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.

Everybody wants the laptop lifestyle.

Nobody wants to do the one thing that actually creates it.

I'm talking about selling. The basic act of putting your offer in front of another human being and asking them to exchange their dollars for what you have. Set aside the cheesy, pushy, hype-driven picture most people carry around in their heads — that's a caricature, and we'll get to it in a minute.

The basic act, though, is the whole game.

And it's the part everyone tries to skip.

I get it, because I spent three and a half years trying to skip it myself. Three and a half years of trying to make money online before I made my first sale. Three and a half years of tweaking funnels, switching products, blaming traffic, blaming offers, blaming everything except the actual reason nothing was working.

The reason was simple. I hated selling.

It was a deep, gut-level, my-stomach-turns-when-I-write-the-pitch kind of hate. And it didn't ease up when I learned new scripts. It didn't ease up when I bought a better autoresponder. It got worse every time I sat down to send another email asking strangers for their money.

The hate starts when you're a kid.

Your parents taught you to stay away from salespeople. Don't open the door for the guy in the suit. Don't sign anything the telemarketer reads to you. Don't let the car dealer push you into something you'll regret on the drive home. The message was clear. Salespeople are the enemy. They want your money, and your job is to protect yourself from them.

You absorbed that message before you could even spell the word "commission."

Then one day you grow up, you read a few books about passive income, and you decide you want to build an online business. You sign up for some program, you watch the training, and they tell you that to make any money you need to do exactly the thing your parents warned you about for twenty years.

Before we go any further…

Some years ago, I was working at a facility that made pesticide fluids for Central American agriculture.

The kind of place where they won't let you through the front gate without a full hazmat suit and a respirator. The kind of place where they run you through a chemical shower before clocking off to lower the risk of skin cancer.

Some weeks, I worked from 4AM until 8PM and still couldn't pay my bills, so I looked online to make more money.

I tried building a social media following like every guru told me to. I spammed affiliate links across Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Quora for months. Not a single sale.

Then I noticed something while visiting Tony Robbins' website. 

He was running what I now call an e-Farm. I checked Bob Proctor's website. Same thing. Tim Ferriss. Same thing. Robert Kiyosaki, Jordan Belfort, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Every person making serious money online owned an e-Farm, and nobody was talking about it.

I scraped together what I could, borrowed money on my credit cards, and figured out how it worked.

Within a few weeks, I was getting real commission checks in the mail. Within a few months, I walked away from the chemical factory for good.

I wrote everything I know about building an e-Farm from scratch into a book called The e-Farming Manifesto. It covers the complete blueprint from zero subscribers to a profitable asset you own outright, without posting content, chasing followers, or depending on any platform.

Use coupon code SHIP4FREE at checkout to get it for $9.99 before the offer expires.

Now, as I was saying…

You need to become the guy in the suit.

Of course, it feels yucky. Of course, it feels cheesy. You're being asked to play the role of the person you were trained to mistrust your entire life.

So most people, when they hit this wall, do what I did for years. They go looking for better techniques. Better scripts. Better email templates. A better funnel. A magic phrase that turns skeptics into buyers without anyone actually having to do any selling.

It doesn't work.

You can have the best sales page on the internet, written by the best copywriter alive, and you'll still sabotage the sale. The moment you sit down to send traffic to it, your tone is off. Your follow-up emails come out flat. You push too hard on the close, or you go limp and never ask for the sale at all. You write the subject line apologetically, like you're embarrassed to be in the inbox at all.

People feel that. Even through a screen. Even through cold copy.

Confidence and discomfort both travel through the words you choose, the rhythm of your sentences, and the way you phrase the offer. You can't hide it. If you don't believe in what you're selling at a 156% level, the sale is dead before the traffic ever arrives.

A couple of years into my journey, I found a program by Dan Kennedy called Wealth Attraction for Entrepreneurs. It was the first piece of training I'd ever come across that went after the real problem. The internal one. The reason I felt sick every time I sat down to write a pitch.

Kennedy made me realize something I'd been avoiding for years. My whole life, I had been quietly convinced that asking strangers for money was something only bad people did. No funnel was going to fix that. Headlines couldn't reach that deep. The work had to happen between my ears, on my own time, before any of the techniques would ever matter.

So I went to school on my own beliefs.

I started reading anything I could find about the psychology of money and selling. T. Harv Eker's Secrets of the Millionaire Mind was another one that hit me hard. Half of that book is about the quiet stories you were told about money as a kid that are still running your decisions thirty years later, even when you can't see them doing it.

For me, those stories came from growing up in Ukraine in the nineties. My dad ran a business but was terrible with money. Whatever came in went straight back out. Eventually, we had to leave the country and start over in Israel with twelve bags of clothes and just under a thousand dollars between us.

Watching that as a kid, you grow up suspicious of both money and selling. A healthy relationship with either of them has to be built from scratch later, as an adult.

Here's the part nobody wants to hear.

Get comfortable being your own biggest fan.

That's the entire requirement. Stand behind what you sell. Talk about it openly. Put it in front of people who might want it. Ask them to buy it. Do that on email, on video, on a webinar, on whatever medium you've chosen — and do it without flinching.

The yucky version of selling — the lying, the outrageous claims, the manipulation scripts — is its own thing. It's a caricature, and it has nothing to do with what works long-term anyway. Forget it exists.

If your goal is thousands of dollars a month online, this part isn't optional. You can have the best product in your niche, the cleanest funnel ever built, and the warmest traffic source on the planet, and you'll still go broke if you can't get out of your own way long enough to ask for the sale.

Better tools don't save bad sellers.

The work is internal. The books I mentioned are a good starting point. Sitting down honestly and asking yourself why you hate selling, where that hate came from, and whether it's still serving you is the next step.

Most people will never do that work. They'll keep blaming traffic. They'll keep switching programs. They'll keep looking for the magic technique that lets them get rich without ever having to act like someone who's selling something.

Be the one who does the work instead.

That's the difference between everyone who wants the lifestyle and the small group of people who actually end up living it.

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