Building a brand through daily emails, with John Bejakovic 
Episode 5, Season 2 – John Bejakovic

 

Welcome to the fifth episode of the second season of The Micro Niche Mastery Podcast.

Our guest for today is John Bejakovic, an author and a copywriter who helps businesses in micro niches to meet their copywriting needs.

If you’re afraid to send out daily emails, John’s personal experience will prove how effective it is for marketing your business.

• How did John start copywriting? Found out how his journey unfolded at 1:27
  
• After writing for different businesses, John niched down and specialized in writing for real estate investing and eCommerce
  
• How writing simple daily emails started making thousands of dollars in a month? Find out at 3:23
  
• The secrets of highly converting daily emails are at 7:16
  
• In order to come up with email ideas, you have to know your audience. How to do it? The answer is at 14:13
  
• What is the greatest resource for marketing research? Check it at 14:58
  
• John grew his email lists with these three things – a blog, books, and a podcast
  
• If you wanna learn more about John, he wrote two books – 10 Commandments Of A-List Copywriters and How To Become A $150/hr, Top-Rated Sales Copywriter On Upwork: A Personal Success Story That Almost Anyone Can Replicate
  
• “If you put in effort into having daily emails and if you make them consistent and you make them above a certain threshold of quality, then there will be people who are happy to hear from you every day.” – John Bejakovic
  
• Wanna start learning about copywriting? Check out John’s resources here
  

Important Links:

 

bejakovic.com

dailycookie. co

Transcript:

Click Below to see the full transcript of this episode





Open Transcript

Voice Over:

Welcome to the Micro Niche Mastery Podcast, where we help you establish yourself in the perfect micro niche. So you will get noticed and grow your business faster. And now your host, he is able to manage five active podcasts because he runs them in seasons and allows himself to take breaks between them according to his business needs Ziv Raviv.

Ziv:

Hello, and welcome to the micro niche mastery podcast. Hi, I’m so excited today to talk with John Bejakovic a copywriter that helps businesses in micro niches and in all sorts of business styles to actually get some of the copy needs met. And what I love about John is how prolific he is and how generous he is on his website, which is bejakovic.com. Start with J and C it end B E J A K O V I C.com. You can go and check it out in the shownotes, us as well, but there so much to cover. Let’s just get right into it. Hello John.

John:

Hi Ziv. Thanks for having me.

Ziv:

Thanks for sharing some time with us here. John, can you tell us a little bit about just for the context and everything that your journey, how did you actually become a copywriter?

John:

Sure. So I have a background in Math and IT so nothing to do with marketing. I worked in an office. I really got sick of working in a, an office and I decided to try to make it on my own. And basically I stumbled into it. And in the beginning I was working for very low fees, but gradually I got better and better clients. I got better and better at what I was doing. And now it’s been a while. I’ve had a lot of personal success. I helped a lot of businesses make money and there’s still a long ways to go. So I feel like when I got into this field, I thought all you have to do is put a how to headline and that’s gonna be a magical way to make money. And it turns out that the field of copywriting is very, very deep and there’s a lot of really subtle psychology. It might not be obvious when you read a very good sales letter, a very good sales email. So that’s what keeps me going.

Ziv:

What type of client for you is the ideal client?

John:

I’ve worked with really a lot of different types of businesses. I, right now I’m working with an agency which has several different clients and we kind of have a revenue share agreement with them. And that’s, this is probably I, I’m very excited about this opportunity in the past. I’ve worked with supplement companies with e-commerce companies with real estate investing Gurus. And before that I’ve even worked with many more, but as I’ve kind of progressed, I’ve started to niche down and specialize into a few fields. And over the past few years, that’s mainly been real estate investing and eCommerce stuff, both kind of the front end acquisition part, and also the backend. So emails.

Ziv:

So you write both the emails and like the copy that compels people to buy stuff on Ecommerce. Like, do you have maybe a favorite client or a favorite case study that you can share with us?

John:

Yeah, sure. Well, I think something that you read your listeners might find valuable is specifically related to email marketing. So one of the clients that I worked with for over two years, they were doing e-commerce. They were selling products in the dog niche. So they were selling dog seat belts and dog harnesses and all sorts of unique products to fix problems for dogs. And we were doing very well because we had a few different funnels that were running on cold Facebook traffic, and we were getting lots of buyers. And that was all interesting. But for me, the more interesting part was the back end. So were they had a lot of clients or a lot of customers coming in, but they weren’t doing anything with those customers. And I kept kind of going back to my own clients and telling them, let me handle emails.

John:

Let me just send these people emails all the time. And for over six months I came back to them and they would say no, and maybe, maybe later right now, we’re not ready to do it. We’re know very well in front end. Eventually they kind of broke down. They said, okay, fine here. Just send emails, you handle it. And then I did. And it was, it was very, very effective. So we started sending daily emails to these people who had bought some sort of a dog product. And the emails were on the one hand, very simple. And on the other hand, very kind of endearing because all it was would be me going and finding some sort of dog related story, which I thought would be cute. I like dogs. So it wasn’t very hard. I went in, I found a story where I said, okay, this is something that makes me kind of smile, or it’s interesting where it’s kind of fascinating.

John:

I take that story, rewrite it a little bit, tighten it up, put it into an email in the middle of it. I’d stick a little picture of a cute dog that was doing something funny. And then at the end of that email, I would tie it into an offer that we had. So it was either an internal product or an affiliate product and doing this. We had a big list, so it wasn’t that big a stretch, but we started making tens of thousands of dollars a month just pulling in a pure profit just by sending out these super simple emails. And by sharing something with people that they like to read, people kept coming back. They kept responding and saying, oh my God, thank you. This was such a cute story. This was such a valuable story. And it was done in a way where it was very consistent with the brand and customers loved it. And that’s why it worked really well is a really good illustration of how well the email can work. If you just have, if you have like a simple mechanism that works.

Ziv:

Wow. And how often would you send those?

John:

Those went out every day, seven days a week. Wow.

Ziv:

So how like, can you share the details if you can of like, did you write them in one day and then scheduled them? How did you manage the, the actual

John:

We had, we had a few different brands and so I was actually writing a couple of daily emails a day and what we were doing was, yeah, these would just go out day for day. So I would, this was part of my regular work for these clients and I would go research a story and again, find a story that I thought would work well, shorten it up, tighten it up a little bit and put it into an email. And after a few weeks or months of doing this became a very quick process. So maybe 20, 30 minutes of day, a day to do all of this, to do the research and to write the email and to schedule it. And even so we were making tens of thousands of dollars just from this simple process.

Ziv:

Wow. That’s wonderful. So tell me your journey into like starting to understand the daily emails actually work. Cause a lot of people are so afraid from what if I send too many emails and people will unsubscribe or they will be very upset. And yet you’ve decided to go into this direction. Can you tell me your journey of making that decision?

John:

Sure. So I started doing this for my own stuff first. So at the same time I had clients who were hiring me to write emails. And I even had a few clients who were fine with sending daily emails. So I, I kind of approached clients who were already pre-sold on this stuff, but in my own experience because I was doing this, I said, okay, I want to practice this and I wanna get better at it. So I still started writing my own emails at the beginning. I had a alternative health blog, which had to do with essential oils and I started writing emails there. And later I started my own blog, my own domain about marketing and about persuasion. And for a long time, all I was doing was just creating content, just daily emails, because I have anything to sell. And I think through that, any kind of fear that I had about people not wanting to read daily emails went away because a, I was practicing and writing and I could see that people were reading.

John:

And I realized that what I was sharing was valuable enough that people would want to read it. And if I had all things that I could sell on top of that at the end of the daily email, it really wasn’t turning people away. And of course there were people who would occasionally unsubscribe, but that’s kind of a part of, of email marketing. And that’s why having good emails is very important because that’s how you keep people around longer. But at the same time, it’s not the only part. And you need, you do need to work on grow your list at the same time. But all I can really say is that if you put in effort into having daily emails and if you make them consistent and you make them above a certain threshold of quality, then there will be people who are happy to hear from you every day.

John:

And the only proof that I can give you is, you know, my own experience, the experience I’ve had for maybe probably around 10 different clients that have at different times had engagements with writing daily emails for, and all of them. It was a big profit center for them. And for me, it’s been absolutely transformative. So over the last you found me not too long ago, and that’s how we got in touch. And a lot of other people found me recently and I’ve had a lot of success very quickly that came or rather I had a lot of success that came very suddenly and all of that success came through daily emailing. So I didn’t do any kind of additional marketing all myself as a personal copywriting brand stuff to write a daily email, to put it onto my blog. And eventually I kind of broke through some threshold where people started finding me and they started looking at me as an expert as kind of a leader in this field. And it was amazing how easy it was from that point on to make progress. So all I can tell you is that if you do daily email, it really can work.

Ziv:

What I love about this is that the way you speak it, it qualifies fully for the question from the book. The one thing which is the question, what can I do today that will make everything else easier or not needed. And by you choosing to do this daily habit of daily emails to your list, at some point you got to a point where marketing became an easy task. People heard about you and you were getting offers to, you know, either featured in this case on a podcast or to get actual copy gigs and clients that are result really with your quality. But I have to also mention that you, your copy, your work, your emails, that later become a part of your website. They do two things for you that I want you to tell me. What do you think about it?

Ziv:

One day show your quality because the copy is, is high quality. You actually put in some work into the research and you provide value. Not just, it’s not just an, another story about the dog. You actually think about deep stuff and share them with us insights. And the second thing you do is actually you are doing search engine optimization, you are growing your footprint in, in front of the search guards. And then like you might even get people to find you through Google because they search for something that you talked about. So what do you think about that?

John:

Yeah, absolutely. So I think both of those are really good points. First of all, if you are constantly writing to people and people are reading your, your emails regularly, then I think one point is exactly what you said, that it’s not a only that you start to build a relationship where they sort of know you and they trust you and they feel that they’re connected to you. But specifically if you’re selling your own services or even a product, you can start to shift people’s opinions in a way, and you can become an expert and you can position you, you basically, you get positioning in a way that you couldn’t get almost in any other way, because in any other way, you have a very limited time to work with daily emails, you’re building, changing the way that people see their own worlds, their own problems, and the way that they see you and you’re creating positioning.

John:

So that’s one very valuable thing. And yeah, the absolute, I mean, I put my emails onto my website eventually, and I wasn’t doing any kind of other SEO work. And so I wasn’t getting a tremendous amount of organic traffic, but the organic traffic that I was getting was very relevant again, because on my own blog, I’m writing about very niche things. I’m writing about direct marketing and famous copywriters and people who wrote books. And it’s a, it’s a very small part of the overall marketing world and the people who are in it though, are very interested in it. And they recognize those names. They might be searching for those specific terms and ideas. And when they find me and they find me on Google, there is a very good chance that for some obscure keyword that I didn’t even think about, I’m gonna be ranked highly and they’re gonna find my blog.

John:

And immediately they’re gonna say, oh, this is somebody who’s, who’s in, who’s in, on this secret world. And so even before I kind of broke through and people started finding my blog and my email newsletter, or a little bit more actively, even before that I had a smaller list, but that list was made up of some of the biggest names in the space, in that direct marketing space. Just because again, a few really key people found me through really, really niche searches. And whenever I talked to them, they didn’t even know how they found my website. It wasn’t that they were searching for my name. They weren’t searching for email marketing. They were looking for something very specific and they found my site and they saw that I have hundreds of blog posts up there and they said, okay, this is somebody I should be in touch with. I should somebody I should follow. So it’s been very effective in a few different areas.

Ziv:

Let’s try and give some people to just starting out with daily emails, some tips like how do you come up with ideas? I mean, with the story about the dogs, it was a very specific template that worked really well for you, but this is not what you will do in every micro niche. So how do you come up with ideas for what to write about?

John:

I think ultimately it’s a matter of knowing your audience because you’re absolutely right. So I, I couldn’t send the same copywriter story to my own list every day and make it interesting. So for dogs, I knew that people who love dogs, they love dogs, and they’re happy to see pictures of dogs every day. On the other hand, it’s not really clear that people who love horse says might want the same story or might want the same format. So you need to know what your audience would want. And there’s no real shortcut to that except to do research, to either be a member of your audience, to talk to your audience, to go spend some time online and see what people are already consuming, what kind of content they’re digging into. And again, if you, for example, for me, a great resource for research is Reddit.

John:

Because if you go on Reddit, you can see the kind of content that people are spontaneously sharing. If you go on a dog subreddit, you’ll see the people are sharing pictures of dogs and stories of dogs. And that way, you know, that that kind of thing might be very good content for you as well. On the other hand, if you go to a subreddit where it’s moms talking about their own problems, then you’ll find stories that are relevant there. And you can talk about questions that moms have or stories that moms are sharing or frustrations that moms are experiencing. And all of those are potentially good topics for a daily email. I think the dog thing was very unique because I could basically have the same format every day. I think in most niches I’ve been in, you wanna mix it up a little bit.

John:

So you wanna have one that’s maybe about a problem. One that’s based on the story one, that’s some sort of case study one way you’re ads answering a question that somebody asks. So you wanna keep it very interesting. And yeah, there are a few key places that you can look. I think Reddit is another one or maybe the primary one that I use, but again, if you’re writing daily emails, one good thing to look at is the kind of content that people are already consuming. Take that type of content, make it a little bit more unique to your own brand, your own product and tie it into what you’re selling. And that’s really all you need to do.

Ziv:

Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing. And I wanna ask one more question, if that’s okay for you to share, like what do you use to grow your list? What tactics do you use to go your copywriting list?

John:

I think that’s a great question. And I’m a terrible person to ask that because I did a very bad job of doing that until now. All I’ve really done for a long time was that SEO stuff where I would put my own emails onto the blog. Another thing that I did, which actually worked very well was I took a lot of the emails that I was writing. I expanded them a little bit and I bundled them together into Kindle books, which was not very difficult to do. I put them onto Amazon and I get regularly people buying those, including again, some of those people who found me were very kind of key people in that copywriting space who bought my book. They said, oh, this is really great. At the end of the book, I had a little link where people could sign up to my email list.

John:

And that is fantastic because on Amazon, you can actually run ads to promote your book. So in effect, you are getting free marketing and you might even make some money off of it. And it’s all promoting your list. And then a large, a large part of it is again, just reused, reused emails that I was already writing. That I took bundled together, expanded a little bit and put into a book. And recently, I guess what I’ve started doing is I’ve gotten out to a couple podcasts like with you. I think that’s a fantastic way of doing it. I’ve been in contact with a few people. Daniel Throssel is an Australian copywriter who I think maybe we got in touch through him. He was absolutely fantastic. And he, he reached out to me and he has a much bigger list and a much, and a very engaged list of copywriters.

John:

And he suggested that we kind of cross promote each other, which was very generous of him because he has a much big your list than I do, but he suggested that. And it was fantastic for me because a lot of people who really liked my stuff came through his list. So in general, if I had to kind of sum it down to what you can do to grow your list is either find people who have an audience already where you can tap into their, which is a relevant audience. And the second element of it would be that you again, need content. So whether that’s a podcast interview or whether that’s a book that people are gonna read, or whether that’s a long piece of content on your own site, but if I’m not a huge fan, at least for my own personal brand of just getting people to opt into my list, by in some way, making them a big promise or tricking them, or getting more names onto my list. I want people who are qualified leads, who want to hear what I’m talking about. And that’s why for example, a podcast is a great resource or having a quality endorsement from somebody who has that excitement audience is probably the most valuable thing. So there’s a lot of stuff to do, but I think that these kind of slow burn ways of growing release can sometimes be more effective than maybe just trying to get big numbers very soon. Wow.

Ziv:

Thank you so much for being transparent and open and sharing. It’s been a pleasure to, to talk with you. I wanna ask you one more thing. Just tell us what books have you written. And I give us an overview so that we could go and enjoy your work.

John:

Sure. So as far as books I’ve written, I’ve got only two. One is about my experiences getting started as a copywriter. So I went from having zero experience and no background and no portfolio. And I started working up work and I was charging $15 an hour for that first two weeks. And then within a couple of years, I’d gotten up to having a hundred percent, I don’t know, favorability rating or whatever it was on Upwork. And I was charging $150 an hour and I was making good money. And I was working with clients and clients were actually paying me that rate. So I wrote a little book kind of step by step with my own journey of what I did. And I’m no longer on Upwork, but I feel like a lot of those same ideas are still relevant. And then the other book that I wrote was last year, and it was about 10 commandments of A-list copywriters.

John:

So A-list copywriters are kind of the, the copywriters who’ve had the biggest success. And I took 10 ideass that each of these copywriters shared, and I kind of again, bundled it up in some stories and some illustrations, and I put it together in a book and that’s all I’ve got on Amazon right now, but I am working on a new book, which I hope to have out in another month or two. And then I’ll talk about that later. But those two are really the only ones I’ve got now. But then if you go on my site, I’ve got more than enough content. If you wanna read about copying your marketing. So there’s a lot of stuff.

Ziv:

Sweet. And once you do ready to launch, I would be very happy to promote your new book also to our list of the listeners. John, it’s been a pleasure, absolute pleasure to meet you in person here in over zoom, and to be inspired by your journey and your ideas. I love how just implement stuff. You, you, you get it done and you do a lot of work, but it’s high quality and then it shows and it shines. So thank you so much again for being here and thank you everyone for listening for yet another episode of Micro Niche Mastery Podcast. See you next week.

Voice Over:

This show was brought to you by daily cookie.com, where you can finally feel supported daily email love. Now delegatable visit daily cookie co for a collection of free resources on how to use copywriting and daily emails to grow your micro niche business today.

 

Download the E-BOOK Recreate 141 ideas for daily emails