225 - Send amazing curated newsletters with Curated

Interview with Ashley Guttuso and Nathan Wrigley

Today we learn about a SaaS platform called Curated and how it can save you a lot of time creating a newsletter.

If you’ve followed the WP Builds podcast for any length of time, you’ll know that I’m often mentioning the fact that we have a newsletter. I usually do this in the podcast audio, right at the start.

Having a newsletter is one of the best ways that you can communicate with an audience. In fact, I’d go as far as to say, that it’s the best. There’s no third-party platform involved. You are communicating with people who have signed up, and therefore really want to get your content. They can opt out when they like, they can ignore it if they like just be clicking delete in their email client. Plus, they can share it with their friends outside of any wall that Facebook, Twitter (et al.) might create as barriers.

I like newsletters, as you might have guessed.

What I don’t like is how time consuming they are to create!

The WP Builds newsletter comes in two forms:

• the newsletter on a Thursday created for the WP Builds podcast
• the This Week in WordPress (TWiW) newsletter which comes out on a Tuesday to show what we talked about the previous day

The former of those is a traditional newsletter. It goes with a WordPress post and is pretty easy to create. However, the ‘This Week in WordPress’ (TWiW) newsletter is different; it’s a curated newsletter.

‘What does curated mean?’ I hear you say. Good that you asked! A curated newsletter is one in which the content is not really your own. You find content created by other people and you collect it up and deliver it. You are taking the time to make a little digest of something and then sending it out to people who are interested.

In our case, the subject matter is clearly going to be WordPress. So, I go out each week and I read a whole load of WordPress news pieces and other articles. I decide which ones I like… and then the problems start.

Now that I’ve got about 15-20 articles that I think are worthy of being in the newsletter, I now have to create it.

So that means that I have to find the titles, URLs and so on for all those pieces of content. Well, that’s pretty easy, but do that 156 weeks in a row, as I have, and it adds up to a boatload of time. It really does.

Open article, read it, decide if it’s worth curating into the newsletter, somehow file that away for the dedicated newsletter creation session later in the week. When that session arrives, reopen all the links that you’ve stored (in Google Drive, Evernote, Pocket, and a bunch of other places), copy the titles, paste them in the newsletter, copy the URL, paste it into the newsletter. You get the idea. It-takes-ages!

So when I heard that there was a Saas service I could use to make life more simple, you can imagine that I jumped on it.

Enter Curated.

Curated makes life so much simpler. You sign up for their service. Create categories for your newsletter, style it with your logo and brand colours, and it’s ready to go.

But here’s the magic! Curated have a Chrome extension (perhaps other browsers too, I don’t recall) which you can use to make all the boring tasks I mentioned earlier go away.

So I’m browsing the web and I find something worthy. I click on the Curated Chrome extension; up comes a pop-up which automatically brings across the page title, URL and any text from that page which I had highlighted before clicking the button. All I need to do is to decide which of the categories I want to give it and click ‘save’.

It all goes into a ‘pending’ feed for my next edition.

When I’m ready to publish the next newsletter, I just head over to the Curated website and decide which of the articles I’d saved should go in the next edition.

Honestly, this saves me hours each week. I’m not fibbing. It really does.

Curated will take on the burden of deliverability too. Just like MailChimp, Active Campaign and others, then make sure that the list is kept up to date. People can subscribe from the newsletter page and unsubscribe from the emails to.

There’s a few little extras thrown in too, such as:

• the ability to publish on an automatic schedule
• you sell advertising slots in the newsletter and deploy them as well
• there’s some basic reporting in terms of open rates, etc.

I’m very happy with Curated and how it’s saved me a lot of time each week. So, if you’re in the market for a newsletter solution, check out Curated.

Don’t forget to post a comment below, or head over to the WP Builds Facebook group, or let us know how you feel on Twitter. Oh, and sign up in the box in this post to get the newsletter I’ve been droning on about!

Mentioned in this podcast:

Curated