📰 Getting them on the list is the easy half

For decades I traveled constantly for work. Nights were long, hotel rooms were quiet, and I needed something to do besides watching reruns and eating airport pretzels. So affiliate marketing became my hotel hobby. I was not trying to build a business. I just wanted to fill the evenings with something productive and maybe earn a little on the side. I had no idea it would take years, cost me thousands of dollars, and eventually turn into something real.

By the end of this, you will:

This week I have made the case for a list twice. Tuesday: it is the one thing online that is genuinely close to yours. Thursday: a short guide is what earns you a place in somebody's inbox.

Here is the part I have not said yet, and it is the part that decides everything.

Getting somebody onto a list is the easy half. Staying worth opening is the hard half, and it is not decided by anything clever. It is decided by whether you show up again, in the same way, when nobody is watching and nothing is happening.

That is not a motivational line. It is the whole mechanism.

Pew Research looked at this in February, in a survey of just over five thousand American adults.

Three in ten adults get news from an email newsletter at least sometimes. So inboxes are a real place where people choose to be reached, not a dead channel.

Then the harder number. Among people who do subscribe to newsletters, sixty-two percent say they do not read most of the ones they receive.

Sit with that second figure for a moment, because it is the honest one. Most newsletters go unread by the very people who asked for them. Not because those readers changed their minds, but because most senders stop being worth two minutes.

I find that encouraging rather than discouraging, and here is why. It means the bar is not talent, and it is not a big audience. The bar is consistency, which is the one thing that does not require you to be clever.

You have already done harder things than write one short email.

I wrote a short course called A List of Your Own. It teaches building a small email list without paying for advertising.

What you are building, across the modules, is two things: a place for people to sign up, and a way to send to them without doing it by hand every time. The course uses systeme.io for the sign-up page and the emails, and LeadsLeap for getting the word out. Both are free for everything the course asks of you, and no upgrade is needed at any point. Putting those two together is what makes a genuinely free list possible, because on their own most people end up paying for one side or the other.

Here is the whole arrangement, plainly.

The first three modules are free. Nothing is asked of you, no card, no trial that quietly becomes a charge. Module four onward is seventeen dollars, one time, and that is the only money in it. It comes to me, which you may as well hear from me. Eight modules as it stands, plus a resource section, and anything I add later is included at no extra cost.

Three honest warnings before you start.

The free modules get your list set up, but they stop before the part that actually sends the emails. If you want it working end to end, plan on the seventeen dollars eventually.

There is no refund, and here is the honest reason. The moment you have the password you have the whole course permanently, and I have no way to take it back. So read the three free modules first, and pay only if they have already been worth something to you.

And I earn nothing from you using the free version of either tool. If you ever upgraded one of them I would earn a little, and that is exactly the upgrade I would tell a beginner to skip until you decide you need it.

Module one is one sitting waiting for you. Start there and stop there if you like. Nothing further is asked.

Start with module one →

If you start, you will not have a list this week. You will have the beginning of one, and a clear idea of what the next small step is. Twelve months of small steps is what this looks like. I will not dress that up.

If you do not start, you have lost nothing. The course keeps. The first three modules will still be free next month.

What I will not tell you is what it earns. I do not know, it depends entirely on what you do with it, and anybody who gives you a number for that is guessing or selling.

When I ask what you want more of, the same answer keeps coming back. A little more coming in each month. Nothing dramatic. Just some room.

So when something turned up aimed squarely at that, I looked at it properly.

It is a live three-day training in October called The ClickBank Profit Challenge. A seat is $37 right now, and that price rises on September 7th.

Here is the honest part. I have not taken it. Nobody has – it does not run until October, so anyone telling you it is proven is guessing. What I can tell you is that I am a member of the system it teaches, and it has paid me $357 in my first month.

Their own published figures average about $5.55 per member. So I have earned roughly sixty-four times what the average member has.

Before you read anything encouraging into that, ask why the gap is so wide. The answer is not talent and it is not luck, and it decides whether $37 is money well spent for you or money thrown away. It is the first thing I get into.

→ Read what I found

I earn a commission if you join through my link. It costs you nothing extra – the price is the same either way.

If you open module one, reply with the number one. Just the digit, nothing else. That is all I need to know you started.

And if you read this and decided it is not for you, that is a perfectly good outcome. It is not for everybody, and I would rather you skip it than force it.

See You at the Bank 💰
Bob

A short story from my place – years on the road, and the slow honest search for a way home. No sales in it.