Lessons

Lesson Info

Introduction

Well good morning so good to be with you it's amazing this technology that we have here and I'm glad to be here thank you creative life for having me thank you guys for being here and thank you all for watching online you know for all of this technology that we have the one thing and you're not really supposed to criticize the people that invite you but the one thing that creative life wasn't able to do was they weren't able to make me look any older than sixteen years old and I guess that's not their fault it's sort of you know something that runs in the family my dad looks young I look young and so when I'm seventy years old I will appreciate it I'm sure but I do assure you that I am old enough to drive a car I am old enough to be here and I'm old enough to know what life was like before the internet and that seems kind of significant that's ah you know I didn't grow up with instant messaging and chat rooms remember those I guess that some people are still using them I remember what ...

life was like before blogging and this is important I think because there are some things about communication that have obviously changed in our lifetime but there are some things that haven't and so really what I want to talk about throughout the course of these next two days is what hasn't changed and so the technology is always going to change, but the ways in which we communicate send and receive information how people are motivated to go make a difference in the world, how they're motivated to buy things these are things that have always kind of been the same and what we're going to talk about is is that and how we use a piece of technology to achieve those means and so what's important is that we're not just talking about technology, we're also talking about techniques so that in some day when maybe email is gone forever some of these principles they're still going to hold true, you're still going to find people who want to kayak, you're going to find people who want to, you know, start a business online or who need help with marriage counseling so it's important that we take the conversation beyond what we're using right now, what tools are available to us because really we're all here because we want to reach somebody with a message that we have to share we wantto do something that's going to make a difference in the world that's going to help people that's going to improve their lives? I believe that that's why I'm in business that's why I started the blog's so many years ago and that's why I think a lot of you are tuning in today so what I want to talk about is a piece of technology of course and it is a piece of technology that a lot of entrepreneurs and marketers are getting excited about again they're trying to unlock this the power of how to reach the most people possible but it's not a new technology it's a very old piece of technology in fact it's older than the internet itself almost as old as me um and it's something that's ah people are wanting tio get back in touch with and it's called email, email marketing and four years I wanted to reach an audience I was marketing director of a nonprofit I was tasked with the challenge of trying to reach the most amount of people with our message so that we could raise funds and raise volunteers for the work that we're doing and I tried everything I chased every trend when facebook started I started a facebook group and when twitter started I was I didn't really understand it but I was you know, typing all these status updates sending them out into the ether or not knowing where they were going I was trying to get people's attention and when I sort of my writing career wanting to publish a book I you know knocked on all my friends doors and texted them and called them and try to get people to read my blawg and it wasn't until I understood the power of an email list that I really saw the difference that I could make the people that I could reach and frankly the amount of income that I could make on dso email is it's very powerful, very exciting the potential it possesses for your business, for your cause, for your brand and that's what we want to talk about but before we get into that I want to talk directly to you guys, all of you who are tuning in and I want to share with you why I'm so passionate about this subject I don't really care about technology that much I'm not a super geek in fact, I was kind of late to the game on getting on the internet, getting a blogged, doing all of these things that are kind of cutting edge technologies at the time that's not what's what's interesting to me I like technology because it allows me to reach people with a message as a writer, as a communicator I care about reaching people I can see the difference that a story makes with somebody I can see when I share something that I'm passionate about and connect with other people who are passionate about that topic I can see the life that that brings that's what excites me and I can tell you after doing this for years working for big brands and then working for myself the best way to do that is through an email list and so this has changed my life starting an email list uh delivering content to people it's the reason that I'm here it's the reason that I've started writing books and it's the reason that ah year and a half ago my wife was able to quit her job and raise our son and why just almost a year ago I did the same to do this full time it has changed my life and so I want you to think about whatever reason you came in here whatever you were hoping to get out of this it's time to expand those expectations it's time to think bigger what could I do if every morning ten thousand people came to my doorstep and wanted to hear what I had to say, this is the power of an effective email newsletter and so I want to ask you to think about what could this be like? How could my life be different? We're not just talking about it's a piece of technology adding one more tool to the tool kit we're talking about reaching a lot of people with an important message we're talking about doubling, tripling, quadrupling your business in a matter of months this is a powerful piece of technology, so what I want to ask you guys is one would you be willing tio expand whatever expectations you came in with? Would you be willing to expand those and think bigger I don't even care if you know what's going to come out of this I just want you to be open to the possibility that it's bigger than you ever thought possible. So can you can you get on board with that guys uh it's like hey what's more money? Uh the second thing I want to ask you to do is I want to ask you to commit now you guys were kind of forced to do this because if you know you fall asleep, I'm going to call you out, but the guys tuning in online you guys, what I want to ask you to do is I want to ask you while you're while you're tuned in and I understand that you know, some of you are watching this while the kids were down for a nap, others are on a break at work I totally get it, but while you're tuned in, could you be all in? Could you be all here fully present so that we can all get the most out of this time if we can commit to those two things together? What I can promise you is that by the end of this two days together you're going tohave une email newsletter not just have the information you're going to have an email newsletter you're going tohave a way for people to sign up you're going to have people already starting to sign up and you're gonna have written your first email that's my commitment if you're committing to doing the work then we're off to the races so I'm good all right I want you guys to write this down you've all got notebooks um and those of your watching online I want you to take a moment to put this in the chatter write it down with whatever writing utensil you have available what's one dream what's one thing that if you could reach more people through an email newsletter and remember we're talking about a technology that allows us to reach people it's not I don't want to learn how to use this tool just so I have another tool to use I want to use this tool the reach people for my business for my cause for my brand what's one big dream what's one big thing that could happen if thiss were successful if you had an email newsletter list with thousands of people that you were communicating with on a regular basis that you were sending content to let stream right one thing down right now I'd love for this to happen got it anybody comfortable sharing yeah go ahead just I'd like to help our sellers double or triple their sales yeah great here if I can get my coaching practice so that it's a staying for my family I conserve in ministry for free you don't have to worry about a salary yeah that's what's amazing! Is that exciting and great? Yep. Terry, I would love to create a tribe of worship leaders working across denominational lines comparing notes. Yeah, great. Awesome. Anybody else we've got bringing more love into the world's. Great. Yeah, actually, that comes from g rated. Thanks for keeping it. T rated e yeah, people will look forward to my newsletter that's another one that just popped in and having people accord exactly lindsay late law says to make a way for people to launch their dreams carla cano says to be a best seller for their non fiction book through eighteen media wants to get more engagement for web traffic and sales and a lot of passion around that. Absolutely a lot of great they're just rolling in that exciting yeah, let's, let's remove the restrictions, the things that we thought possible and this is not just one more thing. This is not some new fad, this is one of the oldest technologies of our lifetime and it is still the most important way to communicate a message today. We're going to talk more about that in a minute, but I want to tell you a little bit of my story why I'm so passionate about email marketing ah, and how I use it to reach tens of thousands of people almost every day, so I am a writer and that's something that I say often when I do see events like this because I have to remind myself that this is really because a few years ago I would have called myself a writer and in fact had this interesting conversation with a friend where he asked me what my dream wass and I said, well, I guess it's too someday maybe sort of, I don't know be a writer and he just looked at me and he said, jeff, you are a writer, you just need to write and after, you know, a chain of events I started writing seriously. I started a blawg I started publishing content almost every day and started pursuing this dream, and I remember writing down some goals and these were, like, you know, one year, three year, five ten year goals and my biggest, craziest list of goals, my ten year goal was like to publish a book, toe work full time as a writer and speaker and a consultant and several other things allow my wife to stay home, raising a family. All these like crazy, impossible things that I thought would take a decade. I wrote that list three years ago and all of them came true last year, and I this is not exaggeration to tell you that it would not have been possible without an email list and so when I started this journey about three years ago, I started a blawg and I did what I think a lot of business owners, a lot of communicators bloggers do they create a bunch content and they wait for people to show up? I mean, this is amazing stuff why is nobody reading it or you have a website and you're like, why are people reading my about page? I am very interesting and nobody cares, and so then you do you go, teo, you know, step two, which is panic mode, and I have to convince cajole all of my friends to go read everything and it's like, you know, you do it in a nice where you like, email the friend and you're like, so I wrote this thing check it out, no big deal or whatever, but if you if you like it feel free to share it with everybody, you know, feel free, like like, as if something's going to go, I wish I wish I could share this with everybody. I mean, I was I wanted to text the link to all of my friends call everybody at my church, you know, print off copies, take it in my library, but they didn't let me they didn't want me to share their message feel free so I started this blogger and I waited and waited for people to show up and six months in the process I had some traffic I had some readers but I was kind of disappointed with the results now what I have done is I had committed to a like two year process where I was going to see this thing through um and I was six months and so I thought ok like I'll spend a little bit more time on this and I kept hearing about email maybe likes me you guys you kept hearing about email newsletters yeah yeah yeah I don't have time for another thing I'm on twitter I'm on facebook I gotta blawg what more do you want from me? But I kept hearing about email newsletters and so on a whim I decided to set one up like over the weekend and I didn't even really have ah format for it I don't know what kind of content I was going to deliver I had no idea what I was doing I would just like give me your email maybe and I will send you something someday and so it just kind of sat there for a few months and slowly I would mention it and slowly subscribers would start to trickle in like one or two a week until I got ah whopping seventy five subscribers which I felt pretty good about but I was frustrated that it wasn't growing mohr and so I decided to do another thing I'd heard about I didn't invent any of this stuff and like I said, I'm pretty slow to the game on technology um I wrote a short e book and I gave it away for free in exchange for an email address so give your email address and then you'll get this free downloadable pdf you know pretty typical thing now lots of people have done it and are doing it and I was like that doesn't work there's no way that's gonna work and over the course of a week of releasing that I went from seventy five email subscribers to over a thousand and all of a sudden everything changed because I know how to an audience I had a thousand people one thousand fans people who had given me permission to talk to them and I didn't know what to say and so over the next weeks and months had to figure it out had to figure out how much can I send email to these people? What kind of message is do I deliver to them and how do I get them to do stuff like how does that get them to click elaine core you know, reply to the message how do I do this and I stumbled my way through it I didn't have a plan I wish there were something like this although maybe with a more handsome older looking host that I could have used toe walk me through the process, and I didn't have anything like that. So I had to stumble along the way and asked lots of advice from smarter people. I knew all of that is what I want to share with you. What I've learned through that process, what I'm still learning and what you can apply today.