I love the online fitness niche.
There are a ton of colorful characters and more than enough drama to keep you entertained.
As a marketer, it’s one of the best niches to pay close attention to.
It’s so saturated the marketing needs to be very sophisticated if you’re going to be successful.
These guys and girls are amazing at content marketing, creating a personal brand, growing an audience, and selling to their audience.
Recently I came across a marketing tactic I haven’t seen before – a personal trainer taking email marketing and dialing it up to over 9000.
His name is Alexander Juan Antonio Cortes.
He’s a bodybuilder, personal trainer, fitness writer, and published author.
He’s written for prestigious publications like EliteFTS and Ironman magazine.
A few months ago he transitioned to online business full-time (he used to have a day job as a personal trainer.)
After coming across email copywriting maestro Ben Settle, Alex decided to start emailing his list 3 times a day, 7 days a week.
I’ve heard of people emailing their list several times a week but never mailing daily, let alone several times a day
So, I just had to pick his brain about it.
He was kind enough to let me interview him for the Digital Disruptors Podcast and provide screenshots of his list growth and revenue numbers.
Enjoy the interview, and let me know what you think in the comments below.
Oh, and don’t forget to subscribe, and leave us a rating and review on iTunes.
Topics covered:
- Who is Alexander Juan Antonio Cortes?
- Why did Alex decide to email his list 3 times a day?
- How is he able to produce so much content?
- What has the feedback from his subscribers been like?
- List segmentation and product development based on subscriber feedback
- People don’t read so repeat important messages
- How Alex uses his personal brand to filter his readers
- Email list growth of 579% over 90 days
- Open rates and click-through rates are above average
- How Alex makes it easier for his audience to consume his content
- How long-form emails are more popular with Alex’s subscribers
- How does Alex generate revenue from his emails?
- As he grows his list revenue will compound
- Unsubscribe rates are about average
- Alex’s perspective on marketing in general (best part of the interview)
Screenshots
Earlier in the year, Alex only emailed his list a few times a month.
He’s now reached the point where he acquires hundreds of subscribers per day.
Here is his revenue generation from emails over the past 90 days.
Alex’s average opens, click-throughs, and unsubscribes.
If you’d like to follow Alex online, here’s where you can find him:
Interview Transcript
Who is Alexander Juan Antonio Cortes?
Nabeel:
Hey, hey! Welcome to another episode of the Digital Disrupters Podcast.
Today’s a special episode in the sense that it’s off-brand and on-brand at the same time. Off-brand because Digital Disrupters is a Dubai-focused podcast. We talk about the marketing scene in Dubai and our discussions and interviews and our guests will be Dubai-based and Dubai-focused. On-brand because my guest today is, in my opinion, a digital disruptor himself. This is a case study and an interview that I just had to jump on.
Now, if you want to learn about online marketing, one of the best niches to study is the online fitness niche. Partly because it’s so saturated that the marketing needs to be really sophisticated in order to be successful.
There are some great marketers who are online fitness gurus. Elliot Hulse is one example that comes to mind. Brandon Carter, too. There are some really great copywriters who are fitness gurus as well, or celebrity coaches sometimes. Craig Ballantyne is one example of a really good copywriter. John Romaniello, amazing copywriter.
My guest today is a personal trainer and a fitness writer. He’s in the online fitness niche, obviously. He has written for a number of very prestigious publications. He’s a contributor, a writer for Iron Man Magazine. He’s written for EliteFTS.com. His name is Alexander Juan Antonio Cortes. Or, is it Alejandro?
Alexander:
Either or, actually. They both work.
Nabeel:
Okay. I’ll let him introduce himself. Alex, why don’t you just give the audience a brief intro about yourself?
Alexander:
No problem. Hello, everyone, to who is listening. Just a brief background on myself. I’ve been a personal trainer since 2009. I’ve been a fitness writer of sorts, or a professional writer if you want to say that, since 2013.
Just recently, I got into the “online game” as it’s called, in the past, about six months or so ago. I have a lot of practical real world experience but working online exclusively and marketing myself online, that’s actually been somewhat of a new endeavor.
Why did Alex decide to email 3 times a day?
Nabeel:
Okay. Now, for the audience, the reason I have Alex on the show as opposed to somebody you’ve actually heard of is because Alex emails his subscribers 3 times a day, 7 days a week. People read his emails and his email list is growing. I believe he’s made, I think four to five figures in the three months since he’s started doing it.
We’re going to dive into that. I’ve got some questions lined up for Alex. I just want to know why he did what he did, how it’s working out and what the response has been.
Alex, I’m just going to go through a few questions and then you can answer and then if they are any additional discussion points, we’ll take care of it as we go.
Alexander:
Yeah. No worries.
Nabeel:
Okay. The first thing is, what in God’s name possessed you to try emailing your list three times a day, seven days a week? Because, email marketing is like, at this point, it’s like dogma. You don’t send super-long emails. You don’t put their name in the subject line or whatever. What caused you to decide, “Okay, this is something I want to try out,” and you actually went ahead and did it? You’re consistent with it. You send out those three freaking emails every single damn day. I have like 200 in my backlog.
Alexander:
Yeah. The overall paradigm I took when I decided I was going to try to work online space, I looked at what everyone was doing and then I asked the secret question of, what are people not doing? Since I could see, pretty obviously, what the common operating norms were and I realized that if you do what is common, you get common results. I wanted exceptional results so then I asked myself, “What’s not being done?”
I’ll give credit, I found a marketing guru of sorts. The guy’s name is Ben Settle and I was on his free email list. I’m now subscribed to his newsletter. It’s paid. Ben’s, without getting into a long tangent, his operative point to writing emails to make yourself more successful is, “communicate more, email more often.” I took that and I ran with it into three times a day. In my mind, I asked myself this question, “What is my edge? What is my razor edge that I have over everyone else? What’s my advantage?”
Your edge is not necessarily something that you can do better than everyone else but it’s what you can do more than anyone else and not tire of. If you can do something beyond anyone else’s capacity and you don’t get sick of it, you can probably master it. In my mind, I have two things. I can teach but I can’t really leverage that online. The other thing is I can write and that can be leveraged.
Emailing three times a day, I don’t get tired of writing. It’s just, I don’t have writer’s block, writer’s fatigue. It seemed very sensible then if I want to grow this list and have an amazing list that buys and sells and corresponds, communicate with them every day, three times a day. That, of and in itself, is the marketing catch of, “Wow. I almost log onto lists just to see if he really does this.”
How is he able to produce so much content?
Nabeel:
Right. Okay. There’re a couple of things that branch off from there. First of all, you said you don’t get writer’s block or writer’s fatigue. How are you able to produce so much content? Because you’re publishing for your blog as well and you’re guest-posting in different magazines, online magazines. You’re a prolific writer.
Alexander:
Yeah.
Nabeel:
How are you able to maintain this writing, actually putting out so much content?
Alexander:
I would consider myself something of an information cipher, or a codex maybe you could say. I’ve always had very high retention for everything that I read. My memory, my overall working memory is very good. I’ve trained my memory actually, which is a whole subject unto itself. At the same time, because I write about health on this very broad spectrum basis, I’m not really limited by a subject too much. It’s not as if the case where I only write about bodybuilding and then after so many months, I’ve run out of topics and I can’t really say any more about it.
By using health as a filter, I can talk about exercise. I can talk about diet and nutrition. I can talk about relationships with yourself, with food, with goals. I can talk about motivation. I can talk about politics if I want to because that affects people’s health. Anything that has an impact on your day-to-day wellbeing is something I can probably put some words to. With this cross-contextual relevance between all of these different subjects, I’m never really at a loss to dive into something.
At the same time, because I email everybody so much, I get questions 24/7 from readers that, “Could you answer this? Could you have a podcast about that?” Then, in the course of studying these subjects or writing about them, I create my own questions for myself. The whole thing is this cycle of send out an email, Tweet about a subject, get feedback back, write about that feedback, post that article, get more feedback, send out that email. Everything is very self-sustaining.
Nabeel:
It’s basically like a virtuous cycle. Once you got is started, it basically runs itself now and you’ll never run out of content ideas.
Alexander:
Yes. Exactly. The only way it would stop is if I just literally ceased to write and said, “I’m not going to write anything today.” There was one time when I sent out an email, I sent out three emails late. Then, I got emails back while I had been waiting for emails all day, question, question, question. “How do you skid in … ” those emails, those were very ironic. I sent these emails very, very late in the day because I still want to send the three. I got emails back asking me how I schedule my time and, what could I suggest to them?
I guess you could say the situational irony of it, I’m running behind schedule. I was thinking, “Oh, maybe this isn’t going to happen today.” Then, in the course of doing that, I get more feedback on, “Hey, could you talk about these subjects that have to do with time and running behind schedule?” It was a very funny situation.
What has the feedback from his subscribers been like?
Nabeel:
Right. Okay. What has the feedback been like? Is it mostly positive and a few negative or…
Alexander:
It’s pretty much all positive. Honestly, the only negative feedback I’ve gotten, obviously I have people unsubscribe, which we can get into the statistics if you want, stats and everything. The only real negative feedback I’ve had, which this is going to sound very basic, I email too much. I’ve had it happen multiple times where I’ve had people unsubscribe. I actually will email them sometimes and say, “Hey, was there a reason you unsubscribed? I’m just curious.”
The feedback, 80% of the time it’s, “You email too much. I didn’t know you’d really email three times a day.” If that’s the complaint, I’m pretty happy with it. Occasionally, there’s also the feedback of, maybe about 20% of the time, of, “I thought this was a fitness list. I just wanted workouts,” or “I just wanted training tips.”
Then, in that case, I understand that but I’ll tell people, “I have another list you could sign for that’s just workouts, if you want to go to that one.” I call it the Daily Workout Newsletter and it’s just training, nothing else. It’s a very comprehensive workout a day. The equivalent of what would be in a magazine. It’s four bucks a month. That’s a paid subscription list but if you just want training, nothing else, go down that list.
Segmenting his list + product development based on feedback
Nabeel:
Yeah. That would be worth it, right, because you’re paying four bucks a month for 30 workouts as opposed to buying a magazine which has 50 pages of ads and 10 pages of content?
Alexander:
Yeah. Exactly. That was my rationale. I realized, as a teenager, as a young man, 15-22 maybe, I probably spent probably four or five-grand on magazines. I’d buy three or four a month every month. Then, I realized over a period of time that, like you just said, if you really go through them, you’ll have about three workouts in them, some columns, some diet nutrition. The rest is just advertisements.
I’m going to pay, let’s just say 20 bucks a month for a training magazine for maybe 10 workouts. Having written for magazines, I could provide you the same thing every day for a much more reasonable price. 80% of the people that read those magazines just want the workouts anyway, so that’s why I made it.
Nabeel:
That’s a really good idea. It caters to the beginner segment as opposed to a paid newsletter that’s like Alan Aragon’s Research Review or something like that.
Alexander:
Exactly. Yeah. It’s much more beginner/intermediate. I don’t write for fitness professionals, so the Daily Workout Newsletter, it’s not highly technical with the language used. It’s comprehensive with the workouts and explains everything well but it’s not meant to be a scientific resource of, “Here are the biomechanical force metrics of hip extension with this degree of knee flexion versus hip extension with no knee flexion.” No one, 98% of people don’t care about that, nor is it really relevant. I-
Nabeel:
Yeah. They just want to get jacked.
Alexander:
Yeah. Exactly. You’re jacked. You want to be yoked.
Nabeel:
Yeah.
Alexander:
You want to get bulky, build muscle, whatever the athlete fib you want to use.
People don’t read so repeat important messages
Nabeel:
Yeah. Now, you mentioned that the people unsubscribe because you email too much but I think you were very, very clear that you were going to email them three times a day, seven days a week, right?
Alexander:
Oh, yeah. I say that in every single … If you go to the contact page it says in bold letters, “I will email you three times a day.” Then, the same thing with the Tweets. It’s made me realize that there’s a percentage of people, you could be as clear with your message as you could possibly be, but there will still be people who will misunderstand you or who will interpret it differently.
You could say, “I’m going to,” whatever your own case in marketing, “I’m going to write you twice a day at two and four o’clock every day,” and there will be someone, somehow, that is both surprised by it and somehow interprets it as being a different time because they may live in a different time zone, or it upsets them that they signed up and you email them at that time. I find it bizarre but perhaps it’s just the nature of people that human beings are highly irrational.
How Alex uses his personal brand to filter his readers
Nabeel:
Have any of your subscribers sent you hate-mail before unsubscribing or-
Alexander:
No. They really haven’t. Occasionally, I’ve gotten a few emails of people that just will send, “You email too much,” then they unsubscribe immediately, or “I didn’t like your emails, unsubscribe.” Nothing, I guess you’d say particularly vitriolic at all.
Nabeel:
Yeah. I think it’s generally, your audience is of a higher quality. Your Twitter audience and your online following are of a higher quality. You wouldn’t necessarily have those responses from just a generic list.
Alexander:
Yeah. I’d like to think so. Part of the reason of emailing three times a day is that it’s … Yeah. In a way, it’s like a personality culling. If someone, if we’re not vibing, obviously it’s email but I’ll say that, I’ll use that term, if we’re not vibing in the emails, we’re probably not going to get along. Then, at the same time, my marketing is very personality-driven. I, at least idealistically, I set out to market myself in such a way that I could reasonably be friends with everyone in my audience. I [inaudible 00:15:08] more often than people.
When people complain about readers or comments, or if you’re continuously getting negative feedback on everything that you’re putting out that, maybe overwhelms the positive, that’s a personal problem. It’s a reflection of yourself. That’s not just people. Negativity does not come out of a vacuum.
Alex’s email list growth of 579% in 90 days
Nabeel:
Right. Exactly. Right. Super. Now, let’s get to the actual numbers.
Alexander:
Yeah.
Nabeel:
Alex is going to give us screenshots of his numbers. Hopefully, when I put the blog post together, we’ll be shown those. How much has your list grown? I think you’ve been running this three times a day thing for about 90 days.
Alexander:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Nabeel:
How much has your list grown since then? What was the starting number? What’s the number now and how is it growing every day? How much is it growing every day?
Alexander:
Yes. I’ll go back to, what, today’s the 13th of February?
Nabeel:
Yes.
Alexander:
Yeah. 90 days ago. I decided around the beginning of November, I would start emailing every day. It took me some time to get traction on it. It started as just emailing just once, then, by the middle of the month, I’d build up. 90 days ago, November 13th, I had 386 subscribers and as of this morning, I have 2,236. Almost 2,000 increase in 90 days, 1,950. If you want to use statistics, you’d say, if I do the math, that’s a 570% (579.27%) increase in list size in three months.
Nabeel:
That’s huge. Then, obviously you’re pushing so much content through there and that’s one of the ways you’ve turned it into books and stuff but I’ll talk about that in a minute.
Alexander:
Yeah.
Nabeel:
Now, you’ve had, what was that? 500% growth in 90 days.
Alexander:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Alex’s open rates and click-through rates are above average
Nabeel:
What are your open rates and click-throughs, whenever you do give them a link to click through?
Alexander:
Yeah. Open rate is 31% average. I think that’s good. I’ll be honest and say, I haven’t researched other fields to know that that’s good or bad. According to Mail Chimp, which is the email service I’ve just been using, the average for the fitness industry is about 18 to around 22%. I think I’m doing above average and I just make sure just to keep my average around that marker. That’s been very consistent from day one until today. Sometimes it will spike up pretty high. I might have an email that I’ll send out and maybe half of the list reads it. Generally speaking, it’s right around the slight 30%+ range.
Then, the click-through rate, similarly, that’s been around 3%. That’s again, very steady ever since I started emailing often. The odd thing about the click-through rate is that I’ve found ways where you can spike your click-through rate depending upon the, let’s say the enticement of the offer.
You can’t really consistently elevate that average for, I think just various reasons because it’s always going to fall back to that baseline where there’s certain factors or personality you can’t control. With click-through rate, like I said, you can offer people things at times where maybe it’ll go up 20% but, at the same time, nobody is going to buy everything or click-through everything every single day. It’s always going to be right around the 3% marker.
How Alex makes it easy for his audience to consume his content
Nabeel:
Right. That sounds fairly standard. I suppose there are a few tweaks that you can do here and there to boost that a little bit but I think you’re doing pretty well considering that marketing isn’t your number one thing. Your thing is writing about health and fitness. I think the good thing is that all your content is delivered within the email. Unless you are publishing a blog post, they don’t actually have to click through to read your material, right?
Alexander:
Yes. Yeah. That’s one thing that … I’ve found this with emails and people will complain about click-through rates. I’ve seen this practice in not just the fitness industry but in pretty much every industry. I’ve subscribed to many, many marketing blogs and when I decided to start emailing three times a day, I was very surprised at this very common practice of people will send you an email and maybe it’s a good headline. It grabs your attention. You open it up and then it link-[inaudible 00:19:43]. The reality is and you know this too, is that the more steps you make for someone to access information, the less inclined they are to go find out.
What I started doing with my emails, I would just take the article and I’d put it into the body of the email. Even for other articles from other websites that I might repost, I would say in the email, “This is from such-and-such individual. You should check them out. Here is there website. Here is the article.” Instead of forcing them to say, “Oh, I’ve found this great thing I’d like you to read,” or “I wrote this, go look at it,” it’s already there for you. That, I think more than anything else, has kept the open rate where it’s at.
Nabeel:
Yeah. That’s a tactic that some people will use, that they’ll put the entire piece of content within the email and they’ll put a link. It’ll say, “If you want to read this on my website, you can click through or if you want, you just read it within the email itself.”
Alexander:
Yeah.
Nabeel:
You give them the option. Otherwise, there’s no reason, technically, for them to be on your emailing list if you’re not giving them something unique to consume. It’s just like it’s a broadcasting thing. That’s what social media is for.
Alexander:
Exactly.
Long-form emails are received well by his subscribers
Nabeel:
Yeah. I think it’s a good practice that you’ve got the entire … It doesn’t really work for very, very long content but I think the length of your emails, which are generally 500 to 1,000 words and sometimes a little shorter, it works really, really well.
Alexander:
Yeah. It does. At the same time, even the longer emails I’ve written. I’ve written a few emails that were around, I think I had a few that were 2,000 words. Funny enough, those had some of the highest open rates and click-through rate. I couldn’t tell you why that somehow ended up higher but the feedback I got from those was extremely positive, where people would email me back.
I had one about stress that was extremely lengthy. They emailed me back saying this was the most amazing thing they’ve ever gotten in an email. I think the medium is untapped in that sense where there’s this common industry perception that people are not going to read long content. If the content’s good, they will.
Nabeel:
Yeah.
Alexander:
Again, it’s just very rare that anyone thinks to do that in the first place. When it does happen, just the sheer novelty of it is actually very intriguing to people. It builds your value that way.
How does Alex generate revenue from his emails?
Nabeel:
Absolutely. How have you started, or you’ve already been doing it, how have you monetized the list?
Alexander:
Yeah. The list, very simple. Every email I send, not every email, but let’s say at least 66.66% of them will have either product links, or Amazon links, or something that I make an either a percentage off of or is some sort of offer. Obviously, I know you’re on the list.
I’m not very overt with the product sales in regards to, “Buy this.” I usually tell a story first and if you want to check it out, you can. Just by doing that, because the majority of the emails have links in them, pretty much every email is being clicked on and is buying something, or someone is buying something.
Nabeel:
You’ve actually used the content that you produce to create and sell eBooks.
Alexander:
Yes. Yeah. That’s something that, again, I thought of the cycle of creation. If I’m writing these lengthy emails with this very in-depth content, a lot of it, I could put that into something where I … Obviously, someone’s not going to go through and read 50 days’ worth of email but there might be a topic they really enjoyed. Then, I can take that topic, compile it, put it up for sale and that’s how I created the first eBook, which is ‘Fat Metabolism,’ which is enough.
It’s only about 45 pages but it’s a very in-depth but layman’s terms overview of how body fat works, how metabolism works, how calories work. That creates sales. Same thing with the ‘Women in Training’ eBook. That was a very popular one for the, I do have a female readership and they really enjoyed that. Then, this month, I’ll have two more eBooks coming out. One is on cooking and then the other one will likely be on either … It looks like right now it’ll be on fasting or possibly a different topic.
Nabeel:
All right. I think you’ve also been selling coaching.
Alexander:
Yes. Yeah. Coaching, same thing. That gets linked in the email. Since I’ve started, I’ve gotten, consistently about one or two clients every single month. I could give you some numbers for it. The way it’s worked out in the last 90 days, it’s been about, these are approximate numbers, but I’ve made about $1,200 off of Amazon affiliate links and book sales. Then, about $6,800 in product sales. It comes out to about $8,000, which over 90 days, I have been pretty pleased with.
It’s paid the bills and for the level of growth that it’s at, that number can only go up. Then, if I go through the numbers month by month, the first month I made $1,200 off of … I just go over, thinking in my head, it’s like, “I sent 90 emails. 30 days, 90 emails.” $1,200 off of the first 90 emails. The second month I made $1,900. The past 30 days, I’ve made $4,900. It’s been a big jump but if you divide up my numbers, that comes out to 8,000 divided by 270 emails I’ve sent, so each email essentially makes me $29, every time I send it. Yeah.
As he grows his list revenue will compound
Nabeel:
Which is pretty good because it’ll take you, what, 15-20 minutes to write and email or 30 minutes at the most?
Alexander:
Yeah. About 30 minutes. My workday, in that sense, is let’s just say an hour-and-a-half, two hours. Each time I send an email, it’s very consistent. I’ll send, I’ll get emails back, “Oh, people bought stuff.” Some days it’s lower and some days it’s higher. Obviously, it goes in a wave that way but it averages out, at this point to, it’s $29 an email. Obviously, the first month it was less than that. The second month it went up a little bit more.
Maybe at 4,000 subscribers, will it be $8,000? Maybe, maybe not. My honest goal when I started this concept was, it’s so basic, but I had this idea that if I could make $1 a month off of every person that signed up with my email list, then if I got to a 10,000-person list, that’d be $10,000 a month. Maybe that’s me knowing nothing about marketing and knowing nothing about statistics and over-simplifying it but after studying all of these subjects, I realized your email list just really comes down to a per dollar value of per person.
Nabeel:
Yeah.
Alexander:
How much is each person spending in a year? If you just averaged it out that way. At 10,000 people, that’s $10,000 a month. That’s six figures a year. The first month of November, that was my first idea, I’m like, “I have,” let’s just say 400 people on the list, “could I make $400 off me list?” I made three times that. Then, in December it was the same thing. “Okay. I’m going to try and make a dollar off of each person that signs up.”
Then, January the same thing. So far, I think I’ve made about $3.50 off of each person. I’m definitely ahead of where I expected to be. At this stage, again, it can only grow from here. On the subject of how many people I add a day, through a combination of just Tweeting, podcasts, the articles on the site, I’ll add anywhere from about 20 to, I’ve had days where I’ve added 50 people. That’s a big range but it’s never really less than 20. Then, in occasional days, it’s been up to 50. That’s every single day.
Nabeel:
That’s amazing because it’s not magic. It’s just math, right?
Alexander:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Nabeel:
Now, you’re getting three dollars a subscriber per month or whatever it is and then you just need to grow because you’ve already got the bottom of the funnel set up. You’re sending out the links that people are going to buy and you’re sending out the coaching and stuff. All you have to do is now grow the top of the funnel, which is the size of your email list. Thus, as it grows, you’re earning potential is exponential, basically.
Alexander:
Yeah. There’s no cap on that and at the same time, as it’s grown, the numbers have jumped up. The first month, I think I went from, I can back and look, it was 386 to … Actually, I might just go to the C right now. I think it went from 386 to 500 and something. Then, in December, it definitely went up significantly. Then, in January/February, it’s gone up even more.
What it looks like to me, my estimation is that as the list has grown, more people are sharing the content, obviously. That itself is creating more momentum with the growth of the list. The bigger the list gets, the bigger it’s going to get. There’s no slowdown that way or I think I write, like a growth rate, where, “Oh. It can grow no more.”
What are unsubscribe rates like?
Nabeel:
Super. You mentioned that only a few people unsubscribed. What’s your unsubscribe rate like per email or-
Alexander:
Yeah. Unsubscribe rate and this is according to Mail Chimp, the number it spit me back, it was 3%. Then, the total number of unsubscribers since I started has been 380. It goes in waves. It’s something like, to every 105 people that subscribe, 25 will unsubscribe. It’s a 25/75 split, roughly. I haven’t really had any drain that way with unsubscription. There was one week in January where I had maybe 80 people that unsubscribed for whatever reason.
That was a week where I talked a lot about just philosophical subjects. I didn’t really talk about fitness too much but I also had the most positive feedback that week, from my readership. Then, ironically, the next week, I had 200 and something subscribers within 5 days. There hasn’t really been any drain that way where I could say it’s gone off of a cliff and then I’ve had to build it back up. The subscriptions always, always, always outweigh the unsubscribed significantly.
Nabeel:
Yeah. That’s normal actually. Every email list has a 25% attrition over a year. That’s pretty much basically what you said, is the standard stuff. Your open rates and click-throughs are pretty much standard as well. You’re doing all right in terms of where you are as a benchmark compared to other people, I suppose.
Alexander:
Good to know.
Alex’s perspective on Marketing in general
Nabeel:
Yeah. It’s really interesting to me because you did actually do a bit of research on how to do content marketing and stuff like that but the way you approached it was you put a new twist on something that’s basically done to death. That’s the reason why I actually wanted to talk to you about it.
Alexander:
Yeah.
Nabeel:
I think, actually, I don’t have any other questions. Do you have anything that you wanted to talk about with regard to marketing topics or-
Alexander:
Yeah. To share some more of the background on it. When you talk about it, obviously there’s so much stuff on marketing. Especially, content marketing now, is the mantra. At the same time, part of the reason I decided on this strategy of emailing three times a day, is that we live in this economy market now where you hear all of this terminology. It’s the Age of Distraction. It’s the attention economy. It’s the era of authenticity.
People love to use these terms but what do those things really mean? The way I looked at it was, the era that we’re in, we went from, for most of human history, living in a personalized economy where because of a lack of mobility, people always knew where they were buying from. Up until, you have to figure, let’s see 1850, there wasn’t really such a thing as buying a major name brand. Then, you have this industrialization era where people want to buy from big companies, so to speak, because they market well and there’s an aspect of novelty.
Then, the last 15 years or so, we’ve moved from corporatism to people wanting to be anti-corporate and wanting to go back to buying individual brands or wanting to know who they’re buying from. What really happened? People found that they want personality. They want a connection to whatever it is they’re purchasing or what they’re investing in. With this authenticity concept now, we’re talking about content. It’s not necessarily the content of itself that you produce lots. You could produce garbage and no one would like it. It’s a storytelling aspect.
When I think of a term like authenticity, it’s very buzzy and I don’t really like the word. “Oh, you need to be authentic.” What does authentic really mean? Being authentic, what does it mean? It means you’re telling a story. You’re telling a story and you are personally connecting with it. In the concept of writing three emails a day, I can be telling a story all of the time. It could be about you. It could be about me. It could be about shared experiences but you’re always going to feel that personal connection to it.
That, of and in itself, whether you’re a big company, or moderate-size, or a small company, whatever your niche is, if you can create a narrative out of your product, out of your service and it’s a compelling narrative, you’re probably going to have success so long as you’re consistent in telling it, sharing it, emailing about it. It’s the inconsistency factor that throws people off and they lose interest.
Nabeel:
Excellent. That is a great way to basically end the episode, to hear your insight on content marketing…
Alexander:
Excellent.
Nabeel:
… because, I think, speaking as a marketer, we get a little bit jaded and stuck in patterns and dogma when we’re talking about marketing, social media, and things like that. It was really interesting to hear your perspective, speaking as someone who’s an outsider who has to use marketing to sell his fitness knowledge. It was really interesting to hear your take on that.
Alexander:
Yep. You’re very welcome.
Nabeel:
All right. That’s basically the end of our episode and you’ll find the show notes, it’ll be either on my blog or somebody else’s blog. Please remember to leave a rating and review on iTunes because that’s how people will find the podcast and benefit from the podcast. That’s how we will be able to get the New and Note Worthy section on iTunes eventually. Alex, I want to thank you again for giving us your time and coming on the show with us.
Alexander:
Thank you for having me on. It was fun to talk about it for the first time.
Nabeel:
Yeah. You know what? I think there is so much. I consider you, not really a fitness writer but a manosphere writer and the manosphere guys, they’re really good internet marketers. I’ve noticed it a lot. A lot of these guys, they’re super-on-point with their internet marketing. They just do things differently and they get great results.
Alexander:
Yeah. I think part of the reason for this, is I’ve noticed the same thing where there’re guys where maybe it’s not a massive following per se, of, “Oh, I’ve got a million Twitter followers,” but they’ll have very strong lists and very good readership. I realize being within the manosphere itself, that when you’re trying to product content and create stuff through this paradigm of, “I’m a man. I’m trying to be masculine. The world, at large, is somewhat against me,” it gives you a very clear message. That, in and of itself, is the clarity factor. That is always going to attract people.
Nabeel:
Definitely. I totally agree with that. Okay. This is the second time we’re going to close off the episode.
Alexander:
Oh, sorry. [inaudible 00:36:49]
Nabeel:
All right. We’re going to close the episode out now. Again, I’m going to repeat it again, please remember to leave a rating and review on iTunes and subscribe to the show. Thank you very much, Alex. This is Nabeel signing off.
Alexander:
Thank you.
