If sales calls are not your thing…

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Yesterday, I was talking to James “Get Paid Write” Carran.

​​James has 100k+ followers on Twitter. He also has a daily email newsletter I’m subscribed to.

James used to do ghostwriting on Twitter — he charged clients a few thousand dollars per month to write tweets. He’s since stopped client work and is writing for himself.

I asked if he would want to go back and do more ghostwriting for clients. To which James replied:

“The thing I don’t like about client work is the getting clients part, which is sales calls. Calls in general, not my thing.”

I told James something, which I will tell you also, because it’s absolutely true and maybe it will be the push you need:

If sales calls are really your block, you don’t have a block. You can do what you want.

There’s no rule out there that you have to get on a sales call and convince clients to work with you.

If you have expertise and an audience, it’s the other way around. You can tell people, “If you want to work with me, this is how I work.”

I don’t do client work any more. But this year I’ve closed $2k and $3k sales by email alone. That’s about the highest-ticket stuff I sell right now. But I bet I could go higher. I know there are people who have closed $5k and $10k and $15k stuff via email, no sales calls required.

Of course, if you decide that you don’t want to do sales calls, you’ll have to adjust other parts of your business to make up for that.

Specifically, you’ll need an audience, perceived authority, and perceived familiarity — your prospects feel they know you even though you’ve never met.

Getting any of these doesn’t happen overnight. But it doesn’t have to take forever either. Depending on where you are, a few weeks or a few months can be enough.

If you want to get started today, then create an optin form, and write an email like this one. ​​Or, if you want my help and guidance along the way, hit reply. I promise there won’t be any sales call.

The oddest info product creators on my list

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Last night, I sent an email asking my readers if they sell their own info products. That email got a LOT of response.

Of course, most people on my list sell familiar info products — ebooks and courses on marketing, writing, bizopp.

But some people wrote in and managed to surprise me. A few standouts:

#1: “My wife and I are developing theatre training courses, mainly to sell to school teachers who are not drama teachers by trade, but have been ‘elected’ to teach the courses and put on the productions.”

#2: “Am currently writing some digital reports requested by our specialist cancer research audience although I have no real idea how to do this!”

#3: “I sell Numerology info products, such as relationship forecasts, life forecasts, name adviser, lucky numbers and in depth reports. I sell to business owners, individuals and women looking for alternative angle to motivate and advise on current situation.”

This morning, I sat down to reply to these folks and to everyone else who had written me. But before I did so, I asked myself:

“What do I want out of this interaction? Why did I even ask this question?”

The following reasons poured out of me. Maybe they will be of some interest or value to you:

1. Find out who’s doing well

2. Connect with more people

3. Find out what problems people are having

4. Find out what problems their customers are having

5. Find out if they have [CENSORED but keep reading, trust me]

6. Find out what’s currently working for them, what’s not working

7. Maintain or rather enhance my reputation

8. See if any opportunities [CENSORED again, but still keep reading, I promise I won’t keep doing this much more]

9. Get possible ideas for new offers to create

10. See if there are any good offers that [CENSORED, last censored thing, keep reading to find out how to uncensor]

11. See if there are people I could connect with each other, either as some kind of broker or just to help out

I’m not sure whether the list above can be useful to you in any way.

Whatever the case may be, my offer from yesterday still stands.

So if you sell your own info products:

1. Hit reply

2. Tell me what info product or products you sell and who you sell it to

When I get your message, I will reply and tell you a genuine secret way to sell more of what you’ve created.

I’ll also tell you about a special, free training — free as in not even any optin required — that lays out real gold about how to actually run this secret selling strategy in practice.

If you watch this free training, the CENSORED bits above will become clear as day.

And who knows. If you just reply to this email, maybe we can connect or exchange some ideas along the way.

Do you sell info products?

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If you sell your own info products — courses, ebooks, big boxes of DVDs and workbooks to go with them — then I’d like to share a genuine secret to help you sell more of what you’ve created.

This secret has nothing to do with writing more emails, or creating promotions, or running ads to get more leads, or affiliate marketing.

My guess is this is a method of selling info products that you’ve never heard of or thought about. At least that’s how it was for me until about a week ago.

​​This method requires almost no work on your part, and yet it could bring in hundreds or even thousands of new sales of your info products each month.

So here’s the deal:

1. Hit reply

2. Tell me what info product or products you sell and who you sell it to

When I get your message, I will reply and tell you this secret. I’ll also tell you about a special, free training — free as in not even any optin required — that lays out real gold about how to actually run this secret selling strategy in practice.

Ugly personal positioning

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“It’s pretty ugly,” my dad said.

I nodded and shrugged. “Yep… I agree.”

My dad and his wife and their two friends were visiting me in Barcelona over the past few days. Today was their last day.

Before leaving, they decided to go see the Sagrada Familia, Barcelona’s best-known landmark, the many-spired church designed by the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi.

My dad, a devoted atheist, is also a connoisseur of churches. He loves to travel the world and visit all kinds of churches with their beautiful architecture and their ancient frescoes and their sculptures of bleeding martyrs.

Earlier on this trip, my dad whimpered a little when we walked by the 14th-century Gothic cathedral in the old town of Barcelona, and the rest of the group decided that it wasn’t the right time to go in.

And yet, when faced with the Sagrada Familia, my dad was not impressed.

I agree. The Sagrada is pretty ugly to me too. It’s kitschy and garish, at least from up close.

And yet, every year, some 20M tourists come and see the creation. They look up, they marvel, and they take literally hundreds of millions of selfies with the church in the background.

I’m not sure what my point is. Maybe it’s just to share the following quote by filmmaker Pedro Almodovar.

Almodovar’s movies have been accused of being kitschy and garish. And yet Almodovar has built an incredible career and has become Spain’s most successful director. About that, Almodovar once said:

“When a film has only one or two defects, it is considered an imperfect film. But when there is a profusion of technical flaws, it is called style.”

Of course, you don’t care about style, at least not when reading this newsletter.

This newsletter is about making sales.

But Almodovar’s quote applies just as well to personal positioning, which makes selling so much easier.

So apply the lesson and confidently pile on the defects. The stupid opinions. The violations of industry norms. The flat-out typos, contradictions, and ugly design.

What you get is something that in time sells itself, because it stands out in people’s minds. And that can lead to millions in your future — and not counted in visitors, but in sales.

The world’s simplest, most powerful conversion tool

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This past Saturday, I got hypnotized by a master hypnotist.

One minute, I was just watching a free video inside the hypnotist’s free Skool group.

The next minute, I found myself rooting through the hypnotist’s website and skimming through his sales pages.

A few minutes after that, I had gotten out my credit card and paid for a $2,900 bundle of digital products.

The master hypnotist in question is Travis Sago. I’ve written about him often in these emails.

Travis would probably claim he’s not a hypnotist. Instead, he would claim to be just a marketing guy.

He’s even modest about his skills there. But if that’s true, then I don’t know how he got me to give him $2,900, without asking. I was even happy and excited about it.

Anyways, that’s all a preamble to the fact that, earlier today, I was watching one of Travis’s videos inside that $2,900 bundle I bought.

Travis promised to reveal the world’s simplest, most powerful conversion tool.

​​He put out up his index finger and held it level. And he said:

“It all goes back to this simple, diabolically redneck, Arkansas, best conversion-tool-ever index finger.”

Travis was saying you have to be able to point to your prospect’s problem. Or rather, to your prospect’s present pain.

In other words, Travis was just repeating the standard advice to be specific, concrete, visual in your copy. Except none of those words are actually specific, concrete, or visual. An index finger is.

Another example:

Your cart software. Imagine it right now. How many sales came in yesterday?

A couple?

​​Just one?

​​Zero?

You might have great offers. You might have a great relationship with your list. You might even have great copy. Bit if your cart software is showing just a couple sales yesterday, or one, or zero, there’s some “act now” magic that’s missing.

And on that note:

Tonight at 12 midnight PST is the last moment to raise your hand, or at the very least an index finger, to indicate your interest in my Secret Demand live training this Friday.

I will close off signups for that training tomorrow. But before I send anyone to the sales page, I want to talk to them, or rather exchange one email to see if could be a fit or not.

​​Since that emailing is going to take a bit of time, the last time to actually express interest is tonight. ​​After tonight at 12 midnight PST, the doors to the front lobby of the Bejakovic theater will close. If you want to see the show, you’ll have to be inside before then.

So ask yourself:

Do you have a business?

Do you have an email list?

Does the promise of unlocking secret demand in your list sound appealing?

If so, then reply to this email.

I’ll have a couple questions for you. And if it sounds like a fit, I’ll send you the full details about this training. You can then decide if you’d like to join me on Friday.

The heart and soul of great copywriting

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Last night, I announced the new “Secret Demand” training I’ll hold on Friday.

This live training will be all about unlocking secret demand in your list. Once you can do that, you can pull an extra $5k, or $15k, or $50k from your list, in just 3-5 days, whenever you so decide.

A good number of people raised their hand to express interest in Secret Demand. I sent them the full details. And this morning, I woke up to the first notifications from ThriveCart that sales had come in.

That’s nice.

Still…

Based on the number of people who had raised their hand, I expected more sales to come in by now.

Maybe that’s greed. Maybe it’s impatience. Maybe it’s simply that I know how valuable what I will teach can be to the right person.

What to do in a situation like that? When some sales are coming in… but you suspect you can do better?

I’ll just share the following quote with you, from marketing legend Gary Halbert, who once wrote:

===

Hark unto me, Buckwheat: Writing “copy” is less than 1/10 as important as learning to think about new offers and getting them down on paper as I just did. I can’t say it often enough or strongly enough…

It Is The Deal… The Offer… The Proposition
You Are Making That Is The Heart And Soul
Of Great Copywriting!

===

This is why the largest of the Secret Demand training will be devoted to the offer. Writing copy is fairly straightforward once you have the right offer in place.

Anyways, signups for the Secret Demand training are now open. If you’re interested, you’ll have to raise your hand by tomorrow, Wednesday night at 12 midnight PST.

That’s because I’m not sending people straight to a sales page. I first want to find out if you’re in a situation where this training can possibly help you. And that will take a couple of emails back and forth.

So ask yourself:

Do you have a business?

Do you have an email list?

Does the promise of unlocking secret demand in your list sound appealing?

If so, then reply to this email.

I’ll have a couple questions for you. And if it sounds like a fit, I’ll send you the full details about this training. You can then decide if you’d like to join me on Friday.

Announcing: Secret demand in your list

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As I’ve been teasing for the past week:

This Friday, I will hold a live presentation about how to unlock secret demand in your email list.

Once you can do this, then you can pull an extra $5k, $15k, $50k from your list — depending on who exactly you’ve got on there. And you can do it again and again, whenever you like.

I’m limiting this training to business owners. If you’re curious why, I might talk about that in the future. For now, just ask yourself:

Do you have a business?

Do you have an email list?

Does the promise of unlocking secret demand in your list sound appealing?

If so, then reply to this email. I’ll send you the full details about this training. And you can then decide if you’d like to join me on Friday.

My supplement stack

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I’m not sure why you’d want to know. But after 15+ years of obsessing over my health, and researching and experimenting with dozens of different, often exotic and possibly toxic supplements, here is my current daily supplement stack:

* Magnesium, zinc, and vitamin D (because they are important and I probably don’t get enough)

* A multivitamin and some fish oil (because why not)

* A teaspoon of glycine and a capsule of NAC (because there’s good science showing this combo actually reverses many hallmarks of aging, at least if you’re getting old)

* A teaspoon of creatine (because it helps increase energy production in both the body and the brain, and God knows I need that)

I’m sharing my supplement stack for two reasons.

Reason one is that I’ve found I like to read stuff like this in other people’s marketing-related newsletters. It makes no sense, and yet it’s there. Maybe you’re the same.

Reason two is that opening this email with my supplement stack allows me to seamlessly, like a silky fox, transition into talking about my supplement theory of email marketing.

Yesterday, I sent out an email that promoted my Copy Riddles program. I made one sale of Copy Riddles as a result, at $997. I’m actually very happy with that.

Because I gotta admit:

That’s hardly the norm. Most times that I send out a regular, daily, broadcast email to promote a familiar offer like Copy Riddles, I don’t make any sales.

As a result, I’ve come to think of daily emails that promote existing offers — buy it today, buy it tomorrow, buy it whenever — like supplements.

Yes, such daily emails will make sales. But the fact that people can buy the offer today, or tomorrow, or the month after, means such sales are unpredictable and rare.

That’s why I say such emails are supplements. Nice to have, but you can’t live off ’em. Instead, you gotta live off proper nutrition.

In email marketing terms, proper nutrition means a regular diet of email-based promotions – time-limited events that get people to ACT NOW.

This coming Friday, I will hold a live training about such promotions for a small group of business owners who have a list.

If that’s you, then my promise is that on this training, I’ll show you how how to pull extra money from your list, even if you don’t create a new offer, and even if you’re not pumping in hundreds or thousands new names to your list every week.

Of course, if you do have an entirely new offer, or you do get a big influx of new leads, these promotional events work even better.

And for the record, these kinds of email promos are something I have quite a bit of experience with. Via my own list and offers… via clients clients I’ve worked with… and most recently, via the coaching I’m doing inside Shiv Shetti’s mastermind, where I strategize on a new such promotion every week.

Maybe you’d like to benefit from my experience, and shortcut your path to a healthy and nutritious email list. If so, then read my email tomorrow, because I’ll have more info on Friday’s training.

My ex doesn’t know what she wants, but she sure knows what she doesn’t want

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I have this friend. Actually an ex-girlfriend. We’ve been friends for 15 years after breaking up.

I talked to her yesterday on the phone. As usual, she’s having problems at work.

“I feel so stuck,” she said. “I think I should go get an MBA in entrepreneurship.”

Huh?

Bear with me for a brief moment while I run through my ex’s troubled work history. I promise to give you a valuable takeaway as a result of it.

My ex graduated some 15 years ago with a master’s degree in economics. Such a degree prepares you to do absolutely nothing in life. I know, because I too graduated with the same degree.

In spite of the worthless economics degree, my ex managed to get a job at General Electric, in what was effectively another graduate program.

After a few years of that and a few years off to raise a kid (not mine), my ex decided she wanted to change careers.

So she went back to school to study UX design. After graduating with her second master’s degree, she started working as a UX researcher.

She’s been doing that for the past several years, in a series of maybe a dozen jobs.

In each job, she very quickly discovers this is not what she had imagined. And within the first week or two, she starts planning and scheming to do something new, different. Now it’s an MBA in entrepreneurship. Anything, as long as it’s not what she’s doing now.

That’s the valuable takeaway I promised you. It’s a powerful sales principle.

It applies to most all of us. Definitely to my friend… definitely to me… probably to you and most probably to your customers.

That sales principle is that people can see with much more clarity and intensity what they have and do not want, rather than what they do not have but do want.

One consequence of this:

Rather than spending a huge amount of time coming up with clever positioning and sales arguments for your offer, it’s often much better to simply position what you have as NOT what your prospect is doing now.

Example:

My Copy Riddles program. It’s not a copywriting course in any traditional sense. It’s not good information. It’s something else.

For more info on this training program that’s unlike anything you’ve seen before:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Test the offer or just launch the damn thing?

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During yesterday’s Write and Profit call, which I host every Thursday night, I got a question from one of the members, Tom Grundy.

During the day, Tom works as a high-powered banker in London.

But ​once night falls and the moon comes out, Tom howls as a sign that his transformation is beginning. He sits down at his computer. And he starts to write one of his very good daily emails, to promote his personal brand as a self-development and career coach.

Right now, Tom is considering taking a mindset workshop he is currently giving live to his colleagues at Lloyds Bank, and turning that into something he could offer to his list as well.

He’s considering it… but he’s not decided yet. As he asked me:

“How should I think about testing the idea first by asking my list if they’re interested in a training like this in the first place. When would you test first rather than just launch the offer?”

It’s a good question. My thoughts are these:

It makes sense to simply launch an offer if 1) it won’t cost you anything to do so or 2) you want to create the offer for its own sake.

For example, my upcoming promo training — still don’t have a better name than that — fits both of these criteria.

​​This training will be delivered live, and won’t cost me anything to launch. If nobody signs up, I don’t have to spend any time, money, or effort preparing it or delivering it.

But the fact is, I will prepare it and deliver it even if I’m only doing so for myself.

That’s because this training has value to me long term — as a template for my own work, as a potential future product to sell, as a way of getting consulting or even DFY clients, if I can find that needle in a haystack.

On the other hand, it makes sense to test out an offer idea if 1) it will cost you to launch it and 2) you don’t want to just create it for its own sake. This is also the case if you have multiple good options for a new offer to create.

For example, I’m considering creating a little ebook or lead magnet to talk about the FREE Formula I describe in part 3 of my Age of Insight training.

The content is largely already there. Still, it would take me some more time to pull it all together, polish it up, and provide extra examples. Also, this FREE Formula idea is hardly the only thing I could create to work as a lead magnet.

So over the next couple of days, I’ll run some ads to see if the thing has any legs, or if it doesn’t, like a viper waiting in the grass to spring on me.

So there you go:

I’ll have more info on the promo training for sure, and maybe a better name, soon.

I might also have more info on FREE Formula soon. Or I might not.

​​And now you know why, and maybe that can help you if you too are considering launching a new offer.

Meanwhile, I can only point you to the one lead magnet I currently have.

This lead magnet has worked very well for me for years now. It’s brought and continues to bring in a small but steady and valuable stream of new leads, many of whom have become great customers.

​​If you’d like to get it yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments