72: How I Went From Dreading My Newsletter to Writing It in 30 Minutes

If the thought of writing a newsletter every week makes you want to close your laptop and never come back, this one's for you. I get it. I've felt that exact dread, staring at a blank screen, deleting what I wrote, and deciding I just wasn't a "newsletter person."

In this episode of The Creative Bodega, I'm sharing how I went from avoiding my newsletter completely to sending my 285th consecutive issue, and the simple format that made it possible. If you've started a list and let it go quiet, or you haven't started one yet because the whole thing feels too big, this episode is for you.

Check out the full show notes for this episode CLICK HERE

Things I cover inside this episode:

• Why I avoided writing a newsletter for so long, even knowing I needed one
• The exact 3-2-1 Create format that takes me 20 to 30 minutes every week
• What goes in each of the three sections, including my favorite one
• Why a smaller, engaged email list beats a big unengaged one
• How I track open rates and clicks with a simple spreadsheet
• Why and how I regularly delete inactive subscribers
• What to do if you're starting your list completely from scratch

Resources & Links mentioned in the episode:

• 25% OFF Flodesk: my email platform of choice, and what I use for both sending the newsletter and cleaning out inactive subscribers
• Start & Grow Your Email List from Scratch my self-paced course for anyone starting completely from zero. We cover building a freebie people actually want, getting set up on Flodesk without wanting to throw your laptop, writing a newsletter you don't dread, and using your list to actually make sales!

Connect with me:
🫶🏼 Follow me on Instagram for daily insights
🫶🏼 Join my 321 Create Newsletter for weekly content tips 
🫶🏼 Check out The Content Coven Membership

Be sure to hit "Subscribe" or "Follow" so you never miss an episode! 

Transcript

0:00

On Saturday morning, with my cup of coffee, a- and this is a full-on ritual at this point, I sit down with my laptop and I write this bad boy in under 30 minutes. Honest to God, sometimes it's closer to 20. Because the structure's so familiar now, I'm not sitting there trying to figure out what to write. I'm just filling in what I already know how to do. And that's the difference between dreading a newsletter and doing it for five and a half years straight and kind of loving every moment of it. Welcome to the Creative Bodega Podcast. I'm Em Connors, Instagram content strategist, one of 43 Canva Verified Experts worldwide, and a mom of two who is not on Instagram for fun. I'm there to market my business, grow my email list, and get the heck off my phone, and that's exactly what I teach. You can expect simple content strategy, visual systems, and Instagram-to-email tactics that actually work without taking over your life. Let's get into it Welcome back to the Creative Bodega Podcast. Today, I'm sharing something I'm honestly pretty freaking proud of, I'm not gonna lie. This week, I send my 285th newsletter. That is literally 285 consecutive weeks of showing up. Divide that by 52 weeks in a year, and that's five and a half years of showing up in people's inboxes. I'm not gonna say without missing a single week, but maybe total in five and a half years I've missed three weeks. I don- and I don't even know. It might even be less. I, I'm not sure. But the reason I think that that number, 285 newsletters, surprises me and maybe you is the same reason that I almost literally never started a newsletter in the first place. I am not a writer, and I have told anyone who would listen, "I'm not a writer. I'm not a writer. Words are hard." If you're in the coven, you know I say it all the time, "Words are hard." Writing does not come naturally to me the way that designing does, right? I can open Canva and lose, like, three hours without blinking. I'm not even kidding. It's, like, my favorite place to hang out. But put me in front of a blank document and with a cursor flashing and ask me to write something interesting and worth someone's time every single week? Scary. Like, that's... I mean, so scary. Like, I can, like, physically feel how I felt five and a half years ago right before I started this newsletter. I did not want to do it. I didn't wanna do it. But everyone that I respected out there in the marketing world said, "You have no choice. Y- you don't have a business if you don't have an email list. You cannot rely on Instagram. Start the damn list." So today, I'm gonna talk about how I went from avoiding my newsletter like the plague to being one of my favorite things to do in my business at this point, and I'm gonna give you the exact format that made that possible. Because if you've been putting off starting a newsletter, or you have one but you dread it, or you started one and you quietly let it die, this podcast is gonna be for you. So here's what tripped me up in the beginning. When I started paying attention to email marketing right before I started my business, the newsletters I kept seeing everywhere were this very specific type: longform storytelling Personal opening that like slowly and really beautifully tied back to some like bigger business idea. I swear to God. So well-written, intimate. It was like reading a good essay, right? And, and, and terrifying to replicate because to write like that, you gotta sit down with a blank screen and engineer this whole narrative from scratch, you know? From beginning to end, a story, a through line, a lesson, a landing point. No. No, no, no. Like literally saying that out loud, my heart is starting to race. And doing that every week, I just couldn't. I, I quite literally couldn't, and I refused to. And, you know, even if I, I tried it, I'd open my laptop and I would just like stare at the screen like, "No, I can't do this every week. I cannot." So I told myself that story for a while, right? I can't write a newsletter. I don't write like that. I'm not a writer. And the whole time I 1,000% knew I needed to be sending email, collecting emails, sending emails, collecting emails, sending emails Your list is the one thing you own, okay? Instagram can tank, Instagram can be hacked, your account could get hacked, the algorithm can change, cut your reach overnight. Like, my God, my reach right now is trashed, quite literally. My list is mine. The people on it choose to be there. I can reach over 50% of them every single week, and I've got over 12,000 people on my list. But knowing that and actually doing it are two very different things when the doing part feels so terrifying and overwhelming. So for me, the shift happened when I found a really structured format. I was receiving an email from a creator. She doesn't do anything like I do, but she was a course creator, and that's how I found her. She was a guest on a course creation podcast, and I really liked everything she had to say, and she said she had this newsletter. So I was in the process of collecting, you know, information, like, like investigating newsletters, right? What newsletters do I get? Which ones do I like? Which ones am I reading? Which ones do I look forward to? And I hopped on hers, and I really, really liked it. And hers was called 3-2-1 something. 321 Design. I forget. I forget the word that came after 321. But I found myself really looking forward to it. So I reached out to her and I said, "I love the format of your newsletter. You like... Is, is it something I could use?" You know? And she was like, "Oh, one, of course, but two, it's not mine. It is the Atomic Habits author, James Clear, Atomic Habits. It's his newsletter format," and I liked it so much that I started using it. So I had her blessing, and I found out where it originated from, which was pretty cool, because I didn't know that. So then, of course, I opted into his as well. And I decided to call mine 3-2-1 Create And it includes three ideas to grow your business, two things I'm loving right now, and one content tip. And that's the newsletter. Throw an intro in there, and at the very end I say what's going on in the coven. And you might be sitting there thinking like, "That's too simple." Like, is that enough? And my friend, newsletter number 285, I can very confidently say the format works. And again, it's, it's not mine, so please use it. If it, if it works for you and you like it, use it. Let me walk you through each section really quickly. So section one, three ideas for your business. Three pretty short, actionable ideas that my reader can do something with. It's, you know, a prompt, a strategy, a mindset shift. It's meant to be short, a few sentences in each of the three ideas, right? It's not a blog. Uh, it's, it's... What I love about this part is that it's basically evergreen content In disguise. So whatever my three ideas are about in my newsletter, it's what my podcast is about that week. So for example, I'm standing here... No, I'm actually sitting, and I'm recording this podcast, and it is all about my newsletter. And so when this newsletter comes out the same week as this podcast, it's gonna be about this, okay? So it all starts with the podcast, and then it trickles down to the newsletter and my content for the week. So I'm pulling from things that I've already talked about, things I know, things I teach. I'm not reinventing new ideas every week. I'm literally distilling what I talked about in the podcast into, like, a digestible form, and I'm trying to get people to listen to the podcast then, right? And because I'm already making the podcast episodes and my Instagram posts and a lot of my coven content, I already have all the material, right? The newsletter is just where the best of what I'm thinking that week gets condensed. So it's three ideas, a few sentences for each, done. Okay? Section two, two things I'm loving. This is quite literally the favorite part of my newsletter, what everyone tells me. And I think it's, like, a little bit of a secret weapon that makes people actually look forward to opening it. I've had so many people tell me, "Oh my God," like, "your favorite..." or, "My favorite part of your newsletter is your two things. Like, I just sometimes scroll directly down there and see what you're sharing this week." And it's just not deep or heavy at all. It's quite literally things I'm loving in my life, whether it's a podcast, a creator to follow. Very often it's fashion stuff. Very often it's things from Amazon that have made my life easier, things that we've gotten for my dog, things that we've gotten for the house, things that I've... beauty products for me. I'm, like, just one of those people that if I love something, I'm gonna tell everyone about it. Like, my friends know that, uh, if, if I bought a shirt that I love, I'm gonna literally be sending them the link and being like, "Everybody has to buy this immediately." And it's so easy to write because it's just about my life. It's just things that I've purchased that I love, and maybe people think I have a shopping habit problem. Maybe I do. I don't know. But I love this section, and it's really, really easy. So that's the two things I'm loving. And then section three is the one content tip. One, not five, not a full framework. It's something specific, actionable, and all I do is look at my content on Instagram from the week before, and I take my highest performing post, 'cause it's typically something that's teaching, and that gets more eyes on that post if I share it inside my newsletter, so why not? You know what I mean? And I used to do that differently. That one tip used to be something just, like, off the top of my head, or it related to the three ideas, and I'm like, "Why am I working?" Like, this is feeling too hard, and how can I make it simpler? And it's like, duh, I've posted seven times last week. What's something that did really well that maybe people didn't see? Which, with Instagram these days, it's a lot. It's a lot of things that people are not seeing. So just putting that post in the one tip area is just easy, easy, current, relevant, quick, and that's my 3-2-1 Create newsletter. On Saturday morning, with my cup of coffee, a- and this is a full-on ritual at this point, I sit down with my laptop, and I write this bad boy in under 30 minutes. Honest to God, sometimes it's closer to 20. Because the structure's so familiar now, I'm not sitting there trying to figure out what to write. I'm just filling in what I already know how to do, and that's the difference between dreading a newsletter and doing it for five and a half years straight and kind of loving every moment of it. So now I wanna talk to you about something that doesn't get enough airtime, in my opinion. It's keeping your list healthy once you have it. I am a Flodesk user. I freaking love Flodesk so much. I do have a code for 25% off. I'll put it in the show notes Because growing your list is one conversation. What happens after is a completely different one. So a smaller engaged list is going to beat a large, big-ass list that's unengaged any day. I used to have 20,000 email subscribers, and the thing is that Flodesk didn't use to charge you per subscriber, and they've changed their model. And honestly, they had to because people were holding on, I wasn't one of them, but people were holding on to people who were not opening their lists, and then it was crushing their open rate. I clean my list every three months. Every three months, it is so easy in Flodesk to look up who has not opened your emails in six months. If you haven't opened my email in six months, you're gone. You can always resubscribe, no problem. That's, that happens all the time. But if you haven't opened my email in six months, I gotta let you go because you're hurting my deliverability across all the big boys, all the big players, the, the Gmail, the Yahoo, all those. So an unengaged audience, no bueno. I would rather smaller, way more engaged. So I, I regularly clean my list. The size of your list matters a lot less than the quality of it, and honestly, the same could be said for Instagram. So here's what I do. I track all my numbers after every time I send my emails. I have an incredible spreadsheet that I'm obsessed with. You get it if you purchase Start and Grow Your Email List From Scratch. I will put that link in the show notes. It's an amazing program that quite literally teaches you from scratch how to start and grow an email list using a newsletter format and using Flodesk In that, I'm tracking open rates, click-through rates, unsubscribes. Like, I'm not obsessively, but I look, and I track it every week, and it takes me two seconds to do it, and I just do it actually one week after I send my newsletter. So that Saturday morning little ritual where I sit down and write my newsletter is when I will update the numbers for the previous week. So it's just showing me patterns, right? What things are getting more clicks, 'cause I also will, in that spreadsheet, track what I'm loving, like the two links, because I wanna reuse stuff if I can sometimes, right? Sometimes I don't have anything that I've purchased. I can't think of anything, and I will go back to things I- I'm loving that got really high clicks. And then the part that people don't love to hear or that really hurts everyone hearts, including mine, is that I delete people. And I know. I've worked really hard for those subscribers. Like, why get rid of them? Well, because a subscriber who hasn't opened your email in six months isn't helping you at all. It's actually hurting you really badly. Email deliverability is a real thing. The more people ignoring your emails, the more likely your email is starting to land in people's spam for everyone, including the people who love you, okay? So cleaning your list protects the relationship you have with your actual readers. When I delete, I make a note in my spreadsheet. I'll put a little note in the spreadsheet saying the date, how many people I removed And the list size before and after. It sounds tedious, but it helps give me a really clear picture of list health over time, and it feels good to me. Honestly, it's like cleaning out my closet, just you gotta get rid of the dead weight and... Yeah, and I hate to call Cubans that. They're not dead weight. But they're hurting me more than helping me, and again, they can always come back. In Flodesk, you just unsubscribe someone and that's, that's, that's it. They can come back. If they opt in to anything of yours, they'll be right back on your list. So here's what I want you to take away. You don't have to be a great writer. I repeat, you do not have to be a great writer, I am not a great writer, to have a newsletter. You just need something useful to say and a structure that gets you out of your own way. 3-2-1 Create is mine. Use it. Adapt it. Call it something else entirely, but the principle, showing up with value, showing up with personality, keeping it short that you actually finish it, that's what's all gonna matter. So start with a format that feels super doable, and I promise you, over time, it is just gonna feel like filling in the blank. That's what it feels like to me. I just move section by section, and it's so satisfying. It's so satisfying. So newsletter 285 didn't happen 'cause I felt inspired every week. I will tell you that. It happened 'cause I had a system, and your girl loves a system, and I teach it all inside Start and Grow Your Email List. So, and it makes showing up so easy, okay? So, so easy. So if you're at the beginning of this and you haven't started your list, or you don't know how to set it up, and you don't know how to get people to sign up regularly, or you don't have a freebie, you don't know what your freebie should be, I'm telling you, my self-paced course, Start and Grow Your Email List From Scratch, is going to be a game changer. I teach you everything. I teach you everything you need to know. It's available right now. It is self-paced. The link will be in the show notes. And if you're already on my email list, you, thank you for being on 3-2-1 Create. If you're not, you can come find me. The link for my newsletter is always in my show notes. All right. I hope this episode gave you the push that you needed to start your newsletter, uh, or fall back in love with the one that you already have. I will see you on the next episode of the TCB podcast. Thanks so much for hanging out with me on the Creative Bodega Podcast. If you loved this episode, please be sure to share it with a fellow solopreneur who could use a little content creation inspiration. And hey, don't forget to check out the show notes for any resources I mentioned on the episode to help you create content that feels easy and actually gets you results. If you want even more Canva and content tips, head over to my website, thecreativebodega.com, or find me on Instagram under the same name. Until next time, keep creating, keep showing up, and most importantly, try and have a little fun with your content. I'll see you on the next episode.