Make Money Online

We publish at least one episode a week.

I am a long and loyal subscriber to Draft Letters. It’s terrifying.

Mondays? Damns. Yeah.

Every other week, I think. I don’t know. So sometimes it comes out with two issues.

Sundays.

I send out a daily newsletter for freelancers and consultants on how to get more clients without spending more on marketing. And you could sign up for that at KaiDavid. c

But no, so I publish daily and uh I really enjoy that experience of writing daily for a couple of reasons. It’s made my mailing list feel more like a community. It’s very polarizing. I have people who join and then immediately unsubscribe and write me a note saying that I publish too frequently, and that’s a perfectly fine reaction. Like, I appreciate feedback like that, but it’s not going to stop me from publishing daily. What I found is by switching from, I used to write every weekish, and when I switched over to a daily newsletter, I found It let me get faster feedback from my audience, for my subscribers, for my readers on the content I was writing about, the ideas I was putting out there. And it also let me test new concepts quicker. If we think about a weekly newsletter, you only have 52 shots in a year. So you have a slightly higher barrier. You’ve got to make it good, otherwise, only got 51 left. It’s not that I think the quality of a daily newsletter goes down. It’s that I could afford to take more risks. I could be a little more out there. I could write about different and interesting topics. I could approach topics in a different way. And I really enjoy that because it’s turned out to be a much more energizing way for me to write. And so, by having it be a daily newsletter, I have 365 shots at it each year. I’m able to, I just. If I was writing every day, I’m only writing on the weekdays, but it allows me to more aggressively put content out there and see what the response is. And the result has been. More engagement, more replies, more people enjoying what I’m writing, more people writing back to say they enjoy what I’m writing. And so for me, switching over to a daily publication schedule has let me say, Okay, as I get ideas and as I encounter things in the wild, what’s the lesson or what’s the connection I could draw to freelancing and consulting and writing an independent business? And how could I teach that or share that information? And it’s been. It’s been a positive, positive experience for the three-ish months that I’ve been doing it so far, and I’m fully intent on doing it for the next X years.

Oh, God. I say there’s three things in life I wish I’d done sooner. Started lifting weights, started losing weight, and started building a mailing list. Those I think are. Three very, very important things. The first two, because they affect your health and they have long-term payoffs. And the third, because a mailing list is strength. A mailing list is an audience. You could change your business, but if you have a mailing list, It’s more durable. And so I’d always been interested in doing a daily or a more frequent newsletter, but I was afraid about the reaction. I was afraid what subscribers would think about it. When I switched over to doing it, I lost about 20% of my list in the first two months. And it’s only been in the last month that I’ve started to have positive, sustained growth. But I’m okay with that because the people who have stuck around and are still on the mailing list are the ones who say, I enjoy getting a daily letter from Kai. I might not read every letter from Kai, but I enjoy getting them and being able to pick and choose which ones I read. And so. The fear that held me back was: A, what am I going to write about? That’s 5xing the amount of content I’m producing. Oh my gosh, what are the topics going to be? And B, what are people going to think? What I discovered is, I actually have more to say than I thought I did. Once I gave myself permission to write in this way, to publish in this way. I now have a Trello board with 200 plus content ideas on it. The challenge I’m facing now is there are more things I want to write about than there are days in the year. And so, what do I do? Double up, and now I send two newsletters a day, start a second daily newsletter. It’s opened up a whole new array of challenges, but it’s also opened up a whole new set of benefits and experiences.

I’ve discovered it’s the flip for me. Like I will write, I’ve fallen into the writing cayhole before where like I’ll start writing and working on a project. Yeah, I know. I looked I thought you’d appreciate that one. And eight hours will go by. And I’m still writing, and I’ve missed two meals, and I’m an hour late for that thing I said I’d be at, and it was a date, and I really should have been there. I just need to finish this one paragraph, and I want it for me, it’s just so energizing, I get sucked into it, and I just love creating that type of content.

So your two objections. Objection number one, you think you’re going to run out of ideas. I ran into that. Well, I ran into that fear. Philip ran into that fear. Other people, our mutual friend Travis, of Member Up, is just starting to do a daily newsletter for membership site owners. I absolutely love the content he started to put out there. And we were talking about it before he started writing this. And I think, if I remember correctly, he shared that one of his worries was: well, what happens if I run out of ideas? And We were talking about it and I said, Well, how many times in the day do you think of something to write about or have some insight about membership sites or respond to a question that somebody emailed you about membership sites? And he was like, Yeah, pretty frequently. And I’m like, every single one of those. Is the opportunity for a daily? So often my dailies are, hey, a reader wrote in with this question. Let me give a response to it, and I’ll give like A 200 to a 700-word reply to it. And I’ll send it to the person and say, Hey, is it okay if I publish this question over here and cross-post it there? But it’s become a way to take the content I’m already creating when I reply to an email and move it over to: hey, a reader wrote in with this question, let me share it with a larger audience. I’ve never once felt like, oh shit, what am I going to write about? Instead, it’s been the opposite of: there are too many ideas out there. Just launched a project or a product on referral systems, and as part of the checkout process, once people bought the product, they got hit with a two-question survey. And the first question was: Hey, what are questions you have about referrals? And so I now have a library of 60 plus questions that people have about getting referrals for their business. Every single one of those is now a potential topic for a daily newsletter. Somebody said, How do I use referrals in this situation? How do I avoid clients feeling like referrals are a big ask? Well, I could write about any single one of those as a daily newsletter. There’s so many sources of content out there or questions out there that people have. It’s almost once you, once, at least in my experience, you open your eyes to publishing this frequently, instead of having this higher threshold of, well, I only get 52 shots, so I better make a count, you’re able to say, oh, holy shit, there’s so many topics I could write about. How do I pick?

There literally should be. I mean, one of the most valuable exercises I did for my business, I didn’t even realize it would pay off in this way, but it has when I started the dailies, is I made the thank you page when somebody opts in for my newsletter to be a questionnaire. Asking them, what questions do you have about freelancing or consulting? What questions? What’s the number one struggle you’re experiencing right now in running your business? And so I think I have like a 15% conversion rate on that form. And so it generates a steady inflow of: hey, this is a question I have, or this is a problem I have, or this is a pain I’m experiencing, or this is a solution I’m searching for. And all of that becomes content that I’m able to questions that I’m able to write about. And I’m able to feed that into the machine overall.

I mean, I hear you and I agree, but I. Don’t know if that’s necessarily a counter to the daily, since a lot of the topics I write about are topics that I encounter when I work with a coaching student or when I work with a client or when I work on a consulting project. I just like a client might ask me a question, and I realize: hey, this is a question that a lot of people in this scenario or this situation or at this level are probably asking. This is content I could write about, this is something I can move forward with. So I think. Even in that client relationship, like obviously, you don’t want to disclose proprietary information or confidential information, but if somebody says, why are we doing this type of research methodology instead of just launching a test? Well, That question could become a daily or a series of dailies as you explore what the implications of this are, what the implications of not doing that are. So, even in a client relationship, I think there’s a lot of potential content. Sawdust, as the 37 Signals folks put it. Comes out of these conversations or these questions that a client might be asking during the onboarding or during the interview process, or once you’re in that engagement, that can all become pieces of content that you then create and share.

As you should.

It is. It’s a holiday.

I actually take the opposite approach where I’m working on building up a three-week content backlog right now. So when I’m at Burning Man, the dailies don’t stop. The dailies never stop. If anything, I will access the internet only to send out a daily on Saturday, which is like, hello, here are 500 vacation photos from me. I love you so much. Burning Man photos endlessly stream down the screen. Like, I enjoy the daily so much, I’ve even considered what happens if I switch over to publishing on Saturday and Sunday as well.

I’m not saying work on Saturday or Sunday. I’m saying publish on Saturday or Sunday.

I got this receipt on Saturday. Obviously, it was a bug. Please, I just need a refund. Thank you so much.

I actually read this. I’m in Puerto Rico. You own Puerto Rico? Why are you so pretty here? I read this amazing study. I’ll find it and we’ll link to it in the show notes. An email marketer for, I think he worked with Constant Contact on this, some large email marketing company, analyzing a corpus of, I think. 2 million emails. He wanted to figure out what is the best send rate. How many times a week should you be sending an email to maximize the number of people who view your email, not maximize open rate? But maximize across your list engagement by opens. And he found that, and this was very amazing to me, 5. 6 days a week. You should be sending emails 5. 6 times a week. More than once a weekday. And it blew my mind to see this, but the logic behind it was you maximize it because not everybody is opening every email, but by sending multiple times a week, Some people, like 30% of your list, might have opened Monday’s email, 30% might have opened Tuesday’s email, but only 50% overlap between those two cohorts. On Wednesday, again, it’s another group of people who are reading Wednesday’s email. People will pick and choose. And when I look through subscriber activity within Drip, I see this exact behavior. Some people are like, oh, the subject line doesn’t interest me. I’m not going to read it. But they read the next four, and then they skip the next three, and then they read the next two. I really buy into this idea that by sending more frequently, by sending daily, or by sending more often than once a week, what you’re really doing is giving your audience more or your readers more opportunities to read those, read what you’re writing, read your letters, and See the type of stuff that you’re putting out there.

I see it more as an argument for daily than for writing on the weekends.

Yep. I mean, I think there’s another great argument for sending out daily because We get into the concept of authority and expertise. And if I said, Nick, I know somebody who every single weekday sends out a tip about optimizing e-commerce sites for conversions. To me, that signals this is a person who knows their shit. This is a person who is deep in the industry. This is a person who is an authority and an expert on this. Because they’re publishing daily, because they have enough knowledge to be able to say, I’m able to think of a question and write something interesting about it. It might be great, it might not be. but they’re sharing this relevant experience. And I think it does polarize people to the point where you get the true fans, you get the people sticking around who say, I love what they’re writing, but it also signals authority and expertise in a way that a weekly newsletter doesn’t necessarily.