The idea of slowly building up a list of emails, which one controls directly, is a way to create—what Seth Godin calls—a permission asset.
(Just to be clear about the language there: I can have many types of assets. Real Estate is an asset, a car can be an asset, … Godin’s point is that having someone’s permission to communicate with them is an asset. The permission itself is an asset.)
In our POD9.5 call today, we were talking about permission assets, and I mentioned that Godin sometimes expresses issues with large email providers. (Issues which, when he writes about them, I jump up, knocking my chair over, and I yell “Hear! Hear! Louder, once more for those in the back!”)
I wanted to share some of what he’s written, so…
Hear! Hear!