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The traffic myth.

Brent Milne

Jul 14

READ IN APP

person using laptop computer holding card

Traffic reveals results.

No traffic = no results.

Wrong traffic = no results.

Wrong hook = no results.

Ah! That’s different.

That means you can have the right traffic and still get no or poor results.

Shoot.

That means…

Bugga.

You’ll have to test the landing page with the traffic.

And then you’ll have to test the follow-up email sequence with the traffic.

The traffic isn’t the problem.

What you’re offering them might be.

The follow-up emails might be.

You can only fix those things with testing.

You’ll have to spend some time or money with that.

Free traffic will need a lot of time to attract, and quite a bit of content.

Paid traffic is faster, but it’ll probably cost you some money before your conversions are higher than your spend.

To maximise your chance of getting it right means you’ll need to clearly understand your customer.

You need to know who they are, what they want, what their pain points are, are they in a position to buy and use your offer.

When you know everything about them you can ensure your landing page, lead magnet, and offer all line up for this person.

You’ll be in a much better position to make a sale.

There is a tool that I built to help me pin this stuff down, and make sure what I’m offering is what they want.

Will it still need fine-tuning?

Possibly, but it will be much closer than you’d think.

It’s built for Claude, not the ChatGPT prompt packs floating around, so what comes out is matched to your niche and your voice, not generic.

Here’s the tool: https://link.ckv.to/prompt-guide.

Regards,
Brent.

July 13, 2026July 14, 2026

How much money buys you freedom?

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How much money buys you freedom?

Brent Milne

Jul 13

READ IN APP

Stacks of hundred dollar bills are shown.

Many people think it takes a million bucks.

That’s wrong.

Let’s start with some simple maths.

The best interest rate I can get right now is 5.3% for a 1 year term deposit.

Plonk a million bucks in there and you get $53k at the end of the term.

Roll it over and you’d keep getting that year after year. Smart move, but you still haven’t bought your freedom.

Because most people don’t roll it over.

They spend some first.

A house, a car, a holiday.

That’s not a criticism, I’d probably do the same.

Now they’ve got maybe $300k left, and they’re still going back to work, living the same life they did before, just with a nicer home and a better car.

That’s not freedom. That’s gilding the cage.

Okay, so what if you don’t spend any of it?

Keep the whole million intact, live off the interest, never touch the capital.

A high interest savings account will get you 4-5%, withdrawn as interest only.

On the full million, that’s around $4k a month.

You can live on that.

Not brilliantly, but you can live on it.

Except, one unexpected expense and you’re dipping into the capital.

Once that happens, your interest payments shrink too.

The “safe” plan turns out to be fragile.

That’s a bit of a downer, isn’t it?

Good news: there’s an easier way to buy freedom than any of that.

It doesn’t need seven figures.

It doesn’t even need six.

Back to the subject line: how much income buys freedom from your job?

For most people, it’s $1-2k a week.

Call it $140-$280 a day.

Whatever replaces your current income.

Compare that to the million-dollar math above.

One number needs a lottery win.

The other needs a system.

You’ve been on this list a while.

You’ve seen autoresponders, affiliate offers, bridge pages, traffic sources.

Maybe tried a few.

None of it’s turned into $150 a day yet.

That’s not a knowledge problem.

I spent years in that exact spot, so I understand the frustration.

What’s missing isn’t more knowledge.

It’s a plan that turns what you already know into a sequence you can actually run: this offer, this page, this email, in this order.

That’s what the Claude prompt guide does.

You answer a set of questions about what you’ve got and where you’re stuck, then fine-tune the response until you’ve got a workable plan of action.

Get the guide here: https://link.ckv.to/prompt-guide

Set it up, takes a few minutes.

Then you can have a workable plan in around 30.

Regards,
Brent.

July 13, 2026July 13, 2026

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July 13, 2026July 13, 2026

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July 13, 2026July 13, 2026

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July 12, 2026July 13, 2026

Claude told me my niche was rubbish.

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Claude told me my niche was rubbish.

Brent Milne

Jul 12

READ IN APP

I’m stuck inside because the weather is crap and I have a cold.

Thanks grandies.

Anyway, even though I can’t think too well, I decided to build a new website.

It’s here:

instagram.wm-tips.com/

Here’s how it happened.

I used a tool to pull keyword and traffic data for a niche.

Fed it to Claude.

Claude told me what I’d picked was rubbish and suggested alternatives.

I ran the tool again on those.

Fed that data in too.

Much better.

Between us we settled on a niche and a site structure.

If you don’t like the content or the niche, that’s fine.

It’s the system that matters here, not what I built with it.

For the techies: it’s not WordPress.

It’s a dynamic JSON site on Cloudflare, staged through GitHub, and it loads faster than WordPress does.

Start to finish — 18 pages, one banner image — took a day and a half.

It just occurred to me I still need Privacy and Contact pages.

Probably done by the time you read this.

I’m not giving you my prompts.

They won’t fit your project.

What will fit: open Claude Code, tell it what you want, ask for guidance, report any errors, follow its steps, and ask when something’s unclear.

18 pages, one banner image, no WordPress, no developer.

Regards,
Brent.

P.S. If you want your prompts already aimed at your niche and your customers before you start that conversation, that’s what this guide does: https://link.ckv.to/prompt-guide.

Follow the PDF, it’s a quick setup.

July 10, 2026July 11, 2026

I only gave you 1 of 5 yesterday.

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I only gave you 1 of 5 yesterday.

Brent Milne

Jul 10

READ IN APP

a group of small white and blue squares with black text

Yesterday I gave you one email template: the one that filters new subscribers by whether they reply, not whether they open.

That’s one piece of a five-step system.

Today you get the rest.

It’s called the Quality Subscriber Playbook.

Quick recap on why any of this matters.

Retention compounds, sign-ups don’t.

Cut monthly churn from 5% to 2.5% and in a year you’re carrying almost double the active subscribers.

Boost sign-ups by that same amount instead, and if they churn at the same rate, you’re just filling a leaky bucket faster.

The playbook works on the step before retention: subscriber quality gets decided before the opt-in, not after it.

Step one, define your subscriber.

Step two, build one lead magnet that solves exactly one problem.

Step three, find three to five newsletters your ideal subscriber already reads and borrow the trust they spent years building.

Step four is the welcome email I gave you yesterday, or one like it.

Step five, tag every subscriber by source and check the numbers after 30 days.

Remember that a smaller, engaged list beats a bigger disengaged one.

Every time.

In deliverability.

In revenue.

In how your brand actually looks to the people still opening your emails.

The traffic from your email list is controlled by you.

Not SEO.

Not paid Google ads.

Not paid Facebook ads, or any other platform.

Not buying traffic from anywhere.

Use any of these to get people onto your landing page, fine. But you don’t own that traffic, and any platform can cancel your account on a whim.

No explanation given.

You own your list.

Build it right and nothing else matters as much.

Read it today, start with step one today: https://link.ckv.to/qspb

Regards,
Brent.

July 9, 2026July 10, 2026

The email marketing metric no one talks about.

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The email marketing metric no one talks about.

Brent Milne

Jul 9

READ IN APP

people holding shoulders sitting on wall

The two metrics everyone talks about are list building and conversions.

Opens don’t get discussed much any more, everyone knows that number’s unreliable.

But there’s one metric that matters more than either, and almost no one talks about it.

Drum roll.

Retention.

Here’s why.

Say your list churns 5% of subscribers a month. Cut that to 2.5%, and a year from now you’re carrying nearly twice as many active subscribers as if you’d left it alone.

Now boost your sign-ups by that same amount instead.

You get more names on the list, but if they churn at the same rate, you’re just refilling a leaky bucket faster. Retention compounds.

Sign-ups don’t.

And the subscribers who stick around are your best source of new ones.

They refer people.

They reply.

They buy.

Like all of us, you want subscribers who open your emails, reply to some of them, buy your products, and stay on your list for years.

You’ll still have to earn the sign-up.

Solve one problem for them, or run them through a quiz that lands on a useful conclusion.

Whatever it is, it needs to be worth more to them than their email address is to you.

Then your first email needs to be a quality filter, not the soppy “thanks for subscribing” note that’s about 90% of what lands in people’s inboxes.

It should take a stance and ask for a response.

Something like this:

One thing most people get wrong about email: they optimise for open rates. Open rates are a vanity metric, revenue per subscriber is the number that matters. Over the next four emails, I’m going to show you the three levers that move that number. Hit reply and tell me: what’s your current open rate? I read every response.

If a new subscriber doesn’t reply within 48 hours, they’re not a good fit for your list.

Flag them for re-engagement or removal in 30 days.

Most autoresponders charge per subscriber, so clearing the decks fast saves you money.

And in my experience, subscribers who don’t respond fast rarely respond at all.

A responsive list of 500 beats a non-responsive list of 5,000, every time.

There’s one way I know to build a list like that: fewer people, every one of them worth having.

You’ll find it laid out here: https://go.wm-tips.com/sr-list.

Regards,
Brent.

July 8, 2026July 8, 2026

I was wrong about delayed gratification.

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I was wrong about delayed gratification.

Brent Milne

Jul 8

READ IN APP

The 1970s Stanford marshmallow experiment did happen, and early follow‑ups did find that kids who waited longer tended (on average) to have better later outcomes like test scores and BMI.

But the test itself was flawed, and the results misleading.

Because the test was carried out with a very small, unusually privileged group of children at Stanford’s nursery school.

Later studies much larger and more diverse samples found that the “marshmallow effect” is much weaker and mostly explained by background factors such as family income, parental education, and home stability.

A 2018 replication (about 900 kids) showed that once you account for socioeconomic background and parenting, the marshmallow waiting time predicts very little about life outcomes by age 15.

A follow-up in 2020 of the original Bing Nursery School kids into their 40s found no meaningful relationship between how long they waited and adult outcomes like wealth, education, or health.

What this means in practical terms is that while delayed gratification can be important, it is not a reliable indicator of you or your child’s future.

Phew, that’s a relief.

As far as I’m concerned, instant gratification takes too long.

Unfortunately, when it comes to online success, the gratification is always delayed.

We don’t get to choose that.

It’s just the way the Internet and compounding works.

So what we have to do is get our gratification from getting a web page built, and email sent, or something done that will bring traffic.

When we give ourselves little rewards for getting small, but important, steps done we are more likely to keep doing those things.

Small steps compound up and down the staircase.

And that’s what brings the bigger gratification.

One thing that I’ve been doing with surprising results is using the Kaizen Coach to help me keep doing those small steps.

That daily email reminder has been invaluable.

Eat the marshmallow, and while you’re enjoying that, go here.

https://link.ckv.to/kaizen-coach.

Regards,
Brent.

July 7, 2026July 8, 2026

There’s a wrestling book from 1914 you can read for free today.

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There’s a wrestling book from 1914 you can read for free today.

Brent Milne

Jul 7

READ IN APP

Two wrestlers grappling on a mat during a match

Matt Furey found it, filmed himself demonstrating the moves, and turned it into a video course.

He’s still selling it.

Right now it’s $297, marked down from $497, and going by his own sales page, he’s kept some version of that price structure running for years, nudging it up as demand grows.

The book itself costs nothing.

It’s public domain.

You can read the whole thing on archive.org.

Furey isn’t a marketer by trade.

He’s a wrestling coach.

He didn’t need a growth hack or a clever hook.

He needed a good book nobody else had bothered to package.

That’s the whole play: find a public domain book in a niche people care about, and turn it into something people will pay for.

Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org), and the Internet Archive (archive.org) have thousands of these, to download and use however you want.

Grab two or three on the same subject, feed them into notebooklm.google.com, and ask it to build a course, a book, a video series, whatever you’re picturing.

NotebookLM will do some of its own research and update the material as it goes.

That’s useful.

It’s also the part you can’t skip past.

Proofread everything it gives you.

Rewrite the awkward parts.

Check every fact it states like it might be wrong, because sometimes it is.

What you ship needs to be worth someone else’s money, that’s your job, not the AI’s.

It pays to remember that AI is neither artificial nor intelligent.

It’s just very good at making you think it is.

Enjoy the books either way.

Regards,
Brent

P.S. If turning old books into new content sounds worth trying but “write good prompts” is the part you’d dread, that’s what the AI Prompt Guide is for: https://link.ckv.to/prompt-guide.

Built for exactly this kind of project

Sugar Puff

Posts

The traffic myth.

The traffic myth.

How much money buys you freedom?

How much money buys you freedom?

634834 is your Substack verification code

810674 is your Substack verification code

525831 is your Substack verification code

Claude told me my niche was rubbish.

Claude told me my niche was rubbish.

I only gave you 1 of 5 yesterday.

I only gave you 1 of 5 yesterday.

The email marketing metric no one talks about.

The email marketing metric no one talks about.

I was wrong about delayed gratification.

I was wrong about delayed gratification.

There’s a wrestling book from 1914 you can read for free today.

There’s a wrestling book from 1914 you can read for free today.