A tale of both woe & dough from the olden days:
Back in late Summer of 2010 I took up a client in a biz-opp related niche where I got paid a nice $5k “base” fee per month, plus 1% of the gross sales of the company.
It was a great gig.
Lots of the green stuff was made.
Lots of fun was had.
And lots of copy was written — for everything from long form sales pages, to 100+ email sequences (leads and buyers), plus squeeze pages, webinar scripts, Facebook ads, JV copy ads, and the list went on and on.
The pay was good.
The people were great to work with.
And all was well as far as that went.
But after a few months I realized something.
I was still having to have all my work “filtered” and approved. I was still just an employee with no real ownership in the company. And, worst of all, I was still just as miserable and frustrated making lots of money each month doing what I loved doing (the marketing and copywriting side of things) as I was when I was broke doing those same things as a freelancer.
i.e., I knew I had to be my own client.
The hybrid copywriter/partner thing simply wasn’t my bag.
The solution?
I forced myself to sit down the week between Christmas and New Years at the end of 2010, block out everything and anything else, and create a business plan for my own venture. In this case, it was the prostate problem niche. So I banged out a business plan, very detailed, using info I had learned while selling an info course 6 years earlier about how to buy your own million dollar business using none of your own money. Before long I had an offer created, a back end already in place, and a plan for generating traffic on deck. It was all based on article marketing and some clever SEO tricks a guy I knew in the weight loss niche had worked out to create a $70k/year income stream doing literally nothing every day, with no back end, affiliates, etc. Just a $19 eBook, a squeeze page, a sales page, and a PayPal account. His day literally consisted of waking up at 10 am, playing with his kids, and maybe a few minutes of customer service. I figured I could just use his lazy model and actually do some work by treating it like a business and clean up.
The goal:
To be liberated from client work by the end of 2011 — exactly one year from the day.
All I had to do was execute the business plan.
And execute the business plan I did.
As rapidly and as aggressively as possible.
At the time, I still had the above client doing ALL their sales pages, emails, other copywriting-related projects… plus my own projects (I was selling a different print newsletter than I do now called The Crypto Marketing Newsletter at the time)… plus spending several hours per day on this fledgeling prostate niche side business (i.e., my “concubine” business)… plus gearing up to do some more stuff in the above weight loss business I was going to partner in.
To say my schedule was packed each day is an understatement.
For a month and a half I barely slept.
And even when I did I was not even sure I was technically “asleep.”
More like in a weird haze of half awake dreaming.
Sometimes I would literally start dreaming while writing.
Was very bizarre.
Anyway, by mid Feb I had written some 1000 pages of content (articles, blog posts, auto-respondered emails, premium content, etc) for the prostate niche concubine business alone, and probably even more than that. Plus my own Ben Settle stuff, my biz opp client’s stuff, and preliminary weight loss niche stuff.
But I had gotten a handle on everything.
And, I was seeing traffic come in to the prostate niche site.
I was getting a few sales per day.
And, those buyers were getting auto-respondered emails selling an upsell.
And… it was starting to happen.
That goal of being client-free was looking good.
So what I did I do?
I took a couple weeks off from everything to visit my dad.
And while I was there I’d check sales and stats, and all was going well. I had all kinds of content ranked on page one of Google, and was probably doing around $50 per day (3 or 4 sales per day), with that growing and projections showing two or three times that over the next month or so, plus my back end continuity starting to kick in simultaneously… all on auto-pilot at that point.
Until one day towards the end of my vacation…
It all came crashing down.
Google decided to (rightfully, in hindsight) “slap” article directories.
Was a huge learning moment about the stoopidity of relying on any one 3rd party platform. In this case it was Google. It’s why I shake my head nowadays when I see people wrapping their entire business around Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, or any other platform. The paranoia simply isn’t there yet for everyone. But it will be. Just a matter of time.
Anyway back to the story:
At first all that work and near zero sleep seemed a huge waste of time.
But I quickly realized it was just the opposite.
At the time I admit it sucked.
But it forced me to rethink everything.
I still had the goal of being client-free by end of 2011.
I simply needed a new plan.
And so I got back to work thinking and plotting.
I thought about a coaching model (was not a fan of doing coaching). I thought about a consulting model (was even less a fan of doing consulting). I thought about continuing the prostate business with paid traffic (and even partnered with a traffic guy to do just that). I thought about getting into the dating niche, which I had been tinkering with. I even thought about doing some kind of copywriting agency business.
But none of them excited me.
Then one day, I was driving up the Oregon coast and it hit me.
I had an $800 email course at the time that people loved and bought. But I was always having to update the dayem thing as every day — sending emails in multiple companies — was giving me new intel, making me realize some things only worked for me and not others, many things I was doing were not “evergreen”, and the list went on. In some cases stuff I was doing that I could pull off and get away with would even be counter productive to most other businesses.
Thus, constantly updating the course.
The solution?
Create a paid newsletter about email.
It seemed so obvious.
But it took a lot of frustration to be open to it.
Long story even longer:
I got out the laptop and hammered out a new business plan for this idea.
I was leaving nothing to chance.
And I was leaving nothing to the whims of Google or anything else.
And, most importantly, I was doing it MY way.
i.e., paper & ink newsletter. Not a membership site, not video, not audio, not delivered “by” email. But print & ink, like my Crypto Marketing Newsletter at the time. Reason why is, I just like that format and I like selling to readers in my niche. But if I was a video guy who likes video more, it’d be in video. If I was an audio guy who likes audio more, it’d be in audio. If I liked diddling around with a community, it’d be a social network based thing. But I don’t like those formats, so I went with the one I did/do prefer.
I was in a couple masterminds at the time.
And I remember two of my mastermind pals whose names you’d probably recognize — who to this day I have nothing but the utmost respect for, no hate here — tell me my idea probably wasn’t going to work.
And admittedly their reasons were sound.
But so was my business plan.
And so I went forth and launched this new venture anyway.
The result:
By late August 2011 (just over half way through the year) I was done with client work.
And even then I was still leaving a lot of money on the table.
For example:
I only sent 5 emails during the launch.
I had zero upsells in place.
And I was relying on just one merchant account.
All the height of stupidity and small thinking.
And so over the next several months and years since I’ve added to, subtracted from, and modified that original business plan for Email Players, and still do so to this day. In fact, just a few weeks ago I created an 11-point document for acquiring and retaining more strategically-thinking subscribers (my favorite kind, who get the most benefit out of the newsletter, although a clear minority amongst the online marketing space), while turning off and turning away more purely tactical thinking subscribers (my least favorite kind, who get almost no benefit out of the newsletter, although they are a clear majority amongst the online marketing space).
And just following those 11 things has already significantly improved sales.
But that 11-point document isn’t the point here.
(It’s only compatible with me and my business, nobody else’s.)
The point here is:
Business plans.
And the power in not only creating them, but sticking with them, and constantly changing, adapting, and modifying them — forever. I can only think of one single person I know who has ever done this. (My business partner in the software space Troy Broussard — I wrote the original SocialLair business plan, he wrote the original BerserkerMail business plan, and both are humming along quite nicely, to say the least.)
Yet, it’s the single most profitable thing I’ve ever done in business.
It continues to be the single most profitable thing I’ve ever done in business.
And I suspect it will always be the single most profitable thing I do in business.
If you have not created on for your business I highly recommend doing so.
And when you’re ready to use email to execute it, go here:
Ben Settle
