The Summer of Strategy is finished! I’ve just wrapped up a content experiment, sending 104 email messages in a row to my list. (It actually was a few shy, and I’ll talk about that below.)
Here’s the post I wrote that kicked the experiment off: Kick off a Summer of Content Strategy with this Power Trio
I linked back to this post quite a bit throughout the series, because that V-E-P concept is foundational to how I approach business writing.
Fun fact: I didn’t notice until about 75 messages in that there was a typo in the post slug. #winning!
It’s not an experiment unless you learn something and then write it down, so here are a few insights gleaned:
Why I did it
To be honest, the project was a bit of a wild hair. I was noticing a lot of 100-day challenges on Instagram for things like sketching, knitting, and sewing, and thought it would be fun to give it a shot.
I went with 104 days in honor of the Phineas and Ferb theme song. Call me simple, I don’t mind.
(If you don’t know this excellent cartoon program, it’s all about doing epic things while also being good human beings. Highly recommended.)
I also have a new website project in mind, and it occurred to me that this would be a great way to get a bunch of fresh content pulled together for it.
The magic of writing every day
I’ve long been an advocate of doing creative work every day. It does something interesting to your brain to come back to your craft as a daily practice.
Normally, I wouldn’t recommend you try to publish every day. But because I’ve been writing content for so long, I was confident I could do it without breaking my brain.
What I will say, and this isn’t a huge surprise, is that the daily message took a lot of my creative energy. Other projects (that website being a big one) got put on the back burner due to lack of creative juice.
I don’t think that would have been as much of a factor if I hadn’t been writing to publish every day. Editing is at least half (and sometimes more like two-thirds) of the work of writing for me. So getting a polished piece was significantly more work.
My engagement didn’t go down
I did have some concerns that my list would start to hate my guts. So for every Summer of Strategy message, I included the option to opt out of the sequence, but stay on my list.
About 15% of the list took me up on that, which is great. It meant they could stick with me on their terms.
Interestingly, my rate of opens and clicks didn’t change much. Folks engaged with the content about as often as they always had — they just had a lot more of it to choose from.
I might have had a few more unsubscribes, but looking over my analytics, these were nearly all folks who weren’t reading messages anyway. The increased frequency just let them notice that there was a subscription they could let go of, and that’s a good and healthy thing.
I used a couple of “streak freezes”
The original plan was for 104 days, but one Saturday, I was having a good time with my family and made an executive decision to skip that day.
Another day, I straight up forgot to queue the message. (Thanks, inconvenient brain.)
I love a good gamification strategy, and streaks are one of my favorites. Watching a streak get longer and longer is a great way to come to your work on days when motivation isn’t so high.
But the flip side of that is that breaking a streak can trigger a “what the hell” effect that keeps you away from your work.
I have no problem using occasional “streak forgiveness” to keep the motivating part. In the greater scheme of things, 102 messages is just as great as 104 messages. And breaking a streak is a silly thing to lose motivation over.
I also used some “stupid sewing”
I’ve written in the series about having “stupid sewing” in your content plan. That’s a format or idea that’s so straightforward that you can do it quickly and without major brain power.
It’s not dumb or simplistic content, it’s just content that’s really fast and easy to produce.
Most of my emails were rather long, 800 words or so. This is my natural rhythm, and I didn’t fight it for the experiment.
But there were a few times when I just wrote a paragraph or so, and that worked really well.
I also raided my own previous content liberally. I used themes and insights that I’d written about on Copyblogger and Remarkable Communication, and just hit a few highlights.
If you try it
This project would have made me miserable if I hadn’t had a list of content topics, so I always knew what to write when I sat down at my laptop.
I kept it really simple: A text doc with a numbered list. I kept adding topic ideas to the list until I hit 104.
I added, subtracted, and rearranged those topics lots of times, and moved some to a “write about this later” list.
You don’t have to write daily emails to benefit from this — it would be a great way to block out your blog or email content for the rest of the year.
I also used my own V-E-P to keep the messages cohesive.
When you do a project like this for yourself, you can write whatever moves you. But when you write for an audience, it’s important to give yourself some guardrails, so you’re not wasting your audience’s time and attention.
Where you can find the messages
Now that I have more brainwidth every day, I’ll be getting the site I mentioned up and running! I’m really looking forward to it. I have a strong vision of what I want it to be, and I can’t wait to share that vision with you.
I’ll be letting you know as soon as we’ve got a solid core published, and then the Fierce each week will point you to a favorite or two. (Thanks to everyone reading this who let me know some of the messages that resonated with you! Those are at the top of the publication list.)
Would you ever try an experiment like this? Ping me over on twitter and let me know!
Stay fierce!
Sonia
