The Ultimate Guide to Writing an Engineering Newsletter (Part 2)
How to Write, Grow and Monetize your Engineering Newsletter
In the first part of this guide, we explored all the stages that, based on my experience, are necessary to start writing an engineering newsletter.
Specifically, we covered:
🙋♂️ Stage 0: understanding the benefits and challenges of writing a newsletter for engineers.
❓ Stage 1: how to find topics and subjects to write about.
🛠️ Stage 2: examining which platforms are best suited for publishing your engineering newsletter.
If you've followed the first part, you should now be ready to begin writing, which is precisely what we will delve into today.
In detail, we will explore:
✍️ Stage 3: how to write a newsletter and the process I use to do it.
📈 Stage 4: strategies to grow your newsletter from zero to thousands of subscribers.
💰 Stage 5: methods to start monetizing your newsletter.
There’s a lot to cover, so let's get started!
✍️ Stage 3 - How to Write an Engineering Newsletter
Writing is an art that requires practice, patience, and a bit of creativity. It's about expressing your thoughts, sharing your knowledge, and engaging with your audience in a way that resonates with them.
Overcoming the Fear of Public Writing
Writing can be at the same time a great way to free up your thoughts and something scary. The fear of judgment and the misconception that one needs formal training to write effectively often stop many people with valuable ideas from sharing them.
I felt this way for many years. Then, in January 2023, after observing and reading other newsletters, I started reflecting on the following things:
👉 Most people don't write publicly, so they will more likely admire you doing this rather than criticize you.
👉 While there are great courses on how to write online, most people who write online haven't taken any; they simply started writing.
When you start writing a newsletter, unless you are someone already publicly exposed (which probably means you have already shared your thoughts in some way), your audience will be very small, if you have any at all.
All these reflections finally made me overcome my fear of writing.
My Writing Process
Before starting to write this newsletter, I went through many tutorials on how to write essays, experiences of other writers, best practices, and so on. Although they were all great and introduced me to many new concepts, I quickly found them to be overwhelming due to my limited time.
Having a family and a full-time job means I cannot dedicate entire weeks to writing.
Therefore, I had to optimize my process to accommodate the 5-6 hours available weekly.
It can be summarized in seven steps: