SPI 608: I Was Wrong About This

SPI 608: I Was Wrong About This

Announcer: Welcome to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, where it’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he raps, also known as spits bars, when he’s by himself in the car. Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: You know, I’m not afraid to admit when I make a mistake or when I’m wrong.

It’s important when you’re a leader that when you make a mistake or you wanna take back something that you own up to it, and you let people know about it, which is exactly why this episode exists because I was definitely wrong about this. And don’t worry, I’m not gonna hold you to the end just to reveal what it is that I’m talking about.

I’m gonna tell you right now, I was wrong about the statement about emails that I’ve been making for years. And that statement was nobody wakes up in the morning and wants more emails. I was wrong about that. And I’ll tell you why, because we at SPI are doing something that made me really think long and hard about that statement, because I took that stance for a number of years that, you know, nobody wakes up and wants more emails.

I don’t dream about getting more emails, but when it really comes down to it, the reason why I haven’t felt that way is because I just haven’t been getting great emails. And I’ve been speaking to a lot of people we’ve been doing a lot of research here at Team SPI on newsletters, emails that are sent on a regular basis to your inbox that include highly valuable niche, specific information that would get you excited.

And at first I didn’t wanna believe that was true. The reason why I took that stance was because I always try to encourage you to when building a email list to not just say you have a newsletter. And I still believe that to be true. You need some sort of incentive along with the ask for the name and email, you need to offer something, right?

You wanna approach the growth of your email list from a giving point of view, giving a checklist, a cheat sheet, as something in exchange for that email address. So there’s a quick win right away. And I think when you’re just starting especially, that’s really, really important, but that blanket statement discounted the fact that you could potentially have a newsletter and one that is just content based that people just can’t wait to get the next issue for.

And the reason why I decided to, and, and Team SPI decided to do some research on this fact is because we decided to explore the idea of creating our own newsletter and part of me was worried about this because of what I had just said. But also we had a newsletter at one point that wasn’t really treated like those newsletters that you might get excited about waking up to.

And I’m talking about the newsletters to the likes of Morning Brew. If you haven’t heard of morning brew, they are an amazing organization company that compiles some of the best information just amongst all the noise that’s out there on the internet and puts them into one spot, your email inbox. And that is of value.

I wake up looking forward to reading Morning Brew and getting excited about just a condensed version of all the news that’s out there all in one spot. And then there’s niche specific newsletters like Hotpod for the podcasting industry or even people’s email lists like and newsletters like James Clears, 321 Thursday newsletter, every Thursday, James Clear the author of Atomic Habits he sends you three ideas, two quotes from others. And one question to ponder, pretty short, but very high value. And it gets you to think right. And that’s one that I look forward to as well, but back in the day, and by back in the day, I mean, you know, five, six years ago, we at SPI had a newsletter that was called the digest. And the digest was simply made up of links and resources of all the things that were mentioned across the SPI podcast, the AskPat podcast, the blog, the YouTube channel, et cetera, just all in one spot. It didn’t add a ton of value. In fact, what that really did was just show people every single week it came out on Fridays. It showed people every week, all the things they missed and it was initially created, cuz we were like, oh, here are the things you missed in case you missed it and you wanna check it out.

Well, here’s a convenient place for them to be, but what I heard and what we heard through the research was, oh, here are all the things I missed. I’m behind. I’m not able to catch up or I must be behind. Right. And those are not the things that we want you to experience when you read a newsletter from us.

So that went on for a couple years. The numbers just continued to dwindle. The open rates continued to go down and just the feedback, there wasn’t any negative feedback per se, except for what I had just said it, and that’s more constructive feedback, but there was no positive feedback coming from it. But when you hear from people who subscribed to Morning Brew or James Clear, or Hotpod, I mean, they couldn’t live without those newsletters in their inbox.

So I wanted to see, well, what could we do at SPI to create an actual newsletter that would get people excited. Is that even possible? So guess what we created it and the newsletter series is called Unstuck. So we want you to get unstuck, get it this little double meeting there, get unstuck. And if you are not subscribed to this newsletter or on our email list right now, I highly recommend you go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/unstuck, because that’s where you can go to sign up, to go and get this newsletter and it will be delivered into your inbox once a week. And it is made up of short, concise five minute lessons. To help you on your way to get unstuck. Every email contains a story about somebody or something that involves getting unstuck as well as resources to help you on your way too.

We also will often highlight members of the community and we’re excited because we’re gonna be also working with sponsors in there. But that was a very big thing for us too is, well, we don’t just wanna inject these sponsors in and have it be just for that. Right. We’re, we’re grateful that we have the opportunity to spread awareness to certain brands that we love and that we enjoy using.

And, and that we’re excited about amongst these stories. And again, with the idea of you getting unstuck, that is who our audience is, right? You are a person or an organization that is trying to grow and scale and generate more revenue that is often dealing with a lot of perhaps limiting beliefs or market competition or something that’s holding you back.

And this email newsletter is gonna be a convenient way to hear my voice and my team’s voice because we’re here to help you get unstuck. And, uh, that’s something that we’ve been doing internally within SPI Pro for the last couple years. And then more recently inside the SPI’s Learner Community to help more of the beginners in our audience.

And now we can do it in your inbox. And what we’re hoping for our big goal with this is to hear feedback from you that these emails are something that you can just look forward to every single week. So I want you to go right now. This is your call to action. Go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/unstuck. Again, SmartPassiveIncome.com/unstuck and subscribe to the get Unstuck newsletter, cuz we want you to get unstuck or it’s the unstuck newsletter at the time of this recording. It’s not even out yet, but an issue has been written and I’m very proud of it. And several issues are already ready to be sent out to you. And I don’t want you to miss them. And I want to hear that feedback from you.

I want to improve this. You might remember a tweet from me a couple months ago. You could probably go and find it under my profile. A tweet asking what would get you, these, this is my Twitter audience, what would get you to get excited about opening up a newsletter email? What kinds of things would you want in it?

And I heard a ton of feedback. A ton of feedback from the SPI audience. And I think that we’ve put together exactly what you might need without being overwhelming. Cause that’s the other thing we could have made these newsletters miles long. We could have made these newsletters just full of all the links and things that we had previously published.

But we also know that you’re already subscribed to the podcast. You already have access to the YouTube channel and, and those kinds of things. You are following those places, you probably are already making decisions as far as whether or not you want to include those things in your life, but the newsletter’s gonna be its own entity this time and not just be a link farm, if you will.

So, not a link farm, but just like a, a directory or a digest. So SmartPassiveIncome.com/unstuck. I wanna hear the feedback from you. You can reach out to me @PatFlynn on Twitter or @PatFlynn on Instagram, or if you’re in the community, obviously in SPI or the learner community, you can go ahead and let us know what you think there.

And we just have to thank all the inspirational newsletters that, and I’ve only mentioned a few. Those are the ones that I follow. Several team members follow newsletters. And I have to thank my team publicly here as well, because they’ve helped me get over that hump, that initial limiting belief that I had, which was nobody’s gonna subscribe to newsletters without some sort of gift in exchange.

But I think that was me having limiting beliefs about just the kinds of emails that I, and the team could write for you. And that has changed. I’m so excited about the Unstuck newsletter. So go ahead and get unstuck at SmartPassiveIncome.com/unstuck. And we’re gonna lead by example, share the results with you over time and hopefully hear some positive and constructive feedback from you @PatFlynn on Instagram or @PatFlynn on Twitter.

And again, SmartPassiveIncome.com/unstuck. Thank you so much. I appreciate you. And I look forward to hearing what you think and also serving you in next weeks. Cheers, peace out, and as always Team Flynn for the win.

Thanks for listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host Pat Flynn. Our senior producer is Sara Jane Hess. Our series producer is David Grabowski. And our executive producer is Matt Gartland. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media. We’ll catch you in the next session.