Email Valhalla Archives - Alex Van Dromme

Licensing is the new black

May 3, 2025April 22, 2025 by Alex Van Dromme

Today I finished crafting a licensing deal.

With that I mean, an agreement where I license the rights to a product someone else made. Either by outright buying the rights to the course, paying them a monthly retainer, sharing a percentage of the profit, or some other form of payment we agreed on.

Doing so allows me to offer many more products than I could create on my own, and serve a much wider range of audiences than would be possible for me to do by myself.

For some reason, even though I’ve been working for myself for over two years already, this is one of those things that makes me feel like I’m running an “actual” business, instead of a glorified side-hustle. There’s something about working together with other people, bundling your strengths, and generating more value for your customers than either of you could do on your own, all the while still keeping your independence and working for yourself, that makes it feel more “business” like and more like I’m actually contributing value to society.

I also thought doing such types of deals was out of my league.

But I’ve spent a lot of time this month learning about all of this licensing stuff, including how to negotiate and what kind of agreements are possible and extremely profitable for both parties involved.

The more I looked into it, the more I realized making these types of deals is a win-win situation for everyone involved.

I’m definitely no expert yet. But I’ll keep learning more about this side of the business.

And no worries, I’ll share a lot of my findings here with you as I gain more experience.

For now, feel free to check out my flagship course Email Valhalla here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla/

I’m always breaking stuff

April 21, 2025April 19, 2025 by Alex Van Dromme

I got a new guitar yesterday. A classical guitar, to be precise.

I’ve always been more of a piano man than a guitar player. But I did enjoy playing the occasional flamenco. Or even the blues.

Not that I was any good at either one of them. But I enjoyed it.

Anyway, the guitar wasn’t tuned quite right when I received it. So I went ahead and started tuning the strings. Except, I immediately snapped on right of the bat. And, as I haven’t had a guitar in quite a while, I don’t own any reserve strings.

So I still don’t have a working guitar to play on for now.

Maybe this is the universe trying to tell me not to even bother playing the guitar. Or maybe, and I think this explanation is just a tad more likely, just maybe, I simple break a lot of things.

Especially things I’m not that experienced with yet.

Maybe that’s just how life’s supposed to go.

Maybe breaking stuff is simply the best way to learn and to improve at stuff. If that’s so, than I do a lot of improving. Because boy let me tell you how often I break, or more generally speaking, fail at all kinds of stuff.

Let’s take writing these daily emails for example.

I failed at so many of them early on. I think I didn’t even make a single sale in my first 200 emails or so. But, as things always tend to go, the more emails I wrote, the better I got at doing so, and the more entertaining my emails became, the bigger a list I started growing, and the more sales I started making.

But maybe, just maybe, you don’t enjoy the idea of having to write 200 emails that suck before getting somewhat decent at it.

If so, I highly suggest you to check out my flagship course, Email Valhalla, where I’ll teach you what it took me over 200 emails to find out, so you can hopefully skip most of the failure and start right at the spot where things start to come together.

Click here to learn more: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla/

Why does everyone focus on the wrong part of creating ads?

April 21, 2025April 18, 2025 by Alex Van Dromme

I finished writing another module of my paid ads course today.

This particular module might very well be the one many people on my list might be the most excited about. Especially because it’s the one topic so many people seem to dread where they have no idea how to even go about it.

In fact, almost anyone I’ve ever spoken with about this seems to spend most of their time worrying about this very topic… even though, it barely matters!

You might be shocked to hear that I’m talking about… writing the body copy for your ad!!

That’s right, I said it.

The body copy of your ad barely matters. It only affects about 20%, if even that much, of the total effectiveness of your ad. Much more important than the copy is the image (or video) and the big idea behind what you’re selling.

Yet so many people seem to flip this on it’s head…

They only care a tiny bit about the big idea. They barely think about the creative at all—for most who enter the advertising game, creatives are only an afterthought, and spend all their time writing and coming up with clever ways to write their copy, trying to sell the customer, who, let me remind you, is mindlessly scrolling on Facebook before they see your ad, not even thinking about anything else but the copy!

That’s the complete opposite of how you want to approach creating your ads.

Anyway, enough judging about what other people spend their time on. I trust you know better.

Speaking of spending your time on what really matters… While you’re waiting to buy my paid ads course which I’ll be releasing soon, why don’t you check out Email Valhalla?

You can do so here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla/

David Ogilvy’s 13 predictions about the future of advertising

April 14, 2025April 13, 2025 by Alex Van Dromme

The final chapter of Ogilvy on Advertising is titled “I predict 13 changes”. As the name might suggest, in it David Ogilvy listed 13 changes related to advertising he thought would occur in the future.

Ogilvy wrote the book in 1983, which means we’re already 42 years into the future, so let’s take a look at some of those predictions, shall we?

Some of them aged like fine wine. Others not so much.

One of the best predictions reads, “There will be a vast increase in the use of advertising by governments for purposes of education, particularly health education.”

I’m not sure how much I agree on the health education aspect, but there’s definitely a big increase in government advertising—an overall good thing to see.

One of my personal favorite prediction reads, “There will be a renaissance in print advertising”. While, as far as I’m aware, this is far from the case—many businesses still overlook print advertising, at least in the form of direct-response advertising (the only exception is B2B advertising, for which direct mail is still being used a ton)—I do feel a movement popping up of people going back to print advertising, particularly direct mail, even direct-response newspaper ads such as the infamous advertorial.

This might just be because that’s what I personally want to see and I’m living in my own bubble. But still, let me have it for now.

Here are a few fun ones that didn’t pan out as expected:

===

“Advertising will play a part in bringing the population explosion under control”

“Candidates for political office will stop using dishonest advertising”

“Direct-response advertising will cease to be a separate specialty, and will be folded into the ‘general’ agencies”

“Advertising will contain more information and less hot air”

===

The first one, ironically, did happen… only to cause worlwide major underpopulation issue requring government bodies to spend tons of money encouraging people to have more children.

But I’ll let you be the judge of those other three.

As for the last one, that might just be a good sign for you. Most advertisements you see today are nothing more than hot air. Just some branding, a vague slogan, a few nice pictures, quite often some random celebrity to associate with the product (which has been proven to be less effective for over 50 years already), and sometimes the price, or more precisely, a discount…

Yet no or very little information about the product to be found (note: I’m not speaking bad about brand awareness campaigns major multinationals like you see Coca-Cola or Redbull doing—they’replaying a different game)

So what’s, the good news?

Well, that just means there’s less competition for you to create high-converting direct-response style ads that sell.

And one, maybe less intuitive, way I found helpful to teach me how to write better information-rich ads that convert is by writing daily emails. Writing these emails forces me to, well… write. But do it in an engaging, fun, and informational way that keeps people reading day after day. Even if people live busy lives and I have to compete for their attention with all the other unread emails in their emails, forcing me even more to grab their attention straight away without letting go.

So while I can’t promise you’ll be writing killer ads starting tomorrow, you might just find learning to write engaging daily emails a worthwhile skill to get better at.

If so, consider checking out my flagship course which teaches you all about it.

Click here for more information: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla/

Should you be afraid to fail?

April 8, 2025April 4, 2025 by Alex Van Dromme

Fear of failure is the biggest cause of failure.

I’ve come to realize that to succeed at anything, you have to be willing to fail. Even better if you’re willing to fail fast and fail often. When learning something new, no matter what it may be, there’s simply no way around failing. Failing is as critical to success as getting an A+ is to a Chinese kid to be respected by his parents (or so I’ve heard—I’m not Chinese).

Let’s do a though experiment real quick:

Image you wanted to become successful at or in something, whatever that means to you. And let’s also assume, as would most likely be the case, that you aren’t that good yet at whatever it is you want to get good at when you first start out. In fact, let’s assume you suck, you have no natural talent at all.

Now, in order to get to where you want to be, you need to improve, of course. But how do you improve? Do you improve by doing the same thing over and over again, always successful, always without fail? That’s not really improving then, is it? That’s staying where you are. And, as we so axiomatically assumed, you started at the very bottom, the worse you could possibly be. So, by simple logic, we have to conclude that by NOT failing at something—not making mistakes and staying at the same proficiency you were already at from the start—it’s logically impossible to improve… Because improving means you were better than you were before, which requires a benchmark of growth, aka your “better” than you were before, which implies that you were “worse” in the past than you are now, which in turn, implies the version of you in the past made mistakes.

We can therefore conclude that success requires proficiency, which requires improvement, which requires a “better” and a “worse” version of you at some points in time, which finally implies a certain degree of “failure” for certain benchmarks.

And there you have it. A completely over-the-top, almost redundant, and way too complicated method—which probably none of it was necessary for you to believe what I was saying—to prove the necessity for failure in order to achieve success.

While we’re at it…

Maybe you enjoyed this email. That would be nice to hear. But then again, maybe you didn’t. In that case, I just failed at writing a fun and engaging email. And by realizing this failure I might just be able to learn yet another way, another method, another approach that does NOT work when it comes to writing engaging daily emails people like and keeps my readers reading day after day.

Which means that whatever the case may be, it’s a win in my book.

If you’d like to improve at your own email writing game, perhaps with just a tad bit less required failure than doing it on your own and trying out weird emails like I’m doing right now, then you might just be interested in my flagship course, Email Valhalla.

Check it out here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla/

I might not be the person I thought I was

April 8, 2025April 2, 2025 by Alex Van Dromme

If you’ve ever taken a personality test before, you may have been asked a question such as “do you enjoy following a routine?”

I, for as long as I can remember, would always answer ‘no’ to that question. I never liked to follow a routine. Give me the feel of unbounded freedom. Give me a purpose, some tasks I need to accomplish and then just let me do whatever I feel like doing at that time, in whatever order I desire, based on nothing but pure intuition and “willingness to act”.

In fact, I adapted a similar system for reading as well.

At any one time I would be reading 8 to 12 different books, perfect for moments when I want to read but don’t feel like reading that one particular book, so I just pick up another one.

For some people a free, completely unregulated, routine-less schedule, able to fill in however you like, would be total chaos. For me, it’s heaven…

Or at least it was…

Not that it’s not anymore. A system like that sounds lovely. But as I look more closely at what I do, how I spend my time, and most importantly, how I decide what to do and how to do it, I find I’m, more than ever before, sticking to the same fixed routine day-in, day out.

I wake up at the same time every day. I take a walk at the same time every day. I even walk the same route every day. I work, eat, relax, write, read, learn, workout, and sleep at almost the same time every single day. I still, at the time of writing this email right now, have exactly 12 books on my “currently reading” shelf… but about 8 of those haven’t been opened for quite a while because I find myself focusing on reading the same 2–3 books until I’ve finished them before moving on to the next.

So did I change my preference?

Or did I always enjoy following a routine, yet never realized it because the allure of a “chaotic day without artificial barriers and obligations” sounded like something straight out of a fairytale for me?

Who knows.

All I can say is that having these routines in place made me much more productive than I’ve ever been before. And sure I do miss certain days. I do “mess up” my routine occassionally—don’t we all? But the thought, the intention, and the schedule is there. And so is the execution of the plan and most days of the year.

Occassionally I also like to switch it up. Throw the routine out the window, see what happens. Nine times out of ten, the quality of everything I do worsens… yet I still like doing it for some reason.

I fear I’ll never understand why…

Something I do understand however, is that writing and sending daily emails people love to read and buy from is a great way to strengthen your relationship with your readers, improve your writing skills at the fastest possible rate, and, generally speaking, is far from the worst thing you could try to improve your business success.

So if you’d like to learn more about that, then check out my flagship course, Email Valhalla, right here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla/

Open for the best April Fools joke ever

April 8, 2025April 1, 2025 by Alex Van Dromme

April Fools!

Ha! I got you real good man. There’s no April Fools joke to be found in this email! Look at you now. I really fooled you now, didn’t I? You really expected an April Fools joke in this email! And not just any old joke. You really expected the best one ever??

Little did you know there was no April Fools joke to be found at all!

Wait…

Anyway.

While I probably won’t be winning any comedy awards anytime soon, I might just be able to teach you how to turn your otherwise bland and boring emails into engaging ones, at least at a passable level that keeps your readers reading day after day.

You might even start making some sales as well while you’re at it.

Click here to learn all about it: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla/

On book-cleaning duty

March 31, 2025March 27, 2025 by Alex Van Dromme

Just the other day I was cleaning my wishlist for future books to buy and read.

And with ‘cleaning’ I mean deleting all of the overrated junk books I added to that list over 2 years ago when I didn’t know what actual good quality books—both fiction and non-fiction—looked like and I purely followed whatever was hot at the time or whatever the “top 10 books to read” listicle of the month was being shared on Twitter.

That’s how I ended up with books such as Think and Grow Rich, Atomic Habits, The 48 Laws of Power, How to Win Friends & Influence People, The Four Agreements, The Daily Stoic, and many, many others like it on my bookshelf.

Some of them I read, some of them I only read a few pages before dumping them and moving on to the next.

But all in all, I’m glad to be able to remove all of these books from my wishlist and to recognize the quality of the books I once read, and sometimes even adored, in the past. It shows me how much I’ve grown. How much I’ve learned and come to realize what matters and what doesn’t. And most importantly, how much I’ve trained my bullshit, or in kinder words, my flawed-argument-aimed-at-a-mass-market-audience detector.

Now, I have no idea how many books I removed or how many were on my list when I started—I didn’t check.

But I do know how many I’ve got on my wishlist right now… over 500 books!

Just to give some perspective: I only really started reading, collecting, and wishlisting books in the past 2 years or so and my current collection of books in my bookshelf is just shy of a 100.

I might have said this before, but if you would’ve told me about this just 3–4 years ago I would’ve called you crazy. Me? Reading books daily? And having a ginormous list of books I want to read??

Truly absurd.

Anyway. I don’t really know where I’m going with this except for sharing a fun and perhaps insightful anecdote about your ability to predict to future.

As for another future prediction I feel a lot more confident in than the knowledge of what I’ll enjoy doing in 5 years time: despite people saying email has been dead for years and years now, email doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere. In fact, even with Google’s latest announcement of making it easier for people to check their current email subscriptions all in one place, and allowing them to easily unsubscribe, this will only make it so much more lucrative for people who know what they’re doing, who write engaging emails people want to read, and who aren’t seen as yet another newsletter filling their inbox with spam.

As time goes on, the competition will only get smaller.

So now might just be a great time to improve your email writing ability and prepare for what’s to come in a way that’s all but guaranteed to grow your skillset, your business, and your wallet.

To do so, check out my flagship course, Email Valhalla, right here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla/

Let this email be an important reminder for you about the power of effort

March 24, 2025March 23, 2025 by Alex Van Dromme

I’ve written about consistency a lot in the (not-so-recent) past.

And when looking back, I have to admit: I’ve been losing mine. The reasons for this are plentiful, but if I had to pick just one or two, it’d have to be because of the many new projects I’ve been juggling at the same time while simultaneously not being as motivated, or for a better word, excited, about many of them.

It’s not that I don’t care about these projects—on the contrary.

Instead, it’s because I stopped putting in as much effort as I once did. I tried to do more while doing less, instead of accepting the reality that trying to do more at once means I’ll have to put in even more effort into everything I do.

There’s no “this thing can wait because I’m working on something else right now”.

No.

That diversion of focus snowballs into the next day, and the next, and the next, and before you know it you’ve been half-assing your work, finding shortcuts wherever you can, losing momentum, and getting a whole lot less done than you were if you simply stuck to just doing one thing—but doing it well.

As seasoned readers of mine know, I’m equally speaking to you, my reader, as I am having a conversation with myself. One that’s true, honest, transparent, and highly necessary—a practice I may or may not have neglected for too long.

With that said.

From now on, you can expect a lot more effort from me in my writing once again. You might even speak of a resurgence or revival of my writing where I’m going back to creating with the same rigor, passion, and effort that I did before.

You may also expect a new release of offers soon—something I haven’t done for many months now. I won’t reveal what those new creations are just yet. But know, if all goes as planned, they’ll be crafted with even more passion and effort than before.

I hope this message is a welcome reminder in your inbox of something vitally important.

In the meantime, my opinion about the power of email as a medium still remains unchanged. If anything, it has only gotten stronger. So I can only recommend you to check out Email Valhalla if you’d like to learn how to write highly engaging emails people love to read and buy from.

Check it out here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla/