Hey everyone! I’m a long time lurker but decided to share some tips and tricks on how my co-founder and I grew our newsletter, Product Byte, to 1500 subscribers and $900/mrr ( 30 paid members) before we even launched. 95% of what I’m sharing here happened between Sept. 1st, 2020 and March 1 (which was our official launch date). My hope is to give you some tactical advice on how to grow your newsletter.
First off, what is Product Byte?
I’m going to briefly touch on this because I think it plays a role in why we were able to grow relatively quickly. Product Byte sends out 1-3 profitable, handpicked, and well-researched e-commerce products that entrepreneurs should sell online. Two things to take away from this -
1.) Our value proposition is that we’ll help you make more money online. I.e it’s an investment.
2.). We help solve a real problem. Currently, the product research tools on the market either make you do all the work, or they curate large quantities of average products.
If I were starting another newsletter, I would definitely try to position my content in one of these two ways.
How we grew it:
Facebook Ads: We’d heard a few other people say they were crushing it using Facebook Ads to grow their newsletter and we figured we’d give it a shot as well. For context, we didn’t have a large advertising budget, so the idea of spending money for subscribers wasn’t our favorite idea. We figured we’d spend $50 and see what happened.
Here’s what we did:
Facebook Ads Attempt #2: The lesson here is that we shouldn’t have kept our targeting to “worldwide”.
Results: We saw about a $3.00/per sign up. Which was more than we were willing to spend for free subscribers. Ultimately, we decided to stop running Facebook Ads.
Facebook Groups: There are a number of niche communities that exist around e-commerce on Facebook. We saw this as a gold mine for getting potential users. First, we tried organic posts within the communities themselves.
Here’s what we did:
Where we’re at today
For the last two weeks, we’ve been really focusing on nailing our content and trying to convert free subscribers into paid members. We’re starting to do more marketing now, and are trying to discover new grassroots channels for growth.
If anyone has any tips on how to organically grow your newsletter, we’d love to hear them. O
I hope this was helpful! Feel free to shoot me any comments - I’m happy to answer questions!
First off, what is Product Byte?
I’m going to briefly touch on this because I think it plays a role in why we were able to grow relatively quickly. Product Byte sends out 1-3 profitable, handpicked, and well-researched e-commerce products that entrepreneurs should sell online. Two things to take away from this -
1.) Our value proposition is that we’ll help you make more money online. I.e it’s an investment.
2.). We help solve a real problem. Currently, the product research tools on the market either make you do all the work, or they curate large quantities of average products.
If I were starting another newsletter, I would definitely try to position my content in one of these two ways.
How we grew it:
Facebook Ads: We’d heard a few other people say they were crushing it using Facebook Ads to grow their newsletter and we figured we’d give it a shot as well. For context, we didn’t have a large advertising budget, so the idea of spending money for subscribers wasn’t our favorite idea. We figured we’d spend $50 and see what happened.
Here’s what we did:
- We created a lead magnet. We’d heard from multiple people that you should promote lead magnet rather than just the newsletter itself.
- We used interests as our primary parameter for Facebook to find relevant people, creating some short ad copy, and our CTA sent them to the signup page on our website.
Facebook Ads Attempt #2: The lesson here is that we shouldn’t have kept our targeting to “worldwide”.
Results: We saw about a $3.00/per sign up. Which was more than we were willing to spend for free subscribers. Ultimately, we decided to stop running Facebook Ads.
Facebook Groups: There are a number of niche communities that exist around e-commerce on Facebook. We saw this as a gold mine for getting potential users. First, we tried organic posts within the communities themselves.
Here’s what we did:
- Found the most relevant posts in the group and tried to emulate those as much as possible.
- Posted similar content as we did on Reddit (value add with little advertising).
Where we’re at today
For the last two weeks, we’ve been really focusing on nailing our content and trying to convert free subscribers into paid members. We’re starting to do more marketing now, and are trying to discover new grassroots channels for growth.
If anyone has any tips on how to organically grow your newsletter, we’d love to hear them. O
I hope this was helpful! Feel free to shoot me any comments - I’m happy to answer questions!