I’m a big fan of Avatar by James Cameron.

The film with the blue people. Not the series about the 4 types of benders, although I love that one as well.

I’ve been a big fan of the first film ever since it released in 2009. I still remember how hyped 9-year-old Alex was after first seeing the film. The whole film was set in such a lively world, the universe was constructed perfectly, and an insane amount of money went into production, mostly toward world-building.

It was mind-blowing how amazing of an experience it was to watch that movie for the first time on the big screen. It truly was a moment I could experience for a second time.

So when the second film Avatar: The Way of Water released late 2022, I just I had to see it. And so I did. It was a good and entertaining film, don’t get me wrong. But it wasn’t a masterpiece.

Far from it.

The visuals were there. The world was, once again, amazing. The music, oh don’t get me started on the music. If you know me, then you already know how much I can geek out over film music. I truly love the music. They did a great job with that.

But it’s the story that felt flat for me. The writing could’ve been a lot better.

And there are a lot of improvements to be made. From pacing to consistency, plotholes, and overall dialogue. But that’s not what I’ll be talking about today.

Let me also add how it wasn’t all bad. There was a lot of good writing as well. Wordbuilding, especially creating a believable world, takes good writing, and they nailed that one.

But the thing that troubles me is this.

You should know that James Cameron made the series into a political commentary.

The argument Cameron makes is how bad greed and consumerism have gotten in today’s day and age, as represented by the humans in the film. And how we should reconnect and live in harmony with nature like the Na’vi are doing.

The human faction wants to destroy everything that lives and breathes on Pandora (the planet where the Na’vi lives) so that they can mine a rare and valuable ore that’s suitably called ‘unobtanium’. And they’re doing all of this purely for profit.

Now. here’s the thing. Consumerism is having an enormous effect on the planet. Animal species are going extinct. Lots of beautiful places on Earth are being destroyed. We aren’t in tune with nature anymore. Most people don’t even blink when they hear that another 1,000 new animal species are now endangered.

There’s nothing wrong there. And many people agree with those statements. It seems like the messaging Cameron made in Avatar should resonate with people—except it didn’t.

And that’s because of the bad writing.

The short story is this: Avatar is propaganda. Let me explain.

Here’s the definition of propaganda: “information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view.”

James Cameron’s Avatar is highly biased because the problem isn’t being explored well enough.

Let’s look at some examples:

• All humans (except for the 4 main characters or something) are pure evil, don’t have any regard for nature or animal lives and gladly engage in killing and genocide

• All Na’vi are perfect, virtuous, and noble creatures. Nobody does anything wrong and they all work together as one harmonious group in tune with nature and morally superior.

• The only reason humans want the unobtanium is for pure profit and nothing else

James Cameron makes shows his message yes, but he doesn’t explore it. He shows the good things about the Na’vi, and the bad side of the humans. He entirely disregards the bad side of the Na’vi and the good side of the humans.

Imagine these situations:

• The humans still kill and do everything for unobtanium, but instead of doing it for pure profit, they need it to save the Earth or keep their space fleets (and all the people on it) alive

• The Na’vi are still in tune with nature and protect both fauna and flora as good as possible, but they sometimes attack other Na’vi tribes and take prisoners to turn them into slaves

That’s what exploring is. You take an idea and you fully explore both sides. The good and the bad.

Because right now? It’s simply too perfect. The audience can’t relate. People think that when something seems too perfect and has 0 flaws whatsoever, it’s probably fake. And rightly so, that’s what you should think.

This is the audience’s objection to Cameron’s idea. An objection to what he’s trying to sell them. An objection to his offer.

And this isn’t unique to political commentaries or films. This is a true objection to every single offer out there. Even to yours.

How do you solve that objection?

Be honest, be transparent. Your offer probably isn’t for everyone. It won’t magically solve all their problems. So just say so.

Tell people what your product does good and who it’s for, but also routinely mention who shouldn’t buy your offer. What your offer doesn’t help people do and where it potentially lacks a bit.

If you want to sell your offer, then it helps to point out the flaws. After all, nobody buys something that’s trying to come across as perfect.

Something else that helps you if you want to sell your offer, especially if you want to sell it through email, is my Email Valhalla.

I’m not going to tell you what’s so great about it and how you can easily get paid every single day by writing simple emails and keeping your readers engaged.

No. Instead let me tell you who this isn’t for.

This isn’t for you if you don’t like to write. My system relies on writing. I send emails every single day. If you merely tolerate writing and only want to send an email once a week, then this isn’t for you.

It also won’t teach you how to set up email sequences. That’s not what it’s about.

First of all, I don’t use any email sequences myself, not yet at least. I don’t have experience with it, let alone gotten results with sequences. So I won’t act like I know all about it. With that said, you’ll find 0 modules, tips, tricks, or anything else related to email sequences.

This isn’t a one-and-done system. It’s not an “automated cash machine” and “get rich quick” course, a marketing angle other creators like to embrace when it comes to email courses.

No it’s none of that. It’s the most important methods, frameworks, and rules/guidelines of selling through email. It teaches you the fundamentals in a clear and step-by-step manner that I haven’t seen other courses do.

It allows you to make money every single day through writing emails that take you 20 minutes to write, grow your list, keep your readers engaged, and live a free life. No hassle, no “money while you sleep”, no fancy stuff.

If that doesn’t sound like anything for you, then don’t get it.

If it does sound interesting to you, then check it out here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla

Let’s jump straight into it:

• Your job isn’t to educate, it’s to entertain & promote

• Email daily—nobody ever made less money by more frequently speaking to their customers, entertaining them, and letting them know about your offers

• Don’t be boring—being boring is the biggest sin in all of marketing

• Screw perfection, embrace your flawed self

• Actively try to find the limits of everything you do (and see whether you can cross them)

• Nobody likes an expert as they do a leader

• Write like you talk—accent, grammar mistakes, and typical speech patterns alike

• Share stories and share’em often

• Answer the questions you receive publicly

• Be a real person, share your opinions (especially, but not limited to, the controversial ones)

• Join the Email Valhalla supremacist fangroup.

Every single one of these has made me more than you could ever imagine.

But who am I to tell you what to do?

So as with anything, test them out for yourself and see how it goes.

And about that last one…

…more information about Email Valhalla, and how to build a better email business, can be found here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla

The more I experiment with creating and running ads, the more I’ve come to realize that most people have come to hate (or at least severely dislike) regular advertising.

Not just because of all the grifters and used car salesmen out there.

But mainly because there’s advertising everywhere you look. People simply can’t escape it anymore—and most of that advertising is boring at best and outrageously disastrous at worst.

See, when it comes to ads that perform, you’ll want to do two things:

1) Entertain

2) Inform

Most ads fail to do either.

Those who succeed in one of them focus way too much on it, so much so that they completely forget and disregard the other.

Yet, there’s an easy trick to get it right without even having to think about it (or even looking at it as “creating an ad”).

The trick?

To use the same principles for your ads as you’d use when it comes to creating high-performing content—which is something a lot more people are able to get right and, definitely not unimportant, you can easily practice without having to spend a single penny.

Think about it this way:

What is an ad if not one of your best-performing pieces of content?

Either way.

While I haven’t got a course for you on how to create, run, and manage high-performing ads to boost your business (it is, however, in the making and will be here sooner than you think). I do have a course helping you pump out tons of emails which are (you guessed it) highly entertaining AND informative which will make you sales and keep your readers reading day after day.

Click here if you’d like to learn more about that: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla

You want freedom over your time.

You want the freedom to work from wherever you want, with whomever you want, whenever you want, and on whatever you want.

But that doesn’t mean sitting on the beach all day drinking cocktails all day.

That gets boring quickly.

No, you do want to work. But you want work that allows for creative self-expression and interesting challenges to overcome. To keep pushing yourself further, to achieve more today than you achieved yesterday.

As the old adage says, it’s about the journey, not the destination—yet it never feels as such.

In short.

You don’t want less work.

You want less meaningless work so you can replace that time with more meaningful work. You might not even call it “work” anymore when it comes down to it.

But that’s what it is.

Work you truly and utterly enjoy doing.

And the only way to get there, and more importantly, stay there, in my humble and accurate opinion, is to start building something of your own. Develop your own skillset, build your own offers, grow your own customer base, and become your own employer (this includes working as a freelancer if that’s what you enjoy most).

Then, and only then, when you’re truly free to work on whatever you want while getting paid more than enough—which is only to rid yourself of all the symptoms that come with not being paid enough, not the goal in and of itself—then and only then will you truly live the life you’ve always dreamt of living, even if you don’t realize it yet.

You don’t want money.

You want the freedom of self-expression and meaningful work.

So stop wasting any more time and get to it.

And if I can recommend you an immensely valuable skill to learn that’ll be incredibly useful to you, no matter what path you’re going down, then it’ll be to learn and master the fundamentals of marketing, and more importantly, email marketing. Because that’s going to enable everything else you’ll be doing.

Anyway.

To learn more about my solution to master email marketing fundamentals, check out Email Valhalla here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla

In the year 2000, two French researchers wanted to know if they could influence the likeness of someone agreeing to your request using just a few specially encoded words.

The exact experiment went as follows:

They would go around to random people on the street and ask for bus fare, telling them they didn’t have any. Remind you, they were total strangers. But there’s a twist. They thought they could increase how much money people received by using a few words at the end of their ask.

And they succeeded.

They discovered a technique so simple and effective that it doubled the amount of bus fare people would give them.

From then on, this technique has been used—with an incredible success rate—by salesmen, charities, voluntary surveys, and many more over the last 2 decades.

Let me repeat this.

There is a set of simple words, no more than 4 words actually, that can literally double the likeliness of people saying yes to whatever you ask them.

I don’t know about you, but that’s insane.

And what’s more insane? All of us can use it immediately. Today even.

You could start using it directly after reading this email and get double the amount of clients you would otherwise. I’m not even joking about this. This is absolute fact, something that’s been recorded in over 42 studies with over 22,000(!) participants. And it turned out to be true every single time.

Hell you could even stop reading any of my emails right after I tell you those 4 simple words, you don’t have to read another email in your life, and you’ll be on your way to double the amount of yesses you’ll get for life.

(Please do keep reading my emails, I enjoy you being on my list. But you are free to leave or to keep reading of course.)

You’re probably interested in knowing those magic—trust, me, they’re magical, 4 words by now, right?

Well ok. I won’t keep teasing you anymore.

Here are the magic words these researchers used in their own experiment, “But you are free to accept or refuse.”

That’s it. So simple.

This is called the “but you are free” technique. And you can use it however you want, whenever you want, and wherever you want. It’s that powerful.

Why does this work?

Well, it’s because people are more likely to be persuaded to give when your ability to choose is reaffirmed. People like to be in control. And they always are. But it doesn’t always feel that way. So show them, tell them, make sure they realize they really are free to choose whether to accept or decline, they are the ones in control.

You’ll quickly notice that when people realize this, they’ll gladly say yes to your requests.

There’s even something more crazy.

The “but you are free” technique doesn’t just apply to face-to-face conversations. No, no. It even works on the phone, via text messages, and yes, even through email.

And talking about email.

Maybe this is the perfect time for you to start building your list. To start sending more emails, to build more products and sell them through your emails, or even just to get more clients for your service business.

Whatever it is. Email will help you achieve more and get you paid more reliably and consistently.

In that case, you should check out my course Email Valhalla. But of course, you are free to accept or refuse.

Here’s the link: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla

At least not your ideal customers.

For one, everything useful can be found online for free. There’s no arguing about that. Even more. Your customers, your readers, and almost everyone else in the market already know the most useful pieces of information.

So people aren’t buying value.

They’re buying adventure, cool tips and tricks, exciting so-called “secrets”(which are nothing more than gimmicks that only make up 1%–2% of the outcome—and which won’t help anyone who doesn’t already have the foundation down), and most importantly, they buy a new perspective, or in other words, new insights.

This is what those “give everything away for free” people are missing (what’s free isn’t being valued, let alone used and implemented) as well as the people who swear you need to hard teach, educate, and share as much “value” as you possible can.

Spoiler, you don’t.

Just take a look at my emails (or anyone else running a successful business you admire for that matter). I’m not teaching you how to do stuff (at least not for free).

I’m sharing tips with you every single day, yes.

But not about how to do something.

I’m sharing tips about what to think about, how to look at the things going on in your market, new ways you might consider approaching opportunities you have, or other insightful realizations that lead you towards better knowing what to focus on (as opposed to a step-by-step plan on how to do something).

Speaking about how-to content.

If, by any chance (no idea why that would happen), you made the realization, or gotten the insights, that, perhaps, building a list and writing daily emails to better build a relationship with your ideal customer, write better, more targeted content, and sell more high-quality products, and getting thanked for it by your customer, if you realized that might be a good way to go about things…

Then do check out Email Valhalla where I do indeed teach more about the exact steps you can take to do exactly that.

Tickles your fancy?

Then check out Email Valhalla here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla

It saddens me to see how people mistreat their email lists.

See, I’m subscribed to a bunch of email lists. Most of them because of the content, value, and entertainment. But a few of them simply because of the people who write them.

They’re either friends of mine or they are other “successful” people who I want to see what they’re doing.

And so many people just disappoint me. Yes, even the “successful” people.

Sure, they might be successful with their Twitter growth or the money they make selling their offers. But that sure as hell doesn’t mean they know what they’re doing when it comes to email marketing.

And it shows.

Some of those people send me a few emails a week, sporadically.

No consistency at all.

One week I might get 2 emails, then none the following week, and then 3 emails the week after. Now although I don’t agree with their method and their chaos. That’s not the worst part.

The worst part is the content of those emails.

“Hey, my course is live, check it out!”, reads one email. Another one reads, “Hey I made this guide for some of my clients, I thought I’d share it with you as well, cheers.” And then yet another one reads, “My client Bob made $5k because of my awesome super magical and out-of-this-world coaching skills, which nobody else can do and he sure as hell couldn’t have done it without me. So get my coaching as well if you want similar results (even though you probably won’t)”.

It’s thrash.

Ok not all the emails I get are that awful.

Some do have something going for them. At least for the first few you get. But after the first 3 emails, you’ll realize that every single email is exactly the same. There’s no variation to it. They’re like a cooked piece of chicken without any spices.

Bland & boring.

I’m not here to bash these people. I sincerely wish them good luck in their business. But I hope that they pick up their email game soon and improve their craft. Because they’re missing out on a bunch of cash, credibility, authority, and growth.

The good news?

You won’t make any of these mistakes. You’re on my email list after all. You should know better.

Taking it even further.

I’ve taken it upon myself to teach people how to actually write emails that get you paid. How not to be the proverbial piece of chicken. How to stand out, not be boring, and how to keep your readers engaged so they keep coming back every single day and just love to buy from you.

And I’m teaching all of it in my flagship course Email Valhalla.

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

Here’s something I heard the other day:

===

There’s 8 billion people on Earth.

1.4 billion are Chinese.

You could then argue that about 1 in 5 (rounded down for simplicity) children born are Chinese.

So statistically speaking, you could say that if you’ve got 4 kids and you’re expecting a 5th, it will be Chinese.

===

Now that silly little joke might not be all that useful.

But let’s think about some other statistics:

There are over 2 million podcasts.

Yet 90% of them never created more than 3 episodes (that’s 1.8 million gone already).

Even more.

99% of podcasts quit before their 21st episode.

So all you have to do is to publish 21 episodes to get into the top 1% of podcasts.

Think the top 1% isn’t good enough?

Here’s some other statistics:

The top 8% of bloggers make a full-time living.

The top 8% of YouTube creators make a full-time living

The top 11% of gamers on Twitch make a full-time living.

Now, yes, arguably these first statistics are for podcasts and I’m guessing you’re probably not running a podcast. And these second statistics are for different media so they’re not directly comparable. But I guarantee you that these numbers will look almost identical no matter what medium, market, or niche you look at (assuming it’s easy for newcomers to join the market, as it is with creator markets).

Point in case.

We’re currently—without a doubt—in a newsletter bubble. With millions upon millions starting and writing their own newsletters (even more than there are podcasts).

So how many of those do you think will get past 52 editions (I’m assuming a weekly newsletter because that’s what seems to be most popular)?

Hell, how many people do you think will even make it past 10 editions?

See, most people quit way too easily.

And one of the main reasons people quit is a lack of results early on.

Which is actually an easier problem to fix than you might think.

The big problem many of these quitters have, aside from not reading my emails, is that they try to figure everything out themselves.

They don’t ask for help. They don’t get support. They’re only looking for free solutions (and we all know ‘free’ is the most expensive option there is). And they think of every transaction as “getting scammed”.

You see, I kind of feel bad for these people. I pity them, I truly do. I also can’t stand their stubbornness and their “know-it-all” attitude.

And I’m allowed to say this because I even used to be one of these people myself when I was younger.

Young, stubborn, and arrogant.

Here’s some slight unrelated advice: never work with these types of people. They’re a pain in the butt and will do you nothing good. I write my posts, emails, landing pages, opt-in pages, welcome email, and everything I can write in such a way to heavily curate and repel these types of people as much as possible.

These know-it-alls simply don’t deserve to be on my list.

And that’s how I know you’re not one of them.

You’re here to learn, to improve, to get better, to invest in yourself and your future. And you sure as hell won’t quit without giving it everything you’ve got.

So with that said.

Maybe you’d like to finally go in and improve your email writing game. If that’s the case then consider checking out Email Valhalla here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla

1. You skip the foundations

2. You play by the rules

3. You’re not building your list

4. You keep getting distracted

5. You’re not making an offer daily

6. You don’t have the right systems in place

7. You’re saying ‘yes’ more than you’re saying ‘no’

8. You blindly copy other people’s methods and frameworks

9. You’ve put all your eggs in one basket you don’t even own (social media)

10. You rather learn the new and shiny tactics than do the obvious thing

11. You’re not selling what people are buying

12. You’re trying to get a yes instead of a no

13. You’re not taking enough responsibility

14. You’re too focused on creating “value!”

15. You’re sharing everything you know

16. As well as giving it away for free

17. You’re underpricing yourself

18. You’re not talking to your customers

19. You’re afraid to offend people

20. You’re also afraid to stand out

21. You’re not writing (enough)

22. You allow everyone to buy from you

23. You’re playing it safe

24. You’re not having fun

25. And lastly, you’re boring

Those are some of the biggest tips (and painful lessons) I’ve learned in recent years.

And if you’d like to learn how to fix some (if not all) of these, then consider checking out Email Valhalla here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla

Once in a while I like to take things easy—i.e., not to take things so seriously, and focusing, first and foremost, on having fun with everything I do.

Which comes with the added benefit (one among many) that this fun can easily be shared with others.

And, as I keep saying so often, I also happen to believe that it's not mere “Value!”, expertise, or credentials that decide the success of a person in their craft (both in business and in life).

But more so the entertainment level they can deliver.

Luckily for me, this is the best of both worlds.

So with that said, that'll be it for today's email. I won't share any other remarks, teach any lessons, or motivate and inspire you (unless I already did in the preamble of this very short email).

Instead, I'll leave you with a funny, relatable, and short (possibly even shorter than this email) video I found on YouTube about the ten stages every author goes through while writing their first book.

And if you just so happen to be writing your first book, let me know what stage you're on right now.

Anyway, check it out right here: https://youtu.be/ImbjaCqOGLk