Travis Sago

4 words that tell you what people will do or want to do

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If you must know the four words, I’ll save you from scrolling and just tell you right away. The four words are:

“I’m not going to”

There. You’re done. You don’t need to read more. But, if you like, do read more, and I’ll give you a bit of context to make sense of these words.

A couple weeks ago, I got a message on LinkedIn (yes, LinkedIn, I have a profile there that I never check) from a dude who was reading my “10 Commandments of Con Men, Pick Up Artists, etc.” book.

I saw that he buys houses for cash. We got into a bit of a conversation. I asked him if, while dealing with house sellers, he has found any little persuasion tricks or deeper psychological principles, along the lines of what I share in the 10 Commandments book.

He had a bunch, including the following:

“When a person says ‘I’m not going to’ it usually means whatever they say after that, they’re going to do or want to do.”

He didn’t give me any examples, but I had heard an example just earlier that day. I had been listening to a call by marketer Travis Sago. Travis was talking about a campaign he ran to sell a bunch of spots for, I believe, an $11k program.

Travis’s strategy was to announce the price early in the campaign. People were shocked at how expensive the program was. One guy apparently wrote in to say, “Have you lost your everloving mind?”

Travis worked his magic during that campaign.

That “everloving” dude ended up buying on the final day. And when he did, he wrote Travis to say, “You know it’s funny, I told myself this morning I’m not going to do this.”

When you think about it, it’s obvious that when people say, “I’m not going to,” they are actually going to, or at least they want to.

Otherwise, why would the thought of doing the thing even be in their head? Even more so, why would they need to try to psychologically guard themselves against the thought by telling themselves and others that it won’t happen?

This is part of a bigger psychological principle, and one that you can use to communicate more effectively and influence people on a day-to-day level, whether you want to buy houses for cash, or to make people laugh, or even to win an election.

I cover all that in Commandment VI of my 10 Commandments book. Speaking of, here’s what the dude on Linked wrote me initially about that book:

“Hi John, I’ve almost finished your book (10 Commandments) and just wanted to say it’s delightful and I appreciate the menagerie of experts you drew on! Thank you”

If you haven’t gotten your copy of my book yet, here’s where you can find it waiting for you:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Fire sale auction

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After my first and very successful “I endorse YOU” auction back in December, I haven’t had much luck coming up with an auction offer that really excited my audience. A few of the flops:

#1. An A-Z system for growing your list via newsletter ads, from finding the right newsletters, to getting the lowest rates, to making ~$10 for every new subscriber

#2. The behind-the-scenes info of auctions I’ve been running with partners, plus info on how I’ve gotten each such partner

#3. A penny auction to find out what marketing book I’ve been reading repeatedly this whole year and keeping hidden, because it’s simply too valuable to share publicly

Auction archwizard Travis Sago says that one of the easiest things to auction off is licensing rights to a course, at least if you got a course, and if you got an audience of marketers who want to make money.

Is that right?

I don’t know. My gut feeling is against it but my gut’s failed me many times before. I am willing to put it to the test and find out.

A few days ago, I listened to a podcast about the realities of the book publishing business:

1. Publishers publish a bunch of books, then sell the books to bookstores.

2. If the bookstores cannot sell all the books they bought, they send the books back to the publisher and ask for their money back.

3. In case the publisher is left holding a bunch of books no bookstores wants, they try to recoup at least some of the value. They auction off the books in a kind of fire sale auction to whoever is willing to pay for the lot (or any fraction of the lot).

4. The rest of the books, the ones that cannot be sold via the fire sale auction, are fed into a shredder, chopped up, and then turned into pulp, to recoup at least a few cents on the dollar of value.

With that preamble, lemme ask you:

Would you participate in my fire sale auction?

The offer on auction is the licensing and resell rights my Copy Riddles course, which currently retails for $997.

Would you bid $1 for the right to sell Copy Riddles yourself, forever, and keep every cent of the $997, or whatever you choose to sell it for?

Copy Riddles is the best thing I’ve created. Out of all my courses, books, and trainings, it’s likely to be useful to the greatest number of people. If anything I’ve created outlasts this newsletter, it will be Copy Riddles.

And yet, I haven’t been really selling it.

In part, it’s because I’ve gotten out of the “teach you copywriting” business.

In part, it’s because my list is growing so slowly and the price point of Copy Riddles is so high that it makes little sense for me to promote Copy Riddles regularly, since I have largely tapped out easy demand in my own list.

That said, Copy Riddles has still has brought in ~20k/year over the past few years, which I’ve made by running a creative and exciting promo for just a few days, once a year.

Would you want to sell Copy Riddles yourself? To your own audience or to other people’s audiences?

You’d be free to reposition it, free to repackage it, free to transform it into another format or AI tool or live workshop or audio book, or to break it up into pieces and sell it that way.

Of course, if I were to run this fire sale auction, I’d throw in some bonuses to make the auction offer more unique and exciting and FIRE.

But really, the core offer is Copy Riddles, and your right to sell it in perpetuity and keep all the money.

Would you bid $1 for that?

If you would, hit reply and let me know. Otherwise I’ll start priming my shredder and wood pulper, and try to reclaim at least a few cents of the $997 value.

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 list growth is your priority, do not read this email

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It’s Saturday morning as I write this, if you can call 1:22pm morning.

I can call it that, or will call it that, because I went out last evening, had some drinks, and then spent a strange, tossy-turny, dream-oppressed night in bed.

All that’s to say, my brain, which is normally not the fastest and most energetic of my organs, is right now even slower than usual.

In my present state, around 1:18pm, I was unsure what to put into today’s email, or if there will even be an email today.

Fortunately, I checked my own inbox. And there I saw a fresh-off-the-presses email by my online buddy Kieran Drew.

“Hullo,” I said. Because the subject line of Kieran’s email was, “I lost $2,152 this month.”

It’s not a tremendously complicated situation:

Kieran sends out weekly emails to his list. Last month he didn’t make any new offers but just promoted his existing courses. That, plus some sales directly from his welcome sequence and some affiliate sales, made him about $3k.

On the other hand, Kieran’s expenses, including his VA, the ads he’s running, and the software he pays for, added up to over $5k.

Subtract one from the other, carry the zero, get out your red marker, and you get a $2,152 loss for March.

Now here’s the rub, and what made me decide to write an email about this:

Kieran’s audience is north of 250,000 people. His email list alone is close to 30k people.

My point being, if you think that a big list or a big audience will solve all your problems with your online business… well, no.

Kieran has made over $1.5M in the past, mainly from his email list, mainly by doing launches around new offers and promos around existing offers.

From what I understand, he’s gearing up to do so again.

But without new offers and without email-intensive launches and promos, he wound up in the red, thanks to an earnings last month of about $0.10/subscriber.

On the other hand, I recently listened to a case study by marketer Travis Sago, involving some unnamed dude. Said Travis:

===

He just went through a transition point in his life, and everything was going wrong. Like Infusionsoft took his list. Like he was coming off a bad relationship.

I remember he was like, “Dude, can you help me?”

I said, “Well, I’m not sure. Come out here.”

I really like the guy. He came out here. He’s got a seven hundred person list.

I’m like, “What I would do is I would mail your list every day, invite them to a phone call, right?”

We came up with an offer for them.

In December, during the Christmas season, he had fifty grand in sales from that seven hundred person list. Now thirty five was collected, about fifteen was on payments.

===

50 grand from a 700 person list. That’s $71/subscriber.

Now, I don’t know the behind-the-scenes details of this dude’s business. Plus, not everybody gets somebody like Travis Sago in their corner. Plus plus, it’s often easier to make higher and more impressive earnings per subscriber with a smaller list.

STILL.

Maybe you don’t make $71/subscriber.

Maybe you make $20/subscriber.

Or $10/subscriber.

Or $5/subscriber.

Or just $2/subscriber.

It’s quite doable.

And if you want some help with that, regardless of the size of your audience, come join me inside Daily Email House. that’s my free Skool group, where our collective mission is, “Email daily, make a $1k offer, pay for a house.” Your spot is waiting for you here:

https://bejakovic.com/house

Glossary of 1-1 follow up

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The past few days, I’ve been telling you about Nick Bandy’s system for reactivating leads and deals that have gone silent, called Ghostbuster Sequence.

If you open up Ghostbuster Sequence, you might find yourself confused by the unfamiliar follow-up jargon. I don’t want you to be confused. I really don’t. So let me give you a glossary that defines some of the terms you’ll see inside:

Stage 1: Conversations that have been dead for 2 weeks or more. For conversations like this, send Nick’s “Stage 1” message and proceed to Stage 2.

Stage 2: Conversations that have been dead for less than 2 weeks. In Princess Bride terms, these are “mostly dead” conversations. There’s a big difference between “mostly dead” and “all dead.”

Meme Warfare: A strategic graphical assault on your dead (or mostly dead) prospect, designed to get them to crack a smile and make it easy for them to reply.

The “Jim Camp Nuclear Option”: A 7-word message to send prospects after multiple previous followups have failed to produce a response. (Nick attributes this message to marketer Travis Sago. I happen to know it goes back to negotiation coach Jim Camp.) Says Nick, “It works TOO well.”

The “Negative Reply Pivot”: A message to send high-value prospects who explicitly tell you “NO.”

Educated assumptions: Statements to send your dead (or mostly dead) prospects that break the pattern of constant follow-up questions.

“Mr. America” technique: Nick doesn’t call it this inside his Ghostbuster Sequence. Instead, he calls it “Stage 7.”

I think my name is distinctly better. It comes from the following story from the book Mr. America, about health publisher Bernarr MacFadden:

“With his marriage to Mary officially over, Macfadden had captured headlines by taking a new bride. Johnnie Lee McKinney was a forty-four-year-old health lecturer and former interior designer when she met the seventy-nine-year-old publisher — a sturdy, vivacious blond Texas beauty molded in Macfadden’s preferred silhouette. Theirs was a whirlwind courtship. He attended one of her talks in Manhattan, then hounded her into a lunch date at the New York Athletic Club. After a wholesome meal, the two proceeded to Johnnie Lee’s apartment, where the vigorously amorous Macfadden demonstrated his usual distaste for small talk by unzipping his trousers to reveal what Johnnie Lee called ‘the most exquisite sex organ I had ever seen on a man.’ Johnnie Lee declined her date’s unspoken offer — as well as his shouted proposal to marry her immediately—” though she did end up marrying MacFadden and his exquisite sex organ within the month.

Maybe you find that story crude. Don’t worry. Nick’s take on this technique is anything but crude. In fact, Nick’s use of this technique is professional and yet effective, and can work not just at the start of a courtship, but after everything else has failed to produce a response.

Nick’s Ghostbuster Sequence goes up in price from $54 to $97 at 8pm EST tonight. If you’d like to get it before then:

https://bejakovic.com/ghostbuster

P.S. If you do get it before the deadline, forward me your receipt. I will personally send you a bonus of equal real-world value, My Secret of the Magi. It sells for $54 on my site right now, and tells you the biggest secret I’ve learned about opening up (not following up on) conversations that lead to business partnerships.

3 conclusions from my 1-day, 3-sale promo yesterday

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Yesterday, I promoted Travis Sago’s course 24 Hour FUN Auction, which is the course I followed to run a $31k auction in my own community Daily Email House.

My email yesterday succeeded in making… 3 sales of Travis’s $49 course.

As I always do, even following a 1-day, 3-sale blockbuster like this, this morning I sat down and wrote up my conclusions from this promo.

I’d like to share three of them with you:

#1. Run live tests

On the one hand, a number of people on my list wrote me to express interest in exactly the information in Travis’s course.

On the other hand, I had floated the idea of selling Travis’s course before in my community, and the results were feeble.

How would my entire list react if I ran a promo selling Travis’s course?

There’s only one way to tell, and that’s to put the offer in front of them.

I had all kinds of plans in case Travis’s course sold well:

– A community for running penny auctions

– Extra bonuses on top of the one I offered yesterday

– Valuable and intriguing additional offers to make to people who bought Travis’s $49 training

… but none of that matters much if the core offer, and the way it’s packaged up, is not something people want.

People’s stated interests, or even stated lack of interest, doesn’t matter much until the test is “live,” meaning people either put money down on the table or they refuse to do so.

I have learned this lesson in the past, and I applied it yesterday.

I didn’t spend any time developing other bonuses, or creating a new community, or writing up an upsell page with additional offers.

I treated yesterday’s email as a live test. The email was straightforward. There was no deadline. It was really just the core offer and a bonus I already had lying around, plus my best arguments why you should buy.

If that sold well, it would make sense to invest time in doing all the other stuff I had planned and to run a full promo. Otherwise, even bonuses and upsells wouldn’t have made this promo worthwhile.

#2. Make sure you get credited for affiliate sales

I made 3 sales yesterday. I got credited for 1 of them.

Travis’s 24 Hour FUN Auction is delivered within Travis’s Skool group. Two of the folks who bought yesterday were already members of that group. And even though they bought through my affiliate link, Skool doesn’t credit me for the purchase. Lesson learned.

#3. Don’t be satisfied with a mystery, or with your own best guesses

Yesterday, I watched from the front row as Maliha Mannan of The Side Bloger ran a 2-hour auction in her community of 60 people.

Results:

– The group grew from 60 people to 97 in a matter of hours

– Even though the group wasn’t massively engaged before, the auction post had 249 comments, and people at the end were commenting things like “that was so much fun”

– Maliha made $1,029 from the winning bidder, and will make untold millions and possibly billions more, from post-auction offers she can make to other people who expressed interest

All that’s to say… auctions work, and do all the stuff I promised in my email yesterday, stuff like:

– They make sales

– They identify high-intent leads

– They act as a price discovery mechanism (and the discovery is often shockingly high)

– They create engagement in communities

– They help communities grow

– People find them fun

– etc.

And yet, my promo yesterday of a $49 offer that shows you how to do this drew 3 sales.

Why?

I could shrug my shoulders, and chalk it up to the “mysteries of the mind.”

I could also make guesses about why people didn’t buy.

But better than either of those is to simply do some investigative journalism, and go out into the world and collect data.

So lemme ask you:

If you clicked through yesterday, but you didn’t buy Travis’s course, what was it that made you say no?

Or if you read though my email yesterday but decided to not even click through, what was the deciding factor?

Hit reply and let me know.

In turn I will reply to you with a bit of a thank-you gift.

I’ll tell you the #1 lesson I got from a quick and dirty marketing book I just finished reading. In a nutshell, I’ll tell you how one smart marketer solves the “top of funnel” problem for himself in a different way from most:

– How he converts bunches of hesitant, skeptical, or unaware prospects in 20 minutes or less (and no, sales copy ain’t got nothing to do with it)

– How he gets these prospects-turned-first-time-buyers to upsell themselves (all very natural, no pushing or persuading) so they turn into high-value, long-term customers

– How he gets them to eagerly refer him to others, so his marketing message spreads without him creating tons of content or spending a cent on ads

Are you curious? Then think about your own reaction to my email yesterday and the offer I made, and tell me what about it made you react the way you did. In turn, I’ll share with you the above marketing mystery.

Today: 51 behind-the-scenes conclusions from my “I endorse you” auction

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On December 10, 2025, I ran an auction in my Daily Email House community.

At the end of 24 hours, the winning bid came in at $31k.

The morning after the auction ended, I sat down and wrote up my impressions, conclusions, and shoulda/coulda/woulda regrets about this auction.

I aimed to write 50 items. I ended up with 51.

Also in the wake of this auction, I had a number of people reach out to me to say I should create a course about how to run auctions.

To everyone who wrote me, I replied this won’t be happening, because such a course already exists, and it’s the one I followed. It’s Travis Sago’s 24 Hour FUN Auction.

Only one problem:

For the longest time, Travis’s auctions course was only available inside Travis’s $1997/year community, Royalty Ronin. (I’ve been a member of Ronin since 2024, and that’s how I got access to the auction course.)

What I didn’t know, until only a few weeks ago, is that inside a second, free community that Travis runs, Community FIRE, Travis is now making 24 Hour FUN Auction available as a standalone course, for just $49.

Let me repeat that. Previously $1997… now $49.

And now, let me encourage you to follow the link at bottom of this email and get Travis’s 24 Hour FUN Auction training today.

As one dude in my community put it after my auction, auctions are not a “method that Internet marketers have ruined yet.”

There’s no guarantee that Internet Marketers won’t ruin auctions given enough time.

But at least this year, auctions a new and exciting way to sell online.

Even if you feel you are the smallest of fish, with a tiny audience, and no partners lined up, knowing how to run an auction like this can be a new opportunity to differentiate and distinguish yourself in the marketplace.

I’ve made the case in an earlier email that auctions are a legit alternative to product launches, and that they fix a lot of chronic problems that launches have.

Auctions are also an amazing way to inject new engagement and life into a list or community, even one that’s languishing or eroding week by week. (In my own non-languishing community, I had people who never even made a peep in the community before the auction bidding thousands during the auction.)

Auctions make buying feel like a treat. And like I wrote yesterday, when buying feels like a treat, the price that folks are willing to pay goes up. As the winning bidder in my auction, The Amazing Nick Bandy, put it:

“@John Bejakovic feel free to quote me saying it’s the most fun I ever had spending $31k”

Also, if you get Travis’s 24 Hour Fun Auction training today, I will give you, as a free bonus, my 51 behind-the-scenes conclusions about my “I endorse you” auction, including:

* How to make more money from your auction offer weeks later… from people who did NOT bid (conclusion 2)

* Why I felt bad right after the auction ended, even with the auction doing 3x of what I had hoped for (stupid but instructive, conclusion 12)

* How to “auction off” multiple identical high-ticket offers in secret (conclusion 13)

* 2 easy tweaks I could have made to grow my group significantly during the auction (conclusions 19 and 20)

* A “strip tease” I performed several times during the auction to inject energy when energy seemed to be flagging (conclusion 21)

* The 13-word question that helped me form the core of the offer I made, which ended up being bid up to $31k

* The one bonus that added ~$10k to the winning bid (conclusion 30)

* The “exploitative” technique (wasn’t really exploitative, but it felt like that to me at the time) that got top bidders to keep bidding (conclusion 34)

* My big resolution about auctions I will run in the future (conclusion 49)

* An easy way to add life in the comments without writing anything (conclusion 51)

Do you want this behind-the-scenes peek into the insights I wrote up for myself? If so, here’s what to do:

1. Go to https://bejakovic.com/fun-auction

2. Ask to join the Community FIRE group (you gotta do it to be able to be able to buy the course, and like I said, it’s free to join)

3. Once you’ve been approved as a group member (should be quick), go to the Course area of Community FIRE, and get your copy of the 24 Hour FUN Auction for a whopping $49

4. Forward me your receipt from Skool, and I will get you my 51 behind-the-scenes conclusions from my $31k auction.

Last bit of encouragement:

If you made a deal with yourself not to buy every shiny and exciting training this year, I honestly recommend you make Travis’s 24 Hour FUN Auction the exception. The link is above.

Dude quietly bows out of Monetization Mastermind

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This past summer I created an invite-only group called Monetization Mastermind. To start, I invited a small group of list owners I have done affiliate deals and list swaps with. The idea for the group is to make more such partnerships possible.

Initially, the group featured mainly list owners who sell courses around copywriting or email marketing, since that’s what kinds of offers I’ve promoted a lot in the past.

Over time, the group has grown, either by my invitation or by recommendation of the people inside. As a result, the profile of people inside has gotten more diverse, and has gone beyond course creators in the copywriting space.

So far, everybody who has joined this group has stayed inside, though some participate more and some less. But now I have the first person who has left the group. It happens to be one of the first people I invited inside the group. Two days ago, this dude wrote me to say:

===

I think I’m going to quietly bow out of Monetization Mastermind. I’ve been making an effort to network outside of copywriting groups and focus on a different audience. While I appreciate what you’ve built here and have tremendous respect for you and the folks in here, I need to put my energy elsewhere.

Thanks for putting it together. You’re doing a lot of good here. I appreciate you letting me be a part of it.

===

I don’t know the full details of this dude’s business.

On the one hand, it’s a tried and true strategy to take yourself and your offers to a new market, particularly one that is willing to pay you more.

On the other hand, based on what little I know of this dude and his business, my diagnosis is that his is an issue of offers.

Specifically, I think it comes down to a classic mistake, one I see others making all the time, and one I have made myself plenty of times too.

Internet Marketer Travis Sago, who is either unable or unwilling to speak other than in metaphor, calls this mistake “selling the hammer.”

The alternative being, selling the birdhouse, or the patio deck, or the chicken coop.

As Travis says, “Nobody is ever just buying a hammer. There’s an outcome they’re looking to get with that hammer”

Do I hear you groaning, or are you rolling your eyes right now?

I mean, this is really just that old chestnut about how nobody wants a quarter-inch drill, but a quarter-inch hole, except with other hardware, right?

Right.

But people find it surprisingly difficult to apply this super obvious and familiar lesson when it comes to their own hammers, ones that they have spent weeks or months designing and sourcing and forging.

Folks keep selling the hammer for years, or for as long as they stand, making new versions and crowing about the latest improvements… until they either wise up and start promising birdhouses and patio decks and chicken coops… or until they quietly bow out of the market, because their hammers are just not selling enough.

This got me curious.

Are you planning to launch an offer in 2026, an offer you need to be a success?

If so, I’m curious what offer you’re planning.

And I’m curious how you came up with your plan.

If you like, hit reply, unburden yourself, and tell me about your upcoming offer.

I’m not promising anything but to listen and maybe to ask some follow up questions.

But who knows, sometimes that can be the most valuable thing you can get, and can lead to insights that can make all the difference when you make the intimidating decision to actually go live.

How do you auction off a self-paced video course?

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Yesterday I wrote about 10 reasons why auctions can legitimately beat product launches.

I got a bunch of responses to that from people, including some big name course creators, who were planning on doing a launch soon but are now considering doing an auction, thanks to the magical power of written words, the ones I sent out yesterday via this newsletter.

I also got a number of questions from people who don’t understand how an online auction in course/info product/coaching space works, or what its purpose truly is.

No shame there.

I was equally as confused when I first heard of auctions. It made no sense to me why or how they work, or what their ultimate purpose is.

In the interest of effective email copy, let me take on one specific question I got. A reader writes in:

===

You have certainly got me thinking how I could do an auction like you did last week.

Was a lot of fun watching you do your thing.

What I am wondering about is whether an action can have more than one winner.

Like you say I want to launch a new course.

I don’t want to sell that course to one person even if its for 31000 dollars. And who in their right mind would buy a self paced video course for that?

Yours wasn’t that. You sold something very special and unique. I could try and do the same, but I am still wondering how this applies to launching a course.

===

In the words of Oprah, “YOU get a car… YOU get a car… YOU get a car…. EVE-RY-BO-DY GETS A CAR!!!”

This new auction way of selling is ultimately two things:

1. A price discovery mechanism

2. A handraiser campaign

The price discovery part is pretty obvious — people bid, and you find out what the market will pay.

The handraiser campaign might be less obvious.

Thing is, people who are raising their hands by bidding in an auction aren’t really raising their hands for your course, coaching, or even for the “something very special and unique” that’s being auctioned.

Nobody ultimately wants a course or a coaching program or even a DFY service. Instead, people want some OUTCOME.

If you take the time to discover what outcome people in your audience ultimately want, then you can auction off “something very special and unique” which promises to deliver the outcome with ease, speed, and style.

(Oprah: “YOU get a car! And it’s an ultra-rare and luxurious Rolls-Royce Boat Tail!!!”)

Of course, you can also make less unique or special offers to people who bid but didn’t win — offers that promise the same outcome, though maybe with more time, effort, or uncertainty.

(OPRAH: “YOU get a car! And it’s a very functional and efficient Renault Clio…”)

Does that make things clearer?

I hope so.

If not, and if running an auction is something that interests you, then I can tell you how I myself grokked how an auction works and how to run one with success:

I went through several trainings by Internet marketer Travis Sago, who invented this new form of selling courses and coaching and services and software.

Travis’s auction-related trainings cost about ~$4k in total and take several days of watching to get through.

Even so, they can be well worth it if you actually do run an auction or two or three.

But maybe paying $4k up front… only to have to go through hours upon hours of Travis talking… just to be faced with the prospect of all the work of finally putting this information into practice and running an auction yourself… is not really the OUTCOME you want?

Maybe the OUTCOME you want is simply to make a bunch of sales of your new course or coaching… to have your audience thrilled with the experience of buying from you and from the spectacle you organized for them… and to still have your eyes clear and your limbs full of energy, because you basically had nothing to do while this auction was going on?

Like I said, I’m talking to several course creators about running an auction for them in place of the launch they were planning.

But I am still interested in talking to more people.

If you have an audience, and if you have solid offers to put in front of them, then my offer is to run an auction for you, including:

– Creating excitement and buzz up front with your audience…

– Defining your offers (from the Renault to the Rolls-Royce)…

– Managing the actual auction process…

– Making sales to all those people who raised their hands by bidding.

And of course, I ask for nothing up front, Only a share of sales made, once the money is sitting in your Stripe or PayPal.

If you’re interested, hit reply and let’s talk.

The best writer on the Internet?

by

There musta been something in the water last week.

First, I exchanged a couple 1:1 emails with Derek Johanson of CopyHour, about a potential JV deal. At the end of of our exchange Derek wrote:

===

I LOVE your emails.

Literally the only daily emailer I read anymore. I’ve un-subbed from everyone. I don’t know how you do it daily. haha

===

Then I sent out one of my regular daily emails and I got a reply from Parker Worth.

In case you don’t know Parker, he is “just a guy with a neck tattoo,” as per his Twitter bio.

In reality, Parker is quite a bit more than that. He’s got an online audience of over 70,000 people spread across Twitter and LinkedIn and his email list, and in just two years, he’s built a 6-figure business on the back of it, teaching people how to write online.

Parker simply replied to my email and said:

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John,

I’m convinced you’re the best writer on the internet.

Happy holidays

===

Then I was on a mastermind call with marketer Travis Sago, somebody I have learned more from over the past couple years than anyone else, and somebody I’ve promoted to this list multiple times.

At one point, Travis said to his mastermind folks:

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I’ll brag on Johnny B. [that’s me, by the way].

Johnny B., when he sends affiliate promos, he brings a buncha people in.

He’s a micro influencer. He’s a big fish in a small pond. That’s all I am too.

But you’ve got these very, very rabid people, and they’re very responsive, because they’re not Mr. Beast and they’re not Grant Cardone. They’re very responsive and a lot of their little ponds will drive so much fucking traffic it’ll blow your fucking mind.

===

I’m telling you this because well, much like milk, endorsements and social proof are best used fresh.

Also, to show you that, as I’ve been claiming, I have the attention and trust of some influential marketers and business owners in my little corner of the Internet, many of whom read these emails every day.

Also, because tomorrow is the grand and dramatic start of my “I endorse YOU” auction.

This is in fact the last email I will send out before the auction starts.

I’ve been talking about this auction for what seems like an eternity. And yet I’m still getting questions about exactly where and how this auction will happen.

The details are the following:

1. The auction will kick off tomorrow at 6pm CET/12 noon EST/9am PST.

2. It will happen inside my Daily Email House community.

I will create a new post to lay out exactly what’s on offer to be auctioned off.

Bids will go as comments under the post. If you are a Daily Email House member, you will be able to bid, if you so choose, by posting your bid as a comment as well.

3. The auction will go on for as long as it has life.

I have had a few dozen people express interest in bidding in this auction. Let’s see who actually will bid, and for how long.

Since I am offering to transfer my own credibility to you (as for my credibility, see above), and since I am guaranteeing the winning bidder to make all his or her money back, I am hopeful of brisk business. But as I wrote yesterday, success is far from certain, and in fact, the road is treacherous.

4. I’ll have a free bonus for you if you make any kind of a bid, even if it’s just $2. The goal is to make this auction fun and lively for as many of my readers as possible.

5. Oh yeah, there will also be a pool party. Did I mention that? I recently moved to a new apartment. I now have a pool. On my terrace. The dimensions are ridiculous (enough to maybe fit a fridge inside, and not much else) and it’s more trouble than use to me. But I have a pool.

Would you like to join me for the pool party? If so, again, doors open tomorrow at 6pm my time. Here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/house