Audience growth tactics for this year
For this new lead-gen model to work, we need to focus on one thing this year: audience growth.
We haven't put much effort into growing our email list in the last few years because we didn't need a huge list for the monetization approaches we were focusing on then.
But now we do. So here's what we're doing to grow our 8,000 subscriber newsletter this year:
Opt-ins. We're releasing lots of free reports and resources, starting with our Sale Multiples Guide in January. We're working on a new SaaS deals report, a big list of firms that buy SaaS companies, and more. These resources are all free and behind an email wall, so readers can get them in exchange for their email address. We're also looking at adding a sponsor to our course and making it free so it can reach a lot more founders.
Webinars. We're about to experiment with free webinars, in two specific formats. One is educational, where we'll dive into a part of the sale process to help founders learn. The other is the one I'm really exited about: showcases. We want to bring together a group of M&A advisors, a group of exit-readiness coaches, a group of lawyers... and give each of these professionals a chance to pitch our community of founders on their services. It's a chance for these experts to get in front of potential clients, and a way for founders to save tons of time by vetting a bunch of service provider options in one hour.
LinkedIn. When I decided to go all-in on LinkedIn this year, I did not expect just how fun it would be. Seriously. I love writing and sharing stories in a way that's helpful to others, so I keep showing up and doing that day after day, and that grows my LI network. I'm at about 11,000 followers there now and aiming to grow at a pace of at least 500 per month. But that's really a vanity metric; what matters is how many high-quality leads and newsletter subscribers LinkedIn brings our way. And LinkedIn absolutely kills it in terms of driving quality leads. As part of this strategy, we also launched a LinkedIn newsletter from my personal profile. We hit 1,000 subs in the first 24 hours! I'm writing a post for LinkedIn on the thinking behind that launch.
A little SEO. I don't want to put too many eggs in this basket because SEO simply isn't reliable anymore. But I do think founders are searching for the kind of information we provide, and I want They Got Acquired to show up when they do. So we're publishing some of the resource and advice posts that have long been in our queue.
Experiments. We're trying a bunch of other things, like partnerships, guesting on podcasts, joining communities, building an AI version of myself who can coach founders who want to sell (that's coming soon!), and more.
What am I missing that we should think about to grow our audience this year?
