Last month I wrote a detailed review of my College’s Weekly Newsletter. Here are some things that you should know about it:
The Newsletter was being written and published in Notion
It was being handled and published by the College’s Publication Committee, a team I’ve worked with in the past but never been a part of (I don’t know why)
The team is known throughout college for its beautiful designs, look at their Instagram
Unfortunately, the beautiful design language and equally comparable writing were not being recognized and spoken about as much as one would expect - I figured the main culprit behind this was how it was being published.
I’ve been writing this newsletter for a year (okay technically I took a 10-month break in between, but I still kept reading about this stuff okay?) and there were a couple of things that I saw in PubCom’s Newsletter that I immediately identified as obstacles on its growth.
So, I ignored my To-Do List, said bye to all the deadlines that could actually impact my college life, and started writing, what would eventually turn out to be: a 1,500 word review about what not to do when writing a Newsletter.
Thankfully, the brilliant editor at PubCom decided to take the advice to heart, and I’m proud to announce that PubCom’s Newsletter is now on Substack!
I’m sharing parts of the review with you cause I think it can be valuable for most people, especially those that are thinking of publishing newsletters with Notion.
Leave your comments below and let me know how you feel, have you personally published, or seen someone publish Newsletters with Notion before? Send me some recommendations at thepuranik.blog@gmail.com.
Using Widgets in your Newsletter
There is a large Notion fanbase that makes widgets, decorations and other cool stuff for other community members to use. PubCom was using a bunch of Widgets in their original Newsletter, and it was messing up a lot of things, particularly:
The formatting of the piece
The load time
The presentation of the information
Here’s what I said to them:
About their Quote Widget
Quote widgets are great for websites and landing pages but not for newsletters and articles. If you're using a quote then make sure it's in line with the theme of the newsletter.
I got this quote while reading your newsletter on boredom:
There is no time for cut-and-dried monotony. There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time. ~ Coco Chanel
As you may guess, this doesn't fit the theme at all.
Moreover, using widgets for things like quotes takes away from the impression you leave with the readers, invest some time in finding the right quote - don't use a shortcut widget.
About the sheer number of widgets they were using:
No two ways about it, as soon as I open your newsletter, I am greeted by 5 widgets that look like the annoying popups we’ve been trying to block since 2006.
Moreover, some of the widgets are unnecessary - I don’t need to see the time and date on a webpage I just opened, that information is already on my screen irrespective of which device I’m reading on.
Nevertheless, Widgets can be fun. In case you want to continue using them - make sure that they come after the content, this way they’re a fun thing to find after reading, not an impedance to the reading itself.
Notion’s Load Times
Notion has been notorious for its long load times, often making people switch to other tools altogether. But speed really matters when it comes to making an online presence for your content, if people aren’t greeted with the content they asked for, within 2 seconds of asking for it, they’ll probably leave.
Here’s what I said to them:
Notion is not the platform that you should be using to write and publish newsletters in the first place. There are a lot of options that are better in each and every aspect of the process - especially when it comes to reading the newsletter, which is inarguably the most important part of any publishing endeavor.
Notion takes extremely long to load, widgets take even longer
I won’t talk about this because you’ve probably experienced it yourself, here some more people that said the same thing:
https://probleme.app/en/notion-not-loading-issues-with-notion/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/lguknm/notion_is_taking_too_long_to_load/
Loading times bite into the number of people that stick around to read, people have never liked to wait and even less so because of how fast social media is today.
An alternative like Substack will reduce loading times to zero because the content is delivered straight to the reader’s inbox and loaded before they even see the notification. This is the primary reason I moved my writing from a Wordpress Site to a Substack Newsletter.
Lack of Community Features
The best part of the Internet age is the fact that your content is open to an unlimited number of people online, this makes your audience a feature that can attract more people. For example, one of Matt D’avella’s biggest selling points as a course creator is that his community features so many like-minded people.
Making your audience accessible to individual members is thus a huge boost to whatever and wherever you publish. Notion’s lack of community features was restricting interaction between the audience, and PubCom.
Here’s what I said to them:
Readers can't interact with the content on mobile
As I said earlier, your goal should be that readers keep coming back to your newsletter to look at what you’ve written and potentially even refer to it to and send it to others, people do this by sharing specific lines of the broader articles by copying, pasting or searching for keywords via their phone’s context menus.
This is so difficult on Notion Sites that it discourages these activities altogether. An alternative like Substack eliminates this very basic but drastically tragic bug.
Readers can’t discuss your publication with each other
There’s no space for public comments on Notion, there’s no space for people to react either, while I see the feedback form, the sense of community brings people back every week.
I also know y’all ask questions to your readers, and readers are always interested in knowing what other people answer.
Getting Insights
If you follow any creators or if you’re a creator yourself, you’ve probably heard the “throw shit at the wall, and see what sticks” advice before - this is made possible via analytics.
Notion, until very recently, wasn’t providing analytics to users, and they still aren’t available to free or student users. The lack of analytics makes it difficult to understand what content is more appreciated by your readers, which writing style makes viewers stay around longer, etc.
Here’s what I said to them:
As far as I know, Notion has no built in mechanisms to provide insights and statistics about the content you put out.
In such a situation finding out what is working and what isn't working becomes increasingly difficult.
Ideally as content creators/publishers you should be reviewing the last week's newsletter while looking at it's performance, and accordingly double down or switch tactics.
But you're devoid of this ability with a platform like Notion.
Conclusion
If you’re publishing with Notion, and it’s working for you, that’s great! Please leave a comment with your publication so I can check you out. Otherwise, you should consider shifting to a more Newsletter dedicated platform, if you want to read the full letter to PubCom, you can check it out here.
Also, consider subscribing to their newsletter, it’s great stuff and I also write for them from time to time.
Until next time, Let out a Sigh!