This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
In this week's failure Friday segment, we hear from an online retailer, a side hustler who starts an online retail business, and they are building a promising email list, but they falter in maintaining it. They kind of just give up on it, and they're very sporadic, inconsistent, and essentially abandoned this growing email list. Now, listen, I have kind of done this too. So many of these failure Friday segments and times that we hear from people who have experienced either a disaster or a mistake or just kind of took their eye off the ball, I've done that. And so it's all about what can we learn from these experiences?
How can we go from failure to success? How can we improve the next project we start? How can we make sure we are consistent? This year, my word of the year is daily, or maybe it's every day. I never could decide which one, like which phrasing I liked better, but the idea is there are things I'm doing every day or daily. And of course, I have the podcast
every day, and I have an Apple Watch running streak for I think about 1,500 days so far, but I wanted to get more consistent on sharing online because I felt like I wasn't doing that so well. So this year, I'm trying to do a better job, but this is not about me. Let's talk about this listener, Hollis from Tennessee. Her story, her business has had a couple of challenges, as you might guess, because of walking away from this email list or not treating it with, you know, maybe the attention it deserved. So let's hear from her about that struggle. I'll come back at the end with some more brief comments and
a little wrap up. Starting my own digital business, I knew right off the bat that email marketing was key. It seemed like a no brainer. Build up an email list, keep in touch with regular juicy newsletters and watch the business grow. I'm Hollis, and here's the not so smooth ride I had with my email marketing efforts, a journey of starts, stops, and eventually a standstill. So I dove
right in. I offered a free ebook as bait to reel in subscribers and boy, did it work? My email list was growing, it was like watching a plant sprout and fast forward. In those early days, I was on it, whipping up weekly newsletters packed with tips, stories, and the latest of my services. But here's the thing, keeping up with a weekly newsletter is tough. It's not just about throwing a few words together and hitting send, it needs
to be engaging, useful, and well, interesting. As my business grew, so did the list of things eating up my time. And slowly, those newsletters started slipping. At first, it was a skip here and there. I'll get back on track next week, I'd tell myself. But next week turned
into next month, and before I knew it, sending out those newsletters felt like climbing a mountain. The crazy part, people kept signing up. It was like throwing a party you had no intention of attending. The guilt of not sending those newsletters was real. I built up this great audience and there I was, not talking to them. I felt like I'd invite a guest over
and then lock the door. Eventually, I just stopped sending them all together. Looking back, I learned a lot from the whole mess. Consistency is king in the email game. And if you can't commit, well, maybe it's not your game. I also realized it's not just
about building the list, it's about maintaining it, nurturing it, you know, actually talking to the people who signed up to hear from you. Now, I've stepped back from email newsletters. The experience taught me about biting off more than you can chew and the importance of actually following through on what you start. While I may have let that email list gather dust, the lessons I learned have been gold. Solid, hard-earned gold.
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. You can always regroup, you can always try something new. And if you've been inconsistent, you can simply start being consistent. And you don't have to make a big deal about it. You don't have to write a long post that says, "Hey, I've been inconsistent. Now I'm going to be consistent." I mean, you can
do that, but that kind of adds some pressure. So you could just start by saying, "Okay, whatever I haven't been doing that I want to be doing, if I said I'm going to do it every day or every week or whatever the cadence was, I'm just going to start now and I'll build that habit. And as I build the number of days and weeks, it's going to become easier to keep going than it would be to stop." And that's when you know the good habit is really set in. So anyway, Hollis, I appreciate you sharing that story. As I said in the introduction, I have done this too. I haven't always been consistent in my online communication, built
various email lists over the years that I haven't done a great job with and some that I have, but probably more of the other way around. So you can always regroup and always try again, as noted. Listeners, if you have a question, an update for us about your hustle, you know where to go, sidehustleschool.com. Today's notes are episode 2,610-2610. You just add that to the end of sidehustleschool.com. Of course, new episodes coming out every day.
It's always free. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.
