How to write an email newsletter 2x faster with AI

Each week I write this email newsletter. I publish it on our company blog, I send it via email and I repurpose it into at least one LinkedIn post, sometimes two.

Over the last year I’ve been improving the speed and, I hope, even the quality of these posts with the help of AI.

Now, I’m a believer in two things:

1. Writing in your own voice is important when building a readership.
2. When it comes to thought leadership, people will continue to respect content written by a real person more than content written by AI (this might be different for technical documentation, of which the reader might just expect competence).

I’ve been using variations of the following process for the last seven months and it’s a well-oiled machine. I imagine many of you are already taking a similar approach or have gone even further. If you have, I’d love to hear what you’re doing.

Here’s a step-by-step as to how I go about this process, beginning to end, whilst respecting these values.

Brainstorming

I like to come up with ideas on my own, usually jotting things down as they come to me during the week and reviewing them on Mondays, when I write. I typically end up with a backlog of a few ideas.

I’ll then prompt ChatGPT with something like this (using last week’s post as an example):

I'm thinking of writing a blog post about demand generation and the different ways the term is used. I want to spend a bit of time focusing on partnerships and acquisitions that drive demand by putting people in a position where they have the need that can be serviced by the business' core product. An example is Stripe's Atlas product. Can you help me think of some more examples for consideration and also summarise how you think people tend to talk about demand generation.

ChatGPT will then start to bounce around ideas and scaffold a post.

At which point I’ll generally push back and add more of my own knowledge. We’ll repeat this cycle a few times until an outline of a post starts to appear that makes sense to me and actually matches knowledge or experience I have.

I am careful not to let ChatGPT dictate the knowledge (too much): I think where I can add value is actually sharing knowledge I’ve accumulated from my time running Vero or from working directly with customers. It feels disingenuous just to summarise ChatGPT’s knowledge: anyone can do that.

Writing the post itself

Once I’ve got an outline, I’ll then write the post. I do this in Google Docs and I do it using dictation. These days I’m using Wispr Flow, which I’ve spoken about on LinkedIn before. It’s much, much more accurate than any dictation tool I’ve used before.

One of the things I like about writing my posts this way is that the first draft can be essentially a stream of consciousness: me talking for 10, 15, 20 minutes. Typically I write longer than I want to end up with. The key benefit of this, in my opinion, is the words are mine and they are actually similar to my spoken word. As many great writers have said: try to write like you speak, particularly when writing non-fiction! It is a powerful way of writing that, IMO, makes what you’re saying more enjoyable and comprehensible for the reader.

Once I’ve cut a first draft, I’ll go back through, delete sections that I think are not valuable, potentially dictate a few more paragraphs here and there and perhaps copy and paste and shuffle a few things around until I’ve got a post that I’m broadly happy with.

Editing the post

At this point, I’ll copy and paste everything I’ve got into ChatGPT, and I’ll provide a prompt, something like:

Here's a draft of the blog post I've written in line with our outline. Can you please help me tidy up this post by:
- Fixing any grammar mistakes.
- Breaking up paragraphs and text to make it flow better or feel more readable.
- Adding or adjusting headings to break the post down to better match our outline and/or to make it more comprehensible.
- Shorten any duplicative phrases that feel unnecessary (note that sometimes it's fine to have repetition or duplication to make a point\!)
Please don't change the general tone as it's written in my voice and that is crucial. Also keep edits of the actual prose/copy to a minimum.

This tends to give me a more structured, slightly shorter, punchier version of my draft without re-writing it away from my voice.

I’ll then read through this version and do a final once-over until I’m happy with what I’ve got.

Publishing to the blog and email

To publish the post, I use Markdown. I export from Google Docs to Markdown, then copy-paste this directly into our CMS. Currently, I use WordPress; most CMSs support Markdown.

I also take the same file and run it through a tool I vibe-coded, which takes the Markdown and generates the newsletter that I send to our subscribers. With one command prompt, this means no copy-pasting snippets of text and moving blocks around Bureau’s drag-and-drop editor. We just end up with the fully rendered file in HTML, and I copy-paste that in.

You can read more about the tool that I vibe coded here. I think it’s really neat and makes it a lot easier to publish something that is text-heavy.

Publishing to social media

Publishing to social media. Once again, I go back to the same thread in ChatGPT, and I give it a prompt something like this:

Take the post and please write a 150 to 300 word LinkedIn post for my LinkedIn profile, not the company LinkedIn profile. We want to draw out the key points of the post. We want to start with a punchy and, if possible, controversial opening sentence. As much as possible, reuse the phrases and language I have in my blog post so that again we keep my tone.

Once I’m happy with that, I’ll then also generate a post for our company page:

Please write another LinkedIn post. This time for our company page. In this case, I'm talking about a similar length. We're going to link directly to the blog post, and you are encouraged to rewrite the post in language that matches previous posts we've worked on and the examples I provided for our company LinkedIn page, which has a more professional tone and, of course, should feel distinct from my own LinkedIn posts.

This tends to generate a post that is in line with our company’s tone and guidelines.

It’s then easy to schedule these posts on LinkedIn.

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Et voilà, that’s it! Hopefully there’s a few useful ideas in here for you to try if writing is a part of your job.

Would love any feedback on what you do.

Keep growing, Chris