I have been writing newsletters since November, 1988. I had delivered presentations at the National Safety Congress to thousands of America’s top safety people and when I returned home, totally exhausted, I faced the ordeal of contacting some 500 leads from attendees who wanted to talk with me about purchasing my books and videos or hiring me to come in and make presentations for their employees. I only had one helper, a secretary, and as we sat in my office looking at that stack of business cards I asked Carla, “How can we contact all of those 500 leads at one time? We were stumped.
I made phone calls to a few speakers and one suggested a newsletter. I had Carla work on a mailing list. She was a whiz. Now this was before E-mail and a hundred other ways of contacting prospects and I was as good as illiterate about computers and such.
I sat down at my typewriter and began writing a newsletter. I can remember how we hired the lady two houses down the street to put address labels on the newsletters and we used commemorative postage stamps, 500 hundred of them, on our first mailing.
One client bought 1,000 of my books. For the next five years at least that initial list of prospects kept me busy speaking and writing new books.
One time we rented a mail list from the National Safety Council and sent out around 12,000 newsletters. That sweet lady a couple of doors down the street had all of her lady friends licking postage stamps for us.
So, here it is 32 years later and I’m still writing newsletters only now it is just for the fun of it.
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