Travis Sago

“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.

Emotional reactivity in email promos

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

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

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

My price was $5k.

Like I said, I started promoting this on Wednesday.

By about Friday, I was hating it.

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

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

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

Fortunately, I have been here before.

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

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

In sum:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

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

Solopreneurs suck

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

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

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

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

The business coach asked who the target audience was.

The member replied it was solopreneurs.

To which the biz coach replied:

“Solopreneurs suck.”

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

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

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

1. Are too tightly controlling

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

3. Are slow to implement big and important changes thoroughly

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

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

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

I’m just putting this idea out there.

Like I said, I myself am a solopreneur.

I don’t know if that will change.

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

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

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

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

I’ve done it already with one major project.

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

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

It’s Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin community.

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

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

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

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

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

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.