Exactly a year ago I started my newsletter.
Though it didn’t really start out as a newsletter. At the time, I was writing my first book, Double Your Freelancing Rate. I decided that instead of just collecting email addresses, I’d presell the book for 20% off. Well, it worked. And I netted a few thousand dollars in initial sales — even though I was quite a few weeks away from delivering a finished product.
I knew that if I paid something to someone I didn’t really know and was met with radio silence, I’d get pretty perturbed. Hell, I might even ask for a refund. With this in mind, I started sending out a weekly mailing to everyone who bought my book. I extracted highlights from what I was writing, summed them up into an easily digestible format, and introduced my signature plain formatted, “Hi $NAME, …, Cheers, Brennan” email structure.