I’ll tell ya, or actually, I’ll defer to a person with more authority on the matter:
Russell Nohelty.
As I wrote once last week, Russell is a bestselling author of fantasy books and comics. He also writes about the business of writing, and he runs Writer MBA, a membership program to help writers make more money.
Over the past 6 months, Russell spent $30k on paid ads to beef up his email list, which now stands at over 70,000 subscribers.
Russell and I did a call last Monday about his experiences spending all that money on ads.
On the call, Russell said something interesting — that advertising democratizes virality. Says Russell, advertising allows people who were not “blessed by the magic audience fairy” to build an audience for their work.
Sounds great, right?
Except… do you really wanna go viral? Here’s another thing that Russell said:
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I have never heard somebody say, “I went viral and got all the best people subscribing to me!”
It’s always some version of “Wow, lots of bigots in the comments who hate everything about me.”
If you are attracting the wrong crowd organically, you could end up in a way worse place than running ads. I know because I’ve been there.
Both are bad and both are good. The difference is the quality of the traffic source, how you nurture the leads you generate, and whether you are paying in time or money.
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This isn’t about trumpeting paid traffic over organic traffic, or vice versa. The point is simply this:
Where you get your subscribers matters… how you get them matters… what you promise them matters… how you treat them when they’re on your list matters.
This is not any kind of inspirational woo-woo, but very practical dollars-and-cents calculus, borne out by sales, spam complaints, and the number of interesting or annoying reader replies.
And this is one of the reasons why I liked Travis Speegle’s paid list-building approach, the one he teaches in his MyPEEPS course, which I’ve been promoting all week long.
Travis’s system is not about paying to inflate your subscriber count with people who hate you or never want to hear from you. It’s also not about getting the cheapest traffic simply because it’s cheap.
Instead, Travis’s approach is about building a quality list, with paid ads, sustainably, with the goal of having a valuable relationship with the people on that list for the long term. That in fact is why the course is called MyPEEPS, and not “8-Figure A-List Media-Buying Secrets.”
The deadline to get MyPEEPS is tonight at 12 midnight PST, less than 12 hours from now.
The reason to get MyPEEPS before then is my Shotgun Messenger bonus — my personal support and insight as you work through MyPEEPS and implement it to grow your own list.
As an extra bonus, I’m also including the call on which I interviewed Russell Nohelty about his experiences with paid traffic to grow his personal brand…, as well as a series of articles that Russell wrote on the topic, which are normally reserved for his paid subscribers.
If you’d like the full details on MyPEEPS and my bonus offer, or if you want in before the deadline strikes:
https://bejakovic.com/shotgun