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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.

In the summer of 2017, I was sitting in my home office in Toronto, the kind of still Tuesday morning where the only sound is the hum of the air conditioning and the occasional click of a keyboard, going through the previous month's traffic reports.

Something was wrong.

The numbers looked fine on the surface. Clicks were coming in. Opt-ins were happening. Everything was moving the way it was supposed to move.

But sales were down. Bounces were up. And my sender score, the thing that tells email service providers whether you're a trustworthy sender or a spammer, had quietly started circling the drain.

I spent three days trying to figure out what was going on.

What I eventually discovered was that somewhere in our traffic buying, which at that point was running at two to three thousand dollars a day in traffic purchases, someone had injected fake email addresses into our campaigns. Sophisticated fake addresses, the kind that passed every basic check.

They'd trigger real IP addresses. They'd pull emails from databases. They'd create the appearance of real human beings opting into a real list.

There were no real human beings. We had paid eighty thousand dollars for ghosts.

I get it if that surprises you. It surprised me too, and I had been doing this long enough that very little surprised me anymore.

Before I understood traffic at this level, I was the person spending money on Facebook ads and wondering why nothing was converting, refreshing dashboards, tweaking creative, convinced the problem was my copy or my offer. It took years and a lot of expensive mistakes to understand that the problem was usually the traffic itself. (I would have saved myself considerable time and money if someone had just told me that early on, which is exactly why I'm telling you now.)

Here's the thing about Facebook that I spent years refusing to accept. The targeting feels incredible. You can get granular, you can slice demographics, you can narrow your audience down to left-handed vegetarians in their early forties who own small dogs.

Facebook will take your money with both hands and show your ad to all of them. What nobody tells you when you're starting out is that most of those people are nowhere near a buying decision.

They're in a scrolling state of mind. Big difference.

I know this because I tried. I ran Facebook campaigns, and the best I ever managed was paying eight hundred dollars to make a nine hundred and ninety-seven dollar sale. (I am going to let you do that math. It should take you about three seconds to understand why I stopped.)

That was during a good period. Before ad blindness got as bad as it is today, before Facebook started gutting targeting options one by one, and before my account got shut down for the twelfth time.

The twelfth time. I counted.

Before we go any further…

You've heard it a thousand times: build an email list and the money will follow.

So you set up the funnel and write the emails. You buy the traffic or try to run free traffic, and watch the autoresponder bills stack up month after month.

All while you wait for the money to show up -

Except it never does…

You're spending more than you're making, and eventually you run out of runway and quit.

The problem is the model itself. You're told to build first and earn later, but "later" never comes when you're bleeding money on tools and traffic with zero return.

My buddy John Thornhill has been flipping that model on its head for over 15 years. He's a 9x ClickBank Platinum Award winner who figured out how to get paid WHILE building his email list instead of hoping it pays off someday.

He made $214,186.36 building a 17,081-person email list using a simple done-for-you funnel that collects commissions from day one.

And he did that all without creating any products, writing sales pages, or dealing with support tickets.

This Thursday, John and I are hosting a live training where he'll show you exactly how this system works and how you can use the same done-for-you funnel to start collecting commissions while you build.

Now, as I was saying…

Google is better. I want to be fair about that. Google actually knows what we are searching for at the exact moment we search for it.

Demographics are a guess. Search intent is a fact.

If your refrigerator breaks and you search for a repair technician, and an ad appears at that precise moment, that is a genuinely targeted click. You cannot buy a warmer lead than that anywhere.

The problem is you will pay for it. Lawyers pay a hundred dollars per click on Google. Insurance agents pay fifty. In the make money online space, fifteen dollars a click is considered reasonable.

Great traffic exists on Google. It is priced at levels that make most online businesses unworkable before they begin.

You see, what nobody explains clearly when you are starting out is that there is a third option that most serious email marketers have known about for twenty years. And it works on a completely different logic than either platform.

Solo ads.

When you buy a solo ad, you are paying a list owner to email their subscribers on your behalf. Their subscribers, who chose to be on that list because they are already interested in the topic, receive an email with your offer. You pay per click, typically somewhere between thirty cents and five dollars, depending on the niche.

These are people who already open emails. That was the thing I could never solve with Facebook subscribers, and it is the reason solo ads work the way they do. The list owner carries you into that conversation the way a trusted host introduces a guest, and that transfer of credibility is something no banner ad on earth can replicate.

Think about it this way. There is a difference between knocking on a stranger's door and being walked through the door by someone the stranger already trusts. Solo ads are the second thing.

The automation is also something I did not appreciate until I had suffered through enough Facebook campaign optimization to want to set my laptop on fire. With solo ads, you find a vendor, agree on a price, they mail their list, and you get clicks.

No dashboard to babysit. No creative to rotate. No algorithm watching your every move.

You can buy solo ad traffic from your phone while doing something else entirely. It just runs.

Now. About those eighty thousand dollars.

The fake traffic problem is real, and you need to know it exists before you start spending. There are vendors who will sell you clicks that are not clicks, opt-ins from people who never opted in, and, in some cases, email addresses that belong to no living person.

The eighty thousand dollar lesson taught me to ask specific questions before handing money to anyone. Where is this traffic coming from? How often do they mail their list? What does their typical open rate look like?

A genuine vendor answers without hesitation. A vendor running fake traffic gets vague in ways you will learn to recognize quickly.

The other thing that experience taught me is that cheap is almost always a warning sign. When someone on Fiverr offers to run your campaign to their hundred thousand-person list for ten dollars, they are appealing to the part of your brain that thinks it found a deal.

That part of your brain is wrong. You tend to get exactly what you pay for in this business.

Good solo ad traffic in the make-money-online space may cost between 30 cents and $3 per click. In personal development or financial niches, expect to pay more. Weight loss runs even higher.

Those prices feel significant when you are starting out. They also produce email subscribers who open email, and email subscribers who open email are the only ones who eventually buy things.

That is the only math that matters in list building.

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