Travis Sago

Millionaire math used by the wealthiest people, but not me

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Yesterday morning, my time, I concluded the “Unannounced Bonus” promo I had been running all past week.

As usual, the final day of the promo was an exhausting barrage of emails.

The last thing I wanted to do yesterday was to think or write more about that promo or how it went.

But today, I did what I usually do and looked at my “Unannounced Bonus” promo — how it went, how it compared to previous promos, what I can learn.

Let me shoo the elephant out of the closet right away, and make the gray beast dance:

This “Unannounced Bonus” promo made fewer sales of Copy Riddles, across 7 days, than I made last year during the last promo I ran for CR, which I called the “White Tuesday” promo, and which lasted just 2 days.

Before you either feel too bad for me or start to maliciously gloat, let me say that the “White Tuesday” promo surprised even me by how well it did.

And though the “Unannounced Bonus” promo did less than that, it still made more in a week than I would likely be making in a month if I had a proper job. It also paid me an effective per-email rate that’s many hundreds of dollars higher than I was making back at the peak of my freelance copywriting career.

But, with all that self-reassuring done, the fact remains I made fewer sales now, over 7 days, than last year, over 2 days.

What’s going on?

I made a list of 10 possible explanations for myself. All of them are legit, and all possibly contributed. But there’s one big one that stands out to me, and that I want to highlight to you too:

During the “White Tuesday” promo last year, part of the offer was a payment plan for Copy Riddles.

95% of people who bought during that promo took the payment plan.

During the “Unannounced Bonus” promo that just ended, part of the offer was once again a payment plan for Copy Riddles.

But just 33% of people who bought during this promo took the payment plan.

The difference is that this time, I was partnering with Lawrence Bernstein, and offering a lifetime subscription to his Ad Money Machine as a bonus for Copy Riddles. (And vice versa — Lawrence was also promoting the offer to his list.)

Due to the uniqueness of this arrangement, I agreed with Lawrence we’d offer the same payment plan as he offered the last time he made the offer of a lifetime subscription for Ad Money Machine…

… which, as I said, 33% of buyers ended up finding enticing.

On the other hand, last year, I followed a very specific payment plan philosophy. 95% of people found that payment plan enticing, and much more importantly, a greater total number of sales came out of it.

Maybe you remember what the payment plan was that I offered for White Tuesday. If not, my emails are all archived on my site, and you can find the campaign there. You can look it up, and see what the exact payment plan was.

But I’ll tell you one thing:

Even if you know the specifics of what I did publicly, you’re unlikely to glean the underlying payment plan philosophy, or the most exciting and valuable marketing trick resulting from that philosophy, which is applied behind the scenes.

I’ll tell you a second thing:

The payment plan philosophy I followed last year came from a 13-minute video by Travis Sago, titled “Millionaire Math Used by the Wealthiest People.”

If you’ve already taken me up on my recommendation to sign up for Travis’s Royalty Ronin community (I myself am a paying member), then you can find this 13-minute video as a bonus inside the Phoneless Sales Machine course, which normally sells for $2,000, and which Travis gives away as a free bonus for those who are in Royalty Ronin.

If you haven’t taken me up on my recommendation to sign up for Travis’s Royalty Ronin community, then I can only tell you Royalty Ronin is expensive. Very expensive. Particularly if you sign up and do nothing with the information.

On the other hand, if you are selling offers online — specifically, info products like courses or ebooks — and if you apply just this one idea from Travis about payment plans, it could well be worth thousands of dollars to you by the end of this week alone, and much, much more in the coming weeks, months, and years.

If you want to invest in a month of Ronin, and see how quickly and thoroughly you can make your money back:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

How to turn $99 courses into $999 offers

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Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a magic spell that turns plain, small, $29 or $99 courses into shiny, exciting, $299 or $999 offers?

The past week, I’ve been trawling the Royalty Ronin community, of which I am a paying member.

I found a curious and old post inside. A lightbulb came on. I had actually written an email on the exact same topic, back in 2021, as a kind of joke, talking about repositioning physical products.

Here’s what I wrote back then:

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If you sell dog clippers today and nobody’s buying, then bundle your clippers with a video. Tell people how to set up their own dog grooming business in their back yard in their spare time.

Charge 10x what the clippers cost… and find yourself in a marketplace of one, instead of a commodity market.

===

I suffer from what is known as “copywriter brain,” which is limited in its thinking and reach.

It takes “marketing and business brain” to take the above idea seriously and see its full potential, particularly when applied to info products.

And that’s exactly what I found in that post inside Royalty Ronin. This post talked about this same idea, and it gave a real example involving Travis Sago (the guy who runs Royalty Ronin).

Travis took a course that sold well for $99 and transformed it, successfully and ethically, into a $999 offer that also sold well.

The point being, you don’t have to start from scratch.

If you want to create a big-ticket offer, this doesn’t mean you need big new course content, a big new topic, a big new mechanism.

You can take what you already have, even if it’s only selling now for $29 or $99 or whatever, and reposition it so it becomes a genuine big-ticket offer.

But what if you don’t have even a $29 or $99 offer right now?

That’s ok. Millions of other people do have such offers. And you can start a profitable repositioning business, with your own home as headquarters, by helping such people turn their $29 offers into $299 offers and their $99 offers into $999 offers.

If you want more info or advice or support on how to do all this, then you might be a good fit for Royalty Ronin.

You can sign up for a trial below and see for yourself if it’s for you.

If you do sign up, forward me your welcome email (the one that says “Vroom” in the subject line). I’ll then tell you where to find the post I mentioned above, which lays out how Travis repositions his $99 courses into $999 offers. Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

The inspiration for my concluded “Buy 5 paperbacks” promo

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This morning at 9am Central Europe Time, I concluded my Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle promo, which has been running since Monday.

As a result of this promo, I sold a couple hundred paperback copies of my original 10 Commandments book. I had multiple people who bought tell me they will use the books as giveaways to their own lists. I got a big jump in Amazon rankings.

Altogether, I call it a success.

I did this promo as a bit of an experiment. I wanted to see if it would work for me. I’m happy with how it went, so I will repeat it, some time down the line, with new bonuses, for my new 10 Commandments book.

Over the past few days, a few people wrote me to say this was an original and interesting promo and offer. And one reader wrote in to ask, “Are you doing a version of Daniel Throssell’s book launch?”

No, Daniel was not the inspiration for this promo. For one thing, it was hardly a book launch — my original 10 Commandments book has been out for 5+ years. More importantly, I don’t even know what Daniel’s book launch strategy is.

That said, my book promo/offer was not original. I copied it exactly from what I saw another marketer doing.

I knew odds were excellent it would to work for me also, because I saw it worked very well for this other marketer.

In fact, this other marketer got me to buy five paperback copies of his book, which are still sitting in their Amazon box, collecting dust, on a shelf right across from the couch where I’m writing this email right now.

I bought those five copies in exchange for a bonus that the marketer was offering, which got me intrigued and which I wanted to get.

And that’s my meta-lesson for you today:

Lots of people are out there sharing marketing how-tos and tutorials and ideas, including in free newsletters like this one.

Maybe all those tutorials and ideas are proven advice. Or maybe they’re not.

But there is a whole other class of marketing and money-making education, which is 100% proven, and which you’ve already paid for, so you might as well get use out of it.

I’m talking about all the offers — books, courses, back scratchers — that got you to buy, and the process by which some marketer or business owner got you to buy them.

Keep a track of those offers and those sales processes. And ask yourself, what did it? Get to the core. Then apply it to what you do. Odds are excellent it will work for you as well.

In case you’re curious, I can tell you that the marketer I imitated for my Buttered-Up Bonus Bundle was Travis Sago.

Some time last year, Travis made people an offer to buy five paperback copies of his book Make ‘Em Beg To Buy From You on Amazon. In return, he would give you a bonus called Shogun Traffic Method, about a source of traffic that converts for any niche or offer, starting at $50 or less.

I had a pretty good idea already of what the Shogun Traffic Method was. But I’ve learned a ton from Travis before, and I decided it was a worthwhile investment. Plus, he piled bonuses on top of his bonuses — including some that were even more intriguing than the core Shogun Traffic Method itself.

As far as I know, Travis ran this promo only within his Royalty Ronin community.

It’s another good reason to be inside Royalty Ronin. Not only is this a community of 500+ Internet marketers who are doing creative deals, often starting from nothing… not only do you get Travis’s ongoing education and inspiration and advice in the community… not only is there a library of Travis’s expensive courses and bonuses (including the Shogun Traffic Method)… but you get to see Travis running creative new promos himself.

The bad news is, that means Travis might get you yet again, so you pay him for something on top of the already expensive $299 that Royalty Ronin costs each month.

The good news is, if you do find yourself paying Travis for something new, you’ve likely just learned a valuable new way to sell (most of Travis’s promos are creative and new in some form or another). You now have a new strategy you can profit from, if you only apply it to what you do.

That’s likely to pay for that new offer you just bought, and maybe even for a few months of Royalty Ronin itself.

If you want to find out more about Royalty Ronin, or maybe give it a try yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

Dark marketplace for courses

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I just bought a course, based solely on the glowing recommendation of somebody I’ve come to trust and respect.

The course is made up of five actual, physical books. It costs $300.

Since the seller is only willing to ship in the U.S., I will need to have these five books shipped to my friend’s post office box in South Carolina, and then pay more to have them forwarded on to me in Spain.

The whole process to order this course has taken about three weeks. The seller has no website, no phone number, no email address publicly listed.

And in case you’re wondering, there are no copies of the course available on Amazon or eBay or other popular “web sites.”

(After this course was recommended by somebody I’ve come to trust and respect in a semi-public setting, I saw someone on Twitter asking how and where to get this course. There were no responses.)

The way I managed to get this course is I remembered a copywriter who mentioned he had worked with the creator of the course. I contacted the copywriter. He put me in touch with the family of the guy who created the course.

Then it was back and forth over email with the daughter of the course creator for a couple weeks, with each back-and-forth taking another few days.

Finally, I made the payment last Friday. I had hoped to hear that the course has been shipped, but the weekend passed. Yesterday, I got a message from the daughter. She wrote:

“Hope you had a great weekend. Thanks for sending the PayPal; I received it and have the package ready. I forgot to ask earlier: Are you interested in other courses that I have…”

… and here followed a list of about 15 more attractive-sounding courses, at least going by titles alone, because that’s all there was. No price, no details, no sales page, no order form. That’s the upsell process. And thanks to this upsell process, it will be another few days before my course is shipped.

I’m not telling you this to complain. I’m happy to get this course and amused by the ordering process.

I am telling you this because, while you might not realize it, there’s a dark marketplace for courses. “Dark” as in “dark web,” the web that’s not accessible publicly or at least searchable by Google and Perplexity.

The fact is, there are billions of dollars’ worth of info products that are not sold on Clickbank, or eBay, or Amazon, or on anybody’s website.

Maybe these info products were created before the web and are simply sitting in a garage or warehouse, in book format or on tapes or DVDs.

Or maybe these info products were online once. But the hosting expired. Or they were a one-time offer. Or the creator simply moved on to other things, and the only place are now is on somebody’s hard drive.

Or maybe these info products are available online, but not publicly. Maybe they are simply sold via backchannels, to people who are on private email lists, or inside private communities, or only to people who know somebody who knows somebody.

To be fair:

Not everything that’s old is gold, and not everything that’s hidden is worth uncovering.

But there is gold, and a lot of it, among the many info products in the dark marketplace.

This is a legit opportunity, for anybody who has the digging instinct, and a bit of marketing and copywriting chops. To wit:

You can find these dark market info products, and simply sell them as-is to a new audience…

Or you can convert them to a new, more accessible format…

Or you can repackage and rebrand them into an offer of your own, while paying the original creator a licensing fee.

If any of this gets you excited, and you’re thinking “Oh if only there were more info on how to do all this,” well, then you’re in luck. This is the kind of stuff that’s taught, discussed, and practiced inside Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin community.

Travis happens to be the person who recommended the course that I ended up buying, based on his recommendation alone. That’s because I happen to be a member of Royalty Ronin, and while I’m not very publicly active there, I do lurk and absorb information and even put it to use.

As I’ve written before, at $300 per month, Royalty Ronin is expensive. But at least in my case, it has paid for itself many times over.

If you’re curious about profiting from the dark marketplace for courses, but hesitant to risk $300 to test out Ronin for a month, then you’re in luck once again. Because Travis is currently offering a week’s trial of Royalty Ronin for free.

If you’d like to join me inside and see if it’s for you:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

Offer

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A few days ago, I was listening to a call put on by Internet marketer Travis Sago.

I’ve promoted Travis heavily over the past couple months as an affiliate for his Royalty Ronin community, which I am a member of and happily pay for.

In case you somehow missed all that promotion, the background on Travis is that he used to have a big Clickbank business in the relationship niche.

He then started working with other online business owners to help them pull more money out of their own customer lists. He made millions for them and for himself doing this. He eventually started teaching other marketers how to do the same.

Travis also happens to be a master of email copy. I always describe him as a “nice guy Ben Settle.” Travis is the one who first turned me on to the power of insight in marketing, because he both teaches it and practices it.

Anyways, in that call I was listening to, Travis said the following about the kinds of emails his list likes the best:

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I see this in email lists too. They’re like, “Oh, I’ve gotta keep giving them amazing content all the time.”

My best stuff, what people people like best, is when I make offers.

Now you have to wrap — ever pill a dog? You have to put the pill in some cheese, right?

But they love it. I think people want to solve problems.

===

Maybe Travis’s “pill a dog” analogy doesn’t read very elegantly here in a transcript. It sounds cuter in the live call with Travis’s perpetually cheery voice saying it.

In any case, taking a cue from Travis, I got an offer for you today.

Last year, Travis wrote a book called Make ‘Em Beg To Buy From You. That books sells for $9.99 on Amazon right now. It’s frankly a steal, because it contains large and key excerpts from Travis’s $2k course Phoneless Sales Machine, which is all about how to persuade people to buy expensive offers in the most efficient and easy way possible.

So, $9.99 on Amazon right now, and worth much more than that.

But I got a deal for you:

I made an agreement with Travis, and you can get a free copy of his Make ‘Em Beg To Buy From You (in PDF format) if you have already bought my new 10 Commandments book. Just sign up to get the “apocryphal Commandment XI” (link at the end of my new 10 Commandments book) and follow the instructions at the bottom of that extra chapter.

And if you haven’t yet gotten a copy of my new 10 Commandments book, you can do so here:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Fundamental theorem of sustainable, stress-free businesses

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I studied computer science in college. A very few lessons have stuck with me. For example, I still remember the “Fundamental theorem of software engineering,” which says:

“All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection.”

In computer science, that means something like, take a step away from the core problem, look at things from a higher level of abstraction, and everything will sort itself out.

Along the same lines, I would like to propose to you the fundamental theorem of stress-free, sustainable businesses, which says:

“All problems in your business can be solved by another level of indirection.”

Would an example help?

Think of the 1848 California Gold Rush.

The zeroth level of that was to take a sieve and sit by the side of the American River, sifting thousands of pounds of silt every day and maybe finding a few nuggets of gold.

As you probably know, that’s not how the real money was made.

The real money was made in selling sieves and pots and shovels to miners, not in shoveling for gold. California’s first millionaire was a man named Samuel Brannan, who opened a big store during the Gold Rush. A first level of indirection.

But you can do still better. Because if your business is selling shovels to miners, then you might be out of business when a gold rush passes. Plus, gold miners are a rowdy, desperate bunch, and selling to them means you might get pulled into a brawl or hit over the head with one of your own shovels.

That’s where the fundamental theorem comes in.

You can introduce another layer of indirection, a second level.

You can get out of the shovel-selling business, and you get into the shovel-distributing business, or the store-construction business, or the info product business targeting owners of big stores, men like Samuel Brannan, a kind of customer with greater staying power and ability to pay than the miners he sells to.

And if it turns out that you don’t like the selling to the Samuel Brannans of the world, you know what to do. Third level, fourth level, fifth level of indirection, and everything will sort itself out.

Somebody recently asked me if I have a course or a training on choosing a niche.

I don’t. I don’t imagine I will ever create one. The above is my bit of advice to help you choosing a niche.

But I do know somebody who has a lot of experience with online businesses, and who has great advice about criteria for choosing a new niche.

That person is Travis Sago. Travis has an entire training called “Niche Factors That Never Fail.”

Travis’s courses, including Passive Cash Flow Mojo, the one that contains that niches training, all sell for thousands of dollars each.

But through some glitch in the matrix, you can currently get access to all of Travis’s courses by being a part of Travis’s Royalty Ronin community. That community is not cheap either, but it’s a fraction of the price of just one of Travis’s high-ticket courses.

I can recommend Royalty Ronin, because I myself am a member.

But you don’t have to decide anything now. Because you can get a free trial to Ronin for 7 days. If you’d like to find out more about this trial offer:

http://bejakovic.com/ronin

A persuasion riddle featuring the greatest ad man of all time

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I got a riddle for you. A persuasion riddle. It goes like this:

In 1907, Albert Lasker, President at the Lord & Thomas ad agency, badly wanted to hire Claude C. Hopkins, widely believed to be the greatest ad man of that time, and really, of any time.

Problem:

Hopkins 1) didn’t want to work and 2) didn’t need the money.

The background was that, a short while earlier, Hopkins had been publicly disgraced and privately shook up.

He had become a part owner of a patent medicine company called Liquozone. He believed in the Liquozone product — he thought it had saved his daughter’s life. He advertised it very aggressively and effectively.

Hopkins took Liquozone from bankruptcy in 1902 to making a profit of $1.8 million the next year (about $60 million in today’s money).

Over the next five years, Hopkins, who owned a 25% stake in Liquozone, made millions of dollars personally, probably over $100 million in today’s money.

And then some muckracking journalist had the gall to go and write a series of muckracking articles (“The Great American Fraud”) about how patent medicines were all bunk and how Liquozone in particular was the “same old fake” and how, according to lab tests, it was probably more harmful than helpful.

In response to those articles, a bunch of states banned Liquozone, and the federal government set up the Food and Drug Administration, to regulate health products and the claims made about them.

Again, Hopkins, who genuinely believed in Liquozone, was privately hurt. And publicly, being involved with something that was now known as a fake and a scam, he decided to retire to a village on Lake Michigan, determined not to work in advertising no more.

And yet, as Hopkins later wrote, “As far as I know, no ordinary human being has ever resisted Albert Lasker. Nothing he desired has ever been forbidden him. So I yielded, as all do, to his persuasiveness.”

So here’s the riddle:

What did Albert Lasker say or do to convince Hopkins, who didn’t want to work and who didn’t need the money, to come out of his village hiding hole and get back into copywriting?

If you dig around on the internet, or if you get Perplexity to do it for you, you can probably find the answer.

But what’s the fun in that? And what’s the value?

The fact is, if you riddle this out for yourself, you might come up with good ideas of your own.

And when I share the actual answer in my email tomorrow, it’s sure to be much more memorable and useful to you.

By the way, the answer to this riddle applies way beyond convincing A-list copywriters to come work for you. It applies to just about any kind of new business partnership you might want to start.

But more about that tomorrow.

For today, I thought about what offer makes sense to promote, given the Hopkins and Lasker story above.

I realized that once again, it’s Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin, which I was promoting extensively last month.

I’m no longer giving away bonuses just for trying out Ronin for free for a week.

I am giving away bonuses if you decide to stick with Ronin past the free trial.

But honestly, the bonuses I’m offering, nice as they are, are but a drop in the total value of what you get if you are actually inside the Ronin community, and if you simply make a point to do something with the resources inside.

If you’d like to find out more:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

Last call for Ronin bonus offer

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The past two weeks, I’ve been promoting a free trial of Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin membership, and I’ve been giving people who took me up on that a bundle of bonuses I’ve created.

I’m ending this promotion tonight at 12 midnight PST.

I will promote Ronin again in the future because…

– I myself am a member or Ronin (paid in full for the next year)

– Considering all the stuff inside (Travis offers $12k worth of real-world bonuses) I think it’s a honestly a great deal, probably the best deal out there right in any direct marketing-adjacent space

– I believe Ronin can be immensely valuable for many people in my audience, whether coaches, copywriters, or course creators, if they were to join and implement just an idea or two that are shared inside

So why stop the promotion?

Well, expose human beings to anything constant — even incontestably good things like compliments, security, or free money — and people soon stop responding. Our strange neurology means we need constant contrast to see, hear, feel, think, and pay attention. Otherwise things become literally invisible.

And so I’m ending my current promotion of Travis’s Royalty Ronin. After tonight, the bonuses I’m offering just for giving it a free trial will disappear, only to be found behind the paywall.

If you have already signed up for a trial of Ronin, forward me your confirmation email from Travis, the one with “Vroom” in the subject line.

And if you have not yet taken Ronin for a week’s free spin, you can do so before tonight at 12 midnight PST and get the following 4 bonuses:

1. My Heart of Hearts training, about how to discover what people in your audience really want, so you can better know what to offer them + how to present it.

2. A short-term fix if your offer has low perceived value right now. Don’t discount. Sell for full price, by using the strategy I’ve described here.

3. Inspiration & Engagement. A recording of my presentation for Brian Kurtz’s $2k/year Titans XL mastermind.

4. A single tip on writing how-to emails in the age of ChatGPT. I’ve been thinking to develop this idea into a Most Valuable Postcard #3, because it’s valuable way beyond just how-to emails. For now, if you’re curious, you can read the core of it in this bonus.

If you’d like to give Ronin a week’s free try, and get four bonuses above, which have your name on them, as my way of saying thanks for taking me up on my recommendation, then here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

How to write how-to content in the age of ChatGPT

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“They can put a man on the moon, but…”

Jerry Seinfeld did a comedy routine in the 1980s about how Neil Armstrong landing on the moon was the worst thing to ever happen, because it gave ammo to every dissatisfied and griping person on earth.

Well, I feel like we’re in a similar moment today. Just yesterday I read a prediction by four smart and informed people called “AI 2027.” It says we will have superhuman artificial intelligence in the next two years.

“They are gonna put superhuman artificial intelligence on my stupid iPhone, but…”

… people still have problems today, big and small.

That’s a part of the reason why I feel that how-to content, mocked for years by Internet marketing thought leaders, is making a comeback.

(By the way, everything I’ve just told you above is a “problem-solution” lead, which is a good way to “pace” your reader in your how-to content, and set up the actual tips you have to share. As for that:)

#1. Absolute best case: Offer a new solution

How-to content offers solutions to people’s problems. People have problems not because they are incompetent and hapless morons. Instead, they have problems because what they’ve tried before hasn’t worked.

So the absolute best how-to solution you can offer them is something new.

Example:

A few years ago I wrote about a trick I had found made me motivated and eager to get to work.

Basically, before getting to work, I’d set a timer for 7 minutes and just sit, without allowing myself to do anything but sit. When the seven minutes was up, I’d be raring to get to work simply because my mind had been so impatient and was looking for some outlet.

(I’ve since started calling this Boredom Therapy and I still highly recommend it.)

When I wrote an email about this 7-minute pre-work trick, I got a record number of people replying and saying, “This is so cool! I gotta try it!”

People are always looking for ways to be more productive or, rather, less unproductive. They’ve heard about goal setting and Pomodoro technique and eliminating distractions. They have either tried them (“didn’t work”) or they’ve dismissed them (“couldn’t work because I heard it before”).

But offer them something new, and neither of those objections holds.

Offering a genuinely new solution is valuable in the age of ChatGPT, because by design, ChatGPT contains at best yesterday’s solutions that it learned from yesterday’s how-to articles.

The trouble is, there’s only so much new stuff, and even less new stuff that actually works. What then?

#2. Next-best case: Offer a solution that’s worked for you personally

In short, if you can’t write a new “How to” solution, write a “How I” case study.

It’s easy to suggest solutions when people have problems, and it’s even easier to dismiss such solutions. What’s impossible to dismiss is a fact-packed personal case study of how you solved a problem in your own instance.

Example:

Did you see what I did in that point 1 above, about a new solution? The fact is, “offer a new solution” is hardly new advice for in how-to content. So imagine that I’d just written the “how-to” part of that section, without including the personal case study of my boredom therapy email.

I feel, and maybe you will agree with me, that it would have made that section much easier to shrug off, and might even have made it sound preachy and annoying (“Oh yeah Bejako? Where am I supposed to get a new solution you donkey?”)

A how-to solution backed by your own case study is valuable in the age of ChatGPT because, while the solution is not new, the case study is. It therefore makes your content both unique and credible. On the other hand, default ChatGPT how-to advice is, once again by design, generic, anonymous, and therefore at least a bit suspect.

#3. Not-quite-best case: Sell the hell out of an old hat

If you got nothing new AND you don’t have a personal case study to share, then you’re left with familiar, well-trodden, old-hat solutions.

At this point, you’re not really in the information-sharing how-to business any more. Rather, you’re in the inspiration and motivation business.

Example:

In my Simple Money Emails course, I spend about a page’s worth of copy in the introduction to warn people against dismissing ideas in the course they might be familiar with.

That’s because later in the course I will suggest such tame breakthroughs as “make sure the opening of your email supports the offer you are selling.”

My customers might be tempted to shrug this off, and so I sell them on it, in advance — by acknowledging it might sound basic but highlighting how valuable it has been to me and other successful marketers, and how long it took me to actually internalize it, and how many people, including well-paid copywriters, actually don’t follow it.

Inspiring and motivating people will remain valuable in the age of ChatGPT because — well, who knows if it will remain valuable.

I’ve actually found ChatGPT to do a pretty good job inspiring me and motivating me.

But I still think humans have the edge here, simply because of our own pro-human, anti-machine embodimentism (a word I just made up to mirror racism and speciesism). I predict that will continue to hold, at least until 2027.

By the way, it’s good to keep your how-to articles to no more and no less than three points. I have more tips to share on writing how-to content in the age of ChatGPT, but I won’t.

Instead, let me tie this all into my promotion of Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin, which I’m bringing to an end tomorrow.

If you think back to my point 1 above, about how there’s not a lot of new stuff out there, and even less new stuff that works… well, that’s because most of the new stuff that works is inside Travis’s Royalty Ronin membership, and the bonus courses he gives away to members.

Over the past five years, I’ve seen dozens of people build 6- and 7-figure coaching businesses by reselling and repackaging ideas that Travis was sharing back in 2018 and 2019.

But Travis hasn’t been sittin’ pretty in the meantime. He keeps creating and innovating new ideas, ones that actually make money for him and for others who know of them and put them to use.

You can know of these if you look inside Royalty Ronin. And maybe you can be inspired and motivated by the other people inside the community to actually put some of these ideas to use.

I’ve been promoting Royalty Ronin for 2 weeks now. I will end my promotion tomorrow, Sunday, April 6, at 12 midnight PST.

I will certainly promote Royalty Ronin again in the future, maybe even every month. So you might wonder what exactly this Sunday deadline means.

I have been giving a bonus bundle to people who signed up for a week’s free trial of Ronin. After Sunday, this bonus bundle will go away, or rather, it will go behind the paywall. I will no longer give it to people who do the free trial, but who end up signing up and paying for Ronin.

If you’d like to kick off a week’s free trial to Ronin before the trial bonuses disappear, you can do that at the following link:

​​https://bejakovic.com/

P.S. My bonus bundle, which I have decided to call the “Lone Wolf and Cub” bonus bundle, to go with the “Ronin” theme, currently includes the following:

1. My Heart of Hearts training, about how to discover what people in your audience really want, so you can better know what to offer them + how to present it.

2. A short-term fix if your offer has low perceived value right now. Don’t discount. Sell for full price, by using the strategy I’ve described here.

3. Inspiration & Engagement. A recording of my presentation for Brian Kurtz’s $2k/year Titans XL mastermind.

I say “currently includes” because I will probably add more bonuses to this bundle, once I remove it as a bonus for the Ronin free trial and make it a bonus for actual Ronin subscription.

But if you sign up for trial now and decide to stick with Ronin (or you’ve already joined based on my recommendation), I’ll get you the extra bonuses automatically in the course area.

The death of infotainment

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A few days ago, an interesting comment popped up in my Daily Email House community. Gasper Crepinsek, who helps entrepreneurs adopt AI, wrote about his current content strategy:

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“So for now… whenever I feel like sharing value, I just share it with my audience directly (despite the current thinking on X that VALUE is bad, INSIGHT is king). I have actually found that people are converting even when I do make a “value / tutorial” sequence paired with soft selling approach. But that is the topic of another post.”

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This caught my owlish eye. It made me think back to the old Dan Kennedy chestnut — whatever becomes a norm leads to normal, average results… and normal, average results put you right at the poverty line.

There’s no denying that infotainment — stories, analogies, insight — has become the norm. Maybe not in every niche just yet, but among course creators, coaches, Internet marketers most definitely yes.

Curious fact:

Gasper is not the only one defying the infotainment norm with success.

As another example, take marketer Derek Johanson, the creator of the CopyHour course.

Derek has been at the Internet marketing thing for a long while, 12+ years.

I know for a fact Derek can write typical infotaining emails because he has done it in the past.

But a while back, he moved to writing very how-to, practical, almost tutorial-like daily emails, which run in series that cover different topics from week to week. I’m guessing it’s because it’s working better for him.

My own consumption of newsletters and marketing advice bears out this move from infotainment.

I’ve noticed I practically never read the infotainment part in the newsletters subscribe to any more. Instead, I just scroll down to see the practical takeaway, and maybe the offer.

Granted, I’m a rather “sophisticated” consumer of email newsletters (meaning, I’ve been exposed to a ton of them, particularly in the copywriting and marketing space, over the past 10+ years of working in this field). Still, that just makes me a kind of owl-eyed canary in a coalmine, and maybe points to a bigger trend that will be obvious to others soon.

But I hear you say, “A craving for fun and entertainment is a fundamental of human psychology! It can’t ever die, you silly canary!”

No doubt. Just because infotainment is dead, or at least dying at the moment, doesn’t mean it won’t come back, like a feathery fiend out of its own ashes.

From what I’ve seen, the mass mind moves in a pendulum, a swing between two poles, in this case infotaining and how-to content. Right now, I think we’re on a down-swing away from the infotainment pole.

That said, I realize I have been violating the very point I’m trying to share with you, by telling you this observation in the context of a story and my own predictions, instead of telling you how to to write how-to content yourself.

Old habits die hard.

I will fix that tomorrow. For real. I’ll tell you how to write a how-to email in an age where ChatGPT can adequately answer any how-to question.

Meanwhile, I would like to remind you of my ongoing, but not for long, promotion of Travis Sago’s Royalty Ronin membership.

It’s finally time to bring this promotion to a close. I will end it this Sunday, April 6, at 12 midnight PST.

I will certainly promote Royalty Ronin again in the future, maybe even every month. So you might wonder what exactly this Sunday deadline means.

I have been giving a bonus bundle to people who signed up for a week’s free trial of Ronin. After Sunday, this bonus bundle will go away, or rather, it will go behind the paywall. I will no longer give it to people who do the free trial, but who end up signing up and paying for Ronin.

If you’d like to kick off a week’s free trial to Ronin before the the trial bonuses disappear, you can do that at the following link:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

P.S. My bonus bundle, which I have decided to call the “Lone Wolf and Cub” bonus bundle, to go with the “ronin” theme, currently includes the following:

1. My Heart of Hearts training, about how to discover what people in your audience really want, so you can better know what to offer them + how to present it.

2. A short-term fix if your offer has low perceived value right now. Don’t discount. Sell for full price, by using the strategy I’ve described here.

3. Inspiration & Engagement. A recording of my presentation for Brian Kurtz’s $2k/year Titans XL mastermind.

I say “currently includes” because I will probably add more bonuses to this bundle, once I remove it as a bonus for the Ronin free trial and make it a bonus for actual Ronin subscription.

But if you sign up for trial now and decide to stick with Ronin (or you’ve already joined based on my recommendation), I’ll get you the extra bonuses automatically in the course area.