Last night, I had some ideas while taking a shower about improving my learning process and my newsletter format. My thoughts were about picking a text every Sunday and study it during the week, creating Zettelkasten notes, and a final article discussing my ideas about the content. So my first question was how could I leverage this process using this blog. Maybe creating a /reading page in which I insert the article and the notes? Push notification to remember to choose a text?
I don't know the answer yet, but it can immensely power my newsletter. Until now, I only sent some notes I make during the week to my subscribers; let's call it "Newsletter v0." However, creating them this way didn't aggregate much value to my readers because they were random notes without some connection.
Well, but what do the reading project and the newsletter have to do with each other? Leverage, because with one action, I can do many other things. My weekly reading can power my newsletter. During the week, I'd have some insights about the topic, and I'd write many notes and tweets to share my studies, and I can use them to create the text I'll send to my subscribers. My newsletter transforms into a summary of my weekly reading with this format, which provides more value because the content will have a meaningful bond with a specific topic.
Newsletter Format
The newsletter template format has three parts: Reading, Twitter, and Spacing Effect.
- Reading: it's the main section. It is my considerations of the text I read during the week. In the best case, I'll share an article that I wrote. In the worst case, the link and some insights of the text that I read.
- Twitter: this item is a tweet that I wrote in the past week, with a high probability of correlating with the reading topic.
- Spacing Effect: this item cannot be correlated with the reading topic because it'll be a random flashcard post to apply the spacing effect.
I plan to send the news every Tuesday, at 10:00 -3 GMT (I need to find out the best time) because it's one of the best times to send an email. Also, I'll prepare the content every morning on Sunday, which we can see as a reading closing. After finish this first stage, I'll choose another topic to read in the following week. So my habit staking of the Sunday morning is closing the current subject and choosing a new one to study.
Revue
I use, and I'll continue to use Revue to create and deliver my newsletter. I like it because I can automate many process steps using its API and browser extensions to add items to the issues. Another benefit is that Revue has integration with many social media platforms, sending my newsletter to my subscribers and my followers on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Even posts on Medium it publishes for me. Revue also facilitates the creation of a paid subscription with the Members feature. Unfortunately, it's infeasible to monetize my newsletter right now because I have some steps to do to create value for my subscribers, but it's on my plans to do it.
Content
I won't follow a particular topic in the following months. My personal goal is to create a broader knowledge base of as many subjects as I can. I read from biology, hormones, for example, to articles about #startups. I'm going to share my range of studies through the newsletter.
What Do I Want to Achieve?
The first goal is to improve my learning habit. It'd be amazing when I cultivate the habit of studying a topic per week, close it, share with other people, and start to read a new different topic. I hope I receive many feedbacks because it can improve the issues I investigate, and on top of that, I can meet amazing people.
I also want to use this process to tweet more. I have an "excuse" to tweet for every thought I have while reading and making notes. Tweeting is part of my plan to be comfortable exposing my ideas on social media.
Do I want to be famous? Well, I'd enjoy it if I had many subscribers or followers on Twitter, but it's not my main goal. Nevertheless, I'll try hard to achieve this because it'll be a metric of how impactful I'll be with the world.