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any tips on growing a newsletter?
currently building a daily newsletter aimed towards people who scroll on social media every morning. instead of waking up to chaotic feeds, how much nicer would it be to learn something cool in <5 minutes before you fully wake up and get out of bed? (quotidianlearning.substack.com)
idk if my newsletter has a large audience and if it does, what's the best way to expand my reach?
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@kattrisen thanks for the suggestions! I’ll probably modify my niche and narrow down the audience before I launch
@kattrisen @carolrong Partnering with other people in the industry who have a lot of people in their email list is a good way of expanding your reach and if you have got some seriously valuable content you will also be able to provide value to their audience so it's a win-win
hey mate, love the idea of a calm morning read. here's some quick thoughts:
know your audience. get specific. your angle sets you apart. own it.
content quality? non-negotiable. if you're a must-read, they'll stick around.
use social to complement the newsletter. snippets can make great tweets.
guest posts? consider it. brings in their audience into your orbit.
exclusive content. make some pieces newsletter-only. creates a velvet rope effect.
collect testimonials. social proof eases sign-up friction.
A/B test subject lines. make opening your email irresistible.
cross-promote. find newsletters with similar vibe, swap shoutouts.
track metrics. but not just open rates. engagement is key.
you got this. it's a marathon, not a sprint. pace yourself, keep learning.
Be sure to think from your consumer’s point of view and try to provide value. What information do they need to qualify them for the next steps to want the service or product you eventually want to sell them? That way your list isn’t just a numbers game, it will be based on quality subscriptions that are somewhere in your sales cycle.
I think it'll be helpful for you to drill down who your audience truly is. How do you *and* your target audience define "something cool"? Is it something cool about AI like Ben's Bites newsletter? Something cool about Healthcare? Music?
Understanding who you're writing for will help you to figure out what your audience is looking for (which will influence how you talk about your newsletter) and where they hangout (which will influence how and where you reach them).
Nonetheless, I'd like to learn more about your newsletter since I would enjoy learning about something cool in <5 min!
@ctrusttea I certainly need to narrow my niche as I continue developing the newsletter. will let you know when I launch so you can be one of the first subscribers :)
@andriyuh @carol
I have a social media-focused newsletter called The Feed with 15,000 readers.
A few things I've learned beyond the traditional scaling via FB/Twitter:
1. Reddit: I have a VA who posts on popular subreddits on my behalf (I used to do it myself and have since taught them). It's very feasible to get 50 sign-ups / day by responding to comments with value-add information. If you give advice that's genuinely useful to someone's question I generally find people are comfortable giving your newsletter a try.
2. LinkedIn: You can send everyone you're connected to a notification that you have a newsletter and ask them to sign up. You don't get the emails but it's easy to reach out to the folks who sign up and get them onto your ESP (Convertkit / Beehiiv) afterward. Easy effort, decent scale.
3. Product Hunt: I'm launching The Feed on Product Hunt in 2 weeks so I can't 100% tell you how scalable that is until then. But what I do know is my readers overlap super heavily with someone who's on here (generally founders looking to bootstrap a business, with some level of interest in how personal branding on social media can be a flywheel for user acquisition).
Ultimately you want to prove out the newsletter in 1-3 of these channels and test a small (call it $250) paid media budget - that should give you enough signal to understand if you have content-market fit.
Since we're in a similar niche feel free to reach out on LinkedIn if you have specific questions! Happy to be helpful to the extent I can.
@nathan_may1 yooo this is super helpful! Thank you for all those suggestions. I will hit you up on linkedin if I need help.
@andriyuh @carol @nathan_may1 That is really insightful.
I am sure you must have heard of Morning Brew and The Hustle.
We have a very similar idea, but we made an app for that. Our app has news-card on each screen, similar to social media feeds, but it instead gives a summary in less than 70 words for each news article.
@andriyuh @carol @nathan_may1 how do you post to subreddits and don't get bounced? I tried it a couple of times and stopped.
@carolrong, you could try expanding your reach through viral interactive content. One platform you might consider is Meiro – https://meiro.cc. It works well for our newsletter!
Focus on making relevant, valuable content. That is by far and away the best way to grow anything in print/online/video etc.
Obviously that is only part of the problem though, great content without anyone discovering it is a waste.
There are a number of places you can post your content to get an initial following. This is what we did. We now have about 15K subscribers to our mailouts.
What we did was to post on social media, for one. This is a grind, but, it's what we did. Try to find ways of making your posts tempting with interesting questions, visuals.
We also found news aggregator sites that allow others to post articles. They get free content, and you get free exposure. This can be a win win, so long as the content is well curated by the site's admins. Don't post on sites with poor authority or are known for allowing spammers to use their site for free advertising, real humans tune out of those pretty quick and so their audiences will likely not be very engaged anyway.
Bottom line, its a lot of work, and you won't really know if your content has a large audience until it does! But the adventure to fine out, in my opinion, is its own reward :)
I've been growing one as well and have come to realize there are a few methods that are relatively easy. The offer is how you differentiate yourself from the rest.
The first thing I would do is ask yourself why you signed up to the newsletters that you've signed up to.
- What do they offer that caused you to sign up in the first place?
Then, for any newsletter that you sign up to going forward, take a screenshot of the ad or the pitch that made you to want to sign up.
- What kind of language is being used? What's the offer? How does it look? The details matter more than you know, but we usually observe them subconsciously.
Most of the time, if you're signing up for a free newsletter, it's because they are offering you something that is of value. At least that's been my personal assessment of my own sign-ups. The newsletters I've signed up for, basically provide insight and research into areas that I'm interested in exploring, but can't always get to every day on my own due to limited time and bandwidth.
A great place to start is to consider what you do everyday for free, that you can write about passionately, that would be of value to someone that is interested but may not have the time to make it their primary area of interest. What I've done for mine is offer a free, in-depth summarization of the books that I ready weekly. This provides my subscribers with insightful content that saves them time, and it's free.
@bradley_w this is very helpful, thank you. I’ve never thought about it from the perspective of the newsletters I’m subscribed to
hey everyone, thank you so much for all the upvotes + advice. just launched my newsletter Quotidian Learning (quotidianlearning.substack.com) and i'm waiting to launch it on product hunt once i reach one week. feel free to check it out! thanks
Visual appeal, doing a market research to see where else you can reach for active traffic, consistent posting, compelling and attractive titles, social sharing, and analytics to check open rates and click through rates CTR. Hope this helps! Good luck
Being part of a community of newsletter creators
To support each other and brainstorm.
Focus on delivering value in each issue and leverage your existing network for initial growth. Worked for my ProductHunt launch too.
Growing a newsletter? First, killer content is non-negotiable. Give people a reason to stay subscribed.
@jeorge28 On Substack and Beehiv I think they have an option where different newsletters can collaborate with each other so if a new person subscribes to your competitors newsletter then your newsletter will also be automatically suggested to them.
Also you can Incentivize existing subscribers with something to share your newsletter with their friends
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