Travis Sago

How to grow a Skool group to 500+ members in 14 days

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Yesterday, I sent out a handraiser email asking my readers if they have a Skool group with 500+ members. Results:

A handful people replied to tell me NO.

Precisely ZERO people replied to tell me YES.

I found that surprising, because a few weeks ago, I sent out similar handraiser email and asked my readers if they have an email list of 5k+ subscribers.

I got dozens of people replying YES to that.

Maybe some of my readers have Skool groups with fewer than 500 members. Maybe they have groups on other platforms than Skool. Or maybe folks on my list are primarily concerned with email, and have no interest in running a group, on Skool or anywhere else.

About that last option, back in 2025, I wrote the following:

“The people who do a good job running communities will have the same advantage that, say, a business that emails its customers regularly with interesting emails and desirable offers has over a business that emails stupid coupons at holiday time with nothing else in between, except maybe a ChatGPT-generated listicle.”

I still stand by that. In fact, I’ve doubled down on it, and now I have two Skool groups, rather than just one. Each of my Skool groups has made me tens of thousands of dollars over the past year.

The thing is, there is plenty of genuinely valuable info on how to write emails and make money from an email list.

There is not so much info on how to manage people in a group, get them engaged, and get them to gladly and even eagerly hand you money.

Yes, there are a bunch of new-baked Skool experts promising to teach you how to be Skool experts, if you would only join their Skool group for would-be Skool experts. so they could finally have some proof to show their Skool-expert system works.

But there’s not a lot from people who have been running groups for, say, 10+ years, who have made millions of dollars per year via groups, who have spun up dozens of new groups and made them successful.

And with that, it is now time for me to once again promote Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin community, of which I am a card-carrying and paying member myself.

Travis has been running groups and communities for 10+ years.

Out of everybody I have seen manage groups, nobody is as good as Travis in terms of 1) engagement and interesting group content 2) the ability to pull money out of a group.

Travis’s Royalty Ronin community is a paid group of about 500 members. Last year, Travis pulled out more than a million dollars out of it, and the majority of that was not through membership subscriptions. Rather, it was by partnering up with members, licensing his courses to members, and by running auctions to sell his new offers.

Last month, Travis ran an auction where the offer on auction was a brand new community that Travis would create, stocked with 500 members, which the auction winner would run and monetize with Travis’s help.

Two days ago, the winner of that auction posted the following inside Ronin:

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$540 monthly recurring. 519 members. 15% conversion.

From scratch. In 14 days.

That’s what Travis Sago’s Netflix Method did for Leads on Demand, the Skool community we built from zero (I say we…Travis is building…I’m doing the documenting!)

If you’ve got a community that’s gone quiet, or you’ve been putting one off because you just don’t know where to start, this is the step-by-step.

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… and then came the step-by-step (part 1 of 4).

I am going through this step-by-step carefully, and I am going to be applying it to my groups.

If you’d like to go through it yourself, Travis offers a 7-day free trial to Ronin (the “Netflix Method” is currently pinned as the top post inside). If you are interested in growing, running, or monetizing a Skool community, and you want to learn how the best that I know is doing it:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

How I run 36-hour promos that make between $2-$6 per newsletter subscriber

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This morning I woke up unusually late, at 9:30am. As soon as I came out of the bat cave that is my bedroom and into the blinding light of the living room, I opened my laptop and turned off the shopping cart for the Age of Insight promo, which had been running for the past 36 hours.

The results of the promo:

* 27 sales

* 8 of those 27 paid in full

* $8,100 total ($4,200 collected, $3,900 in future payments)

Good? Bad?

In my book, whenever I can make $1k from my email list in a day, I figure it’s been a good day at the office. And by “office,” I mean the couch.

In this case, the promo effectively ran for 3 days – one announcement day to pre-sell the offer, and two days of actually selling. I’ve collected $1,400 per day already, and will be collecting more in next couple months (my readers have diligently paid me whenever I’ve offered payment plans).

This is the third such 36-hour promo I have run.

All in all, I have made $31,312 from these three 36-hour promos. That’s 31k I ascribe to a single idea, common to all 3 of these promos, which I got from marketer Travis Sago.

About that, I’ve prepared a report I’ve creatively titled:

“How I run 36-hour promos that make between $2-$6 per newsletter subscriber”

This report summarizes what I’ve done in these 3 promos, and tells you how (and when) you might be able to do the same.

I’m willing to give you this report for free. I’m wanting to give it to you for free. I’m WAITING to give it to you for free.

Here’s the deal:

Like I said, these 36-hour promos were all built around a single idea I got from marketer Travis Sago.

If you are interested in running money-making email promos, whether for yourself or for clients or partners, then you should be in Travis’s world, because the man has many excellent ideas, not just this one. I estimate that, all in all, implementing Travis’s stuff over the past few years has been worth on the order of $200k to me.

Travis’s world today is a paid Skool group called Royalty Ronin. I myself am a paying member, and I keep promoting it because it keeps making me money.

Ronin has a 7-day free trial.

My deal to you today is:

1. Sign up for the Ronin free trial using the link below

2. Read the “Welcome! Plz START HERE” post linked to in the sidebar

3. Introduce yourself in the comments to that post

4. Send me an email or a Skool DM to let me know you’ve done steps 1-3

That’s it. Do this and I’ll hook you up with my “How I run 36-hour promos that make between $2-$6 per newsletter subscriber” report.

This offer is good for the next 24 hours, until tomorrow, Sunday, at 8:30pm CET.

If you’d like to make more money from your email list, or from the email lists of others:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

P.S. If you’re already in Ronin, my offer extends to you. So does the deadline. Just write me and let me know you want the report before the deadline, and I’ll get it to you.

Fantastic copywriting skills considered harmful

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Point 1:

A couple days ago, I asked people in my Skool group what offer they want to make to their list in the next week.

Many of the folks in my group are copywriters, and many of those who aren’t copywriters by trade still know a lot about copywriting because they do marketing for their own businesses.

When I asked about offers, there was talk of things like:

* 1-1 coaching

* Courses, full or condensed

* A research system

* Longform sales pages

* 5-minute trainings and hour-long workshops

* Order bumps

Point 2:

Today, I went into Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin community.

I am a paying, card-carrying member of Ronin. I’ve been making a habit of promoting it, and and easy way to promote it is simply to go in there every week and see what’s up.

Today, I saw a post by Travis about auctions, specifically about a recent auction that made $50k in 24 hours. Here’s the relevant bit, relevant to that offers discussion above, and relevant if you sell online:

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Because the Fun Auction…

Does NOT require fantastic copywriting skills.

The CORE is…

Get ______________! Bids start at $1.

The BLANK is something they REALLY, REALLY WANT, which is worth far more than $1.

It’s funny to me…

That TRAINED copywriters fuck this up more than newbies.

NOBODY WANTS a proven system, coaching, 1:1, orthodontist services, drills or an AUCTION BTW!

If what’s in the blank…for $1…doesn’t make their HEART do a flip…find something that will squirt dopamine into the lizard brain.

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Travis is saying you don’t need fantastic copywriting skills to sell VIA AUCTION, and that copywriting skills might even be harmful.

I’d add that this goes way beyond auctions.

I’ve seen people with a lot of copywriting skill, whether professional copywriters or business owners, who have spent tens of thousands of dollars to learn copywriting, do a terrible job of selling online.

Most often, the reason why they are so terrible at selling is what Travis says above. They focus on couldn’t-care-less deliverables rather than outcomes that make people’s heart do a flip. (I’ve made this mistake myself, btw, plenty of times.)

Point 3:

Last December, I ran an auction in my Skool group that pulled in $31k in 24 hours, and that could have legit pulled $70k+ had I just taken the money that was offered me.

The reason that auction popped was, like Travis says above, the BLANK that people REALLY, REALLY WANTED.

When I polled for interest in my blank, I got about 50 people saying they would bid to get it, with 6-7 people saying they would bid whatever it takes to win. A couple of people even said they might take out a zero-interest credit card to be able to bid enough to win (I discouraged this, even if it was said in jest).

Lemme wrap this up.

If you have an audience and a working offer, my ongoing offer is to help you run an auction, and do everything:

* Craft a HEART-FLIPPING auction offer

* Come up with post-auction offers that move those deliverables you got and focus on, the 1-1 coaching, the courses, the 5-minute trainings and hour-long workshops

* Write all copy (I’ll keep my fantastic copywriting skills in check)

* Run and manage the auction itself

* Sell, sell, sell after, to the people have raised their hands by bidding

IMPORTANT: I charge nothing up front. For every $10,000 I send you in sales, shoot over $2500 to me AFTER the money is in your bank account.

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

And if you don’t have an audience or a working offer, specifically if you’re a working copywriter…

… you would be served well by seeing how Travis creates and presents his own offers.

It will make you into a more valuable copywriter, and clients will be willing to pay you much more, and will fight to keep you working with them… instead of you having to chase them for a little gig here or maybe there, today and maybe again in five months’ time.

But more important, if you get good at creating offers, then when you try to sell your own stuff, you will have a real shot of getting 50 people to reply YES and even a few people who say they will pay whatever it takes… rather than hearing crickets, seeing tumbleweeds, and feeling the chill of a desolate wind.

I’ve learned more about offers from Travis than anybody else.

If you wanna learn something also, Travis offers a 7-day free trial to Royalty Ronin. 7 days is not long, but it’s enough to pick up one or two good ideas that you can implement for your client (or yourself) today, and it can give you a sense if Ronin is for you. If you’re interested:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

Likes are cash, but better

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A while back (and now for all I know), there was an online business guru who built his brand on the slogan:

“Likes ain’t cash”

Except, likes are cash, or actually better, at least if you know where to look.

Today is Monday, which is quickly turning into my day to promote Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin community, of which I myself am a paying member, and have been a member for over two years.

Travis’s Ronin community is about making money online.

It’s very engaged, just as it is, even though the entire group is only about 500 members. People post and comment a lot every day, as does Travis.

And yet, Travis will soon be running a month-long contest to get members to post even more, to comment even more, to engage even more.

The winners will be determined by — you guessed it — likes.

As for the prizes, they will come in the form of licensing rights to Travis’s IP (most of his courses and trainings sell for $2k+), in the form of distribution to Travis’s audiences (I’m guessing Ronin, plus Travis’s other Skool communities, and maybe his email list), as well as Travis’s help running the campaign.

In other words, the winner will get a product to sell… an audience to sell it to… and Travis’s help in selling it. And frankly, I don’t know anybody online who is as good at running sales campaigns as Travis is.

Insert a saying here about how you cannot lead a horse to water, but you can teach him how to fish—

—you know what I mean. Cash is nice. But cash + evergreen assets + newfound knowledge on how to sell those assets is much nicer.

Of course, there’s great value in winning Travis’s contest even without the official prizes.

If you don’t know what that value is, then you must be less of an egomaniac than I am.

All I can say is, I myself keep swinging back and forth between the idea of not participating in Travis’s challenge (I have enough to do already, without competing in a contest that involves lots of posting and commenting) and participating in it (I would love to win, just so I can inflate my ego, and the prizes genuinely sound nice).

Anyways, I’m telling you all this for two reasons:

1. Reason one is to promote Ronin. Maybe you are curious to see this contest unfold. Or maybe you yourself want to go into Ronin, and start implementing some of the stuff that Travis teaches there, and report on your results. In my experience, that kind of content always gets the most likes. If you dedicate yourself to it for a month, you have a legit shot at winning, and you have a legit shot at making tens of thousands of dollars even if you don’t win, simply by implementing what Travis teaches.

2. Along with being an expert in running sales campaigns, Travis is also an expert in community management. This challenge idea is one that you can try for your own community in order to boost engagement and to get a ton of content generated for your group for free. (Travis has more such ideas inside Ronin.)

Anyways, Travis’s contest kicks off in a few days. If you’d like to try out Ronin, either to observe the contest from the sidelines, or better yet, to participate, Travis offers a free 7-day trial, which you can find here:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

P.S. If you sign up for the trial to Ronin and then write a post inside the group to introduce yourself, write me a message and let me know. I have several bonuses with your name on them.

“Double down” secret of a $17M offer owner

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Today, I want to share something with you, because it’s something I wanna both remember and implement.

This something comes from a guy named Robby Blanchard, who is one of those “compulsive winner” types.

Blanchard is super nice, super clean-cut, and from what I can tell, legit and honest.

And yet, in spite of his niceness and cleancutness, within four years of getting started in Internet marketing, Blanchard reached the status of #1 ClickBank affiliate globally, with tens of millions in tracked ClickBank sales.

He then launched a course about how to be a top affiliate, called Commission Hero.

Blanchard sells Commission Hero for $1k, and has had over 17,000 people go through it in six years. If you are as bad at math as I am, that works out to over $17M, from one offer.

Here’s something Blanchard said about that and about his way of working, which really stuck with me:

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Internet marketing, it’s like you launch a product, and it peaks, and then it starts to die down.

What most people will do is they’ll scrap it and go on to build the next product, because it’s fun to build new products, that adrenaline rush.

What I’ve done with Commission Hero, we initially launched it, and it did really well and faded away a little bit.

Instead of me pivoting to a new offer, I said, let me double down on this. Let me make it even better. Let me focus on more student success. Let me rework the webinar with more testimonials.

I’ve constantly done that. I’ve done that for five years now. How can I constantly improve this thing? That’s why I am where I am.

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This comment from Robby Blanchard me think of a call I was on a couple months back with marketer Travis Sago.

I brought up how folks are seeing reduced course sales. Here was Travis’s take:

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Here’s what’s going on in all these course sales and all these marketing things. And it’s good for me. It’s bad for a lot of people. But you have to iterate your angles and your hooks a lot faster now, because things are changing faster.

You can still sell hammers all day long. But you can’t sell hammers to build outhouses any more. Because that’s yesteryear.

So you have to iterate the angles and all those kind of things much much faster now.

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Travis then gave an example of what he means.

His core course (which sells for between $1k and $6k, depending on how it’s packaged up) is called Phoneless Sales Machine. It’s basically how to make high-ticket sales via email and DM. Travis put that out maybe 6 years ago, and since then, a bunch of other people have come out with similar offers.

And yet Travis still sells a bunch of copies of Phoneless Sales Machine, and for a few thousand dollars each, because he’s changing the angle or the hook.

For a while he was showing people how to make sales in communities by running a poll (run a poll and then apply Phoneless Sales Machine). Now his big thing is auctions (run an auction… and apply Phoneless Sales Machine).

It’s almost like coming up with various new front-end offers that feed into the main course sale you want to make.

Each one of those new hooks or “front ends” selects a new segment of the market, and gets them juiced on the outcome, and then the main course makes for a natural or necessary followup or upsell.

To me, the thing that Travis and Robby Blanchard are saying is the same.

Take what’s worked for you, and rather than scrapping it, iterate.

Find new ways to get new people interested, make the product applicable to new uses, improve the sales process and the deliverables. You will be able to sell that same thing you’ve sold before, and you will make your whole business easier, more predictable, and more profitable.

I’m not really in Robby Blanchard’s world. I’m not interested in affiliating for weight loss offers on ClickBank.

But I am in Travis Sago’s world. I am interested in email marketing, and crafting new “front ends” for existing offers, and monetizing audiences. And to my mind, there’s nobody who does it as well, or who teaches it as well, as Travis does.

Travis has a paid community called Royalty Ronin, of which I am a paying member. You can learn from Travis, you can partner with the other members there, you can implement ideas from Travis’s paid trainings (such as Phoneless Sales Machine, and the training on auctions), most of which are available as free bonuses once you’re fully signed up.

Maybe most important, you can watch Travis iterate, and spin up new angles and hooks to sell things that he’s already sold hundreds of times to thousand of people. And yet, he will find effective new ways to sell the same, again, ways that you can model and adapt.

Travis offers a free 7-day trial to Ronin. If you would like to see if it’s a fit for you:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

P.S. If you sign up for the trial to Ronin and then write a post inside the group to introduce yourself, write me a message and let me know. I have several bonuses with your name on them.

On average I write 3.4 good emails a month

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Over the past 8 years of running this daily newsletter, I have had a long line of big-name direct marketers and A-list copywriters come and go as subscribers.

Along the way, many have had good things to say about my abilities as an email copywriter. My favorite is from Joe Schriefer, who at the time was the copy chief at Agora Financial, one of the biggest imprints at one of the biggest direct response publishers. Joe wrote me one time and said:

“Just wanted to tell you how much I enjoy reading your emails. I think you’re one of the best email writers out there!”

I’m telling you this to set up the following shocking and quite depressing fact:

Even though I write and send an email every day, I on average write only 3.4 good emails a month.

Here’s how I know:

Earlier this year, I finally did something I shoulda done on day 0 of starting this newsletter. I created a new Google Doc, and I named it “Emails that did well.”

Ever since, when an email stands out in terms of results — usually sales made, but sometimes for other reasons, like getting a lot of qualified leads, or opening an unexpected new door, or simply getting an unusual amount of engagement — I put it in this document, along with a short summary of the results that made me think the email did well.

Over the past 5 months, since the end of January, I have put 17 emails into the “Emails that did well” document. By my math, that works out to 3.4 emails a month. That’s barely over 10%.

What about the remaining ~90% of emails I write?

I reckon they are doing their work still, and are moving some of the people somewhat closer to the hole, as marketer Travis Sago likes to say.

Still, fewer than 10% of my emails appear to be outstanding in terms of their impact. (For the record, none of these “Emails that did well” is a “cart close, last call” email. “Cart close” emails work great, but for reasons other than the copy.)

Would you like to know which of my emails did well this year?

Would you like to have running access to the emails of mine that do well in the future, for as long as I keep writing this newsletter?

If you would, I’ll make you a deal:

I’m currently promoting Lawrence Bernstein’s Lead Gen Legend. This is a massive swipe file of winning lead gen copy and set of special reports on lead gen, which Lawrence normally sells for $379, but which he is making available for $79 during my promo, because that’s the deal I made with him.

I bought Lead Gen Legend myself earlier this because I was sold on it myself, without thinking to ever promote it as an affiliate.

I am promoting it now because I think it’s great, like everything else Lawrence sells, and a sweet deal at just $79.

At the same time, I’ve learned a bit or two during these 8 years of running my own newsletter.

That’s why I’m also including the following three bonuses to Lawrence’s core offer:

FREE BONUS #1. Emails that did well

I’ll give you access to my “Emails that did well” document, now and in perpetuity. You can see which of my past emails did well and why. And as I update the document, you will see which future emails have done well. In a way, it’s a swipe file of outstanding email copy, from, as Joe Schriefer would say, “one of the best email writers out there.”

FREE BONUS #2. Core Promise Workshop and Q&A call recording

I recently sold this workshop recording for $97, along with some bonuses. It’s yours free (minus the bonuses) if you get Lawrence’s Lead Gen Legend for $79.

FREE BONUS #3. “Perfect Lead Gen Offer”

Not my idea. Also not a specific offer template you can swipe. Rather, a simple but counterintuitive process for figuring out what offer to make in your lead gen ads to maximize lifetime value and minimize ad costs.

If you want it, or at a part of it, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/leadgen

P.S. To get $300 off the regular $379 price of Lead Gen Legend, put in the coupon code BEJAKO on the cart page. Lawrence has these instructions on the page itself, but it’s a bit hidden, and some people have written me in confusion about it.

How to make sure women won’t cheat on you when you’re going steady

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Yesterday I wrote an email in which I talked about my current dating model:

I go out on a date with a girl. If we have fun and I like the girl, I propose a second date. If that still goes well, then I go over to her house, sit her down on the couch for a serious conversation, and propose “going steady.”

(At this stage, there’s no ring yet because I reserve that for marriage and marriage comes later.)

After I sent out yesterday’s email, a reader replied with a question I’ve seen before in various forms:

“John… How do you ensure you find out if these women you ‘go steady’ aren’t cheating on you? Just handshake?”

Handshake is a bit too formal for my romantic soul, but the basic idea is there.

I go out with women I reasonably feel I can trust based on what I know of them so far, and I’ll offer to “go steady” with a woman only after we’ve been on a first date or two or three and it’s gone well.

If you’re a regular reader of mine and you’re shaking your head right now, wondering how in the world you have missed this important email in which I talked about my dating life, fear not.

You didn’t miss anything.

Yesterday’s email was not really about women and dates and going steady, but rather about business owners and partnerships I’m doing with them, in various forms, whether that’s emails written on spec (did some of that last year)… or auctions I run and manage for others (did one earlier this year with Derek Johanson)… or my current offer of a free advertorial for ecom store owners (I just delivered the first such free advertorial).

Whenever I write about some such deal, I get a variant of the question above:

“Hey John how do you track sales and make sure how much money these partners of yours have made via your partnership? How do you know you’re getting paid what you’re due? Do you have access to their bank accounts and tax statements and phone records, or are you using some clever affiliate tracking platform, or do you just hire a private investigator to make sure they aren’t cheating you?”

The short answer is, I don’t know.

I take a leap of faith and I see how it goes.

I do protect myself a bit, by not engaging in marriage with somebody I have just met, but instead proposing we have a “first date,” usually in the form of a small and very tightly defined project, something that won’t drain me of too much time or energy if it goes bad.

If that goes well, then we might have a second or a third date, and eventually I will go over to their house and sit them down on the couch for a serious conversation.

There’s a bigger question here.

Rather than just “How do you make sure you get paid what you’re due,” the bigger question is, “What kind of a life do you want to live?”

My personal answer to that is that I want to live a life that doesn’t involve being constantly suspicious of others or chasing in debts.

I also want to live my life thinking that, for every person out there who might actually cheat me once every Halley’s comet, there are four or five people who I could immediately find in their stead who would be happy to partner with me and be honest and fair with me.

I don’t think I’ve ever written an email in which I talked about the idea of “abundance.”

The word has unfortunately gotten tainted by hucksters.

But the fact remains, you can choose to live in a world of scarcity or a world of abundance. Making the mental switch from the first to the second takes a bit of effort, and it takes time before the mental model starts to produce material results. But it is a choice, and one you can make, and get results from.

This entire discussion, by the way, goes back to the one guy I’ve learned the most from over the past couple years.

That guy is Travis Sago. The analogy above, between dating and business partnerships, is Travis’s analogy. So is the idea of offering commission-only deals rather than doing client work that you get paid for upfront. So is the idea of doing a small test project to get a sense whether you can trust people or not.

Travis’s Royalty Ronin outlines dozens of ways that Travis has personally used his wits to make tens of millions of dolalrs online, dozens of ways that people like me have learned from Travis and have made good money with.

But the bigger idea of Ronin is that idea of organizing life in a way that suits you, really suits you, and recognizing the world really can be a place of abundance, including for you.

If you wanna give Ronin a try, Travis offers a free 7-day trial:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

P.S. If you sign up for the trial and then decide to stay on past the 7 days because you can see the value for you inside Ronin, write me a message and let me know. I have several bonuses with your name on them.

Fumbling and bumbling to $10k+

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Over the past week, I’ve fumbled and bumbled my way through the Hogwarts of Influence promo, up to and including the cart close email, which never came, because yesterday I wrongly scheduled it to go out at 4pm my time today, which is 7 hours after I’ve actually closed the cart.

I was on vacation the entire time of this promo.

That means I didn’t revamp the offer page as I had planned.

I didn’t write more emails, particularly ones crowing about sales I had made along the way.

I didn’t come up with a better process to upsell the people who had gotten either the Hermione or Snape levels.

As a result of all this, Hogwarts of Influence was not a smashing success.

Even so, it looks like when all is said and done, it will bring in north of $10k, which is not too shab for selling a bunch of offers I have already been promoting for 5+ years, literally hundreds of times, to my small and frankly not-really-growing list.

This morning, one of the folks who asked to join at the last minute wrote:

“Btw, what’s the big idea anyway with not just having a regular sales page? Interesting!”

The background is that I had an offer page, where I listed the offer, and then asked people to write me via email instead of just linking straight to ThriveCart as is usual.

There’s a reason for this, a money-making reason, something I picked up from marketer Travis Sago.

I sat down right now, and I wrote up 7 elements of this Hogwarts of Influence promotion, which I can trace directly to Travis and his teachings.

I have made the claim before that following the stuff that Travis teaches has has led me to $100k+ worth of income that I wouldn’t have made otherwise. It looks like I can stack another $10k to that.

My ongoing offer stands:

The best place to learn from Travis is inside his Royalty Ronin community on Skool.

You get to watch Travis work live. You get a library of Travis’s expensive courses, all for free. You get a bunch of smart and successful marketers, myself included, in the group to talk with and learn from and do deals with.

Travis offers a 7-day trial for Royalty Ronin. If you’d like to see if it’s for you:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

P.S. If you sign up for the trial and then decide to stay on past the 7 days because you can see the value for you inside Ronin, write me a message and let me know. I have several bonuses with your name on them. I’ll also share with you the list I just made of 7 of Travis’s sales teachings that I integrated into my just-closed Hogwarts of Influence event.

How to make direct marketing FUN for yourself

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OLD, DULL WAY OF DOING DIRECT MARKETING

You get bombarded with direct response ads, whether via Facebook, in your inbox, or via your physical mailbox. And if you’re anything like me, your reactions as you flip trough these ads is…

“Not for me… not for me… God this is ugly… this COULD be for me except they are talking to me like I’m an idiot… not for me… not for me…”

On the flip side, you bombard others with direct response ads, whether actual ads or emails or sales letters. And if you’re anything like me, you dutifully stuff your ads full of the old DR chestnuts you have read about in books and courses:

“Buy now… amazing… secret… our warehouse manager just called… my accountant says I’m crazy… maximum money… minimum time…”

FUN, NEW WAY OF DOING DIRECT MARKETING

You open up a new text file. And when you get bombarded with DR ads, you treat each one like a riddle, a puzzle, or a scavenger hunt. You look for curious or interesting patterns or phrases. You write down any that you find in your text file.

“Why isn’t this number lower”… “You can’t buy anything here”… “A month from today, you can be nothing more than 30 days older”… “It costs you nothing to learn about this opportunity…”

On the flip side, you take your curious or interesting patterns and phrases from your text file, and you find ways to test them out in your own marketing.

“Will it work for me, I wonder… and if it doesn’t work for me, I wonder why that other ad was using it and if it worked for them… and if it does work for me, I wonder how else I can use it…”

I’ve done this in many forms, with many ads, over many years.

When I just got started with copywriting, I did it with sales letters my clients wanted me to model.

Later, on my own, i did it with emails. (I went for a month in 2019 reading Ben Settle’s emails not for the content, but with an eye to patterns in the hooks he was using and the offers he was promoting.)

And just yesterday, I started doing it with Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin group.

I’ve been promoting Ronin regularly, because I’m in it and because I’ve profited mightily from being in it.

If you’re not as much into Ronin as I am, you might not realize that Royalty Ronin is basically one big direct response ad. I mean the content inside the group.

Travis Sago, the guy behind Ronin, is a master of direct marketing. And everything he does inside Ronin is done with a purpose, and that purpose is selling.

Ronin, for all the education, inspiration, and value it delivers along the way, is effectively a giant, ongoing, direct response sales letter for various of Travis’s new offers.

Some of Travis’s direct response experiments work. Some don’t. Some he ends up codifying and sharing with others, often in the form of an expensive new training. Some he keeps to himself for years, or maybe forever.

For my own benefit, and in order to make direct marketing more FUN for myself, yesterday I sat down and started looking for phrases and patterns inside Ronin that caught my eye.

I made a list of 10 ideas, looking over just a few of Travis’s recent posts.

One of these 10 ideas, a subject line Travis used, led to the offer behind my email yesterday, about an auction to get investors to purchase your newsletter or group.

Other ideas I spotted I might use in other emails, or in sales letters, or on live workshops, or maybe in one of my communities.

So my advice for you is to do likewise.

Make direct marketing more FUN for yourself.

Turn it into a game, and you will enjoy yourself more, and make more money. (In minimum time!)

I also got an offer for you:

Try out Ronin yourself. Travis offers a week’s free trial. If you find it’s not for you, you can cancel before the week is out and get charged nothing.

If you do sign up for a trial of Ronin, forward me your welcome email from Travis.

In turn, I will send you a list of the 10 valuable ideas I noted in Ronin yesterday, along with how I am planning to apply a few of them.

I’m making this offer good until tomorrow, Tuesday Jun 9, at 8:31pm CET.

If you’re interested, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/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.