Hey, Brendan here.
Happy New Year!
If you’ve been a subscriber for a while, you must have noticed there wasn’t a newsletter issue for the past 3 weeks.
Here’s an overview of what I did:
- Went on a road trip with my parents and In-laws around Taiwan
- Went on a lovely dinner with my wife for Christmas
- Took my cousin, his girlfriend, and her parents around Kaohsiung, Taiwan
- Rethinking my priorities and direction as a creator
I won’t apologize for enjoying the holidays and neither should you.
Alright, let’s get into the topic for today:
The platform you should be focusing on in 2024.
That’s hands down going to be a newsletter.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen creators complain about reach and growth across all social platforms.
The smart ones know having an owned channel is the only safeguard against this.
It has always been this way and this will never change.
Those who obsessed over followers on social media have given up.
This is a cyclical pattern that will continue to repeat.
Your goal is to use social media as a traffic mechanism to funnel as many people as possible into your newsletter.
That’s it.
Don’t forget, that’s only one way to promote your newsletter.
This is going to be my focus for 2024.
I’ve also decided to revive my YouTube channel as I miss filmmaking.
Writing is excellent, but nothing beats video for building relationships with the audience.
Most importantly, I want to have fun.
And I’m totally fine leaving money on the table.
That’s it!
As always, thanks for reading.
Email me or send me a DM on X or LinkedIn with your plans this year.
I’d love to hear from you.
See you in the next issue!
Cheers,
Brendan
My Favorite Discoveries This Week
- New Personal Knowledge Management Tool: I’ve used Notion for many years. Both for professional work and my creator business. But I’ve never found it to work effectively as a “second brain.” I’ve begun using Obsidian as my main tool to distill notes, create connections, and generate novel ideas. Notion will still be used for Standard Operating Procedures, Project Management, Collaboration, and other non-idea synthesizing functions. I’ll create content around my process in the future.
- YouTube Video: I came across this video by Henbu about creating cinematic Instagram carousel reels. He was able to generate up to a million impressions from just a single one! Pretty insane considering he only has 200k followers. It’s one of his insane strategies that made him go viral multiple times. Check it out.
