Relationships Before Transactions Still Wins in 2026
The unscalable stuff isn’t a distraction from the business. It is the business.
A few years back, I had a mid-priced offer to sell and a list to sell it to. It was a live event in Manchester I had 20 available places (I prefer small events). The standard approach, the one every guru nudges you towards, was to write one email, schedule it, and blast the lot in a single click.
I didn’t. I picked 30 people from my list, I thought would be interested, and who lived within 100 miles of Manchester, according to Kit. I wrote to them one at a time. Not “Dear [First Name].” Real emails, to real people, mentioning the event and asking if they would be interested. I also gave them my phone number so they could ask me any questions.
By lunchtime, I had sold out (actually sold 22 places as I was a bit slow closing it down). From thirty little conversations that took me a morning and a lot of coffee.
I’ve since sent automated emails to thousands of people and converted hardly any thirty written by hand emails converted at over fifty percent. I’ve never forgotten what that taught me.
We’re deeper into the automation era now than we’ve ever been. AI will write your emails, your posts, your replies and your whole funnel while you sleep. I use some of it, I’m not a monk. But here’s the thing everyone one ignores. People can tell. They can always tell. They know the difference between a message written to them and a message fired at a list they happen to be sitting on.
The whole online writing business, still, in 2026, is relationships before transactions.
Not as a nice slogan for a mug or a tshirt (ohhh I might do that!). As the actual order you do things in. Build the relationship first, and the transaction becomes almost an afterthought, a natural next step between two people who already know each other. Skip the relationship and lunge straight at the transaction, and you’ll spend your life shouting at strangers like the weirdo on the bus and wondering why nobody buys.
The maddening part, if you’re chasing scale, is that the relationship bit refuses to scale. You can’t automate someone feeling known. You can’t outsource actually caring what happens to a reader. It’s slow, it’s manual, it’s a morning of coffee and thirty emails. It’s checking in occasionally and asking how people are, it’s listening to the problems they are having (a community really helps for this!) And it’s the single highest-return thing I’ve done in 21 years.
Here’s what it looks like in practice, and none of it is special or unique. You reply to the comment. You answer the email properly, as yourself, not with a canned line. You remember that someone mentioned their half-finished book, and next time you ask how it’s going. You treat a hundred real readers as a hundred real people, and not as one big number called “An Audience.”
You behave like a person! (I know unique ideas in this day and age!)
Do that for a year and something happens no funnel can buy. People start rooting for you. They pick up the $7 offer, then the next offer, not because a sequence pinged them at the statistically optimal hour, but because they like you and want to watch you win. That’s not a customer list. That’s a room full of people who’d notice if you vanished.
The writers panicking about AI eating their livelihoods have it backwards. The more automated and samey everything gets, the more a real human who actually talks to you stands out. The scarce thing now isn’t content. It’s contact.
So this week, do one unscalable thing. Reply to one person properly, ask them a real question, remember one small detail, and make no effort whatsoever to turn it into a system. It won’t show up in your stats on Friday, and it’ll matter more than anything that does.
Relationships before transactions. It was true the day I started, it’s true this morning, and it’ll still be true long after the current batch of clever tools has been retired for the next.
This is really what the free community is for. It’s where the replying, the remembering and the actual conversations happen, no charge to walk in. Come and say hello. Link in my profile.
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