I have a newsletter and I will use it
Everyone is getting newsletters these days. Newsletters are basically the Ray-Ban’s of the web, if you don’t have one you’re missing out. They are totally hip. That of course is one of the reasons I want to write and publish my own.
I don’t really pursue a specific goal with it, I just think it’s nice to share thoughts, bits and pieces that I care about with a smaller audience. Not because I am not posting the content of the newsletter on my blog, I definitely will. I just think it’s more convenient for you because a tweet can be missed quite easily (thanks to the Twitter algorithm) and second of all, I might share news with you earlier than on my blog. When I have something to share, you know it first, cool?
Other than that I am fascinated by successful newsletter marketing. I’ve read a ton of blogs and articles about it and I just simply want to give it a shot. Put what I learned into practice. Make this thing as successful as it can be. This is difficult of course. First of all because I don’t really know the type of content I want to share every week – some articles might be boring for some readers (hint: sourdough bread) and sometimes I might find a hard time writing anything with purpose. My main goal is to just keep writing and trying out new things. That’s what a personal blog is all about. And I am not suffering from loss of reality and think I am gonna collect a few thousand readers and become the new kottke.org. My content cannot be that interesting, also because I only have limited time writing it. But I will try anyway.
I structure my newsletter into three sections.
- The first section is one or more topics that I have in my mind for this week.
- The second section deals with something I have learned. Maybe I have learned something about myself or I have learned a new skill, or I gained a new insight.
- Links of the week, websites that I find interesting.
That is the plan, at least for now.
What I learned last week
Well, I already put that into a post, called “The masterplan is a myth”. I just realized that I as a digital designer will never be able to deliver the masterplan to a client. First, I have to get to know their business, what their strategy is, what their obstacles are, in order to find solutions to their problems. Although this might be very clear to a lot of people I just had to remind myself of that fact.
The second thing I realized is that I am overworked. Not physically I’d say but rather mentally. We’re at a very exciting phase in our company, we grew quite a lot and with that also the pressure is rising. We have to deliver and we are responsible for ~20 people now. That is no easy task, let me tell you that. I also am in the process of building a house. Last week I had to pickup a pipe from the water supplier in Berlin. Yes, when you’re building in Berlin you have to do that yourself. Sometimes this city really leaves me speechless. Anyway, building a house or rather doing the project management for it, is no easy task. This is another opportunity to write a guide about it, or rather writing down my experiences with it. And then there is the pressure of just being a parent and you have that every day. Am I doing everything right? Have I damaged her psyche permanently because of some action or some word or some stupid face? Watching your child grow is a rollercoaster of emotions and every day is exhausting. Also in a good way. But after dinner, you’re just too tired to do anything really and you just fall to bed.
Links of the week
A true thing of beauty is this website by Nesta, called Visions for the future internet. My MacBook Air’s fan is not a fan though, haha wordplay.
If you ever wanted to build a true masonry layout without JavaScript, Tobias has the solution. I will definitely give this a try soon.
Because I did a bit of a redesign for my site, I also switched to Matomo from Google Analytics. Matomo is a free and secure analytics platform that you can host on your own server. It comes with a ton of great features. Formally it is known as Piwik. Anyway, I use it for my site now and am quite happy with it, because …
… I can use it inside Kirby. I also updated my website to Kirby 3 and with that I also installed the Matomo plugin for the admin panel. Meaning, I don’t have to login to Matomo in order to see my stats. Isn’t that beautiful?
And with that I am leaving you all this week.
Take care and see you soon,
Lorenz