Follow the Dwight Rabbit – Clarity Lab Issue 76

Hi there.

My good friend and brilliant business strategist, Ryan Lex, recently dug up an old issue of my newsletter in his inbox from 5 years ago, forwarded it to me, and pointed out some things he liked about the format I used to use.

I’ve drifted from that format due to a desire to experiment, iterate, and make the best newsletter for you that I can. But when I read my five-years ago newsletter, I felt like “Forest version 2016” was doing things better.

The main difference? A shorter, more condensed reading experience.

Let’s do this.

1
Follow The Dwight Rabbit.

Former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower was known for using a robust decision-making framework that came to be known as the “Eisenhower Matrix.” As Anne-Laure Le Cunff explains in this article, his matrix essentially comes down to putting things into one of 4 categories: Urgent and Important, Important but Not Urgent, Urgent but Not Important, or Neither Urgent Nor Important. This tool is so useful that I’ve decided to make my own. It’s called the Linden Matrix: A four-quadrant framework to help you decide what flavor of doughnut to eat.

2
Passion Trends.

What does it look like when you have a successful career that’s stable and safe, but you have a side “passion project” that starts to take off on Youtube, and you decide to take a leap and start a business around that passion selling an online course? In this short video, Tasha Cochran tells the story of how it happened for her, going from a successful career to a multi-six figure business teaching personal finance skills. I love her story because it’s genuine, and the income during her first couple of launches is realistic and achievable for anyone heading down this path. That and her family is beautiful.

+ If you pay attention to the shot of her screen showing the inside of her online course, you may recognize the software she uses to run her multi-six figure business: it’s Kajabi.

3
I know what you want, what you really, really want.

So much of running an online business comes down to figuring out what people in your market want and then finding products or services that will give them what they want. Of course, then you have to convince them that what you’re selling is the best solution to their problem, but that’s where marketing and selling come in. Before you get to that phase, you have to find a way to crawl inside people’s minds and figure out exactly what they want. Doing this is as hard as it sounds. Here’s Jeff Ridall at Search Engine Journal with 10 Ways To Tell What Readers Want And Give It To Them.

4
Vertical-specific Snackable Content Scalability.

I love marketing. You probably do as well. But our industry is filled with phrases that look, to the non-marketing infatuated person, like gibberish. The marketers at Column Five Media decided to poke some fun at our industry. They recently created The Marketing Gibberish Generator. I’ve been on this site for 20 minutes now, reading what gibberish it makes, and I can’t stop smiling. I may send out an entire newsletter filled with nothing but marketing gibberish and then sell a $3,000 webinar teaching about thought leadership, trending leverage platforms, and mobile-ready longtail disruptive shoptimization.

5
Level The Paying Field.

Thinking of monetizing your newsletter and making it one of the primary sources of income for your business? (Wait…you are? Damn. I knew you were smart, but now I think you’re brilliant.) Making income from a newsletter might seem trendy, given all the press that Substack newsletter writers are getting lately. But paid newsletters were some of the first income-generating methods used on the internet back in the mid to late ’90s. Those early paid newsletter creators had a challenge that’s still around today: how to decide what to charge. Steph Knapp at Convertkit has the scoop on how to come up with the right price for your paid newsletter.

+ To create a wildly successful paid newsletter, you’re going to need some software. My current favorite email marketing platform for sending out newsletters, which also has built-in features that make it easy to create a paid newsletter, is Convertkit.

Hope you have an amazing week over there!

You’re awesome.

~Forest Linden

P.S. If you enjoyed this newsletter, I’d be ever so appreciative if you could forward it to a friend or share it on social media: Share on Twitter | Share on Facebook