3 lessons I’ve learned from newslettering

Note: I define newslettering as not only creating one, but also studying the genre via subscribing to newsletters and interviewing people who regularly hit “send.”

1) The best way to figure out if your plan is going to work is to try it.

I’ve talked to many people who are crippled by anxiety. They want 100% assurance of success before launching. It doesn’t work that way. You come up with an idea and you test it. Then you iterate and you test that. And the best chance you have at success is launching with an intention to help others, not yourself.

2) Consistently reporting on a topic is both a goal and a reward.

Subject matter expertise isn’t something anyone is born with. It takes immersion. Challenging yourself to stay on the pulse of a topic your readers care about makes you their guide. Assessing the value of curated content to their lives (“should this be included or does it fail to meet a quality standard I’m creating on the fly?”) helps you begin to recognize quality, form your own ideas, and become a part of the conversation.

Committing to serving readers is both a personal learning journey and a path to thought leadership.

3) Email newsletters are relationship growers.

Letters have historically been an intimate way of staying connected. From my earliest issues I noticed that the more vulnerable I was—and the more focused on specific audience members I’d personally spoken to (as if writing just to them)—the more my message resonated with all subscribers. Mary Ellen Slayter explained it well in an interview when she said that newsletters take 1:1 and make it 1:many, but that only works if you still write as if it’s 1:1.

And it takes time. Issue after issue of sending little pieces of yourself to all those 1s.

Last week I shared a particularly tense story and encouraged you all to persevere in your newslettering.

This week’s intro is not quite as thrilling, but, I can attest, the more you put into your relationships with subscribers, the more fulfilled you will be by the process.

Ashley Guttuso