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As for today’s story, I’ve got a bone to pick with a fella named Alex Lieberman about his newsletter advice. After I dust that task off my list, we’ll get into This Week’s Marketing Wrap-Up.

Wrong-headed Newsletter Tip

I dropped this link to Alex Lieberman’s newsletter tips in a recent edition of Inbox Hacking. 

In case you don’t know, he co-founded something called Morning Brew😉. It’s kind of a big deal in Newsletter Land.

While you can’t go wrong listening to successful marketers like this fella, the main tip he offered is suspect.

Lieberman said that starting a Morning Brew-type newsletter would be nearly impossible today.

“Creating a general-interest newsletter like Morning Brew would be difficult in today’s landscape. It's not impossible, but the bar is much higher because people can get broad news content in so many other ways.”

Here’s the problem. If Lieberman had asked 20 “experts” back when he and his team were building Morning Brew, what do you think the expert advice would’ve been?

I imagine it would have gone something like this…

• “Son, the topic’s too broad.”

• “Boy, why would someone read your newsletter when all the big newspapers have business newsletters?”

• “Look here, junior, people get too many emails as it is.”

• “Drill down into a niche, something fresh no one else is doing, that’s the ticket, you little whippersnapper.”

And if he had listened to that expert advice?

Lieberman would not have turned Morning Brew into the behemoth it is today. 

He might’ve chased some niche that was too small to pay off like the newsletter he did build that interested an enormous audience (aka broad). 

He’s clearly smart as a whip, though. So maybe he would have been successful regardless of the topic he chose for the newsletter. But what if it took five times as long to reach the same level of success they hit with Morning Brew? 

BTW, I could name a hundred occasions where an expert opinion on “what works” was useless. I’ll list the most recent example in a second. First, let me say…

Niche Newsletters are Awesome

I love reading newsletters from people who are into niche topics. Those people might go extinct someday as AI gives summaries on every topic known to humankind. For now though, it’s cool to learn about something very few people on the planet (comparatively) care about and even fewer have deep wisdom about.

The problem is when newsletter tips like Lieberman’s leave out the flaws with niche topics. This advice does a disservice to content creators. Think about it…

Not even Alex Lieberman could get four million subscribers for a niche newsletter about say… email marketing. Because he’d run out of content in no time. 

Most niche topics have that roadblock. They simply don’t offer the writer much to write about unless the writer is out there making things happen themselves versus covering what other people are doing in the space. 

The other issue is monetizing a small audience. Yep, there are niche topics that draw loyal interest from affluent readers who might be willing to pay for a premium subscription or be targeted with ads for luxury offers.

But monetizing with ads in a broad-interest newsletter is the simpler path for most would-be newsletter creators. 

Newsletter Tips and Other Expert Opinions

That screenshot is from YouTube sensation Peter Santenello's email. Another expert creator. 

He’s super successful. Knows his stuff. Yet, he admits he didn’t know his newest video would be a hit. He thought it sucked. Luckily he posted it anyway because it racked up millions of views.

Lucky for us, Peter is humble enough to admit he was wrong and smart enough to know he doesn’t know everything.

Just more proof that no one, not even someone as successful as Alex Lieberman, can tell you what you should create and what to avoid creating. 

No one knows. Expert or not. Same as the experts saying Dos Equis’ “Most interesting man in the world” ads would flop. They did not!

Same as Tony Kornheiser. A grizzled veteran of the sports news world, he predicted Pardon the Interruption would be canceled in two months when it first launched. The ESPN show’s been a hit for nearly a quarter century. 

The point? Create what you want to create. Even if you have doubts. Then post it anyway. 

Coming up, we wrap up the week that was in marketing.

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Shane McLendon - Copy Kingpin

“Marketing has been easy for the last decade. For the next decade, you're going to actually need to be good.” ~Alex Lieberman

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