Lesson 5: Content Flywheel
Lesson of the Week:
The Newsletter Content Flywheel
One of the biggest benefits of newsletters is the ability to publish in a safe space. Most social networks are not as friendly or as safe.
But on your newsletter, your audience has opted-in to read you; they’re friendly. And if they’re not, you can remove them because you have total control over a newsletter.
What this allows you to do is workshop ideas and refine them.
You can present an idea that may be in its nascent stage to your readers in the newsletter, hear feedback through replies, and iterate on it. Incubate and evolve your ideas in the safe harbor of your newsletter before releasing them to the wild on Twitter, LinkedIn, or your social media of choice. We call this an Idea Public Offering (IPO).
Doing this week after week leads to a “Content Flywheel.”
Sharing the best ideas from your newsletter out in public social media channels then brings in more subscribers, leading to more ideas you can workshop and share with even more people privately on the newsletter.
We believe it’s important to protect ideas while they’re new.
Developing ideas are fragile and easily shot down. Your newsletter audience is a nice, safe spot to introduce, brainstorm, and work on ideas with constructive, not withering criticism. And when ideas are ready, the cycle repeats, and your content on public channels is better off for it.
Newsletter of the Week:
John Nicholas writes the Creator’s Corner. He’s recently been exploring the concept of Personal Monopolies in his newsletter and you can see the evolution of his thought process over recent issues. I’m not sure what feedback John got from his readers, but you can see the clear progression in his thinking.
Issue 12: John discusses his quest to find a niche and his experience so far in Michael Sklar's Personal Monopoly Accelerator.
Issue 14: John completed the course and reflects on the lessons. He’s seeing how they apply to his life.
Issue 17: John thinks about his own personal niche “maybe Accidental Actuary?” and talks about the resistance, but also why he wants a personal monopoly.
Issue 18 (Last week!): John talks about his perspective on personal monopolies and invites his readers to discuss.
There a clear progression on two topics, John’s own personal monopoly and the Personal Monopoly as a concept. We’re looking forward to hearing (and adding) to the conversation.
Tip of the Week:
Most newsletter editors have a “Preview” function. This lets you see the layout and formatting. There is also often be a “Test” function where you can send the newsletter to yourself in order to test all the links and make sure everything is working the way it should be. We didn’t follow this advice the first few weeks!
Thank you for reading. We hope you have a wonderful weekend. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with a friend or two.
Louie & Chris
P.S. you can respond directly to this email. We read every reply. We'd love to hear from you.
Our personal newsletters:
This is a great idea, and it's probably the safest. In comparison, Twitter is a lot faster for feedback on ideas.
I usually do a tweet if that works, expand into a thread, and later into a blog post/newsletter.