Hello,
welcome to a new edition of TRUST-able.

M mission is to help those who want to improve their marketing and communication strategies online.

My values are built around creating value and cultivating long-term relationships.

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 (30+ pages) - inside a Google Document.

To unsubscribe click here.

To get in touch with me, Robin Good, just email me at:
Robin.Good@masternewmedia.org 

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

Create Emotional Resonance

Content that appeals to you emotionally will always be what you gravitate towards. No AI bot can compete with that emotional resonance.”

With the amount of new stuff, tech, apps, AI tools that appears online everyday, one is increasingly forced to find “sources” who can act as reliable filters for their specific needs and wants. Becoming a reliable filter in a specific area, means monitoring and scanning many topics continuously and extracting and contextualizing the most useful ones for your specific audience and needs.

Read more in the Full Gdoc edition.

Source: Jason McBride - “"The Future of Business on the Internet is Human”

P.S.: Find profitable projects where someone decided to start filtering specific info for others: Curation Monetized Premium

Show What’s Not Obvious

It is not the quantity of interesting stuff you throw at your readers that makes a difference. It’s how much you open their eyes in discovering the hidden value of something that makes the bowl tip over.

Inspired by Susan Moeller 

Specialize

To create real value: Focus on building specialized knowledge that your readers and fans:

• Respect

• Would be willing to pay for

• Find hard to learn and to do

Source: Erik Torenberg - “Build Specialized Knowledge and Skills: See your Career as a Product”

2) How To Cultivate Relationships

Accept Others (as they are)

One of the most frequent causes of frustration is when someone we like, respect or work with, lets us down. We build expectations about people, without remembering that they are not us, and that they have different standards, values, ideals. Not better or worse than ours, just different. So, let them be. Hold on stronger to your standards and values on these occasions and do not photocopy bad behaviour as a tacit revenge.  

Robin Good

Get Really Curious

The very best way to rapidly build a relationship with someone is to get extremely curious about that person and to ask questions that show your genuine interest for him/her. In my experience, adopting this approach (being sincerely curious without being impolite) allows me to discover more about the context in which my clients operate, as well as the motives and expectations that have led them to me.

Robin Good

Tinderize 

Key takeaways I have brought home after reading this article by the Inbox Collective on effective Tinder communication:

1.  Be different
Check what most others do, and then make sure you communicate in a completely different way.

2.  Engage
Write in a way that invites the other party to start a conversation with you.

3.  Focus
Communicate as authentically and genuinely as you can. Be your real, deeper, truer you. To find a great match avoid trying to  be nice and acceptable to all.

4.  Storytell
Storytelling drives attention. Use your personal story to start building a relationship.

Inspired by / Source: Inbox Collective - “How Tinder Made Me a Better Copywriter”

3) How To Communicate Effectively

Trim the Fat 

Ten practical tips on how to improve your newsletter.

1) When sharing valuable links, always give context and why. Context = relevance for your specific readers. Why = reason why you are recommending it. 

2) To appear more credible and professional, make little or no use of emojis.

3) After writing the contents, revise and try to cut off at least a good 20% of it.

Read the other seven in the Full Gdoc edition.

Source: Inspired by Josh Spector - “Ten Ways To Trim the Fat In Your Newsletter”
Optimized, revised and edited by Robin Good.

Write Like You Speak

School and academia have taught us to write in a cold, dry, redundant and heavy to read format. The secret to learning how to write as if you were speaking, is to voice-dictate what you want to communicate as if you were talking to a specific client or friend. Say out loud what you need to communicate as if you were actually in front of that person, and then edit and refine what the voice dictation software will have captured. 

Robin Good

Control Emotions

“Anger is a tool that can be taken out as needed. It can be put away the moment the phone rings, and pulled out again after one hangs up. Anger is a means to achieve a goal. Personal anger is nothing but a tool for making others submit to you. Anger is a form of communication, and that communication is possible without using anger. … Emotions don't somehow exist independently. It is a lie to separate “I” from “emotion” and think, “It was the emotion that made me do it.””

Source: Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga - “The Courage to Be Disliked”

4) How To Market  Yourself

Share a View 

If you just share content, people interacting with it don’t associate it as coming from you. But when you share content and you add your point of view – making it more valuable – you get credit for the content others have created. It’s as easy as saying: 

“Pay attention to the third paragraph, that’s where the biggest learning is.” 

“This article identifies the five most important skills for IT execs, I agree with all five and would add these two.”

Source: ATD Staff - Q&A with Digital You Author William Arruda

Be Clear

“There are many people with similar jobs, credentials and career goals. 

To stand out and attract the attention of people who matter, you need to be clear about:

1. who you are,
   

2. what separates you from everyone else who does what you do and
   

3. what makes you relevant and compelling to decision-makers. 

That’s personal branding. 

If what you offer is the same as everyone else who does what you do, you’re a commodity, not a unique brand. 

That means you’re replaceable by anyone who shares your job title.”

Source: ATD Staff - Q&A with Digital You Author William Arruda

Cultivate Trust

Two key things can be done to grow trust: a) In the present, you can increase your reputation and trust by asking for help instead of acting like a standard leader-guru who always tells others what to do.  b) For the future you can cultivate trust by:

• setting a clear direction,

• giving people what they need to see it through, and

• getting out of their way.

Source: Paul Zak - Harvard Business Review - “The Neuroscience of Trust”

5) How To Get More Visibility

Give More

From 1000 to 20,000 followers in one week. The interesting advice from an amateur LinkedIN author who is a strategy expert: Alex M H Smith.

The essential recipe:
1. Compounding Posts

2. Restful Copy (use information design)

3. Passion / True Interest

Watch the 23 slide carousel here. 

via CreatorBoom newsletter

Define Your Identity

• Identify your key principles and ideas.

  • Spell out the principles that characterize your business and your approach to it.
    

• Share these principles with your audience endlessly. Use different ways, tones, styles and present it from different perspectives and for different applications.
   

  • You don’t need to keep inventing new principles.
    

  • You simply need to identify those that define you and share them repeatedly while explaining them more/better each time. 

To stand out and get noticed, you need to be singing the same note over and over but in different, complementary ways. That means distilling your brand into the thing you want to be known for. 

Inspired by: ATD Staff - Q&A with Digital You Author William Arruda

Increase Authority

Moz, the SEO-focused tool builder/online magazine/blog and newsletter, recently published a fat list of visibility factors to invest on in 2022.

Among the 22 factors covered, there are three that are of utmost importance for trusted advisors, consultants, teachers and coaches: 

1. Author pages
   Build high-quality pages that provide an in-depth bio of you and other authors on the site, while integrating links to work done, portfolios, authority pubs who mention you and anything else that proves in an unequivocable manner how good you are.
   

2. FAQs

   Create pages that collect and organize the most frequent questions from your tribe/audience while providing quality and resourceful answers (full of good references and links).
   

3. Reputation research

   Find out (sooner than later) what others are saying about you online. Go out of your way to contact, make friends and help those who could then speak, write and tell others how good you are at what you do.

Source: Smart Google SEO Tips for 2022

6) How To Monetize

Help Creators

A few, valuable, illuminating thoughts from this expert round-up on Indie Hackers focusing on the Creator Economy and its future potential. 

“If [you can develop] a product [that] can help creators on any platform grow an audience and monetize that audience then there's a lot of value to be captured there.” 

“The future of the creator economy is indie. Indie hackers building products for indie creators.”

Source: Indie Hackers - “The Creators Economy Is Dead, Long Live the Creator Economy”

Build with Passion

Listen to your heart, not to your calculator. Pick something to build that you are passionate about. 

“I've created products in the past that I thought could make money but ultimately I didn't enjoy trying to grow them and inevitably they died.

Source: Katt Risen - “From  Curation To Acquisition” 

Cut the Costs

One of the most popular platforms to sell digital products online, Gumroad, has significantly increased its commissions (what you pay to them when you sell your products). Gumroad is now collecting 12.9% on each of your transactions. That's far more than any of the competitors. Here are four alternative services that I’d take into consideration if I were to sell digital products online today. They are: 

• Lemonsqueezy

• Whop

• Paddle

• Payhip

See how they stack against Gumroad and which ones have the features and characteristics that you need most by checking the full Gdoc edition.

Source: Uneed - “Best Alternatives To Gumroad” 

7) How To Stay Ahead 

Be Consistent 

Paul Graham says people under-estimate the cumulative value of getting a little bit of work done every day. For writers, this might mean finishing one page per day. That may not sound like much, but a page per day leads to a book per year. 

Consistency is the key: 

“People who do great things don't get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing.”

Source: Paul Graham - “How To Do Great Work”

Do the Work

The more people are into quick fixes and focus on the acute problems and pain, the more that approach contributes to their underlying chronic condition. The more you get caught up looking for shortcuts, the longer your journey is likely to take. Consider focusing on doing the work, developing legit skills, and building real relationships… you know, the non-sexy stuff that takes significant time and effort.

Source: Stephen Covey - “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” - via Nihall Doherty eBiz Facts “Aspirin and Band Aids”

Love Solitude

Loneliness doesn't stem from not having anyone around, but from:

1. the inability to communicate things that seem important to us

2. attaching value to certain thoughts that others deem unacceptable.

When a person knows more than others, he/she becomes lonely. Yet, loneliness isn't necessarily the enemy of friendship, for no one is more attuned to relationships than the solitary individual, and friendship only flourishes when a person is mindful of their own individuality and doesn't conform to what most others think, believe and do.

Source: Carl Gustav Jung - “The Value of Isolation, Loneliness and Solitude”

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From the Heart

The Story of the Chinese Farmer

Once upon a time, there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away.

That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate.

They said, "We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away.

This is most unfortunate." The farmer said, "Maybe."

The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, "Oh, isn't that lucky? What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!" The farmer again said, "Maybe."

The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg.

The neighbors then said, "Oh dear, that's too bad," and the farmer responded, "Maybe."

The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg.

Again all the neighbors came around and said, "Isn't that great!" Again, he said, "Maybe."

Source: Alan Watts

It’s impossible to tell whether anything that happens is intrinsically good or bad. 

The natural world is a highly interconnected and intricate system. We cannot label any event as entirely good or bad, as we cannot predict all the consequences.

Thus beware of judging apparently bad things as disasters or vice-versa. 

Something that may appear unfortunate at first may lead to unanticipated benefits later on, while something that seems positive may end up causing issues.

Source: Gurteen Knowledge Letter: Issue 278 - August 2023

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

Read the Full Edition Gdoc

If this newsletter did help or inspire you, please do let me know.(email me at robingood@substack.com)

If you like what I do, please consider supporting me.

Follow a path with a heart.

The time is NOW.

From sunny Holbox island,
Robin Good

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