Hey,

There are two ways to approach email marketing and one of them is dead wrong.

If you focus on numbers vs. people, asks instead of gives, or building funnels over creating community, you're doing it wrong, sorry.

But it’s not either/or.

You can build a thriving community which is powered by slick funnels and monetized up the wazoo. If your overarching focus is on community — genuinely so, and you aren’t just paying lip-service to the idea — then you’ll get the balance right. (In fact, I bet your monetization efforts will outperform the “funnel bros” too.)

Focusing on numbers over people is more insidious because it’s hard to even conceive of the possibility that you made bad choices when your subscriber count is surging.

Getting 5,000 low-quality sign-ups is relatively easy. But getting 500 high quality sign-ups, can be hard — especially when you’re starting out.

But getting 500 readers in your genre to willingly sign up to your newsletter is infinitely better than press ganging 5,000 randoms onto your list.

Once again, though, it’s not either/or.

You can have a big beefy list crammed full of genuine readers with deep engagement. (And there is only one real path to that — and it’s not by playing fast-and-loose with ethics or best practices.)

Maybe you’ll take that medicine easily enough, but the hardest pill to swallow is this: while your mailing list will certainly be your most valuable marketing asset — especially if you do it right — you should never think about it that way when writing a newsletter.

These are people, not emails to be harvested.

These are readers, not a resource to be strip-mined.

Yes, these names on your list might be very useful to you and your career, but never forget they are human beings — with their own hopes and dreams, needs and frustrations.

Having the right attitude costs nothing — except sometimes a little bit of swallowed pride; it’s the shortest path to success too.

Reading Newsletter Ninja by Tammi Labrecque will shortcut the process further for you… if you are open to having your mind changed.

It’s particularly great at teaching a philosophy of email which naturally leads into embracing all the right ideas — instinctively.

I think anyone who wants to get more from their newsletter would benefit from reading it. I wish it had been around in 2011 when I started out; maybe I wouldn’t have wasted 7 years of my career doing almost everything wrong with email.

Regrets, I have a fewwwwwwwwww...

Next time, we’ll talk about the content of those emails — and specifically how that is different for fiction and non-fiction.

Then we will move onto flashier things: ads, growth hacking, monetization, and the best ways to deploy your new, muscular list to dominate the charts on launch day.

If I was selling you something, I’d probably start with the flashbang. But the hard truth is that all the fancier stuff is pretty much pointless unless you start from the right place.

Don’t despair about where you might be with your career, or with email marketing specifically. As I will show you soon, the rewards from getting the stuff right are easily worth the hassle — it’s just so much fun when everything starts to click.

And remember this: it’s never too late to turn that ship around.

I’m living proof.

Dave

P.S. Writing music this week is Billy Idol and Eyes Without A Face.