I was waiting in the line at the coffee shop this morning. The barista was making a latte with oat milk for another customer, and she looked up at me.
“Coffee?” she asked.
I nodded and said yes.
“Well?” she said with a bit of frustration in her voice, waving her hand to indicate I should be a bit more specific than that.
I’m telling you this fascinating story because I want to set up something email-marketing related.
I’ve been running my revived Daily Email House group for a few weeks. I invited people to post about problems they are having, and see if the group can help. Came the following problem:
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How do I grow my list? That’s my biggest problem.
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“Well?” I said when I read this question, waving my hand to indicate that the question-asker should be a bit more specific than that.
If you’re reading this right now, odds are excellent that you already know two dozen perfectly good ways to grow an email newsletter. Maybe more.
The fact is, there are hundreds and possibly thousands of ways to grow an email list. Many of them can work great. What’s more, there’s a ton of good and free information online about how to put most of them into practice.
And I guess therein lies the trouble. There are simply too many choices, including too many good choices, when it comes to growing an email list.
It paralyzes people, the same way that a choice of two dozen sourced coffees from around the world… prepared with two dozen different techniques including V60s and aeropresses and pretentious pourovers… resulting in two dozen final products like lattes and batch brews and cortados and americanos… can paralyze people, if they don’t already know exactly what they want.
To help with that (not the coffee, but the list growth), let me propose two simplifying questions:
1. “Which platform do I believe in?”
A “platform” is any technology or site or organization that’s already got the attention of some humans. Here are few examples:
– YouTube
– Substack
– Amazon
– Email newsletters
– Yellow Pages
– AM radio
– your local Chamber of Commerce
…
Pick a platform from the list above, or some other platform you believe in. You can believe in it because you believe it has staying power… because you feel some affinity for it… because you think that the kinds of people you want to attract are there… or ideally all three.
2. “Do I prefer to pay with money or time?”
You have to pay, unfortunately.
The question is whether you’d rather pay with a dozen hours a month spent creating content, or reaching out to people one-on-one, or building yourself up to be a more attractive and fascinating person…. or whether you’d rather spend a few hundred dollars a month to get the platform owners to push your message out for you.
There are pros and cons to both paying with money or time, including ones which are nonobvious.
For now, just go with your gut. You probably have a sense of which one is a less painful cost to you to pay each month — a dozen hours of your time, or a few hundred dollars from your wallet.
Once you have your two answers to the question above, the path will be clear. You will know what to do — again, most of the details are out there on the Internet, and it’s just a matter of committing to it and following through.
But what if you pick the wrong platform, or you start to pay with one currency and you realize you made a mistake, and you want to switch?
It’s not really a big problem. Anything you do will be infinitely better than doing nothing, and pivoting to a new platform, or switching from paid in time to paid in money, or vice versa, is pretty straightforward.
Did this help?
I hope so.
But if not, my Daily Email House community is still there, waiting to help people who want to use their email list to pay for a house.
Over the next few days, I will be releasing a Daily Email Habit Starter Pack, including a proven way to grow your email list, which is based on my own personal answers to the two questions above.
If you’d like to get inside Daily Email House in time to get this Starter Pack: