Today, a biz owner whose emails I read sent out an email that opened with: "This email is for you if you want quality help on [achieving business outcome] but don't want to commit the [lotsa shekels] that top-shelf collaborators charge." I winced at this. The fact is, this guy is a legitimate expert, who deserves to get paid based on the business value of his services, and yet here he is, leading off the pitch for his new offer by saying, "It's cheap relative to what you might expect." I think there's a lot of value in raising your prices. I think it can even make sense to be the most expensive in your field. Sometimes, on occasion, it can still make sense to offer something at an "attractive" price. But in that case: 1. I don't think it makes sense to lead off with that. Instead, it makes sense to first and foremost fully sell the "quality help" that this biz owner only got to later, and to emphasize that before appealing to cheapness. 2. It makes sense to give a legit public reason for the "attractive" price, and that reason can never be "I am doing it because I'm afraid you won't pay the going rate for this," even if that is part of your private motivation. I wonder if we can come up with a list of such reasons. I'd like to invite you to think for a moment, and comment below with one or more reasons you could use to justify a particularly "attractive" price, which is lower than the going rate for whatever it is that you sell. I'm inviting you to do this for two reasons: 1. Because if you do it now, there's an excellent chance you will remember this important lesson, and you won't make the same mistake this biz owner made in his email today. 2. Because I'm running a little experimental contest. The last person to comment on this post wins $100, which I will PayPal to you in case you are the winner. How do we determine the last person? I will come back to this post periodically and check the comments. If when I come back, there have been no new comments with a reason to be cheap FOR A WHILE... then then last commenter will win and I will announce the fact.

@Vasileios Apostolou writes in his email today: === I found this question in a book. I think it’s worth thinking about. “Imagine your child, or someone else you love, inherits your exact habits upon coming into adulthood. Which ones would you pay good money to delete from their life?” === I have no children, but imagining I had one or a dozen, and imagining the kind of fatherly love I keep hearing about from people who do have children... ... I might pay good money to delete the following from my imaginary child's adult life, had they inherited it from me: - The habit of working too much, or spending too much of their mental space thinking about work-related things - [A habit I had when I was younger, "upon coming into adulthood"] The habit of following the latest reasonable-sounding but ultimately harmful restrictive diet/way of eating - 8. The habit of thinking things will be better in the future if they only get X, or that things were better in the past back when they had Y What about you? What would you pay to delete?

I've seen at least a couple hundred emails from different folks saying something like "I had this guy on my list for 107 years, he never opened a single email, then out of the blue he spent $19k on stickers from my Etsy store." Do you find this happens regularly? Never? I ran my own analysis and the conclusion may shock you.

Marketer Dean Jackson recently shared an idea — bear with me because I won't tell you what it is yet. I will tell you I read Dean's idea and I said to myself: "It could never work. It's asking people to do your work for you. Besides, people don't know what they want. Maybe in 1-1 conversations you could use this, but it could never work in a regular broadcast email." In short, I had a bunch of objections and reasons why Dean's idea is no good, or at least no good for me. But Dean is a marketer I respect. I have tried his stuff before and been surprised by how well it works if I do it exactly as he says. I also have behind-the-scenes access to my own thinking, and I have seen my brain spin up stories and warnings and even sabotage to keep me from trying something new and potentially taxing. (I call this part of my brain The Censor. I respect the Censor and what he has to say. But I still get to choose whether I listen to his advice, or to act alongside it.) In any case, I decided to test out Dean's idea exactly as he said. (You can see it in my email today if you are curious.) One thing I've learned, after many years of wasted effort and time, is to stop thinking I know better than an expert who has done the thing I want to do for years at the highest levels. These days, more than ever before, when I find somebody I respect, I am willing to simply do as they tell me to do. I don't tweak, I don't question, I don't add or subtract. Sometimes, the advice I'm following doesn't work as promised. But it often does, and on occasion I am shocked by how big of a success a trivial suggestion can create. I am telling you this so you can maybe shortcut some of the wasted years I have experienced. (And as for Dean's idea, I will let you know tomorrow what came of trying it out in my email today.)

In another thread, @Svetoslav Dimitrov asks, "What's keeping you from emailing daily?" To which i replied with a quote: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." I figure it takes a certain number of things to line up in order to have success and to make daily emailing worthwhile and sustainable. If you're missing any of these things: failure, unique failure. If you have all these things: success. That's why, when you look at folks who are having success with emailing, they are all alike. This morning I sat down and forced myself to write out 10 things it takes to see success with emailing. I was pleasantly surprised at the reasonableness of my list. I don't think I was stretching it just to fill up 10 items, and I don't think I missed anything really important. Read below if you like, and either feel good because you have the needed thing for success, or figure out what you don't have, so you can find a way to get it, if you so choose. #1. A market that spends money This can be surprisingly colorful. One guy on my list has been writing daily emails and presumably making good money from his emails for years. He runs a brick-and-mortar store selling supplies for Warcraft, which is some sort of tabletop game. People pay good money for those supplies, and so it pays for him to email them daily. On the flip side, if your market is, "People who like SpongeBob memes," you're gonna have a hard time. #2. A list of some size made up of people from that market What exactly does "of some size" mean? A list of five million names or more is best, but even a list of a hundred or so people can already be valuable. A second dude from my list had a list of 170 people as of April of this year. From that small list, he had gotten a $1k coaching client and a handful of course sales. He then turned around and started funneling some of those profits into ads. (I imagine his list is significantly bigger now.)