In September, I gave myself a challenge: Dan, you need to launch a newsletter within the next seven days.
Seven days isn’t a huge window of time to launch anything — let alone the newsletter that became Tools for Reporters. So how do you get a project like this from concept to launch to inbox that quickly?
By having an awesome toolbelt at the ready.
I’ve written before about the idea of the toolbelt — that, like Bruce Wayne, all of us should have certain tools and tricks at our fingertips. You never know when you’ll need them.
So here are some of the tools on my toolbelt that helped me start this very newsletter.
The Tools That Power ‘Tools for Reporters’
1. The first thing I needed was a website where people could sign up for the newsletter. So I bought a domain, installed WordPress and went searching for the right theme to install. LaunchEffect was the obvious choice.
It’s a free, responsively-designed theme that gives you the power to customize and tweak everything on the page — fonts, background images, the size and shape of the sign-up window, etc. For $35, LaunchEffect will also let you use the theme on all your blog’s pages. (Like this.)
There are a lot of launch page tools out there, but LaunchEffect is my favorite. It helped me get Tools For Reporters up and ready for launch in less than 24 hours.
2. MailChimp has powered my newsletters for more than two years. I love it. It’s a free tool, but it’s really powerful — and keeps getting more powerful. MailChimp’s recently made it even easier to send out mobile-friendly emails, and they’ve added a tool to let you customize every pixel of your newsletter. They let me schedule my newsletter to go out at a certain time — what, you think I’m sitting at my desk at 11:45 every Tuesday morning waiting to click the ‘Send’ button? — and they give me stats after each newsletter goes out. (Did readers open the email? Did they click on links? At what hour of the day are people clicking?)
Plus: MailChimp lets you run A/B tests on your newsletters. That means that you can test out different subject lines or delivery times to see what works best for your email list.
And yes: MailChimp integrates really nicely with other tools — like LaunchEffect.
3. I also wanted to make sure the newsletter had a home on my personal blog. So to get these big orange sign-up boxes on my blog, I used a tool called OptinSkin. It costs $47 for a license, but it works across all your sites, and it lets you add customizable social share and email sign-up boxes to any page. And it integrates easily with MailChimp.
MailChimp’s one weakness is that it doesn’t offer attractive embeddable sign-up forms. OptinSkin solves that problem.
4. But all of this wouldn’t mean much without this one final tool: Delicious. Yes, it’s been around for a long time, but the social bookmarking site is essential to my workflow. When I spot a new tool, I tag it in Delicious. At the end of the week, I’ll go through the newly-tagged tools and figure out what’s best for the next week’s email.
When it comes to keeping track of what you’ve seen and liked on the Internet, Delicious is still really effective. And yes, it’s still free.
Now get out there and tell some great stories today!