Blogs usually contain more than a single post, and this blog did too, once. But for reasons which I’ll elaborate on in just a minute, I have decided to unpublish all the blog posts that were previously live on thebestofemail.com. The only one I’ve left live is the one you’re reading right now, to explain why I did it, so here goes:

I should probably begin by setting the context for this move with a quick backstory of how this website (TheBestOfEmail.com) came about.

Back in 2014 I found myself with a little spare time on my hands after returning from an extended trip overseas. I had always wanted to create a website or blog about one of my great (and slightly nerdy) passions – Email Marketing. In particular, I noticed there was a severe lack of examples on the web (or anywhere, really) of great newsletters from other brands, to provide both guidance and inspiration for email marketers, so the main premise of my website became to create an Inspiration Gallery showcasing exemplary, standout newsletters.

The aim was never to turn it into a huge repository of ‘every type of newsletter under the sun’, which is a concept that other folks actually have brought to life since I created TheBestOfEmail.com. The idea was for me to hand-pick truly exceptional examples of newsletters I came across, and not only display them, but also use my experience as an avid email marketer to explain why they were praise-worthy. I wanted it to be a truly worthwhile resource for like-minded marketers, because I know that I would have appreciated such a resource myself, had it already existed.

So I hired someone to build the website for me, and proceeded to subscribe to hundreds of newsletters from a variety of brands across a variety of industries and niches. As the newsletters came flooding in week after week, I realized that it wasn’t enough to simply display the online version of each newsletter inside an iframe (which was the logical, scrappy approach) because many of them would become inactive after a while, so the only other way to display them in a way that would stand the test of time, was to manually create a screenshot of every single newsletter. It turned out to be a super-fiddly exercise and honestly, I failed to anticipate just how time-consuming it would become – not to mention the actual process of sifting through the hundreds of newsletters that would land in my bulging inbox each week, just to identify the handful of emails that I considered to be true ‘gems’.

It was a labour of love at first, so I persevered and proudly launched TheBestOfEmail.com (or TBOE, as I fondly refer to it now). The compliments flowed, as did the praise for the concept itself, because it was novel at the time.

But just a month after the launch, I was offered the position of Director of Content for Israel’s largest tech-oriented investment group. Talk about exciting! Working with investors and entrepreneurs in such a vibrant startup ecosystem was super interesting and rewarding, but also demanding, and I found I had less and less ‘spare’ time to devote to TBOE as regularly as I would have liked. I didn’t have a team to help me, or software to automate the process. I didn’t WANT to automate the process anyway, because that would be antithetical to the whole idea of the newsletters being hand-picked for their excellence.

That was the beginning of a long stretch of inactivity for poor old TBOE, followed by an even longer stretch of neglect. Over the past few years, as my experience and skillset in ‘all things content’ continued to grow thanks to being exposed to amazing opportunities and a constantly-evolving content landscape, TBOE was sidelined in favour of other projects and priorities.

Fast forward to 2020: After returning to Australia (just pre-Covid, as it turned out!) and contemplating my next move, it occurred to me that TBOE – which is specifically focused on email marketing – was not the right vehicle for me to showcase my personal brand, which has always been chiefly based on writing but also very multidisciplinary in nature – and even more so now after years of expanding my skillset and expertise. I realized I needed a new home on the web, and promptly got to work on developing noyalizor.com.

I ummed-and-ahhed for ages about what to do with TBOE and decided that the Inspiration Gallery is actually still a pretty good resource, albeit a kind of ‘newsletter time capsule’ circa 2014. In fact, some of the brands featured in it no longer exist or have since rebranded, so it really is a historical ‘marketing snapshot’ of sorts – which also makes it kind of fun! But I digress. Long story short – I’m still hopeful that I may add to it from time to time, and when I do, instead of sharing new additions in TBOE’s newsletter (which I have also discontinued), I’ll share them in my noyalizor.com newsletter, which is now the main way for me to communicate with my followers.

So there you have it! I have unpublished the ‘old’ TBOE blog because it was, well, old, but I’ve left TheBestOfEmail.com live purely to house the Inspiration Gallery I originally worked so hard to create, and which I am still hoping to update with new examples of kick-ass newsletters – as often as my current schedule will allow.

With that said, I’d like to invite you to visit my new home on the web at noyalizor.com and subscribe to my newsletter (over there), as well as to my brand-new YouTube channel. YouTube’s algorithm has been a real A-hole so I’d appreciate it if you could subscribe to help get it to notice me 🙂

You can also follow me on LinkedIn and read my musings on Medium.