How to Start a Newsletter in 2024 For Free

Are you looking for an easy guide on how to start a newsletter?

This step-by-step guide will show you how to create a newsletter in 20 minutes with basic computer skills.

After completing this guide you will have a beautiful newsletter that is ready to be shared with the world.

This guide was designed for beginners. I walk you through each and every step, using plenty of pictures and real-life examples for you to understand exactly what needs to be done.

If you get stuck or have questions at any point, simply send me a message, and I will do my best to help you out.

My name is Matt Merrick, and I am going to show you how to start a newsletter today. I have been following newsletters since early 2018 and recently sold a newsletter that got to 4,000 subscribers in 2 months without one paid ad.

I believe that newsletters are the future, email newsletters to be exact. The market is saturated with tons of email service providers but not many are focused on just newsletters as a business. That will change in the coming years.

I am the first to admit that when I first jumped into newsletters I made tons of mistakes. You can now benefit from these mistakes when you make your own newsletter. I created this free guide that a complete beginner can learn how to write a newsletter quickly and easily

So, just how do you start a newsletter?

1. Get Started

Define what you want to share with your subscribers for signing up.

Before you start looking for subscribers, make sure you define your end goals. After reviewing over 1000 newsletters, you get to understand what works and what doesn’t. Picking a niche is important even though you can have success without a niche specific topic.

How can we find a niche?

Here are the biggest niches:

Make Money Online
Finance
Travel
Fitness
Personal Development
Relationships
Lifestyle
Real Estate
Gadgets And Technology(AI)
Food

You can get started with any of the above or pick something completely different, the choice is yours.

Are you looking to make money?

If you wrote this newsletter for 12 months straight and didn’t make a penny, would that be ok?

Newsletters are passion, you have to love what you are writing about. Email is the most valuable access to customers according to this study.

Email subscribers are 50% more likely to make a purchase from a brand they receive email newsletters from.

What does this mean?

It’s simple, really. If you have them as subscribers, the chances are they will want to buy your product one day. So obtaining a subscriber to your newsletter is the holy grail. Treat it as such.

Pick a niche, stick to it.

Send Schedule

Next, you should decide on the send schedule. We researched and found that sending once a week contributed to the highest open rate of 35%.

Ultimately, the choice is yours, and many newsletter operators will ensure they can keep up with the demand. If you are starting, maybe twice a day isn’t a good strategy unless you have the time.

Here are some things I found while reviewing over 1000 newsletters:

E-commerce – once a week(you don’t want to upswell them all the time)
Bloggers – Once a week plus make sure they highlight articles that were published during the week.
Newsletters – These vary but the household names are sent daily(Monday-Friday)

Ultimately, if you provide value to your subscribers, you will see growth and success from your newsletters.

Starting your newsletter is simple, but ensuring it gets sent to your subscriber’s inbox is another story. This is why using a newsletter platform software is important in your success.

Emails don’t automatically go into your subscribers’ inbox right away. Most times, when you send an email, it will go to spam or the promotional section, which reduces the chances of your subscribers even seeing it.

Having a dedicated email service allows you to worry about writing content and not making sure your email was delivered or not.

This is why we recommend beehiiv and use them for all our newsletters.

–> Click Here To Try beehiiv free with no credit card required <–

1. Go to beehiiv

2. Complete the 3 Steps

Fill in your email address, First Name, and Last Name, and answer a question about your current newsletter experience.

3. Pick Your subdomain

Your subdomain is how you will send people to your newsletter. For example, https://newsletterlife.beehiiv.com

4. Pick your tags, you should pick 3.

Make sure to do this step as selecting your tags will help you later in cross-promotion within beehiiv. beehiiv has a robust network of recommendations for both free & paid.

5. Upload your logo

Picking a logo doesn’t have to be done right away but it is recommended that you have one before you send the first newsletter. There are plenty of websites you can use to design a killer logo like Canva,

6. Pick your colors

A strong color pallet is essential. Sometimes a good color scheme is the reason a person subscribes to your newsletter. You should spend a few minutes on this as it will make it easier to design your homepage.

If you are struggling, our friends over at ponderer.co do amazing work with design related to beehiiv.

The next steps in any successful newsletter is creating an email list, adding a powerful welcome message, and making your audience respond.

Email list

This is the lifeblood of your newsletter. Make sure you have the following

100% opt-in – they sign up because they want to. You don’t force them
Bot protection – this is usually covered by the email provider but double check cache is on.
Unsubscribe after 14 days of never opening – The chances are if a user hasn’t opened an email in 2 weeks, they aren’t going to.

Welcome Email

A welcome message is sent after the subscriber joins your email list. Most welcome emails are sent within the first few minutes of subscribing.

A welcome email is the first impression you give your subscriber. You don’t want to mess it up. You could say it’s the most important email you ever send.

Here a few tips on making the proper welcome email

Keep it short & Sweet
Overview of your newsletter
Links to popular content
Ask a question/misspell a word on purpose
Get subscriber to safelist your newsletter

As someone who has reviewed over 1,000 newsletters i always respond to a welcome email if the person has a good question or misspells a word. This helps you as a newsletter operator to get your domain name away from spam and into your reader’s inbox.

you can check the domain name your emails are sent from in beehiiv by clicking on publications and then selecting domains.

If you are using beehiiv, you can use the standard URL which has a good success rate of going to a user’s primary email box.

Forms/Opt-ins

beehiiv has a wonderful built-in subscriber landing page, but for some, this isn’t enough customization. In that case, I recommend carrd. Carrd is $9/year and lets you fully customize your landing page to your liking.

–> CLICK HERE TO GET STARTED WITH CARRD <–

If you use carrd you will need API access which is only accessible to paid plans on beehiiv.

Import existing contacts

Go to audience – > subscribers – > Import Subscribers

Now, there are a few options for importing existing contacts to your beehiiv account:

Upload a file (.csv)
Copy/paste contacts from an Excel spreadsheet (.xls)

You can upload up to 100 contacts at once; if you want to upload more, you need to verify your identity, which will enable 10,000 subscribers at a time.

4. Create Your Landing Page

A landing page can be the reason you get a subscriber or if the person leaves the page. Building a killer landing page is smart. beehiiv has some awesome features on how to customize your landing page.

A few things you should know:

Simple is better
Have a heading – 3-5 words
1-2 sentences about what your newsletter is about.
Subscriber Button with plenty of places for users to enter

One of the best landing pages I have come across is TLDR.

Every Newsletter should have something similar to the 4 sections TLDR covers.

Title Of Newsletter
Hook – Tell people quickly what your newsletters is about
Overview – Give more detail into what your newsletter is about
Subscribe button – Make it clear and center for your future subscribers.

If you focus on your landing page in the start you will see higher conversions. You can always change it and see what works but a good landing page is important when you start. Don’t start advertising till you get a killer landing page.

We are now finally ready to write our first newsletter!

You need to make sure you start a routine of getting

Create the first newsletter you are going to send to subscribers. Don’t worry if you start with one subscriber; you can work on writing a killer newsletter so when more follow, you are ready.

You can’t just write whatever you want. Remember you are starting in a niche make sure to stay focused on this niche but don’t worry if you expand to a broader group as time goes on.

Every newsletter should have a structure. If you don’t follow a structure users may unsubscribe as they don’t see the same setup each time.

Let’s go back to our favorite newsletter TLDR, Dan has made a massive newsletter business from a structure that is now copied a ton.

He breaks out each newsletter into sections

Big Tech & Startups
Science & Futuristic Technology
Programming, Design & Data Science
Miscellaneous
Quick Links

Each section has different content in it. For example, the first two sections have 2 topics. While the other sections have more topics, they cover them all in a simple yet effective way. There is a reason TLDR has over 1 million subscribers.

Before you hit the send button on your first newsletter. It’s smart to preview and send a test email.

This should be your final step before sending your newsletter to subscribers to do one final readover and check how it looks on different dimensions.

To test your campaign, click Send test inside your current draft email.

It opens to allow you to send a test. You are able to Simulate subscribers or just send it to your default email address.

If you are doing advanced with multiple subscribers, this works with anyone who collects the first name or other information about their subscriber.

Check your email, if everything looks good you are ready to schedule!

One amazing feature of beehiiv is when you schedule the post, they give you the best time to send your newsletter based on when people open your newsletters.

Now that you have sent your first newsletter, it’s time to analyze the results. Here are a few tips to help you build your newsletter.

The key metrics for any newsletter are the open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rate, and bounce rate. These are what will help you get advertisements and more.

Here is a breakdown of each of them.

Open rate: Your email open rate tells you the percentage of total recipients who opened your campaign.
Click-through rate: The click-through rate represents the percentage of recipients who clicked a link in your email but only for those who opened it
Soft bounces: The email temporarily fails to deliver because the recipient’s server is down or their mailbox is full.
Hard bounces: The email will never be delivered. (Email address is incorrect or no longer exists.).

We did a deep dive into everything necessary about these and gave examples of what industries have the best and worst metrics.

Keep pushing forward and make sure to stick to your schedule.

You are ready to take over!

If you have any other questions about how to start a newsletter, please contact me or reach out on Twitter.

Next Up – Learn How to Make Money From Your Newsletter