Today is our last day in Palm Springs. Tomorrow we head for northern Alabama where we will be attending an RV entrepreneur summit next week and meet more crazy people like us. And this week, Amy and I celebrate our 9th anniversary of full-time RV living!

Based on the emails I received about last week’s conversation, it seems several (16) of you are warming up to the idea of writing a newsletter. Not surprising to me, the (7) BV people prefer the topical long form newsletter while the (9) FLS people favor the court case curated one.

On to this week. So I have previously written about why newsletters are better than social media here and what style of newsletter you can write here. Let’s continue the dialog and talk about the common elements of great newsletters that creates engagement.

And if you’re new here, welcome aboard. This is what we do!

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What 3 non-BVFLS apps/programs can’t you live without in your BVFLS practice?
Mine are Buffer, PayPal, and Zoom.

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Great newsletters get opened, read, and shared. (You’re sharing mine, right?!) That is engagement.

And the number of newsletter subscribers you have doesn’t matter. The number of subscribers who engage with your newsletter does.

Here’s how to make the magic happen.

Great newsletters have a cadence

People expect to see an email from me every Wednesday about a practice development or practice management topic. It has become a social contract with my subscribers. And if I do a good job, people look forward to getting that email.

By having a consistent schedule for sending your newsletter, you will be able to stay top of mind with your audience so they don’t forget why they subscribed or where the value is in allowing you access to their inbox on a regular basis.

Great newsletters are personal

Newsletters that offer a little bit of personality or personal information remind subscribers that there’s a person on the other end, not just emails from corporate robots sent from a noreply@address.

My newsletter works, in part, because every email sounds like I am talking to you, (I hear this often.) And every reply comes directly from me. Being personal turns a broadcast into a conversation with people who pay attention to what you write.

During those conversations, you will learn of the topics they want/need to read about (what’s keeping them up at night) so you can serve them better with new/add-on services and collateral 1:many products and, thus, stay valuable to your audience over the long term.

Great newsletters are private

Someone’s email address is sacred. The only reason you’ve got their email address in the first place is that they specifically asked you to send them something.

If you abuse that trust, you will never make newsletters work the way they can and should.

Great newsletters are focused

Email is awesome because inboxes are for reading information quickly and easily. There are no distractions, no ads, and no popups in our inboxes.

So you don’t want to clutter up a newsletter with lots of images or graphics or branding. You want to cut the cruft because people are there to read, and they’re mostly reading on smartphone screens.

So what

If you will be starting a newsletter, or tweaking an existing one, I don’t have all of the answers. But I do have six questions for you to consider:

1. Who should receive your newsletter? What do they have in common with each other?
2. Where do these people currently spend their time? Who do they currently read? Who has these people as part of their audience already?
3. Where and how will you recruit these folks? Where will they come from and why will they leave the places they’re already spending their time? What need will you fill?
4. What format will the newsletter take – long form, curated, or news?
5. What would be considered a success for this newsletter? Why?
6. How will you make time to plan, write, edit, schedule, and reply at a regular cadence? How many hours a week/month do you need to do this properly?

In real life

You know the kind of newsletters you like receiving.
You know the audience you want to attract.
What kind of newsletter would your audience like to read, open, and share?

If you want more ideas, start looking at other people’s newsletters and incorporate what you like (love) into yours.

Reading that can help

Newsletter or Blog: which is better for you?

Cheers!

 

 

 

Action Items

– If you like what I write about, tell a colleague.

– If something resonates and you want to reach out directly, email me.

– If you think we share common interests, connect with me on LinkedIn.

– If you want a sense of how well your practice is working for you, take this Practice Self Assessment.

Several people emailed me to say they found last week’s conversation about getting more done by changing up their routine to be really helpful. (I love the feedback!) Because at the end of the day it’s really not about finding more time to get more things done. It’s about better using the time we have to get the right things done.

On to this week. Which concerns something that happened last week. In a blog post, Chris Mercer wrote:

If you want more business from existing clients and new business from prospects, think about the Reason and do what it takes to communicate the Reason to them clearly and consistently over a long period of time.

And according to Chris, one of things that would give the Reason for a client or prospect to reach out to you was: “Writing a newsletter or blog directed to clients or prospects.”

And if you’re new here, welcome aboard. This is what we do!

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What is the best non-BVFLS book you’ve read so far this year/in the last 3 months?
Mine is Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear.

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That’s right.

One of the things that can give clients and prospects the Reason to call you is a newsletter or blog you write.

I have previously written about why newsletters are better than social media here, so let’s have a dialog about how you can create the best email newsletter for your audience.

There are 3 kinds/styles of email newsletters

 #1 – Long Form

As the name implies, long form is a long newsletter (word-count be damned!), and this newsletter is a long form example. Looking for another example? Fred Rosen writes a fantastic weekly practice development newsletter for attorneys called Friday File.

In many cases, the longer the newsletter the less frequently it is sent out because it is difficult to deliver 3,000 good words every week.

#2 – Curated

Curated newsletters follow a “your summary/3^rd party link” format of themed articles that appear in various online places and spaces. One I subscribe to is Brian Clark’s Further, which deals with health, wealth, and personal growth resources for Gen X (even though I am Gen Old Fart).

These newsletters are a nice way to provide value to an audience without having to write 1,000+ word articles. And by sharing only the best links on a theme, you save your audience the time and effort of finding information they would have to track down.

#3 – News

Similar to a curated newsletter, a news newsletter is focused on topical or breaking news, generally for a specific genre, e.g., politics. My favorite in this category is Next Draft, authored by David Pell.

This kind of newsletter requires a lot of work because you’ve got to digest current events quickly and then share the best content while it’s still timely. But despite the effort required, these newsletters are often emailed out daily.

My recommendations

Knowing the needs of our BVFLS leads, prospects, clients, and referral sources, I recommend a long form or curated newsletter. Why not a news newsletter? Frankly, I think it’s too much damn work.

Your long form newsletter should cover the practice area or industry niche you are in or want to be in and want to be known for. Mine is obviously about practice development. If you’re into ESOPs, your newsletter would be the who, what, why, where, when, and how of ESOPs.

I think court cases would really lend themselves to a curated format. You are probably reading the cases anyway to stay current, so why not curate them for an attorney audience. My only caveat would be that the type of cases should match the kind of attorneys you have on your email list. (If I were an estate planning attorney, why would I want to read a lost profits case?) If you are in a large firm with multiple practice areas, the firm can create multiple newsletters for different lists of attorneys.

So what

Newsletters as a practice development tool? If I can’t convince you about their importance, maybe you’ll believe Chris Mercer!

And there is no one type of newsletter that works best (despite my opinion above) … only the best format for the subscribers you’ve got and want to attract coupled with the best format for you to consistently write it.

In real life

Regardless of the newsletter style you choose, there is one common denominator: you have to write it. This isn’t as hard as you think, nor do you have to consider yourself a “writer.”

Anyone can write. We all write emails … and we likely write more words per day than we think. An email newsletter is just the next step.

Sometimes we need to get over the stories we tell ourselves about what we think we can’t do and just do the work. And give the Reason to clients and prospects to call us.

Reading that can help

The Reason: Professional Services Marketing Insights from a Country Music Star and a Baseball Legend by Chris Mercer.

Social media is good … newsletters are better … here are 8 reasons why.

Cheers!

 

 

 

Action Items

– If you like what I write about, tell a colleague.

– If something resonates and you want to reach out directly, email me.

– If you think we share common interests, connect with me on LinkedIn.

– If you want a sense of how well your practice is working for you, take this Practice Self Assessment.

I hope our last conversation spurred you to take another look at your website: does your website speak the right lingo? You know how you want to feel when you land on someone’s website. Do you think your audience feels that way when they land on yours?

On to this week. It’s true that I continue to get most of my leads from social media (LinkedIn). I believe a good part of the reason is because I have learned its do’s and don’ts. But while you can knock on the door with social media, a newsletter (or blog) gets you inside. Here’s why.

And if you’re new here, welcome aboard. This is what we do!

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The 2019/2020 BVR Firm Economics and Best Practices Guide is finished. And as an advisor for BVR on this project, I saw the amount of effort that went into the publication. If you participated in the survey you already received the free Executive Summary. The full Guide is now available in PDF, and the print version will ship in early March. You can get more details here.

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The case for social media

Let me say this right up front. Social media can be incredibly efficient. And relative to 1:1 meetings, which can be incredibly effective, the case for social media is simple. It allows us to:

• Provide evidence of our credibility
• While sharing glimpses of our personality
• To hundreds or thousands of leads and prospects
• Simultaneously
• In less time
• At less cost

Further, scheduling tools like Buffer and Hootsuite mean you don’t have to be sitting at your computer when you send out valuable posts to your audience … making social media usage even more frictionless.

But I have become warier as more stories come out about why social media itself is exploitive and how the companies that run the various platforms have a business model based on selling our privacy and data for profit. (We are not the customer; we are the product.) That is why you won’t find me on Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram. And I am only on Twitter to get practice development ideas from sources that I can transfer to a BVFLS setting.

Why newsletters are better

I have put my stock in weekly newsletters. So while the social media updates I post are meant to be short and sweet and get me noticed, my long-form newsletters allow me to build credibility with the people who recently subscribed but are still getting to know me and to increase validation with the people who are long-time readers.

Here are some other advantages newsletters have over social media:

#1 – We pay a fair price for the email software. That allows the email service provider to make enough money in that business model so they don’t have to sell our data.

#2 – We own our email list data. Want to change email service providers? We can export our subscribers’ information and import it to another service. Try porting your Facebook fans or Twitter followers to another platform. Can’t do that because each platform owns and controls the data.

#3 – We control the reach of our email list. When we send out an email, it will reach every one of our subscribers. Social media platforms can (and do) throttle our reach and charge us to “boost” our posts to the audience we built.

#4 – Email service providers don’t track our every move on the internet or target us with ads about products and services we Googled a day ago.

#5 – Emails don’t go away if we don’t check our inboxes for a few hours. We can read them later – easily – because they are “there.” But how many of us scroll through our social media feeds to see who posted what while we were gone?

#6 – Email metrics are better. Open rates let us see what percentage of audience read at least some of our message. Social media “Likes” don’t require us to read anything.

#7 – Social media is designed to be addictive. In fact, it counts on it. Email is designed with “mission accomplished” in mind.

#8 – Don’t want to receive any more emails from a sender? Hit the unsubscribe button … done. Want to stop someone from showing up in your social media feed … the companies make it purposely hard to do (it’s like trying to exit a casino).

At the end of the day, email has been around for 30 years, and I don’t see it going away. And attaching a newsletter to an email is the surest way I know to get your best content read and build your authority with an interested and invested audience.

So what

Social media is valuable.
But my usage is transparent … it is the gateway drug to my newsletter.

In real life

Craig Mod wrote this in an article for WIRED magazine:
We simply cannot trust the social networks, or any centralized commercial platform. Email is definitely not ideal, but it is: decentralized, reliable, and not going anywhere—and more and more, those feel like quasi-magical properties.

Reading that can help

Are you a digital sharecropper?

Newsletter or Blog: which is better for you?

Cheers!

 

 

 

Action Items

– If you like what I write about, tell a colleague.

– If something resonates and you want to reach out directly, email me.

– If you think we share common interests, connect with me on LinkedIn.

– If you want a sense of how well your practice is working for you, take this Practice Self Assessment.