I’ve signed up to a bunch of newsletters as part of my preparation for going freelance in iOS Development. The newsletters are a varied mix of freelance advice and building an online business. Not all advice is relevant but it only needs a couple of nuggets to make an impact.
Rachel Andrew produces quality content and lots of it. As a product person and speaker in the web industry she has loads of great advice to share.
Brian Casel’s email course Productize Your Service which is a preview of Productize course. The email course covers documenting your processes in order to be able to outsource them elsewhere.
Amy Hoy has a bootstrapping email course with “kick your arse into gear” attitude.
Benefits
Of course, there are other benefits to signing up for these newsletters. These guys are the experts. You get to learn how they do newsletters so professionally. You get to see how they connect to customers. Rachel Andrews uses Drip to capture emails. A big part of the signup process was an emotional want to complete the Drip popup.
You can maybe use this as an opportunity to connect these people and bring yourself to their (and their communities) attention.
You can also find out who they are influenced by. Rachel lists Brian Casel, Ian Landsman and Sasha Greif as interviewees in her book. That’s how I signed up to Brian’s course and found that I should already be thinking about life after freelancing. That’s how I became a regular listener to Ian’s podcast Bootstrapped and signed up to his newsletter. That’s how I came to notice this AMA by Sasha Greif.
BONUS – Newsletter tip: In Gmail, apply a label to all your newsletter sender addresses. Otherwise, you’ll miss them. Then, when you’ve got time, you can catchup on your list as if you were using an old skool RSS reader.