Newsletter Making & You
How to create a simple, no-code newsletter for free
Anyone can start a newsletter.
All you need is the interest to share your ideas and thoughts with a specific group of people, and the hankering to do it on (at least) a semi-regular basis.
If you want to create your own, it’s easier than you think. But there are a few things you’ll have to figure out.
Things like:
#1 What you’re going to say and when
A newsletter can be a link roundup, a recommendation list, or even a whole blog post. It can be anything.
But like a blog, your newsletter needs to have a value proposition.
In plain words, when people come to your landing page, you have to convince them to sign up by explaining how your newsletter will be useful for them.
- Are you going to be sharing this week’s news in the field of robotics?
- Is it going to be a series of articles about design?
- Will it have a list of reading suggestions for the week?
- Are you promoting your own blog or product?
Once you’re clear about what your newsletter’s going to talk about, decide on a schedule and stick to it. You can send an email every fortnight, every week or even everyday.
Finally, sum it up in a tagline. (Don’t worry about a name yet. Unless you already have something in mind, use a placeholder.)
The tagline can be a one-liner like Muck Rack’s:
Or it can be much longer, à la Farnam Street:
It all depends on your style. The important thing is to be concise and clear.
#2 How to set up a simple newsletter
There are only two basic parts in any email marketing system: the editor & the landing page. All email marketing platforms will give you both a place to edit and send your emails, and a public page where people can subscribe.
The good news is, you don’t need to know design or coding to start a newsletter.
The editor comes bundled with a dashboard that gives you access to settings, subscriber details and analytics.
A basic landing page will have a title, a description, a text box with a subscribe button, and a link to the letter archive.
The easiest free email marketing platforms to use for a small project like this one are MailChimp and Tinyletter. I use the latter. It’s an extremely simple tool (read: you can’t personalize it too much, but that’s okay).
Here are a couple of landing pages created with TinyLetter:
You can customize colours, type and the background.
I haven’t run into any major problems with TinyLetter so far, except one glitch. Analytics (which is stripped down to bare essentials) went haywire one week and failed to register opens, but it was up and running again in a snap.
#3 Things you’ll learn after you begin
If you’ve gotten past point #2, you’ve already come 90% of the way. Congratulations! The last 10% comes from experience.
Some things I wish I’d known when I started my own newsletter:
Be flexible about what you share. Sometimes, clarity only comes with time.
Noodle Soup was originally called The Content Marketing Pick. I was more than ten weeks in when I realised that the scope of my curation was wider than just content marketing (thanks to some timely advice from Akash Sharma).
Tiny Letter anticipated this perfectly because it put my username in my landing page URL, and not the name of the newsletter. So I could just change it immediately and I didn’t have to worry about anything else.
Like I said, don’t worry about the name.
Plan every email a few days in advance
I missed sending out an email last Thursday because I was out of town, and I didn’t plan ahead. I felt terrible.
I still struggle with this one.
Basic design is not hard, so don’t hesitate to experiment
This means picking out images for your post, resizing it and maybe even slapping some text on it. So far, I’ve only used three tools for this and they work well enough:
- Pablo by Buffer (captioned images)
- Canva (templates and layouts, if needed)
- Unsplash or Pexels (free stock photos that don’t suck)
Make sure you add alternate text to any images you use, because a lot of email clients won’t display them by default.
And that’s it. All you need to do now is say something.
If you’re looking for some more clarity or inspiration before you get started, check out why I started my own newsletter.
I hope you found this useful! Thanks for reading.
