My projects typically start with a 15-minute clarity call to discuss needs, goals, and budget. Since Kristy was referred by a client of mine, she requested to skip this step.

Instead, I sent her a proposal detailing how I would help her start and nurture a monthly newsletter.

After she accepted my proposal, we had a 90-minute call where I dove deep into her business, background, and bigger vision for the future. Kristy brought relevant brand documents, audience information, competitor links, newsletter and social media analytics, and other resources that helped guide the questions.

We reworked her strategy every quarter from July 2021-March 2023. She also received a copy of the strategy document after every call.

During the calls, I asked questions to help define her short and long-term goals, messaging and copy needs, and target audience before I ever sat down to write the copy.

For each email, we:

• Got clear on the goal

• Developed a relevant call to action

• Connected the content’s focus with a monthly theme

• Highlighted her related services to promote in the emails

The strategy calls gave me a lot to work with, but I always do additional research on my own.

I used social listening to find pain points directly from her dream clients, created a word bank to keep the email copy on-brand, and reviewed Kristy’s past content to get a better understanding of her tone of voice, her brand archetype in action, and what her audience connected with the most.

There are a lot of brand strategists out there, but Kristy has a unique approach to it that she wants to share with a larger audience. Joy is at the center of her mission, something that became obvious through the extra research I conducted.

Uncovering this pattern and weaving it into the newsletter strategy led Kristy to officially name her newsletter The Joyful Entrepreneur!

Once Kristy was excited about the strategic direction of her newsletters and I did my own research, I started outlining the 2 newsletters for the month.

Each outline included the monthly goal, theme, send schedule, two subject lines/preview texts so we could run A/B tests, and the newsletter content.

Once the outline was done, I walked away from the copy for a day or two.

When I came back to it, I edited the copy to reflect my research, Kristy’s word bank, and our strategy call. This step was about aligning the content with her goal and making sure it read like Kristy wrote it.

For each of Kristy’s newsletters, I offered 1 round of edits. I gave her about 4-5 days to provide comments on the email drafts via Google Docs.

She’s a booked-out business owner wearing many hats, so the goal was to make providing feedback quick and easy.

After Kristy’s feedback, I either implemented her suggestions or commented back my professional opinion on why we shouldn’t go in that direction.

1-2 days after she left comments, I sent her the final copy of her newsletters. She then passed it along to her VA to format and schedule on FloDesk.

After the final copy was sent, our work was done until the following month!

Typically, I sent a draft of the monthly newsletters by the 15th, she had edits in by the 20th, and I delivered the final a few days later. This was to ensure that the content was accessible to her well ahead of when it would be published the following month.