My Newsletter & Blogging Process at 1k Subs

I crossed a big milestone recently: 1000 subscribers to Developer Microskills 🎉. I'm at about 22 weeks since I started the newsletter.

A few people in different communities have asked me about my process for writing & marketing the newsletter & how I repurpose issues into blog articles. I thought I'd create a post here with images and resources in case it would be helpful for anyone else. I know this kind of thing helped me quite a bit when I was first getting started.

I rely on Newsletter OS in Notion to track everything. First I create a new issue in the Newsletter Issues db. I use properties to keep track of issue status (more on this later). I don't put notes or outlines here but do add links I may want to use.

I draft every issue in MD using Drafts -- it's fast and I can export it anywhere. I tried to do this in Notion but it's just too slow because of the processing it runs on the text.

Once I'm ready to go, I create a new broadcast in ConvertKit. I have a tag that gets added whether someone signs up at the landing page or my site.

This is the automation that adds it:

I create a social card (og image) in Figma using a free community template. I can re-use this image for the RSS feed, my blog, or Twitter threads.

I created a specific email template in ConvertKit for the newsletter that has little touches I've added over time. The special tag lets people unsub from the newsletter without completely opting out and the archive url lets people share the issue with friends.

Drafts has an action lets me copy the MD as HTML...

...which I can then paste into the legacy editor of ConvertKit (doesn't work with the new editor).

I learned this trick from Joel Hooks.

Once I've proofread the issue, I schedule the broadcast in ConvertKit for 5 am PST on Friday. I've debated about changing the day of the week because a lot of people don't open it until Monday, but so far my open rate is still pretty good (usually 40%+ by Monday).

After I schedule the week's issue, I head back to Newsletter OS and make sure I've updated the previous week's analytics & issue properties like the issue's public URL or an article or thread I've created from it. I also have checkboxes for cross-posting to places like Hashnode. Here's what the analytics page looks like:

Tracking things like the public URL and article URL makes it really handy for sharing when the topics come up again:

To create a blog post based on the issue, I have a script that creates a new folder & MD file in my blog repo & sets up the frontmatter. I learned this from the Imposter's Handbook by Rob Conery. It's hooked up to Keyboard Maestro so I can trigger it with a shortcut & UI.

Here's the script I made.

I can then just copy and paste the MD from Drafts, edit it to be more like a blog article, and copy the social image I already created. The script uses a naming convention for slugs and images. Once I publish a commit it deploys with Netlify.

The following week I also create a Twitter thread with Chirr based on the issue. This has proven exceptionally good at driving sign-ups. You can see here in Fathom that most of the newsletter landing page traffic is coming from Twitter.

I've experimented a lot with threads and here's what I've found performs the best:

• Value from the 1st tweet
• Each has an image, diagram, or link
• Use real numbers
• <10 tweets, 6-8 is the sweet spot
• Only CTA is in the last tweet, asking to sign up (learned from this article from Marketing Examples)

This writing and publishing process has been working pretty well, though I still need to automate a few things to speed up the process.

Let me know if this has been helpful -- I'm also happy to answer any questions you may have!