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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.

A few years back, I spent months trying to make Pinterest work, and I have almost nothing to show for it.

On paper, it looked like an easy win. The compliance was relaxed — nobody breathing down my neck about what I could and couldn't say, which is a rarity these days. That kind of freedom is exactly why I love solo ads and email drops, where no platform gets to tell me how to phrase my message. The targeting options were generous, too. I could slice the audience down to almost anything I wanted.

So I went in optimistic.

What I got back was a slow and expensive lesson.

The clicks were costing me five, six, seven dollars each. For a platform built on people lazily scrolling through pretty pictures, that price was almost offensive. Anyone would flinch at it, beginner or veteran. And the traffic that came through behaved strangely. People would opt in, then disappear. They rarely checked their email. They showed almost no appetite to buy anything.

I kept turning the screws.

I disabled all mobile traffic. iPads gone. Phones gone. Desktop only. Then I cut anyone who wasn't on Wi-Fi, because I didn't want to land in front of someone half-distracted on 4G in a grocery line. I narrowed the age range to thirty through fifty, United States only.

Before we go any further…

Everyone chasing real estate right now is focused entirely on houses.

It makes sense because houses are what every guru teaches, every investing show covers, and every investor in your market seems to be competing over at the same time.

My buddy Joe McCall has been doing something completely different for years.

He flips vacant land.

The empty lots and raw parcels most investors drive straight past without a second look. 

Unlike a house, vacant land doesn't need to be fixed up before it can be sold. 

There's no renovation project standing between you and a profit because dirt doesn't break down, rot, or need a new roof.

And because almost nobody in real estate is paying attention to land, the competition is a fraction of what you'd face chasing houses.

Joe is running a free 5-day Flip Dirt Challenge where he walks you through his entire process for finding, making offers on, and flipping vacant land.

You don't need a pile of cash to get started. Joe teaches you to find the deal first, because a strong land deal can attract buyers and partners on its own.

Now, as I was saying…

By the end, I had whittled the audience down to a tiny, pristine sliver of exactly who I believed my perfect buyer was.

The needle still wouldn't move.

So I did the only sensible thing left. I shut it down and dropped Pinterest into the wastebasket, right next to Reddit and Quora.

Those two burned me in a similar way, and Quora stung the most.

Years earlier, I had built a serious reputation on the old Warrior Forum, back when forums were still where everyone hung out. I ran ads there and made $1.3 million in thirteen months. That was my biggest win at the time, and it taught me a lesson I was certain would carry over: if you can win on a forum full of people asking questions, you can win anywhere people ask questions.

Quora looked like the exact same game. People posting questions, people hunting for answers. So I bid on questions about affiliate marketing, lead generation, ClickBank, JVZoo — all the stuff in my world.

The clicks poured in. Almost no one engaged.

It took me a while to understand why, and the answer was hiding in my own behavior. When I land on Reddit or Quora, I'm there to get one specific answer to one specific question. I'm scrolling, hunting, locked in. Every ad in my path is an obstacle between me and the thing I came for. I scroll right past them. I barely register them.

Now think about how I watch YouTube. There I'm relaxed, half-entertained, happy to wander. When an ad interrupts, I let it. I'm in a completely different frame of mind, and that frame is what makes me clickable.

Once that clicked, the whole way I think about traffic shifted.

A traffic source is never simply good or bad. The real question is whether it fits. Pinterest works beautifully for interior design, fashion, makeup, cooking — anything visual, where the picture is basically the product. My offers had nothing to do with any of that, so the platform and I were never a match in the first place.

Look at Meta if you want the cleanest example. It's one of the biggest ad platforms on earth. And most of my peers — people earning multiple six figures, some doing seven — cannot make Meta work to save their lives. Does that make Meta broken? Of course it doesn't. It simply means whatever they're selling fails to line up with how that audience buys.

Here's the thing most people miss. Forget about hunting for the one magic source that prints money in every niche. The real game is matching the format of your offer to the way that traffic already behaves.

Solo ads are forgiving. Drop a squeeze page in front of them, and you're usually fine. Taboola wants a content site, because that audience came to read articles and click around. Meta these days demands a low-ticket offer up front, or it'll quietly drain your wallet. And YouTube keeps moving the goalposts entirely. Seven years ago, I could send cold YouTube traffic straight to an automated webinar and print money. Then everyone discovered webinars, and the magic died. So I built a VSL disguised as a podcast, spent a quarter of a million dollars on it, and generated around $750,000. When that cooled off, I started sending traffic straight to a $197 offer that nobody else was running.

Same core message every time. Different wrapper each time.

So when a platform flops for you, resist the urge to declare it dead. It might be dead for this funnel, in this niche, with this exact offer — and perfectly alive for someone three feet to your left selling something completely different.

If I walked into a brand new market tomorrow, I'd happily retest every single one of those "failed" platforms again. Pinterest included. Because the platform never actually failed me. The match did.

And matches can always be remade.

P.S. Want to know why I care so much about this topic? I broke it down on this podcast episode. Listen, and you'll see why it should matter to you, too.