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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.

If I ranked every asset I've built in my business from most valuable to least, the list would start with my email list. Then my sales funnels, my email sequences, my books, my webinars, my landing pages, the relationships I've built with partners and vendors over the years, my advertising campaigns — even the ones that ran for a week and died.

Somewhere at the very bottom of that list, well beneath everything else, sitting in the dark next to things I'd rather forget, is my Facebook fan page.

To give you a more precise location: below the sewers. Below where the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles hang out eating pizza. Somewhere closer to the molten core of the earth. That's where it belongs. Somewhere between the white film that coats your teeth when you're dehydrated and the liquid that drips from a garbage bag you've left out too long. That is the value I place on a Facebook fan page, based entirely on the amount of money it has generated for my business over the course of my entire career.

Which is zero.

The number is zero dollars. Absolute zero. And before anyone raises their hand — yes, I run ads on Facebook and Instagram. Yes, I spend real money on Meta platforms. The ads work. The fan page does nothing. Those are two completely different things, and conflating them is the exact mistake that keeps people pouring time into an asset that will never pay them back.

There is a meaningful difference between a platform that works for you and an asset you actually own. A Facebook fan page is something else entirely — a tenant arrangement where you have no lease, no rights, and no recourse when the landlord decides to change the rules. And Facebook changes the rules constantly — reach gets throttled, algorithms shift, pages that took years to build get reduced to broadcasting into a void where three percent of your followers might see what you post on a good day.

You built it on someone else's land. That's the problem.

Before we go any further…

Most email list builders spend months in the red before they ever see a return.

You need a lead magnet, a landing page, an autoresponder, a follow-up sequence, paid traffic, and weeks of testing just to find out if any of it works.

My buddy John Thornhill found a different way.

He's a 9x ClickBank Platinum Award winner who built a system that pays you commissions from day one while your list is still growing.

Instead of telling people to build everything from scratch, he will hand you a done-for-you ClickBank membership funnel you can plug into immediately.

Bleeding money on tools and traffic while you wait for "later" to arrive isn't working for most people — and this does.

This Thursday at 2pm EST, we're hosting a live interactive training where you’ll see the exact system and how you can start generating commissions without building products, writing sales pages, or handling customer support.

Now, as I was saying…

The people who argue for Facebook pages usually point to the follower count. Look at the numbers. Look at the social proof. Look at how many people liked the page. And I understand the appeal of a large number sitting under your profile picture — it feels like evidence of something. A follower on a Facebook page is the least committed relationship in digital marketing. They gave you nothing. They opted into nothing. They clicked a button once, probably years ago, and Facebook has been quietly deciding ever since whether or not to show them anything you post.

Compare that to an email subscriber. An email subscriber made a deliberate decision to invite you into their inbox. They typed their name and address into a form and clicked confirm. That's an act of intention. When you send an email, it arrives. It doesn't get filtered by an algorithm deciding whether your content deserves distribution today. It lands, it sits, and the subscriber chooses whether to open it. That relationship is yours. The platform can't take it away, throttle it, or decide to monetize it out from under you.

That asymmetry is everything. And it's why I've spent my career building lists instead of pages.

The 80-20 rule applies here as cleanly as it applies anywhere else. Eighty percent of the things you can do in your marketing will produce little to no meaningful impact on your bottom line. Building and maintaining a Facebook fan page falls squarely into that eighty percent. It feels like work. It looks like progress. The follower count goes up, and there's a number on the screen that suggests something is being built. When you trace it back to revenue — actual dollars in your account — the line goes nowhere.

The things that move your business are in the twenty percent. Your list. Your offers. Your ability to drive traffic to a landing page and convert that traffic into subscribers you actually own. Your email sequences. Your relationships with people who can send you buyers. Every hour you spend on the twenty percent compounds. Every hour you spend on the eighty percent is an hour you spent feeling productive while standing still.

Most people spend years in the eighty percent before someone finally tells them the truth.

So here it is: your Facebook page is an activity, not an asset. It lives on rented land, reaches a fraction of the audience you think it reaches, and generates a return that, for the overwhelming majority of people building businesses online, rounds to zero.

Build your list. Own your audience. Everything else is decoration.

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