How I reached 100 subscribers to my newsletter for Free

Quick bio: My name is Clayton and I'm an aspiring neuroscientist and author of the Synapse newsletter for people curious about the brain.

5 weeks in, my newsletter finally reached 100 subscribers!

Creating in Public

First and foremost, I believe the main reason for my success has been that I am creating in public. I've had other online writing projects in the past and I never associated them with my personal social media account because I was afraid to put myself out there in front of family/friends. This resulted in me burning out because I would put a lot of work into a blog post and no one would read it or find my blog!

However, this time, I decided to post about my newsletter project on FB and Twitter and in just a week I already had 40 subscribers and my posts were getting ~200 views.

This doesn't seem like a lot, but imagine giving a presentation to a room with 40 people. You'd be amped and motivated to make it good, right? Suddenly, I was excited to write each week because I knew people were reading it. This makes my content better and better each week.

Other Growth tips

Besides creating in public, here is other growth tips that have driven traffic to my blog/newsletter:

1. Post your blogs to Medium and Reddit. Reddit is a very engaged community and my posts have done well there to drive traffic and a few signups. Also, one of my Medium posts got curated and this drove traffic back to my newsletter because Medium links to the original source at the bottom of an imported post.

2. Be involved in online communities I am an active and engaged member of a Substack Writers FB group and Neuroscience FB group and my posts have done well there as well. The Substack Writers group encourages self-promotion and the Neuroscience group is happy to have my blog posts because they provide value. I also participated in #BlackinNeuro on Twitter and this drove some traffic to my posts.

3. Encourage forwarding Three weeks in, I encouraged forwarding to friends and this led to even more signups. People are much more likely to signup if something is recommended by a friend.

4. Collaborate I searched for other Substack neuroscience newsletters and found another one that was similar but is taking a more cognitive approach than I am. Our target audiences likely overlap so I reached out and suggested we cross-promote each other. We'll be doing a collaboration soon as well so that will effectively combine out audience sizes.

Let me know if you've got more growth tips in the comments below and good luck everyone!