I help online business owners earn money with their email lists without being spammy, scammy, or sleazy. So many clients and friends have come to me with a great idea – or even a finished product – for an online course they want to sell. They’re smart and special. Their services have changed so many lives for the better. AND they have a unique framework for how they teach what they know.

When I started my business almost four years ago, the first place I went for advice was Facebook. In hindsight that sounds like a not-so-great idea, but as a new mom, I knew that Facebook groups facilitate conversations between women. I wanted to eavesdrop.

If that headline actually sounds boring as hell to you, answer me this: how come one of the first questions I get from people who are starting to think more seriously about email marketing is “Which email service provider should I use?”

This is how a lot of marketing emails look. What’s the problem with this? Remember 8th grade? It was awkward for me. (I would include an image of my school picture here but I burned them.) ANYWAY, in 8th grade my best friend was Cecilia, we both loved The X-Files and I had a huge crush on David Duchovny. And we wrote each other letters.

I was talking with a friend about the wide-ranging 60-minute conversation I had with Denise, and she said, “Maggie, you didn’t ask her a single question about email.” Well, that’s true. BUT. I did ask her a lot of questions about the things having an email marketing strategy allows mothers who are business owners like her to do,

Renee was talking about selling before the Internet. No Facebook ads, no funnels, no Zoom. She told me that she taught her teams that if they wanted to set up a meeting with a potential client, they needed “proximity and a reason to reach out.” So they needed to be in a place where their potential client would be, and they needed a reason to strike up a conversation.

“Nurture” is one of those business-speak marketing words that means nothing because it means different things to different people. Does “nurturing” your contacts mean, “email them regularly even though 80% or more of them never open your emails”? I think it means something else:

What do we think about having a "personal brand"? Have we "basically been seduced into objectifying and dehumanizing ourselves," as my friend Jason put it? Yikes.

I’d like to take it a step farther. I don’t think you should talk about your kids at work just because it makes you more relatable. Although that’s nice. One of the stickiest lies that patriarchy has propagated is the idea that the work that we do educating young children is dismissible and should be hidden from site, when it’s actually the most important work on Earth.

It’s tough to stand out in a sea of email. Here are some common mistakes I see that make it even tougher!