83: How I Never Run Out of Newsletter Ideas (Or Stare at a Blank Page)

🌟 The Blank Page Was Never About Running Out of Ideas

You want to email your list. You know you should. You might even have the list built and sitting right there, waiting for you.

But you sit down, the cursor blinks, and your brain goes completely blank. So you close the laptop and tell yourself you'll figure it out next week. And next week, you do the exact same thing.

I get this question more than almost any other: how do I come up with what to write about each week? Every time I opened the intake form for my old email program, I asked women what scared them most about starting a newsletter. The same answers came back over and over. "Coming up with ideas." "Not having good, original content consistently." One woman wrote something that stopped me cold: she had several newsletters written that she still hadn't sent, and the more time passed, the more terrified she got of sending anything. Her word for it was brutal.

I felt that one in my soul, because I remember exactly what it feels like. So if the blank page is the thing keeping you stuck, stay with me. It's not proof that you're not cut out for this. It's a much smaller, much more fixable problem than you think.

✨ I Was More Scared to Start My Email List Than to Give Birth

I've never ghosted my email list. This October it'll be six years of showing up every single week. But getting started? Starting the damn thing in the first place? I was terrified.

It wasn't the tech that scared me most, and it wasn't even the commitment. It was the dreaded blank page. I once made a post that I was more scared to start an email list than I was to give birth to my children. I'm not exaggerating. The idea of sitting down to write something, and then real live humans opening it up and reading my words and judging them, made me want to curl up and disappear.

Underneath that was a belief I think a lot of us carry, especially those of us in a certain age bracket. I'm an elder millennial. I came up being told you had to be qualified to have a voice. You needed the credentials and the polish and the certainty before you were allowed to open your mouth. I'm the kind of girl who wants to be perfect at something right out of the gate, and if that's not possible, I'm just out.

So the thought of starting a weekly newsletter before I had it all figured out felt wrong in my whole body. Who was I to land in someone's inbox every week?

Go look at my early newsletters sometime. They are tiny. Embarrassingly short. And you can hear the unsure tone in them, like I wasn't quite sure I was allowed to be there. And that was completely fine, because here's what I know now that I didn't know then: a short, unsure email that actually gets sent beats a perfect one that sits in your drafts forever while you wait to feel ready.

The unsure ones still built my list. The unsure ones still made me money. The unsure ones are the reason I get to talk to you at all. So if you're waiting to feel like a writer before you start, stop waiting. You become one by doing it, not before.

🎯 It's a Structure Problem, Not a Creativity Problem

Here's what changed for me, and it's not what you'd think. I didn't wake up one day more creative or more confident. Nothing about me changed at all. What changed is that I got a structure. If you know me, you know I live and die by structure. Structure, system, repeat.

That's the whole secret. The blank page isn't a lack of ideas problem. It's a structure problem. When you sit down with nothing, no format, no starting point, no container to pour your thoughts into, of course your brain locks up. Anyone's would. You're asking yourself to be brilliant from a dead standstill, every single week, with no plan of attack.

And a structure problem has a solution. That's the good news. Let me walk you through the pieces that made the blank page disappear for me.

💡 Study Your Own Inbox First

Before you write a single word, do this. It's free, it costs you nothing, and it's the exact thing I did.

Go subscribe to newsletters. Be intentional about the mix. Subscribe to a product or clothing brand you love, because those people are masters at short, punchy, get-you-to-click emails. Subscribe to a service provider you admire, someone doing what you want to do. You don't even have to sign up for new ones, just pay attention to the ones already in your inbox that you open and enjoy.

Now here's the important part: you are not subscribing to copy these people. You're subscribing to study them. And specifically, you're paying attention to which emails you open. Not which ones are objectively good. Which ones you open. Which subject lines make you go, ooh, what's this. Which formats make you read all the way to the bottom instead of archiving.

That tells you everything. You're a reader before you're a writer, and your own inbox is a goldmine of data about what makes someone open the thing.

And a funny little truth about this. The part of a newsletter that connects is almost never the part you'd expect. I have a section where I share two random things I'm loving lately. Could be a lip balm, could be a romantasy series. It sells nothing. It does nothing strategically. And it's people's favorite part. Some lovely woman was in my inbox last week telling me she bought a pair of barrel sweatpants from Walmart that I recommended and now she lives in them. The thing that builds the relationship isn't always the polished, on-brand, strategic thing. Sometimes it's just you being a person. Keep that in your back pocket.

📝 Pick Your Lanes on Purpose

Here's something that might land. If you've been around a while, you've watched me solve this exact problem before, just on a different platform. Because "what do I even write?" is the same monster as "what do I even post about?" Same spiral, word for word. It's all been said before. I'm going to run out of ideas. Who am I to be talking. Identical fear, whether you're staring at a blank email or a blank caption box.

And I solved it the same way both times. Not by becoming more creative or taking writing classes. By building a set of content pillars that tie back to my offers, a handful of topics I always come back to, and, this is the part people skip, a why behind each one. A goal. A reason that pillar earns its place, tied to what I actually want that content to do for my business.

That's what makes the blank page disappear. You're not walking up to an empty canvas hoping to be struck by genius. You're walking up to a set of lanes you already chose, on purpose, for a reason. You pick your lane and go. If you already trust me on the Instagram version of this, the newsletter version works the exact same way.

🎁 Steal a Format That Makes You Go "I Could Do That"

Let me tell you where my 3-2-1 format actually came from, because I love this story. You know the format: three ideas for your business, two things I'm loving, one tip.

I was subscribed to a woman's newsletter. She runs courses, she's wildly successful, and I loved how her newsletter was laid out. So I emailed her and asked if I could use her format. She wrote back and told me she got it from James Clear, who's been running his own 3-2-1 newsletter for years and who you can still go subscribe to right now.

Think about what happened there. She found a format she loved and made it hers. I found her version and made it mine. And now I'm handing it to you. That's not stealing. That's how this works. Nobody invents the newsletter from scratch, and you don't have to either. You find a structure that makes you go "oh, I could actually do that," and you make it yours.

💫 You Are Your Own Ideal Client

Here's the reframe that makes the "what do I write" question basically disappear. You are very likely your own ideal client.

The people you're trying to serve were you, one problem ago. They're a few steps behind where you are right now, walking the exact path you already walked. Which means you already know what they need to hear, because you needed to hear it not that long ago.

So when you're stuck, you don't need to survey your audience or overthink it. You just need to remember what confused you a year ago, two years ago, and talk about that. What did you figure out that you wish someone had told you sooner? That's your email for the week. And it's an endless well, because you're always learning, which means you always have a new thing to hand back to the people a step behind you.

This is also where trusting your gut comes in. The stuff you're genuinely excited to talk about? That excitement is data. It's not a distraction from the strategy. A lot of the time, it is the strategy. When you write about the thing that lights you up, people feel it, and they lean in.

🚀 Want to Watch Me Actually Do This?

I've been building a program called The Newsletter System, and the doors open September 14th. If you get on the waitlist now, you get first dibs on the limited spots, and you also get a full behind-the-scenes tour of my entire newsletter process, start to finish. Where the idea comes from, how it becomes a podcast, how the podcast becomes the newsletter, how that becomes my carousel for the week. All of it. The stuff I don't normally show anyone. That's yours just for raising your hand early. Join the waitlist here.

🛠️ Resources & Links

• ✨💌 CLICK HERE to hop on The Newsletter System waitlist (join for first dibs on the limited spots plus a behind-the-scenes tour of my full newsletter process)

• One of my early newsletters sent 4/7/21 via Flodesk (referenced when talking about her short, unsure first j)

• James Clear's 3-2-1 newsletter (the original format Em's 3-2-1 traces back to)

💪 The Most Fixable Problem in the World

Let me bring this all the way back around. The blank page was never a sign that you're not cut out for this. It's not proof that you're not a writer or not creative or don't have anything to say. It's a missing structure. And a missing structure is the most fixable thing in the world.

You already have the ideas. They're sitting in your own experience, one problem behind you. You already know what works. It's in the newsletters you actually open. You just need the container to put it all in.

That container is the whole reason I built The Newsletter System. It's my former list-building program, glowed up into everything I've figured out over sending more than 290 newsletters without missing a week. If you want to stop starting from nothing every single week, get on the waitlist before the doors open September 14th.

If this reframed the blank page for you, send it to the friend who keeps telling you she "should really start a newsletter" and then never does. She needs to hear that it's a structure problem too.

Now tell me in the comments: which newsletter do you open every single time it lands in your inbox, no matter what? Drop the name below. I'm always hunting for good ones to study, and so is everyone else reading this.