Direct Marketing

Sunday morning startler

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This morning I went out for my usual walk, and as I stepped out the elevator at the bottom of my building, I felt something odd inside my shoe, right at the toe.

Probably just my sock crumpled up? Or maybe a pebble?

I sat down on the stairs to investigate.

I took off my shoe and shook it. Nothing fell out.

I looked inside. Nothing.

I reached to straighten out my sock and— GAH!! — I instinctively threw something away.

In the dim light of the building lobby, I took a closer look at what I had just touched and tossed.

It turned out to be a live gecko that had been stuck to my sock. It must have crawled into my shoe during the night and gone to sleep.

It’s no big mystery how the gecko got inside my shoe.

The Mediterranean house gecko is endemic to the Barcelona area.

I’ve often seen the little guys inching their way up the outside walls of my building.

For the record, I live on the 9th floor.

It must take a whole evening for a gecko to slowly make his way up the wall to where I live. But I guess it doesn’t matter to them. They like high places… time is passing anyhow… and so they might as well climb.

Now that I’ve opened up this fascinating topic, let me go full-gecko:

You might know the Geico Gecko slogan, “15 minutes could save you 15% on your car insurance.”

Well, I got an update for you:

“$10-$15 could get you 10-15 new subscribers on your email list.”

For the past few days, I’ve been promoting a new offer with that promise. The background:

I will be building up a new list I’ve launched via paid ads, starting at $10-$15 a day, and aiming to get 10-15 subscribers for that money.

If you like, you can follow the same process I will be following (a course by an expert list builder, which costs $495), plus you can get my copywriting feedback and marketing insight as a free bonus.

10-15 new subscribers a day is not exactly a rocket launch.

But like my shoe gecko shows, a bit of progress, repeated consistently, gets you up to high places, and sooner than you might think.

Like I wrote yesterday, I will be promoting this offer for another week.

But if you decide you want to jump in by the end of today, at 12 midnight PST, I will do two things:

1. I will put you into the Skool community as soon as I open it up on Monday

2. I’ll give you a special mystery bonus to say thanks. This special mystery bonus is about a strategy that’s not covered in the list-building blueprint I will be following… but a strategy that I’ve used in the past to offset the cost of running ads, and in one case even eliminate it

Of course, don’t decide now if want to join me or not. Simply decide if this sounds interesting to you, and and if it does, hit reply and say so. I can get you the full details, and you can decide then, and maybe even in time for today’s mini-deadline.

A favor?

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Would you do me a favor?

As you might know, for the past few days I’ve been promoting a new “work alongside me offer.”

In short, I’ve launched a new list and I’m starting to grow it by paying for ads. I’m inviting people who want to follow the same process I’m following to work alongside me and to grow their own list, while getting copywriting feedback and marketing input from me.

A part of how I will deliver this feedback and input will be via a Skool community.

Which brings me to the favor:

I will be promoting this “work alongside me” offer for another week.

But I want to open up the Skool community early, and start interacting with people and giving them feedback. The reason for this is both to take the load off that’s sure to come with a bunch of people signing up at the final deadline… and also to get a sense of where people are at, and inform the marketing I will do during this last week.

So if you’ve been interested in this offer but you have been holding off, would you let me know now?

I can then share the full details of how this “work alongside me” offer will work. And if you decide to join early, by tomorrow, Sunday, at 12 midnight PST, instead of waiting for final deadline in one week’s time, then I will do two things:

1. I will put you into the Skool community as soon as I open it up on Monday

2. I’ll give you a special mystery bonus to say thanks. This special mystery bonus is about a strategy that’s not covered in the list-building blueprint I will be following… but a strategy that I’ve used in the past to offset the cost of running ads, and in one case even eliminate it

So if you’re interested in this offer, would you let me know? I’ll be checking my inbox throughout the weekend, but maybe it’s best to do it now, while it’s fresh on your mind. Thanks in advance.

The reputation benefit of a bigger list

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My own email list — this one, about marketing and copywriting and influence — is tiny. But some of the people on my list have much bigger lists than I do.

One such person is Russell Nohelty. 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.

Russell’s audience on Substack is over 70,000 people.

Last week, when I started writing about my plan to grow a new list via paid traffic, Russell reached out. He offered to share his experiences spending $30k since February to grow his audience.

Russell and I got on a call this past Monday. It was interesting and valuable throughout, but one thing in particular stuck with me, something Russell said about the reputation benefits of various list sizes. In Russell’s words:

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There were a couple of break points where everything felt different.

10,000 emails felt different than 8,000.

30,000 emails felt way different than 20,000 emails.

From my experience, talking to other people, 50,000, 80,000 — there’s different break points where people go, “Oh you’ve got 45,000 people on your list! Yes, I want to get in front of them!”

Promotions become easier. When you’re a Dream 100 guy like I am, you can reach out to almost anyone and be like, “Hey, do you wanna be in front of my 35,000, 45,000, whatever the number is, people.”

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I can imagine that somebody somewhere has just crossed his arms and frowned. “Well, I’d much rather have a small but mighty list than a stupid big list that doesn’t read or buy from me.”

Sure. It’s my policy as well with my own list. That said, you can have both a large and a mighty list — Russell does.

But here’s the sneaky thing:

All of us constantly use mental shortcuts to evaluate the people around us and the choices we have.

On the one hand, a large list is an immensely valuable asset for its own sake.

On the other hand, a large list is also an immensely valuable asset because of its reputation benefit. Because people treat you differently if you get one. Because opportunities open up which would be closed otherwise.

All that’s to say, if you got a business, and a list, but it’s not quite going how you’d like… then the solution might just be to get a bigger list. Maybe if you can make it to the next break point, like Russell says above, then your problems now might just go poof.

Which brings me back to my plan to grow a new list via paid traffic.

If you like, you can join me. You can build up your own list using the same process I will be following, and get my copywriting feedback and marketing input while we work alongside each other.

I can tell you right now that the investment for this offer is $497 to get started, plus $10-$15 a day for ads. If that doesn’t deter you, hit reply and tell me so, and I can give you more information.

$10-$15/day to stop being a newbie

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For the past couple days, I’ve been fielding responses about my new “work alongside me” offer.

In short, I’ve launched a new list and I’m starting to grow it by paying for ads. I’m inviting people who want to follow the same process I’m following to work alongside me and to grow their own list.

Inevitably, I’ve gotten a few timid hand-raises from folks who consider themselves beginners, like the following message:

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I don’t actually have a list yet. But I am scouting for products at the moment, which I would like to promote as an affiliate.

Would this offer be relevant for me as a newbie?

I am starting this side venture in the hopes of replacing my 9 to 5.

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And the answer is…

Yes yes, of course! This offer’s PERFECT for newbies!! Just give me your money now, and we can talk about it later.

A little more seriously:

I followed up with the dude above. I wanted to know what exactly “newbie” meant to him. Turns out, he has been studying marketing and copywriting for a year+, buying courses, preparing to jump in for real.

The fact is, I do think that this “work alongside me” offer would be relevant to him.

But whatever I write now will seem self-serving, just as self-serving as my “yes yes, just pay me” rant above.

So I won’t write anything now.

Instead, let me share something I wrote almost six years ago, specifically on Dec 29 2018, in an email with the subject line, “The salutary effect of paying for traffic.” That email was about my campaign at the time to grow my alternative health list via Facebook ads, and the positive effect it had on me:

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Well, paying for traffic doesn’t have the same salutary effect [as making cold calls].

But it does make me want to write emails every day to these leads.

What’s more, it makes me want to write emails that get read and get people stirred up.

In other words, I’m no longer just writing for the sake of being able to say I’ve done it. Instead, I’m writing to make sales.

That’s both because I’m spending money on traffic now (rather than counting on an indefinite stream of leads from Google)…

And it’s also because it becomes a game — can I make back the money that I will spend on ads, so I can do this all over again on a bigger scale?

The weird thing is, this kind of sales-first writing is something I’ve been able to do for a long time — as long as I was writing for clients. But it took paying for traffic to get me to do it in my own project as well.

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I’d like to suggest that paying for traffic could have the same salutary and head-clearing effect on you, even if you are a newbie.

Does that mean this “work alongside me” offer will give you a side venture that can replace your 9-5?

Nope. It will only give you one thing, and that’s a paid traffic system to build you an audience.

That done, you will still need to find or create offers to promote. And you will still need emails to send to people, whether you write them yourself or get someone else to do it.

At the same time, will you be 1,000,000x more likely to do those things and actually succeed if you start paying to build an audience… than if you just keep paying for courses and preparing to jump in for another year?

I absolutely believe you will, for reasons that I wrote about in that email from 2018:

The fact you will be paying money (even $10-$15 a day is very motivating)…

The fact you will be able to see quickly if it’s working or not…

The fact that it will feel like a game you want to win.

Of course, ultimately, it’s your call and your decision.

But if you want to experience the salutary effect of paying for traffic, and get some real experience, which you can then flip over and over on a bigger scale, then maybe you’d like to get my help along the way?

That’s what this “work alongside me” offer is about. In case you’re interested, hit reply, and I can give you more information.

The Shoshal Media Redemption

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In my 13+ years of trying to make money online, I have had precisely ZERO success in creating an audience on social media. But I do know somebody who’s had a lot of success with it.

It’s my friend Kieran Drew. Since 2021, Kieran has built up an enviable one-man business on the back of a 250,000-person audience across Twitter and LinkedIn.

A couple days ago, Kieran launched a new product, and in promoting it, he wrote:

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Because I don’t know about you, but I became an entrepreneur for freedom.

I want to spend my days doing what I love because I choose to.

But social media?

It’s a prison in disguise

You have to post every damn day and slave away in the comments. And if you stop, you fade into obscurity within weeks.

You’ve basically made an algorithm your boss.

And the crazy part?

You don’t even own your audience. You rent it. And they can rip away the keys whenever they’d like.

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Maybe, like Kieran, you’ve had success on social media.

In that case, maybe you can empathize with what he says. Maybe you’ve had your fill of constant posting and replying… and fighting off dwindling reach… and crack-like addiction to notifications.

Or…

Maybe you haven’t yet had success on social media. Maybe you’re hoping to build an audience there, and you are looking up to people like Kieran.

In that case, maybe Kieran’s message above gives you a taste of what’s waiting for you in case you get what you think you want.

But let me pay off the Shoshal Media Redemption subject line.

If social media is a kind of Shawshank Prison for Kieran, with its loss of autonomy and control… then what’s the equivalent of the little fishing village on the Pacific coast of Mexico, where you can live life on your own terms?

Like Kieran says in his new promo, it’s having your own engaged email list.

Sounds great, except… how do you build up an email list if you don’t use social?

I’d like to propose a way that doesn’t involve years of hammering through the thick wall of indifference on LinkedIn… or crawling through a mile-long sewage pipe on Twitter.

That way is to pay, specifically for ads, more specifically for engaged subscribers to grow your email list.

Sure, ads cost money. But wouldn’t you pay money to stay out — or get out — of prison?

If you’re at least open to the idea, I’d like to remind you that I have started a new list. And in the next few days, I’ll start building it up via ads.

If you like, you can join me. You can build up your own list using the same process I will be following, and get my copywriting feedback and marketing input while we work alongside each other.

I can tell you right now that the investment for this offer is $497. If that doesn’t totally deter you, hit reply and tell me so. I can get you the full details of my daring escape plan, and you can decide if you want to join me, or if Shawshank Prison doesn’t sound so bad after all.

Announcing: Attentive human vending machine

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In Hangzhou, China, there’s a vending machine that sells live crabs. The machine has a 3x-your-crabs guarantee — if it ever spits out a dead crab, you will be compensated with three live ones.

Significantly higher up the prestige totem pole, there is the gold bullion vending machine in Dubai. It holds up to 520kg of gold, and prices are updated every 10 minutes via an Internet feed.

And then, higher still, all the way at the top, with diamond-level prestige, there is the attentive human vending machine.

That’s what I want to talk to you about today.

The attentive human vending machine takes in $10-$15 in coins or credit, and dispenses 10-15 attentive humans.

More specifically, it dispenses 10-15 readers for your email list.

You can then email these new readers, so they read whan you wrote… recommend you to other attentive humans… and buy from you when you choose to sell them something.

And if you like, you can go back to the attentive human vending machine whenever you like, even every day, and put in more coins and get more attentive humans out.

As you can probably guess, the attentive human vending machine is paid traffic. Ads. A system that takes in money, and gives you readers in return.

I’ve started a new list and I will start building it up via ads.

I will be following the how-to blueprint of a master list builder and media buyer I’ve had the good fortune to come across.

If you like, you can join me. You can build up your own list using the same process I will be following, and get my copywriting feedback and marketing input while you put your attentive human vending machine together.

I can tell you right now that the investment for this offer is $497.

That happens to be the price of the blueprint I mentioned above, the course that lays out the how-to of the master list builder.

Depending on your perspective, that means you can either invest $497 to tap into my ~10 years of professional copywriting experience, and get my help with your ad copy and landing pages, and get the how-to blueprint for free…

Or you can pay $497 for the blueprint, and get to work alongside me, and see how I do it, and get my help and advice, for free.

In either case, the way forward is to reply to this email and express your interest.

I’ll send you more details about how this project work. You can then decide if you want to join me… or if you’d rather go spend your money on a bunch of possibly dead crabs.

Using pendulum swings to predict opportunities

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I read today that SpaceHey just reached 1 million users. In case you don’t know, as I didn’t —

​​SpaceHey is an ugly and basic social media network that’s meant to recall the web of the early 2000s.

SpaceHey was started four years ago by a German 18-year-old with no budget. Last week, SpaceHey reached 1 million users. It still has no budget, except occasional donations from users who love the service.

Point being:

In pop culture as in politics, there are pendulum swings. A big part of how we humans define ourselves is in opposition to what came before, or in opposition to what’s here now that we don’t like.

The result of this are pendulum swings, from polished to rough, crowded to sparse, materialistic to spiritual, conservative to liberal.

It makes sense to keep an eye on what the pendulum is doing. It can give you clues about what’s coming in the future, and where opportunities might lie.

And on that note, I would like to announce that starting tomorrow, I will be promoting a $497 course called myPeeps, put together by Travis Speegle.

Travis is an expert list builder and media buyer, who has built up email lists totaling some 7.5 million subscribers for big brands (BowFlex, Thrive Market, Truth About Cancer) as well as for big non-profits (Surfrider Foundation and Well.org).

Travis’s myPeeps course lays out his how-to of buying ads to grow an email list. It’s based on Travis’s experience and philosophy, which is to keep things simple, fast, and effective.

I’ve gone through Travis’s myPeeps myself. I’m planning to follow it to the letter to grow a new list I have started.

And if you like, you can work alongside me, follow Travis’s process also, and build up your own list with my help and feedback.

I’ll have more info on how this “work alongside me” component will look. For now, I’ll just say this will be a free bonus I’ll be offering to encourage you to buy myPeeps through my affiliate link.

And in case you’re wondering, Why? Why this? Why now?

It’s because I’m feeling a pendulum swing away from Twitter and social and free means of list building in general.

I’m feeling it in myself. I’m feeling it in the people I talk to.

This includes some people who have actually been successful in the past in growing a free audience on social. In spite of their success, they are feeling fed up. And they are looking for an alternative that costs less time, that’s more reliable, and that doesn’t require them to build their house on a platform that could be pulled out from under them on a whim.

But more about all that tomorrow. Meanwhile, if you want to know what the future looks like:

https://spacehey.com/

**HUGE ANNOUNCEMENT**

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Alex Hormozi, the bearded, trucker-hatted, nasal-stripped author of the book $100MM Offers, has been aggressively running Facebook ads that open with:

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**HUGE ANNOUNCEMENT**

I’ve never publicly endorsed anything until now. And that’s because I’ve built my reputation on giving amazing value.

Anything I endorse has to live up to that. Nothing has, until now.

For many of you who want to start a business online, this is the fastest, easiest, most fun way I’ve found.

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The ad goes on, but the gist is that the fastest, easiest, most funnest way that Alex is endorsing is… Skool.

You might know Skool — it’s an online community platform, much like Facebook groups, but without all the stigma that anything connected to Facebook has today.

I don’t know the deal that Hormozi has struck with Skool. But even at the most plebeian level, Skool offers 40% to affiliates, lifetime, each month, for anybody who comes in and creates a group (creating a Skool group costs $99/month).

So maybe Alex Hormozi is wrong?

Maybe Skool is not the fastest, easiest, most fun way to start a business online?

Maybe promoting Skool is? Or if not Skool, maybe some other software-as-a-service?

This got me wondering about what other worthwhile SaaS platforms have generous lifetime affiliate programs.

I know that many email marketing and web hosting companies do. But what else?

Software for design? For sales? Practice management? Inventory management? Pet store management?

If you know of a good software product that offers recurring affiliate payouts, write in and let me know. I’m curious. And in return, I’ll reply and tell you about a super-clever way I’ve seen one affiliate promoting a SaaS company, and apparently making a killing right now.

The final straw that broke this email camel’s hump

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Yesterday, when I got ready to schedule my daily email in ActiveCampaign, I got hit with an ugly yellow banner that read:

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You are approaching the limit of emails sent per month.

You currently have sent 87.45% of your available emails to send per month. You may want to upgrade your plan to allow sending more emails.

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I had no idea what this is about, so I looked it up. It turns out ActiveCampaign doesn’t just have subscriber limits to its various pricing plans. There are also monthly email send limits, set at 10x the limit of subscribers.

I don’t know if this is a new invention, or if I simply never noticed it before.

In any case, it’s the final straw that broke this email camel’s hump, and that will force said camel to move off ActiveCampaign for good, some time in the next month, even though I expect the move to be a mess.

But that’s not what this email is about. This email is simply to highlight how crazy, stupid, or simply out of touch the ActiveCampaign policy is.

10 emails per subscriber each month?

It reminded me of Bill Gates’s infamous statement, back in 1981, about how nobody will need more than 640Kb of computer memory. (Gates denies he ever said this, but that’s neither here nor there.)

I know I’m probably preaching to the converted here. But the more often you email your list, the more money you make. It’s a very simple calculus.

I’ve never personally sent 10 emails to my newsletter subscribers in one day. But I could imagine it could be lucrative, particularly if I have an offer that’s doing well, and a deadline is nearing, and people need a push.

Short of that, sending an email each day of the month, and sometimes multiple times a day when there’s reason for it, is the smart thing to do.

It’s not a matter of burning out your list for the sake of short-term profit. It’s a matter of staying visible, of continuing to nurture a relationship, and yes, of making sales when sales are there to be made, because it’s in both sides’ interest to make the exchange.

Again, you probably know all this. But if you don’t yet send daily emails because don’t have time or energy, hit reply and get in touch.

I might be able to find an email copywriter for you who will write daily emails for you on commission only.

​​Just make sure you’re not using ActiveCampaign if it does happen.

The Golden Triangle of Success

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In software development, a field in which I spent the salad days of my life, there’s a meme known as the Iron Triangle. It’s about how software is developed, and it says:

“Fast, cheap, good — pick two”​​

Yesterday, I fielded interest in a new offer, “Work alongside me to launch or build up your list via paid traffic.”

In a nutshell, I’m about to start building up a new list via paid traffic. And if you like, you can work alongside me to launch or build up your own list… follow the same process I’m following… plus get my feedback and input on your ad copy and lead magnets etc.

I got a good number of people expressing interest in that.

But inevitably, I also had a few people write in, saying they are not sure if they have the money.

To which I thought up a kind of Golden Triangle of Success, similar but different to the Iron Triangle above. The Golden Triangle says:

“Time, effort, money — pick two”

This is similar to the Iron Triangle — because you pick any two for guaranteed success. One will not do.

But it’s also different to the Iron Triangle because this is about requirements on inputs, rather than constraints on outputs.

​​In other words, pick two — or three. You can have all three corners of the Golden Triangle.

But what if you don’t?

What if you don’t have the money corner, specifically?

No shame in that. Was a time when I was in the same situation. You can get up and out of it with enough effort and time.

On the other hand, if you’re simply not sure whether you have the money to invest in an asset like an email list, then the Golden Triangle of Success might give you a different way to look at your situation.

In any case, if you’re interested in the offer I made yesterday, to work alongside me to build up your list, write in and let me know. I want to hear your situation and get your feedback as I decide on the final form of how this will work.