newsletters
Personal brands to the rescue
Let’s close out summer on a high note — a business doing it right. My wife signed us up for this summer camp-themed dinner at a local restaurant. We were greeted with Old Fashioneds, served with the chefs’ high-end interpretation of camp food, and read a ghost story from the
Can personal brands save big business?
NP Digital asked 200 companies about their employees’ personal brands. If you’re guessing that most companies said, “Huh? what?” you’re probably right. Over 80% of the companies didn’t support their employees’ personal brands. Only 18 of the companies reported that they both supported employees with personal brands,
Stop asking me if I exist.
Is this true for you? I keep getting emails from newsletters asking me if I’m still around. Maybe it’s because I use Apple products, which emphasize privacy, and mask a lot of opens and clicks that newsletters (still?!) use to determine engagement, as if we were living in
Be weird. Save Lives.
We don’t deserve dogs. So, I got a new puppy. I figure the lack of sleep and constant cleanups will eventually get me close enough to deserving this dog. This past week I wrote about how the rest of the newsletter world is waking up to the fact that
This newsletter model is dead.
Matt McGarry just posted about what he’s calling Newsletters 3.0. “If you’re running a ‘newsletter business’ the way most people do, you’re doomed to fail.” His post could be mistaken for a summary of the topics in my book on newsletters, but his take is from
Where does blogging fit in your newsletter strategy?
I got this question from a reader recently: “Have you written about how a blog and a newsletter could interact together? Two problems: 1. We’ve monetized each newsletter. Can I monetize the blog? 2. Can I train my audience to visit a ... blog (?) ... every day?” I moved my blog
SEO elder abuse
According to research by Neil Patel, 59.2% of traffic to blogs is driven by SEO. It’s the biggest single driver of traffic by far. He also reports that your SEO decreases over time, if you’ve published a lot of posts that no longer get the traffic they
What’s the job?
The Criterion Collection just put out their 4K edition of No Country for Old Men, which includes a new interview with the Coen brothers. The Coen brothers made two of my favorite films of all time: The Big Lebowski (a film about life trying — and failing — to change an oblivious
Newsletters are getting personal
A lot of my advice, especially to small businesses, involves getting more personal in their email newsletters. It remains a struggle to convince some businesses to include real names (not just the brand name), be a little less perfectionist in their designs, and write like a real human. The more
Brands became bands.
Rick Beato just posted a video about why bands have disappeared from the charts, replaced by solo artists and collabs between solo artists. Before recorded music gained mass popularity in the 1950s, music branding was all about individuals. As the industry became a well-oiled machine with global distribution, bands became