How To Start a Newsletter The Right Way [1/3]
TL;DR
There is no shortcut. Running a newsletter, build a platform for it, dealing with content, assets, marketing, technology is a huge undertaking. If you plan to publish your own newsletter, the following will help you to decide, what is important, and what is not.
The Basics
You want to build a newsletter? she asked and looked at us as if we were a bit dumb. What do you want to build? Just create an account at one of the newsletter providers, write an email and done!
Our thought process stopped for a moment, because Bastian as well as I looked deep into our innermost self. Silence. Did we make a mistake? Did we overthink? Did we overplan? Was everything that we put into our few-weeks backlog already doomed due to massive overengineering on our side?
The silence abruptly ended, and we both independently and synchronously said: “Naaaaaa…”, shook our heads, each with a knowing smile in the face but still a bit irritated. We had to build that thing. And we knew why. We knew, what our MVP feature set needed to be for the first few weeks and month, and we also knew, that even the best newsletter providers out there would not be able to fulfill those needs. Luckily we both are developers, so we did not have to rely on another party to make that software dream come true. But what should follow during the next 12 weeks until we launched, was a learning process that taught us several lessons.
So should you plan to publish a newsletter and eventually build an automation platform around it, then think twice. And then think again. What lies in front of you — even the thinnest of the most minimal MVP you can imagine — is a huge mountain of work. And when you are done and your newsletter engine purrs like a contented kitten on the warm stove, when you finally think “It’s done” … then the real work just starts. And I can tell you, even just a weekly newsletter with a little bit of content will set your personal time account back by at least 1 1/2 to 2 days. Fulltime. At least.
On 17th of June we started https://8bitnews.io/ — a newsletter around retrocomputing, DIY projects, early microcomputers of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s that Bastian and myself grew up with. It’s a topic we both love. We evaluated the size of the community and we realized, even though it is a huge niche, there was no well written, high quality newsletter. So we took — and still take — the risk, ditched very well paid client work, spent time and money and here we are. In the middle of it. And the following is an honest and open summary of the dos and don’ts, the must-haves and the things you might want to avoid.
Why?
The most important question you should ask yourself, is “Why?”. Why do you want to build another newsletter. Over the last 25 years email has become a burden, SPAM is the pest. People seriously hate it. So the chance to successfully plant an email in your prospects inbox dramatically decreased especially in the last decade. Yes, there are the Morningbrew’s and TLDR’s of the world, but do you actually believe, you can compete with them? Funded, equipped with an army of writers, content producers and graphic designers, marketing experts, programmers and seasoned advisors with many years of experience in digital business — these companies waded through a swamp of challenges and created one thing: a working business. And a business is only a business, if it makes a profit.
Can you compete? Can you break even before you run out of money? If your answer is yes, fine. Go ahead, feel encouraged — would love to see your business plan.
But there are other reasons, why you would want to create a newsletter. You might already have an audience, followers on any of the social platforms, a huge customer base of an existing and sustainable business. That is a different scenario, because a newsletter can become the super fuel for your rocket ship to planet “Success”. One of the reasons, why a proportionally large group of users actively subscribes to newsletters and reads them, is: offers. So if you already run such a business, a newsletter can and should be one of several channels in your marketing strategy, but it can quickly become the most important one, because it comes with enormous conversion rates. If done right.
And there might be other good reasons for a newsletter too. You might just be an outstanding author with a magic finger of ink and pen and a sheer overflowing pool of ideas for valuable articles worth reading. And you want to share your genius with others. That is fine. Do it. But in all the mentioned cases, there is just one thing, that is important. It is the essence of every successful newsletter:
You need to deliver high quality content which — the one way or the other — solves a problem for your readership. You need to create actual, real VALUE.
And what is important here, is, that you understand, what that value might be. For the thrifty among us, it may be the latest coupon, a sales or a special offer. For others it might be the hottest news of the day, or it might just be your opinion, expertship and advise crystalized into an email on a regular basis.
But unless you can deliver exactly that — offers, sales & coupons or expertise, real value or advise — chances are, you will fail.
A good monkey doesn’t let go of one branch until he already has the next one firmly in hand. Just be warned, a newsletter might not be the “next branch” here. Evaluate the size of your market. Get a clear idea of what the value you want to deliver really is. Test, whether your prospects actually realize that value. And test whether your target market is willing to take the burden of another subscription, because in reality, very few do. Even those who energetically promise an immediate sign up after your go-live will rarely sign up. It is a reality, deal with it.
Basic Requirements
There are a number of basic requirements and preconditions you need to be aware of. And even though our newsletter at https://8bitnews.io consists only of very few pages and looks like something that could be built by some engineers over a weekend, do not fool yourself. The following list should be your guide to an MVP — just a minimal valuable product of a newsletter.
Sure, there are cases, when you can get away with a Mailchimp account and a weekly plaintext email which takes you an hour to write. Unless you are that unicorn of a content creator with a followship in the hundredthousands already, you might better want to implement and realize the following list of absolute basics.
Market Analysis
Do a proper market estimation based on data. Nothing is worse than someones “opinion” about a market size. Do not fall into that trap and do not rely on opinions of people. Gather data, evaluate all available sources, speak to potential prospects, use available tools to create a survey and try to spread it beyond your personal network. In the end, you probably will have to make money with your newsletter. And you want to end up with a market size, that allows you to become sustainable. A newsletter — compared to other sales channels — can have conversion rates between 5% und 25%. In some cases even higher. Consider the worst, make a proper business plan, summarize your monthly cost and work from bottom to top to calculate the minimum size your target market has to have, so you can operate profitable. Keep in mind, that even in the best case scenario only a small fraction of your market will become your subscribers. And there is a long way to actually reach that number of subscriptions. So if you operate in a niche and if you have to make a profit, think very, very carefully and do your homework before you jump into the following adventure.
If you do not have to make a living from your newsletter, just ignore it. Go ahead. The universe seems to love you.
Core Value
Customers and prospects are typically huge bags of emotions and the majority of decisions to buy a certain product, book or service are emotional reactions to reduce a specific pain. The rational explanation mostly follows afterwards. So the core value, that you deliver, needs to solve a problem of your potential customer. Otherwise she will not sign up to your newsletter. It is absolutely fundamental, that you understand, what your core value is. You need to be able to describe it in very few words. It might be helpful to work on your elevator pitch. Summarize the customers problem, your value proposition, and your USP / differentiating factor in as few words as possible.
If that does not work for you, put yourself into the shoes of your prospects. Work with personas. Create fully fledged profiles of people in your target audience, that might really exist. Imagine the situations, in which these people have a specific problem, and how you can cure it.
If you are not able to summarize your core value, your cure for the customers pain, then most likely you are setup for failure.
Ability to Write
A newsletter means writing. What a realization, right? A process that not only costs time. It needs some experience. Test yourself. Pick a topic, write and test your skills with people who are not necessarily subject to personal confirmation bias towards your person. If it works, good. If it does not, try again and again until it works.
Willingness to expose Yourself
That is a big one. The willingness to expose yourself. In the very moment you start writing in the public, you are exposed. Everyone can potentially read your outpouring of more or less interesting thoughts. There will be people who like your content. There will be people who hate your content. And there will be plenty of people who judge you, despite never having produced and released something of value on their own. These people might try to make your life miserable. They will downvote, comment, post ridiculous smileys below your Facebook posts and just enjoy their hatred. You need to be able to cope with that and stay sane at the same time. I personally like to see it from the perspective of Morgan Freeman who once said:
Some of the best advice I’ve ever been given: Don’t take criticism from someone, you would never go to for advice.
Marketing Plan
If you want to create your newsletter just for fun, then ignore this one: a marketing plan. If you hop onto an airplane, you can be sure, the pilots always have a flight plan. If you see a construction site, everything gets built according to a plan. If you go for a recreational dive — which could end deadly — you follow a dive plan. When the stakes are high, every professional follows a plan. So should you. Marketing is much, much, much more than you might currently imagine. It is definitely not about a few Google ads, a bit of a Facebook campaign or some sponsored Twitter messages. If you want to make a living from a newsletter, your content and your marketing plan are the fundamental underpinnings of your financial success.
Over the course of the last 14 years I developed 5 digital products on my own. All were — of course — a stroke of genius. All of them failed as a product. The main reason was, that I developed these products out of a personal need and fell victim to the narrative: “I need it, so there must be other people like me seeing value in it”. I did not evaluate the market beforehand. Worse, I did not do any real marketing at all, because I did not understand, that marketing is more than just a word with 9 letters and a job description. It is what makes your business an operational success. The one recommendation I always give: Start with the bestselling book 1 Page Marketing Plan from the author Alan Dib and move from there. This book will be the best 20 bucks you spent in a long time. If you do not want to get into marketing. Good luck!
Social Reach
More and more people seem to turn away from social media. At least they say. Matter of fact is, that social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok … you name them have a gigantic reach. And you also need to understand that, even though you are posting the most awesome content for several month now in your newsletter and archive, organic growth is a joke.
Your potential subscribers do not search for and find you, because they do not know in the first place, that you exist! A proper social strategy is a small part of your marketing plan, and since you decided to get into the newsletter business, it is a must-have for you. I personally did not tweet, did not post on Facebook or other platforms. I was what once was coined as the term dark matter programmer but I had to learn, that only these platforms will put your content in front of your prospects. So you have to post. Regularly. Ideally automated. Create a post for every newsletter you send out and create separate posts for every valuable article in your newsletter. That means, even if you only send out your newsletter once per month, bi-weekly or weekly, there is plenty of reason to post in between, to keep your audience interested and informed.
Persistence
Psychology says that we start to love the things that we have in front of us over and over again. That is of course not the same old ad, that you try to put in front of your audience for the hundredth time. But you need to understand, that in 2021 people have become extremely cautious with whom they listen to and whom they trust. You need to earn that trust first, and that is hard. But the best way to become a trusted source of news for your subscribers, is to deliver a high quality product and real value REGULARLY. Nothing is worse than a “bi-weekly” newsletter, that gets send only occasionally, because the sender just found some time again between his first and second job. So make sure, you actually can deliver quality content with the frequency you promised. If you can not, be open about it. Communicate the change and publish less often. Your subscribers will understand that — at least most of them and prefer a lower delivery frequency over a newsletter that gets sent out according to the concept of the holes in a Swiss cheese.
Money
I hope that is a no-brainer. Even if you do not build your own publishing platform like we did, you will have recurring cost. Your newsletter provider, your frontend provider, your backend provider, potential (non-Google) statistics services (we will come to that), the ads part of your marketing strategy (we will come to that too), domain name registration, CDN… you get my point. And if you plan a fully fledged development of your own platform, calculate two competent software developers for a timeframe of at least 8 weeks for an initial MVP. You need logos, designs, color schemes, potentially more of that like banners, Youtube intro videos and so on. You do the math.
It.Costs.Money.
Platform & Automation
If all of these basic requirements are fine for you, and you are already impatiently waiting on your chair slipping back and forth gnawing at the fingernails, then I won’t keep you in suspense any longer and come to the technical details of what you need for your MVP. Remember, just your MVP.
In part 2 of this 3-part series we will talk about what you need in terms of technology but also from an organizational perspective.
