A Complete Beginner Guide To Writing Newsletters
The full process
This guide will not go into the nuances and technical details of writing.
Most of that comes with practice anyway, and clogging your mind up with a bunch of tactics will just overwhelm you.
Before we start, there are a few things I recommend reading before or after this.
The content map - so you have topics and ideas to write about
Short form drills - so you can practice concise impactful writing (that transfers over to newsletters very well)
How to write about your deep ideas in a way that still grabs attention - because most people have great writing, but their headlines suck so nobody reads it
Those alone will teach you almost everything you need to know to get started writing. I’ll link a few more at the end of this that will also help.
A newsletter, or any form of long-form content (YouTube scripts, solo podcasts, book chapter, etc), is composed of one main idea as the topic with multiple sub-ideas as key supporting points in the form of a narrative.
This is how I think of writing newsletters.
I choose one idea as the main topic.
I choose 3+ ideas as the key points.
Those ideas tend to follow a Problem → Insight → Solution framework as the overall structure of the newsletter (I choose ideas that would fit for each of those).
Then, I discover or research more ideas that I can plug into each section. This is why I go on so many walks. I outline my weekly newsletter at the start of the week, then I listen to audiobooks, lectures, and other things that could spark novel ideas that I can weave into my writing. When I have the idea, I write it down in my notes and add it to my outline/newsletter when I sit down to write in the morning.
So, a newsletter is a hierarchy of ideas:
1 Topic Idea (title or headline)
3+ Key Point Ideas (section headlines)
3-5 Filler Ideas Per Key Point (body text)
String them together as a story (problem → solution) and you have a great newsletter, article, podcast script, YouTube script, book chapter, etc.
That's all that content is. Playing legos with ideas and weaving them together into something compelling.
When writing a newsletter, the reason you get stuck staring at a blank page is because you don't have an idea that fits into the puzzle you are putting together.
At that point, staring at the screen longer isn't going to help you. Reading a book, reading an article, listening to a podcast, conversing with AI, contemplating on a walk, or any other method you can experiment with to surface ideas.
If that doesn’t work, sometimes you need silence, low stress, and a clear mind. Relax. Think of idea generation as expanding and contracting your mind like you’re training in the gym. Consumption and work contract your mind, rest and relaxation expand it.
If you're worried about copying an idea, you may not understand this process yet. You aren't copying the idea, you are pulling multiple potent ideas together into an original narrative, creating your own ideas from it.
Let's make this more practical.