Yesterday, as the plane leveled off over the Bavarian Alps, I had a newsletter growth idea.
You might say that’s a waste of pleasant scenery on Christmas Day. But what to do? That’s how ideas seem to work.
They bubble up at the oddest times, when you’re not thinking about subject, triggered by nothing obvious.
Jim Rohn might shrug and say, “mysteries of the mind.”
Anyways, my idea was this:
I have another newsletter besides this one. That other one is in the health space.
The content is good. I know, because my audience says so, and even recommends me to others unbidden. But my list is still small.
I could pay to get more readers onto my other newsletter, and in past I have done so.
But why pay when I might be able to get somebody else to pay?
So my Alps-high idea was to contact a few companies in the space and make them a deal they cannot refuse, or that they certainly can.
The idea is that they pay for my ads. Some modest sum at first, say $1k for one month as a test.
I then run ads on FB promoting my newsletter. And to every new subscriber, I also promote the partner company’s offer on my thank you page, in my welcome sequence, and as the main sponsor of each of my issues.
At the end of the month, we revisit the arrangement.
Did the company make back their $1k? Or is there hope they will do so because they got new customers via my newsletter that will add up to more than $1k in LTV?
If yes, we keep going, increase ad spend, and revisit the agreement one month later.
If no, we call it a failed experiment and that’s that.
That was my idea.
You might say it would never work. All the risk is on the company.
True.
I might need something extra — credibility, for example.
To get credibility, I could run an initial campaign with my own money, test out how it does, and have that data when I first pitch this idea to my would-be partner.
Or I might contribute some money myself so they feel I have skin in the game.
Or I might have to offer them a Calas-Powell-Rosenthal-and-Bloch-style guarantee, and say that I will refund their ad spend if the test is not successful.
Whatever. I’ll see. In any case, the bigger point still stands:
You don’t have to go at it alone. As the 21.7 Billion Dollar Man, marketing wizard Jay Abraham, once said:
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In business there is certainly no rule, no law, that says you have to do it alone. You don’t. There are a number of businesses out there that are as motivated if not more so than you are to help grow your business for you. You just never recognized that motivation and asked them, or taken advantage of their willingness to help. And that willingness means they can help finance, they can bring people into your business, all at no cost or risk to you.
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In the training where I heard that, Jay went on to give three concrete examples of his clients who got others to pay for their advertising… or for their operating costs… or even for their sales people.
This Jay Abraham training has been very valuable to me. It sold for something like $297 30 years ago. Today, it would probably sell for $2,997 and maybe much more.
But you can get it for an earth-shattering $12.69, and get hundreds or thousands of dollars in additional valuable ideas. The details are here: