TL;DR
I set out to start a newsletter and found that the hard part wasn’t the tool. It was learning the basics of modern online marketing, and finally answering a question I had avoided for years: what do I do, and for whom?
A while ago, I decided to start a newsletter on a new platform. I had done what I thought was a thorough investigation of the market, with sneak peeks at a number of platforms. It was also a pillar in building a marketing platform for myself, as part of my re-identification from freelance consultant to something closer to an entrepreneur. I have written before about this transition when I had just entered the process.
I have published “newsletters” for quite a long time, but it never gained momentum, because I never made a habit of it. In fact, all I had done was configure my WordPress site so that a new blog post generates a mail notification, landing either the whole post or an excerpt in a subscriber’s inbox. The so-called Jetpack bundle, a potentially huge (and possibly expensive, depending on how you buy it and what you think you need) add-on to WordPress, supports both sending posts in a newsletter-ish format and managing subscribers.
So I went for what Jetpack initially delivered in their free plans for a number of years, then recently I stumbled out in the wild, exploring different dedicated newsletter/marketing platforms (beehiiv, systeme.io, Kit) and finally I landed on WordPress again, in coexistence with a dedicated newsletter platform (Kit), integrated with the WordPress site.
What the bundle or any of the tested platforms don’t tell you is that sending a newsletter is the easy part. Before it matters, you need to learn the fundamentals of modern online marketing.
The LinkedIn detour
I had read a lot of LinkedIn posts and other material about what you need to do to succeed as a “multi-disciplinary freelancer” building a “portfolio career,” and I kept stumbling over terms I knew nothing about. One piece of advice was to post regularly on LinkedIn. For a while, you could skyrocket there by posting frequently about whatever people got hooked on, mainly how to be successful, mainly by (yes, you guessed right) posting frequently on LinkedIn.
I have never liked posting on LinkedIn. The tone feels so, well, icky maybe? So I kept posting sporadically on my website and sometimes copied the posts to LinkedIn articles, just for the sake of it. My marketing felt extremely secondary at the time. I was busy in my clients’ work, and my assignments were extended one after the other.
A new vocabulary
Then I realized I had to learn some new terms:
- Outbound: harder, and requires grit, time, and skills many of us aren’t aware of.
- Inbound: better and easier, a reward that comes after the former, but requires somewhat different skills.
- Distribution: I’m still not sure what it means, but marketing gurus use it a lot.
- Funnel marketing: I came across it in a “how to get clients” course and realized I probably needed one. But how and what to market?
Meanwhile, LinkedIn’s algorithms had changed drastically. A smart move I learned was to use posts from a blog or newsletter as material to refer to and recycle in my LinkedIn posts. Even more important: you now need to engage in other people’s posts, and comment in a way that makes you stand out. That also means being nice and wise when commenting, or you get ignored and your visibility sinks to the dark bottom of the ocean of success.
The question I had avoided for so long
The biggest lesson was the one I had dodged for years. I finally really needed to answer the million-dollar question: what do you do, and for whom? In other words, what value do you deliver, and to whom? It has boggled my mind for almost a decade, because I stepped onto a train already running at full speed when I became my own employer, and I never had to solve that riddle.
In part II: what happened when I tried to answer it.
To be continued…
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