😭
This is incredible (sports) writing.
nytimes.com/athletic/7734617…
Can any media operators make sense of this for me…
Doing some digital PR work and the online pub of a very recognizable brand followed up with this.
Pickleball is #2 topic at city council meetings - primarily in support of them.
The Picklr just filed Chapter 11 and facilities are closing or up for sale.
The winners will be whoever solves access at a price that works.
Works in sponsor sales too.
When a brand call stalls, I stop pitching packages and ask what they're trying to get done this quarter. Half the time the real deal is something we hadn't offered yet.
Has compounded our "offerings" over time too.
I'm bullish on "Free tools as ads".
We're building small tools, industry reports, digests, etc...
1. A tool gets shared, a newsletter issue doesn't
2. Every use is a reason to subscribe - often email gated
3. It ranks and gets cited by AI answers long after launch
Really good growth plays to run right now:
1. Free tools as ads
2. A podcast as a sales list
3. "vs" pages for every competitor
4. A site (portions of your site) built for AI agents
5. A changelog as a content calendar
6. Sales calls as a content engine
7. Remplate libraries
8. Employees as part of distribution
9. A newsletter for your customers' customers
Testing branded animations for information gain, differentiation, on-page engagement, SEO/AEO optimization.
Super simple here depicting how a pickleball point develops.
Could see us doing a full YouTube channel of VO’s + animations talking strategy.
pickleballunion.com/pickleba…
This works even better in newsletters.
Most readers skim on a phone. 1/3/1 gives them a reason to stop in every section.
Worth testing on sponsor blurbs too.
But like anything, your voice is the differentiator.
The easiest formatting upgrade to make your writing impossible to put down:
The 1/3/1 structure is all about pacing. You give your reader an easy entry point, build on that with just enough info, and close with something impactful. Then, you repeat the process all the way down the page. It’s like a song, where each beat hits just right, pulling the reader through.
1 sentence: Easy entry hook
3 sentences: Context, data, or elaboration
1 sentence: Punchy takeaway
Format for rhythm and readers will devour every word.
Platforms rent you attention. Email lets you keep it.
Reach on social comes and goes for us. The list at about 40K subscribers is the part that kept working through every change.
Own the list first.
Paul Lemley retweeted
liz warren: we’re gonna stop the mayonnaise company from buying a hot sauce company
elon musk:
Paul Lemley retweeted
It’s not about the zoo tickets, it’s that at some point I looked up from my paycheck and realized OH, cool, I’m apparently funding the welfare state, Big Pharma, foreign countries, “Learing Centers,” government programs I’ve never heard of, Planned Fucking Parenthood, and seventeen layers of bureaucracy whose primary function appears to be emailing each other PDFs; meanwhile, I pay taxes when I earn money, taxes when I spend money, taxes to employ people, taxes on property I ALREADY OWN, taxes go up every year anyway, the school district discovers another $75,000,000 it absolutely cannot survive without, and if I so much as raise my hand and ask whether maybe, possibly, perhaps somebody could spend slightly less money, I am informed that I hate teachers, children, puppies and probably literacy, and NOW after financing civilization itself I’m also supposed to smile and subsidize someone’s trip to see the giraffes.
Know what I mean?
Can confirm, this still works.
Deployed today with a handful of grok bot prompts across two businesses.
20 emails total (10 for each) and in under 3 hours I earned 3 confirmed backlinks.
