Newsletters are seen as the new gold with the rapid decline of organic reach in social media. Furthermore, sending out a regular newsletter is also a great way to develop your thinking and writing skills. Besides creating and publishing a newsletter, you also need to consider how you attract new people to your newsletter and promote your current editions; for this, you need some traffic drivers.
How it helps me
This Notion Template for my Newsletter helps me create a structure to make sure I can publish a weekly edition of my newsletter every week. It provides me with a place to capture my ideas, it gives me a checklist of what to do next, and it automatically generates drivers for me. The only thing I have to do is to write and publish.
How I work with it
First, the most essential thing for publishing a newsletter is never running out of ideas; the second most important is having a healthy content buffer ready to use. Both help you increase longevity and avoid burnout or stress from constantly writing.
So, I capture all my ideas for the newsletter and revisit them over time. Furthermore, I tend to write on multiple editions at the same time. This allows me to stop or switch when words stop flowing in one edition and I go to another, which feels better or easier to write. Even though I am a one-person shop for my newsletter, I leave an edition to sit for a while after I am done writing and reviewing it. It is surprising how much you want to rework when you go alone for a while and how much better it gets.
I always have a buffer of around 2-3 months of newsletters. I plan them upfront, but sometimes, current events change that scheduling. After the scheduling, there is, of course, the publishing. Thanks to Notion’s automation on the database level, I will have 6 drivers created as soon as an item is published.
Drivers
For me, on LinkedIn, drivers are posts that provide more attention to the newsletter. I always have six created, spaced out eight days each, providing me with content every day of the week. I write drivers more ad-hoc since they are smaller and derived from the main newsletter theme, making it a lot easier to write for me, mainly since I use some templates for these posts, which reduces the thinking about structure and messages and provides me with almost a fill-out exercise. For drivers, I use a similar multistep process as with newsletters; I write them, let them sit, and then publish them. Also, from a workflow, it is easier since I have to do less tool switching and can focus on a specific task at hand.
If you want to start publishing a newsletter, give this template a look.
