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This Secret Newsletter Strategy Will BLOW UP Your Business cover
This Secret Newsletter Strategy Will BLOW UP Your Business cover
The Marketing Misfits

This Secret Newsletter Strategy Will BLOW UP Your Business

This Secret Newsletter Strategy Will BLOW UP Your Business

1h08 |13/05/2025
Play
undefined cover
undefined cover
This Secret Newsletter Strategy Will BLOW UP Your Business cover
This Secret Newsletter Strategy Will BLOW UP Your Business cover
The Marketing Misfits

This Secret Newsletter Strategy Will BLOW UP Your Business

This Secret Newsletter Strategy Will BLOW UP Your Business

1h08 |13/05/2025
Play

Description

Seeking true authority, explosive growth, and real connection with your audience? Newsletters aren’t dead, they’re the secret weapon most marketers overlook.


Unlock proven strategies, expert insights, and game-changing tools to grow your brand and boost your sales here: ➡️https://marketingmisfits.co/


Join Norm and Kevin as they battle newsletter myths and break down how a simple email can launch a $500,000 profit machine.


You’ll learn:

- Why controlling your own list beats playing the social lottery

- Niche-tested secrets to jaw-dropping open and click rates

- How AI, referrals, and community tactics scale your impact

- Monetization realities they won’t teach you in marketing school


This is the episode every founder, creator, and digital hustler needs. Don’t miss the tricks, cautionary tales, and industry laughs right to the end!


⏰ Timestamps:

00:00 - The $500K Newsletter Myth

05:59 - Newsletters in the AI Renaissance

8:15 - Growth Engine Unlocked 11:06 - List Authority & Monetization

15:08 - Open Rates, Real Fans & Community Tactics

23:04 - Referrals, Hacks & Tools That Supercharge Lists

32:25 - Deliverability Mastery & Tactical Testing

1:01:29 - Your Audience Awaits!


This episode is brought to you by:

- House of AMZ: Elevate your brand today at https://www.amazonseo.com/

- 8fig: Get 25% off 8fig off at https://8fig.co

- Stack Influence: Use code MISFITS for 10% off at https://stackinfluence.com/

- Levanta: Get 20% off Levanta's gold plan and book your call today - https://get.levanta.io/misfits


Don’t miss out on the insights that could transform your business!


Hit that Subscribe button 🔔 and join the Marketing Misfits crew for weekly insights into the tools, strategies, and stories you need to stay ahead in the ever-changing world of marketing.


Hosted by Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

  • Speaker #0

    The true advantage of having a newsletter is you control the messaging and you control the delivery to a point. So what you want to pay attention to is the click rate. So you want to put stuff in there that encourages people to click. You tease them and you give them, but you got to give them enough information where they don't have to click off that I got it. But you want to encourage them to click off too. You're watching Marketing Misfits with Norm Farrar and Kevin King. Hey, Norm, remember a couple of years ago, I said I was going to start a newsletter. Remember when we talked about that?

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, I told you you were crazy. Nobody reads them.

  • Speaker #0

    Yeah, my wife, ex-wife, let me emphasize that, said the same thing. Maybe she should be ex-partner now. I don't know, but she said the same thing. But do you realize that this year, that newsletter, less than two years since starting it, will generate over a half a million dollars profit in my pocket?

  • Speaker #1

    And none of that's coming to me. Thank you, Kevin.

  • Speaker #0

    That's right, but you have a newsletter too. I do. And it's going to pick up some steam. And I think anybody that's listening to this, if they're not doing a newsletter, they may want to rethink that. And that's what we're going to talk about today.

  • Speaker #1

    Right. Nope. Let's get into it.

  • Speaker #0

    So, you know, I had a newsletter back before newsletters were cool. I had a newsletter back in the late 90s, actually. I think I've told you maybe this story over cigars one time, but for the audience that hasn't heard it. Back in the late 90s, Mark and I had a company and we were dealing with pretty women. We had like baseball cards and calendars and all kinds of different collectibles and stuff, dealing with like bikini models and things like that. And we needed a way to actually reach the audience. So what we did is we were advertising all the traditional direct mail. This is before the internet was a hot thing, direct mail things back then. And then we started promoting this newsletter. and said hey uh top of funnel just we didn't know funnels existed you know nobody was talking about that back then come to our website and sign up for this newsletter and every day seven days a week we would send out a newsletter to our users we end up getting up to about 250 000 people that were getting this every single day and in that newsletter would be a short little text-based summary no images just a sort uh there's no html email or anything back then and be like five I've had lines almost like a... If you're familiar with Drudge Report or something like that in these states, just five little headlines about anything to do with pretty girls. So it could be Farrah Fawcett did this or Thana White on the Wheel of Fortune did this or Hugh Hefner did this or Dallas Cowboy cheated. And then they would click through and then we have a photo of the day. They would say something like, see today's, see Julie, you know, today's featured model or whatever. They would click through, and they would take them to a nicely designed HTML website that would have a photo of the girl. a little bio about her we had a joke section we had a game section we had a trivia section a few other little sections on there plus these five headlines that were clickable hot links that would go off the stories on other sites and i literally had back then there was no ai or no tools to aggregate this stuff so i had two guys one in houston it was in a he was in a wheelchair so it was a really good job for him and another guy in uh in la And every day they would go and find articles and post them. We had this backend database. It wasn't Google sheets or anything like that back then. And they would post these links in there and they post, they find 30 or 40 stories a day. And every night before midnight, no matter where I was in the world, I remember being in an Island in Honduras with, and I had a satellite phone, one of those big honking satellite phones, because there's no internet in the hotel back then. And I had to connect to it, turn off all my images on my browser. and connected like 300 bits per second or whatever that slow-ass rate was on a modem to actually log in, look at these stories, and approve five of them that would go out in the email starting at midnight that night. People could choose the time of day they got the email, but that grew that list so big. We got on Howard Stern when he was on public radio before satellite. We got we were selling Hold it.

  • Speaker #1

    Hold it. So you went on Howard Stern.

  • Speaker #0

    I personally did. Our models did. But I was in the green room with them there. Someone had to escort them, you know, and make sure Howard didn't do any crazy stuff.

  • Speaker #1

    I was just wondering if they were going to rate you, you know, with the laser point. Well,

  • Speaker #0

    they did. Coincidentally, we had a model. One of our top models was from your neck of the woods, from Toronto. Her name is Katia Corvo. You can actually go to YouTube and look this up. Go look up Katia Corvo, C-O-R-R-I-V-E-A-U, spelled the French way. and Howard Stern, you can see the video because E! Entertainment Television back then filmed all of his stuff. And you can see where she went on the show. They tried to get her, you know, Howard, he's a pretty girl on the show. He tries to get them naked, tried to get her naked. She refused to do it, but she got in her underwear if they would get in their underwear. It's really funny. So I think she got everybody in the studio to get in their underwear. It's really funny. But at the end of that, you know, they're promoting our website. And our servers would blow up. We would have someone standing at our facility to flip the switch. You know, we had one of those remote switches to restart the server. And it was crazy. But we'd get tons of leads. And we dealt with Bomas, who ended up being one of the founders of that, went off and started Wikipedia. And it... It just blew up and we sold tons of products off it. But what happened is around 2001, 2002, the CanSpam Act came out. And so stuff started going to spam. And so a lot of our guys were sending out all these massive emails and a lot of people just quit getting them and they started complaining. And then so we just ended up basically shutting this thing down and just continuing on our way. We built up a big list and we use that list. will come 2023 i'm sitting at perry belcher's ai bot summit in vegas and he's talking about using a this is like april of 2023 and he's talking about using ai to actually generate newsletters and that this is some big opportunity and you can crank out newsletters using ai and i was like yeah you i can see this you could definitely do this but they're going to be pieces of newsletters and it turns out his his theory was actually a piece of because you you can't really you can do it but but they don't last. Um, But you can use AI as a tool for sure and help you with it. So I was like, you know what? I'm going to bring this back. And then you were doing a newsletter at the time, your Lunch with Norm newsletter. Yeah,

  • Speaker #1

    I think there's a lot of people in the space that just had this newsletter, but nobody defined what it looked like. And I want to thank you, by the way, for pulling me aside one day and saying, your newsletters.

  • Speaker #0

    well i think i did that to a bunch of people oh no you did that btss bdss that was hilarious i had sponsors in the room and i'm like your newsletter is uh uh kaka uh and they're like we just sponsor a lot and you're just calling us out here it's like yeah i'm calling you out um no uh but yeah so there what happens a lot of people have they have a promotional eight i call them promotional emails they call them newsletters they still exist to this day I get a ton of them from people in the Amazon space that we're in, some of the marketing people, newsletters. They'll say up at the top, you know, the ones that always get me is like, the April newsletter or the May newsletter is here. I'm like, that's how they started off. The May newsletter is here. They started off with like, the weather is bright and balmy outside. I hope it's good in your deck of the woods. You know, some sort of, those are garbage. And they'll say newsletter and you look at it. It's not a newsletter. It's a promotional email about their services. Even some of the biggest names in the Amazon space have really garbage.

  • Speaker #1

    The marketing space, Kev.

  • Speaker #0

    The newsletters and the marketing and the digital marketing space too. But if you're not providing value or someone doesn't have to click off to actually get the value, then you're not providing a new, you're not really doing a newsletter. So I decided to start one and I launched it in August of 2023 to the Amazon world. i did not some people just blast their newsletter to their entire email list anybody's ever given them an email or bought something they just blasted to them i didn't do that i made you opt i made everybody opt in and when so i started i think the first issue went out to like august 14th 2023 to like 1400 or 1700 1700 people i think it was and then for the next year i just refined it i tested different things i tested you know putting a story in i tested different sections and games and different kinds of value different lengths And then after, I just basically grew it off referrals. So people that liked it would refer other people. And that worked really well. I incentivized that, got it up to about 10,000. And then last year in August, literally August of last year, so not even a year ago, I started running Facebook ads. And now I'm doing some other additional stuff. And we're at 32,000 active people right now. And I've kicked off about 17,000 for actually not opening it. But the core thing about this. Anybody can do this, no matter who's listening here, whether you're selling physical products, you have an agency, you're in some sort of marketing and consulting, you have a SaaS product. If you don't have a valuable added newsletter, you're missing a major opportunity.

  • Speaker #1

    Now a quick word from our sponsor, LaVonta. Hey, Kevin, tell us a little bit about it.

  • Speaker #0

    That's right, Amazon sellers. Do you want to skyrocket your sales and boost your organic rankings? Meet Levante, Norm and I's secret weapon for driving high-quality external traffic straight to our Amazon storefronts using affiliate marketing. That's right, it's achieved through direct partnerships with leading media outlets like CNN, Wirecutter, and BuzzFeed, just to name a few, as well as top affiliates, influencers, bloggers, and media buyers. all in Levanta's marketplace, which is home to over 5,000 different creators that you get to choose from.

  • Speaker #1

    So are you ready to elevate your business? Visit get.levanta.io slash misfits. That's get.levanta, L-E-V-A-N-T-A, .io slash misfits, and book a call and you'll get up to 20% off Levanta's gold plan today. That's get.levanta. dot IO slash misfits.

  • Speaker #0

    Now, does everybody read their email? No, you're going to get open rates, depending on a number of factors between 25 and 50%. Typically, you know, some people may get a little bit higher than that, but usually it's a small list or a very targeted list. If they get higher numbers than that, but if you get above 10,000 subscribers and you're getting 40, 50% open rates, you're doing, you're doing well. And, but the thing is, The newsletter that I've done, I think I've told you this, has given me more authority than anything I've ever done. I've had 220,000 people go through the Freedom Ticket course to sell on Amazon. I've done 156 episodes. I just looked earlier at the AM, PM podcast. You and I have done about 52 or 55 of this podcast. We've spoken on stages all over the world. We've done seminars and trains, been guests on other podcasts. But I can tell you nothing has moved the needle more. than doing the newsletter. And it's actually now turned into, like I said, at the beginning of the show, last year I did over $250,000 in profit. This year I'll do over 500,000. And some of that's not counting some of the residual effects. It's hard to track of people buying a ticket to BDSS or whatever it may be. So I think anybody listening needs to actually think about actually creating a real newsletter. And I know... when you were doing yours, your lunch with Norwin, I basically, like you said, I told you it was crud and you guys changed it up and now it's really good. I mean, Kelsey, I know Kelsey does a lot of it, your son, and he's doing a good job with it. And what have you seen after starting the newsletter? How have you seen it affect what your business and what you're doing?

  • Speaker #1

    Well, first of all, I thought our newsletter originally was good. I thought we had some interesting content. And then... uh you told me i remember we're sitting down having a cigar and i kind of got a little perturbed because it was i thought it was good and then uh i said okay so uh you were telling me everybody that you kind of called out on stage which i thought was hilarious uh because they all thought they were having a great newsletter and i listened to you and i said you know what kev i might not be number one but i'm gonna be number two And what does it take to do that? And we were partnering on this. We were partnering in our company and we sat down and I remember you just said, look, you gave me a few points. I told Kels and then eventually you spend some time with Kels. One of the things I decided, everybody's got to have a USP. And my USP was going to be a personal story followed up by a business, turning it into a business lesson. And then gamifying it a little bit, I have something called Find the Beard, where it's kind of like Find Waldo or Where's Waldo. And then we just go out and we find interesting information. Now, we've been able to grow this into last year, which was a six-figure business, not as much as you. We were just over, I think we got to about $125,000 in revenue last year. just Doing it right, giving the right exposure, having a great... Now, I know open rate is really hard to talk about, but our highest open rate was over 70%. Our lowest, I think it was 43%. And we're kind of maintaining a mid-average. But the click-through rates, we're doing really good. They range from at low, yeah, 4-something, at a high, a 7.5, I think. I think. So, let's click through, right? Yeah. So, we're providing some really good options for the sponsors. We also provided values, my top 10 list for books, AI tools. We just didn't keep it to Amazon, although it was kind of an Amazon-focused newsletter, but we wanted to, we asked people, what do they want? They wanted AI. They wanted... Uh, education. They wanted all these different things, SOPs, action steps. And that's what we looked for. So at the end of the day, if I take a look at it, I'm finding the same thing. So I've got a community a bunch of different communities based off of lunch with norm lunch with norm reaches a ton of a ton of people the podcast um i have three spot sponsors and a banner listing of a bunch of different sponsors and i would think that drove a lot of the leads but guess what the newsletter grew a ton of leads similar to what you're saying and because of this And because we built that really loyal community, and I think we should touch on that afterwards, but now you could change that into dedicated emails. And your open rate on the dedicated emails is incredible because people trust you and it's coming from you.

  • Speaker #0

    Yeah, a newsletter gives you permission to be in their inbox. You start, when you first start sending it out, you're sending it out and people are like, oh, another email. But if you're delivering value... like both of our newsletters actually do real value in there and you you engage them like you're doing with the stories your personal stories which are great i did some of that in the beginning i've shied away from it recently just more of a space issue and then i tried to i switched to branding a little bit uh but that's a great personal brand for you and like you do with the game the vacation where you have the little uh uh picture and it's like find find you in this maze of uh people sitting on the beach you know a thousand people sitting on the beach where's norm where's the beer guy, which is... in theme with your brand, with the beard. So it's, what I've seen is now people, they look forward to it and they're drinking their coffee in the morning or maybe they don't read it that day. Maybe they save them up and read them on the weekend or they do something like that. And I'm even doing mine in podcast. I have a podcast version of mine right now. So my newsletter comes out on Mondays and Thursdays and at BillionDollarSellers.com. and It comes out in the mornings. I would like to get them out a little bit earlier than I do, but I'm not able to because of this thing I do with a podcast. So I have a guy in the UK that every night, so I finish, I personally write my newsletter. This is not a VA doing it later. I have a template. I'm able to do it in under two hours, each one. If one's a little bit more detailed or I'm writing something a little bit more, maybe a little bit over two hours, but I'm able to put them together. It wasn't that way in the beginning. It was four or five hours for each one in the beginning. But about two hours is what it takes me to put each one together. I've never missed. That's a key. It's consistency. So my trainer started one. You've never missed either. Right. And my trainer started one, and he's hit and miss. Our friend Elena sometimes doesn't come out. There are people like life gets in the way. And when you're media, that can't happen. When you're part of someone's life, you have to come out. So even if I'm at a BDSS in Iceland. and I know I'm not going to have time to mess around and keep up with what the latest things are and publish that, I'll do a best of. I'll do a couple in advance and they're like best ofs, because even a best of, I haven't really seen you do this yet, but even a best of is still, it's better than nothing. And the fact is, if you're only getting 40, 50% of the people to open any given email, 40 to 50% of them haven't seen that stuff. So it's going to be new to a lot of A lot of them have forgotten about it or they skimmed over it. So it's still nobody's complaining and saying, oh, this is regurgitated, recycled stuff. And in today's AI world, I think you and I talked about this. One of the big advantages of putting out content like we're doing with the podcast, our individual podcast, this podcast, the training thing that we have under Dragonfish used to be called Ascend. I can't remember the name of it now. The new name. Whatever the new name is, we had to change it as a trademark issues. Um, it's coming out, it's launching soon. That's why it's not active right now. So I can't remember the exact name, but, uh, and then our newsletters is massive content and today's world with LLMs and everything, the content people are, have a major advantage. So you're, you're producing this massive content. I even had my, my assistant, my VA that I have in Pakistan that does some stuff for me. I didn't go find all the podcasts I've ever been on in the last 10 years or whatever since 2016 when I came on my first podcast and find them all and translate them all. And he's done the same thing for all these podcasts, all the AM PM podcasts I do. So it's creating massive content. But with that newsletter, you're getting permission to come every day. And then like you said. You see what people are clicking on, what they're interested in. So you can double down on that. You can ask them too, but you can also double down on the things that they're clicking in. You can run ad sell advertising spots. You can do affiliate commissions to make money out of the newsletter, which in some times can be real money. But where the big money is at is like exactly what you just said is a dedicated email. So my newsletter comes on Mondays and Thursdays. And On Tuesdays and Wednesdays originally, and I just added Fridays as an option now too, even though it's not the best day, I'll send them a message to the newsletter subscriber list. It doesn't say BDSN in the subject line because that's what it always says for my newsletter, so you can quickly sort them or find them. But it'll be an email for a single topic. Sometimes it's for us. We're promoting a webinar we're doing for Dragonfish. Sometimes it's an advertiser. And I charge right now $4,000 per email for that. And I sell out about a month and a half in advance on those. And so that adds up to real money. I've had one advertiser, it's done so well for him, spend close to 80 grand in the last year just advertising because it's done so well for him. And he knows that, yeah, every time he has an ad in the newsletter, maybe he gets 20, 30 clicks or 50 clicks or something. That's nothing great. But he knows long-term that branding is like Coca-Cola. Top of mind. Awareness. As soon as someone needs him, he's going to be there and going to be the first one they think of. And that's what it does. It gives you more authority. It leans into everything else that you do, whether you're selling courses. But as a product, even if you're doing products, you can sell your products off it. I mean, I sell my BDSS. I sell my virtual events. I sell my replays. I mean, replays to the events you came to in Iceland have done well over $100,000. just selling the replay that the cost to do that was 15,000 bucks and to bring the crew out and have them actually do that and edit it on the spot and do a live stream. And I just take the videos. I upload them to video Vimeo for me. I didn't have to do anything. Just put together the email and the links and send that out. And that's, if I didn't have that newsletter, a lot of those people would be ignoring my emails or they wouldn't be aware of it. And you're, you're reaching into all these other people. And that's, you can do that for any brand but The thing is, you have to provide value and you have to be consistent. And that's where I think a lot of people have trouble. But with AI, there's ways to, you can't have AI do all the work, but AI can be a tool that you can utilize to summarize things or to do it in certain angles or to train it with your voice and help it write some of the stuff that you've, or rewrite some of the stuff that you've written. There's lots of cool stuff.

  • Speaker #1

    that you can do when it comes to newsletters so everybody i mean you agree i mean you've seen the power of it i've seen i've seen the power and surprisingly um way over double triple quadruple over the um podcast which i was shocked at and one of the other things we never talked about and i think we have to talk about uh community i think we have to talk about deliverability but One of the things that I started doing recently, you did this right off the top. We took our time and this was kind of a backseat. We didn't know what to promote, but we started doing referrals. And we've done that now for about two months. And have we got a ton of referrals that have come in? So we're giving away prompt books, we're giving away courses, we're giving away all sorts of different things. Matter of fact, this year, I think we have a virtual BDSS giveaway. The person gives away enough. but That's if you have to be creative, like I'm trying to do it because I have the podcast, because I have the, the, the communities that I've built, I can go out there and try to promote it that way. Then I go out and go to people like you and on Beehive, you can promote me. I think that's what you're doing because we're getting a bunch of leads that come from you. I know that there's other newsletters out there. And then there's the whole referral network. which is working really well. I think we got a few hundred emails or subscribers just off of that this month.

  • Speaker #0

    Yeah, referrals. So there's different tools. If you're going to do a newsletter, some people use Kit, some people use Substack, some people. You don't want to be using a general tool like MailChimp or AWeber. to do a proper newsletter there's the best tool in my opinion is beehive b-e-e-h-i-i-v it's spelled weird b-e-e-h-i-i-v yeah um it was built for newsletters and they have they have advertising built in where advertisers will come to you and you can make 100 200 bucks 300 bucks per uh pawn you choose which ads you want and you automatically insert them it does all the tracking all that helps you with all the writing it's built to actually do new proper news there's not email marketing and it's it's really really good and one of the systems they have is a referral thing and what norm's talking about is you can add a little line of code and it'll put a little box on there you don't have they'll say hey if you like this news that you put some copy whatever you want to say if you like this refer a friend and get rewards and you can create like a little gif that goes through these this animated gif of all these rewards and where a lot of people mess up is they'll say refer five people and get a coffee mug Prefer 10 people get a t-shirt. And for me, I don't think that's valuable. Most people don't give a crap about your company logo on a coffee. They just don't. What they do, if your newsletter is for accountants, instead of a coffee mug with Kevin's accountant's service on it, you should have a coffee mug that says some sort of slogan for accountants. I don't know. I'm just accountants. know their data. I don't know. Some sort of slogan that accountants identify with, it's a cute little slogan for them. Then they'll take that. And then the other mistake a lot of people make is they make the rewards too high. Most people don't know five people. Most people know, unless they're going to post it on their social media or somewhere, most people know one person. So you have to have a quick win. Something of value, like you're doing the prompts thing, and I do a 21 hacks deal. So one, just refer... just get them started. Just one person. And then they get that and they're like, that's pretty cool. Who else do I know? And they'll refer other people in the office or they'll refer their partners or they'll refer, post it somewhere. And that's how I exactly how I grew from those 1700 when I started to 10,000. And I still do it now, but I'm also doing a lot of outside advertising. And another thing that like you just said is inside Beehive, and there's other companies like Sparkloop that will do this too. I use both of them. And you can refer. out. So I can refer to you. So when someone signs up for my newsletter, pops a little pop-up on the confirmations page that says, oh, by the way, you might also like Lunch with Norm. Do you want that? And you might also like Retoo's AI for e-commerce. Do you like that? And if they say yes, it automatically subscribes them to you. So you get a lead. Now, in our case, we're buddies, so I don't charge you for that. Well,

  • Speaker #1

    how come I've been cutting your checks?

  • Speaker #0

    Oh, where have they been going? I haven't seen those. i oh maybe it's going to the coke zeros that's that that's where that's going that's going to mexican coke zeros mexican coke zeros um so but you can refer out and you can get paid so people will pay you you know buck two bucks three bucks it depends you know for those and so a lot of times if you do this right if you if i'm advertising um and i'm spending say a dollar per lead in ads And I can get a dollar back from a lunch with Norm, who, if you weren't my buddy, would be paying me to do this. I can basically have this as a wash. And so I'm getting all my leads for free and I can grow this thing, if you do it right, basically at a profit in a way.

  • Speaker #1

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  • Speaker #0

    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 #1

    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 #0

    Right now is one of the best times to get started with Stack Influence. You can sign up at stack. influence.com or click the link in this video down the description or notes below and mention misfits that's m-i-s-f-i-t-s to get 10 off your first campaign stack influence.com so i make a little bit of profit on when i was doing facebook ads it was difficult i was it was costing my best leads for two dollars and seventy three cents a piece so if i got Not everybody signs up for the newsletter suggested. So if up pops, let's just say you were paying me $1 and Ritu was paying me $1. Y'all pop up after that $2.73 cost per lead, and only 50% of the time do you take the offer. So basically, I'm getting $1 instead of $2 of that back out of every lead. So that's costing me $1.73. Well, that cuts my advertising costs. But I'm doing stuff now with intent-based targeting where I'm popping up into the inbox. I'm using Inbox Mailers, one of their subsidiaries. And actually popping up into the inbox when someone's in their inbox and I can target specific websites so I can target in the Amazon space. I can target my Amazon guy or Packview or Smart Scout or people that have been there. And these tools know who's been there by cookie trails. And when they're in their inbox, check in their email. I'll ping, ding, you've got mail. And a message will appear right at the top of there. their email stack, which means they're most likely to see it. It's not going to get lost in their, their, all their junk mail. And if they open that and click anything in there, they get added to my list. Those are costing me 73 cents elite or 77 cents elite right now, which is really, really good. And so you can't have, yeah,

  • Speaker #1

    the, the question, I think that a lot of people are saying is who cares how many people you're getting? So why is it so important that you're adding subscribers?

  • Speaker #0

    So one is, you know, it's the quality of subscribers matter too. So some of these guys on these referral things might refer you not so good subscribers. So like you mentioned earlier, open rates is a standard metric, but it's a hard metric to actually use because on an Apple device with the OS, I think it's 15, 14 or 15, which is a couple of systems a couple of years ago, they've made a change where any email shows is opened. So your open rates may show at 34%, let's say. But if 20% of your people are on using an iPad or an iPhone or their Mac computer to open that email, your open rate is a lot less because every one of them is shown as open. So what you want to go by is click rates. So when someone tells me they have a 70% open rate, I seriously doubt them unless their list is small. It's highly targeted. It's a really kick-ass subject line. They might hit that one time, but that means their list is small or they got a lot of Apple people. that they don't know that are on their list. A good target, you want to be above 30%. If you can get that 40% to 50% like you're doing and like I'm doing, then you're good. When I was smaller, under 10,000 people, and everybody was from referrals, those were much higher quality leads because you're referring, you know, if you refer to someone, you're going to refer to someone that you know probably in the Amazon space. That's going to be a good lead. And so my open rates were consistently 50%, 55%, 60%. Now my open rates are anywhere. I've had a low of 32% recently, all the way up to the averaging in the low 40s now. But part of that's because I've grown and I have less quality leads, but that's okay. They filter themselves out. I delete those people. And I clean the list once a month to get rid of the people that have it open and clicks because that affects, like you said, deliverability. And deliverability is the game. But the true advantage of having a newsletter Sure. is you control the messaging and you control the delivery to a point now the ESPs if you're not doing certain things right you can your deliverability can be definitely affected but if I post something on the lunch with norm Facebook group um that and you've got I don't know how many members you have you got 5 000 members in there only about 30 of them are going to see it and then if those 30 interacted uh Facebook will show it to another whatever the algorithm is 50 100 200 if they continually interact it'll keep spreading that out but most posts go to darkness and and they don't get seen um versus an email if you're sitting twice a week like i'm doing you're once a week on mondays i'm twice a week and you're getting that open rate of 35 40 and a click rate like you said of four to seven percent then you know you're reaching a lot of people they might just skim it but you you know you're reaching those people, which you could never... In my case, that means 10,000 people, if I'm getting just a 30% open rate on mine, which is higher, but at least 10,000 people or at least skimming every single email I sent. I don't get that on any social, unless it goes viral on a social post on LinkedIn or something, but I'm consistently getting that. And then, so what you want to pay attention to is the click rate. So you want to put stuff in there that encourages people to click. And that could be things like, rate this issue. Did you like it? Good, bad? and different could it be uh clicking off to see the rest of the story so you tease them and you give them but you gotta give them enough information where they don't have to click off that i i got it but you want you want to encourage them to click off too even one of the things kev that we do with the podcast is we'll put uh

  • Speaker #1

    you know dan kurtz uh four reasons blah blah blah blah the first reason the second reason the third reason and drop off at the fourth

  • Speaker #0

    to get them to click over to here the rest of the podcast that's really good yeah you guys are doing a really good job on that to get them but now we know you don't want to want them clicking the youtube so now now we learn that at uh at uh elevate 360. uh don't send outside traffic to youtube so now i saw in your recent one kelsey made the change uh it or maybe it's two issues ago um he made the change to be like go find us on all your favorite platforms uh search for us on youtube uh i noticed that i haven't made that switch yet in my newsletter but it's coming um but but yeah i was just gonna say the other thing that uh we were having a cigar i don't even know when it was we have so many

  • Speaker #1

    but uh maybe it was out on your balcony but uh you were telling me and this was really cool uh this is a game changer as well and i hate that phrase but mark mark don who's been on this podcast told you something about skimming you know it's just so what we've what you've done is you've started to break up the newsletter and have it all over the place not I shouldn't say all over the place, but, you know, just mix it up a little bit. So,

  • Speaker #0

    not just skimming to the end. I had it modulized in the past. So, if you knew, like, this section is a good tip, this section is the funny thing, this section is a whatever, you could just skip to what you want. And something I do, I mean, you do it with your where's norm thing, but I have a trivia question at the top. It's called Ask Bezos. And a lot of people say they love that. They read that trivia question. But to get the answer, you've got to scroll all the way to the bottom. to get the answer. And that's very effective. And if you've noticed in my newsletter now, all the headlines, they alternate colors. So if you look at any of my newsletters, headlines for a story, it'll be in blue and red. So certain words like two or three words are in red, two or three words or whatever in the headline are in blue. That's for skimming. And then you'll see I'm putting little boxes around stuff to actually put into sections to make it digestible and easier to read or easier to skim through. Because there's some people out there. You know, I had one guy at market masters tell me it's a canadian guy those canadian guys are weird i know they're actually they're actually cool guys uh he said he actually prints it out and and cuts it up and puts it into a binder by category and then there's other people that i know that the guys from uh selling from the beach they they subscribe to like retos and yours and mine and a couple others and they any cool articles they clip them and put them into like a google database of all these like gpts and say the gpt that's ever been in um retoo's newsletter for example she's another one that's doing a good job she's providing really good value in her newsletter and there's there's i i personally read about 30 a day but i unsubscribe a day um i go through 30 about 30 a day you can't work on the other project that's about an hour it's my chill time give me a mexican coke zero all right that lies nice little ice i turn on some uh just uh like uh lounge music and i sit there and i just go through them and these are some of these are are for our industry for ecom yeah some of them are just general news or ai or or whatever so it gives me a good cross-section and i find content that way too right but that's a hobby and it's keeping me informed i just saw some uh somebody i think it was one of the guys from shark tank uh the canadian uh the the uh canadian he's not he always canadian but he by way of uh of uh

  • Speaker #1

    Robert or

  • Speaker #0

    Robert? Yeah. But he was saying that someone asked him, what do you see? You know, a lot of billionaires. What do you see in these billionaires as the like the three most common characteristics? And one of them, he said, was extreme discipline. One of them, as he said, was extreme knowledge on a specific thing. They know a lot about everything, but they're they're masters at one specific thing. He said, the other is a thirst for knowledge, where they're constantly reading, constantly keeping themselves up. So that's what, I should be a billionaire then, because I have a thirst for knowledge. Norm, what's going on here? Yeah. Help me out. Help me out. So that's where I get that, but I get content and ideas that way, and I'll mix things together. And I changed the subject earlier, but the other thing that I do is, and you might consider this with Lunch with Norm too, is I turn my newsletter into a podcast. I started talking about this earlier, I didn't finish. So I finish it on a Sunday night. I send it to a guy in the UK. He's six hours ahead of me. So while I'm sleeping, he's taking this, running it through an AI tool and some other stuff and tweaking it, changing some of the words a little bit. And he puts it in my voice. So we used, I think he used 11 labs or something to clone my voice. And it's about 10 to 12 minutes of me, me reading the newsletter. And he changes up. It's not word for word. He makes it flow. And so there's a link in every newsletter. and I'm about to put this on all the podcast platforms. I just haven't done it yet, but it's going to be on all the podcast platforms. So that would be lead gen too. You'll find it on YouTube or you'll find it on Spotify or Apple. And then like, I didn't know he had a newsletter. What's this newsletter? Let me go see. I'll get you on the list. But. A lot of people love that because they don't want to read everything, but they'll listen to it while they're on the train or while they're at the gym or while they're driving their car. And I have a lot of people comment about how much they like that. There's not thousands and thousands of people clicking that, but there's enough to where it's building a little core little group. And I'm experimenting with a couple of things there. And so that's something else. But one of the key things about a newsletter, like I was saying earlier, where you control the message, is you also… You own the customer. If you're advertising on Facebook or you're advertising on selling on Amazon or Walmart or some of these places, you don't have the customer data. You don't own that relationship. They do. You can extract that data in some cases, but with a newsletter, everything is under your control. When I'm at a show, people are like, Kevin, tell them about your Billion Dollar Seller Summit. and I know that if I start talking about that As soon as I say it's $6,000 to come, they're going to be like, they're going to tune me out a lot of times. I'm just wasting my breath. If I say, don't worry, just get on my newsletter. It's free. Here, sign up. It's BillionDollarSellers.com. Here's a QR code right here. I get them in that funnel, I've got you. Now, even if you say unsubscribe, I still can retarget you on Facebook or other places. Even if you say unsubscribe from the newsletter, I've got you. Once I've got you, you're in my marketing funnel and in my marketing system and i'm gonna do everything i can to sell you something at some point and that's the beauty of of having a newsletter that's providing value and they're giving me permission to do it i'm not just blasting a promotional email uh and that's that's the key what what are you doing um from like product side are you doing anything yet on lunch with norm like pitching any kind of products or anything? I know you're doing the advertising and the affiliate stuff, but are you doing any, like I pitch, you know, the BSS events and that's, I guess, technically a product. Are you doing anything there? Yeah,

  • Speaker #1

    we're not doing too much right now. One of the things that we do promote and hopefully to help grow is Dragonfish and Marketing Misfits. We're doing sponsorship and that's about it. I don't have the events, so I'm not pushing that at all now one of the things uh we are doing in the referral side is we're getting honu involved um i'm trying to do more with the marketing content press releases again so that's something that we can push but right for the last i don't know how long i've been doing this a year and a half maybe we've just been focusing on pure value value more value And I think we can grow that next. I think with our size, I was talking to Kelsey today, and I think we might have hit 10,000 subscribers.

  • Speaker #0

    Oh, awesome, man. Congratulations.

  • Speaker #1

    So, yeah. So, we've been working hard at that. But you've got a much bigger subscriber base. so I think it's smart for you to do what you're doing. And especially with the events that you, that you have, I don't have that. What I do push day in and day out is my personal brand. So people will see that I am an authority in all sorts of different spaces. And especially when you do the podcast and the newsletter, well, even though you're interviewing, Bing. Ryan Dice or whoever, but you become that expert, even though you're doing the interview. Plus, everything that I'm doing, Kevin, I know this is something you probably going to look into, but I link it to Google business, Google knowledge graph. So everything, every article, every everything is being associated with me. And I think that helps me just grow who I am. So when we go and we do something together, it's going to just go out to that many more people. So that's what I'm doing. Personal branding.

  • Speaker #0

    Well, I think a lot of people listen to this. All this sounds good. Kevin, you and Norm are teaching people Amazon doing this. You're business to your B2B. And B2B newsletters do typically have a little bit higher value. You can charge more for things. but uh I B2C can also work really well. So if you're listening to this and you're a brand, what I recommend is you don't do a brand newsletter. So if I'm Zoe's Pets, and that's the name of my brand, I'm not going to have a Zoe's Pets newsletter. Right. I'm going to have a newsletter in the, say I specialize in dog toys. That's what I specialize in. I'm going to have a newsletter about dogs. and maybe it's sponsored by Zoe's Pets, and there's an occasional ad in there, occasional plug for Zoe's Pets, or there's a section about Zoe's tip of the week or something like that. So I get that branding in, but I'm going to make it more about the industry for several reasons. One is it makes it not feel as promotional and advertising and more general knowledge to an avatar. And then second, it allows me to advertise other people in there without potentially conflicts where I can test as affiliate commissions. maybe a product I'm thinking about selling or something else I'm thinking about doing. I can test that. I can get other people to come in and help subsidize it and pay for it as well. Maybe pay for ads that don't compete directly with me. I can also build authority in the dog space and get people. A lot of times you'll get people willing to contribute content. I have a guy right now on Amazon. Every week he sends me an article and says, here's an article. If you want to publish this, I'll give you first rights. You publish this first. It's on AI stuff. And And he doesn't ask for any money in return. He just wants a credit. And it helps him build his authority and get the word out. You'll have people do that kind of stuff. Or if you're in the pet space, veterinarians or somebody, you can get them to do a little section about something. Or trainers or whatever. You can get people to provide a lot of the content where you're not having to have a writer do all this stuff. 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 #1

    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 #0

    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 #1

    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 #0

    So if you want to take your product to the next level, check out House of AMZ. That's houseofamz.com. House of AMZ. And you can do this. And with AI helping you rewrite stuff or helping you put five different articles together into one summary thing, you can do some pretty cool. pretty cool stuff and deliver something that people are going to start to follow and start to really enjoy. I mean, one of the things that, and you can even create awards in your industry. That's one of the things I've done with my newsletter is I have about once a month, I come out with something called the Dream 100. And so in the Amazon space, there's a lot of people that are trying to teach people how to sell on Amazon. They're kind of like scammers. They go on YouTube and they have a Lamborghini and they're talking about how easy it is to make money. And And, you know, they're flashing money like Norm's just doing there. And they're just, they're full of BS. But so I recognize some of those legitimate people and I have a list of 100 of them. And I've gotten through about 36 or so right now. And every month I list one of those people and I write a little bio on them. Why I chose them. Norm is one of them, for example. Oh,

  • Speaker #1

    you can't see my belt over there.

  • Speaker #0

    It's over there. And then the next time I show up to a live event, you know, I bring him up on stage and like Norm was just talking about, he gets like this wrestling belt. You know, it says Dream 100. It's this big old thing to recognize them. You know, those things cost me two or three hundred bucks a piece to have those things made. So I give that to them. You know, but what that does is it creates branding. It creates awareness. Then I can spin that off. So now I do an event called Market Masters. And it's like, come sit with the Dream 100. And people are like, oh, these are like the best people. in the space that Kevin's recognized. And now people are coming to me like, how do I get into that? What do I got to do to get into that? It's become a thing. And it's so you can do things like that in any space. So whether you're a chef or you're a pickleballer, or whatever, you can do this and you can own the customer. And like what Norm said earlier is you got to take it beyond that and you can use this and piggyback this into communities. whether that's a whatsapp group like we both have for our newsletters like my newsletter to get into my new whatsapp group for the newsletter you have to refer at least uh three people uh to get in there and then you get a special invitation to come in the whatsapp group so everybody in that whatsapp group there's hundreds of people in there 300 i think 400 they've referred at least three or more people so those are die hard loyal people that and they get to be in that group and share tactics and stuff with each other uh you you can do that kind of thing but the next thing is community And where we're going with AI and everything, people are... eager to have in real life stuff so that's why i do my events that's why norm and i for marketing misfits we do the the cms that collective mind society trips the next one's coming up in november in tampa you can go to collectivemindsociety.com check that out it's gonna be a cigar smoking and whiskey drinking and hanging out with like-minded people over the weekend in tampa which is like the headquarters of cigars in the united states a lot of people think it's miami but it's actually not, it's Tampa. We did one last year on the train, train ride across the Rocky Mountains of Canada. We did one at the F1 the year before. These are amazing events, but people want that kind of stuff, and they're willing to pay to have that. Experiences are one of the things that you can give people. And when you have a news like this, you can spin that kind of stuff off of it. For, you know, if you're a dog, back on our dog example, you can have a dog training meetup or, you know, segment your audience. If you get big enough, you know, this weekend we're doing a... the dachshunds dachshunds in la dachshunds in miami you could ask for people on the newsletter to lead it lead the meetup group or whatever local cafe you can do all kinds of cool stuff to engage community and just help really extend your brand from a grassroots up effort now this is not a get rich quick thing but over time you do this long enough and properly enough in a few years you're going to start seeing some momentum building and you're going to start seeing a real brand being built that you might be able to exit pass on to your kids one day or have a nice lifestyle off of. And a newsletter, I believe, is the crux of that. But it has to be a newsletter done right.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, I agree 100%, Kevin. You can't just be a fly-by-night. And one of the things I want to add, you did this with the Dream 100, but Elena Ceres has done this with a pickleball newsletter. And one of the things that I think is very important, she created her own association. I thought that was so cool. So all of a sudden you have an association, which gives you more credibility. And if you want to join it, you have to join this association, which then you'll get this email letter and she gets the lead. It's very interesting what she's been able to do. And we're doing that. I don't know when that's going to happen, but we're putting together this cigar newsletter that we're going to try to create. And we think it's going to be...

  • Speaker #0

    one of the top newsletters out there yeah we have norm and i are working on cigar newsletter under the dragon fresh uh brand we have a newsletter coming out for this this podcast for marketing misfits this summer you'll be able to get a news a weekly newsletter that i'll summarize some of what we talk about in the podcast because not everybody has an hour to listen to the whole podcast uh it'll also have some additional marketing tips and strategies uh in there there as well a couple other cool things We also are doing this for other people. So if you're like, oh, this newsletter thing sounds good. I just don't have time or the knowledge or want to do it. You can actually reach out to us at dragonfishci.com. You can reach out to us and we'll possibly be able to help you. We have a wait list right now. We'll possibly be able to help you with a newsletter if that's something that you're looking to do as well. We have set up a whole team and systems to actually do that for people and to do it right and help you grow. grow it but newsletters i think people look at email email is one of the oldest forms of internet communication way before and it still exists and is there a lot of spam absolutely there's a lot of garbage and i get i wake up every morning to 200 messages and i just i gotta spend the first 10 minutes of the day deleting those i know you have an ea that does a lot of that for you uh norm but yeah it's just like come on man this people just but i the email still works and you can't be afraid. We know people, Norm and I know people that have 800,000 emails on their list and they're afraid to email them. They're like, what do I do? What if someone says unsubscribe me? What if they don't like me? It's okay. We get people like both of our newsletters, it's unsubscribe or they mark it as you go in a beehive. And I just sent out 32,000 emails yesterday in my newsletter and four people marked it as spam. Oh, no. I'm like, you sons of... But you're going to have people do that because it's easy up at the top. or they are they subscribe to it then they just didn't realize they didn't have time for it or whatever but you're gonna have some of that happen but the more you email the more money you make that that that's that's a lesson i was just at the driven mastermind um with perry belcher and they had a guy from angora it's a billion dollar email brand email and physical newsletter brand uh and they they said the guy said that they email some of their people 20 times a day i'm like 20 times a day. I'd be unsubscribing pretty quick. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people do, but the ones that don't are your customers. And he said, the more we email, the more money we make. And that's where you got to be not afraid to do that. Now, the downside to this is. What Norm talked about earlier is on deliverability. If the Google and Yahoo and Gmail, which account for about 65% of all emails, deliver email boxes. So only about 35% are non-Gmail, Google, or Yahoo addresses. So basically, whatever their rules are, are the rules you got to go by. And they're tightening everything up. They're putting newsletters now into a newsletter tab. They're moving stuff into promotion or spam. But there's ways that you can help. mitigate that by like when you on your welcome email that you send out when someone subscribes to your newsletter ask them to respond back and say hey uh in my case i just say respond back with a yes and where you're from and that tells the the esp's the email service providers that hey this person actually wanted that email they triggered a response back it's a legit email don't put it in the spam folder but more likely to put it in the inbox so a little thing not everybody does that only about 20% of the people will do that, but 20% helps. Yeah. Then you got to do stuff. There's rules now with DKIM and SPF. These are special headers in DMARC. They're special in EIMI, I think. Those are the four things you got to pay attention to in your DNS settings. And if those are not set right, especially if you're sending through a third party like Beehive, a lot of stuff will go to spam and won't get delivered. So there is a little technical side where you can do it yourself or you can have someone come in. And there's companies that do that. fairly cheap and they'll make sure that stuff's all set up right or otherwise you're going to go into the spam box and then there's tools like before i send every one of my newsletters i send it through mail-tester.com and mailgenius.com and what i do is i go to these websites one of them is free one of them is i pay for 30 bucks a year or something and it generates a random email address you just hit a button says test email it generates a random email address i go into beehive I paste that into my preview link, and then I send that message to there. About a minute later, I can go and hit a button that says, check the score. And it'll give me a spam score. And sometimes it'll say, your spam, this is a 9.5 out of 10. That means I'm good to go. Other times, it'll say, this is an 8 out of 10. And some spam filters are going to flag it. I go and I look through it. It'll say, oh, you're linking to a dead website. One of your links is not good. You made a typo or whatever. And so I'm like, oops, I did. I got to fix that. And other times, it'll say, you're using the word free seven times in the newsletter. legitimately you're not like yeah looks so high but it's legitimate so i go in i change the word free to complementary or to something else or reword it so because those are the the spam filters will just catch that or the word guarantee or or something like that so i i change that kind of stuff up and get that score up as high as i can and then i send the message out and so that helps with deliverability so there's little things like that that that you do but the other thing once you have an email address, at least in the United States. You can actually get the physical address and the phone number in a lot of cases of 60 to 80% of your customers. Even if they didn't give it to you, there's big databases like Melissa Data and some of these that will actually do appending services. So they have all these big databases that links all kinds of data from all over the internet and all kinds of services and magazines and everything together. And they can append an email address. They can take the Norm's email address at Lunch with Norm and figure out. Well, he's in Canada, but if he's got a U.S. address, figure out what U.S. address is associated with that and match them up. And then you can use that to do direct mail if you want to or to or SMS. You get SMS a whole nother animal, but you got to have permission on that. You can get some big fines, but you could use it to have people opt in to an SMS or something or notify them by something if they've given you permission on SMS. So there's a lot of cool stuff you can do, but you've got to own that data and have that relationship. And newsletters, some people are like, well, why don't I just do a blog? Blogs are something that people have to go to to read. A newsletter is push instead of pull. Blogs are pull marketing. You got to pull them in. Newsletters are push marketing. Now, blogs are great for like SEO and the beautiful thing about an AI search and all that kind of stuff. The good thing about Beehive is it converts every newsletter into a blog. And I'm starting to see now more and more links coming with a Google source attribution. I'm like, Google? I'm not advertising on Google right now. It's because someone typed in some sort of keyword. My newsletter version of my, the blog version of my newsletter showed up in the search results. And they click through. And when they're looking at it in a web browser, as they scroll halfway down the page, and all of a sudden start, I'll pop up, hey, you like this? Subscribe. And so I'm getting subscribers, you know, it's not a ton, but I'm getting subscribers off of that as well. You can create this. The newsletter can be the hub of the flywheel that can do all this really cool stuff. And I think most people are just missing the mark on that.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah. And there's a couple of other things. You know, we don't have to get right into it, but we also have point. We point our domains instead of having lunch with norm dot beehive dot com. And you're trying to tell that to people, which they'll spell wrong. You know, we have a pointer. Their years is billion dollar. Summit, right?

  • Speaker #0

    Billion dollar sellers.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, billion dollar sellers. And mine is LWN.news. A lot easier to do. But one of the things I want to really, really push is that don't try to do that unless you know how to do it, but don't try to do the deliverability yourself. You can go to Fiverr, you can go somewhere. And I used Fiverr Pro for this, found a really great guy. And he does all my deliverability for me. And then I test it once in a while. I go over to an app called Warmly, and it tells me what's getting through. What you have to do is you take 40 email addresses, you push it through, and then it tells you the deliverability on Google or Gmail, Google Suite, Outlook, and there's a couple of others. And you can see whether you're good or not. And that just, you know, peace of mind, because if you're not getting into the inbox, then your deliverability or your your newsletter is going to be, you know, as good as the as good as you get into that inbox.

  • 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 #1

    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 and it's just me on here? You're not going to know what I say.

  • Speaker #1

    I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too. You can go back and forth with one another. Yikes. 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. Oh,

  • Speaker #1

    so. make sure make sure you go either to five or wherever you want to go but pay a few bucks and it might cost you 100 bucks it might cost you 200 bucks um to get everything set up some they'll do it for 50 but just check it out and uh get them to make sure that the deliver that deliverability is right and when we're talking about this it's not so much when you're going through a company like Beehive. you want to check it out but when you're doing a dedicated email and you're using another domain that's where it could come up especially if you're using it for there has been no warm-up emails so you're just shooting it off uh to your list if it's a cold lit not a cold list but if you're just transferring it over the chances of it being any good you might have to warm that up a bit warm up uh how you're sending out those dedicated emails

  • Speaker #0

    Yeah, you don't want to just suddenly blast a whole bunch of emails to a list because that'll freak out the ESPs. They're like, what is this? Why is all this stuff coming from this one guy all of a sudden? And so that's what he means by warm up. You start with, you send 30 this day, then 50, then 100, then 150, then 500 and 1,000. And you warm it up because along the way, people are opening and responding and clicking. And that tells the ESPs that, okay, you're legit. You're a legitimate emailer. this is people stuff that people want to get. Another important point is that if you don't have anything to sell, a newsletter might not be for you. right now, unless you're, I mean, and by selling, that doesn't mean you have to have a physical product. It could be, you're just trying to get speaking gigs on stage. Uh, you know, people hire you for speaking gigs. It could be, it could be that, but you need to, to, in order to monetize it, you're going to, you can do it with affiliate commissions. You can do it with advertising and those should cover your cost of doing it and maybe make you a small profit. But if you really want to make the big bucks, you need something to sell some sort of in, you know, a conference, a course, a physical product, consulting service, something along those lines. And that's where the biggest payday is going to come from on doing a newsletter. Otherwise, it's going to be difficult. And there's newsletter conferences you can go to. There's two or three of them out there that has popped up. There's a guy named Matt McGarry. That actually has a newsletter that comes out every Saturday about the newsletter industry with tips and strategies. And I would growth letter. I think it's a growth letter dot com. And you can you can get that. There's also a newsletter called Growth in Reverse by Chanel that actually dissects how did people grow their list? How did they how did this guy get a million subscribers on his email list for whatever newsletter? And she'll dissect it. And she'll go back and look in the time machine online. She'll like, oh, look, in 2021, he started a LinkedIn profile. He had 16 followers. And then he started posting like this, this, this, and this. And then he'd use this strategy and this strategy. And by 2023, he had 110,000 followers. And then he started putting this newsletter plug in. This is how he did it. And then he was posting on X. And she'll break it all down. You can reverse engineer a lot of these strategies that people are using and then maybe implement, get ideas. for your stuff. There's also newsletters like Who Sponsors What that will tell you who's running ads in different newsletters. There's a whole little cottage industry that's popped up where you can keep abreast of what's going on in that space and get ideas for tools and tips and everything else.

  • Speaker #1

    All right. It's been about an hour, Kev.

  • Speaker #0

    It has. I love talking about this kind of stuff, but hopefully today we've given you a little bit of value.

  • Speaker #1

    i even saw norm taking a note over there i mean guys what are you writing down what you're writing down your lunch your that uh i like this is what i know genius i'm not using male genius i was going to go check that out see and that's the thing we we go back and forth there's times that you're using something that you have uh that i've never heard of and vice versa so exactly

  • Speaker #0

    i mean we that's That's the idea here. but hey if you like this podcast hopefully you've gotten something out of it today um let us know by putting a comment down below uh if you see a comment spot if you're listening to this on spotify or apple or maybe you're watching this on youtube leave us a little comment and let us know how we did we we take good ones we take bad ones we take critiques uh i don't take bad ones i'm sorry i say don't know if you give a bad normal cry but yeah you You can tell me I've got stuff between my teeth. It's okay. Okay. But yeah, make sure you hit that subscribe button or forward this, you know, if you like this for someone, you know, that might want to hear about what we talked about today or any of our previous topics for that for this to them and hit that subscribe button too. And you can always find out more and see direct links to some of the back issues. Find out more about what's going on in the marketing misfits world, but at marketingmisfits.co, not .com, .co, marketingmisfits.co.

  • Speaker #1

    All right. That's it for today. Thanks, everybody, for joining us. And we'll see you next Tuesday.

  • Speaker #0

    Take care.

  • Speaker #1

    Bye.

Description

Seeking true authority, explosive growth, and real connection with your audience? Newsletters aren’t dead, they’re the secret weapon most marketers overlook.


Unlock proven strategies, expert insights, and game-changing tools to grow your brand and boost your sales here: ➡️https://marketingmisfits.co/


Join Norm and Kevin as they battle newsletter myths and break down how a simple email can launch a $500,000 profit machine.


You’ll learn:

- Why controlling your own list beats playing the social lottery

- Niche-tested secrets to jaw-dropping open and click rates

- How AI, referrals, and community tactics scale your impact

- Monetization realities they won’t teach you in marketing school


This is the episode every founder, creator, and digital hustler needs. Don’t miss the tricks, cautionary tales, and industry laughs right to the end!


⏰ Timestamps:

00:00 - The $500K Newsletter Myth

05:59 - Newsletters in the AI Renaissance

8:15 - Growth Engine Unlocked 11:06 - List Authority & Monetization

15:08 - Open Rates, Real Fans & Community Tactics

23:04 - Referrals, Hacks & Tools That Supercharge Lists

32:25 - Deliverability Mastery & Tactical Testing

1:01:29 - Your Audience Awaits!


This episode is brought to you by:

- House of AMZ: Elevate your brand today at https://www.amazonseo.com/

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Don’t miss out on the insights that could transform your business!


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Hosted by Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

  • Speaker #0

    The true advantage of having a newsletter is you control the messaging and you control the delivery to a point. So what you want to pay attention to is the click rate. So you want to put stuff in there that encourages people to click. You tease them and you give them, but you got to give them enough information where they don't have to click off that I got it. But you want to encourage them to click off too. You're watching Marketing Misfits with Norm Farrar and Kevin King. Hey, Norm, remember a couple of years ago, I said I was going to start a newsletter. Remember when we talked about that?

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, I told you you were crazy. Nobody reads them.

  • Speaker #0

    Yeah, my wife, ex-wife, let me emphasize that, said the same thing. Maybe she should be ex-partner now. I don't know, but she said the same thing. But do you realize that this year, that newsletter, less than two years since starting it, will generate over a half a million dollars profit in my pocket?

  • Speaker #1

    And none of that's coming to me. Thank you, Kevin.

  • Speaker #0

    That's right, but you have a newsletter too. I do. And it's going to pick up some steam. And I think anybody that's listening to this, if they're not doing a newsletter, they may want to rethink that. And that's what we're going to talk about today.

  • Speaker #1

    Right. Nope. Let's get into it.

  • Speaker #0

    So, you know, I had a newsletter back before newsletters were cool. I had a newsletter back in the late 90s, actually. I think I've told you maybe this story over cigars one time, but for the audience that hasn't heard it. Back in the late 90s, Mark and I had a company and we were dealing with pretty women. We had like baseball cards and calendars and all kinds of different collectibles and stuff, dealing with like bikini models and things like that. And we needed a way to actually reach the audience. So what we did is we were advertising all the traditional direct mail. This is before the internet was a hot thing, direct mail things back then. And then we started promoting this newsletter. and said hey uh top of funnel just we didn't know funnels existed you know nobody was talking about that back then come to our website and sign up for this newsletter and every day seven days a week we would send out a newsletter to our users we end up getting up to about 250 000 people that were getting this every single day and in that newsletter would be a short little text-based summary no images just a sort uh there's no html email or anything back then and be like five I've had lines almost like a... If you're familiar with Drudge Report or something like that in these states, just five little headlines about anything to do with pretty girls. So it could be Farrah Fawcett did this or Thana White on the Wheel of Fortune did this or Hugh Hefner did this or Dallas Cowboy cheated. And then they would click through and then we have a photo of the day. They would say something like, see today's, see Julie, you know, today's featured model or whatever. They would click through, and they would take them to a nicely designed HTML website that would have a photo of the girl. a little bio about her we had a joke section we had a game section we had a trivia section a few other little sections on there plus these five headlines that were clickable hot links that would go off the stories on other sites and i literally had back then there was no ai or no tools to aggregate this stuff so i had two guys one in houston it was in a he was in a wheelchair so it was a really good job for him and another guy in uh in la And every day they would go and find articles and post them. We had this backend database. It wasn't Google sheets or anything like that back then. And they would post these links in there and they post, they find 30 or 40 stories a day. And every night before midnight, no matter where I was in the world, I remember being in an Island in Honduras with, and I had a satellite phone, one of those big honking satellite phones, because there's no internet in the hotel back then. And I had to connect to it, turn off all my images on my browser. and connected like 300 bits per second or whatever that slow-ass rate was on a modem to actually log in, look at these stories, and approve five of them that would go out in the email starting at midnight that night. People could choose the time of day they got the email, but that grew that list so big. We got on Howard Stern when he was on public radio before satellite. We got we were selling Hold it.

  • Speaker #1

    Hold it. So you went on Howard Stern.

  • Speaker #0

    I personally did. Our models did. But I was in the green room with them there. Someone had to escort them, you know, and make sure Howard didn't do any crazy stuff.

  • Speaker #1

    I was just wondering if they were going to rate you, you know, with the laser point. Well,

  • Speaker #0

    they did. Coincidentally, we had a model. One of our top models was from your neck of the woods, from Toronto. Her name is Katia Corvo. You can actually go to YouTube and look this up. Go look up Katia Corvo, C-O-R-R-I-V-E-A-U, spelled the French way. and Howard Stern, you can see the video because E! Entertainment Television back then filmed all of his stuff. And you can see where she went on the show. They tried to get her, you know, Howard, he's a pretty girl on the show. He tries to get them naked, tried to get her naked. She refused to do it, but she got in her underwear if they would get in their underwear. It's really funny. So I think she got everybody in the studio to get in their underwear. It's really funny. But at the end of that, you know, they're promoting our website. And our servers would blow up. We would have someone standing at our facility to flip the switch. You know, we had one of those remote switches to restart the server. And it was crazy. But we'd get tons of leads. And we dealt with Bomas, who ended up being one of the founders of that, went off and started Wikipedia. And it... It just blew up and we sold tons of products off it. But what happened is around 2001, 2002, the CanSpam Act came out. And so stuff started going to spam. And so a lot of our guys were sending out all these massive emails and a lot of people just quit getting them and they started complaining. And then so we just ended up basically shutting this thing down and just continuing on our way. We built up a big list and we use that list. will come 2023 i'm sitting at perry belcher's ai bot summit in vegas and he's talking about using a this is like april of 2023 and he's talking about using ai to actually generate newsletters and that this is some big opportunity and you can crank out newsletters using ai and i was like yeah you i can see this you could definitely do this but they're going to be pieces of newsletters and it turns out his his theory was actually a piece of because you you can't really you can do it but but they don't last. Um, But you can use AI as a tool for sure and help you with it. So I was like, you know what? I'm going to bring this back. And then you were doing a newsletter at the time, your Lunch with Norm newsletter. Yeah,

  • Speaker #1

    I think there's a lot of people in the space that just had this newsletter, but nobody defined what it looked like. And I want to thank you, by the way, for pulling me aside one day and saying, your newsletters.

  • Speaker #0

    well i think i did that to a bunch of people oh no you did that btss bdss that was hilarious i had sponsors in the room and i'm like your newsletter is uh uh kaka uh and they're like we just sponsor a lot and you're just calling us out here it's like yeah i'm calling you out um no uh but yeah so there what happens a lot of people have they have a promotional eight i call them promotional emails they call them newsletters they still exist to this day I get a ton of them from people in the Amazon space that we're in, some of the marketing people, newsletters. They'll say up at the top, you know, the ones that always get me is like, the April newsletter or the May newsletter is here. I'm like, that's how they started off. The May newsletter is here. They started off with like, the weather is bright and balmy outside. I hope it's good in your deck of the woods. You know, some sort of, those are garbage. And they'll say newsletter and you look at it. It's not a newsletter. It's a promotional email about their services. Even some of the biggest names in the Amazon space have really garbage.

  • Speaker #1

    The marketing space, Kev.

  • Speaker #0

    The newsletters and the marketing and the digital marketing space too. But if you're not providing value or someone doesn't have to click off to actually get the value, then you're not providing a new, you're not really doing a newsletter. So I decided to start one and I launched it in August of 2023 to the Amazon world. i did not some people just blast their newsletter to their entire email list anybody's ever given them an email or bought something they just blasted to them i didn't do that i made you opt i made everybody opt in and when so i started i think the first issue went out to like august 14th 2023 to like 1400 or 1700 1700 people i think it was and then for the next year i just refined it i tested different things i tested you know putting a story in i tested different sections and games and different kinds of value different lengths And then after, I just basically grew it off referrals. So people that liked it would refer other people. And that worked really well. I incentivized that, got it up to about 10,000. And then last year in August, literally August of last year, so not even a year ago, I started running Facebook ads. And now I'm doing some other additional stuff. And we're at 32,000 active people right now. And I've kicked off about 17,000 for actually not opening it. But the core thing about this. Anybody can do this, no matter who's listening here, whether you're selling physical products, you have an agency, you're in some sort of marketing and consulting, you have a SaaS product. If you don't have a valuable added newsletter, you're missing a major opportunity.

  • Speaker #1

    Now a quick word from our sponsor, LaVonta. Hey, Kevin, tell us a little bit about it.

  • Speaker #0

    That's right, Amazon sellers. Do you want to skyrocket your sales and boost your organic rankings? Meet Levante, Norm and I's secret weapon for driving high-quality external traffic straight to our Amazon storefronts using affiliate marketing. That's right, it's achieved through direct partnerships with leading media outlets like CNN, Wirecutter, and BuzzFeed, just to name a few, as well as top affiliates, influencers, bloggers, and media buyers. all in Levanta's marketplace, which is home to over 5,000 different creators that you get to choose from.

  • Speaker #1

    So are you ready to elevate your business? Visit get.levanta.io slash misfits. That's get.levanta, L-E-V-A-N-T-A, .io slash misfits, and book a call and you'll get up to 20% off Levanta's gold plan today. That's get.levanta. dot IO slash misfits.

  • Speaker #0

    Now, does everybody read their email? No, you're going to get open rates, depending on a number of factors between 25 and 50%. Typically, you know, some people may get a little bit higher than that, but usually it's a small list or a very targeted list. If they get higher numbers than that, but if you get above 10,000 subscribers and you're getting 40, 50% open rates, you're doing, you're doing well. And, but the thing is, The newsletter that I've done, I think I've told you this, has given me more authority than anything I've ever done. I've had 220,000 people go through the Freedom Ticket course to sell on Amazon. I've done 156 episodes. I just looked earlier at the AM, PM podcast. You and I have done about 52 or 55 of this podcast. We've spoken on stages all over the world. We've done seminars and trains, been guests on other podcasts. But I can tell you nothing has moved the needle more. than doing the newsletter. And it's actually now turned into, like I said, at the beginning of the show, last year I did over $250,000 in profit. This year I'll do over 500,000. And some of that's not counting some of the residual effects. It's hard to track of people buying a ticket to BDSS or whatever it may be. So I think anybody listening needs to actually think about actually creating a real newsletter. And I know... when you were doing yours, your lunch with Norwin, I basically, like you said, I told you it was crud and you guys changed it up and now it's really good. I mean, Kelsey, I know Kelsey does a lot of it, your son, and he's doing a good job with it. And what have you seen after starting the newsletter? How have you seen it affect what your business and what you're doing?

  • Speaker #1

    Well, first of all, I thought our newsletter originally was good. I thought we had some interesting content. And then... uh you told me i remember we're sitting down having a cigar and i kind of got a little perturbed because it was i thought it was good and then uh i said okay so uh you were telling me everybody that you kind of called out on stage which i thought was hilarious uh because they all thought they were having a great newsletter and i listened to you and i said you know what kev i might not be number one but i'm gonna be number two And what does it take to do that? And we were partnering on this. We were partnering in our company and we sat down and I remember you just said, look, you gave me a few points. I told Kels and then eventually you spend some time with Kels. One of the things I decided, everybody's got to have a USP. And my USP was going to be a personal story followed up by a business, turning it into a business lesson. And then gamifying it a little bit, I have something called Find the Beard, where it's kind of like Find Waldo or Where's Waldo. And then we just go out and we find interesting information. Now, we've been able to grow this into last year, which was a six-figure business, not as much as you. We were just over, I think we got to about $125,000 in revenue last year. just Doing it right, giving the right exposure, having a great... Now, I know open rate is really hard to talk about, but our highest open rate was over 70%. Our lowest, I think it was 43%. And we're kind of maintaining a mid-average. But the click-through rates, we're doing really good. They range from at low, yeah, 4-something, at a high, a 7.5, I think. I think. So, let's click through, right? Yeah. So, we're providing some really good options for the sponsors. We also provided values, my top 10 list for books, AI tools. We just didn't keep it to Amazon, although it was kind of an Amazon-focused newsletter, but we wanted to, we asked people, what do they want? They wanted AI. They wanted... Uh, education. They wanted all these different things, SOPs, action steps. And that's what we looked for. So at the end of the day, if I take a look at it, I'm finding the same thing. So I've got a community a bunch of different communities based off of lunch with norm lunch with norm reaches a ton of a ton of people the podcast um i have three spot sponsors and a banner listing of a bunch of different sponsors and i would think that drove a lot of the leads but guess what the newsletter grew a ton of leads similar to what you're saying and because of this And because we built that really loyal community, and I think we should touch on that afterwards, but now you could change that into dedicated emails. And your open rate on the dedicated emails is incredible because people trust you and it's coming from you.

  • Speaker #0

    Yeah, a newsletter gives you permission to be in their inbox. You start, when you first start sending it out, you're sending it out and people are like, oh, another email. But if you're delivering value... like both of our newsletters actually do real value in there and you you engage them like you're doing with the stories your personal stories which are great i did some of that in the beginning i've shied away from it recently just more of a space issue and then i tried to i switched to branding a little bit uh but that's a great personal brand for you and like you do with the game the vacation where you have the little uh uh picture and it's like find find you in this maze of uh people sitting on the beach you know a thousand people sitting on the beach where's norm where's the beer guy, which is... in theme with your brand, with the beard. So it's, what I've seen is now people, they look forward to it and they're drinking their coffee in the morning or maybe they don't read it that day. Maybe they save them up and read them on the weekend or they do something like that. And I'm even doing mine in podcast. I have a podcast version of mine right now. So my newsletter comes out on Mondays and Thursdays and at BillionDollarSellers.com. and It comes out in the mornings. I would like to get them out a little bit earlier than I do, but I'm not able to because of this thing I do with a podcast. So I have a guy in the UK that every night, so I finish, I personally write my newsletter. This is not a VA doing it later. I have a template. I'm able to do it in under two hours, each one. If one's a little bit more detailed or I'm writing something a little bit more, maybe a little bit over two hours, but I'm able to put them together. It wasn't that way in the beginning. It was four or five hours for each one in the beginning. But about two hours is what it takes me to put each one together. I've never missed. That's a key. It's consistency. So my trainer started one. You've never missed either. Right. And my trainer started one, and he's hit and miss. Our friend Elena sometimes doesn't come out. There are people like life gets in the way. And when you're media, that can't happen. When you're part of someone's life, you have to come out. So even if I'm at a BDSS in Iceland. and I know I'm not going to have time to mess around and keep up with what the latest things are and publish that, I'll do a best of. I'll do a couple in advance and they're like best ofs, because even a best of, I haven't really seen you do this yet, but even a best of is still, it's better than nothing. And the fact is, if you're only getting 40, 50% of the people to open any given email, 40 to 50% of them haven't seen that stuff. So it's going to be new to a lot of A lot of them have forgotten about it or they skimmed over it. So it's still nobody's complaining and saying, oh, this is regurgitated, recycled stuff. And in today's AI world, I think you and I talked about this. One of the big advantages of putting out content like we're doing with the podcast, our individual podcast, this podcast, the training thing that we have under Dragonfish used to be called Ascend. I can't remember the name of it now. The new name. Whatever the new name is, we had to change it as a trademark issues. Um, it's coming out, it's launching soon. That's why it's not active right now. So I can't remember the exact name, but, uh, and then our newsletters is massive content and today's world with LLMs and everything, the content people are, have a major advantage. So you're, you're producing this massive content. I even had my, my assistant, my VA that I have in Pakistan that does some stuff for me. I didn't go find all the podcasts I've ever been on in the last 10 years or whatever since 2016 when I came on my first podcast and find them all and translate them all. And he's done the same thing for all these podcasts, all the AM PM podcasts I do. So it's creating massive content. But with that newsletter, you're getting permission to come every day. And then like you said. You see what people are clicking on, what they're interested in. So you can double down on that. You can ask them too, but you can also double down on the things that they're clicking in. You can run ad sell advertising spots. You can do affiliate commissions to make money out of the newsletter, which in some times can be real money. But where the big money is at is like exactly what you just said is a dedicated email. So my newsletter comes on Mondays and Thursdays. And On Tuesdays and Wednesdays originally, and I just added Fridays as an option now too, even though it's not the best day, I'll send them a message to the newsletter subscriber list. It doesn't say BDSN in the subject line because that's what it always says for my newsletter, so you can quickly sort them or find them. But it'll be an email for a single topic. Sometimes it's for us. We're promoting a webinar we're doing for Dragonfish. Sometimes it's an advertiser. And I charge right now $4,000 per email for that. And I sell out about a month and a half in advance on those. And so that adds up to real money. I've had one advertiser, it's done so well for him, spend close to 80 grand in the last year just advertising because it's done so well for him. And he knows that, yeah, every time he has an ad in the newsletter, maybe he gets 20, 30 clicks or 50 clicks or something. That's nothing great. But he knows long-term that branding is like Coca-Cola. Top of mind. Awareness. As soon as someone needs him, he's going to be there and going to be the first one they think of. And that's what it does. It gives you more authority. It leans into everything else that you do, whether you're selling courses. But as a product, even if you're doing products, you can sell your products off it. I mean, I sell my BDSS. I sell my virtual events. I sell my replays. I mean, replays to the events you came to in Iceland have done well over $100,000. just selling the replay that the cost to do that was 15,000 bucks and to bring the crew out and have them actually do that and edit it on the spot and do a live stream. And I just take the videos. I upload them to video Vimeo for me. I didn't have to do anything. Just put together the email and the links and send that out. And that's, if I didn't have that newsletter, a lot of those people would be ignoring my emails or they wouldn't be aware of it. And you're, you're reaching into all these other people. And that's, you can do that for any brand but The thing is, you have to provide value and you have to be consistent. And that's where I think a lot of people have trouble. But with AI, there's ways to, you can't have AI do all the work, but AI can be a tool that you can utilize to summarize things or to do it in certain angles or to train it with your voice and help it write some of the stuff that you've, or rewrite some of the stuff that you've written. There's lots of cool stuff.

  • Speaker #1

    that you can do when it comes to newsletters so everybody i mean you agree i mean you've seen the power of it i've seen i've seen the power and surprisingly um way over double triple quadruple over the um podcast which i was shocked at and one of the other things we never talked about and i think we have to talk about uh community i think we have to talk about deliverability but One of the things that I started doing recently, you did this right off the top. We took our time and this was kind of a backseat. We didn't know what to promote, but we started doing referrals. And we've done that now for about two months. And have we got a ton of referrals that have come in? So we're giving away prompt books, we're giving away courses, we're giving away all sorts of different things. Matter of fact, this year, I think we have a virtual BDSS giveaway. The person gives away enough. but That's if you have to be creative, like I'm trying to do it because I have the podcast, because I have the, the, the communities that I've built, I can go out there and try to promote it that way. Then I go out and go to people like you and on Beehive, you can promote me. I think that's what you're doing because we're getting a bunch of leads that come from you. I know that there's other newsletters out there. And then there's the whole referral network. which is working really well. I think we got a few hundred emails or subscribers just off of that this month.

  • Speaker #0

    Yeah, referrals. So there's different tools. If you're going to do a newsletter, some people use Kit, some people use Substack, some people. You don't want to be using a general tool like MailChimp or AWeber. to do a proper newsletter there's the best tool in my opinion is beehive b-e-e-h-i-i-v it's spelled weird b-e-e-h-i-i-v yeah um it was built for newsletters and they have they have advertising built in where advertisers will come to you and you can make 100 200 bucks 300 bucks per uh pawn you choose which ads you want and you automatically insert them it does all the tracking all that helps you with all the writing it's built to actually do new proper news there's not email marketing and it's it's really really good and one of the systems they have is a referral thing and what norm's talking about is you can add a little line of code and it'll put a little box on there you don't have they'll say hey if you like this news that you put some copy whatever you want to say if you like this refer a friend and get rewards and you can create like a little gif that goes through these this animated gif of all these rewards and where a lot of people mess up is they'll say refer five people and get a coffee mug Prefer 10 people get a t-shirt. And for me, I don't think that's valuable. Most people don't give a crap about your company logo on a coffee. They just don't. What they do, if your newsletter is for accountants, instead of a coffee mug with Kevin's accountant's service on it, you should have a coffee mug that says some sort of slogan for accountants. I don't know. I'm just accountants. know their data. I don't know. Some sort of slogan that accountants identify with, it's a cute little slogan for them. Then they'll take that. And then the other mistake a lot of people make is they make the rewards too high. Most people don't know five people. Most people know, unless they're going to post it on their social media or somewhere, most people know one person. So you have to have a quick win. Something of value, like you're doing the prompts thing, and I do a 21 hacks deal. So one, just refer... just get them started. Just one person. And then they get that and they're like, that's pretty cool. Who else do I know? And they'll refer other people in the office or they'll refer their partners or they'll refer, post it somewhere. And that's how I exactly how I grew from those 1700 when I started to 10,000. And I still do it now, but I'm also doing a lot of outside advertising. And another thing that like you just said is inside Beehive, and there's other companies like Sparkloop that will do this too. I use both of them. And you can refer. out. So I can refer to you. So when someone signs up for my newsletter, pops a little pop-up on the confirmations page that says, oh, by the way, you might also like Lunch with Norm. Do you want that? And you might also like Retoo's AI for e-commerce. Do you like that? And if they say yes, it automatically subscribes them to you. So you get a lead. Now, in our case, we're buddies, so I don't charge you for that. Well,

  • Speaker #1

    how come I've been cutting your checks?

  • Speaker #0

    Oh, where have they been going? I haven't seen those. i oh maybe it's going to the coke zeros that's that that's where that's going that's going to mexican coke zeros mexican coke zeros um so but you can refer out and you can get paid so people will pay you you know buck two bucks three bucks it depends you know for those and so a lot of times if you do this right if you if i'm advertising um and i'm spending say a dollar per lead in ads And I can get a dollar back from a lunch with Norm, who, if you weren't my buddy, would be paying me to do this. I can basically have this as a wash. And so I'm getting all my leads for free and I can grow this thing, if you do it right, basically at a profit in a way.

  • Speaker #1

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  • Speaker #1

    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 #0

    Right now is one of the best times to get started with Stack Influence. You can sign up at stack. influence.com or click the link in this video down the description or notes below and mention misfits that's m-i-s-f-i-t-s to get 10 off your first campaign stack influence.com so i make a little bit of profit on when i was doing facebook ads it was difficult i was it was costing my best leads for two dollars and seventy three cents a piece so if i got Not everybody signs up for the newsletter suggested. So if up pops, let's just say you were paying me $1 and Ritu was paying me $1. Y'all pop up after that $2.73 cost per lead, and only 50% of the time do you take the offer. So basically, I'm getting $1 instead of $2 of that back out of every lead. So that's costing me $1.73. Well, that cuts my advertising costs. But I'm doing stuff now with intent-based targeting where I'm popping up into the inbox. I'm using Inbox Mailers, one of their subsidiaries. And actually popping up into the inbox when someone's in their inbox and I can target specific websites so I can target in the Amazon space. I can target my Amazon guy or Packview or Smart Scout or people that have been there. And these tools know who's been there by cookie trails. And when they're in their inbox, check in their email. I'll ping, ding, you've got mail. And a message will appear right at the top of there. their email stack, which means they're most likely to see it. It's not going to get lost in their, their, all their junk mail. And if they open that and click anything in there, they get added to my list. Those are costing me 73 cents elite or 77 cents elite right now, which is really, really good. And so you can't have, yeah,

  • Speaker #1

    the, the question, I think that a lot of people are saying is who cares how many people you're getting? So why is it so important that you're adding subscribers?

  • Speaker #0

    So one is, you know, it's the quality of subscribers matter too. So some of these guys on these referral things might refer you not so good subscribers. So like you mentioned earlier, open rates is a standard metric, but it's a hard metric to actually use because on an Apple device with the OS, I think it's 15, 14 or 15, which is a couple of systems a couple of years ago, they've made a change where any email shows is opened. So your open rates may show at 34%, let's say. But if 20% of your people are on using an iPad or an iPhone or their Mac computer to open that email, your open rate is a lot less because every one of them is shown as open. So what you want to go by is click rates. So when someone tells me they have a 70% open rate, I seriously doubt them unless their list is small. It's highly targeted. It's a really kick-ass subject line. They might hit that one time, but that means their list is small or they got a lot of Apple people. that they don't know that are on their list. A good target, you want to be above 30%. If you can get that 40% to 50% like you're doing and like I'm doing, then you're good. When I was smaller, under 10,000 people, and everybody was from referrals, those were much higher quality leads because you're referring, you know, if you refer to someone, you're going to refer to someone that you know probably in the Amazon space. That's going to be a good lead. And so my open rates were consistently 50%, 55%, 60%. Now my open rates are anywhere. I've had a low of 32% recently, all the way up to the averaging in the low 40s now. But part of that's because I've grown and I have less quality leads, but that's okay. They filter themselves out. I delete those people. And I clean the list once a month to get rid of the people that have it open and clicks because that affects, like you said, deliverability. And deliverability is the game. But the true advantage of having a newsletter Sure. is you control the messaging and you control the delivery to a point now the ESPs if you're not doing certain things right you can your deliverability can be definitely affected but if I post something on the lunch with norm Facebook group um that and you've got I don't know how many members you have you got 5 000 members in there only about 30 of them are going to see it and then if those 30 interacted uh Facebook will show it to another whatever the algorithm is 50 100 200 if they continually interact it'll keep spreading that out but most posts go to darkness and and they don't get seen um versus an email if you're sitting twice a week like i'm doing you're once a week on mondays i'm twice a week and you're getting that open rate of 35 40 and a click rate like you said of four to seven percent then you know you're reaching a lot of people they might just skim it but you you know you're reaching those people, which you could never... In my case, that means 10,000 people, if I'm getting just a 30% open rate on mine, which is higher, but at least 10,000 people or at least skimming every single email I sent. I don't get that on any social, unless it goes viral on a social post on LinkedIn or something, but I'm consistently getting that. And then, so what you want to pay attention to is the click rate. So you want to put stuff in there that encourages people to click. And that could be things like, rate this issue. Did you like it? Good, bad? and different could it be uh clicking off to see the rest of the story so you tease them and you give them but you gotta give them enough information where they don't have to click off that i i got it but you want you want to encourage them to click off too even one of the things kev that we do with the podcast is we'll put uh

  • Speaker #1

    you know dan kurtz uh four reasons blah blah blah blah the first reason the second reason the third reason and drop off at the fourth

  • Speaker #0

    to get them to click over to here the rest of the podcast that's really good yeah you guys are doing a really good job on that to get them but now we know you don't want to want them clicking the youtube so now now we learn that at uh at uh elevate 360. uh don't send outside traffic to youtube so now i saw in your recent one kelsey made the change uh it or maybe it's two issues ago um he made the change to be like go find us on all your favorite platforms uh search for us on youtube uh i noticed that i haven't made that switch yet in my newsletter but it's coming um but but yeah i was just gonna say the other thing that uh we were having a cigar i don't even know when it was we have so many

  • Speaker #1

    but uh maybe it was out on your balcony but uh you were telling me and this was really cool uh this is a game changer as well and i hate that phrase but mark mark don who's been on this podcast told you something about skimming you know it's just so what we've what you've done is you've started to break up the newsletter and have it all over the place not I shouldn't say all over the place, but, you know, just mix it up a little bit. So,

  • Speaker #0

    not just skimming to the end. I had it modulized in the past. So, if you knew, like, this section is a good tip, this section is the funny thing, this section is a whatever, you could just skip to what you want. And something I do, I mean, you do it with your where's norm thing, but I have a trivia question at the top. It's called Ask Bezos. And a lot of people say they love that. They read that trivia question. But to get the answer, you've got to scroll all the way to the bottom. to get the answer. And that's very effective. And if you've noticed in my newsletter now, all the headlines, they alternate colors. So if you look at any of my newsletters, headlines for a story, it'll be in blue and red. So certain words like two or three words are in red, two or three words or whatever in the headline are in blue. That's for skimming. And then you'll see I'm putting little boxes around stuff to actually put into sections to make it digestible and easier to read or easier to skim through. Because there's some people out there. You know, I had one guy at market masters tell me it's a canadian guy those canadian guys are weird i know they're actually they're actually cool guys uh he said he actually prints it out and and cuts it up and puts it into a binder by category and then there's other people that i know that the guys from uh selling from the beach they they subscribe to like retos and yours and mine and a couple others and they any cool articles they clip them and put them into like a google database of all these like gpts and say the gpt that's ever been in um retoo's newsletter for example she's another one that's doing a good job she's providing really good value in her newsletter and there's there's i i personally read about 30 a day but i unsubscribe a day um i go through 30 about 30 a day you can't work on the other project that's about an hour it's my chill time give me a mexican coke zero all right that lies nice little ice i turn on some uh just uh like uh lounge music and i sit there and i just go through them and these are some of these are are for our industry for ecom yeah some of them are just general news or ai or or whatever so it gives me a good cross-section and i find content that way too right but that's a hobby and it's keeping me informed i just saw some uh somebody i think it was one of the guys from shark tank uh the canadian uh the the uh canadian he's not he always canadian but he by way of uh of uh

  • Speaker #1

    Robert or

  • Speaker #0

    Robert? Yeah. But he was saying that someone asked him, what do you see? You know, a lot of billionaires. What do you see in these billionaires as the like the three most common characteristics? And one of them, he said, was extreme discipline. One of them, as he said, was extreme knowledge on a specific thing. They know a lot about everything, but they're they're masters at one specific thing. He said, the other is a thirst for knowledge, where they're constantly reading, constantly keeping themselves up. So that's what, I should be a billionaire then, because I have a thirst for knowledge. Norm, what's going on here? Yeah. Help me out. Help me out. So that's where I get that, but I get content and ideas that way, and I'll mix things together. And I changed the subject earlier, but the other thing that I do is, and you might consider this with Lunch with Norm too, is I turn my newsletter into a podcast. I started talking about this earlier, I didn't finish. So I finish it on a Sunday night. I send it to a guy in the UK. He's six hours ahead of me. So while I'm sleeping, he's taking this, running it through an AI tool and some other stuff and tweaking it, changing some of the words a little bit. And he puts it in my voice. So we used, I think he used 11 labs or something to clone my voice. And it's about 10 to 12 minutes of me, me reading the newsletter. And he changes up. It's not word for word. He makes it flow. And so there's a link in every newsletter. and I'm about to put this on all the podcast platforms. I just haven't done it yet, but it's going to be on all the podcast platforms. So that would be lead gen too. You'll find it on YouTube or you'll find it on Spotify or Apple. And then like, I didn't know he had a newsletter. What's this newsletter? Let me go see. I'll get you on the list. But. A lot of people love that because they don't want to read everything, but they'll listen to it while they're on the train or while they're at the gym or while they're driving their car. And I have a lot of people comment about how much they like that. There's not thousands and thousands of people clicking that, but there's enough to where it's building a little core little group. And I'm experimenting with a couple of things there. And so that's something else. But one of the key things about a newsletter, like I was saying earlier, where you control the message, is you also… You own the customer. If you're advertising on Facebook or you're advertising on selling on Amazon or Walmart or some of these places, you don't have the customer data. You don't own that relationship. They do. You can extract that data in some cases, but with a newsletter, everything is under your control. When I'm at a show, people are like, Kevin, tell them about your Billion Dollar Seller Summit. and I know that if I start talking about that As soon as I say it's $6,000 to come, they're going to be like, they're going to tune me out a lot of times. I'm just wasting my breath. If I say, don't worry, just get on my newsletter. It's free. Here, sign up. It's BillionDollarSellers.com. Here's a QR code right here. I get them in that funnel, I've got you. Now, even if you say unsubscribe, I still can retarget you on Facebook or other places. Even if you say unsubscribe from the newsletter, I've got you. Once I've got you, you're in my marketing funnel and in my marketing system and i'm gonna do everything i can to sell you something at some point and that's the beauty of of having a newsletter that's providing value and they're giving me permission to do it i'm not just blasting a promotional email uh and that's that's the key what what are you doing um from like product side are you doing anything yet on lunch with norm like pitching any kind of products or anything? I know you're doing the advertising and the affiliate stuff, but are you doing any, like I pitch, you know, the BSS events and that's, I guess, technically a product. Are you doing anything there? Yeah,

  • Speaker #1

    we're not doing too much right now. One of the things that we do promote and hopefully to help grow is Dragonfish and Marketing Misfits. We're doing sponsorship and that's about it. I don't have the events, so I'm not pushing that at all now one of the things uh we are doing in the referral side is we're getting honu involved um i'm trying to do more with the marketing content press releases again so that's something that we can push but right for the last i don't know how long i've been doing this a year and a half maybe we've just been focusing on pure value value more value And I think we can grow that next. I think with our size, I was talking to Kelsey today, and I think we might have hit 10,000 subscribers.

  • Speaker #0

    Oh, awesome, man. Congratulations.

  • Speaker #1

    So, yeah. So, we've been working hard at that. But you've got a much bigger subscriber base. so I think it's smart for you to do what you're doing. And especially with the events that you, that you have, I don't have that. What I do push day in and day out is my personal brand. So people will see that I am an authority in all sorts of different spaces. And especially when you do the podcast and the newsletter, well, even though you're interviewing, Bing. Ryan Dice or whoever, but you become that expert, even though you're doing the interview. Plus, everything that I'm doing, Kevin, I know this is something you probably going to look into, but I link it to Google business, Google knowledge graph. So everything, every article, every everything is being associated with me. And I think that helps me just grow who I am. So when we go and we do something together, it's going to just go out to that many more people. So that's what I'm doing. Personal branding.

  • Speaker #0

    Well, I think a lot of people listen to this. All this sounds good. Kevin, you and Norm are teaching people Amazon doing this. You're business to your B2B. And B2B newsletters do typically have a little bit higher value. You can charge more for things. but uh I B2C can also work really well. So if you're listening to this and you're a brand, what I recommend is you don't do a brand newsletter. So if I'm Zoe's Pets, and that's the name of my brand, I'm not going to have a Zoe's Pets newsletter. Right. I'm going to have a newsletter in the, say I specialize in dog toys. That's what I specialize in. I'm going to have a newsletter about dogs. and maybe it's sponsored by Zoe's Pets, and there's an occasional ad in there, occasional plug for Zoe's Pets, or there's a section about Zoe's tip of the week or something like that. So I get that branding in, but I'm going to make it more about the industry for several reasons. One is it makes it not feel as promotional and advertising and more general knowledge to an avatar. And then second, it allows me to advertise other people in there without potentially conflicts where I can test as affiliate commissions. maybe a product I'm thinking about selling or something else I'm thinking about doing. I can test that. I can get other people to come in and help subsidize it and pay for it as well. Maybe pay for ads that don't compete directly with me. I can also build authority in the dog space and get people. A lot of times you'll get people willing to contribute content. I have a guy right now on Amazon. Every week he sends me an article and says, here's an article. If you want to publish this, I'll give you first rights. You publish this first. It's on AI stuff. And And he doesn't ask for any money in return. He just wants a credit. And it helps him build his authority and get the word out. You'll have people do that kind of stuff. Or if you're in the pet space, veterinarians or somebody, you can get them to do a little section about something. Or trainers or whatever. You can get people to provide a lot of the content where you're not having to have a writer do all this stuff. 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 #1

    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 #0

    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 #1

    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 #0

    So if you want to take your product to the next level, check out House of AMZ. That's houseofamz.com. House of AMZ. And you can do this. And with AI helping you rewrite stuff or helping you put five different articles together into one summary thing, you can do some pretty cool. pretty cool stuff and deliver something that people are going to start to follow and start to really enjoy. I mean, one of the things that, and you can even create awards in your industry. That's one of the things I've done with my newsletter is I have about once a month, I come out with something called the Dream 100. And so in the Amazon space, there's a lot of people that are trying to teach people how to sell on Amazon. They're kind of like scammers. They go on YouTube and they have a Lamborghini and they're talking about how easy it is to make money. And And, you know, they're flashing money like Norm's just doing there. And they're just, they're full of BS. But so I recognize some of those legitimate people and I have a list of 100 of them. And I've gotten through about 36 or so right now. And every month I list one of those people and I write a little bio on them. Why I chose them. Norm is one of them, for example. Oh,

  • Speaker #1

    you can't see my belt over there.

  • Speaker #0

    It's over there. And then the next time I show up to a live event, you know, I bring him up on stage and like Norm was just talking about, he gets like this wrestling belt. You know, it says Dream 100. It's this big old thing to recognize them. You know, those things cost me two or three hundred bucks a piece to have those things made. So I give that to them. You know, but what that does is it creates branding. It creates awareness. Then I can spin that off. So now I do an event called Market Masters. And it's like, come sit with the Dream 100. And people are like, oh, these are like the best people. in the space that Kevin's recognized. And now people are coming to me like, how do I get into that? What do I got to do to get into that? It's become a thing. And it's so you can do things like that in any space. So whether you're a chef or you're a pickleballer, or whatever, you can do this and you can own the customer. And like what Norm said earlier is you got to take it beyond that and you can use this and piggyback this into communities. whether that's a whatsapp group like we both have for our newsletters like my newsletter to get into my new whatsapp group for the newsletter you have to refer at least uh three people uh to get in there and then you get a special invitation to come in the whatsapp group so everybody in that whatsapp group there's hundreds of people in there 300 i think 400 they've referred at least three or more people so those are die hard loyal people that and they get to be in that group and share tactics and stuff with each other uh you you can do that kind of thing but the next thing is community And where we're going with AI and everything, people are... eager to have in real life stuff so that's why i do my events that's why norm and i for marketing misfits we do the the cms that collective mind society trips the next one's coming up in november in tampa you can go to collectivemindsociety.com check that out it's gonna be a cigar smoking and whiskey drinking and hanging out with like-minded people over the weekend in tampa which is like the headquarters of cigars in the united states a lot of people think it's miami but it's actually not, it's Tampa. We did one last year on the train, train ride across the Rocky Mountains of Canada. We did one at the F1 the year before. These are amazing events, but people want that kind of stuff, and they're willing to pay to have that. Experiences are one of the things that you can give people. And when you have a news like this, you can spin that kind of stuff off of it. For, you know, if you're a dog, back on our dog example, you can have a dog training meetup or, you know, segment your audience. If you get big enough, you know, this weekend we're doing a... the dachshunds dachshunds in la dachshunds in miami you could ask for people on the newsletter to lead it lead the meetup group or whatever local cafe you can do all kinds of cool stuff to engage community and just help really extend your brand from a grassroots up effort now this is not a get rich quick thing but over time you do this long enough and properly enough in a few years you're going to start seeing some momentum building and you're going to start seeing a real brand being built that you might be able to exit pass on to your kids one day or have a nice lifestyle off of. And a newsletter, I believe, is the crux of that. But it has to be a newsletter done right.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, I agree 100%, Kevin. You can't just be a fly-by-night. And one of the things I want to add, you did this with the Dream 100, but Elena Ceres has done this with a pickleball newsletter. And one of the things that I think is very important, she created her own association. I thought that was so cool. So all of a sudden you have an association, which gives you more credibility. And if you want to join it, you have to join this association, which then you'll get this email letter and she gets the lead. It's very interesting what she's been able to do. And we're doing that. I don't know when that's going to happen, but we're putting together this cigar newsletter that we're going to try to create. And we think it's going to be...

  • Speaker #0

    one of the top newsletters out there yeah we have norm and i are working on cigar newsletter under the dragon fresh uh brand we have a newsletter coming out for this this podcast for marketing misfits this summer you'll be able to get a news a weekly newsletter that i'll summarize some of what we talk about in the podcast because not everybody has an hour to listen to the whole podcast uh it'll also have some additional marketing tips and strategies uh in there there as well a couple other cool things We also are doing this for other people. So if you're like, oh, this newsletter thing sounds good. I just don't have time or the knowledge or want to do it. You can actually reach out to us at dragonfishci.com. You can reach out to us and we'll possibly be able to help you. We have a wait list right now. We'll possibly be able to help you with a newsletter if that's something that you're looking to do as well. We have set up a whole team and systems to actually do that for people and to do it right and help you grow. grow it but newsletters i think people look at email email is one of the oldest forms of internet communication way before and it still exists and is there a lot of spam absolutely there's a lot of garbage and i get i wake up every morning to 200 messages and i just i gotta spend the first 10 minutes of the day deleting those i know you have an ea that does a lot of that for you uh norm but yeah it's just like come on man this people just but i the email still works and you can't be afraid. We know people, Norm and I know people that have 800,000 emails on their list and they're afraid to email them. They're like, what do I do? What if someone says unsubscribe me? What if they don't like me? It's okay. We get people like both of our newsletters, it's unsubscribe or they mark it as you go in a beehive. And I just sent out 32,000 emails yesterday in my newsletter and four people marked it as spam. Oh, no. I'm like, you sons of... But you're going to have people do that because it's easy up at the top. or they are they subscribe to it then they just didn't realize they didn't have time for it or whatever but you're gonna have some of that happen but the more you email the more money you make that that that's that's a lesson i was just at the driven mastermind um with perry belcher and they had a guy from angora it's a billion dollar email brand email and physical newsletter brand uh and they they said the guy said that they email some of their people 20 times a day i'm like 20 times a day. I'd be unsubscribing pretty quick. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people do, but the ones that don't are your customers. And he said, the more we email, the more money we make. And that's where you got to be not afraid to do that. Now, the downside to this is. What Norm talked about earlier is on deliverability. If the Google and Yahoo and Gmail, which account for about 65% of all emails, deliver email boxes. So only about 35% are non-Gmail, Google, or Yahoo addresses. So basically, whatever their rules are, are the rules you got to go by. And they're tightening everything up. They're putting newsletters now into a newsletter tab. They're moving stuff into promotion or spam. But there's ways that you can help. mitigate that by like when you on your welcome email that you send out when someone subscribes to your newsletter ask them to respond back and say hey uh in my case i just say respond back with a yes and where you're from and that tells the the esp's the email service providers that hey this person actually wanted that email they triggered a response back it's a legit email don't put it in the spam folder but more likely to put it in the inbox so a little thing not everybody does that only about 20% of the people will do that, but 20% helps. Yeah. Then you got to do stuff. There's rules now with DKIM and SPF. These are special headers in DMARC. They're special in EIMI, I think. Those are the four things you got to pay attention to in your DNS settings. And if those are not set right, especially if you're sending through a third party like Beehive, a lot of stuff will go to spam and won't get delivered. So there is a little technical side where you can do it yourself or you can have someone come in. And there's companies that do that. fairly cheap and they'll make sure that stuff's all set up right or otherwise you're going to go into the spam box and then there's tools like before i send every one of my newsletters i send it through mail-tester.com and mailgenius.com and what i do is i go to these websites one of them is free one of them is i pay for 30 bucks a year or something and it generates a random email address you just hit a button says test email it generates a random email address i go into beehive I paste that into my preview link, and then I send that message to there. About a minute later, I can go and hit a button that says, check the score. And it'll give me a spam score. And sometimes it'll say, your spam, this is a 9.5 out of 10. That means I'm good to go. Other times, it'll say, this is an 8 out of 10. And some spam filters are going to flag it. I go and I look through it. It'll say, oh, you're linking to a dead website. One of your links is not good. You made a typo or whatever. And so I'm like, oops, I did. I got to fix that. And other times, it'll say, you're using the word free seven times in the newsletter. legitimately you're not like yeah looks so high but it's legitimate so i go in i change the word free to complementary or to something else or reword it so because those are the the spam filters will just catch that or the word guarantee or or something like that so i i change that kind of stuff up and get that score up as high as i can and then i send the message out and so that helps with deliverability so there's little things like that that that you do but the other thing once you have an email address, at least in the United States. You can actually get the physical address and the phone number in a lot of cases of 60 to 80% of your customers. Even if they didn't give it to you, there's big databases like Melissa Data and some of these that will actually do appending services. So they have all these big databases that links all kinds of data from all over the internet and all kinds of services and magazines and everything together. And they can append an email address. They can take the Norm's email address at Lunch with Norm and figure out. Well, he's in Canada, but if he's got a U.S. address, figure out what U.S. address is associated with that and match them up. And then you can use that to do direct mail if you want to or to or SMS. You get SMS a whole nother animal, but you got to have permission on that. You can get some big fines, but you could use it to have people opt in to an SMS or something or notify them by something if they've given you permission on SMS. So there's a lot of cool stuff you can do, but you've got to own that data and have that relationship. And newsletters, some people are like, well, why don't I just do a blog? Blogs are something that people have to go to to read. A newsletter is push instead of pull. Blogs are pull marketing. You got to pull them in. Newsletters are push marketing. Now, blogs are great for like SEO and the beautiful thing about an AI search and all that kind of stuff. The good thing about Beehive is it converts every newsletter into a blog. And I'm starting to see now more and more links coming with a Google source attribution. I'm like, Google? I'm not advertising on Google right now. It's because someone typed in some sort of keyword. My newsletter version of my, the blog version of my newsletter showed up in the search results. And they click through. And when they're looking at it in a web browser, as they scroll halfway down the page, and all of a sudden start, I'll pop up, hey, you like this? Subscribe. And so I'm getting subscribers, you know, it's not a ton, but I'm getting subscribers off of that as well. You can create this. The newsletter can be the hub of the flywheel that can do all this really cool stuff. And I think most people are just missing the mark on that.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah. And there's a couple of other things. You know, we don't have to get right into it, but we also have point. We point our domains instead of having lunch with norm dot beehive dot com. And you're trying to tell that to people, which they'll spell wrong. You know, we have a pointer. Their years is billion dollar. Summit, right?

  • Speaker #0

    Billion dollar sellers.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, billion dollar sellers. And mine is LWN.news. A lot easier to do. But one of the things I want to really, really push is that don't try to do that unless you know how to do it, but don't try to do the deliverability yourself. You can go to Fiverr, you can go somewhere. And I used Fiverr Pro for this, found a really great guy. And he does all my deliverability for me. And then I test it once in a while. I go over to an app called Warmly, and it tells me what's getting through. What you have to do is you take 40 email addresses, you push it through, and then it tells you the deliverability on Google or Gmail, Google Suite, Outlook, and there's a couple of others. And you can see whether you're good or not. And that just, you know, peace of mind, because if you're not getting into the inbox, then your deliverability or your your newsletter is going to be, you know, as good as the as good as you get into that inbox.

  • 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 #1

    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 and it's just me on here? You're not going to know what I say.

  • Speaker #1

    I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too. You can go back and forth with one another. Yikes. 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. Oh,

  • Speaker #1

    so. make sure make sure you go either to five or wherever you want to go but pay a few bucks and it might cost you 100 bucks it might cost you 200 bucks um to get everything set up some they'll do it for 50 but just check it out and uh get them to make sure that the deliver that deliverability is right and when we're talking about this it's not so much when you're going through a company like Beehive. you want to check it out but when you're doing a dedicated email and you're using another domain that's where it could come up especially if you're using it for there has been no warm-up emails so you're just shooting it off uh to your list if it's a cold lit not a cold list but if you're just transferring it over the chances of it being any good you might have to warm that up a bit warm up uh how you're sending out those dedicated emails

  • Speaker #0

    Yeah, you don't want to just suddenly blast a whole bunch of emails to a list because that'll freak out the ESPs. They're like, what is this? Why is all this stuff coming from this one guy all of a sudden? And so that's what he means by warm up. You start with, you send 30 this day, then 50, then 100, then 150, then 500 and 1,000. And you warm it up because along the way, people are opening and responding and clicking. And that tells the ESPs that, okay, you're legit. You're a legitimate emailer. this is people stuff that people want to get. Another important point is that if you don't have anything to sell, a newsletter might not be for you. right now, unless you're, I mean, and by selling, that doesn't mean you have to have a physical product. It could be, you're just trying to get speaking gigs on stage. Uh, you know, people hire you for speaking gigs. It could be, it could be that, but you need to, to, in order to monetize it, you're going to, you can do it with affiliate commissions. You can do it with advertising and those should cover your cost of doing it and maybe make you a small profit. But if you really want to make the big bucks, you need something to sell some sort of in, you know, a conference, a course, a physical product, consulting service, something along those lines. And that's where the biggest payday is going to come from on doing a newsletter. Otherwise, it's going to be difficult. And there's newsletter conferences you can go to. There's two or three of them out there that has popped up. There's a guy named Matt McGarry. That actually has a newsletter that comes out every Saturday about the newsletter industry with tips and strategies. And I would growth letter. I think it's a growth letter dot com. And you can you can get that. There's also a newsletter called Growth in Reverse by Chanel that actually dissects how did people grow their list? How did they how did this guy get a million subscribers on his email list for whatever newsletter? And she'll dissect it. And she'll go back and look in the time machine online. She'll like, oh, look, in 2021, he started a LinkedIn profile. He had 16 followers. And then he started posting like this, this, this, and this. And then he'd use this strategy and this strategy. And by 2023, he had 110,000 followers. And then he started putting this newsletter plug in. This is how he did it. And then he was posting on X. And she'll break it all down. You can reverse engineer a lot of these strategies that people are using and then maybe implement, get ideas. for your stuff. There's also newsletters like Who Sponsors What that will tell you who's running ads in different newsletters. There's a whole little cottage industry that's popped up where you can keep abreast of what's going on in that space and get ideas for tools and tips and everything else.

  • Speaker #1

    All right. It's been about an hour, Kev.

  • Speaker #0

    It has. I love talking about this kind of stuff, but hopefully today we've given you a little bit of value.

  • Speaker #1

    i even saw norm taking a note over there i mean guys what are you writing down what you're writing down your lunch your that uh i like this is what i know genius i'm not using male genius i was going to go check that out see and that's the thing we we go back and forth there's times that you're using something that you have uh that i've never heard of and vice versa so exactly

  • Speaker #0

    i mean we that's That's the idea here. but hey if you like this podcast hopefully you've gotten something out of it today um let us know by putting a comment down below uh if you see a comment spot if you're listening to this on spotify or apple or maybe you're watching this on youtube leave us a little comment and let us know how we did we we take good ones we take bad ones we take critiques uh i don't take bad ones i'm sorry i say don't know if you give a bad normal cry but yeah you You can tell me I've got stuff between my teeth. It's okay. Okay. But yeah, make sure you hit that subscribe button or forward this, you know, if you like this for someone, you know, that might want to hear about what we talked about today or any of our previous topics for that for this to them and hit that subscribe button too. And you can always find out more and see direct links to some of the back issues. Find out more about what's going on in the marketing misfits world, but at marketingmisfits.co, not .com, .co, marketingmisfits.co.

  • Speaker #1

    All right. That's it for today. Thanks, everybody, for joining us. And we'll see you next Tuesday.

  • Speaker #0

    Take care.

  • Speaker #1

    Bye.

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Seeking true authority, explosive growth, and real connection with your audience? Newsletters aren’t dead, they’re the secret weapon most marketers overlook.


Unlock proven strategies, expert insights, and game-changing tools to grow your brand and boost your sales here: ➡️https://marketingmisfits.co/


Join Norm and Kevin as they battle newsletter myths and break down how a simple email can launch a $500,000 profit machine.


You’ll learn:

- Why controlling your own list beats playing the social lottery

- Niche-tested secrets to jaw-dropping open and click rates

- How AI, referrals, and community tactics scale your impact

- Monetization realities they won’t teach you in marketing school


This is the episode every founder, creator, and digital hustler needs. Don’t miss the tricks, cautionary tales, and industry laughs right to the end!


⏰ Timestamps:

00:00 - The $500K Newsletter Myth

05:59 - Newsletters in the AI Renaissance

8:15 - Growth Engine Unlocked 11:06 - List Authority & Monetization

15:08 - Open Rates, Real Fans & Community Tactics

23:04 - Referrals, Hacks & Tools That Supercharge Lists

32:25 - Deliverability Mastery & Tactical Testing

1:01:29 - Your Audience Awaits!


This episode is brought to you by:

- House of AMZ: Elevate your brand today at https://www.amazonseo.com/

- 8fig: Get 25% off 8fig off at https://8fig.co

- Stack Influence: Use code MISFITS for 10% off at https://stackinfluence.com/

- Levanta: Get 20% off Levanta's gold plan and book your call today - https://get.levanta.io/misfits


Don’t miss out on the insights that could transform your business!


Hit that Subscribe button 🔔 and join the Marketing Misfits crew for weekly insights into the tools, strategies, and stories you need to stay ahead in the ever-changing world of marketing.


Hosted by Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

  • Speaker #0

    The true advantage of having a newsletter is you control the messaging and you control the delivery to a point. So what you want to pay attention to is the click rate. So you want to put stuff in there that encourages people to click. You tease them and you give them, but you got to give them enough information where they don't have to click off that I got it. But you want to encourage them to click off too. You're watching Marketing Misfits with Norm Farrar and Kevin King. Hey, Norm, remember a couple of years ago, I said I was going to start a newsletter. Remember when we talked about that?

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, I told you you were crazy. Nobody reads them.

  • Speaker #0

    Yeah, my wife, ex-wife, let me emphasize that, said the same thing. Maybe she should be ex-partner now. I don't know, but she said the same thing. But do you realize that this year, that newsletter, less than two years since starting it, will generate over a half a million dollars profit in my pocket?

  • Speaker #1

    And none of that's coming to me. Thank you, Kevin.

  • Speaker #0

    That's right, but you have a newsletter too. I do. And it's going to pick up some steam. And I think anybody that's listening to this, if they're not doing a newsletter, they may want to rethink that. And that's what we're going to talk about today.

  • Speaker #1

    Right. Nope. Let's get into it.

  • Speaker #0

    So, you know, I had a newsletter back before newsletters were cool. I had a newsletter back in the late 90s, actually. I think I've told you maybe this story over cigars one time, but for the audience that hasn't heard it. Back in the late 90s, Mark and I had a company and we were dealing with pretty women. We had like baseball cards and calendars and all kinds of different collectibles and stuff, dealing with like bikini models and things like that. And we needed a way to actually reach the audience. So what we did is we were advertising all the traditional direct mail. This is before the internet was a hot thing, direct mail things back then. And then we started promoting this newsletter. and said hey uh top of funnel just we didn't know funnels existed you know nobody was talking about that back then come to our website and sign up for this newsletter and every day seven days a week we would send out a newsletter to our users we end up getting up to about 250 000 people that were getting this every single day and in that newsletter would be a short little text-based summary no images just a sort uh there's no html email or anything back then and be like five I've had lines almost like a... If you're familiar with Drudge Report or something like that in these states, just five little headlines about anything to do with pretty girls. So it could be Farrah Fawcett did this or Thana White on the Wheel of Fortune did this or Hugh Hefner did this or Dallas Cowboy cheated. And then they would click through and then we have a photo of the day. They would say something like, see today's, see Julie, you know, today's featured model or whatever. They would click through, and they would take them to a nicely designed HTML website that would have a photo of the girl. a little bio about her we had a joke section we had a game section we had a trivia section a few other little sections on there plus these five headlines that were clickable hot links that would go off the stories on other sites and i literally had back then there was no ai or no tools to aggregate this stuff so i had two guys one in houston it was in a he was in a wheelchair so it was a really good job for him and another guy in uh in la And every day they would go and find articles and post them. We had this backend database. It wasn't Google sheets or anything like that back then. And they would post these links in there and they post, they find 30 or 40 stories a day. And every night before midnight, no matter where I was in the world, I remember being in an Island in Honduras with, and I had a satellite phone, one of those big honking satellite phones, because there's no internet in the hotel back then. And I had to connect to it, turn off all my images on my browser. and connected like 300 bits per second or whatever that slow-ass rate was on a modem to actually log in, look at these stories, and approve five of them that would go out in the email starting at midnight that night. People could choose the time of day they got the email, but that grew that list so big. We got on Howard Stern when he was on public radio before satellite. We got we were selling Hold it.

  • Speaker #1

    Hold it. So you went on Howard Stern.

  • Speaker #0

    I personally did. Our models did. But I was in the green room with them there. Someone had to escort them, you know, and make sure Howard didn't do any crazy stuff.

  • Speaker #1

    I was just wondering if they were going to rate you, you know, with the laser point. Well,

  • Speaker #0

    they did. Coincidentally, we had a model. One of our top models was from your neck of the woods, from Toronto. Her name is Katia Corvo. You can actually go to YouTube and look this up. Go look up Katia Corvo, C-O-R-R-I-V-E-A-U, spelled the French way. and Howard Stern, you can see the video because E! Entertainment Television back then filmed all of his stuff. And you can see where she went on the show. They tried to get her, you know, Howard, he's a pretty girl on the show. He tries to get them naked, tried to get her naked. She refused to do it, but she got in her underwear if they would get in their underwear. It's really funny. So I think she got everybody in the studio to get in their underwear. It's really funny. But at the end of that, you know, they're promoting our website. And our servers would blow up. We would have someone standing at our facility to flip the switch. You know, we had one of those remote switches to restart the server. And it was crazy. But we'd get tons of leads. And we dealt with Bomas, who ended up being one of the founders of that, went off and started Wikipedia. And it... It just blew up and we sold tons of products off it. But what happened is around 2001, 2002, the CanSpam Act came out. And so stuff started going to spam. And so a lot of our guys were sending out all these massive emails and a lot of people just quit getting them and they started complaining. And then so we just ended up basically shutting this thing down and just continuing on our way. We built up a big list and we use that list. will come 2023 i'm sitting at perry belcher's ai bot summit in vegas and he's talking about using a this is like april of 2023 and he's talking about using ai to actually generate newsletters and that this is some big opportunity and you can crank out newsletters using ai and i was like yeah you i can see this you could definitely do this but they're going to be pieces of newsletters and it turns out his his theory was actually a piece of because you you can't really you can do it but but they don't last. Um, But you can use AI as a tool for sure and help you with it. So I was like, you know what? I'm going to bring this back. And then you were doing a newsletter at the time, your Lunch with Norm newsletter. Yeah,

  • Speaker #1

    I think there's a lot of people in the space that just had this newsletter, but nobody defined what it looked like. And I want to thank you, by the way, for pulling me aside one day and saying, your newsletters.

  • Speaker #0

    well i think i did that to a bunch of people oh no you did that btss bdss that was hilarious i had sponsors in the room and i'm like your newsletter is uh uh kaka uh and they're like we just sponsor a lot and you're just calling us out here it's like yeah i'm calling you out um no uh but yeah so there what happens a lot of people have they have a promotional eight i call them promotional emails they call them newsletters they still exist to this day I get a ton of them from people in the Amazon space that we're in, some of the marketing people, newsletters. They'll say up at the top, you know, the ones that always get me is like, the April newsletter or the May newsletter is here. I'm like, that's how they started off. The May newsletter is here. They started off with like, the weather is bright and balmy outside. I hope it's good in your deck of the woods. You know, some sort of, those are garbage. And they'll say newsletter and you look at it. It's not a newsletter. It's a promotional email about their services. Even some of the biggest names in the Amazon space have really garbage.

  • Speaker #1

    The marketing space, Kev.

  • Speaker #0

    The newsletters and the marketing and the digital marketing space too. But if you're not providing value or someone doesn't have to click off to actually get the value, then you're not providing a new, you're not really doing a newsletter. So I decided to start one and I launched it in August of 2023 to the Amazon world. i did not some people just blast their newsletter to their entire email list anybody's ever given them an email or bought something they just blasted to them i didn't do that i made you opt i made everybody opt in and when so i started i think the first issue went out to like august 14th 2023 to like 1400 or 1700 1700 people i think it was and then for the next year i just refined it i tested different things i tested you know putting a story in i tested different sections and games and different kinds of value different lengths And then after, I just basically grew it off referrals. So people that liked it would refer other people. And that worked really well. I incentivized that, got it up to about 10,000. And then last year in August, literally August of last year, so not even a year ago, I started running Facebook ads. And now I'm doing some other additional stuff. And we're at 32,000 active people right now. And I've kicked off about 17,000 for actually not opening it. But the core thing about this. Anybody can do this, no matter who's listening here, whether you're selling physical products, you have an agency, you're in some sort of marketing and consulting, you have a SaaS product. If you don't have a valuable added newsletter, you're missing a major opportunity.

  • Speaker #1

    Now a quick word from our sponsor, LaVonta. Hey, Kevin, tell us a little bit about it.

  • Speaker #0

    That's right, Amazon sellers. Do you want to skyrocket your sales and boost your organic rankings? Meet Levante, Norm and I's secret weapon for driving high-quality external traffic straight to our Amazon storefronts using affiliate marketing. That's right, it's achieved through direct partnerships with leading media outlets like CNN, Wirecutter, and BuzzFeed, just to name a few, as well as top affiliates, influencers, bloggers, and media buyers. all in Levanta's marketplace, which is home to over 5,000 different creators that you get to choose from.

  • Speaker #1

    So are you ready to elevate your business? Visit get.levanta.io slash misfits. That's get.levanta, L-E-V-A-N-T-A, .io slash misfits, and book a call and you'll get up to 20% off Levanta's gold plan today. That's get.levanta. dot IO slash misfits.

  • Speaker #0

    Now, does everybody read their email? No, you're going to get open rates, depending on a number of factors between 25 and 50%. Typically, you know, some people may get a little bit higher than that, but usually it's a small list or a very targeted list. If they get higher numbers than that, but if you get above 10,000 subscribers and you're getting 40, 50% open rates, you're doing, you're doing well. And, but the thing is, The newsletter that I've done, I think I've told you this, has given me more authority than anything I've ever done. I've had 220,000 people go through the Freedom Ticket course to sell on Amazon. I've done 156 episodes. I just looked earlier at the AM, PM podcast. You and I have done about 52 or 55 of this podcast. We've spoken on stages all over the world. We've done seminars and trains, been guests on other podcasts. But I can tell you nothing has moved the needle more. than doing the newsletter. And it's actually now turned into, like I said, at the beginning of the show, last year I did over $250,000 in profit. This year I'll do over 500,000. And some of that's not counting some of the residual effects. It's hard to track of people buying a ticket to BDSS or whatever it may be. So I think anybody listening needs to actually think about actually creating a real newsletter. And I know... when you were doing yours, your lunch with Norwin, I basically, like you said, I told you it was crud and you guys changed it up and now it's really good. I mean, Kelsey, I know Kelsey does a lot of it, your son, and he's doing a good job with it. And what have you seen after starting the newsletter? How have you seen it affect what your business and what you're doing?

  • Speaker #1

    Well, first of all, I thought our newsletter originally was good. I thought we had some interesting content. And then... uh you told me i remember we're sitting down having a cigar and i kind of got a little perturbed because it was i thought it was good and then uh i said okay so uh you were telling me everybody that you kind of called out on stage which i thought was hilarious uh because they all thought they were having a great newsletter and i listened to you and i said you know what kev i might not be number one but i'm gonna be number two And what does it take to do that? And we were partnering on this. We were partnering in our company and we sat down and I remember you just said, look, you gave me a few points. I told Kels and then eventually you spend some time with Kels. One of the things I decided, everybody's got to have a USP. And my USP was going to be a personal story followed up by a business, turning it into a business lesson. And then gamifying it a little bit, I have something called Find the Beard, where it's kind of like Find Waldo or Where's Waldo. And then we just go out and we find interesting information. Now, we've been able to grow this into last year, which was a six-figure business, not as much as you. We were just over, I think we got to about $125,000 in revenue last year. just Doing it right, giving the right exposure, having a great... Now, I know open rate is really hard to talk about, but our highest open rate was over 70%. Our lowest, I think it was 43%. And we're kind of maintaining a mid-average. But the click-through rates, we're doing really good. They range from at low, yeah, 4-something, at a high, a 7.5, I think. I think. So, let's click through, right? Yeah. So, we're providing some really good options for the sponsors. We also provided values, my top 10 list for books, AI tools. We just didn't keep it to Amazon, although it was kind of an Amazon-focused newsletter, but we wanted to, we asked people, what do they want? They wanted AI. They wanted... Uh, education. They wanted all these different things, SOPs, action steps. And that's what we looked for. So at the end of the day, if I take a look at it, I'm finding the same thing. So I've got a community a bunch of different communities based off of lunch with norm lunch with norm reaches a ton of a ton of people the podcast um i have three spot sponsors and a banner listing of a bunch of different sponsors and i would think that drove a lot of the leads but guess what the newsletter grew a ton of leads similar to what you're saying and because of this And because we built that really loyal community, and I think we should touch on that afterwards, but now you could change that into dedicated emails. And your open rate on the dedicated emails is incredible because people trust you and it's coming from you.

  • Speaker #0

    Yeah, a newsletter gives you permission to be in their inbox. You start, when you first start sending it out, you're sending it out and people are like, oh, another email. But if you're delivering value... like both of our newsletters actually do real value in there and you you engage them like you're doing with the stories your personal stories which are great i did some of that in the beginning i've shied away from it recently just more of a space issue and then i tried to i switched to branding a little bit uh but that's a great personal brand for you and like you do with the game the vacation where you have the little uh uh picture and it's like find find you in this maze of uh people sitting on the beach you know a thousand people sitting on the beach where's norm where's the beer guy, which is... in theme with your brand, with the beard. So it's, what I've seen is now people, they look forward to it and they're drinking their coffee in the morning or maybe they don't read it that day. Maybe they save them up and read them on the weekend or they do something like that. And I'm even doing mine in podcast. I have a podcast version of mine right now. So my newsletter comes out on Mondays and Thursdays and at BillionDollarSellers.com. and It comes out in the mornings. I would like to get them out a little bit earlier than I do, but I'm not able to because of this thing I do with a podcast. So I have a guy in the UK that every night, so I finish, I personally write my newsletter. This is not a VA doing it later. I have a template. I'm able to do it in under two hours, each one. If one's a little bit more detailed or I'm writing something a little bit more, maybe a little bit over two hours, but I'm able to put them together. It wasn't that way in the beginning. It was four or five hours for each one in the beginning. But about two hours is what it takes me to put each one together. I've never missed. That's a key. It's consistency. So my trainer started one. You've never missed either. Right. And my trainer started one, and he's hit and miss. Our friend Elena sometimes doesn't come out. There are people like life gets in the way. And when you're media, that can't happen. When you're part of someone's life, you have to come out. So even if I'm at a BDSS in Iceland. and I know I'm not going to have time to mess around and keep up with what the latest things are and publish that, I'll do a best of. I'll do a couple in advance and they're like best ofs, because even a best of, I haven't really seen you do this yet, but even a best of is still, it's better than nothing. And the fact is, if you're only getting 40, 50% of the people to open any given email, 40 to 50% of them haven't seen that stuff. So it's going to be new to a lot of A lot of them have forgotten about it or they skimmed over it. So it's still nobody's complaining and saying, oh, this is regurgitated, recycled stuff. And in today's AI world, I think you and I talked about this. One of the big advantages of putting out content like we're doing with the podcast, our individual podcast, this podcast, the training thing that we have under Dragonfish used to be called Ascend. I can't remember the name of it now. The new name. Whatever the new name is, we had to change it as a trademark issues. Um, it's coming out, it's launching soon. That's why it's not active right now. So I can't remember the exact name, but, uh, and then our newsletters is massive content and today's world with LLMs and everything, the content people are, have a major advantage. So you're, you're producing this massive content. I even had my, my assistant, my VA that I have in Pakistan that does some stuff for me. I didn't go find all the podcasts I've ever been on in the last 10 years or whatever since 2016 when I came on my first podcast and find them all and translate them all. And he's done the same thing for all these podcasts, all the AM PM podcasts I do. So it's creating massive content. But with that newsletter, you're getting permission to come every day. And then like you said. You see what people are clicking on, what they're interested in. So you can double down on that. You can ask them too, but you can also double down on the things that they're clicking in. You can run ad sell advertising spots. You can do affiliate commissions to make money out of the newsletter, which in some times can be real money. But where the big money is at is like exactly what you just said is a dedicated email. So my newsletter comes on Mondays and Thursdays. And On Tuesdays and Wednesdays originally, and I just added Fridays as an option now too, even though it's not the best day, I'll send them a message to the newsletter subscriber list. It doesn't say BDSN in the subject line because that's what it always says for my newsletter, so you can quickly sort them or find them. But it'll be an email for a single topic. Sometimes it's for us. We're promoting a webinar we're doing for Dragonfish. Sometimes it's an advertiser. And I charge right now $4,000 per email for that. And I sell out about a month and a half in advance on those. And so that adds up to real money. I've had one advertiser, it's done so well for him, spend close to 80 grand in the last year just advertising because it's done so well for him. And he knows that, yeah, every time he has an ad in the newsletter, maybe he gets 20, 30 clicks or 50 clicks or something. That's nothing great. But he knows long-term that branding is like Coca-Cola. Top of mind. Awareness. As soon as someone needs him, he's going to be there and going to be the first one they think of. And that's what it does. It gives you more authority. It leans into everything else that you do, whether you're selling courses. But as a product, even if you're doing products, you can sell your products off it. I mean, I sell my BDSS. I sell my virtual events. I sell my replays. I mean, replays to the events you came to in Iceland have done well over $100,000. just selling the replay that the cost to do that was 15,000 bucks and to bring the crew out and have them actually do that and edit it on the spot and do a live stream. And I just take the videos. I upload them to video Vimeo for me. I didn't have to do anything. Just put together the email and the links and send that out. And that's, if I didn't have that newsletter, a lot of those people would be ignoring my emails or they wouldn't be aware of it. And you're, you're reaching into all these other people. And that's, you can do that for any brand but The thing is, you have to provide value and you have to be consistent. And that's where I think a lot of people have trouble. But with AI, there's ways to, you can't have AI do all the work, but AI can be a tool that you can utilize to summarize things or to do it in certain angles or to train it with your voice and help it write some of the stuff that you've, or rewrite some of the stuff that you've written. There's lots of cool stuff.

  • Speaker #1

    that you can do when it comes to newsletters so everybody i mean you agree i mean you've seen the power of it i've seen i've seen the power and surprisingly um way over double triple quadruple over the um podcast which i was shocked at and one of the other things we never talked about and i think we have to talk about uh community i think we have to talk about deliverability but One of the things that I started doing recently, you did this right off the top. We took our time and this was kind of a backseat. We didn't know what to promote, but we started doing referrals. And we've done that now for about two months. And have we got a ton of referrals that have come in? So we're giving away prompt books, we're giving away courses, we're giving away all sorts of different things. Matter of fact, this year, I think we have a virtual BDSS giveaway. The person gives away enough. but That's if you have to be creative, like I'm trying to do it because I have the podcast, because I have the, the, the communities that I've built, I can go out there and try to promote it that way. Then I go out and go to people like you and on Beehive, you can promote me. I think that's what you're doing because we're getting a bunch of leads that come from you. I know that there's other newsletters out there. And then there's the whole referral network. which is working really well. I think we got a few hundred emails or subscribers just off of that this month.

  • Speaker #0

    Yeah, referrals. So there's different tools. If you're going to do a newsletter, some people use Kit, some people use Substack, some people. You don't want to be using a general tool like MailChimp or AWeber. to do a proper newsletter there's the best tool in my opinion is beehive b-e-e-h-i-i-v it's spelled weird b-e-e-h-i-i-v yeah um it was built for newsletters and they have they have advertising built in where advertisers will come to you and you can make 100 200 bucks 300 bucks per uh pawn you choose which ads you want and you automatically insert them it does all the tracking all that helps you with all the writing it's built to actually do new proper news there's not email marketing and it's it's really really good and one of the systems they have is a referral thing and what norm's talking about is you can add a little line of code and it'll put a little box on there you don't have they'll say hey if you like this news that you put some copy whatever you want to say if you like this refer a friend and get rewards and you can create like a little gif that goes through these this animated gif of all these rewards and where a lot of people mess up is they'll say refer five people and get a coffee mug Prefer 10 people get a t-shirt. And for me, I don't think that's valuable. Most people don't give a crap about your company logo on a coffee. They just don't. What they do, if your newsletter is for accountants, instead of a coffee mug with Kevin's accountant's service on it, you should have a coffee mug that says some sort of slogan for accountants. I don't know. I'm just accountants. know their data. I don't know. Some sort of slogan that accountants identify with, it's a cute little slogan for them. Then they'll take that. And then the other mistake a lot of people make is they make the rewards too high. Most people don't know five people. Most people know, unless they're going to post it on their social media or somewhere, most people know one person. So you have to have a quick win. Something of value, like you're doing the prompts thing, and I do a 21 hacks deal. So one, just refer... just get them started. Just one person. And then they get that and they're like, that's pretty cool. Who else do I know? And they'll refer other people in the office or they'll refer their partners or they'll refer, post it somewhere. And that's how I exactly how I grew from those 1700 when I started to 10,000. And I still do it now, but I'm also doing a lot of outside advertising. And another thing that like you just said is inside Beehive, and there's other companies like Sparkloop that will do this too. I use both of them. And you can refer. out. So I can refer to you. So when someone signs up for my newsletter, pops a little pop-up on the confirmations page that says, oh, by the way, you might also like Lunch with Norm. Do you want that? And you might also like Retoo's AI for e-commerce. Do you like that? And if they say yes, it automatically subscribes them to you. So you get a lead. Now, in our case, we're buddies, so I don't charge you for that. Well,

  • Speaker #1

    how come I've been cutting your checks?

  • Speaker #0

    Oh, where have they been going? I haven't seen those. i oh maybe it's going to the coke zeros that's that that's where that's going that's going to mexican coke zeros mexican coke zeros um so but you can refer out and you can get paid so people will pay you you know buck two bucks three bucks it depends you know for those and so a lot of times if you do this right if you if i'm advertising um and i'm spending say a dollar per lead in ads And I can get a dollar back from a lunch with Norm, who, if you weren't my buddy, would be paying me to do this. I can basically have this as a wash. And so I'm getting all my leads for free and I can grow this thing, if you do it right, basically at a profit in a way.

  • Speaker #1

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  • Speaker #0

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  • Speaker #1

    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 #0

    Right now is one of the best times to get started with Stack Influence. You can sign up at stack. influence.com or click the link in this video down the description or notes below and mention misfits that's m-i-s-f-i-t-s to get 10 off your first campaign stack influence.com so i make a little bit of profit on when i was doing facebook ads it was difficult i was it was costing my best leads for two dollars and seventy three cents a piece so if i got Not everybody signs up for the newsletter suggested. So if up pops, let's just say you were paying me $1 and Ritu was paying me $1. Y'all pop up after that $2.73 cost per lead, and only 50% of the time do you take the offer. So basically, I'm getting $1 instead of $2 of that back out of every lead. So that's costing me $1.73. Well, that cuts my advertising costs. But I'm doing stuff now with intent-based targeting where I'm popping up into the inbox. I'm using Inbox Mailers, one of their subsidiaries. And actually popping up into the inbox when someone's in their inbox and I can target specific websites so I can target in the Amazon space. I can target my Amazon guy or Packview or Smart Scout or people that have been there. And these tools know who's been there by cookie trails. And when they're in their inbox, check in their email. I'll ping, ding, you've got mail. And a message will appear right at the top of there. their email stack, which means they're most likely to see it. It's not going to get lost in their, their, all their junk mail. And if they open that and click anything in there, they get added to my list. Those are costing me 73 cents elite or 77 cents elite right now, which is really, really good. And so you can't have, yeah,

  • Speaker #1

    the, the question, I think that a lot of people are saying is who cares how many people you're getting? So why is it so important that you're adding subscribers?

  • Speaker #0

    So one is, you know, it's the quality of subscribers matter too. So some of these guys on these referral things might refer you not so good subscribers. So like you mentioned earlier, open rates is a standard metric, but it's a hard metric to actually use because on an Apple device with the OS, I think it's 15, 14 or 15, which is a couple of systems a couple of years ago, they've made a change where any email shows is opened. So your open rates may show at 34%, let's say. But if 20% of your people are on using an iPad or an iPhone or their Mac computer to open that email, your open rate is a lot less because every one of them is shown as open. So what you want to go by is click rates. So when someone tells me they have a 70% open rate, I seriously doubt them unless their list is small. It's highly targeted. It's a really kick-ass subject line. They might hit that one time, but that means their list is small or they got a lot of Apple people. that they don't know that are on their list. A good target, you want to be above 30%. If you can get that 40% to 50% like you're doing and like I'm doing, then you're good. When I was smaller, under 10,000 people, and everybody was from referrals, those were much higher quality leads because you're referring, you know, if you refer to someone, you're going to refer to someone that you know probably in the Amazon space. That's going to be a good lead. And so my open rates were consistently 50%, 55%, 60%. Now my open rates are anywhere. I've had a low of 32% recently, all the way up to the averaging in the low 40s now. But part of that's because I've grown and I have less quality leads, but that's okay. They filter themselves out. I delete those people. And I clean the list once a month to get rid of the people that have it open and clicks because that affects, like you said, deliverability. And deliverability is the game. But the true advantage of having a newsletter Sure. is you control the messaging and you control the delivery to a point now the ESPs if you're not doing certain things right you can your deliverability can be definitely affected but if I post something on the lunch with norm Facebook group um that and you've got I don't know how many members you have you got 5 000 members in there only about 30 of them are going to see it and then if those 30 interacted uh Facebook will show it to another whatever the algorithm is 50 100 200 if they continually interact it'll keep spreading that out but most posts go to darkness and and they don't get seen um versus an email if you're sitting twice a week like i'm doing you're once a week on mondays i'm twice a week and you're getting that open rate of 35 40 and a click rate like you said of four to seven percent then you know you're reaching a lot of people they might just skim it but you you know you're reaching those people, which you could never... In my case, that means 10,000 people, if I'm getting just a 30% open rate on mine, which is higher, but at least 10,000 people or at least skimming every single email I sent. I don't get that on any social, unless it goes viral on a social post on LinkedIn or something, but I'm consistently getting that. And then, so what you want to pay attention to is the click rate. So you want to put stuff in there that encourages people to click. And that could be things like, rate this issue. Did you like it? Good, bad? and different could it be uh clicking off to see the rest of the story so you tease them and you give them but you gotta give them enough information where they don't have to click off that i i got it but you want you want to encourage them to click off too even one of the things kev that we do with the podcast is we'll put uh

  • Speaker #1

    you know dan kurtz uh four reasons blah blah blah blah the first reason the second reason the third reason and drop off at the fourth

  • Speaker #0

    to get them to click over to here the rest of the podcast that's really good yeah you guys are doing a really good job on that to get them but now we know you don't want to want them clicking the youtube so now now we learn that at uh at uh elevate 360. uh don't send outside traffic to youtube so now i saw in your recent one kelsey made the change uh it or maybe it's two issues ago um he made the change to be like go find us on all your favorite platforms uh search for us on youtube uh i noticed that i haven't made that switch yet in my newsletter but it's coming um but but yeah i was just gonna say the other thing that uh we were having a cigar i don't even know when it was we have so many

  • Speaker #1

    but uh maybe it was out on your balcony but uh you were telling me and this was really cool uh this is a game changer as well and i hate that phrase but mark mark don who's been on this podcast told you something about skimming you know it's just so what we've what you've done is you've started to break up the newsletter and have it all over the place not I shouldn't say all over the place, but, you know, just mix it up a little bit. So,

  • Speaker #0

    not just skimming to the end. I had it modulized in the past. So, if you knew, like, this section is a good tip, this section is the funny thing, this section is a whatever, you could just skip to what you want. And something I do, I mean, you do it with your where's norm thing, but I have a trivia question at the top. It's called Ask Bezos. And a lot of people say they love that. They read that trivia question. But to get the answer, you've got to scroll all the way to the bottom. to get the answer. And that's very effective. And if you've noticed in my newsletter now, all the headlines, they alternate colors. So if you look at any of my newsletters, headlines for a story, it'll be in blue and red. So certain words like two or three words are in red, two or three words or whatever in the headline are in blue. That's for skimming. And then you'll see I'm putting little boxes around stuff to actually put into sections to make it digestible and easier to read or easier to skim through. Because there's some people out there. You know, I had one guy at market masters tell me it's a canadian guy those canadian guys are weird i know they're actually they're actually cool guys uh he said he actually prints it out and and cuts it up and puts it into a binder by category and then there's other people that i know that the guys from uh selling from the beach they they subscribe to like retos and yours and mine and a couple others and they any cool articles they clip them and put them into like a google database of all these like gpts and say the gpt that's ever been in um retoo's newsletter for example she's another one that's doing a good job she's providing really good value in her newsletter and there's there's i i personally read about 30 a day but i unsubscribe a day um i go through 30 about 30 a day you can't work on the other project that's about an hour it's my chill time give me a mexican coke zero all right that lies nice little ice i turn on some uh just uh like uh lounge music and i sit there and i just go through them and these are some of these are are for our industry for ecom yeah some of them are just general news or ai or or whatever so it gives me a good cross-section and i find content that way too right but that's a hobby and it's keeping me informed i just saw some uh somebody i think it was one of the guys from shark tank uh the canadian uh the the uh canadian he's not he always canadian but he by way of uh of uh

  • Speaker #1

    Robert or

  • Speaker #0

    Robert? Yeah. But he was saying that someone asked him, what do you see? You know, a lot of billionaires. What do you see in these billionaires as the like the three most common characteristics? And one of them, he said, was extreme discipline. One of them, as he said, was extreme knowledge on a specific thing. They know a lot about everything, but they're they're masters at one specific thing. He said, the other is a thirst for knowledge, where they're constantly reading, constantly keeping themselves up. So that's what, I should be a billionaire then, because I have a thirst for knowledge. Norm, what's going on here? Yeah. Help me out. Help me out. So that's where I get that, but I get content and ideas that way, and I'll mix things together. And I changed the subject earlier, but the other thing that I do is, and you might consider this with Lunch with Norm too, is I turn my newsletter into a podcast. I started talking about this earlier, I didn't finish. So I finish it on a Sunday night. I send it to a guy in the UK. He's six hours ahead of me. So while I'm sleeping, he's taking this, running it through an AI tool and some other stuff and tweaking it, changing some of the words a little bit. And he puts it in my voice. So we used, I think he used 11 labs or something to clone my voice. And it's about 10 to 12 minutes of me, me reading the newsletter. And he changes up. It's not word for word. He makes it flow. And so there's a link in every newsletter. and I'm about to put this on all the podcast platforms. I just haven't done it yet, but it's going to be on all the podcast platforms. So that would be lead gen too. You'll find it on YouTube or you'll find it on Spotify or Apple. And then like, I didn't know he had a newsletter. What's this newsletter? Let me go see. I'll get you on the list. But. A lot of people love that because they don't want to read everything, but they'll listen to it while they're on the train or while they're at the gym or while they're driving their car. And I have a lot of people comment about how much they like that. There's not thousands and thousands of people clicking that, but there's enough to where it's building a little core little group. And I'm experimenting with a couple of things there. And so that's something else. But one of the key things about a newsletter, like I was saying earlier, where you control the message, is you also… You own the customer. If you're advertising on Facebook or you're advertising on selling on Amazon or Walmart or some of these places, you don't have the customer data. You don't own that relationship. They do. You can extract that data in some cases, but with a newsletter, everything is under your control. When I'm at a show, people are like, Kevin, tell them about your Billion Dollar Seller Summit. and I know that if I start talking about that As soon as I say it's $6,000 to come, they're going to be like, they're going to tune me out a lot of times. I'm just wasting my breath. If I say, don't worry, just get on my newsletter. It's free. Here, sign up. It's BillionDollarSellers.com. Here's a QR code right here. I get them in that funnel, I've got you. Now, even if you say unsubscribe, I still can retarget you on Facebook or other places. Even if you say unsubscribe from the newsletter, I've got you. Once I've got you, you're in my marketing funnel and in my marketing system and i'm gonna do everything i can to sell you something at some point and that's the beauty of of having a newsletter that's providing value and they're giving me permission to do it i'm not just blasting a promotional email uh and that's that's the key what what are you doing um from like product side are you doing anything yet on lunch with norm like pitching any kind of products or anything? I know you're doing the advertising and the affiliate stuff, but are you doing any, like I pitch, you know, the BSS events and that's, I guess, technically a product. Are you doing anything there? Yeah,

  • Speaker #1

    we're not doing too much right now. One of the things that we do promote and hopefully to help grow is Dragonfish and Marketing Misfits. We're doing sponsorship and that's about it. I don't have the events, so I'm not pushing that at all now one of the things uh we are doing in the referral side is we're getting honu involved um i'm trying to do more with the marketing content press releases again so that's something that we can push but right for the last i don't know how long i've been doing this a year and a half maybe we've just been focusing on pure value value more value And I think we can grow that next. I think with our size, I was talking to Kelsey today, and I think we might have hit 10,000 subscribers.

  • Speaker #0

    Oh, awesome, man. Congratulations.

  • Speaker #1

    So, yeah. So, we've been working hard at that. But you've got a much bigger subscriber base. so I think it's smart for you to do what you're doing. And especially with the events that you, that you have, I don't have that. What I do push day in and day out is my personal brand. So people will see that I am an authority in all sorts of different spaces. And especially when you do the podcast and the newsletter, well, even though you're interviewing, Bing. Ryan Dice or whoever, but you become that expert, even though you're doing the interview. Plus, everything that I'm doing, Kevin, I know this is something you probably going to look into, but I link it to Google business, Google knowledge graph. So everything, every article, every everything is being associated with me. And I think that helps me just grow who I am. So when we go and we do something together, it's going to just go out to that many more people. So that's what I'm doing. Personal branding.

  • Speaker #0

    Well, I think a lot of people listen to this. All this sounds good. Kevin, you and Norm are teaching people Amazon doing this. You're business to your B2B. And B2B newsletters do typically have a little bit higher value. You can charge more for things. but uh I B2C can also work really well. So if you're listening to this and you're a brand, what I recommend is you don't do a brand newsletter. So if I'm Zoe's Pets, and that's the name of my brand, I'm not going to have a Zoe's Pets newsletter. Right. I'm going to have a newsletter in the, say I specialize in dog toys. That's what I specialize in. I'm going to have a newsletter about dogs. and maybe it's sponsored by Zoe's Pets, and there's an occasional ad in there, occasional plug for Zoe's Pets, or there's a section about Zoe's tip of the week or something like that. So I get that branding in, but I'm going to make it more about the industry for several reasons. One is it makes it not feel as promotional and advertising and more general knowledge to an avatar. And then second, it allows me to advertise other people in there without potentially conflicts where I can test as affiliate commissions. maybe a product I'm thinking about selling or something else I'm thinking about doing. I can test that. I can get other people to come in and help subsidize it and pay for it as well. Maybe pay for ads that don't compete directly with me. I can also build authority in the dog space and get people. A lot of times you'll get people willing to contribute content. I have a guy right now on Amazon. Every week he sends me an article and says, here's an article. If you want to publish this, I'll give you first rights. You publish this first. It's on AI stuff. And And he doesn't ask for any money in return. He just wants a credit. And it helps him build his authority and get the word out. You'll have people do that kind of stuff. Or if you're in the pet space, veterinarians or somebody, you can get them to do a little section about something. Or trainers or whatever. You can get people to provide a lot of the content where you're not having to have a writer do all this stuff. 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 #1

    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 #0

    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 #1

    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 #0

    So if you want to take your product to the next level, check out House of AMZ. That's houseofamz.com. House of AMZ. And you can do this. And with AI helping you rewrite stuff or helping you put five different articles together into one summary thing, you can do some pretty cool. pretty cool stuff and deliver something that people are going to start to follow and start to really enjoy. I mean, one of the things that, and you can even create awards in your industry. That's one of the things I've done with my newsletter is I have about once a month, I come out with something called the Dream 100. And so in the Amazon space, there's a lot of people that are trying to teach people how to sell on Amazon. They're kind of like scammers. They go on YouTube and they have a Lamborghini and they're talking about how easy it is to make money. And And, you know, they're flashing money like Norm's just doing there. And they're just, they're full of BS. But so I recognize some of those legitimate people and I have a list of 100 of them. And I've gotten through about 36 or so right now. And every month I list one of those people and I write a little bio on them. Why I chose them. Norm is one of them, for example. Oh,

  • Speaker #1

    you can't see my belt over there.

  • Speaker #0

    It's over there. And then the next time I show up to a live event, you know, I bring him up on stage and like Norm was just talking about, he gets like this wrestling belt. You know, it says Dream 100. It's this big old thing to recognize them. You know, those things cost me two or three hundred bucks a piece to have those things made. So I give that to them. You know, but what that does is it creates branding. It creates awareness. Then I can spin that off. So now I do an event called Market Masters. And it's like, come sit with the Dream 100. And people are like, oh, these are like the best people. in the space that Kevin's recognized. And now people are coming to me like, how do I get into that? What do I got to do to get into that? It's become a thing. And it's so you can do things like that in any space. So whether you're a chef or you're a pickleballer, or whatever, you can do this and you can own the customer. And like what Norm said earlier is you got to take it beyond that and you can use this and piggyback this into communities. whether that's a whatsapp group like we both have for our newsletters like my newsletter to get into my new whatsapp group for the newsletter you have to refer at least uh three people uh to get in there and then you get a special invitation to come in the whatsapp group so everybody in that whatsapp group there's hundreds of people in there 300 i think 400 they've referred at least three or more people so those are die hard loyal people that and they get to be in that group and share tactics and stuff with each other uh you you can do that kind of thing but the next thing is community And where we're going with AI and everything, people are... eager to have in real life stuff so that's why i do my events that's why norm and i for marketing misfits we do the the cms that collective mind society trips the next one's coming up in november in tampa you can go to collectivemindsociety.com check that out it's gonna be a cigar smoking and whiskey drinking and hanging out with like-minded people over the weekend in tampa which is like the headquarters of cigars in the united states a lot of people think it's miami but it's actually not, it's Tampa. We did one last year on the train, train ride across the Rocky Mountains of Canada. We did one at the F1 the year before. These are amazing events, but people want that kind of stuff, and they're willing to pay to have that. Experiences are one of the things that you can give people. And when you have a news like this, you can spin that kind of stuff off of it. For, you know, if you're a dog, back on our dog example, you can have a dog training meetup or, you know, segment your audience. If you get big enough, you know, this weekend we're doing a... the dachshunds dachshunds in la dachshunds in miami you could ask for people on the newsletter to lead it lead the meetup group or whatever local cafe you can do all kinds of cool stuff to engage community and just help really extend your brand from a grassroots up effort now this is not a get rich quick thing but over time you do this long enough and properly enough in a few years you're going to start seeing some momentum building and you're going to start seeing a real brand being built that you might be able to exit pass on to your kids one day or have a nice lifestyle off of. And a newsletter, I believe, is the crux of that. But it has to be a newsletter done right.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, I agree 100%, Kevin. You can't just be a fly-by-night. And one of the things I want to add, you did this with the Dream 100, but Elena Ceres has done this with a pickleball newsletter. And one of the things that I think is very important, she created her own association. I thought that was so cool. So all of a sudden you have an association, which gives you more credibility. And if you want to join it, you have to join this association, which then you'll get this email letter and she gets the lead. It's very interesting what she's been able to do. And we're doing that. I don't know when that's going to happen, but we're putting together this cigar newsletter that we're going to try to create. And we think it's going to be...

  • Speaker #0

    one of the top newsletters out there yeah we have norm and i are working on cigar newsletter under the dragon fresh uh brand we have a newsletter coming out for this this podcast for marketing misfits this summer you'll be able to get a news a weekly newsletter that i'll summarize some of what we talk about in the podcast because not everybody has an hour to listen to the whole podcast uh it'll also have some additional marketing tips and strategies uh in there there as well a couple other cool things We also are doing this for other people. So if you're like, oh, this newsletter thing sounds good. I just don't have time or the knowledge or want to do it. You can actually reach out to us at dragonfishci.com. You can reach out to us and we'll possibly be able to help you. We have a wait list right now. We'll possibly be able to help you with a newsletter if that's something that you're looking to do as well. We have set up a whole team and systems to actually do that for people and to do it right and help you grow. grow it but newsletters i think people look at email email is one of the oldest forms of internet communication way before and it still exists and is there a lot of spam absolutely there's a lot of garbage and i get i wake up every morning to 200 messages and i just i gotta spend the first 10 minutes of the day deleting those i know you have an ea that does a lot of that for you uh norm but yeah it's just like come on man this people just but i the email still works and you can't be afraid. We know people, Norm and I know people that have 800,000 emails on their list and they're afraid to email them. They're like, what do I do? What if someone says unsubscribe me? What if they don't like me? It's okay. We get people like both of our newsletters, it's unsubscribe or they mark it as you go in a beehive. And I just sent out 32,000 emails yesterday in my newsletter and four people marked it as spam. Oh, no. I'm like, you sons of... But you're going to have people do that because it's easy up at the top. or they are they subscribe to it then they just didn't realize they didn't have time for it or whatever but you're gonna have some of that happen but the more you email the more money you make that that that's that's a lesson i was just at the driven mastermind um with perry belcher and they had a guy from angora it's a billion dollar email brand email and physical newsletter brand uh and they they said the guy said that they email some of their people 20 times a day i'm like 20 times a day. I'd be unsubscribing pretty quick. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people do, but the ones that don't are your customers. And he said, the more we email, the more money we make. And that's where you got to be not afraid to do that. Now, the downside to this is. What Norm talked about earlier is on deliverability. If the Google and Yahoo and Gmail, which account for about 65% of all emails, deliver email boxes. So only about 35% are non-Gmail, Google, or Yahoo addresses. So basically, whatever their rules are, are the rules you got to go by. And they're tightening everything up. They're putting newsletters now into a newsletter tab. They're moving stuff into promotion or spam. But there's ways that you can help. mitigate that by like when you on your welcome email that you send out when someone subscribes to your newsletter ask them to respond back and say hey uh in my case i just say respond back with a yes and where you're from and that tells the the esp's the email service providers that hey this person actually wanted that email they triggered a response back it's a legit email don't put it in the spam folder but more likely to put it in the inbox so a little thing not everybody does that only about 20% of the people will do that, but 20% helps. Yeah. Then you got to do stuff. There's rules now with DKIM and SPF. These are special headers in DMARC. They're special in EIMI, I think. Those are the four things you got to pay attention to in your DNS settings. And if those are not set right, especially if you're sending through a third party like Beehive, a lot of stuff will go to spam and won't get delivered. So there is a little technical side where you can do it yourself or you can have someone come in. And there's companies that do that. fairly cheap and they'll make sure that stuff's all set up right or otherwise you're going to go into the spam box and then there's tools like before i send every one of my newsletters i send it through mail-tester.com and mailgenius.com and what i do is i go to these websites one of them is free one of them is i pay for 30 bucks a year or something and it generates a random email address you just hit a button says test email it generates a random email address i go into beehive I paste that into my preview link, and then I send that message to there. About a minute later, I can go and hit a button that says, check the score. And it'll give me a spam score. And sometimes it'll say, your spam, this is a 9.5 out of 10. That means I'm good to go. Other times, it'll say, this is an 8 out of 10. And some spam filters are going to flag it. I go and I look through it. It'll say, oh, you're linking to a dead website. One of your links is not good. You made a typo or whatever. And so I'm like, oops, I did. I got to fix that. And other times, it'll say, you're using the word free seven times in the newsletter. legitimately you're not like yeah looks so high but it's legitimate so i go in i change the word free to complementary or to something else or reword it so because those are the the spam filters will just catch that or the word guarantee or or something like that so i i change that kind of stuff up and get that score up as high as i can and then i send the message out and so that helps with deliverability so there's little things like that that that you do but the other thing once you have an email address, at least in the United States. You can actually get the physical address and the phone number in a lot of cases of 60 to 80% of your customers. Even if they didn't give it to you, there's big databases like Melissa Data and some of these that will actually do appending services. So they have all these big databases that links all kinds of data from all over the internet and all kinds of services and magazines and everything together. And they can append an email address. They can take the Norm's email address at Lunch with Norm and figure out. Well, he's in Canada, but if he's got a U.S. address, figure out what U.S. address is associated with that and match them up. And then you can use that to do direct mail if you want to or to or SMS. You get SMS a whole nother animal, but you got to have permission on that. You can get some big fines, but you could use it to have people opt in to an SMS or something or notify them by something if they've given you permission on SMS. So there's a lot of cool stuff you can do, but you've got to own that data and have that relationship. And newsletters, some people are like, well, why don't I just do a blog? Blogs are something that people have to go to to read. A newsletter is push instead of pull. Blogs are pull marketing. You got to pull them in. Newsletters are push marketing. Now, blogs are great for like SEO and the beautiful thing about an AI search and all that kind of stuff. The good thing about Beehive is it converts every newsletter into a blog. And I'm starting to see now more and more links coming with a Google source attribution. I'm like, Google? I'm not advertising on Google right now. It's because someone typed in some sort of keyword. My newsletter version of my, the blog version of my newsletter showed up in the search results. And they click through. And when they're looking at it in a web browser, as they scroll halfway down the page, and all of a sudden start, I'll pop up, hey, you like this? Subscribe. And so I'm getting subscribers, you know, it's not a ton, but I'm getting subscribers off of that as well. You can create this. The newsletter can be the hub of the flywheel that can do all this really cool stuff. And I think most people are just missing the mark on that.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah. And there's a couple of other things. You know, we don't have to get right into it, but we also have point. We point our domains instead of having lunch with norm dot beehive dot com. And you're trying to tell that to people, which they'll spell wrong. You know, we have a pointer. Their years is billion dollar. Summit, right?

  • Speaker #0

    Billion dollar sellers.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, billion dollar sellers. And mine is LWN.news. A lot easier to do. But one of the things I want to really, really push is that don't try to do that unless you know how to do it, but don't try to do the deliverability yourself. You can go to Fiverr, you can go somewhere. And I used Fiverr Pro for this, found a really great guy. And he does all my deliverability for me. And then I test it once in a while. I go over to an app called Warmly, and it tells me what's getting through. What you have to do is you take 40 email addresses, you push it through, and then it tells you the deliverability on Google or Gmail, Google Suite, Outlook, and there's a couple of others. And you can see whether you're good or not. And that just, you know, peace of mind, because if you're not getting into the inbox, then your deliverability or your your newsletter is going to be, you know, as good as the as good as you get into that inbox.

  • 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 #1

    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 and it's just me on here? You're not going to know what I say.

  • Speaker #1

    I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too. You can go back and forth with one another. Yikes. 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. Oh,

  • Speaker #1

    so. make sure make sure you go either to five or wherever you want to go but pay a few bucks and it might cost you 100 bucks it might cost you 200 bucks um to get everything set up some they'll do it for 50 but just check it out and uh get them to make sure that the deliver that deliverability is right and when we're talking about this it's not so much when you're going through a company like Beehive. you want to check it out but when you're doing a dedicated email and you're using another domain that's where it could come up especially if you're using it for there has been no warm-up emails so you're just shooting it off uh to your list if it's a cold lit not a cold list but if you're just transferring it over the chances of it being any good you might have to warm that up a bit warm up uh how you're sending out those dedicated emails

  • Speaker #0

    Yeah, you don't want to just suddenly blast a whole bunch of emails to a list because that'll freak out the ESPs. They're like, what is this? Why is all this stuff coming from this one guy all of a sudden? And so that's what he means by warm up. You start with, you send 30 this day, then 50, then 100, then 150, then 500 and 1,000. And you warm it up because along the way, people are opening and responding and clicking. And that tells the ESPs that, okay, you're legit. You're a legitimate emailer. this is people stuff that people want to get. Another important point is that if you don't have anything to sell, a newsletter might not be for you. right now, unless you're, I mean, and by selling, that doesn't mean you have to have a physical product. It could be, you're just trying to get speaking gigs on stage. Uh, you know, people hire you for speaking gigs. It could be, it could be that, but you need to, to, in order to monetize it, you're going to, you can do it with affiliate commissions. You can do it with advertising and those should cover your cost of doing it and maybe make you a small profit. But if you really want to make the big bucks, you need something to sell some sort of in, you know, a conference, a course, a physical product, consulting service, something along those lines. And that's where the biggest payday is going to come from on doing a newsletter. Otherwise, it's going to be difficult. And there's newsletter conferences you can go to. There's two or three of them out there that has popped up. There's a guy named Matt McGarry. That actually has a newsletter that comes out every Saturday about the newsletter industry with tips and strategies. And I would growth letter. I think it's a growth letter dot com. And you can you can get that. There's also a newsletter called Growth in Reverse by Chanel that actually dissects how did people grow their list? How did they how did this guy get a million subscribers on his email list for whatever newsletter? And she'll dissect it. And she'll go back and look in the time machine online. She'll like, oh, look, in 2021, he started a LinkedIn profile. He had 16 followers. And then he started posting like this, this, this, and this. And then he'd use this strategy and this strategy. And by 2023, he had 110,000 followers. And then he started putting this newsletter plug in. This is how he did it. And then he was posting on X. And she'll break it all down. You can reverse engineer a lot of these strategies that people are using and then maybe implement, get ideas. for your stuff. There's also newsletters like Who Sponsors What that will tell you who's running ads in different newsletters. There's a whole little cottage industry that's popped up where you can keep abreast of what's going on in that space and get ideas for tools and tips and everything else.

  • Speaker #1

    All right. It's been about an hour, Kev.

  • Speaker #0

    It has. I love talking about this kind of stuff, but hopefully today we've given you a little bit of value.

  • Speaker #1

    i even saw norm taking a note over there i mean guys what are you writing down what you're writing down your lunch your that uh i like this is what i know genius i'm not using male genius i was going to go check that out see and that's the thing we we go back and forth there's times that you're using something that you have uh that i've never heard of and vice versa so exactly

  • Speaker #0

    i mean we that's That's the idea here. but hey if you like this podcast hopefully you've gotten something out of it today um let us know by putting a comment down below uh if you see a comment spot if you're listening to this on spotify or apple or maybe you're watching this on youtube leave us a little comment and let us know how we did we we take good ones we take bad ones we take critiques uh i don't take bad ones i'm sorry i say don't know if you give a bad normal cry but yeah you You can tell me I've got stuff between my teeth. It's okay. Okay. But yeah, make sure you hit that subscribe button or forward this, you know, if you like this for someone, you know, that might want to hear about what we talked about today or any of our previous topics for that for this to them and hit that subscribe button too. And you can always find out more and see direct links to some of the back issues. Find out more about what's going on in the marketing misfits world, but at marketingmisfits.co, not .com, .co, marketingmisfits.co.

  • Speaker #1

    All right. That's it for today. Thanks, everybody, for joining us. And we'll see you next Tuesday.

  • Speaker #0

    Take care.

  • Speaker #1

    Bye.

Description

Seeking true authority, explosive growth, and real connection with your audience? Newsletters aren’t dead, they’re the secret weapon most marketers overlook.


Unlock proven strategies, expert insights, and game-changing tools to grow your brand and boost your sales here: ➡️https://marketingmisfits.co/


Join Norm and Kevin as they battle newsletter myths and break down how a simple email can launch a $500,000 profit machine.


You’ll learn:

- Why controlling your own list beats playing the social lottery

- Niche-tested secrets to jaw-dropping open and click rates

- How AI, referrals, and community tactics scale your impact

- Monetization realities they won’t teach you in marketing school


This is the episode every founder, creator, and digital hustler needs. Don’t miss the tricks, cautionary tales, and industry laughs right to the end!


⏰ Timestamps:

00:00 - The $500K Newsletter Myth

05:59 - Newsletters in the AI Renaissance

8:15 - Growth Engine Unlocked 11:06 - List Authority & Monetization

15:08 - Open Rates, Real Fans & Community Tactics

23:04 - Referrals, Hacks & Tools That Supercharge Lists

32:25 - Deliverability Mastery & Tactical Testing

1:01:29 - Your Audience Awaits!


This episode is brought to you by:

- House of AMZ: Elevate your brand today at https://www.amazonseo.com/

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Don’t miss out on the insights that could transform your business!


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Hosted by Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

  • Speaker #0

    The true advantage of having a newsletter is you control the messaging and you control the delivery to a point. So what you want to pay attention to is the click rate. So you want to put stuff in there that encourages people to click. You tease them and you give them, but you got to give them enough information where they don't have to click off that I got it. But you want to encourage them to click off too. You're watching Marketing Misfits with Norm Farrar and Kevin King. Hey, Norm, remember a couple of years ago, I said I was going to start a newsletter. Remember when we talked about that?

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, I told you you were crazy. Nobody reads them.

  • Speaker #0

    Yeah, my wife, ex-wife, let me emphasize that, said the same thing. Maybe she should be ex-partner now. I don't know, but she said the same thing. But do you realize that this year, that newsletter, less than two years since starting it, will generate over a half a million dollars profit in my pocket?

  • Speaker #1

    And none of that's coming to me. Thank you, Kevin.

  • Speaker #0

    That's right, but you have a newsletter too. I do. And it's going to pick up some steam. And I think anybody that's listening to this, if they're not doing a newsletter, they may want to rethink that. And that's what we're going to talk about today.

  • Speaker #1

    Right. Nope. Let's get into it.

  • Speaker #0

    So, you know, I had a newsletter back before newsletters were cool. I had a newsletter back in the late 90s, actually. I think I've told you maybe this story over cigars one time, but for the audience that hasn't heard it. Back in the late 90s, Mark and I had a company and we were dealing with pretty women. We had like baseball cards and calendars and all kinds of different collectibles and stuff, dealing with like bikini models and things like that. And we needed a way to actually reach the audience. So what we did is we were advertising all the traditional direct mail. This is before the internet was a hot thing, direct mail things back then. And then we started promoting this newsletter. and said hey uh top of funnel just we didn't know funnels existed you know nobody was talking about that back then come to our website and sign up for this newsletter and every day seven days a week we would send out a newsletter to our users we end up getting up to about 250 000 people that were getting this every single day and in that newsletter would be a short little text-based summary no images just a sort uh there's no html email or anything back then and be like five I've had lines almost like a... If you're familiar with Drudge Report or something like that in these states, just five little headlines about anything to do with pretty girls. So it could be Farrah Fawcett did this or Thana White on the Wheel of Fortune did this or Hugh Hefner did this or Dallas Cowboy cheated. And then they would click through and then we have a photo of the day. They would say something like, see today's, see Julie, you know, today's featured model or whatever. They would click through, and they would take them to a nicely designed HTML website that would have a photo of the girl. a little bio about her we had a joke section we had a game section we had a trivia section a few other little sections on there plus these five headlines that were clickable hot links that would go off the stories on other sites and i literally had back then there was no ai or no tools to aggregate this stuff so i had two guys one in houston it was in a he was in a wheelchair so it was a really good job for him and another guy in uh in la And every day they would go and find articles and post them. We had this backend database. It wasn't Google sheets or anything like that back then. And they would post these links in there and they post, they find 30 or 40 stories a day. And every night before midnight, no matter where I was in the world, I remember being in an Island in Honduras with, and I had a satellite phone, one of those big honking satellite phones, because there's no internet in the hotel back then. And I had to connect to it, turn off all my images on my browser. and connected like 300 bits per second or whatever that slow-ass rate was on a modem to actually log in, look at these stories, and approve five of them that would go out in the email starting at midnight that night. People could choose the time of day they got the email, but that grew that list so big. We got on Howard Stern when he was on public radio before satellite. We got we were selling Hold it.

  • Speaker #1

    Hold it. So you went on Howard Stern.

  • Speaker #0

    I personally did. Our models did. But I was in the green room with them there. Someone had to escort them, you know, and make sure Howard didn't do any crazy stuff.

  • Speaker #1

    I was just wondering if they were going to rate you, you know, with the laser point. Well,

  • Speaker #0

    they did. Coincidentally, we had a model. One of our top models was from your neck of the woods, from Toronto. Her name is Katia Corvo. You can actually go to YouTube and look this up. Go look up Katia Corvo, C-O-R-R-I-V-E-A-U, spelled the French way. and Howard Stern, you can see the video because E! Entertainment Television back then filmed all of his stuff. And you can see where she went on the show. They tried to get her, you know, Howard, he's a pretty girl on the show. He tries to get them naked, tried to get her naked. She refused to do it, but she got in her underwear if they would get in their underwear. It's really funny. So I think she got everybody in the studio to get in their underwear. It's really funny. But at the end of that, you know, they're promoting our website. And our servers would blow up. We would have someone standing at our facility to flip the switch. You know, we had one of those remote switches to restart the server. And it was crazy. But we'd get tons of leads. And we dealt with Bomas, who ended up being one of the founders of that, went off and started Wikipedia. And it... It just blew up and we sold tons of products off it. But what happened is around 2001, 2002, the CanSpam Act came out. And so stuff started going to spam. And so a lot of our guys were sending out all these massive emails and a lot of people just quit getting them and they started complaining. And then so we just ended up basically shutting this thing down and just continuing on our way. We built up a big list and we use that list. will come 2023 i'm sitting at perry belcher's ai bot summit in vegas and he's talking about using a this is like april of 2023 and he's talking about using ai to actually generate newsletters and that this is some big opportunity and you can crank out newsletters using ai and i was like yeah you i can see this you could definitely do this but they're going to be pieces of newsletters and it turns out his his theory was actually a piece of because you you can't really you can do it but but they don't last. Um, But you can use AI as a tool for sure and help you with it. So I was like, you know what? I'm going to bring this back. And then you were doing a newsletter at the time, your Lunch with Norm newsletter. Yeah,

  • Speaker #1

    I think there's a lot of people in the space that just had this newsletter, but nobody defined what it looked like. And I want to thank you, by the way, for pulling me aside one day and saying, your newsletters.

  • Speaker #0

    well i think i did that to a bunch of people oh no you did that btss bdss that was hilarious i had sponsors in the room and i'm like your newsletter is uh uh kaka uh and they're like we just sponsor a lot and you're just calling us out here it's like yeah i'm calling you out um no uh but yeah so there what happens a lot of people have they have a promotional eight i call them promotional emails they call them newsletters they still exist to this day I get a ton of them from people in the Amazon space that we're in, some of the marketing people, newsletters. They'll say up at the top, you know, the ones that always get me is like, the April newsletter or the May newsletter is here. I'm like, that's how they started off. The May newsletter is here. They started off with like, the weather is bright and balmy outside. I hope it's good in your deck of the woods. You know, some sort of, those are garbage. And they'll say newsletter and you look at it. It's not a newsletter. It's a promotional email about their services. Even some of the biggest names in the Amazon space have really garbage.

  • Speaker #1

    The marketing space, Kev.

  • Speaker #0

    The newsletters and the marketing and the digital marketing space too. But if you're not providing value or someone doesn't have to click off to actually get the value, then you're not providing a new, you're not really doing a newsletter. So I decided to start one and I launched it in August of 2023 to the Amazon world. i did not some people just blast their newsletter to their entire email list anybody's ever given them an email or bought something they just blasted to them i didn't do that i made you opt i made everybody opt in and when so i started i think the first issue went out to like august 14th 2023 to like 1400 or 1700 1700 people i think it was and then for the next year i just refined it i tested different things i tested you know putting a story in i tested different sections and games and different kinds of value different lengths And then after, I just basically grew it off referrals. So people that liked it would refer other people. And that worked really well. I incentivized that, got it up to about 10,000. And then last year in August, literally August of last year, so not even a year ago, I started running Facebook ads. And now I'm doing some other additional stuff. And we're at 32,000 active people right now. And I've kicked off about 17,000 for actually not opening it. But the core thing about this. Anybody can do this, no matter who's listening here, whether you're selling physical products, you have an agency, you're in some sort of marketing and consulting, you have a SaaS product. If you don't have a valuable added newsletter, you're missing a major opportunity.

  • Speaker #1

    Now a quick word from our sponsor, LaVonta. Hey, Kevin, tell us a little bit about it.

  • Speaker #0

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  • Speaker #1

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  • Speaker #0

    Now, does everybody read their email? No, you're going to get open rates, depending on a number of factors between 25 and 50%. Typically, you know, some people may get a little bit higher than that, but usually it's a small list or a very targeted list. If they get higher numbers than that, but if you get above 10,000 subscribers and you're getting 40, 50% open rates, you're doing, you're doing well. And, but the thing is, The newsletter that I've done, I think I've told you this, has given me more authority than anything I've ever done. I've had 220,000 people go through the Freedom Ticket course to sell on Amazon. I've done 156 episodes. I just looked earlier at the AM, PM podcast. You and I have done about 52 or 55 of this podcast. We've spoken on stages all over the world. We've done seminars and trains, been guests on other podcasts. But I can tell you nothing has moved the needle more. than doing the newsletter. And it's actually now turned into, like I said, at the beginning of the show, last year I did over $250,000 in profit. This year I'll do over 500,000. And some of that's not counting some of the residual effects. It's hard to track of people buying a ticket to BDSS or whatever it may be. So I think anybody listening needs to actually think about actually creating a real newsletter. And I know... when you were doing yours, your lunch with Norwin, I basically, like you said, I told you it was crud and you guys changed it up and now it's really good. I mean, Kelsey, I know Kelsey does a lot of it, your son, and he's doing a good job with it. And what have you seen after starting the newsletter? How have you seen it affect what your business and what you're doing?

  • Speaker #1

    Well, first of all, I thought our newsletter originally was good. I thought we had some interesting content. And then... uh you told me i remember we're sitting down having a cigar and i kind of got a little perturbed because it was i thought it was good and then uh i said okay so uh you were telling me everybody that you kind of called out on stage which i thought was hilarious uh because they all thought they were having a great newsletter and i listened to you and i said you know what kev i might not be number one but i'm gonna be number two And what does it take to do that? And we were partnering on this. We were partnering in our company and we sat down and I remember you just said, look, you gave me a few points. I told Kels and then eventually you spend some time with Kels. One of the things I decided, everybody's got to have a USP. And my USP was going to be a personal story followed up by a business, turning it into a business lesson. And then gamifying it a little bit, I have something called Find the Beard, where it's kind of like Find Waldo or Where's Waldo. And then we just go out and we find interesting information. Now, we've been able to grow this into last year, which was a six-figure business, not as much as you. We were just over, I think we got to about $125,000 in revenue last year. just Doing it right, giving the right exposure, having a great... Now, I know open rate is really hard to talk about, but our highest open rate was over 70%. Our lowest, I think it was 43%. And we're kind of maintaining a mid-average. But the click-through rates, we're doing really good. They range from at low, yeah, 4-something, at a high, a 7.5, I think. I think. So, let's click through, right? Yeah. So, we're providing some really good options for the sponsors. We also provided values, my top 10 list for books, AI tools. We just didn't keep it to Amazon, although it was kind of an Amazon-focused newsletter, but we wanted to, we asked people, what do they want? They wanted AI. They wanted... Uh, education. They wanted all these different things, SOPs, action steps. And that's what we looked for. So at the end of the day, if I take a look at it, I'm finding the same thing. So I've got a community a bunch of different communities based off of lunch with norm lunch with norm reaches a ton of a ton of people the podcast um i have three spot sponsors and a banner listing of a bunch of different sponsors and i would think that drove a lot of the leads but guess what the newsletter grew a ton of leads similar to what you're saying and because of this And because we built that really loyal community, and I think we should touch on that afterwards, but now you could change that into dedicated emails. And your open rate on the dedicated emails is incredible because people trust you and it's coming from you.

  • Speaker #0

    Yeah, a newsletter gives you permission to be in their inbox. You start, when you first start sending it out, you're sending it out and people are like, oh, another email. But if you're delivering value... like both of our newsletters actually do real value in there and you you engage them like you're doing with the stories your personal stories which are great i did some of that in the beginning i've shied away from it recently just more of a space issue and then i tried to i switched to branding a little bit uh but that's a great personal brand for you and like you do with the game the vacation where you have the little uh uh picture and it's like find find you in this maze of uh people sitting on the beach you know a thousand people sitting on the beach where's norm where's the beer guy, which is... in theme with your brand, with the beard. So it's, what I've seen is now people, they look forward to it and they're drinking their coffee in the morning or maybe they don't read it that day. Maybe they save them up and read them on the weekend or they do something like that. And I'm even doing mine in podcast. I have a podcast version of mine right now. So my newsletter comes out on Mondays and Thursdays and at BillionDollarSellers.com. and It comes out in the mornings. I would like to get them out a little bit earlier than I do, but I'm not able to because of this thing I do with a podcast. So I have a guy in the UK that every night, so I finish, I personally write my newsletter. This is not a VA doing it later. I have a template. I'm able to do it in under two hours, each one. If one's a little bit more detailed or I'm writing something a little bit more, maybe a little bit over two hours, but I'm able to put them together. It wasn't that way in the beginning. It was four or five hours for each one in the beginning. But about two hours is what it takes me to put each one together. I've never missed. That's a key. It's consistency. So my trainer started one. You've never missed either. Right. And my trainer started one, and he's hit and miss. Our friend Elena sometimes doesn't come out. There are people like life gets in the way. And when you're media, that can't happen. When you're part of someone's life, you have to come out. So even if I'm at a BDSS in Iceland. and I know I'm not going to have time to mess around and keep up with what the latest things are and publish that, I'll do a best of. I'll do a couple in advance and they're like best ofs, because even a best of, I haven't really seen you do this yet, but even a best of is still, it's better than nothing. And the fact is, if you're only getting 40, 50% of the people to open any given email, 40 to 50% of them haven't seen that stuff. So it's going to be new to a lot of A lot of them have forgotten about it or they skimmed over it. So it's still nobody's complaining and saying, oh, this is regurgitated, recycled stuff. And in today's AI world, I think you and I talked about this. One of the big advantages of putting out content like we're doing with the podcast, our individual podcast, this podcast, the training thing that we have under Dragonfish used to be called Ascend. I can't remember the name of it now. The new name. Whatever the new name is, we had to change it as a trademark issues. Um, it's coming out, it's launching soon. That's why it's not active right now. So I can't remember the exact name, but, uh, and then our newsletters is massive content and today's world with LLMs and everything, the content people are, have a major advantage. So you're, you're producing this massive content. I even had my, my assistant, my VA that I have in Pakistan that does some stuff for me. I didn't go find all the podcasts I've ever been on in the last 10 years or whatever since 2016 when I came on my first podcast and find them all and translate them all. And he's done the same thing for all these podcasts, all the AM PM podcasts I do. So it's creating massive content. But with that newsletter, you're getting permission to come every day. And then like you said. You see what people are clicking on, what they're interested in. So you can double down on that. You can ask them too, but you can also double down on the things that they're clicking in. You can run ad sell advertising spots. You can do affiliate commissions to make money out of the newsletter, which in some times can be real money. But where the big money is at is like exactly what you just said is a dedicated email. So my newsletter comes on Mondays and Thursdays. And On Tuesdays and Wednesdays originally, and I just added Fridays as an option now too, even though it's not the best day, I'll send them a message to the newsletter subscriber list. It doesn't say BDSN in the subject line because that's what it always says for my newsletter, so you can quickly sort them or find them. But it'll be an email for a single topic. Sometimes it's for us. We're promoting a webinar we're doing for Dragonfish. Sometimes it's an advertiser. And I charge right now $4,000 per email for that. And I sell out about a month and a half in advance on those. And so that adds up to real money. I've had one advertiser, it's done so well for him, spend close to 80 grand in the last year just advertising because it's done so well for him. And he knows that, yeah, every time he has an ad in the newsletter, maybe he gets 20, 30 clicks or 50 clicks or something. That's nothing great. But he knows long-term that branding is like Coca-Cola. Top of mind. Awareness. As soon as someone needs him, he's going to be there and going to be the first one they think of. And that's what it does. It gives you more authority. It leans into everything else that you do, whether you're selling courses. But as a product, even if you're doing products, you can sell your products off it. I mean, I sell my BDSS. I sell my virtual events. I sell my replays. I mean, replays to the events you came to in Iceland have done well over $100,000. just selling the replay that the cost to do that was 15,000 bucks and to bring the crew out and have them actually do that and edit it on the spot and do a live stream. And I just take the videos. I upload them to video Vimeo for me. I didn't have to do anything. Just put together the email and the links and send that out. And that's, if I didn't have that newsletter, a lot of those people would be ignoring my emails or they wouldn't be aware of it. And you're, you're reaching into all these other people. And that's, you can do that for any brand but The thing is, you have to provide value and you have to be consistent. And that's where I think a lot of people have trouble. But with AI, there's ways to, you can't have AI do all the work, but AI can be a tool that you can utilize to summarize things or to do it in certain angles or to train it with your voice and help it write some of the stuff that you've, or rewrite some of the stuff that you've written. There's lots of cool stuff.

  • Speaker #1

    that you can do when it comes to newsletters so everybody i mean you agree i mean you've seen the power of it i've seen i've seen the power and surprisingly um way over double triple quadruple over the um podcast which i was shocked at and one of the other things we never talked about and i think we have to talk about uh community i think we have to talk about deliverability but One of the things that I started doing recently, you did this right off the top. We took our time and this was kind of a backseat. We didn't know what to promote, but we started doing referrals. And we've done that now for about two months. And have we got a ton of referrals that have come in? So we're giving away prompt books, we're giving away courses, we're giving away all sorts of different things. Matter of fact, this year, I think we have a virtual BDSS giveaway. The person gives away enough. but That's if you have to be creative, like I'm trying to do it because I have the podcast, because I have the, the, the communities that I've built, I can go out there and try to promote it that way. Then I go out and go to people like you and on Beehive, you can promote me. I think that's what you're doing because we're getting a bunch of leads that come from you. I know that there's other newsletters out there. And then there's the whole referral network. which is working really well. I think we got a few hundred emails or subscribers just off of that this month.

  • Speaker #0

    Yeah, referrals. So there's different tools. If you're going to do a newsletter, some people use Kit, some people use Substack, some people. You don't want to be using a general tool like MailChimp or AWeber. to do a proper newsletter there's the best tool in my opinion is beehive b-e-e-h-i-i-v it's spelled weird b-e-e-h-i-i-v yeah um it was built for newsletters and they have they have advertising built in where advertisers will come to you and you can make 100 200 bucks 300 bucks per uh pawn you choose which ads you want and you automatically insert them it does all the tracking all that helps you with all the writing it's built to actually do new proper news there's not email marketing and it's it's really really good and one of the systems they have is a referral thing and what norm's talking about is you can add a little line of code and it'll put a little box on there you don't have they'll say hey if you like this news that you put some copy whatever you want to say if you like this refer a friend and get rewards and you can create like a little gif that goes through these this animated gif of all these rewards and where a lot of people mess up is they'll say refer five people and get a coffee mug Prefer 10 people get a t-shirt. And for me, I don't think that's valuable. Most people don't give a crap about your company logo on a coffee. They just don't. What they do, if your newsletter is for accountants, instead of a coffee mug with Kevin's accountant's service on it, you should have a coffee mug that says some sort of slogan for accountants. I don't know. I'm just accountants. know their data. I don't know. Some sort of slogan that accountants identify with, it's a cute little slogan for them. Then they'll take that. And then the other mistake a lot of people make is they make the rewards too high. Most people don't know five people. Most people know, unless they're going to post it on their social media or somewhere, most people know one person. So you have to have a quick win. Something of value, like you're doing the prompts thing, and I do a 21 hacks deal. So one, just refer... just get them started. Just one person. And then they get that and they're like, that's pretty cool. Who else do I know? And they'll refer other people in the office or they'll refer their partners or they'll refer, post it somewhere. And that's how I exactly how I grew from those 1700 when I started to 10,000. And I still do it now, but I'm also doing a lot of outside advertising. And another thing that like you just said is inside Beehive, and there's other companies like Sparkloop that will do this too. I use both of them. And you can refer. out. So I can refer to you. So when someone signs up for my newsletter, pops a little pop-up on the confirmations page that says, oh, by the way, you might also like Lunch with Norm. Do you want that? And you might also like Retoo's AI for e-commerce. Do you like that? And if they say yes, it automatically subscribes them to you. So you get a lead. Now, in our case, we're buddies, so I don't charge you for that. Well,

  • Speaker #1

    how come I've been cutting your checks?

  • Speaker #0

    Oh, where have they been going? I haven't seen those. i oh maybe it's going to the coke zeros that's that that's where that's going that's going to mexican coke zeros mexican coke zeros um so but you can refer out and you can get paid so people will pay you you know buck two bucks three bucks it depends you know for those and so a lot of times if you do this right if you if i'm advertising um and i'm spending say a dollar per lead in ads And I can get a dollar back from a lunch with Norm, who, if you weren't my buddy, would be paying me to do this. I can basically have this as a wash. And so I'm getting all my leads for free and I can grow this thing, if you do it right, basically at a profit in a way.

  • Speaker #1

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    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 #0

    Right now is one of the best times to get started with Stack Influence. You can sign up at stack. influence.com or click the link in this video down the description or notes below and mention misfits that's m-i-s-f-i-t-s to get 10 off your first campaign stack influence.com so i make a little bit of profit on when i was doing facebook ads it was difficult i was it was costing my best leads for two dollars and seventy three cents a piece so if i got Not everybody signs up for the newsletter suggested. So if up pops, let's just say you were paying me $1 and Ritu was paying me $1. Y'all pop up after that $2.73 cost per lead, and only 50% of the time do you take the offer. So basically, I'm getting $1 instead of $2 of that back out of every lead. So that's costing me $1.73. Well, that cuts my advertising costs. But I'm doing stuff now with intent-based targeting where I'm popping up into the inbox. I'm using Inbox Mailers, one of their subsidiaries. And actually popping up into the inbox when someone's in their inbox and I can target specific websites so I can target in the Amazon space. I can target my Amazon guy or Packview or Smart Scout or people that have been there. And these tools know who's been there by cookie trails. And when they're in their inbox, check in their email. I'll ping, ding, you've got mail. And a message will appear right at the top of there. their email stack, which means they're most likely to see it. It's not going to get lost in their, their, all their junk mail. And if they open that and click anything in there, they get added to my list. Those are costing me 73 cents elite or 77 cents elite right now, which is really, really good. And so you can't have, yeah,

  • Speaker #1

    the, the question, I think that a lot of people are saying is who cares how many people you're getting? So why is it so important that you're adding subscribers?

  • Speaker #0

    So one is, you know, it's the quality of subscribers matter too. So some of these guys on these referral things might refer you not so good subscribers. So like you mentioned earlier, open rates is a standard metric, but it's a hard metric to actually use because on an Apple device with the OS, I think it's 15, 14 or 15, which is a couple of systems a couple of years ago, they've made a change where any email shows is opened. So your open rates may show at 34%, let's say. But if 20% of your people are on using an iPad or an iPhone or their Mac computer to open that email, your open rate is a lot less because every one of them is shown as open. So what you want to go by is click rates. So when someone tells me they have a 70% open rate, I seriously doubt them unless their list is small. It's highly targeted. It's a really kick-ass subject line. They might hit that one time, but that means their list is small or they got a lot of Apple people. that they don't know that are on their list. A good target, you want to be above 30%. If you can get that 40% to 50% like you're doing and like I'm doing, then you're good. When I was smaller, under 10,000 people, and everybody was from referrals, those were much higher quality leads because you're referring, you know, if you refer to someone, you're going to refer to someone that you know probably in the Amazon space. That's going to be a good lead. And so my open rates were consistently 50%, 55%, 60%. Now my open rates are anywhere. I've had a low of 32% recently, all the way up to the averaging in the low 40s now. But part of that's because I've grown and I have less quality leads, but that's okay. They filter themselves out. I delete those people. And I clean the list once a month to get rid of the people that have it open and clicks because that affects, like you said, deliverability. And deliverability is the game. But the true advantage of having a newsletter Sure. is you control the messaging and you control the delivery to a point now the ESPs if you're not doing certain things right you can your deliverability can be definitely affected but if I post something on the lunch with norm Facebook group um that and you've got I don't know how many members you have you got 5 000 members in there only about 30 of them are going to see it and then if those 30 interacted uh Facebook will show it to another whatever the algorithm is 50 100 200 if they continually interact it'll keep spreading that out but most posts go to darkness and and they don't get seen um versus an email if you're sitting twice a week like i'm doing you're once a week on mondays i'm twice a week and you're getting that open rate of 35 40 and a click rate like you said of four to seven percent then you know you're reaching a lot of people they might just skim it but you you know you're reaching those people, which you could never... In my case, that means 10,000 people, if I'm getting just a 30% open rate on mine, which is higher, but at least 10,000 people or at least skimming every single email I sent. I don't get that on any social, unless it goes viral on a social post on LinkedIn or something, but I'm consistently getting that. And then, so what you want to pay attention to is the click rate. So you want to put stuff in there that encourages people to click. And that could be things like, rate this issue. Did you like it? Good, bad? and different could it be uh clicking off to see the rest of the story so you tease them and you give them but you gotta give them enough information where they don't have to click off that i i got it but you want you want to encourage them to click off too even one of the things kev that we do with the podcast is we'll put uh

  • Speaker #1

    you know dan kurtz uh four reasons blah blah blah blah the first reason the second reason the third reason and drop off at the fourth

  • Speaker #0

    to get them to click over to here the rest of the podcast that's really good yeah you guys are doing a really good job on that to get them but now we know you don't want to want them clicking the youtube so now now we learn that at uh at uh elevate 360. uh don't send outside traffic to youtube so now i saw in your recent one kelsey made the change uh it or maybe it's two issues ago um he made the change to be like go find us on all your favorite platforms uh search for us on youtube uh i noticed that i haven't made that switch yet in my newsletter but it's coming um but but yeah i was just gonna say the other thing that uh we were having a cigar i don't even know when it was we have so many

  • Speaker #1

    but uh maybe it was out on your balcony but uh you were telling me and this was really cool uh this is a game changer as well and i hate that phrase but mark mark don who's been on this podcast told you something about skimming you know it's just so what we've what you've done is you've started to break up the newsletter and have it all over the place not I shouldn't say all over the place, but, you know, just mix it up a little bit. So,

  • Speaker #0

    not just skimming to the end. I had it modulized in the past. So, if you knew, like, this section is a good tip, this section is the funny thing, this section is a whatever, you could just skip to what you want. And something I do, I mean, you do it with your where's norm thing, but I have a trivia question at the top. It's called Ask Bezos. And a lot of people say they love that. They read that trivia question. But to get the answer, you've got to scroll all the way to the bottom. to get the answer. And that's very effective. And if you've noticed in my newsletter now, all the headlines, they alternate colors. So if you look at any of my newsletters, headlines for a story, it'll be in blue and red. So certain words like two or three words are in red, two or three words or whatever in the headline are in blue. That's for skimming. And then you'll see I'm putting little boxes around stuff to actually put into sections to make it digestible and easier to read or easier to skim through. Because there's some people out there. You know, I had one guy at market masters tell me it's a canadian guy those canadian guys are weird i know they're actually they're actually cool guys uh he said he actually prints it out and and cuts it up and puts it into a binder by category and then there's other people that i know that the guys from uh selling from the beach they they subscribe to like retos and yours and mine and a couple others and they any cool articles they clip them and put them into like a google database of all these like gpts and say the gpt that's ever been in um retoo's newsletter for example she's another one that's doing a good job she's providing really good value in her newsletter and there's there's i i personally read about 30 a day but i unsubscribe a day um i go through 30 about 30 a day you can't work on the other project that's about an hour it's my chill time give me a mexican coke zero all right that lies nice little ice i turn on some uh just uh like uh lounge music and i sit there and i just go through them and these are some of these are are for our industry for ecom yeah some of them are just general news or ai or or whatever so it gives me a good cross-section and i find content that way too right but that's a hobby and it's keeping me informed i just saw some uh somebody i think it was one of the guys from shark tank uh the canadian uh the the uh canadian he's not he always canadian but he by way of uh of uh

  • Speaker #1

    Robert or

  • Speaker #0

    Robert? Yeah. But he was saying that someone asked him, what do you see? You know, a lot of billionaires. What do you see in these billionaires as the like the three most common characteristics? And one of them, he said, was extreme discipline. One of them, as he said, was extreme knowledge on a specific thing. They know a lot about everything, but they're they're masters at one specific thing. He said, the other is a thirst for knowledge, where they're constantly reading, constantly keeping themselves up. So that's what, I should be a billionaire then, because I have a thirst for knowledge. Norm, what's going on here? Yeah. Help me out. Help me out. So that's where I get that, but I get content and ideas that way, and I'll mix things together. And I changed the subject earlier, but the other thing that I do is, and you might consider this with Lunch with Norm too, is I turn my newsletter into a podcast. I started talking about this earlier, I didn't finish. So I finish it on a Sunday night. I send it to a guy in the UK. He's six hours ahead of me. So while I'm sleeping, he's taking this, running it through an AI tool and some other stuff and tweaking it, changing some of the words a little bit. And he puts it in my voice. So we used, I think he used 11 labs or something to clone my voice. And it's about 10 to 12 minutes of me, me reading the newsletter. And he changes up. It's not word for word. He makes it flow. And so there's a link in every newsletter. and I'm about to put this on all the podcast platforms. I just haven't done it yet, but it's going to be on all the podcast platforms. So that would be lead gen too. You'll find it on YouTube or you'll find it on Spotify or Apple. And then like, I didn't know he had a newsletter. What's this newsletter? Let me go see. I'll get you on the list. But. A lot of people love that because they don't want to read everything, but they'll listen to it while they're on the train or while they're at the gym or while they're driving their car. And I have a lot of people comment about how much they like that. There's not thousands and thousands of people clicking that, but there's enough to where it's building a little core little group. And I'm experimenting with a couple of things there. And so that's something else. But one of the key things about a newsletter, like I was saying earlier, where you control the message, is you also… You own the customer. If you're advertising on Facebook or you're advertising on selling on Amazon or Walmart or some of these places, you don't have the customer data. You don't own that relationship. They do. You can extract that data in some cases, but with a newsletter, everything is under your control. When I'm at a show, people are like, Kevin, tell them about your Billion Dollar Seller Summit. and I know that if I start talking about that As soon as I say it's $6,000 to come, they're going to be like, they're going to tune me out a lot of times. I'm just wasting my breath. If I say, don't worry, just get on my newsletter. It's free. Here, sign up. It's BillionDollarSellers.com. Here's a QR code right here. I get them in that funnel, I've got you. Now, even if you say unsubscribe, I still can retarget you on Facebook or other places. Even if you say unsubscribe from the newsletter, I've got you. Once I've got you, you're in my marketing funnel and in my marketing system and i'm gonna do everything i can to sell you something at some point and that's the beauty of of having a newsletter that's providing value and they're giving me permission to do it i'm not just blasting a promotional email uh and that's that's the key what what are you doing um from like product side are you doing anything yet on lunch with norm like pitching any kind of products or anything? I know you're doing the advertising and the affiliate stuff, but are you doing any, like I pitch, you know, the BSS events and that's, I guess, technically a product. Are you doing anything there? Yeah,

  • Speaker #1

    we're not doing too much right now. One of the things that we do promote and hopefully to help grow is Dragonfish and Marketing Misfits. We're doing sponsorship and that's about it. I don't have the events, so I'm not pushing that at all now one of the things uh we are doing in the referral side is we're getting honu involved um i'm trying to do more with the marketing content press releases again so that's something that we can push but right for the last i don't know how long i've been doing this a year and a half maybe we've just been focusing on pure value value more value And I think we can grow that next. I think with our size, I was talking to Kelsey today, and I think we might have hit 10,000 subscribers.

  • Speaker #0

    Oh, awesome, man. Congratulations.

  • Speaker #1

    So, yeah. So, we've been working hard at that. But you've got a much bigger subscriber base. so I think it's smart for you to do what you're doing. And especially with the events that you, that you have, I don't have that. What I do push day in and day out is my personal brand. So people will see that I am an authority in all sorts of different spaces. And especially when you do the podcast and the newsletter, well, even though you're interviewing, Bing. Ryan Dice or whoever, but you become that expert, even though you're doing the interview. Plus, everything that I'm doing, Kevin, I know this is something you probably going to look into, but I link it to Google business, Google knowledge graph. So everything, every article, every everything is being associated with me. And I think that helps me just grow who I am. So when we go and we do something together, it's going to just go out to that many more people. So that's what I'm doing. Personal branding.

  • Speaker #0

    Well, I think a lot of people listen to this. All this sounds good. Kevin, you and Norm are teaching people Amazon doing this. You're business to your B2B. And B2B newsletters do typically have a little bit higher value. You can charge more for things. but uh I B2C can also work really well. So if you're listening to this and you're a brand, what I recommend is you don't do a brand newsletter. So if I'm Zoe's Pets, and that's the name of my brand, I'm not going to have a Zoe's Pets newsletter. Right. I'm going to have a newsletter in the, say I specialize in dog toys. That's what I specialize in. I'm going to have a newsletter about dogs. and maybe it's sponsored by Zoe's Pets, and there's an occasional ad in there, occasional plug for Zoe's Pets, or there's a section about Zoe's tip of the week or something like that. So I get that branding in, but I'm going to make it more about the industry for several reasons. One is it makes it not feel as promotional and advertising and more general knowledge to an avatar. And then second, it allows me to advertise other people in there without potentially conflicts where I can test as affiliate commissions. maybe a product I'm thinking about selling or something else I'm thinking about doing. I can test that. I can get other people to come in and help subsidize it and pay for it as well. Maybe pay for ads that don't compete directly with me. I can also build authority in the dog space and get people. A lot of times you'll get people willing to contribute content. I have a guy right now on Amazon. Every week he sends me an article and says, here's an article. If you want to publish this, I'll give you first rights. You publish this first. It's on AI stuff. And And he doesn't ask for any money in return. He just wants a credit. And it helps him build his authority and get the word out. You'll have people do that kind of stuff. Or if you're in the pet space, veterinarians or somebody, you can get them to do a little section about something. Or trainers or whatever. You can get people to provide a lot of the content where you're not having to have a writer do all this stuff. 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 #1

    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 #0

    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 #1

    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 #0

    So if you want to take your product to the next level, check out House of AMZ. That's houseofamz.com. House of AMZ. And you can do this. And with AI helping you rewrite stuff or helping you put five different articles together into one summary thing, you can do some pretty cool. pretty cool stuff and deliver something that people are going to start to follow and start to really enjoy. I mean, one of the things that, and you can even create awards in your industry. That's one of the things I've done with my newsletter is I have about once a month, I come out with something called the Dream 100. And so in the Amazon space, there's a lot of people that are trying to teach people how to sell on Amazon. They're kind of like scammers. They go on YouTube and they have a Lamborghini and they're talking about how easy it is to make money. And And, you know, they're flashing money like Norm's just doing there. And they're just, they're full of BS. But so I recognize some of those legitimate people and I have a list of 100 of them. And I've gotten through about 36 or so right now. And every month I list one of those people and I write a little bio on them. Why I chose them. Norm is one of them, for example. Oh,

  • Speaker #1

    you can't see my belt over there.

  • Speaker #0

    It's over there. And then the next time I show up to a live event, you know, I bring him up on stage and like Norm was just talking about, he gets like this wrestling belt. You know, it says Dream 100. It's this big old thing to recognize them. You know, those things cost me two or three hundred bucks a piece to have those things made. So I give that to them. You know, but what that does is it creates branding. It creates awareness. Then I can spin that off. So now I do an event called Market Masters. And it's like, come sit with the Dream 100. And people are like, oh, these are like the best people. in the space that Kevin's recognized. And now people are coming to me like, how do I get into that? What do I got to do to get into that? It's become a thing. And it's so you can do things like that in any space. So whether you're a chef or you're a pickleballer, or whatever, you can do this and you can own the customer. And like what Norm said earlier is you got to take it beyond that and you can use this and piggyback this into communities. whether that's a whatsapp group like we both have for our newsletters like my newsletter to get into my new whatsapp group for the newsletter you have to refer at least uh three people uh to get in there and then you get a special invitation to come in the whatsapp group so everybody in that whatsapp group there's hundreds of people in there 300 i think 400 they've referred at least three or more people so those are die hard loyal people that and they get to be in that group and share tactics and stuff with each other uh you you can do that kind of thing but the next thing is community And where we're going with AI and everything, people are... eager to have in real life stuff so that's why i do my events that's why norm and i for marketing misfits we do the the cms that collective mind society trips the next one's coming up in november in tampa you can go to collectivemindsociety.com check that out it's gonna be a cigar smoking and whiskey drinking and hanging out with like-minded people over the weekend in tampa which is like the headquarters of cigars in the united states a lot of people think it's miami but it's actually not, it's Tampa. We did one last year on the train, train ride across the Rocky Mountains of Canada. We did one at the F1 the year before. These are amazing events, but people want that kind of stuff, and they're willing to pay to have that. Experiences are one of the things that you can give people. And when you have a news like this, you can spin that kind of stuff off of it. For, you know, if you're a dog, back on our dog example, you can have a dog training meetup or, you know, segment your audience. If you get big enough, you know, this weekend we're doing a... the dachshunds dachshunds in la dachshunds in miami you could ask for people on the newsletter to lead it lead the meetup group or whatever local cafe you can do all kinds of cool stuff to engage community and just help really extend your brand from a grassroots up effort now this is not a get rich quick thing but over time you do this long enough and properly enough in a few years you're going to start seeing some momentum building and you're going to start seeing a real brand being built that you might be able to exit pass on to your kids one day or have a nice lifestyle off of. And a newsletter, I believe, is the crux of that. But it has to be a newsletter done right.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, I agree 100%, Kevin. You can't just be a fly-by-night. And one of the things I want to add, you did this with the Dream 100, but Elena Ceres has done this with a pickleball newsletter. And one of the things that I think is very important, she created her own association. I thought that was so cool. So all of a sudden you have an association, which gives you more credibility. And if you want to join it, you have to join this association, which then you'll get this email letter and she gets the lead. It's very interesting what she's been able to do. And we're doing that. I don't know when that's going to happen, but we're putting together this cigar newsletter that we're going to try to create. And we think it's going to be...

  • Speaker #0

    one of the top newsletters out there yeah we have norm and i are working on cigar newsletter under the dragon fresh uh brand we have a newsletter coming out for this this podcast for marketing misfits this summer you'll be able to get a news a weekly newsletter that i'll summarize some of what we talk about in the podcast because not everybody has an hour to listen to the whole podcast uh it'll also have some additional marketing tips and strategies uh in there there as well a couple other cool things We also are doing this for other people. So if you're like, oh, this newsletter thing sounds good. I just don't have time or the knowledge or want to do it. You can actually reach out to us at dragonfishci.com. You can reach out to us and we'll possibly be able to help you. We have a wait list right now. We'll possibly be able to help you with a newsletter if that's something that you're looking to do as well. We have set up a whole team and systems to actually do that for people and to do it right and help you grow. grow it but newsletters i think people look at email email is one of the oldest forms of internet communication way before and it still exists and is there a lot of spam absolutely there's a lot of garbage and i get i wake up every morning to 200 messages and i just i gotta spend the first 10 minutes of the day deleting those i know you have an ea that does a lot of that for you uh norm but yeah it's just like come on man this people just but i the email still works and you can't be afraid. We know people, Norm and I know people that have 800,000 emails on their list and they're afraid to email them. They're like, what do I do? What if someone says unsubscribe me? What if they don't like me? It's okay. We get people like both of our newsletters, it's unsubscribe or they mark it as you go in a beehive. And I just sent out 32,000 emails yesterday in my newsletter and four people marked it as spam. Oh, no. I'm like, you sons of... But you're going to have people do that because it's easy up at the top. or they are they subscribe to it then they just didn't realize they didn't have time for it or whatever but you're gonna have some of that happen but the more you email the more money you make that that that's that's a lesson i was just at the driven mastermind um with perry belcher and they had a guy from angora it's a billion dollar email brand email and physical newsletter brand uh and they they said the guy said that they email some of their people 20 times a day i'm like 20 times a day. I'd be unsubscribing pretty quick. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people do, but the ones that don't are your customers. And he said, the more we email, the more money we make. And that's where you got to be not afraid to do that. Now, the downside to this is. What Norm talked about earlier is on deliverability. If the Google and Yahoo and Gmail, which account for about 65% of all emails, deliver email boxes. So only about 35% are non-Gmail, Google, or Yahoo addresses. So basically, whatever their rules are, are the rules you got to go by. And they're tightening everything up. They're putting newsletters now into a newsletter tab. They're moving stuff into promotion or spam. But there's ways that you can help. mitigate that by like when you on your welcome email that you send out when someone subscribes to your newsletter ask them to respond back and say hey uh in my case i just say respond back with a yes and where you're from and that tells the the esp's the email service providers that hey this person actually wanted that email they triggered a response back it's a legit email don't put it in the spam folder but more likely to put it in the inbox so a little thing not everybody does that only about 20% of the people will do that, but 20% helps. Yeah. Then you got to do stuff. There's rules now with DKIM and SPF. These are special headers in DMARC. They're special in EIMI, I think. Those are the four things you got to pay attention to in your DNS settings. And if those are not set right, especially if you're sending through a third party like Beehive, a lot of stuff will go to spam and won't get delivered. So there is a little technical side where you can do it yourself or you can have someone come in. And there's companies that do that. fairly cheap and they'll make sure that stuff's all set up right or otherwise you're going to go into the spam box and then there's tools like before i send every one of my newsletters i send it through mail-tester.com and mailgenius.com and what i do is i go to these websites one of them is free one of them is i pay for 30 bucks a year or something and it generates a random email address you just hit a button says test email it generates a random email address i go into beehive I paste that into my preview link, and then I send that message to there. About a minute later, I can go and hit a button that says, check the score. And it'll give me a spam score. And sometimes it'll say, your spam, this is a 9.5 out of 10. That means I'm good to go. Other times, it'll say, this is an 8 out of 10. And some spam filters are going to flag it. I go and I look through it. It'll say, oh, you're linking to a dead website. One of your links is not good. You made a typo or whatever. And so I'm like, oops, I did. I got to fix that. And other times, it'll say, you're using the word free seven times in the newsletter. legitimately you're not like yeah looks so high but it's legitimate so i go in i change the word free to complementary or to something else or reword it so because those are the the spam filters will just catch that or the word guarantee or or something like that so i i change that kind of stuff up and get that score up as high as i can and then i send the message out and so that helps with deliverability so there's little things like that that that you do but the other thing once you have an email address, at least in the United States. You can actually get the physical address and the phone number in a lot of cases of 60 to 80% of your customers. Even if they didn't give it to you, there's big databases like Melissa Data and some of these that will actually do appending services. So they have all these big databases that links all kinds of data from all over the internet and all kinds of services and magazines and everything together. And they can append an email address. They can take the Norm's email address at Lunch with Norm and figure out. Well, he's in Canada, but if he's got a U.S. address, figure out what U.S. address is associated with that and match them up. And then you can use that to do direct mail if you want to or to or SMS. You get SMS a whole nother animal, but you got to have permission on that. You can get some big fines, but you could use it to have people opt in to an SMS or something or notify them by something if they've given you permission on SMS. So there's a lot of cool stuff you can do, but you've got to own that data and have that relationship. And newsletters, some people are like, well, why don't I just do a blog? Blogs are something that people have to go to to read. A newsletter is push instead of pull. Blogs are pull marketing. You got to pull them in. Newsletters are push marketing. Now, blogs are great for like SEO and the beautiful thing about an AI search and all that kind of stuff. The good thing about Beehive is it converts every newsletter into a blog. And I'm starting to see now more and more links coming with a Google source attribution. I'm like, Google? I'm not advertising on Google right now. It's because someone typed in some sort of keyword. My newsletter version of my, the blog version of my newsletter showed up in the search results. And they click through. And when they're looking at it in a web browser, as they scroll halfway down the page, and all of a sudden start, I'll pop up, hey, you like this? Subscribe. And so I'm getting subscribers, you know, it's not a ton, but I'm getting subscribers off of that as well. You can create this. The newsletter can be the hub of the flywheel that can do all this really cool stuff. And I think most people are just missing the mark on that.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah. And there's a couple of other things. You know, we don't have to get right into it, but we also have point. We point our domains instead of having lunch with norm dot beehive dot com. And you're trying to tell that to people, which they'll spell wrong. You know, we have a pointer. Their years is billion dollar. Summit, right?

  • Speaker #0

    Billion dollar sellers.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, billion dollar sellers. And mine is LWN.news. A lot easier to do. But one of the things I want to really, really push is that don't try to do that unless you know how to do it, but don't try to do the deliverability yourself. You can go to Fiverr, you can go somewhere. And I used Fiverr Pro for this, found a really great guy. And he does all my deliverability for me. And then I test it once in a while. I go over to an app called Warmly, and it tells me what's getting through. What you have to do is you take 40 email addresses, you push it through, and then it tells you the deliverability on Google or Gmail, Google Suite, Outlook, and there's a couple of others. And you can see whether you're good or not. And that just, you know, peace of mind, because if you're not getting into the inbox, then your deliverability or your your newsletter is going to be, you know, as good as the as good as you get into that inbox.

  • 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 #1

    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 and it's just me on here? You're not going to know what I say.

  • Speaker #1

    I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too. You can go back and forth with one another. Yikes. 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. Oh,

  • Speaker #1

    so. make sure make sure you go either to five or wherever you want to go but pay a few bucks and it might cost you 100 bucks it might cost you 200 bucks um to get everything set up some they'll do it for 50 but just check it out and uh get them to make sure that the deliver that deliverability is right and when we're talking about this it's not so much when you're going through a company like Beehive. you want to check it out but when you're doing a dedicated email and you're using another domain that's where it could come up especially if you're using it for there has been no warm-up emails so you're just shooting it off uh to your list if it's a cold lit not a cold list but if you're just transferring it over the chances of it being any good you might have to warm that up a bit warm up uh how you're sending out those dedicated emails

  • Speaker #0

    Yeah, you don't want to just suddenly blast a whole bunch of emails to a list because that'll freak out the ESPs. They're like, what is this? Why is all this stuff coming from this one guy all of a sudden? And so that's what he means by warm up. You start with, you send 30 this day, then 50, then 100, then 150, then 500 and 1,000. And you warm it up because along the way, people are opening and responding and clicking. And that tells the ESPs that, okay, you're legit. You're a legitimate emailer. this is people stuff that people want to get. Another important point is that if you don't have anything to sell, a newsletter might not be for you. right now, unless you're, I mean, and by selling, that doesn't mean you have to have a physical product. It could be, you're just trying to get speaking gigs on stage. Uh, you know, people hire you for speaking gigs. It could be, it could be that, but you need to, to, in order to monetize it, you're going to, you can do it with affiliate commissions. You can do it with advertising and those should cover your cost of doing it and maybe make you a small profit. But if you really want to make the big bucks, you need something to sell some sort of in, you know, a conference, a course, a physical product, consulting service, something along those lines. And that's where the biggest payday is going to come from on doing a newsletter. Otherwise, it's going to be difficult. And there's newsletter conferences you can go to. There's two or three of them out there that has popped up. There's a guy named Matt McGarry. That actually has a newsletter that comes out every Saturday about the newsletter industry with tips and strategies. And I would growth letter. I think it's a growth letter dot com. And you can you can get that. There's also a newsletter called Growth in Reverse by Chanel that actually dissects how did people grow their list? How did they how did this guy get a million subscribers on his email list for whatever newsletter? And she'll dissect it. And she'll go back and look in the time machine online. She'll like, oh, look, in 2021, he started a LinkedIn profile. He had 16 followers. And then he started posting like this, this, this, and this. And then he'd use this strategy and this strategy. And by 2023, he had 110,000 followers. And then he started putting this newsletter plug in. This is how he did it. And then he was posting on X. And she'll break it all down. You can reverse engineer a lot of these strategies that people are using and then maybe implement, get ideas. for your stuff. There's also newsletters like Who Sponsors What that will tell you who's running ads in different newsletters. There's a whole little cottage industry that's popped up where you can keep abreast of what's going on in that space and get ideas for tools and tips and everything else.

  • Speaker #1

    All right. It's been about an hour, Kev.

  • Speaker #0

    It has. I love talking about this kind of stuff, but hopefully today we've given you a little bit of value.

  • Speaker #1

    i even saw norm taking a note over there i mean guys what are you writing down what you're writing down your lunch your that uh i like this is what i know genius i'm not using male genius i was going to go check that out see and that's the thing we we go back and forth there's times that you're using something that you have uh that i've never heard of and vice versa so exactly

  • Speaker #0

    i mean we that's That's the idea here. but hey if you like this podcast hopefully you've gotten something out of it today um let us know by putting a comment down below uh if you see a comment spot if you're listening to this on spotify or apple or maybe you're watching this on youtube leave us a little comment and let us know how we did we we take good ones we take bad ones we take critiques uh i don't take bad ones i'm sorry i say don't know if you give a bad normal cry but yeah you You can tell me I've got stuff between my teeth. It's okay. Okay. But yeah, make sure you hit that subscribe button or forward this, you know, if you like this for someone, you know, that might want to hear about what we talked about today or any of our previous topics for that for this to them and hit that subscribe button too. And you can always find out more and see direct links to some of the back issues. Find out more about what's going on in the marketing misfits world, but at marketingmisfits.co, not .com, .co, marketingmisfits.co.

  • Speaker #1

    All right. That's it for today. Thanks, everybody, for joining us. And we'll see you next Tuesday.

  • Speaker #0

    Take care.

  • Speaker #1

    Bye.

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