You’re reading this because you’ve opened my email in the past. This week, I deleted over 20 emails from this newsletter.
During a short course on Skillshare on email marketing, I came across the idea of “cleaning your list”: removing people who aren’t engaging.
My engagement in this newsletter hit 30% recently and in the past, looming between 11 and 15%, I wondered what I was doing wrong.
I contemplated what to offer, whether my frequency was too much or the emails too long, then, like most things in my life, I realized something:
I was doing everything right.
When you’re writing a story, if you think about editing it while the idea is formed, you’ll lose the story.
When ideas come to mind, the best thing you can do for you ( and the idea ) is to write it down, and let it sit for a bit.
Journaling is such a powerful tool; you can time-travel to both the past and future—you can steal ideas from your self and implement them in the future (now the present).
As for my newsletter angst, I realized I was doing everything right: I was thoughtful about my content, I wanted to share only the best, and I was experimenting to see what would get you more value.
I went through my 200+ list and cut it almost to 3/4 of what it was.
I like how it looks now. Every email present has either signed up recently or opened up emails from me.
This is something I’ll be doing every few months —going through and cleaning. Making sure if you’re not opening my email, it shouldn’t clog your inbox.
It’s this same feeling I had when I published my first trailer review on YouTube.
It was an experiment: an attempt at using a trending topic to grow my channel. And guess what? I got some excellent feedback: the views on the video are above my typical average—and growing.
I’ve studied how to grow on YouTube so much. I know everything I’m doing wrong.
There is a formula to grow and many people have made videos on the platform for free.
You can have a successful YouTube channel. You just need to know what success means to you.
Right now, part of my success is to get to 1000 subscribers. I can’t control how fast that happens—but I can control how much content I make.
Also, because you’ve opened my email in the past, I know you enjoy my content.
I would like to ask that you subscribe to my YouTube channel.
The content there allows you to see a side of me that is hard to express on the text and also my interests, like the movie trailer.
In order for a YouTube channel to get monetized, I’ll need to get 4000 hours of watch time ( 4000 hours of individual humans watching my videos) and 1000 subscribers.
It is arguable that getting the hours will surely get subscribers. But nothing hurts from asking my community to subscribe there.
That’s my request for this Monday—click here and subscribe to the channel.
If you’ve ever enjoyed reading me, I am more than confident you’ll find videos worth your while.
Your relentless storyteller,
Kamga.
P.S: I had my first live session for my writing class this Saturday. I recorded 4 tutorials and also worked with 2 coaching clients. As you can imagine, I haven’t been able to write much on Medium. But this is all because I’m not efficient with my time. I’m almost done with my new system to create without burning out (and without losing the quality) while increasing my income streams ( right now, it’s mostly droplets, lol)