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11 Comments

It took me 6 months to reach 100 email subscribers

I've been building communities for a long time, but I always failed (or found an excuse) not to participate in the communities for community builders.

I know, kinda funny.

As part of my own personal progression I wanted to change this.

Any new landscape can be hard to get a true understanding of. Often information and people scattered. It takes time to find out what is what, and who is who. Then it takes time to organise this into something meaningful.

As part of this process I set up a page of resources to help myself. I also decided to set up a newsletter, this was mostly to help keep me accountable of staying on top of current news.

I started from scratch 6 months ago:

  • I set up a single page with useful resources
    added my newsletter sign up to there
  • tweeted a few times
  • shared on LinkedIn a few times
  • I hang out on a couple of community slacks and a FB groups, participating and occassionally sharing the link where relevant
  • first 15 or so newsletters were completely automated via RSS from blogs, websites, podcasts and things I had stumbledupon that I had bookmarked/saved on weekly basis.
  • I've had great and positive feedback on the actual newsletter (via Slack, FB, Twitter and personal emails)

Now, reality check: it took 6 months to get to 100. It feels slow, but really it's ok.

It makes me laugh, but I'm honestly in no rush, and really it's a way to force me to learn more about the community building world and network with others.

The design isn't anything special, there's lots I could do to improve it.

I'm starting to get recognsied more (never had the time in the past), been invited to speak on an online thing and had compliments that people love the newsletter.

Also upon reflection, the professional 'community building' world isn't massive and really I see it as a place where lots of growth needs and will happen over the coming years.

Overall I feel like it is providing value, so I'm happy.

Here it is for reference: https://community.rosie.land/

  1. 6

    Rosie, there's such a nice maturity about this. You're not in a rush. You're building on your own terms - finding your own way in Rosie Land.

    1. 1

      Love that it says four sharing and you currently have 4 upvotes!

  2. 2

    keep going! you know the “secret” for anything like this: it starts small and the growth starts small too. most folks quit before they really ever see the fruits!

    this is how it’s supposed to “work”!

  3. 1

    100 more than every one else who didn't start - well done Rosie!

  4. 1

    This was good to read. I try to remind myself that the finish line doesn't have an expiration date and to enjoy the process, slow as it may be.

  5. 1

    I feel you because I have been building my newsletter for 2 years and I haven't reached the 100 mark, but it's my first newsletter, and it's on Revue. Here is where I sharpened my sword and really learned my tone of voice. Oh and guess what, I had been blogging on Medium prior to that for about a year. Not enough people talk about the messy middle, but that's what it is.

    Somethings need to take time to be done right.

    Thanks for sharing

  6. 1

    Thanks for sharing Rosie and congrats on the patience and results so far.
    I have some questions:
    You mentioned the first issues where automated from RSS from blogs, podcast, etc. Did you need to ask for rights of usage to share the links?
    Any tools in your experience is worth looking at to automate the content of the news letter?
    Is the content curated by you now and why did you decide to stop automating?

    Keep the good work

    1. 1

      I stopped automating as I had gathered a fair amount of sources via RSS and the automatic output wasn't as organised as I would like it to be. Also, I was using Mailchimp which limits the amount of outputted links to 20, which sounds like a lot, but I was finding that the RSS links gathered weekly were more than that. So I opted to do it manually and cull some along the way.

      I don't see a need to ask for right of usage of links, so many newsletters these days are based on sharing industry/relevant links.

      I used Mailchimp for email, then I use https://bazqux.com/ as an RSS reader. It's works really well despite the name! It's cheap and has the crucial feature of outputting a single rss feed on 'folders' I organise.

      1. 1

        Thanks for the information I'll take a look. It makes sense to stop automating at some point and get a more curated list.

        The current content of the news letter is very good, good luck!

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