Are you utilizing email marketing for your editing business? Unlike social media, your newsletter subscriber list is something you own that no one can take away from you. In this episode of The Modern Editor, we’re getting back to the basics of what a newsletter is, what it entails, and whether or not you need one for your business. Listen in as we explore a powerful communication tool that can help free you from the social media circus.
Are you utilizing email marketing for your editing business? Unlike social media, your newsletter subscriber list is something you own that no one can take away from you.
In this episode of The Modern Editor, we’re getting back to the basics of what a newsletter is, what it entails, and whether or not you need one for your business. Listen in as we explore a powerful communication tool that can help free you from the social media circus.
Hello, welcome to today's episode. So we just wrapped up our series on social media, and so now I wanted to chat about other ways that we can talk about our businesses, build community, and connect with our potential and current clients.
So we are gonna talk about newsletters today, and it's going off of the social media series because the bottom line is I want freelance editors, I want you all out there to build a business with tools that you either own or have the most control over. Social media is not one of those platforms. However, our email newsletter subscriber list, we do own.
So we're gonna do a 101 on newsletters. What they are, if you need one, what they entail, and I'm gonna have some questions for you at the end to see if a newsletter is right for you at this stage. So let's dive right in.
Welcome to The Modern Editor Podcast, where we talk about all things editing and what it's like to run an editorial business in today's world. I'm your host, Tara Whitaker. Let's get to it.
This might seem a little silly, but I wanna start out by defining what a newsletter is. In its most simplest form, a newsletter is a regular email you send to people who have subscribed. That's it. And when I say newsletter in this episode today, an email newsletter, not a paper physical newsletter, which could also be a very valid thing to try. But we're talking about email newsletter today.
This email newsletter can be super simple, it can be uber fancy, and anywhere in between. It can be sent every week or every month. The choices are endless with an email newsletter, but it is simply a regular email you send out to people who actually want to hear from you.
And that is the most powerful thing about an email newsletter is that these people have specifically said, Hey, I want to hear from you. I'm giving you my email address. I am giving you permission to land in my inbox, to teach me things, to share things with me. I want to read your content.
It's not a random Google find.It's not a social media follower who has like a, who knows, minuscule percentage of being able to actually see your content that you post. They are specifically saying, I want you in my email inbox. And that is very powerful. I don't want to—I wanna make sure that is underlined because nowadays with our attention and our inboxes are flooded with all sorts of stuff, to have someone say, Hey I want you to be in my inbox is extremely important and exciting, and that's why a newsletter can be so very powerful and cool when it comes to our businesses.
All right, now Google is great. I'm not saying that; SEO is amazing. SEO takes time to build, so it's not, it's a long-term strategy and social media is fine too. I'm not dogging on social media, but the chances of someone seeing your content on social media is so much lower than it is your newsletter or an email just because of how targeted and specific a newsletter is.
All right, now do you have to have a newsletter? If you've listened to the podcast before, you'll know what I'm going to say in just a second. But if you're new to the podcast, you're gonna hear me say this a lot moving forward.
You do not have to have a newsletter. You don't have to do anything in your business you don't want to except for taxes and things that are gonna get you in trouble. A newsletter can be a wonderful tool. Social media can be a wonderful tool, but they're not requirements. You do not have to have those to have a successful business.
And if you hear someone saying that, please question it because there is not one single strategy, tool, tactic, platform, whatever out there that guarantees success. All of these different ways of doing things work best for some people and not for others. And business is one big experiment of trying to figure out what works best for us.
So it could be social media, it could be newsletters, it could be something totally different. But the bottom line is you have to have a way to connect with people. It doesn't matter what that way is. It just has to be a way to connect with people. Social media is a very natural thing right now to do, and so are newsletters. Those are great ways to connect with people, but there are other ways.
So why have a newsletter specifically? Lots of reasons and also reasons not to, but having a newsletter is a great community-building tool. You all know I love community. You all know I preach community. This is a great way of building a community of readers of your newsletter.
They can be full of other editors. It could be your ideal clients, whoever those might be, whoever you want to be reading your newsletter. That is whoever you want in your community, that's who you should be inviting to read your newsletter.
The newsletter itself can have so many different things inside it. You can showcase other editors and authors and publishing professionals. You can talk about, I've seen editors interview their author clients. I've seen so many things at this point. People sharing industry events, people sharing their insight or their opinions on a certain something, or things that are happening in the industry like book banning or talking about funding libraries.
There's so many things that you can talk about, sharing your specific expertise or sharing specific stories related to you, your business, however, whatever you're comfortable with sharing, but people want to be connected. I know sometimes we feel like we don't wanna be, but we all need connection and community and a newsletter is a very great virtual way of doing that.
It's also a great way to show up in front of people on a regular basis. I already touched on this a little bit earlier, but these people that have signed up for your email newsletter want to see you, whether that is weekly, biweekly, monthly—those are very common I've seen for freelance editors—but it's whatever you are comfortable with and what you are capable of doing.
I am gonna say this with an asterisk because I was not good about this in the past, but with a newsletter, consistency is key. And consistency means whatever timeframe you have decided. If people are expecting to hear from you on a regular basis, try to meet that expectation. Of course things are gonna happen. Of course you're going to miss sending out a newsletter. It is not the end of your business or the end of the world. Let's keep things in perspective here. But if you have someone who specifically has said, I want to learn from you, I want to read your newsletter, try to meet that expectation as much as you can.
That doesn't mean you have to send an email every day. It means just sticking to what you have created and what has worked for you and your schedule. And that can always change. I used to send out emails weekly and I was like, yeah, that's not gonna happen. So now I send them out every other week. Some people send them out monthly and that is completely fine. So try to stay consistent with everything else going on in our world and our lives.
But a newsletter is also a great way to sell your services. And this can be done directly or indirectly. And what I mean by that is a direct pitch could be in your newsletter that's like, Hey, are you looking for an editor? I have XYZ availability and dah, dah, dah. Here's the link to my intake form, or my free consultation, or whatever. Let's work together. Or it can be something like a footer at the end of your emails. It just shows up at the end of all of your emails and it has links to things like your calendar if you link that or your consultation form or whatever the case may be.
So it's just always there. It's not a direct pitch, which I don't recommend doing necessarily every single newsletter unless you are participating in a challenge, or you've said, Hey, I'm gonna directly pitch to you for this month because I'm gonna try and not have a problem with asking for business. Whatever the case may be.
But I wouldn't do a direct sales pitch and only a direct sales pitch every month or every week. People didn't sign up to get pitched to all the time. They signed up for community and to learn So there's a balance there, and you have to figure out what that balance is for you. Sometimes it's more often, sometimes it's less often.
A newsletter is also a different way of communicating than say, social media. If you are someone like me who has a hard time distilling what you want to say into a ten-minute or ten-second Instagram Story, a newsletter could be a perfect avenue for you.
A newsletter doesn't have to be 10,000 words, like good grief. Some can, why not? But for the most part, people that are reading an email expect to have it be longer than a TikTok or even an Instagram post or a Bluesky post, like it's gonna be longer. So if you like writing beefier content or wanna dig into something a little bit more, a newsletter could be a great avenue of doing that as opposed to social media, which tends to be more short and snappy.
And with a newsletter, you're not fighting or trying to keep up with an algorithm or trends or something completely outside your control. So we have seen multiple times where social media platforms either go off the rails or they go down, like the servers go down or whatever. And yes, email service providers can go down too. Everything is, you know, on servers and the cloud and all that stuff can happen.
But other than maybe showing up in someone's junk folder, which of course can happen it is pretty safe to say that your email is going to land in your email subscriber's inbox. Like you hit send, barring any tech catastrophes, or junk folder, that email is going to end up in the inbox in front of the eyes of the person that wants to see from you.
So a lot of people you'll hear, like marketing people or business strategy, will say if you have things like social media or you have an audience somewhere else, they all should be on your email list. So if you have Instagram followers, you should also have them on your email list because if Instagram goes down, guess what? You can still talk to them and it's still gonna be an avenue for you to talk to the people that want to hear from you. All right?
A little bit with tech stuff, 'cause this can be very intimidating. It was super intimidating for me. You can get very fancy or keep it very simple with a newsletter. It can be straight text, it can be text with images. It can be super fancy designed, like there's all sorts of ways of doing it. And I always say start out simple or the simplest for you, whatever that may be. Your skillset might be different than mine.
Of course, if you are better with graphics than I am, then maybe yours looks a lot fancier, but my email service provider is called Kit, and they allow, I mean, that's a fancy version. They have all sorts of segmentation and you can set up sequences, which are a series of emails that automatically send to people. There's automations, there's a whole bunch of stuff.
You don't have to go that fancy. There are tons of email service providers out there now that make it very simple. Most have free versions. Just know that the functionality is probably gonna be very limitedcompared to the paid versions. But you can always try out a provider and see if you like it, if it's intuitive to you, if it's easy to create a newsletter 'cause the harder it is to create a newsletter, the less likely you are to do it.
So make sure that the friction there is as little as possible, or the learning curve is something that you can do at this point in time, which is actually a very unintended segue into how I was going to leave you, which is with a few questions to ask yourself to help you determine if an email newsletter is right for you and your business, and even if it's right, right now.
So I kind of mentioned some of these before. Do you like writing longer content? If you like writing longer form pieces, a newsletter is phenomenal. You can still write longer pieces and maybe disseminate them on social media in different posts, but it's different, right? It's a different way of writing and consuming. So if you like longer form content, a newsletter would be great.
Do you like writing without trends? And what I mean by this is some—specifically editors, I have one in mind, shout-out to Kaitlin—who have an absolute knack for creating content around editing and writing and publishing that fits into a current trend, like whether that's a sound or a voiceover or whatever.
I do not possess that cleverness. Sometimes I'll have a good idea with it or what I think is a good idea, but I find it very hard to come up with an idea that is related to editing or writing that fits certain trends. Other people out there are incredible at it. So if you like and are good at writing content based on these trends, great, social media is your happy place.
But also, if you're not, a newsletter could be a good place. Or it could be you could be really good at the trendy content and the email newsletter content. It just depends. But if you are someone who needs to just write based off what you're feeling or what you're experiencing, or what you've seen with clients or something like that, and don't want to have to worry about it not being seen by an algorithm because it doesn't have a trendy sound with it, a newsletter might be a better option.
Then are you able to stick to a regular schedule. And whatever that schedule is again, right. Whether it's weekly, biweekly, monthly. If you just had a baby, I'm gonna guess the answer is no. If you are dealing with a flare-up, I'm guessing the answer is no. We have different seasons of life.
Maybe sometimes we are able to stick to a regular schedule and other times we're not. That's totally fine too. But back to that consistency piece, if we can, it's better to stick with a regular schedule, but if it's not possible, then it might not be the right time to have a newsletter. Or you can have a newsletter and be very up front with your subscribers and say, Hey, thanks for being here. I appreciate it 'cause I know that your inbox, you know, is inundated most likely with stuff. I'm gonna try and send this out whenever you want. But there's a strong possibility that that might not happen. But just to let you know I appreciate you reading it when it does land in your inbox. Okay, thanks bye.
That can work for you too, but if you are going through something right now or it's just a season of life where even doing something like that is not feasible, it might not be the right time to have a newsletter, which is totally fine.
But also going along with that, are you willing to promote your email newsletter? It's just like a website where if we write a website, you know, build and launch a website, or we start writing a newsletter, we still gotta tell people those exist. If only we could just build a website and put it out on the interwebs and people would just flock to it naturally and just be inundated with potential clients, not how the world works.
And it's the same with a newsletter. You can have the newsletter, but you still have to tell people that it exists and that they should read it. So this isn't a way of avoiding marketing, unfortunately. It's just another tool that we still have to get the word out about. So remember that you still have to market the newsletter, and if you're okay with doing that right now or in the future.
Okay, there was your quick-and-dirty lesson on newsletters. Make sure you take a few minutes to answer those questions I just talked about for yourself. Without judgment or any sort of—don't impose anything on yourself. A newsletter is great. It might not be great for you ever. It might not be great for you right now. It could change. It could be great, and then it could not be great. Only you can answer that for yourself and your business.
And please just remember that anything that I talk about, nothing is forced or you have to do this or you should do this. Our businesses are so individual and custom to us and our skills and our experience and our lives and our seasons of life and all of the things that make us up.
And there is no one-size-fits-all strategy or way to market our business other than what is working for us at the moment. I think I'm getting a little bit on a soapbox because lately I have seen some very generic information and guidance out there from others that's you have to do this and you know, you have to do that and your business is gonna fail if you don't do this.
And I just can't stand that. So we don't have a business to have other people guilt us into what we should be doing. We have a business because we wanna be in control. We have businesses for a lot of reasons, but part of it, I'm assuming, is to be in control and to be able to decide for us how we run it. And if that's on social media, great. If that's with a newsletter, great. If that's with in-person events, great. Like, there's just so many options.
So all that to say, is a newsletter right for you? Take the time to think about that. And remember, you still have to get people on your email list, which we're gonna talk about on the podcast here soon.
I'm also going to be cohosting a workshop with the amazing Natalie Silver from Silver Scribe Editorial Services in November 2025 inside the Freelance Editors Club. And we're gonna be talking about building and sustaining a newsletter. Natalie has an amazing newsletter. She sends it out monthly. I binge-read it as soon as I get it in my inbox, like she's one of the people that I subscribe to and when I see it, I'm like, yep, I wanna read what she has to say.
So she's gonna share her tips and strategies with us. And if you want to join us, you can always go to TaraWhitaker.com/Club and we've got the 14-day free trial. If you're in the free trial, you can still come to the workshop or if you are a paying member, come to the workshop and it's gonna be great. I'm very excited.
So until next time, keep learning, keep growing, and remember to build your business on platforms within your control.
Thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode. If you enjoy The Modern Editor Podcast, I would be so grateful if you left a review over on Apple Podcasts or wherever you consume podcasts. And don't forget, you can head to TaraWhitaker.com to connect with me and stay in touch. We'll chat again soon.