7 Things To Do When Starting a Newsletter

Anj Salonga
3 min readMay 23, 2024

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Tips from Marketing Examined founder

If you want to start a newsletter…

Alex Garcia, the founder of the newsletter Marketing Examined had generously shared his strategies on how he created the newsletter and scale it to four more newsletters.

I compiled tips that he shared from some of his interviews from Starter Story and RevGenius Youtube channels and I got…

7 things that anyone should do and keep in mind when starting a newsletter.

Starting with…

1. Pick a niche you can’t help but talk about or something you want to venture in.

Alex anchored his content with his interest in marketing strategies that successful companies are using. He built his audience by posting rundown of updates and marketing moves from big brands and shared his insights.

Another way to find your niche according to Alex from his interview with Pat Walls, is by picking a trending topic and get into the wave.

2. Share your own experience

There are a lot of newsletter creators and media companies that are competing to get subscribers everyday. And to be in the sea with the same topics, your only edge lies in embracing your journey and sharing it to your subscribers.

Alex, believe that your experience in work, building things, starting a business, failing in business and more can help educate your readers.

Just like in social media, being relatable enough to your audience can attract loyal fans that eventually became a community.

3. Create an expectation for the reader

Taking a idea of making your newsletter as a ‘type of media’ like magazine or tv show.

Take Morning Brew as an example, they took the structure of a newspaper or tv news that supplies the same information to their subscribers but sent directly to their emails.

4. Create your ideal reader

Write for one person only.

Like many well known online writers, Alex believe that you should write for one specific person in mind that you wish will read your newsletter. In his case, his ‘one person’ is Dharmesh Shah from HubSpot.

5. Hand to Hand Combat

This is actually one of the strategies that Alex got from Noah Kagan. Noah is a entrepreneur who also recently published the book “Million Dollar Weekend”. The main idea of this strategy is to do the tasks that cannot be scaled but is important task.

You can try this by messaging your friends or family and ask them to subscribe. You can also do this by reaching out to every fb friends or ig followers that you have on your list.

This may take time and effort but this is the best way to start spreading the word about your newsletter.

6. Buffet Marketing

Buffet Marketing is also a term from Noah Kagan, but how Alex use this is by ‘taking’ everything at the start and see what you actually get and keep coming back to.

This can be applied in content marketing strategies, picking the right tools, content structures or topics to focus on.

The more I consume content about Alex’s journey, the more I realize how he favors “iteration”. He always advice to refine every strategy or processes until you see what actually keeping you win.

It shows how important being able to adapt and be proactive in building your newsletter. But he also added that you should not just be data-driven, being intuition-driven is a trait that an aspiring entrepreneur should also have.

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Anj Salonga
Anj Salonga

Written by Anj Salonga

Sharing lessons and experience building a Newsletter Business | Content Writer