How to grow your list (without social media)

by

Social media is a new thing.

Marketing and sales aren’t.

There have been plenty of ultra-successful marketers selling all sorts of products, services, and even experiences for far longer than social media has been around.

Don’t get trapped in this mindset that social media is the end-all-be-all. The only people who want you to believe that are the ones who want to sell you their social media course.

I’m not saying social media doesn’t work—it does.

But it’s not for everyone and it isn’t your only option.

Realize that, while powerful and useful, social proofis far lower on the ladder of necessity than you might think.

90% of all the ads you see (if not more) don’t use any kind of social proof. They simply make you aware of a problem you might be having, and then offer you a potential solution to said problem.

If the advertiser did his homework, aka he knows what keeps his market up at night, then the problem will be so close to home you can’t help but pay attention to whatever solution the ad might be offering. And if the solution is positioned correctly then you, the customer seeing the ad, will end up buying it.

Regardless of whether you’ve heard of the product before or your next-door neighbor Nancy also happened to have used that same product.

Once your realize this, that’s when countless doors will open for you.

You’ll realize all you have to do is get your product, service, or better yet, yourself (and a plug to your email list—the most valuable asset you’ll ever build and which allows you to create repeat buyers and die-hard fans instead of having to survive on one-time sales) in front of your target audience while talking about their problems or their interests—regardless of what market you’re in (every single product in the entertainment industry solves the “problem” of boredom—which just so happens to be at an all-time high right now; making it the best time ever to grow your entertainment business if you know what you’re doing).

Some possibilities:

  • Run ads on Google, Facebook, Amazon, popular forums, or wherever your target audience hangs out (simple yet effective)

  • Get on podcasts as a guest speaker: start small and build your way up. You won’t get on Joe Rogan’s podcast as a no-name but there are thousands of people with dreams of building a big-name podcasts who just so happen to always have a need for guests to interview. Mention what you’re working on and how that could interest their audience and chances are most, if not everyone, would like to talk to you.

  • Write blog posts, articles, or press releases for online newspapers, other people’s blogs and email lists, internet magazines, or any of the tens of thousands of media outlets all scattered around the internet (most of which are owned by people who dislike writing articles but want to publish as much content as possible so they can make a living off the ad revenue)

  • Message local newspapers, radio shows, or television channels: Most people lead boring lives. So just by building a business or doing something artsy or creative, you instantly become so much more interesting—which is more than entertaining enough for every local media outlet to want to interview you (what’s a better story than the “local celebrity”?)

  • Meet new people and keep an eye out for potential joint-ventures: You’re not alone in your market. Use this to your advantage. Work together with other creatives or entrepreneurs. Ask if they’d be interested in recommending you or your products to their audience if you’d do the same for them (or simply pay them to recommend you).

There’s a lot more where that came from, but this should be more than enough to keep anyone busy for quite a while already.

After all, no amount of information will save you if you never get to implementing things.

So get to it.

Start implementing at least one or two of these and build yourself a big email list.

At that point, you might want to master how to write engaging, entertaining, and persuasive emails that’ll help sell your products while keeping your readers reading day after day as well.

For that, consider checking out Email Valhalla here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla


The purpose of entertainment

by

Henry David Thoreau, the American essayist, poet, and philosopher once wrote:

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”

“For books are not to teach us how to live,” writes Frederic Gros in his book A Philosophy of Walking, “but to make us want to live, to live differently: to find in ourselves the possibility of life, its principle.”

Both Thoreau and Gros argue that true, valuable, and insightful books can only be written when combined with lots and lots of walking.

True walking.

Not the kind you do when you’re out shopping, rushing to get to the train station, or going to the hairdresser around the corner.

True walking is when you’re out in nature without a destination or goal to achieve, with no purpose whatsoever. It’s just you, Mother Nature, and your thoughts. Often for hours on end—even though it’ll only feel like a few minutes at most after you’re done. That’s how time functions when out in the open, connected to the world around you, and without a care in your mind; the flow gets all tangled up and you have no idea how many seconds, minutes, or even hours have passed.

“What’s the point of telling me all this?” you might ask.

Well, it’s simple really.

First, it might be a worthwhile idea to go on more walks, experience life more clearly, and inspire you to write your next masterpiece.

Second, and this is where today’s marketing lesson comes in, the first Thoreau quote I shared helps you answer the question of “What problem does an author solve?”.

To clarify what I mean, take a look at the following quote by famous comic book writer, publisher, and producer, Stan Lee, who single-handedly grew one of the biggest multimedia enterprises to date:

===

“Entertainment is one of the most important things in people's lives. Without it they might go off the deep end. I feel that if you're able to entertain people, you're doing a good thing.”

===

Or in other words, you’re helping people want to live (and live differently).

You can prove this to yourself by looking at people’s expenditures during difficult economic times, filled with doubt, uncertainty, and anxiety. You’d expect people to start saving more and only spending their hard-earned money on basic needs for survival such as food, shelter, hygiene, and transportation.

Instead what you’ll find is, yes people will spend more of their budget on those things (relatively speaking), yet they’ll also start spending a lot more money on entertainment as well.

After all, what good is mere survival without the will to live?

Now, you might nod your head while reading this and think “okay that’s cool”, but not so fast. Because this is truly important news for you to keep in mind as long as you work in the entertainment industry—which, at this point, almost everyone does to a certain extent.

Why?

Because that’s the key to all your marketing!

The big question people always have is “what can you do for me?”, no matter if they’re buying new clothes, booking a vacation, taking a language course, or shopping for new books in their local Barnes & Noble.

You simply cannot succeed in your marketing endeavor if you’re unaware of ‘what you can do for them’, or in other words, ‘what problem you’re solving’—a question that is a lot easier to answer in non-entertainment-related markets.

Speaking of marketing, and more specifically email marketing…

You might want to check out Email Valhalla if that’s something you want to learn more about.

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


The marketing world is changed, I feel it in the water

by

Recent trends in people’s beliefs, skepticism levels, and general outlook at life are changing how to play the game of marketing.

For instance, people have been bombarded with hype, impossible-to-keep promises, ridiculous guarantees, and over-the-top aggressive copy shouting in people’s faces for years now. That would be fine if those marketers could, somehow, keep these otherworldly promises, except, they obviously couldn’t.

And so people have been burned one too many times, and they better know what to expect. In fact, it’s generally true that the more hype, promises, guarantees, aggressive copy, and crazy boasts a sales message has, the worse the end product (or service) is.

Almost no exception.

I’ve been guilty of this myself. I won’t pretend otherwise. Everyone starts somewhere, after all. And proper learning happens through imitation of those that went before you—often in a different time, playing by different rules.

Does this mean there’s nothing to be learned from the old-school marketing legends?

No of course not, after all, we’re all building on top of one another, standing on the shoulder of giants as they say. It’d be stupid to reinvent the wheel every few decades just because the playing field has changed.

You don’t dive straight into the teachings of Schopenhauer without first familiarizing yourself with David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Doing so would be missing the bigger picture, unable to follow along with Schopenhauer and only ‘understanding' superficial arguments and statements, if any.

No, you start from the beginning and build your way up.

There’s a reason why Plato’s Replubic is still widely, although lessening at a sad and alarming rate, read as is Homer’s Oddysey and Iliad. It’s because those are the foundations almost everything else, even centuries later, to this day, is still built upon.

Anyway, I’m going off on a tangent here, again…

The point remains, study your classics, even in today’s digitally dominated field of marketing, and ease up on the aggressiveness of your claims and your copy.

And after that, maybe check out Email Valhalla to learn how to get paid writing entertaining emails that keep your readers reading day after day, without having to rely on the usage of overtly aggressive marketing language.

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


How fair is the game you’re playing?

by

“No one is more convinced of the fairness of a game than the man who won.”

Let that thought sit in your mind. Let it simmer. Let it marinate. Take it all in. Truly think about what it means to you and how it may (or may not) affect your life.

Now, I haven’t given you any context to work with.

I just gave you a quote. I didn’t even mention who the quote is from just to give as little context as possible (you receiving this email from me already has context included based on your perception of me and what I write about, so no context is, quite literally, impossible).

Just to give praise where praise is due, I found the above quote in an old blog post from historian Bret Devereaux, talking about the Spartan agoge, their infamous training regime which is oddly similar (in some, or sadly many, cases exactly alike) to indoctrination regimes terrorist organizations use for the creation of child soldiers—except these organizations have the decency to only abduct young boys from the age of 15 and up, compared to Sparta who takes boys aged 7 and up.

Anyway, I’m getting off track.

See, even though I didn’t give you any context, I’m quite certain you immediately thought of something when reading the above quote. It’s a perfect example of survivorship bias, after all, and can be applied to many, many different cases.

For one, the seemingly overabundance of people who preach about the magic powers of social media marketing (or any other marketing trend for that matter), preaching how everyone should become a creator and if you’re not creating dancing videos on TikTok (or whatever the current trend is), you’re just not serious enough.

And, while they’re not totally wrong about the power of social media, they’re not entirely correct either.

For one, not how I italicized the word “seemingly” in the previous paragraph.

That’s precisely because of this survivorship bias, the phenomenon where, in our case, only the most successful people who just so happened to succeed at social media have the ability to make noise, get the algorithm’s attention, and appear on everyone’s timeline. Everyone else, including people who might have done the exact same things as the “successful” people, showing how it might not be entirely black and white in the talent vs luck department, aren’t able to be heard and thus have no way to warn people about the dangers, obstacles, risk, or any other important reasons explaining why the grass in social media marketing land maybe isn’t as green as it first might appear.

And sure, I love talking down on people’s overreliance on social media, and how they don’t own their audience, are relying on the whims of the algorithm gods, or even the U.S. government as we’ve now clearly seen with the TikTok ban, and could randomly lose their entire business one day; and there’s nothing they can do about it.

Except there is:

It’s called taking accountability for your business, being prepared, not relying on anything you can’t control, and making sure you build your email list—one you own completely and back-up regularly so even if your current Email Service Provider decides to lock you out for any reason whatsoever, you still have your list and didn’t lose a single thing (except perhaphs a few hours of frustration moving over to another ESP).

And sure, the rule of survivorship bias works for people who preach about email, taking accountability, and self-reliance as well.

But I’m guessing, if you just think about it for a moment, even though there might be some survivorship bias happening around here, the arguments still stand, the reasoning is solid, and the suggestions only ever improve and secure your situation, without putting you at any risk whatsoever.

With that said, check out Email Valhalla here to learn more about how to build yourself an email-centered business, including how to write entertaining emails that get you paid and keep your readers reading day after day: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla


Never show weakness

by

For some reason, the so-called “social media experts” love circle jerking about how important it is to show vulnerability and to share your mistakes.

This would create relatability with your reader and better your engagement, increasing your success. Or so they say at least…

Yet sharing your mistakes, showing vulnerability, and being open and “authentic”, as they call it, which is the complete opposite of true authenticity if you think about it… The only thing that would do is create doubt, distrust, and possibly even disgust in the minds of your readers.

Sure, some people might end up “relating”, whatever the hell that means, or even sympathizing with you. But people don’t buy out of sympathy—and those that do often feel awful about it afterward, most often even cheated.

You don’t build a business out of sympathy.

“But Alex, I’ve seen some of my favorite creators share their flaws, their mistakes, and their misfortune before and it got great results, I even loved it myself!”, you might complain.

Ah yes. These types of stories do happen. Often part of their infamous “origin story”, which includes, but is not limited to, having to sleep on the couch, or worse, “the floor!”, in a crappy office they’ve hired, losing all of their social connections, thinking everything is over, only to just then, at that almost poetic timing, meet an unknown mentor, pick up an obscure book, or figure out some crazy method that suddenly catapulted them into riches and success.

Or something along those lines.

Anyway, the point remains. Those are carefully, even more carefully than a bomb squad might approach a suspicious backpack in the middle of the town’s square, crafted stories with attention to specific details and especially specific outcomes.

Namely.

Those stories all share a happy ending. An overcoming of the obstacles in front of them. A true underdog story.

These (often made-up, or at least highly altered to fit the necessary message) stories aren’t a rich collection of their mistakes, their flaws, and vulnerabilities. These stories are, in fact, a manifesto of their ideology, a tale to show their extreme perseverance, untapped potential, can-do attitude, otherwordly creative thinking prowess, and everything else necessary to show how incredible of a human being they just so happen to be.

After all, a flaw isn’t a flaw if it can be turned into a positive outcome.

Because let’s be honest.

Nobody buys from a homeless nutjob preaching the healing powers of moon-infused special rocks that hold the body to shape your body like that of Arnold Schwarzenegger without so much as lifting your butt off the couch. But if that same nutjob, preaching those same scientifically dubious rocks, just so happened to have overcome immense odds, built their dreamlife, and appears to be successful solely due to the discovery of these life-altering rocks, then maybe, just maybe, possibly even more than maybe, maybe even quite certainly, you’d be willing to make the leap of faith and trade your hard-earned pocket money in favor for some rocks infused with metaphysical powers, and quite certainly a weird but soothing smell that comes along with it.

Anyway, I don’t know what these special rocks have to do with anything, or even where my imagination came from.

But I hope the point is clear.

People want to believe in someone they can look up to. Someone who seems so far ahead of them, almost blessed by holy powers, someone they can put on a pedestal, carefully listen to, learn from, and be told what to do and how to do it, hoping they can perhaps achieve a similar level of success— or even a sliver of theirs would be enough.

These people don’t “make mistakes”.

Now, if this message doesn’t suit you, if it doesn’t sound “authentic”, then that’s fine. I’m just sharing a message. Don’t shoot the messenger, even though that’s what happens most of the time historically speaking—quite a strange saying then, huh?

But just know and be aware of the dangers that lie behind the ever-so-common piece of advice of “sharing your flaws”.

If you still want to come across as “real” and “authentic”, whatever that means to you, then I’d suggest you check out Email Valhalla, where I give you actual sound and tested advice on how to do so through your writing, without resorting to sharing your flaws or coming up with weird, often shrewd and ill-intentioned, origin stories.

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


What’s the point of a blog anyway?

by

Came a question from an interested reader:

===

“I noticed a while back you don’t post every email of yours on your blog. Why not? Is there a strategy or bigger picture reasoning behind not doing so?

Been wondering about that for a while now.”

===

Great question.

But before I can answer that directly, I have to clarify something first, just be sure everyone’s on the same page.

See, the purpose of any single blog out there is always the same: to attract readers.

Forget where they come from, what they’re looking for, how they got here, or anything else that might confuse you. For now, the only thing that matters is that every single blog shares the same purpose of getting attention and attracting readers.

Now, that’s only the first degree purpose.

Behind wanting to “attract readers” there’s another purpose, always. Even people who write for the joy or art of it such as fanfics or what have you still have the second-degree purpose of feeling a sense of accomplishment and, most importantly, approval from others when they see other people are reading their stuff.

This “second-degree purpose” might differ from business to business.

In my case, that’s to build my email list. After all, my email list has been, and will forever remain so however long I continue doing what I do, at the center of my business. It’s what powers everything else and makes everything I do possible.

So, naturally, the only reason for me to even host my blog is for people to stumble upon it one way or another, check it out, enjoy what they read, and, this is the crucial bit, ultimately decide to opt-in to my list.

At that point my blog effectively loses its functionality for that specific person… but that’s ok because the only purpose of my blog was to get people to opt-in to my list, which it, at that point, did successfuly.

This brings me back to the original question.

Why don’t I publish all of my emails on my blog?

Well, think about it yourself. If I did publish every single email on my site, why would anyone even bother subscribing to my list? All they’d gain would be the “convenience” of not having to check my site manually. At most they’d lose out on some gift or a lead magnet I give to people who opt-in. But none of that is making much of a case, at least not a strong one.

No, there needs to be an air of mystery, intrigue.

People need to be excited and curious to want to find out more, to discover everything there is to discover, to get all of the privileges, known and unknown, of being an actual subscriber to my list, not just an incognito reader on my website.

There are other reasons, of course, but this is definitely one of the most important ones to realize.

As for best practices of what to do when people finally opt-in to your list, you might want to check out my flagship course, Email Valhalla, to get an answer to that question: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla/


Improving your email growth

by

Once upon a time, I received a message from a daily reader (not sure if he wants me to name him):

===

Hey Alex! How can I grow my email list faster?

===

You’d think this would be a simple and straightforward question, right?

Well, yes and no.

Here’s my response:

===

Short answer?

You promote it more

Long answer?

Depends on where your bottleneck is.

Might be social media growth [in this case, the person who asked was getting most of his leads from social media], the link click-through rate on your promotion posts, or your sign-up conversion on your landing page.

Might be something else or a mix of those 3.

===

After all, an email list consists of many moving parts.

Some are more important than others, sure. But there’s a lot going on. And it can become confusing if you don’t know where to start or what to focus on.

The good news is you control everything.

You can change whatever you want, however you want. You can make it work together in perfect harmony to create the best-performing list mankind has ever seen. Or you can create an absolute mess that doesn’t produce any results whatsoever.

Either way, it’s in your control.

And that’s a good thing because it means you can learn, adapt, and improve.

This brings me to my flagship course, Email Valhalla, which, in my not-so-humble and extremely biased opinion, is the best and most effective resource you can get your hands on to learn how to build a well-functioning email list.

One where all the parts work together in harmony. And one that’ll help you earn a lot of money.

For more information, click here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla


A simple trick to massively increase conversions

by

Here’s a quick but simple tip for you to use the next time you write a sales page.

Write “One-time payment. Lifetime access forever.” directly below the purchase/payment button on a sales page—as long as it makes sense and you’re actually selling a product like that, anyway.

It’ll easily increase the conversion rate of your entire page manifold.

Anyway, that’s it for me today.

Sometimes an email can be short, yet sweet.

For more short but sweet tips and tricks about writing high-converting sales pages easily, effortlessly, and efficiently, check out Sales Page Sorcery right here: https://alexvandromme.com/sorcery


I’m learning to design fancy sales pages

by

You may (or may not) have seen a couple of my sales pages already.

They all pretty much have the same 'look’ and feel to it, albeit personalized to the respective product it’s selling. It’s the same template, the same framework, the same structure.

It’s also pretty old-school. Those sales pages won’t be winning a design award any time soon, that’s for sure.

That said.

Things might very well change in the near future. See, I’ve started building a new “modern” salespage for a hobby product, aimed at a mass market audience. But not just any market. A visual and artsy marketing.

Meaning, a creative and visually pleasing design of my sales page can (it’s not guaranteed—nothing is) improve the performance of the sales page.

It’s been a lot of fun so far.

One thing I’ve noticed, for example, was how easy it comes to me. The underlying principles are all the same after all. So it the copy, the structure, and the psychology. All I really have to do is use my design skills to package it up nicely and make it look visually pleasing to the eye.

Luckily for me, I enjoy being creative and designing stuff.

Anyway, enough yapping about.

In case you haven’t picked up on the moral of the story yet. It’s that it pays to understand the fundamentals before you start tinkering about with the fancy stuff.

And when it comes to sales pages, it would be true marketing malpractice if I wasn’t going to mention one of my precious products I’m so very proud of, Sales Page Sorcery, which teaches you all the fundamentals of conjuring up brand new sales pages fast, easily, and effortlessly.

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


What are your flaws?

by

Every product has flaws.

So does every service, every piece of content, every work of art, every person, every institution, and everything you see all around you has flaws. There’s nothing exempt from this rule.

But that doesn’t mean everything is bad.

It’s the contrary.

Flaws give meaning and value to everything you use and consume. Perfection is another word for meaningless.

The things in life that don’t have flaws, don’t upset some group of people, or don’t work or function exactly as some group of people would hope, those are all meaningless and have nothing to offer.

People differ by nature.

Everyone has different needs and requirements, different interests and passions, different tastes as well as dislikes. Something that’s perfect for everyone, by definition, has to be so bland, so generic, so stripped of everything that gives it meaning, that it becomes all but useless, obsolete, and devoid of meaning.

Give me one valuable product, one great work of art, one anything really that does everything perfectly for everyone all around the world.

But let’s get back to why I’m yapping on about this.

What I wanted to make clear is that whatever it is you’re creating, it has to have a flaw.

And wherever there’s a flaw, there’s an opportunity.

More precisely, there’s an opportunity to highlight, not belittle, but highlight, maybe even exaggerate, your flaw. Talk about all of the flaws you can find about your product, then talk about why your creation has that flaw, what that flaw allows it to do or why it needs to have that certain flaw for it to work as you intended to do.

Every flaw gives meaning to a creation.

Highlighting the flaw turns it into a strength for the right group of people your creation is made for while automatically disqualifying and repelling everyone it doesn’t benefit (which would’ve been awful customers to deal with anyway).

A high-powered industrial vacuum cleaner will make a lot of noise—that’s considered a flaw. So highlight how much noise it makes by clarifying the noise is exactly because of the extremely high suction capability the vacuum cleaner has (something your ideal customer wants).

On the other hand.

A compact vacuum cleaner made for at-home use will obviously be a lot less powerful because it has to be a lot smaller, and more compact, maybe even with a pretty design, to fit in with the interior or be easy to hide away in a closet or a shelf. Highlighting the flaw of it being less powerful than an industrial one by explaining how a less powerful one allows it to be as small as possible while also being completely silent during its use.

Now, you might find this to be a stupid example, but either way you get the point.

Highlighting your flaws and turning them into sales angles is an extremely powerful copywriting tool that could singlehandedly ‘disarm’ your, oftentimes wary, customer from most (if not all) his objections—or at the least it won’t cause your customer to dismiss your product if he has to learn about your product’s flaws on his own without your explanation as to why that’s the case.

Anyway.

If you’d like to learn more about how to talk about, promote, and sell a great product (or even how to create one) then you might want to check out my Product Creation Made Easy framework.

It definitely ain’t cheap, but that gives you an indication of how high of a quality you can expect from it.

The product wouldn’t have been nearly as good, nor would I have been able to create a high-quality one, if it hadn’t supplied me with the resources I needed to support myself while I kept working on it to make it as good as it could humanly be.

Not to mention the amount of praise and kind words I get from people who bought the product at the current price.

Anyway.

Enough time talking.

Check out Product Creation Made Easy here: https://alexvandromme.com/product