Business Newsletter Quotes

Go through them one by one and ask, ‘Is this subscription moving me forward in my business, or just taking time from me?’ Unsubscribe from any newsletter that isn’t taking you and your business forward.

What works to generate flows of new leads: Trial-and-error in lead generation (requires patience, experimentation, money). “Marketing through teaching” via regular webinars, white papers, email newsletters and live events, to establish yourself as the trusted expert in your space (takes lots of time to build predictable momentum). Patience in building great word-of-mouth (the highest value lead generation source, but hardest to influence). Cold Calling 2.0: By far the most predictable and controllable source of creating new pipeline, but it takes focus and expertise to do it well. Luckily, you are holding the guide to the process in your hands right now. Building an excited partner ecosystem (very high value, very long time-to-results). PR: It’s great when, once in awhile, it generates actual results!

What works to generate flows of new leads: Trial-and-error in lead generation (requires patience, experimentation, money). “Marketing through teaching” via regular webinars, white papers, email newsletters and live events, to establish yourself as the trusted expert in your space (takes lots of time to build predictable momentum). Patience in building great word-of-mouth (the highest value lead generation source, but hardest to influence). Outbound Prospecting (aka "Cold Calling 2.0"):: By far the most predictable and controllable source of creating new pipeline, but it takes focus and expertise to do it well. Luckily, you are holding the guide to the process in your hands right now. Building an excited partner ecosystem (very high value, very long time-to-results). PR: It’s great when, once in a while, it generates actual results!

We can also increase the perceived long term value by the way we describe our emails. Nowadays many businesses mention a newsletter on their website, but the phrase ‘newsletter’ doesn’t have any implied value in it. In fact the word ‘news’ is probably something you don’t want to hear from a potential supplier. Who cares whether Mary in accounts has had a birthday? What you would like to get is useful, valuable information. So instead of calling it an email newsletter, I call mine ‘client winning tips via email’. Or you could call it a ‘divorce survival bulletin’. Or ‘the cash flow accelerator emails’ or ‘tax cutting tips’. Each of these names implies some kind of value or outcome your potential subscribers will get from your emails. To come up with a good name, go back to your customer insight map for your ideal clients and look at the big problems, challenges, goals and aspirations your clients have. If you can name your emails to relate to those big goals and problems then they’re likely to see they’ll get value by subscribing to them.

Assign a file or paper tray to collect single-side printed paper for reuse. Boycott paper sourced from virgin forests and reams sold in plastic. Cancel magazine and newspaper subscriptions; view them online instead. Digitize important receipts and documents for safekeeping. Digital files are valid proofs for tax purposes. Download CutePDF Writer to save online files without having to print them. Email invitations or greeting cards instead of printing them (see “Holidays and Gifts” chapter). Forage the recycling can when paper scraps are needed, such as for bookmarks or pictures (for school collages, for example). Give extra paper to the local preschool. Hack the page margins of documents to maximize printing. Imagine a paperless world. Join the growing paperless community. Kill the fax machine; encourage electronic faxing through a service such as HelloFax. Limit yourself to print only on paper that has already been printed on one side. Make online billing and banking a common practice. Nag the kids’ teachers to send home only important papers. Opt out of paper newsletters. Print on both sides when using a new sheet of paper (duplex printing). Question the need for printing; print only when absolutely necessary. In most cases, it is not. Repurpose junk mail envelopes—make sure to cross out any barcode. Sign electronically using the Adobe Acrobat signing feature or SignNow.com. Turn down business cards; enter relevant info directly into a smartphone. Use shredded paper as a packing material, single-printed paper fastened with a metal clip for a quick notepad (grocery lists, errands lists), and double-printed paper to wrap presents or pick up your dog’s feces. Visit the local library to read business magazines and books. Write on paper using a pencil, which you can then erase to reuse paper, or better yet, use your computer, cell phone, or erasable board instead of paper. XYZ: eXamine Your Zipper; i.e., your leaks: attack any incoming source of paper.

Here are a few common time-consumers in small businesses with online presences. Submitting articles to drive traffic to site and build mailing lists Participating in or moderating discussion forums and message boards Managing affiliate programs Creating content for and publishing newsletters and blog postings Background research components of new marketing initiatives or analysis of current marketing results Don’t expect miracles from a single

Video Marketing Strategy for Promoting Business Any marketing strategy should have a clear result. Video marketing is no different. Simply saying you want more views or impressions is fine, but it doesn't really measure how successful a video is or how you're going to get it. The first thing you need to consider when setting goals for your video marketing strategy is whether your video idea is on-brand. If you've established a brand of being calm and meditative, you don't want to make a video that's suddenly quirky and quirky. This will immediately drive people away from your brand and cause them to not trust what you say, even if your next video is back in form. Any goal that you set for yourself should be specific and attainable within a given time frame. You don't want to set a vague goal and then burn out within a week. Another thing to consider is who your target audience will be. If you're already creating written content, such as blogs, newsletters, and so on, you should have a pretty good idea of ​​who that is already. If you're just starting out, take some time and see who you want to consume your content. If you're still not sure what type of video marketing material you want to create, or if you're not sure whether you want to create your own video, we're at a marketing agency in Utah to help you. Contact us here to schedule a consultation so we can help you create a video marketing plan that will appeal to your target audience.

Just because it didn’t work doesn’t mean it was the wrong choice. The world is full of probabilities, not certainties. Find a game where the probabilities favor you and keep taking shots.

Unchain yourself from your computer. Unsubscribe from all unwanted newsletters. Set up an autoresponder that says, “I check my e-mail only twice per day. I will reply as soon as possible. If this is an emergency, phone this number.” A journalist for Fortune magazine once wrote that when he arrived back at the office after a two-week European vacation, he had more than 700 e-mails waiting for him. He realized that it would take him a week to get through them all before starting on important projects. For the first time in his career, he took a deep breath and punched the Delete All button, erasing those 700 e-mails forever. He then got busy with the projects that were really important to him and his company. His explanation was simple: “I realized that, just because somebody sends me an e-mail, it does not mean that they own a piece of my life.

Become a Member of the DONA International (Cost for 1 year is $50, 2 years $85, and years $125) Though you are not required to join DONA International until you apply for certification, it will do you good to become a member. There are benefits that you can get including a subscription to the quarterly magazine and newsletter, discounts on certification packets and conference fees, and eDoula.

What’s your unique angle in thirty seconds or less?” In other words, why would anyone care to read his newsletter? I know that sounds harsh, but that’s the first question you have to answer before you put yourself into the public sphere. Pressed into defining his unique angle, Ben paused. He rumpled his face up, laughed nervously, and shrugged. This is hard! Finally he spoke, slowly, and then with confidence. Listen to how Ben defined his angle, his sauce: “I’ve been a performance coach for the last fourteen years, working with the best athletes in the world. Helping people perform better is my groove. I want to help anybody who wants to have a great day and shift them into the mentality to dominate their life. I have information to share when it comes to dealing with the best.” That is beautiful! Both in its heartfelt honesty and authenticity, but also in its clarity. Let’s pick it apart and look at what he did in those four sentences: He defines who he is, Why you should trust him, What he is passionate about, and What unique thing this prepares him to do for you. It is clear, approachable, direct, and short. The first three sentences define what makes him special (fourteen years helping the best athletes in the world perform better!), and the fourth (how he’s solving his customers’ problems, teaching mindsets needed to dominate life) defines the kind of love and attention he’ll generously dispense to cultivate a community. Take a minute, and as Ben has done, write out a pitch in your journal describing your special sauce. CHALLENGE Write out your unique angle. There are no right answers here. You can change these any time you’d like. Who are you? Why should people listen? What are you passionate about? What will you do for people?

The Gary Halbert Letters was my first introduction to the world of direct-response copywriting. Halbert had put an archive of his (normally, very expensive) work, including 25 years of marketing newsletters, online for free.

75-25 rule: 75 percent of your newsletter should give solid information of worth and value; 25 percent can give selling information.

write a brief column on your field of expertise, then offer it to newsletters devoted to that topic.

The bad news diet. I used to spend an hour or two a day watching or reading the news. It is impossible to pick up a paper or watch the news without thinking the sky is falling, even when it is not falling around you. It was making me slightly depressed. I have gone to a strict no more than 10 minutes per day bad news diet, and let me tell you, it has done wonders for my outlook on life and business.

I was looking to buy a franchise, I considered companies that were large and small. I was interested in a few of them but not a single franchiser other than the dry cleaning franchise I ended up buying stayed in contact with me. None of them followed up for longer than two months after I first contacted them, and ultimately, all of them missed out not only on the initial franchise fee but also on the ongoing franchise fees I paid. Business Nugget 1 People are ready to buy when they are ready to buy, not when you are ready for them to buy.

She thinks of Stanley's colored pencil drawings of theoretical businesses: a cafe, a bookshop, and, always, a grocery store. When she was ten and he was fourteen, he was already working as a bag boy at Publix, reading what their father called "hippie books." He talked about stuff like citrus canker, the Big Sugar mafia, and genetically modified foods and organisms. He got his store manager to order organic butter after Stanley'd read (in the 'Berkeley Wellness' newsletter) about the high concentration of pesticides in dairy. Then, for weeks, the expensive stuff (twice as much as regular) sat in the case, untouched. So Stanley used his own savings to buy the remaining inventory and stashed in his mother's cold storage. He took some butter to his school principal and spoke passionately about the health benefits of organic dairy: they bought a case for the cafeteria. He ordered more butter directly from the dairy co-operative and sold some to the Cuban-French bakery in the Gables, then sold some more from a big cooler at the Coconut Grove farmer's market. He started making a profit and people came back to him, asking for milk and ice cream. The experience changed Stanley- he was sometimes a little weird and pompous and intense before, but somehow, he began to seem cool and worldly.

I mean, he could blow old Capitalist-Stevie here away." Felice doesn't respond. She pulls the backs of her ankles in close to her butt and rests her chin on the flat of one her knees. She thinks of Stanley's colored pencil drawings of theoretical businesses: a cafe, a bookshop, and, always, a grocery store. When she was ten and he was fourteen, he was already working as a bag boy at Publix, reading what their father called "hippie books." He talked about stuff like citrus canker, the Big Sugar mafia, and genetically modified foods and organisms. He got his store manager to order organic butter after Stanley'd read (in the 'Berkeley Wellness' newsletter) about the high concentration of pesticides in dairy. Then, for weeks, the expensive stuff (twice as much as regular) sat in the case, untouched. So Stanley used his own savings to buy the remaining inventory and stashed in his mother's cold storage. He took some butter to his school principal and spoke passionately about the health benefits of organic dairy: they bought a case for the cafeteria. He ordered more butter directly from the dairy co-operative and sold some to the Cuban-French bakery in the Gables, then sold some more from a big cooler at the Coconut Grove farmer's market. He started making a profit and people came back to him, asking for milk and ice cream. The experience changed Stanley- he was sometimes a little weird and pompous and intense before, but somehow, he began to seem cool and worldly. Their mother, however, said she couldn't afford to use his ingredients in her business. They'd fought about it. Stanley said that Avis had never really supported him. Avis asked if it wasn't hypocritical of Stanley to talk about healthy eating while he was pushing butter. And Stanley replied that he'd learned from the master, that her entire business was based on the cultivation of expensive heart attacks.

Prioritizing Your Email Roadmap Chances are you’ll need a Hail Mary. And a Net Promoter Score survey email. And a newsletter. And… And… And… If you are getting started with your email program, the list of emails you’ll need will probably be very long. Do you need to do everything at once? Definitely not. In fact, it’s best to start your program by aligning with business priorities and getting results before thinking about expanding. What areas are most troublesome in your business right now? What metric are you expected to move with email? Is it: Engagement? Retention? Conversion? Revenue? Signups? If none of those stick out above the rest, start from the top. Welcome and onboarding emails set the tone for product usage. Better onboarding and value communication lead to reductions in churn and disengagement down the road. Welcome and onboarding emails are also sent to most, if not all, of your users, thus they have a greater potential to influence user behaviors. At Highlights, for example, we set up a welcome email, five onboarding emails, and an upsell email the week before we launched the product. The goal was to maximize the number of people in a position to convert. It also allowed us to start getting some data to optimize performance. In general, you’ll want to prioritize emails that: send a lot (large volume of sends); send consistently (every day, or every week at least); and have the potential to have a big impact on a key business goal. In the beginning especially, you want to make sure that you have a clear goal or metric to monitor with the aim of evaluating performance with user data. Start implementing a first sequence, test, gather data, and move on to the next sequence.

Here’s the trick to significantly improving your SaaS email marketing skills—you have to become a student of it. This means you should: Start collecting great email copy, CTAs, and designs. Understand the objective behind each and every email that businesses send. Try to understand the rationale behind copy, link, and design decisions. There are great websites like Really Good Emails11, Good Email Copy12, and Good Sales Emails.com13 that you can use for your research. These sites categorize email copy and designs by types. As well as this, you should sign up to receive emails from some of the leading SaaS brands. Those include, among others: Drift MailChimp Pipedrive Shopify SurveyMonkey Trello Wistia Zapier You should also sign up to competing products and mailing lists from companies in your sector. I personally signed up to thousands of products and newsletters. It’s great for benchmarking and research. At the time of writing, I’ve already passively collected more than 60,000 emails. Obviously, don’t sign up to your competitors’ products with a business email address! I have a special email address I use for this. This account allows me to get data, understand what other organizations are doing, and find good copy ideas. For example, here’s what a search for ‘Typeform’ gives me: Figure 18.1 – Inbox Inspiration It’s not uncommon for me to sign up several times to the same product or newsletter. This allows me to see what they have learned and to track the evolution of their email marketing program. At LANDR, we created a shared document to keep track of subject lines, offers, and copy we wanted to test. Our copywriter was even going through his junk mail folder to find ideas and inspiration. There are tests we ran that were inspired by copy found in his spam folder. Some of them turned out to be really successful too—so keep your eyes open for inspiration. You can use Evernote, Paper, or any other platform to collaborate on idea generation. Alternatively, you can subscribe to paid services like Mailcharts14 or Mailody15. These services will help you track and understand your competitors’ email programs. Build processes to find and access copy and design ideas. It will help you create better emails, faster. In the next chapter we’ll get started creating our first email sequences.

You don’t have to blog four times a week if a monthly newsletter with meaningful content is what you can manage and is more suited to your business. As with social media, experiment with how best to use your email list. If you send something out and readers unsubscribe en masse, don’t do that again. But if you offer your knowledge, your insights, your experience, and a discount, and you see a response, do that over and over.

Axios In-House Newsletters Lights On from our revenue team . . . Cranes from Axios Local . . . Click Clack from our web-traffic guru . . . The Funnel from our head of growth . . . The TopLine from our sales warriors. • Those are just a few of the newsletters regularly published by Axios execs using Axios HQ—for their bosses, their teams and their colleagues across the company. Why it matters: This gives winners a forum for sharing best practices, encourages healthy competition among business units and gets rid of silos—everyone has visibility on what everyone’s up to. Between the lines: For the cofounders, these updates are an early-warning system for anyone’s activities that might be veering away from company goals. In one Sunday evening, we can be sure everyone’s on track and spot pockets that need our attention, encouragement or kudos. • And here’s our favorite part: When we have one-on-one meetings with our leaders, we’re already caught up. So we can use that time to talk through innovations, insights, bottlenecks, disruptions.

ACTION ITEMS TO INCREASE YOUR EHR Install time management software on your computer. Monitor how you’re spending your time. Adjust your workflow based on the report. Turn off all social media notifications (both emails and push notifications on your phone). Switch your phone to silent. Unsubscribe from any email newsletter that isn’t taking your business forward.

A platform is a raised, level surface on which people or things can stand. A platform business works in just that way: it allows users—producers and consumers of goods, services, and content— to create, communicate, and consume value through the platform. Amazon, Apple’s App Store, eBay, Airbnb, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pay- Pal, YouTube, Uber, Wikipedia, Instagram, etsy, Twitter, Snapchat, Hotel Tonight, Salesforce, Kickstarter, and Alibaba are all platform businesses. While these businesses have done many impressive things, the most relevant to us is that they have created an oppor- tunity for anyone, even those with limited means, to share their thoughts, ideas, creativity, and creations with millions of people at a low cost. Today, if you create a product or have an idea, you can sell that product or share that idea with a substantial audience quickly and cost-effectively through these platforms. Not only that, but the platforms arguably give more power to individuals than corporations since they’re so efficient at identifying ulterior motives or lack of authenticity. The communities on these platforms, many of whom are millennials, know when they’re being sold to rather than shared with, and quickly eliminate those users from their con- sciousness (a/k/a their social media feeds). Now, smaller organizations and less prosperous individuals are able to sell to or share their products, services, or content with more targeted demographics of people. That’s exactly what the modern consumer desires: a more personalized, connected experience. For example, a Brooklyn handbag designer can sell her handbags to a select group of customers through one of the multitude of fashion or shopping platforms and create an ongoing dialogue with her audience through a communication platform such as Instagram. Or an independent filmmaker from Los Angeles can create a short film using a GoPro and the editing software on their Mac and then instantly share it with countless people through one of a dozen video platforms and get direct feedback. Or an author can write a book and sell it directly from his or her website and social channels to anyone who’s excited about it. The reaction to standardization and globalization has been enabled by these platforms. Customers can get what they want, from whomever they want, whenever they want it. It’s a revised and personalized version of globalization that allows us to maintain and enhance the cultural connections that create the meaning we crave in our lives.

That is how the critique of Doug Henwood, David Graeber and others can be understood. ‘The major frustration of the book is political’, writes Henwood, publisher of the American newsletter Left Business Observer and author of Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom.32 Piketty does not deal with the question of which political forces affect inequality and the wage ratio. Piketty ignores ‘the most obvious’ reason for the lower capital–income ratio, according to Graeber.

Whites impose these rules on themselves because they know blacks, in particular, are so quick to take offense. Radio host Dennis Prager was surprised to learn that a firm that runs focus groups on radio talk shows excludes blacks from such groups. It had discovered that almost no whites are willing to disagree with a black. As soon as a black person voiced an opinion, whites agreed, whatever they really thought. When Mr. Prager asked his listening audience about this, whites called in from around the country to say they were afraid to disagree with a black person for fear of being thought racist. Attempts at sensitivity can go wrong. In 2009, there were complaints from minority staff in the Delaware Department of Transportation about insensitive language, so the department head, Carolann Wicks, distributed a newsletter describing behavior and language she considered unacceptable. Minorities were so offended that the newsletter spelled out the words whites were not supposed to use that the department had to recall and destroy the newsletter. The effort whites put into observing racial etiquette has been demonstrated in the laboratory. In experiments at Tufts University and Harvard Business School, a white subject was paired with a partner, and each was given 30 photographs of faces that varied by race, sex, and background color. They were then supposed to identify one of the 30 faces by asking as few yes-or-no questions as possible. Asking about race was clearly a good way to narrow down the possibilities —whites did not hesitate to use that strategy when their partner was white—but only 10 percent could bring themselves to mention race if their partner was black. They were afraid to admit that they even noticed race. When the same experiment was done with children, even white 10- and 11-year olds avoided mentioning race, though younger children were less inhibited. Because they were afraid to identify people by race if the partner was black, older children performed worse on the test than younger children. “This result is fascinating because it shows that children as young as 10 feel the need to try to avoid appearing prejudiced, even if doing so leads them to perform poorly on a basic cognitive test,” said Kristin Pauker, a PhD candidate at Tufts who co-authored the study. During Barack Obama’s campaign for President, Duke University sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva asked the white students in his class to raise their hands if they had a black friend on campus. All did so. At the time, blacks were about 10 percent of the student body, so for every white to have a black friend, every black must have had an average of eight or nine white friends. However, when Prof. Bonilla-Silva asked the blacks in the class if they had white friends none raised his hand. One hesitates to say the whites were lying, but there would be deep disapproval of any who admitted to having no black friends, whereas there was no pressure on blacks to claim they had white friends. Nor is there the same pressure on blacks when they talk insultingly about whites. Claire Mack is a former mayor and city council member of San Mateo, California. In a 2006 newspaper interview, she complained that too many guests on television talk shows were “wrinkled-ass white men.” No one asked her to apologize. Daisy Lynum, a black commissioner of the city of Orlando, Florida, angered the city’s police when she complained that a “white boy” officer had pulled her son over for a traffic stop. She refused to apologize, saying, “That is how I talk and I don’t plan to change.” During his 2002 reelection campaign, Sharpe James, mayor of Newark, New Jersey, referred to his light-skinned black opponent as “the faggot white boy.” This caused no ripples, and a majority-black electorate returned him to office.

Here’s one thing I can offer you C, and I’ll be brief. Please consider the budget. The company spends too much on food meant to allure newcomers. We invite people to events and say there’s Chipotle, and do you know comes? People who like Chipotle. We put our cause on the bottom of our newsletters and the “FREE FOOD” goes bright and center and we wonder why no one stays. If people want to come, they’ll come. We don’t need guacamole. We need people who are hungry for our mission.

newsletter. This “something” is a lead generator, a resource that magnetically attracts people to our businesses and invites them to take action.

ACTION ITEMS TO INCREASE YOUR EHR Install time management software on your computer. Monitor how you’re spending your time. Adjust your workflow based on the report. Turn off all social media notifications (both emails and push notifications on your phone). Switch your phone to silent. Unsubscribe from any email newsletter that isn’t taking your business forward. Get support emails out of your inbox by using dedicated help desk software. Block ‘deep work’ time into your calendar (at whatever time suits you) so you have uninterrupted work time. Make portions of your time available to others using a scheduler tool. (The rest of the week is yours.) Purge unwanted things and people from your life. Set a 12-week goal and stick to it. Hint: Actioning items in this book will change your life. Commit 12 weeks to actioning the key elements at the end of each chapter. Prioritise sleep. Get eight hours a night for a week (even if it means not getting as much ‘work’ done) and see how it feels. Clean up your diet. Eat food that’s as close to the source as possible (i.e. not out of packets). Find a type of exercise or daily movement you enjoy, and carve out time to do it every day.