How to use cross-promotion to grow your newsletter faster

The first time after launching a newsletter can be challenging. Before word-of-mouth and organic growth take off, it might feel as if you are sending into a void.

By teaming up with other newsletter owners, you can grow by talking about each other's newsletters.

I tried to find as many resources and links as possible on the topic:

🛠 How-to

The cross-promotion works best when you both have audiences that have similar interests.

• Find newsletters (tools and resources below) with similar audiences.
• Reach out to the owners with your offer.
• Track your progress

💰 Success stories

• Josh Spector ran a cross-promo in For The Interested and sent 1200 people to their sign-up page (250+ subscribed).

• Emanuel Cinca started running cross-promotions when Stacked Marketer crossed 2000 subscribers. Out of the 50k they have now, between 4000-8000 are from cross-promotions.

• Dylan added the "GC Newsletter of the Week" to his Growth Currency newsletter and is doing weekly swaps. This is one of the reasons he recently hit 3k subscribers.

• Greg Bussman got 30% of his subscribers from swaps with other newsletters.

• Lenny Rachitsky is getting 78% of his new subscribers from Substack's referral feature.

🕳 Mistakes

• Not tracking the results. There's no one-size-fits-all. Make sure you track the return for each cross-promotion. That way you know if it is worth repeating a few months later!
• Not using UTM tags. By adding a simple UTM tag on the link to your opt-in page, you'll be able to see the exact number of subscribers from each collaboration.
• Once you go over 10,000 subs, swaps seem to be a time sink and not scalable.

🪛 Tools

• Organize your cross-promotions with this free Notion template.

• Lettergrowth is a fast and simple way to find and connect with newsletter owners open for cross-promotion.

• Sparkloop's Upscribe is a cross-promotion tool that works with all major newsletter platforms.

• Collab Match currently has 200+ newsletters in their database, open for swaps.

• Refind offers a 1-for-1; you send them one, and they send you one.

• Post on Indie Hackers. Katt Risen posted asking for others interested in Swaps and received dozens of replies.

• Discover amazing newsletter at Inbox Stash.

• InboxReads: Email newsletters for any topic.

🗂 Resources

• The Newsletter Blueprint: a vibrant community for newsletter owners.

• Cross-promo email template from Dan at TLDR.

• The subreddit r/tech_newsletter opened a thread for connecting other newsletter operators.

Thanks for reading this far! :) This was published in my newsletter first, I share one every week.

Would love to hear if you have a specific growth tactic for newsletters you'd like me to cover?