Guides to writing an email course

Six subjects, each with one complete guide at the top and the shorter pieces underneath it: building a list at all, email courses as a format, the welcome sequence, the lead magnet, the five-day challenge, and getting the mail delivered. Every page carries the date it was last reviewed, opens with its answer, and says where its rules come from.

Each subject has one long guide that is meant to be complete on its own, and a handful of shorter pieces that answer one question each: a template written out in full, a rule explained with its source, a decision between two things. The long guide is the place to start if you have an afternoon; the short ones are the place to start if you have a question. Where a guide describes a rule — what confirmed opt-in requires of you, what has to be in the footer of a commercial email, what the large mailbox providers ask of anyone sending in bulk — it links to where the rule is written, because a rule with no source is only advice wearing a uniform. A new guide is added only when a question arrives that none of these can absorb without getting worse; anything smaller is added to the guide that already owns the subject, and that guide’s review date moves.

Most of these pages are about the format rather than any particular tool. The exception is the guide to email course software, which compares the tools by name — including 5dayemail.com, which the authors of this site make — from dated facts with a source for every one. What 5dayemail does, and what it deliberately does not do, is on the home page, where it can be checked against the thing itself.