Cycling Insight

I've migrated Cycling Insight from Wordpress onto Ghost CMS. Managing WP was way too much effort when I just wanted to write. I have eCommerce sites on WP, where the work to get it just right is justified.

Ghost has proven easy and loads lightning fast. Definitely my favourite platform for publishing.

Took the chance to run an ad in an industry newsletter and it helped grow my newsletter subscriber base. The cost per new sign-up was around £15-£20 so quite expensive but it gave me a good boost.

My next milestone is 250 subscribers which I anticipate to be harder.

This week I've hit 50 subscribers to my weekly newsletter on cycling industry trends and insights.

The growth has predominantly been through my own network in the cycling industry, but almost half has also been through cold emailing businesses and Twitter DMs.

I launched the free weekly newsletter to 27 subscribers who are cycling industry professionals.

The newsletter achieved a 90% open rate and focused on the growth in virtual training platform Zwift and turbo trainers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It also got picked up by cycling industry media BikeBiz.

I cold contacted 10 cycling businesses in the UK via email. I figured even for businesses with a support email address, someone in the cycling industry is attending to that - and low and behold someone from a support email did sign-up.

Personal LinkedIn messaging and Twitter DMs has also been an area that has helped get signups

I nearly created a membership platform, conduced primary research and long articles but realised that people may not be interested in this.

I switched to a simple email newsletter as an MVP and built it using Carrd and Mailchimp. If it goes well I can grow this into the bigger project that I first dreamed up.