Welcome,
my name is Robin Good and my mission is one of supporting those who want to realize their entrepreneurial dreams without selling their soul to marketing and to profit for the sake of profit.

I like to help those who want to open and explore new roads, experiment and discover alternative paths, those who want to leave a mark of their passage while truly helping others along the way.

N.B.: There are two language editions of this newsletter:
The original English language edition and the Italian version.

There are also two formats:
a) the short synthetic version published on Substack you are reading now 
b) the full uncut version (25+ pages) - inside a Google Document.

To unsubscribe click here.

To get in touch with me, Robin Good, just email me at:
RobinGood@substack.com 

I am here to make friends.

Follow a path with a heart.
The time is NOW.

Robin Good

Read the Full Edition Gdoc

1) How To Create Real Value

Curate

Writing about what you have heard or read from others is easy. Researching what others have not yet discovered is much harder. But distilling the essence, contextualizing and interpreting for your specific audience what is of value is the ultimate challenge. That has great value.

Source: Robin Good

Piss People Off

Some people will dissect your viewpoint, disagree with it completely, or even troll you. Not only does this come with the territory, but it’s also the path through which good writing emerges. If you never piss anyone off, you’re not saying anything. If your writing comes with no risk, you have nothing worth saying.

Source: Chef Boyar - “How To Become a Remarkable Writer”
(content not available anymore online)

Be the Lighthouse

Don’t be the ocean. Nobody wants more “content.” Your audience is looking for a guiding light, not another drop in the bucket. Create best answer content—data-based, comprehensive, valuable—and let it be a beacon to lead weary sailors to your shore.

Source: Joshua Nite - TopRankBlog - “How To Create Best-Answer Content: 6 Inspiring Examples”

2) How To Cultivate Relationships

Listen Better 

Listening is a true, complex and difficult skill. There are a few tangible actions that can be taken to make sure that true listening is actually taking place:
a. Not talking when others are speaking
b. Letting others know you’re listening through facial expressions and verbal sounds 
c. Being able to repeat what others have said, practically word-for-word

Source: Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman - Harvard Business Review - “What Great Listeners Actually Do”

Find Your Community

Discover, compare and review the most interesting communities and online groups organized in over 30 categories.
Unita

Reach Out

Want to reach out but don’t have the email of the person you want to contact? Here’s a mini-collection of tools that allow you to find the email of almost anyone who works for a specific company.  If that’s not enough, here's one tool that allows you to instantly discover all of the social media channels a person / brand is using online. 

3) How To Communicate Effectively

Follow the Three 

1. Limit your presentation, guide, speech or analysis to three key points, not more.

2. Explain things in multiple ways, ideally three, by leveraging multiple metaphors.

3. Repeat your key concepts at least three times.

Source: - Kevin Dickinson - “Three Rules To Express Your Thoughts So That Everyone Understands”

Synthesize

Synthesis makes communication easier and more effective. Who can write synthetically is generally a good writer. For most people who have not yet developed this skill the easiest way to learn how to synthesize something is to try to verbalize it while having a strict time limit to do so. Once they’ve done so, writing down exactly what they said helps them re-learn a natural skill that academic education has made us lose.

Robin Good

Make It Short

People are more likely to finish reading when you take this precautions when writing:

1.  Use shorter, common, and concrete words to make your writing easier to understand (e.g. ‘similar’, not ‘almost indistinguishable’)

2.  Avoid long or complex sentences or using the passive voice (e.g. ‘Sign up now to access all benefits’, not ‘Creating an account allows users to access a host of unique benefits’)

3.  Keep your readers’ attention through an excited, anxious, or hopeful tone (e.g. use words like ‘thrilled’ or ‘excited’ instead of ‘pleased’)

Source: Thomas McKinlay - “The 3 Science-Based Rules of Writing”

4) How To Market  Yourself

Become an Historian

Who do you trust more? Someone who knows most everything about the history of its field or someone who claims to be really good but has little or no knowledge of the masters who preceded him and what characterized them? The more you know about the history of your field, the more patterns you have at your disposal to design how you are going to differentiate yourself from others. 

Source: Robin Good

Analyze Your Positioning

A new version of the Personal Branding Canvas has been released. The PBC is a useful tool that helps indie entrepreneurs analyze and evaluate their market positioning, key strengths, credibility and communication strategy.

Personal Branding Canvas 2023.

Crowdsource Your Logo

One of the best solutions to create an effective logo is to crowdsource its design. That is, to involve many different designers to interpret and code your company spirit into a recognizable symbol. You get so many more ideas, so much more variety at a very reasonable cost. Here the top 12 online services offering crowdsourced design:
See Google Doc extended edition

Source: Robin Good

5) How To Get More Visibility

Stand Out

Figure out your first principles as a person—the Lego blocks of your talents, interests, and preferences—and paint the target around them. Your first principles are often the qualities you suppress the most—because they make you weird or different from other people. If you blend into the background—if you show no idiosyncrasy, no fingerprints, no contrast, no anomaly—you become invisible. You become the background. It’s only by embracing, your idiosyncrasies that you can become extraordinary.

Source: Ozan Varol - “The Key To Becoming Extraordinary”

Spread Wide

Investing primarily on your website may not actually be the best choice you can make (from a business standpoint). If, as it looks, the shift from individual websites to fewer and fewer online destinations will continue as now, it may be wise not to overspend on your website but to distribute your valuable content as far and wide as possible, across popular established networks. 

Source: Ev Williams - comment reply to “Who’s Afraid of Big Bad Medium?”

Use SEO But

Pay attention to good SEO practices, but… if that becomes the reason you are writing something, you are writing for the wrong reasons. SEO is like venom. In small quantities can be a miraculous medicine, but when used in large quantities it can do deep and irreversible damage.

Source: Mike Falconer - “The Ethics of Content Curation”

6) How To Monetize

Create Products

Creating your own products, such as apps, guides, toolkits or courses is the best way to monetize your newsletter (especially if compared with alternative business models like affiliate commissions or sponsorships). These three are in fact the most popular business models utilized to generate profit from a newsletter. When deciding which product to create, the ten most popular monetization routes are:
See Google Doc extended edition

Source: Matt McGarry - “3 Ways To Monetize and How To Build a Value Ladder”

Make Friends

"All things being equal, people buy from their friends. Period. So: 
1) make everything else equal, 
2) then go make a lot of friends.".

Source: Colin “Goatherders” on Hacker News in reply to “How Do You Brand Yourself as a Freelancer?” 

Go For Quality

I often see people trying to pack more and more content into a publication, with the idea that the more they stuff in it the higher the value of the pub will be. “When asking people to pay, quality matters far more than quantity, and the ratio matters: a publication with one valuable article a day about a well-defined topic will more easily earn subscriptions than one with 3 valuable articles and 20 worthless ones covering a variety of subjects.”

Source: Ben Thompson - Stratechery - “The Local News Business Model”

7) How To Stay Ahead

Smile and Nod

Avoid the need to become a self-improvement evangelist. The need to ‘show people the light’ is strong but ultimately useless. To make things change the way you want to, you do not have to go and tell everybody the truth you have just discovered. That can actually be counterproductive. “If you can combine skepticism of the narrative with the ability to smile and nod, you have a shot. What do I mean by ‘smile and nod’? 

See extended Google Doc.

Source: Ayodeji Awosika - “5 Traits You Need to be One of the Few People Who Reach Their Dreams”

Trash the Tube

a) We lie like hell. b) None of it is true. c) TV is a total illusion. People are the real thing. Estimating the damage that we inflict to ourselves by watching television is likely incalculable. The damage is deep and triple. a) We are deeply misinformed. b) We are deeply distracted from the REAL stories we should be paying attention to. c) We give up incalculable time and energies that could be used to inform ourselves and to create the world we want to live in.

Source: Film “The Network” - Directed by Sidney Lumet (1976)

Original quote

Video clip
Duration: 2’

Pause and Reflect

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).” 

Source: Mark Twain, notebook (1904)

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From the Heart

Be Useful

I must deeply agree with this one. Trying to be happy is really the wrong pursuit. And just being busy all the time, running 24/7 because “our business requires it” is just a bunch of crap.

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honourable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, an essayist, a lecturer and a philosopher said that. He was right.

Happiness is the wrong pursuit. 

Usefulness is a better goal if you want to find meaning in life. This powerful mindset has changed how I work and pursue success in all areas of my life. It can not only change your career, but it can also change your life if you consistently apply it.

Creating value is one of the secrets to a happy life. I don’t know about you, but I am happiest when I am stuck in the “flow” of creating and sharing value.

Source: Thomas Oppong - “The Purpose of Life is to be Useful, Not Happy”

Read more on these topics by checking out the extended edition of this newsletter.

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Thanks for reading.

Follow a path with a heart.

The time is NOW.

From sunny Holbox,
Robin Good

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