$416k from a 328-person email list

My wife and I were sipping piña coladas and eating fish tacos on the beach in Cartagena, Colombia.

Howdy!

Welcome to Growth Writer.

My name is Jack. I write assets to help coaches and counselors scale six and seven-figure email lists. I write this weekly newsletter to help you do the same.

This is a long one. It’s probably ONLY worth reading if you want to grow a six-figure email list. If not, carry on with your day.

If so, buckle up.

Today, I’m going to walk you through…

How I generated $416k for my client from their tiny email list of 328 subscribers.

It all started 20 months ago.

My wife and I were sipping piña coladas and eating fish tacos on the beach in Cartagena, Colombia. “I think we should do it,” I said. “I think we should make the offer.”

( ^ Pic or it didn’t happen )

As soon as we got back home to Washington, D.C., we did it.

We made the offer on our first home.

Within 24 hours, we got an email. The offer was accepted, and we were thrilled. There was only one problem. A few hours later, I got another email. “Jack, you’ve done great work for us, but we will no longer require your services. This is a 30-day notice of the termination of our contract with you.”

My stomach dropped.

That was my only client.

I had been with them for 2+ years, and I LOVED working with them. So much so that I increased my workload with them to nearly 30 hours per week, making the biggest mistake in the freelancer bible: never rely on one client for your livelihood.

So there I was.

Offer accepted on my first home and zero earning potential.

(Btw, these are some of the best moments in life. The moments without a safety net. The moments when you discover what your faith is really in. The moments you discover who you really are and whether or not you have what it takes.)

This is the moment I decided to STOP being an order taker.

This is when I discovered

Nicolas Cole

’s work. (and yes, you will hear me reference him a lot in these newsletters because I can pretty much attribute my livelihood to what I’ve learned from him. Thanks, Cole 🫡).

Until this point, I had taken orders as a freelance writer.

“Jack, can you write this blog post?”

“Hey, can you write a new landing page for me?”

“Idk if you do this sort of thing, but can you write copy for our product packaging?”

“Sure!” was my usual response, followed by a proposal that said something along the lines of “I charge… $100 per hour or $80 or $65 or basically whatever you’re willing to pay me.”

I always knew I should stop taking orders and start putting together offers.

This moment of desperation forced me to follow wisdom I already knew but had not yet applied.

I couldn’t sit and wait for clients to come to ME. I needed to go out and land DEALS. So I asked myself 3 questions:

1. Who do I love serving? Answer: executive coaches (I had worked with 1 before)

2. What do they need the most in their business? Answer: an engaged email list.

3. What do I love doing the most? Answer: writing in other people’s voices.

Nicolas Cole taught me about Educational Email Courses.

They’re a powerful way to get people OFF of social media and ON your email list, in a way that fosters trust.

I handwrote his email course, Premium Ghostwriting Blueprint, and then got to work.

I cold emailed about 100 executive coaches, offering a free strategy call to help them figure out the bottlenecks in their business. I booked a handful of calls. A few of them needed an asset to grow their email list, so I pitched them on an Educational Email Course.

Within 30 days, I closed $10k in deals. (Seriously, shout out my man Cole).

But that’s not the important part.

The reason you’re reading this is because of the RESULTS I created for my clients. Today, I’m just going to talk about 1 of them.

$416k from a 328-person email list.

I’m going to try to write about this with enough specificity for this to be valuable to you but enough ambiguity to protect the identity of the client.

Like I said, this person had NO way to grow their email list.

• No ebook.

• No webinar.

• No “newsletter sign up” form.

But their product was somewhere in the range of $15k-$20k.

Essentially, they were asking people to make the GARGANTUAN leap from being a social media follower to forking over a small down payment. The good news is that their offer was phenomenal and definitely worth the price. They had a training program to help people become a coach.

There’s a ton of those programs out there, so that’s as specific as I’ll be.

Here are the 4 Assets I Wrote to Grow & Monetize Their List

First, I wrote them a Free Educational Email Course.

Think of this like a BRIDGE. Imagine a raging river with class 4 white water rapids. One bank is their social media following. The other side is the offer. This company was expecting people to rope swing across the river.

Instead, I built them an educational bridge so that more people could safely cross to the other side.

An educational email course is like an ebook or a webinar.

It is content designed to educate people, help them solve their problems, and ultimately position your paid product as a better solution than trying to figure it out on their own. The difference is, it is separated into shorter lessons. Those lessons are delivered one at a time, directly to their email inbox.

Shorter lessons mean more people consume the content, which means you build trust with more people, which means more people end up buying.

Second, I wrote Launch Assets for the Email Course

A bridge is no good if nobody knows that it exists.

So in addition to writing the email course, I wrote social media posts promoting it to their followers. I also wrote a few other things: podcast ads, a website pop-up, and a landing page.

From these efforts, we were able to generate 328 leads.

Third, I wrote them a Weekly Newsletter

It’s not enough to get people ON your email list.

Not everybody is going to buy right away. You have to continue building trust with them over time. I sent out a survey to the list asking people what questions they have about becoming a coach. Then, I interviewed the client to get their answers to the questions. I turned those interviews into weekly newsletters to educate the audience on how to get started.

Fourth, I wrote them a Quarterly Sales Sequence

If you want an email list full of “free loaders”, only send educational content.

If you want to monetize your email list, send a Quarterly Sales Sequence. In this sales sequence, I detailed the difficulties of trying to get started as a coach on your own. In contrast, I showed them how our program could help them save time, save money, avoid effort, earn more, and impact more people in the long run.

That’s pretty much it!

From that teeny tiny list of 328 people, 26 joined the program, which produced $416k in revenue.

Bonus: The most important component.

I cannot overemphasize this.

The reason we were able to produce so much revenue from such a small list is because everything I wrote was highly specific. We were speaking to a highly specific audience: successful leaders in a season of transition. And pitching a highly specific offer: impact more people and make more money working for yourself as a coach.

Not very many people are looking for something like this.

Conventional wisdom is to cast a wide net.

Instead, we were fishing with bait.

We created assets that NO ONE ELSE WOULD WANT. Besides this very specific person.

This made it possible to speak to their unique desires, problems, pain points, and questions.

If you can take away two things from this newsletter it’s this:

1. Build an educational bridge that makes it easy for people to find, understand, and buy your offer. Don’t let them assume anything. Make it crystal clear who it is for and who it is not for.

2. If you’re focused on making money (not building a “big” audience) be WAY more specific than you feel like you should be.

Alright, that was a LONG one, but I don’t have time to make it shorter or edit it because I’m only giving myself 1 hour per week to write this 😂.

Hope it was helpful.

Drop a comment or DM me if you have any questions.

Remember, 1 idea can shift the trajectory of someone’s life.

Don’t hoard your ideas. Share them.

To your growth,

Jack Durham

P.S. Oh, and by the way, we bought the house (actually it’s a condo), and we LOVE it. Shoutout to the moments of desperation that call us to a higher level. I’m so grateful for them, even though they suck in the moment.