Read My Emails

I tell all my clients to send regular content emails. It's by far the best way to bond with your audience.

This isn't just talk — I walk the walk, too. I have my own email list. I mail it once a week.

I keep an archive of those emails on the page you're reading right now. So if you want to get a sense of my writing style, or peek into my brain, read on.

(By the way, if you'd like to get my emails, you can subscribe below:)

Abraham Lincoln

When I was 17 my neighbors had a garage sale. They were selling a giant cardboard box full of huge hardcover books about former presidents.

They had:

· An 1,100 page book about Harry Truman

· A 600 page book about John Adams

· A 750 page book about Abraham Lincoln

· A 450 page book about the American Revolution

· And more.

I bought them all. (Don’t ask me why.)

I’m way too intimidated to actually read them. So they’ve just been sitting around collecting dust for years, until I decided to take the Lincoln book with me during my travels.

A couple weeks ago I finally got around to reading it. (Which is a pain in the butt: when I’m carrying it around, my backpack is twice as heavy!)

If you grew up in the US, you learned about him in school. You learned how he grew up in a log cabin, and then he gave an address at Gettysburg, and then he freed all the slaves, and then he got shot while watching a play.

What you don’t learn is that Lincoln was never actually supposed to be president. At the time, a guy named William Seward was the hotshot politician considered next in line to become president. But for weird political reasons, Seward didn’t get nominated by his party.

Abraham Lincoln saw those weird political reasons coming a year in advance. He saw that there was a chance Seward might not get nominated. And if Seward didn’t get nominated, his party would need a “compromise candidate”. Lincoln wanted to be that compromise candidate.

His problem was that nobody knew who he was. So he spent the entire year before the election building his reputation. He toured the US, speaking everywhere he could. He published his autobiography. He got his hands on the transcripts of his debates with Stephen Douglas, and had them published. Anything to get his name out there.

Seward didn’t get nominated on the first ballot. Then he didn’t get nominated on the second ballot. Some of the delegates started whispering that Seward was unelectable, he had too much baggage.

But they had to nominate somebody. So some of Abraham Lincoln’s friends said, “hey, what about Abe Lincoln?”

A few ballots later, Seward was out, and Lincoln was in. And you know the rest of the story.

I say in these emails constantly that if you want to sell high-ticket, you need to build your personal brand. People don’t buy high-ticket coaching from people they don’t know.

The more famous you get, the more you can charge. The difference between a $2,000 coaching package and a $20,000 coaching package is mostly just, how much do people recognize your name?

(This is how Tony Robbins can charge people $1,000,000 for a year of 1-on-1 coaching.)

In 6 years, Abraham Lincoln built one of the best personal brands ever. He went from being completely unknown to being an American legend.

How’d he do it? He started by just getting his name out there. He talked to as many influential people as he could. He published as much stuff as he could. He basically went on the 1800’s equivalent of a PR blitz.

You can do the same thing today. In fact, it’s way easier, because of the internet. And because unlike Abe Lincoln, you don’t need to become president — you just need to be famous in your niche.

There are a bunch of ways to do that: you can write a book, you can start a podcast, you can start a YouTube channel, you can post on Instagram. But my recommendation: write emails just like this one.

Want me to help you with that? Then check this out:

theoseeds.com/brandvoice

Türkçe

I was ordering a chicken dürüm wrap last night, in this hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Istanbul.

A jolly-looking Uber Eats driver walks in. He looks at me. “Sen büyüküz!” he says.

Why am I in Istanbul? Because I decided to teach myself Turkish.

I don’t speak it very well yet. Most of the time I have no idea what the people around me are saying.

But I know I’m making progress. When I got here a month ago, I couldn’t understand anything. Now, every now and then I understand a word or 2 of what somebody says, and I feel on top of the world!

(That happened with the Uber Eats driver. He said “you are very tall”.)

Learning is only fun when you feel like you’re making progress. When I first got here and realized I understood basically nothing, I lost my motivation pretty quickly. Then I started recognizing a few words and got it back.

If you sell information online, then your clients go through the same thing.

When they’re making progress, they’re having the time of their lives, and they love you. When they’re not making progress, they’re frustrated, and they wonder if you scammed them.

So give people a sense of progress early on. Give them a “quick win”, so they can clearly see you’re teaching them something valuable.

(This goes double if you offer a money back guarantee. The faster you give people a “win”, the lower your refund rate!)

I’ll give you an example. A year ago I hired a copy coach. He told me to email all my former clients, tell them about a recent successful project I did, and then offer to help them somehow.

How can you give your students a quick win?

Best,

Theo

P.S. If you want help writing content emails, check this out: theoseeds.com/brandvoice

How I screwed up my date last Saturday

I accidentally stood somebody up on a date last Saturday.

I’m gonna tell you the story, but first I have to tell you this story. A couple weeks ago I went to an expat event here in Istanbul, and I met this super adventurous Colombian woman.

Her goal is to go to every country. She’s already been to over 100 countries, including North Korea and Afghanistan. She invited me salsa dancing, and then we hung out a few more times, and then she invited me salsa dancing again on Saturday.

But there’s a problem. Half of Istanbul is in Europe and half of Istanbul is in Asia. I live on the European side and she lives on the Asian side.

There are no trains that go from the European side to the Asian side. There are only a few buses. Going from one side to the other takes forever. It’s an enormous pain in the ass.

On Saturday we agreed to meet up on the Asian side. So I got on the bus to go to Asia, then got on a train to the meeting place. The whole thing took like an hour and a half.

Here’s where things start to go bad. At some point during that hour my phone died. So I couldn’t get in touch with the woman I was meeting.

I also didn’t know exactly where she wanted to meet up. I knew the general vicinity. But it was a pretty big area.

I started looking for her in one place. She was looking for me in another.

(Later I found out that she had only been about 200 meters away. But we didn’t see each other.)

Eventually I just threw in the towel and got back on the train, then back on the bus, and then took the hour-long bus ride back home.

When I got back I saw all her messages, which were saying stuff like “where are you Theo?” and “I’ve been waiting for you for a half hour” and “I don’t know where you are so I have to leave now.”

I felt super crappy. I felt like I had let her down. All I had to do to prevent this was clarify with her where we were meeting. Or make sure my phone was charged before I left. Somehow I didn’t do either of those things.

So, why am I telling you this story? For an unintuitive personal branding reason.

If I just brag all the time, then how’s that gonna make me look?

You might get suspicious that I’m not actually as perfect as I say I am. Or if you believe me that I actually am perfect, you’ll probably find me pretty hard to relate to. (Because I’m guessing you’re not perfect, either.)

If you’re building a personal brand, you have to talk about your mistakes. You have to talk about your failures and all the dumb stuff you’ve done.

We’ve all failed and we’ve all done dumb stuff, so talking about your failures and the dumb stuff you did makes you more relatable. People will empathize with you. And it’ll make you seem like a human instead of a picture-perfect robot.

It’s hard talking about your failures. It scares the crap out of most people to talk about anything that makes them look bad. (Hell, writing this scared the crap out of me.)

But I promise you — it’s worth it.