What should an industry newsletter cover so professionals actually read it?

Most industry media isn't written for the people doing the work. Fix that and you have an opening.

I spent nearly twenty years in insurance before this, so that's the industry I know. All insurance media is old magazines and garbage websites. Even the information that's out there isn't valuable to an agent whose job is selling insurance.

"So, most insurance media is like, oh, this company merged with this company or this actuary. Like, who cares, right?"

What do most industry newsletters get wrong?

• The value isn't in the newsletter. It links out to something somewhere else. Make the newsletter the value, so readers don't have to leave it.
• The wrong writers. Legacy media companies staffed by journalists and corporate MBA types who don't know anything about selling insurance.
• The wrong reader. A restaurant owner is trying to run a restaurant. Stock moves and industry earnings aren't relevant. Build the media company for owners and operators, not for investors or Wall Street.

What should it cover instead?

What's going on in the industry that affects the reader's job. My concept was a Morning Brew for insurance agents, because agents just need to keep up with what's going on, and nobody does that for them.

I'd stay away from teaching tricks and positioning myself as the expert. The industry already has influencers who teach. News is better ground anyway, since there's always something happening.

The writing itself is no longer the hard part. I gave a deep research tool a prompt for a sample issue and it wrote about 95% of it. As a former agent, I would absolutely have read it.

Should I call it "AI for [my industry]"?

No. Meet people where they want to be. Someone in HR or insurance isn't thinking "I want to learn how AI can help me." They want to be better at their job and know what's going on in their industry so they can make better decisions. That's not a tool-based concept.

Lots of people also hate AI, and they won't choose to read about it if it's in the title. Make it the newsletter for that profession and let AI show up inside it when it matters. Keep in mind that a lot of people don't actually want to get better, so pure self-improvement content can have a smaller audience than you'd think.

Can memes carry an industry newsletter?

I think they could be the secret sauce. People love funny memes about their industry that nobody else understands. One to three new, funny memes a week could get shared all over the industry's Facebook groups, and that drives subscribers and opens. It's also less work than researching news: people are already making memes about sales and customer service, and you adapt the language for your industry.

The catch: you have to be funny. I've played with AI meme tools, and they're better than nothing but not actually funny yet. I also tried a classic old meme as an ad and it didn't work. A peer told me he's seen memes as ads sometimes double performance, so it needs testing. More on this in memes and GIFs in newsletters.

Should I split it into versions for different audiences?

Maybe later. With insurance, I thought about one newsletter for independent agents and one for captive agents, since the content differs. Captive agents are also easier to reach, because they all share their carrier's email domain.

Be careful going further. If a signup survey splits readers into 12 segments and you write a version for each, you're sending 12 emails instead of one. You probably won't get 12 times the upside, so I'd hold off in the short term. For picking the niche in the first place, see how to choose a newsletter niche.