Every single Friday, our head of growth, Adam Vazquez, sends out a short newsletter on how to make money through content. Just six weeks into our newsletter’s existence, it already had an audience of 300+ marketers. Modest, but growing. Here’s how we build it.
First of all, if you do not yet get the Fresh Friday Finds email, go subscribe here.
Six weeks after starting our email newsletter, we already have a decent and growing audience of about 300 marketers who receive it weekly. Our engagement rate is also pretty good with around a 30% open rate and 10-12% click-through rate.
Neither are world beaters, we can do better for sure, but pretty encouraging when you consider it didn’t exist six weeks before.
Making a newsletter each week is a lot easier than a lot of people think, and it’s obviously valuable enough that we have this small but growing audience engaging with it. Let’s walk through the process.
#1 — Collect
All week long, Adam collects interesting trends, articles, tweets, and so that could be helpful to our audience. He does this with the foreknowledge that he has three slots to fill every Friday.
One is dedicated to promoting whatever episode of Content Is for Closers came out that week, so he has two more to fill and wants plenty of options to choose from when he does.
#2 — Draft
On Wednesdays, Adam begins writing the outline for that week’s newsletter. Typically this involves gathering the links he wants to share, developing some commentary around what he thinks is important about that, and getting some loose structure, like which points he would like.
#3 — Write, Test, Schedule, Promote
On Thursdays, Adam entirely writes out the email and sends a draft to himself to test all the links. Then he’ll schedule it in Substack and send out a tweet or LinkedIn post. This will remind any of his audiences on those platforms who might be new to the newsletter that it’s coming out and they should subscribe if they want to receive it the next day. That also seemed to help us grow over the last six weeks.
#4 — Easter eggs
In the newsletter itself, Adam concludes with a call to action or an easter egg for those who read all the way through. In the past, this has included things like…
- Free coffee on me. Adam will Venmo people for replying and telling him they want a free coffee.
- One hour of free consulting. While this one is time consuming depending on how many people respond, it allows Adam to get to know people he might not otherwise know personally and better understand who the audience is.
#5 — Reflect, Review, Revise
Most of the audience engages with the newsletter over the weekend, so on Mondays Adam will review what was most engaged with and then continue the process of collecting information for that Wednesday when he begins the draft process again.
Overall, putting a newsletter together sounds like a lot but really—aside from potential consulting hours—the email only takes 2-3 hours per week. Once you get into a rhythm of workflow, that average can easily be taken down to two hours or less.
A few quick benefits to having a newsletter:
- It keeps you as the creator in front of your audience
- It’s a way to connect with people who may not listen to your podcast or have worked with you before
- It gives people who prefer to read than listen away to engage your content
- It’s something that seems to continue to gain momentum
If you get the newsletter, Adam would love to know about what other newsletters you may like. What are some of your favorites that provide value to you? Feel free to contact him by replying to the newsletter or emailing him at adam@trustheard.com.