Writing a newsletter
Dec. 11th, 2019 12:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
soniaReposted from comments left on radiantfracture's post.
I do a combination blog/newsletter article once a month as my main form of marketing for my practice. Someone told me I had to do a newsletter eleven (!) years ago, and this is what I came up with. It took a long time to build up enough to bear fruit, but these days a lot of people find me (or remember that I'm there) via the articles and website.
I had to ignore what I thought a newsletter looks like to come up with what worked for me. I think of it as an offering, a gift to the people on the list. Just about every month, I have to tell myself, "Maybe this month it will just be a paragraph," to be able to get started. And then it turns out to be the usual 2-3 pages.
The monthly discipline of it is a drag sometimes, but I always manage to find a topic, put something together, and send it out. I like that I find out what I have to say, and the commitment to myself to send *something* gets me past the inner censor that says it's not worth saying. I realized recently that yes, the writing is still hard each month - creating something new *is* hard.
No need to be consistent month to month either - my topics vary quite a bit. And sometimes the throwaway "no time this month, just put something simple out there" articles get the most appreciative comments. Trying to predict how people will react is a losing game.
I do get less anxious about pressing Send on the newsletters than I did the first year or two, and I've only ever gotten two pieces of hate mail in response, which is pretty darn good for today's Internet.
Nowadays I send them via phpList with mailgun as the back end, which lets me avoid giving my subscribers' email addresses to a third party, and also avoids the hassles of trying to send mass emails via a web host that isn't really set up for that.
radiantfracture's post.I do a combination blog/newsletter article once a month as my main form of marketing for my practice. Someone told me I had to do a newsletter eleven (!) years ago, and this is what I came up with. It took a long time to build up enough to bear fruit, but these days a lot of people find me (or remember that I'm there) via the articles and website.
I had to ignore what I thought a newsletter looks like to come up with what worked for me. I think of it as an offering, a gift to the people on the list. Just about every month, I have to tell myself, "Maybe this month it will just be a paragraph," to be able to get started. And then it turns out to be the usual 2-3 pages.
The monthly discipline of it is a drag sometimes, but I always manage to find a topic, put something together, and send it out. I like that I find out what I have to say, and the commitment to myself to send *something* gets me past the inner censor that says it's not worth saying. I realized recently that yes, the writing is still hard each month - creating something new *is* hard.
No need to be consistent month to month either - my topics vary quite a bit. And sometimes the throwaway "no time this month, just put something simple out there" articles get the most appreciative comments. Trying to predict how people will react is a losing game.
I do get less anxious about pressing Send on the newsletters than I did the first year or two, and I've only ever gotten two pieces of hate mail in response, which is pretty darn good for today's Internet.
Nowadays I send them via phpList with mailgun as the back end, which lets me avoid giving my subscribers' email addresses to a third party, and also avoids the hassles of trying to send mass emails via a web host that isn't really set up for that.
