The Art of the Newsletter - Tiago Forte and Nathan Barry

10:55PM Feb 21, 2021

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So I'm listening to Tiago and Nathan Berry. And Tiago, his top three tips for someone starting a newsletter are to have quality of readers versus quantity. Because as a beginner, you want to get that feedback and engagement of what's going well and what's not. So I'm really happy that I have 195 subscribers. And I am really content that I have some really quality readers. So I appreciate all of you and you know who you are. The second tip, he said, was to have a specific time that the sub newsletter comes out each week. I recently changed mine from Monday to Tuesday, because I found myself staying up very late Sunday night, and not really enjoying my whole weekend to write my newsletter. And I would rather space out that spread over a longer period of time and send it out on Tuesday. So I still get to write about what happened that past week and have that reflection on the week and send up Tuesday. The third point he was saying so quality over quantity, send it out in a certain time. The last point he said was to share about your whole life, and not just a piece of your life of the niche you're really focused on like for me, I've never, if you've been following along, you know that I haven't really struggled, I haven't focused on one point, I'm constantly jumping around. And that's not really intentional. That's kind of just where I'm at right now. And I don't really have a niche, and I'm hoping that I can find the nice ones, I explore them. But I don't think my exploration will ever go away. So from that third point, I'm going to challenge myself to share more of the problems I'm dealing with to humanize my reflection and everything so that I can be more courageous and be the woman in the arena that I want to be. So that's something that really resonated with me because I don't want to ever come across as someone who's on a pedestal or better than any of you, we're all peer to peer feedback here and I value my community. Don't need some fancy recorded ebook or online course video all you really need for your lead magnet, which has the highest conversion rate for Tiago 3%, which from 2019, before teaming up with David, he was at 5500 subscribers and now a year and a half later with ConvertKit. After transitioning from MailChimp, he's at 45,000 subscribers. So that is crazy growth in a year and a half. But what's helped him convert the best has been the top 10 most popular pieces of writing on his website. So I was thinking I could do my top 10 pieces of it could be I could position it as most popular, but they could be the pieces I'm most proud of. And my top five shipments of top five essays. And I could even have my a video if I wanted or would be super cool to have a song I wrote. Yeah, or book, I had no book I read and just like get them, let them get to know me and my values and allow my content to portray what I believe in. And then they can get to know me very quick in that incentive email. So right now I kind of have a lead magnet already in my incentive, but it's not direct and that I just say, subscribe. And I never really say like, oh, you're going to get said my top 10 most popular writings.

But that's what's happening.

So that's what Tiago does. And I should do that too. I already kind of am. So a cohort based course is like a peer pressure cooker that you are paying money for guaranteed to meet people that are along the same path as you so you're there's a baked in community. And it's like you're paying for a world class college course, rather than a textbook

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with videos where it's like 100 bucks and you'd rather just find it online. A cohort based course is really you're paying for an experience and it can be justified the cost because a professor can be an expert but they honestly can't be the the best facility of learning like they might not know enough about pedagogy. Like if I got my MFA, I think I'd become an English teacher. But that does not by any means mean that I am cut out to be a teacher. Like I just have the knowledge that doesn't mean I know how to convey the knowledge in an effective way. an entertainer like David Chappelle could be a much better storyteller, which could mean that you're, you're allowing information to be more digestible for the student, as opposed to being very theoretical, not applicable. And just jargon eating out a bunch of verbiage, that is your expertise with acronyms, we're not breaking it down for the student. And it's not an enjoyable experience. So cohort based courses are really changing it where it's a credit might be $500. So three credit courses 15 $100. And they could be even more than that, depending on the school. So to invest that money in one course that like, and you're guaranteed to know the names of everyone in that course. And then you can keep in touch with them after and the incoming students as well. So it's kind of like Friedman, where he is the duck community, where like I've been able to like, in and out been able to connect with other entrepreneurial students from Miami because of that one course I took, but no other course has ever done that before. Where there's a longevity in the community of the students at with the professor and really talking about all that. Many people tend to put teaching up on a pedestal thinking it's too far to do like Ali Abdullah, who had a million YouTube subscribers said that I can't teach. And when really what it takes to teach is something that should not be put up on a pedestal, it's, it's a blend of being able to coach facilitate,

to be

a storyteller to speak in metaphors. And to simplify concepts. You need to engage your audience like Richard Fineman, I've really captivating and entertaining them to keep their attention, while simultaneously simplifying it to make it less complex. And Richard Fineman was revered a rare breed, because he had the skillset of being very deep theoretically into his niche of physics. But also being able at the same time to be entertaining, and Goofy and silly, and make sure his students are paying attention. So he had the rare blend of both of these skills. And when you start to become an expert, you forget what you used to not know. So the more narrow you go into a topic, in a way, you're doing yourself a disservice of not taking a break to teach it to someone else. We all should be teachers more or less, like, I remember, like my backup plan, I thought, if I didn't want to go into banking was to be a math teacher, because I had Ms. CASS, who, like I dropped down from the honors track with math in high school and my ego took a huge hit. But I was still like, in I was a junior in this class with all these seniors and I still, outperforming doing really well, having fun making some friends teaching them things that they weren't getting like. So I felt like I was starting to, I don't know, understand things. And I thought like, oh, a math teacher like Mr. Rowe Mrs. Kurtz like Mr. Martin, I don't know barely like Tim, or Mr. bassel. It looks like a goat freshman year of high school. But I'm just a how all these math teachers gave me frameworks to understand different formulas. And I thought, like, that'd be cool to be a math teacher like it's less subjective, like the grading process would be so much easier. And that was the biggest burden. I thought growing up. If I wanted to be a teacher, I didn't want to have to grade all these assignments. But I can teach students how to teach themselves. And then there's peer to peer feedback where the peers are taking control of signing of grading the papers or your audience, and seeing the engagement where you self assess how that blog when teachers don't have to be the assessors anymore. Like that is brilliant. Like, we don't like we can go back and forth between as a teacher learning from our students, students learning from each other. Students teaching teachers like when I found out that mentors like when I decided to not do But organically became more of a mentor to like my younger cousins. Realizing like i, this is like just as rewarding for me as it is for them, I hope, I think, and just realizing that like, with this never ending journey of life, like being a lifelong learner, or like a student for the rest of our lives, like, we will always be pivoting between sitting in one seat. And in a way, you're, you're wearing the student hat, and then you're switching to the teacher hat. But like, it's more organic than that we're like, it's not, you're wearing both hats at the same time, always, almost. And yeah, I think that's a beautiful thing. Like you don't ever

need to be one identity of the educational path. Like, you don't have to just be a math teacher, you can be a math student at the same time. And you don't have to get math student, you can also be a math teacher to your other peers. And like, it's just so beautiful. Staying, we always want to see the behind the scenes, instead of some fake polished image that's up front, where it's just the end product. Like, that is the beauty of the captions at the museum. Like, you get to read what happened behind the scenes to create this masterpiece. But at the same time you feel like you're doing it a disservice of judging it before you actually enjoy looking at it. So do you want to know the behind the scenes? Or do you want to see the outcome first?

It's like, the journey of like taking shortcuts where you see the recipe before you see the like cooked cake? Or do you want to look at the cupcake and then like ask like, oh, what ingredients made this flavor. And then you go read the description. I kept going back and forth between the two. And I wasn't sure. Which was better. It was like a weird experience of like, my reader, like, I don't want to just jump to reading. It's kind of like hard work. But at the same time to view I just looked at the painting sometimes I don't always know what exactly I'm looking at. And like that's a beauty in it of itself that you get to guess what you're looking at. But also what have you really are studying Monet, and you want to know where he was painting and at what point in his career did he paint this in like maybe he had a trend of colors he was using. So yeah, it's like an ebb and flow of like, trying to know behind the scenes, but also needing to appreciate the finished product.

So Tiago has a completely bottom up approach with clip triggers and ConvertKit, which I think I would love to have, oh my gosh, like I could, of course I want my whole audience to stay up to date with like me all the time. And maybe I wanted to have a monthly newsletter as well. I'm really just doing a deep dive into like, if I were to show by marketing for dummies progress on that habit or for a month if I wanted to learn more Dutch language or dogs just like have videos of myself speaking or interview people, or just like grammar lessons and homework assignments, I've given myself and share that journey of like a mini course of doing for my own accountability, to have a click trigger for that group. If I get enough Dutch followers who would want to click that or etymologists, or like some people really liked the Course

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blurbs, but I didn't really put a lot in there because I wasn't sure if my whole audience would want to read about that. So I think that's a really cool opportunity. That's what Tiago does. He just writes what she's obsessed with. And then if people are responding, he writes more. And then if people are still engaging, then he'll create a click trigger, a link trigger and then that link trigger group after a month or so sequence learning has it's not a guess it has a baked in audience that you see user behaviors that he's clicked, they've clicked on this link, they are interested in learning more. And let's say it's like, Oh, are you interested in learning about how I like starting to brew my own beer? Like oh, you are like, okay, like, I'm gonna start to like, share, like what I've learned here, and then maybe after I learned enough, after two months, I'll like brew my own unique beer. And maybe after being a part of that journey, you'll end up I'll challenge myself to create a finished product. And then I'll be selfishly learning and then you selfishly can also, like sell this beer to you and create a product to sell it. That, that small interest group that's a segue offer my main newsletter. So it's forming interest groups based off of what I'm interested in, and then creating something to monetize off of it, which isn't bad because it's forcing a project on myself that I see a viable audience. So I need to create a minimum viable product and then get feedback from the audience that I've created. So, Tiago, I love this phrasing. Tiago just funds his hobbies.

Through this

marketing funnel up there, click bait, click the clicking link things in ConvertKit, where you create interest groups, and you productize your hobbies. And this is like over a million dollar business. It's very lucrative, but he still says it as his mindset is funding his hobbies. And it's because he has an obsessive personality, where he's just always curious about different things. And there's a random chain of events of just random randomness. And he can't help but he's forced to keep doing this in the best and fastest way to learn is to get your hands dirty, you build something and create or make. So it's really easy to make something to show it to the digital world, leverage it, and then sell it a bunch of times and make money off of it. I feel like a whole entire book could be written about this, this whole mindset of funding your hobbies, just being obsessed with it and finding your niche across the whole internet. There's people out there, you just have to have hope. And know that if you market well enough you can find them. A book is something that is still the most familiar format to consume knowledge around the world. And it will continue to well beyond into the future. The same thing happened with James clear where he had a huge audience of newsletter subscribers before atomic habits. But after atomic habits, it grew even more because a book is just the most comfortable way for people to still consume knowledge. It's been around the longest and it's here to stay if you look at the Lindy effect. So yes, Andy MacIsaac books don't work. But also books do work. Because people don't necessarily the internet is huge. But the most easily accessible form of knowledge is still books, it will always be books. So that's why Nathan Berry and Tiago forte. Both have booked deals right now. And yeah, there, they just convinced me that I still need to write a book. I think I've been using the internet in my newsletter as a vehicle to find my voice, and to find or not find my voice to surface and discover it. And to bring others along my journey and build behind the scenes in front of the curtain and build my courage. And it's a great vehicle to do that. So I don't regret having a newsletter or anything. But now like, I definitely just created more sense of urgency in my timeline of my horizon of wanting to have a book eventually, because it can go international and spike and they can reach more people if your idea is really that powerful. So yeah, I generally met I am a philosopher. I'm a lover of questions and I am eternally curious. Being an online course creator is really sillim cyclical and has all this risk because the millions of dollars that they create is all created within two weeks of the year.

So it was very obvious choice to Tiago to partner with David and then be able to split the cost of hiring their full time staff of Wilmington because he's busy the whole year. And then Tiago and David are in the five week sprint modes and then the free course

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where they it justifies the cost of having a full time employee with him so grateful to have this technology of recording my voice right now. Just g blast needs a lot my news what letter followers know to use otter because this is like a magical technology.