How To (Actually) Grow Your Newsletter: The Growth Assassin Behind Codie Sanchez and Milk Road

um [Music] hey what's up everyone welcome to the copyblogger podcast thank you so much for joining me we have a special episode this week ethan spent all week making a connection with matt who i have on the show matt hi welcome i'm really excited to talk to you hey thanks for having me yeah no problem and then what happened is ethan sent us both a uh a text message today saying that he had a ton of construction outside of his house it was super noisy and so this is just going to be matt and i matt is an expert at newsletter growth and this is a topic that we talk about a lot on the show so so we're just going to jump right in matt first off once again really appreciate you jumping on we don't do interviews very often on this and so ethan said like no we have to talk to this guy this is really important so i'm thrilled that you've given us your time it's actually the opportunity yeah it's gonna be here i've actually read the blog for the past few years on and off i started off whenever i started digital marketing as a copywriter so it was a good resource for me so it's good to meet you yeah it's i always love hearing that because for instance when we hire employees in my company i always say like find the best writers find the best writers copy blogger is a bunch of writers and i state often that the best foundational skill is being a good writer do you think that's a true statement or do you think yeah i agree i think that gets overlooked so much especially when you start working at big tech like i did in digital marketing is so focused on the marketing part and like they kind of subjugate copywriting to a smaller role or a junior employee which is just a silly thing to do because they can have the biggest impact on your business on your growth more than anything and um it surprises me how few people read about copywriting like read the foundational copywriting books by like claude hopkins and o will be and all the guys who are passed away now that like are the founding fathers of direct response marketing so it helps you with everything related to marketing because everything you're putting out there has a message whether it's a video or a copy online like you have to have that right to make the marketing work yeah well i can tell we're going to get along great all right so let me take a step back i did a terrible job of introducing you matt mcgarry is your name did i pronounce that right yeah perfect we're going to talk about all of your experience we're going to talk about the newsletters that you've worked on we're going to talk about some of the real in the weeds stuff which you and i were were hitting out a little bit before but before we do could you give just like a two-minute introduction how did you get into newsletters you said you have an agency right now what are you working on yeah so i previously worked at the hustle which is one of the larger business and tech newsletters media companies it was bought by hubspot um and i helped them grow over 2 million subscribers and after working out there for about two years i kind of had these opportunities i had a lot of people asking me to help them with their newsletters outside of the hustle and in april of this year i left to do that and now i have this newsletter growth agency that i'm growing working with about 10 newsletters right now mostly focused on paid growth for those folks what's it called what's your interest you thought it is called grow letter there's really like the name isn't really out there right now because it's just me i'm like the sole person doing it right now hiring people later this year excellent grow letter.com or yeah.go right now yeah we will uh definitely link that link that in the show notes on coffeebloggerpod.com okay so your experiences with newsletters your experience with this is with ads i am gonna approach this conversation very selfishly because it was ethan actually he was breaking down and i'm sure you're familiar with this um the hustle's newsletter growth book that they did it's like a 200 page research document they put together and so ethan was the one that explained to me that the majority of media outlets that are considered newsletters and even ones that aren't considered newsletters kind of follow this format right there's the free newsletter which usually monetizes through ads and then there's what they call the front end product which is the product that's like really on display is usually the cheaper i shouldn't say cheaper the more affordable product anywhere from 100 bucks a year to let's even call it 500 bucks a year and then there's the back end product which is the real high dollar vip type products it could be a mastermind you know could be a real high-level research publication it could be something like that right so there's the free newsletter there's like the front end product and then there's the back end product and when ethan explained this to me i was like oh my god this is what i've been doing i've been working on my personal blog on tim stodd's forever and never really knew what i was doing with it was just just write in because i enjoy to write and figure like yeah i'm working on my brand right and so when ethan said that like i went for it i was like i'm taking this model i've gotten 7 500 subscribers right now and launched a front-end product which is 99 bucks for the year still super super affordable but we're just getting started and and it's going great i've got about 160 members on my front end product i got about 700 7500 subscribers on my newsletter and this is something i'm very very interested in and so i'm going to approach this conversation very selfishly and just ask questions that are going to benefit me in hopes that they're going to benefit other people now so the first question when i say all of that do you hear that model and think like yeah that's that's a good plan is there like another underlying business model that you think is more effective with newsletters or how does it no i think that's perfect i love that model in kind of ethan in the team that wrote that kind of took that from like agora and also the motley fool which i think does the best those are both multi-billion dollar businesses and they have that exact same model they have a lot of free newsletters they have a front-end product which is usually 49 to 99 per year and they have back in products that are about two thousand dollars a year and if you look at the motley pool they have you know the stock advisor which is 99 bucks a year they have millions of members on that and i think they only have one or two back-end products that are about 2k per year each and they kind of upsell and cross-sell those to the front-end customers and that's a that's a massive business so gory does it well too they have multiple like different agora they have multiple publications that are under agora like agora financial is one of the most well-known ones and then i'm sure there's tons of other folks that have copied this model too so it's the way to go i see a lot of people create like courses that are a thousand dollars or a newsletter that's a thousand or thousand dollars and they have nothing in the front end and they really struggle to convert customers who are um cold they convert people who like have been following them for years and know a ton about them but when they go out with ads and they try and reach cold cold audience like it doesn't convert so having that front end which is like the in between um helps the funnel a time so interesting i never would have thought of it that way and then once you once you drink the kool-aid you think like what other way would you possibly do it like anything else wouldn't make sense and an example that you just put together is is perfect it's so much easier to sell a 2 000 product to somebody who's already bought a 90 product and more importantly has had like a really great experience with that let's just the front end product 90 bucks to 500 bucks let's call it and i never would have thought about that until i i read that booklet it's like a really great piece yeah it is it's just that like getting that commitment that they already bought from you they're gonna buy from you again so it's so much easier to convert them you don't need a two hour long webinar to convert them to your high-end product you don't need to get on the phone um although that may help but like just having them trust you and like deliver on a low-cost product helps and like 100 a year is like two dollars a week or something like that so it can you can get people in the door uh very quickly or something like that yeah so let's talk about paid acquisition i think paid scares people especially people on twitter who are creators i have a weird love-hate relationship with this term creator because well i just don't get what it means like i see content as a way to grow a business whereas i think other people see content as just a thing within itself to me it's always a means to an end as opposed to like the end result within itself right and so so much of the chitter chatter is build an audience build a social audience get your brand out there and grow your newsletter for that and i've seen some people have success with that but the real real successful newsletter businesses spend money to grow and so where from your experience which is significant is it really doable to build let's say a million dollars a year is it doable to build a million dollar newsletter without any paid acquisition at all it's tough usually the people that have success there already have a large social following and they're able to convert you know 20 40 percent of their audience to the newsletter so if you don't have you know 100k plus social following already you really need to be using paid acquisition and be able to you know acquire a customer for a subscriber for a few bucks and then make a few bucks from them via sponsorships or a paid product and that's just going to be the fastest way to grow it's going to be paid advertising you can always grow faster with that as long as your ads have roads you can grow faster with that than growing up autumn's audience organically totally so talk me through it man let's say i called you i say hey i got 10 grand a month i want to grow my newsletter just walk me through the process i wouldn't even know where to begin believe it or not i've never spent a single dollar in advertising ever so do you begin with the messaging do you begin with the audience do you begin with just tests and experimentation how the hell would i even get started yeah well first of all you have just traction which you already have but if someone out there has the newsletter no subscribers like start publishing start posting on social media get you know 5 000 subscribers which you can do in a couple months if you get like a content market fit um so once you have that some degree of content market fit you have some subscribers and a value proposition to your newsletter basically you need to have a landing page and it doesn't need to be super complicated um like sub stack has built-in landing pages b if you have built-in landing pages you can make something with click funnels really quickly and you want to see what the conversion rate is in that landing page you can do this those tools have i think you can see in the dashboard of those tools you can look at google analytics but you want to get a landing page and try and have your organic landing page conversion rate around 40 percent and it's not that hard to do that if your newsletter has a good value proposition you're showing people how you solve the problem or like a benefit that matters to that reader and the landing pages that work best are literally just pages that there's one thing to do on the page and that subscribe they can click on the privacy policy of course and stuff like that but like you can't scroll it's just a headline sub headline form and a subscribe button and that's all you need maybe some testimonials or some social proof can help a lot but build a landing page like that um if the conversion rate's around 30 or 40 percent it will probably be even higher for a lot of folks then you're ready to use that page um for advertising so that's step number one step number one too i guess um then we're actually going into building the ads so the platform that i recommend most people start with is facebook it's just like i guess i think it's the biggest google might be number one but it's the biggest for newsletters it's really easy to set up there's no minimum spend like you can start spending 10 bucks a day 50 bucks a day and um setting up the tracking is pretty easy so that's where i recommend people starting and when i say facebook i also mean instagram it's the same platform the facebook ad platform right so where do we start from there i would just go look at your competitors and other newsletters that are leading the space so check out the hustle check out morning brew and go to the facebook ad library you can just google that and find that and type in those facebook pages and look at like what ads are working for them you can sort by active ads and then go down and try and find the oldest ads ads that have been running for the longest because in theory those ads are working the best because they've been active for a long time right and i would just basically start swiping you don't need to have super creative ad copy you don't need to have a long form copy for a newsletter either because you're asking for something that's pretty easy to get an email address you're not selling a product yeah so what's working well on the ad creative side is one swiping and if you get inspiration from other ads that are outside of the newsletter industry that's fine too that's that's even better actually um but what's working well for my clients and the ads that we put out there are tick tock style videos that's a huge one some people call this ugc you can do this just ugc what's that user generated content got it i guess ugcc might be more like a testimonial style video and the tick tock style video could be you know anything you see on tick tock right however that same kick talk style video works amazing as a facebook or an instagram ad because thirty percent of the time people spend on instagram is on instagram reels a lot more percentage that time is on instagram stories yeah so that's that you know vertical ad format that video type of ad works super well and you can make that yourself if you did some swiping like i talked about you can find examples of those types of ads that you can translate to your newsletter you can follow some basic tik tok trends basically turn that trend into an ad for your newsletter or you can go out to fiverr and there's a few other marketplaces like swipeouts.com where you can find ticktackers and pay them to make a video ad for your business for between fifty and a hundred dollars per video it's not super expensive to get videos like this what was that called swipe swipe what swipe house i think it's swifthouse.co and honestly fiverr might be the best best one out there for this um strike house is good another thing is just like reaching out to creators that you like or kind of in your niche and asking them to do a video and getting the rights to use as an ad that can be more expensive than fiverr but that's something that maureenberg does a lot they're constantly reaching out to creators and paying them a few hundred bucks to make a video ad for them but that might be your best performing creative in these videos um the second best style created might be memes i like to find memes that like are not necessarily funny but they can somehow show someone the benefit of your newsletter of your product yeah right so it's not you're not going to lol at it but like it gets it gets people's attention because it's a meme we're trained to look at memes because we get like a little dopamine spike and we struggle with them yeah and it can lead people into subscribing to the newsletter so those two work really well man there's so many places i want to go here i'm going to start with this because this is a caveat and this isn't the conversation but memes in general i find so fascinating like the culture of memes the fact that they're just a thing right now that is so easy it's it's like there's an entire conversation that you can fit so perfectly into like such a bite-sized chunk and the the memetics of them like quite literally where where the the root word comes from makes it so that all of these ideas out there are like competing against each other and i just i think that's so fascinating where like it really is survival of the meme you know and the best meme with the best idea like will win the entire market and so memes are super powerful like i know that they have like a tongue-in-cheek kind of connotation in our society but fundamentally what they are they're very very powerful and they can move society in different directions very quickly so i i think people should appreciate memes a little bit more they should yeah they should think of it as like a skill they can develop too yeah it's kind of just like copywriting you can be a better meme maker and that if you're able to do that i think you can make a lot of money or help your business a ton by doing that and we'll i think we'll see more of that in the future but um it's some niche of your practice a good resource for folk i think if you type if you google like meme templates there's a great website called imgflip.com and it's basically just a database for different memes and you can also like rank memes they have at least they have a ranking system that shows the most popular memes in the past 7 or 30 days and this is where i get a lot of my ideas obviously like reddit and twitter is good too but like this is a good site where you can basically just go and see hundreds of memes and just keep clicking and keep reading dozens of them until you find a meme that fits for your newsletter or your business and then you make the ad with that mean yeah you make a bunch so it's a fun thing it's a fun thing to do but it's also really effective yeah and i mean it's every time i get into these conversations i i feel like i repeat myself sometimes because i'm such a technical seo person to me this whole underbelly of the internet is like uh it's like looking under a carpet you know like you never know what you're gonna find under there whereas me it's always very analytical like this is what people are searching for this is the intent behind it like how can you take this and turn it into money but this is like a whole other thing where you're you're not starting with the intent you're starting with that the idea and then you're like manifesting that idea into the action that you want people to take so anytime i get into these conversations i just i have to refrain from going down the rabbit hole because i find it to be so fascinating yeah it's an interesting one it's one that i can honestly get a lot better at i haven't because it's so just common you don't think about this can be like a really valuable thing in the skill yeah it can be it's funny totally all right let's get back on track here landing page is number one the the facebook and the ads we got vertical videos these are tick tock style videos i know what you mean like like vertical style videos so my next question i think is important and it's not quite in the weeds but it's more of a it's more of like a philosophical type thing there's so many newsletters that are about like digital marketing and are about newsletters and it sometimes i worry like gets too meta right like it's the same idea stacked on top of itself stacked on top of itself like turtles all the way down you know do you still think that there's viability and there's still openings in this market is this just like an endless pool of of attention or do you think it's eventually going to cap out to the point where there's going to be a few that are going to dominate all of this and everybody else is going to be fighting for scraps yeah in the newsletter market overall or in the digital marketing newsletter market let's stick with the newsletter market overall just because the email is like is so valuable in the digital marketing in general like that can just go on forever right but like email addresses within themselves are um it's a finite resource because people are so protective of their inboxes so let's let's stick with this really yeah i think newsletters are going to be 10 times bigger than they are now within a few years and that's all because of the tools to make them have become so much more accessible you have sub stack which everybody knows about you can create a newsletter in 60 seconds beehive is an up and coming tool that i'm using a lot that's basically i like those yeah they're fantastic it's created by a morning brew one of the first employees of morning brew i think yeah tyler and um it makes it really easy to grow your newsletter with sub stack it's like really easy to start but if you want to grow your newsletter or paid ads substance not a good platform for that beehive they have a built-in referral program they have better tracking they have detailed analytics on your subscribers all out of the box it's so amazing because like at the hustle we spent years and we had two or three engineers in the team to build the things the bi has out of the box where you can just sign up for free and use them right away so anybody who who wants to start a media business or a newsletter business has the tools to do it now and that they're very accessible and there's so many creators that have an audience that want to do more than just influence want to do more than just be an influencer and get brand deals they want to start immediate business around their brand yeah that's me i want to do something more so you really think that they're going to keep growing and keep growing yeah and there is saturation right because you can only subscribe to so many newsletters you know five ten year inboxes it's probably more than enough for most people but there's all types of niches that can be really big and you can have a million subscriber newsletter here and there you know there's like fantasy football there's all types of different nations inside marketing inside finance there's going to be a long tale of newsletters that are already successful and there will be like the big winners like the morning brews or the industry dives but there'll be a lot of really successful ones in smaller niches i think that's true as well this is some ethan and i talked about a lot where sorry my dog was dying to get in here if you you see her in the background but there's it's to the point where every interest is within itself a micro community and so i think very similarly to how we've seen with i guess reddit's a good example because a subreddit is nothing but a micro community right i think people are going to get more sophisticated around email and i think since email is so much more personal and so much more of like a direct relationship the i don't know what you would call it like the strength of the community within an email list is it's like more bonded it's more of a commitment to subscribe and unsubscribe from a newsletter especially something that you're really really interested in so i i i do agree with you i i think about it sometimes and i think man like how many more marketing newsletters are there gonna be but then i think to myself lots more right because there's so many people that are interested in this just like there's so many people that are interested in like you said fantasy football or who knows paintball or or insert topic here right there's an endless pool of different ideas there can be a successful newsletter business for a lot of those and they don't really exist now there's like broad stuff like the hustle morning brew i keep using those examples but there's really not a lot of large newsletter businesses there's a lot of media companies that have a newsletter and they just repost their articles in there it's not very good there's a lot of people who do email marketing but when you have a dedicated newsletter that has an amazing reading experience that's something that's still untapped and why i see it for some of my clients they have you know 40 or 50 000 people on their newsletter that have a 95 plus open rate and they're that engaged and when you're that engaged open an email every single day you are a part of community they can monetize the [ __ ] out of those folks that's something that most media companies can't do because they don't have that deep relationship with a reader like a newsletter might have i totally agree i'm going to stick on this for just one more question because this is something that i think is going to change depending on who you ask but i'm really interested in what do you agree is it better to be curated or is it better to just be a like an essay in a newsletter form what what what grabs people more in terms of the content that that people send out to their audience that's a good question because i see both like there's there's lots of examples on both sides you can think of like not boring is like an essay style of newsletter that's huge in the tech community it doesn't have a lot of subscribers but it's really highly regarded and they make a ton from sponsorships and then there's you know the hustle morning brewer more curated there's a newsletter i work with called execsum.com it's all curated it's maybe a newsletter if you go to the site and check it out it's like maybe you're 20 or 25 bullet points there's no original content but they have a 60 open rate and the engagement is super high so i would for me i would start on the curated ends like the bullet point style newsletters and find curations really valuable to the subscribers to the readers yeah just anecdotally i've seen those work better because like the essay style or just original writing can be so hit or miss if that's something you're really skilled at then then do it but if it's something you don't feel like you're amazing at then stick to the other one and then maybe there's like a good the hustle had a lot of both like we would do monday through friday was a more curated newsletter and then every sunday we would have the sunday story which is a long form original piece so both can work as well very cool all right thank you for going on that little rabbit hole with me let's get back to growth we've established our landing page we've picked out some cool creative we have a little bit of a budget then what just start running ads and see what happens it's got to be more sophisticated than that right yeah a little bit it's not super complicated though because you know facebook can drive a lot of the paid growth you don't need to do a dozen different platforms or even a handful of bad platforms what really matters here is like making great ad creative so spending time finding that perfect hook on for your tick tock video finding that perfect meme finding different ad formats that work for you doing a lot of testing on the creative side and then testing audiences too the targeting on facebook is pretty simple you're just gonna interest audience are gonna be what's gonna work best for folks especially when they're first starting out they don't have a lot of data to create look like audiences yeah and you're just gonna keep testing and like most newsletters can have a cpa that's below two dollars if you have a lower budget your cpa can be even lower than that first sign up yeah two dollars no hold on hold on are you just saying that like no yeah most of my clients are at two dollars or below and maybe when you're spending you know 50 100 grand per month it's gonna go higher right because you spend more on facebook you kind of reach outside your your target audience it costs more uh your cpms are higher when you spend more but if you're spending you know 10 grand a month you can do two dollars we did that for milk road basically everybody i work with is at that two dollar or less range and maybe i have one folk that's like one guy that said um you know three dollar cpa and just for when i say cpa i'm talking about a free newsletter we're not talking about a paid product of course i gotcha totally um so yeah it's doable in facebook like people talk about rising facebook cost it's not really that high like the ad prices overall are lower than they were last year ios like att hasn't affected newsletters as much as has affected e-commerce and other businesses sure because for newsletters you don't do retargeting you're left you're going to look like audiences and the tracking doesn't matter as much you just you got the email you didn't exactly the tracking is super simple facebook doesn't really screw it up they're pretty accurate um so if you have that content market fit you have a good landing page you have a good ad upgrade of you can get signups at that cost that it's honestly harder to monetize them than it is to get them but also you're talking to me and my main skills is better growth like so i may be better at this than the average person so that's my i might be able to get those results faster and easier than some folks okay you said it so now we're going to talk about it you said that it's very simple and i appreciate that because i oh this might sound like a humble brag but i've been pretty successful and i when people ask me questions i never really know what to say because it's always a really simple solution you know like basically everything in my life that i've gotten in terms of just business success there's a lot of definitions of the word success right but of my career has come from writing an article a week like a good long form 2 000 word article every week i've i've done it probably once or twice a week for the past 10 years and so when people ask me stuff i'm just like yeah like that's all really good but like i don't actually have anything cool to say i just write a lot you know and so when you said it's pretty simple that really stuck out to me however just because you say it's pretty simple doesn't mean that there might not be some kind of touch that you have or or some kind of insight that regular people wouldn't have so in your opinion and i know that i'm asking you to be a little bit self-reflective i'm not trying to totally put you on the spot here i'm just trying to dig a little bit deeper like what do you think is an x factor that can make it from five dollars six dollars a sign up to two dollars yeah what's helped me the most is probably the copywriting shops that i have is that i've spent a long time just focusing on that when i first started digital marketing in reading all those those foundational books um i need to revisit a lot of those like reading those once a year also really help you keep skills up to date totally um so like if someone knows nothing about copywriting they're gonna have a hard time getting an ad campaign going successfully you have to have some skills there because you can only just we talked about swiping but you can only do so much of that if you don't have any copywriting skills right because then you're just going to be copying swiping and surfing the copy and swiping is taking something taking inspiration making it a little bit better making it work for you copying only works so much right so that copyright is a whole separate subject i can kind of break down what type of ad creative and like what works well because we didn't get into the details there and that's that's the key thing because it's the same format for every newsletter i work with it's not no please let's talk about it i i appreciate the guidance as well like i don't know anything about this so if you think this is a cool if this is like a valuable thing to give our listeners to i'd love to hear it please so step one just read some copywriting books for the folks out there that have never done that before you can do that in in a few hours but so what works like what type of copy attracts newsletter readers and gets people to join and read at a low cost straight so number one is like your newsletter needs to solve a specific problem for a specific reader or have some some benefit so a few examples of those exact sum is the newsletter it's going to be very big in the next year so their their focus is on investment bankers and people who work in finance and basically their pitches like people that have the job they need to step in all the financial and business needs they need to know it for their job for their boss or their clients they work with so instead of checking reading bloomberg or the wall street journal they can just read the exact same newsletter read the 20 bullet points and that's everything they should need to know for the day so like the updates on their work the milk road that has a lot more original writing so it's a little bit harder to distill that value pitch into a few sentences but like they help you discover the latest crypto projects and trends that you wouldn't have heard about if you weren't subscribed to the milk road newsletter and that's really valuable to folks because they can potentially make a lot of money by investing in those nft projects or coins or just like learn a new emerging industry um there's a lot of value to that one piece of language that worked really well for the milk road was like we explained crypto in plain english just that one sentence was like a big a big positive factor in our ads and that's something that a lot of like other crypto media companies or influencers don't do if you read an article from the coin telegraph and you don't understand half the words in it so that solves a problem for folks that want to understand crypto another example is just time saving the exact same with that there's a lot of newsletters that are just focused on time saving so instead of reading boring articles you read morning brew for five minutes in the morning another one is looking smart or sounding smart especially in front of your colleagues or your boss or people you want to impress one of the best performing ads of the hustle this ad copy worked for years it literally worked from like 2017 to now they're still running the hustle in the test it was a it was like a fake testimonial and the copy was like my boss thinks i'm smart i'm not it's because i read the hustle and he has no idea it exists and a lot of other newsletters have like swiped that and it's worked really well basically it's like i have a secret that my boss or my colleagues don't know about that gives me an advantage edge in the workplace and that's why i read the hustle or why i read another newsletter so those are all like examples of problem solutions and benefits that work well but i would i would try and find that tr try and find the problem you're solving how your newsletter is the solution or try and find that benefit that people want and how your newsletter provides that benefit if you don't get to that that's like step one if you don't get that right the other stuff probably won't work as well and you may need to like edit your content to drive that benefit or solve that problem and a lot of people need to do that and that's okay that's exactly what what happened to me i started like a lot of people just writing about digital marketing or something i've been into for years and that's that's where i started and after talking to ethan what you said is totally right it's a specific need for a specific person so i thought about this for like really like a year i remember i had you talk about swiping it's so funny because that's that's really all i've done with this the hustle has and when you said it i've realized it the time saving it's five minutes or less i've seen it everywhere and so my friend gonz as well he's got this newsletter called seed table it's basically the hustle except for european tech and he says learn more about european tech in five minutes or less and so i swiped it and it was be a better entrepreneur in five minutes or less and it was okay it did alright but i thought really really hard like what the hell is a thing that i have that not a lot of people have that i can confidently bring to the table and legitimately offer some kind of solution and i've i've been really good at like establishing companies and then automating them with personnel and software and so it's it's been very helpful for me to have different income streams and so that was like [ __ ] i got it that's what it is and as soon as i put that tagline on the home page of my website my i don't know exactly what it is i'm not very sophisticated it might be 30 something like that um i get about 20 20 sign ups a day and yeah i get about 100 or so hits to my website a day so close and it was uh i will teach you how to generate multiple streams of income and so i might not be hitting one of those really specific looking smart time saving oh well i guess i am a specific problem for a specific reader right so i guess i am kind of hitting that as soon as i figured out like exactly who i am in my newsletter the whole thing started coming together and that's all that one little sentence but like what you said is also true i changed my newsletter to fit my promise and that might hurt some people in their ego because they have like this vision about like what it is they're trying to create right but for me as soon as i did that the whole thing took off on me yeah and look at that difference between like become a better entrepreneur versus get multiple streams of income like there's a big difference one is general one specific specific always works better we want to have a specific promise followed by exact proof so another example of this is the newsletter called front office sports they're really big really successful specific promise with what specific promise followed by specific proof so proof is basically just backing up that promise right yeah because if if you just make a massive promise the bigger the promises the less believable it is so having that proof to follow up is big so an example of that front office sports they are a newsletter about the business of sports and like their tagline is basically like well we'll make you a smarter smart sports business person i don't know the exact tagline i don't work with them but something like that you can imagine and their proof is like every nba franchise owner reads our newsletter so specific promise specific proof they're super successful because of those two factors and if people find those two things that can generate a great headline and greatly and educate ad and grow the newsletter really quickly and not everybody's gonna have that audience right but they can find something else another example even just putting like your exact number of subscribers even if you're small to help a lot you know we have 1503 subscribers put that on your landing page and like that that's better than just not saying anything about your subscribers if your subscribers work somewhere like they have a work email address in your email database and you see they work at you know some well-known companies put that on your landing page too you have to follow up that promise with with some degree of proof it doesn't have to be super in depth but that helps a lot as well yeah i love this we got a couple of minutes left i got two questions i want to ask you one this is out of left field but i'm genuinely curious that somebody who has their finger on the pulse in your view what are some of the most opportunistic industries niches communities out there that people aren't taking advantage of for the newsletter space there's a lot out there it's tough for me because i'm so dialed in on building my company helping newsletters grow um i'm not researching a lot of the grand opportunities ethan's probably a better person for that because he's so dialed into the trend i think i would think about it in reverse actually if you're growing a newsletter that's going to be primarily monetized through sponsorships you need to think about who are the most valuable advertisers in your newsletter which is not like a fun way to think about things not everyone wants to think about things this way but like you want to have an audience valuable to those advertisers so that's why b2b is so great in serving an audience that is just focused on a an industry in building a newsletter around that industry and then you can find advertisers that want to reach people in industry that's a great way to think about things so there's a lot out there industry dive is a great example they're basically a b2b newsletter that has a dozen different publications in different industries they have waste management they have marketing they have payments all different types of things i would find something that you have some experience in and just build something around that and then try and position them the way to advertisers that you're like the leading source of news for this specific niche in this industry and you have these industry leaders on your newsletter and you can sell much higher price ads that way it's kind of i kind of went around your your question there because i don't have a great answer for like what's up and coming i would rather focus on like what's most valuable i think you know there's just you don't have to find something brand new like there's big niches there's spaces within marketing within any industry that you can do well on i don't feel like that was a dodge i actually really respect that i get i don't want to call it flack i get uh feedback sometimes in the content i put out there because i'm not very romantic i guess you could say with what i'm trying to do like for me if i'm gonna sit and stare at this screen i better be getting something out of it and it's just always been very calculated for that and and so there's times where i think to myself oh like maybe people are in it for entertainment like maybe there really is this creative expression out here and i don't know that just ain't for me like i'm trying to i'm trying to grow and and help with my career and my family and my finances that's that's where i'm at it for what i'm in it for and so i do like actually really really appreciate that answer because i think that's the right way to approach it like why bother with the headache just find the fast the fastest most direct path to success and then just execute on it that's always what i'm trying to do yeah that's what a newsletter business is about really is execution because you're it's not a winner take all game if you make better content do better marketing than another newsletter or another media company you can win there and it's there's not a lot of newsletters out there even though the people listening to this they probably know of a lot but the average person really doesn't and they're not reading many newsletters and there's a lot of room to grow okay i love this because this is my last question actually more of a thought experiment than a question as you know i own a an agency that works with addiction treatment centers i've been involved in behavioral health care for years it's something i'm super passionate about it's important to me that these services are out there and that people get this help for many reasons i have seen for years an opportunity for a newsletter that speaks specifically to behavioral health care professionals there's 14 000 or so treatment facilities in the country alone got to be 100 000 therapists insurance verification employees administrators right business development reps um liaisons that work with hospitals and treatment centers to kind of cater that relationship to somebody like overdoses in a hospital and then you go to treatment right like that's that's a field within itself but i've always been reluctant because of exactly some of the things that you said like is this even a viable option is this even a newsletter that would work but you gave an example i wrote it down i forget exactly which one it is but it was so dry it was so systematic and it speaks only to this group of professionals so when i say that to you and if anybody's listening to this and you have some kind of weird esoteric idea in some kind of industry that you're involved in and you think to yourself no that'll never work what would be your feedback to that i think there's a few factors that can to make it work or to make it not work um first of all that's a great idea i think that could be a really successful newsletter it's not going to have millions of subscribers like just having 10 000 subscribers of people who work in the industry may be extremely valuable to advertisers and you can grow beyond that so that's i keep mentioning industry dive because they do such a good job i think they just sold for over 100 million dollars and they just do b2b newsletters like that in different niches so that could be a massive business right there but to answer the question like how i think about it is if you're doing a newsletter that's focused on monetizing sponsorships your audience needs to buy things so professionals in that industry that you just mentioned they probably buy a lot of products for their business right and so you can get those advertisers in the newsletter if you create a newsletter that's for teachers for example they don't really buy a lot they buy school supplies and that's about it so you have to be you have to think about it that way now if you're creating like a product for teachers that helps them do their jobs better like teachers page teachers is a huge business maybe that that could be successful but you have to think about how you're going to monetize your newsletter and you need to build your audience around that so if you're if you're monetizing by selling a course maybe you go more broad maybe you target entrepreneurs if you're monetizing through sponsorships maybe you you only target you know waste management professionals and you find companies that sell into that industry to become your sponsor so it depends on what you're going for so that's what i would recommend totally another one of those moments where after you say it it's like duh because the professionals in healthcare in general need a ton of products you need software you need crms you need call tracking software you need call tracking routing software you need phones you need hard lines like you need so much [ __ ] and and i always thought to myself like am i am i creating content for the business professionals or am i creating content for the facilities themselves in this newsletter and in my head it was always for the professionals because they're the ones that actually need to know the news about i don't know some kind of let's say an insurance company updates their their terms or whatever you know like that's really boring news to the regular person but for people in in this industry it really speaks to them but even with that said the actual question to ask is do these professionals buy stuff and like for me the answer is yes and so for anybody listening if you have a an esoteric idea in your head the question to ask yourself is does your audience buy stuff and if they do there's a viable path to profitability yeah that's you just got to distill it down to that it's a great way to do it yeah seriously just like you said man it's pretty simple i love it man i i loved this thank you so much for coming on i'm glad we're friends because i'm going to need you yeah and this is super super exciting i tried to find some stuff about you before you started recording you're like one of these quiet assassin internet marketing type that like doesn't really care if people follow you on twitter or not so yeah i've got a lot out there i i i haven't put a lot out there um grow letter dot co has like my socials and my email if you want to contact me there but um i may publish more but i've just been so focused on like just helping clients i've gotten so many referrals so i haven't really needed to do content marketing yet but maybe someday i'll put some more stuff out there oh amazing i love it okay well go to the show notes copybloggerpod.com everything we talked about is going to be linked up in the show notes matt thank you so much seriously this was great i really really loved it let's keep in touch we'll do it again yeah that'd be fun let's get into the weeds a lot of a lot of fun so it's great meeting you i'll be in touch likewise all right everyone if you enjoyed the show give us a like give us a subscribe please leave the five star reviews thank you for all the kind words i'm gonna get into the dm's on twitter talk to you guys next week [Music] you

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Length: 48min 26sec (2906 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 31 2022