You have a list. You want your subscribers, friends, and followers to hire you, refer you, promote you, or otherwise do something that will (eventually) bring you more business.

That’s why you have a list, right?

You want people who have never hired you to pull the trigger. You want old clients to contact you about a new matter. You want referrals, reviews, sign-ups for your seminar, and you want people telling others about you or your content so you can build your list.

But you don’t want to overdo it. You don’t people on your list to leave or get pissed off and then leave. You don’t want people to think you’re too spammy or unprofessional.

So, how much is too much?

First, as long as you’re writing something your readers find interesting or valuable or that allows them to connect with you, you can’t write too often. Even every day is not too often.

So, not boring. Check.

But what about selling? How “pushy” or “salesy” can you be, should you be, and how much is too much?

In a nutshell: soft sell regularly and hard sell occasionally.

Yes, I said hard sell. You can (and should) do it because there are people on your list who need your help but need a little push. A hard sell from time to time may be just what they need to finally take action.

Good for them and obviously good for you.

Just don’t do it all the time because you’ll wear out your welcome.

We’ve all signed up on lists where everything we get is a hard sell. Pitch, pitch, pitch, urgency, scarcity, now or never, coming out of their pores.

Yeah, don’t be that guy.

Marketing is seduction. You can’t constantly ask your list to go to bed with you.

But this isn’t something most attorneys do. Most attorneys do the opposite.

They send lots of information but never sell anyone on anything.

News flash: you’re not in the information delivery business.

You’re in the helping business, so tell people what to do to get your help.

Tell your subscribers to make an appointment or call with questions or sign up for your next event.

Do that regularly because you never know when someone on your list is ready to take the next step.

While you’re at it, tell them to invite their friends to see your video, read your blog, or sign up for your newsletter. Their friends need your help, too.

Sometimes, you push a little. Sometimes, you push a lot. Sometimes, you add a link (and a few descriptive words) and let your readers decide if there’s something they should see.

In other words, mix it up.

In other words, be normal. Like you’re having an ongoing conversation with people you care about and want to have in your life for years to come.

Because you are.

My email course shows you how to do it right

Many studies confirm the supremacy of email over social media for marketing, including one I saw the other day.

Sumo sent a Facebook post to 74,000 fans and, they said, they got 10 clicks. They sent the same message to 81,000 email subscribers and got 4,203 clicks.

“In 10 hours, the email had 420x more clicks. Plus, with email you OWN the list. Not Facebook,” they said.

One reason for this disparity: many people simply don’t see your social media posts, due to filtering (censoring), and because many people don’t check social media as often as they check email.

But that’s not the entire story.

Even if you got the same number of clicks from social, email will almost always outperform social where it counts–new clients, repeat business, referrals, engagement, and relationship building.

Because email is more intimate than social media.

With social, unless you PM someone, everyone sees the same message. Most people, therefore, liken social media posts to ads or commercial messages.

But email is perceived as a personal message.

Even though you might send your message to hundreds or thousands of people, if you do it right, each recipient reads it as though it was sent just to them.

Doing it right starts with sending an email, not an ad or commercial message, or an article they can find anywhere online.

Email is the killer app.

This is why I (and others) tell you to build an email list. It’s why we say you can get big results with a small list. It’s why many of us build successful practices and businesses without spending a lot of time (or money) on other forms of marketing.

Build a list and stay in touch with it. By email.

If you want to learn how to do it right, go here