#085: Why You Should Start a Newsletter (and How to Keep it From Being a Drag)

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia.

Hey there. Thank you for joining me for episode 85 of the High Income Business Writing Podcast. My name is Ed Gandia and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to take their writing businesses to the six figure level or the part time equivalent. As a quick reminder, you can find the details show notes for this episode when you go to b2b launcher.com forward/episode85 Back in 2004, late 2004, I had a newsletter, an email newsletter for my freelance copywriting services. Everything was going well. I was publishing monthly. But after about 18 months I let that newsletter go and a few years later I realized that this was a mistake. My newsletter could have helped me weather the storm of 2008. Late 2008, I lost several big clients, including one that was about 50% of my business. It could have given me one more way to stay in touch with longer term prospects, with dormant clients, with past clients, and it would have made it much easier to promote new services and openings in my schedule. I could have gotten real creative with that. If you're starting a new business, you've probably heard me say that I don't recommend launching a newsletter right off the bat, and I still stand by that recommendation because it can easily become a stumbling block to getting your business off the ground and gaining that early momentum. But if you already have a client or two, the benefits of a newsletter far outweigh the time and cost needed to launch and maintain one. And in today's episode, you're going to hear from my friend and colleague, Michael Katz. Michael is an authority on launching, publishing and leveraging a newsletter to grow your service based business. He is going to explain the biggest and not so obvious benefits of having a newsletter. How to launch one, what format to use, how often you should publish, how to easily come up with a ton of topic ideas, and just how to keep it from becoming a real drag, which can be an issue for folks who have launched one and they've gotten kind of their first four, five, six issues out of the way and now they're really struggling with how to keep it up. So without further ado, let's get to that interview. I think you're really going to enjoy this one. Michael. Welcome to the show, man. Welcome back actually.

Great. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, man. So you know you and I had an interview a couple of years ago. It went over really, really. Well, we talked on a similar topic and we're going to talk about today. But for folks who don't know much about you aren't familiar with your work, why don't you start by telling us a little about the work you do, who you are, your sign, all that good stuff.

Great. Well, my company is called Blue Penguin Development, and I am located just outside of Boston, and I'm a marketing consultant and I specialize in email newsletters. And I've been doing it since about.

2000, which was like, right when things. That was just becoming slightly popular.

Yeah. It's funny, I was telling somebody the other day when I first started doing email newsletters, the biggest objection I would hear from potential clients was that not enough of their customers had email. And I would say, just wait, it's coming, it's coming.

This is like the next big thing, man.

Yeah. Plus, it was a lot. It was way harder. I know, we'll talk about this. It was way harder to do because you didn't have vendors that made it the back end easy. So you actually needed a designer and a technical guy every time you publish every newsletter.

Yeah, it was. It was a big project.

Yeah, it's really a technical undertaking.

And your clients are typically professional service firms, right?

Well, not typically. Only so I only work with people who sell a service. If you sell stuff like sneakers or, you know, you own a pet store or something, that newsletter still actually is helpful. But the real sweet spot for me is people who are selling a. Essentially a commodity. So, you know, every financial planner and every attorney and every, you know, consultant sells the same thing. It may be. There may be some nuance differences, but it's hard for a potential client to tell the difference. And so I find a newsletter really works well when your competitors appear to sell the same thing you do.

Gotcha. Because, I mean, I'm assuming now you can show your personality, now you can develop a relationship through another medium.

Yeah. You know, it's a funny thing, but really, whether you're talking to a recruiter or a consultant or a writer or coach, we believe we are different than our competitors. And it's sometimes the case, but usually we're actually not in terms of the technical capabilities, but from a perspective client's point of view, one financial plan is the same as the other. They can't tell the difference. It's like you don't know how technically good your doctor is. Medically, the reason you like a particular person or company, I think has at least as much to do with the way you feel about them. Do you trust them? Do you like their point of view? And that that's something that a newsletter, if done well, brings out in people. And then people get to know you without you even necessarily talking to them. And then when the time comes, they need what you have, which can be sometimes, you know, years. Yeah, you're the obvious choice. So it works really well.

Yeah. And I found that with freelance professionals, right, when they're. When they don't know you, your credentials matter more than once you develop a relationship. And it's not that you shouldn't have credentials, it's just that you don't have to rely on your credentials and your track record as much as you do once you've developed somewhat of a relationship. And when I say relationship, I could mean online, like the never actually talk, but they get to know you through your communications.

Yeah, I agree. So, yes, you need the experience and the credentials and the ability to do a good job, but that's like the price of admission. So everybody's got that. Who's going to stay in business. The funny thing is, though, on the whole relationship thing, which it took me a while even to realize this for myself through my own newsletter, is that you end up having readers who know you and you've never even heard of them. It's like a really weird thing. But they read your stuff. And if you reveal enough about yourself and your interests in your point of view and, you know, even like your family, sometimes you hear from them, like, I'll get people and ask, like, how's your son doing in college? And I don't even know who they are. Yeah, but that's really good because when people trust you that they're willing to. They don't haggle on price, that they're. They treat you better. They don't. They don't just say, we're going to take, you know, the second cheapest person who does whatever you do, however people choose that way. And so it's a real differentiator. Even though it's a very soft kind of thing, it's very subjective.

Couldn't agree more. Couldn't agree more. So let's talk a little bit about newsletters and how having one as a freelance writer or copywriter could really make an impact on your business. I've kind of gone back and forth on this a couple of times. So when I was getting started, I was really high on the whole newsletter thing. And this is like 2004, I think I launched mine and I did it for about a year and a half, it was definitely helpful, but then it, it just kind of faded. And then I became kind of an opponent to doing that. And the reason I became an opponent is that I saw that a lot of people were not launching their business because they were waiting to have their newsletter right ready. And it just became another obstacle. So I started really convincing people not to do this. However, now I still take the same approach. I said, look, you got to get your business off the ground. If this is something you want to do, get it off the ground. Forget about the newsletter for now. But now that I'm working with folks who are beyond that point, the newsletter thing is becoming something I really starting to harp on. So, you know, I want to hear your view on this is what do you, you know, we've talked about one of them, the benefits of having a newsletter. One of them is building that trust. What other benefits do you feel a newsletter can give you if you're a freelance writer or copywriter?

Well, first of all, I agree with exactly what you said. So even I, the guy who like, lives and breathes newsletters, if you said you started your business today, I would say, great, don't do a newsletter yet. Because the newsletter, as we've been saying, it's a relationship building tool. And so it's fine to start when, say, you still have a job and you're thinking of leaving and you have some time because you're developing an audience, but you're not going to get a client probably the first time you publish. And so there's other things you need to do in terms of getting the business going and all that before you do this kind of thing. But when you get to the point where you can do that, a bunch of things. So yeah, there's the whole trust thing. Second, which is a key thing, is the repetition that goes with the newsletter. So it's not that I'm going to read your newsletter again one time and hire you. It could happen. Probably not. What happens though is you're there over and over and over again in people's inbox, assuming they've given you permission to do that. And so, you know, people originally will read your newsletter because they want the useful information you provide, not necessarily because they want to hire you. So if I'm a writer and I'm writing about how to write better, how to include things in your presentations or whatever for a particular audience, people who subscribe to that don't actually care about you, they just want the information. And that goes for Whether you're a recruiter or like a plumber or whatever. But what happens is over time, they start to feel like they know you in some way. They start to like your stuff, and if they don't, they unsubscribe. And so it's sort of like you've got this ever increasing basket of prospective clients. They're just not ready to buy yet. But the benefit is it keeps coming over and over and over again until they say stop. And so the people who call you the best ones are the people who've been reading your stuff for some period of time. So it kind of removes timing from the equation. Like even if you bought a Super bowl ad, you know your phone to ring off the hook for a week and then you'd be back to zero again. So this idea that without any real cost, other than, you know, the small amount that you'd have to pay a vendor, assuming you write it and set it up yourself, you're just out there over and over again. So that's a big one. Trust the repetition. Another one is people get a chance to kind of check you out. Like, it's very hard to decide how much you're gonna like working with this person. And in the case of a writer, do I even like the way they write? So it gives people a way to try you out. You know, it's, it's sort of like, it's very hard, say if you're a financial planner, for me to decide, do I want to give you my life savings. This allows people to get a sense of you. So it's this, this risk free, free sample that if you sell a service, it's hard again. If you sell sneakers, I can try them on. If you sell food, I can have a sample. This is hard to do it with a service. And then another key thing which people don't really think about is it helps you get really clear on what your own thoughts are about your own profession. So in order to write something on a particular topic, you know, 600 words or whatever, you have to sort of think it through. And what I find often happens is I'll write a newsletter on a particular thing and then a week or a month later I'm having a conversation with someone and I realize I'm sort of retelling the thing I had straightened out in my own head as a result of having written it. So it's that self. And then, you know, there's a whole bunch of other things. You put it on your site as a blog. Google likes that so you're adding content to your site on a regular basis. People reprint your newsletter so you get more redistribution of that. So it really covers so much. In fact, to me, it's the best marketing tool I've ever found. It does so many things at once. And what's great for your audience is the biggest problem people have is they can't write or they hate to write. But if you're a writer, it's like you've got the secret weapon that everyone wishes they had. So that's not an obstacle.

Man, I love what you just shared there. And I'll tell you, I couldn't agree more about your last point too. What I found is my newsletter forced me to think about content and actually get it out of my head and into paper. And then it gave me a seed that I could replant and repurpose in a bunch of different places. So I would put reports together based on content from past issues or just write a guest article somewhere and I would take one of my articles and I would rework it a little bit. But the essence was already there. I mean, I had done 80% of the work, so it became kind of like this multipurpose tool that forced me to get these ideas again out of my head, communicate them more clearly in an organized way, and really multiply my efforts. Because a lot of people I found complain, well, I don't want to spend the time. I only got maybe 50 people in my newsletter, that kind of thing. So it seems like a waste of time. But, man, if you can repurpose that content, you can multiply that by like 10 in terms of the value.

Yeah, I mean, you know, I stumbled on newsletters as a marketing tool when I first began. When I left my job in 2000, I was going to develop websites for people. That was going to be my thing. And I just started writing a newsletter. It wasn't even really a newsletter. It was like a bulk email. And I started to realize that because I was out there all the time sharing useful information, it led to all kinds of stuff. I mean, my entire marketing approach is newsletter based. So I don't do any outreach of anybody. I just publish. And then you get. And then there's all these things that fall out of it. But every client I have and every person I know is the result of my newsletter. Like, I know you, because someone else that we knew in common read my newsletter and ended up inviting me to some event where we were both speakers.

Yeah.

And I can, I can back trace every single client I have from the same way. So, yeah, it's not. It's not the size of your list is so much as the. All the things you can do once you start publishing.

Well, I'll tell you something even freakier, right? It's. You're right. We know each other through somebody who read your newsletter years ago, brought you in to speak at an event that I was also speaking in. But he told me that he was. He had invited you. He asked me if I knew you. I said, oh, I know, Michael, because I subscribed to your newsletter back in, like 2003 or 2004. So it was interesting because that kind of lubricated the process. And when I did meet you, it wasn't. You weren't a stranger. I felt I didn't remember a lot about you, but I did feel like I knew you to a certain degree. So it certainly made a difference, I think.

Yeah, it's a funny. It's a very funny thing. And I think that a key piece is having the patience and sort of belief that this thing will work because it's not nearly as trackable or as quick as, say, mailing 10,000 postcards and seeing how many people call or putting an ad on Facebook and how many people click because it's all these kind of random things. So it is chance, but it's not like you have no impact on it. I think of it as I'm sort of turning up the volume on serendipity by publishing. I don't know who's going to call me or who's going to connect me with who, but I do know if I just keep publishing, good stuff happens. People invite you to speak, people want to partner with you, people call you up to be clients. So it just does so many things at once. And all you have to commit to is publishing on a regular basis. I mean, I think that's probably the second biggest hurdle, once you've got the writing thing taken care of, is because you don't get immediate results. It's sort of like joining a gym, you know, you have to believe that it actually works because you're not going to see results on the first day or even the tenth day.

Yeah, let's. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about frequency. Since you've mentioned it, you know, what would you recommend for a freelance writer or copywriter in terms of frequency?

Well, you know, 15 years ago I used to say publish once a month and you're all set. Today I say if you publish less frequently than Once a month, don't even bother. Because now there's all, you know, everyone publishes content from, you know, social media on down. Back in 2000, nobody published content other than companies, so it was pretty open. Today there's so much noise that I think if you were to publish less frequently than once a month, and the default tends to be the fallback from there tends to be quarterly. It's just not even enough. So nothing is anything magical about once a month. But my concern is that if I start you off too quickly, the whole thing will collapse of its own weight. So I still use once a month as the starting point. Sometimes people say, oh, I'd like to do maybe twice a month. And I'm always like, okay, look, publish once a month for six months and don't miss a single one. And then we can talk about more frequently. But it's like if you know to use the exercise thing again, if you never exercised in your life and you said, tomorrow I'm going to start training for a marathon, I'd be like, well, I don't know, maybe that'll work for a week. Start slow. You can always increase it. So I find monthly is good. And also, what's also changed now is when you publish your newsletter again. It used to just be all you did really was send it out to those 50 people and that was it. Well, now you're going to post it on your website as a blog. You're going to do all kinds of social media stuff to point back to it in other places. So you. It's not like you just publish once a month and then you're quiet for 29 days. There's other things you can do, but they're all leveraging that one thing you wrote. And so again, like, I publish twice a month, but I've been doing it for a long time and I like writing and it feels right. I start everybody once a month.

So one of the things that you need is some sort of email service technology. Right? I don't even know what you would call that, but you need like a constant contact, a mailchimp or whatever. I'm curious what service you like best and why.

Yes, actually, just to sort of orient people. I like to describe it as newsletter is like publishing a magazine. So if you think of Time magazine, it's got a design that looks the same every week, more or less, the content changes. But I could show you Time magazine in Chinese and you'd recognize it. It looks a certain way, it's got a delivery mechanism of how do they get it to your house, to the supermarkets? You can buy it and then it's got the words. Same with the newsletter. Words, Design and then Constant Contact and their peers, they call them email vendors, they provide the sort of back end delivery mechanism and tracking. In fact, the two I recommend are just the two you said. Constant Contact and mailchimp. So there's dozens of them, but I can vouch for both of those. I've been a Constant Contact partner for like 14 years and, and I've used Mailchimp for other people. Constant Contact I like because they have free phone support. Mailchimp I like because the interface is really simple. Like all mailchimp does is email. Constant Contact's involved in events and social media and stuff like that. But Mailchimp, you can't talk to anybody, so. And also Mailchimp's cheaper. Mailchimp is free up to, I think 2,000 people on your list. Whereas Constant Contact, I think maybe it starts at $15 a month and kind of goes up from there. Still not a lot. So you need a relationship with the vendor. And they'll do a lot of stuff for you. They'll give you templates that you can use for your content. They'll make sure it's spam compliant, which matters, particularly if you're in Canada where they just passed a pretty strict law in the last year. You got to make sure you're not breaking the law there. And they'll give you all kinds of tracking information, who opened it, how many people clicked on what. And so for, you know, $15 a month or even free, you get a lot of stuff that you don't have to invent on your own like you had to 15 years ago.

Yeah, that's, that's absolutely huge. And you know, you mentioned templates. I know back when I was using it, they had some really, really cool templates. I chose to go with the very, very basic setup. But, you know, would you suggest that people start with one of the templates they see there just to kind of get going, or do you suggest they create something custom?

Well, just sort of. To your point earlier, the most important thing you can do is start publishing. And so I would just say use a template and get going. If you were to custom design it, which you can. So when I do a newsletter for a client, we don't use templates. It's custom designed. But that's going to now stretch you out a month or two at least by the time you like the design and you figure out how to get it into constant contact. So I'd say, look, pick one. Put your stuff in there. There's many, many choices at this point. And all right down the road, once you're publishing now, you're out there, sure, bring a designer in and make it better and all that, but don't let that be the stumbling block. The other stumbling block people run into, regardless of how well or how much you like to write, is they say, I'm going to stockpile a bunch of issues. So I'm not going to do it until I have like six or whatever in the can. And the problem is. So now you just pushed it out again. Yeah, you know, you don't. It's like, you don't have to stockpile if you're going to, like, have lunch with a client. You wouldn't say, I'm not going until I have six lunches worth of information. What happens is you start publishing, and each time you'll come up with the next thing. And you want to remove as many of these barriers as possible because you know your first newsletter won't be as good as your tenth, but you got to write nine before you can write the tenth. So just write them now. And they may not be that great, but they'll just keep getting better.

I'm with you. I'm with you. Related to that and the previous question about frequency, let's say that, oh, my gosh, you know, I just missed my next target date. Is it a big deal? I mean, is it a big deal that are people really expecting it on a certain day? Or would you say, look, just pick it back up where you left off and just get going?

I'd say the latter. So the schedule isn't really for your readers. It's for you. So I publish every two weeks. There's some people who think I publish weekly. I've had people who think I publish monthly. They don't really know. But the point of publishing on a regular basis is for you. Because the thing about a newsletter is it's never due today. So it's so easy to push it off. What happens is people push it off and push it off, and then, oh, gee, the whole month went by. So I'd say, yes, just pick it up and start going. And, you know, I don't need to get an email saying, sorry, I didn't publish this week. Like, no one's paying that close attention. You want to develop this regular rhythm. And so what I recommend is that you pick a not a date, because a date will move around in the month, you know, the 15th, is it Sunday today? And you know, Tuesday next month pick something like third Thursday of the month at 10am but something that's like really rock solid for yourself. In fact, when I work with clients, I force them not just to pick that, but the welcome email we send when you sign up says, this will come out the third Thursday at 10am so now I've like boxed them into a corner because you need a deadline. And so that's what it's really all about. Once again, you've been doing this six months, certainly a year, it becomes less important. And then if you wanted to skip one because it was the holidays or something, that's okay. But really in the beginning you got to make sure that it's like no matter what, this comes out as scheduled.

So how do you get subscribers? I get asked this a lot. And let's just assume for this illustration that I'm already in business. So I'm not just starting out this week or this month. I'm already in business. How do you get your subscribers?

Well, I'd start with the people you already know and email them and ask if I could add you to my list. So everybody's got a list of people they know, whether it's 2,000 people or 50 people. And it's not so much a numbers game, it's a relationship building game. So don't worry if you have 50 for all the reasons we've talked about. But you don't want to just add people. So that becomes your starting point. And I'd also say invite anyone who you think might be interested, even if they're interested in you and not your business. And so what I mean by that is your college roommate, your brother in law friends, which people are like, oh, that seems really weird. But think about this. We've all got the brother in law who after 20 years still doesn't know what you do for a living. The problem is that guy can't bring business to you because he doesn't get it. But I've had all kinds of odd friends and relatives sending people to me because they get my news again, they don't read it because they care about, you know, the topic so much. It's more a way to stay in touch with me. But the more people who know and understand and remember you, the more referrals you can get. So you want to, you know, depending on how well you know people like, you know, your brother in law, you can say, I'm putting you on my list because you know you're not going to be a spammer. Other people you don't know as well, you have to, of course, kind of tread lightly. So then you have your sort of starting point. Then it is an ongoing process because it's a leaky bucket. Every month people are going to unsubscribe. Some people's email addresses are going to go bad. So you have to add to it. So a few things. One is I do find the free giveaway with when you sign up works really well. Meaning. So for a while I had something that said, sign up and I'll give you a digital copy of my latest book. So I had that for a couple years. I'd recently changed it to sign up and I will give you a 20 minute video I did on like seven newsletter essentials. So to give people a little something in return helps people kind of push them over the edge. Any vendor you work with, by the way, constant contact or whoever will give you the code you need to put on your website. So that's one of those boxes where someone puts their email address in and it adds them to the list. The second thing I found works really well is to offer your newsletter to be republished by other places. So you can, you can contact a place that speaks to a similar audience and say, hey, do you accept contributed content? If they say yes, you're like, well, here's an article I did on whatever. And when they publish it, what I always do is I offer a little blurb at the bottom that says, you know, Michael Katz is a marketing consultant, blah, blah, blah, to sign up for his newsletter, go here. And so when that appears in somebody else's publication, some of those people who like what you wrote come back sign up. Similar thing. If you do any public speaking, whether it's paid or not, make sure that in your bio or in the way they introduce you, they mention you have a newsletter. So there's no silver bullet. Like there's no thing you can do that'll get you 10,000 names tomorrow. @ least. Nothing ethical. It's. It's a combination of all these things just being out there and just making it as easy as possible. People to sign up who want to sign up and it's more of a onesie twosie game. But that's okay because again, it's relationship building. It's not blasting people. You want people who are interested in what you're doing, not just a bunch of names on your list. So don't worry so much about my list. Isn't that Big. Because if you think about how many clients you need, say in a year, for most of us it's less than 20. I mean, I'm talking new clients. It's not huge numbers. So you don't need 20,000 people on your list. I mean, sure, that's nice, but just with the three or four hundred people you already know on planet Earth. That's a newsletter list case.

So to be clear on one thing, let's say your past or dormant client or prospects you're suggesting to contact them and make sure it's okay to add them to the newsletter. Don't assume that they're interested in Adam automatically.

Yeah, now, again, so first off, in Canada, the law they pass says you explicitly need their permission. So that bar is way higher than the US Bar. The US Bar basically says you can't pretend to be somebody you're not. If people want to take, want to get off the list, you have to let them. But there's a big difference between what's legal and what's considered kind of best practice and private. So the key concept here is you don't want to add people who don't want to be on your list who don't really know you. So again, you're talking your brother in law, your clients. If I launched today, I'd say to my clients, hey, I'm launching a newsletter. It's got a lot of useful information I'm going to put you on. Is that okay? So that's a little more than just can I. But again, my relationship with them is current and strong enough that that's okay. If you were a client from five years ago, I'd contact you and say, hey, you know, how you doing? I got a newsletter. Again, I think you'd find the information useful. Can I add you to it?

Yeah.

The more effort and personalization you put into that. Meaning if you send a blanket email to a thousand people, you're not going to get nearly the number of people saying yes, as if I said, hi Ed, how are you? Oh yeah, the more effort I put into that, the more likely you are. And then you kind of often running and then again you have to keep doing things to try and grow the list. But that's how it goes.

Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense. And I feel the same way too. I've heard two different approaches to it. I really side more with the, hey, just ask them, you know, just to make sure. I'm curious. Just have a couple of other quick questions and curious about coming up with top two Challenges that are related that I hear a lot. One is, you know, I'm struggling to come up with topics or the other is I got the topics, but I'm really having a hard time writing the draft. When it comes to client work, no problem. I can get it done. When it's my stuff, it's not that I'm writing about me, but when it's my stuff, I am having a heck of a time with it. Any thoughts or tips? I know that's a big question, but any thoughts, tips or ideas on how to solve that?

Yeah, so it is a big question. But your newsletter should be written to the perfect prospect or client. So that's the first question like who are you writing this thing to? To me, I'm writing it to the. To the kind of person or company I would like to hire me. So I actually have a like a Persona written out of. This is the person. In my case it's a woman, she works for a company of this size and blah blah, blah. And what I'm trying to do is educate her on what I my area of expertise is which is newsletters and running a small business. So that's what I write about. Depending on who your particular listener is here and what their expertise is and who their audience is, sort of the same thing. But the whole formula only works if the end user finds value in it because again they're not going to read it because they like you other again than your brother in law. But you're really going for that. The perfect client says I got to read this. So to use a simpler example, because this one I always use this because people can get this. Suppose you're a carpenter and your target audience is people who own homes for whom you do additions and bathrooms and stuff like that. So that's your target audience. Your area of expertise is residential carpentry. And so the stuff you would write about are little tidbits of information related to caring for your home. The mistake I think people make is they think gee, I need to come up with some brand new idea nobody's ever heard of or something that's like really impressive. But remember if you're a carpenter and I'm just Joe Homeowner, a newsletter that is like here's five ways to use an adjustable wrench is an insight to me. So it's always going to be sort of carpentry 101, really simple. So a writer could write something like the importance of an opening sentence and how to write it. That's a whole newsletter. How to use a semicolon, Nobody understands that you know how to put humor into the things you write. It's really just taking your expertise and chopping it up into really tiny little pieces. Each one of those is a newsletter. And not to overreach very much, I like to have one useful idea per newsletter, which that'll take you five or six hundred words and that's kind of all you want.

Yeah, man, I'm with you. That's a great way of explaining it. I can see how that could eliminate that writer's block. I think we tend to overcomplicate it. I've certainly fallen into that trap and I think that's sage advice, my friend. So I wanted to ask you, before we signed off about a training program that you have, that you recently put together, that it's fantastic and shows people how to do just this, right, how to launch your newsletter, how to get it going, how to get subscribers. So tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, it's called Create Exceptional Email Newsletters and it's video based, so you don't actually see me, but I'm talking over the slides and the presentation and the examples. And it's 10 modules and it's all this kind of stuff. It's intended for business people, meaning not technical people who have an area of expertise and they want to put it out. It's intended specifically for solo professionals. So the assumption is you have no staff or anybody like that. But I just lay it out for you and I base it on these, these three things I talked about with the magazine. So there's one section which is on design and how to do it and formatting and all that. There's another one on content and what to write about and how to write. And there's another one on all this, like delivery and grow your list and tracking stuff. And the idea is that when you're through with it and as you move through it, when you come out at the end, you'll have the newsletter that you are trying to create.

That's fantastic. I know a lot of people need that kind of guidance step by step, because even though the tools have gotten easier, it's much more than just a tool. Like you've broken it down, right? There's three pieces to it. And having someone walk you through everything to make sure you actually get it out there, done and consistent, that's key for a lot of folks. So I encourage people to check that out. I'll include a link to that training program in the show notes. So take a look at that. And Michael, before we sign off, where can listeners learn more about you and what you're up to?

The best place to find me is@michael katz.com and that's everything I'm up to.

Awesome. Well, hey, listen, thanks again for coming on. It's always a treat to talk with you and I'm glad we got to chat about this topic. I know it's a hot item on a lot of people's plates.

Yeah, me too. And thanks so much for having me.

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