Discover the resilience of email marketing as a cornerstone of your business when social media turns its back on you. Leslie Samuel's cautionary tale of being banned from YouTube spotlights the volatile nature of online platforms and the stark reality that, without warning, your digital empire can crumble. Yet, amidst the ruins, an engaged email list stands as a beacon of hope. This episode isn't just about the pitfalls of digital reliance; it's a treasure trove of strategies for growing a robust email list that not only weathers storms but thrives in them. From the compelling success story of Jason Van Orden to actionable tips using platforms like ConvertKit, learn to turn subscribers into a loyal community that powers your business engine.
The dark web of channel bans and hacked accounts holds a grim lesson for online entrepreneurs, and Leslie Samuel's Interactive Biology channel serves as a prime example. My journey through the treacherous territory of online bans reveals why being one of the "good guys" in the digital space matters. Security is paramount, just as locks are to a storefront, so is two-factor authentication to your online presence. This episode is packed with insights on safeguarding your digital assets and keeping your audience within arm's reach. It's not just a conversation; it's a masterclass in fortifying your business against the unexpected and ensuring your voice is never silenced.
Discover the resilience of email marketing as a cornerstone of your business when social media turns its back on you. Leslie Samuel's cautionary tale of being banned from YouTube spotlights the volatile nature of online platforms and the stark reality that, without warning, your digital empire can crumble. Yet, amidst the ruins, an engaged email list stands as a beacon of hope. This episode isn't just about the pitfalls of digital reliance; it's a treasure trove of strategies for growing a robust email list that not only weathers storms but thrives in them. From the compelling success story of Jason Van Orden to actionable tips using platforms like ConvertKit, learn to turn subscribers into a loyal community that powers your business engine.
The dark web of channel bans and hacked accounts holds a grim lesson for online entrepreneurs, and Leslie Samuel's Interactive Biology channel serves as a prime example. My journey through the treacherous territory of online bans reveals why being one of the "good guys" in the digital space matters. Security is paramount, just as locks are to a storefront, so is two-factor authentication to your online presence. This episode is packed with insights on safeguarding your digital assets and keeping your audience within arm's reach. It's not just a conversation; it's a masterclass in fortifying your business against the unexpected and ensuring your voice is never silenced.
Episode two six one late night. Internet marketing this week on the late night internet marketing podcast, I'm going to tell you an absolutely insane tale of woe and we're going to talk about what it means for you and your business. I'm talking about my great friend, Leslie Samuel, and how he got himself banned from YouTube. All this and more on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.
Announcer:The Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. You've been working for somebody else, but you want a business to run yourself. You want to know how to start and where to begin. Can you get out your comfort zone, my friend? Yes, you can do it right when it's late at night. At the end of the day, your dreams burn in your sights. At the end of the day, your dreams burn in your sights.
Mark Mason:Keep it up and you will find that you're building your business one night at a time and now broadcasting late at night from a little studio in the big state of Texas, your host, mark Mason. Hey, hey, hey, how is everyone doing? I am your host, mark Mason, coming to you from the little studio in Dallas, texas, where we're hardcore into baseball mode. I'm super excited because I have tickets to go see the Rangers on opening weekend. Everything is going great here and I hope your life is fantastic as well this week.
Mark Mason:I want to talk to you about some crazy stuff that happened to a friend of mine. You know we have talked in the past about the power of email marketing and actually the way the landscape has changed over the years. Email marketing, which has been around for as long as email has been around, literally for decades has become more, not less, important, especially recently, and there are a lot of reasons for that. I think you can look at the conversion rates that people enjoy for email marketing and compare them to things like social media, where the conversion rate tends to be sort of low, and you can also look at things like the lifetime value of someone that you have on your mailing list, and you'll find that people that are on a mailing list have a much, much higher lifetime value than someone who is generally, say, in your social media following or on some other platform that you might be engaged in. So we know that email marketing is powerful and we know that it is something that has withstood the test of time. One of the reasons for that is that your email list is something that you actually own, and I'll tell you a couple of tales of woe, as I call them, here in a minute, but really, what I want you to understand is that when you build a mailing list, that represents a real asset that you actually can have and hold, real asset that you actually can have and hold. If you have a list of people that are on your Facebook profile, that is also an asset, but it's not really your asset, it's really Facebook's asset. You don't own that list. Facebook can lock you out at any time, and so it's really important to understand this idea of owning an email list, and maybe you don't even realize this, but if you build a list of email addresses that you can communicate with, you can download that list, put it in a spreadsheet, take it with you, print it out, fold it up, put it in your pocket. So what this all boils down to is that your email list is the most important asset in your business, and that's because of this idea of the mitigation of risk.
Mark Mason:Now, I'm certainly not saying you shouldn't use social media. I definitely believe that you should meet your potential customers and listeners or viewers where they are, and they are on social media. That's a great place to meet them, to engage with them, to be where they are. But eventually you want to bring them back and capture them on your email list as a way to mitigate the risk of operating on that other platform. To mitigate the risk of operating on that other platform. And this sort of approach gives you so many more benefits, not the least of which is the ability to directly communicate with your audience. You can post on social media. I can't exactly tell you how, when or why someone is going to read your post on social media, but you can certainly post there. But with email marketing, you have the ability to directly communicate with your audience. Whether that's an audience of buyers, people who have bought from you before, an audience of listeners, like people who are on my list that listened to this very podcast, people like you or a list of prospects, you can be in contact with them directly and you can control not only the contents of that communication but also the timing of that communication. And, as I mentioned earlier, email continues to enjoy really good open rates, particularly if you take good care of your email list. If people are engaged and the main email platforms, particularly Gmail, see that people are looking forward to opening and reading your message, you'll be rewarded with landing in those people's inbox. So hopefully you'll accept my premise that email marketing is important.
Mark Mason:Let me give you some examples of what can happen to you that would make it important for you to have an email list. Let's start with a story that was relayed to me years ago when my friend, jason Van Orden was running Internet Business Mastery, which was a very famous podcast, not too different from this one, but more than 15 years ago. Jason tells this amazing story about a client of his that had a business was very successful. It was so successful, in fact, that he brought in partners to help him run the business. It was growing very well and eventually the business grew so much that the partners and the guy who originally owned the business, jason's friend started moving kind of in different directions and their vision the new partners vision for where to take the business became different from the original person's idea of where the business should go and eventually those new partners squeezed the original guy out of his business and he lost the business. I mean, these things happen in business, of things go South and there's just really nothing you can do but leave. But in this particular situation, this original business owner had an email list. So what did he do? His partner squeezed him out and the very next day he uploaded those names to new email software and emailed his list and said hey, if you've been looking for me, I have moved to this new business and if you'd like to continue following me or doing business with me, or whatever the case is, here's how you can do it. And he could stay in contact with those people despite having lost his primary platform. So that's a really interesting tale, but it's a tale from 15 years ago.
Mark Mason:Let's talk about a tale from 15 hours ago. Less than 15 days ago, my friend, leslie Samuel, who's known to many of you as the force behind becomeabloggercom. He's also got an amazing biology channel called Interactive Biology. Leslie is a very well-established business coach in the online business space, has had a lot of different kinds of success over the years, but his true passion is teaching biology and in fact, he has degrees in biology and has taught biology at a university and so forth. He's a real biologist and he has a channel on YouTube that's incredibly popular and again, it's called interactive biology.
Mark Mason:The other day he woke up in his YouTube channel, which has more than a quarter million subscribers, had been hacked, and this is not really exactly my story to tell. If you want to hear all the details about what happened to Leslie, he's got a full podcast episode just about that and you can find that over at late night. I amcom forward. Slash Leslie L E S L I E, and I only do it that way because I'm not sure what the exact YouTube URL is, but I'll redirect you over there Again. If you go to late night. I amcom forward. Slash Leslie L E S L I E. You can see that whole YouTube episode. It's quite amazing All the things that he's been through, and if you think this can't happen to you, I think you're wrong.
Mark Mason:So Leslie wakes up and all of a sudden, people are trying to get in contact with him because someone is live streaming crypto scam paraphernalia on his YouTube channel and people are like hey, leslie, what's up? Why is this crypto scammer on your YouTube channel? It turns out the guy had hacked into Leslie's YouTube channel. You can hear all about that in the podcast. And then eventually, as Leslie tried to get the channel back, youtube banned the channel because it was a crypto scammer channel. Now, and so all of Leslie's work, all of his followers, all of his reach through his channel, all his ability to publish YouTube shorts and get in contact with people to publish a video about what was going on with the channel, let alone biology, the significant ad revenue that was involved in that channel all of it gone in an instant. And what's triple crazy about this is that it's not like Leslie is a random YouTuber. Leslie's part of the YouTube black program. He's actually been out to Google and met with some of the leaders of the YouTube platform out there, so he's a known quantity and he was banned.
Mark Mason:And then there's a lot more to this story and I encourage you to go check out the podcast over at late night. I amcom forward slash Leslie, but it's still not done. It's more more than a week later and monetization still not back. There's a lot of stuff going on there and it's just a nightmare. So I don't tell you this story and stories like this to scare you away from building a YouTube channel or building a following on Facebook or on TikTok. These things can be incredibly valuable. I tell you these stories because I want you to manage your risk, and the way I want you to manage risk is by building an email list, by always trying to drive people back to your email list so that you can capture their email and build a relationship with them on your terms.
Mark Mason:On your email marketing channel, you know there's been a lot of research done. As I mentioned before, email marketing is said to have the highest ROI compared to other marketing channels. It's been shown that people who subscribe to your list are more likely to be engaged. It's been shown that people who subscribe to your list are more likely to be engaged, and usually the reason for that is oftentimes when you're talking to someone on social media, you've interrupted them, whereas in email marketing they've opted into your list and they're reading your email when they're ready to read it. You also have the opportunity to do more in-depth content and with email marketing you can do some really nice targeting when you segment your list. There's also all kinds of opportunity in automated email marketing, like the drip of sequences, to nurture leads and drive sales. If you were to just go out on Google and search for effective or successful email marketing case studies, your screen would be full of examples where email marketing has been proven to be incredibly successful.
Mark Mason:So at this point, I can imagine what some of you are probably saying. You're saying, wow, the Leslie story is really scary. In fact, some of you probably know Leslie and so that's a frightening story, and you probably believe me when I say that email marketing is an incredibly valuable way to influence people, to engage your audience, to deliver products and content to your audience. I bet you're believing me. The question you're having is hey, mark, I don't know what to do about this, and I think the easiest thing to do is to adopt a strategy for building your list.
Mark Mason:A lot of times, that can be as simple as offering a valuable lead magnet to incentivize people signing up to your list, or maybe just simply creating an opt-in form on your website or your blog. Maybe you invite people from social media to simply join your list, or, even better, to grab your incredibly valuable lead magnet as a way to convert them from whatever platform you're on, to your email list, or you can even partner with other businesses or influencers and cross promote. In fact, convertkit now has this really innovative recommendation platform where your email list can be recommended by other influencers as people are opting into their lists and a lot of people have had success for that, and ConvertKit is what I use and if you're interested in that, you can find that. Of course, as always at latenightimcom forward slash ConvertKit. But all of these are just a few of the ways that you can find to grow your email list, this asset that will last you through the life of your business.
Mark Mason:So the question is well, mark, what do I send? And if you're on my email list, which you can find over at late night I amcom forward slash news, you'll know that I just email things that I think will help you once a week. That's really the simple thing. I spend a few hours each week writing helpful information on the list and if you want to see what that looks like, you don't even have to opt in. You can go over to late night imcom forward slash news and just check out the last couple of newsletters. That's another feature of convert kit. It sets up the little website where people can see your email newsletter content and opt in for future newsletters if they like. So that's a really cool feature and you can go check that out right now.
Mark Mason:And you know, of course, once you have an email list. And let's say you have a product and let's say that in general, every 10 people that land on your email list end up buying your product. Or maybe even every hundred people that end up on your email list buy your product let's say your product. Or maybe even every hundred people that end up on your email list by your product. Let's say your product is $400. That means that every subscriber on your email list is worth at least $4. That's fantastic information because if you can pay $3 a subscriber using social media ads or other kinds of advertising platforms, that means you're adding and growing your email asset profitably. That's really the goal. If you can create a lead magnet and advertising strategy that actually grows your list profitably, that's probably the best way to ensure the longevity of your business.
Mark Mason:There's other things you can do with your email list, too, that are really cool, that go in the other direction. For example, you probably know that you can take your email list and upload it to Facebook and tell Facebook to target your ads at people that are similar to the people that have already joined your email list, because, after all, these people on your email list are the kind of people that have said they your email list. Because, after all, these people on your email list are the kind of people that have said they like your content. So you can ask Facebook to find you more people like these, like the people on your list, and send your ads to those people, which can, in turn, be added to your list, and so you can run this thing in a big circle. You know, I see a lot of businesses also incorporating email sign-offs into their offline businesses. A local Mexican food restaurant I love Tex-Mex, by the way. I really am a big Mexican food guy Not surprising, I guess, being from Texas, but I love Tex-Mex and I was in a Mexican food restaurant not too long ago and they were offering free queso in exchange for your email address. You signed up and they mailed you a coupon for free queso and chips. That's a great lead magnet. It's actually a little bit unusual as a physical lead magnet we often don't see that, but it's a genius idea.
Mark Mason:So what have we learned today? What's important here? The first thing we've learned is that email marketing is not dead, far from it, I think, as more and more uncertainty happens. I mean, just think a tick tock right, maybe you've got a massive following on tick tock. What's going to happen if the U S government bans tick tock? I'm not saying that's actually going to happen, but if you listen to the news, it sure sounds like it might happen. Well, what should happen for you is that you should have been capturing as many of those followers as you can on your email list by offering incentives in your TikTok channel to get people to join your list. That way, if TikTok goes away, that's not your only way to reach those people you can continue to reach at least an important segment of your audience that was interested enough in your content to respond to your opt-in offer. That's really important. So we've learned that We've heard some tales of woe from Leslie, and I want you to go check that podcast episode out from Leslie. I think you'll really enjoy Leslie's show. He's like a super high energy, fantastic guy late night. I amcom forward slash Leslie. And then we've talked a little bit about if you believe in this and you really want to do it, what you can do to build your list.
Mark Mason:Now, if you want even more information about email marketing, I've got two other podcast episodes from my catalog that I recommend that you listen to. The first episode is episode 247, which is an episode about the way to think about email marketing. One of the things that I've noticed about successful email marketing implementations is that they have a clear strategy. People are thinking about their email marketing in the right way, and episode 247 will help you do that. And then a companion episode, episode 248, talks about how to grow your list, how to unlock business growth through email marketing. So if you want to learn more about email marketing, I recommend you go back in the back catalog and listen to episode 247 and 248. And, of course, as always, you can find those episodes at latenightimcom forward slash podcast All right. So I hope that helps you out.
Mark Mason:As I mentioned in the last couple of episodes and I want to keep mentioning this as long as I can work it out I've got still a couple more slots available for complimentary coaching sessions. As you know by now, I've been coaching people on and off for more than two decades and I coach entrepreneurs directly one-on-one regarding their business, and one of the challenges with that is that not everyone can afford high-end coaching like that. So periodically I do complimentary coaching sessions for people that help them get going. And if that's you and you would like to see if there's a fit for us to do a complimentary coaching session, head on over to latenightimcom forward slash apply. Now I do have one disclaimer about this. If you're expecting this to be some kind of high-pressure sales pitch for paid coaching, that's not what it is. What we would be doing is a full up coaching session with absolutely no cost, no strings attached, no sales pitch, no ask at the end of the session, none of that.
Mark Mason:So this is just me coaching a few of you for free. I've done several of these recently In fact, I just did one the other day and I really enjoy them. I enjoy coaching and I like to do for some people what I wish I could do for everyone. Obviously, I can't coach everyone for free, but I can throw a few free coaching sessions into my schedule. So if you're interested in that, latenightimcom forward slash apply Until next time. I hope you have an amazing week. I hope that you take massive action. I hope that you make a decision about what you should be doing with your email marketing and I hope you make a plan to do that and execute on the plan. And if you do that and you'd love to tell me about it, or if you've got a question for me regarding your email marketing strategy, hit me up at feedback at late night. I amcom until next week. Ciao.
Announcer:You've been listening to the late night internet marketing podcast. Be sure to visit L N I M podcastcom today to leave feedback for mark, download special bonus content, access the show notes and more. See you there. Until then, go and make some great progress on your internet business one night at a time.
Mark Mason:Man, this thing with Leslie freaked me out, you know, because you don't like to see people that you really like go through bad things, and this is something that I really didn't expect. You know, people getting their channels banned. I've been banned from more stuff than I can count. I've had my Google ads accounts banned. I've had Facebook accounts banned both ads accounts and my regular Facebook account and I'm not exactly a spammer, right. But the stuff that I talk about is related to make money online, and we all know there are a lot of charlatans and frauds in this space. In fact, that's one of the reasons that I like this space is because I'm trying to be one of the good guys, and so it's not a surprise to me if I get banned from someplace.
Mark Mason:I got banned from the Walmart marketplace for a while. I mean, this is a part of doing business online. But when a biology channel first gets hacked and then second gets banned and then third gets demonetized, I mean this is a channel about biology. It really makes you wonder what the heck is going on and really got my attention. And so the other thing that we didn't really talk about in the episode, the first part of this story, which I think I'm remembering that Leslie does talk about this in that podcast episode. You really need to make sure your stuff is locked down with two-factor authentication. If something has two-factor available, you should turn it on, and that is a really important part of securing your online business. It's like putting really good locks on your doors if you have a brick and mortar business, so that's really important. Anyway, this thing with Leslie really got my attention and I wanted to get this message out for you both to help share Leslie's message and to encourage you to go build that list.
Announcer:Ciao.