Twenty-six years of the same nine ideas
Six hundred issues of marketing advice for solo professionals — and what it all added up to
Sept 1999 – July 2026 · 600+ issues
Michael Katz wrote The Likeable Expert Gazette twice a month for more than twenty-five years — 600-plus short essays for solo professionals and small firms, each one starting with something that happened to him and ending with something useful. It has now concluded. Read end to end, the archive makes the same nine arguments in six hundred different costumes.
600+
issues published
26
years, without a gap
5,000
subscribers, 40+ countries
~30
ideas, by his own count
The whole thing in one sentence
Stay in front of the people you know, over and over again, in a way that positions you as a likeable expert.
He said that sentence, essentially unchanged, for twenty-six years. The nine ideas are its anatomy — read in order, they describe one sequence rather than nine separate pieces of advice.
The Ideas
Nine things he kept coming back to
The stories change — a payphone in the woods, a bottle of wine and four stitches, a paragliding trip he didn’t want to take. These don’t.
Positioning
Different beats better
Every professional in your field is competent, credentialed and careful. That’s the problem. Nobody refers you because you’re marginally more qualified than the next person — they refer you because they can remember you. Being better is a private achievement. Being different is a public one.
You are facing a much bigger risk when it comes to generating word of mouth and referrals: being invisible and being unmemorable.
Different is Better Than Better · Oct 2021
Positioning
Narrow the niche until it almost hurts
The instinct is to stay broad so you don’t turn work away. Katz argued the opposite for twenty-six years: the narrower the niche, the less your marketing has to do. A good niche isn’t just a label — its members have to know they belong to it, and they have to share a problem you can name.
The narrower, more well-defined it is, the less effective (frankly) your marketing needs to be.
Niche Craft · Jul 2014
Getting hired
Hiring isn’t a meritocracy
People hire people they know and like, or people referred by someone they know and like. Clients can’t evaluate your technical skill anyway — to them you cleared the competence bar a long time ago. What’s left is whether they’d enjoy working with you, which means the version of you in your marketing had better be the version that shows up.
It’s the you in you — not your skills — that your existing, happy clients love.
Lose the Act; Gain More Clients · Aug 2006
Generosity
You can’t give too much away
The most common objection he heard: if I tell them the answer, they won’t need me. His response never changed. Watching a house get built doesn’t make you a builder. Giving away what you know doesn’t cost you the work — it’s the only evidence a prospect has that you know anything at all.
Watching isn’t the same as knowing.
The Magic of Free Information · Apr 2019
Discipline
Nothing happens until you push send
Of all his arguments, this is the one he made most often and cared about most. A newsletter has no deadline, which is precisely why it dies — there’s always a better use of Tuesday. The people who get the speaking invitations and the inbound leads aren’t the best writers. They’re the ones who never missed.
Pick a date, give it the respect it deserves, and stick to it.
Why Newsletters Fail · Apr 2023
Craft
Story first, lesson second
Most business writing opens by explaining a concept, which is why most business writing goes unread. Katz opened with a thing that happened — a shoulder surgeon, a payphone, a bottle of wine — and let the point arrive afterward. It isn’t a stylistic preference. It’s the only part of your content nobody else can produce.
Your expertise is not unique. Your life is.
How I Write This Newsletter · Mar 2022
Selling
The sale happens long before the sale happens
Professional services feel risky to buy, are hard to sample, and cost real money. No closing technique survives that. By the time someone asks what you charge, they’ve already decided — on the strength of months or years of small, unbilled contact. Selling, in this business, is just the last five minutes of something much longer.
By the time the question is asked, the decision has already been made.
Closing Is Not Selling · Dec 2018
Scale
Do the things that don’t scale
Large firms are forced to automate, which leaves an entire category of marketing lying on the ground: the handwritten note, the personal reply, the problem solved without a form. These get worse when you industrialize them, which is exactly why a one-person firm can own them outright.
Good writing doesn’t scale. It’s not a function of time, effort, horsepower, or budget.
The Bigness of Smallness · Oct 2021
Working solo
The job was never the safe option
A running argument across the whole archive, and the one that reads least like marketing advice. A salary is a single client who can fire you for reasons unrelated to your work. A book of twenty clients is diversification. The freedom is the compensation — and turning down the wrong work is how you get more of the right kind.
Working for a large company is like being a solo professional with one client.
The Illusion of Safety · Jun 2008
1999 – 2026
What changed, and what didn’t
The advice held steady; the weather around it did not. Read chronologically, the archive doubles as a field record of what small firms were being told to worry about, decade by decade.
1999–2004
Making the case for email
Before anyone had an inbox strategy. The argument is simply that a small firm can publish at all — and that permission, not reach, is the asset.
Personalization Ain’t Personal The Power Of A Free Sample Leap, And The Net Will Appear
2005–2010
The likeable expert
The thesis sharpens into a position: expertise is table stakes, personality is the differentiator, and a niche is what makes both legible.
Lose the Act; Gain More Clients World’s Leading Expert Familiarity Breeds Clients
2011–2016
Everybody’s a publisher now
Blogs, social, podcasts, automation. As the channels multiply, his answer narrows: be a human, be specific, be remembered.
Blinded by the (Technology) Light Small Is The New Big Write Once; Share Often
2017–2022
Small on purpose
Smallness is reframed from limitation to strategy. Handwritten notes, trust, the unscalable. Then a pandemic makes it all literal.
The World’s Greatest Marketing Tool What To Say Now The Bigness of Smallness
2023–2026
What the machine can’t do
AI arrives and the twenty-year argument turns out to have been the right one all along: point of view, voice, and story are the parts that don’t commoditize.
Godzilla Wants Your Job 3 Ways You Are Better Than A.I. Presumed Competent
The Method
How you write six hundred of these
He published the formula himself, which is very much in character. Three steps, roughly 800 words, twice a month, for twenty-six years.
Step One
Find something interesting
Something that actually happened to you. A surgeon’s offhand remark, a payphone in the middle of a state park, a bottle of wine and four stitches in your thumb.
Step Two
Make a connection
Find the business idea hiding inside it. This is the hinge, and it’s the step everybody else skips — most newsletters begin here and wonder why nobody reads them.
Step Three
Share the insight
Now explain the thing. By this point the reader is already with you, and the point has something to stick to.
I’ve written more than 500 of these newsletters. I’ve only got about 30 ideas.
How I Write This Newsletter · Mar 2022
The other half of the method is the headline. Nearly every issue is titled with a song, film or idiom bent slightly out of shape — a small, consistent promise that the next 800 words won’t be boring.
Start Here
If you only read six
A short path through the archive — one from each strand, arranged so they build on each other.
Mar 2022
How I Write This Newsletter
The three-step formula, given away for free. Start here and the rest of the archive becomes legible.
Oct 2021
Different is Better Than Better
A payphone in a state park explains why your credentials aren’t the thing people repeat.
Apr 2019
The Magic of Free Information
The definitive answer to “but if I give it away, why would they hire me?”
Dec 2018
Closing Is Not Selling
An unromantic marriage proposal, and what it says about how professional services actually get bought.
Jun 2008
The Illusion of Safety
Written mid-financial-crisis, and the clearest statement of why he thought working alone was the conservative choice.
May 2021
Lessons From 500 Newsletters
Five lessons, beginning with “Nobody cares that you’ve published 500 newsletters.”
The Last Word
The final issue was about failing
The last Likeable Expert Gazette went out in July 2026. Its subject was riding a bicycle — a thing you cannot learn by being told, only by falling over. He used it to catalogue his own flops: the PenguinScore, the newsletter factory for construction companies, the one-day marketing bootcamp that sold zero tickets. Twenty-six years in, that was the note he chose to end on.
The more things we try, the sooner we uncover the ideas that actually work.
Failure Is an Option · Jul 2026 · the last issue
The Likeable Expert Gazette was written by Michael Katz of Blue Penguin Development, published twice monthly from 1999 to 2026 and now concluded. Every issue remains online in the archive. Quotations on this page are taken verbatim from the posts linked beside them.