resources you can utilize to follow all the latest trends within AI. Personally, I follow both TLDR AI and Alphasignal, which both provide daily summaries on the latest news within AI. However, I also recently started my own AI-focused newsletter, focusing on the latest trends within AI, and the topics I myself write articles on.
In this article, I’ll provide a high-level overview of why and how I started my AI-focused newsletter, including both my motivation and reasoning for starting the newsletter, and the tools and approaches I use to create my newsletter. I aim to inspire you to create a newsletter, providing more resources to the AI community, which has experienced unprecedented development in the last few years.
Why you should make a newsletter
I think newsletters are incredible resources for the AI community. You get to follow your favorite creators and pay attention to what they are working on. I think this is important for:
- Inspiration
- Learning
- Staying up to date
I particularly think inspiration is one of the most important aspects. Reading different newsletters keeps me up to date, but most of all it gives me different ideas for what I want to implement, or allows me to see problems from different perspectives, which is incredibly important in my day-to-day work as a senior data scientist at a startup.
I believe creating a good newsletter is beneficial both for the creator and the reader. The creator gets:
- People follow them, becoming a thought leader on a topic
- Monetary benefits
- Learning: Writing about your experiences is super useful to deepen your understanding
While the reader gets:
- Access to free or cheap high-quality resources
- Interact with a community
- Become inspired for their own work
Thus, creating a good newsletter is positive for all sides, and something you should consider if you’re particularly interested in certain topics
AI-focused newsletter – How to create it
I’ve now covered why you should create a newsletter, highlighting how it’s beneficial for both the creator of the newsletter and the subscribed reader of the newsletter.
Creating your own newsletter doesn’t have to be super difficult, and naturally, you should start simple and then iterate on your newsletter to improve it.
I simply started my own newsletter by discussing previous articles I had written, providing a summary and taxonomy of the articles, and some of my own thoughts and reflections on the articles. I think reflecting on your previous content is very valuable, both reading feedback from readers, but also reading through older content, and noticing the improvements you’re making, to always strive to be a better writer or creator. Below you can see an outline of my first newsletter:
I’m creating my newsletter using MailerLite, which allows you to organize your list of subscribers (I’ll cover how to acquire subscribers in the next section) and create a newsletter you send out to your subscribers. They also provide forms you can use to have people sign up for your newsletter. I am not sponsored by MailerLite.
To create the actual newsletter, I create an HTML file in Cursor. I provide Cursor with:
- Links to all the articles I want to refer to with titles
- The text I want to include in my newsletter (i.e., my thoughts on AI agents and vision language models)
- Paths to images I want to include, such as the image you see in my newsletter snippet above
Cursor then takes care of setting up the outline of the newsletter, the bullet point lists, and the general design of the newsletter. Writing the newsletter in HTML locally is a lot faster.
This follows the same principle I follow for my own website as well:
Never use drag and drop editors. Instead: look for a way to code it up yourself using any AI agent
Coding it yourself is so simple nowadays with tools like Claude Code or Cursor, that you should essentially avoid drag-and-drop editors at all costs
I applied this same concept in my article on How to Code Your Own Website with AI.
How to get signups
Now that you know why you should make a newsletter and how to make it, you need to have people sign up for the newsletter. This can be challenging, but you should always strive to follow the main principle:
If you create high quality content, the viewership will come by itself
If you keep writing high-quality articles and directing your readers to continue following you through your newsletter, you’re essentially guaranteed increased viewership over time.
There are, however, also some specific techniques you can use to increase signups more:
- Link to your newsletter on your online content (I recommend linking at the end of your articles, to ensure your content stays pure, and then show a CTA to your newsletter at the end of your content)
- Provide other resources, such as Webinars and eBooks, and have people sign up for your newsletter for free access to your content
- Guest posts: You can guest post some of your articles to attract readers from other channels
These are the approaches I use and recommend. Importantly, the techniques are:
- Not annoying, or in a way lowering the quality of your other content. If readers only want to read your article without distraction, there’s nothing preventing them from that
- The reader is benefiting from signing up, both through high-quality newsletter content and with free access to other content, such as eBooks and webinars
It’s incredibly important that you always make sure the user benefits from signing up for your newsletter.
Conclusion
In this article, I’ve discussed why and how to create a technical newsletter. Having a newsletter is good because both you, as the creator, and the reader benefit from the contents of the newsletter. It’s important to always keep in mind that the content you create, in some way, benefits your readers, for example, through easy access to high-quality resources. I also discussed how I make my newsletters through Cursor by creating HTML files and then pasting them into MailerLite to send them to my subscribers.
I believe having a newsletter is an incredible resource, both for creators and readers, and is something that will become more and more important when we enter a period of time where it’s harder and harder to separate AI content from real human-made content. Having an authentic newsletter with content written by humans is a good way to ensure authenticity.
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