Should You Wait to Email Your List Until You Have Something Important To Say?

Many moons ago, when I was still learning the online marketing ropes, I bought into this really crippling lie.

I can even picture where I was when this lie sank its talons into my brain:

Pushing a shopping cart toward the checkout at Wal-Mart, a podcast chirping away in my ears.

The guest on the show had achieved some modest success with his blog and business—he was definitely ahead of where I was at the time.

At one point the host asked him how often he emailed his list, and he said something like:

“I don’t like to wear out my welcome. So I only email them when I have something really important and valuable to say.”

What that looked like in practice was they’d only hear from him once every few weeks—but since he’d waited so long, boy would he ever knock their sock off with value!

At the time that made perfect sense to me.

I didn’t want to waste my subscriber’s time and attention by “emailing just to email.”

So I decided to save emails for when I had something mind-blowing to share.

Well, guess how often that happened?

Yeah…

What I’ve learned since is this:

The first step to having useful, valuable ideas is to put yourself in a position where you MUST have useful, valuable ideas.

And what that means when it comes to email marketing is:

The only way to write great emails is to commit to emailing your list on a schedule—and then sticking to that schedule no matter what.

Julia Cameron, author of the The Artist’s Way (excellent book by the way, highly recommend) has this quote tacked up above her desk:

“Leap, and the net will appear.”

You have far, far more value to share with your audience then you realize.

Many times I’ve finished one of these emails and thought, “Is this just a complete waste of my reader’s time? Is anyone even going to benefit from this?”

Only to have someone reply and say, “Thank you, thank you, this is exactly what I needed to hear right now.”

If you’re an expert on your topic…

Or if you’re even a few steps ahead of your audience…

Then you have an INFINITE amount of valuable and important things to say.

So write, dear reader, and the ideas will come.