ProloguePrologue

There are moments when you don’t have to question whether you should do a thing.

The idea comes. You know it’s wonderful. And you just go.

I am such a dork that I had a long weekend (I took Monday as a vacation day) and I used part of it to complete a course and order a book.

Go ahead.

Call me insane.

But when something clicks, it clicks.

And the course topic, which I mentioned last week, was worth nerding out about: Narrative Design.

For all the lit majors and journalists in the crowd, who long to think narratively and flex that muscle we have that aches to create an amazing story—this is the good stuff.

Why? Because we all want to tell the story people remember, right?

We want to be epic.

Not a slightly different version of the same old same old.

Where am I going with this in terms of newsletter advice, though?

Your newsletter is one of thousands, millions even. It has to captivate readers to win subscriptions and opens. It has to battle for its spot in the inbox and be worth consuming. On repeat.

Employing Narrative Design—actually thinking about not only positioning but also how your readers can win whatever game you are helping them play—could be the thing that takes you from “just another newsletter” to “the newsletter I can’t live without.”

For me, a marketer of 8 SaaS tools, it was a dorky, fun way to spend a few hours of my weekend.

Besides, this coming weekend I will be hosting a Cupcake Wars birthday party for 11-year-olds, and that will also be EPIC.

Now, on to this week’s links.

But first, thank you to Russ Henneberry at theCLIKK for leading a customer workshop last Friday. If you haven’t checked out his newsletter and course selection, you should.

Ashley Guttuso  

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Have a great week sending, y’all.

Thanks for reading,

Ashley Guttuso