First half of wildcard weekend done and I got both predictions for yesterday wrong. Maybe I’ll have better luck today.
I'm Starting a Newsletter Again, With a Difference
With a rising interest in newsletters, I started one last year. I tried to publish one long-form post a month as well as a collection of links at the end.
I intended to keep this newsletter going through the year, but after a few months, I decided that a newsletter of this kind wouldn’t be of any additional value that my blog couldn’t already provide.
Now I’m also blogging on a daily basis, so there’s no need for such a newsletter, and most likely I’ll never publish a newsletter of this kind again.
The newsletter experiment did not succeed in the way I thought it would, but although I closed the newsletter down, I learned something valuable from the newsletter.
Newsletters themselves are great, but the real value of a newsletter is the niche the newsletter caters to. This niche could be an interest, a topic, a market or anything like that.
This year I’m starting a small side project to build a newsletter aimed at a specific type of organisation who are looking to make more effective use of their digital presence and other tools to help those organisations.
I’m sending out a few invites to sign up for some local organisations that meet this criterion. I’ll then run the newsletter for a few months, collecting feedback on the first few editions. If the feedback is positive, I’ll keep going. If it's terrible, I’ll adjust the content to either suit the feedback or close the newsletter down.
I’ve already got a landing page up and running and I just need to dig into how to send a welcome email to each new sign up. Once done, I’ll be ready to accept sign-ups as they come. I’m not going to market this though until I decide that it has any lasting value as a product.
There are a few added benefits from this experiment.
I get some hands-on experience with running a newsletter using MailChimp. TinyLetter was an ideal service for my previous newsletter, but for this newsletter, I need a few more features like more options for formatting emails and their content.
I can spend a bit of time researching and writing content for the newsletter. I’m budgeting a fixed number of hours a month for this, and in that time I need to have the material ready to send and handle any replies or feedback. A test of time management and improving my writing.
The final benefit is that this is a testbed to a more significant opportunity. I’m using the newsletter to gauge the interest in a range of services that could help a particular market. This newsletter will be the on-ramp to that range of products and services and will determine if there’s any value in them.
I think I’ve found a niche market with this newsletter but only time will tell. I do believe that this will have a better chance of success than my previous attempt at a newsletter, but the only indication of this is whether organisations that sign up for this and find it useful.
Nicholas Bate reminds us of the basics when we’re stuck.
My Three Words for 2018
I've already written about how I use habits rather than resolutions for the year. Resolutions are doomed to fail, but practices can be iteratively built on over the year and eventually form a set of good habits.
How do you stay focused on these habits though?
Well, one way I've been able to build on these habits over the last couple of years is using Chris Brogan's three words. It's a simple idea.
You pick three words for that will guide your actions through the year. Through the course of the year, your efforts should align with these three words so that anything that you do is working towards them. The words themselves are goals, but not specific ones. Just parts of your life that you want to make better.
Last year my words were habit, health and hustle. I'm chuffed to say that at the end of 2017 I had lost a bit of weight and I'm now more active through the work week to stop myself getting any more back pain.
This year's words are less of a focus on health and work and more about content and delivery.
Bootstrap - For too long I've had a little email product running that has been running quietly in the background. It's time to bring it to the masses and bootstrap it from being merely just a product that people use to one that people rave about. Of course, I'm talking about DailyMuse. I want to expand this product so that it becomes more of a featured revenue stream than something I merely allow to run. DailyMuse isn't the only product in the pipeline though. I'm intrigued about a numberless analytics idea, and I'm interested in exploring a niche market for my web development skills that could help end the feast and famine cycle that is always at the back of my mind as a freelancer.
Blog - I remember the great days of blogging every day. It didn't matter what day it was. I punted something out anyway. This single word over the last two weeks has prompted me to write and publish more often already this month and look set to complete one week with a post a day.
Budget - When it comes to time, we only have so much of it. For 2018 I want to budget my time and energy through the week so that I'm not idling away my time in front of the television or on my phone. This isn't a call to budget every minute of every day. Scheduling my day in this way doesn't work for me. The plan is to spread my time, focus and energy over the week, rather than blitz everything in the one day. One way of doing this is to theme each day around a particular product or project.
I wouldn't say that 2017 was a significant success using this technique, but I did make some gains. I'm aiming to do better with my three words for 2018.
Just found out how to use the SUMIF function in Numbers for the first time. Every day is a school day.
I completely missed the part of GitHub’s project tracking feature that allows you to track projects in other repos as well. Might be the game-changer for managing my own projects.
GitHub’s Projects feature is increasingly becoming an alternative to using Trello, but Trello’s native apps still make it my preferred project management tool.
One of the significant problems with social media is that everything has a number against it. Followers, likes, retweets, hearts, comments and many more. Quantity is everything on social media, and yet there are so many people on social media creating content that many of us would like but we never get to see them thanks to timelines that are re-ordered for our so-called benefit.
When Manton Reece opened up Micro.blog last year to the public, I couldn’t find the number of followers that people had. Even one year on, Micro.blog still doesn’t use counts for followers and likes.
Manton explains:
It mirrors a philosophy we have with Micro.blog to launch without follower counts or public likes. Follower counts are not very useful for a new platform. They add anxiety and unavoidably lead to value judgements when considering whether to follow someone, instead of letting the quality of someone’s writing and photos speak for itself.
— Don’t worry about the numbers by Manton Reece
I love this approach. Less focus on the numbers and more emphasis on the content.
Recently, I removed all the analytics tracking from my blogs. A crazy move? Maybe, but I would like to think that my time is better served creating more content rather than worrying about how many people are reading it.
I would still like to see what people are reading and what the trending posts are on my blogs. I’m not interested in the numbers though, just what people are reading. And that’s got me wondering about an idea.
A numberless analytics dashboard.
Rather than serving up a dashboard of page views and visitors with numbers everywhere, this would serve up the titles of the posts that people are currently reading. Much in the same way that the trending widget does on Twitter. It would also show the most popular posts for the past month and year.
Terrible idea? It might be, but it's probably not the worst idea in the world and may be worth exploring.
Stay tuned for updates on this.
A new year, a new Hobonichi. Same old trusty Lamy Safari though.
The unruly web
Amongst another Twitter scare, there’s a reminder that there’s a better social network where there’s less hate.
The unruly web — unregulated and uncontrolled — is, perhaps paradoxically, the easiest place to limit hate. Not because we can stop people from publishing, but because we don’t have to live by Dorsey’s and Zuckerberg’s rules and designs.
— 2018: Some Hope by Brent Simmons