Emails
Our sign-ups had slowed down and we couldn’t figure out why.
This is what we do: Abrar has a list of bloggers to write to, along with a short description of what they write about, and what platform their blog is on. Then he writes to them and follows up as necessary.
I’ve seen his emails — the messaging is good, they’re not too long, they have actionable links at the bottom… but signups had slowed down.
Whenever this happens I start panicking e.g. “OMG WE’RE GOING TO FAIL AND I’M GOING TO HAVE TO GO AND GET A REAL JOB” etc. so having no constructive inputs I sent this message:
Yes, that was the best suggestion I could come up with.
Formatting
For those of you who haven’t done this before, let me tell you something about emailing strangers — it’s a huge pain in the ass.
If you send a beautiful HTML email with colors and fonts and borders and a cute image, then a) it takes an entire evening to get it right, and b) everybody knows that emails like that are probably spam.
But if you send a plain-text email it looks unprofessional. (And ugly. Quite ugly.)
So I’m experimenting with a “middle-path”. Fonts and colors, but no images. The emails look clean and pro and I would certainly hesitate before deleting them.
(By “I’m experimenting” I mean “this idea occurred to me last week but I haven’t tried it yet”, so I can’t report back at this time but I intend to.)
Messaging
Here’s the thing with writing about IndiTip.
When we target tippers it’s easy — “tip content you love”, “support writers and creators”, “more than a like” etc. And everyone who’s not a big cheapskate thinks “Ok, I can see myself doing that”.
But for beneficiaries, the message is “earn money”. “Let your readers tip you money”. “Monetize your content”… and that just sounds spammy. Sorry, it does, and I don’t know how to fix it but it sounds spammy.
Ugh.
