Overcoming newsletter paralysis

This Creative Life #04: on creating a newsletter and building a community around your business with Astrid Bracke

Your newsletter can be one of the most enjoyable and effective ways of sharing your story and selling your offers. It can also allow you to connect more deeply with your audience and create a sense of community around your business. But many people find it hard to move beyond the blank page, and this is where today’s guest can help.

Astrid Bracke

works with small business owners, freelancers and creatives as a business mentor, and has launched a new self-paced course — Small business newsletter magic — to help you feel more confident about your newsletter, develop a strategy that works for you, and grow a list that builds connection.

If you’re looking to create more impact with your newsletter, this is a great place to begin. Over to Astrid.

How to deal with newsletter paralysis
with Astrid Bracke

In this article, I give a taster of the course, focusing on that all too common problem for many of us: newsletter paralysis. I’ll share some common causes of newsletter paralysis and give you the encouragement you need to get unstuck, both emotionally and practically.

The paralysis of the blank page

You might be very familiar with this scenario. You sit down at your desk, determined to write your newsletter, open up a new file or page and then…nothing. Any inspiration or motivation you might have had before you sat down has disappeared. All of the potential topics you might have had now seem silly and irrelevant. The cursor blinks and the page stays blank.

We’ve all been here. I love writing my newsletter, but even I feel this way from time to time. If you’re suffering from this type of paralysis, this might help:

• Try a different medium: if you’re used to writing your newsletter on your laptop, grab a notebook and pen instead;

• Embrace the ‘shitty first draft’: feeling like you need to write the perfect words and sentences on the first try will only paralyse you further. Aim for what Anne Lamott calls a ‘shitty first draft’ instead and edit later;

• Only five minutes: start small and set a timer for five minutes. Tell yourself that you only need to write for five minutes. You can sit with the discomfort for five minutes, I promise. Get up when your timer is done, and sit down again to write for five more minutes, or maybe even ten;

• Try some music: if I’m really lacking focus I reach for a trick I developed while writing my PhD dissertation. I put on Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. It’s pompous and over-the-top, but there’s nothing quite like it to get me writing. If you don’t know what music might inspire you, search for ‘music for focus’ or ‘music for writing’ on YouTube or Spotify;

• Try a different location: find a different location in your house, move your desk so that you’re facing a different view, or go elsewhere—a library, a coffee shop or bookstore. A different location will often take us out of patterns, and out of our funk.

Not knowing what to write about

Generating ideas for your newsletter a topic that I go into more depth in Small business newsletter magic, but these are a couple of quick strategies to get you started:

• Go back to your values. What are the values that your business is centred around, and how do they show up in how you run your business and what you offer? How does your value of sustainability, for instance, influence the choices you make in creating and shipping your products? How does your value of community influence your marketing?

• Make a specific story general. You might think that people aren’t interested in your story of the steep learning curve of becoming the photographer you are today, but they are. Even people that aren’t photographers will resonate with your story because in essence it’s a story about learning something new, dealing with setbacks, finding fulfilment. No matter what you do or what your business is, you’ll have collected experiences along the way that can be generalised in this way;

• Pay attention to the kinds of questions and stories that come up in conversations with clients and customers. What are potential clients and customers interested in? What do they wonder about your services or products? What are their struggles and desires? Even if you’re just getting started, conversations you have about your business with others—even if it’s just business buddies or friends—can spark inspiration.

The fear of being visible

The biggest hurdle I had to clear when I started writing my newsletter was suddenly feeling very visible (even when I only had a tiny number of subscribers). This struggle or fear of being seen, of being visible, is what many of my clients feel as well. It’s often not so much that other people will read their words—although it can be that too—but a sense of ‘everyone will see!’ or nakedness that keeps them from sending their newsletter.

This feeling might also pop up if you haven’t written to your list in a while. You might get stuck in thoughts of wondering whether to explain or apologise to your list, or fears that they will think negatively about you now that you’re suddenly writing again. (Trust me: they won’t think less of you and you don’t owe them any explanations or apology.)

Running a business is a constant exercise in taking up space and this can be deeply uncomfortable. I can promise you that this will get easier. You will start to feel more comfortable showing up in the world with your business.

My biggest encouragement to you here is to be very gentle with yourself. This feeling of discomfort that you’re feeling is normal—don’t beat yourself up for it. Start with small steps outside of your comfort zone. A newsletter is actually a great place to experiment with this, because you can be as personal (or not) as you want, and not being visible in the literal sense allows us to hide a bit. Perhaps instead of sending a newsletter about you or your business explicitly, build and connect community this month by sharing your favourite resources—and come back to your business and the story around it next month.

Remember: no one pays as much attention to your newsletter as you do. Your readers will be nowhere near as critical about your words as you are. Go back to why you started your business in the first place and root into that sense of joy and possibility as you move forward. The world wants to see the amazingness you have to offer.

Dealing with newsletter paralysis is just one of the topics Astrid covers in Small business newsletter magic, her new self-paced course, which will help you to feel more confident and (re)inspired about your newsletter. She’ll walk you through the foundations of writing and sending a newsletter and support you with growing your list slowly, gently and effectively. And in case you need extra encouragement along the way, you can tune into one of the five mini audio pep talks Astrid has created.

Small business newsletter magic is for sale until mid-November 2024, and you get lifetime access once you purchase it.