I'm a designer who turned into a writer who turned into a startup CEO. My mission is to help creators earn a living. Subscribe for essays on building an audience and earning a living as a creator.
How to grow your newsletter insanely fast
Hi Reader,
How do you grow your newsletter list?
Typically, the answer you hear is: publish great content, give people a chance to subscribe, and hope a small percentage of readers enter their email address.
But something new has changed the game:
Newsletter recommendation widgets.
When you add a newsletter recommendation widget to your opt-in form, any person who subscribes to your email list will also be presented with a list of several creators you recommend. They’re given a chance to subscribe to the other creators’ lists as well with one click.
Now, you might be thinking, “That’s great, but doesn’t that just help someone else grow their list? What about me?”
This is where it gets interesting:
If you partner up with several other creators, and you each recommend each other’s newsletter, you’ll all grow exponentially.
One example of this is to form a mastermind group with people who are at a similar level to you where you all promote each other.
What this might look like on the front end is with platforms like Twitter, which reward early engagement, everyone makes a point to reply to one another's tweets shortly after they are published. This will help the tweets spread further.
Then on the back end, you all use a newsletter recommendation widget to promote each other’s newsletters.
Not only will your social media posts do better, but whenever one of you grows their list from a post doing well, everyone else’s list grows too! Everyone is in the group incentivized to promote you, because if you do well, so do they.
Now you have a flywheel where everyone grows exponentially fast.
This exact scenario played out when Jay Clouse went viral on LinkedIn: his post got a bunch of views and he gained a ton of newsletter subscribers that day.
But he wasn’t the only one whose list grew: because he had a newsletter recommendation widget, the people he recommended gained 500 subscribers of their own! And they didn’t even have to lift a finger.
When any one person in the group goes viral, everyone goes viral.
The takeaway is: you don’t have to do this alone.
In fact, you shouldn’t do this alone. It’s not a zero sum game, and a rising tide raises all ships. You’ll grow faster if you grow together.
ConvertKit Creator Network
If you’re wondering, “Where can I find such a newsletter recommendation widget so I can try out this strategy?” I have some good news:
We just launched the ConvertKit Creator Network which includes this exact feature.
Check it out and get early access here:
ConvertKit Creator Network »
SPONSORED BY HEDONOVA
One Fund for All Alternative Investments
Ready to take your investments to the next level? With Hedonova, you can now access a highly profitable market of alternative investments. Invest in equipment finance, litigation finance, real estate and more with their state-of-the-art platform, backed by Morgan Stanley and the Royal House of Oman. Investors enjoyed 32% returns in 2022, plus Hedonova has a AA+ Moody's rating and 4.8 customer service rating on Trustpilot. It's like having a mutual fund for all your alternative asset needs—all within one fund! Don't let this opportunity pass you by and join Hedonova today.
CONFERENCE
Come see Sahil Bloom speak at Craft + Commerce
If you want to know where the top online creators gather to help grow their businesses, Craft + Commerce is the answer.
Sahil Bloom, who has one of the fastest growing newsletters I've ever seen, is taking the stage as one of our keynote speakers.
Join us for a three-day conference in downtown Boise June 8th–10th to build relationships with other professional creators and learn all about earning a living online.
TWEET
Emotion is powerful in advertising
Val Katayev shared this great ad on Twitter.
It reminds me of Mad Men era advertisements, and it's a good reminder that people make buying decisions emotionally first and then justify with logic after the fact.
Here was the slogan posted in a followup tweet:
Hope to see you at the conference this summer!
—Nathan
Nathan Barry
I'm a designer who turned into a writer who turned into a startup CEO. My mission is to help creators earn a living. Subscribe for essays on building an audience and earning a living as a creator.
Hey Reader, If I could solve only one thing in my business, that would have the biggest impact, what would that be? This is the question every great entrepreneur obsesses over. Rather than trying to do everything at once, you look for the bottleneck and focus on solving that. There’s a book called The Goal by an Israeli physicist named Eliyahu Goldratt. It’s a 1984 business novel that business systems nerds love. However if you’re not a business systems nerd you probably… won’t love it. It’s...
Hey Reader, Have you ever spent money on something and immediately felt guilty afterward? Will Guidara spends his money foolishly on purpose. And he thinks you should too. He once bought an entire barrel of whiskey and put it in his basement. He also put a skee-ball machine in the office. Is he going to get a monetary return on either of these things? No. But that’s kind of the point. He calls it the 95/5 rule: Manage your money and time like a maniac 95% of the time (no expense is too...
Hey Reader, Have you ever spent a whole day on something almost nobody saw? It's painful when the whole reason you worked hard was because you wanted to reach people. If you teach a workshop in person, you reach the 20 people in that room. But if you record that same workshop once, you can keep teaching for years on autopilot. This is the concept of leverage, and it's something I talk about in my upcoming book, The Ladders of Wealth (you can pre-order it now). A lot of people will look back...