IN THIS ISSUE
- What two farmers can teach you about your most important digital asset
- What is a digital fence and do you have one?
- The new success recipe that most don’t know about
- What 3 newsletters can you look to for inspiration?
Let’s start with a short story.
Two guys decided to start farms.
The first guy goes out and buys a bunch of cows hoping to turn an immediate profit.
The second guy wants to buy a bunch of cows too but realizes he’s not properly set up. So instead of buying the cows, he builds a massive fence around his pasture.
Then the second guy finally buys his cows.
Meanwhile, the first guy’s cows arrive but slowly wander away from his pasture. He makes income for a while but goes broke when the last cow is gone.
The second guy’s cows—all fenced in—produce income for many, many years.
The Fence
No cows, no income.
Few cows, less income.
It’s important to keep your cows!
Let’s equate the cows from our story to your email list subscribers—your herd!
Let’s say that buying those cows, is the same as attracting subscribers. You probably get these subscribers at no small expense by buying traffic or paying for referrals.
What you do to keep them is your fence. And I think we can all agree that the worst business is one where you constantly have to find new customers—more cows—so you should consider what type of fence is required to keep your cows from wandering off.
Each Week I Share The Latest Digital Builder Tips, Techniques, and Stories:
- Learn Rare Big Ideas
- See Applied Builder Models
- Expand Your Network of Builders (like you).
Your Newsletter as Fence
Long before the rise of the weekly, digital newsletter, Dan Kennedy was recommending the best fence a business owner could build was a powerful monthly newsletter.
A weekly newsletter enables you to get in front of your subscribers and nurture and strengthen the relationship with content that, if done right, they look forward to each week.
As I’ve written in past newsletters, your customer list is your most important asset. Your newsletter is insurance on this valuable asset.
Each newsletter keeps the cows inside the fence.
Circling back to the newsletter where I talked about leverage, each newsletter represents massive time and communication leverage.
One newsletter touches many subscribers!
The New Success Recipe
The success recipe becomes:
- Get new subscribers
- Retain existing subscribers.
Rather than spend most of your time and energy getting new subscribers only to have them wander away, you now spend half or more of your time crafting a great newsletter to keep your existing subscribers.
Essentially, your newsletter is your front-end, but has plenty of income stream possibilities:
- Sponsorships (share those eyeballs)
- Joint venture referrals
- Links to affiliate partners
- Offer delivery for back-end products.
Part of your success recipe should also be the continuous improvement of your newsletter structure and content.
At the moment, I think you should do as I say, not as I do, as this newsletter is not extremely fancy.
To make some improvements, it’s a good idea to see what some of the most successful newsletters are doing. There’s a ton out there to choose from, but here’s a small list:
- Sahil Bloom's - The Curiosity Chronicle
- Contrarian Thinking: Free Your Mind & Build Your Bank Account
- Justin Moore's The Creator Wizard Newsletter
Join 325,000+ others who receive the 2x weekly newsletter, where Sahil provides actionable ideas to help you build a high-performing, healthy, wealthy life.
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Join 300k+ Contrarians on Codie Sanchez's free newsletter and learn the tactics and tools to achieve financial freedom through boring businesses.
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What you’ll notice about those newsletters is that they are highly polished and contained multiple sections or departments. And at the bottom of most newsletters is an offer to make referrals via a SparkLoop link.
Stay tuned to this newsletter to see what I do to improve the production quality of this newsletter, my fence.
Updates
After talking a lot about Twitter last week, I did very little to implement my strategies. Still, I’m up to a whopping count of 4 followers. I’ll try harder next week.
Builder Profiles
I’ve started to add some different content to the website. As this is a site to help aspiring digital asset builders, I thought it would be useful to start building out profiles of fellow builders. Take a look here.
These profiles will eventually resemble case studies for how these builders have done what they’ve done. I have sections for playbooks and toolboxes. I think it’s helpful to know what tools folks use as I evaluate my own choices.
Book Recommendations
As I study fellow builders or take their courses, I often come across the books that influenced these people. I’ve started a section to list these books and have added my reviews.
On the Fence
One last thing about the idea of the fence. Your newsletter is not the only part of your digital fence.
Your fence is all your content, your automation, your nurturing—everything that keeps your herd in your pasture.
Over time you’ll see me building out new parts of the fence, but I’ll try to call them out to help inspire you.
That’s all I’ve got this week, see you next week.
— Bill
P.S. If you liked this newsletter, please consider leaving me a testimonial to help me spread the word.
When you are ready, here are some next steps…
- Pick any of my recommended courses to continue investing in yourself
- Build your digital assets using the tools I recommend in my toolbox.