It’s not easy to get somebody to give you their email address.
Most people wage an ongoing war with their inbox and the last thing they want is to invite more incoming missives into their life.
But, with the right approach you can still build a large and engaged subscriber base.
Here are five simple keys to getting people to hit that subscribe button, based on my experience growing the For The Interested newsletter to 25,000 subscribers.
When we have a bad day, it’s usually our own fault.
Because while there are days when things happen that are out of our control, the quality of most days is determined by how we choose to approach them.
A bad day is often the result of bad choices we make about what we invite into our day. The better we choose our “inputs,” the better our days become.
Our inputs — the things we consume, interact with, or experience in a given day — are largely in our control.
While we can never guarantee ourselves a great day, we can stack the deck in our favor by pursuing positive inputs and limiting negative ones.
Here are a few simple places to start.
“Even small wins can boost inner work life tremendously. Many of the progress events our research participants reported represented only minor steps forward. Yet they often evoked outsize positive reactions.”
“The first thing Jobs does is probably the hardest. He takes a pause, sits in silence…and thinks. In what seems like an eternity to the audience (and in reality lasted about 10 seconds), Jobs takes a sip of water and reflects on both the criticism and the question.”
“Providing an agenda before the meeting makes people feel like there’s a good reason for them to attend. But giving people the agenda before the meeting also gives people the chance to opt out if they don’t feel they can provide or extract value.”
“The allure of independence, so powerful to previous generations, holds less sway over today’s teens, who are less likely to leave the house without their parents. The shift is stunning: 12th-graders in 2015 were going out less often than eighth-graders did as recently as 2009.”
“Being industry famous should be the result of some contribution to the world that the industry respects and wishes to learn from. Or insights unique and useful that it genuinely makes people’s lives better.”
“The people who populate our unique social media worlds set the bar for what we may perceive as ‘common’ or ‘normal.’ They make up our networked information universe. The majority of Americans who are online — 62% of them — receive news from social media platforms. Of all American adults who are on Facebook, 76% use the platform on a daily basis.”
“My mistake was thinking the time I spent on side projects had been wasted. It was, and is, in fact, the most valuable time I’ve ever owned — the jewels in a lucky, joyful writing life.”
“Part of why online conversations can’t really get deep enough is that they’re missing two of the three pillars of analog human communication: facial expression and body language.”