I’ve never published a newsletter before.
So many questions were running through my head. What’s the point? Is it easy to do? Should I just concentrate on what I’m doing? But in reality, this could all be boiled down to one question.
Will anyone read it?
But one thing I’m trying to do at the moment is to flip concerns or worries around, and look at them in a positive light. So, instead I looked at it as another opportunity for people to see my work. Let’s face it, you can never have too many ways to get your work out there. I decided that for the time being, I won’t be creating any additional content, it will simply be a way to compile and distribute my week’s work. This would streamline the process for now, but nothing is set in stone…
So, I quickly set about some research into the best way to build and distribute the newsletter as easily as possible.
Some of these services are very fancy, but in my experience, that also means that they are expensive too. I was looking for a cheap, or ideally free, service to start with. After a bit of searching, I noticed that Ali Abdaal was using a service called Revue, so I decided to sign and have a proper look around.
And here are my 5 reasons what I think it is a great option for beginners:
Simple Design
Revue uses a content block design that is simple but effective. It’s very easy to set your standard template with design and colours etc. You can then create different content blocks and drag them into the right place. All that is left for you to do is then populate these blocks with whatever you want to share, be it words, links, videos or pictures.
WordPress plugin
This website is a wordpress site, and as such is built around a template that utilises plugins. Think of a plugin like an app on your phone; each one performs a different task that you can control. Now there is a Revue plugin to make it so simple to create sign up forms for you site, and drop them wherever you see fit.
There are other tools that can do this, but a native sign up form makes this so so simple to create and display these forms on your site.
Social sharing
Being owned by Twitter, you would expect social sharing to be at the centre of all they do. And you would be correct. It is so simple to add your social networks and to automate the sharing of your newsletter. Just one less thing to worry about.
Subscriber management
Revue has an easy to use subscriber management system that makes it easy to see who was has subscribed, and who has unsubscribed. You can then ad people manually, or export any lists. Again, very simple but effective.
Twitter integration
Now this is potentially the most helpful tool in their arsenal.
When you’re working on your newsletter, you can literally bring up you twitter timeline on the side, and drag in your tweets (and any links etc) and use that to form the content. Now as I share all of my work (articles, videos and tweet threads) on twitter, it is literally so easy to pull this into my newsletter template.
All in all, it now takes me less than 15 minutes to build my newsletter, and get it ready for sharing. I literally cannot think of an easier way to compile a week’s worth of work and share it at once.
I would definitely recommend creating a newsletter to help get your creations out there, and Revue offers very little friction in helping you to achieve this.
Feel free to check out my newsletter, and as usual let me know what you think or reach out if you just want a chat.
