newsletters
Surviving the Ad-pocalypse…Again
Experience is a brutal teacher. One lesson, that is almost never passed along, is that creators should avoid advertising as a business model for as long as possible. Sure, most of time, it seems like the easiest, fastest way to put food on the table, especially to a younger generation
You’re Doing Email Marketing Wrong
The time and money invested in email is going to the wrong places. Investing for the long-term with relationship and content marketing is the best use of your funds. But short-term-focused marketing emails still represent the vast majority of spending. As long as that’s true, where should that spending
Be everywhere. But be your best here.
The biggest trend in branding this year appears to be one of the oldest trends — signature models. From shoes to guitars, old-school brands are flooding the market with products stamped with a creator’s personal brand. A “brand” is just a “reputation.” The bigger you get as a company, the
Ghosting to Improve Relationships
This post is my first on my new host, Ghost. They were kind enough to port my 15+ years worth of blog posts and newsletters over to kick the tires. My former host, Squarespace, was built up by word-of-mouth during the second golden age of blogging, and evangelized by bloggers
A New Brand of Unsubscribe
A few weeks ago, I downloaded the Substack app. I didn’t like what I saw, so I deleted it. That action unsubscribed me from every email newsletter on Substack. Fast-forward a few weeks. This is what I just received. Notice: 1. Substack newsletters are now just email “notifications.” 2.
The great personal newsletter migration
For the third week in a row, about a dozen of my favorite indie newsletters have landed in the spam folder — newsletters I’ve opened and click-through hundreds of times. What gives? I love how Apple, DuckDuckGo, Neeva, and others are making our online lives a little more private and
35 Lessons from 35 Years of Newsletter Publishing
My first newsletter was about ninjas in 1987. I was 12. Since then, I’ve been obsessed. I’ve created small newsletters for my own projects, and big newsletters for corporations. What ties them all together? Probably hundreds of things, but I’m lazy, so let’s start with 35.
Mies van der Rohe Marketing
Have you heard about the latest “trend” in online marketing? It’s not really a trend — good publishers have been doing it all along. But with the recent privacy changes at Apple (and soon many others), online publishers have had to resort to some old-school methods of getting the word
Experiments Check-In 2
I have a few updates since my last 2021 experiments update [https://www.cjchilvers.com/experiments-check-in/]. I do these mostly for myself, but I figure they may help others on similar journeys. The Good * Readership and follows are still going up across all platforms, but especially the newsletter [https://www.
A Good Philosophy for Personal Publishing
From Om Malik [https://om.co/2021/05/31/some-changes-2/]: > “I have often lamented that the ‘why’ of blogging got overtaken by the ‘what’ and the ‘how,’ with the tools and format becoming the primary focus. Ironically I made the same mistake with my newsletter. I don’t work