She built a fully booked business without networking

Last Friday, I wrote about how the newsletter is the only channel you fully own. Today, I’d like to show you what that means in practice with one of the twelve stories from the book.

When the copywriter Kathrine Louise Nielsen started her business in 2016, she’d just moved to Canada. No professional network. No coffee dates, no networking breakfasts. So she created a newsletter instead and sent it out once a week, just so people could hear from her regularly.

Within a year, she was fully booked. She’s been that way ever since, without cold calling and without all the networking fuss that many self-employed people think is a must.

My favourite detail: A project for Novo Nordisk came about because a project manager was sitting in the canteen with a colleague who’d attended one of Kathrine’s courses ten years earlier, and her name came up when someone said, ‘We need a copywriter’. Ten years from meeting to recommendation. That’s the sort of customer journey a newsletter facilitates, because you keep popping up in people’s inboxes.

And the size? Kathrine’s list stands at just over 1,840 subscribers. It’s not an American ‘dream figure’, but it’s enough for a fully booked business here at home.

That’s how all twelve case studies in the book are: real people, on a scale that’s achievable.

If you pre-order the book before 1 October, you’ll receive a e-book by email when it’s published, along with a place on the workshop.