An Email Players subscriber (who I am not sure wants me to name him) asks:
Question for your “old days” when you were starting to sell EP or even before then with CM:
I’m trying to compare myself to where you were all the way back then if that helps.
Anyway, what percentage of your first time buyers do you think came from a one on one conversation before they bought their first product?
Or, were you able to turn leads into buyers via automated emails only?
Most of the buyers who come from my daily emails are people who I’ve had a relationship with before they buy.
My email list is small so I’m not sure if it’s my emails that aren’t working or if it’s par for the course as you grow and do things that increase your status.
Thanks for any guidance you can provide.
I never talked to anyone.
I hate talking to people so that was out of the question. I started my list in 2002 and did hardly anything with it for the next 6 years except occasionally send emails, because that was what even the great Gary Halbert as well as what many internet guys said to do: only mail once per month or once per week or “when you have something to sell.” I was not taking Bruce Barton’s advice, using Joseph from the book of Genesis after he rose up in Egypt, as an example of what happens when you stop marketing regularly and people forget you.
(i.e., new kings arise who know you not.)
So I sent maybe 1 or 2 per month.
Luckily, in 2008 I heard the great and esteemed “High King of Email” Matt Furey himself being interviewed by Harlan Killstein and it totally changed my attitude, and I bought and aggressively applied Matt’s teachings on the subject from his original course he did back in 2005.
I started by mailing daily and selling ebooks, mostly.
Then in Fall 2009 I sold my first subscription offer.
It was a CD interview and transcript of the month product.
And while it was successful, and I could have easily built upon and grew it into something big… I hated doing it (interviewing people) and dissolved it after the 1st month. Shortly after that, I launched the Crypto Marketing newsletter (a print newsletter — which I loved writing) in Feb 2010. It lasted 30 issues, but was too general, and started to bore me writing it.
About a year before dissolving it, I launched Email Players.
The timing was ripe for it then, and it would be hard to replicate today, mostly due to me, ironically, as I spawned a lot of copycats. Including copycats who publicly bash me to this day thinking it is helping them, when really it just makes them less credible and trustworthy and shows their neediness. But at that time there was nobody doing what I was, to my knowledge. And there was certainly not today’s army of email marketing grifters saturating the market.
Timing is like that, though.
That’s why copying others is a crap shoot.
Yes, the pioneers take the arrows but they also get rich, while the tenderfoots just grift.
Anyway, Email Players launched to a small list of only about 3k people. And I did everything wrong at first: No back end, no 1-click upsells, sent only like 4 or 5 emails for the entire launch selling it, only one merchant account (the dumbest thing of all I could have done), and the list goes on. But even with all those mistakes it was successful enough to get me out of client work and create a bunch of copycats & trolls who still generously promote my business whether they realize they are doing it or not.
I have come to realize Dan Kennedy was right about that too:
You want people talking about you even if lies, attacks, etc.
All it does it bring people into your world.
And the quality people stick around, realize how low class the haters are, etc, and so it goes.
Anyway, I don’t know if any of this helps anyone reading this. But my point to my customer was, you cannot compare yourself to me or anyone else. Everyone’s situation is different. Your way will not look like my way. It will be unique and, I would argue, it MUST be unique.
Hence there is no typical or benchmark.
It’s just doing the work, making mistakes, making discoveries, and moving forward. Everyone reading this email has assets & attributes I did not, just as I have assets and attributes you do not. And there are other people out there in the same boat as you who have assets & attributes neither of us do, but wish they had yours or mine.
You take what you have and do what you can with it.
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Ben Settle
