Subscribe
Sign in
Advice in launching a newsletter and twitter presence
Hey guys,
I am quite new to the whole hacking products together thing, and have recently learnt how to build landing pages. I have heard that twitter is a commonplace for tech personas and was wondering if anyone has any experience in how to build a personal brand on twitter. Could anyone direct me to good highly engaged twitter accounts as an example that I can learn from.
Additionally I want to start a newsletter regarding my learning in life as a budding maker, data scientist, and former wall street trader. My intention is to create a feedback loop where my job is to learn what I need to do learn, while trying to explain it in a simplistic manner plus shed some light into these quite opaque industries. Has anyone had any experience building a newsletter and what are the important steps I should be aware of?
Thank you!
13
Replies
Best
Nastya Mikeyeva
Hi @jack_gan , My advice is to repost the popular tweets on related themes and to comment them. This should enlarge your impressions.
Report
Share
I've not got a newsletter yet, but conceptually you're on the right track. https://substack.com/ seems to be the standard nowadays, but there are alternatives.
As for twitter, authenticity goes a long way. Build in public, find popular hashtags in your industry (without becoming "spammy"), etc.
Finally, be willing to play the long game. Everything compounds slowly, you have to be ready to keep investing time and effort.
empathy goes a long long way. who are you looking to attract, and what do those people need? who can you listen to and respond from? in just 4 words the most effective strategies all incorporate: listen, learn, care & serve.
I've talked with a few people who have built such accounts and some of the advice was:
- First, you need to reach a 'critical' audience by being VISIBLE. If you like/engage/re-tweet, people are going to notice you. People with >100k followers are way less to notice you than people with, say, <1k followers (but who might be interested in what you have to offer)
- Once you reach a 'critical' audience, start making interesting tweets that they can re-tweet. Tweets that are easy to consume/packed with value can work well (if you use an image/video along the text, you can pack way more value in a tweet vs. just text). Also Twitter threads. Basically, experiment what works.
To manage the newsletter you can use Mailchimp, the free version is good enough and it also allows you to create the sign up form that you can embed on your website.
For twitter in order to get followers and start up your account you need to engage with people who share your same interests (follow them, like their tweet, comment, reshare...). Be patient, it will take a long time to get a following on Twitter (or any other social network).
I like Harry's Marketing examples, @ GoodMarketingHQ on twitter. Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but it's worth checking out!
Take a look at Letterstack for help on newsletters. It was shared a week or two ago I think and it has links to really good sources.
All the best!
Viktor Torstenius
Rather than a newsletter, you may be better off starting a blog and letting people subscribe to it. Blogs can be extremely useful inbound traffic drivers - someone who's searching for, say, going from Wall Street to entrepreneurship is unlikely to have a newsletter subscription pop up as an organic result. Use the blog to populate your email list by creating compelling content and making it easy for people to get emailed every time you post something new.
@daniel_ruby I have started posting medium articles and hitting up subreddits. Currently funnelling into twitter. Will take your advice of newsletters after the fact.
There are tons of inspiring newsletter success stories out there. My personal favorite CXL - all started with a newsletter, Harry's marketing examples - like the fresh approach, Finshots - launched as a newsletter with just 1 story in a day and mail brew.
I guess, people engage with something that they can relate to, be authentic, genuine and grateful and create value for your readers.
My advice is start with a small hypothesis and test it with minimum resources.
As an individual, your experience is unique so use that, start creating content and stick to a routine, can be daily, weekly, monthly, bi-weekly, doesn't matter.
Just start small and keep iterating and learning.
@28alec Sounds a lot like trading where you rapidly test new hypotheses for trading strategies. Will put my scientist cap on!
Write a newsletter to yourself every day to see if it is something you can actually stick to.