10 Adages of Profitable Newsletter Ads

Look, you want to sell, I get it.

But you have to resist the urge!

You have to offer something free in your ad.

If you want to make more money, at least.

Lemme explain, Jason, will ya?

Obviously you want buyers, right?

You want AS MANY BUYERS AS POSSIBLE, right?

Well, offering something FREE does this exact thing.

Because…

Which milkshake do you think would bring more boys to the yard? The free or the paid?

Aka which ad would bring more people to your email list? The free or the paid?

Obviously the free!

And when would you have a higher chance of selling something to someone?

When you ask them once or when you ask them many times over a longer timespan?

Probably the latter, right?

Right.

Offer something free so you can get a lot of subscribers to your list where you can sell them over and over.

Which brings me nicely to the second adage of newsletter ads:

Now that you’ve gotten their email and they are your eternal prisoners, you can start blasting them with offers until the end of time.

And this starts immediately after they click the submit button on your sales page.

No, not in the welcome email. Not in the email after that.

When they submit their email, immediately redirect them to the first offer you wanna put in front of them.

You snooze you lose!

They already have excitement in their little hearts… they’ve read your page and offer… and they’ve already decided to give you a chance.

And with this momentum going, this is the perfect place to offer something additional, paid this time.

They are more likely to take you up on it, but also, you make it clear that this is no charity, there are still things for sale. Things that are even more amazing, more helpful, and more valuable than what you offered them at first.

You just got a deafening “YES!” to your free offer.

Your now-subscriber is proven to be interested in the thing.

So, it makes perfect sense to make your follow-up, PAID offer related to your FREE offer.

And you can do that in two ways:

• Expand on the FREE offer
• Present them the next step

So, for example, one common offer a lot of people use in their ads is a smaller or ‘lite’ version of an existing course they have (or a bundle of lite versions of current courses).

Which is completely in line with the ‘taste test’ analogy I mentioned in the previous adage.

Then, on your paid offer, you could offer to give them the full version of that course/those courses at a juicy discount.

Obviously, they wanted the thing. So, they definitely want the bigger thing too, so then it comes down to a matter of price and circumstances, since the want is already there and proven.

The other option is to present them with the next step. What comes after the offer. What problem presents itself when their current one is solved by your free thing.

Like how when you buy a gym membership, someone might offer you a meal plan or a supplement stack since they are natural next steps.

Think about what your FREE offer does and then find what could be a good, natural next step from there.

The goal is to bring as many people to your list as possible, right?

Right.

(If you said ‘wrong’, say ‘right’ instead and there will be no trouble, okay?)

And it would make sense that the more valuable and helpful your offer is, the more people will take you up on it, and the more people will sign up for your list.

And I really mean GO BIG. If you can offer something that normally costs $1,000s of dollars or can seem like it costs that much or is equivalent to something that costs $1,000s of dollars, then offer them that.

So, it’s something that’s obviously helpful and desirable for that audience and it has a super high real life value.

Let me give you an example you’ll probably hate:

As a kid, what’s the rarest, most valuable resource on the planet?

Candy! (and maybe time on the PlayStation)

So, what do people with vans offer outside of kindergartens and elementary schools?

Candy! (and maybe time on the PlayStation)

Now, instead of being an absolute piece of shit of a human being, you can use this lesson to offer something that will actually help someone for free (and a follow up at a great price) so that everyone leaves happy from the exchange.

There’s no easy way to explain this but it’s a lot more desirable and persuasive when you know that an offer was made just for you specifically.

And if a reader sees that this product/offer/bundle was made with them in mind + it’s free to claim, they are much more likely to trust you and take you up on that offer.

But, at the same time…

If you find a winner, don’t be afraid to run it again and again on different lists!

Every person’s list is different. But we, as people, are not as unique as we think we are. We have similar problems, similar wants, similar needs.

So, if you find an offer that worked great in a person’s list, don’t be afraid to run the same offer to another list with a similar audience.

“But, GC, how do I make it unique AND run the same offer?”

I’m glad I asked. Great question, me!

There are three things you can do:

Events always make things special. They always make you pay more attention to the thing and they are received more positively than offering the same exact thing but without an event.

Like giving someone a gift on a random Tuesday vs giving someone a gift on Christmas. It hits different.

Or let’s imagine you offer a bundle of client acquisition, fulfillment, invoicing, project management, branding products.

These sound good, don’t get me wrong.

But it sounds better if you offer “the ultimate freelancer package — everything you need to get your next client, deliver great work, and start a snowball of incoming work.”

They’re just not the same.

I personally love framing it as an event, but if you can’t make it work no matter what, at least do yourself a favor and name your bundle instead of just saying “I’ll give you this, this, and that.”

Make your offer more than just an offer!

When you make this an event, it’s also easier to follow the next adage.

This is an amazing and rare opportunity/event you’re offering to the readers. You can’t just be mellow and chill about it.

(I mean, you can, but it will cost you sales).

You can be as nonchalant, mysterious, and edgy as you want inside your emails…

For now, PLEASE do yourself a favor and get your excitement up a notch or ten, okay?

Look at the mind-b(l)oggling offer! It’s hard to NOT bring in excitement and energy when you give your offer such a name.

Do what you have to do to bring excitement to your ad and offer.

I don’t care if you have to eat three slices of a three-layered cake or you have to snort a surprisingly long line of coca cola.

I care about you getting better results and making more money.

Plain and simple.

I hinted about it in one of the previous adages but it deserves its own adage.

Honestly, I didn’t think I would have to even say this, but I’ve seen too many people mess this up so I’m adding it in.

Please! For the love of all that’s good, have a dedicated sales page for your offer!

I see people mess this up in 2 distinct ways.

What some people do — and I think that’s the worst, but it’s also rare — is to send people straight to their homepage or their general newsletter signup page.

Which is a big no no!

If you’re creating an offer based on the adages I wrote above, you should be writing a new, special sales page for this FREE offer specifically!

The other thing I see a lot of people doing is to treat this offer as a lead magnet.

(And it technically is, since you’re offering a free thing to get leads into your newsletter)

But that doesn’t mean you should be creating a page similar to what you’d create for a lead magnet.

So, what you DON’T WANT is a page with just a headline, a couple of bullets, and an opt-in form.

I mean, yeah, having that at the top is good, but don’t stop there. Actually write a solid sales page for your offer, with a proper lead, explaining each product and everything.

All while keeping the excitement high.

Having one thing to sell in the backend is great. Having many things is better.

And there are many reasons for that.

First of all, what happens if someone buys your backend offer?

Congratulations but now what? Do you just sit and look at each other?

Of course not!

What you do is, you offer them more stuff!

Like a good capitalist would do.

If that person ends up being exactly your ideal client, they might end up buying everything!

It’s bad to make (just) a $1,000 offer to someone who would give you $100. It’s worse to make a $100 offer to someone who would give you $1,000.

Don’t be afraid to ask for more.

Secondly — and that’s especially important if you don’t run newsletter ads often — presenting more offers on the backend allows you to understand your buyers better!

You can see what products they buy and which ones they don’t.

You can see which angles they respond best to and which ones make them yawn so hard they need to go to the ER for their jaw.

And you can test smaller versions of offers you’re thinking about making without having to commit to building the whole thing.

Instead, you offer a smaller, cheaper version of it and give them a discount in the future if it’s a hit and you end up building it.

Nothing ever gets done without a deadline.

Not in our daily lives, not in our workplaces, not anywhere.

And most importantly…

Nobody buys if you don’t have a deadline in place!

Okay, obviously some people do, but they are way fewer than the people who buy when you DO have a deadline.

And don’t make it a long one. 24 hours is ideal from an urgency standpoint, but I prefer 48 hours to make sure that late readers also get a chance to capitalize on it.

Make it clear both in your ad and in your sales page that this is a limited time offer.

Which also adds to the ‘event’ feeling and to our goal of making the offer truly special.

After all, there are just 48 hours from the 10s of thousands of your life that this offer is available.

When people are not given a deadline, they put off the decision for later. They might be at the office when they read your email or they might be doing chores or they might be tired.

So, they’ll put off signing up until they forget about it and they never do it.

Deadlines stop that and make them sign up instead.

Also, according to Parkinson’s law, work expands to fill the time we’ve allocated to it.

Similarly, the process of signing up to your list expands to infinity when you don’t have a deadline.

When you do have a deadline, it takes up to 48 hours.

But what if someone reads your email later in the future and the deadline has already passed?

Well, first of all, there won’t be that many people that will read the email that far in the future.

But still, we want to catch as many sign ups as possible.

So, keep the page up and the sign up link working. But after the 48 hours have passed, replace the offer with a different one that’s not as good.

If it’s a bundle of things, you can remove one of the items, for example.

This way, you keep your promise of the offer only being available for a limited time while still leaving everyone else the opportunity to sign up to your page and get something that’s pretty awesome but not as good as the original offer.

Which is also exactly what I did after the mind-b(l)oggling offer expired.

After the 48 hours passed, I replaced the original page with a different one that had this headline:

This was the ad that ran on The Side Blogger’s newsletter:

This is the headline of my sales page:

And this was my sales page above the fold after the deadline was over: