You are receiving this newsletter because you are already on our email list, having requested a copy of one of our resources. If, for any reason, you don't want to get this free email newsletter, reply with the words “opt out.”

Every issue of this newsletter gives you the exact systems, strategies, and principles I’ve used to generate 8 figures (almost entirely) with email marketing. So you can build your own systems that will carry you through the next algorithm change or recession. This is what actually works.

When I first started online, my definition of success was extremely simple.

Make money.

That was the whole goal. I didn’t have a philosophy about business yet. I wasn’t thinking about brand, relationships, or long-term reputation. I just wanted to figure out how to make money on the internet, and I wanted it badly enough that I was willing to try almost anything.

Looking back now, I’m not particularly proud of that attitude. But at the time, it was the reality.

Like many people who entered the online marketing world in those early days, I eventually wandered into what people call “black hat” territory. If you’re not familiar with the term, it basically refers to tactics that are questionable at best and sometimes outright unethical.

Almost everyone who has been in this space long enough has some version of that story. Even some of the biggest names in internet marketing have admitted to experimenting with things they probably wouldn’t repeat today.

I certainly had my own version of that phase.

At one point, I discovered a way to obtain email addresses that definitely wasn’t legitimate. Once I had those addresses, I uploaded them into an email platform that was popular at the time called Imnica Mail.

What happened next is something I still remember very clearly.

Back then, there was a website called the Warrior Forum. For those who were around in the early internet marketing days, the Warrior Forum was the center of the universe. It was where marketers gathered to share ideas, learn new tactics, buy courses, and stay on top of what was happening in the industry.

They also had a marketplace where different products were promoted to their audience.

And the recommendations from that platform carried enormous credibility.

So I did something incredibly reckless.

I wrote emails that looked exactly like the promotional emails sent by the Warrior Forum. Same style, same tone, even the same sender address. At the time, the email system allowed you to send from almost any address you wanted without verification, which made this possible.

It really was the Wild West of internet marketing.

Once everything was set up, I pressed send.

What happened after that honestly shocked me.

Before we go any further…

Free traffic isn't free.

Even “free traffic” like SEO or posting on social media has it’s costs…

You waste months posting on social media, optimizing for search engines, and writing blog posts that nobody reads. Then you spend thousands on software, tools, and courses teaching you how to do it "for free."

I just put together a training showing you a better way.

In it, you’ll see the exact traffic system I use to generate 500 quality leads per day on autopilot. 

This is the same system that's made me anywhere from $21,779 to $36,147 in affiliate commissions in a single day as a super affiliate.

I have a simple, little-known traffic source that's 20 times more profitable than Facebook or Instagram, and I want to show you how to start driving traffic on a budget, even if you're brand new. 

And I reveal the one tweak I applied to all my campaigns that lets me break even on traffic instead of bleeding money on ads…

Plus a special opportunity to have me do everything for you.

The training and this chance are only available til Sunday night so I urge you to check it out now.

Now, as I was saying…

I would schedule the emails to go out around noon Eastern time. After sending the email, I would sit down with my girlfriend — who later became my wife — and we would watch a movie while eating takeout in our tiny apartment.

We didn’t even own a television back then. Our entire entertainment system consisted of a laptop sitting on a small coffee table in front of the couch.

But I had one other thing running on that laptop.

I had installed a browser plugin that triggered a notification every time a sale came in. Whenever a payment hit my PayPal account or an affiliate commission was recorded, a pop-up would appear on the screen.

I set it up deliberately for conditioning.

Every time money came in, I wanted to see it.

So we would start watching our movie, and before long, the first notification would appear.

Ding.

Then another one.

Ding.

Every few minutes, another sale notification would interrupt whatever we were watching. I had to grab the mouse and click “OK” just to make the pop-up disappear so the movie could continue.

My wife thought it was incredibly annoying.

I thought it was the greatest thing I had ever seen.

Every few minutes, the screen would light up again. Another sale. Then another. And another. Sometimes, ten sales in an hour. Sometimes more.

For the first time in my life, I was seeing twenty or thirty sales in a single day coming from one email.

It felt unbelievable.

The strange thing was that it almost didn’t matter what I promoted in those emails. As long as the product had decent earnings per click, people bought it. The credibility of the Warrior Forum brand was so strong that if an offer appeared to come from them, people assumed it must be worth purchasing.

Of course, that situation didn’t last very long.

Within a couple of months Imnica Mail figured out what was happening and shut down my account immediately. Looking back, they were completely justified. If anything, they were generous by simply banning me from the platform instead of taking legal action.

That particular experiment ended right there.

But the experience taught me something that turned out to be incredibly important.

And it had nothing to do with black hat tactics.

What it revealed to me was the true power of trust in email marketing.

Those people weren’t buying because of the product itself.

They were buying because they believed the recommendation was coming from a source they trusted.

Once that realization sank in, it completely changed the way I thought about email.

Because if credibility alone could create that kind of response, imagine what happens when the trust actually belongs to you.

Imagine having a list that recognizes your name in the inbox. A list that reads your emails regularly and gradually begins to see you as someone worth listening to.

That’s when email becomes something extraordinary.

You can send a single message and watch a wave of sales come in almost immediately. Not because you tricked anyone, but because the audience has already decided that your voice matters.

When that relationship exists, offers become almost interchangeable.

Today, you might recommend one product. Tomorrow, you might recommend another. The specific offer changes constantly, but the relationship with the audience remains intact.

That relationship becomes the real asset.

And it’s also the reason so many people get distracted by the wrong things in online marketing. Every few months, there’s a new tool, a new platform, or a new technology that promises to revolutionize everything.

Lately, artificial intelligence has accelerated that trend even more, creating endless new distractions for marketers chasing the latest opportunity.

But underneath all the noise, the fundamental principle remains exactly the same.

The ability to communicate with an audience that trusts you.

Over the years, I’ve been able to trace virtually every dollar I’ve earned back to a simple action: sending an email.

Millions of dollars have come from those messages.

Not because the tactics were complicated.

Not because the technology was special.

But because there was an audience on the other side willing to listen.

That’s the lesson I carried forward from that early mistake.

Offers can change. Tools can change. Strategies will evolve as the market shifts.

But the trust you build with your email list — the relationship that makes people open your messages and pay attention — that is the one asset that makes everything else possible.

And once you understand that, you start treating it like the most valuable thing in your business.

Because in many ways, it is.

P.S. If you enjoy these ideas, you’ll love the deeper conversations we have on the List Building Lifestyle podcast.