A newsletter is a great way to engage with your crowd and like-minded people searching for the same kind of knowledge. To stay updated on the latest topics that matter to us the most, we started curating and sharing the relevant link on our team hangout channel. But soon it became too crowded. So we decided to share this as an email newsletter.
We first started it as Engigogo digest that we ran for 2 years and then stopped. If you’re interested, you can read the whole story here. In January 2020, we again started the curated newsletter, but it is now not only a newsletter but more than that.
Initiator creator is a weekly hand-curated newsletter full of interesting articles, links, and resources divided into the developer, designer, marketer, entrepreneur, and must-read categories for easy digest. I read more than 50+ websites, 30+ newsletters, and many subreddits to curate the best and interesting content for the readers.
After handing two newsletters for more than 3 years collectively, now I’m in the position that I can share my experience and how you can handle it like ours.
The process:
Source handling
It all starts with finding the best sites for content. I use Panda to find the latest posts from popular websites, but most of the time, I save the interesting websites in the chrome bookmark manager. Here is the full list of the sites and newsletters that we follow.
Curation
For curation of interesting articles, I use Airtable web clipper. It is a great tool; using it, you can save interesting articles in a tabular database and then select which one you would like to share. But the only drawback with it is that it is only available for the Pro plan users.
Newsletter
I use convertkit for email delivery due to its high email deliverability and simple UI. It is used to be paid only, but now convertkit also offers a generous free plan.
Incoming Email
I use Google workspace for the email handling.
Landing Page and hosting
I created a simple landing page and hosted it on Cloudways. You can use the landing page builder provided by your ESP or use a simple static template from Themes For App.
This is the simple stack that I use to maintain our weekly newsletter. If you are wondering why I’m using an all-in-one solution like curated.co, revue, or something else, then you can read this article where I have written the reason in detail and also about the solution that we are working on.
If you send well-written content to your readers, I suggest you must use a proofreading tool, which can help your content be error-free and maintain quality.
