How To Use Newsletters To Your Advantage

Hey there, everybody. Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today we're having a special interview with Dan Kennedy and Alexandria Brown. Now, Dan Kennedy, as you know, has a physical newsletter. You can go and check it out right now. But today we're going to be talking to Alexandria Brown, who has an e-version of a newsletter. Both strategies are extremely valuable. She's going to show you not only where she came up with the idea, but how she's using it in order to help make her cold calls go to none. So that way her customers come to her. And she's going to share a guide with you to help you do the same thing. Let's jump in.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy. The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril.

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Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like.

Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless.

His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. Well, hello, Gold Plus members. This is Bill Glazer, and I'm joined with me today by Dan Kennedy and also our special guest expert who is Alexandria Brown. Most of you probably know Alexandria. You've seen her at our events and actually speak at our events and actually will be speaking this weekend at our sales strategy seminar that we are conducting in the Reston, Virginia area. Alexandria is well known as the e-zine queen and she has become really kind of famous becoming the foremost authority in driving sales Through Email Publishing. And today's topic is about newsletters. And as Alexandra will probably tell you a little bit about in a few moments, what she does, ezines, is kind of the online version of a newsletter. And I'm going to actually be asking questions to both Dan and Allie today about newsletters. I mean, certainly Dan has been publishing newsletters for years, writing and publishing newsletters for years.

I was sending them out in rocks.

So I say, why don't we get sort of started with what both of you are currently doing. Dan, if you could give everybody just a brief description of what you're doing in terms of offline newsletters, what you're sending out, and then we'll get to Allie, what she's doing, and then we'll go back and talk about why you want to be in really both of these businesses. So, Dan, let me get started with you.

Well, as everybody on the call at least gets the core, the No BS Marketing Letter, we also publish the No BS Marketing to the Affluent Letter, the No BS Information Marketing Letter, which recently moved over to Glazer Kennedy. I do a fourth newsletter called "Look Over My Shoulder" once a month, which is about copywriting and for copywriters. I contribute to some other information marketers' newsletters from time to time. Over the years, I think that I started my first print newsletter a paid subscription, started in late '78 or early 1979 and it was niched. There have been niche ones over the years, one for speakers, sort of a precursor to information marketers, one for chiropractors and dentists, and then general ones. No BS marketing letter had a predecessor by another name before it. So in a typical month I'm doing 4 full ones plus some component parts of some other people's.

And Alec, describe basically what you're doing in terms of newsletters and maybe even a little bit of the journey that got you there.

Sure.

I mean, when I was growing up I didn't say I want to grow up to be the ezine queen. This kind of happened accidentally. Just a little background, when I was in a job about 7 years ago and working at a small ad agency in New York, and one of my assignments actually was to work on a print newsletter for a hospital client. And that's how I learned a lot about newsletters and the power of newsletters. When I went off on my own and finally realized that actually, geez, I should learn about marketing myself because I'm going to go broke, I was not that comfortable selling in person. I'd go to networking meetings and meet people, but had a really hard time with the follow-up, making the phone calls and asking for business. What I was comfortable with was sending out a short email once a week. What I did was I just started I started with a little tip of the week. I offered a little of the information that I knew. At that time it was marketing communications that was my business, and wrote a little bit about that and then a paragraph or two about my business. And a funny thing happened. People just started to call and they were forwarding my emails around. And I'm thinking, oh my gosh, they think I know what I'm doing because I'm publishing. So they perceived me then as an expert. Started getting great clients like Dun Bradstreet, New York Times Digital, and then my freelancer friends started asking me, you know, how are you getting these clients? We don't see you at these networking meetings anymore. So long story short, I decided to write a short guide on the topic. It started off as an article and then turned into a book, and then I learned how to sell an eBook online, and that was Boost Biz Dev. Start a Business with Your Own Ezine, which is now really what I'm known for. I teach many different areas of marketing and business to mostly my clientele is women solo business owners. But the core tool I still teach is the ezine because it's so powerful. In my own marketing, I publish a weekly ezine. It's called Straight Shooter Marketing. I have about 22,000 subscribers. To some marketers, that's a small list.

To some, it's a big list, but they are extremely responsive.

This year, they'll bring me a multiple 7-figure income. From a list that size, it's really about building the relationship with them, and I'm sure we'll talk about that today.

Right, and everybody who would like to subscribe to Ally's newsletter and sort of see what she's up to, I just want to let you know, if you want to just jot this down, you want to go to www. Alexandriabrown.com, alexandriabrown.com, and you go there and subscribe and you can spend every day you could spend with Allie. So it doesn't get much better than that. And also I should mention that Allie is one of our, what we call our phenomenon practitioners. All of you are going to be hearing a lot about the phenomenon very shortly. The phenomenon is when you experience, you achieve more within 12 months than you did in the previous 12 years. And Alexandria definitely has been living that life, 'cause at the end of every year, the last 2 years, I've been thrilled to sort of get her summary report. I know Dan gets it and I get it, and we just see everything she's accomplished. And it's just great to see that you can really be living the phenomenon, continually, and so you'll be seeing her in the Phenomenon DVD Adventure that's about to be released the middle of October. So let's move into, let's talk about newsletters. And let me, Dan, let me sort of start off with you and ask you a question of, as far as the offline newsletter is concerned, you and I both teach, and I first heard it from you, is that you want to deliver a newsletter to your customer every month. And what are some of the reasons why you want to deliver a newsletter every month?

Well, Alex, Andrea made a great point that, you know, one of the many benefits of this is being taken seriously that you are published and real publications. Arrive on a consistent and typically frequent schedule. So if you subscribe to a business publication, Forbes, Fortune, Inc., if you subscribe to Time Magazine or Newsweek, by its very title, for example, Newsweek does not get published every once in a while when somebody gets around to it. They actually have to deliver that thing every Friday, and its subscribers expect to get it every Friday. And so if you want to be taken seriously, then it's mandatory that you establish a regular publication schedule and adhere to it. The big separator between a publication in junk mail is an expectation of receiving it and receiving it on a regular schedule. The frequency itself, monthly as opposed to bimonthly or quarterly, there's both empirical test data as well as anecdotal, what we know from our own businesses, that a bimonthly touch is not sufficient to really create and sustain the relationship, which is where all the profit is. As you use the newsletter as a foundation, as a device to build and sustain relationship, By far, anything less than a monthly frequency is just not adequate. Beyond that, of course, what's evolved since I started when print was really the only option and then we began to supplement monthly newsletters with things like weekly faxes, which continue today, and then supplement as you do now with biweekly emails, that just provides more touch and enhances the relationship. But it is still my contention that the core package, the little Christmas package they look forward to and expect expect and your most serious customers are eager to receive, rip open the envelope, bar the door and pour over what you have sent them and mark it up and make copies and so forth. That's the glue that holds the whole thing together.

Well, you know, Dan, I, in preparation for today's call and for our Gold Plus members that you'll find this kind of surprising, we actually do prepare for these calls. I went back and I found the original sheet that you put together with Pete Lillo on announcing the Done For You Customer Newsletter. On there you gave a lot of great bullet points. I just want to read this off of some of the other advantages. Many of them, Dan, you mentioned and also touched on, but let me just go through this and then we might want to go back and have both you and Allie expand on some of these if you want to. But one of them is retention, so retaining customers. The second one is a reminder to increase repeat business. The third one is referrals stimulated by the reminder. The fourth one is a pass-along factor and that significantly works both offline and online, which I'm sure Allie would agree with. The fifth one is differentiation from the competitors, which Dan, you mentioned. And the last one is that monthly frequency, proven best path to superior results, which again, Dan, you mentioned. So any, you know, Dan, let's start with you, Dan. Do you want to further expand on any of these?

I think anybody and everybody in any business, clothing store, dog groomer, you name it, they ought to be doing a free customer newsletter for all of the reasons that you just enumerated. My contention would be a print publication, an offline publication, then supplemented by even more touches with an online publication. Then beyond that, there are many businesses that could also be in the paid newsletter business. But all of those things, I mean, retention, retaining interest in you, see it's not just Big business thinks in terms of we have retention if we still have a valid name and address and phone number in the database, and that's really not what we're talking about here. We're talking about having customers who are, again, to use the word relationship, they're in a relationship with you. They're interested in the next chapter in your soap opera story. They're interested in your personal life as well as your business. But that maintains interest in the business. That also stimulates referrals and word-of-mouth advertising because it's top of consciousness and it gives them a reason to do so. There are too many compelling reasons not to do it, and if you go into just about any niche and you isolate the top 5% who have the most successful businesses and are making the most money, you're going to keep in mind that this is a difference between them and the other 95% is that they are using both online and offline media. They do have a regularly scheduled publication or publications, and in many cases they have both free and paid serving different purposes. And if you talk to anybody who provides a newsletter service to types of business owners in a niche. Ron Ipac to auto repair, Ben Altadonna to chiropractors, Jerry Jones' company to dentists, on and on and on, Rory in restaurants. They all have stellar examples of businesses where this and this alone has made a substantial difference in all of those categories— sales, retention, referrals, and so forth.

Well, let's sort of look at some of these in regard to the e-zine, and I have some very specific questions for you at the end of the call in regard to e-zines. But using again our bullet list, how often are you sending out your e-zine, and what are you seeing are you seeing in terms of the retention of the people that have signed up for it?

I have extremely good retention. I mean, we maybe only have a handful of people dropping off the list at any week. And I mean, I'm talking about maybe 4 or 5 people. It's actually pretty unheard of. I do publish weekly, and I did notice a big difference in the beginning. I started off publishing about every 2 weeks, and then about 2 years 2 years ago I went to weekly and immediately saw a much higher response. So one of the big things I hear from clients when they are starting a newsletter, an online newsletter, is that they are worried it is going to be a lot of work, probably the same excuses you hear for print newsletters. I'm going to have to put content together. We are going to have to send this thing out, and wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. Well, the best thing I can tell you is it doesn't need to be long. And in fact, frequency will outperform as a whole having more content in each issue. So I tell people this does not need to be like a long email. In fact, it shouldn't. You don't need 3 articles and a recipe of the day, and an interview, and a quote, and all this stuff. If you keep it short and sweet, you can just publish every week. It is more about the contact that you are building with people. 2 clients of mine, they are in my coaching group. Their names are Lisa and Lucho Quisale. They have a health and nutrition nutrition business. And they had amassed a decent list of customers and clients over the years, had not been doing anything with it. And they thought about doing a print newsletter, but for them it was just going to be too much work to start with. I suggested starting with an e-zine. And the very first issue they put together and sent out to their clients just with a picture of them, a note from them, and like a health and fitness tip. They got so many We got so many responses. People clicked through and started buying products from the website. They wrote Lucho and said, "Hey, I'm glad to hear from you. I'm getting fat. I need to come back for nutrition coaching." Even people without even building your list any further, if you guys aren't doing this and you have a current client or customer list, you have to start doing this. I love email because it's just the easiest way to start. Now Dan and Bill, you'll both be happy to hear that I actually just started a print newsletter. My coaching program.

You actually mentioned that at the last InfoMastermind meeting, and I was just ecstatic to hear it.

Yeah, and you know what? Something happened to trigger that because I've been putting that off for a while. It actually was my dad. My parents are on my list, and they kind of understand what I do, but they don't. They're just like, "Oh, isn't that nice?" and all this stuff. My dad, I know he's on my email list. I know he reads my emails. I never hear much, but I decided to do a mailing and I put him on the list with this long sales letter for one of my events. And usually I don't hear anything, and then my mom told me, she said, "He read it cover to cover. He sat down and read your 25-page sales letter cover to cover." And I realized because it was printed, because he could hold it, it was tangible. He could carry it to the bathroom or wherever he read it. I probably don't want to know. But it was tangible.

It was something he could pick up and touch and was there.

I realized that I started doing more offline marketing like the last year and a half, especially with Bill's encouragement because I'm in Bill's InfoMastermind group. That has dramatically increased my response. I know it goes back and forth. People will get an offline mailing from me and then they'll get the e-zine and that triggers them to buy something, or they'll see the e-zine magazine, and then they get the mailing, and then the mailing triggers them to buy something. It really all works together.

You know, both of you in this topic of retention, both of you kind of use what I'm going to lump under the category of fun stuff in both the offline newsletters and online newsletters to sort of make the newsletters more entertaining, People are looking more forward to reading them. Allie, let's start with you. What are some of the fun components that you add to your ezines in order to increase that retention and readership?

This is funny because when people start publishing, they think, well, I don't want to put anything personal in there. People don't care about that. They don't want to read about my vacation or my new dog. It's actually the opposite. They probably care more about that than what you have what you have to say. I mean, and I see this all the time. And how I learned about this was several years ago I got this new kitten, and this kitten was driving me crazy running around the office. And I'm trying to write the newsletter, and I ended up just writing a few lines about the kitten saying, "We got this new kitten, and she's so cute, but my gosh, what a handful." And you know, the cats are running around. It's like Tom and Jerry. Anyway, here's this great article on how to drive thousands more people to your website. Push send. I go out for the day. I come back and I have dozens and dozens of emails about the cat. People wanted to hear about the cat. They loved the cat. They were writing me saying, "What's your cat's name?" You know, "Can we see a picture of the cat?" "How many other cats do you have?" People are sending me pictures of their cats. I mean, this was just freaky. And it made me realize though that people need a connection. And especially online, a lot of us, We use the Internet to keep a distance and to make our companies look bigger and a little more scarier and threatening. But actually, when you're more of a person and you can share a little bit about yourself, you have no idea how dramatically this will increase your response. So now, I mean, you guys get my eZine and you see me mentioning vacations. I'll show pictures of the beach house I bought last year. I was going to have actually vote on Ally's his new haircut, but I never got around to that. But I thought that would have been a good thing to have in the newsletter. People love it when you mention things like that. And I know with Dan's newsletter too, those are the things I always remember and that I read. I like to hear about Dan's racing adventures.

The stories are what you remember.

And then that builds the relationship. The content gives you credibility. The content gets them to buy, but the relationship really is what keeps them on the list like glue.

Well, lately we've been reading about Dan's racing adventure both on and off the Salkie Show. Dan, a couple years ago at the InfoSummit, you did— you delivered one of the best presentations that you've ever delivered on what I called called it Putting Personality in the Copy, and we now have turned that into a home study tool that we've just sold an unbelievable amount of. Anybody who doesn't have it, you should. I'll plug our web store. You can get it at glazierkennywebstore.com. You go into great detail about this whole issue of adding additional components to your newsletter in order to make it more entertaining, more interesting. But can you just give a few highlights of that?

Well, yeah, I call that program Customers for Life because that's really what it's about. I think first of all on the very superficial level, even putting out the simplest free newsletter, you know, the first thing for people to really get a grip on is that if you're in the pest control in the pest control business, you don't want to be putting out, and nobody really wants to be getting an 8-page newsletter every month or a weekly email about bugs and toxic chemicals and the latest research that's been done on cockroach feet in Africa. This may fascinate you, but it's not really what your customers are looking for. And so they want to People want to be entertained more than anything else. It's why Reader's Digest is still the largest circulation publication in existence. And it's really not for the core articles. It's for the laughter is the best medicine page and the trivia games and so forth. Beyond that then to what you've addressed and what Alexandria was just talking about, the whole idea idea of the personal or person-to-person human connection. That's important and there's a lot of psychology to that, but fundamentally the more you reveal, the more you connect. And then there's also the entire issue which she raised of of telling stories versus teaching. And I think it's significant that we have childhood conditioning that storytelling is something positive, that we look forward to hearing a story, being read a story, being told a story, going and sitting in the classroom and being taught is not something so pleasurable and to be looked forward to. Now, we could probably just as easily have been conditioned to believe the opposite, and if that conditioning had occurred from birth, we'd react differently than we do to those two things. But that's very ingrained conditioning that makes us like stories and not like education. And so if all you deliver is education, you commit the ultimate marketing sin. You bore people. They might never enunciate why. They may not even know why. But it won't matter how valuable your education is. You will lose them in droves, especially after a period of time where they've like got the core elements of what you teach. Now Alexandria has an advantage in that respect because of all of the media in the world, the internet media has more change in it at a continuous and faster pace than anything else. But like in our case, in my case, I mean look, once you've taught unique selling proposition and 3-step mailing and feature benefit, I mean And once you've gone around that dial once, you can only keep going around it so many times before somebody feels like they got it. Now they may not be using it, but they feel like they got it. And so your retention beyond that point has everything to do with relationship, very little to do with core content, and it's supported and maintained is maintained by telling stories, not by standing at the lectern figuratively and delivering now another educational presentation.

Now to be fair about what you just said, Dan, oftentimes even though somebody's heard something before, when they hear it again later in a different way, that's when it oftentimes does connect. Even if you feel as though that you've sort of gone around the dial completely, I just find that so many people just don't get the clicks every time.

Well, yeah, and look, I don't mean to diminish the value of the core content. However, the value of the core content is really irrelevant if people don't hang around to read it. And to have them hang around around. The imperative is that they be entertained, that they be engaged, that they connect with a human, all of those things. I first started to get it because of speaking and view writing really as the extension or the print version of what you would do in person. When I first started speaking, The sort of stock joke in speaking is, you know, "Do I have to be funny?" And the answer is, "Only if you want to get paid." And Johnny Carson famously said, "Compare my salary to the salary of the Dean of Harvard and you will know what the American public values most." And you can't ignore these realities. So I think you have to earn the right to deliver the valuable how-to content and attitudinal perspectives by wrapping it with all of these other things that keep people engaged and keep people around.

Bill, can I jump in for a minute?

Please. Well, you know, that brings up a great point. Good point. I'll let you guys in on a little secret, and the Gold Plus members listening, is that I haven't written a new article actually in months. I actually recycle a lot of my content. In fact, each article is probably run every year. And very few of my readers have picked up on it if they've commented or anything. And I'll throw in a new one occasionally, but the content doesn't change. And actually, there's a lot of the Internet while people are always selling the latest greatest thing, there is a lot of the marketing principles do not change. And so my articles if anything may have to be tweaked a little bit. But once you've got some content down, I tell my clients that you just rerun it and rerun it. And they are like, well, people are going to see it's the same. They don't. You can tweak it. They are reading your stories. They are reading about your trip to Italy. They are excited that you just had a new baby or something like that. It's really great that once you get about a year of publishing under your belt, the work dramatically decreases and you can start having more fun just with the personality part of it.

See, Ally, I really wish you wouldn't have revealed that to Dan because now he has no BS marketing letters. He's just going to go back, grab the old ones, and resend them to me every month.

But I know what Dan is saying. The stuff doesn't change, but I love reading his newsletter anyway. Because people need to be reminded of the basics.

Yeah, but you and I both know if we stripped out everything but the reminders of the basics, they'd all be gone. True.

Let's talk about on this list here, I'd like to talk about at least one more on the reasons to deliver a newsletter and/easing list. There's this whole issue about referrals.. And like I know, and Dan, you know, you and I have both heard so many times when we're at a live event and we'll say to a group of people, you know, how did you first come to us? Oftentimes it's, well, you know, somebody handed me your newsletter and I read it and then I was hooked and I subscribed. Allie, what do you actively do with your current online lists in order to enlist them to be secret salespeople for you or going out there actually like what Dionik always calls his silent army of people out there that are enlisting new people for you?

Admittedly, I probably could be doing more than I do, but I do the basics. One is telling people if you like this newsletter, pass it on to a friend. I mean, it's so basic, but you'd be amazed how many people when I really track back, you know, how did you find out about me, it was usually a colleague or a friend passed on my ezine to them and said, hey, you've got to check this girl out. Her stuff is really good. Check it out. My affiliate program has done very, very well in building the list. And for example, one strategy I use is by offering a really meaty free teleseminar my affiliates will drive their list to that teleseminar. And in order to get on the call, of course, people have to opt in. And I let them know they will be receiving a complimentary subscription to Straight Shooter Marketing when they opt in for the call. Now if they end up buying anything, the affiliate gets credit for that. So the affiliate is happy to send people to the call. And those people get on the list. That's just one of the strategies I do, but basically there are so many list building strategies, but those are the ones I would consider referral based.

Another item on our list here was this whole issue of increasing repeat business. Allie, you mentioned before, I think I got the number right, is that your subscribers to the Straight Shooter list list that has— every year that generates 7 figures for you.

Is that correct?

Yes.

Talk a little bit about how by building these lists and by using frequency to continue to communicate with them, how that can often increase response and be monetized for you.

Okay, there's a lot to cover there. The short answer, but everybody listening, the first place to start is if you already have clients or customers, this is where you start. Most people, they'll hire me for my time and ask, "What should I do first?" And I'll tell them to go back to the list they already have. These are the most valuable people you can start with, and at least get your easing going from there. Now the next step is figure out who your target market is. And you need to think about this before you go out paying for traffic and buying leads and all this stuff. A lot of people, I have to get them to turn around and step back and say, who are you really going after here? I've heard Dan say the who is more important than the what. So once you've determined who those people are, you want to look at where are they already hanging out in large numbers, both online and offline. Offline. I teach many different list methods. One of my products covers 101 different ways to build a list. But online you want to be looking at anything you would usually do to bring traffic to the site. That's one place to start. For example, search engines, pay-per-click ads like Google AdWords, article marketing. I am a huge fan of taking content you've already written, repurposing it. There are sites and places to put it on the web that will bring you traffic. E-zine ads, e-zine directories, blogs, social networking sites like YouTube and MySpace, offline teleseminars, offline article marketing, direct mail, speaking is another great way to build your audience, doing interviews, radio, TV interviews, live networking, word of mouth. Basically any way you think of usually driving traffic or getting a customer, I want you to back up a step and look at getting them on the list first. This is a very, very important part. And people overlook this. I see people going out and spending thousands of dollars a month on a Google AdWords campaign for pay-per-click ads, and they are sending people to their home page which has no sign-up form to get them on the e-zine list. So you need to set up the net before you go fishing, and that's where you want You want to make sure that you are either driving people to what's called a squeeze page or a landing page that has just the option to opt in, or at least if you are taking them to a page on your site, there is a big, big box that offers free tips, free resources, free subscription. Now years ago you could just say, "Get on our mailing list," and people would actually give you their email for a free e-zine. Or sign up for our mailing list. And it would actually work. But these days you have to sell something that is free. So after you get all this traffic to your site, you want to make sure they are getting on this list. And the way you do that is you have to have a very enticing offer that makes your newsletter sound like it is going to give them the sun, the moon, and the stars, and bonuses. And you really have to go the extra mile. But it pays off in droves. So that covers the getting them on the list. And Bill, I think I lost the other part of that question.

Well, the other part is sort of maximizing the value of the list.

Ah, yes.

Now here's where—

oh, I'm glad you asked, because when I got started in this, I was learning from all the internet marketing guys. And I learned a lot from these guys and running around to all those seminars and stuff. Here is what was missing. A lot of them are missing building the relationship with the list. They build a list and then they just start hammering them with offers, or they won't send anything to the audience for a while, and then several weeks later they will just send them an offer. Now there is no doubt that what are called solo mailings or email broadcasts, those single emails about a particular product or event can for me generate about 10 times the response of a newsletter. However, the newsletter is what builds the relationship and keeps them on the list in order for you to get the good response to the promotions. And I hope that makes sense to everybody. So the easing is a little bit of the extra work. This is where you give good information. You tell a little bit about your life, what's going on. You open up that channel of communication. You are not just promoting yourself. Even though I do a lot of promotion in my newsletter, people tell me it never feels like I'm selling because I give good how-to information, good content. For example, my e-zine just went out today and there is an article in there on how to build your list when you are at seminars. So there is good content there. So when I do send out a promotion, that promotes my upcoming workshop or a teleseminar, that gets very good readership and good click-throughs. And it's very important to note that those do work together.

Well, I guess we should also address this whole issue about the fact that, you know, people are hearing already for some time now, Allie, people are hearing that, you know, email marketing doesn't work as well as it's worked in the past. I mean, obviously for you it's working better than ever. So, you know, just sort of what's your comments about still the continued effectiveness of email marketing and e-zines, etc.?

Yeah, there are definitely some more challenges now with email than there were several years ago. And in fact, This is one of the reasons that I really opened my eyes and decided to start doing more offline mailing. I'm making offers to get people's physical addresses, fax numbers, phone numbers, all these additional ways of contacting my list because you guys teach this as well, is that you never want to rely on one specific medium to communicate with your clients, your customers, your prospects. So that is important. So I want to make sure people know that the Internet and email is not the end-all. However, when it comes to speed and cost-effectiveness, it's amazing. The one challenge that is most common right now is deliverability, because there are so many spammers out there abusing the email networks. There are spam filters in place. The ISPs are doing doing a lot of blocking right now. I find most of the problems are with people on my list who are using more consumer-based systems such as AOL, Hotmail, Google, Yahoo, especially those free ones. And what you have to do is just keep an eye on your numbers. You have to look at what are called your bounce-backs or your deliverability reports. If you see there is a problem with a particular ISP, You need to do what's called being whitelisted with them. And these are steps that I teach. However, you know, if you have around 90% deliverability, you are pretty golden. And if you fall under that number, that you're going to be, you know, something's wrong. There's a red flag there.

Okay. I must tell everybody that as we're doing this call, we just moved into our new offices yesterday and we've got sort of workers and everybody just sort of prancing around here as we're doing this call. So I'm trying to stay as focused as possible here, although I got an electrician that's climbing over me right now. Let's talk— sticking with this whole issue of online easings for a second, Ali, I would like you to talk a little bit about, you know,— people look at how do I deliver an online easing, the mechanics of the whole thing. Do I have to be like a— understand computer programming and all that other stuff? Talk about how this thing can actually be really kind of easy for folks.

It can be really easy, especially with a lot of the systems out there right now. There's one point I want to make, and that's a question I get a lot related to this. People say, should I publish in text or HTML? And I know you guys, you publish Dan's Tips in text. Text is very easy. Anyone can do it. It's just words. There's no graphics. There's no pictures, any of that. And many marketers prefer text because it is easy, and there's few if any problems with getting delivered. In the past, there were some issues issues if you were to send out an email in HTML which means email with color and graphics. However, these days, and I just got some updated studies to confirm this, that HTML email does on average, and I've seen this for me and every client I've had move to HTML, it increases your readership. More people will read it, open and read it. It increases your click-throughs which means the people people clicking on a link to go through to your site to see an offer or something you are talking about in the newsletter. It is also good for your branding. And I don't mean branding like your logo. I mean they are seeing your photo. They are seeing if you do have a logo, they see that. It is reinforced over and over and over, your images in their mind. And you can also show little pictures. Like I mentioned, if you did get a new dog, you can put a photo in there or a photo of your product.

If I looked like you, we'd be doing HTML. There's Photoshop, Dan. Come on. We did that on that Vanity Fair cover years ago, and I've been getting mail from an inmate ever since.

That was a classic. So there are reasons to do it, but some people prefer the text. But either way, there are systems systems that make both very, very easy. One, if I have clients who want to do an email with graphics in HTML, I recommend Constant Contact is a good option. That has very easy color templates that you can just plug in and stick in your photos and send it out. Another system that I use and love is the good old OneShoppingCart. OneShoppingCart is the software web application that can run your shopping cart and all that stuff. Those are the two I recommend most because I have experience using them and my clients have used them as well. So you don't need to be a programmer. You don't need to know HTML, none of that. If you can write an email and press send, you can do this.

And of course, if you can do what I can do, you can do any of it, which is just find somebody else to do it for you.

Exactly.

Well, that's a good point because now I'll tell you guys that every week I have— many of you know I don't have any employees. I have a few virtual assistants. Most of them are stay-at-home moms. And one of them, her job each week is to have the issue ready for me. And she'll just tell me this week's issue is ready. She plugs in the ads. I do sell ads in the eZine. I don't know if you want to get into that or not. She puts in the promotions that I tell her and then I fill in the note from me at the top and then she sends it. There are ways to systematize it. This is what I teach, so it's not much work at all.

One of the things that everybody, I believe, on this call agrees with is that you should be doing really a combination of both online and offline newsletters. In Glaser-Kenny's case, we had online and we added offline. Online and in Ally's case she has online and now she's adding offline. One of the big things whenever you talk to anybody about doing a newsletter, and Ally, you alluded to this before, but I want to throw this at Dan first, is people always look at it and they say, my God, how am I going to find time to get that thing done every month? Dan, let me first back up. I publish a newsletter. I've been doing it for 9 years now for my BGS Marketing System called the Outside the Box Marketing Newsletter. When I first started to write it each month, I spent about 20 hours a month on it. Now I've got this thing down to somewhere around 3.5 hours to produce this. I wouldn't be surprised if I think Dan is much quicker even on the No BS Letter, although I'm not sure. So there's a lot of shortcuts that I've sort of learned through the years in order to make this easier to get done. Dan, what are some of your techniques, strategies, shortcuts in order for you to be so prolific? Because you're putting out so many newsletters every month.

Well, I think the first comment I'd like to make, it's more of a general answer than a specific answer is that the, the, oh, when am I ever going to find the time to get this done, or oh, this is too much work, it takes too much time, these questions/complaints come from a starting place that views doing this as a luxury rather than as an essential and vital a part of your marketing.

I know you don't need me to tell you this, but that's a great point you just made.

It really is. And so, you know, I mean, it's like, you know, how do you find— if you're as busy as we are, how do you find time to eat 3 times a day and defecate once? Because pretty much after 2 or 3 days of not doing either or both, nothing else works real good, period. It's not an option. And as soon as you come to grips with, you know, the underlying themes of this call, that the points that we have all made, that the asset value, the profit is in the relationship and the way to sustain the relationship. You know, so as soon as you view this now as an essential, not as a luxury, then the questions of how do I find the time and it's too much work, see that stuff all goes away because it's not a matter of choice. Then there's the question of are you going to do it well or are you going to do it half-assed and that now gets to do you spend 3 hours or 30 hours or, you know, all of that. There's lots of shortcuts. I'll give you my biggest, but it probably takes me 4 to 5 hours of actual uninterrupted time to do an issue of No BS and Gold and Gold Plus, and slightly less for Affluent, especially since that cheats. It alternates every other month. With a less involved hot sheet. About the same for info, less for LOS. So I don't know, if you add them all together, we're probably talking about 15, 20 hours for a month. And like you, Bill, when I first started doing mine, and the first one, the primary benefit was not, although it was paid subscription, We actually sent it out free to a lot of people too. The primary benefit was what Alexandria said at the very beginning. It was about being taken seriously in a niche. It probably took me 4 times as long to do them as it does now. So you speed up with reps, with repetition, and you develop methodology and your subconscious knows to click into newsletter writing mode when you have trained it to do so and so forth. The greatest shortcut I think is, and it's the same actually for writing sales letters or really writing just about anything else, is never sit down to write from a blank slate. The enemy of speed is a blank sheet of paper. And so the opposite is to have more stuff than you can possibly use, and your task being picking and choosing and stitching together rather than creating. And so I have very inelegant boxes for next issue, optional, any issue for each of these publications into which stuff is thrown their own all month long. And magazine articles, notes taken while watching a television program, a 3x5 card on which a note was scribbled while driving down the road, stuff people send me. And fortunately, a lot of our members are very good about sending in stuff that they think I ought to see. Some of them are very good at downloading stuff from the internet that they think I ought to see because they know I'm not there looking. And so all that accumulates. And in my case, the boxes have more in them than I could use if I stopped adding anything new and just worked out of the boxes for the next 6 months. And so when it comes time to actually do a newsletter, I'm really picking and choosing out of a box and making a stack. And then coupled with that, having a theme, both your overriding theme, your core content, as Alexandria said, sort of locks in and gets repeated with different examples and different stories and different illustrations again and again and again. You have seasonal themes that speed the issue. And speed the creative or the fun. I just did the October issue and of course October is Halloween so that dictates for me every year a certain approach to that issue of the newsletter that is almost a template in a sense. So I'm never, ever, ever, ever starting from scratch.

I mean, listening to you, Dan, is I'm using almost the exact same strategies, which I think one of the things I really want to emphasize that you said is there's the continual collection of stuff all the time. And, you know, I mean, you and Carla and Karen and I, we took a little field trip to Las Vegas Vegas. And it's amazing how many times now I've seen you write about things that you observed there or you ripped out of a magazine there or something while we were away sort of on a social occasion. So, you know, everything is constantly sort of having the antennas up, looking for stuff, just grabbing it and throwing it into the appropriate pile to use it when it's time that you can use that.

One of our neighbors when I was a kid was a pig farmer. Any pig farmer will tell you, use every part of the pig. So a trip, an experience, a story, yeah, you use every part of it.

Allie, putting you on the spot, you've already revealed one of your ultimate shortcuts. Which is just reusing the same information over and over again. And there's really nothing wrong with that. But putting you on the spot, how about one other one? Anything else you do to sort of shorten the task?

Yeah, a few things. And this saves a lot of time for people too. One thing I would say is question and answer columns are great. So look at the top 5 or 10 questions that your clients or customers are asking you over and over. Over and over and over and just have a question and answer in each issue. People like Q&A. It's a very easy format to read. Success stories or client profiles. I have so many of these now. It's great. I realized when I was putting that print newsletter together, I'm like, geez, I can have a whole page on this. This is great. And got a lot of ideas from you guys. I am so envious that, Dan, your people send stuff in all the time. I can't figure out how to get mine to do that. But definitely using the questions or success stories that your clients or customers already have, that's great. Guest authors are another way. If you have other experts in your industry or other industries that your readers would like hearing from, that's another good option. There are also places online to find free content. Now some of it is bad and some of it can be very good. There are a few dos and don'ts for that. But there are places to find free content. One of my clients did not want to write at all, but she had a course that she was teaching. So we found her a really low-cost writer who took her course and took it apart and made it into 52 small lessons. And that became one e-zine each week for the whole year. And then the client just filled in the top note from her, and her whole year He was ready to go.

That's great. I can tell you the secret to getting them to send you stuff if you want to know that. Yes. You make a big deal out of it when they do. Mention their name. Both directly to them and visibly in your publications. Then two things happen. People get the message that, oh, This is how things work around here. I'm supposed to be doing this. And because people like recognition. Dale Carnegie said, "The sweetest sound anybody ever hears is their own name." And so we all do it. And so people like recognition. And when you show a path to get it, a lot of people will then get on the path.

Thank you for listening to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with Dan Kennedy. If you love hearing in on these lost Dan Kennedy talks and speeches and calls, then please let someone else know about this podcast. That's how you can help it to grow, and the more it grows, the more free Dan Kennedy we can bring to you. Also, Dan would love to give you the most incredible free gift ever designed to help you make maximum money in minimum time. This free gift comes with almost $20,000 in pure money-making information for free just for saying maybe. You can get this gift from Dan right now at NoBSLetter.com. Not only do you get the $20,000 gift, you also get a subscription to 2 marketing newsletters that will be hand-delivered by the mailman to your mailbox each and every month, one from Dan Kennedy and one from me, Russell Brunson. To get this gift and your subscription, go to NoBSLetter.com right now.