How I Grew My Newsletter to 50,000 Subscribers in 20 Months - Harry Dry

[Music] next up guys uh is mr harry here so a couple words about harry so we've been hearing a lot of like this is how marketing should be done this is a guy who's been doing it in his own way so um harry in my completely uh inaccurate yet uh opinionated impression is is he came out of the woodworks nobody knew about this guy and suddenly look at him he's got a mess following he's got a huge twitter following he's posting actionable content he's cr if you're a part of lots of facebook groups you see how he's cross-promoting along uh across lots of po groups his content and its works because it's good so harry's uh gonna tell us how he does it uh so harry you're ready to go uh can you hear me kids can you hear me better yeah you're great oh stage is yours man uh sweet i'm just trying to get the uh the slideshow up one second uh share a google doc i think i've done that already um i'm gonna go with the girl share screen and see see how we go from here uh your entire screen however so pep if my slides are in how do i get them again how do i access them uh you should yeah share your screen the the arrow the arrow button if you click on it share screen and then you can choose this i've got it i've got it i've got it i've got it we're in brilliant all right sweet sorry about that everybody um are we seeing everything what i'm saying [Music] the wpa will get surprised i hope the presentation's a little bit smoother than this present all right okay so uh yeah i i haven't definitely not got the experience with flow um but i'm going to talk about how i grew my newsletter to 53 000 subscribers in 20 months uh so two years ago as pep said i was actually a web developer and i was really interested in marketing so i started writing these case studies online and i got a sponsor people seemed to like them so i left my job and went full time on it and um here's the website marketingsamples.com uh how do you grow a newsletter well i think it can be over complicated to touch i think essentially um you need two things to happen you need people to see your work uh and you need people to choose to convert and that's that's sign ups uh so firstly the first 10 minutes of the talk um we're going to think well first five minutes however long we're going to focus on getting getting people how how how do you get your content out there second half is going to be how uh how can you improve conversion now i'm just going to double check that people hear me okay because um i cannot see anything right now just just a little bit nervous about getting this right i love the exciting way to go oh we hear you thank you annabelle um back to it uh i'll be the last time i didn't want to do the whole thing and um and no one hear any of it so uh so yeah how how do you get people to see your work well when i started marketing i didn't really know so i had this website which no one was visiting marketing examples and i thought how can i how can i get you know build attention for it so i slowly but surely put together like a landscape or watering holes as i i call them of all the places where marketers hang out online so loads of facebook groups i found twitter obviously linkedin um designer news indie hackers a bunch of slack groups and reddit forums and then i thought to myself um no one's reading my website at the moment so what about if i could somehow take my articles my content and share them where there's loads of marketers but buzzing around the ocean like fish um so i yeah i found all the places where markets hang out and and i thought how can i add value directly to these platforms um now adding value isn't just dropping a link on twitter you know i wasn't nobody still having nobody no one's gonna click that link so how do you do it slightly more imaginatively and it's not rocket science essentially um i like to say people are busy so you've got to wow them where they're already at so what i did is i'd write these articles and um i would write them out on my website and then also in school on twitter at threads on reddit on the different submissions entrepreneur as a full article and then on indie hackers on facebook groups literally everywhere i would just put the article um had to like get the nate get the word out somehow and then at the end of each article i would say hey i thought this was good well you might like the newsletter right i write it twice a month um subscribe slowly but surely the the email started started ticking up um and then sorry once a day and then i thought to myself well i'm kind of doing this on twitter linkedin reddit kind of pretty well but what about sorry not linkedin but what about if i did it on instagram and linkedin as well so again exactly the same principle i would take the content i wrote and just tailor it to uh do these different platforms so instagram i would use slideshows linkedin i would use i do slideshows um and um there's no one-size-fits-all method of sharing content essentially i would yeah just tailor it to the platform uh facebook groups is a little bit harder because you can't really share a full article so i i made all these quick tips i made and the beautiful thing about about images is that you can kind of share them anywhere because all platforms are really suited to images so uh this is the sas growthhacks facebook group and i would just share the uh the tip i made this one's about copywriting i think uh instead of saying the world's first digital media player uh every song you've ever owned in your pocket no one cares what you can do everyone cares what you can do for them and i i'd um just mention the slide at the bottom slowly but surely i started getting a bit of traction with this sharing pro process um so then six months later with a bit of experience i realized essentially this diagram explained explains all you you create value which is a bit of a cliche word but it's probably the easiest one to use on all these different places you transfer them to your article your website and then your subscriber your email subscribers is where you store the value um why email so uh let's say someone comes to market examples once the chances are they'll probably forget about it probably won't return but if you can capture them as an email subscriber then you've you've got that direct line into them uh whenever you like really um i think if you kind of rely on platforms like twitter again it's a cliche but you don't own your audience there so the algorithm changes and you go from being um the over the wall to a fever duster i think that's a quote from somebody um so over the last year this is i think a rough spread of where my subscribers came from mostly from twitter reddit indie hackers facebook linkedin etc etc uh okay and we talked a lot about self-promotion and i like to say that i'm definitely a self-promoter but i think that the best self-promoters aren't really self-promoters so i took the time to become more or less genuine member of all the communities i was sharing my content in so indie hackers for example this i absolutely love and i've hang out there a lot and this is an example of how i promote on in cactus someone writes i want to get better at sas sales so i reply hey chef i was in your shoes this time last year started reading a lot about subject here's some of the best stuff i found uh linked a bunch of useful resources and then said i got so into it that i set up my own thing marketing examples where i share short sweet real world examples report months into it and genuinely think it will help you for free and i think that i think i like to say that content promotion is a positive fun game so i'm i think if you help other people out like i helped shiver that a little bit they'll help you out and you can't just force your stuff down people's throats that's not really how marketing works at least from my experience you kind of have to be turn it into more of a conversation uh i want to double check we're all good still we hear you i meant to please make this disabled i meant okay i'm pretty sure we're good i'm going to rumble on like like a train all right so we've talked about sharing your content uh essentially you want to find all the places where your audience hang out and and and uh feed it into them like the way they like to perfume it so on twitter that might be a thread for an article i'm linking that with like yeah we covered this uh conversion the other big thing um which which is how you grow a newsletter how do you get people to actually uh try so uh here we go um okay so uh let's say you've got a flight with 10 000 tips a week on it and one percent of people are signing up to the newsletter at the moment that is 100 signups a week now if you want to turn that into 300 you've got two options either you you turn the traffic to 30 000. pretty hard to do you might take a lot of advertisement it might take a couple of years of content marketing just sort of rank for seo that type of thing or you improve the conversion of three percent which honestly you could probably do in a day if your site hasn't really been optimized or looked at properly so i think conversion there's two important things uh firstly you've got to make something people want to sign up for so the mistake you see all the time is uh b2b or just any company has this little like email thing on their website and it's like subscribe for updates or subscribe to our newsletter but there's no real purpose behind it so adding this purpose is the first way of increasing that number so a bad example is this is more for a person but you see all the time on these websites is i'm starting this startup newsletter i'm writing about start every week blah blah blah please subscribe and honestly there's no way i'm subscribing to that there's just no reason to so um let's rewrite it each week i spend 50 hours analyzing the new startup trend i share what i learned in a five minute email or would like you would love you to subscribe um purpose like passion another example of this um patchpatch.com their old subscribe um form on their website subscribe to the newsletter cliche no one's signing up for that so they changed it to sign up to our free houseplant parenting course and receive 10 bite size lessons um and the trick here is don't think about capturing people's emails that's like what people say i gotta capture their emails no think about creating something worse worth subscribing to so that's what you've done here essentially it's like a lead magnet you're gonna use the obvious terminology but you really want to work on that um uh and here's mine so back in the day my subscribers like the one on the left it was why not join the weekly newsletter no one wants to try to do it because there's just nothing to it so over six months per year it changed to hey i'm harry each week i share a new case study in my newsletter it's short sweet and practical 25 000 marks to read it i'd love you to join and then loads of social briefing people staying this is great i love it i read every article etc and honestly just that one tweet was one percent to three percent um overnight uh okay and the second thing as well as making something that people want to subscribe to is make it easy for them so here's a little video on mark's examples there's four ways of signing up to the newsletter you've got the fixed navigation bar at the top of the site you've got at the end of each article uh there's a pop-up which comes up after about 60 seconds and there's a dedicated subscribe page um let's play a quick video so you get you see you see it so fixing up at the top there uh end of each chart so i write the article and i say hey you know you want to sign up to this thing uh pop-up which comes up and subscribe page if you go forward slash subscribe you'll see that you'll see the subscribe page um one sec um so the key here is that from any given point on the website you're only one click away from signing up and honestly i would just look at your own your own website and think how could we make some small tweaks to improve conversion one of them which is so obvious is just asking people to subscribe in human language so at the end of your article instead of saying something like uh subscribe to the newsletter say hey i'm janet i write two articles a month for x company um i put a lot i put everything into them you know not these exact words but i'd love you to subscribe okay uh so we've covered getting people to your site first part of it or getting people to see your content first part of it and we've covered um a version but i'll be lying if i said that content wasn't really the key behind all this so good content firstly get means more people are going to see your stuff because people are actually going to share it organically and obviously it improves conversion because if you read a great article there's more chance of signing up uh so so how do you write very constantly actually i'm not sure i got the answers to that question it's um yeah there's no there's no one-size-fits-all solution where are we at um i think i think one thing you can do is actually one thing one thing i realized is that the returns you get from a great piece one great piece far outweigh the returns from say 20 pieces which are kind of okay so this video is literally one article i wrote um it was a twitter inspiration handbook that i put together i was probably uh two probably a month three weeks at least on this on this one article um i i think that yeah i i think you kind of gotta change your mindset slightly because when managers might say hey we've got to get this out we've got to get this out by tuesday and it's got to have these keywords in and um you know get on it that's not really giving you the fuel to to to actually write great content so if you look at markzware's however marketing examples a lot of stuff was would definitely have been rejected by by any kind of like marketing manager i would have said to them i want to spend about a month for two months just hanging around on marketing forums and talking to people and making friends um they'd be like nah you can't do that you've got you've got to do some work and then the other thing i'd say to them hey i want to write like the best one on landing pages out and i'm gonna spend as long as it takes to do it um and most people would say probably not you probably gotta get something done by tuesday so you can never really create the kind of content which maybe which helped me grow i guess um all right last thing um i hope this has been fun i've been a bit all over the place but i've enjoyed it i hope you can hear me actually so last thing is uh creating loops between your your pieces of content i think is a really underrated thing so when i must example started i got traction on twitter that's where i kind of like a couple of people shared my my work there a couple of founders shared my work and it got me a bit of attraction so then from twitter i take them to the newsletter and then from the newsletter at the end i would say ps i'm down to connect on linkedin if you'd like so that's how i kind of kick started my link my linkedin growth is everyone from the newsletter would come to linkedin and then on linkedin i'm sharing the slideshows and then stay at the end of that hey you come to the newsletter and then when i launch my instagram um i think i probably put it in an email saying hey i've just launched the instagram page like where i'm gonna share slideshows if that's your chosen platform so you kind of kickstart that and it's and it's all these um it's connecting these platforms together you can kind of create a bit of a web i guess around around marketing so to wrap up um how do i create how do i how do i build a big newsletter well uh fairly big i guess um i don't think you should be overcomplicated you need to have a way of getting people to see your content sharing strategy um conversion create a newsletter people want to read how can i make great content how do you stand out and then finally luke how can you use twitter to build your newsletter which builds your links in which builds it like all of that stuff um there you go thank you very much for listening i hope you learned something cheers thank you so much harry uh i have a question of my own so one thing about your approach is that nobody else is doing what you're doing or there might be somebody that haven't heard of but it looks like you're the only one doing so you well everybody else is looking at afreps and what is the keyword volume and blah blah blah you do something else you invented the new forma i mean swipe files i've been around but essentially it's kind of your own thing so you how do you think about building your own formats and how did you come up with this it was a it's an interesting question i'm really flattering the question i think i had a benefit because i had no experience when i started so i didn't even know about hrfs existed i didn't even know about pep blaster i'm hoping that's your surname sorry um so i came from a totally new angle i i didn't know any of marketing so i had to kind of learn it myself and and what i realized is that the old school format was like hey we've got to get people to our website that's the key but people aren't really reading websites as much as they're reading twitter as much as they're reading linkedin so i basically thought how can i take over these platforms um and then and then say hey you let market examples exist as well and we've got this this newsletter it was a tremendous view it was just a lot of trial and error it was just a lot of fumbling around not it not working for quite a long time there's no secret formula really well there never is yeah so if i have to sum up what you said is hey ignorance is a bliss because since you didn't know anything you weren't limited by things and so you just use your creativity and two you kept going you you know kept on iterating and experimenting which is what we all need uh stewart here is asking what's the end goal of building your newsletter do you think what you do is scalable uh good question stuart so uh no i've made very little money right now i think that sponsorship isn't is a really uh like if your website gets 300 000 hits a month you can you can get a big email sponsor you can make a lot of money i have got a great sponsor but this just it doesn't make me crazy money in the slightest but i think what i have got is a very engaged email list who like the content and a social media following so um i'm actually uh probably what i was going to do it today but i had to write this course this talk there's a course coming out a marketing course coming out uh i've made the landing page and i'm really excited for it it's gonna be six months just grinding on this thing and i really think that um i can make something good and we'll see what happens like i think that i read this line from johnny wilkinson the rugby player and he said that um there's two options control or explore this is a real kind of like zen thing to say but um i'm not trying to control anything i i'm literally making up as i go along and just hoping not hoping but like i don't really know what the right wording is but i've got the i've got the ideas in my head and um i'm just gonna explore and see what happens that's a really bad answer to this question sorry stu it's good as a modern day philosopher i like it i love this question here by viral how many how hours did you fail until you didn't how many hours until you hit 10k subscribers well to be honest with you market examples actually it did all right early on before market examples i made about two or three businesses which which which failed for months and months and months and months that was where i kind of learned stuff and with market examples i launched with a couple of articles really one or two articles very early on um the site wasn't built properly as you saw that the subscriber page was awful at the start um i got lucky because what happened was i wrote about nomad lists seo uh this big travel website the founder of new mexico i was there the founder of of nomadlist shared um the article on his social media guy called peter levels and he has a hundred thousand followers something like that so that got me my first hundred subscribers um and i think that kind of came from i don't know right place right time like you have to i was in a couple of groups with these kind of people so you can you can i think making friends is so underrated if you're trying to get attraction i i 100 agree find people you know your own size growth together that's how i built so many of my my own things a lot of questions here so damn we've lost uh michael is asking how long are you spending on each piece of content uh so in the early days i was trying to do one a day and i quickly realized that the returns from this content it's it's literally having the best thing on a topic so i know pep wrote about brand differentiation spent ages on it and i think that that's where all the value is if you can come up with the definitive piece so originally i was writing like really short snappy examples um and that was good at start because i had quantity and i was kind of like learning what worked and what and what didn't work but now i've got an audience the goal is every single time just write the best thing on this topic that's it it's i can't um if you drop the if you're like a musician it's really pretentious to say but if you treat yourself like a musician and you release two bad albums your career is done no one's gonna listen to you again so you want to just keep i don't know like it's a really backwards way potentially thinking about it but if you can get into the mindset of like look this is gonna be the best thing on this topic i'm gonna spend as long as it takes to make it the best thing you'll get a reputation for for doing that and i'm not saying i've got that reputation but that's where i'm trying to go dude uh when i started cxl as a blog 10 years ago my goal was to write the best article in the world about whatever topic i was writing on and this the mindset really helped me and also you know this content marketing built cxl so i think there's something to it having that mindset whether it's you know whether you succeed or not at least you reach for it um thomas walker mr tommy i presume is asking here can you talk more about your early traction on twitter like what were you doing at the outset all right so i think that my twitter site is probably one of the worst to to look at for actually maybe inspiration look basically this guy called steve shoega designer he started taking design um which was written in blog post youtube videos and he turned these things into into quick tips so he would he would create a little tip where he would annotate stuff and he'd say hey look change the box shadow from this to this and this is the impact i saw his account on twitter explode so i thought to myself i'm alright design i can do this for for marketing i can take this format of basically making these insane images um and that's how i got all my my twitter attraction the early days i was i'd share the i made all these quick tips i'd share them on facebook slack and then i'd say people would say hey this is cool and i'd say all right well you know there's a twitter account which makes some of these um so that's how i got the ball rolling on twitter also i think don't be afraid to spend ad money i think that if you're if you're putting the work into i would spend eight hours on one tip easily and if you're putting the work into that um put budget behind it and say look this is gonna get us 500 followers because we're going to target i don't know um peps audience or whatever and you're going to build your account that way i didn't actually really have that luxury but if i was doing it all over again 100 i would i would spend ages making an amazing tip find like five people who audience i want and just run follower ads to them with this great tip they follow you you just repeat repeat repeat um also don't be afraid to post stuff twice like it's it's a bit of a boring tip but most people let's say your account explodes fifty thousand to ninety thousand kind of happened to me um the people who have joined the last 40 000 haven't seen the stuff you spent literally weeks on so it's not the worst thing in the world i mean to just to just repost that's what i think at least i mean there's a lot more to saying today yeah multiple people are here asking about uh about your audience so how do you define your target audience so like who is the profile what's the profile of your subscriber and do you have a specific person in mind when you're creating your content my subscriber is is people who want to get their hands dirty it's marketers like i strategy is important in marketing 100 is but i feel like you sometimes watch these podcasts or whatever clubhouse chats all that and people are just chatting so much about hey you gotta do the strategy it doesn't it's just not there's nothing behind it so my subscriber is someone who kind of gets that like okay uh this is actually practically how you set up uh how you how you um how you write a landing page that converts we've got numbers we've got examples we've got examples we've got more examples of this and it's it's yeah that's the person it also it's it's entrepreneurs as well as marketers it's um it's like uh it's kind of like uh it's like a buffet you go to the buffet and you get the um hand food whatever it's got i'm using the wrong words but like you go to the buffet and you um you get the chips off the side they're already in your mouth it's people who like it easy that's what it is like i try and make it easy for people um yeah marketers founders who want to be who like practicality that's what i'd say cool kisha here is asking how do you manage your time to make sure you contribute to each community and you know you create content at the same time how do you balance that i haven't worked it out i haven't worked it out i'm trying my best still i mean it's a complete mess it really is i'm i've started like i try and i try and dedicate the weekends to messaging people and emails if i if i do emails first thing in the morning my day spirals out of control in a negative way so i got this from someone with josh waitzkin he said that um work pre-input and what i think he meant by that is like can i do the creative work i do um without getting bombarded with hey harry your subscriber form is broken hey you've got a typo here hey so so i i try and have like five six seven hours where i'm just i'm just no distractions trying to trying to write really the best stuff i can and then it's like to say then the data senses okay i can now just hang out on on um on a webinar and just you know all that kind of thing or i can reply to messages or i can fix bugs yeah uh two questions here about if you do it all yourself or do you outsource any part of your uh work or design or i do it all myself uh i do it all myself i yeah there's no there's no one helping out and is that uh because you just uh like to do it on yourself or because you're just early stages and uh it just doesn't make economic sense i haven't no i couldn't hire someone if i tried that you're gonna see but hopefully when i make more money the first person i would hire would probably be someone to help with community like communication because um it's it's there's a lot of messages you get on which is honestly amazing but i've been someone who doesn't actually i don't text my friends back that often so to get the um i like creating the content that's the thing that's why there's no community right now at least um yeah all right uh let's uh end with a more inspirational advice here so gargan is asking here what advice will you give to small business entrepreneurs with little marketing experience to increase audient engagement uh i would say that i'm gonna just give you a quote because i haven't got the words i would say that there are no adults everybody is making up as they go along so figure out yourself and do it um honestly no i i came at this from a view of just just um let's post on reddit and let's get told that you can't post on reddit and then let's post on another subreddit and then let's get a load of up like there was there's no real process to this there really isn't and i think that i mean practically what i would do is uh i can't quite remember what his business was but like i would i would um hey run some ads try it out start a newsletter i don't know that's actually really bad advice without knowing the business it's hard to give you practicality stuff but um we're all making it up including pep amen amen well thank you so much harry everyone marketing examples.com go subscribe i'll see you on t on the internet somewhere man thanks a lot really appreciate it uh cheers have a great session guys you

Channel: Wynter

Views: 14,863

Keywords:

Id: IdJwCJK2T6E

Length: 31min 20sec (1880 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021