Creating a Quality Newsletter

Business Brain, episode 528 for Wednesday, February 28, National Time Refund Day 2024. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take an idea or three, we analyze it, we dissect it, we discuss it so that we can each tune our business brains a little bit more every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include go squared away.com contact squared away empowers highly educated military spouses to become your remote executive assistants. We'll talk more about that in a little bit. For now here on National Time Refund Day, back in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And I'm Shannon Jean in Lafayette, California. I have no idea what time refund. Is that what it is, Time refund day?

I don't know. I don't know.

Okay.

Someday, I think it's because there's a leap year or whatever. One would think that would be the 29th, but it's listed here as being on the 28th.

It could be tomorrow.

Yeah.

Maybe they're getting you ready so you can take advantage.

I can take advantage of the time refund. I'm not convinced that I get anything back, but, you know.

No, that's just another. Just another day.

It's just another day. Yeah.

Just another day. So you're back. How was your trip? You were talking about sitting around in the pool, which is unusual for you guys.

It. It was good. You know, when we travel normally, we. We don't do like the travel to a beach and, and sit around all day. Right. We. We're not really, like, all inclusive resort types of people. It just, I mean, they can be nice. And I just spent seven days at one. Like, I. And we had a fantastic time, but we wouldn't schedule seven days at 1. Right. That would be too much for us to just have to sit around. And I guess if we were going to do it, we would book like, excursions or things to do to leave during the day to mix it up. When we go for fish, though, or, you know, for a concert. With the concerts, it's not at night. That kind of becomes the thing around which we optimize our day.

That's the event.

That's the event. That's the excursion, if you will. Even though it's right there down the beach. But we know we're going to be standing for, you know, whatever, three hours watching the show. And it's, it's, you know, there's. There's an element of it that's an ordeal. It's an enjoyable Ordeal. But it's an ordeal nonetheless, of course. Right. And so we save our energy for, you know, for the shows. And that means between the time we wake up and the time we head down the beach for, you know, to get a spot in the sand for the show, we have, you know, we maybe eat a meal and then we'll sit in the pool. And it's something we would never do otherwise. But knowing that we have this other thing to do, we kind of give ourselves permission to sit around and do nothing and feel like we're not wasting our time. Yeah, exactly. And it really makes. It's a nice change for us, just sitting around and kind of doing nothing. Yeah. Somebody asked us, I don't know, a month or two ago, we were somewhere. Somebody said, so are you, You. You going to, you know, to do the fish thing on the beach in Mexico? And we're like, yeah. And they're like, is that expensive? I'm like, oh, yeah, it's ridiculous, you know, and it's gotten more expensive. We. We've done this six times, and it's. I think it's double now. What it. What it used to be. Yeah, of course, everything is. Yeah, everything is right. And. And Lisa kind of turned to the person and said, listen, what you have to understand is as long as we can afford it, we're going to do it. Because it's the only time I ever see Dave turn off and do nothing all day.

That's really valuable.

And it is. It is value. She's right. Like, she's correct on both sides of this. Like. Like, it is the. Pretty much the only time I. I don't do something. And it's good to do this for a change. Not.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you wouldn't do it every time I go with you, but sometimes sitting, stopping, floating, reading, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's really great. We did a whole episode on it. I think if you search for downtime at Businessbrain show, you'll find it. And, you know, if you're. If your day is going and you're just stacking up task after task after task, and you get it. I mean, like, I had a crazy day yesterday, and by the time I walked back down to the house, man, I was. I was done.

Yes.

And all I wanted to do was just stop and sit.

Yes.

And it's unusual for me because I'm always like, okay, well, we can eat, and then I can go work, get some more stuff done because I love my work. Of course we'll get Some more stuff done, but once in a while, you just gotta be able to disconnect. And I think it's great that you were able to do that.

Yeah. And I think that the reversing it and doing the event in the evening because, like, if we do travel, you know, we usually go to cities or whatever, and we do stuff during the day. We have a dinner, and then after dinner we'll go back and chill at the. At the Airbnb or wherever we're staying.

Sure.

You know, recharge, go to sleep, wake up, and do whatever crazy thing we have scheduled for the next day. This is a reverse schedule that we wake up and we have nothing to do for six hours or something.

Yeah.

And. And nothing. When I say we have nothing to do, it's not that we're looking for something to do is that we have scheduled nothing to do, you know, nothing as an event. And. And it's. It's interesting having that reversed time wise.

Yeah. I think that's. That's pretty cool. I think that it's good.

Yeah.

Yeah. There's some real value in trying to figure it out and trying to manage your. Because I get behind the eight ball, where I'm just like, okay, I got a pump. I got to get this grind going. But sometimes you just have to get up and walk away. Because, like, I was working on my website this morning, and I have this one thing that won't line up, and the field length is something, and it just drives me nuts.

Maddening.

And I finally is like, just leave it. Nothing bad is going to happen while it's sitting there like that.

So.

So just walk away. Go do something else. Go get another cup of coffee and just reset. Yes, it's really important, and I encourage everybody to do it.

All right, business brain listeners. You know how juggling your to do list can sometimes feel like you're trying to balance plates while riding a unicycle? Especially when every task demands a PhD in multitasking. Does that even exist?

I don't.

I don't think so. Like, coordinating podcast schedules. It's not just picking dates. It's like aligning stars. And let's not forget the black hole of time known as research. Sitting in meetings, wishing you had an extra brain just for note taking. I mean, who hasn't wished for a clone in those moments? Well, clone no more, my friends. Our sponsor Squared Away is here to save the day with their team of superhero remote executive assistants on all highly educated military spouses. You're not just delegating you're empowering your business with trust and top tier talent. And yes, you're also supporting military families, which is pretty awesome. These aren't just any assistants. They're the Navy SEALs of admin support. Whether it's diving deep into research, coordinating travel itineraries that don't make you cringe, or ensuring your meetings are more productive than a brainstorm in a coffee shop, they've got you covered. And the best part, they're as integrated into your team as your morning coffee, offering custom plans to fit any entrepreneurial dream. With Squared Away, it's not just about getting things done. It's about getting them done with a charm that would make even a chaos magician jealous. So don't wait. Contact Squared Away today to find out how they can help your business thrive. Just go to go squared away.com contact. That's go squared away.com contact. Let the business magic happen together. And our thanks to Squared Away for sponsoring this episode. So, I know we talk a lot, Shannon, about things that have replaced email. Text messages. Slack. Right. You know, and getting away from email has been a great thing for our internal operations at all of our businesses.

Correct.

However, we still very much use email for external business operations. And really, it is the only electronic, universal, electronic communication mechanism through which you can actually send meaningful data. I know there's sms, but that's crap.

Well, it's, it's, it's different. Yeah. And it's still the king of email.

Is king. Yes.

You know, you're converting. You want people to connect with you. You. We talked about cult marketing last week.

Yeah.

You want to try to start building that connection. If you've got social media followers, you want to convert them to your email list because that's the only thing you control.

Yeah.

If you're on these social platforms, doesn't matter how many followers you have, you could lose. Lose that. You don't know.

You don't own it. No.

Yeah. Um, so having a great email strategy is. Is important. And I'd love to just talk about newsletters, what I think makes a great newsletter. I've written them my whole life for every business that we've had. I've done terrible at it in many, many ways.

No, you, you've. You taught me. You were the first person. Well, let me rewind a little bit. I'll get back there. When we started the Mac observer, we decided we needed to not have our personalities involved. This was a huge mistake, by the way, but we were looking at, well, there's all these amateur Publishers out there, we need to put on a better face than that. So let's be more like the New York Times, right? Yeah. I mean, this is not a terrible model to follow, provenance. And let's just, we can offer analysis and observations and all of those things and news, but let's leave us out of it. And then I saw your newsletters with, with Mac Rescue.

I think it was Mac Rescue.

Yeah. And, you know, this was, I forget you called it Shannon something. Ira Feigelman at Outpost did the same thing with Iris Picks or I was weak Iris Weekly thing. And I was like, wait a minute, I know that. Like, I knew you were the owner of, of Mac Rescue or at least one of them. And. But Ira was an employee over that at Outpost. I'm like, wait a minute, there's more to this. And that really was what caused us to rethink things at Mac observer and allow our personality personalities to shine through, which was absolutely the right move. So I think you've, you've always had a sense for the right way to do a newsletter.

Well, I, I love, I really, I enjoy writing. I, I'm better at it now because I have AI grammar checkers helping me along the way because that, and that always helped me, held me back. So, sure, if you're, you know, we're going to talk about writing here, if you're not comfortable writing or you're worried maybe one of your people writing something, you know, get Grammarly as a writing companion. And you know, there's another one called Hemingway that's I'm hearing good things about. But I think there's different ways to do it. And I believe your, your comment about personality is, I think, spot on. But you also need to recognize there are certain people that won't like it in your, A percentage of people in your subscribers or whoever you do won't like it. So you have to give them a way around it. And the way around it is to build the newsletter structure to where in the beginning the first thing they should see, especially if you have a lot of text, if you're just sending out pictures, which I don't, I don't think is a good thing to do either. You know, product pictures and that kind of stuff and buy me, buy me, buy me that you don't need this. But if you're going to try to connect with your customers on a deeper level, you need to give them the. What do you call it? The tldr.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you just do that in the beginning. You Just have some bullet points here. Here's what we're going to talk about today. And the first thing, because I would write it and I always. I called it my monologue. It was. I just wrote a monologue. Something I was talking about that may or may not, more likely may not have been related to anything we were going to technical tips or product sales. It was just my. You remember dawn from Small Dog?

I knew who you were talking about before you said the company name. And it's because she did the same kind of thing.

Yeah, he did. He had this.

Don did. Don also took. Took it over, though, so. Yep.

And Don had his thing. He called it his soapbox. So. And you knew now he went a different direction. I didn't think it was the best with the political thing, but at least he said, hey, here's I'm on my soapbox now. And at the end he would say, I'm a stop soapbox. And now I go on to these other things. But letting your people know up in the beginning sec. Okay, here are the five things we're going to discuss today. Shannon's monologue, this technical tip, this product solution, and these are the items on sale. Whatever. Because they can look at it and go, I'm not interested in any of that.

Delete, delete.

Correct your value, their time. You're. You're not like, you got to read through everything. People aren't going to read it.

No.

They're going to. They're going to look it over and scan it and they're going to look for things that catch your eye. And I would say, especially in this day and age, short chunks of text are very important.

Yeah. Two, two, maybe three sentences per paragraph. That's it.

Yes.

Yeah.

And then, you know, maybe an image or a graphic or something to. And what you're doing with those sentences, every sentences, you're trying to buy the next line. You're trying to buy their attention to go to the next sentence. That's the way you should think about it. It's. Why should they read it? You know?

Yeah. Okay.

You can tell your story in the monologue. And I just kind of had a rambling thing. I would tell stuff about what was going on with my family or whatever, and I got tons of great positive feedback. But I got also a lot of people like, this is a waste of my time. That's when I added the, you know, the bullet points and we hyperlinked it so they could just skip past my monologue if they wanted and go down the page. To the product specials or whatever they want to. You have one newsletter, but you're chunking it up to try to get it in a format that attracts most people or useful to most people. Yep. And so that those. Each of those sentences that you're typing should. Should really serve a purpose after your monologue where you can mess around. But if that sentence is. Just doesn't do anything, get rid of it. You know, if it's a technical tip, quick and to the point, and here's a link or resource or whatever it is.

Yep.

And then on. It's the same reason we cut the, the this show in half.

Yeah.

Because we know people are busy. We want to. If we could get 15, 20 minutes of your time, that's a success.

It's amazing.

And. Yeah, yeah. But getting an hour of your time, you know, we're not Joe Rogan and, you know, that kind of thing.

And we don't. And we don't. We never tried to be either.

No, no.

Like that. That's the thing. Yeah. Yeah.

So I love, you know, breaking it up. I think, as you know, I'm a huge fan of stories. You know, I love stories. And. And when I say that outside of your monologue, you could tell a story about the product or maybe the story is a comment you got from a customer, how a product changed their life or saved. Whatever. Save your data if you're a data. But something that connects other than this thing's on sale because everything is on sale.

Oh, well, yeah. Understanding that your customers may not agree that there's a difference between for sale and on sale.

Oh, that's true.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. You know, especially if all you're ever doing is telling people, hey, it's that there's a discount. There's a discount. There's a discount. It's like, well, training. You're training them. Yes. Yep.

Yeah. So you're. I always try to sell value. I constantly tell people and, you know, clients that I work with, raise your prices. You know, you need. You need the, the whistle, the workhorse and the whale. And, and if. If you don't know what that is, go up to business brain.show and search for that term.

You don't even have to.

We'll.

We'll put a link in the show notes.

Yeah, yeah, we did a great show about that. Those. Those three product types. So.

And speaking of the show notes, and very timely here, given the subject of this go to Business Brain show and sign up for our newsletter. The. The one thing that you will get Consistently from us are the show notes to every episode, which include all the links to the things that we've talked about. So you don't have to go search. You don't even have to remember to go search because you know that in your inbox is a copy of the show notes. You can just click it right there. Yeah.

So if you're in the car, like I. Or on my phone listening, I'm treadmill, whatever. Yeah, whatever you do. Yeah, so. So I, I like using story as. As much as I can. You can't be this long rambling thing about every product, but it could be just a couple of sentences about, you know, thing. And I like, if there is a longer story, put a link there and push them to a blog post.

Right.

And so the people that want that additional story about how this product does X, and we can give you five different ways it does Y, start them off, get with the hook and, and, and go. But the hook is important. You want to get there. You want to get their attention. The, the other thing is I think you got to use humor to get people's attention to.

You have to use your personality, whatever that is. Humor works very well. It does if you're humorous, if you are good at that. Right. And how do you get better at.

How do you get better at being humorous? Do you use AI?

I was going to say. Yeah, it can be. I mean, well, if you listen to. You get to decide. I tell ChatGPT to make the ad. The scripts that it creates for the ad reads funny. You may or may not agree. I kind of like the bizarre humor that it comes up with. It's different. It keeps it interesting. And that's really what it is, is keep it interesting. Humor can do that, but there's other mechanisms. Right, but you're right. I think chatgpt or, you know, some AI, you know, LLM that, that can. And tell it. Make it funny. That, that's. Those are the three words that I use in my instructions for the ad scripts that I do is, you know, do this, make it this length, make it funny. And then here's the talking points. Yeah, why not?

Humor is, you know, just humor stories, whatever little tidbits if you make, if you made a mistake, oh, tell people that it's great. You know, tell them how you screwed up. And if you, you know, whatever. I think it's very important. And maybe you're not the funniest person, but somebody could be or I don't know, like say use, use the AI or use Whatever.

Like think about, try and write how you talk. That's really the key. And if you can't, if you, if you aren't yet skilled in writing how you talk, talk and dictate it and then edit what you've dictated and go from there.

Yeah, I love that one tip. I'll give you that.

We only got one left. Last one.

What's it it's really quick and it's tiny. Is put choose an emoji related to your company or newsletter and that should be the in your every single subject line. Oh, the guy from the Naptown Scoop Ryan. I forget his last name. His is a little ice cream cone. And I have a nonprofit I work with and I started adding a little American flag because it's kind of a patriotic group and everything. So every newsletter goes out, they see that American flag and they identify. I know who that's from.

Oh, brilliant, right?

And so you get that in. So share your tips. We I would love to, you know, help educate us and we can create these tips together. FeedbackusBrain Show. Let's do it.

Let's do it. Feedback at BusinessBrain Show. Make sure to check out gosquaredaway. Com contact. That's where you're going to learn about our sponsor Squared Away and go sign up for our newsletter BusinessBrain Show. You'll get a form right there. Keep living that charmed life. We'll see you on Friday.