For six years people have been welcoming AgileSherpas into their inboxes.
At first they were mostly just welcoming me, since I was the original (and only) trainer/coach. Eventually they came to welcome us as a brand, and several non-Andrea people have served as the “voice” of the copy inside the emails.
We’ve published just over 300 pieces of blog content in 6 years, and they’ve all had an email to go along with them. Sometimes it’s been once a week, other times twice.
But rain or shine, feast or famine, in sickness and in health, we create content and send emails about it.
I’ve heard from dozens of readers over the years about how useful our content has been, and that they would, in fact, miss our emails and blog posts if they stopped coming. In the content marketing community this is the gold standard.
If you went away, would anybody notice?
Not including your boss.
Or your mom.
Would anybody miss your content if it disappeared tomorrow?
For years I’ve been proud to be able to say “yes” to that question.
But recently, I got uncomfortable. I felt that our emails, and our content overall, had become complacent. We were going through the motions, but not being reflective enough about what we were doing, for whom, and why.
We’ve historically talked mostly (only?) about Agile marketing. We’ve spoken to the believers. Created content for the converted. And generally not thought much about the marketers who hadn’t yet seen the beautiful light of agility.
I think it’s time to change that.
At AgileSherpas we believe Agility is for Everyone…but how can we expect Everyone to find it if they don’t know they need it, or what it looks like, or why they should love it?
So I’m going off the trail to do something different…and hopefully better.
(By the way, that’s the title of our relaunched, revamped, and revitalized newsletter: Off the Trail.)
Here’s why it’s called that:
This will be a special piece of content only available to subscribers, so it's sort of off the beaten track.
I plan to venture "off the trail" to collect insights and ideas, and then bringing them back in the newsletter.
If your day, week, quarter, or year feels like it’s gone off track and you’re wandering far from the marked path, maybe you'll find their way back through this content.
Off the Trail will come out every Friday, and it will include my own musings and analysis about all things marketing agility. But, much more importantly, it’ll collect ideas from AgileSherpas' brilliant coaches, consultants, and trainers as well as some of the most insightful marketing- and Agile-related content around.
The only way to follow me off the trail will be to subscribe to the newsletter. We’ll probably publish excerpts of it on LinkedIn and the like (because marketing), but the good stuff will be accessible only to subscribers.
We’re going in a new direction, away from the familiar road more traveled by. I hope you’ll join me on the journey.