How to grow your newsletter insanely fast

Published about 1 year ago • 2 min read

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 »


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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.

Register now »

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

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