Last week, I made the case that email is king. When we have limited resources, this seems like the marketing tactic most likely to help us deepen relationships with our stakeholders. Every marketing tactic has tradeoffs, and the downside of email is that there is no algorithm that will help strangers find you. Unless you publish your work! Publishing your emails on the internet allows you to feed two birds with one scone.

The Social Network

On Tuesday, I watched The Social Network, which reminded me how much I dislike social media. I stopped using Facebook around ten years ago and I never really started using Instagram.

Platforms invented after those are foreign to me. The only social media I use regularly is LinkedIn, which, to my delight, has been deemed unbearably cringe. I don’t disagree. The cringe is what makes it great. There's a reason I’ve never met anyone addicted to LinkedIn. (If you have this affliction, this is a safe space and I’m sorry.)

When I suggest that you double down on email, take what I say with a grain of salt. I miss the old internet. When it was all about the blogs.

Publishing sets email free

The limit of email marketing is that it can’t go viral. Unless people relentlessly forward your emails, your list is your ceiling. To get around this, companies are bringing blogging back. (It never left!) Substack, Ghost, and Patreon allow creators to publish content to a small list of subscribers. When they push publish, two things happen at once:

1. The content is emailed to subscribers
2. The content is published on the internet.

This second element of publishing, creates an opportunity for additional traffic. Once it's on the internet, the search engines can find it.

Another way to be found

As a marketer, one of your jobs is to make it easy for people to find and remember you. In a noisy world, that is very hard!

(What would Elon think if he knew I screenshot my LinkedIn posts to share with my newsletter subscribers.)

When people want to find you, they’ll use search engines (and increasingly LLM’s). Organic traffic works like this:

1. Publish your content
2. Google indexes it
3. Someone searches for something you wrote about
4. Google promotes it in the results.

When you search “Ted Kriwiel” on Google, tedkriwiel.com is the top result! I even rank for a few variations like “ted crm,” “ted software,” and “crm ted.”

Surface area for luck

Publishing increases your surface area for luck. People like Sahil Bloom, Aaron Francis and others introduced the concept to me but I don’t know where it originated.

Put simply: the more shots on goal you take, the more opportunities you will have to get lucky. Publishing your work online increases your chances of being found. Plus, it’s efficient! You’ve already done the hard work of creating the content, recycle it by posting it on the internet. Let it breathe.

Some suggestions

If you are rethinking how you want to approach your newsletter, I’d suggest a tool like beehiiiv or my favorite software of all time, Ghost. Substack and Patreon will force you to publish in their ecosystem which has some upside for distribution, but I’d suggest publishing on your own domain so that you own the content and the traffic comes to you.

Parting thought

The SEO world is panicking right now trying to figure out how LLM’s are going to impact search. Ranking on Google won’t be as important when people go to ChatGPT to find information.

Very soon, people’s first impression of your nonprofit will be an LLM summary of what you do. Publishing your email newsletter content gives LLM’s context to write the most accurate summary they can.

Last week, for the first time in the very short history of tedkriwiel.com, an LLM referred someone to me.

Artificial intelligence will give and take away.

Until next week,

Ted