Travis Sago

Inspire readers to take action using what you’ve already got

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A bit of background:

I once had a copywriting client who was a real estate investing guru in Australia.

The guy was dyslexic or illiterate, I don’t know which. Whenever he wrote me an email to communicate something about the project to be done, the email was borderline illegible, with weird grammar mistakes, terrible spelling, and just a general aura of “this was written by a not very precocious four-year-old.”

And yet, the REI guru was an incredible speaker.

In front of crowds of hundreds, he was fluent and dramatic. He hypnotized his audience and moved them to change their lives and get that financial freedom they had been lusting after, which meant working with him and paying him thousands of dollars for his REI knowledge. He had thousands of customers and clients.

That’s the background.

The story starts when I got one of those misspelled and misgrammared emails from that REI guru. This was about 2–3 years into my copywriting freelance career.

He wanted me to rewrite a sales letter. He thought the previous copywriter had made it too factual and bland, and he wanted me to make it more “inspiring.”

Now I’m a factual and bland person by nature, and because of that, I was 100% certain I could not inspire, hype up, or goose anybody, in print or in words.

So I wrote the REI guru an email, perfectly proofread and 100% grammatically correct, to say I appreciate the offer, but that inspirational copy is really not my strong suit, and therefore I will have to turn the job down.

The end? Almost.

I was ready to live out the rest of my life as a bland and uninspiring entity.

But I happened to listen to a podcast back in 2019 by a certain marketer, a guy I had never heard of before.

This guy was making about $3M a year, taking a cheap and widely available resource — copywriters like me — and turning that resource into a “back-end agency,” where he’d help existing businesses promote their existing offers in new ways via email marketing.

Now here’s the point of this email, the takeaway to the long story and background above:

This very successful marketer said that if you can inspire people, the world is really yours. And here’s the crucial part — he said that there are 1,001 ways to inspire people.

He then gave just one example: “Show people that they already have the resources needed to succeed.” He gave a few examples, I think something to do with mommy bloggers, and how their experience running a family and household would translate into the online business world.

This blew my mind.

For one thing, I had always thought of inspirational copy as the equivalent of a Tony Robbins event — lots of hand clapping and yelling and jumping up and down.

For another, I hadn’t ever occurred to me that a logical argument — “Let me show you how you already have the resources you need to succeed” — could be inspiring.

This changed everything.

Because after this simple realization, I started keeping track of copy that I personally found inspiring.

And now that I had the realization that there might be a structure to it, I started looking out for what it was that had inspired me.

After identifying such inspiration structures, I started using them in my own copy.

The first few times, it came a little ham-handedly, but then more naturally and unselfconsciously.

Today, I also find that inspirational copy is some of the most effective copy that I write — both for getting sales today and for keeping people reading tomorrow.

I’ve even baked it into my public image a bit — people will often reply to my emails to tell me how they loved or were inspired by a particular story I shared.

All that’s to say, you too can inspire, even if you are as bland and factual by nature as I am.

The fact is, there’s a structure to inspiration, just as there is a structure to desire. And now that you know that, you can look out for that structure, and copy it and mimic it, and make it your own.

By the way, the marketer who first turned me on to the structure behind inspiration, the guy in that podcast who was making $3M a year running a back-end agency, was Travis Sago.

I’ve been promoting Travis’s Royalty Ronin community for the past few days, because I myself have been inside this community for more than a year now, and have renewed my subscription for an extra year just a few weeks ago.

And even though I am promoting Royalty Ronin as an affiliate now, I actually promoted it last year as well, for free, simply because I think it’s of genuine interest to you, in case you find my own emails interesting and valuable.

Travis is now running a 7-day free trial for Royalty Ronin, which gives you full access to both the community and to several of his biggest and most expensive courses (including BEAMER, the one on running a back-end agency).

If you’d like to try out Ronin risk-free for a week, take a look here:

​https://bejakovic.com/ronin​

P.S. If you’ve signed up for RR before, I’ve just added a new bonus into your Ronin bonus bundle in the members-only area of my site. This new bonus is a presentation I gave last year inside Brian Kurtz’s Titans XL mastermind, all about various inspiration structures I’ve identified over the years, along with examples from my own copy and from the copy of several copywriters I admire.

And if you haven’t gotten access to the Ronin bonus bundle but you’ve taken me up on the Ronin trial, forward me your confirmation email from Travis, the one with “Vroom” in the subject line. I’ll get you access to the Ronin bundle with the inspiration training above and a few other goodies as a way of saying thanks that you took me up on my recommendation.

The joy and food-poisoning risk of exploring and experimenting

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I’m in Rome for a few days. My dad and his wife were coming for a trip here and asked if I would like to tag along. I said yes.

We arrived yesterday. And after visiting four churches, three fountains, and one set of famous stairs, it was time to sit down and eat something.

“Where will we eat?” I’d asked my dad’s wife before we arrived. They had been here a few times before, and I figured they might have favorite places.

“Oh, we’ll just sit down somewhere,” she said. “All the food is great there.” Right as she said that, thunder started rumbling off on the horizon.

So yesterday, we just sat down somewhere. The first course of pasta came. It looked unimpressive and yet had an off smell.

I ate it – I was very hungry. “This must be some unique ingredient they use in Rome,” I said to myself, as I tried to ignore the unpleasantness of it.

But by the time the second course came, it was undeniable. The meat was tough, the potatoes were in a state between undercooked and raw, and the two pieces of seafood were communicating in various ways that they had been bought a week or more ago, and caught who knows when.

I put my knife and fork down, figuring that it’s best to lose this single battle rather than the entire Rome campaign.

My bit of wisdom for you today is that there can be joy in exploring and experimenting, and occasionally discovering something really great and new.

In fact, that’s how I like to live much of my life. And that’s why I can say with a lot of confidence that exploring and experimenting does largely result in failure, and occasionally will lead to food poisoning.

The other option is to get recommendations, to follow in somebody’s tracks who’s been there before, whose experience and integrity you trust.

I’m no longer just talking about restaurants in Rome. I’m talking about other things in life as well, such as for example, the topic of this newsletter, which is effective communication, marketing, and online business.

And with that, I would like to remind you of Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin free trial offer, which I’m recommending as an affiliate these days.

Travis is somebody I personally have learned a ton from, whose experience and integrity I trust. The man has made tens of millions of dollars selling his own offers, in various niches. Plus he’s worked as a kind of JV marketing partner for a bunch of other online businesses, and made tens of millions of dollars for their businesses too.

Now, Travis has built a community of like-minded marketers and business owners around him. Plus, he’s sharing a lot of wisdom that he’s collected over the years, in the form of various high-ticket courses, which he makes available as free bonuses in this community.

And like I said, Travis is now offering a week’s free trial to this, so you can look inside, and discover something really great and new, without risking anything, including food poisoning.

If you’re curious to find out more about Royalty Ronin, or even take Travis up on his risk-free 7-day offer, take a look here:

​https://bejakovic.com/ronin​

P.S. If you already signed up for a trial of Royalty Ronin via my link above, then send me the confirmation email you got from Travis, the one with “Vroom” in the subject line.

In turn, I’ll send you my Heart of Hearts training, about how to discover what the people in your market really want, so you can better know what to offer them and how to present it, as a way of saying thanks for taking me up on my recommendation.

Why I shouldn’t be allowed near a toaster

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A couple days ago, I started promoting a free trial of a Skool group as an affiliate… or so I thought.

At first, I figured Skool doesn’t let me see who had signed up via my affiliate link, since it’s a free-trial offer.

It turns out Skool is happy to show me this information. The problem was that I didn’t use the affiliate link when linking to this offer. Instead, I used the bare link.

Strike one.

A few days before that, I wrote an email and scheduled it for my usual sending time between 8 and 9 o’clock.

Except it only turned out the next morning, after several dedicated readers wrote to ask me where my email is, that I realized I had scheduled my email for the wrong day, and for “am” instead of the usual “pm.”

Strike two.

A few days before that, I did a list swap with Jason Resnick.

I gave Jason a link for the lead magnet I was offering… and then a day later, I airheadedly used the same URL, as a redirect on my site, to link to Jason’s landing page from my own email.

If that URL chicanery doesn’t make any sense to you, don’t worry. It takes a special kind of genius to understand.

The end result of all that genius was that a bunch of Jason’s readers, who clicked on the link in Jason’s email in order to get my lead magnet, were redirected to Jason’s optin page instead.

That meant that not only did I miss out on a bunch of new subscribers, but I created a hassle and a headache for my JV partner.

Strike three.

The honest-to-woodheadedness truth is that I really should not be allowed anywhere near a computer, smart TV, or toaster.

Because if there’s a chance to harebrain some setting, to forget to push some button or to push the wrong button that shouldn’t be pushed, and to cause the toast to burn as a result, then I am sure to find that button.

And yet, I keep living. In fact, I keep living quite well. Which brings me to an idea I’d like to share with you.

That idea is the Casino of Life.

Unlike in a normal casino, when you play inside the Casino of Life, you don’t need to have a winning hand to win.

Because in the Casino of Life, you can walk around all the tables, see which hands other people have, and you can bet on their hands. And not only that.

In the Casino of Life, if you yourself happen to have just one good card, for example, the Ace of Copy, or the Queen of Traffic, or maybe the King of Offers, you can find somebody who is missing just your trump card to form a royal flush, and to win a bunch of gold doubloons, which you can then split.

The Casino of Life is a reframe I got a long while ago from Internet marketer Travis Sago.

Not very coincidentally, the Skool group I am promoting as an affiliate is Travis’s Royalty Ronin, which I myself happily pay for, and have done for the past year.

In fact, the reason I screwed up the affiliate link in the first place was that I promoted Royalty Ronin some time last year, for free, before Travis had an affiliate program for it. I simply thought Royalty Ronin would be interesting and valuable for people on my list.

I still think so.

Because Royalty Ronin isn’t just about getting access to a bunch of Travis’s unique and powerful marketing ideas (including via a suite of Travis’s $3k-$6k courses, which come as bonuses for Royalty Ronin).

It’s also about steady exposure to Travis’s brain-shifting insights and inspiration, like the Casino of Life idea, which have made all the difference for me at the right moments.

Plus, Royalty Ronin is also about joining a community of 500+ motivated, skilled, and yet imperfect people, all of whom are holding unique hands, some of them very powerful, and some missing exactly the card you may be holding.

I’m not much of a networker. I haven’t been taking much advantage of the community aspect of Royalty Ronin. Altogether I’ve connected with fewer than 5 people there.

Even so, just one connections I made in Ronin last year, with media buyer Travis Speegle, paid for yearly subscription for Royalty Ronin for the next few years.

I bet that in the next year, I will make at least one more connection which will pay for a few more years.

Like I said, Travis is now offering a week’s free trial to Royalty Ronin.

If you’d like to check out this unique casino, see who else is inside, or even form a connection or two that can pay for many years of being a member, maybe in just the next week:

​​https://bejakovic.com/ronin​ (yes, the link has been fixed)

P.S. If you already signed up for a trial of Royalty Ronin via the link above, even though it wasn’t my affiliate link until now, then send me the confirmation email you got from Travis, the one with “Vroom” in the subject line.

I’ll honor my end of the deal, and send you my Heart of Hearts training, about how to discover what the people in your market really want, so you can better know what to offer them and how to present it, as a way of saying thanks for taking me up on my recommendation.

Why discounting fails to drive sales, even when it’s by a lot

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A while back, I talked to a business coach, somebody who has a lot of experience with online marketing.

She told me about how she launched a new membership… how she offered a launch discount… how she even ended up increasing the discount over what she had initially planned.

Result:

One person ended up signing up.

Does this mean this new membership offer clearly sucks, since only one person bought even at a double-discounted launch price?

I told this business coach something that took me too long to internalize:

Discounting only works if people already value the thing you’re selling at the full price you’re selling it for.

In short, 20% off nothing is still nothing. So is 50% off.

The long term fix for this is your ongoing presence in your audience’s minds… trust and credibility built up by days and weeks and months of advertising yourself… sharing case studies of people who bought your offers and got value from them… and repeatedly driving home the fact that your offers sell for the price you are claiming for them, and that they’re worth every penny and in fact much more.

That’s how you convince people that, say, your membership is actually worth $300, and is even a steal at that price.

Good news:

There’s also a short-term fix. You can sell your offer at full price, and have people buy it, even if they don’t yet value the thing you’re selling at the price you’re selling it for.

This short-term fix is an obvious idea, but again, it took me too long to really internalize.

It finally clicked for me last year, via a little-known resource I was turned onto by marketer Travis Sago.

Travis is a very clever and very creative guy when it comes to Internet marketing… but he’s also a very thorough student of marketing and copywriting classics.

One of the things I have gotten via first stalking Travis online, and eventually paying him a lot of money for his marketing education and ideas, is simply exposure to really great, simple, often very old marketing ideas, which have made me much more money than the large sums I have paid Travis.

Speaking of which:

Yesterday, I started promoting Travis’s Royalty Ronin community as an affiliate.

I paid Travis $3k over the past year for access to Royalty Ronin and for a suite of his courses, which he makes available for members of Royalty Ronin.

I also recently renewed my membership to Royalty Ronin, ahead of schedule, for another year, in one lump sum payment of $1k.

Good news, part 2:

If you like, you can now get inside Royalty Ronin for a little less than the $3k I paid over the past year… and less even than the $1k I paid in a lump sum a few weeks ago to renew.

Specifically, you can get inside Royalty Ronin for free, because Travis has started offering a 7-day free trial.

Like I wrote/said yesterday, there aren’t many affiliate offers I’m wiling to promote. That’s because most are simply not good enough… because most aren’t a good fit for my audience… because I’m simply not enthusiastic about most of them.

On the other hand, I’m 110% enthusiastic to promote Travis’s Royalty Ronin, and all the multi-thousand dollar courses that come as bonuses, because I’ve so thoroughly benefited from them, and because I continue to benefit from them.

If you’d like to test out, look around, and even profit from Royalty Ronin, for free, for a week, you can do so here:

​https://bejakovic.com/ronin​

P.S. If you already signed up for a trial of Royalty Ronin via my affiliate link above, send me an email to let me know. Skool doesn’t let me see who has signed up, so the only way I know is if you write me.

And if you do write me to let me know, I’ll send you a recording of my Heart of Hearts training, about how to discover what the people in your market really want, so you can better know what to offer them and how to present it.

I previously planned to sell Heart of Hearts for $300, along with a few bonuses. I even had a few people pay me $300 for it, before I changed my mind, pulled the offer, and refunded their money. (I simply didn’t have time or desire to create the promised bonuses.)

Good news, part 3, is that Heart of Hearts is yours free, because you’ve taken me up on this trial of Royalty Ronin.

Plus, as an extra bonus when you write me, I’ll tie up this email, and I’ll tell you the short-term fix I mentioned above, for getting people to buy your offer at the full price even if they don’t value it yet. I’ll even tell you the little known resource, which I was clued into via Travis Sago, that finally made this click in my own head.

A rule you can take to the bank

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“If you talk less, you’ll sell more, and that is a rule you can take to the bank.”
— David Sandler

What, you’re still reading?

Even though I’ve paid off the subject line?

Insatiable. All right…

I can tell you I’m re-reading David Sandler’s mysteriously titled book, You Can’t Teach A Kid To Ride A Bike At A Seminar.

In case you don’t know Sandler, the man was a sales trainer, and his book is about his sales system.

Sandler was influential enough in the world of actual sales — the world of cold calling, going to prospect’s offices, sitting across the table.

But his ideas are much better known in the world of online marketing because negotiation coach Jim Camp, who influenced a million and one Internet marketers, apparently got most of his negotiation system, often verbatim, by being a Sandler franchisee.

Aaanyways…

Sandler says to talk less. To draw out your prospects to talk. To listen, and to get them to sell themselves.

It’s good advice. I tried it. It worked like magic, back when I used to get on calls with prospective copywriting clients.

It’s great advice for sales copy too.

Back when I was writing sales copy — thousands of words every week of advertorials, and VSLs, and sales emails — I made it a policy to “write as little as possible.”

That didn’t mean to have a VSL of 150 words or a half-page advertorial.

Instead it meant “getting the market to write your marketing for you,” as Travis Sago likes to say. To mirror and feed back things that people in the market already said themselves, in their own words, instead of coming up with my own arguments and language.

So that’s a tip for you. Talk and write less. You’ll sell more.

Here’s another tip. The above tip is great advice if all you’re looking to do is to sell, today.

But if you’re writing a daily email newsletter, particularly one for yourself and your business, then there’s a second purpose to your emails.

This second purpose is more wooly. Much less measurable than sales. It also happens in the vague future, rather than the clear present.

I’m talking about getting people to open your emails again tomorrow, and to give you an honest hearing. About gradually, getting people to see you as an authority, a leader, a trusted guide in all kinds of questions in their life.

Sales today are necessary and nice. But really, all the profits in email are in this long game, in the ongoing relationship, in the back end.

And that’s a rule you can take to the bank.

And now, on to my offer. If you don’t buy it today, I’ll promote it again tomorrow, and maybe I’ll convince you then.

Or maybe I’ll convince you today?

My offer is my Daily Email Habit service. It’s a new prompt/puzzle each day, delivered to your inbox, to help you write your own daily email.

The dual goals for Daily Email Habit are 1) making you sales today and 2) establishing your influence and authority, so you have an asset in your email list that only grows in value tomorrow, and the day after.

If you’d like to get started with those dual goals, and now:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

The JV Nothing

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The first book I read in English — English not being my native language — was The Neverending Story by Michael Ende.

Maybe you know the 1984 Hollywood movie? The original book is much bigger, and much more profound.

At the core of it is a boy named Bastian Balthasar Bux, who leads a gray and dreary life.

But then one day Bastian is transported to a fantastical land called Fantastica.

He’s brought there to save Fantastica from an existential threat known only as The Nothing.

The Nothing is not a hole. It’s not black. It’s not white. It just makes people and places in Fantastica disappear. Where these people and places were, nothing is left, or more precisely, The Nothing is left.

But let me get to The Something of this email:

Last year, I went on a kick of cold emailing random business owners in a quest for JV partners.

I did this in part because I was following Travis Sago’s BEAMER training, and also because I was working as a coach in Shiv Shetti’s PCM mastermind, where most people were doing similar cold outreach. I wanted to see if I could do it myself.

My quest for JV partners came to exactly nothing in the end. And that’s even though I had a good offer, and I did my research on people, and though my copy was on point.

What happened? Nobody knows, and nobody ever will.

One minute, my cold outreach messages were in my gmail composer, and after I clicked send, they disappeared. The JV Nothing swallowed them up.

No information ever came back about where I went wrong — whether it was the list, or the offer, or the copy.

I’m sure somebody has good experiences to counter my bad experience with cold outreach.

But from what I’ve seen, it takes huge numbers of cold outreach messages to get any kind of a serious prospect, and even when you get somebody, they rarely turn out to be a good partner, and the relationship tends to be very flimsy.

So what to do?

In The Neverending Story, Bastian eventually saves Fantastica (and himself) via an act of total self-abnegation. He has to give up his own identity, down to every desire, every memory. It turns out to be transformative.

I’d like to propose the same if you’re trying to get JV partners, whether for a list swap, or an affiliate deal, or some sort of long-term collaboration.

Many things go into making that happen and turn out well.

But in terms of getting it at least started, I can recommend the following:

Start with people you know, and who know you.

Once you’ve worked through those, go to people you know, who don’t know you — people you’re a fan of, follower of, genuinely can say feel you know them, even though the feeling is not mutual. (Trust me, if you communicate this, it somehow comes through clearly in a message.)

And once you’ve worked through those people, go to people you make an effort to get to know, over time, either via an introduction, or by following them, reading their stuff, buying their products, writing them, helping them — without your desires or your memories of your planned JV deal in mind.

Anything to avoid the genuinely cold outreach message.

That’s my fantastical tip for you today.

My fantastical offer today has nothing to do with today’s fantastical email. Well, it does, but in a way that I’m not willing to reveal just yet.

For now, if you’d like my help in starting and sticking with a consistent daily email habit, so you can gradually expand the universe of people who know you, and who can connect you, and who you can partner with:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

I want Justin Goff back

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Two days ago, Justin Goff sent a new email.

Do you remember Justin Goff?

He was a direct marketer who made between $30k-$70k per month, writing a daily email and creating a new offer a month, usually in partnership with some industry expert.

I wrote an email about Justin back in July, with the subject line, “What happened to Justin Goff?”

Because back then, Justin had decided to stop emailing daily. First, he switched to emailing weekly, but that didn’t stick, and so he stopped emailing altogether.

By my count, Justin has sent only 3 emails since. One, back in October, to say he’s struggling to adjust to no longer having the identity of an entrepreneur… a followup a few days later, with a self-help lesson… and now this one, two days ago, about success, like nothing happened.

I don’t know if Justin’s latest email means he’s preparing for a comeback. I hope so, because I found his email newsletter valuable.

Justin used to share the results of his ultra-profitable, very simple campaigns, and he reminded me of fundamental, make-or-break direct marketing truths that are easy to forget in the chase for something new. For example, take the following koan, about all it takes to create a hyper-successful offer, from Justin’s email on 2023/6/3:

“Making money with an email list is really about selling the same benefits over and over again with a new mechanism.”

“Pff,” I hear you saying. “So obvious. Perhaps you’re not aware, John, but I’ve read Breakthrough Advertising. Well, the first three chapters anyway. I know all about new mechanisms.”

I’m sure. The thing is, it’s not about knowing, but about applying, creating, and actually doing a good job of it.

Because so many marketers, so many business owners, think that a mechanism is the same as an acronym:

“Buy from me because of my proprietary, 5-step F.A.N.C.Y. system! What could those letters stand for? You’ll never know, not unless you buy! And you’ll be sorry if you miss out, because I’m telling you, F.A.N.C.Y. is unique, and it’s new, and it’s an acronym!”

No, a new mechanism, at least one done right, is not an acronym. A few examples of new mechanisms done very right:

* Travis Sago’s Phoneless Sales Machine, about making $5k sales without ever getting on a sales call, all via email and Google Docs, which every guru and coach is now using and peddling

* Donovan Health Solutions massive promo a few years back, about curing all your health problems with a special, magical sound frequency that activates your vagal nerve

* Justin’s own “Pocket Change Offers” training, which he did in partnership with Ning Li, for building an email list of thousands of buyers, quickly, with little $7 offers

So that’s why I’m hoping Justin will come back. I want him to promote stuff again, and share more impressive results, and remind me of what really matters, and how it looks when it’s actually carried out well.

But on to work:

Daily email. Sticking to it. It can be very valuable, as Justin’s promo results have shown.

On the other hand, letting your daily emails go slack can be harmful to your mental health. At least that’s my reading of Justin’s few emails of the past 6+ months.

If you want my help writing daily emails, and sticking to it, in a completely new way that you haven’t seen or tried ever before, you can find that at the link below.

Frankly, each day matters, each day is unique, and so my recommendation is that you get started today.

For the full info:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

How to stop being seen as a milquetoast

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Today is the last day to sign up for MyPEEPS and get my free “Shotgun Messenger” bonus. You can expect me to send many more emails about this offer today. And on that note, I wanna tell you a quick story of rejection:

I first discovered marketer Travis Sago thanks to a podcast interview back in 2019. I was super impressed by everything Travis said, and so I got on his email list right away.

Travis had an automated welcome email that ended with, “I’m curious… What business are you in?”

I wrote back. I told Travis that I loved his interview, I gave some specifics of what I loved, and I said my business was copywriting.

And what I got back was… nothing. No smiley face, no “good on ya,” not a single word.

I figured then and in all these intervening years that either Travis didn’t check the reply email regularly, or he simply didn’t think me important enough to reply to.

Then this very morning, Sunday September 15 2024, I was listening to a short recording that Travis did for the people in his community.

Travis was talking about how persistent he is in following up with his prospects, particularly the “movers and shakers.” And he said the following:

“In fact, in my business, if a copywriter reaches out to me, my typical M.O. is not to respond back. I wanna get rid of all the milquetoasts, because I’m looking for people who want to get things done in the face of a challenge.”

Point being:

You might know that followup can get the attention of those who forgot about you or never even noticed you.

You might also know followup can build more desire.

But I imagine you never thought of followup as a kind of proof element.

And yet it is. Because who follows up?

People who believe in what they are doing and selling, including themselves.

The milquetoasts drop away.

So send regular emails, preferably daily… and if you got a deadline coming up, send a bunch.

You’ll catch people’s attention… you’ll remind them of what they want and how you can help… and you will convince them you have something worthwhile, just because you keep following up about it. And now, since you’ve read this email, you are a few minutes closer to the deadline for my MyPEEPS offer. The deadline will come in a flash, tonight at 12 midnight PST.

In a nutshell, MyPEEPS shows you how to build up your email list with paid traffic — putting in $10-$15 and getting out 10-15 new subscribers a day — so you can in time have a proper audience of people who want to read your emails and buy from you.

And the free Shotgun Messenger bonus I’m offering gets you my direct help and input as you actually put the MyPEEPS process into practice.

If you want the full details on that, or to sign up for before the deadline strikes:

​https://bejakovic.com/shotgun​

If your open rates are excellent but your sales suck

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Yesterday, I wrote an email about a magical, far-off place called Affiliate World. I even invited you to meet me there.

​​To which, I got a reply from James “Get Paid Write” Carran, whose newsletter I am a reader of. James wrote:

===

I’m obviously not in the right crowd because I spent this entire email thinking affiliate world was a thing you were making up for the email until I got to the end and realised it was a conference 😂

===

James is right — i didn’t explain Affiliate World at all.

I didn’t mention it was a conference, or that it was in Budapest until halfway through the email, or anything about the dates. I figured there was no point — either people are already going and they know, or there’s no way I will persuade them to go with this one email.

Lazy?

Maybe.

Self-defeating?

Maybe.

But I remember hearing something about this a long time ago in an interview with marketer Travis Sago.

Travis a kind of nice-guy Ben Settle. Like Ben, Travis is an expert email copywriter and direct marketer. Like Ben, he has a cult-like following. And like Ben, he has made millions with his own online businesses and has helped others make millions too. One curious thing:

Travis says he writes his email subject lines like he has to pay for each open.

Rather than trying to get everyone to open, and hoping to somehow persuade or convince or explain to them why it’s in their interest to take the next step before they click away… Travis uses each email to select from the audience a tiny pocket of highly qualified people.

There’s a broader approach here – efficiency as a business principle. It’s how Travis has been able to build up a multimillion business selling little $39 ebooks… and how he was later able to build up a second multi million business, selling $5k and $10k and $25k programs and masterminds.

I don’t practice Travis’s subject line approach with this newsletter, not every day. But maybe it’s something for you to think about on this Sunday, particularly if your open rates are excellent but your sales suck.

And in case you’d like to know what to write once people open your emails, so your emails not only get opened, not only get read, but also make sales, you might like:

https://bejakovic.com/sme

You won’t make money by reading this email, but you might become a bit smarter

by

True story:

I once knew a girl who was in the last year of law school. She had just broken up with her boyfriend, who owned some kind of online business.

The guy wasn’t willing to accept the breakup. So he called the girl and texted her, asking that they meet again so he could plead his case.

The girl said no.

The guy kept texting and asking for them to meet.

The girl politely but firmly still said no.

Finally, the guy, clever and successful businessman that he was, wrote her a message saying how he understood she is a poor law student, and that since we are all self-interested creatures, he would be willing to pay her a nice and fair hourly rate, fit for a full-fledged lawyer, if she would only meet with him for a coffee and a chat.

At this point, the girl stopped responding to the guy.

But she did tell me this story. And she laughed as she told it, as if to say “What was I doing with him?” She rolled her eyes at how warped his brain had become, and how he thought he could buy her.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Travis Sago lately. And Travis likes to say that money is tertiary.

As in, yes, money is important to most of us. But in the grand scheme of what we all want, two categories of needs are even more important.

And in fact, there are situations where money is even at odds with those two other categories. In those situations, offering money completely spoils the appeal.

Perhaps you heard how last week, after the CrowdStrike IT snafu interrupted life-saving surgeries… disrupted millions of people’s trips… and caused panic and days of extra work for businesses around the world, CrowdStrike went into damage-control mode.

They sent an email to key partners to apologize. And in addition, to show how truly bad they feel about the whole thing, they also included a $10 Uber Eats voucher.

“Your next cup of coffee or late night snack is on us!” CrowdStrike wrote.

Unsurprisingly, backlash and mockery followed all over Internet.

There’s no doubt in my mind that no backlash or mockery would have happened had CrowdStrike simply sent an apologetic email and left it at that.

So keep that in mind.

Money is tertiary.

As for what’s secondary and primary, if you think a bit about your own motivations in life, with respect to work in particular, I’m sure you will be able to figure that out.

But if you want to see how top copywriters make appeals to those primary and secondary needs, you can find that round 19 of my Copy Riddles program, which is titled:

“A sexy technique for writing bullets that leave other copywriters green with envy”

For more information on Copy Riddles:

https://bejakovic.com/cr