Everything You Need To Know About Email Newsletter Archives

If your newsletter is one of the main ways you show up online and market your business… why let some of your best stuff disappear after you hit send?

Many entrepreneurs don’t think twice about what happens to their old email content once it’s been opened. But if you regularly send emails that are packed with value through tips and stories, they deserve a longer shelf life.

That’s where a newsletter archive comes in. It’s not exactly standard practice in the industry, but it’s a smart move — especially for creatives who are totally overwhelmed with content creation and need what they’ve already got to keep working for them.

Here’s everything you need to know about email newsletter archives and why you need to create one, like yesterday.

What Is An Email Newsletter Archive?

A newsletter archive is a centralized place where you store all your past valuable emails (rather than just leaving them in your email marketing software to die a slow, painful death after the first influx of opens from your subscribers).

Email newsletter archives generally live online and are publicly available for both your current subscribers to read and discoverable for people who may become subscribers in the future.

If you’re thinking… ‘kay great cool. But why should I care about having a newsletter archive?

Good thing I wrote an entire blog post about why you should archive your newsletter and the benefits of having one! Here’s the TL;DR:

• Makes it super easy to reference + link back to your past emails (I do this quite a bit!)
• Helps you capture lurkers who want to poke through your content before committing
• Lets your current subscribers go back and binge your old stuff
• Strengthens your marketing funnel, making email even MORE worthwhile
• Boosts your SEO with the right strategy (*if* your archive is hosted on your website)

Should I Archive Every Email I Send?

If you have a weekly (or biweekly, or monthly) newsletter that you send out to subscribers to share stories, tips, and resources, those are the emails that I recommend archiving.

If you don’t have a regular or consistent newsletter, but you still occasionally talk to your list, my litmus test is this: your archive is meant to provide value to subscribers and prospective subscribers, so only archive newsletters that were primarily written to provide value.

Any emails that were written with the primary purpose of selling — sales emails, promotional campaigns, launch sequences, etc. — should be left off the archive. These types of emails aren’t evergreen and don’t provide long-term value.

Does This Mean I Don’t Have to Blog?

Absolutelyyyy not. Blogging — aka publishing longform content on your site, like *this* very blog post — is still hands-down the best way to bring in organic traffic and build your authority over time.

A newsletter archive can be a great supplement if you don’t publish blog posts super frequently, or if blogging feels overwhelming right now. But it’s definitely not a long term replacement.

I’ll always be a proponent for creative entrepreneurs having an actual blog on their website — my roots are in blogging, after all! Instead of thinking of a newsletter archive as a replacement for creating in-depth, searchable content on your site, think of it as a way to talk to your audience in a slightly different (and more vulnerable, as newsletters often are) format.

Common Myths About Archiving Your Newsletter

❌ Myth #1: “If I make my emails public, no one will actually subscribe.”

A newsletter archive gives people the ability to preview your content, but if they like what they see and WANT to hear more from you, they’ll subscribe for the convenience of receiving your newsletters directly in their inboxes.

Sure, there may be some people that don’t subscribe if they can read your archive without signing up. But if sampling your content doesn’t make someone want to subscribe, the truth is that they weren’t likely to be an engaged subscriber or buy from you even if they had.

❌ Myth #2: “Publishing my newsletters will hurt my SEO.”

A lot of people believe that because they talk about similar topics on their website and in their emails, having a public archive where they publish newsletters will hurt their SEO because of duplicate content and content cannibalization.

Two things I have to say about that:

• While duplicate content is most definitely a thing that Google recognizes, getting penalized for it is highly unlikely. This means if you have the same content in multiple places, Google may only prioritize ranking ONE of the URLs rather than all of them.
• If you talk about the same topics on your blog and newsletter, you may eventually have competing posts in the Google rankings. But you can mitigate this a bit by making sure your newsletters target different keywords than the ones you’re targeting in blog posts on similar topics.

❌ Myth #3: “I already have a blog, so there’s no point in an email archive.”

This kind of builds onto point #2 — if you talk about a lot of the same stuff on your website and in your emails, you may feel like there’s no point in double dipping and resharing the same information.

But SEO content and newsletter content are wayyy different and speak to different types of people. Blog posts speak well to browsers and people who are just stumbling across your brand. Newsletters speak better to people who are already your clients, buyers, and fans.

❌ Myth #4: “It’ll be too much work/setup/maintenance.”

Not necessarily! Like anything, you can make it complicated. But some email newsletter archives are dead simple to set up and maintain — like a Substack publication that you simply copy + paste your newsletters to each week as you send them.

From my experience, this type of archive takes about 10-15 minutes/week to maintain. The initial setup, especially if you have a lot of past newsletters you’ll need to archive, is what takes a while — but the good thing is I can take this part off your plate so you don’t have to worry about it!

The Best Ways to Set Up Email Newsletter Archives (Even If You’re Not Tech-Savvy)

Archive setup	Best for	What to know
Website	Site owners who want full control and SEO payoff	Requires a bit more setup but gives you the most strategic benefit long-term
Substack or Medium	Creators who want a simple, discoverable setup	Easy to launch/maintain and nice UI — but limited customization
Email marketing platform	Users of platforms like Kit and Beehiiv that offer this feature	Fastest option, but limited customization and control
Notion or Airtable	Creators who want a simple archive for subscribers and internal referencing	Super easy to set up, but not ideal for discoverability or SEO

Your website (on a separate RSS feed)

If your website platform gives you the option to create multiple blog feeds, you can set up your newsletter archive on your site. You can set it up so that it’s completely separate from your actual blog and hidden from your primary navigation, and you’ll get SEO benefits from publishing your newsletter content directly to your website.

Is it right for you? I recommend this option for hosting your newsletter archive if you’re already paying to host a website AND want to reap the SEO benefits. It’s a great choice if you’re someone who doesn’t have time to actually blog weekly on your website because it gives you fresh content to publish week to week.

A third-party publishing platform like Substack or Medium

Substack and Medium are both easy-to-use publishing platforms with existing audiences. Creating a publication on one of these platforms to host your newsletter archive means built-in discoverability and the ability to easily customize your archive to make it aesthetically pleasing.

Is it right for you? This option is great if you want something that feels a bit separate from your actual website. If your blog + newsletter content are very closely related (like, you repurpose the same topics for both each week), then this separation can be good. It’s also a great choice if you want something that looks nice without having to spend a lot of time setting it all up.

Your email marketing software’s “publish to web” feature

Some email marketing platforms, like Kit and Beehiiv, have built-in features that allow you to publish your newsletters to the web directly from their platform. If you want something super quick and easy, this can be a great way to go. You’ll be able to do everything directly from your email software and quickly grab shareable links whenever you need.

Is it right for you? It depends on if your email marketing software even offers a feature like this, and if they do, if it will allow you to actually do what you want to do. For example — what are the editing capabilities like? Will you be able to optimize in any way? Are there limitations that are going to start bugging you eventually?

A public database on a platform like Notion or Airtable

If you want to get a bit creative, you can use project management software to build a newsletter archive in a public database. I’ve seen archives on Notion and Airtable, but the possibilities are endless here. If you’re already paying for a project management software subscription, this could allow you to take advantage of the product you’re already paying for. 

Is it right for you? If you mainly want an archive for your existing subscribers to be able to go back and read, a simple database could be a good choice. You can use a platform you’re already familiar with — super easy to set up and maintain. However, this method doesn’t really have any built-in discoverability.

Copy-Paste vs. SEO-Enhanced Email Newsletter Archives

Not all email newsletter archives are built the same — and that’s a good thing.

Some people want an archive because they’re tired of not being able to easily reference their old content and stories from past emails. Others want their newsletters to live on and continue working for them because they spend so much time and effort writing them each week.

There are literally no rules to how you choose to archive your newsletter, but I generally approach it in one of two ways:

The Copy-Paste Newsletter Archive

This is a more minimalist, low-lift option. No fancy content additions or edits, maybe just a bit of formatting and tweaking after pasting your newsletter into whatever tool you’re using to archive — Substack, Notion, etc.

If your goal is to give subscribers (and lurkers) a way to catch up on past newsletters, and make it easier for yourself to link back to old stuff, a copy-paste newsletter archive gets the job done and is quick to maintain.

The SEO-Enhanced Newsletter Archive

This is the slightly more advanced option that requires more effort to maintain. You’re still republishing your newsletters — you’re just optimizing them a bit for search and discoverability. 

That could mean things like: adding a more clear title and matching URL slug that targets a specific keyword, reformatting the content for better skimmability, or even adding/removing content in certain areas to make the content clearer or more helpful.

If you’ve chosen to set up your newsletter archive on your website, it’s worth adding a light SEO layer to help make your effort go further.

Deciding Which Type of Archive Is Right For You

	Copy-Paste Archive	SEO-Enhanced Archive
Required Effort Level	Low — just copy + paste each issue	Medium to high — light content editing, formatting, and keyword selection
Maintenance Time	~10-15 min/week	~15-45 min/week
Visibility	Great for current subscribers and easy linkbacks	Great for new audience discovery via search
Drawbacks	Limited discoverability or SEO benefit	Requires some upfront setup and strategy
Best For	Entrepreneurs who want something simple and sustainable	Entrepreneurs who want their newsletter content to work harder over time

How to Maintain Your Archive Without It Becoming a Backburner Task

As an ADHD entrepreneur, I’m welllll aware at how easily tasks like these can slip to the backburner each week. (And then you wake up one day and realize you have 4857 past newsletters that are still waiting to be archived 🫣)

Here are a few ways you can make maintaining your newsletter archive easier, so it doesn’t turn into yet another guilty to-do sucking up your precious mental energy:

• Add an “archive” step to your weekly email marketing workflow
• Set a reminder to batch your archive updates once per month or quarter (if that works better for your brain)
• Use a template so you’re not formatting from scratch each time
• If you send a LOT of emails and archiving them all seems overwhelming, only archive the ones that are exceptionally helpful/valuable

Orrrr, if you don’t want to manage this yourself: Hire me to take care of it for you. 🙂

I help creatives like you build email newsletter archives from scratch, catch up their past newsletters, and then provide monthly support/maintenance so they don’t even have to think of it. Inquire to learn more about working together!