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CJ Chilvers

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Conquer Newsletter Obesity

Over time, your list of subscribers will become bloated with the no-longer-interested, no-longer-reading, or no-longer-with-us. This decreases your open rate, bleeds your wallet, and makes you look more like a spammer to email providers. For personal newsletters and small business newsletters, the solution is to simply prune your list of

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Don’t personalize. Write like a person.

Every newsletter has a different idea about how you should greet a new reader, and keep in touch with funnel-ized “personalized messages.” I don’t agree with most of them. It’s true, if you’re a business, using a person's name in any email will probably increase

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Recommended: Do Open

If you don't know where to start in creating a newsletter, the book Do Open [https://amzn.to/39gfesV] is what I always recommend. In fact, I give it out to anyone I work with on a new newsletter. It's the perfect, easy-to-read, back-to-basics start for

Recommended: Do Open
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Introduce Yourself!

Wondering why email newsletters are starting to introduce themselves with every issue lately? It’s a practice that goes back years, but was recently popularized (and templatized) by Craig Mod in his post, On Being a Good Newsletterer [https://craigmod.com/essays/on_writing_good_newsletters/]. He offers the following

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Finding Your Favorite Newsletter Format

If you have a personal newsletter, the structure of newsletter should not be much a struggle. Personal newsletters tend to train their audiences in how they should be read. So, the goal here is to find the format that not only attracts and keeps your ideal reader, but fits your

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Define Your Audience

Although you don’t have a say in the make up of your audience on social media, email newsletters give you the freedom of defining your own constraints. What’s the goal of your newsletter? Establishing a better relationship with your existing audience? Growing that audience? Selling a product? Segmenting

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Why You Need a Newsletter in 2020

You are publisher now, whether you asked to be or not. You’re either telling the story of your work and life, or someone else is. Even if you never post anything anywhere on the internet, your life story is being exchanged by companies and governments. At the other extreme,

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Month of Daily Posts 2: Newsletters

I loved the last time I tried blogging daily for a month on one topic, so I'm trying it again. This time it's about something you all should be creating: newsletters. I'll explain why and how. You can refer back to this page for

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Can you publish a guitar?

Blank canvases products are everywhere. Pens, watches, cars, guitars — there are certain objects that attract artists to create. I love digging into why. In a way, it’s just a different form of publishing. It seems like all the same rules apply: create, edit, integrate, and ship. Repeat until death.

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The Year in Review

I usually can't reflect on a year until well into the next, but I'm going to give it a try here. I want to get clear about what is worth focusing on more in 2020. What worked Daily blogging in November I loved it. I grew