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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.

My nephew and I made a bet.

He was convinced that social media was the future of online business. More followers meant more reach, more reach meant more sales, and anyone who thought otherwise was behind the times. He had grown up watching creators build audiences of millions and monetize them into empires. From where he was standing, the logic was airtight.

He had a point, on the surface. At the time, I had close to 10,000 followers across my social media pages — an engaged audience that had actively sought me out.

By his logic, that was the asset.

I told him I could outsell that entire following with an email list one-tenth the size. One thousand subscribers against ten thousand followers. He thought I was bluffing. So we ran the test.

For three days, I warmed up both audiences simultaneously — teasing an upcoming product to my social media followers and my email subscribers at the same time, same message, same energy. On the fourth day, I launched. A $200 offer teaching people how to command more authority and influence through the power of their voice.

I sent the email to my list and posted on social media at the exact same moment.

The campaign ran for 72 hours.

Before we go any further…

Zero To Online is now live on Amazon.

This book shows everything I learned in the last 20 years about how to start a profitable online business without wasting years on bad information dressed up as good advice.

Mark Ford (pen name Michael Masterson), the author of Ready, Fire, Aim, wrote the foreword for the book.

And he said, I quote: "This book is going to help a lot of people”

Plus, for a very short time, I'm releasing limited-edition bonus packages that are worth up to 50X the book price.

The bonuses include things I've never put on the table before…

Like live experiences with me that I've kept completely off-limits until now…

And direct access to me that’s usually just reserved for my inner circle.

You’ll also get access to everything I know about making money online, built up over 20 years and multiple 8-figure businesses.

The bonuses scale with how many copies you buy—and those extra books make perfect client thank-you gifts, team handouts, or donations to your local library.

There are only a handful of the top-tier bonus packages available, and every hour that goes by, more of the top bonuses disappear.

I urge you to claim yours while the tier you want is still available: 

Now, as I was saying…

When it closed, I had made 98 sales. Almost $20,000 in revenue. Every single one of those 98 sales came from my email list of 1,000 subscribers.

My social media following of nearly 10,000 people — people who had followed me, who saw my content regularly, who were by any definition an engaged audience — generated zero sales. Twenty dollars per subscriber from the email list. Zero dollars per follower from social media.

My nephew went quiet after that.

The math is simple once you see it. A social media follower is a passive relationship. They opted in to see content, which is a very different thing from opting in to hear from you directly.

When you post on social media, you are asking an algorithm for permission to reach your own audience. Sometimes it says yes. Often it says no. The platform decides how many of your followers actually see what you put out.

That number is almost never as high as you think. On most platforms, organic reach has been declining for years. The platform wants you to pay for what you used to get for free.

An email subscriber is a different animal entirely. They gave you their address. They said: contact me directly. When you send an email, it lands in an inbox.

There is no algorithm standing between you and the person you are trying to reach. Nobody is throttling your delivery based on whether you spent money on ads this month.

You write, you send, they receive. That distinction is worth $20,000. I have the receipts.

Then there is the day Facebook reminded me why I do not build on rented land.

I was on my third espresso at Landwer on Bathurst Street in Toronto when the notification came through. Facebook had shut down my business manager account. Again. Third time in two years.

No warning, no appeal, no explanation. Just gone. And with it, 147,000 followers I had spent two years building. Two years of content, of consistency, of showing up and growing something — deleted in a single notification I had no say in.

I closed the notification and opened my email sending tool. I had 18,342 subscribers on my list — an asset Facebook had no access to, no control over, and no ability to delete. I wrote an email for a product offering and sent it.

Within 72 hours, I had made $21,400 in sales from a list that still existed because I had been building it while everyone else was chasing followers.

I have a friend named Charles who teaches men how to perform better in bed. (His niche is more competitive than you'd think.) Charles had built a viral YouTube channel — years of work, hundreds of videos, his primary source of new customers. One day, YouTube deleted it without warning. No appeal process that actually worked. Everything he had built on that platform was gone overnight.

Charles did not panic. He had been driving viewers from his videos to an email capture page the entire time — quietly, consistently, without making a big deal of it. When YouTube pulled the plug, he still had a list of 60,000 responsive subscribers who had chosen to hear from him directly.

His business did not even take a hit.

Does this pattern sound familiar yet?

This is the thing about email that nobody wants to say out loud because it is too unglamorous to make a good tweet. Email is old. It is boring.

Boring means it works the same way on Tuesday as it did on Monday. Boring means you can build a system around it and trust that the system will keep running.

The platforms that feel exciting right now are the same platforms that will feel terrifying the day they decide your account violated a policy you never knew existed. A platform cannot delete your list. An algorithm cannot hide your messages. A policy change cannot vaporize two years of audience building in an afternoon.

Given the choice between 500,000 social media followers and 50,000 email subscribers, I would pick the email list every time. You do not want a following that applauds. You want an audience that buys.

Those are two very different relationships. One of them generates likes and comments and the occasional viral moment that does nothing for your bank account. The other one generates revenue, compounds over time, and belongs entirely to you — regardless of what any platform decides to do tomorrow morning.

One of them kept Charles in business when YouTube deleted everything he had built. One of them kept me in business when Facebook did it to me. Three times.

Only one of them keeps the lights on.

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