Growth Strategy Round Up

These 3 newsletters are all actively growing and are sharing what’s working. Check out their stories and growth strategies here:

1. NOLA Business Insider

The NOLA Business Insider (3,200+ subscribers as of the end of July) is a daily email newsletter featuring the New Orleans business community’s challenges and opportunities. In this RJI article, Sydney Lewis reports on how they reached 1,000 subscribers on June 7…the same day they launched.

Their growth strategies included:

• Audience research
• Platform promotion
• Paid marketing
• Newsletter cross-promotion
• Community connections
• Analyzing effectiveness
• And pivoting when they hit plateaus

Pay attention to their willingness to pivot:

“Our ability to pivot when we noticed the sign up numbers trailing off helped us get back on track towards our goal of reaching 10,000 sign ups within three months.”

2. Not Boring

In 2019, Packy McCormick started the Not Boring newsletter sharing business strategy, pop culture links, and commentary. He now has over 145K subscribers and is the #1 business newsletter on Substack. Arthur Takeda details his journey and growth strategies, including the way he:

• Avoided a paywall by creating a sponsor deck and pushed it to potential sponsors
• Shared failures, successes, and insights publicly and regularly
• Created an investment memo and fund called “Not Boring Capital”
• Launched a podcast
• And other stuff, too

Key takeaway:

“His approach to writing is what I believe any content creator in any medium should work towards 1. Keep the audience’s trust; 2. Keep them engaged; 3. Put your best stuff out there”

3. Future Party

In this episode of Simon Owen’s podcast, The Business of Content, Simon interviews Boye Fajinmi, creator of The Future Party. It’s a witty business, entertainment, and pop-culture newsletter. Fajinmi started out hosting parties in 2012 and over the years turned that into a mega media company with 150K subscribers.

In the podcast, they discuss shifting from parties and events to becoming a media company; transitioning from a weekly newsletter to a daily newsletter; how they’re working to create, curate, and provide content for their niche; and the growth strategies they employ, including:

• Leveraging events to bring in quality users (attendees become subscribers)
• Organic growth within the entertainment industry
• Creating a referral program
• Remaining open to collaborations
• And utilizing traditional, native advertising

I appreciated this truth bomb:

“Media is telling stories on different mediums… it doesn’t take a rocket science to see all the possible places we can tell stories on, but it does take a businessman to see that we can’t do all of those things at once. Right now we are focused on internal excellence.”

Issue 94 • Sep 8th 2022 •

Insights From A Newsletterer

In this 35-minute YouTube video, Larry Cornett asks For the Interested’s Josh Spector these 3 questions related to boosting your business via a newsletter:

1. How do you make your newsletter a must-read?
2. How do you balance paid advertising and organic marketing?
3. How do you structure your business?

Issue 93 • Sep 1st 2022 •

New Best(ish) Practices

Chad S. White of Oracle Marketing Consulting reports on new best practices his team are adopting as they overhaul newsletters for clients. He lists and explains 9 tactics you might want to consider.

My quick takes on a few of them:

1. Personalizing newsletter content (aka letting subscribers subscribe to select topics instead of everything you send). Big fan of this if you’re covering a variety of topics and can send separate newsletters. Alternatively, you can clearly label categories so your readers recognize mileposts and scroll to their favorites.
2. Teasing website content instead of delivering the goods in the email so you can count clicks. This is a post Mail Privacy Protection play to gather insights by measuring clicks more closely. But it’s not something I support because I feel requiring clicks to get to the good stuff is self-defeating. Try to create a balance if you’re employing this.
3. Creating read magnets (burying your most popular content near the bottom of the email but calling it out in the subject line / table of contents to entice the scroll). I'm lukewarm on this. I like the idea of including a fun kicker section that readers enjoy, but I don’t think it makes sense to make people scroll too far before they get to a highly valuable / popular piece of content. I think of the first 1-3 pieces of content in the newsletter as alpha content and consider it a shame if you’re willing to risk it not being seen. Don’t tease me. Deliver—before I get a distracting notification and shift focus.

Issue 93 • Sep 1st 2022 •

Stuff You Can Steal From The Steal Club

Ever wish you could get a behind-the-scenes look at how another newsletter works? The Steal Club is pulling back the curtains to show you everything from their content creation process to future plans.

Discovered via Growth Marketer Weekly.

Issue 93 • Sep 1st 2022 •

A Look At The Past

In this issue of Tedium, Ernie Smith takes readers through a newsletter history lesson, starting in 1704.

My take: Newslettering isn’t easy, but the challenges we face aren’t “new” or as bad as we think. Stay strong and newsletter on, y’all.

Discovered via Inbox Reads.

Issue 92 • Aug 25th 2022 •

How Harry Jowsey Grew A Massive Audience

Australian viral content creator Harry Jowsey has figured out some organic growth tips that newsletter creators should pay attention to. Christian Anderson shares Jowsey’s top 5 tips.

1. Be consistent
2. Monitor your analytics
3. Collaborate with other content creators
4. Look at yourself as a brand
5. Focus on posting exciting content that engages your audience

Discovered via Smart Brief on Social Business.

Issue 92 • Aug 25th 2022 •

Should You Treat Your Newsletter Like A Homepage?

“The new content homepage isn’t a site or a social platform—it’s your inbox”

Are you treating your newsletter like a homepage? Jason Schulweis explains how media is evolving and that now is the time to shift your newsletter strategy.

(Fair warning: you need to create an Adweek account to read the full article)

Discovered via Inbox Reads.

Issue 92 • Aug 25th 2022 •

Newsletter Advice From Peter Houston

“I saw a quote the other day that said everyone and their grandmother has a newsletter. Is it even worth me starting one? ...I saw that quote too and I thought, ‘Yes, but you’re going to have to do it differently from everyone else, especially their grandmother’.”

Learn what else Peter Houston, co-host of Media Voices, thinks about starting a newsletter now here.

Discovered via The Media Roundup.

Issue 91 • Aug 18th 2022 •

Lessons From A Year Of Newsletter Publishing

Ashley Janssen has been publishing The Every Intention for a year now. In this issue, she shares some reflections including:

• Consistency is key
• Just because you love it, doesn’t mean it isn’t work
• We are all the same, we are all different
• You never know how something you share is going to hit
• The end of one thing allows for the beginning of another

Discovered via The Rebooting.

Issue 91 • Aug 18th 2022 •

The Future Of Newsletters (This Time Around)

Remember 2020 when newsletters were the hot new (old) thing and everyone was itching to take part?

Peter Kafka breaks down where newsletters stand and what their future could be in this Vox article.

Discovered via The Rebooting.

Related: Learn what Ernie Smith thinks newsletter authors can learn from the print newsletter era

Issue 90 • Aug 11th 2022 •