The Value of a Newsletter

Through the past two weeks, the combination of swapping over email addresses and GDPR have given me a ton of reminders of the random places that have my email addresses, including services that I used once years ago and services that I don’t want to use anymore.

No Bandsintown, you’re not being clever, even if I have to email you to delete an account. I’m stubborn enough to take that effort.

But I’ve also gotten plenty of newsletters that I do enjoy. The ones that keep me in the loop on topics that I’m interested in. The ones that give me an overview of the day’s news. The ones that entertain with lighter fare.

For a year I ran a now-defunct newsletter called This Week in Web. Each Friday I would share some of the news stories related to privacy, technology, security, and random occurrences around the web. I would attempt to put variety in sources, and give a short impression of whatever I was sharing to give my opinion as well as make it easier to determine whether to read the full article or not.

That said, newsletters have been making a comeback. Email is still the killer app when it comes to reaching people most broadly, and if you’re like me, a lot of your consumption comes to your inbox as opposed to a notification feed.

While I’m on day 25 of my month-long challenge of daily blogging, I haven’t yet restarted a newsletter. I worry that it won’t be focused enough to attract regular interest, or that I will make it too focused for most people.

I don’t know which of those two options is the better outcome in my case, and I’m regularly concerned that by placing a newsletter on my personal site I will be tying subscribers to myself as opposed to a brand or business that could grow beyond myself.

But that’s probably thinking too far ahead. Instead why don’t I do the same thing that I’ve done with the blog: write about whatever it is that is interesting to me that day, and try to gauge where reader interest leads the content.

To that end I’m opening up subscriptions for a new newsletter. I’ll put out the first email next week, and I’ll start with a commitment to sending once per week. What that newsletter will have is yet to be seen, but I want to shake up the layouts that I’d used in the past.

Sign up below if you want to keep up with whatever random things I’m doing or thinking about, and get some links to cool things, gifs that I’m liking, or I guess links to my posts if you really want those.

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If you do subscribe, I want to treat it like a two way communication street. Email me back with stuff that you’ve seen recently that you liked!


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The Value of a Newsletter