Last week Funeral Director Daily passed the 500 subscriber mark for e-mails sent daily to regular readers.  Thanks for signing up.  All growth has been organic and now, since I’ve learned how to use Google and other search engines we are growing by about 1% per week.  When you consider we had about 8 readers for the first six months while I was learning the networking of attracting and holding readers, that is pretty impressive.

How We Started:  Since I sold the majority of my funeral business five years ago I’ve found a great deal of satisfaction in helping as a mentor and sometimes investor to young people in different industries.  One of them operates a business where he wrote a blog daily with the intent of having people in his industry look to him as an “expert” source in that industry.  He challenged me in that he thought, because of my funeral industry insight coupled with the fact that I’ve been involved in a lot of other industries, people in the death care industry might be interested in seeing a perspective of someone with a long – term point of view on funeral related issues.  I took up the challenge and learned what I had to do and just began writing with zero readers.

Where We are Today:  Today, as I mentioned, I have over 500 daily readers plus those that I pick up on a daily basis -that don’t subscribe- from search engines on our daily stories.  I’m pretty amazed that people are willing and interested in reading what I write.  Of our 500 daily readers we have world-wide reach with the vast majority in North America but a dedicated and growing number in Great Britain and Australia.  We even have some daily readers in India and the Far East.

How Can you Help:  I plan to continue to write stories as I somewhat enjoy the research and learning as I search out topics – although it can be time consuming.  You can help by telling me what type of stories you would like to see more often – I’ve tried to target my articles to helping those who own their own small funeral industry businesses.  However, because I can see what e-mails get the daily version sent to them, I know that I have large public company CEOs and many corporate people reading the daily articles also.

Another way you can help is that, if you enjoy my articles and learn from them, please pass Funeral Director Daily on to not one colleague, not two colleagues, but four colleagues so that I can grow the daily readership.  I’ve underwritten all the costs of FDD on my own so far, but the time will come when I will need sponsors to continue to do so – the more readers that I have, the more value that I can pass on to those sponsors.  I’ve decided against using ads from places like Google’s Ad Sense because I don’t want my readers inundated with pop-up ads that will ruin your pleasure in reading.  At some point I will ask death care industry companies for advertising in the box format as you see on the front page.  Their ads will allow click-thrus to a web-site chosen by them.  If your company is interested please let me know.  Now that we are getting thousands of readers a week, I believe there is value to those ads.

Finally, this is an experiment that I have really enjoyed.  I really thank those of you who have e-mailed me with encouragement and told me you are putting into practice something that I suggested.  That is really gratifying.  Or those of you who have called and visited about how you can bring more value to your business is very flattering to this small town kid.    Tomorrow I will be sitting down on Convocation Day at the University of Minnesota School of Mortuary Science and visiting with new students.  One thing I always tell them is that the nicest people work in funeral service — that’s something I’ve known for a long time!!  Thanks for letting me into your world.

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