How often should you send your newsletter?

If you're spinning up a newsletter and have chosen a topic you're passionate about, it's time to decide the second most important thing — how often you're publishing!

There are three main criteria that your publishing cadence should fulfill. Let's introduce them, and then talk about each more in depth.

Your ideal publishing cadence should be:

1. Maintainable over a very long period of time.
2. Frequent enough that your audience stays informed and engaged with your work.
3. Concurrent with your success criteria and subject matter.

Maintainability

I'm gonna get the most important thing out of the way first: the most common — and the most dangerous — way newsletters fail is by burning themselves out.

Newsletters — just like any sort of content creation, like a podcast or a video series or anything! — are a serious commitment! They take time and energy and can feel often feel Sisyphean, especially in the early goings when it might feel like you're writing to an empty room.

Frequency

On the other side of the spectrum — it might be infinitely easy to maintain a publishing cadence of "whenever I have time and/or feel like it", but your subscribers will not be having a great time.

Subscribers — and the finicky email algorithms that make sure they see your writing front and center — like consistency. Consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, but consistency — even at a very slow publishing cadence, like once a month or once a quarter — is the key to success:

1. It's easy for you to build the habit of writing and sending if you know you need to always have something ready to go by, say, Friday morning.
2. It primes your subscriber base to expect your email in their inbox, which means they'll read and engage with it more.
3. It provides an air of professionalism and stability that is important for almost any success criteria, whether its driving folks to be patrons of your writing or establishing your credibility as a consultant.

If you run something monthly, your subscriber base will grow very slowly. Eventually, it almost felt like it’s not worth it. The impact was too low and I wanted to see results. Also, very few people wait for or expect a monthly email. Learn how Stefan Judis uses Buttondown ↗

Concurrency

The final variable — and the trickiest to reason about sometimes — is to make sure your publishing cadence matches what you're writing about.

If you're largely commenting on breaking news or industry buzz, temporality is everything!

Conversely, if you're trying to write long-form, atemporal pieces, publishing every week will cheapen the effect that an email has on your subscribers.

The hidden variable: email length

There is one cheat code to the publishing cadence discussion that gets overlooked fairly often, which is (roughly):

Writing one 500 word emails is about the same amount of effort as two 250 word emails.

This is not exactly true, of course — there are lots of fixed costs to writing an email, like lining up sponsors or coming up with subjects and so on — but it's mostly true, especially when you're planning out your time.

So if you find yourself really confident that, say, the right cadence for you is three-times-a-week but you're a little skittish about the commitment that entails... maybe experimenting with shorter-form or commentary/riff-driven emails as opposed to longer, extemporaneous missives is the way to go!

All of this is to say:

If you expected this essay to end with a conclusion along the lines of: "therefore, just write a weekly newsletter and be done with it", I hate to disappoint. The right schedule does not exist: there's only a schedule that best aligns with your goals, commitments, and energy level.