Email

Once came a Reddit post titled “Are newsletters better than social media following?”

It went as follows:

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I see a lot of talk about newsletters on here and am about to publish my first (and possibly only) book. As I consider how to connect with readers and what to put as a hook to connect at the end of the book, I was wondering… isn’t social media more engaging than newsletters? Would an invitation to follow a FB page, for example, not be more effective at regularly having a dialog? Why or why not?

I appreciate you guys being willing to share your experience with a newb like me.

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Short answer: email is superior in every way

Longer answer: Take a look at this and think about how “useful” this is.

You create a Facebook page, Instagram profile, Twitter account—or whatever social media you prefer—and invite all of your readers, customers, and other folks interested in your stuff to follow your profile.

Then, even though you’ve already got them to follow you (a difficult step on it’s own) you’ll still have to compete against hundreds of other people (friends, family, influencers, theme pages, other businesses,…) to get the attention of your followers whenever they happen to doomscroll (or zoomerscroll) through their homepage—most of the time while taking a dump at work to avoid working.

And as if that alone wasn’t enough.

If you do happen to grab their attention, then god forbid if you want to show them something nice, guide them to a new product of yours (a podcast you were on, a new YouTube video, your latest book, or even a free novella as a gift) because you will be heavily punished by the platform for “sending traffic away” aka, including a link that points to anywhere else but the social media you’re using.

Hell, let alone if someone doesn’t like something you post and decides to report you. With how today’s social landscape is looking, that could easily mean a total loss of your profile (losing everything you’ve worked for in the process).

You don’t even have to piss someone off to have it happen to you.

Many creators get their accounts banned or closed for no reason at all (and trust me because I’m one of them).

Long story short, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

Using email as the main form of communication between you and your customers is the only certainty and security you’ll ever have.

Make sure you’re using it.

Anyway.

If you’d like to learn more about all things email-related, then check out Email Valhalla here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla

A question popped up in a self-publishing writer’s community:

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I published my memoir in late January of this year. I was able to get quite a few sales (I was amazed tbh because my previous book I had published barely even sold…).

I’ve been trying my best to promote it this last month because the sales are dropping and I think it’s simply because people have no idea it exists…? But I don’t think I’m catching people’s attention with it.

I published it on Amazon kdp. I can’t pay for ads currently so…am I SOL? I really want my story to be heard

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Classic case of short-sightedness.

You see it everywhere. People trying to get others to buy their products or services so they start looking for ways to advertise that specific product… only to get a few one-time sales and then struggle to keep that momentum (if they even got any to begin with) going—never actually making a business out of what they’ve got.

Here’s the tl;dr of what I’d suggest to anyone in a similar situation:

• Step 1: Create an email list

• Step 2: Drive people to your opt-in page through content creation

• Step 3: Email them as often as you can about the common interests that connect you and them to whatever you’re selling.

• Step 4: Sit back and relax while growing a business that doesn’t rely on one-time sales because you’re not losing your customers. Instead you’re actively growing your customer list and building a better and tighter relationship with them, guaranteeing more sales (consistently) in the future as long as you keep giving people what they want.

Ain’t nothing complicated to it (and if you think this only works for authors, you couldn’t be more mistaken).

If you’d like a more in-depth view of this process, then check out Email Valhalla to learn all about building, growing, and monetizing your email list.

Click here to check it out: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla

I had a small back-and-forth with a long-time reader a short while days ago (not sure he wants me to name him).

To give some context:

He’s a passionate game dev and has been thinking about starting his own email list about game design.

Note: “thinking about starting”.

When I asked him what’s been holding him back he gave 2 reasons:

(This is how I summarized it based on his response

1) He doesn’t believe he’s “big/successful” enough to have something to offer. So why should people listen to him?

2) He prefers creating games more than writing about them, so why waste time with an email list when he could create more games instead?

Both of these are valid and popular, but ultimately flawed, responses—making this a great opportunity to share my answer publically.

So let’s talk about why those two reasons aren’t as important/valid as you might first expect.

First off, if only the biggest and most successful people could build an email list, then there’d only be a handful of lists and every market. Which simply isn’t the case.

The truth is…

People care more about people than anything else. Someone might be a lot more successful and have 10 more years of experience. But if you’re the more entertaining person while caring about your audience and actually, from the bottom of your heart, want to help your audience succeed as best as you can, then you’ll be the one they want to be around and listen to.

That’s just how it goes.

There’s no ifs, buts, or maybes about it.

Secondly, and this might not seem directly obvious when looking at it at first glance. But building your email list actually helps you free up more time (making it so he could create more games in this case).

Here’s how that works:

Instead of focusing all his effort on writing articles, social media marketing, reaching out to people, “networking”, taking on projects you don’t care about just to make ends meet, and god knows what else… You could instead focus solely on building and writing to your email list, which will take care of all your financial issues if done right, freeing up your schedule of all other things you had to do till now.

Now you’ve freed up so much time. Time you can choose to spend on creating more, writing emails (if you so choose), or just plain relaxing, whatever you choose.

Anyway.

If you haven’t started your email list yet, now’s the time.

And if you’d like some help figuring out how to get everything up and running, then check out Email Valhalla 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

But I finally did it.

I’m talking about something so crucial, so important, so absolutely vital to my business (and more than likely yours as well), yet so overlooked by almost everyone out there it’s not even funny how overlooked this is.

Entire businesses can go from thriving one day to having lost everything and going completely broke the next if they don’t do this one simple thing.

And it really isn’t that hard.

In fact, it took me all about an hour or two to do this thing and I’m not set up for life. I never have to spend any time on this, never even have to click on anything, hell I don’t even have to ever think about it ever again.

All it took (and all it ever will take) is one to two hours.

And it could probably take you a whole lot less (maybe a bit more) depending on how much experience you have with stuff like this. But then again, it’s something anyone could easily figure out by reading a guide or watching a free 10-minute video explaining EXACTLY (and I mean to the letter) what to do.

The reason why it took me (and many others) so long to do (remind yourself, some people never do this and lose everything because of it) this, yet it’s so incredibly important is simple.

It doesn’t do anything unless it’s too late.

See, what I’m talking about (which I’ll reveal in just a minute) is more of an insurance. Not an actual business benefit. Yet it’s the most important insurance you can have for your business.

But that’s just how insurances go. Nobody ever wants one…

Until it’s too late.

Ok enough teasing for now.

The insurance I’m talking about, and what I finally did today that was long overdue was to set up an automation that backs up my email list in real-time (for those interested in the technical side: I do this by adding the emails to a Google Sheet whenever someone subscribes to Beehiiv, using Make dot com—as well as adding unsubscribes to another spreadsheet (and removing them from the original one)).

This way I’m making sure I’ll never lose my email list no matter what.

Yes building your own list is great since that’s something you “own”. But that owning part only goes so far if you never take it off the platform you’re using. Every single day is another chance for you to get de-platformed (it happens a lot more than you think, especially in today’s age of cancel culture), let alone if the platform suddenly shuts down (no business lasts forever).

So the final layer of protection is to back up your email list.

Anyway, enough of that.

Speaking of email lists and protecting your business. Another vital step of this equation is to master the art of daily email writing and list building to get yourself a valuable list you’re afraid of losing enough to get the motivation to back it up in the first place.

And for that, let my biased ass tell you this, there’s simply no better place to start than by checking out Email Valhalla here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla