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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.

Hand most marketers a blank page, tell them to "open with a story," and you can almost watch the panic set in.

They freeze. Storytelling, they assume, is some rare gift handed out to novelists and screenwriters and nobody else. They picture clever twists, gorgeous sentences, characters with rich inner lives they could never dream up on their own. So they quietly decide they weren't built for it, and they go back to writing the kind of dry, forgettable email the reader forgets before he's even finished reading it.

I want to take that fear off the table today, because it is quietly costing you sales you'll never even know you lost.

You learned everything you need to know about storytelling before you could read.

Think about the stories we tell small children. Fables. Bedtime tales. The ones you've read to your kids so many times you could recite them in your sleep.

They're simple. Sometimes painfully predictable. Two characters, usually animals, walking around with human habits and human flaws. One of them wants something. He sets off to get it. Somewhere along the way he runs into a problem, and then he has to figure out how to climb over it.

Take the tortoise and the hare. A slow turtle wants to win a race against a fast rabbit, and everyone watching knows he has no business winning. He keeps plodding along anyway. The rabbit gets cocky, lies down for a nap, and the turtle crosses the line first. You heard that one as a child, and you still remember the lesson decades later.

That's the whole machine. Somebody wants something, tries to get it, slams into a wall, and finds a way over the wall.

And it works. It worked on you when you were four, and it works just as well on a forty-five-year-old reading your email at his kitchen table. The mechanics have never changed.

Before we go any further…

They fail at the decision point nobody talks about: choosing the wrong business model to begin with.

The wrong model means you spend months building something before you realize the traffic costs more than the product pays, the platform owns your audience, or the skill set required belongs to someone ten years younger with nothing to lose.

I made $25 million online and created Zero To Online specifically to solve this problem.

It walks you through a 7-step framework for evaluating any online business opportunity before you commit a single dollar or hour to it. It breaks down 7 different business models with brutal honesty about what each one actually requires, and lays out the 14 myths that keep people broke and starting over every six months.

Mark Morgan Ford, the Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestselling author, wrote the foreword after reading the manuscript.

The Zero To Online Starter Pack gives you everything you need to go from picking the right business model to building it, generating income from it, and eventually running it without trading every waking hour for money.

Just cover shipping and the entire starter pack is yours.

Now, as I was saying…

You don't need fancy language. You don't need a shocking twist at the end. Forget the novel — you're telling a small, simple story to land a single point.

The one thing that truly matters is whether the story is relatable. Your reader has to see a piece of himself sitting inside it. Get that part right, and you can be clumsy with everything else and still win.

Which brings me to the habit that has done more for my marketing than almost any clever tactic I've ever picked up. Years ago, I started collecting stories.

Some of them came from my own life. Plenty came from other people — stories I was told over dinner, stories I caught buried inside someone else's email, stories I found while reading. More than once, I've been halfway through a business book, hit a story that knocked the wind out of me, and stopped everything to copy it down word for word. Straight into the swipe file it went.

If you want a masterclass, study the personal development legends. Zig Ziglar. Brian Tracy. Bob Proctor. These men built entire empires on storytelling, and almost none of their stories were complicated. Pick up an old Zig Ziglar book like Selling 101, and you'll find one story after the next, each one carrying a single idea you'll still remember years later.

People get squeamish about the next part, so let me just say it plainly. Stories live out in the open air. A song has a copyright. A screenplay has a copyright. A story someone told you over coffee belongs to everyone who repeats it. You can borrow it, reshape it, and bend it to fit whatever point you're making this week, because almost any good story can be twisted to carry a brand new lesson.

So start your own collection today. Keep a file — call it a toolbox if that sits better with you — and every single time you stumble across a story that moves you, drop it in. A year from now, you'll have a vault you can reach into any time you sit down to write.

And once you have that vault, the way you sharpen the skill is almost embarrassingly obvious. You tell more stories.

Tell them in your emails. Tell them at dinner. Tell them when a friend asks how your week went. Then watch which ones make people lean in and which ones make their eyes drift toward their phone. That feedback is pure gold, and you collect it for free every single day of your life.

Then read more of them. Steal shamelessly from the masters. Study the kindergarten stuff — the fables, the simple two-character tales — until the shape of a good story becomes second nature to you.

You were telling stories before you could tie your shoes. The talent was never the problem. Somewhere along the way, you simply stopped practicing.

Pick up right where five-year-old you left off.

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