newsletter

Milking Brand Voice for All It’s Worth

Let’s pretend you are a marketer for a large consumer brand. You plan to launch an email newsletter. You call it “Spam the Newsletter.” You’d never do that, right? It’s like a grammarian named “Typo.” Or a hopeful politician with the name “Loser.” But let’s pretend you did call it Spam—you really did! And when you write your first issue you misspell your CEOs name (twice). (You address your newly acquired subscribers as “FIRSTNAME LASTNAME” (literally—that’s the “name” you use).) (Pause here to check if all those parenthetical asides are parenthetically closed correctly. Yes? Yes! Onward.) * * * What’s the best way to get subscribers to your fresh new newsletter named Spam? Create a viral Twitter thread followed by a CTA like Sign Up for More of This Brilliance Or Die Penniless and Alone. Display an aggressive website pop-over that assaults anyone whose cursor hovers within a hair of […]

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4 Important Writing Tips from Warren Buffett’s Letter to Shareholders

Warren Buffett published his much-celebrated annual Letter to Shareholders yesterday. I noticed it was out while I was on a flight home from LA, just as JetBlue and I were 30,000 feet over Nebraska. Nebraska. Buffett. Me. Coincidence? I. THINK. NOT. (To quote The Incredibles‘ Bernie Kropp.) By the time I landed in Boston, analysts and commentators and journalists were all over it. Here’s a hilarious thing: Yahoo can’t seem to get its email client right. But even before the letter’s official release, Yahoo had produced a video highlight reel with Warren’s letter’s best quotes. And by “hilarious” I mean funny-eyeroll. Not funny-ha-ha. Let that sink in for a minute: A letter gets its own trailer. Yes, the letter is written by the world’s most famous investor. But still. Warren doesn’t care about any of them, though. Not the New York Times or MarketWatch or Yahoo’s letter-trailer. He writes his

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What I Learned from Keeping a Journal and Why I’m Relaunching My Newsletter

Recently my friend Ben Opsahl sent me a note. He had subscribed here in early 2017 expecting a regular newsletter, and then noticed that he didn’t hear from me much. He had four emails from me last year, he pointed out. Four? Yep: F–O–U–R. Because that’s how often I wrote here and how often I published a “newsletter.” (Which was really just a blog post notification.) Lame. So what gives, Ben said? I wrote him back, explaining that I’m kind of busy with MarketingProfs. And what’s more, I did produce throughout 2017—just not for my own site. Even as I wrote that to Ben, it felt weird. Like an excuse. A cop-out. Why didn’t I write on my own site? Yeah… What gives? 2018 is the year to change that. Here’s the plan. But first, a story… When I was eight years old, my parents gave me a journal for

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