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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.

In 2024, I spent a full week at WebinarCon, and it took me the better part of another week to recover.

Three espressos a day, eight hours of sleep every night, a quarter of Modafinil on the harder days, plenty of water. Still came home feeling dazed, a little hollowed out, operating at maybe seventy percent of my usual capacity.

The travel was fine. The sessions were interesting. The culprit was the sustained performance of being around people for five days straight.

I am an introvert. Genuinely, in the way that takes a full week to unwind from a networking event, even when the event went well. Even when the conversations were good and the connections were real and you left with a stack of business cards and a list of follow-ups worth making. Even when, by every measurable indicator, the whole thing worked.

I know it does not always appear that way. I have trained myself to be engaging in public. That training did not happen overnight — it was a deliberate, slightly uncomfortable process that took years of forcing myself into situations I would rather have avoided.

I can walk into a room, meet strangers, hold conversations, and generate energy that looks effortless from the outside.

The inside is a different story. The inside is counting the hours until I can close the door and be quiet.

I am telling you this because I want to be clear about something. When I tell you networking is one of the highest-leverage activities in business, I am saying that as someone who finds it genuinely costly — someone who had to actively train himself to be functional in rooms full of strangers, and who still pays for it afterward with a week of recovery. I do it anyway because the math is undeniable.

Before we go any further…

Most people chase the sexy online business models. They want to start private label products and personal brands…

So they burn through their budget, which was hundreds of hours, and quit before they ever make a dollar.

My buddy Luke has been making money online for over 20 years, and his company is on the Inc 5000 list. 

He's helped absolute beginners collectively make millions of dollars using a method so unglamorous that most people overlook it completely.

He flips used textbooks on Amazon.

His student Randy has done over $5 million. Seth from the UK has done over $3.6 million working two to three hours per day. Patrick started as a broke college student with a maxed-out credit card and has done over $500,000.

We just recorded a training where we walk through three different ways to make $10,000 per month flipping books. We show each method live so you can see which one will work best for you…

And they all work without a website, email list, ads, or any content creating.

The replay comes down soon, so I urge you to check it out now:

Now, as I was saying…

Here is how I think about it.

Every person you meet is a handshake. Some handshakes lead directly to something useful — a joint venture partner, a referral, a project, a deal.

Many go nowhere immediately, and that is fine, because the handshake is never just one step. It is the beginning of a chain. The person who does not obviously connect to what you do right now might know someone who does. Or might become relevant in ways you cannot predict from a single conversation.

At that WebinarCon, I met a man who sells physical products on Amazon. On the surface, nothing there connected to my world. Email marketing, affiliate offers, list building — none of that overlapped with his business in any obvious way. I could have written off the conversation the moment I understood what he did.

Instead, I met him again the following week. Because he was at WebinarCon, which meant he was at least tangentially connected to the webinar world. Which meant he likely knew people who taught e-commerce. Which meant some of those people might make excellent joint venture partners for what I do.

Two handshakes from someone who appeared, on first meeting, to have nothing to offer.

That same week, I got on a call with a copywriter. As of that conversation, we could not see a clear path to working together. The projects did not line up. The timing was off.

He went on my shortlist that same evening.

A few months later, a project came up where I needed a copywriter. I opened the list, found his name, and sent one message: remember we spoke earlier this year? I have something I think might be a fit. The conversation that appeared to go nowhere became the one that saved me weeks of searching for someone I could trust with the work.

This is what most people miss when they decide networking is not worth their time. They evaluate every connection by its immediate, visible return. No deal on the table right now means the conversation was wasted. (It means the opposite, actually — the conversation is now an asset sitting in the background, compounding quietly.)

The return is not immediate. It is delayed and then disproportionate.

None of this means you must network the way I did, or do it at all. If your business runs entirely on cold traffic and affiliate platforms, you can build something real without ever attending a conference. Even then — and I say this to people who tell me they genuinely hate events — building relationships with account managers at affiliate platforms, knowing which suppliers other sellers trust, understanding who the top performers in your space actually are: that is networking. You are just doing it in a narrower lane.

The question is never whether to network. The question is who to target and why.

If you are looking for joint venture partners, spend time where JV partners gather. If you need a media buyer, find the rooms where the best media buyers compare notes. If you want to understand what is actually working in your space, show up where the people doing the work talk to each other. Strategic targeting turns a vague social activity into a pipeline with a clear input and a predictable output.

I flew out for something like WebinarCon once a year, maybe. The cost was too high — not in dollars, in recovery time. Most of my networking happened virtually, or in smaller settings where the energy expenditure was manageable for someone built the way I am.

Every single time I did this, without exception, something eventually came from it. A deal, a referral, a person on a shortlist who got the call when the right project finally landed.

I have never yet met anyone in business whose life would not have been improved by a stronger, more strategic network.

I just have not seen the exception yet.

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