Creating consistent, high-quality newsletter content can be time-consuming and challenging, especially if you’re a solopreneur wearing all the hats at this stage of your business. I’ll assume you’re reading this because you want to be more consistent with emailing your list (and building it, too!) but you’re struggling to do it regularly.
In this article I’ll go over some strategies for streamlining your newsletter content creation process, focusing on some of the reasons why you may be getting stuck. These tips will help you set up a simple system for emailing your list regularly and lay the foundation for the next stage of email marketing.
Once you’re able to email your list consistently, you’ll be able to optimize your numbers (opens, click thru rates, and sales) and eventually: outsource the email stuff altogether!
The Importance of Streamlining Your Newsletter Content Creation Process
Streamlining saves you time and energy and allows you to focus on other (more) important aspects of your business. According to Hubspot’s State of Email Marketing in 2020, email is still one of the most important and effective ways for your business to connect with customers and build lasting relationships with them, and email marketing has the highest return on investment for small businesses. (Campaign Monitor, 2019)
Creating a system means that you’ll be emailing your list more consistently, which builds the relationship and trust factor with your subscribers. This will help you establish yourself as a trustworthy authority in your industry, and keep your readers warm so that when you’re ready to launch something special, they’ll be primed to buy it.
It’s important to find your own process for streamlining your newsletter content creation to ensure it’s actually sustainable for you.
You’re a solopreneur with lots of things on your plate, so while the strategies I outline below can be helpful as a starting point, it’s more important to focus on your own personal preferences and create a workflow that works for YOU. This will increase the likelihood of you sticking to the process over time.
Let’s get started!
Goal-Setting and Planning for Streamlined Newsletter Content Creation
If you need to email your list more consistently (or more often, if you’re rarely emailing at all), start with a goal.
What would you consider “consistent?” How often is “often,” exactly?
Sure, industry standards recommend emailing at least once a week, after your initial welcome sequence has finished. This keeps you top of mind with your ideal customer and sets you up as an authority in their inbox.
But it’s important to be realistic — do you really have enough content to send them an email every week? What if we changed it to every other week? Or every three weeks, or even monthly?
In addition your frequency goal, set a goal on what you want to include in your newsletter. Here are some ideas:
Newsletter Content Ideas for Solopreneurs
- A short, personal message from you as the founder
- Upcoming important dates or holidays
- Your latest blog post or podcast episode
- General encouragement to lift your readers’ spirits
- Resources you recommend, that are relevant to your industry
- Your thoughts on major news and events that impact your ideal client
- A promotional blurb for your services
- Good things that you witnessed or experienced
- Artwork that you saw online or in real life that affected you
- A reminder of the products you have for sale
- A funny social media post (and it doesn’t have to be yours!)
- Insightful posts on social media that made you think differently about the impact you want to have
- An exclusive behind-the-scenes update
- Your favorite affiliate links
Action Step 1: Set a goal for how frequently you’ll you want to send your email blasts and exactly what kind of content needs to be included in each newsletter.
Addressing Bottlenecks in Your Newsletter Content Creation Process
You’re reading this because you’re struggling with batching your email content regularly (either that or you’re just deeply enamored with Rochelle’s ideas and you’re a big fan — either way, welcome!), and that probably means you’re having issues with bottlenecks in your process.
What’s a bottleneck?
It’s the point in your process between “I need to email my list” and “The email has been sent” where you’re getting stuck.
If we pretend you’re one of those cool people who emails their list regularly and doesn’t struggle with this stuff at all, the process looks like this:
- Relevant content is gathered/created,
- Content is entered into your email service provider (whatever you use to send your newsletter)
- Newsletter has been sent or scheduled.
Where is your bottleneck happening?
- Bottleneck 1: You don’t have any content to send to your list
- Using the idea list up near the top of this article, you should be able to compile a decent amount of content that you can send to your email subscribers.
- Keep all the ideas and resources you want to share with your audience consolidated in one place that can be easily accessed whether you’re using your phone, tablet, or laptop. If you’re more of an analog person and you’re great at always keeping a notebook with you (the small moleskin notebooks are great for this!), you can keep all your ideas in there, too. Choose one storage place and stick to it, so it’s easily accessible later on (no more sticky notes, please!)
- Bottleneck 2: You don’t have anyone to send your emails to
- If you don’t have any email subscribers, it’s time to get some! It can be daunting starting out with a list of zero readers, but everyone starts somewhere. While your friends and family may not be your most ideal clients (and may very well NEVER buy from you), it can be helpful to simply have their support when you’re first starting out.
- Create a “lead magnet” or “freebie” to entice your social media followers to join your list. This could be a quick PDF cheat sheet (created easily in Canva), a discount code if you’re a product-based business, or simply an invitation to engage with you 1-on-1 on a non-social media platform.
- Invite your friends and family to join your email list and help keep you accountable to writing your newsletter regularly. Note: Don’t add them manually. (That’s against the law in some places). Send them the subscription form so they can opt in themselves.
- Invite your fellow founders and entrepreneur friends to subscribe. Be clear about what the benefits are and what kind of things you plan to send out. (This is a great way to add in some accountability for the goals you set in Step 1!)
- Bottleneck 3: You’ve got the content and the list of emails but you just never get around to it.
- If you’re sitting on valuable content that needs to be sent out to your email subscribers AND you already have a list of subscribers on your email list, then the best way to tackle this bottleneck is to enlist the help of a virtual assistant. You can find yourself a general, administrative virtual assistant and assign them the task of compiling your email content into your email service provider and scheduling it to be sent for you. See the next section for an example of how this could work.
- If you’re not interested in hiring someone to help keep you accountable, form an accountability club with your biz besties. You can text each other after you’ve sent or scheduled your email newsletters and keep each other accountable.
- If it’s a matter of feeling burnt out of doing the same email dance every other week, I strongly recommend centering your email newsletter content creation with a batching process. More on that below, but it basically means writing a bunch of them at a time instead of “thinking of something to send” every month or week. We often consider this process for social media content creation but it slips our minds when it comes to email content.
Action Step 2: Decide which bottleneck has been holding you back from sending your email newsletters more consistently, and take action on the suggestions listed.
Building Habits for Consistent Newsletter Content Creation
Sending consistent emails to your subscribers may seem simple in theory, but for many solopreneurs, it can be a challenge to make it a regular habit. If this is where you tend to get stuck, try one of the following:
- Create an accountability system with a buddy / biz bestie. You can body double (meaning you both sit down and write your newsletters together, regularly, just like you would if you were doing a workout together), or simply promise to text each other on a set date to ask if the other person has written and scheduled a newsletter to be sent.
- Try habit stacking. If there’s something you already do with the same frequency as how often you’d like to send an email to your list, find a way to combine the two. For example, maybe you water certain plants every two weeks. You can put a note on your watering can that you need to write and schedule your next batch of emails before you can water your plants. Maybe even cover the pour spout with it, implying that you’re not allowed to water your plants until the email is sent!
- Save all your ideas and resources somewhere that can be accessed on the internet from anywhere, like Evernote, Google Keep, or a similar app. That means no more sticky notes all over your desk. I like to use getpocket.com to save the articles and social media posts that I want to share with my readers. Knowing that you have your own private goldmine of helpful resources and thoughtful messages waiting for you may inspire you to sit down and focus on sending your newsletter more regularly.
- Pay a virtual assistant to check in on you and ask you every week for the content for your newsletter. Whether you write it or not, you’re paying another human to check in on you and hold you accountable. And if you ask me, it’s a lot better use of your money to have a VA copy, paste, upload, and schedule your emails than to simply “check in,” so if you’re motivated by spending your money efficiently, this could be the the nudge that gets you on track!
Action Step 3: Build a habit based on the above suggestions, or create your own. For a bit of added accountability, share it in the comment section, below!
A Sample Workflow for Streamlining Your Newsletter Content Creation
Everyone’s work style is different, so I hope that you found the information above valuable as you sit down to streamline your newsletter content creation process.
Some people work better from an example, so read through following workflow and try it out. You can think of this the same way you would approach a fitness workout you found on the internet: try it out, keep the parts that work best for you, and make adjustments as needed.
Keep in mind: This is for your regularly scheduled email newsletter, and intended to continue the relationship building process with them. It’s not a hard core launch sequence or a special promotion of a collaboration or discount package. Those would go into a launch sequence, which is different.
Example of a Streamlined Newsletter Content Creation Process for Solopreneurs
Step 1: Set a goal to stick to. Decide on and document the frequency that you want to email your readers, minimum. For many people, bi-weekly (every other week) works well as a starting point
Approach this goal by looking at the entire 12-week quarter so that you don’t get buried in the details too much.
Example: In June, July, and August, I want to send 6 standard email newsletters.
Step 2: Decide what kind of content should be regularly included in your regular email newsletters. Set some length parameters so that you know what to expect. This will also make it easy to outsource to a writer, later on.
Example: In each of the 6 newsletters, I’ll include a personal note from me as the founder, a short behind-the-scenes update in 3 bullets or less, 3 things I found interesting recently, 1 promotion (whether it’s my own product or someone else’s that I’m happily sharing with my audience), and the most recent episode of my podcast.
Step 3: Keep all content that could possibly be included in your email blasts consolidated in one place.
Example: My friend is publishing a book, so I’ll add her landing page to my Pocket account with the tag “Newsletter mention.” I also add that article on Medium that I liked, and that podcast about email subject headlines. All the URLs get saved into Pocket with the “Newsletter mention” tag. I’ll write a couple of quick notes about what I want to include as a behind the scenes update in Evernote, and save that note’s URL in Pocket, too.
Step 4: Batch out your emails. Gather your links, open a tab for your notes and a tab for wherever you “collected” all your content ideas. In a word document, spend dedicated time flushing out your ideas, writing some quick, snappy sentences about why you’re sharing the resources you included. Keep them in the word document. Don’t put them in your email service provider until ALL of them are ready to go.
Example: I have a Google Doc where I’ve written 6 uplifting “from the founder” statements, 18 bullets of “updates” (projected into the future, so yes, I’m pretending a little but I can update as necessary if something super dramatic happens and derails everything), and 12 things that are interesting (I left room to add 1 thing to each email as their scheduled send date approaches). I alternated my promotions between my coaching service, my workbook, and my Facebook group, and those promo blurbs are ready to copy-and-paste. And I added a blurb for whichever episode of my podcast will be the most recent according to send date.
Step 5: Once all of the above is done, copy and paste the content into your email service provider. Go ahead and schedule the next 2-3 emails to send, and leave the rest as drafts. Many email service providers let you add a “note” to the email blast that won’t be seen by your readers. Use that section to note anything that needs to be updated before the email is sent. Ideally, this step of copying, pasting, and scheduling your emails will tasked out to a virtual assistant in the future!
Example: My 6 emails are now all uploaded into Active Campaign. I already pre-scheduled the first two, so I don’t even need to think about email stuff for at least the next month. If something comes up, it’s easy to sign in and add additional content to each email newsletter, but I don’t need to worry about that. I know that I’ll be hosting a webinar around the time the 5th newsletter, but I don’t have the links yet. So I made a note in ActiveCampaign that that one shouldn’t be sent until it’s updated with the correct URLs.
So there you have it!
Email content doesn’t have to be a slogging chore to catch up on. By implementing the strategies I’ve outlined, you can streamline your newsletter content creation process and send consistent, high-quality emails to your subscribers.
Building a solid relationship with your readers is important for your business, so be sure to make it a priority. Set realistic goals and plan your content in advance, remembering to address bottlenecks in your process.
Follow the example workflow and make adjustments to personalize it for your creative process and the content you want to share.
Have any questions or feedback? Still feeling stuck on a particular step? Drop a comment below and I’ll be happy to troubleshoot with you.