Guides to writing an email course

Six guides, in two halves. Three on the format: how to get a five-day course written, what the permission rules around it really require, and whether a course or a newsletter is the thing you should be writing at all. Three on choosing something to send it with: what separates one sending tool from another, how a course differs from a drip campaign, and what the whole thing costs to run.

Six, not sixty. Each one answers a question somebody actually types, at the length it takes to answer it completely rather than at the length that fills a content calendar, and each carries the date it was last reviewed at the top. Where a guide describes a rule — what confirmed opt-in requires of you, what has to be in the footer of a commercial email, what the large mailbox providers ask of anyone sending in bulk — it says where the rule comes from, because a rule with no source is only advice wearing a uniform. A seventh exists only when a question arrives that none of these six can absorb without getting worse; anything smaller than that is added to the guide that already owns the subject, and that guide’s review date moves.

Three of the six are about the format and three are about choosing something to send it with, which is the point at which writing of this kind usually turns into a sales page. These do not: no product is named in any of them, nothing is scored in a comparison table, and where a criterion cannot be checked from outside a guide says so rather than turning it into a feature to demand. What 5dayemail.com does, and what it deliberately does not do, is set out on the home page, where it can be checked against the thing itself.