This morning, as all mornings, I got up, opened the balcony doors, sat down on the couch, and started looking at new subscribers to my health newsletter. That’s an ugly addiction I formed in the first few months of my new newsletter, thanks to an early success.
I was doing the same back when I had only a couple hundred subscribers, when one morning, I saw that the CEO of the Oura Ring company had signed up to my newsletter.
Like a crypto fiend, I’ve been checking my new subscribers ever since, hoping for that same fix.
But while my subscriber list keeps growing, I’ve never found another new subscriber of the same caliber. Still, I make a point every day to look up anyone with a custom domain name.
Today, I got a signup from, let’s say, bill@shackleford.com. The “bill” part is not real, but the domain is. I checked it out so you don’t have to. Here’s what I found:
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Find your @shackleford.com email address
Swap out your generic email address for a professional and clear your firstname@shackleford.com email. Grab yours now.
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The price for this professional and clear service? $35/month.
What a great business idea.
I mean, stamping out another email account if you already have website hosting is free. These guys charge $35/month for it!
But is this still an opportunity? Won’t all these family name domains be taken?
I think the opportunity might still be there. I did the lightest bit of detective work and looked up grinell.com, which according to a census site is a last name of comparable frequency to Shackleford.
The domain is for sale. I don’t know for how much. But I can imagine that, across the entire universe of mildly common last names, you could find at least a few dozen or a few hundred .com domains that you could acquire for a reasonable price.
“Great,” you might say, “and then I have a stupid grinell.com domain. How would I possibly persuade any Grinells to actually use my custom email address?”
That’s the beauty of my plan. Because that entire marketing funnel has already been done for you, some 60 years ago.
I’m talking about Gary Halbert’s Coat of Arms letter. You could even use the original product — a framed report about the history of the Grinell family name — as a kind of loss leader to get people onto your email address subscription.
(Incidentally, if any Bejakovics are reading this right now who would like to get their very own firstname@bejakovic.com email address, write to me. It’s just $35/month, and I will tell you all I know about the illustrious and warlike Bejakovic clan, going two generations back.)
Maybe your greed glands have been set a-workin’ by my Coat of Arms plan.
But maybe you’re wondering what I’m on about.
So let me say that the bigger point of my email today is that key appeals, ones that worked 60 or 160 years ago, are most likely still around.
The specific products, the ways to satisfy those appeals might change.
But people’s desire for locking down and celebrating their family heritage… for free money from the government… for getting rich in real estate… for manifesting their thoughts into reality… all those worked a century ago, and they will still work today.
Don’t like any of those appeals?
Then let me tell you about another appeal that worked a century ago, which still works today.
That’s the appeal of new, money-making skills. For a specific way to get yourself a particularly lucrative set of such skills, more quickly than you might ever believe, I’ll refer you to the page below. It’s also courtesy of Gary Halbert: