The exact DIY steps I followed to get from concept to reality
Here’s some background: I never launched a newsletter before.
I’ve been blogging for a while and I work as a full-time freelance writer, but launching a newsletter was new to me.
I did these steps myself and didn’t pay for any services in doing so (apart from Twitter and Medium, but those are merely personal choices and don’t really affect the process).
The following case study explains the various steps I took in setting up my newsletter, along with my reasoning for the actions I took. I learnt a lot along the way, so I’m happy to share what I discovered and I hope it helps other writers speed up their own launch.
Key Definitions
Before I started this project, there were a few key things that needed to be defined in advance:
- My reason for starting a newsletter
- Who my target audience is
- Topics I will be writing about
My Reasoning
I enjoy blogging, but I think of running a newsletter like following a fitness or diet regime. Once people sign up and give you access to their personal inbox, I feel there is a responsibility to deliver.
Putting myself out there with a bold statement that I’ll be helping people every week adds a lot of accountability. This will ultimately drive me to write better and become more disciplined.
I also wanted to learn email marketing, play around with an email service provider (ESP) and explore newsletter monetisation. Sponsorships and affiliate marketing are just some ways to earn from newsletters, but it’s also a great way to advertise my own freelance writing service on a regular basis.
Pinpointing a Target Audience
The online writing space is saturated. So instead of battling it out with thousands of other content creators, I thought I’d look at what I already have.
I have over 600 followers on the various platforms I write on. I analysed the list and saw a lot of content writers. Add to this the fact that I often get messages from other writers asking for advice and I soon realised this was a good target audience.
More specifically I want to target aspiring writers wanting to improve their writing skills and learn about freelancing.
Choosing Topics
This specific target audience description helps identify my content topics. Freelance writing is a broad genre, so I came up with a list of over 100 pain points my target audience may encounter. Each pain point has the potential for a newsletter edition. That’s already 2 years of content ideas for a weekly newsletter!
Action Plan
So I had a target audience and a list of pain point-derived topics. Now it was time to start building. Like I said, I started from scratch, so after some further thinking and researching I realised I needed these things:
- Brand name and logo
- Content platforms
- Lead magnet
- Social media campaign
Brand Name and Logo
I chose Writer’s Juice. This dates back to my college years when I would drink a few beers in the evening and write out my thoughts. Back in those days I was heavily inspired by the likes of Kerouac and Bukowski. I would drink my Writer’s Juice and spill my unfiltered thoughts out onto the page.
As for the logo (as you can probably guess), I drew up that masterpiece myself.
I’m not trained in branding or graphic design, but after far too many hours experimenting, I came across this useful guide to choosing colours. I went with blue and used Inkscape (free software) to create the graphics.
Content Platforms
I wasn’t going to collect all the signups and send from my personal email, and I don’t recommend you do that either. I needed an ESP.
I looked around for a while and went with Beehiiv. They are on a roll at the moment and have a great 2 week onboarding sequence plus plenty of useful tutorial videos on YouTube. You can use Beehiiv for free up to 2500 subscribers, so there’s plenty of space to get your newsletter up and running.
I also changed my Twitter handle to @WritersJuice and set up a Medium publication, as well as dedicated email and Notion accounts. Why Notion? This is where I chose to host my lead magnet.
Lead Magnet
It’s a classic tactic: I’ll give you something valuable for free, you provide me your contact details. I need signups, so I wrote up a free guide on Web3 Writing Platforms.
I thought about where to host such a guide. Would this be a PDF? A video tutorial? A digital course?
My Twitter buddy Web3 Savant suggested I try a Notion page, which turned out to be a great idea. Not only is it possible to update this interactive guide with new info, I can also monitor page views in the analytics section.
Social Media Campaign
I won’t be paying thousands of dollars to run ads for this newsletter. This is a passion project, so I’ll be leveraging my own social media to spread awareness. My focus will be on Twitter, LinkedIn and Medium.
As I wrote up a 3000 word interactive guide, with over 20 platform resources, I now have plenty of content that can be snipped and repurposed for social media posts.
Behind the Scenes
OK. Now the world knows I have a newsletter. But what else did I do and what did I learn?
I realised I still had to get these things set up before launch:
- Welcome letter
- Template
- Email CTAs
- Various web copy
The Welcome Letter
This is an automatic email that gets sent out to new subscribers, I’m sure you’ve received a fair few. It’s the start of a new relationship with each reader, so I took the opportunity here to:
- Thank them for signing up
- Introduce myself and explain what I do
- Tell them what I plan to do with the newsletter (what topics, what frequency, etc.)
Then I asked for 2 important steps:
- Reply to the email
- Move the mail to the primary inbox
I want to make sure the mails don’t end up in the spam folder. This is why you’ll often see newsletter welcome mails asking you to send a reply. It shows the email host that you think the sender is trustworthy.
Finally, I delivered on my promise and sent the reader a link to the lead magnet. I included the link as a hyperlink within the text, as well as in a dedicated button. This is because after testing the email on a few different email providers, I noticed that one of them didn’t display the button (looking at you Tutanota).
Templates
Templates save you time and help guide you through your processes. But a good newsletter template will also guide your reader through the content in a comfortable, familiar way. The more they read your content, the more they become accustomed to the template.
For my template I wanted to do have the following sections:
- Intro
- Specific guide (remember my list of 100 pain points?)
- Curation (short section with hyperlinks to other news stories)
- Something special…
- Close out with CTAs
Email CTA
Every email is an opportunity to get your reader to perform a specific task. In my case I had 3 actions in mind: something for the readers, something for prospective clients and something for new sponsors. So I created a brief 3 step CTA footer that I can easily attach to each email.
- Readers can join a free community to interact with one another. Remember, this is a specific target audience, so the community is predestined to grow with likeminded people.
- Prospective clients can find out where to work with me. As a newsletter writer, each additional email is further proof of my competence.
- Sponsors can get in touch to book a slot on the newsletter. Yes, it’s early days, but if you don’t ask, you don’t receive.
Web Copy
Throughout the process there were (and still are) countless small things that need to be created or adjusted. Here are a few that I tackled:
- Text for the subscribe button
- Text for the signup landing page
- Text for the content-gating pop ups
- Description for the Medium publication
- Updating my Twitter bio and adding a signup link
- Updating my LinkedIn bio and adding a signup link
My Findings
Whether through researching or executing, I learnt many things along the way. Did you know that:
- Many newsletters have become successful business via their sponsorship models. Rates can vary, but I hear that $25 per 1,000 subscribers is a fair rate for a sponsorship slot.
- Adding curation links in your newsletter is an effective tactic to get readers to click within your email. There are 3 key statistics: Subscribers, Open rate, Click rate. Sponsors want to know that your emails get clicks.
- There are several other things you can do to improve your newsletter such as creating more detailed signup sequences and by leveraging paid advertising. As I just bootstrapped this project from scratch, I haven’t explored these options yet.
Newsletter Launch Recap
This is the step-by-step process I took in setting up my newsletter. It’s not perfect and paid options will certainly be more effective, but it’s still a solid place to start from for absolute beginners.
Feel free to try it yourself:
- Figure out your reason why
- Pin down your target audience
- Come up with pain-point derived content topics
- Come up with a brand name
- Choose an Email Service Provider
- Acquire any additional platform handles, email accounts, publication URLs, etc.
- Work on your brand logos and graphics
- Create and host a lead magnet online
- Draft up a social media campaign
- Write your welcome letter
- Design a template for your regular newsletter editions
- Craft compelling CTAs for your newsletter
- Identify and fix any other web copy linked to the newsletter and brand
- Go for it!
What’s Next
Once I had the welcome mail and lead magnet in place, I figured I was ready to start collecting email addresses. After that, it would be just a matter of time before the first edition would be ready but at least I wouldn’t be writing into the void.
After a few posts on Twitter and LinkedIn I’ve gotten these results:
So here’s what’s next:
- Write the damn thing (first edition is drafted and scheduled)
- Capture more signups through content repurposing
- Begin targeting sponsors that match the target audience
- Collaborate with other newsletter editors for referrals, guest posts, affiliate links, etc.
Whatever happens, this has been a great learning experience so far and it’s building my discipline skills. If email marketing turns out to be my thing, and the newsletter gains traction, then I will already have a step-by-step process from which I can build a new newsletter in a different niche.
How about you? Have you ever written a newsletter? What would you add to this process or do differently?
I guess that’s it for now.
Talk to you soon,
Jason
P.S. You didn’t think I’d write all this and not ask you to sign up for my newsletter!? You can do that here. Sign up to get immediate access to the free Web3 Writing Platform guide, as well as weekly emails focused on writing skills, productivity hacks and freelance mindset.
