The food blog newsletter, without a content calendar
A recipe blog's newsletter does not need a content calendar; it needs a way to see, each week, which five or six recipes already on the blog belong in one email right now, and a reason to send it.
Every food blogger has a newsletter, and most of them send it when a new recipe goes up, which means the list hears from them when the blog is busy and not when it is quiet. The content calendar is the usual fix: plan twelve months of themes, write to the plan. It is also the usual failure, because the plan is written in January about a kitchen in October, and by March it is a spreadsheet nobody opens.
The alternative is not discipline. It is noticing what the catalog can already do.
The catalog is the calendar
A blog with three hundred recipes has, at any moment, several emails sitting in it fully formed. Six cranberry recipes in October. Four soups and a bread in January. A main, two sides and a dessert that make a Sunday dinner in any month. The recipes exist, the photos exist, the season is doing the work of making them timely. What is missing is someone looking.
So the weekly question is not "what is this week's theme" but "which five or six recipes belong together right now". Belong together means: a shared ingredient, a shared course, a shared occasion, or a shared season, and none of them sent in the last month or so.
That question has an answer every week. Some weeks it has twenty.
What an issue is
Once you stop thinking in themes, an issue is a small, fixed thing:
- A reason. One sentence. Cranberries are in the store. It is soup weather. Thanksgiving is four weeks out.
- Five to seven recipes that belong together, the strongest one first.
- An opening of a paragraph or three, in your voice, that connects the reason to the first recipe.
- A subject line that says what is inside without a riddle.
That is the whole form. What to send your list when you have no new recipe walks through finding the recipes. Roundup emails is about picking the five. How often is about the rhythm.
The three shapes
Nearly every issue we have sent is one of three shapes.
The roundup. Five to seven recipes sharing one thing. Cranberry recipes. One-pot dinners. Things to do with a rotisserie chicken. The lead recipe is the one in season or the one with the best photo.
The dinner. A main, two sides, and a dessert that go together. It reads as a plan, not a list, and it gets more clicks per recipe than a roundup because the reader is deciding what to cook tonight.
The spotlight. One recipe with a story, and three that go with it. The new post, if there is one, or an old one that deserves a second life.
A list that gets a roundup most weeks, a dinner every few, and a spotlight when there is something to say, does not get bored and does not get sick of you.
What not to do
Do not send the RSS feed. An email that is the post's first paragraph and a "read more" is a notification, not a letter. It trains readers to ignore you.
Do not wait for a new recipe. The list does not know or care what you published this week. It cares what is for dinner.
Do not repeat yourself too soon. If shrimp went out last week, this week's roundup is not shrimp. A month between appearances of the same recipe is the floor; longer for the same theme.
Do not write to the calendar's voice. The planned issue reads planned. The one written because the cranberries were on sale reads like a person.
Where this came from
Three recipe sites, a regular letter on each, several years. Mary to say how often and for how long. Doing this by hand means opening the catalog every Monday, scanning for what fits, pulling photos and links, and writing the opening. It takes an hour that is mostly looking. The looking is the part that can be done for you; the opening is the part that should still sound like you.