Listicle

Simple, easy, and effective, listicles have always worked great when it comes to content.

That's why you see so many listicles in the form of blog posts, social media posts, and nowadays, every other YouTube video is basically a listicle.

In honor of this section, here is a listicle of potential listicles you can use in your content:

How-To Lists

Your goal with this is to teach your reader how to do something. And more specifically, you put your war helmet on, pretend you're Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan or some shit and...

Divide and Conquer

Which, in less dramatic, more peaceful terms means that you take a big problem, you split it into smaller problems and then you solve each one of those smol problems independently.

Example: "10 Steps to Start a Successful Blog"

Tips and Advice

This initially sounds similar to How-To lists. In reality, how-to lists are sequential steps to achieving a certain goal, while Tips and Advice are more general tips, all connected to the same goal but without being necessarily connected.

Example: "15 Tips for Saving Money on Groceries"

Ranked Lists

Blogs LOVE this type of listicle. It's easy content that you don't reaaaally need to come up with. It's perfect for when you want to leverage someone else's popularity or if you're feeling lazy today.

Which is all perfectly valid — get yo' bread

But to use it in email, you need to switch it up a bit. First of all, you usually don't want to use as many entries in your list. 2 or 3 are usually enough. And of course it must be immediately related to what your readers care about and to what you're selling.

Example: "Top 10 Best Movies of All Time"

Product Recommendations

When writing a product recommendation email, you have to do things a bit different than your average product recommendation blog post. You can talk about software you use or courses from other people that you've enjoyed or you can even go full relationship-building and talk about the snacks you've been enjoying lately.

Example: "My tech stack for writing daily emails"

Checklists

These are great for lead magnets and freebies and very common in the blogging space. Which makes them even more valuable when you send them as emails (assuming your checklist is legit and you don't write about "the ingredients you'll need for the perfect Gin & Tonic" which are... Gin & Tonic).

Example: "The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Packing List for Long Travels"

Facts and Trivia

This type of list is not the most interesting 90% of the time. But 10% of the time, it can be one of the best emails you can send to your list.

(They are the best of times, they are the worst of times)

That's when something NEW and potentially MASSIVE enters the scene

For example, you might know of AI... He is one of the best guards of all time and a joy to watch, despite his height.

(For those uninitiated the joke above is talking about Allen "The Answer" Iverson, an old NBA player).

Example: "4 things you should know about Veo3"

Do's and Don'ts

If you're in the mood for some hard teaching in your newsletter, first of all, put your ruler back in, this is not what we mean by 'hard'.

It's suddenly more interesting, because it's more clear in our head what is going on. And we are curious to see if we do all of the Do's and none of the Don'ts.

Example: "5 Do's and Don'ts of Using AI for Writing"

Reasons Why

A very smart one if you use it right. Collect enough info about your audience's identity. Find something they deeply care about or strongly believe. Then either amplify that belief or call them out on their bullshit (respectfully) ((well, not too too respectfully)).

Example: "4 Reasons Why AI Will NEVER Replace You (unless you're doing this)"

Benefits Lists

One of the rarer types but another great one for enhancing identity and making people believe even more in your message. Unless you're selling NFTs, in that case, just ignore this email type because there simply are no benefits in owning one.

Example: "3 Benefits of Handwriting Sales Letters"

Comparative Lists

You can compare different products of yours. Compare approaches. Compare two different directions and see what life looks like following each of them — which I think is also the most interesting type of comparative list.

Example: "Writing emails vs writing cold traffic ads"

Best Practices

Similar to Tips and Advice but here you rely more on what the industry is doing and what's proven to be the best way to approach a task in general.

Example: "4 best practices for writing killer ads"

Favorite or Must-See Lists

Great if you have lots of affiliate links or a lot of thoughts on your mind right now. Adapt to your niche — travel writers cover destinations, marketers cover their favorite sales letters or DR copywriters.

Example: "My 4 favorite copywriting books"

Mistakes to Avoid

Put your white beard and gray hat on. It's time to pretend you're 834 years old. You are the wise, arthritic monk-wizard that has been waiting for literally ages for someone to visit him so he can spit all the knowledge that's been bubbling up in his head all those years.

Example: "4 things to avoid in your lead magnets"

Inspirational Lists

Two flavors: give your reader material to take inspiration from in their work, or use it mid-promo to inspire fence-sitters with stories from people who succeeded with your product.

Example: "10 Old-school Big Ideas That Brought in Millions in Sales"