If you are a member of an online community and you participate, you’ll often write a few paragraphs in response to a comment or question. This is also true if you use a social network like LinkedIn well. Both of these let you share your knowledge and experience with low effort.

While you can definitely gain visibility, your wisdom will only benefit a few people.

If you posted to a synchronous community, the people who happened to be around when you posted will benefit, but no one who visits the site in a few months or years will. Okay, if someone is determined, they might struggle through a search for the topic and find it. If what you write is really memorable, other people might link to your post. But most of what you share will go straight to the Slack memory hole.

If you post to a social network, you are at the not-so-tender mercies of the algorithm. What you write might surface for your followers a day or week later, but a month or year later it’ll be gone. Detritus floating on the scouring stream of witty content and pleas for attention, if you will.

But you spent precious time creating that post. You’re an expert in your field, and you post about it. You shared your experience and your wisdom. Why should you let it go by the wayside? Is there a way to leverage it without too much effort?

Yes.

Capture it in a newsletter or blog post. I prefer a newsletter, which has the following benefits:

• you can easily build an audience of people who want to hear from you
• you can have your ideas posted to a permanent URL that Google can find and others can share
• a newsletter can be casual

First, you need to select a theme, usually related to your professional goals, and then set up a newsletter. Examples of themes can range from database optimization to product marketing; it doesn’t matter what the theme is as long as you have expertise and plenty to say. The nuts and bolts of setting up a newsletter and adding a subscription form to your website are well covered by the newsletter providers (Beehiiv, Substack). Therefore, I want to focus on the next step, gathering and publishing content.

After you read this post, you’ll know how to gather and publish the scraps of insight your share around on communities or social platforms in a sustainable regular way. You can start getting the first one hundred subscribers to your newsletter; people that want to hear from you.

Doing so is a four step process:

• gather sources
• schedule scouring
• tell a story
• schedule it

It’s important to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Finding, editing and shipping existing content in a newsletter is a process that you’ll get better at, but you don’t need your newsletter to be perfectly manicured like one of the big newsletters, or a newsletter from a large company. You may build your newsletter into that, but to get started, the goal is to enable you to send a regular newsletter. Remember, we want to avoid letting that great insight languish.

Let’s look at each of these above steps.

Gather Sources

First, gather your sources. I start with a google doc and write down links for everything that might be a source of newsletter content.

This includes social media platforms where long form posting happens, such as LinkedIn or Facebook. Also, include sites where you write substantive comments, such as Hacker News or Reddit.

The real gold is often in private communities such as slack or email lists. Make sure you respect community rules and never use someone else’s content. But your long, detailed answer to a common technical question is perfect for touching up and publishing to your newsletter list.

Another place to look for newsletter content is livestreams or podcasts you are a guest on. The technical conversations are a great source of content for a newsletter.

Any fully-formed GitHub project READMEs can also be good content, especially if they talk through the use cases of a particular tool or project.

Wherever you share insights related to your newsletter theme, especially if it is long-form and ephemeral, is fair game.

Add these to a list. Keep it up to date; as you appear on a new podcast or start posting thoughts elsewhere, add the links.

Scouring

Next, find some regular time to review these sources. I suggest doing this once every two months, but the right frequency depends on how many newsletters you want to send and how often you post.

In the google doc, do the following:

• mark the date you reviewed
• copy and paste the text
• capture the link

Don’t grab one to two line comments or anything that is off-topic of your newsletter . Instead, look for the multi-paragraph insightful comments. If there was a discussion, grab all your comments. Don’t forget to grab any links you mention as well.

How exactly you grab the text depends on the source:

• If you are looking at LinkedIn, you can search for all posts and comments you have made.
• If you are using a podcast or video stream as a source, For these, you can use a tool like Youtube Transcript to extract text and then scan to find insights that you can repurpose. You can use GenAI tools to group the text into high level topics that you can portion up into newsletters.
• If you are posting on a slack, you can search for all your posts using the from modifier.

Each source will have a different way to find your content, but after the first few times it’ll be second nature to grab it.

Tell A Story

The next step is to take the raw text and turn it into a coherent story. You want to do this every month or so, though you may need to front-load this if you are starting a newsletter.

You’ll need to spend some time on this process. The goal is to create something worth sending out to your readers.

Each post should be:

• 500-1000 words
• coherent; if you are merging together more than one comment, make sure tense and pronouns agree
• edited; remove fluff words and anything that distracts from the point, especially if you are condensing a podcast section
• on theme; if you are a devops consultant, don’t post about ice cream stores, unless they relate to devops

You will end up with a solid newsletter post. Mark this fragment with the date you reviewed and turned it into a story. This will prevent you from using the same text in six months.

In my experience, this is an AI-aided manual process. You can use the AI to condense podcast text, think of alternate angles, or give you feedback on any other areas to cover. But what you should not do, unless you want a newsletter that sounds robotic, is paste your text into ChatGPT and ask for a newsletter-length block of text.

Don’t rewrite the text. The whole point of this process is to leverage existing content you have created in a low-effort, sustainable way.

Since you have all your content in one place, you can repeat this process to get many newsletters ready. I like to get as many ready as I’ll send out in the next month.

Then, schedule them out.

Schedule It

You’ve done all the hard work, scheduling is easy.

Make sure any platform you select supports scheduling out newsletters.

Test sending them to yourself to see what they look like.

Schedule each story on a regular interval. I like to send on the same day of the week every time. Once every two weeks to once a month is sustainable but will keep you top of mind.

If there’s timely news that you want to address, you can bump one of the other newsletter editions.

Summing Up

This process is the start of a journey that will end with a permanent, searchable corpus of your insights, at relatively low cost in terms of effort and time. It also ends with you having a list of people who want to hear from you about the topics you cover.

You will no longer be letting your content go to waste.

It is not, however, a quick process. You may send newsletters to hundreds of subscribers for years. There are two ways to think about that:

• oh man, I only have 200 subscribers and therefore I compare poorly to people who have tens of thousands of subscribers or more
• oh my, I have 200 subscribers who want to hear what I say and are willing to let me into their email inbox regularly

Which do you think is the better perspective?