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David Woodward of ClickFunnels

Mike Dillard

Founder at Self Made Man

After 20 years as an entrepreneur, the lessons he learned and connections he made along the way are what allow him to help my students and clients grow faster than they ever thought possible, and avoid costly mistakes in the process.

Mike Dillard Media is his umbrella education company that publishes the courses that he produced and offered the past few years including “List-Grow”, “7-Figure Sales Presentations”, and “Mike Dillard Mentoring”.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Mike’s success

Creating offers that convert

Result if you follow the steps in Mike’s session

Knowing exactly what offers best suits your target audience for the best chance of conversion

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

The single biggest asset that I’ve ever built has been my email list. And if I’m talking to a new entrepreneur, and they really want to know what to focus on, to me, that’s it. And the way that I think about an email list is really as a virtual distribution channel.

So if you think about Starbucks, and all of their stores or Walmart and all of their stores, they’ve got these huge retail distribution channels, takes a lot of time and money to set those up and create them and we have an opportunity here as you know, online business owners to create a virtual distribution channel.

And that can be done, you know, through a YouTube channel and Instagram channel, Facebook fan page, whatever it may be. My channel of choice has been email for a couple of primary reasons.

First and foremost, it’s still the single most effective communication channel to drive revenue and sales. Social media is great for getting attention and to build rapport with your audience. But when it comes to actually driving the sale of a product or service, it’s still second to email.

The second primary reason why I want entrepreneurs to consider focusing on building an email list is that it’s the last channel out there that is not controlled by an algorithm.

So we all know for those of us who built up Facebook fan pages a few years ago, they implemented their algorithm and our reach essentially went to 1, 2% of your fans. So if you’ve got 10,000 fans, maybe 100, 200 of them might actually see the post that you make unless you’re willing to spend money and boost it. We just saw the same thing happened recently with Instagram as well.

So I know a bunch of our mutual colleagues have Instagram followings of, you know, 100,000 plus people. And if they make a post, it might get seen by 3000 people, 4000 people, I know, a few really big brands who have a million plus Instagram followers.

And if you go look there through their feed, and you look at the number of likes and things like that, they might have 3000 likes, 4000 likes out of a million plus followers. And so you’ve lost essentially control of your distribution and your reach through those big entities.

But with email, you still don’t have that problem. Nobody can stop you. You can send your emails out, they’re going to hit the inbox and at that point, your open rate is essentially up to you and the value and the relationship that you build with your audience.

So for me, that’s always been my primary focus. And the second real big advantage about it is that if you build a fantastic relationship with your readers, they will follow you throughout your career. So again, I’m on my third business, and I’ve got readers who’ve been on my list for 10 plus years, and they buy every product that I ever release.

And what it does is it ensures that your next venture is going to be an instant success. And so when I talked about the podcast earlier, when we launched that three years ago, building up a podcast audience is one of the most difficult things you could possibly do these days, if you’re going to do it from scratch.

Well, if you’ve got an email list like we had, we just sent out a couple of emails letting people know about the show and we were number one in our category and within 24 hours, we had 10,000 downloads in the first day. And then we’ve got you know, 4 million plus downloads so far on the show.

And all of that is only possible because of that email list. So those are some of the big kind of cornerstone pieces as to why I believe this is the single most important asset you can build as a business owner.

 

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