Happy new year!
2013! A brand new year which means brand new plans and this year I have launched my first newsletter which is also known as Notes on social media, photography and doing work you love (my passions!).
It will be a monthly newsletter and I have already sent out January’s edition to my readers.
I wanted to share a few thing that I have learnt so far about trying something new and starting a newsletter.
- It took longer to put together than I thought. I spent a lot of time deciding what to include, what to leave out. How much information in a newsletter is too much? Can there be too little content?
- It made me wonder if I knew my friends/followers/audience as well as I think I do. Will the content be relevant to them?
- Marketing 101 – more people subscribed to the newsletter once I started saying what it was about instead of just saying ‘Get my new newsletter’. When I changed the wording to ‘Get my newsletter about social media, photography and doing the work you love’, then there was more interest. Of course!
- What’s the value of the newsletter to the people subscribing? Will it be of use? Will it give peeps some help or advice? Will it deliver something new and interesting?
- The learning curve. I’m using MailChimp for my newsletter and it is awesome. It’s free (for the first 2000 newsletter subscribers), and it does a LOT; from helping you make your newsletter look well designed to telling you who and how many people have subscribed to providing tons of statistics, and so much more. I had already gone through the learning curve when putting The Guardian’s n0tice newsletter together, but it’s not too steep a curve and it’s definitely worth spending time on.
I’m working on the February edition now which will be love themed of course! Now I have got January’s newsletter under my belt I am finding that this next edition will be a bit quicker to put together.
Thank you to everyone who have signed up for it so far. And for your feedback!
Richard says: I’ve taken a look at your newsletter. It’s AWESOME! And very timely re Community stuff. Will be re-reading.
Francis says: Thanks for timely newsletter. You have inspired @drsarahmoz and I to plan our year.
Chris (via email) says: I found it interesting and you have reminded me to get going and plot my 2013 targets.
