Logos Don't Write Letters

Open your inbox and look at the newsletters from companies. Not the ones from people. The ones from brands.

Most of them read the same way.

"We're excited to share."

"Our team has been hard at work."

"We'd love to hear from you."

They're friendly, polished, and completely interchangeable. You could swap the logos and nobody would notice.

That's not because the writers are bad. It's because they're writing as an entity, and entities don't have voices. They have guidelines. Guidelines can tell a writer how to sound. They can't give them a story to tell.

Nobody has a relationship with a "we"

People connect with people.

We trust a face, a name, a voice with quirks and opinions. We don't form attachments to a corporate first-person plural.

I’ve spent dozens of hours with Daniel Priestley’s YouTube videos and studied hundreds of his LinkedIn posts. I bought his books in print, ebook, and audio. He runs a company, Dent Global. I bought into him.

When a business is big, faceless, and selling a commodity, a corporate "we" is fine. Nobody needs to feel close to their electric company.

But if your business runs on your name, if clients hire you partly because of who you are, then writing as "we" throws away the one thing your competitors can't copy. There are a hundred firms that do what you do. There's only one of you.

What a person's voice sounds like

A human voice has edges.

It has opinions that some readers will disagree with. It has a sense of humor, or at least a sense of what's ridiculous. It tells you what it got wrong last month.

It uses the words you'd actually use in conversation, not the words that survived a review meeting.

Imagine two owners announcing the same change:

We're excited to announce the launch of our new client onboarding process, designed to streamline your experience.

I used to lose about a week with every new client to paperwork. Last month I finally fixed that, and I want to show you how, because you're probably losing the same week.

The first one is information. The second is a person talking to you. Only one of them makes you want to keep reading, and only one of them makes you feel like you know the writer a little better by the end.

"But I'm not a writer"

You don't have to be. You have to be yourself, consistently, on paper.

That's harder than it sounds, because most people stiffen up when they write. Every claim gets a qualifier. Every opinion gets watered down until nobody could object to it. The result is accurate and lifeless.

Four things help:

Write the way you talk to a good client. Not a prospect you're nervous about. A client you've worked with for years, who trusts you and wants your honest read. Write to that person.

Keep one opinion per issue. Every newsletter should have at least one thing in it that you actually believe and that not everyone would agree with. That's what makes it yours.

Tell them something from this week. A conversation, a mistake, a decision, a thing you noticed. Specifics are what make a reader feel they're getting a glimpse of a real person rather than content.

Give them something to take with them. A lesson, a shortcut, a question to ask themselves. A story from your week earns their attention. Something they can use earns the next open.

This is what a ghostwriter is actually for

People sometimes assume ghostwriting means someone else's voice wearing your name.

Done well, it's the opposite.

A good ghostwriter's job is to capture how you think and talk, then do the time-consuming part of turning it into finished writing on a schedule. It should read so much like you that nobody could tell the difference, including you.

That's you on a good day, with time to think.

Logos don't write letters. People do. If your name is on the business, put your voice in the inbox.