001: Micro-community courses
Welcome to Issue 001!
I've been away for a while and I'm now experimenting with a new format for this weekly newsletter. I moved to Substack and you will now receive this revamped newsletter every week on Wednesdays.
Each issue will contain links and occasional commentary across key areas required for success in your journey as a course creator or coach — selling (sales and marketing strategies), content (writing, video and audio creation workflows), engagement (teaching effectively, enabling transformation, building community), technical (tools, website maintenance, online security, etc), and productivity (peak performance, wellbeing).
These are the picks for this week.
Selling
The ultimate SEO checklist for 2021 — Following this SEO checklist helped us grow our blog traffic to over 640,000 monthly search visits. (Ahrefs)
The Twitter tips collection — A collection of links to Twitter tips to help you figure out what to tweet, get more followers, and get more value out of the platform. (Josh Spector)
Content
Writing well — Learn to write and rewrite your thoughts so that they're interesting, substantive, and resonant. (Julian Shapiro)
Principles of effective storytelling — Storytelling is a key to unlocking growth in your writing, startups, marketing, business, career, or life. (Sahil Bloom)
Engagement
Are micro-community courses the future of online education? — Online education is not about selling content. It is about making an impact. (d.MBA)
It seems that following just one metric can be a really harmful way of measuring a product. It is super easy to over-optimize for one goal and create problems somewhere else.
After a few years of experiments, together with the d.MBA team, we settled on a combination of three metrics:
Student ratings - How satisfied are students with the course?
Completion rate - How many students finish the course?
Alumni stories - What have alumni achieved as a result of taking a course?
Reflections on ten years of running an online community — Behind-the-scenes details of what it’s really like to run a private community and the unique challenges faced. (Tropical MBA)
Technical
My minimal desk setup for video editing — This video editing desk setup tour can spark ideas for your own space, tools, and workflow. (Caleb Wojcik)
What is 2FA? — Enabling two-factor authentication is a good step towards making your accounts more secure. (Dashlane)
Productivity
Mental models — Mental models are how we understand the world, they shape the connections and opportunities that we see. (Farnam Street)
A realistic guide to time management — Making the most of your hours, while avoiding overwhelm and learning to work with the constraints on your time. (Doist)
Thanks for reading! If you have any feedback, just send a note to hello@cline.app and I will get back to you. Cheers.