A couple days ago, an article on The Verge by David Pierce picked up steam and then really started chugging along, tearing through any obstacles in its path, and demanding the attention and concern even of slack-jawed layabouts who were minding their own business just moments earlier. The title of Pierce’s article:
“So where are we all supposed to go now?”
Pierce was writing about how social media — first Facebook, then Twitter, now Reddit — are dying. And what, he wanted to know, will be next?
I know all about this because I’m a painfully contrary person. After about 20 years of resisting social media, I am now getting on social media full on.
First, I got on Twitter a couple months ago (under a pseudonym). That’s how I came across that runaway Verge article. And I will also most probably get on LinkedIn in the next few days (under my own name).
I figure what others, smarter than I am, have already figured out:
Maybe social media is a cesspool, and maybe it’s now dying to boot. But there are still billions of people on there. I only need a small and select fraction of those people to do very well.
My ultimate goal — as you can probably guess — is to get these people onto my email lists, either this one that you’re reading now, or my new health newsletter. That’s how I can write to them regularly, with something interesting or valuable, and build a relationship, and even do business and exchange money for my offers.
So what will come after Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit? Where are we all supposed to go now?
I don’t know, and I don’t particularly care. Because I use a mental shortcut known as the Lindy Law, which says that you can expect technology to survive on average as long as it’s already been around.
Email has been around for 52 years, longer than the Internet as we know it.
Will email still be around 52 years from now? Who knows. I figure its odds are better than any new technology that comes out today or tomorrow.
But you probably knew all this before. What you might not know — something that surprised me yesterday — is that there’s an email platform called Beehiiv.
I promoted Beehiiv in my email yesterday, and I gave people a bit of a carrot-and-stick to sign up for a free account on Beehiiv using my affiliate link.
I got lots of people taking me up on the offer, and I got lots of people thanking me for cluing them in to Beehiiv. That’s the part that was surprising to me — so many people had not heard of Beehiiv before.
I personally use Beehiiv, I’m very happy with it, and that’s why I’m happy to recommend it. As for why you might want to try it for your new newsletter or project, here’s my best case for that:
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Beehiiv is slick and it has a buncha tools that other email providers don’t have. Like a nice-looking website, straight out of the box, that doubles as your email archive. A referral program. Recommendations from and to other newsletters. An ad network if you want to monetize your newsletter that way.
Just as important:
More than any other email platform I’ve directly used or indirectly heard about, Beehiiv is stable and reliable. It doesn’t crash. It doesn’t lock up. It doesn’t fail to send out emails you meant to send and it doesn’t sneakily send out emails you didn’t mean to send.
But really, try it out for yourself and see. Maybe it’s not for you. Or maybe you will love it.
There’s no risk either way. Because Beehiiv is free to start using and to continue using indefinitely — for sending emails and for the website.
You only have to pay something if you wanna upgrade to some of the fancier growth and monetization tools — which I’ve done, because it’s well-worth the money for me, and because I’ve decided to stick with Beehiiv for the long term.
So like I said, I encourage you to give it a try. But—
I know that encouragement, and good arguments, and lists of shiny features, are often not enough to get people to move.
So I’ll give you a bit of a carrot-and-stick too.
Over the past two months, I’ve grown my new newsletter from 73 subscribers to 1,109 subscribers.
And if you try out Beehiiv using my affiliate link, I will send you a recording in which I talk about all the stuff I’ve done to grow that newsletter — what’s worked, what hasn’t, what I plan to do going forward. (I’ll even tell you some stuff I’m planning to do to grow this daily marketing newsletter that you’re reading right now.)
Also, here’s another thing I promise to give you:
I had some deliverability problems early on with my new newsletter. It turned out not to be Beehiiv’s fault. Rather it was that I had failed to set up my DNS right. I fixed that, and my deliverability problems got fixed. But I went one further.
I also came up with a little trick to increase my deliverability going forward and even to increase my open rates.
This trick has nothing to do with DMARC or DKIM records. It has nothing to do with trying to game Gmail. It’s just plain old marketing and psychology. And it’s allowed me to actually increase my open rates while my list has grown quickly and sizeably.
This trick is not complicated — it takes all of five minutes to implement.
And if you take me up on my offer and try out Beehiiv, I will send you a quick writeup of exactly what I did, and how you can do it too, to have the kinds of deliverability and reader engagement that other newsletters can only wonder at.
So that’s the carrot. The stick, or the threat of it, is that there’s a deadline, 24 hours from now, at 8:31pm CET on Thursday, July 6.
If you’re interested, here’s what to do:
1. Head to Beehiiv using this link: https://bejakovic.com/beehiiv
2. Sign up for a free account. You don’t have to sign up for anything paid. I am counting on Beehiiv’s quality and service to convince you to do that over time.
3. Once you’ve signed up, forward me the confirmation email you get from Beehiiv — and I will reply to you with 1) the recording listing all the things I’ve done and will be doing to grow my new newsletter and 2) a write up of my little deliverability and email open trick. Do it before the deadline — 8:31pm CET on Thursday, July 6 — and you get the carrot, and not the stick.
