Why Starting a Newsletter Is The Single Best Decision You Can Make

Hello amorteurs,

No, that is not an insult. This is the official revival of the Amateur newsletter, where I'm rebranding so and so to this and that.

I thought to myself, "mayhaps I shall take to committing once more to the writing of a week-daily and weekly publication." But then I decided to take my top hat off and get to work.

Ideally, we'll be writing week-daily. What would that look like? Eh, who knows.

But we're here to deliver ideas.

Let's get to it!

The Highest Dollar-Per-Word Form of Writing... And Should You be Doing It?

Writing is money.

It's undeniable that writing is one of the most powerful forms of monetizable leverage. Copywriting and audience-building are among the hottest monetizable skills one can pick up, both requiring a mastery of persuasion and storytelling, which are children of deliberate writing ability.

Not only that, all forms of digital writing carry an evergreen potential to change and influence.

Plus, writing is fun and easy to get into.

And I'm not paying thousands of dollars to dropship (yet).

The problem is there are a million plus one mediums and methods for writing, and it's easy to get lost in the noise.

• What should we be writing?

• What should we be writing on?

• What should we be writing for?

And I can stretch this for as many combinations of words to create an infinite amount of modifiers.

Let me simplify the answer for you. I've spent at least 5 seconds (more accurately, 8+ months) looking for the answer, so you don't have to.

You can. I won't stop you.

Or, actually, I will. The answer is newsletters.

Everyone is Writing Newsletters, so You Should Too... Or Should You?

Everyone and their mom's dog are writing newsletters. Anyone with an ant's audience can start and will start one because that's what everyone says you should do.

(And don't underestimate ants... There are a LOT of them out there!)

This is a no-brainer. You're reading this newsletter right now, but maybe you needed someone to tell you for the nth time that newsletters and essentially any form of email copy are essential.

Especially if you have at least an ant's audience.

So what do we do as creators? We see successful newsletters, and we want the success that goes with it. The next rung of the content creation ladder is always to start a newsletter! They all got one, and if we want to be successful, we gotta get one too!

Or do we?

A Better Strategy: Choose Your Pond

Allow me to offer another, possibly better, possibly worse, strategy:

Choose Your Pond

Stick with me here because this analogy is about to get aquatic.

Imagine you're a frog. Now, you may already identify with the physical appearance of a frog, and that's okay. Frogs are beautiful too.

But hear me out. If you're a frog with the choice to live at either Pond A or Pond B, which would you choose? That would depend. Which pond is a better environment for me? At this point, you'd pull out your protractor and start calculating the pros and cons.

Now imagine you see an eagle flying above you. You might think, "that's a fine bird. It's probably going to eat me." You would also think, "Flying is so cool. I should do that too."

So then you jump off the tallest tree and plop into the waters, moving on about your day.

This is how much of us approach writing, newsletters included.

Many of us are frogs. Many of us are birds. Yet we're trying to pick the wrong pond or satisfy the wrong niche because "everyone" is doing it.

Just because one frog is killing it in Pond A doesn't mean you should drop all your marbles and copy their exact strategy. It's one of the reasons why I suspect many who enroll in a writing or audience-building course end up with miserable results: or, more often, no results (because we don't finish the course lol).

The better strategy? Choose your pond.

• Choose the environment that maximizes your natural proclivities.

• Choose the role that maximizes your strengths.

• Choose the stuff that works for you.

Not the stuff that's working for "everybody."

(Which is often just a select few, who have chosen the right pond for them).

One Question to Determine What You Should Write: And My Results.

The science of maximizing strengths and optimizing for "match quality" is much less a science and more an art.

I learned a lot about maximizing one's strengths and choosing the right ponds for them that I can get into, but I'll save that for another newsletter issue (for the interested!)

Instead, I'll give you my fast-track, tactical SINGLE-BEST question for determining which pond you should pursue.

Find a trusted friend. It can be your mom. Or your cat even. Okay, maybe not your cat. And definitely not the person looking back at you in the mirror (this will make sense very soon).

Then, ask them this ONE question:

• What are my best strengths?

It's really as simple as that. The best way to figure out which pond you should choose is to solicit feedback from others. And it's imperative that it is from others. 

Feedback from others has the advantage of being more objective and accurate. The truth is we are very biased about ourselves. Look up a list of cognitive biases, and you'll quickly realize the reality.

Think you're more objective than others? You may be right...

But you're probably WRONG! That's a cognitive bias too!

But who cares about cognitive biases. The essence is that we are often blind or skewed to our own ideas. Even by trying things out, we interpret the results in favor of what we want to believe. Don't believe me? Well, I'm probably wrong, but give this a try:

Ask this question to as many people as possible without warranting a restraining order.

You might be surprised at what you learn. Often our strengths are blind or undervalued by ourselves, which makes perfect sense.

Naval says, "Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others." True strengths are often overlooked because they are so natural to us.

Even if the other party is slightly biased, this works. Other people have a better gist of how you place relative to others, and you win the game when you own a category relative to others.

The point is: if someone asks you to write a newsletter because they think you'd be good at it, go for it. If you tried it and people ask for something else, do that instead. It's more fun to do what we're naturally good at.

DON'T write a newsletter just because other people are asking you to. There are better things you can do with your time and more ponds to dominate.

Give it a try, and let me know what you think.

And for the organized: here's a helpful worksheet that may help you from the modern monk, Jay Shetty.

Cheers!

Thanks for reading this piece.

Are newsletters your type of thang? 

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