Are you stuck on what to write about in your email newsletters? Here’s how to create content for emails if you don’t consider yourself a writer.

Instead of starting from scratch, I like to use what others are already writing as a basis to create content for myself. I’ve fond that the online question and answer (Q&A) websites are a great place to provide a baseline for a blog post (and therefore an email newsletter, since I my blog posts as my newsletter).

No matter what type of business you’re running this approach will work.

First of all, what’s an online Q&A site?

Q&A sites aggregate questions and answers on just about any range of topics. People can collaborate by editing questions and suggesting edits to other users’ answers, thereby creating a community focused on those asking for help and those willing to give it for free.

There’s a number of sites out there and virtually all are free. Some are broad based like Quora and other’s address a very specific audience, like Stackoverflow (for techies).  Here’s a list of question and answer sites, if you’re interested.

Why are they a good source for email content?

Here’s a simple equation to explain my rationale.

[A] If people are taking the time to talk about a subject and ask strangers to help them then the subject matter must be pretty important to them. They’ve probably, tried searching Google for help and got stuck. Often it’s much much more productive if they can get the input of an expert.

[B] If there’s a ton of people asking the SAME question and there’s a vibrant discussion involving others wanting to contribute, then it’s probably a safe assumption that many more people across the web (including your audience) would be interested in a newsletter on the topic.

[C] By editorializing content that has already been created by others, much of the writing leg work has already been done for me. Instead, of having to work out what to write about all I need do is interpret and paraphrase what’s already out there. It’s like being the museum curator pulling together an exhibit, in my case my exhibit is made of curated content.

[A] + [B] + [C] = create content in less time with high relevance and guaranteed interest.

Here’s the steps I go through to when creating blog / newsletter content in this way. I like to use Quora as my source Q&A webite.

Step 1: Pick your keyword topic

So I’m not wandering too much in the dark when I get to Quora, I have a topic or keyword in mind first. Ideally, I like to have this fit with my overall keyword strategy.

For a moment, lets assume I’m a consultant running a media business called “Downward Dog PR”. As the name suggests my audience is people who run Yoga studios or those who are looking to get started.

One of the topics I know that is important to my audience involves the costs and logistics of running a studio and especially around “getting started with a Yoga Studio”.

Therefore, I’m going to login to Quora.com and search for questions and discussions around this topic. First I run a basic search for “Yoga studio” (see results). I’m starting with a broad search term because I want to get an idea of what is trending around Yoga.

I could have started with a more targeted term such as “yoga start-up” or “start-up costs for yoga”. You can try both approaches.

flashissue quora create content

 

As, you see there’s a varied list of questions being asked around this search term, many of which aren’t relevant to me. This is to be expected given the broad nature of the search term and it’s fine because it’s just my starting point.

Step 2: Find 3 Questions that directly relate to my key phrase.

Now I start digging deeper. The fourth question down on my original search looks to be a good candidate.

yoga question create content

When I click to open the question I see the nuts and bolts of the discussion. Here’s what I’m looking for:

  1. The quality of the answers are good i.e. relevant and specific. 
  2. There’s been a good level of interest around the question.
  3. There’s at least 1 more relevant questions I can link to from this one.

flashissue create content yoad question

 

I like this question because it’s meets my 3 criteria (view question):

  1. There’s good source material here for my newsletter, especially all the external links to content about starting a yoga studio.
  2. It’s been viewed by 3,951 people which means it has good interest to my audience and there are 12 followers.
  3. I have at least one link to another similar question.

I then find 2 or 3 other similar questions, each of which give me even more content and links for creating my newsletter.

It’s pretty easy to find additional questions at this stage because every question I open has suggested  links to other similar questions.

Step 3: Create a master document of the relevant content.

Now I want to filter out all the relevant content that will be useful for my newsletter.

I copy / paste the relevant parts of the Quora answers to a Google doc (view doc online or download pdf). Just to be clear at this stage. I am not recommending that your final newsletter becomes a list of glued together paragraphs taken from Quora.

Not only do I not want to go around taking other’s content, I also want my final newsletter to flow and read well. It should always  be personal to me.

The purpose of the Google doc is NOT to create a finished piece, all I want is a rough draft for my newsletter. It’s sort of like using  Spark notes to write that essay at school.

Once I’ve built out my Google doc, I open another doc and start writing my finished newsletter (this can then be pasted into my blog site and my newsletter service for sending out. Of course, I use Flashissue to create my newsletter.

The whole issue of not knowing what to write is now taken care of.

In fact, I often have too much content (a much better position to be in).

 

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