- Speaker #0
It's funny because email has been claimed dead by probably five different marketers, right? Email is dead probably by five, six different marketers over the years. And it just keeps resurrecting, man. Just keeps coming back. Your watch on marketing misfits with Norm Farrar and Kevin King.
- Speaker #1
Mr. Norm Farrar, you're back again? You had to show up again. One of these times, you know, it's just going to be me or just going to be you. But why is it always me and you? Or you and me? Which way is it? You and me or me and you?
- Speaker #2
That's a really good song, Kevin. I could just see us skipping down the road holding hands.
- Speaker #1
I'll pass. Sounds like a great theme. Mental image is not working well for me.
- Speaker #2
That's the theme song. That's what we can do.
- Speaker #1
You know what was actually a good mental image was actually yesterday. We record these podcasts in batches a lot of times. And yesterday after the podcast, I got off and I did a little bit of business. And you know what? I made about $70,000 yesterday. And I didn't sell a single physical product. I didn't do any consulting. Do you know how I did it?
- Speaker #0
Your body?
- Speaker #1
No, I wasn't on OnlyFans. All right. That gig, shh, don't tell anybody about that stuff. No, it was actually, remember our guest yesterday? He talked about two things, Jordan Hall, or the guest we talked to yesterday. It may have been an episode or two back when people were listening to this. But he talked about two most important things in this new AI and this marketing world, and that's distribution. and and owning, which is basically owning an audience is part of the distribution side of it. And that's what you and I both do, not only with the podcast, and the podcast is great because people are tuning in and listening, but we don't really own them in the true sense of the word of own, because we don't know who they are. They know who we, me and you are, but we don't know who they are. We don't have a way to directly reach to them. But when you started, when you have an email list or an SMS list or physical mailing address. You have a way to actually reach people. That's probably the most valuable asset to any business is a list of your customers. And in our world, email is probably the easiest one to do. And you have a newsletter, the Lunch with Norm newsletter. It comes out every Monday. For those that haven't been checking that out, lunchwithnorm.com.
- Speaker #0
No,
- Speaker #2
lwn.news.
- Speaker #1
Lwn. No, sorry, lwn.news. And I have BillionDollarSellers, BillionDollarSellers.com. That comes out twice a week. And I've been doing this for about two years. You've been doing yours for a couple years as well. And we both leverage that not only as the audience to where we can reach people to tell them about our events, about the podcast, about things we're doing, but we also make money off of that. And yesterday I sold $70,000 worth of ads to my newsletter that has about 30,000 subscribers. I'm actually only sending to 18,000 of them right now. I've had 50 something thousand sign up. I've kicked off 20,000 for not opening and clicking, and I've been doing some other fine tuning, and I'm down to 18,000 now core people. And it's helping a lot on a lot of stuff. But to that 18,000 core people, I leverage that and sell advertising in the newsletter, but also do what I call dedicated emails where on the days that I'm not sending out the newsletter, and I think you do this too. I'll send an email on behalf of a sponsor. So it's a dedicated email. It's just them in the email. And I'll send that out. And I charge $4,000 per email for that. I'm sold out for the next two, two plus months. And I had someone today say they want two spots and they want a discount because they're buying two spots. And I said, no. And they said, well, I'm not sure I advertise this. No problem. Somebody else will fill it because these things work. And our guest today, this is what he does. I mean, he's one of the masters and one of the OGs when it comes to newsletters. And I think he does micro newsletters and leveraging these and monetizing them. And so I'm super stoked to have Nate on the show today because I think he's going to be sharing a lot of valuable information with the audience and you and I probably learn a thing or two as well.
- Speaker #2
100%. And one thing that we talked about the other podcasts and many other podcasts. is building a community. And what I find is newsletters, it's probably the simplest way to really hone in and build that community. So why don't we get to our guest?
- Speaker #1
Let's do it. Let's bring on the man, the myth, the legend, Mr. Nate Kennedy.
- Speaker #2
All right. There we go. Look at that. I did my job.
- Speaker #1
You're getting good after a year of hitting the button, Norm.
- Speaker #0
Nailed it.
- Speaker #1
You nailed it. How are you doing, Nate?
- Speaker #0
I'm great. How are you guys?
- Speaker #1
I'm good. We're good. So, Norm, the first time I'm meeting you, we met at a conference in Austin, but I've been following you for a while, and I really like what you're doing, especially when it comes to the email and marketing space, newsletter space, but that's not where you got your start. You've been at this game selling millions and millions of dollars worth of stuff for a while, right?
- Speaker #0
I have. I got introduced into the internet world, into the interwebs back in 2006 and started as an affiliate marketer, actually. So and that parlayed into owning some products. I was in the real estate space. I was flipping real estate deals and I productized that. And, you know, back then we had to build and code pages ourselves. Right. So we did all that. I learned a lot of how to code and run ads and run. paid ads and everything just kind of trial and error to figure it out and along the way i hired some people and stuff like that but yeah it was uh it it's been a while man i've been in the game for a little bit so back in
- Speaker #1
2006 we're having to actually go into the html code or the php code and actually actually like tweak it because there wasn't on these landing page builders and all this kind of stuff that we have now that just makes it one click or ai building it for you or whatever.
- Speaker #0
Yeah. Way back then. And like, shh, well shortly after i got in this thing came out called the butterfly script which was like the original like one click up so mike phil same i think was the one who created it oh yeah so yeah it allowed us let us do one click upsells without having to like code it was pretty cool but yeah that's uh we've come a massive i mean they come a long long way and ai is actually even accelerating you know the last 15 years will probably be feel like two years over the next year with AI. It's wild.
- Speaker #1
For sure. So you, and your focus now, is it primarily the email marketing and newsletter stuff, or are you still doing a lot of the digital marketing and ad agency cap and stuff too?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, that's, we've evolved right over the years. I guess to kind of step back for you. So when I got in, I was buying and building out my own products and brands, and then I ended up selling those off and started an agency. Then I had the agency for quite a while, for about... just about 10 years and ran tons of traffic, built a bunch of funnels, did all that for our clients, kind of hired, you know, a hired gun at that point. And in 2020, I went in straight into email and launched, basically said, Hey, I want to own all my audiences. I want to control that side of it because I know if I own the audience, people will come to me and buy traffic, right? I wanted a little sliver of the pie of the paid ad world. uh, with doing that. And when you own your audience, you have that ability. So for me now, I've done that for the last five years. I have a company called click movement that runs all that. And I've got a great, great team of people over there. And then I also have, I, I still do run paid ads for myself and to grow my newsletters. And then I have paid ads that I do. Like I've got my own info product, uh, newsletter stuff that I sell as well. So I'm still involved in that.
- Speaker #2
You know what? I'm surprised that we have this podcast. And you would think it reaches a lot of people. And the sponsorship on this podcast, I would have thought would have been, or the money-making abilities from the podcast would have been a lot bigger than any newsletter. And it's the complete opposite. When we started building out these newsletters, like Kevin was talking about this, and it's like, come on, Kevin. You know, this is old news. uh, there's no way you can make money on this. And he's saying, yeah, look at, and he started to make some money. I looked at it and I started to build up mine. And right now, sponsorship wise, that's probably one of the biggest revenue streams we have. It's just a shock. And even you talking about email, you talk to most sellers, they think email's dead or they don't want to, you know, uh, uh, annoy. I'll put it that way. I'll say it the nice way. I annoy their customers, right? But this is, it's still a year, year and a half for me. And I'm still absolutely shocked at even the new revenue streams that can come through newsletters, dedicated emails, and just email clients as like just building lists.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, it's it. It's a massive opportunity, right? I think there's a lot of attention being pushed out on social and podcasts and everything else. But if you can drive them into your newsletter and own that audience and have that communication, you're right. A lot of people, I talked to a lot of people like, well, I don't want to email. They might unsubscribe. I was like, that's all right, man. They're just telling you, you know, they're. They're improving your metrics because they're leading. You know what I mean?
- Speaker #1
Yeah, they're happening to get another inbox as well. Exactly.
- Speaker #0
You know, it's pretty wild that a lot of people don't use email. And it's funny because email has been claimed dead by probably five different marketers, right? Email is dead probably by five, six different marketers over the years. And it just keeps resurrecting, man. Just keeps coming back.
- Speaker #1
It's one of the oldest forms of of Internet communication. I mean, it's one of the origins. I mean, you had the little B2B boards where you had to go like a little dial up modem. And like it's almost like an old school kind of like walkie talkie chat kind of thing. And then but email was one of the first. Well, I think it was the first mass way to communicate. And I did a newsletter back in the late 1990s, early 2000s. We had 250,000 people on this newsletter before canned spam. And it was daily. And we built cron jobs to send it out at certain hours of the day when they wanted it. They could actually pick. I wanted it at three o'clock every day, my local time. And we would send it at that time. And it did really well. The can spam kind of killed it because there weren't all the tools and stuff and figured out how everything works now. So I went away from it and I came back. And like Norm said, when I launched it two years, my newsletter two years ago, a lot of people were like. there's no way you can keep it with the content. You know, this first, I sent a couple out, and they're like, this is pretty good. It wasn't AI written, or I was, and to this day, I still personally write them, personally, twice a week and lay them out. It's not a team. And I enjoy the process. It keeps me up to date on everything. And people were like, why are you doing email? And my wife at the time was like, that's stupid. Everybody's on social media. And it took a while. I mean, the problem is it's work. And when I first was doing it, it was like four or five hours to write each one. And I was a curator. I call it like being a DJ. You're like a DJ, and the way you mix the music and the way you mix it is how people perceive it. And it took a while and consistency. I never missed a Monday or Thursday. I still haven't in two years. Always. And a lot of people will start. And my trainer started one after me, a couple other people I know, and they flake out. It's just like on podcasts. Most podcasts don't make it. They're like, oh, this is work. But it took about a year to build this up. And then it really started taking off to where now, literally yesterday, that's not an exaggeration, $70,000 worth of dedicated emails sold to six different people. It wasn't like one guy just came in and bought a bunch because they work. And I keep the list very clean. So when you're teaching people, I know you have your course. And you have these things called micro newsletters. And you're using some AIs. Can you walk us through the process of someone that's listening? Yeah, okay, this sounds cool. I've got a list or maybe I don't or both ways. I have a list or I don't have a list. If they want to get into establishing a newsletter either for their brand or for their category of what they sell in, what are some of the steps that they should take? Because I think a lot of people don't quite understand or when they hear newsletter, they think marketing email or promotional email. And you have all these companies in our space in Amazon where Norm and I are heavily involved. Everybody's got a newsletter, but they're not newsletters, just marketing emails. here's our latest release and here's our newest thing. And Johnny just got promoted. So can you explain what is a newsletter and what your approach and like the micro newsletters and the way you are enabling people with a list and without a list?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, I think it's important to understand the difference between the two, right? You are correct. A lot of people, when they send email, it's all promo based, right? So when I first got into sending emails, it literally was, you know, that one guy told me, he's like, you know, as you grow your list, A couple of things are going to happen. They're going to buy, they're going to unsubscribe, or they're going to die. And I was like, he's like, so just keep mailing. And it was always promo-based. It's all sales-driven. And a lot of that is done the same way now, right? It's still some people have not evolved through that process. For me, I think you mentioned earlier, Norm, about community, right? I think a newsletter is a great way to build your audience and your community. people that understand you, that follow you, that look up to you, that look to you for guidance, right? If you're an expert and a newsletter, the way that I like to do it is more, it doesn't have to be a daily thing. As you even mentioned, Kevin, you do Monday, Thursday, right? So it doesn't have to be daily, but it should be consistent and it should be value driven. So a micro newsletter to me is a way for somebody to showcase their expertise and put information in front of somebody that is value-driven as opposed to buy, buy, buy. So as long as you, now don't get me wrong, there's always definitely a time to sell. and there's opportunity to sell. But if you're giving somebody the ability to learn or teach or educate that, like you're educating them on whatever it is you're great at, right? And if you're putting that in front of them, you instantly are, not instantly, but over time, you're developing this rapport, you're developing this, you know, leadership with them by doing that to where now when you make recommendations or you do a... sponsorship or you do a dedicated email, you're going to get higher performance. And so the micro-inventory center to me is the ability to take your knowledge and expertise, package it into a weekly email, send it out, high value driven content. Now, this is even great for people with podcasts because they can leverage AI to take that podcast episode, have a high value email written by AI and pushed out to their subscribers, right? So there's a lot of different ways to make it much easier now. So that's one way of doing it, right? That is one way that I think the market is evolving to. I think the large email lists, news-driven stuff, sponsorship-only driven stuff on faceless brands is definitely an opportunity, but it's changing a little bit. So to look at the other avenue of it, my media company owns a bunch of different... brands. I've not attached to any of them. They're faceless newsletters, really. They're these brands that we mail and we mail updated, curated content to. And those do well. And we have sponsors and affiliates and all that stuff that run inside of that. But I see that market shifting very dramatically to where it's moving into where people want to be around experts or they want to follow somebody who's giving high-level content, not just quick tips and news of what's going on in that day. So I do think the evolution of people wanting more community, people wanting to be a part of a brand. Now, it doesn't get me wrong. You can still have a brand, right? So, Kevin, you probably, your newsletter probably has a name to it, right? Yeah. Imagine Kevin.
- Speaker #1
Really, that's Billion Dollar Sellers. Yeah.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, right? So it's Billion Dollar Sellers. So people are tuning in. You just happen to be the editor, right? Yeah. So people do know you and start following you. So, you know, for me, I think it's. That's really how we're doing it. We're taking an expert content. We're building a niche newsletter around that content and delivering that value to those subscribers. And then that's obviously building leadership. It's helping you own your audience and even control and become a thought leader really kind of in that domain and whatever that niche is that you're in.
- Speaker #2
Are you looking to quickly boost new Amazon product launches or scale up existing listings to reach first page positioning? The influencer platform Stack Influence can help.
- Speaker #1
That's right. Stack Influence pushes high volume external traffic sales straight to Amazon listings using micro influencers that you only have to pay with your products.
- Speaker #2
They've helped up-and-coming brands like Magic Spoon compete with Cheerios for top category positioning, while... also helping Fortune 500 brands like Unilever launch their new products.
- Speaker #1
Right now is one of the best times to get started with Stack Influence. You can sign up at stackinfluence.com or click the link in this video down in the description or notes below and mention Misfits, that's M-I-S-F-I-T-S, to get 10% off your first campaign. Stackinfluence.com. Norm and I are both, I mean, we've been in the Amazon. That's where we come from, the Amazon world. We both have podcasts that are spoke each individually that focus on that world. We've both done a lot of training in that world. And I've had a course, The Freedom Ticket, How to Sell on Amazon. 220,000 people have gone through it. We've both spoken on tons of stages, attended lots of conferences. And I think I can speak for me, and I think I can speak somewhat for Norm, too, is the newsletter has been the most powerful authority-building thing that we've done. It takes a little time, but people start to look forward to it because, like you said, you are providing real value in there. It's not just marketing. And, yeah, there's an ad or two here. They're an affiliate link or whatever. But they're getting value. And I've had people tell me that they print mine out and clip it and put it in a binder and organize it. And it gets forwarded on to other people because there's actual tactical stuff in there. It's not just fluff. but creating the content is, can be a challenge for somebody. I come from a media background. I was editor of my high school paper 17,000 years ago when I was young. Um, and so I have some, and I published a magazine for a while and norm is the same. Um, so we have a little bit of background there, but the average person, they may not be a good writer or they may not be a good curator of content or a good sourcer of what's content. Like you said, if it's easy to do, like have AI pull everything about sewing and have a newsletter go out about for people that love to sew, but if there's not an authority figure or someone that's curating that, it's hard to make that last. So how, what's your. How do you approach that? Do you have, with all these newsletters, do you have a human that's editing it and guiding it? Or is it a lot of AI-driven stuff? Or what's your approach on that?
- Speaker #0
So we started developing out content intelligent agents, and the CIA, right? But we started developing these out where we're able to take your voice, your brand, the things you talk about, the language you use, and develop, and I... For myself, I've created that, right? The content intelligent agent where I can now plug in new topics, new content and stuff that I like. And it'll create my version of that.
- Speaker #1
Let's take the near past writings or talks or whatever. And that creating a best writing,
- Speaker #0
these products, videos, trainings, all that stuff. Right. And I plug it in to create this, this content intelligent agent. And then from there. I now have the ability to take a couple, like hey, I'm gonna create around this topic today. And I'll plug it in, it'll create and write for me. And then I look at that and obviously, it does about 90, 95% of the work for me. I still have to come in and edit, but it's gotten really good and I've trained it really well to actually write and speak like me. So, and it saves me countless, countless hours. It took me a long time to kind of define the process and build the frameworks around getting it right and making sure that the agent is actually writing properly and formatting and all that good stuff, right? It takes quite a bit of time to set it up, but in the long term, it's saving me countless hours. I don't know how many times you guys have done this, but I've gotten in front of a computer where I've had to write, and I start typing away, and it's just blank. for a while, right? Like it takes me a while to get into mode, to think of ideas. So AI has made things so much easier than back in 2007 when I was sending an email every day, you know, when I'd have to figure out what am I writing about today?
- Speaker #2
2000, yeah, 2022. What's the difference between, you talk about a micro newsletter and a regular newsletter, what's the difference?
- Speaker #0
So I've got... what I would call like a media brand, right? So for example, we've got one called, it's called Newsflash and it's just curated content of what's going on around the US, right? So it's curated content, it's articles, it's more news driven. So we have a lot of that stuff and a newsletter in that aspect, right? So no one knows, well, I guess people know I own it now but at the point like my name is not attached to it and that to me is a media type newsletter right it's a similar like you know you're going to get newsletters from there's a brand out there called join 1440 right that's general news right without the spin it's a very large brand community has yeah so they are they they grew that and it's all just news driven it's curated content morning brew the hustle Like all those kind of brands are newsletters to me, but they're curated content from around the web. And it's a brand in itself, right? And they're in a specific niche. For me, the micro newsletter is more of a, if you're a, let's say, I want to say an expert in something, a coach, a consultant or service provider, right? This is an opportunity for you to create a newsletter and a brand around your content. And mail, you don't even have to mail every day. It could be once a week of just a good high-level content piece that goes out. And then the second email in the week could also be more about what you're doing and service-wise. So you still promote inside of the micro-newsletter. And whereas you're going to sell your own products and services for the most part with a micro-newsletter, as a other side of it, the media-type newsletter is going to sell sponsorships, dedicateds. to different types of brands as well now you can still send dedications into your micro newsletter if you want to but for me the way that i run it i tend to spend more time on it selling my own products and services or my you know other people's product my clients products and services right
- Speaker #1
A lot of people say that now. I mean, there's been a big over the last couple of years, basically because, you know, the morning brew sold for millions of dollars. You had the hustle. You had, you know, Sam, the My First Million podcast. Both those guys had newsletters, you know, the crypto newsletter that they had that sold for like 10 million bucks. And you see these others. What was that one that sold for like 625 million? You get all these big things. Yeah, industry dive. You see all these big things and that's attractive. And you have tools like Beehive and ConvertKit that have come in that make it much simpler and geared towards newsletters versus just a standard MailChimp or something that has some of the features, but it's not really dialed into newsletters. And so there's been a big fad, like a get rich quick kind of thing with a lot of people like, hey, everybody should start a newsletter. But a lot of people, they don't realize even with AI. And I remember Perry Belcher a couple of years ago. did a big thing and his AI bought some. It's like, hey, newsletters are the next hot thing. Look at all these numbers. And with AI, I'm running 19 newsletters a day and I'm not touching a thing. I got one DA in the Philippines that checks it and hits a button and we're spitting these out to my list. And I was like, that's just not going to last. It'll work for a little while, but there's no way that's going to stick. And I proved to be right and he's moved away from that. So back to your curation, like with yours, you have the the agent that has your tone, it can write in your tone, which that's really cool. But then what is, do you have another agent that's going out and sourcing the content? Or is it sometimes you just have a topic like, Hey, I think we should talk about this. And you just plug that in and maybe you write a little bit and then AI fills in the gaps or how are you, how are you coming up with the topics, especially across multiple newsletters and keeping that fresh and current and not stale.
- Speaker #0
So on the If we're talking about a micro-newsletter, for me, I'm sourcing my topics, right?
- Speaker #1
Okay.
- Speaker #0
I'm seeing stuff. So when I talked about this when we first met, it's like when I use social or if I'm on YouTube, I'm there to find creative ideas, not consume, right? Like a lot of times it's like people just watch it and flip it and scroll and scroll, right? I look at social as a way for you to get creative ideas and stuff that makes sense. I'm a firm believer that. At this point in time, most content has already been created and recreated with someone else's take on it, at least 17 times probably. You know, there's a lot of content out there and a lot of opinions. So a lot of times what I'll do is if I see a content piece I like, I'll take that content piece, I'll put my twist on it, put my thoughts on it, and then recreate how I want to put it out, right? My AI agent will put it out in my voice and how I want it to be and how my views are on it, right? So that's one way. And then there's sometimes too, where I'll be, I try to walk every day because when I walk, I think, and I get ideas and everything else. And I have this little whisper app on my phone. And when it pops up, I'll just talk into it. So I'll record a three minute blur while I'm walking. And then I'll plug that into my AI agent and that will pump out the content piece for me. So that's how I'm doing my micro newsletter. If you're moving over and you wanted to be more of like a media brand. right? Like we talked about and hopefully not confusing our listeners, but the, the media brand itself, like I actually have created a tool that writes content on a daily, it sources content daily. If the top headlines and top news articles are going on, it rewrites that content and posts this to our site. So we've leveraged that to automate that process. And it is, so that's one way, but I agree with you. It's my team is still involved in before the publishing goes out. before it gets sent. You know, that whole process is not perfect, right? And so there's still a team involved in there going that route. I do agree that the AI press send type thing is, you know, you don't even have to look at it. You know, I agree with you like that. That has gone away. And I think people want good quality content. They don't want. Oh, they don't want this fast AI push button stuff that goes out. They're not looking for that.
- Speaker #2
So going back to your agents, do you have an agent? You just click one button or do you have multiple agents? One going for sourcing or researching the content, one coming back writing, one being a senior editor and then putting it all together.
- Speaker #0
So right now I have the content. It gets pushed into content and then it gets published as a draft to our sites. what we're trying and then I have one that pulls the content. What I'm actually doing is now trying to put that into one tool. So my developer is putting that into one right now. And so once we have that done, it'll literally be every morning a team will wake up. They'll have ideally the drafts already in our site for them to publish. Nice.
- Speaker #1
And so how many newsletters? I saw somewhere, maybe you mentioned it somewhere, you're sending millions of emails a day. Um, so, um, how many newsletters is that? Is that one, a couple of really big ones and a lot of micro ones that are a little bit more niched down or is that, uh, is that hundreds of newsletters or 20 different ones?
- Speaker #0
Yeah. So it's, it's, uh, right now it's 12 different brands that we have.
- Speaker #1
Okay. And these are all yours or you, some of these are client? No,
- Speaker #0
those ones are all mine. I'm not like all the micro newsletters I have partnerships in. We, I have six of those. Okay. And. the me so the media side where we're sending like general news stuff i've got 12 of those and at one point in time we we had 30 running so we've consolidated simplified and just took our best performers and we and we keep then we kept those and as a micro newsletter stuff that's a little bit different we i've got my i have two that i personally run that i own One's a brand new one that I just started actually trying to really solidify the authority in a very specific niche. We may or may not be talking about that stuff right now. And then I have a, you know, my other one that I've always run that goes out once a week too. So it's a, and then I have partnerships and four others where I've helped other people launch theirs. And then we've come in and we've partnered out there. their, their idea. Cause I think it's really big.
- Speaker #1
I think the two people leading the charge in the space of newsletters, mostly is Matt McGarry and you. Well, I would say over the two bigger ones that are getting some traction, it's more of the authority figures on what works and what doesn't work when it comes to newsletters.
- Speaker #0
Yeah. Matt's done some really cool stuff. Like he's taken it to events and he kind of works in that creator crowd. Right. It seems like he works on the creator side and he's done some really, really cool stuff. but, you know, and he's got that going on. And I think, you know, we kind of tackle it in a different aspect. And I think my experience comes from a whole different world of building out those media properties and doing mass lead generation for what we were doing and going from zero to three million subscribers in my own brand, in my own company, right? And then now taking all those resources and things that we learned, building our own stuff and helping other people do that. themselves but uh yeah i think it's you know thank you i guess let's appreciate that uh i'm trying trying to you know just give value and help as many people that can in the space because there's huge opportunity and you know for me one of the biggest things that why i got into that uh back into the email is because it became more of a i wanted to focus more on lifestyle A lot of times we build a business and then all of a sudden the business starts consuming us. And I wanted to flip that. So in 2020, my goal is to flip that and actually make, and that started happening in my agency. I was running my agency. It was controlling my time. And when I created the newsletter business that I have now, it became more where, all right, I can control my time and my business is now my. Business is now built around my life instead of my life designed around my business, right? So that was a new business for me, you know.
- Speaker #2
Back in the day, well, still today, I'm involved with press releases. And I go out and I talk to people about press releases, and they only have one thing in mind, a product launch. And I'm sitting there going, there's tons of different things, different types of content for press releases. I even wrote a PDF. Here's 108 different things. well even with your newsletter, is there things, is there a different type of content? Like with social media, you don't just do quotes. You have to mix it up. Can you give us some examples of different things that you can put into your newsletter? Not just the basic article.
- Speaker #0
Oh, it's more than a basic article. It's a thought leadership piece. But yeah, it's... It is. So for me, I like to mix things into, so I have, I've got kind of a section I call daily dose, which is like a quick thought. I've got a thing I've been testing where I'm actually highlighting other newsletters, right? So newsletter highlight where we're talking about what other people are doing good. The first personal brand newsletter that I launched, the first one I did a couple years back, we talked about a lot of different things. I had three sections when I first started that. It was a marketing section, marketing review, a marketing tactic, almost like reviewing a product or an ad, then having a tactic, and then having a... what I still like to call the daily dose, which comes down is, my buddy used to always say this, when you get in a conversation with him, he'd be like, thank you so much for my daily dose of who gives a shit. And so it's always stuck with me. So I put that in my newsletter. So I do have different sections. And you'll see a lot of people will do, like one of our things we have is an American fact for the day, right? Like something that happened that day. Inside so there are some stuff and things that you can do we also some other components you can put into your newsletter are a Prop you create a giveaway and then in that giveaway when people refer somebody into your newsletter It automatically gives them that gift right or whatever that you know magnet lead magnet is We like to put surveys inside of our newsletters right and see if what people are thinking So that's another thing that we like putting in there So there's stuff you can put in there to break it up as well, for sure.
- Speaker #1
What's up, everybody? Your good old buddies, Norm and Kevin here. And I've got an Amazon creative team that I want to introduce you to.
- Speaker #2
That's right, Kevin. It's called the House of AMZ. And it's the leading provider in combining marketing and branding with laser focus on Amazon.
- Speaker #1
Hey, Norm, they do a lot of really cool stuff if you haven't seen what they do, like full listing graphics, premium A-plus content. storefront design, branding, photography, renderings, packaging design, and a whole lot of other stuff that Amazon sellers need.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, and guess what? They have nine years active in this space. So you can skip the guesswork, trust the experts. There's no fees. There's no retainers. You pay per project.
- Speaker #1
So if you want to take your product to the next level, check out House of AMZ. That's HouseofAMZ.com. House of AMZ. I think a lot of people think a newsletter group has to be written words, but you look at Charter. Charter is almost all charts, graphical stuff. You look at Smart, what's it called, Smarty Pants or something like that, and they take cartoons and they have these characters and they explain something like, what does iodine do? Or why do hippos have pimples on their butt? Or whatever. And they'll break it down, all these cartoon things. You just follow it all the way down. Or you have ones that are like Sean Puri, I think it does. the five best tweets of the week and he just takes content of the five most and so there's all kinds of things you can do for a newsletter but some of these some people what what is your take on should a newsletter be a quick one two minute read sometimes you'll see people that this newsletter can be read in one minute and 23 seconds what is your take on what what's the optimal length because people are getting hundreds of emails a day and hopefully they're opening yours and Some of your diehard fans are going to read every single word. They're going to save it until the weekend and catch up on it or whatever. I see that happen when my open rates go up on the weekends from earlier in the week. Other ones are going to just skim it. So what's an ideal length and how does formatting look? Because I always say people eat with their eyes first. The look of it, does it need to be skimmable and is it easily digestible? A lot of people don't have good design when it comes to newsletters. good. So what are your thoughts on those two, the length and the design aspects of a newsletter?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, so you definitely have, we handle it a couple of different ways depending on what we're doing. But I think for me, I still use the direct response style when I write, when I put my newsletter together, right? It's not long paragraphs. It's, you know, you might have a, you're going to have some headlines throughout there. You're going to have a really, you know, one to. to maybe three sentences if one of them short max in regards into a paragraph so i'm kind of following that because they are skimming so i want them to be able to get that point across right if they're not going to read the whole thing so on a high level content piece i'm doing it that way so you can also definitely have something unique and it comes down to what your market wants and i i'm a i'm a firm believer that should it should look good there's times that people said newsletters and it looks
- Speaker #1
just to me it's terrible it's it's it's horrible i yeah unreadable it's just a mess of it's like who's gonna read
- Speaker #0
So for me, I like to use sections. So if I have one that has sections in it, I want it to be clearly known that each section is there, right? So I'll use, you know, and design-wise, I mean, simple things. I'll use borders. I'll use, you know, some spacing elements and things along those lines that make it stand out and people know, all right, here's my section. I'll use headlines to call that section out potentially, you know? So. I don't get too crazy in regards to, you know, design like you're going to see in an e-com newsletter, right? Because at the end of the day, it's content driven. The Biker newsletter is content driven. So I want them to either read or read, click and read again, right? So, you know, I just try and make sure it's readable. The sections are broken up and look good. It's formatted properly. You don't got five spaces in between two sentences, you know, and And I hate to have it. I try to remove any long dash, you know, the chat GPT, whatever that thing's called, right? As soon as you see it, you're like.
- Speaker #2
I build that into my prompts. One of the other things, especially if you've never had a newsletter, you want to get into it, you might have a small list. How do you organically, what are your recommendations on just building an audience, building a subscriber base? Are there any tips that you can give us?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, number one is if you have a social following or you're building out and posting on social, don't have anyone on your newsletter list, I would make your number one and only call to action on your social profiles to subscribe to your newsletter, right? And very simple to do that. And also you can get into, depending on where you're, where are your people hanging out to. So I was posting a ton of Instagram stuff a while back and videos and we didn't get a whole lot of traction on it, but my audience at the same time, wasn't really hanging out there. Right. And so my audience is more on Twitter and LinkedIn. Twitter's got a little tougher. Uh, I think to, to scale quickly on the organic side, LinkedIn. LinkedIn, if you're in a professional space, I think there's an opportunity over there for sure. And if it's B2B or you're looking for professional stuff, it depends who your consumer is or who your subscriber is. And I mean, nothing beats paid ads. You don't have to spend thousands of dollars a day when you have a newsletter. If you want to start growing your audience, you can literally spend $10, $20, $30, $40 a day. and get some subscribers coming in regularly. So like if somebody is new to it and if you have a small list now, great. That's awesome. Communicate with them. You know, like a lot of people go, oh, my list isn't that big. I don't want to send an email, you know, like it's not that big. No one's going to listen. But you know, there's people and you know, you mentioned Jordan in the very beginning of this, right? Like Jordan's got a process. You could have a hundred subscribers And. learn how to generate revenue from that. So it doesn't take a lot of subscribers. It takes the right subscribers. And that's what I like about the micro newsletter too, is it's more filtered towards getting the right subscribers as opposed to the most subscribers.
- Speaker #1
Yeah. I think a lot of people look at that as a vanity metric. How many subscribers do you have and how much you're open, right? And neither of those really, I mean, they're, they're both important metrics, but they're not the most important at all because it's exactly what you said. I'd rather have 8,000 subscribers that are opening and clicking and buying than 80,000 subscribers that I'm constantly fighting the ESPs to get them out of spam.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, remember when we went to the podcast show and we were sitting there and somebody, and NPR was up there and they were talking about some huge membership program they had. And then there was that lady sitting beside and she had under a thousand followers. And she was making $18,000 a month from those 800 subscribers or followers.
- Speaker #1
Yeah.
- Speaker #2
So you don't have to have a ton of subscribers. It's always kind of nice. I don't mind.
- Speaker #1
So what are you doing? You're sending millions a day. I mean, one thing is you own the distribution. So you own it and you can hit that send button almost any time you want to talk to them. But that doesn't mean they're actually going to see it because. In today's world, that was true 20 years ago when I did my original newsletter way back when. Everybody pretty much got it. Open rates were probably like 95%. But now with the ESPs are making decisions and gate. They're the gatekeepers of whether someone's going to go into junk or spam or just completely blocked, period. And so a lot of people, I think, don't understand how to clean their list and how to actually really stay on top of it. So what are your techniques for keeping those millions that you're seeing a day landing in the right spot? What are you doing from a DKIM point of view and from ESP and deleting people that don't open or click and stuff? What are your tactics on that to keep clean?
- Speaker #0
Email list health, man. The most boring topic in the world, but the most important topic. You're in email, right? So, yeah, I mean, you obviously want to follow all the DKIM protocols. You can literally Google, and it'll give you the process to do your chat GPT, whatever you want to use. But, yeah, so you definitely have to set all those pieces up properly on the front end. And those are identifiers basically, right? So DKIM and all that, and your SPF records, those are all identifying real and not being, you know, trying to steal someone else's email and get it to the inbox, right? So that's what these big ISPs are looking for. Do you have that information? Is it set up properly? So you definitely want to do that. And the next thing is if people aren't paying attention, we just don't mail them anymore. So we will change our... segmenting, right? So we've got our different segmenting kind of protocols that we follow. So the biggest one that we've used over the years is our sunset policy. So we would only email to people that had clicked an email in 90 days, opened an email in 60 days, or had been newly added in 30 days. So we had what we called our 90, 60, 30 sunset. That is one way as well, is you can figure out, all right, if people aren't paying attention, there's no sense in mailing to them because it's only negatively impacting your deliverability. So you can just remove them out. Now, people stress about that, right? Like, I've spent money to get these people. There's a process, right? So not everyone that you mail is actually going to... Not everyone that subscribes will always open. And so those people that never open and they... They subscribe but never open. You might as well just not mail them and go for it. So we leverage a sunset policy. Now, I also am looking at a little bit deeper though, right? So a lot of times people look at my open rate and my click rate. I like to look and go, the major ISPs, are we inboxing and at what percentage? And what's our open rates? So if I have 100,000 subscribers and 50,000 are Gmail, which tends to be the bulk of a lot of email. And by inboxing and by that, I can say, all right, well, maybe only 90, you know, of those 50,000, maybe I only got a 50% delivery rate. Okay, well, I got an issue I got to solve, right? They're blocking that email, could be for a couple of different reasons. Or let's say Yahoo recently kind of changed their deliverability parameters, which you probably, you guys both probably experienced, right? Seeing some issues getting into the Yahoo inbox. Yep. So it's paying attention on not only just the opens and clicks, but it's also paying attention at the ISP level and understanding, are you inboxing there and at what percentage and what opens are you getting? So if you're sending 10,000 emails to Yahoo and you're getting zero opens, you're clearly not getting an inbox. So you can spot that and then you can start solving for it, right?
- Speaker #1
Yeah, I think it's AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail. They're the four biggest that account for about 70%, 80% of all email in the world. So those are the ones you got to really pay attention to. But yeah, that's a challenge for a lot of people because they don't understand that. Or like you said, or Norm said, they're afraid to take them off. And what I do is I keep my... My newsletter list, it's on Beehive, and that's all I do is send the newsletter on Monday and Thursday. And all my marketing stuff is on Aweber and Klaviyo. And so those are on completely separate domains, completely separate ISPs and everything, so that one doesn't affect the other. And if I sunset somebody off of my newsletter, I give them a longer runway on the marketing side. So I will continue to keep, like you said, if it's a 90-day thing. I might keep them 180 days on the marketing one before I take them off because that might be negatively affecting me a little bit, but I'm willing to take a chance over there versus ruin the open deliverability of the...
- Speaker #2
the crown jewel uh basically yep yeah and she can you can maneuver and kind of create different segments based on who you're mailing to right yeah can that can that affect by kevin you're doing your strategy where you're protecting the beehive and you're sending out these other ones uh these marketing emails on clavio let's say and all of a sudden the persons i've had enough there's too many marketing emails coming on unsubscribe and then monday comes along thursday comes along and the person sees oh here's the you know billion dollar seller newsletter i unsubscribe to you know that prick boom i'll do it again and now i'm going to report them for spam could
- Speaker #1
that like i'm just thinking out yeah no that's a valid there that probably does happen from time and time but it's a chance that it it's working for me. So it's a chance I'm willing to take, but I'm sure there is an occasion that that does happen. There's also people that legitimately want the content but don't want the marketing. So they're like, I'm happy with the content. I'll take some ads in there, but I don't want all these Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday emails that you're sending out on behalf of other people. And so there's a lot of that, too. And it's working. How are you setting your... So like you said with the micro, that's mostly the people are monetizing because they have their own product. They have their own book or their own course or their own agency or something that they're selling. On the mass ones, are you doing a CPM model? Are you doing a flat fee? Are you doing per open or per click? How do you monetize on those?
- Speaker #0
So that's evolved over the last five years too. So we started where it was CPM based. So we were charging for every thousand emails we sent, right? And at the end of the day, they still needed performance because even on a CPM basis, if they don't get performance, they don't buy again. Yeah. So we've kind of evolved now and we say, all right, well, we've got an, we know what we can send for, right? We know what it costs us to send. And so we know we'll charge, but at the same time, we also ask and we define with our client what their goals are. So what are your performance goals? So back in the day, it used to be someone would come in and go, hey, I'm going to buy these five lists from you twice a month. So I want 10 drops. It's, you know, I want to pay $1,500 for each one. And then we, you know, so they buy, they pay $3,000 per list for two different emails to that list, right? We have five, what, 15, right? So then you have some that'll come in and they'll want to buy more than that. right? So it's all just, that's how it used to run. But then they'd come back and say, hey, I need a make good, right? It didn't perform. Can you send another email for me? And along that way, I kind of got frustrated. I was like, you can't go to the grocery store and return half a loaf of bread. You can't go to Facebook and ask them for your money back because your offer didn't convert, right? And so me being a direct response marketer, I started getting kind of like, all right, this is frustrating me a little bit. So I started moving towards something different. It's like, all right, tell me what performance you need. Let's just set a budget and let us mail when we want to mail. And so we now have a budget for the month and we just mail for our clients based on what budget we hit. And then if we hit it quicker, they re-up. If it takes a little bit longer, they re-up again as well. But usually our goal is to hit it within 30 days, their budget. But we want to be able to maneuver. and control when our dedicateds are going out, when our sponsorships are going out, as opposed to being locked into a day specifically with them. So this actually has made things much, much easier for us and our advertisers. So it's kind of a combo model now on the CPM side, right? And so we also at the same time do a lot of CPA stuff as well, where we have clients where we know, all right, we've been working with them long enough to where we're just basically moving towards a CPA. model where they'll just pay us for every lead or every customer.
- Speaker #1
Is there a time of day that you found to be the best to send email? A time of day or what's a good day of the week and a bad day of the week to send?
- Speaker #0
Every day is a good day.
- Speaker #1
I love that. Just hit send. What about time of day?
- Speaker #0
Time of day, so, you know, we send morning, afternoon, and evening. So we find that we've got openers multiple different times of the day. Keep in mind that's two different worlds, right? So let's talk business one over here, which is mass media. We're sending three times a day. Over here on the micro newsletter, we're sending once a week to twice a week. Yeah. And one time per day. But they have two separate goals, right? So our large email list that we had that we're sending millions of emails a day in, that's our CPM performance model that we have all that going on. Our micro side is more thought leadership, and the goal is to drive. It's a new way to drive high-ticket sales. It's a new way to drive product sales. It's the new way to drive and increase revenue without having to. It's an easier way of growing a list and driving more applications and more sales as opposed to having to do the low-ticket ascension all the way through.
- Speaker #1
Are you driving new subscribers through ads or through?
- Speaker #0
referrals or through stuff like instantly or like intention-based stuff or how are you growing that my on brand based you know the micro newsletter model we are drive we're running ads to those right so we're driving subscribers to that we survey those subscribers when they come in and then we have a thank you page offer for them as well so we got a whole little newsletter funnel that we've designed and built and So we have that in place. And then from there, we have some follow-up campaigns that all get triggered and happen when they subscribe. And then, so yes, we are doing that. And one thing I'm getting ready to test, that's the one thing with me, I'm in it. This isn't really, I don't really like talking theory and stuff. So I'm in the trenches every day. I'm building my own stuff along with our client stuff, right? So one thing I'm testing, and I'm really curious to see how these leads perform versus just the opt-ins. But I do have a book funnel that I run and I'm going to make a bonus of joining that book, the newsletter. And so I want to see how those book buyers specifically perform on opens and clicks and high ticket sales on the back end from coming from that newsletter. So I think you can also get paid if you have the right offer to grow your newsletter, right?
- Speaker #1
Hey, what's up everybody? Kevin and Norm here with a quick word from one of our sponsors, 8Fig. Let me tell you about a platform that's changing the game for Amazon sellers. That's right. It's called 8Fig. On average, sellers working with 8Fig grow up to 400% in less than a year.
- Speaker #2
8Fig offers both funding and free tools for e-commerce growth and cashflow management. And here's how it works.
- Speaker #1
8Fig provides flexible data-driven funding tailored to your exact needs. You know, they could fund anywhere from up to $50,000 all the way up to $10 million.
- Speaker #2
8Fig gives you free tools to forecast demand, manage inventory, and analyze cash flow.
- Speaker #1
Visit 8Fig.co, that's 8Fig.co, to learn more or check the link in the show notes below.
- Speaker #2
Just mention Marketing Misfits and get 25% off your cost.
- Speaker #1
That's 8Fig.co, 8Fig.co. See you on the other side. I met some guy at the conference we were at that I don't know if you work with him or not. Those guys out of Chicago that do the high ticket sales. And I did a little test. They said, hey, we could offer your newsletter on your landing page. What are you doing right now? I said, I'm just saying thanks for subscribing. There's a little video of me thanking them and stuff. Oh, man, that's a perfect place to be selling. You should have an upsell there, an offer. I was like, yeah, I know. Let's try something out. So they're like, all right, let's give you some code and book a call. And we'll just figure out if anybody's interested. And so we did that for about three weeks. And rather than selling them, people would call and they would just say, hey, what are you interested in? Oh, you want to know how to sell on Amazon? Okay. Just kind of get engaged if there's a market. And they came back to me and said they think there's a market there. where they could sell some $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 coaching to these people. And they would go source the coaches and do all this stuff. And I decided to not do it because I'm like, that's my reputation. People are signing up for a newsletter. Like you said, it's a micro-newsletter by your definition, and it's my name. And what if someone pays $15,000, these guys go out and have someone do some coaching, and it's not very good, and then people start bad-mouthing, Oh, that Kevin King newsletter. It's a scam or it's a this or that. So I decided to not do it. I'm probably leaving some money on the table, but that's okay.
- Speaker #0
Um, so what, what do you find that on landing pages, they're the software, like, Oh, upgrade to the book and for nine 95 or 1995, or the high end coaching is best on landing pages or, and welcome emails or thank you emails. What, where are you finding that works?
- Speaker #1
Or is this, it varies, it varies on the person and in the, in the actual niche, but right. Like, for example, we have a AI partner and we've got a book we just launched. Uh, we do have a book on the thank you page and a book in the followup teaching it. The whole thing is about teaching, uh, parents, how to, how parents can keep their kids informed on AI. Right. So I think the stat I just saw was something insane. Like 50% of the entry level white collar jobs will be gone in like three years. Right. And so that's a lot of kids right now.
- Speaker #0
Well, you're having to have right now, a kid's coming out of college with a computer science and programming degrees, having a hard time getting jobs right now.
- Speaker #1
So, and it's only going to get worse, right? So they're going to come out with even more debt because I don't see tuition dropping and they're going to come out with more debt and they're going to have less opportunity. So it's very interesting that, so anyways, that whole thing is built around helping these parents help their kids navigate that process, right? And we've got a book and we just started testing it. The price point I think we went with a little too high, so we're going to try and test a lower price point on that.
- Speaker #0
This is a physical book in the mail or a PDF or Kindle type of thing?
- Speaker #1
It's a PDF book.
- Speaker #0
Okay. Okay.
- Speaker #1
Yeah. So it's 30 conversations to have with your kids about AI is the book. So it is a lot of good feedback on the book. We just got to get people to actually pull out the card and pay for it now. But it is. So we have that and then, you know, we're testing that, but we don't really have a high ticket offer over there. So there's other stuff where there's a high, you know, that I run that I have a high ticket offer on and that does well too. Right. So just depends on what the person has to offer.
- Speaker #0
Are you doing any community building off the back of any of these newsletters? Like one of the things, Norm and I both have WhatsApp channels for our personal newsletters in the Amazon space. Actually, we don't have one for marketing misfits. I just realized that, Norm. That's your department,
- Speaker #2
Kev.
- Speaker #1
How does that work for you? How does that go?
- Speaker #0
Both of them are very active. Norm, I think you just got to kind of sign up to get into his.
- Speaker #2
You have to answer some questions.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, you answer some questions and they kick out the spammers. For me to get into mine, I have two. One is for people that have been to my high-ticket events. I have a a $5,000 plus event called the Billion Dollar Seller Summit that I do. So just by attending that, you get in. That one's very active. Then I have one for the newsletter that you have to refer three people. You have to refer at least three people, and then you can request access, and then I approve you. So you have to actually refer. And that one is not quite as active, but it's doing okay. But I'm about to start something online called the Billion Dollar Seller Club, which is going to be $99 a month. And it's going to include all the elaborate of all the past issues, all my past podcast and content, like my own little custom LLM with a massive amount of data that they can query and ask me and experts and stuff. And then some monthly training and a mastermind call with me and a bunch of other bells and whistles in there. And I think that's going to do very well. And then Norm and I are going to do it for Marketing Misfits as well. And then just like you said at the beginning. We're not doing it now, but it's on our roadmap this summer. It's actually to launch a newsletter off the back of this podcast where we'll take the podcast, have AI exactly what you said, summarize it, create an article, and then we'll append one or two other little sections to that that's not in the newsletter to make it a little bit unique and send that out. And it'll create this whole flywheel effect. But I think that's a massive opportunity that I see with newsletters that you build that authority, you build that. You're part of their daily life, and then you make them some sort of community offer that's just irresistible or you can't say no to. And I think you can get a lot of people in there. And, you know, you just do the math on this. If I can get 500 people out of 30,000 that are active subscribers right now, that's not a high number. And when my avid audience is well over 1,000 that are actively opening, clicking, and reading almost everything, that's not a high number. That's decent. That's a nice little chunk of change every year. And it could just continue to grow. And so I think that's a massive opportunity too for a lot of people. Are you doing anything along those lines?
- Speaker #1
I am not. I've been kicking around the idea. I just haven't figured out the best delivery mechanism, right? I've got a school thing that I push them into. They buy our book that they go into, but it doesn't get very active. And I've also looked at doing Slack. I've done some courses, like cohorts, where I put them in Slack and communicated there. And I've actually been looking at WhatsApp lately. So, because I do want to add a $99 a month, interesting you say that, $100 a month kind of component to our front end offer. And, you know, give a communication way for people and everything else. But would you do that in WhatsApp as well? No,
- Speaker #0
I'm going to probably do the community part in school. Not in school, sorry, in Circle. And actually Circle probably instead of school. There's just some more additional better features that I like in Circle. But I'm doing a monthly training where I'll do a two-hour mastermind call, group call with me because a lot of these people want access to me and they want tech strategies and stuff. And then I'll bring in a guest speaker once a month to actually deliver like an hour and a half tactical presentation. And I'm motivating those people rather than just coming, hey, come provide content. I'm making all the money. I'm going to pay them. you know, say $2,500 to show up and actually give a presentation. And then at the end of the presentation, people will score them on a 0 to 10 basis. If they get a 7 or below, I'm just going to tell them you got a 7, and here's your $2,500. Thank you very much. If they got an 8, that goes up to like $3,500. So they get a 9, it goes up to like $5,000. If they get a 10 out of 10, it goes up to like $10,000. So they're incentivized to provide massive value so that people that are paying this $99 a month are like, holy cow. Uh, that's worth every little penny because I just got some technique or tactic to make more on TikTok shop or make more on Amazon or, or whatever. So I'm doing some things like that and then giving them discounts on my in-person events, um, and access to this massive database and, um, the, the, the community, uh, private community group where they can help each other. That's outside of WhatsApp, a little bit more exclusive and some other bells and whistles. Oh, a printed newsletter. I'm actually doing... I take in the Dan Kennedy approach. And actually, I'm going to do a quarterly printed newsletter sent physically through the mail. You know, 11 by 17 sheets folded in half and stapled. It's like 16, 20, 24 pages or something. And that'll have additional content that's not in my newsletter, like, you know, special stuff from some events or whatever. And they'll get that as well. And I think that at one point I thought about just charging separately for that and having that as an upsell. But I decided to include it in this $99 thing and see what happens as a value stack. And I think that'll do well. And the print newsletter, you know, it sits on their desk. They may not read it for three months, but it sits there on their desk or sits there in their bathroom or wherever they take it. And I think the legs on that are going to be just something you hold in your hand just feels worth more than an email.
- Speaker #1
I'm pretty sure I still have some Dan Kennedy inner circle newsletters somewhere laying around in boxes after all my boobs.
- Speaker #0
Probably. Yeah. But you don't have his emails have long disappeared. But yeah, yeah. So there's so much you can do. I mean, we've just barely touched the surface here in this chat over the last hour. We could keep going for hours on this.
- Speaker #1
Good question for Norm, actually. Norm, how's your WhatsApp working?
- Speaker #2
My WhatsApp's working great. uh we've we had some problems with spammers at the beginning and now we have brought in some extra moderators that we've added um four additional questions so they have to really prove themselves to get in the group then once they're in the group uh what's nice about it is i'm busy you know just like kevin's group but people just i don't have to be there for the group to carry on so i'll wake up in the morning and there might be 10 questions or 10 things going on and I didn't have to get involved, which was really nice. So once you have the community, you know, people just take off.
- Speaker #0
That's the difference. A lot of people don't understand what's the difference between audience and community. Yeah. An audience is where the creator, me, you, Norm, have to be involved or it dies. But community runs without you and you peek in. So that's what you definitely want to always try to build community. And WhatsApp is great. You're... capped it, I think, 1,024 people in a WhatsApp group. I think that's the cap. So it can't grow infinitely. You might have to have separate communities. So that is one limitation. But it's nice because it actually... It gets through to everybody. There's no spam filters or anything unless they unsubscribe or they might have that little dot there for a week because they haven't checked it. But eventually they're going to check and scroll through. The downside is it can get unwieldy. If you go on Norm sometime and something was active in there and you didn't log in over the weekend, there's 100 messages and you're like, ah, I'm just going to quickly scroll through or something. Or you stop and read them all. That can be... sometimes a little daunting.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, we've broken ours. We've created separate groups as well. So if somebody just wants to talk about general items, it's a PPC, another item, sourcing another group. So we've got, I think there's five groups that are going on at any one time.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, and it keeps that touch, that relationship, and it keeps top of mind. And we'll both occasionally promote something in there. a webinar or something that we're doing, an event that we're doing together. We'll promote in there, but we keep it pretty clean and pretty much people helping each other out.
- Speaker #1
Nice.
- Speaker #0
Hey, Kevin King and Norm Farrar here. If you've been enjoying this episode of Marketing Misfits, thanks for listening this far. Continue listening. We've got some more valuable stuff coming up. Be sure to hit that subscribe button if you're listening to this on your favorite podcast player or if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify. Make sure you subscribe to our channel because you don't want to miss a single episode of the Marketing Misfits. Have you subscribed yet, Norm?
- Speaker #2
Well, this is an old guy alert. Should I subscribe to my own podcast?
- Speaker #0
Yeah, but what if you forget to show up one time? It's just me on here. You're not going to know what I say.
- Speaker #2
I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too. You can go back and forth with one another.
- Speaker #0
Yikes!
- Speaker #2
But that being said, don't forget to subscribe. Share it. Oh, and if you really like this content, somewhere up there, there's a banner. Click on it, and you'll go to another episode of The Marketing Misfits.
- Speaker #0
Make sure you don't miss a single episode because you don't want to be like Norm.
- Speaker #2
All right, guys. We are past the top of the hour. So, Nate, I... told you at the beginning of the uh webinar or webinar podcast i always ask our guests one question and if they know a misfit i know a lot of misfits perfect but i'll give you one so
- Speaker #1
i would say um you know there's zach uh zach williams super smart with uh He's not really in the scene too much, I think, on the internet marketing world, but super smart guy with some AI. And, you know, he just showed me some stuff today that blew me away. He is a great marketer, owns a large agency, and doing some really, really cool stuff. So he's a good one. And obviously another great one would be, and I'll give you two. Is two okay?
- Speaker #2
Sure.
- Speaker #1
Sure. All right. Another great one, obviously, I always recommend to him is Mark Evans. Uh, he's the one who got me into the marketing world, but Mark Evans, DM, great dude. He's doing some really cool stuff. More, uh, has moved from marketer to business growth. Uh, he's doing a lot of unique things that way. Just super big thinker and executor and getting things done. It's, uh, it's, it's pretty cool to, you know, good friend of mine and been great to see his evolution, even from introducing me. I'll never forget when I first got. First time I met him, he was doing a telecall to sell his real estate course via telecall.
- Speaker #0
I remember those telecalls. It's like a group chat on a phone.
- Speaker #1
He was like, what is this guy doing? We just met. He's on some call. He's selling something. I owned a mortgage company at that time, so I was just learning about the online world. So yeah, he's another good dude, another misfit. It'd be great.
- Speaker #2
That's awesome. All right. So if anybody wants to get a hold of you, how do they do that?
- Speaker #1
Yeah, natekennedy.com forward slash newsletter is probably the best spot to go. Just get on the list and reach out, shoot me an email. And if you want to get to me on social handles, I recommend going to natekennedy.com forward slash newsletter, but all my social handles are natekennedymd. Perfect.
- Speaker #2
All right, sir. Well, thanks for coming on the podcast today. This was awesome.
- Speaker #1
All right. I appreciate it, guys. Thank you so much.
- Speaker #0
Thanks.
- Speaker #2
Now I'm going to do my job.
- Speaker #0
All you got to do is hit a button.
- Speaker #2
I'm doing it.
- Speaker #0
It is. You did it. It should be like balloons that go through the screen.
- Speaker #2
I was just going to say, if you do this, probably balloons will go off.
- Speaker #0
I got to do this. Where's the thing? There we go. There we go. I don't know. So, I mean, newsletters, like, we just talked about newsletters. newsletters are powerful. But the trick is you got to commit. And I think that's the thing where a lot of people are like, yeah, it sounds good, but you got to commit. Like Nate said, you have to be regular. You and I, I don't think you've missed a Monday lunch with Norm. I haven't missed a Monday or Thursday in two years of mine. Even if we're out of town, even we're traveling, sometimes we're somewhere. I'm like, Norm, I can't smoke till three in the morning today. I got to go finish the newsletter. Um, so, Or I do them in advance or do it best of. But that's the key. But the power, if you haven't gotten anything from what we just talked about with Nate, the power of these is immense. And so don't be afraid to take a look under the hood. And Nate's got a great training course on it if you want to go and check out what he does. And it can kind of walk you through some of the process as well. But, you know, that's what we like to do here on. the marketing message is like show people different ways and different angles of marketing and i think we we pretty we pretty much done been doing that and we're going to continue doing that with a lot of great guests so if you like this episode or know someone that might want to do a newsletter be sure to forward it this episode a link to it to to them so they can check it out hit that subscribe button on uh on youtube or on uh apple or spotify or wherever you're listening to this and leave us a comment down below tell say hey Kevin, I agree with Norm. I'm tired of hearing your voice. Will you shut up and let Norm talk? Yep. Or say, hey, I really like the podcast. This is awesome. Keep it up. Whatever you want to say. We'd love to hear from you.
- Speaker #2
Like, Kevin, does your voice get on your nerves, too? That's it. There we go.
- Speaker #0
There you go. That's the line. That's the line. But it's marketingmisfits.co. And we have a couple other things coming up. We have the CMS, Collected Mind Society trip. where we're going to be smoking cigars in Tampa, November 6th to the 10th. So you can go to collectivemindsociety.com and talk about that. We'll probably have a whole episode coming soon where we'll have a couple of people that will probably be joining us, and we'll talk about the whole thing. It's really, really cool. And we have a new video channel we have. It's a new YouTube channel,
- Speaker #2
and it's doing well. It's just for clips, so we'll take the best of and just make them three minutes or under clips. So if you just want to hear, you just got a limited amount of time, don't want to listen to the long form podcast, you can just head over there. That's on YouTube. And that is Marketing Misfits Clips.
- Speaker #0
And soon, watch for the Marketing Misfits newsletter. We just spoke about newsletters and we actually have one coming out this summer. So look for the announcement of that and hopefully subscribe to that. But other than that, Norm, I think we'll see everybody next time, right?
- Speaker #2
I think we will. All right, everybody.
- Speaker #0
Thanks a lot.
- Speaker #2
And we'll see you next Tuesday.
- Speaker #0
Yeah. Bye. Bye.
- Speaker #3
Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Thank
