How to Make Friends and Money
Recently I told you of my weird “hang outs” with friends. We just sit around, add value to the world by delivering unique, entertaining, and helpful content. Then we go workout, eat amazing, healthy meals, and do it all over again. It’s like we’re family.
And it all started with Joel’s first email to me back in 2008. It’s something you need to review. This was sent just after I had successfully launched a small (real) book on Amazon and got it up to #21 on the main Amazon list (all by myself, not with 100 partners).
I knew Joel’s name through his T-nation articles, but we had never spoken or met. Here’s what he sent me. Again, remember that this is the very FIRST contact we ever had. It’s instructive.
Subject Line: Congrats and Idea
Hey Craig,
Congrats on the Amazon ranking for Just Say No to Cardio! I was actually just on SIRIUS Satellite Radio last week and the host and I got to talking about cardio (and how he hated long cardio sessions) and I gave you and TurbulenceTraining.com a shout. Hope it helped to send some traffic your way.
I just thought of another way I can help you with JSNTC.
I’m on the expert panel at LifeScript.com and do their Diet & Fitness newsletter along side Jorge Cruise (Jorge does the fitness side and I do all the diet content) which goes out to over a million opt-in subscribers daily. The site as a whole gets about 4.5 million uniques per month, and collectively all their newsletters go out to about 10 million+.
How about I interview you about Just Say No to Cardio? I should be able to get it in their largest circulation newsletter, Healthy Advantage, which goes out to several million daily. Their demographic is women age 25-40, so it’d be geared toward that audience. Total of about 1200 words for the interview–that’s the length they like for full-length articles.
Wish you nothing but success with it!
Let me know,
Joel
***
This first contact email is the exact OPPOSITE of what 99.999% of people send me when they want to get my attention. Those folks all ask me to do something for them.
Joel did not. He was all about helping me. Then again, he’s one of the most generous guys I know…and that’s why he is so successful.
Let’s break down the email.
First, Joel made this email all about me, not him.
Second, he made it clear that he know who I was, what I did, and what was important to me at that time.
I’ve interviewed potential employees that couldn’t tell me a thing about Turbulence Training. It was – or should have been – embarrassing for them. That’s just one of the things wrong with kids these days…
…but back to Joel’s email. Third, Joel also specifically showed – and proved – how he could help me. He talked real, significant numbers.
It got my attention, it made me realize I was talking to a person that “gets it”, and the email proved to me that it was worth my time to take a few minutes out of a busy launch to contact Joel.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Lots to learn there for when you are contacting your own potential affiliates, especially the “big dawgs”.
Figure out how you can help,
Craig Ballantyne
Helping others inevitably makes your life better. Be the biggest GO-GIVER that you can be…starting today.