4,000 newsletter subscribers in 5 months
by Monica LentOkay, it's technically 5 months and 7 days. But yesterday, Blogging for Devs surpassed 4,000 email subscribers.
What moved the needle for the last 150 to this milestone?
One of the subscribers posted an article to Hacker News, with some of his SEO learnings from my newsletter. He also kindly linked and recommended to it readers in one of the first paragraphs.
His article reached #3 on Hacker News, and sent me a lot of new subscribers! (Thanks Maxime!)
My stretch goal for the year was 5,000 subscribers and this is looking more attainable every day 😱
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I actually joined your newsletter Monica! Can't wait to learn from it. I've read some fantastic reviews. Congrats on your success!
I think a certain % of people would pay you for the 7 day newsletter course up front if they are impatient. I would pay $10 to get it all now instead of waiting for a week lol.
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Yay welcome Kenneth!
Thanks for the suggestion on paying for the course up front.
One thing I like about email is a lot of people reply to the questions at the end of each of the lessons and it sparks great connections and conversations, which I'd miss out on if I sold it e.g. as a PDF.
It's a totally fair point though, it's also something @AndrewKamphey recommended when I posted in one of his threads about newsletter monetization ideas. Looks like he was right!
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🎉🎉
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🥳
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Really cool Monica!
How did you promote your individual issues and what has proven to be the best growth channel for you so far?
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hey steven! i don't promote the individual issues, there is no public archive available.
i do sometimes convert newsletters that get a lot of replies into articles, or post standalone article i send to the subscribers.
best channel has been twitter, long-term, followed in volume by a product hunt launch :)
more than channels though, i think the reason it's grown quickly is because it offers an email course when you sign up that's pretty outcome-oriented. so people "get" why they'd want to subscribe right away.
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Interesting! Thanks for elaborating
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Great news Monica! Just read today's issue on how to motivate oneself blogging consistently. Good job 🔥
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Thanks Yanis! I'm glad you enjoyed it, it took a lot of self-motivating to write it hahaha.
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Hey Monica congratulations!
I see you’ve just started a community and would like to ask you a few questions about your experience since it’s something I’m considering too.
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What percentage of subscribers do you expect to join? Based on my limited experience I’ve seen anything between 10-20% (free) and between 1-5% (paid).
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I wrote a thread about choosing the right platform and would love to hear your thoughts. Are you having trouble getting members to engage on a community that lives on your own domain?
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Hi Andre!
Sure thing, happy to share my experience so far. I only have 100 beta members and am a total n00b at this, so that's my disclaimer :D
- Percent of subscribers: I have no idea and I haven't tried estimating! So far, I've been hand-picking the most engaged subscribers and proactively inviting them until I reached my personal "free limit" of 100. I wanted to "prove" the community to myself before inviting people.
- No, I don't think there's an issue getting people to the community on my domain. Circle's weekly email certainly helps with re-engagement, and I do a monthly community summary newsletter.
Ultimately I'm very happy to have chosen my own domain, because I'm extending the experience with custom tools and content and it would be super un-integrated if I had two websites. Now people have a single account and can use that to comment on the blog, access learning material, discuss in the forum, and I plan to further "productize" the website so it becomes even more useful.
I'd be more than happy to share the figures of the launch with you if you'd like in terms of the email / visits / conversion rate! I guess I'll end up posting something on IH regardless.
Re: Your tweet, one thing is that my members are all developers, and many developers hate facebook. So I felt like FB would really be the wrong place for a community of developers (so many people subscribe to my newsletter with ProtonMail accounts lol). I do run a community for my SaaS subscribers on FB and there it's a great fit because those people are already in tons of groups.
Hope this long-winded rambling is somehow useful? :D
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Thank you for your detailed answer, it’s definitely useful!
Yeah it makes a lot of sense avoiding FB in your case. I have a few ProtonMail subscribers as well, didn’t expect it to be so popular.
I’d be interested in knowing more about your launch!
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Congrats on the milestone! Just subscribed 🎉
I'm curious about how you think about Affilimate. Is it (mostly) unrelated to Blogging for Devs? Or do you see dev bloggers wanting to monetize their audience as a primary customer segment for Affilimate (and Blogging for Devs as an acquisition channel)?
I see you're doing a 12 startup challenge, so maybe they're just completely independent and moving forward in parallel. Kudos to you for being able to juggle multiple successful projects!
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Hey Tim! Thanks for joining up ^_^
I definitely don't see Blogging for Devs as a potential customer segment for Affilimate. There is some crossover but it's very, very small. The path of education would also be too long and slow, as Affilimate is really best suited for people who are already making money and have a fair amount of traffic, but want to get more strategic about it.
However, I do want to try whether a strategy like the one that worked for BFD would work for Affilimate (e.g. attracting people with an email course, or something like a webinar, educational material, etc).
My initial strategy was just to test interest and get exposure as someone who's "building stuff", so that's worked so far and led to some great connections which are relevant for Affilimate, too. There are some common elements like blogging and SEO, so they're not totally disparate.
Honestly there isn't a huge grand plan :D Just testing stuff, seeing what works, and trying to learn.
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All makes sense to me! And I like idea of adopting the BFD strategy for Affilimate. You'd know more than me, but I feel like the internet is probably full of content like "How to get started with affiliate marketing", but probably less content that's more like "How to get more strategic about affiliate marketing"
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Totally agree, Tim! Plus, newbies who would read something like "how to get started" aren't the target market for Affilimate at all.
We would need to focus on a challenge that we believe would attract our target customers. Could be as simple as "Intermediate affiliate marketing" or "7-day CRO for your affiliate site", will have to think about it.
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Just applied to your community as well!
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Yay just saw it!
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Kudo's, Monica! So well deserved :-)
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Thank you Kirsten! ^_^
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That's cool. Congratulations
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Thanks!
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