Welcome to our Newsletter

Intellectual Masturbation
and other matters

No control.

If Meta decided to close or shut us down, we would lose a huge part of our lead generation. Guess what, it happened! The CIA (Chief Interruption Agents) aka hackers, accessed our account on 27th Sep and did a big mess. Meta found our activity fishy and shut us down. Yep. With a newsletter, our community does not get cut off from us since we can easily switch from Convertkit to Mailchimp or any other platform. Our community always continues learning, applying, and growing.

Intellectual Masturbation.

Not everyone wanted to ask a question on comments in the presence of the entire world. As such, we had to infer from our conversations with clients what they wanted us to talk about. And it did feel like we were posting for us – Intellectual Masturbation. This was never our intended goal.

Defining Intellectual Masturbation:

• The act of satisfying one’s ego through statements intended only to show off one’s intelligence.

• Acting like a know-it-all jerk that no one likes to listen to and everyone wishes would just shut up.

Too generic.

At the back of our minds was the gnawing feeling that we were not talking to someone but an entire group. Admittedly, receiving an email saying ‘Hi Ben’ is a very small gesture. Even so, we will do it! And we will be adding segmentation to ensure our emails speak to people’s needs.

No vanity.

The number of followers, likes, and all that have become vanity metrics in this day. One of our most engaged posts was actually “You don’t need 1,000,000 followers”. Yes, I can see the irony of mentioning the performance of the post. 😁 Yet, it showed us that we have people who viewed followers as such. No one knows how many people are in our newsletter. It matters not to anyone else. All that matters here is the quality of every piece that goes out and how much it impacts you.

Social Media is meant to be social.

There, we said it. We were tired of doing ads. You see, there are two types of marketing strategies.

• Interruption. This is where as you scroll through cute images of puppies, an ad is forced into your life. We did many ads that ultimately did this in people’s lives.

• Permission. This is when you have signed up for some message or newsletter. I think a newsletter is the best application of permission marketing. And I would very much prefer permission to be our primary marketing strategy.

Constant email address.

How many times have you joined or left a (given social media) platform? Compare that with how many email addresses you have ever owned. You probably embarrassingly remember your first one – theonlyrealben789@yahoo.com! – it has to be Yahoo. 🙈 Then, you got a more mature one once you entered campus or the job market, to look professional – mukomaben@gmail.com. And you stuck with the mature one through the years and you are happy about it. With this in mind, we don’t have to switch platforms just to give you information that helps you build your brand. Not at all.

Hi, My name is Ben and I am the one behind Kenyan Grafik. I have toyed with the idea of a newsletter for quite a while, wondering if it was something our community needed at all. Our Instagram and Website were doing a good job sharing our knowledge to help people build their brands - and to showcase our work. However, a few things bugged me and a newsletter is a strong solution for them.

And so… We decided to do a newsletter every week, going out on Thursdays, starting 19th Jan 2022. Why Thursday? Because it gives you time to process, through the weekend, and apply in the coming week. These newsletters will contain information that helps you build your brand so that you increase brand awareness, convert more customers and increase customer loyalty.

Every email is by me and you can leave at any time. I promise never to give your details away to anyone else. At times, I may have other partners and experts in various fields (such as business strategy, marketing, advertising, or branding) writing to you. Even then, I will read through the articles to ensure that the info shared is beneficial for you.

Finally

It’s good to have you here! Please reply to the email with “Hi!” or “It’s great to be here!” so that we can ensure the emails hit your inbox (and not promotions or spam!). You will start receiving updates right there in your inbox. You can also come to our website to read the full archives and other posts as they are published.