Don’t blow up the board

I purchased a product online, despite my initial hesitation. I wasn’t fully convinced of the seller’s credentials.

They seemed a bit exaggerated. It was a book on how to create a successful Substack newsletter. I bought it out of curiosity about the person behind it, not for the knowledge it contained.

But what made me uncomfortable was how the author treated me as a customer. I’ve run a digital publishing business online since 2000.

In the late 1990s, I began moving my mail-order publishing company to the Internet. By 2000, I had established my presence online and earned my living as an author and self-publisher.

Over the years, I’ve seen a lot. I learned from some early pioneers. They include Jonathan Mizel, John Reese, Frank Kern, Yanik Silver, Jim Edwards, Ryan Deiss, and Jimmy D. Brown etc. Many have faded from the scene, although Ryan Deiss and Frank Kern are still prominent names.

I’ve been on private inner circle calls. They were around the time of John Reese’s launch of Traffic Secrets. It was the first time anyone on the internet had made over $1,000,000 in 24 hours.

The public persona was different from the private reality. They preached about respecting customers and caring for their well-being. Instead, they treated customers as a wallet to extract cash, fast. Then, they moved on to their next victim.

That’s as much as I’m willing to say about these low-life internet marketing gurus, except for a word of caution—buyer beware.

I wasn’t impressed with how the person who sold me the Substack book treated me. He bombarded me with so-called bonuses. All were thin, badly executed attempts to get me to buy more of his products. This isn’t a respectful way to onboard a customer.

I took the first step with a cheap book. But he was already trying to sell me more before I could review it.

This leads me to the topic of customer onboarding. You don’t immediately push for more sales when you onboard a customer. That’s the traditional approach, but building trust first is much more effective. To boost back-end sales to that first customer, establish trust. Be an authority.

You’re much more likely to succeed if you do. Help them understand and use the product they’ve bought. If someone buys a £15 book, thank them. Offer to help them reach their goals with the product. Guide them through how to use it, providing reassurance.

A week of onboarding emails is ideal if the market can bear that frequency. These emails show your genuine support for the customer. When done right, the open rates will be high—my onboarding sequences have over 70% open rates.

Only introduce back-end offers when the customer feels comfortable and trusts you. This approach goes against the grain. The usual advice is to extract as much cash as possible until the customer gets fed up and unsubscribes.

I can’t sleep well with that kind of attitude. It feels scummy, predatory, and extractive—the worst aspects of capitalism.

Instead, we need to reinvent the world to be more caring and service-oriented. Extracting money from people, with no care for their well-being, isn’t service. It’s exploitation.

That’s something worth reflecting on.

Marketing wannabees

I came across a quote from Joe Schriefer, a high-ranking executive at Agora Financial Publishing, one of the world’s most successful paid newsletter brands.

His words resonated with me, particularly in relation to my experience as a best-selling author on Substack, where I have gained hundreds of paid subscribers within three months.

I’ve observed numerous individuals positioning themselves as Substack experts. When evaluating marketing advisers, I always scrutinise their practical experience.

From my observations, the majority of Substack trainers appear to have limited real-world experience, merely repackaging information from Substack’s help files and formulating theoretical principles for managing a paid newsletter.

Intriguingly, some of these self-proclaimed experts have fewer subscribers than I do. This situation underscores the importance of thorough research before accepting advice from individuals who may excel at self-promotion but lack substantive achievements.

Joe Schriefer’s statement encapsulates this issue succinctly: “Most teachers of marketing are nothing but wannabes. They fake their guru status because they’ve never actually made anything work.”

This assertion rings particularly true in the context of self-publishing books or running a paid Substack newsletter.

Caveat emptor!