Earlier this year, in March to be specific, I wrote an email about turning skim milk into butter. That email was based on a question from a reader, who wrote:
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I have a question about your Simple Money Email course.
I’ve been writing an email to my list six days a week (or occasionally five) for the past month and a half or so, since about the beginning of February. At first, sales came in, but since about the beginning of March, they’ve declined by a lot, by over 50%. Will your course help me to figure out what’s going wrong so that I can set things to rights?
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The answer in short is “probably no.”
If you’ve never emailed your list regularly, then what you have yourself is a pail of rich whole milk, with the cream at the top. You simply go in there, use a ladle to skim the cream off the top, and with a bit of additional processing, you get yourself some delicious Kerrygold.
But once you’ve pretty much skimmed all the cream off top, the butter creation becomes harder.
It’s still possible to occasionally turn skim milk into butter — I had one guy on my list for 775 days, reading 775 emails, before he decided to buy something from me.
But it’s never as easy as right at the start.
And assuming you’ve been doing a decent job of cream collection, no kind of magical spoon, skimmer, or ladle will really make that much of a difference after a while.
So what do you do?
You got a couple options.
One, you can add new whole milk to your pail — ie. add new people to your list.
Two, you make other use of the skim milk that you have. There’s no law saying you can only sell your list just one thing, in just one way. Or stretching the analogy, there’s no law saying you can only ever make butter from your pail of milk, as opposed to also making cheddar, ice cream, and quark.
Back in March, when I first wrote about this, I promised I would one day talk more about cheddar creation, specifically, about churning up new offers that don’t involve creating whole new products.
Well, that day has come.
As I wrote yesterday, I’ve set aside time over the next month to help two business owners to quickly churn up new offers using their catalogue of existing products. The ultimate goal here is to:
* Create something new and exciting for your audience, without creating entirely new products
* Develop a new asset for yourself — a new offer you can reissue in the future with little tweaks or maybe without any tweaks
* Bring in new buyers who might then buy other stuff from you, or get deeper into your world
* Do a bit of work and make back a good deal of money as a result
If you want a specific example:
Last week, I sent three emails over two days in what I called my Shangri-La MVE event. Those three emails ended up selling 22 copies of a $297 course that I had already promoted hundreds of times over the past couple years. $6.5k or so when all the money comes in, and all it took in terms of work was a couple of hours of repackaging content I already had.
I’ve run other such promo events, ranging anywhere from 1-14 days. Some were complete duds, and brought in less money than this Shangri-La event. But others brought in more, well into the 5-figures.
Your specific numbers?
It will depend on how big your list is, the relationship you have with the people on there, and of course your offers.
But with my second pair of eagle eyes scanning over all your assets… and my experience running not only my own “reissue events” but also coaching a couple dozen copywriters who worked on these kinds of promos for clients… you will be more likely to come out of this with a result you can be happy with.
Like I said, I’m talking to a few business owners about this already.
If you’re interested in this offer in principle, hit reply and let me know a bit about your list (size, how often you write, etc.) and your back catalogue of previous hits.
I will be promoting this offer until this Thursday. I want to talk to everyone who’s interested and find the two people I think I am best qualified to help… and then we’ll kick things off.