Essays
Long-form marketing playbooks drawn from 1,412 documented experiments — the same field-tested work behind companies like Notion, Buffer, and ConvertKit, broken down into lessons a solo operator can ship in a weekend.
An editor's note
What an essay is, here
A TLC essay is not a hot take. It is a documented playbook, written by one of our nine editors or four contributing analysts, drawn from a specific experiment in The T.L.C. Lab or a contributor’s own tracked work — with the raw data, spend, and outcome attached.
Every essay ships with the same three artifacts, in the same place, every time:
- A 90-second TL;DR audio version. Recorded weekly by our audio engineer. The first marketing blog to do this at scale.
- A downloadable artifact. A Notion template, a Figma asset, or a sheet — readers leave with the file, not just the advice.
- A measurement plan & a “when not to bother” line. A copy-paste framework to ship the tactic, and an honest call on when it is not worth your weekend.
Average essay length is around 3,400 words. Average open rate on the email that ships them is 47%. We have never run a sponsored post, and we publish our full editorial policy at tlc-blog.com/editorial.
— Maya Okafor & the TLC editorial desk
Brooklyn, NY · Founded March 2019
The archive
Recent essays
Four category lanes — SEO, Lifecycle, Distribution, Pricing — each essay tagged with a read-time, an audio badge, and the artifact it ships with.
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SEO № 214
The programmatic SEO page that 8x’d our trial signups in 90 days
A teardown of the ‘best [tool] for [use case]’ template we shipped across 412 pages — the editorial brief, the schema, the internal-link graph, and the exact week traffic plateaued (and why).
Oct 14, 2025 -
Lifecycle № 213
The seven-email welcome sequence we rewrote three times before it converted
Lifecycle emails are not copy — they are a product. We rebuilt ours around a single behavior signal and watched activation lift from 11% to 38% in two cohorts.
Oct 7, 2025 -
Distribution № 212
Why we stopped cross-posting to LinkedIn — and what we replaced it with
Cross-posting killed our referral numbers. Here is the channel-by-channel breakdown of where essay traffic actually comes from in 2025, and the one distribution habit worth keeping.
Sep 30, 2025 -
Pricing № 211
The pricing page test where the ‘loser’ became the winner at $20k MRR
A six-week A/B on annual vs. monthly defaulting, told honestly — the variant we shipped, the one we killed, and the arithmetic that decided which was which.
Sep 23, 2025
Editor’s Pick · Issue №210
The flagship essay of the season
The 14-month compounding content experiment — what 200 essays, ranked, actually taught us
We went back through every essay The TLC Blog has ever published, tagged them by category, scored them against traffic, signups, and citations, and asked a quiet question: which essays compounded, and which ones just aged out?
- 3,800words · 16-min read
- 12,400downloads of the Notion kit
- 41cited by Ahrefs, Moz, Shopify, ConvertKit
“The most useful single piece of writing on content compounding published this year — we sent it to every strategist on our team.” — Ahrefs blog, roundup №38
The TLC essays changed the way our three-person content team plans a quarter. We open the Lab table, pick a tactic that fits our stage, and ship the artifact the same weekend. It is the only marketing publication we pay for twice — once for the team, once for ourselves.
Eliza Vandermark
Head of Content, Dovetail — TLC newsletter subscriber since 2021
Dovetail is one of 41,327 subscribers receiving the Weekly TLC Letter.
The Weekly TLC Letter
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Want the raw data first? Open The T.L.C. Lab — 1,412 documented experiments →