sending a weekly newsletter is sabotaging your best content

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I think that most of you should stop sending a newsletter. Like, right now. Immediately. CLOSE THE SUBSTACK TAB!
When you start learning about marketing a business outside of Instagram or social media, one of the first things that gets shoved into your brain is the idea that you NEED to send an email every week to your audience.
This is both terrifying and daunting, because
* The idea of reminding someone you exist every week means they can reject you EVERY WEEK, vs. sliding under the radar hoping they don’t unsubscribe from your email list simply because they don’t notice you. Yery Jurassic Park “T-rex can’t see you if you don’t move” vibes.
* Writing — not putting together a bunch of pictures, not talking in a 15 second IG story, not recording an off-the-cuff podcast, but actually WRITING something — every week is time-consuming, even for people who don’t have to google where the apostrophe goes for its and it’s every time. (It’s me, I’m people)
So a lot of us don’t do it, or pretend that this advice doesn’t apply to us, or stick our fingers in our ears and go LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU.
And — pay attention, this is where I vindicate you and you get to forward this to everyone who’s ever made you feel bad about your inconsistent email schedule — the advice to send a newsletter every week is burning people out, keeping them stuck in content loops that don’t convert, and creating audiences who don’t actually know what you do.
Not because you’re doing it wrong! But because a weekly newsletter might be the wrong tool for you entirely.
I know you’re punching the air in celebration right now. But before you get ahead of your skies, I regret to inform you that there’s some solid logic to the Internet Person Commandment #1, “Thou shalt email your list every week.”
Here’s what it gets right:
* building your email list is important because it’s the only digital audience real estate you “own,” meaning it’s independent of a platform (like Instagram or Youtube), you can take it with you anywhere, and it’s not impacted by petty algorithm changes that hide your content from you audience at the exact moment you’re really trying to reach them
* but an email list full of people who don’t know who the hell you are or WHY they signed up for you email list in the first place is another type of hell, and definitely not a hell that you can make money in (more like a hell that makes you feel like a unwelcome guest in your own home, like you’re interrupting a party that you organized… yuck)
* so you should email your list regularly to create trust and recognition — this creates a relationship between you and your audience members, especially when you provide them value
* and putting out regular content is a great way to test your ideas and gauge general audience interest
Basically, help people remember who you are and what you do and give ‘em a little somethin’ somethin’ that makes them happy to see your name in their inbox instead of feeling dread or annoyance when your name pops up next to a subject line.
It’s easy to reduce all that logic down to a quick and dirty bottom line — I’...