011 • Three takeaways from starting a newsletter

Thank you all…

Last week’s issue of Fundamentalised was its 10th, and if I’m honest, I didn’t know whether we would get there.

I started a newsletter on Substack in March that didn’t make it past 1 issue. Beehiiv was my second attempt, and it gained a lot more traction.

Although I’ve just started, as newsletters go, I’ve learned quite a bit about writing this form of content along with Medium articles and tweets (or should that be Xs?). I wanted to share some of this knowledge with you here…

I’ll start with storytelling…

The audience of this newsletter is the core of my fans, those who care somewhat about what I’m getting up to, so it’s only fitting that I tell a few stories about the events going on in my life.

The trick is to relate these stories to the audience’s experiences, so they can gain some value rather than just listening to my monologue every Friday evening.

An example of this came recently when I wrote an issue about the purchase of my new MacBook - I told the story of how my productivity decreased when moving to the new device, but there was an important message about the nature of getting work done underlying it.

I concluded by telling people to build meaningfully in public rather than tinkering with systems in the dark where nobody can see, providing advice and value alongside the story.

My newsletter issues are quite short too, so I’ve learned to condense their contents to something less than what I might publish on Medium, whilst trying to provide more value.

It’s not easy, and they take me longer to write, but it comes down to being direct…

Formatting, emphasis and sentence structure are the body language of the written word. They play almost as large a part in the overall communication of the piece as the word choice itself.

Formatting, emphasis and sentence structure are the body language of the written word.

This is especially important in shorter pieces such as the newsletter. You should use all the tools at your disposal to capture the attention of the reader and convey your message in the most impactful way.

It might not be comfortable, but it’s proven to work. I’m still working on using emphasis and short sentences to their best effect, but writing this publication and posting on Twitter is helping me master this skill.

I’m very new to the newsletter game, but all these first 10 issues have done is make me more committed to sticking at it for the long run. It’s great to own an audience who truly values what I have to say, so I thank you again for reading.