My wife and I watched the pilot episode of The Office the other day. It was funny . . . really funny. I remember watching the pilot in 2005 when it first aired. I didn’t laugh. It wasn’t funny to me. I didn’t get it . . . yet. That first episode had all the…
On Entrepreneurship
How Black Friday Spreads
Want to mobilize a large group of people to take action all at the same time? Pick a day and name it. Be specific about the task. Repeat the day and it becomes a tradition. Today is Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year. “The Day After Thanksgiving” was always a popular shopping…
What would you create even if no one was watching?
Basecamp, the company formerly known as 37 Signals, is a big name in the startup space and very popular among developers. Their rise to prominence in that space came largely due to one thing: a blog. They had a blog that turned into a book that turned into a movement. Early on, though, they didn’t…
Newsletter Names: Don’t call your email newsletter a “newsletter.” Use one of these ideas instead.
I heard Nick Stephenson say in an interview that renaming his email “Newsletter” as a “Reading Group” increased the number of people that signed up. Listen to the full interview here: Getting Your First 10,000 Readers with Nick Stephenson (Self-publishing School Podcast) He pointed out that no one wants to sign up for a newsletter,…
Why Blogging Is Free
In the summer of 2017 I took The Marketing Seminar online course with Seth Godin. This is an adaptation of a post I wrote in the course forum. It helped clarify my thinking about the purpose of blogging. For years now there has been a lot of talk about “monetizing your blog.” The thought is…
