MY NEWSLETTER NURTURING SEQUENCE

Day 1: I’m a Former Coke Addicted Dog Walker Turned NY Times Bestselling Author

Hey hey, Light Hustler.

Thanks so much for taking my quiz and being open to hearing from me.

I’m oh so aware of the fact that you have an insane number of messages competing for your attention. Yet you took my quiz, entered your email address, and signed up to learn more.

I don’t take this lightly. In fact, I now see it as my obligation to compete against the other messages in your Inbox and stand out as something you want to read. I'll do this by introducing myself to you over the next week and then delivering weekly messages that I hope are both interesting and helpful to you.

So here goes: I’m Anna David. I’m a former coke addicted dog walker turned New York Times bestselling author who’s determined to help other people share their darkness to find their light.

Of course, I can’t help you share your darkness without telling you a little about mine.

So here goes…

I’ll never forget the day the woman whose dog I was walking told me that she no longer wanted to pay me my hourly rate of $15 since we’d agreed that I’d only be walking her dog for 15 minutes or so.

When I explained to her that she lived 20 minutes from me and so the entire experience took me over an hour, she responded, “Yes, but look at it this way: I work at Paramount. And they pay me to be there. They don’t pay me for the time I spend driving there.”

So that was it. I was demoted to $7 a day.

I wasn’t in a position to complain. At that time in my life, my main activity aside from walking this woman’s dog and lying to my therapist was doing cocaine by myself, pretending to write. My drug use had gone from casual to serious to extreme rather quickly and I was at the point where, after long nights of doing coke alone, I would get so disgusted with myself that I would throw the coke away, only to then start jonesing 20 minutes later and dig it out of the garbage.

After learning that I was actually willing to dig drugs out of the trash, I got smarter and started throwing my coke in the dumpster when the self-disgust hit. That’s when I learned that I was willing to dig cocaine out of a dumpster. So I got smarter and moved onto flushing it. Unfortunately, that’s when I learned that I was willing to just call the dealer right after for more. And if there was anything that disturbed me more than doing cocaine alone all the time, it was wasting money—especially when I was making $7 a day and plowing through my savings.

I can’t tell you exactly what happened to me that day in May of 2000 when I woke up and called my mom to tell her I had a coke problem. Nothing horrible had happened the night before. Call it God. Call it being sick and tired of being sick and tired. All I know is I made the call and the following week I was in rehab.

Getting sober was nothing like I expected it to be. And while the beginning of recovery was just about acclimating to life without white powder, Ambien and Amstel Light as fuel, the longer I trudged the road the more it became about getting out of my own way.

Learning to do that changed my entire life—particularly my career. When I got fired from my dream job as an entertainment journalist six months into sobriety, I chose to believe what I’d been hearing in recovery circles—namely that everything was happening the way it was meant to. Instead of lamenting the fact that I’d been fired, I decided it was time to do what I’d been wanting to do since I was seven years old and had discovered, via the Guinness Book of World Records, that the youngest author was six: become a real writer.

In recovery, I was able to take all the energy I’d channeled into blotting out my feelings and pour it into my creativity. Perhaps because I felt like I was making up for lost time, I accomplished an insane amount in my first 10 years of recovery—writing and selling two novels and four non-fiction books, writing for The New York Times, Playboy, Cosmo, Redbook, Time, Vice, Marie Claire, Vanity Fair and more and appearing on The Today Show, The Talk and The CBS Morning Show, among many other shows.

I don’t say any of this to brag. I say it because I had no idea what I was capable of until I could clear away the wreckage I’d created. I thought, before I got sober, that the height of my success would be to land interviews with big celebrities and write profiles of them. I had no idea I’d write a book, let alone six, and that one would become a New York Times bestseller.

Here’s my point: you are more powerful than you know. We all are. The problem is a lot of us put on some tainted glasses along our journey. If I learned to take my glasses off, you can, too. Maybe you’re not picking up shit for $7. But perhaps you have your own version of that.

And I’m here to tell you that you can do more.

I’d like to share with you some of the best ways I’ve found to do that, so expect an email from me tomorrow with those details.

On that note, you’re going to be hearing from me a lot over the next week; I promise the missives won’t come as often after that. But I want us to get to know one another off the bat. Speaking of which, I’d love to know what you’d most like to hear about from me. Hit reply and let me know.

Looking for Light in the Darkest of Places, Anna

Day 2: We’re Only as Sick as our Secrets

“I could never write about that,” she said. “People would judge it too much.”

I was talking to one of my students. I can’t tell you how often I hear this refrain from one of them. It’s always after they’ve just told me about the experience they’ve had that meant the most to them— something inevitably disturbing or difficult.

Right after expressing concern over being judged, they usually say, “But this is what I want to write about.”

And it makes sense; when we’ve struggled with something and come out on the other side, it’s thrilling. We want to share it. We want to help other people find the solution we have.

The problem is that it can be terrifying to share our darkness with the world. Who on earth wants to tell strangers that they suffered from abuse, have been crippled by anxiety, used to hoover cocaine or were suicidal over a divorce?

We do, that’s who.

And that’s because many of us have realized that the best way to release the shame around what we’ve long considered our biggest secrets is to share them.

The relief that comes from sharing things we always assumed we’d take to the grave is one thing. But the relief that comes from sharing those so-called secrets with people we don’t even know is just about the most liberating thing I’ve ever experienced.

Because that’s when I discovered that other people not only related but also that I was helping them feel less alone. Truth talk: Learning that others relate to some of my most horrifying experiences and feelings has, in fact, helped me as much as years of therapy.

I’m not going to lie: it’s taken a lot of trial and error (emphasis on error) to find my people. But now that I have, I’m all the more motivated to find more.

None of us want to feel alone. All of us are seeking a tribe. And we’re living in a wonderful time, when we can find tribe members all over the world—people who can love and support and relate to us simply because we’ve shared darkness that makes them feel their own release of shame.

So, I urge you, if you’re struggling, share that with someone. It can be a loved one. But it can also be the big wide open world. I promise you that there’s nothing you’ve experienced that someone can’t relate to. You just have to give them the opportunity.

When I did that, I not only found relief but I also found success. I’d always thought I had to show the world the perfect me. Turns out I needed to do the opposite to get the acceptance I’d always craved. I needed to be honest, even if that honesty meant sharing things that scared me. And I needed to find my people—and help them find me.

Look out for an email from me tomorrow, where I’ll share with you an example of something I really don’t want to admit.

Keep on hustling that light, Anna

PS I also wanted you to know that I regularly publish posts on my blog. Here are two I think you might be interested in:

How Writing Just One Book Can Make You an Expert How Creatives Can 10X Their Impact Online

Day 3: There are Things I’ve Written That I Absolutely Hate

I wrote a book that sucks.

Honestly, I don’t think my second novel, Bought, is worth kindling. Even after I sold it to HarperCollins, I hated it. In fact, I asked for it back so I could do a page one rewrite. My editor told me I didn’t need to but I felt the book rang false. I also hated the characters. And so I spent the next year rewriting it.

Even after that, I didn’t like it.

I think one of the reasons I struggled so much with that second book is that I had such an amazing experience writing my first book, Party Girl. And I think that’s why I believe it’s the best thing I’ve ever written.

This is surprising to other writers. After all, I wrote it over a decade ago. Surely my writing has improved since then. Shouldn’t I be cringing at what I thought was good writing back in the early 2000s?

The thing is, that book is pure. It’s what I wrote before I knew anything about Amazon reviews, let alone GoodReads haters. It was what poured out of me before I knew to think about what I thought would sell well and whether or not it would make any bestseller lists.

The truth about sharing our stories, in my experience, is that we’re going to be supremely proud of certain things and have others that make us want to cower in shame. The fact is there are stories I’ve published that I wish I could take back and things I’ve said on television that make me want to crawl under the nearest couch and hide. Then there are stories I’ve written, like this one I did as a New York Times Modern Love, that help balance that out because they make me proud.

As someone who helps other people get their stories out into the world, I don’t want people to know that I’ve published things I hate or wish I could take back. But how can I help anyone if I can’t even be honest with them?

It’s embarrassing to admit I wrote a book I think sucks but it also allows me the freedom to step into my light and say, when I feel the opposite, “Hey, I did something good—check it out!” While humility is wonderful, it’s also important to celebrate ourselves. So I’m telling you that I wrote a book I hate, a book I’m proud of and four others that I think are pretty good.

But work for just work’s sake is, in the end, kind of empty. The most rewarding aspect of having written Party Girl is that it led me first to opportunities to share my struggles and triumphs on TV shows like The Today Show, The Talk, Attack of the Show, The CBS Morning Show and other programs on CNN, NBC and MTV.

But it wasn’t the TV appearances that attracted the kick ass students I now work with. I had to strategically set out to find my people in order to help them bring their darkness into the light.

At first, I made a lot of mistakes in my quest to seek out my audience. But I learned from those mistakes—and I’m learning more all the time.

As a result, I’ve been able to attract press for the work—like this amazing piece in Forbes, an incredibly-flattering profile in Entrepreneur and this story in The Huffington Post.

I try to always remind myself to feel grateful for these things— something that can be hard when you have a mind that tends to settle on the negative. If you relate to that, I’d love it if you’d do me a favor: Write me back and tell me what you’re proudest of. It doesn’t have to be career related. I just want you to celebrate something by sharing it with someone. Why not me?

By the way: Despite my pride about Party Girl, my experience when it came out wasn’t anything like I’d hoped it would be. Tomorrow I’ll be telling you all about that.

Until then, keep on hustling your light, Anna

Day 4: How Ewan and Renee Almost Ruined Me

There’s a little-seen Ewan McGregor-Renee Zellweger movie that nearly destroyed me.

It’s called Down with Love and it’s one of those throwback-to-the-60s movies about how Renee is anti-love—and then meets Ewan and (you guessed it) falls in love with him.

But I don’t remember the love story or the 60s stuff at all.

What I remember is that Renee was a super glamorous writer and since the movie came out just before my first book was being released, I assumed I would have the experiences Renee did (the mid 2000s version, anyway)—glamorous lunches with my editor, endorsements by major celebrities and just generally being treated like I was a Really Big Deal.

Instead, my publisher was fired in the biggest scandal to ever hit the publishing business a few months before my first book came out. There was no editor to lunch with; there was no editor at all.

No matter, I thought! I was on television at the time; I had a gig as the dating expert on a show called Attack of the Show and was regularly appearing on The Today Show and CNN. People would care about my book.

Turns out, people had to know about my book in order to care about it. See, I didn’t understand back then that the most important aspect of a creative endeavor is NOT creating the work. If you’re a creative person, of course you’re going to create the work. The most important part is finding an audience for that work.

Kevin Kelly wrote a seminal piece called 1000 True Fans, which posits that a creative person doesn’t have to be world famous in order to be a success. All we need are 1000 people who will buy everything we do.

A thousand didn’t sound like a lot to me then. Didn’t millions of people, after all, watch The Today Show? Well sure, but thousands of people were appearing on those shows every year. And it turned out that had been relying on the wrong methods for finding my 1000. I had thought letting readers find me through my magazine and TV work would do it. They would find me.

Turns out I had to go find them. And that’s okay because we’re living in the best possible era for that—a time where we get to be our own publishers, production companies and publicists. It’s a thrilling time, if you choose to look at it that way.

Ever since I learned that, my focus has been entirely different. Yes, I still do a lot of creative projects. But I focus just as much on finding the people who will get something out of them. Some may roll their eyes at the amount of time I spend figuring out social media and newsletter lists. I get it; I used to be one of the scoffers. I thought the word “marketing” was boring at best, evil at worst.

I’ve discovered the opposite. Marketing is just as creative to me as writing. It’s in fact an ideal combination of the two passions that made me want to be a writer in the first place—words and psychology. I get to think about you—yes you, the person reading this. I get to think about what you may want, not just what I feel like telling or creating for you.

This epiphany has been one of the most liberating experiences of my life. I’m no longer at the mercy of publishers (who may get fired), the whims of the Google algorithm or whether work like mine is trending when I release it. I get to be creative and know that people will consume it because, after all, I made it just for them.

The first step in this process was creating the simplest website ever to show who I was. Tomorrow I’ll detail how I did that.

Day 5: What Every Creative Person’s Website Needs

When I bought my name as domain in 2003, people thought I was crazy. Call it prescient, call it an inflated sense of self-importance but I went and had a site created that featured the (few) published stories I had at the time.

As I published more, I continued to add to it.

In the ensuing decade-and-a-half, I’ve worked with more web designers than I’d like to remember and redesigned the site more times than I’m willing to admit. I’ve played around with having myriad drop downs, various home pages, different pop ups and everything else under the sun.

After 15 years, you could say I’ve learned some things—the main thing being that I was making the whole thing far more complicated than I needed to.

Here’s what I know now: we have roughly 15 milliseconds to make an impression on someone so we’d better be incredibly clear about how we do that. And a creative person’s website only needs a few things.

-A HOME page -A START HERE page -A CONTACT page -A WORK EXAMPLES page -A NEWSLETTER sign up page -A PRIVACY POLICY and DISCLAIMER (Extra bonus points if it can also contain a blog)

There are easy and hard ways to go about doing this. Creative work is challenging so I say make this part as simple as can be and hire a designer to create your site in Wordpress so that you can post and add pages yourself (Wordpress, when it comes to simple fixes, is idiot proof if you’re tech deficient—I’m living proof).

Yes, you can design a site on Wix or Square Space but if you’ve got a couple hundred dollars, why not hire someone else to save you headaches aplenty? (I implore you, do not allow someone to charge you over $500 to create a basic site when www.upwork.com lists designers who will create sites for $200 or less.)

The home page should be basic. Provide a clear, hi-res image of yourself that’s congruent with the impact you want to make. If you’re establishing yourself as an expert, why not use a photo of you speaking? If you’ve got a testimonial, use it. Have your social media icons prominently displayed and the drop downs laid out across the top.

In my opinion, a START HERE page is crucial and yet it’s not terribly common. It’s a page that allows you to control where the reader goes. First you get to tell them who you are, then you can direct them to your favorite articles, videos, episodes, art pieces, testimonials or songs, show them where they can buy your book or essentially send them wherever you’d like.

As for the CONTACT page, if there are four words I think are the most crucial, it’s these: put your email address here. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve wanted to offer people opportunities I felt certain they would want but I abandoned pre-offer when I saw that the only option on their site to contact them was a form.

I put my main email address everywhere—on my site, on my social media, on my course registration pages and wherever else I can think of. The result? I get far more opportunities than I ever would if I had a silly form. It’s also important to include contact info for your book publicist or booker or agent or anyone else who’s relevant to your career but my God, make sure you include yourself.

Now this next one is sort of obvious but show (or play) your work on your WORK page. If you’re a writer and you’ve had stories appear on line, it’s better to copy and paste text onto a page or post on your site than to just link to that publication—not only because you want as much text as possible on your site for Google ranking purposes but also because other sites get redesigned and you risk having dead links if you’re not regularly checking your site to make sure your outbound links are still working.

Next up: the NEWSLETTER sign up page. For this, you need a newsletter provider, like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Ontraport or Drip. I know that gathering email addresses may sound exhausting but I promise it will be far more exhausting to go out and seek your tribe later if you don’t start doing it now. (I’ll explain in a minute what you do once you start gathering those email addresses.)

Of course you, as a savvy web user, know that people don’t just fork out their email address for no reason. Oh, no. Today you need to be giving them a reason to subscribe.

A few years ago, free ebooks (even very short ebooks) were all the rage. But then everyone and their mother started offering these “lead magnets” and they began to feel, to the average reader, less and less compelling. Cheat sheets and swipe files work well, meaning PDFs that you, based on your expertise, can provide for people (if you’re a painter, this could be the best ways to judge how much art pieces are worth; if you’re a writer who focuses on women’s rights, it could be a PDF that lists the best organizations for activists to contact; if you’re a podcaster, it could be a sample pitch letter for getting booked on podcasts).

Still, the most effective tool I’ve found for obtaining email addresses is a quiz. All you do is write up questions and answer options and then have the quiz taker put in their email address to obtain the results. Once they’re emailed their results, they’re automatically added to your newsletter list. (There’s a Wordpress plug in my designer added that made this process incredibly simple.) And my quiz is also fairly simple: I help people share their dark experiences to find their light so the quiz helps them determine if they should be sharing their story.

Again, the best quiz for you is going to be based on whatever creative work you do. If you’re writing about recovery, maybe it’s a quiz that helps people determine if they have an unhealthy relationship with substances or are getting complacent in their recovery. If you’re a healer who works with those who’ve been through divorce, perhaps your quiz determines whether someone is at the point where they’re open to healing. This is for you to figure out.

The final necessary element for your website is the most straightforward: Have a PRIVACY POLICY and DISCLAIMER. Why? Well, if you’re collecting people’s email addresses (and, as we just covered, you are), you need to explain to them that you’re not selling those off to the highest bidder. And then a disclaimer protects you from having others lift your work and display it on their own sites. If you don’t have a disclaimer, in short, other people have no legal obligation to remove your work from their site. And speaking of legality, some states actually require disclaimers on websites. (I got my disclaimer and privacy policy through this site.)

And about that extra credit section I mentioned? Blogs can help with your SEO rankings and also give people a reason to return to your site. If you’ve got the time, do it. Posts don’t need to be long—check out Seth Godin’s blog for examples of how to pack a punch with just a few words—and of course this gives your reader more of a chance to get to know you.

The other benefit of a blog is that it gives you something to start emailing your list. I highly recommend sending newsletters as regularly as you can (you can create a format and then just plug and play, getting the task down to a half hour of work a week). If you don’t have a blog, you can email news stories relevant to your topic, links to other people’s blogs, memes, quotes or anything you think they’ll be interested in.

Keep in mind that open rates for newsletter lists can be dismal; if a quarter of your list is opening them, that’s considered fantastic. But you still want to send them so that when you’re promoting your creative projects, your subscribers are used to hearing from you.

So there you have it: my guide to the ideal website for every creative person. I hope it gives you some inspiration and ideas. Tomorrow I’ll let you know how advice like this has helped some people I know.

Day 6: A Few Simple Tips Can Change Everything

Many people are apprehensive when it comes to working with a new teacher or coach or course. They’ve either been through the ringer with a series of online courses they never finished or been exposed to coaches who promised big results and delivered nada.

I know this because it’s a conversation I have with pretty much every student who enters one of my coaching programs.

I also know this because I’ve taken my share of online courses and coaching programs and have learned the difference between the ones that give me very little that I want and those that provide 10 or 100 times of what I thought I’d get.

While creating my programs, I become obsessed with trying to create products that will make people feel the latter.

And I’m here from the frontlines to report that obsessing about over- delivering pays off, if I’m to believe what my students tell me. Steve Costello said, after one of my courses, “If you’re serious about achieving your dreams, Anna’s program is a no-brainer.” Jon Smith told me, "The quality of information and real-market application makes it essential.” And Aubree Nichols said, “The program gave me the confidence to let the world see me.”

But my favorite feedback came from a recent student, Elizabeth Overstreet, because it got so specific.

Here’s a snippet from an email she sent me: Not only did you help me get clearer about my goals, but you offered practical guidance, tools, and feedback to move me along in the process. Plus, you held me accountable.

I've learned more from you in the short time I have known you than many others who claimed to be experts in writing, marketing, and pitching. The proof is in the results I have had in less than six months:

14 of my articles published in Thought Catalog, a website that has 25 million plus visitors per month

Active writing portfolio on Medium

A solid outline for my book and working proposal

Published article on Thrive, A Huffington Post company

Actively being sought out for other credible relationship websites, dating apps, and an opportunity to ghostwrite for someone

I provide this list not to brag, but to show the power of working with you and a group of people supporting and pushing one another to keep writing. Without you and your constant input, support, and feedback from the group and practical lessons of the course, I am positive these opportunities would not have come my way.

I’m sharing this with you not so that I can brag but so that I can show you what can happen if you do what you love and focus on helping other people do what they love. We all have gifts to share and the ability to over deliver. We can do that through our creative work, through coaching programs or through some combination of the two.

In short, by sharing our dark to find our light, we get to light the way for the next person.

It feels good. I promise. It makes surviving the dark actually seem worth it.

So keep on hustling your light, Light Hustler…