Week #19 Email Update: Best Business Software to Use to Run Your Business in 2022 – from Brandon on August 18
Oh man, we’re deep in week 34 of 2022 and it’s flying by like a Falcon 9 rocket zipping through space.
Here’s your weekly roundup with things that will give you an edge to win in your business and your life…
- Community announcements and shoutouts.
- New EDGE podcast episodes that will move you and your business forward. Including….
Best Software to Run Your Business, an Email Marketing Math breakdown and a show on Situational Awareness that will help you be safer.
- What we learned from increasing the font in this newsletter that will help you with your email marketing.
- A book worth reading that will help with your writing.
- A Show worth watching with a guy who you wouldn’t guess is a great business person and…
- What I’m writing about
It’s likely you know someone who would also enjoy this newsletter, please forward it to them and share the 
.
Let’s go!
Community Announcements & Shoutouts
Welcome the 44 new subscribers to this newsletter who joined since last week. We’re grateful to have you here! We’re now 17,337 strong.
Thank you to Joe Valley who hosts the Quiet Light Podcast for having me on and allowing me to share the story of how I started my first company, lessons I learned from the many mistakes I made, and how I made it a “buyable company” that I eventually sold to a large media company. You can listen to it here.
Thank you Danielle Jenkins for helping to get our new On Business Podcast launched. Find out what happens when you take a millennial business owner who runs a successful cleaning company in Canada and pair her with an Gen X business owner who runs a software company in Silicon Valley? It’s fun and we offer great candid advice. Episodes drop every Tuesday. Listen on Apple Podcasts, it’s free, and hit subscribe.
Office Hours for past students and subscribers start back up next Tuesday. Q&A format, bring your questions. Details will be sent out.
Worth Listening on EDGE
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Email Marketing Math | Ep. 371
How to build a model to predict how much money you can make with each email you send.
Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
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401k Part 13 – 401K Cash Balance Plans with Matt Ruttenberg | Ep. 372
All about 401k cash balance plans and how they allow you to save more money than you’ve been told in your 401k’s.
Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
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Turning a Tailgate into an Entire Business with Tyler Green Co-Founder of Cache | Ep. 373
Tyler shares this “how we built Cache story”. He shares lessons learned building a product company and the challenges they’ve had to overcome.
Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
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Best Business Software to Use to Run Your Business in 2022 | Ep. 374
We pull back the curtain and share what business software we’re using to run our company in 2022 and why we love it.
Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
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Situational Awareness with Former Army Special Forces Instructor Jameson B. | Ep. 375
US Army’s Special Forces shares what he learned when he was overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan and his biggest revelation that scared the heck out of him from learning to be a SF instructor.
Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
Worth Sharing
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Results from Changing the Font in This Email Last Week
Last week a segment of you received this email newsletter with an increased font size. The idea came about because I was catching up on some email newsletters that I subscribe to and one of the things that I noticed was that the ones with a bigger font were easier to read. This made me want to read their whole newsletter because it was easy.
With that observation we ran a test and increased the font from 18pt to 24pt. You’re reading 18pt size font now unless you manually forced your settings to show a larger font size.
To get feedback I asked that people reply to the email to let me know if they loved it or hated it.
The results…
About a 50/50 split.
The feedback for loving it was simple, it was easier to read.
On the other side of the coin, some people said it was actually hard to read because they couldn’t tell the difference between the sections.
People who were on smaller phone screens said that they were seeing only two or three words per line which made it incredibly hard to read. The exact opposite effect we hoped for.
When we followed up with readers who like the larger font, it turns out they were on iPads or computers. These larger devices allowed the the bigger font to still work as it relates to being able to tell the different sections and sentences had enough words per line that reading wasn’t a problem.
What we’re thinking of doing...
We may allow people to set a preference of smaller or larger font. It would add about twenty minutes more on to creating these emails, but worth it if we can make it easier to read for some people.
We’re also looking into a compromise. Our options building these emails is size 18pt font or size 24pt font. There is no 20pt option. I did a little digging and its the same with online blog editors. We’re going to dig in a little deeper and see why 20pt is not available. Maybe there is a technical reason it’s not possible.
If 20pt font is not possible, we’ll give people the option to receive a version in the font of their prefernce. How’s that for customer service 🙂
Take away from this experiment:
It’s really hard to do a one size fits all when people use so many different devices to read emails.
Experimenting like this helps get feedback so you can improve your customer’s experience. Test and experiment often.
If you send an email newsletter and have some feedback please reply to this email and let me know. I’d be grateful to hear other people’s experiences.
Worth Reading
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer’s craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer and business person must have.
I’ve mentioned this book before when I was about 1/2 way through it. The middle section got a little slow so I put it down for a while. Last week I picked it back up and it’s gotten better with each chaper. As in practical writing advice I’ve already put to use.
Everyone can benefit from this book. Writing is so core to business that if you can’t do it half way decent you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage.
Highly recommended.
Best price I found for the paperback or hardcover version of the book is here
Worth Watching
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My Life as a Rolling Stone – Mick Jagger
Imagine doing what you love for over 60 years and getting paid to do it?!
The Stones were’t always making money. In fact, they went broke until Mick too over the “business”of the Stones. It’s part of the story I didn’t know. Mick isn’t just a great entertainer, he’s a great business man.
Recommended
A Series on EPIX with a new episode every Sunday
What I’m Writing About in
EDGE’s Print Newsletter
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Still at the keyboard writing my first book. I started on the evening on June 16, 2022. Here’s my progress:
I have’t made any progress worth writing about over the last week. I could write a bunch of reasons, but the hard truth is I didn’t make time between everything else. When that happens, progress suffers. Case in point. I need to do a better job.
I plan to spend about eight hours this weekend on it. That effort could get it to a point where I have a draft to send out for a first read to a few people. Fingers crossed.
Here’s my total words by week:
Week 1: 8,000 (+8,000)
Week 2: 30,641 (+22,641)
Week 3: 33,368 (+2,727)
Week 4: 33,123 (-245)
Week 5: 33,798 (+675)
Week 6: 32,948 (-850)
Week 7: 33,496 (+548)
Week 8: 31,572 (-1,924)
Week 9: 31,594 (+22)
This Week at EDGE
* Three guest recording sessions for the EDGE podcast.
* Sending out this newsletter.
* New episodes on the EDGE YouTube channel daily where you can catch the video version of episodes.
Last Word
Thanks for reading. Here’s to a great rest of the week!
Brandon
P.S. Make sure to subscribe to the EDGE in your podcast player so you don’t miss any episodes >>>
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