PrologueSo I was trying to teach a group of K-3rd graders about space science the other day and I had an idea.
Note: this is a Girl Scout volunteer thing. Not something I’m actually trained to do.
I just went with it.
“I’ll be Earth. I need volunteers for the moon and sun.”
I wanted to demonstrate two terms: orbit and rotate.
Looking back, I should have chosen to be the sun.
But there I was, all masked up and instructing one girl to slowly circle me while I spun in circles and orbited a stationary sun.
They loved it.
They got it.
And now they’re all charting the moon phases for a month, watching the gradual change in shadows and reflections.
Some people are jolted by change. They want a crisp vision of the future.
But I get a kick out of the evolution of ideas.
Trying things one way and then another and never really landing at perfect.
I like the imbalance of flux.
My CEO and I were chatting about this tweet storm the other day. It raises a (familiar) question of whether a bootstrapped underdog with a good product can compete with the VC funded SaaS companies of the world. It’s also a warning against entering an arena where you don’t decide on the rules.
Curated and the other Simple Focus Software brands are all bootstrapped solutions with inspiring founder stories and niche, sometimes cult-like user bases. We’re dedicated to those people and the unique ways we serve them, but not interested in getting caught up in category feature wars. We think a lot about how we adapt as the world changes.
How am I going to tie this back to your newsletter?
Simple.
Don’t let anyone tell you there’s one way to write it, send it, monetize it, or let it evolve.
Create your own success metrics.
Know what winning is to you. Heck, design the game you want to play and play it.
There are so many ways to be successful in life as we spin and round the sun.
Figure out how to be content with each phase of your newsletter as you observe and reflect.
Your newsletter is yours. Own it. Use it to manifest what you want instead of getting caught up in someone else’s unicorn dust.
The links gathered in this issue are intended to help you look at it through a variety of perspectives and keep improving it.
PS It’s great to be back from Spring Break. Can you tell I took some time to stop spinning so fast? Huge thanks to Sarah Colley for stepping in last week.
PPS I hope I’ll see you all at Newsletter Fest April 12 -16. Vote for the top newsletters of 2021 here.
My daughter, Josie (8), spent the first few days of this week forcing her blistered thumb in people’s faces and proclaiming, “Look what I did!”
It was the size of an iPhone app button, if that button was a miniature cellophane balloon filled with whatever the stuff in a blister is. Pus?
This blister was the result of some serious labor.
When we arrived at the fair for her aerial gymnastics performance, we had a little time for rides before the show started. She was determined to spin herself dizzy on the teacups. From the moment she plopped into her teacup until the ride was over (two minutes?), she very aggressively achieved her goal.
But as she walked off the ride, pain spread across her face. She’d rubbed two blisters. One had popped in the process of spinning and now a splash of water, a bandage, and a little fanfare ensued as we treated the little gymnast who’d spun her teacup so hard she’d injured herself.
She made it through her performance—striking poses on a rope ladder with two other girls—and an afternoon at the fair without much more drama (aside from the very awkward moments when supervisors had to be called to convince ride workers that if her head touched the line on the height chart that meant she could ride).
The big blister popped a few days later at school and the healing has begun.
She’s now checking the progress and smiles as she remembers how fast she was able to spin. Maybe she’ll hold back next time. Or maybe she’ll wear gloves.
Her experience and the wound hasn’t slowed her down much. She had a speaking part at church Tuesday and nailed it. Today she has a practice standardized achievement test. And Friday… Spring Break begins.
That’s right. This family, which has been a collection of spinning teacups for the past several weeks as our pre-Covid schedule seems to be returning, is taking an actual break.
We’re headed to the Keys and I’m determined to let my mind heal itself.
I’m getting off my personal spinning teacup (which, boy do I love making go round and round faster and faster) and I’m going to intentionally relax, reflect, and envision our future.
As a newsletter creator, it’s important, I think, to carve out a moment to distance yourself from the process you’ve created and return fresh with ideas.
I’ve invited Sarah Colley, a talented freelance writer I’ve been engaging with on LinkedIn, to be your guest curator for Opt In Weekly next week.
You’ll notice a few references to her below in the Screen Share and Marketing sections. Please give her a warm welcome and enjoy her take on content and newsletters. I’m excited to see what she does.
Also, we’re taking nominations for 2021’s Top Newsletters of the Year. Nominate your favorite newsletters now, then vote March 26 - April 15. Winners will be announced Friday, April 16, at Newsletter Fest.
Note: Nominations created on all building/sending platforms are welcome.
Now, let’s spin along into this week’s roundup of newsletter advice.
A Quick Request: Take The Managing Editor Salary Survey
Hey editors, writers, copywriters, journalists, and content marketers, please take a few minutes to participate in this survey for Managing Editor Magazine.
Your participation helps us “content people” better navigate employment and negotiate salaries.
Newsletter writers are cursed.
All writers are, really.
We face the daunting burden of knowing what we know.
Don’t get me wrong.
It’s a gift and a curse.
The gift is in the drive and ability to effectively communicate a thought your readers will value. We have the power to educate and empower—to change lives—with carefully crafted words and phrases.
The curse is our inability to experience our content the way our reader might, without knowing what we know.
Even the best writers are challenged when it comes to adopting the mindset of a reader: to imagine former, less informed versions of themselves encountering the words the present tense version has used to express an idea.
If you recall your grammar lessons, there was a word that meant “a thing or event that existed before or logically precedes another.” I associate it with figuring out who or what a pronoun is referring to in a complex sentence or paragraph. That word is “antecedent.”
Today, though, I urge you to think about it in terms of what you might be projecting unintentionally on your reader. What assumptions are you making that you really shouldn’t?
It’s fair to assume that if you serve a niche audience, they may have some basic understanding of a particular industry. And that you can safely use their vernacular or colloquialisms (aka “write in their language”).
But beyond writing for someone who is not you and therefore could get lost in your words because you’ve assumed too much of them, newsletter writers face an additional challenge: we have thoughtfully created and sent every issue of our newsletters to date and can too easily imagine our subscribers have read them all—and closely.
Reality check: 99% of your readers haven’t.
This could be their first issue.
Or they might have subscribed months ago, but they tend to skim.
Or they started to read one issue really closely, but then they got a text from their mom so they dropped off.
Your job is to write in a way that serves each of these people and their potentially limited attention spans.
Your job is also to not make them feel guilty that they have no clue what brilliant point you made in issue 5 that you’re now building on in issue 23.
Help them navigate back to that point if you want to reference it.
Give them the antecedents they need.
Read your copy and imagine this is the first issue of your newsletter you’ve ever seen.
Then ask someone else to give it fresh eyes.
Don’t trust that you can actually unknow what you know.
Revise until there is no unanswered question your words should have addressed to make the point as clear as possible.
And then, give yourself grace when someone responds and asks the question you thought you answered.
Now, onto this week’s issue. I’ve rounded up some content for both the advanced newsletter creators and those just starting the journey. My prologue was inspired by How and why writers should avoid ‘the curse of knowledge’ included in this week’s Writing section.
Enjoy.
Last Sunday, we awoke to the familiar sound of an early morning pickleball match and a mountain of cases of Girl Scout cookies that had taken up residence in our living room.
This was intentional.
Out of sight would mean out of mind, and this is our family’s 4th year of selling cookies.
We know that it’s about 45% strategy (pick the right places to sell at the right time) and 55% hustle (commit the hours it takes to conquer that mountain).
This year the hustle was a little harder because we decided not to sell at a grocery store booth. The pandemic has impacted everyone, even the volunteer sales force that brings you Girl Scout cookies.
But the day promised opportunity.
The pickleball court is across the street from our house and the sun was out, which meant people would also be using the nearby pool.
So we set up shop in the driveway. One daughter managed to hoverboard with a large sign like a really coordinated panhandler and the other ran in and out the house to restock cookies as they sold.
It was a slow start, but as the game released and a large group of neighbors came out, they all smiled with delight at our efforts.
Most of them bought cookies. AND ALL OF THEM MESSAGED THEIR NEIGHBORS.
A steady stream of people began to stop by.
We had cars stopping in the middle of the street and reversing to buy cookies.
A good many of those people showed up because their neighbors called and texted them.
It was high-visibility meets word of mouth at its finest.
The girls managed to do something they’d only done at grocery stores before: they sold a total of $422 worth of cookies in roughly 5 hours.
Why? Because they targeted an audience that WANTED to help them.
The pickleball players were huge amplifiers.
We all need amplifiers.
People trust other people more than they trust companies.
If you’re trying to grow your newsletter subscription list, it helps immensely if someone with a larger reach than your own is so impressed by your work that they share it with their audience.
Sometimes that means strategically targeting those people. Find ways to get their attention and earn their amplification.
Go find your pickleball players and let them know you’ve got cookies.
This week’s issue includes some voices I think are worth amplifying. Read more about targeting people who will share your content in today’s Marketing section.
There are moments when you don’t have to question whether you should do a thing.
The idea comes. You know it’s wonderful. And you just go.
I am such a dork that I had a long weekend (I took Monday as a vacation day) and I used part of it to complete a course and order a book.
Go ahead.
Call me insane.
But when something clicks, it clicks.
And the course topic, which I mentioned last week, was worth nerding out about: Narrative Design.
For all the lit majors and journalists in the crowd, who long to think narratively and flex that muscle we have that aches to create an amazing story—this is the good stuff.
Why? Because we all want to tell the story people remember, right?
We want to be epic.
Not a slightly different version of the same old same old.
Where am I going with this in terms of newsletter advice, though?
Your newsletter is one of thousands, millions even. It has to captivate readers to win subscriptions and opens. It has to battle for its spot in the inbox and be worth consuming. On repeat.
Employing Narrative Design—actually thinking about not only positioning but also how your readers can win whatever game you are helping them play—could be the thing that takes you from “just another newsletter” to “the newsletter I can’t live without.”
For me, a marketer of 8 SaaS tools, it was a dorky, fun way to spend a few hours of my weekend.
Besides, this coming weekend I will be hosting a Cupcake Wars birthday party for 11-year-olds, and that will also be EPIC.
Now, on to this week’s links.
But first, thank you to Russ Henneberry at theCLIKK for leading a customer workshop last Friday. If you haven’t checked out his newsletter and course selection, you should.
What if, in business, the goal of every single task was to grow customer trust?
Hear me out.
I had a moment the other day when I imagined every department within an organization acting as a modified extension of the customer success team.
I feel like this is applicable even for businesses that don’t have official success teams, because we all have success initiatives (read: customer happiness goals), right?
Whatever you’re doing, dearest newsletter creator, it’s part of some plan you have to make the people who receive and open your emails happy they did.
I know I certainly am. The entire reason this newsletter exists is to help you improve your newsletter. I want you to feel like Opt In Weekly delivers ideas and stories you find so helpful that you use them and achieve success.
And I know I repeat quite regularly that a newsletter is a relationship builder that scales what feels like 1:1 and makes it 1:many.
It’s because I think the depth of that relationship, how well you prove they can trust you, is the most critical key to a newsletter’s success.
Because it’s the most critical key to a company’s success.
Think about enjoyable customer experiences you’ve had.
Do you keep that subscription?
Return to purchase more?
Tell people how amazing that company is?
They’ve earned your trust.
And it’s what we should all strive to do with the words we craft in each issue we send.
P.S. In case you missed last week’s announcement, Newsletter Fest is April 12 - 16 and we’re lining up some amazing speakers and workshops. Subscribe to get updates here and share this link with your fellow newsletter creators.
I am bursting with exciting news, y’all.
I usually open this newsletter with a how-this-thing-in-my-life-teaches-us-a-lesson-about-newsletters narrative.
And you read with skepticism, wondering how I’m going to manage to teach you anything of substance.
Then suddenly, you are surprised by just how brilliant my point is (a girl can hope, right?).
BUT
I have news that is too good to bury more than six paragraphs in:
Curated is launching the first ever Newsletter Fest this April… and it’s FREE.
What’s Newsletter Fest?
What began as a Slack chat about what we could do to celebrate Curated founder Dave Verwer’s 500th issue of iOS Dev Weekly morphed into a plan to spread our passion for what he began to the rest of the world with a digital celebration and some newsletter workshops.
After receiving enthusiastic responses from some potential speakers I approached, it feels like one day will not be enough.
So, we’re planning a week-long online conference for newsletter creators.
Don’t worry. You don’t have to commit an entire week on your end. You’ll get to pick and choose which sessions will be most helpful to you.
Mark your calendar for the week of April 12 and subscribe to our Newsletter Fest Newsletter (yes, it’s a newsletter about a newsletter festival being announced in a newsletter about newsletters).
We’ll use subscriptions to gauge interest and send updates to bring you along for the journey as we add speakers and workshops for publishers, independent creators, and marketers.
And we’ll also be taking nominations for a newsletter awards ceremony (you’ll get to vote for your favorites in different categories) and a chance for some of y’all to enter to win free Curated accounts for a year (if you like that sort of thing).
Our goal is to build the BEST newsletter conference out there and we’re eager to hear your thoughts on topics and speakers you’d like us to try and line up.
We’ve also got an event landing page in the works that should be live next week and will serve as a registration page and resource hub.
So… I hope you like this exciting news and I’d appreciate your feedback. Just hit reply and let me know.
And read on for your weekly dose of newsletter advice and insights.
You can’t be everyone’s favorite crayon color.
I found something along these lines online a few years back and adapted it to a conversation I had with my oldest daughter when she was in 2nd grade.
She was, at age 8, a bright, kind, child struggling to make friends and had, for the first time, used some self-deprecating statements that punctured my heart.
“I’m not pretty. No one wants to play with me. I’m not popular.”
It stings, right?
To see a child’s confidence crushed by the opinions of others.
So I comforted her and went searching for answers.
I found something close to this expression (which I can’t seem to resurface):
You can’t be everyone’s favorite crayon color.
We had a talk about how she has a favorite color. It’s not that she doesn’t like green. It’s just that she loves yellow.
Then we imagined that she was a crayon herself.
And talked about how there would be some people who saw her for what she is (brilliant, kind, loyal) and would love that.
But there would be others who would not.
And that’s ok, because everyone you meet isn’t your favorite crayon color, either.
And the lesson stuck, because her younger sister (now 8 herself) has recently had her confidence shaken in similar ways. We returned to the crayon analogy, big sister explaining to little sister how she doesn’t need to be everyone’s favorite crayon color.
Here comes the part where I segue to newsletter creation and tell you something important:
Don’t try to be everyone’s favorite crayon color.
The more you understand who really likes the vibrant hue that you are, the more you can write just for that audience.
And, here’s an interesting twist:
You don’t always have to write to please that audience.
Sometimes you want to prompt that audience to THINK.
Sometimes service is in beginning a discussion and continuing to develop your thoughts about that topic in each issue.
I’ve collected some articles in this issue that I hope will serve you in your creation process.
Reply to let me know if you find any particularly helpful or thought-provoking.
Why should you publish your marketing newsletter to your domain and make the archives accessible and searchable?
Matthew Sciannella and I discussed some interesting newsletter topics during his show, Industrial Marketing Live, on Monday and this was one of them.
It was tied into a question about how much information beyond an email address would be good to ask for when people sign up.
And my answer is this: if I could send you my newsletter without asking for anything, including your email address, I would.
Because the purpose of a marketing newsletter is to serve and deepen the brand:consumer relationship.
So I want to make it as easy as possible for you to read what I’ve written.
To binge the archives if you want.
Because my intention is not to get your email address.
Or to learn how many people work in your office.
Because forms with fields like that indicate I’m measuring you up to sell you something. And I’m not.
Instead, I’m showing you what it’s like to be supported by me, customer or not, with the bonus perk that you get to see the software I promote in action.
If you treat your newsletter like other content marketing and make it easy to browse without subscribing, then that subscription is an opt in to be alerted when you’ve posted something new, not a trade for something kept behind a locked gate.
Note: If you’re trying to build an email list to market the launch of an info product to, you may strongly disagree with me because you need those emails to sell your product. And if you sell sponsorships to your newsletter, you may disagree because you want a large list to tout to advertisers.
But I’d still challenge you to consider that the less mysterious and more available your content is, the more those subscriptions mean and the more engaged they’ll be because they’re indicating they don’t want to miss what you publish. This obviously does not apply to private or paid subscription newsletters.
Little bonus here:
I made this quick Before You Send Checklist for the people in that audience (yes, marketers, but anyone sending a newsletter can benefit from using it), and I want to share it with you:
Before you send, ask: Does this newsletter...
...deepen your relationship with your readers?
...service as a quality touchpoint with your audience? (Would YOU read it and smile?)
...remind the reader that you (or your company) cares about their success?
...provide resources that support that success?
...feel like it was sent by a human?
...deliver quality content that earns you the right to be promotional?
Please let me know if you feel like Opt In Weekly is achieving these goals, and, if not, how I could improve.
You can find this checklist on the Notion page I built for the Industrial Marketing Live talk I gave here.
Also, if you’re interested, I’ll be chatting with Dennis Shiao from The Content Corner during his Bay Area Content Marketing Meetup next Thursday, February 4, at 3 p.m. EST. Bay Area citizenship not required.
