Joker Mag

First time reaching this milestone from a single newsletter send. Still growing audience through paid acquisition and a few organic subs trickling in each week (two embedded sign-up forms on every article). Need to continue finding ways to grow revenue & reinvest in content + subscriber acquisition.

Total unique opens crossed a number larger than the total number of subscribers on the entire email list this time last year. Growth has come through: Facebook Lead Ads, converting organic readers from my website, Beehiiv recommendations, and social media.

Made our first affiliate sale from the newsletter. Pretty cool feeling. This is a brand I reached out to about a sponsorship, but they wanted to test the waters as an affiliate first. I wrote the ad copy and plugged it into the sponsorship slot of the newsletter, then a reader clicked it and made a purchase. If we can crack affiliate marketing, we will be in great shape.

Cracked 50,000 pageviews for the month of June! Still consistently publishing high-quality, optimized content alongside exclusive profiles & interviews with athletes. Building topical authority around the 3 main sports we cover (Baseball, Football, Basketball) while also showing our expertise in the sports niche in general.

Still plenty of competitors with low-quality (and even AI content) generating 5x the traffic we are. So plenty of meat on the bone here. This is only the beginning!

May 2022 was our first month reaching 40,000 monthly site visitors! Site traffic is up +140% year-over-year, thanks to our investment in SEO. 40K used to seem like a big number to me, but now I see there is a ton of room for growth in our niche.

The key has been increasing publishing velocity while focusing on high-quality content targeting long-tail, "low volume" searches (according to 3rd party tools – there's actually substantially more MSV than these tools say).

We're building a content moat by zeroing in on a very specific theme in a very specific niche, and creating more in-depth & comprehensive content.

By doing this, we've been able to outrank top sports websites such as ESPN, Sports Illustrated, The Athletic, and Bleacher Report.

Exciting things coming. Sticking to the plan & starting to formulate ideas for monetization (possibly affiliate marketing for digital products that will help our target audience). Programmatic display ads are not worth it to me or my readers – we value the user experience above all else.

Cleaned our email list of low-quality subscribers who came in through Facebook Lead Ads. They were never engaged to begin with and were dragging down our open rates.

It sucks, and it reverted us back to a much smaller list. Focus shifts to engaged subscribers over everything – email is the most intimate form of communication with our audience.

Our new "Shock The World" video ad is outperforming expectations.

The key is a scroll-stopping thumbnail and a captivating, emotional video with quick cuts.

The lead form is simply our newsletter's value prop + leads them to joining our Facebook group.

Experimenting with Facebook Lead Ads has worked tremendously well. I went from 290 subscribers to 500 in less than 5 days.

Some quick notes:

• Facebook placements have converted better than Instagram placements. Maybe our ideal audience is older than I expected?

• Currently getting $0.29 per lead on a cold audience (targeting general "Sports" interest in Facebook's detailed targeting)

Today I realized that we officially have more newsletter subscribers than 'likes' on Facebook.

This is significant to me because in the beginning I was focused on the wrong thing (social media followers). I didn't realize this was the equivalent of building a house on sand.

It feels great knowing I'm building on a solid foundation – I own my audience.

After being stuck at 190 subscribers for a few months, I finally crossed the threshold!

This was a result of my Twitter DM experiment – sending a personalized direct message to ~10 followers per day with a plug of my newsletter.

I engage in a legit sports-related conversation (i.e. what an Eagles fan thinks of the team drafting a QB in the 2nd round) and then tell them about my newsletter.

This strategy has worked like a charm, as I'm converting at a 20-30% clip!