Why you need a personal newsletter

I send out a personal newsletter on a reasonably regular basis containing stuff you’ve almost always already seen. Why do I do that?

One simple reason: it’s about throwing mattresses.

Some of you get the most value from me on Twitter. When I fling very small, 140 character mattresses at your head, they go in nicely. If I threw a big honking Facebook update at the door, it’d bounce off.

Some of you get the most value from me on Facebook. Some of you get the most value from me on LinkedIn.

And some of you absolutely, positively need me to throw mattresses in the form of email, in the form of a newsletter that rolls everything that’s happened up into a tight, compact format that’s your preferred medium because it just works better for you. What percentage of you is that? Fairly significant. As of this writing, I’ve got just north of 6,000 connections on LinkedIn, 25,000+ on Twitter, and over 9,000 active readers in email. If any one of those channels wasn’t working, if there was no one who wanted a mattress thrown at them that particular way, then chances are there would be no one listening. Thousands of people don’t connect in any given medium to avoid listening.

Here’s a simple suggestion: find a way to integrate a personal email newsletter into your usage of social media and online marketing. Depending on who your friends and acquaintances are, you might just find it to be an incredibly powerful medium for communicating what you’re all about. I’ll give you an example: when I ran a financial services audio podcast, I had a fairly good size audience. I thought I was doing well, reaching a few thousand people a day with useful information. The day I added an email subscription option for exactly the same content, I saw a 25% increase in my audience immediately, because a large minority of them were more comfortable with email than anything else. What’s of interest is that the folks tuned in by the RSS feed didn’t go down. The new channel didn’t cannibalize from my existing audience, but rather tapped into an entirely new audience that wasn’t listening prior to the addition.

Try throwing your content mattresses as many ways as you can practically support. You might be surprised at the results.

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