Every day you meet good potential business contacts. Maybe you're a plastic surgeon, with your own private practice. You meet a beautician at Supercuts, while getting your own ears lowered. Could she refer you a new patient in need of some rhinoplasty? You betcha.
You play golf with a new physician buddy, who is a general practitioner. New contact for your email list? Absolutely.
I have personally added six to eight new contacts - people whom I have met in the legitimate course of business - to my mailing list (email list modernly) every single day for 44 years. Every day. I hope you'll agree that we've had some fun together.
Okay, so what do you send them? Well, how about the best jokes and memes that your own buddies send you? Need more? There are tons of sites on the internet with jokes and funny memes, like dailyhaha.com. I enjoy a free subscription to six different daily joke email newsletters. Part of my job is to sit around and read jokes. Haha!
Maybe you might show your contacts some of the wonderful plastic surgery work being done by Doctors Without Borders, correcting, say, some unfortunate third world children born with a cleft palate. Maybe there is a new surgical procedure to tighten up excess skin. If you look, you'll find something interesting to share every couple of weeks.
Okay, but where do you maintain this email list. We here at Blackburne and Sons have worked well with iContact.com. They not only provide the software to maintain your email list, but they will also provide email templates and blast out your newsletters for you. They do all of this for you for just a few hundred dollars per month.
Templates, huh? You have to be professional, right? No-no-no!
Oh, my goodness. Have you ever read a "professional" newsletter from a CPA? I am asleep in ten seconds. ZZZ. Never-ever-ever try to be professional. Professional is boring. No one reads boring stuff.
Want to be rich? Then write to your contacts as if they were your friends and sitting next to you in a bar. Violate every rule your English teacher ever taught you. Use contractions. Use incomplete sentences. Use lots of slang. Start sentences with the word, "and" or "but." Write the way people speak in real life.
True Story:
I am sitting in a bar watching an Indianapolis Colts game. A forty-year-old man sits down next to me, along with this lovely 32-year-old wife. Somehow we get on the subject of children. (I am constantly boasting about mine.) He announces that he and his wife do not intend to have children. Too many problems in the world. Yada-yada.
I look over at his beautiful wife, and I see the pain in her eyes. Then I tell this guy that he is missing out on the greatest joy on earth, like the time that my wonderful first-born son came from behind 14-0 at the Junior National Fencing Championship... and won 15-14. Or the time when my second son, a natural athlete, hit four straight three-pointers in the fourth quarter of his basketball game. Or the time when my miracle daughter (eleven in vitro fertilization attempt$$$) smashed the winning goal in the Sectional Soccer Championship against her arch-rivals.
"You are missing out, sir, on the greatest joy on Earth." We exchanged phone numbers. Twelve months later, I got a text, "Well, George, we listened. We went right home and created our beautiful baby boy. Thank you!" And he was indeed a beautiful little boy. [Proud grin]
So back to today's marketing tip: I urge you to be conspicuously unprofessional and to write to you contacts like they were your buddies And don't worry about having the most professional-looking newsletter. You don't want to be professional. You want to be fun! People read fun newsletters.
Okay, let's start small. Find a shoe box. Every time you meet a new contact - maybe a CPA or a real estate broker - scribble his contact information on a pink message slip and throw it in the shoebox.
Smart Tip:
Also write down the date and how you met him. "Met Steve at the National Realtor's Convention in May of 2022."
When you get 200 contacts in your shoebox, ask your ten-year-old kid to set you up on iContact. After that, add all your new contacts directly into iContact. Every day. I am semi-retired, but I still add six to eight new contacts every single day.
Don't worry if your newsletter is butt-ugly. I want it to be butt-ugly. For twenty-five years, I just typed my company address at the top of a piece of copy machine paper and started adding my corny jokes and interesting stories.
Someday I'll tell you about The Hot Zone and my newsletter about it. Ebola became airborne and almost killed us all. My best newsletter ever - just typed on copy machine paper.
My buddy, Tom Harrier of Integrity Commercial Loans, just wrote me, "Soranus was a Greek physician. I wonder if he was a proctologist?" Hahahaha!
