Roast my newsletter-building strategy

Hey all,

I’m currently creating Component Odyssey (https://component-odyssey.com), a highly interactive web development course designed to help developers build their own component libraries.

I don’t have a big social media following, a few hundred followers on Twitter, a few hundred connections on LinkedIn and that’s about it.

As I’m gearing up to open the course for early access, I want to gather as wide a range of interested folks as I can. I feel that building a newsletter following is the best solution, for the following reasons:

• It’s platform agnostic, if Twitter tanks, I don’t lose all my followers
• It’s a direct line to people who have expressed explicit interest in my course

With that said, I want to get your thoughts on the best approach to build a strong newsletter. Here’s what my strategy is so far:

• Write heaps of high-quality articles, and publish them on my website
• Cross-post those articles on Dev.to, Medium, Hashnode, FreeCodeCamp (with the correct canonical URL set ofc). These link directly to my “subscribe” page which displays little more than a email capture form.
• Repurpose the articles as a LinkedIn post
• Repurpose the articles into shorter form content (Mastodon, Twitter)
• Send completed articles to development roundup newsletters

I have a few limitations, first and foremost is time. My priority is to build out the platform and record the content. This takes up the vast majority of my time. This is why I’m not yet investing in:

• short-form videos (YouTube Shorts or TikTok).
• Reddit, I want to be able to commit to contributing to subreddits before I start posting my content

I also know that I can improve my article thumbnail game since it’s an easy and very effective way of distinguishing my content online.

There are a few things that I’m not willing to compromise, and that’s:

• Spam (I don’t want to write low-quality content to boost SEO)
• Being disingenuous (I don’t want to be fake or inflammatory to boost my public profile)

I’d love to know what strategies have worked for you in the past. Specifically how to make the most of my content, so I can post with lower effort, but with higher reward.