While I’ve been email marketing for over two decades, this is the first time ever that I’m working on a weekly newsletter for you and the other Ingeniuses, and I’m doing a ton of research and a ton of documentation along the way to tell you how it’s been.

It hasn’t even been a month since we started and it’s already been a wild ride - soon enough we’ll be telling you all about it (and the first ones to hear about it will be the people who come in to our live shows).

As a part of this experiment, I’ve been doing a lot of research, and I found 6 tactics you can use in the early stages to find content for your newsletter EASILY (or you can just watch the 13 minute YouTube video I did about this).

Here they are:

Content Tactic #1: Use Stolen UGC

UGC stands for “user generated content” - this is the content created by the users of a service either on that platform, with its assistance, or even just about the service.

A lot of companies spend a lot of money trying to get UGC from its customers because it’s just so valuable for their brand.

But, their UGC can also be valuable for you if you curate it from the right place.

For this strategy, you’ll be curating, or sharing, the UGC from other brands’ communities (with full credit, of course!).

One example of this is the curation of particular Reddit threads.

Another example is the curation of app called Fish Bowl, a community/forum for corporate professionals.

You can also go to forums like Wall Street Oasis, a community for finance and Wall Street people, to find debates, guides, rants, and other forms of UGC from their users.

The cool thing is a lot of brands will welcome your curation of their content as long as you’re giving credit, because it promotes and spreads awareness of their brand.

I talk about exactly how to do this at about 0:36, by the way.

Content Tactic #2: Spy On Your Competitors

I find it a lot easier to get started with something if I’m immersed in it.

For example, if I wanted to be a prolific newsletter writer, I would read a ton of newsletters for inspiration.

To do this, I created a dummy email address and subscribed to hundreds of newsletters that seemed to be similar to what I was looking to start.

Over the course of two months, I actually went through 8,000 emails to get inspiration and see what everyone else was talking about, and I think it really helped me.

You can use this tactic to find stories, get content to repurpose inside of ChatGPT, or just to get inspired.

You also don’t have to read 8,000 emails like me to get value out of this method.

I talk about how to go about this tactic at about 2:40.

Content Tactic #3: Curate Books with AI

There’s a little known feature on your iPhone that can help you turn books into content.

To REALLY understand how to do it, you need the visual demo - I do a full 6 minute training on it over on YouTube - so go study that to fully understand this method.

Content Tactic #4: Summarize Long-form Content with AI

People are busy. A lot of them want the information from long form podcasts or interview, but they just don’t have the time to actually listen to them.

You can take advantage of this and provide people with the summaries and key points of longform videos they’re too busy to watch.

And you can use AI to help. You can use tools like Assembly.ai, or this Hugging Face model to grab the transcriptions of long youtube videos and then feed those transcripts to ChatGPT to pull the newsletter-worthy pieces of content out.

In my training, I explain how to do this at about the 3:30 mark.

Content Tactic #5: Solving Your Own Problems

The best content is content that helps people sove problems.

You can help people solve their problems by going out, solving your OWN problems, and then talking about it.

Have a fitness plan? Go lose 20 pounds, document how you did it, then talk about it.

Chances are, you’re not the only person with this problem and other people want to know how to solve it as well.

The strategy here is to ‘build in public’, set a goal you haven’t reached, investigate how to get there, apply those findings, then share it in real time.

You don’t even have to do it successfully, you could FAIL to lose 20 pounds and still have content come out of it. Talk about what didn’t work, what you’ll try next time, etc.

When you create content by solving your own problems, treat it like a science experiment. You have a hypothesis, you research it, test it, publish your findings, regardless of whether or not your hypothesis is supported.

This is actually what I’m doing right now! Ingeniosity itself is one of those experiments, and I’m racking up a lot of really valuable content that I’m going to be publishing very soon.'

People like it when you conduct these experiments because it’s relatable (they want to solve the same problem you’re working on) and because people value transparency.

Content Tactic #6: Get Guests To Do It For You

Can’t come up with anything? Borrow somebody’s brain and get a guest to write for your newsletter.

But, if you’re running a newer newsletter with only a few subscribers, this might seem impossible. Why would somebody be interested in writing content for little ol’ me?

While it might be challenging to get somebody to guest on your brand new newsletter, it’s definitely not impossible.

The key is identifying the influential figures within your niche. These influencers don’t necessarily need to be fellow newsletter owners; they could be on YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, they could even be your neighbor - where you find them doesn’t necessarily matter as long as they have something valuable to share.

After you’ve identified the people who could have something valuable to contribute, it’s time to reach out.

You’re going to have to get comfortable with cold email - that’s how you’re going to find your guest. Be polite, but forward and specific. Invite them to answer a specific question on a specific topic, don’t reach out to people with vague propositions.

This targeted approach not only communicates the value they can bring but also makes it easier for them to contribute. Specific requests are less likely to be overlooked because it requires less thinking on the part of the guest. More general requests require the guest to do more heavy lifting on their part, making it a less effective approach.

Many will ignore you, but it only takes 1 positive response to get some valuable guest content. Persistence is your ally here, don’t get disheartened if your first few emails go unanswered. This is a tactic that relies on volume, the more emails you send, the higher your chances of success.

And, as your newsletter grows and you estabilish a reputation as someone who provides real value, it will get easier to find guests. Eventually, if your brand grows large enough, they’ll come to you!

Another slightly different approach you can take is to reach out on LinkedIn if you can’t find their email. LinkedIn is a good platform to ask for advice, it’s very common for professionals to send cold messages asking for ‘coffee chats’ or 30 minute informational interviews to gain a better understanding about someone’s area of expertise.

And, like almost any opportunity vehicle, a little bit of cash can really expedite the process. There are websites like intro.co that allow you to pay money to get 30 minutes of time with experts over Zoom or the phone, and it’s not even that expensive.

You can book guests for as low as $50 and up to about $1000 on the platform for a talk, but experts cost a few hundred dollars a call. But, in my opinion, that’s very cheap to get on the phone with people like the reddit founder, the Zillow founder, billion dollar VC fund owners, and all kinds of other experts you’d be surprised you can contact for under $1,000.

Don’t see the value in paying for this sort of thing? Well, according to business superstar Alex Hormozi, his paid introduction experience paid off big time - and it cost him 6-figures.

He invested $120,000 into 4 hours of coaching with billionaire Grant Cardone over Zoom. While he found the advice valuable, it also served as rich content for his audience.

Don’t worry, you don’t need to shell out 100k to make your paid introduction worth it - with some strategic thinking, you could make a small $100 investment go pretty far…

The Secret Spy Tool to Skyrocket Your Market Research... And It's FREE!

Have you ever stared at your screen for hours trying to come up with your next ad creative?

Maybe not, but I can say that I have.

The antidote for my ‘marketer’s block’ has always been to spy on other people’s ads.

Facebook has an ad library you can use, TikTok has one, and now Google does: its brand new Ads Transparency Center.

Interestingly, they released this tool “for a safe and open internet”, but we all know that people are using this tool to spy on their competitors.

While this isn’t breaking news, it is relatively new and only came out a few months ago and I don’t really see people talking about it, which doesn’t make any sense to me because it’s actually such a powerful tool.

Why is this big news for you?

If you don’t already use ad libraries as a part of your market research strategy, you need to start now.

I’ve actually launched offers and entire businesses based off of the insights I’ve gotten from using tools like this. You’re basically in the dark if you’re not working these kinds of tools into your workflow.

Using different spy tools, I've identified market gaps and needs. And now, with Google’s new tool, this research is even more accessible.

Let me demo the tool for you

I actually ran a quick 5 minute training over on YouTube going over how you can use this tool to boost your bottom line.

Originally we did it live on our weekly Wednesday training (which you need to start attending, by the way!) and we looked at what kinds of ads HubSpot, BlackRock, and Walmart were running.

To get the full benefits of this new tool, you really need to go and see the full training we did.

If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email!

Thanks for reading.