Copywriter Method.

Normally, I would not be interested. For the past year, I have been consciously working to move away from coaching, selling, or marketing to copywriters.

But this was something different.

Shiv was looking for a “hot seat coach.” Each week, I would have to give a different copywriter a strategy for a new email promotion. The copywriters were working with solid, successful clients, and were writing email promos for them on performance-only deals.

I told Shiv I am interested in this. So we agreed I’d start a 2-week trial period at the end of January.

In the meantime, I got to work preparing.

I bought Daniel Throssell’s Campaign Conqueror course, because Shiv was explicitly looking for someone who knew how to do promos in that style. I went through Campaign Conqueror twice.

Second, I went through Shiv’s trainings inside PCM. They talked about mindset… about Shiv’s system for finding these PCM clients… about writing promos themselves.

Third, I looked over previous hot seats that Shiv had delivered himself, all of which surprised me in how thoughtful and thorough they were.

Fourth, I joined the PCM Skool community, where I first started lurking and then contributing bit by bit.

Long story short:

I was impressed by Shiv’s program… impressed by the copywriters inside… impressed by Shiv and his team.

I guess they liked me as well, because my trial period came and went, and now we continue to work together.

My main job is, as I said, to take in a bunch of info each week, and come up with the strategy for a new email promo, much in the style of Daniel Throssell’s Campaign Conqueror. The strategy includes a promo offer, a theme, and email hooks.

For example, tomorrow I have call set up with an Australian copywriter who’s working with a music coach. He’s supposed to send emails over 5 days to promote the coach’s $2,800 offer to the coach’s list of 12,000 names.

I will prepare the strategy. I will go over it with the copywriter over Zoom. He will then go off and write the implement the strategy some time in April.

If all goes well, the client will make a bunch of money without doing any work. The copywriter will end up getting paid much more for those emails than he ever could if he were getting paid up front. And then next month, he and the client will do it all again, with a new offer and a new theme.

So far, I’ve done five or six of these hot seats, one per week. Most of the promos are set to run in the next few weeks, so I can’t report on any impressive wins yet. I imagine those will come.

The other part of my work as a hot seat coach is participate in the PCM Skool community, fielding questions every day.

Those tend to range from technical questions to client acquisition questions to copy and promo questions.

Fortunately, this community is nothing like r/copywriting or the various Facebook copy groups. The people inside are all normal, are all looking for results, are all actually working copywriters with solid copy chops.

All that’s to say, i continue to work with Shiv and his PCM community.

I can tell you from the inside that this program is 100% legit.

​​Not only is it well-designed and well-delivered, with care and effort, but the copywriters inside are getting these performance deals going with quality clients, and from what I’ve seen of the results so far, they are making bank.

If you’re interested, you can find out more about PCM below.

But before you go there, you might notice the curious fact that I am not in any way creating a promo out of this offer.

There’s no deadline.

There’s no disappearing offer, or a bonus, or a discount.

That’s because I don’t want to create any additional urgency about this, beyond what you might already feel as a copywriter dissatisfied or worried with the status quo.

But if you are dissatisfied or worried, and if you’re looking for a new way to work as a copywriter, then PCM is definitely worth a look. For more info:

https://bejakovic.com/pcm