I wanted to know whether my 3,456 subscribers were real people. Most of them aren’t.
I’ve been writing this newsletter for about eleven months, three times a week. Before starting the record you’re reading, I thought I should check who was actually on the other end.
So I took a sample. 153 active subscribers, picked at random, and I looked at every one.
151 of 153 were business addresses.
Here’s where they came from. I used a service that finds business contacts – you describe who you want and it hands you a list. I sent those contacts four emails through a separate tool. Anyone who opened one of the four got added to the newsletter.
That felt like a filter at the time. Open an email, show a flicker of interest, come aboard. It’s the part of the setup I was proudest of.
It’s also the part that fooled me. An open isn’t a person. On a business address, an open is usually the company’s security software checking the link before it lets the mail through. I hadn’t built a filter that let interested people in. I’d built one that let scanners in.
My open rate sat around seventy percent after that, which is very good for a newsletter. I’d been quietly pleased about it for months. You can see what it really was in the timing. On one send, twenty clicks landed inside the same minute. Sixty-five clicks out of a hundred came from three accounts.
Scanners don’t read. They check.
Here’s the number that settles it. Eleven months of a seventy percent open rate. And $141.99 earned, all of it from sponsored ads that pay a few cents a click. I’m not counting that as a start. I can’t tell how many of those clicks were people either.
I’m 78. I’d rather know than carry on being pleased.
So that’s week 0. No pitches, nothing earned, because the work this week was finding out where I actually stand – which is close to the beginning.
Here’s what happens next. For twelve Saturdays, from 10 October to 26 December, I’m going to try to get somebody to pay me for something I already know how to do. Each Saturday I’ll write down what happened. What I tried. What came back. How many people I asked, and how much money came in.
Most weeks that last number will be nothing. I’ve built this page so that a nothing week looks like a nothing week, instead of quietly going missing.
I don’t know how this ends. That’s rather the point of writing it down while it happens.