The last two steps have hopefully shown you how much time can be saved compiling a newsletter using AI.
A huge barrier for most people is the time it’ll take to write a newsletter and create or find images for it. These barriers are now much lower.
We’re going to go into a LOT more detail about newsletter content creation over the next 2 days.
All I want right now is for the time/energy barrier to have been surmounted so that you can think freely about what sort of newsletter you can now create.
We have 3 choices to make.
There are two basic types of newsletter:
Content creation
Content curation
Content creation newsletters are based on you creating content from scratch. These tend to be newsletters that inform, educate or entertain based on your personal skills and take on life.
This newsletter that you are reading is creation focused: every day I’m sitting down to write this out from scratch. Actually, I’m standing at a standing desk but that’s not important!
Content curation newsletters on the other hand are about finding existing content that someone else had made and bringing it together in a single newsletter.
Curation could be:
a single link (ie For the Interested)
multiple links (ie. Javascript Weekly)
Whatever their particular format what they have in common is that they are based off existing content rather than on new content.
Our recommendation is to create a newsletter that is a bit of content creation and a bit of content curation.
Stacked Marketer is a great example of this. The core content is curation - it’s a set of interesting news stories, product launches and educational links. But the publisher also adds a few paragraphs of context about why these links are useful.
This is a strong combination of curation (the links) and creation (the editorial comment).
The rest of this guide will work whether you are creating or curating. But we’ll use a mixed hybrid of creation/curation moving forward.
For now your action is to simply to decide the format - creation or curation.
Next up - what’s the length of your content?
Going back to For the Interested you’ll see that this email is literally one line of context and one link.
This newsletter has over 40k subscribers and charges $350 to sponsor an issue. It’s published daily so that’s ~$127,750 per annum for one sentence a day.
So: short can work!
Alternatively there are newsletters like this one which are much more long form. It’s a creation based newsletter than matches my style of creation - in-depth guides.
In the middle there are newsletters like Stacked Marketer than have 5 or so items per issue. 5 links, with 5 pieces of context.
Your choice will depend on what is most valuable for your niche. And that’s based on your own expertise in this area as well as your research you did when subscribing to competitor newsletters.
What do you think will be most valuable? Indeed, as someone who is interested in this topic: what length of newsletter would you want to read?
The third choice is how often you’ll publish.
For the Interested, Stacked Marketer and this newsletter are daily.
Other newsletters are weekly. Some are even monthly.
I’d recommend minimum once a week. Daily if you have the time and inclination.
Why? More issues means more sponsor slots which will be important when we come to monetise the newsletter.
How often you publish will really depend on what priority this business is to you. If you are uncertain start with weekly. And then if it takes off look at moving to 3x/week or even daily.