You’ve certainly heard of the newest online business model that’s minting 7-figure fortunes: email newsletters. Everywhere you look, there’s a new Forbes or Entrepreneur article detailing the story of a twentysomething newsletter founder who’s now unfathomably successful.
Articles like how the 1440 newsletter makes $15 million per year or how Shaan Puri started the Milk Road newsletter and sold it for $10 million… just 10 months later.
It feels like the early days of YouTube influencers or blogging before that (and a dozen others along the way). And like those, newsletters feel like they’re here to stay.
Of course, great content is the main driver of success and revenue for all of these channels.
How Newsletter Content Drives Success
Plenty of aspects go into a great newsletter, but none matter so much as good content.
You can be successful without A+ design (the 1440 newsletter looks like it was typed up in Word). You’ll even stumble into revenue as advertisers reach out to you for paid spots as your subscriber base grows.
But content is the thing that enables you to carve out a spot in almost any niche. It’s what gets your subscribers to open your emails and even forward them to other people. A newsletter without good content is like starting a fire without wood. You can spray igniter fluid and get a nice flare of subscribers, but it’ll die out fast.
With unique content, you can even stand out in an already crowded field. Take the NextDraft newsletter, which is just one man’s take on daily news stories. It seems impossible to grab a foothold in that space, considering it’s oversaturated with massive companies.
However, his mostly text emails show off his witty humor and wide-ranging intelligence as he comments on what’s happening in the world. He has hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
Great content doesn’t happen by accident, but you also don’t have to be a world-class copywriter to write a compelling newsletter. What you’ll need is executing a strategy that helps you stand out.
8 Steps to Build Your Newsletter Content Strategy
Let’s break down putting together a great newsletter into bite-sized pieces.
1. Find Your Niche
The first step in your strategy is to determine what space you want to be in. Your best bet will be to discover the intersection of a topic:
- You’re fascinated by - Can you write about this topic consistently for a long time without burning out?
- You have experience in - Can you write from a place of experience and expertise? If not, are you okay just focusing on curating other articles and commenting on them?
- With an audience - Are there Facebook groups of 50k+ on your topic?
- With monetization possibilities - Is there a newsletter business model that will allow you to earn significant income within your niche? You can make money with just about any topic you choose, but earnings per subscriber vary wildly by industry.
Consider what you do for a living or something that you find yourself researching frequently. Do you have a hobby that many people are interested in? Is there something that you’ve competed in previously? What do you do in your free time or spend money on?
2. Define Your Audience
Now that you’ve figured out your niche, it’s time to understand your potential readers so you can write in a way that lands. If you’ve chosen a topic you’re interested in, congratulations! You are the target market.
That’s a good start, but you need to go deeper. You can learn more about your audience by:
- Subscribing to newsletters in your niche.
- Joining and interacting with Facebook groups (or other online communities such as Reddit).
- Talking to your friends/family who are also interested in your topic.
Now, you’ll start to figure out everything you can about your audience, such as:
- Age
- Gender
- Education
- Economic status
- Family Status
- Values
- Probable assumptions
You can use that information to write in a way that connects. For example, if your audience is primarily women aged 35+, talking about kids is likely a win. However, if your audience is male CEOs in their 50s, don’t mention scenes from The Notebook.
A great example is NextDraft, where Dave Pell writes to a slightly older audience. He frequently references Bruce Springsteen and jokes about feeling out of touch with his kids.
Then there’s Newsette, which does a terrific job of catering to women—from their newsletter’s chosen colors, the way they talk, and the stories they curate. Here’s an example:
3. Discover your Unique Selling Proposition
Unique selling proposition, or USP, is a term businesses use to define how they’ll stand out in the market—basically, why a prospect should choose your business over another.
It’s the same with newsletters. You’re unlikely the first in your niche, so why is subscribing to you worth their time?
You can also think about it like this:
How do you plan to entertain your audience?
The good news is that “entertain” comes in plenty of different forms. A stand-up comic entertains with humor, a novelist entertains with stories, and a news anchor entertains by presenting information.
So, what’s your place in the market?
- Are you incredibly well-versed in the topic and can provide high-level analysis?
- Do you have expert-level skills and can teach people how to do what you do?
- Are you witty?
- Are you a top-level copywriter who could write an engaging story on any topic imaginable?
- Are you going to outwork others to find great curated content, present case studies, or test things out yourself?
One incredibly unique content creator is Tim Ferris. He runs a popular podcast and a companion newsletter with 1.5 million subscribers. Here’s how one article describes him:
He’s famous for many things, but one is to try insane things that few ever do. You could ask yourself how you could outwork, out-test, out-experiment others in your niche.
4. Determine Your Writing Style
Now that you’re beginning to understand how you’ll be unique (and therefore draw people to you), let’s figure out how that looks in an email.
The easiest way to stand out is to be yourself by talking in the first person and telling personal stories. The Money With Katie newsletter does this to perfection. Even though she talks about personal finance, she still starts with messages like this:
Her audience includes people interested in finance and drawn to her personality.
Realize that your newsletter will never appeal to everyone, so don’t worry about those that will be put off by you. That’s okay—strong personalities repel but also make people similar to you like you all that much more. Don’t temper your personality.
Of course, you can go a different route, largely devoid of your specific personality.
1440 presents the news in a sanitized, bipartisan voice, but it’s massively popular because their readers want information that doesn’t try to influence their opinion.
Ben Thompson’s Stratechery may seem incredibly boring to most people, but to highly educated tech and business professionals, it’s catnip.
In other words, it comes back to knowing your audience!
5. Decide on Content Blocks
Most newsletters are broken up into distinct sections, which can help you tremendously moving forward to create a template to follow for each message you send.
Let’s do a quick example of a personal finance newsletter. Your content blocks might look like this:
- Quick intro with a personal anecdote.
- Round-up of interesting stories.
- Editorial section where you present an idea.
- Reader success stories
- One quick financial strategy
And that’s it! Each newsletter issue feels less daunting, because you’ve given yourself a template to follow. You could make it even easier on yourself with a curation-only newsletter. In that case, you’ll have just one big block of content with each paragraph or sub-head commenting on a different story.
6. Design your layout
Successful design can mean different things, depending on your style and niche. Here are a few design flavors you can shoot for:
- Beautiful - Eye-catching custom images and plenty of color.
- Minimalist - Some of the most successful newsletters in the world are text.
- Practical - Clean design with simple images that keep the focus on the message.
- Fun - Memes, emojis, and energetic writing can give your newsletter a fun feel, even if it’s not exactly a work of art.
Many email marketing platforms offer templates to help get you started. From there, you’ll have to decide on a layout that works for you.
For example, you can always stick to text-based headlines if you're not a designer or pressed for time. Or, you could make section headers for each content block in Canva.
Just stick to the #1 rule: whatever your layout, ensure it’s clean and keeps your content easy to read.
7. Determine frequency
How often you send your newsletter is going to have a tremendous impact on the content of your newsletter.
Going back to the NextDraft example, he’s a one-man show putting out a daily newsletter. By necessity, everything’s black and white and extremely simple.
On the other hand, the Money With Katie newsletter is part of the Marketing Brew family. Her access to resources and once-a-week frequency allow her to put together very long, incredibly well-crafted emails.
In the early days of your newsletter, your available time and resources will be the greatest factor in deciding frequency.
8. Write, Write, Write
Lastly, it’s time to get writing! It is nearly impossible to fully flesh out your newsletter voice in your first issue.
For this reason, it’s important to start writing early and often, even if you don’t have subscribers yet! That gives you enough time to keep improving so that you’re putting out something great by the time you have a significant audience.
If you’re worried about your writing skills, there are options for you, such as hiring a ghostwriter. If you already have a content outline and your curated links, you can find a good writer for $100 or less per newsletter.
Another option is to leverage AI to boost your writing. It does a tremendous job of taking what you’ve already written and improving flow, grammar, typos, and more.
Integrating AI into your Newsletter Content
Letterhead’s built-in AI functionality can help take your content to the next level. Schedule a consultation with us today, and we’ll show you how easy it is to build out and send newsletters that drive engagement.
