Last year — not meaning yesterday, but actually 12 months ago — I set three themes for myself.
A theme is an idea I got from James Altucher. It’s a general direction to move in, unlike a goal, which is more like a destination to arrive at by a specific time. Themes work for me, goals don’t.
Anyways, one of my 2022 themes was “offers”. And I did well with that. By my count, I made over a dozen different offers last year to this list alone.
The most unique of those offers was my Most Valuable Postcard.
Each month, for all of two months, I sent a postcard from a new place with a short greeting and a URL. The URL took you to a secret website, where you would find my in-depth treatment of one fundamental marketing or copywriting topic for that month.
Subscribers loved the Most Valuable Postcard.
I hated it.
I hated walking around in the summer sun trying to find nice-looking postcards. I hated addressing and writing them by hand.
I hated the pressure of finishing up the actual content each month and making it great before the first postcards started arriving.
I hated the fact that the postcards didn’t arrive reliably and that I had to resend many of them.
So I killed the Most Valuable Postcard off. Subscribers sighed and said they saw it coming.
But now, the Most Valuable Postcard is back. In a way.
The core concept of the Most Valuable Postcard is something I find too valuable to let go. Like I said, it’s to take a fundamental marketing idea and go deep. As copywriter Dan Ferrari wrote a while back:
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Learning fundamentals and mastering fundamentals are two different things. Sorry to break it to you, in my experience, ~80% of copywriters NEVER reach mastery. The simple explanation is they have NO idea how much deeper they can go. That’s too bad because all it takes is a willingness to put the SCUBA gear on and explore the depths.
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So my plan is to go deep, write more Most Valuable Postcards, and put them inside the members-only area of my site.
There won’t be a physical postcard any more, but the website content will have the same format as before.
There also won’t be a monthly subscription, but I will sell the postcards individually, whenever I put them out.
To start, I’m selling the first Most Valuable Postcard, which so far only went out to those first 20 people who managed to sign up last summer.
But I am only selling this offer to people who are on my email list. In case you are interested in my Most Valuable Postcard, or simply want to read my emails as I write them every day, click here to sign up to my newsletter.