We did it, besties – it’s been a whole year!

Today, let’s take a look back at the little newsletter that could and talk about the highlights, challenges, and some top posts.

At the end, I’ll also talk a bit about the future of this newsletter, and there’s a little survey for you ✨

💖 Why I started Work Bestie

As I’ve moved solidly into management roles, one of the things I’ve missed the most about being an IC is writing copy. In a lot of my jobs, I got to write copy for apps or marketing, but now the majority of what I get to write is internal-facing. So the main driver for a newsletter was just the love of writing – and this has definitely been successful!

I chose a newsletter because I wanted to be held accountable to writing regularly, which I thought I wouldn’t do if it was a blog. I think this is probably true, considering a lot of posts are now written the night before 👀

🎯 The goals

Aside from writing regularly, I set myself a couple of goals with the newsletter as well:

Grow with the newsletter: I wanted to feel like I was growing in some way as I wrote. Something that had become unfulfilling with university mentoring (which I’d done for years) was that I was answering the same questions over and over again, and it felt like mentoring wasn’t doing anything for me. Writing has made me (I think) a better manager and a better mentor.

Keep a foot in marketing-land: Even though it’s been about 10 years since I worked in digital marketing, I love it so much and have always liked that as a designer, I got to have a hand in what went out to customers. I didn’t want to lose touch, especially considering I’m working in marketing software. (And honestly, it has genuinely helped a lot with my day-to-day more than I expected.)

Don’t get too number-driven: I didn’t want to end up obsessing over subscriber numbers, click rates, or anything else – and I didn’t! Metrics aren’t the only indicator of success, so I knew they wouldn’t tell me if I was enjoying myself or if what I wrote resonated.

One thing I didn’t anticipate that has been really important is anecdotal feedback. Sometimes a post doesn’t get particularly high engagement, but I get messages or comments from people about it, and that feels a lot more special than big numbers.

I originally intended to focus more on monetisation to at least offset the cost of publishing, but I quickly decided that it wouldn’t be worth the effort of creating frequent paywalled content or partnering with subpar advertisers. Luckily growing the newsletter into a side hustle wasn’t an original goal!

🧗🏻‍♀️ The challenges

Maintaining multiple channels is exhausting: I originally launched Work Bestie with a companion LinkedIn and Instagram, and if you look at them you can see they’re incredibly out of date. Because growing my audience is not a big priority for me, I haven’t wanted to spend the effort in pulling traffic from other areas of the internet.

Writing for too many people can make topics tough: I thought I’d narrowed down my target audience when I began writing, but being across jobs in so many industries at such different scales can make it tough to target pieces. My audience is quite varied in terms of where they’re working, so that basically means what I write won’t resonate with everyone.

Surprisingly, I wouldn’t say the last-minute writing is much of a challenge – I don’t mind it, and it’s nice to have a deadline to get you moving!

🤩 Top 5 posts

1. Three ways to make your résumé stand out.

2. The best way to combat burnout? Preventing it.

3. Why you should always be looking at job ads – even when you're not really looking.

4. Do this before you start any project.

5. Making your inbox work for you.

🥲 Least popular

• Stakeholder drama? Try this.

• Are you good-busy or bad-busy?

• The secret to how I manage my workload.

• Dealing with procrastination.

• Overwhelmed with tasks? 5 ways to manage your to-do list. (first post ever!)

💖 Honourable mentions

My favourite 3 posts that weren’t in the most popular:

1. When times are tough, think about this.
   This covers “the 3 month rule,” which has been really important in shaping my career journey. I’ve cited it to many coworkers and direct reports as a way to reframe struggles, so I think it’s one of the best pieces of advice even if it didn’t perform well!

2. No more awkward follow-ups.
   A short one but something I lean on a lot at work. You’d be surprised by how many people are awful at asking for your input on work!

3. The peer network you need to succeed.
   I’m not surprised this one wasn’t very popular because it was really long and more on the personal strategy side, but I really enjoyed the process of this one because I articulated something I’d never had to before. It actually made it easier to diagnose a missing connection for teammates!

🌈 What’s next?

One year down, ??? to go!

I’ve been thinking a bit about the direction for this newsletter recently, and I’ve been considering focusing more on the product & design space. If that interests you, I would be so grateful if you would take a few minutes to fill out a survey so I can see what kind of content you’d be interested in:

See you next week!