how to create a totally free newsletter for your blog

Having a newsletter is a necessity if you want to keep people coming back to your blog. You can’t always depend on social media or google traffic to bring visitors to you, you need to have direct access to your readers so that they remember that you exist. It also makes it easier to find you if they need to recall something from your blog!

That being said, building a newsletter can be somewhat costly. There’s three main services that you can find yourself paying for:

1. The newsletter itself: you need to have a platform on which you create and send out your newsletter
2. Collecting emails for your newsletter on your blog: this is often separate from the newsletter service
3. Physical mailing address: a hidden cost- legally, all newsletters are required to have a physical mailing address on them, so you would have to pay for a virtual mailing address or a PO box, etc.

However, as you all know, I am a very big proponent of doing things for free or as cheap as possible (see my recommendations page for a collection of budget friendly blog essentials). I am proud to say that after several hours of research, I have found a method that is absolutely free and looks professional! Here, let me show you what it looks like:

How to achieve this

Okay so let me explain what I did/what I’m using!

For the newsletter itself, I’m using Substack. This was recommended to me in the past and I actually use it for this blog, although here I just link to my substack through a button. I have a separate blog though for my first side hustle project and I felt like it was too unprofessional to have my visitors leave my site to subscribe. I want them to stay on my blog, type their email in, and move on with reading my post, which prompted me to find a way to embed the substack sign up form into the blog.

Side note on why I like substack

Substack is pretty useful because it solves 2/3 problems that I mentioned above, and then some. First of all, it’s fully free. It’s easy to create a newsletter on there- I have to say though it may not look as great as some other platforms because the newsletter functions are a little bit basic. But I personally think that compared to building a newsletter from scratch, it definitely speeds up the process and gives you a nice end result.

Also, it solves the mailing address problem since your newsletter will automatically be published with the substack address so you don’t have to invest in a virtual mailbox or a PO box! The newsletter will also have an unsubscribe button which is another legal requirement that you now don’t need to worry about.

Some of the things that I was willing to sacrifice when I was trying to do things fully manually I was able to now have as well. For example getting email notifications when someone subscribes, having automatic welcome emails, etc. There is also no limit on how many people can subscribe, and no limit to how many emails you can send either, which a lot of other newsletter plugins have.

It doesn’t take very long to setup, maybe about 30 min to an hour. I usually go to the settings tab on the publisher dashboard and fill out everything, working my way down from the top. The only downside that I can think of is that your newsletter will still have the substack logo on it but it’s honestly inconspicuous and doesn’t ruin the aesthetic of the newsletter. It’s usually located at the very bottom.

Oh and the other thing is that when someone signs up it sends them a confirmation email, so they have to confirm their subscription before they start getting emails. This is more effort than just clicking the “I consent” checkbox, but there’s not really a way around it. It helps cut down on spam though so you will have real, loyal, readers. I take email confirmation over a google captcha any day (those things are horrible).

So that’s my honest take on substack. I really do think I will be using it for as long as possible, even if my blog starts to scale!

How to embed directly into website

Copy and paste the code below :D!!! It’s really that easy (note: I found part of this code here– gotta give credit where credit is due).

In wordpress there is a custom html block so just type “/html” and it should pop up. Then you can copy the code into it and even preview it within the editor before you publish. I included extra comments in all caps so you can see what to change to customize your subscribe box. If you have any questions, leave them in the comment section below and I will try to address them ASAP.

<!-- Substack Embed with Title and Frame -->
<div style="
    padding: 20px; 
    border: 2px solid #204776; <!-- COMMENT/DELETE THIS OUT IF YOU DON'T WANT A BORDER -->
    width: fit-content; 
    max-width: 100%; 
    margin: 20px auto; 
    text-align: center;
">
    <!-- Title -->
    <h2 style=" <!-- YOU CAN CHANGE THE FONT, SIZE, AND COLOR OF THE HEADING HERE -->
        font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; 
        font-size: 1rem; 
        color: #204776; 
        margin-bottom: 15px;
    ">
        Subscribe to my wonderful newsletter <!-- INSERT YOUR CAPTION HERE -->
    </h2>
    <!-- Substack Embed -->
    <div id="custom-substack-embed"></div>
    <script>
      window.CustomSubstackWidget = {
        substackUrl: "yoursubstack.substack.com", <!-- INSERT YOUR SUBSTACK URL HERE -->
        placeholder: "example@gmail.com",
        buttonText: "Subscribe",
        theme: "custom",
        colors: {                   <!-- CHANGE BUTTON COLORS HERE -->
          primary: "#204776", 
          input: "#FFFFFF",
          email: "#B0B0B0",
          text: "#000000",
        },
      };
    </script>
    <script src="https://substackapi.com/widget.js" async></script>
</div>

Turning your subscription form into a popup

Popups are annoying, but they work. If you have a subscription form then most likely you will want to have a popup sign up form as well! Here’s how to do it (also for free :D).

I’m using WP Popups (I’m including my referral link here although you will only need the free version- I just want to see my influence). It’s super user friendly and the tools you’ll need are free. At first glance it looks like the popup is going to be really ugly but if you mess around with it a bit it ends up looking pretty professional.

So once you have the pop up all setup, you’ll need to do a little bit more on the coding side but I promise it’s easy. Just go to your wordpress dashboard -> appearance -> theme file editor. In your theme files find one called functions.php. Then you’re going to scroll allll the way to the bottom of that file and add the following code (don’t forget to add the code you customized above under the comment in all caps):

add_shortcode( 'wpp_substack', 'wpp_substack_code');
function wpp_substack_code() {
	ob_start();
	?>
<!-- PASTE YOUR SUBSTACK HTML EMBED CODE UNDER THIS COMMENT -->

<?php
	$html = ob_get_clean();
	return $html;

}

Then hit update file. Now go back to your form, and in the content block type:

[wpp_substack]

It should look something like this:

Save and make sure your popup is toggled on! You should be able to see your sign up form in the popup now!

Also just a side note, what you did was turn the code you customized into shortcode. So now instead of pasting the html block on your widgets and blog posts, you can add the shortcode ([wpp_substack]) instead! For example, in the blog editor you can just type /shortcode and paste the shortcode inside it.

THAT IS ALL

Let me know if this was helpful or if you run into any issues in the comments below, I’ll do my best to help!