How do I get local people to contribute content to my newsletter?

Getting people to submit content is gold. The contributor feels good about it and wants to share it: look, I was written about. That's free content and free distribution in one move.

"Getting people to submit content is freaking gold, because A, they feel good about it, they want to share"

It's also the part AI will never do. Featuring real people from your town is what's going to make local newsletters amazing.

What kinds of reader content work?

• Community shout-outs. Your kid's second grade teacher went above and beyond? Tell us and we'll post it. People like seeing that kind of stuff.
• Local people doing good things. A section with someone's photo and a short write-up, plus a line in the issue asking readers to nominate someone.
• Business owner features. In a B2B newsletter, you feature business owners instead of community members.
• Op-eds. In a newsletter you can put them front and center, not in a weird place nobody sees, like old newspapers did.
• Birthdays. One B2B operator I know runs a birthday section with people's faces in it. It sounds silly. He says people love it.

One idea I heard and liked, though I haven't tried it: a teacher of the month. Readers submit nominations, and a few local businesses each put in $50 toward a $500 classroom donation and get their names on it.

How do business owner interviews work?

You don't need reporters for this. Put a form in the newsletter: do you want to be featured? Fill this out. I use a text-based interview with six questions. When an owner fills it out, AI pulls the most interesting comment from each answer and formats it for the newsletter. The piece links back to their site, which also gives them a backlink.

Owners are excited to do it, because it gets their word out and gets an article written about them. A chamber of commerce could help recruit them.

I also want to offer a free AI audit for business owners: I interview them, record it, run it through Claude for advice, and the result becomes content.

How should you collect submissions?

Start simple. We put links to an ad submission form and an event submission form in the email footer. It doesn't feel like part of the email, but it is.

Once the volume grows, route each type where it belongs. This is how I set it up in our own software:

1. Events and jobs go automatically to the website and into the newsletter builder.
2. Everything else, like an editorial about a restaurant or a business, goes into the newsletter's content feed tagged by section, and into an admin queue for the website.
3. On the website, an editor can post it as is, have AI expand a two-paragraph submission into four or five paragraphs, or delete it. The newsletter version stays exactly the same.

Expect a lot of submissions you won't use. Many events people send aren't the kind you want in the newsletter, and it's annoying because you feel bad. The long-term fix is an events page on the website where overflow events can live.

Why aren't people submitting?

Usually because they don't know the option exists. We launched a Community Voices section and found it hard to get in front of people. We haven't promoted our submission page at all, and we haven't gotten many.

Attention fixes this. I know an operator who gets submissions even from the city, because nobody goes to the city's website. Once you have the eyeballs of the town, everybody wants their stuff on your page. That's where it gets exciting.