Two Digital Tools You Need to Start a Newsletter
At the beginning of the year I launched http://lilyqa.com, a free Q&A platform where I help answer any digital media related questions. After launch my friends were buzzing about it, but then crickets. Silence. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada.
I did design it in mind that people will only use it if and when they need it. So my challenge was how to keep my audience informed and most importantly engaged.
I share a lot of resources on Twitter but not everyone is on there. Plus with so many people on Twitter, how do you cut through the sea of links and information and reach out the right people?
Newsletters are great for content curation, which was exactly what I needed. So I created a newsletter where I share digital media tips and resources with my subscribers.
My next challenge was putting the newsletter together. How do I do this with the least amount of time spent? I started looking for shortcuts and after testing couple of options I settled on these two tools:
Goodbits.io
With this free newsletter builder you can collect and build your newsletter in a matter of minutes.
- It has an easy and intuitive drag & drop concept that you can use to plug in your content into a responsive email design.
- Add content with browser extensions (Chrome, Firefox, Safari), connect with Buffer or your RSS feeds.
- Add your own images or use the image that comes with the post as well as edit the hed and deck.
- It's integrated with MailChimp where you can easily set up a free account (more about MailChimp below).
- You can use Goodbits’ templates or Mailchimp’s, it's up to you and how much time you want to spend on design.
MailChimp
This email marketing service provider is free up to 2,000 subscribers. You can easily set up your mailing list, use their newsletter templates or integrate it with Goodbits.io I mentioned above, which is what I did.
If you'd like to give this a try, check out the useful resources I included in this week's newsletter, http://eepurl.com/bknUaf
This post is part of a series about digital tools that I personally use and find helpful. Please let me know if there is anything specifically you would like me to address.