Why I started a newsletter

Originally published on jnielson.com

Hi there! I started a newsletter! You can sign up by heading over to my newsletter page!

Why a newsletter?

First things first, I like newsletters. I prefer to get an email about important things over any other communication method, in most cases. If someone that I think does great work has a newsletter, I sign up for it. I have over 20 people I've signed up to receive newsletters in my personal inbox from! If you have a newsletter, add it to this twitter thread!

Secondly, I think I have something useful that you might want to read about. That's why I started blogging in the first place! Blogging is great, but sometimes it's hard for people to find what I write. I have an RSS feed for my blog, but not many people I know still use RSS readers (even though I do). I generally post about what I write on my twitter, but twitter is chaotic and hard to find things on. From what I've seen in the newsletters I'm signed up for, newsletters are a great way to share the content you produce to a group that actually wants it enough to give you their email address.

Dealing with inbox clutter?

A common thing I think of when I see a newsletter signup form is "Do I want another piece of email coming my way?"... usually yes! I chatted with Ryan Warner and a few other people in the party corgi discord (which you should join!) about adding newsletters to personal websites, and learned that not everyone has the same approach I do to their email inboxes. For over two years now, I've subscribed to the "inbox zero" lifestyle. I think there hasn't been an entire week pass where I've left something in my inbox that couldn't be read and taken care of, or snoozed for later when it was actionable. For the most part, newsletters fall into the category of "at least skim, but regardless I'll archive it when I get to the bottom", which has helped me stay up with inbox zero while signing up for newsletters wherever I can find them. One of the nicest things about newsletters is their capability to link out to other things, which if I have time and interest I can click on... but there's nothing that says I have to click!

Why not post more on your blog?

I'm working on it! Taking a page out of Chris Biscardi's book, I'm going to use my blog as a place to post all sorts of content. If I have a time-bound newsletter post, it'll probably also end up on my blog. A shadow newsletter... likely wouldn't end up on my blog...? I dunno yet. I personally like newsletters that have a link out to a personal site to read them on to break up looking at my email reader, so maybe it'll end up as a section of my site. 🤷‍♂️

Either way, the blog and newsletter are both priorities for me. The reason for that, is I enjoy writing! I find writing to be an excellent way to marshal the thoughts that I have and get them out into the world in a communicable way. It helps me to get out of my box of like 30 people that I work with regularly, which I think is important enough to put time into.

I'm going to be a bit surprised if anyone reads this post all the way through, so if you do... tweet me about it! I'm excited to see where this newsletter journey goes from here. 🥳