The first three modules are free
A List of Your Own
Someone finds you, has a look, and leaves. You'll never know who they were.
Unless you asked for their email address first. Then you can still be talking to them next year, and that is the whole of this course.
Modules 1, 2 and 3 are free to read.
Module 4 onward is $17, bought once.
No subscription, and nothing else to buy afterwards.
You keep starting over
Here is the shape of it, whether or not anyone has put it to you this way before.
You find some way to get a person's attention - a post, a comment, an ad, a conversation. They go and look at whatever you were recommending. Most of them don't buy. That's true of every sales page ever built, and anyone quoting you an exact percentage is guessing.
Then they leave, and they're gone. You paid for that visit with money or with an hour of your time, and you got one chance at them.
So next week you do it again, with different strangers. Then again the week after that. Nothing you did in March is available to you in November.
That isn't a character flaw and it isn't a shortage of effort. It's the arrangement.
Ask for the email address first
Send the visitor to a page of yours before you send them anywhere else. Offer something small and useful. Some people will give you an address and some won't - and the ones who do are still reachable tomorrow.
Now that same visit buys you something different. You can write to that person next week, next month, next year. You're not asking a stranger to make up their mind about you on the strength of one page.
And the list is yours. It isn't rented from a platform that can change its mind on a Tuesday. If the software you're using turns bad - puts its prices up, changes its rules, goes under - you take the addresses somewhere else, and the people on them never notice.
That one change is most of the difference between the people this works for and the people who quit.
What you'll actually build
One thing: a list of people who asked to hear from you, and a short run of emails that goes out automatically after they join.
That's it. Every module here serves that, and nothing else.
Why I wrote this one
I'm not a marketer and I don't have a system. The course I bought had 36 chapters, and I read them all.
Some of it was fine. But it quoted numbers nobody could have measured, it promised money on a timetable, and a few of the methods it taught would have had me quietly breaking the rules of sites I'd want to keep using.
But the worst of it was this. It started out teaching LeadsLeap, then switched to a completely different program without a word of explanation. One that isn't free.
You'll notice this course uses two programs as well. The difference is that I'm telling you here, on the first page you read, that both of them are free, and that I'll explain why each one is there before you sign up for anything.
I couldn't recommend it to anyone. I also couldn't unlearn the parts that were genuinely useful. So I wrote my own and left out everything I couldn't stand behind.
That's the whole of my authority here, and you should have it before you read any further: I'm a few steps ahead of you, not a hundred.
- It won't tell you what you'll earn. I don't know, and neither does anyone selling you a number.
- It won't quote a statistic I can't point at a source for.
- It will tell you when a step needs money, at the step where it happens.
You'll use two programs. Ignore most of what's in them.
Building a list needs four things: a page, somewhere to keep the addresses, a way to send emails automatically, and visitors. No free tool does all four. Two of them together do, so that's what this course uses.
Systeme.io does the first three. LeadsLeap brings the visitors.
Both have menus with far more on them than you need, and that's where most people freeze, click around for twenty minutes, and never come back. So here's the map.
Systeme.io
Sales funnels - builds your opt-in page (under Sites)
Contacts - holds your subscribers
Campaigns - the emails that go out automatically (under Emails)
LeadsLeap
Your visitors
Post Credit Ads - brings the visitors
Track Links - tells you what is working
Everything else in both programs works and has value. It just can't help you until you have something for it to point at. Module 8 is where you go back and look.
Is this for you?
This is for you if
- You're closer to retirement than to your first job, and you'd like income that doesn't involve a commute or a boss.
- You have more time than money, and you'd rather not pay for software before you've earned anything.
- You've been burned by at least one program that promised more than it delivered.
- You can give this about an hour a day for two months.
- You're willing to write an email. Not well. Just willing. (You can use AI.)
This is not for you if
- You need money this month. This doesn't do that, and neither does anything else that's honest with you.
- You want something that runs without you. This one needs you, especially at the start.
- You're looking for a shortcut. The shortcuts in the course I bought are exactly the parts I left out of mine.
- You want a guaranteed number. I don't have one, and I'd be suspicious of anyone who does.
And it's free to start
Here's the part I checked before I wrote any of this, because it's the part the course I bought got wrong.
Both programs are free to use, and neither one is a trial. You can build the whole thing - the page, the list, the automatic emails, your first visitors - without a card.
There are ceilings, and here they are. Systeme.io's free plan holds 2,000 subscribers, and it puts a small "Sent with systeme.io" line at the bottom of your emails. On LeadsLeap's free account you earn your traffic instead of buying it, which means at least ten minutes a day viewing other people's ads to build up credits for your own. (I spend 30 to 45 minutes, with my coffee.) That's a real cost. It's time rather than money, and if you have more time than money it's the better trade - but I'm not going to pretend it's nothing.
Both have paid plans. I'll tell you what they buy at the point where it matters, and the honest answer today is that you can't make that decision yet. By Module 7 you'll have a couple of weeks of your own numbers, and it turns into a real question with a real answer.
What you won't find here is a course that says free and then quietly needs a paid platform to work. That's what happened to me, and it's most of the reason this page exists.
Modules 1, 2 and 3 are free, and they stay free. Everything after Module 3 comes as one $17 purchase. I'd rather you knew that here than found out in three weeks.
The eight modules
One module a week, for eight weeks. The reading is short on purpose. The building is what fills the week.
Module 1 - Why the list is the only thing you own The argument first, the software second. What actually happens to a visitor when you send them straight to an offer, and what happens instead when you ask for an email first.
Free · Read: about 13 minutes · Build: about 45 minutes
Module 2 - Something worth an email address Nobody hands over an email address for "free tips." What works is one specific thing that solves one problem in one sitting. This module is about making that thing, and making it small enough to finish.
Free · Read: about 12 minutes · Build: about 3 hours
Module 3 - The page that asks One headline, one promise, one field, one button. You won't start from a blank screen - there are share links that import a working page you can change the words on.
Free · Read: about 15 minutes · Build: about 90 minutes
Modules 4 to 8 and the Resources page are $17 for all of it, bought once.
Same course, same voice.
Module 4 - What to say to new subscribers Somebody just gave you their address. What arrives, how fast, and what it says. We write the first three emails together, then connect them to your page so they go out on their own.
Part of the $17 set · Read: about 20 minutes · Build: about an hour
Module 5 - Your first twenty visitors How the credit system works, how to write a small ad someone actually clicks, and the daily habit that pays for it. Twenty visitors isn't a business. It's proof the machine is wired correctly.
Part of the $17 set · Read: about 15 minutes · Build: about 45 minutes, then at least 10 minutes a day
Module 6 - The sequence that runs without you What arrives on which day and why the order matters. Four more emails, added to the campaign you already built, so the first month runs whether or not you're at the desk.
Part of the $17 set · Read: about 18 minutes · Build: about 2 hours
Module 7 - Reading your own numbers Five numbers, and how to tell a traffic problem from an offer problem - because the fix is completely different and most people guess wrong. This is also where the paid-account conversation lives.
Part of the $17 set · Read: about 25 minutes · Build: about 45 minutes, then 10 minutes a week
Module 8 - Month three The module nobody writes. The novelty is gone, the numbers are small, and the work is just work. What to do anyway.
Part of the $17 set · Read: about 20 minutes · Build: ongoing
New to any of this? Start with the basics here.
Affiliate marketing, lists, autoresponders, landing pages, and the rest of the vocabulary. Definitions only, no strategy. Skip it if none of those words gave you pause.
Don't know what your list would be about yet?
What you could teach ➔
Ten questions about your working life. It gives you back a subject, the person it's for, and something you could give away. Free, about five minutes, no account.
Do them in order
Modules 1, 2 and 3 are free and they stay free. They aren't a sample - by the end of Module 3 you'll have something worth an email address, a page that asks for it, and a list catching what comes in.
Modules 4 to 8 and the Resources page are $17, bought once.
Not a subscription, and there's nothing else to buy afterwards.
The course
$17, BOUGHT ONCE
Module 4 - What to say to new subscribers
Module 5 - Your first twenty visitors
Module 6 - The sequence that runs without you
No subscription, no upsell, no reseller rights.