Week 12: What To Write About

I had a consultation earlier this week and my client is going to start a monthly newsletter. He has an email list already, but he hasn’t been doing anything with it.

I suggested that before he announces his new newsletter to the world, we put together a plan of themes or content ideas for the first couple of months.

I cannot tell you how often I’ve seen people start a blog or a newsletter and then give up after sharing two or three posts or emails because they don’t have a plan or they’ve run out of content ideas.

I’m not saying you need a 12-month strategy and a list of fifty-plus content ideas, but you do need to put some thought into your content.

You need to be realistic about how much content you can produce. And you need to be sure you can keep coming up with ideas that keep readers engaged.

Write for your audience

The best way to keep readers engaged is to write stuff they are interested in.

With that in mind, I want to know what you want from me.

And, because I’ve just signed up for the free trial of Beehiiv’s Scale Plan, I now have a fancy poll feature to help me find out. Let’s see if it’s any good…

You won’t always know which posts will be popular

It is possible (to an extent) to figure out which topics will be popular with your audience. You can find out what people are searching on Google, you can find out what questions people are asking on forums and in social media groups, and you can track your own content to see which topics get the highest engagement. You can even do what I’ve just done and ask your audience what they want more of.

And you don’t have to constantly come up with new ideas. You can repackage or repurpose content that you’ve used elsewhere. I’m a huge fan of reusing and recycling content - I’ve mentioned it in previous updates.

Before I launched The Freelance Fairytale Newsletter (TFF) on Ghost, I was running a newsletter of the same name on LinkedIn. Sometimes when I’m having a busy week, I recycle content from the original newsletter and use it for my new one.

This week was one of those weeks and, on Wednesday, I tweaked some content I wrote a year ago.

I shared the post on Facebook and LinkedIn, and for some reason, it performed particularly well on LinkedIn. It got over 1000x more impressions than I usually get from sharing a blog post and four times as many impressions as it got when I originally shared it as a LinkedIn newsletter.

That’s the problem with social media algorithms - you never know whether they’ll work in your favour or not.

Sometimes your post appears in lots of feeds and sometimes it dies a quick death. Even when it does appear on lots of feeds, there’s no way of knowing how many of those people are your target audience or how many actually paid attention to your content.

That’s why I bang on about reusing and resharing content so much. Even if something flops the first time around, reshare it. You’ve invested time in creating it so get maximum mileage out of it. The next time you post, you might reach the right people.

The content I recycled this week got me a couple of new newsletter subscribers and a handful of new LinkedIn followers. Not bad for something I wrote a year ago.

Weekly Progress Report

My priority right now is getting subscribers and pledges for Write With Lisa so I’ve been pushing that on my socials.

I’ve also signed up for the free trial of Beehiiv’s Scale Plan. I only got around to it on Thursday afternoon, so I haven’t had much time to try it out yet, but I’ll be testing some of the features over the next week or so and reporting back with my thoughts.

Next week, I’ll be sharing my results for March (subscribers, costs, earnings etc.) and letting you know my plans for April and beyond.

That’s all from me for this week, but I would love to have you in my Write With Lisa membership.

As always, if you have any questions, hit reply and let me know. Thanks for reading.