044: Robert Glazer - Run Your Newsletter Like a Boss: Tips From a Top-Level Corporate CEO
Nathan Barry Archive
How to Grow a Newsletter
I look every week at the total number of opens by a subscriber because it gives me a sense of if it's being forwarded beyond the initial open. I actually had a tool that would scrape my inbox and do that, which is pretty cool. And then I started to just think more about touch points, you know, in terms of if someone was doing a we'd sign them up for B.A. A lot of times I'd sort by, one of the tools that really helped me was sorting by most open by person.
Robert Glazer is the founder and CEO of Acceleration Partners, a global marketing agency. Robert is also the co-founder and Chairman of BrandCycle, an affiliate marketing and content monetization platform.
Acceleration’s accolades under Robert’s direction include Glassdoor’s Employees’ Choice Awards, Entrepreneur’s Top Company Culture, Inc. Magazine’s Best Place to Work, and Fortune’s Best Small & Medium Workplaces. Robert is also the international bestselling author of four books: Elevate, Friday Forward, Performance Partnerships, and How To Thrive In The Virtual Workplace.
With a passion for helping entrepreneurs and organizations achieve success, Robert shares his insights in Friday Forward, an inspirational weekly newsletter reaching over 200,000 individuals and business leaders across 60+ countries. He is also a regular columnist for Forbes, Inc. and Entrepreneur on the subjects of performance marketing and entrepreneurship, company culture, hiring, and leadership.
Robert enjoys speaking on business growth, culture, mindful transitions, building capacity and performance, and spends his spare time skiing, cycling, reading, traveling, renovating his home, and spending time with his family.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- The most important component for maximizing your content’s reach
- The necessity of giving your audience direct access to you
- Why the culture of your organization or brand is so important
Links & Resources
- Entrepreneurs' Organization
- “This Is the Only Newsletter I Always Read. Here's Why”
- Rad Reads
- Friday Four
- James Clear
- “How a CEO’s Inspirational Emails Got a Worldwide Following”
- Benjamin Hardy
- Tim Ferriss
- Malcolm Gladwell
- Danielle Steel
Robert Glazer’s Links
- Robert Glazer’s website
- Friday Forward
- Elevate Podcast
- Acceleration Partners
- Books by Robert Glazer
- Robert’s Twitter
Episode Transcript
Robert: [00:00:00]
Here’s how you should think about what is a mistake that you have permission to make: one of the things that was really helpful is we shared with the team a picture of a boat with a waterline, and said, “Look, the below-the-waterline stuff is going to sink the boat, the stuff that’s above the waterline, that’s not going to stink the ship. Let’s make mistakes, learn from them, and not make them again. What we really need you to do is watch the waterline.”
Nathan: [00:00:31]
In this episode, I talk to Robert Glazer, who built a newsletter called Friday Forward to a couple hundred thousand subscribers, which is really impressive.
But then he also did it while running a full-time business while running a team of over 200 people. They’re growing really quickly. The company is called the Acceleration Partners, and they are an agency that works with all the biggest affiliate programs out there. So it’s fascinating the way that he took the content, the way that he republished on LinkedIn and wrote for Forbes, and, Inc., and others.
We also get into other things like company culture. He runs a virtual team. We get into why he writes books and produces courses even as he’s running a multi-million dollar company. A lot of interesting things. There are questions that I’m asking kind of really for myself, because he has this interesting split of content creator and CEO, that I try to find that balance and walk that line as well.
It’s a phone conversation. We've been friends for a long time and, haven’t caught up in quite a while. So, it’s just fun to chat.
I hope you enjoy the episode.
Bob. Welcome to the show.
Robert: [00:01:34]
Good to be here.
Nathan: [00:01:36]
So I actually haven’t talked to you in a long time. I was just thinking back to,
Robert: [00:01:41]
Pre-COVID probably. And then we really
Nathan: [00:01:43]
Yeah, exactly. But we’ve had so many good conversations, like a few interesting things that we have in common is both running good sized firms, like as CEOs, and then also loving content creation and loving this side of it. So, I want to talk about all kinds of stuff related to that. But first, your newsletter Friday Forward, like, will you just tell high-level where that came from?
Because as I understand it, you didn’t set out to start a newsletter. You set out to create content for your team.
Robert: [00:02:12]
Yeah, and even set out to work on my morning routine. So, I actually had come from a leadership event, pretty intensive event that Entrepreneur’s Organization had put on. I think it’s until I started a long time. And then you realize you’ve got to change your dates like five, seven years ago now.
The real focus is on the morning routine, not the real focus, a big focus was on a morning routine, starting off the days. Because, you know, time for thoughtful reflection, reading something positive writing, which is a great routine for a creator anyway. And, we were given some stuff to read.
It was a little too like rainbow and unicorny like, “You can do it!” quotes. Like it wasn’t my cup of tea. And so I, when I got back and I continued through the routine, I was like, you know what, maybe, maybe I’ll combine these activities. I have some stories that I like and some quotes and some things in this folder.
Like, so I thought like our team was like 40 at the time, I think maybe 45 and we’re all distributed. We’ve always been virtual. And so I was like, I’ll just start writing this note to the team on Fridays. And it won’t be about our business or anything. It’ll be about a story or something kind of inspirational and motivational getting better.
Started sending these things, I changed the name a few times. For a couple of months I didn’t think anyone was reading them. Then I did get some notes back saying, you know what, I did this thing, you talked about three or four weeks ago, or, “Thanks, that was really helpful.” And the other curious thing was I got notes like, “Hey, I shared this with my wife’s company,” or, you know, “My brother shared this with his family. He loves it. I’ve been sending it to him.”
So, I was actually at another EO conference a couple months later talking with some other CEOs about like, this is, this has been really good. It’s been good for me. It makes me think about something, right.
It’s been a great way to connect to the team. You know, you, you should all try this. And they said, Oh yeah, well, se...
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