It started out with my kids stepping on the “FH” (fire hydrant) lids embedded in the sidewalk.
To them it meant… “Free Hug.”
So if you stood on one, you’d get a free hug from the person you were with.
Awww!
It was cute and nice. That is…
Until somehow, someway… probably a kid-growing-up thing…
“FH” came to mean…
“Free Hit.”
So the first person to jump onto the fire hydrant cover got to smash the arm of the person they were with.
Ahhh… kids?!
Now… because we live in the countryside, we do a lot of driving.
So once or twice a week we head to the “big city.”
While driving there’s not much chance to jump on top of fire hydrants.
But there ARE the occasional fire hydrant-colored things we pass. So they became stand-ins.
Namely… yellow cars (our fire hydrant covers are yellow, you see).
So why not make it that you get a free hit if you’re the first to spot a yellow car?
After much leg pummeling…
And protests about who spotted what first…
The fire eventually faded out of the game.
But it continued to haunt me.
Kinda like the kid in the movie, The Sixth Sense, who sees dead people…
I see yellow cars.
And I see them… EVERYWHERE.
My senses were tuned in to them.
And now they flash up on my radar constantly.
Here’s the email marketing tie-in…
People who don’t do daily email often wonder where the ideas for writing an email every single day come from.
It’s kinda like how it is the more yellow cars you pass…
The more emails you write… the more you pick up on things to write about.
It’s because daily email writers are tuned into them.
I’m listening to my email list.
And much of the time I collect ideas that just pop up from “life stuff.” Like this story about yellow cars.
Collecting just one idea a day is enough to sustain a daily email habit.
But if you start… I bet you’ll run into WAY MORE than one idea a day.
Some days I collect 10 ideas for emails. Some days one. Or none. But I’ve got a huge and growing collection.
It builds up an idea bank. So I never need to sit down and wonder…
“What should I write?”
I just pick the first one that jumps out to me from my 500+ strong stash of ideas. And start writing.
Like this idea today. Which I noted down probably 5 months ago…
But today it spoke to me… “It’s time, Chris.”
That’s my daily email ideas process. Simple, right?
Ready to build your email list? Go here…
EmailForTheWin.com
Chris Milham