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How do you promote your newsletters?
by
AdrianWo
SEO, paid advertising, other?
Would love to know your methods for newsletter growth 🤜
So far I haven't done much promotion other than emailing friends, tweeting, posting to my blog, and submitting to newsletter directories.
Hey Paolo, thanks for the post on newsletter directories. 🙃
Have you seen some effects with your promotion efforts? What has been the most succesfull?
Subscriber growth has been mostly flat for months, so I have no conclusive clues my promotion efforts have had any impact. However, there seems to be a barely noticeable uptick in subscriptions from directories.
Interesting, I will surely take a deeper look into directories. Thanks for your insights Paolo :))
If you're just starting out, your strategy is best summarised by "a little bit of this and a little bit of that".
Share your newsletter with your friends and family, promote it on Twitter and on-category sub-reddits, submit to newsletter directories, etc
If you have some money, it's probably not a bad idea to do some FB ads. If you have some experience, you can bring your CAC (acquisition cost) down to $1-$3/signup.
Another good strategy to get some "big lumps" of signups is to do giveaways with something your audience will find valuable (make sure the prize attracts the right kind of people).
Once you have more than 1,000 subscribers, adding a referral program to grow your audience on autopilot is basically a no-brainer. To set up a referral program for your newsletter you can use SparkLoop.
For full disclosure, I'm one of SparkLoop's co-founders but it's truly magical for growing an email audience. Just ask James Clear or one of our hundreds of customers ;)
Best of luck!
Thanks for the detailed answer, Manuel. Would love to be that big to use SparkLoop one day 😆
Dope! Was it a subreddit in your niche or a more popular one?
It was subreddit r/startups and it was not even my post. I comment with the link and 110 in 1 day subscribe. I don't like Reddit but it worked great :D
That's a huge number of subs from one comment! congratz!
Yea, I was surprised. Now thinking to maybe even pay some ads there, since they don't allow me to post with link to newsletter.
Back in January 2019 when I started Creativerly I shared it in a couple of Facebook Groups, posted on Twitter when I sent out a new issue, and tried to be active in different groups on LinkedIn and some Subreddits related to the content I share in my newsletter.
That brought in my very first subscribers. Once I reached 100 subscribers, word of mouth started to kick in, and I regularly gained subscribers without doing any marketing measures.
This year I started to do cross-promotion with other newsletters which definitely brought in the biggest amount of new subscribers. Besides that I still post on Twitter about new issues. Other than that I do not use any other methods, although I want to get back to posting on reddit.
Also, never used paid ads on any platform.
My growth is not the biggest/fastest, but my newsletter grows constantly, so I am pretty happy about that.
Thanks, Philipp! How do you find other newsletters to cross-promote? Do you do research or are there any places to chat with other newsletter creators? (beside IH, of course).
Glad I found out about Creativerly, keep up with good content 🙃
I am a member of the Newsletters Creators Facebook Group by Josh Spector and there get always some opportunities posted to find other newsletters to do cross-promotion. Most of the newsletters I did already a cross-promo with I found through this Facebook Group.
But I also look around other social medias.
Thank you so much Adrian, I really appreciate it! I do my best to come up with only the best content for my readers, and they seem to enjoy it so far. 🤩
Thanks for the link to the facebook group, Philipp! Who knows, maybe somewhere in the future, we'll cross-promote each other 😎
Just ping me 👍️
My DMs on twitter are always open, or you can also reach out to me via email creativerly[at]philipptemmel.design
I usually publish my newsletter on time every 2-week via Substack
Other than that, I will repurpose my content and amplify it via my social network i.e. LinkedIn and Twitter. Keen to hear your feedback!
Hi Felix, have you seen some effects so far? Twitter and LinkedIn are great platforms to promote on but take a while to kickoff 😪.
I’ve been tweeting and linkedin-ing for years for multiple projects as well as my full time geek. Hence there’s a little advantage for my 1st and 2nd degree connections to get to know what I usually do.
#1 tip on promoting is to always leverage what you already have. Wish you good luck with your future growth, Felix :)
Apart from big promotions like "launching" via tweet and a recent launch on product hunt, just having an eye-catching pinned Tweet on my Twitter profile has driven a lot of signups!
Maybe it's too obvious but anywhere that tracks referrer will let you see the short twitter link, stick it in Twitter and you can attribute it back.
Totally works :)
Thanks for the reply, Monica, I appreciate it.
Looking forward to learn more from your blog, love the content :))
I use funnels using paid ads. I also try some organic methods but I like the effectiveness of paid ads.
Thanks for the reply Ricardo. What platform are you advertising on?
Facebook Ads. I have been considering YouTube but the strategy involves having a channel, so it is in the pipeline at the moment
Cool, do you know any good resources on how to manage facebook ads campaigns? Maybe your own tips? 🤓
I am working on a program teaching how to grow using funnels, SEO and paid ads. The best tips is nail the offer first, before scaling because you can burn a lot of money. Use outreach to learn the most about the audience. Don't worry about making a lot of money first but try to at least break even. The important part is to grow the email list, you will make the money long term. It is a complex subject, so i can rant on the subject for hours :)
Thank you so much for your insights Ricardo! Seems like you have some knowledge on the subject, maybe you should consider starting a blog or something? 😁
Thanks Adrian. I feel there's a need in the market, but I don't know if developers are willing to pay for it. As nice it is to help people, it has to make sense financially.
For Psych, My audience mainly exists on Twitter as well as forums like this (I believe).
I haven't tried Paid advertising but I am not sure if that would help. What is your newsletter about? I think it would depend on that.
Hi Vaibhav, are you doing something specific to gain followers on tt?
I'm planning to start a newsletter about growth tactics for indie hackers, something like @growthbites, so I'm gathering some ideas 👀
btw psych is soo good, add one to your subscribers' counter 🤗
Well, I am not doing anything special of sort to gain followers on it. I just talk about my newsletter where I think it would help.
For example, I think there is no point of telling people about Psychology Biases who are talking about Fishing Hooks :) So, Maybe your audience would be a community who is into marketing part. Glad you like Psych!
I just launched Crafted a few weeks ago and have 200+ subscribers. I got them almost exclusively from Reddit posts in various beer-themed communities.
I noticed huge spikes in subscribers for the following 24 hours each time I posted. Basically I shared a link to my newsletter with a value-adding description and then cross-posted it everywhere.
This worked the first two times but fell flat and had almost no effect when I did it this week. I had the most success when post Tuesday mornings (Europe timezone). I think I have to be careful and drawback - make sure I'm actually adding-value to the community instead of spamming them.
So that's kind of worrying. And now I'm being more careful, while also looking for other ways to promote.
Which is why I appreciate this thread. Thanks everyone for your input!
Your newsletter has a very underserved audience, good luck on your journey :)
For various newsletters I’ve worked on I’ve promtoted via:
So a bit of everything 😁
Have not yet used a referral program so that’s something to try in the future.
There’s a growth section on my site https://letterstack.co if you’re looking for more ideas.
Hey Paul! Among all these methods, which one seemed to be the most effective?
You've got a nice product for newsletter creators, will surely take a look at your site from time to time :)
Depends on your definition of effective. Cold outreach was good because I started conversations with people, got feedback and people who subscribed stuck around. But was time consuming as manual.
At scale you can’t beat Facebook (from my experience).
Cross promotion in newsletters is also very effective as it’s a personal recommendation. Hard to scale this but you can work with bigger newsletters as you grow.
Cool, thanks for your insights on the topic 🤜
Honestly haven't gone crazy with promotion, besides tweeting about BrainPint, building the newsletter in public and posting it on Facebook to share with my friends and submitting to some newsletter directories.
I have it in my profile line on certain communities and sites, and do include it in some introductions and I guess that helps.
Hello Janel, have you been satisfied with the effects so far?
BrainPint provides lots of value, keep it up :))
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Hi, Charlie. Are you planning on monetising your newsletter in the future or will you stick to it as a side hobby project?
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