Hi Reader, I wanted to make a nice side income selling online courses back in 2015. So, I subscribed to email lists of the net’s biggest marketers to see how they promoted their wares. Before Netflix and X fame, Ramit Sethi was a big online course guru. I liked reading Ramit’s emails. I could tell he wrote them himself. And even though I’m from Ireland, I enjoyed his contrarian American-style take on personal finance. Ramit launched various online business courses over email every month. His...
3 days ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, Designing a landing page trips many people up. I was on a call with a marketer who presented a landing page that looked like….a Gingerbread house! She explained to Zoom attendees, “Visitors can click on the windows on my house. We'll send them a PDF if they get the right one.” The team never signed off on her landing page. You see… A good landing page either sells or converts. It’s not a puzzle. And it’s not a work of art. Send traffic to your landing page from social media or paid...
4 days ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, One of the big problems with AI? It spits out bland, boring content that sounds nothing like what a creator or business owner wants. Even Claude. It’s my fav AI tool for generating AI content. They’ve just rolled out a new update to help with this problem. You can create a custom style guide for Claude. After setting my style guide up, Claude dramatically improved. Watch AI tools are time-savers for creators and business owners if you use them correctly. My approach is like that...
5 days ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, I spent the past few days preparing my content strategy for 2025. Here’s what it’ll look like: Spend 30 minutes every day writing this newsletter Rework my newsletter for Substack and as posts for LinkedIn Publish 1–2 notes per day on Substack Publish 1–2 educational videos per week on YouTube Spend 30 minutes per day engaging with other business owners on LinkedIn and creators on Substack Publish insider content on my private Telegram group for creators I picked LinkedIn because...
6 days ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, I started my email list years ago on MailChimp. I quickly discovered that monkey-branded piece of software is best for e-comm brands. I moved to Kit and spent dozens of hours testing parts of my newsletter, including subject lines, content formats, and segmentation. Oh, how I geeked out on segmentation. Most of these types of tests did little for my business. Take list segmentation It's a powerful strategy for some creators. But, it's also a black hole of hard work. I got sick and...
7 days ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, Most creators and business owners are chasing the latest AI tools and bots for content ideas. After dropping the kids off at school, I spend ten minutes reading an odd website from the 1990s: the Drudge Report. Matt Drudge set up the gossipy news aggregation website in 1995… before Google. It still attracts nearly one hundred million visitors every month. If you ever wasted hours agonizing over the look and feel of your newsletter or personal website, the Drudge Report looks the...
8 days ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, I was weirdly obsessive about productivity for a few years. Name a productivity book or technique, and I’ve read or tried it. One man who has a good approach is author Nir Eyal. He wrote the book Indistratable a few years ago. When I interviewed Nir for my podcast, he explained the concept of timeblocking. Rather than keeping a mega to-do list that’s impossible to get through, schedule each part of your day based on what you want to work on. Don’t multi-task, either. When you get...
9 days ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader, “Where can I get a job?” An email subscriber asked me that exact question last week. Some one of few words, they provided no context or information about who they are or what they offer. I get brief emails like these a few times a month. I love hearing from readers, but I can’t do much with these one-line questions. Are they looking for a job writing for my website? In that case, I stopped hiring over a year ago because I changed my business model… Do they want to know which big...
10 days ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, I was listening to a Tim Ferriss podcast while knocking out some deadlifts at the gym the other day. Tim interviewed the musician Jon Batiste. Before the podcast, I didn’t know much about Jon, as he’s not that big in Ireland. But I love interviews with superstar creatives. Halfway into the podcast, Jon told Tim: “People, whether creative or not… have two, maybe three ideas in life. We have two ideas that we are constantly refining, recreating, presenting. Refining, recreating,...
11 days ago • 1 min read