I’ve been doing a bit of thinking recently about my jobs newsletter (again – it happens semi regularly without coming to many/any conclusions). It was always a bit of a niche idea – a regular, curated list of jobs that were kind of digital without being too techy and pretty public service/interest without always being Government.

As of this morning it has 961 subscribers and an undefined amount of people who just check the web version each week (which Medium used to suggest was around 250 – my brief use of Worpress suggested less than 200 but I’m currently using neither to cross publish). Whichever way you carve it up it is more than I ever expected – I’ve also received 42 ‘coffees’ on Ko-Fi which is really quite lovely.

I would like to do two things at the moment –

(1) Get over 1000 subscribers – because I am so close it just feels like I need to make it happen

(2) Start using the newsletter to promote links about good practice in hiring/jobs boards/culture etc – without alienating my current audience

For now I am just going to focus on (1) and I have been inspired by a tweet from Mark O’Neil –>

..and my blurry memories of Webrings in the age of GeoCities and AngelFire and Blogrolls in the early days of blogging.

So what I want to do is prominently feature a link to another newsletter each week in mine on a reciprocal basis. It would have to be somewhat on topic – so data science, visualisation, product management, agile, digital government, civic tech, careers, culture….you get the idea – and probably a personal rather than a professional thing as well.

A different link (and description) to a new newsletter each week and maybe a link to an archive of all of them as well also.

Anybody up for it?

Newsletters feel like such an old internet culture come back around so maybe an old way of increasing attention might work as well?