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This Black Friday, we did $650,000 in revenue in 10 days. And we did it almost entirely through email. So in this video, I'm going to walk you through how I wrote our Black Friday emails, how I constructed this whole campaign, how I prep the page, how I organize a campaign like this, how I come up with ideas for how to frame the value of each email, and how I also frame the value of the product that we're dropping. So if you want to see how I write emails that generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue, especially in a very compressed period of time, like, here you go. All right, so the very first thing I do whenever I'm constructing a big email campaign, and by big, I mean, you know, something north of 5 to 10 emails, especially when we're doing a campaign like this for Black Friday, this is going to happen over the course of a week or 10 days. And sometimes especially near the end of the campaign, we're sending more than one email per day. So two emails are on the very last day. Usually we'll send like three or even four emails, like, hey, you know, 24 hours left, 12 hours left, five hours left, right? And so the very first thing that I do whenever I'm building a big sequence like this is I shell it all out. I like using Notion. You can do this in a Google Doc, it doesn't really matter. I like using Notion because I can organize everything into these little dropdowns. And the first big decision is what emails are being sent on what days. So all I do is I shell out, here's how many emails we're targeting, and here's when we're going to send each email. And the best way to do that is to just pick, you know, the day and then put the date. And the reason that that's so helpful is it it gives you a starting point for how big is this thing going to be? You know, how many total emails am I going to need to create? And when you do that, what you're sort of doing is you're creating this container where you have a very clear beginning and you have a clear end. And if you don't have that to start with, then what happens? And we talk about this mistake in all of our writing programs in chip 30 in premium ghost Trading Academy, if you don't create that constraint of a beginning and an end, what happens is you fall into the legacy writers problem where you just sit down and you start writing and you don't really know where you're going yet. Right? The Metaphor I use is it's sort of like being stuck in the middle of the wilderness with just a flashlight and you're trying to find your way out, right? You can only see a few feet in front of you. What you want to do is you want to light up the whole forest. And so this is a very easy and effective way of lighting up the whole forest and seeing, okay, I've got this many emails I need to write. It's going to happen over X amount of days. It also helps you see which emails are going to go on which days, Right? So maybe even if you. If you come up with two ideas, you might want one of them to happen on a weekend versus another one to happen on a weekday, right? So it helps to make all of these decisions to start. Okay, so once you have a clear beginning and end and you've defined those dates, the next thing and if you think about it, it just makes sense in a hierarchy of decisions, order, right? The next thing that you want to come up with are, so what is the theme of each email? What is the idea of each email? And some of these you sort of already know. I like working from both ends and then getting closer and closer to the middle. Think of the middle of a campaign as when you're probably providing the most value and, or you're leaning the most into whatever the hard pitch or the hard sell is. But at the beginning and at the end you have these bookends, right? So the beginning is almost always, hey, we have this exciting thing coming up. And the end is almost always, hey, 24 hours left, or 12 hours left, right? Or three hours left. So I actually like starting with the ends and then working my way to the middle. And so some of these pieces, as you notice, you know, as I write here, you notice sometimes I'll be moving ideas back and forth, sometimes I'll put an idea there and then I'll later realize, actually I want that idea to happen in the FOMO sequence at the end. Right? So the way that I typically think about a big campaign like this is I think of the first half as being very value oriented, and I think of the second half as being very sales oriented. And the reason this is so important and this is a really big idea that I preach in everything that I Talk about on YouTube or in this podcast or in all of our writing programs, is people can't care about the solution until they first care about the problem. So where a lot of creators go wrong when they're building out email campaigns is they think that the name of the game is I have to sell this product to people. And that's actually not the name of the game. The name of the game. This all goes back to why I'm such a big believer in ghostwriting versus copywriting. Copywriting all leans more towards sales. Ghostwriting leans more toward education. And the piece that so many people miss, especially copywriters, is they think that the game is all about sales. And that's actually not what it's about. The game is about education, right? So you first have to educate people and then you can present a solution. So the first half of any email campaign that I'm putting together almost always has to do with, let me explain to you what problem you currently have in your life and, or if you have this thing that you desire, here are the things that you're going to run into that are going to keep you from that, right? So it is very education oriented. And the reason that I do that is because I need the person to care about the problem before I can present a solution, right? So then after I pick ideas for each one of the emails, the next thing that I do is I give. This is what I like to call prepping the page. So I want to create a shell inside each one of these emails. So if you notice, this is what I'm doing. And I know that every email in some capacity is going to start with hey there. And then it's going to end with Cheers. Dickie and Cole links to our companies, right? And it might seem like such a simple thing. And I also know every email is going to have a subject line and it's going to have a preview text line, right? And these might seem like really small variables, but, but when you just shell them out and then you copy, paste them into every single email like template, you know that you're basically creating. It's not really a template, but you know, like a container for each email. What it does is it makes it really, really easy to approach the writing. Because now you're not starting from a blank page every time I open an email to begin writing it. Well, I already know I'm gonna start with hey there. And I already know I'm gonna end with chat soon. Dickie and Cole links to our companies. So it sort of tricks your brain into feeling like 20, 30% of the writing's already done, right? And the more that you can prep the page, the easier it is to approach the writing. This is how, by the way, I can write an entire 10, 15 day email campaign in 3 hours. I reduce the cognitive load by trying to get as many little decisions out of the way as possible and by making it easy for myself to approach the writing. And the way that you make it easier for yourself is you create these containers inside of each email. Once I see those containers, I go, oh, I'm not really writing, I'm just filling them in. Trust me, I've tried everything over the past 10 years. Writing on the Internet, this is the most effective technique that I've come up with. And as soon as this clicked for me, the speed and efficiency of my writing went through the roof. What you'll also notice me doing is, as I do this, I am actually not necessarily writing or thinking about this email campaign linearly. Part of why I encourage you to shell out all of the pieces first is because you want to think of it as one thing that you're constructing. You're not really, like, writing 10 different emails. You're constructing a highly choreographed sequence, right? So you have to view the sequence as a whole and then break it down into parts. And so what inevitably happens as I go through this exercise is I will start to come up with ideas for different parts of the sequence. And those ideas don't always come linearly. So you'll notice here I'm just diving right into this isn't day one, but I'm just diving right into one of these days. Because in that moment, I was like, oh, at this point in the sequence, I know I'm going to want to do something like this. I know that this is how I'm going to frame the value. I'm going to create this sort of language that I know I can reuse in a bunch of these emails. Let me just do that now. So I think a mistake that a lot of writers make is they think about this whole process linearly, and they think that they have to do it linearly. And in reality, that actually makes it a lot harder for you, because as you go through and structure things this way, you're going to come up with ideas. You're going to be like, oh, that's a great way of framing the product. I could easily use that as a section in all of the emails leading up to the FOMO sequence. Well, why don't I just throw that into all of these emails now? Right? You can move so much faster when the idea hits you and you're excited about that idea in that moment. Whereas if you put the constraint on yourself that you need to start with the first email and you can't Move on to the second or third email until you finish the first email. Well, it's not very effective. It takes you a lot longer. You're asking yourself to do something that you're actually not in that moment in flow doing, right? So something that I hope you take away from this is when I'm writing these email campaigns, very often I will shell the whole thing out and then I'll write like the second to last email first and then I'll be like, oh, this actually gives me an idea for this email here in the middle, I'm going to do that. Or here. What I realized is that in every one of the emails where I'm talking about a different section of this product, I realized that that was actually a template. And that template I could just duplicate, right? So in this product, for example, for category newsletter creator, that was the name of the product. It was actually broken into five smaller products, like five mini courses that laddered up to this larger product. And in each one of these mini courses I covered something different, right? In one I covered writing and one I covered monetization, etc. And so whenever you have pieces of a product, a very easy framework that you can use is to just take each one of those pieces and turn it into a value email, okay? Because really what you're trying to communicate to the person is here's this thing you want or here's this problem that you have here is sort of high level how to think about it or how to solve it. And then by the way, there's an entire section inside this product where I help you solve it. And that little three step value chain is essentially the whole secret here, right? You're not just saying buy my product. You're not just saying, hey, here's a new product and it's 50% off, right? I see all these mistakes that creators and writers make all day long. The name of the game is you go, here's the problem you have, here's the thing you desire, here's how to think about it. And by the way, inside the product, I tell you exactly how to do it. I give you the answer, right? And you're just sort of repeating that loop over and over again. And on the front half of the email campaign, you're doing this in a way more value forward way, right? It's more of a here's how to think about it. Oh, and P.S. really excited to share all this with you. In the product and in the back half of the email campaign, you're basically flipping it and you're going, here's a little bit of value, but really, here's all of the different ways I help you solve this inside of the product. So it's more of a hard sell. But you want to educate them first before you get into the sales, right? So as I go through the writing process here, I'm trying to fill in as many of these pieces as I can. I want, in an ideal world, before I sit down and start actually writing these emails, what I want is I want a day and date chosen for every single email. I want an idea for each email on each day so I can see how the ideas stack up throughout the course of the sequence. Right? I want it to be choreographed, and then I want to make as many small decisions as possible inside of those larger decisions. So I want to come up with working subject lines. I want to come up with working preview text lines. I want to create the shell hey there and talk soon. Right? I want to fill in any quick ideas I have about those emails. It could just be chicken scratch. It doesn't even have to be real writing. If I come up with a piece or a section within an email that I really like, because it just hits me in that moment, I immediately ask myself, how could I duplicate this? How could I use this again in another email? Great. Copy paste. Put it over there, maybe tweak it so I don't have to think about it. So before I even get into the writing, I want to have as many of these decisions made as possible. Because when you start to get into the writing, writing is actually very different than strategic thinking, right? Strategic thinking is very big picture. It's like, what are the big decisions and how do I think about making those decisions? Writing is actually very in the weeds. You are literally thinking on a sentence and word by word level. And so it's very hard to be in the flow. And every three seconds, go back to strategic thinking and go, do I want to put this here? Right? So you actually want to separate these two. You want to batch these as two different tasks, and you want the strategic thinking to all happen in one work session or one little sprint or even just together. And then you want all of the writing to happen at a different work sprint or just together. Oftentimes when I'm writing these, I will do both, but back to back, right? I'm not going. I'm not doing one and then the other one and then the other, and I'm flipping, right? I'm doing all the strategic thinking, and then once that's Done. I just move into the writing, and I just stay in the writing. Right? And so that's really the goal. And I find that, again, a big mistake that writers and creators make is they don't do that. They don't separate these tasks, and they bounce back and forth. And that is part of why the writing takes so long. And it's also why the end product isn't as good, because you're doing neither efficiently. You're not allowing yourself time and space to think deeply about the strategic component by itself and then the writing component by itself. And again, the last thing, just to reiterate, when I do all of this, the real goal is to make it as efficient as possible for me. When I move into the writing, I want as many strategic decisions out of the way so that all I have to think about is communicating the ideas that I've already picked, right? All I'm doing is filling in the sections that I've already shelled, and that is the whole goal. Okay? So then once all the strategic thinking is done, then it's time to get into the writing. And I just want to, you know, walk you through my thought process of writing this first launch email. People think that, you know, the writing of the launch email is different than writing of a value. Email is different than writing, like a FOMO sequence email. And the reality is, they're really not. All of the principles are the same. The one rule of thumb is it's like lead with education. Educate the person on the problem before you present the solution. And that's about it. So let's just start really simply. First thing I say, hey, there. Today is the day, right? Today is launch day. That's the first email I'm writing. Now. A lot of people will sit there and they'll go, oh, should I say, today is the day? Or should I say, I have a special announcement? Or should I say, you know, today is a special day in our company's history? Or it doesn't matter. Those are all different versions of the same idea. One of the biggest things that I can pass along to you is that in writing, there is really one thing that crushes your efficiency, and that one thing is not understanding the difference between a different idea and a different adjective for the same idea. Okay? And if there's one thing that you could take away from this that would improve the efficiency of your writing is whenever you find yourself debating adjectives, whenever you find yourself sitting there obsessing over, should I say this or this? The first question you need to ask Yourself is, wait, am I debating between two different ideas? Or am I debating between two different ways of saying the same idea? And let me tell you something. The vast majority of the time, especially when you're writing like an email campaign like this, if you are sitting there just debating how to say the same thing in a different way, you are wasting a lot of time. Because the reality is, it doesn't matter if you say today is the day or if you say today is a special day or you say, I have an announcement to make. It's the same idea, and the reader is going to interpret it the same way. Okay? So one, don't sit there and obsess over saying the same thing a different way. Just if you have one idea, run with it. And if you come up with a different and better idea, then, sure, swap the ideas. But don't sit there obsessing over adjectives. Okay? So the first thing that I do is I just get the intro out of the way. And if you notice the intro is very short and it's very. It's like a little bit of context, and then we dive right in, okay? You do not need to sit there and give a whole commencement speech before you get to the point. All right? And the first real milestone, I'm a big believer in subheads. This is a massive just framework and thing that we hammer home inside ship 30 is that you should think about your writing inside the constraint of subheads. Because what happens is readers will open these emails and they will skim the subheads first. They won't read the email top to bottom. They will skim the subheads, and then they will decide whether it's worth it to read. Okay? So little pro tip, whenever I'm structuring these emails, I really try and think in subheads first. And the very first subhead, especially in an email campaign for a product launch like this, the very first subhead needs to be crystal clear. What are we talking about? Right? So I don't want to bury the name of this product in the intro. I want to make it as abundantly clear as possible. Hey, there, first subhead. This is the product, right? I want the cognitive load of this email to be near zero. I want someone to be able to be, like, incapacitated and still be able to understand what this email is saying. Okay? And I know if that sounds ridiculous, it's like, good, because that's how you should think about it. All right? You need your subheads to be crystal clear. And so the way I structure these emails is Typically, first subhead, here's what this email's about. Here's what we're going to talk about. Here's what I'm giving to you, right? Two thirds of the way down. Usually some variation of, like, here's what's included, or here's what we're going to talk about, or here's the problems, or here's the outcomes, right? Like, and here is the thing a little bit deeper. So you could skip to that section. And then usually at the end, some variation of. So if you want to take action, here's what you do. And if your subheads are not clearly communicating that little story arc, Right, because that's really what it is. You have three subheads in a given email, give or take, and those subheads create a mini story arc. Here's the thing. Here's more info about the thing. If you want to take action, here's what you do, right? And so I think about writing within those containers. And once I have those containers set, then I go, all right, well, let me start digging into the specifics, right? So here I am presenting. Here's the product. Here are the different things that the product is going to help you with, right? And then I'm essentially teeing up over the course of, you know, this next week, I'm gonna tell you about all of those things, okay? So I'm not just saying here's the product and here's what makes the product great. I'm saying, here's the things that the product is gonna help you solve, and I'm going to continue hammering home why these are important, what problems they solve, what outcomes they help unlock, right? I'm setting the frame of the education from here. The next section that you. You can play with. It's optional, but it is something that I'm throwing in here is some sort of credibility, right? So it's not just, here's this thing that I'm going to help you solve, but it's also, here's why you can trust me and trust us to help you solve it, okay? And if you don't have this and you don't have a huge amount of credibility, you don't need to do this. I am such a firm believer in the quote, unquote, credibility is icing on the cake. But it is not the cake itself. The cake is your ability to educate people on the problem that they're faced with or the problem that they don't know they have. If you can do that sufficiently, they will listen to you. If you can't do that sufficiently. No amount of credibility is going to get them to listen to you. And I find that this is something that takes people a really long time to understand. And there's so much I see it in our programs because one of the things that writers ask me most often is they're like, what do I do if I don't have credibility? Or the follow up is they get moving and they go, what's the best way to leverage this new credibility that I have? And sure, I can give you the answer, but the real answer is that it is not as important as people think. The example I always share is I built my ghostwriting agency to 300 clients and over $2 million in annual revenue. And I didn't use a single testimonial. Literally, it was all, all, hey, this is ghost. We have a ghost trading agency. Sorry, we can't talk about our clients. But. And then I would go back to the problem the person had. I didn't use any testimonials and I had no problem generating millions of dollars. Another great. Just if you want to stress test this for yourself, notice the next time that you're scrolling through TikTok or Instagram or Twitter or whatever feed, right? You will give your attention to things not. Not because the person has some massive amount of credibility, but because they start the video or they start the thread or they start the whatever piece of content speaking directly to you and the problem that you have. So if a video starts with, you know, hey, are you looking to adopt a dog? But you don't know where, where to find, I don't know, like ethical adoption centers near you, you're like, yeah, actually, I was literally just thinking about that. Now, does that person need to have 18 degrees and be the most credible person on earth? No. It could literally be some random person who lives in your city that's like this. This was my experience and I just wanted to share this with you. The reason that you listen to them is not because they have some massive amount of credibility. The reason that you listen to them is because they are speaking directly to the problem that you have, or a problem that you don't know that you have, but now you're aware of it. All right? So if you do have credibility, it's great to throw that in there. So, for example, here, the reason that we picked this topic was because we have done all of these things, right? We're like, here's a product showing you how to build and monetize a newsletter. It could be a Free newsletter. It could be a paid newsletter. Oh, and by the way, we've done this with two free newsletters and two paid newsletters. And these newsletters have generated millions of dollars for us and we have built two of the highest performing paid newsletters on Substack. That's a lot of credibility. And that's also what made it a great digital product idea. But you do not need to have that in order to create your first digital product. So I just want to hammer that home, okay? Another thing that I always am looking to do. Again, this is not necessary, but I'm always asking myself, how can I show or add some sort of visual that will reinforce the idea that I'm explaining in an email? So this might be a stripe screenshot. It might be a screenshot of a newsletter's growth in Substack or convertkit or wherever. It might be an image of the product. For example, like, we put the image of the product at the top of each email so people are reminded, like, yes, we are talking about this product, right? We're talking about all of the things related to this product. Something that we've been doing more recently that has been really effective, especially in emails further into the sequence is we've been either dropping screenshots of the product inside school, or a screenshot of a loom, or even embedding a loom itself and then having people watch the loom and go, and here's a deep dive on what's inside the product, or here's a quick explanation, or here's a quick bonus module. A little pro tip further inside the email sequences, something that we found to be extremely effective is we would do pss where if someone still hadn't bought, you know, in emails further in the sequence, we would go, PS if you're still on the fence, just take a look at how in depth these modules are. Here's. Here's a free module just so you can poke around and see what sort of information we share. So we're literally like, here's a free module. Check it out if you want, right? So the more that you can show and not just tell, right? The telling is important, the writing is important. But I'm always asking myself, how can I reduce the cognitive load? How could I make it where the idea that I'm trying to communicate can be understood with the least amount of brain power in the least amount of time? That is always the measure for success. It is not like, how beautifully written can I make this email? It is not how complicated can I Make this email. It's not how smart I can make this email, it's what is the core idea and how do I get there as fast as possible. And so if you notice, as I'm assembling this, this launch email, something that you might see me do as well is I will bounce around to different sections. I will bounce around to different sentences. I might start with the intro and then get an idea for the conclusion, and then go, bounce to the conclusion and then I'll go, all right, now that I have, you know, the end pieces, now I can go back to the middle, right? And part of this, this approach of structuring things in containers gives you that freedom, right? You can bounce between sections, and then, if you notice, it's a very small thing in here, but if you notice, what I will do is I will, often after I write, you know, one or two different sections, I will then go back to where those sections meet and I will maybe tweak the subhead between them. So in a metaphor, it's sort of like you're making a quilt and you do one section and then you do another section, and then when they're done or they're close to done, then you go back and you restitch them together. And that is often how I think about writing. I think of it like assembling a quilt, and. Which is kind of funny, but that is what I do, and that is how I think about it. And so one of the edits that I find myself making most often is I will finish two different sections and then I'll go to the subhead where they meet, and I might change the intro of that. You know, I might add an and or a but or a so. Because that just, like, as I'm reading it and I'm hearing, I'm like, oh, you just need that little word to sort of tie it together, right? And so that's the goal. And as I, as I go through and I do the writing, I give myself the freedom to bounce around. I give myself the freedom to follow ideas. If I come up with a section that I really like, something that you're going to repeat in a lot of these emails is you're going to repeat the. The CTA part, you know, the. So. And by the way, if you want our help, we cover all of this inside the product, right? That section, which is usually the last section of the email, you're probably going to reuse some variation of that. So when I come up with something that I like, I go, oh, I could Take this section, I could duplicate it and I just go and copy paste it into the shells of all the other emails, right? The last thing that I want to leave you with is this is one of those skills where you will get much better at it faster if you create constraints and you force yourself to do sprints within those constraints. Okay? So what I mean by that is oftentimes people think about writing as this indefinite thing. You know, it's the cliche where your friend's working on their novel, you're like, how's the novel coming along? And they're like, it's going. And there's no. It's indefinite, right? There is no hard cap, there is no clear end date, there is no constraint. And because there is no constraint, it just sort of goes on and on and on and on. And then 40 years later, your friend never finishes the novel. Right? And something that I've found to be extremely effective for me is I don't just think about writing as I write until I'm no longer writing, right? I don't think about it as indefinite. I think about it more as running a race or running a sprint. And so inherently, running a race or running a sprint means having a constraint, right? 100 yard dash, 200 yard dash, you know, 400 yard dash, whatever the constraint is. And so what I will do when I'm writing these emails is I will create that constraint for myself and I will say, not just I have to write this email sequence or just let's say you're writing five emails, five email sequence. I won't just say I have to write five emails. I will say I have to write five emails in two hours. And I set that constraint for a couple reasons. One, because setting a constraint forces action in a different sort of way. But two, what starts to happen is if you duplicate that process over and over and over again, you will train yourself to be able to think on command. And I find that this is something that a lot of writers really struggle with because they treat writing indefinitely. And the first time that you do this, you're going to struggle. You know, you're going to hit the two hour mark, you're going to have written two of the five emails and you're going to be like, well, I failed. Well, you shouldn't stop there, right? You should do it again and try again. Because what happens is pretty soon your subconscious is going to kick in and your subconscious is going to realize, wow, the conscious part of me wasn't playing around. You go and you ship those Two emails and you got done what you got done, right? So the subconscious realizes that the conscious isn't playing. And when you say you're going to do something, you do it. Which means the next time that you set a sprint, your subconscious kicks in faster and is more efficient because it knows, oh, whatever we get done in this writing session, this is getting shipped out. So we better move quickly. And when you start to do that enough times, pretty soon you will match. You will run the race in the amount of time that you've given yourself. And then once you get there, you can start bringing the time down. Okay, so I used to do this when I was running my ghostwriting agency and I would, I would ghostwrite articles and I would. Oftentimes the constraint was set for me. I would go, I have a client call in an hour, but I have another client who's asking for edits on their most recent piece. I have one hour to rewrite and fix that piece. I had a call, right? I only have an hour, which means I have a constraint. I have to do it. But once I got good at that, I could actually start bringing the time constraint down. I could tighten it and I could still perform within that amount of time. And I'm telling you, I got to a point where I was able to Ghostwrite an entire 800 word article in 15 minutes or less. But how I got there was by ghostwriting 3000 articles and doing it within time constraints. Okay. There was even a point running my agency where I was ghostwriting articles between client calls and sales calls and employee calls within 15 minute increments. So I would get off of a sales call at 1 and then I would write a brand new piece for a different client to 1:15. And then I would hop on at 1:15 with a new hire, and then at 1:30 I would get on a client call and then from 1:30 to 2 I would write another piece. Okay? And the only way that you can do that is when you put yourself through that, that test over and over and over again. And with emails, these campaigns are the. I do the exact same thing. And so when I sit down to write one of these, I don't think about it like this big indefinite thing. I set a constraint and then I push myself to get done whatever I can get done within that constraint. And then over time, I tighten that constraint so that my subconscious kicks in and I get more and more efficient over time. All right? And so this is one of those things where you can listen to this. You could read about Writing emails all you want. I could give you all the frameworks in the world, but the reality is you're going to get good at writing these sorts of campaigns the more that you do it. So for our businesses, in the past four years, I have probably written close to a thousand emails for this. Tons of education sequences and FOMO sequences and product launch sequences and nurture sequences and abandoned cart sequences, and over and over and over and over and over again. And every single time, every single time. The sequence that I made today is the best sequence that I've ever made. This launch sequence that did $650,000 in 10 days. This is the best sequence that I've ever written in my life. But I guarantee you, the next one that I write it will be better than this one. And that is how I have felt with every single thing that I write in every domain forever. You will always make your next best thing tomorrow, but the only way to get there is to write and do the thing today. So I hope this helped you, gave you a little behind the scenes on how I think about structuring these Black Friday campaigns. Really, all of our email campaigns, I do the same thing. And if you take nothing else away from this, I really hope that you adopt the Prep the Page framework. It is the most efficient thing that I have added to my writing arsenal. It's something I talk about all the time. So take that, use it, and incorporate this into your next launch campaign.