Consistency, timing, psychology, resources.. everything you need to make your decision on how often to publish.

If you&#39;re spinning up a newsletter and have chosen a topic you&#39;re passionate about, it&#39;s time to decide the second most important thing — how often you&#39;re publishing!
There are three main criteria that your publishing cadence should fulfill. Let&#39;s introduce them, and then talk about each more in depth.
Your ideal publishing cadence should be:
<ol>
<li>Maintainable over a very long period of time.</li>
<li>Frequent enough that your audience stays informed and engaged with your work.</li>
<li>Concurrent with your success criteria and subject matter.</li>
</ol>
<h3 id="maintainability">Maintainability</h3>
I&#39;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&#39;re writing to an empty room.
<h3 id="frequency">Frequency</h3>
On the other side of the spectrum — it might be infinitely easy to maintain a publishing cadence of &quot;whenever I have time and/or feel like it&quot;, 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:
<ol>
<li>It&#39;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.</li>
<li>It primes your subscriber base to expect your email in their inbox, which means they&#39;ll read and engage with it more.</li>
<li>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.</li>
</ol>
<blockquote className="relative py-0 [*>p]:my-0">
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.
<a href="https://buttondown.email/stories/stefan-judis" className="absolute bottom-3 right-3 bg-blue-500 px-2 inline-block text-white font-bold no-underline hover:bg-blue-700 transition-colors">Learn how Stefan Judis uses Buttondown ↗</a>
</blockquote>

<h3 id="concurrency">Concurrency</h3>
The final variable — and the trickiest to reason about sometimes — is to make sure your publishing cadence matches what you&#39;re writing about.
If you&#39;re largely commenting on breaking news or industry buzz, temporality is everything!
Conversely, if you&#39;re trying to write long-form, atemporal pieces, publishing every week will cheapen the effect that an email has on your subscribers.
<h3 id="the-hidden-variable-email-length">The hidden variable: email length</h3>
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&#39;s mostly true, especially when you&#39;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&#39;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!
<h3 id="all-of-this-is-to-say">All of this is to say:</h3>
If you expected this essay to end with a conclusion along the lines of: &quot;therefore, just write a weekly newsletter and be done with it&quot;, I hate to disappoint. The right schedule does not exist: there&#39;s only a schedule that best aligns with your goals, commitments, and energy level.

How often should you send your newsletter?

Cutting through the buzzwords and helping you get new subscribers.

So, you’ve created a newsletter. Presumably you want people to read the newsletter. Now that your mom has subscribed, a dilemma arises: how to find more readers?
Actually, this dilemma persists even if your newsletter is successful, because writers always want to expand their reach. That’s the magic of writing — it’s not just communication, but scalable communication. You can write once and reach many people.
Whether your mailing list is brand new or several thousand emails deep, you probably want to grow your subscriber base. Offering a lead magnet is an effective method to lure in new readers.
Admittedly, the word “lure” implies one of those mermaids who drowns lonesome sailors. Don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be like that! Ideally, your lead magnet is more like the sidewalk sign outside your favorite brunch spot, advertising bottomless mimosas to passersby.
A lead magnet is something you offer for free in exchange for the recipient’s contact information. It’s such a powerful technique because:
<ol>
<li>People love free stuff. As a general principle.</li>
<li>The people who want your free thing in particular are especially interested in the topic, and thus make a great audience for your writing… plus any paid products or services you may offer.</li>
</ol>
Back in ye olden days, the bank would give you a free toaster if you signed up for an account. The gimmick was powerful enough to <a href="https://thefinancialbrand.com/news/checking-accounts/the-toaster-effect-free-gifts-can-boost-new-account-openings-by-15-or-more-160914/">become</a> “a banking cliche, but that’s probably because it works.”
<div class="bg-green-100 p-4 [&>p]:my-4 [&>p]:!text-[18px] [&>p]:!leading-[28px] w-1/2 ml-8 mb-4 float-right">
Definition

A lead magnet is a valuable free resource that you offer to your website visitors in exchange for their email address. This could be:
• an ebook, 
• a checklist, 
• a template, 
• any other content that your target audience would find helpful.
By providing a desirable asset up-front, you can entice more people to subscribe to your newsletter and continue receiving valuable information from you.
</div>

<blockquote>
</blockquote>
Basically every single ecommerce website does this. “Join our mailing list for 15% off your first purchase!” Of course, the hope is that the discount code will be a deal-sweetener that prompts you to buy something immediately. But even if you submit your email, then get distracted while browsing and don’t make a purchase, it’s still a win. Now the brand has a ticket to your inbox They can send reminders about your abandoned cart, alert you to new collections, announce future sales, etc.
The “lead” part of “lead magnet” refers to the sales jargon of leads — people who might buy your product if “nurtured,” AKA reminded of your existence a few times. (A lead moves down the funnel to becomes a prospect once a relationship is established.)
You’ve probably been on the other side of this equation, encountering various offers around the web. I bet you hemmed and hawed about whether you wanted the free pre-formatted spreadsheet — or whatever — enough to bother signing up for an account. Does this 15% discount outweigh the consequences to my inbox? That’s why Gmail invented the Promotions tab.
I gotta admit, personally I almost always decline. I’d rather avoid the bother of unsubscribing from the newsletter later. Some people have a separate throwaway email they use to sign up for offers, the inbox of which is ignored. (Honestly a good strategy, I should start doing that…)
There’s the rub. Your lead magnet has to be good enough to be worth it. Ideally it’s so good — so well-targeted — that people are excited to start receiving emails from you. In the best case, joining your mailing list feels like an extra perk rather than a cost.
How do you achieve that? Know your audience.
<h2 id="customer-persona">Customer Persona</h2>
Who is your ideal subscriber, and what do they want? Better yet, what problems do they have that you can solve? For example…
Let’s say you have a personal style newsletter. Your ideal subscriber is a late-30s woman named Samantha who works in an office. She’s pushing for a promotion this year, and she wants to make the jump from renter to homeowner before she turns 40. Samantha has a comfortable budget for clothes, but she’s not rolling in dough — she buys Coach purses, not Chanel. In other words, she’s budget-conscious enough to love a good sale, but the sale might be at Nordstrom.
Samantha feels vaguely unsettled by Gen Z becoming the “cool generation,” making fun of the millennial trends from her teens. Looking nice and feeling put-together is important to Samantha, but she’s anxious about the prospect of updating her wardrobe as her career advances. How should she balance the desire to be “with it,” not dowdy, with the desire to feel like herself? All without breaking the bank?
Samantha needs a guide to curating a professional capsule wardrobe that will transition easily from meetings to happy hour. She needs examples of adult but fashion-forward silhouettes. She needs help identifying which $50-150 blouses are worth it, due to the materials or construction quality, and which ones are a waste of her budget.
If an influencer she trusts offers one of those ideas as a free download, you know Samantha is swiping up for the link.
That’s enough about Samantha. We wish her well, but her particular concerns aren’t really the point. The point is that she has particular concerns — based on her identity, her lifestyle, and her hopes for the future. Your ideal subscriber does too, whoever they may be.
Imagine the person you’re trying to reach, in detail. What’s bothering them? How can you help them move toward their goals with confidence?
In fact, don’t just imagine your target audience. Find where they hang out online, and observe what they complain about.
This is a type of ethnography, and it’s how some of the biggest hit products were invented. Consider the <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/03/22/product-development-race-goes-swiffer/ddjA1UKErXX33B2Vx1rdsJ/story.html">origin story of the Swiffer</a>, which consultants created for Proctor &amp; Gamble:
<blockquote>
Continuum researchers videotaped people cleaning their homes and realized just how much people hated touching dirty mops. They also realized that most dirt in the home is primarily dust that could be picked up electrostatically.
</blockquote>
Paying attention to the people you want to serve is essential. In the case of the soon-to-be Swiffer, <a href="https://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2014/06/14/7876042.htm">close observation led to clever innovation</a>:
<blockquote>
It became clear that floor cleaning was a complex process. The women had to assemble a system of products to get the job done, most of which we had not initially thought of as being relevant to our business. We noticed that generally people swept the kitchen floor before they mopped it, so dustpans and brooms were part of the system. Often people wore old clothes because cleaning a floor was a dirty job. This was the first contradiction we noticed: when you clean, you get dirty. Often people had to move furniture to get easier access to the floor. We saw that people used vacuum cleaners on carpets, but vacuums did not work well on hard floors.
But the real epiphany came after we got back to our studio and looked at the videos. We listed each of the steps required to clean a floor: move furniture, sweep loose dirt, locate components, mix solution, prepare mop, and so on. It was a very mundane list, but when we put on our anthropologist hats and tried to see what was going on outside of any preexisting framework, we noticed something strange: about half the steps were for cleaning the floor; the other half were for cleaning the mop. If we had come down from Mars we might have concluded that the women were not floor cleaning, but mop cleaning! Why was this?
The experts on detergent chemistry had talked about a successive mixing model: dirt is dissolved or suspended in the soapy water stored in the cells of the mop; when the mop is rinsed, this dirt is mixed with the cleaner water in the bucket. As a result, the water in the mop gets cleaner and the water in the bucket gets dirtier. This might be a useful model if you&#39;re in the detergent business, but we were not sure that it was the right explanation for what we were seeing.
We looked more closely at dirty sponges. Under a microscope it was clear that most of the dirt was stuck to the outside surface of the sponge. We concluded that mops also worked by the adhesion of dirt to a cleaning surface. And then we recognized the second contradiction: the better a mop was at grabbing dirt off the floor, the more difficult it was to clean the mop itself.
From this process of ethnographic fieldwork and studio- based analysis, a clear set of design requirements emerged. We were looking for a solution that:
• Works for both sweeping and mopping; 
• Does not require you to clean the broom or mop after cleaning the floor; 
• Is clean to use and doesn&#39;t make you want to wear old clothes; 
• Is quick and fun so people want to clean more and can have cleaner homes.
</blockquote>
Get into that anthropological mindset and explore what your audience is currently doing. From their current behavior, and gripes, you can extract pain points to address with your content. Maybe you’re not about the reinvent the floor mop, but you should have the same approach as those researchers: figure out what’s really going on in your targets’ lives, and break down their problems.
Bear in mind that what people say in direct response to your queries is less meaningful than what they say spontaneously, and behavior is more important than both. To quote <a href="https://www.momtestbook.com/">The Mom Test, by Rob Fitzpatrick</a>:
<blockquote>
The world’s most deadly fluff is: ‘I would definitely buy that.’ It just sounds so concrete. As a founder, you desperately want to believe it’s money in the bank. But folks are wildly optimistic about what they would do in the future. They’re always more positive, excited, and willing to pay in the imagined future than they are once it arrives.
</blockquote>
<a href="https://graphite.dev/blog/the-mom-test">Greg Foster of Graphite read The Mom Test</a> and realized that he needed to think about his potential customers’ feedback differently:
<blockquote>
When I used to share my excitement about our iOS rollbacks concept, the usual response was overwhelmingly positive, but in hindsight it was probably just folks being nice to me.
Of course, my friend would tell me, “iOS rollbacks sound like a great idea!” But what I should have asked was:
• “When was the last time you googled for a way to roll back your iOS app?” 
• “Did you try the answers online?” 
• “You’re a great engineer, tell me about how you’ve hacked a solution here.” 
• “Given that you’ve hacked a solution, do you still google from time to time for something better?”
The key is to ask questions that dig deeper, inquiring about actual behavior, like whether someone has ever actively sought a solution like yours.
</blockquote>
Okay but wait, aren’t we talking about a free download of some kind? A lead magnet doesn’t mean selling anything. Well… yes and no. I said above that people love free stuff, and that’s a big part of why lead magnets are so effective. Still true!
But at the same time, you kinda are selling your offer. It’s just that the price is an email address. You still need to offer something valuable to make the trade.
For more, read “<a href="https://stackingthebricks.com/how-do-you-create-a-product-people-want-to-buy/">How do you create a product people want to buy</a>?” from business coach Amy Hoy. Notice the ways Amy uses the sales psychology that she describes on you.
<h2 id="the-magnet-itself">The Magnet Itself</h2>
Once you’ve figured out what subject to focus on, it’s time to think about format. There are many different types of lead magnet:
<ul>
<li>Ebook</li>
<li>Video course / training videos</li>
<li>Whitepaper / research report</li>
<li>Case study</li>
<li>Template</li>
<li>Cheatsheet / reference guide</li>
<li>List of ideas / swipe file</li>
<li>Quiz result</li>
<li>Early access</li>
<li>Community chat or forum</li>
<li>Anything else you can come up with!</li>
</ul>
As for how you present the lead magnet, it can have its own landing page, or be integrated into a blog post or article. Digital marketing guru Neil Patel <a href="https://neilpatel.com/blog/creating-irresistible-lead-magnet/">recommends</a> the “content upgrade” tactic, which doubles down on whatever information the reader is already perusing: “A lead magnet sweetens the pot by providing additional insight on the same exact topic they were reading about.”
<h3 id="author-lead-magnets">Author Lead Magnets</h3>
Sci-fi author Ryan Williamson uses <a href="https://bookfunnel.com/">BookFunnel</a> to deliver a free download his novella Land of the Black Sun, which he promotes to his followers on X:
<img src="/next-assets/img/lm7.jpeg" alt="landoftheblacksun.jpg">
<img src="/next-assets/img/lm6.png" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-15 at 3.29.24 PM.png">
The free novella is positioned as a “welcome gift” for joining the newsletter.
Bestselling novelist Ruth Ware writes psychological thrillers. On her website, she offers a <a href="https://ruthware.com/murdermysterypartygame/">free murder mystery party game</a> called The Detective Club Murder:
<img src="/next-assets/img/lm5.png" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-14 at 1.38.20 PM.png">
Interestingly, The Detective Club Murder isn’t gated at all — you don’t need to sign up for anything to get the download. Presumably Ware has decided it works the best when people actually play the game together. She has pre-packaged an experience that her devoted fans can use to create new ones.
This brings up an important point: What if people share the lead magnet after downloading it? That’s a good thing! It means you created something genuinely useful. Just make sure your information is included in the file so you’re easy to find. Notice the size of Ware’s byline on the first page of the game guide:
<img src="/next-assets/img/lm4.png" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-14 at 1.47.31 PM.png">
Ware also uses a more conventional lead magnet to invite newsletter subscribers — a free short story:
<img src="/next-assets/img/lm3.png" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-14 at 1.34.27 PM.png">
<img src="/next-assets/img/lm2.png" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-14 at 1.34.46 PM.png">
She also pitches the ongoing rewards of joining her newsletter.
The lead magnet for an author newsletter doesn’t necessarily have to be literary. Felicity and Selena Wilder offer a cookie recipe and a baby quilt pattern to promote their <a href="https://harmony-creek.com/">Harmony Creek</a> pioneer romances:
<img src="/next-assets/img/lm1.png" alt="Screenshot 2024-02-16 at 12.01.11 PM.png">
The idea is that the type of person who reads cozy historical romances likely also enjoys baking and crafting.
<hr>
Need more examples to inspire you? There are tons of lead magnet guides competing on Google, and I read a bunch of them to prepare for writing this post. I think these four are the most useful:
<ul>
<li>“How to create a <a href="https://zapier.com/blog/lead-magnet/">lead magnet that converts</a>”</li>
<li>“20 Eye-Catching <a href="https://wisepops.com/blog/lead-magnets">Lead Magnet Examples</a> [+Tutorial]”</li>
<li>“<a href="https://ahrefs.com/blog/lead-magnet/">Lead Magnets Explained</a>: Definition, Basics &amp; 17 Examples”</li>
<li>“How to <a href="https://www.leadpages.com/blog/15-ways-to-create-a-high-value-lead-magnet">Create a High-Value Lead Magnet</a> in 30 Minutes or Less” (warning, the “30 Minutes or Less” claim is ridiculous but otherwise this is a decent rundown)</li>
</ul>
Bonus: Every single one of those articles contains a CTA asking for your email, to remind you how it feels to be the target 
Speaking of CTAs…
<h2 id="call-to-action">Call To Action</h2>
The call to action is when you say, “Enter your email to get 24 scrumptious dumpling recipes!” Tell the reader what you want them to do, and why it will benefit them.
Here is where you emphasize the value proposition of your lead magnet. Distill its purpose into a sentence, focusing on what your prospective subscriber is trying to accomplish. Be specific.
Consider a few possibilities:
<ul>
<li>24 scrumptious dumpling recipes to impress your dinner party guests.</li>
<li>24 scrumptious dumpling recipes to meal-prep healthy lunches for your work week.</li>
<li>24 scrumptious dumpling recipes with easy step-by-step instructions for new cooks.</li>
<li>24 scrumptious dumpling recipes to make in big batches, freezer-friendly.</li>
<li>24 scrumptious dumpling recipes to feed your picky-eater kid.</li>
</ul>
In theory, these could all be the same 24 recipes. But the best pitch for downloading them depends on who you’re trying to reach, and the problem you’re trying to solve for them.
What if you’re trying to reach newsletter writers who want to grow their audiences? You might publish an in-depth explanation of how lead magnets work and how to create a good one. At the end, you might say…
<div className="bg-purple-100 p-4 border border-purple-300">
<div className="font-black text-center text-2xl mb-1">Get more insights. Grow your newsletter.</div>
<div className="text-center mb-8 text-lg leading-6">Join 36,000 writers, creators, and entrepreneurs learning how to grow their audience and spend more time doing what they love.</div>
<form
 action="https://buttondown.email/api/emails/embed-subscribe/buttondown"
 method="post"
 target="popupwindow"
 className="flex space-x-2 "
>
 <input
 type="email"
 name="email"
 placeholder="Your email address"
 className="border border-neutral-300 rounded-full border-solid p-1 px-4 w-full text-black text-md flex-2"
 />
 <input
 className="rounded-full bg-purple-600 w-full inline-block p-2 px-4 font-bold hover:bg-neutral-700 transition-colors text-white cursor-pointer text-sm flex-1"
 value={"Subscribe"}
 type="submit"
 />
</form>
</div>

That’s right. This whole post was a lead magnet  And you didn’t even have to enter your email to access it!

What the hell is a lead magnet?

Here's how to prepare for Gmail's 2024 sending requirements

Earlier this month, Google announced <a href="https://blog.google/products/gmail/gmail-security-authentication-spam-protection/">new protections to cut down on spam in Gmail</a>:
<blockquote>
These changes are like a tune-up for the email world, and by fixing a few things under the hood, we can keep email running smoothly. But just like a tune-up, this is not a one-time exercise. Keeping email more secure, user friendly and spam-free requires constant collaboration and vigilance from the entire email community. And we&#39;ll keep working together to make sure your inbox stays safe.
</blockquote>
These protections boil down to three points that apply to anyone sending more than 5,000 emails a day:
<ol>
<li>All emails need to be signed with DKIM and SPF.</li>
<li>All emails need to offer one-click unsubscribe.</li>
<li>All emails need to stay below a strict spam rate threshold.</li>
</ol>
The important thing up front: if you&#39;re a Buttondown user using our own domains, nothing changes for you. Buttondown already conforms to all three of these protections (and has for some time!) Yay! (If you&#39;re using a custom domain, you&#39;ll have to set a DMARC record soon — and we&#39;ll be in touch with more details there.)
More broadly, this is a good change, and we&#39;re happy Google is taking steps to curtail spam. There are a lot of decisions and directions that Gmail have made over the years that we&#39;re not huge fans of (remember AMP for email?), but this just makes good sense.
The vast majority of folks sending emails are well-intentioned good actors; the handful of malicious senders blasting out cold emails or making it hard to unsubscribe are poised to ruin the inbox — a sacred place, free of algorithmic meddling — for everyone. Cheers to Google for trying to keep the inbox sacred.

What you need to know about Gmail's new protections

Asking your subscribers to reply to your email helps everyone

Every month, I send an <a href="https://newsletter.buttondown.email/archive/buttondown-updates-from-march/">email roundup</a> to Buttondown&#39;s subscriber list about new features that are launched, upcoming work, and other interesting updates.
I end each email with some sort of exhortation to reply to the email:
<blockquote>
Loved this email? Hated this email? I want to hear about it! If you think there’s something that needs to be improved — or, even better, if there’s just something you wish was improved — reply to this email because I want to know more!
</blockquote>
Each time I do this, I get a lot of answers — last month, it was around 65.
This sounds like a fairly banal call-to-action, I know. But I&#39;m confident that some variation of &quot;plz reply&quot; is the best way to drive engagement, especially when you&#39;ve got a somewhat amorphous newsletter: this mailing list is a delightful cornucopia of potential customers, existing customers, and churned customers, so trying to be aggressive about selling isn&#39;t quite the right fit. (It&#39;s also, frankly, not my style!)
Here&#39;s why:
<ol>
<li>The email gods and goddesses love a reply. It&#39;s a signal that the email being replied to is important and genuine, and therefore deserves to be in the &#39;Primary&#39; tab as opposed to the &#39;Promotions&#39; tab.</li>
<li>It&#39;s a great way to qualify your subscribers and learn more about them. (<a href="https://buttondown.email/features/surveys">Surveys</a> also work really well here!)</li>
<li>It&#39;s a huge font of information for what folks find interesting! Almost all of Buttondown&#39;s blog topics — including this very one — come from replies.</li>
</ol>
To quote from Brennan Dunn&#39;s <a href="https://createandsell.co/issues/always-have-something-to-write-about/">excellent newsletter</a>:
<blockquote>
This is also a more reactive way of listening. Why? Because you can reply to those emails with, &quot;This is such a great question, Brennan. Would you mind if I reply to this as a dedicated email to my list?&quot;
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
This becomes a win for them (a much more thorough reply than they&#39;d get if you were sending something 1:1), and a win for you – another piece of shareable content that reacts to an actual need someone has.
</blockquote>

The reply loop

One weird trick to make sure your content calendar is never empty

<h2 id="introduction">Introduction</h2>
Whenever you haven&#39;t sent an email in more than 45 days, Buttondown sends a friendly little reminder (just one — we&#39;re not monsters!) that ends with a call-to-action: if there&#39;s anything we can do to help alleviate your writer&#39;s block, reply and let us know!
A customer wrote in with a common question:
<blockquote>
Hey Justin — I love Buttondown the tool but I must confess that I&#39;ve come down with a serious case of writer&#39;s block, as you say. It was very easy to send out the first few editions of the newsletter but as I got further and further down the line it became increasingly difficult to come up with new ideas about what to write. How do you find topics?
</blockquote>
There&#39;s one word that I lasered in on there — can you guess what it is?
It&#39;s new. New ideas about what to write.
I am sure there is a cute term for this fallacy, but I don&#39;t know what it is, so I&#39;m going to call it the writer-audience context gap. (Okay, that&#39;s not a cute term at all.)
<h2 id="the-writer-audience-context-gap">The writer-audience context gap</h2>
The writer-audience context gap refers to a simple fallacy:
<ol>
<li>You&#39;re intimately aware with everything you&#39;ve ever written — your tweets, your blog posts, your newsletter, your pillar pages, all of it!</li>
<li>Only a miniscule subset of your audience has actually consumed everything you&#39;ve ever written.</li>
<li>So what seems like it might be &quot;recycled&quot; material (taking a tweet from six months ago and expanding it into a longer-form email; re-running an old blog post with additional commentary; etc.) to you is actually brand new to the vast majority of your readers</li>
</ol>
Here&#39;s the big secret: most of the best content writing and marketing can sound like screaming into the void over and over, like a radio tower not quite sure of who&#39;s picking up on the broadcast.
<img src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1515436080986-1ca7a3fa51ec?ixlib=rb-4.0.3&ixid=M3wxMjA3fDB8MHxwaG90by1wYWdlfHx8fGVufDB8fHx8fA%3D%3D&auto=format&fit=crop&w=1170&q=80" alt="Your mission is to be a radio tower: broadcast important information over and over to the right people.">
Lean into this! Whenever you&#39;re feeling at wit&#39;s end about what to write, pore through your archives — on Buttondown and otherwise — to see what can be revisited or upcycled. The best writers have a handful of messages that their entire audience knows well, not dozens of messages that are lightly diffused across their audience.

Ask the experts: How do I come up with content?

Software may not last forever, but it should last longer than this.

Google Domains is <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-15/alphabet-selling-google-domains-assets-to-squarespace">being sold to Squarespace</a>, per Bloomberg.
This is the latest — the 286th, in fact — in a long line of <a href="https://killedbygoogle.com/">defunct Google projects</a>.
What are we to do? What lessons can we learn from yet another product — one that was healthy, well-recommended, and perfectly functional — being sold off and abandoned?
No piece of closed-source software can promise to last forever — as Big K.R.I.T. reminds us, <a href="https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/big-krit-4eva-is-a-mighty-long-time/">forever is a mighty long time</a>, and I think it&#39;s fair to treat any promises of &quot;forever&quot; with a good amount of suspicion.
But you can certainly increase the average lifespan of the tools you use by asking yourself a simple question:
<blockquote>
Could this piece of software, as it currently exists, stand with its current market and functionality in its current organization for a decade without catastrophe?
</blockquote>
This eliminates, for instance, software that runs on a negative cash-flow basis with hopes of stumbling into advantageous unit economics or a new business model somewhere along the way.
This eliminates, for instance, software that represents a 0.0001% component of a company&#39;s top-line revenue — if the company has a mandate that all projects must purport to be sufficiently large lines of business or else they&#39;re failures.
All of this to say: Buttondown has been a happy <a href="https://dnsimple.com/">DNSimple</a> customer for years on end, and is even prouder to be one today. (<a href="https://porkbun.com/">Porkbun</a> looks excellent, too.)

What can we learn from Google Domains?

We looked at 170 newsletters' sticker rates for sponcon. Here's what we found!

<h2 id="tldr">TL;DR</h2>
Start with $.50/click. Adjust down if you&#39;re having trouble filling inventory; adjust up if you&#39;re consistently booked.
<h2 id="whered-you-come-up-with-that-number">Where&#39;d you come up with that number?</h2>
We looked at 170 newsletters across newsletter advertising marketplaces like <a href="https://www.passionfroot.me/">Passionfroot</a>, <a href="https://sponsorgap.com/">Sponsorgap</a>, and <a href="https://paved.com">Paved</a> — selecting only newsletters which fit the following criteria:
<ol>
<li>Published subscriber counts and click rates;</li>
<li>Published sticker rates for pricing;</li>
<li>Actually had bookings.</li>
</ol>
From there, the math is simple: <code>sticker_price / (subscriber_count * click_rate)</code>. The median came out to a very satisfying <code>0.52</code> cost-per-click.
This is, of course, a naive inquiry — these numbers vary based on niche, brand reputation, and a thousand other things. But if you&#39;re jumping into sponsorships for the first time (on either side of the table!), this is a good heuristic to anchor to.
<h2 id="what-about-affiliate-pricing">What about affiliate pricing?</h2>
Some larger, more sophisticated sponsorships go instead with an affiliate model: rather than charging per click, they charge per conversion. Some examples as pulled from <a href="https://postapex.com/">PostApex</a>:
<ul>
<li>DigitalOcean pays out an 8% affiliate fee for all sales generated</li>
<li>99designs pays out $4 per sale</li>
<li>ClickUp pays out $15 per lead</li>
</ul>
Affiliate pricing can be very attractive for two reasons:
<ol>
<li>Most affiliate links are self-serve and require very little creative back-and-forth. They can be good &#39;mortar ads&#39; to fill in empty slots in your booking schedule.</li>
<li>If you&#39;ve got a particularly niche-y newsletter and a sponsor that&#39;s going to appeal strongly with the niche, you can capture more value by aligning your revenue with theirs.</li>
</ol>
...but it&#39;s hard to jump right into the affiliate game. Conversions are rare and noisy (meaning subject to statistical noise) relative to just having a simple sticker rate.

What to charge for sponsorships on your newsletter

Write as much as you need to, but no more and no less.

<h2 id="introduction">Introduction</h2>
Buttondown is a tool for sending newsletters of all types: marketing-y ones for Shopify stores, thought-leader-y ones for folks selling consulting services and info-products, silly ones for folks running small private newsletters.
The single most common &quot;how do I send emails better?&quot;-type question we get is: &quot;how long should my emails be?&quot;
There is a lot of folk wisdom floating around this question, often coming from well-intentioned but poorly-reasoned places. &quot;Keep it short and sweet!&quot; &quot;Have exactly two CTAs, one after the third paragraph and one at the end!&quot; &quot;Keep people in the inbox as long as possible!&quot;
I don&#39;t have a particularly principled answer to this question, but I do have a bunch of data...
<h2 id="methodology">Methodology</h2>
Here&#39;s how I collected the data:
<ul>
<li>I sample one hundred thousand bulk emails sent from Buttondown over the last twelve months.</li>
<li>I calculate the word count of each email, clamping it to the nearest hundred.</li>
<li>I then calculate the click rate of each email.</li>
</ul>
A couple caveats:
<ul>
<li>Buttondown has click tracking turned off by default. Naturally, this means the one hundred thousand emails must specifically come from newsletters who have opted into click tracking.</li>
<li>Clicks are defined as a unique tuple of &quot;URL, subscriber&quot; — so if a subscriber clicks the same link twice, it only counts as one click, but if they click two different links, it counts as two clicks.</li>
<li>I discarded emails with word counts below 50 and above 3000, as they were fairly noisy and did little else than clutter the final resulting graph.</li>
<li>I ignored clicks outside the context of the email itself (such as &#39;view on web&#39; or &#39;unsubscribe&#39; links), though I think those will be interesting for follow-up analyses</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="data">Data</h2>
You&#39;re here for the headline, not the flowery prose, so let me jump to the interesting stuff:
<img src="/next-assets/img/click-rate.png" alt="">
Unsatisfying, I know. No pretty linear relationship! No mandate to write exactly X words per email, and no more!
I think you should take this as instead as a simple lesson: write the correct number of words for your email. If you&#39;re writing a short, pithy newsletter, don&#39;t pad it out with fluff. If you&#39;re writing a long, thoughtful essay, don&#39;t cut it short because you&#39;re worried about click rate.
<h2 id="further-analyses">Further analyses</h2>
I think playing around with this dataset is fun and useful, and I plan to do more of it in the future. Here are some ideas I have:
<ul>
<li>How does the presence/absence of a pre-header affect open rate?</li>
<li>How does the length of a subject line affect open rate?</li>
<li>Do questions in subject lines increase open rate?</li>
</ul>
If you have any ideas, please <a href="mailto:justin@buttondown.email">reach out</a> — I&#39;d love to hear them!

Email length doesn't affect click rate

How to use Buttondown's image API to easily draft beautiful Markdown newsletters in Typora

<h2 id="introduction">Introduction</h2>
If you&#39;re a fan of writing content in Markdown there&#39;s a high chance you&#39;ve heard of the absolutely fantastic editor / real-time Markdown rendering genius, <a href="https://typora.io">Typora</a>. Aside from being simplistic while still having an absolute boat-load of features that we don&#39;t have time to get into, suffice it to say that Markdown + Typora is my favorite way to write. The <a href="https://theme.typora.io">Newsprint Theme</a> is where it&#39;s at:
<img src="https://assets.buttondown.email/images/5a58a3bf-28b2-43c2-8330-dcb711b5de88.png" alt="Typora&#39;s &#39;Newsprint&#39; theme">
And writing content intended to be sent in Buttondown couldn&#39;t be easier. Just write everything up how you like, hit <code>Cmd+/</code> to switch to source code mode and copy the raw markdown text, then paste it into Buttondown and send! Except... images.
Images are tricky. Typora is more than happy to render your images inline as you write a new document, which is really nice:
<img src="https://assets.buttondown.email/images/cd434998-d8eb-40db-af37-0fc0fb00772a.png" alt="image-20230502070736404">
But if you&#39;re using local images in your document (as you likely would be) you might run into trouble when copying that document over to Buttondown. And &#39;local&#39; is the keyword here. When Typora renders those local images inline, all it&#39;s doing is reading the image content from your filesystem:
<img src="https://assets.buttondown.email/images/9bf84493-e884-41b2-b03c-b289d4051cfa.png" alt="image-20230502070822228">
<h2 id="failing-email-images-ahead">Failing email images ahead</h2>
And there in-lies the problem. If you were to copy that document over to Buttondown and send it out, that image wouldn&#39;t load for anyone!
<img src="https://assets.buttondown.email/images/7f4967f7-6aaf-4beb-af80-e757a8d7d835.png" alt="image-20230502071207221">
The source of the generated HTML would still be looking for an image on that local file path, which isn&#39;t going to exist on your recipients&#39; machines (or be accessible by their mail clients anyway). Worse still, if you send a draft email to yourself beforehand and open it in your own local email client, since you&#39;d be looking at that draft from the same machine where that image file-path does exist, you may well have the experience of &quot;everything working&quot; and not realize that your images will fail when sending to anybody else.
<h2 id="upload-magic">Upload magic!</h2>
Good news, though. Typora has a neat, extensible system built in to automatically upload images to a third-party web service instead of just rendering local images inline. And Buttondown exposes their image upload functionality through <a href="https://docs.buttondown.email/api-reference/images">their API</a>! Together, with a small chunk of glue-script, we get an experience like this:
<img src="https://buttondown-attachments.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/images/a5505277-2a40-4512-903c-9e4570a37383.gif" alt="trimmed">
Any time we paste or drag an image into Typora, it automatically uploads that image to Buttondown&#39;s image hosting service and injects the resulting URL into the Markdown for you. Now our image is publicly hosted on the cloud! Even better, once we finish writing our document, we can have confidence that copying it over to Buttondown for sending will bring portable (publicly accessible) image URLs that are safe and ready to be sent in emails!
<img src="https://assets.buttondown.email/images/067cf9b5-9daa-4e1e-8069-b6f25f66d23a.png" alt="image-20230502072617589">
We&#39;ve essentially cloned Buttondown&#39;s &quot;drag an image into the editor for auto-upload&quot; into Typora 
<h2 id="but-how-do-i-do-that">But... how do I do that?</h2>
It&#39;s actually pretty easy! As Typora notes in their <a href="https://support.typora.io/Upload-Image/#custom">&quot;custom&quot; image upload docs</a>, we just need to provide a script into the Settings -&gt; Image -&gt; Image Uploader: Custom field and set When Insert... to &quot;Upload Image&quot;.
<img src="https://assets.buttondown.email/images/4e9b238f-cfa0-48bb-90a2-9b81c13da3a9.png" alt="image-20230502072821391">
We&#39;re going to use an inline one-liner bash script to do the uploads for us. This one took some time to craft just right, but does exactly what we need it to. Make sure to grab your <a href="https://buttondown.email/requests">API key from Buttondown</a> and add it to this script before pasting into Typora:
<pre><code class="language-sh">API_TOKEN=&quot;YOUR_API_KEY&quot; &amp;&amp; upload() { for file_path in &quot;$@&quot;; do response=$(curl -s -X POST -H &quot;Authorization: Token $API_TOKEN&quot; -H &quot;Content-Type: multipart/form-data&quot; -F &quot;image=@$file_path&quot; &quot;https://api.buttondown.email/v1/images&quot;); echo $(echo $response | sed &#39;s/.*&quot;image&quot;: &quot;$[^&quot;]*$&quot;.*/\1/&#39;); done; return; }; upload
</code></pre>
And be careful to copy and paste that code as a single line. It is not a multi-line script.
<img src="https://assets.buttondown.email/images/73ee3254-4bf3-44ab-8a04-14aa8dcf0120.png" alt="image-20230502072943868">
So what does it do? Let&#39;s break it down into multiple lines for readability and we&#39;ll see it&#39;s not too complicated:
<pre><code class="language-sh">API_TOKEN=&quot;YOUR_API_KEY&quot; &amp;&amp;
upload() {
 for file_path in &quot;$@&quot;;
 do
 response=$(curl -s -X POST -H &quot;Authorization: Token $API_TOKEN&quot; -H &quot;Content-Type: multipart/form-data&quot; -F &quot;image=@$file_path&quot; &quot;https://api.buttondown.email/v1/images&quot;);
 echo $(echo $response | sed &#39;s/.*&quot;image&quot;: &quot;$[^&quot;]*$&quot;.*/\1/&#39;);
 done;
 return;
};
upload
</code></pre>
Essentially we setup the &quot;upload&quot; routine to iterate over all arguments given to it (<code>$@</code>) and for each, POST it to <code>https://api.buttondown.email/v1/images</code>, Buttondown&#39;s image API. We pull the <code>&quot;image&quot;</code> key out of the JSON response with <code>sed</code> and output it to StdOut (which is what Typora wants) — specifically avoiding more eloquent JSON tools like <code>jq</code> since not all Typora users will have that tool installed (or globally available). Once we&#39;ve gotten through all the arguments, we return!
We&#39;re setting this up as a method then ending the command with a call to the method because of how Typora invokes the command. Typora essentially invokes <code>COMMAND &quot;file/path_1.jpg&quot; &quot;file/path_2.jpg&quot;</code> — it just adds the local file-paths as strings immediately after the command. Since we&#39;re setting up <code>upload</code> as a routine and ending the command with a call to <code>upload</code>, those appended strings actually get regarded as arguments to <code>upload</code>, exactly what we want.
As always, once you paste in the one-liner, make sure you hit the &quot;Test Uploader&quot; button and get a green, &quot;Successfully get uploaded image url&quot; message.
<img src="https://assets.buttondown.email/images/664c30b4-bf11-47f7-89ee-499ce90ddcf3.png" alt="image-20230502070434529">
That&#39;s it! Automatic image-upload and ultimate Markdown portability. Enjoy writing your future Buttondown content in Typora!

Automatic Image Upload With Buttondown + Typora

The secret to sustained focus? Having a 'second thing' to do.

Haruki Murakami has made a name for himself over the past many decades as
not only an acclaimed and prolific novelist, but also as a guy who rejects
the traditional idea of a writer&#39;s life. He&#39;s written about his love of
running, his workmanlike approach to writing, and his deep feeling of &quot;being ordinary.&quot;
In his most recent book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Audible-Novelist-as-a-Vocation/dp/B09SN2XC66/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1QDAVJLZK12G4&keywords=novelist+as+a+vocation&qid=1681418162&s=books&sprefix=novelist+as+a+vocation%2Cstripbooks%2C107&sr=1-1">Novelist as a Vocation</a>, Murakami writes about balancing deep flow work with something that engages a different part of the brain:
<blockquote>
The first step in my novel-writing process is, metaphorically, to clean off my desk. My stance is that I will work on nothing but the novel until it is completed, so I need to prepare. If I happen to be writing a series of essays, for example, I have to break it off, at least for the time being. Unless something really extraordinary comes along, all new projects are turned down. I’m the sort of person who when I throw myself into one thing, can’t do anything else. It’s true that I often work on translations while writing a novel, but those are done at my own pace and without any deadline, and I use them to give me a break from my writing. Translation is a technical process, so it uses a different part of the brain than creative writing. Rather than hindering the progress of a novel, therefore, working simultaneously on a translation can actually aid in the process by helping me keep my mental balance, a bit like stretching before exercising.
</blockquote>
I find this fascinating and resonant. The conventional advice for deep flow work is to reject all distractions and focus on the task at hand. But Murakami&#39;s approach is to have a second thing to do, something that engages a different part of the brain.
When I&#39;m working on a deep technical project, for instance, I &quot;come up for air&quot; by working on some piecemeal, smoother-brained tasks like backfilling comparison pages or clearing out some unused routes.

What Murakami tells us about focus

Learn how to use Netlify Functions and Buttondown to create a custom newsletter subscription form for your website.

I enjoy the process of designing and building a custom personal website. It’s a great way to experiment with different technologies and have fun learning new tools and concepts along the way.
This time, I was eager to learn how to use <a href="https://www.netlify.com/blog/intro-to-serverless-functions/" title="Intro to Serverless Functions">serverless functions</a>.
<h2 id="the-challenge">The Challenge</h2>
I use a static site generator called <a href="https://jekyllrb.com/" title="Jekyll">Jekyll</a> to build and publish <a href="https://andrewstiefel.com/" title="Andrew Stiefel">my website</a>. The result is a collection of static HTML, CSS, and JS files that are lightweight, fast, and easy to maintain. It reduces my overhead, both in cost and time because I don’t need to manage a server. But it does have one drawback: I can’t easily handle small background actions, like form submissions.
After all the effort I put into building my personal website, the last thing I wanted to do was slap a pre-designed newsletter subscription form on it. Most email providers offer forms you can quickly embed on your website, but they come with a series of tradeoffs. They are difficult to customize to exactly match your website’s design, and they usually require users to load third-party scripts and styles. Often these third-party resources get blocked by browser privacy settings, and even if they don’t, they can be slow to load.
Eventually, this led me to serverless functions. A serverless function is really just a piece of code that runs like an API endpoint, independently of your website or app. Despite the name, serverless functions do, indeed, run on a server. It’s just a server you don’t have to build or maintain.
<h2 id="the-team-netlify-and-buttondown">The Team: Netlify and Buttondown</h2>
I use a service called <a href="https://www.netlify.com/" title="Netlify">Netlify</a> to build and deploy my website. It’s key for this project because it publishes the static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript assets from my static site generator to a global CDN and runs the serverless function for my email subscription form.
I’m using <a href="https://buttondown.email" title="Buttondown">Buttondown</a> as my email list provider. Buttondown is a simple, privacy-first newsletter platform. It offers an <a href="https://docs.buttondown.email/api-reference/introduction" title="Buttondown API">API with extensive documentation</a>, including an OpenAPI Specification file. Buttondown is free for up to 100 subscribers, after which it costs $9 a month for up to 1,000. The API is available for paying customers starting at the $9/mo plan.
As a side note, Buttondown offers extensive customization options for HTML form embeds, so you can accomplish almost everything in this tutorial with less work. But this is a good starting point to learn how to build serverless functions and as an introduction to creating advanced automation with the Buttondown API.
Here is a brief overview of the steps involved:
<ol>
<li>Prepare your environment</li>
<li>Create the newsletter subscription form</li>
<li>Write the serverless function</li>
<li>Deploy with Netlify</li>
</ol>
Ok, let’s get started!
<h2 id="1-prepare-your-environment">1. Prepare your environment</h2>
To begin, you need to configure a few settings within Netlify before you can start building serverless functions.
<h3 id="configure-your-netlifytoml-file">Configure your Netlify.toml file</h3>
First, you need to tell Netlify where it should find and process your serverless functions. If you don’t have one already, create a file in your root directory called <code>netlify.toml</code>. The most basic version should include information about how to build and publish your website. <a href="https://docs.netlify.com/configure-builds/file-based-configuration/" title="Netlify Documentation">Refer to the Netlify documentation</a> for additional information.
In this example, <code>publish</code> tells Netlify to deploy the HTML and CSS files saved in the <code>public</code> folder for a simple, static website. This example also includes a command Netlify should run (<code>npm install</code>). Netlify will install the single node module dependency you will need later.
<pre><code class="language-yaml">[build]
 publish = &quot;public&quot;
 command = &quot;npm install&quot;
</code></pre>
Now you can add the path to the functions directory. The default functions directory is <code>YOUR_BASE_DIRECTORY/netlify/functions</code>. You will need to use the <a href="https://github.com/node-fetch/node-fetch">node-fetch v3</a> module later. Due to a change to node-fetch, you will need to enable ESM for the site by adding <code>node_bundler = &quot;esbuild&quot;</code> under the <code>[functions]</code> section of your <code>netlify.toml</code> file:
<pre><code class="language-yaml">[functions]
 directory = &quot;netlify/functions/&quot;
 node_bundler = &quot;esbuild&quot;
</code></pre>
For this tutorial, your completed <code>netlify.toml</code> file should look like this:
<pre><code class="language-yaml">[build]
 publish = &quot;public&quot;
 command = &quot;npm install&quot;

[functions]
 directory = &quot;netlify/functions/&quot;
 node_bundler = &quot;esbuild&quot;
</code></pre>
<h3 id="save-your-api-key-as-an-environment-variable">Save your API Key as an environment variable</h3>
Next, you must add your Buttondown API Key as an <a href="https://docs.netlify.com/environment-variables/overview/" title="Netlify Docs - Environment Variables">environment variable</a> for your Netlify site. Environment variables are useful to hold information that we don’t want to make public, like API Keys.
<a href="https://buttondown.email/requests" title="Buttondown API Key">Find and create your API Key in Buttondown</a> under Settings &gt; Power Tools &gt; API. Copy this value and then add it as an environment variable using the Netlify Admin interface under Site Settings &gt; Environment Variables.
For this tutorial, we’ll name the key <code>BUTTONDOWN_API_KEY</code>, add the value from Buttondown, and save it.
<img src="/next-assets/img/netlify-env-variables.png" alt="Add the Buttondown API key as an environment variable">
<h2 id="2-create-the-newsletter-subscription-form">2) Create the newsletter subscription form</h2>
Now that Netlify is set up, I need a way to collect email submissions. The HTML for my email subscription form is very basic to start:
<pre><code class="language-html">&lt;form name=&quot;newsletter&quot; method=&quot;POST&quot; action=&quot;/success/&quot; data-netlify=&quot;true&quot;&gt;
 &lt;label for=&quot;email&quot;&gt;Your Email Address:&lt;/label&gt;
 &lt;input type=&quot;email&quot; name=&quot;email&quot; required /&gt;
 &lt;button type=&quot;submit&quot;&gt;Subscribe&lt;/button&gt;
&lt;/form&gt;
</code></pre>
There are a few important things to note. First, I need to tell Netlify to process the form. All I need to do is add the <code>data-netlify=&quot;true&quot;</code> attribute to the form tag.
Next, I must give the form a unique name using the name attribute. In this case, that’s simply <code>name=&quot;newsletter&quot;</code>. The form’s name attribute determines what shows up in the Netlify interface:
<img src="/next-assets/img/netlify-forms.png" alt="List of forms in the Netlify app">
I wanted to redirect users to a confirmation page, so I added <code>action=&quot;/success/&quot;</code> to display a page that contains the success message.
The next input in the form is named email. That’s where we collect the email addresses. You could name it anything, but make sure you note what you call it for the next step.
I’ve specified the input type as email and indicated that is required. This means that the browser will do all my validation for me, and won’t let users submit anything besides a valid email address.
<h3 id="enable-bot-and-spam-protection">Enable bot and spam protection</h3>
I’m going to take advantage of the built-in anti-spam and bot protection that comes with <a href="https://docs.netlify.com/forms/setup/" title="Netlify Forms">Netlify Forms</a>, so I&#39;ll tweak the form a bit. I added the <code>netlify-honeypot=&quot;bot-field&quot;</code> attribute and created a hidden label and input:
<pre><code class="language-html">&lt;label class=&quot;hidden&quot;&gt;Don’t fill this out:&lt;/label&gt;
&lt;input class=&quot;hidden&quot; name=&quot;bot-field&quot; /&gt;
</code></pre>
This should catch any bots and filter them out before they ever hit my subscriber list. Here is the completed HTML for the newsletter subscription form:
<pre><code class="language-js">&lt;form
 name=&quot;newsletter&quot;
 method=&quot;POST&quot;
 action=&quot;/success/&quot;
 netlify-honeypot=&quot;bot-field&quot;
 data-netlify=&quot;true&quot;
&gt;
 &lt;label class=&quot;hidden&quot;&gt;Don’t fill this out:&lt;/label&gt;
 &lt;input class=&quot;hidden&quot; name=&quot;bot-field&quot; /&gt;
 &lt;label for=&quot;email&quot;&gt;Your Email Address:&lt;/label&gt;
 &lt;input type=&quot;email&quot; name=&quot;email&quot; required /&gt;
 &lt;button type=&quot;submit&quot;&gt;Subscribe&lt;/button&gt;
&lt;/form&gt;
</code></pre>
<h2 id="3-write-the-serverless-function">3) Write the serverless function</h2>
Now that I have a working email submission form, it’s time to create the serverless function. To start, create a file in the functions folder called<code> submission-created.js</code>. If you used the default functions directory, you should save your function at <code>YOUR_BASE_DIRECTORY/netlify/functions</code>.
I’m going to use the <code>submission-created</code> event trigger, which will tell Netlify to run my function every time the form is submitted. To accomplish that, I have to make sure the file is named <code>submission-created.js</code>.
Here’s the code for the serverless function:
<pre><code class="language-js">const { BUTTONDOWN_API_KEY } = process.env;
import fetch from &quot;node-fetch&quot;;

exports.handler = async (event, context) =&gt; {
 const email = JSON.parse(event.body).payload.email;
 console.log(`Received a submission: ${email}`);

 const response = await fetch(&quot;https://api.buttondown.email/v1/subscribers&quot;, {
 method: &quot;POST&quot;,
 headers: {
 Authorization: `Token ${BUTTONDOWN_API_KEY}`,
 &quot;Content-Type&quot;: &quot;application/json&quot;,
 },
 body: JSON.stringify({ email }),
 });

 let responseText = await response.text();
 console.log(&quot;Response:&quot;, responseText);

 return {
 statusCode: 200,
 body: JSON.stringify({}),
 };
};
</code></pre>
Let’s look at this line-by-line to understand how it works.
<h3 id="configure-prerequisites">Configure prerequisites</h3>
First, I import the Buttondown API key I saved earlier as an environment variable for my function:
<pre><code class="language-js">const { BUTTONDOWN_API_KEY } = process.env;
</code></pre>
On line 2, I import a small library called <code>node-fetch</code>. This allows me to use Javascript’s Fetch API, which is how we’ll format an API POST request to send data to our email service:
<pre><code class="language-js">import fetch from &quot;node-fetch&quot;;
</code></pre>
NOTE: When I was writing this post, many of the tutorials available used the <code>require</code> method to import the Fetch API, which resulted in errors when I tried to deploy the function. Make sure you use the method I described above. If you upgrade to node-fetch v3, you&#39;ll also need to update either your netlify.toml file or package.json to use ESM.
<pre><code class="language-yaml">[functions]
 node_bundler = &quot;esbuild&quot;
</code></pre>
You can find more information about <a href="https://www.netlify.com/blog/how-to-make-a-fetch-request-using-node-fetch-v3/" title="Netlify Blog">how to make a fetch request using node-fetch v3</a> in an excellent guide by Tatyana Novell on the Netlify blog.
<h3 id="define-the-serverless-function">Define the serverless function</h3>
Line 4 is where I define the function. The <code>exports.handler</code> value is where Netlify expects to find the function. This is the basic syntax I’ll use to create the serverless function:
<pre><code class="language-js">exports.handler = async function (event, context) {
 // your server-side functionality
};
</code></pre>
<h3 id="parse-the-form-submission">Parse the form submission</h3>
The first thing I need to do is retrieve the email address from the form submission. I’m going to use <code>JSON.parse</code>. Since I’m using an event to trigger the function, we’ll use <code>event.body</code> to parse the submission and <code>payload.email</code> to retrieve the value of the email input field.
<pre><code class="language-js">const email = JSON.parse(event.body).payload.email;
</code></pre>
Then log the data in the console for debugging:
<pre><code class="language-js">console.log(`Received a submission: ${email}`);
</code></pre>
<h3 id="create-the-api-request">Create the API request</h3>
After retrieving the email address from the event value using <code>JSON.parse</code>, I’m ready to add the email to my list of subscribers using the Buttondown API. I’ll use the <code>node-fetch</code> library I imported earlier to create the POST request.
I need to authorize the API request by passing the <code>BUTTONDOWN_API_KEY</code> environment variable in the headers, and I’ll need to add the email address to the body of the request as a string:
<pre><code class="language-js">const response = await fetch(&quot;https://api.buttondown.email/v1/subscribers&quot;, {
 method: &quot;POST&quot;,
 headers: {
 Authorization: `Token ${BUTTONDOWN_API_KEY}`,
 &quot;Content-Type&quot;: &quot;application/json&quot;,
 },
 body: JSON.stringify({ email }),
});
</code></pre>
<h3 id="log-the-response">Log the response</h3>
Then capture and log the response from the email service. We do this to diagnose any issues that happened. Netlify makes it easy to check your function’s logs, so use console.log often!
<pre><code class="language-js">let responseText = await response.text();
console.log(&quot;Response:&quot;, responseText);
</code></pre>
And finally, we return the response from the function with an empty body:
<pre><code class="language-js">return {
 statusCode: 200,
 body: JSON.stringify({}),
};
</code></pre>
<h2 id="4-deploy-the-function">4) Deploy the function</h2>
Now that I’ve written my function, configured my netlify.toml file, and added my environment variables, everything is ready to go. Deploying is painless: just set up Netlify’s GitHub integration, push your changes, and your function will be deployed.
<h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2>
It took me less than 50 lines of code to build a custom newsletter subscription form using a serverless function. I wrote it all in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and everything is served from my domain. Plus, my website visitors get a nice experience whether they have JavaScript enabled or not, and I’m protected from bot and spam submissions by default.
If you’d like to experiment with creating your own custom newsletter form, you can clone and deploy the GitHub Repository below to Netlify. It comes with a minimal HTML landing page, a simple form, and everything you need to deploy the Netlify Function:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://github.com/andrewstiefel/buttondown-netlify-function" title="Buttondown Netlify Function">GitHub Repo</a></li>
<li><a href="https://buttondown-netlify-functions-demo.netlify.app/">Demo Form</a></li>
</ul>
Good luck, and I hope you have fun building a custom newsletter subscription form for your website!
A version of this article originally appeared at <a href="https://andrewstiefel.com/netlify-functions-email-subscription/" title="Build an Email Subscription Form with Netlify Functions">andrewstiefel.com</a> on August 28, 2022.

Netlify Functions + Buttondown

<a href="https://www.weebly.com/">Weebly</a> is a great tool by Square that makes it free and easy to build out a website
for your business.
Getting a Buttondown form onto Weebly is as quick and easy as everything else.
First, go to your <a href="https://buttondown.email/settings">share page</a> and copy the HTML code under Your Buttondown subscribe form:
<img src="/next-assets/img/21.png" alt="">
Next, go into your Weebly editor and add a &quot;Custom Embed&quot; widget. You should get an input popping up that
says &quot;Edit Custom HTML&quot;:
<img src="/next-assets/img/22.png" alt="">
Go ahead and paste in that HTML code:
<img src="/next-assets/img/23.png" alt="">
Hit save and you should be good to go!
<img src="/next-assets/img/24.png" alt="">

Adding a Buttondown subscription form to Weebly

Add subscriptions to your Squarespace site to collect an audience of fans and interested readers.

Squarespace is a great tool that makes it easy to create beautiful websites. You can enhance your Squarespace site by connecting it with Buttondown — making it easy for site visitors to sign up for updates to your newsletter.
<h3 id="prerequisites">Prerequisites</h3>
This tutorial assumes that you have a:
<ol>
<li>live and working Squarespace site with a page that&#39;s ready for adding a new <a href="https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/206543757-About-blocks">content block</a></li>
<li>Buttondown account. If you don&#39;t have one, you can <a href="https://buttondown.email/register">sign up here!</a></li>
</ol>
<h3 id="getting-your-share-form">Getting your share form</h3>
First, head on over to your <a href="https://buttondown.email/settings">Share page</a> and click as a form. You should see a code snippet that&#39;s captioned with Your buttondown subscribe form:
<img src="/next-assets/img/11.png" alt="">
This is the HTML snippet that we&#39;ll be bringing into Squarespace.
<h3 id="adding-it-to-squarespace">Adding it to Squarespace</h3>
Head over to the Squarespace page you&#39;re looking to add your Buttondown form to and create a content block. You should see a menu like this pop up:
<img src="/next-assets/img/12.png" alt="">
Type in &quot;Embed&quot; and choose the option that pops up:
<img src="/next-assets/img/13.png" alt="">
Next, type in the URL of your newsletter:
<img src="/next-assets/img/14.png" alt="">
Next, hit the Gray code icon that looks like <code>&lt;/&gt;</code> to the right of the text box.
A window that says Embed Data should pop up. Copy and paste your share form from Buttondown and press Set.
<img src="/next-assets/img/15.png" alt="">
Hit Apply and you should be good to go! You should now see a Buttondown form on your Squarespace page:
<img src="/next-assets/img/16.png" alt="">

Adding a Buttondown subscription form to Squarespace

Buttondown makes it easy to start collecting subscriptions without having to muck around and changing your CMS.

You can create a subscription form in Webflow and connect it to your Buttondown newsletter to gather email addresses and segment them in two easy steps:
<ol>
<li>Grabbing your subscription URL from Buttondown</li>
<li>Configuring your Webflow form to forward emails to Buttondown</li>
</ol>
<h3 id="requirements">Requirements</h3>
<ol>
<li>If you haven&#39;t already, <a href="https://buttondown.email/register">create a Buttondown account</a>. It&#39;s easy and only takes two minutes.</li>
<li>Ensure you have a <a href="https://university.webflow.com/article/intro-to-forms">form</a> on your Webflow page.</li>
<li>Ensure there&#39;s at least one input field on your form (set to required) with the name set to <code>email</code> and the <code>text type</code> set to email, like the below:</li>
</ol>
<img src="/next-assets/img/59.jpg" alt="">
<h3 id="getting-your-subscription-url">Getting your subscription URL</h3>
<ol>
<li>Log in to your Buttondown account and go to the <a href="https://buttondown.email/settings#">Share page</a>.</li>
<li>Click on &quot;as a form&quot;.</li>
<li>Copy the URL on the second line, as highlighted below:</li>
</ol>
<img src="/next-assets/img/9.png" alt="">
<h3 id="configure-the-form">Configure the form</h3>
<ol>
<li>Return to your project in the Webflow Designer.</li>
<li>Select the form on the canvas.</li>
<li>Go to the Form Settings section under the Settings tab.</li>
<li>Paste the action URL you just copied into the Action field.</li>
<li>Set the Method to <code>POST</code>.</li>
<li>Publish your site!</li>
</ol>
<img src="/next-assets/img/10.png" alt="">
<h3 id="any-trouble">Any trouble?</h3>
If you have any questions, please feel free to <a href="mailto:support@buttondown.email">email us</a> — we&#39;ll be happy to help.

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