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.

One of my most-opened emails has a subject line that implies something it does not actually deliver.

The subject was: My Wife, My Best Friend, and My Bedroom.

The email was about FIFA on PlayStation. My friend used to come over and we would play for hours, and my wife hated it so much that she would lock herself in the bedroom rather than watch us. That was the whole story. The subject was mildly scandalous, the content was completely tame, and the email performed.

I bring this up because it illustrates something about how I actually write emails. Not like most people think emails should be written.

I have never sat down and pre-planned thirty days of content. I have never mapped out which topic goes on which Tuesday and which story I will tell on Friday. My brain is more like a mechanic who deals with whatever is in front of him — I am not strategic in the chess player sense, I am reactive in the team sports sense. And I have found, over a long time, that reactive is the right mode for email.

The speeding ticket I got one afternoon became an email. The argument I had with my wife became an email I have repurposed many times over the years. The thing that happened this morning is almost always more interesting than whatever I might have planned last week to write about today.

The best piece of advice I ever received about email writing came from my mentor, Ross Bowring. He has written copy for Larry King and a long list of well-known names. He sat me down, made me write, then tore apart what I wrote until I rewrote it to the point where it was actually good.

He told me one thing that I have quoted more times than almost anything else I have been taught: I wish more people wrote emails the way they write Facebook posts.

Think about what that means. When someone writes a Facebook post, they have an agenda. They want to be funny, or make a point, or rally people behind something. They go unfiltered.

They write the way they would talk to a friend over coffee — casually, emotionally, without worrying about being poetic or formal. And because they are emotional when they write it, the person reading it feels something.

That emotional transfer is almost the whole game.

Before we go any further…

Something is shifting in the affiliate marketing industry right now.

Algorithm changes are rolling out practically every month. Ad costs keep climbing while leads and sales keep dropping. AI is flooding the feeds with content, making it nearly impossible to compete.

The old models have become a game of diminishing returns.

But some affiliates are doing better than ever despite this.

They're not fighting algorithm changes because they built something the algorithms can't touch.

An email list.

I've made over $5.1 million last year alone promoting affiliate offers to my email list. It took me three and a half years of failing at every other strategy before I stumbled into this one by accident.

Now I want to take you from zero to your first 1,000 email subscribers and your first real commissions in just 30 minutes per day.

We’ll build your pages together, drive traffic together, choose offers together, and craft your email sequence together.

I wrote a message sharing exactly how this works, but I can only help a limited number of people, so I urge you to check it out now:

Now, as I was saying…

The worst thing an email can do is make the reader feel nothing. Apathy is the enemy.

This is why I have always been willing to attack things in my emails — Tim Ferriss and the four-hour workweek concept, Grant Cardone and hustle culture, Gary Vee and his gospel of relentless hard work, Meta ads, social media as a platform. Picking a fight generates a reaction, and a reaction is infinitely better than indifference. The only person I have never attacked in an email is Dan Kennedy. Not yet anyway.

The other thing worth getting clear before you write anything is what you actually want to happen at the end of the email. Most people skip this step entirely, then wonder why the emails do not convert.

If you know the goal — get the click, get the signup, get the sale — you still tend to make one of two mistakes. Either you write an email that wanders so far into storytelling that it has almost nothing to do with the offer, or you go the opposite direction and push so hard that the reader feels the pressure and closes the tab.

There is a line I keep coming back to: people hate to be sold to. They love to buy.

What this means is that if someone believes they chose to buy, the transaction feels different than if they felt pushed into it. The emails that produce the best results over time are the ones where the reader arrives at the decision themselves.

The mechanism for doing that is story. (And the story does not need to be about the product at all — it just needs to create the right emotional state before the offer arrives.)

Here is a question worth sitting with: when did you last receive an email and feel genuinely glad you opened it?

I used to drink coffee from a company called Happy Goat, based in Ottawa. The origin story: a farmer was walking his goats in unfamiliar territory when a couple of them broke away from the group.

He went looking for them and found them jumping around with unusual energy. They had eaten berries from a coffee bush. The goats had accidentally discovered the beans. The company takes its name from that discovery.

If I were promoting Happy Goat to an email list of coffee drinkers, I would not open with: here is a great coffee you should try, click here to buy. I would tell that story.

At the end, I would say: first-time customers can get a two-pound package for thirty dollars with free shipping. No push. No pressure. Just a story that made the product feel worth trying.

The story gives the beans a personality. It makes them different from whatever is already in the reader's cupboard.

The reader arrives at the offer having already decided, in some small way, that these beans are worth investigating. They do not feel sold to. They feel like they encountered something interesting and followed it somewhere natural. That is the difference between an email that earns its click and one that demands it.

Write like you are talking to someone you know. Tell a story. Know what you want to happen at the end before you write the first sentence. And give people enough room to feel like the decision was theirs.

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