Hi, welcome to 2022. I hope this episode finds you well. We're in mid-ish January, i think, by the time that you hear this. I like the new year. I don't get super nuts about resolutions and stuff like that, but I do like to look back and sort of assess what worked and what didn't and kind of make adjustments. It feels really fresh to me. My birthday is the day after Christmas, so I think I've always had this association with a new birthday, or a new age rather, and a new year. They're kind of really close together. It's just like this momentum I have, i think, in my chart and in my life. That's always been. It's always felt really fresh for me.

This year I just celebrated 40, which is exciting Weird Weird to say that, but 40 years old, it feels good. I really am excited. I feel like sort of this is a really sweet spot in life. The late 30s were great, the early 30s were great, but I think everybody's life is different. But I think that coming into more of myself, understanding more of what I'm all about, getting better at practicing the things I want to get better at getting better at saying no to the things I don't actually want to do all that stuff has somehow become easier. I'm looking forward to the next decade and also this next year ahead. There's a lot of cool stuff going on, but there's also a lot of crap going on. I just lost a big contract branding contract that hopefully it won't be lost for good. But due to COVID, if you're in the Northern Hemisphere like I am I'm staying in Minnesota and not doing the beach thing this year It can be a huge bummer because when the virus kicks up, stuff gets canceled. People don't want to be indoors And for photographers it's too cold to shoot outdoors most of the time. If you're feeling that bit of a bummer, i'm with you. This is actually a really great time to focus on other stuff in your business Contracts and voices, all the sort of logistical work, flowy things that get buried under shooting. This is a good time for that. If that speaks to you, if that's something that you're planning on doing, then this episode and the next one are going to hopefully be a little helpful for you.

I'm going to be talking about email lists exclusively. I've spoken about them before, but I'm going to just give you a little bit of the what and the why sort of what's the deal with email lists for photographers and why are they important, and hopefully that helps inspire you to get organized when it comes to your list. I say that because lists are. it's like a broken record, i think, but lists are so important to your business. I mean, i've said this many times before, but I have brought in a lot of extra money when it's been needed. I did the Pay It Forward campaign in 2020 when COVID hit and asked my list to purchase their family sessions ahead of time. That got me through a huge lurch, i guess, in income, and I've also I tend to sell out my mini sessions really, really quickly, and that's also because I have a mini session list. So those are just two examples of, as a photographer, why your list can be really important. But there are, you know, kind of bigger reasons, just sort of broader reasons, broader strokes.

I guess that you may want to consider having a list, and the big one is obviously to connect with your audience. We can connect on social, that's true, but not everyone is on social. A lot of people are, but a lot of people aren't, and a lot of people, even if they are, don't see your stuff. So the argument for getting something to go directly into someone's email box is pretty strong. Email box, inbox, whatever. You know you want to be regularly connecting with your audience. You want to be sharing your story. You know you're a service provider. It's generally just you, it's not you and you know a million other people. Like an office, i mean you might be a photo studio, fair enough, but for the most part when you can connect a little bit human to human with people, it just keeps you top of mind. It makes it more fun and easier when you do get together to do those photo shoots. You can go a lot more in depth in emails than you can on a lot of social media platforms, in the sense that, like you know, substack is such a cool resource right now And people are really turning to long form communication And so, like I said, if folks aren't on social or they're not seeing you pop up because of the algorithm, an email is a great chance to like, really like, bring people to other places.

You know blog posts offers resources, anything that you want to do. It's really easy to do that in an email. You can serve your audience and add value in email really well. An example of that might be, let's say, you're a family photographer and in your newsletter, every week or every two weeks, whenever you schedule it, you have a little section of products or toys or stores that you really love for kids, you know, and so if your clients are parents which if you're a family photographer they are that just, it's not photography related, but it adds value and it gives your audience something of value to look forward to, like oh my gosh, i learned about this really cool clothing line That's eco-friendly or whatever, and it's in your newsletter. So it doesn't always have to be like this is what I'm doing as a photographer. It should definitely include this is what I'm doing as a human. These are products or things that I think are cool. This is what I'm listening to, this is what I'm reading. You get the point. So adding value is another thing that you can do in your newsletters And, again, you can do this on social as well, but I coach a lot about how not everyone is seeing everything you put out there, and so if someone misses it on social, they'll get it in the newsletter.

Vice versa, maybe some people miss your newsletter, but they get it on social. But you know you want to at least be reaching your audience where they are, and my audience opens their emails. So that's where I'm coming from. You can also share little mini lessons. You can share tips and tricks. You know how to prepare for shoots. Really, it's just a way to build your relationship with folks outside of the time that you're shooting with them once or twice a year. So it's maintaining that relationship, it's building that relationship, it's warming them up when you do have an offer. So, rather than just like mini sessions, you know it's letting people know what's going on in between the mini sessions, for me, for example.

So those are all reasons that having an email list is really useful. The big one, of course, is that you have control and ownership over those emails once people opt into something. So once they say like, yes, here's my email list or here's my email address, you know you can you have that list, and we saw it with Vine a few years ago, if you remember that. We almost saw it with TikTok here in the States. But social media platforms can just stop And you know you don't want to depend solely on your followers on one platform in case that happens. So if you can get folks from social media to also be on your list so that you can communicate with them in a more controlled way should anything happen. That's a really good reason.

Also, on that note and you already heard it I am bringing back Grow Your List. It used to be a group zoom thing And I've just turned it into a self-paced course. So I've taken everything that I taught in Grow Your List and put it into a little self-paced course that doesn't take more than maybe 20 minutes to go through. It might take a couple hours to get all of your sequencing written out and your lead magnet sharpened up and your forms put together, but for the most part, you can go from zero to like starting your list in a very short period of time with the information in this mini course. So it's 2022. I wanted to offer it in a price point that was fair to me but also just really accessible to anybody that needs to be doing this. So for $22, you can get the entire Grow Your List course with the workbook and the worksheets and the sample lead magnet and sample templates for your welcome sequences. There's all kinds of stuff in there, so you can just go to photobishelpcom forward slash list.