I do a combination blog/newsletter article once a month as my main form of marketing for my practice. Audience-building, like you said. Someone told me I had to do a newsletter eleven (!) years ago, and this is what I came up with. It took a long time to build up enough to bear fruit, but these days a lot of people find me (or remember that I'm there) via the articles & website.
The monthly discipline of it is a drag sometimes, but I always manage to find a topic, put something together, and send it out. I like that I find out what I have to say, and the commitment to myself to send *something* gets me past the inner censor that says it's not worth saying. I realized recently that yes, the writing is still hard each month - creating something new *is* hard.
I had to ignore what I thought a newsletter looks like to come up with what worked for me. You could create your own format. Sounds like you want something short, with a poem or an image (or both). I bet you could come up with something once a month that you want to send out. You could think of it as an offering, a gift to the people on your list.
Best wishes with negotiating with your pathologically aggressive diffidence (lovely phrase!) and I look forward to seeing what you come up with. I do get less anxious about pressing Send on the newsletters than I did the first year or two, and I've only ever gotten two pieces of hate mail in response, which is pretty darn good for today's Internet.
no subject
The monthly discipline of it is a drag sometimes, but I always manage to find a topic, put something together, and send it out. I like that I find out what I have to say, and the commitment to myself to send *something* gets me past the inner censor that says it's not worth saying. I realized recently that yes, the writing is still hard each month - creating something new *is* hard.
I had to ignore what I thought a newsletter looks like to come up with what worked for me. You could create your own format. Sounds like you want something short, with a poem or an image (or both). I bet you could come up with something once a month that you want to send out. You could think of it as an offering, a gift to the people on your list.
Best wishes with negotiating with your pathologically aggressive diffidence (lovely phrase!) and I look forward to seeing what you come up with. I do get less anxious about pressing Send on the newsletters than I did the first year or two, and I've only ever gotten two pieces of hate mail in response, which is pretty darn good for today's Internet.