What Happens If You Run Out Of Ideas For Your Marketing Emails?

In college my career dream was to become a journalist.

So halfway through my sophomore year, I took a job as the assistant editor of the student newspaper.

There was a lot about this new role that intimidated me.

Like calling strangers up on the phone and grilling them for facts and quotes for my stories.

And learning how to lay out pages in our desktop publishing software.

Far and away the most petrifying task was:

“Filling the board.”

The student newspaper office had this huge conference table. And bolted to the wall next to the conference table was a large whiteboard.

The whiteboard had lines on it like giant notebook paper.

Each of those lines was a slot for a story idea.

And as assistant editor, it was my job to make sure that each of those lines had a story idea on it when the newspaper staff crowded around the conference table each Tuesday afternoon to hand out assignments.

Empty slots meant we wouldn’t have enough stories to fill the weekly paper—and a roomful of collegiate reporters staring at me and asking, “What other ideas do you have, Josh?”

No pressure, right?

At first I was really stressing out:

What if I run out of ideas?

What if everyone is looking at me and expecting me to come up with something brilliant—and I choke?

I hear this same fear echoed frequently from entrepreneurs and business owners who are just getting started with email marketing.

And it’s very understandable:

It IS pretty intimidating to commit to emailing your list weekly or twice a week (not to mention daily like I do).

The way to overcome this anxiety is to do what I did as a wet-behind-the-ears newspaper editor.

You put a little system in place that keeps a steady supply of great stories and ideas flowing TO you.

In the journalism world, this is called a “beat.”

You work your beat for a little while, and before long you have a massive backlog of ideas for stories and emails—more than you could use if you had weeks to write about them.

You’ll find, as I did, that this backlog gives you confidence… The kind of confidence that allows you to just show up and write without a lot of struggle and hand-wringing.

Tomorrow, October 13, at 11 a.m. Eastern I’m opening enrollment for a 4-week, online workshop that I’m leading.

I’ll have more details for you then.

For now I’ll say, as a student in this “email bootcamp”-style training, you’ll develop your own system to feed you ideas for emails, blog posts, sales copy…

And by the end of the 4 weeks, you’ll have a big “bag o’ ideas” that you can reach into whenever you need inspiration.

Space in this workshop is extremely limited, and I do expect that it will sell out.

So keep an eye for your invitation tomorrow morning…

Contact me prior to 11:59 p.m. Eastern today, October 12, 2016, and I’ll shoot you an early invite.

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