Training Newsletter (on newsletters lol)

Last week on one of our lecture calls (by the way you should join the next one, they're on Fridays at 1 PM PST) I asked the group that joined what they wanted help with.

Someone said, “Newsletters and how you align them with short-form content like tweets?"

This is actually a pretty good question for a few reasons…

1. You can offer this as a service to others and charge skrilla
2. You can do it for yourself  and make skrilla
3. A lot of people overcomplicate this and that's silly

One of my previous clients, Daniel Fazio, I wrote his newsletter for about a year and it brought in close to $1M in revenue with this formula I’m going to share with you.

It’s simple. It’s easy. It’s fast. It’s efficient.

So here’s a high-level overview of my process that I would walk a client through if I was working with them from scratch:

Step 1: Creative Brief For Client

You only need to do this once. Schedule a meeting with your client to discuss their goals with the newsletter, and then from there interview them to produce a Creative Brief 

(You can check these out inside of the VSL course or the AI course inside Skool to get more info on how to craft them - it’s a longer topic)

When we have a clear understanding of what the client is aiming to achieve (specific promos vs. general nurturing) and we understand who we are writing too, only then can we get started. 

Step 2: Pick 1 Problem/Desire As The Central Theme 

Going through the Creative Brief I would pick one problem from our problem list section or one desire or one feature/benefit of the product. The point is to pick one CENTRAL THEME that we will focus on for the week.

For example, if your client is in the fitness industry, a problem could be "struggling to lose weight"...this is a broad enough problem that we can use to create some diverse-ish content.

Again, we choose one theme per week to maintain focus and clarity.

Step 3: List out all the sub-problems/sub-desires that come from that problem

Break down the main problem or desire into smaller, more specific issues.

For the "struggling to lose weight" example, sub-problems could include: lack of motivation, low energy, don’t know what to eat etc.

Step 4: Come up with newsletter topics based on those topics

Use the sub-problems and sub-desires to generate newsletter topics. We want to aim for a healthy mix of informative, entertaining, and actionable content.

Usually I’ll just spend 5-10 minutes brain storming on what to do here, just like this:

Lack of motivation = Mice and butter (this is a great story from the book, the compound effect. I love using this one for motivation)

Low Energy = remember the 25 year old you? (This can be like a hey remember when you weren’t all lazy and shit, what if you could get that back?

Don’t know what to eat = the dreaded menu (tell a fictional story that involves them going to work dinner and ordering from the menu seeing what they ordered vs what jacked employee Chad ordered) 

The point is to just get ideas out there and not judge them. Stories, analogies, fables, experience, wisdom, etc. all work great

Step 5: Write newsletter drafts

Once I have a general understanding of what the email is about, who I’m writing it to, if there’s a call to action or not, etc. what I’ll do is I’ll take all that information and I’ll feed it to a bot like Claude.

The prompt will look something like, “Hey Claude, can you take all this information and put together a 3000 word blog post that is written in a similar manner to my creative brief” or something similar. Shit, you can even have Dan Kennedy write your stuff for you if you want that’s how cool AI is.

Then it spits out a first draft for each newsletter, so we should have 3 or 4 of these things.

Step 6: Edit into final drafts

So Claude is meant to give us a good starting baseline for what some of the writing inside of the newsletter could look like. It’s not to say that we’re going to use all of it though. These large language models vary on quality based on the specificity of the detail and if there’s anything that it can actually pull to use for reference.

Would I like to do is just sit down and start editing, I remove the things I don’t like, I keep the things that I do like, I expand in the ways that I wanna expand…

It’s pretty straightforward. This is how I remove that AI feeling from what I’m writing. Nobody can tell that it’s AI because it’s highly edited, it’s like I wrote it, I just didn’t have to do 60 to 70% of the work lol.

With this newsletter, help me put together some of the structure on it but right now you’re reading me.

Step 6: Edit into short form tweets

Extract the key points from your newsletter and turn them into concise tweets.

We want to take the best nuggets from what you wrote and what was put into the newsletter and then turn that into tweets.

You could do this manually, or you can also run it through AI. Just feed it the text as a hole and ask it to turn it into short tweets that are under 280 characters, you’ll have to play around with the prompt sometimes it gives you way too many emojis and hashtags which you also want to tell Claude or GPT to not do. Looks gay.

Step 7: Schedule and send newsletters + tweets

Then all you need to do is just schedule everything out and I would have it be that if you’re sending out three newsletters a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday) then you have the content for that newsletter on those days (newsletter 1 extracted tweets - Monday + Tuesday, newsletter 2 extracted tweets - Wednesday + Thursday, etc.) and that’s pretty much it

The key here guys is to keep things simple and to create a system that works for you.

Even when I was stacking multiple clients doing this, getting everyone done in a day over a few cups of coffee was very manageable.

All I did was plan what I was going to write (steps 1-3) and it made everything else very easy.

Use this process and you’ll save a lot of time and produce some great work.

Hope you find this useful for you and/or your clients.