The money is in the list. It’s the only audience that you control. Emails sell courses/services.
Every online business realizes those three facts sooner or later.
So as a course creator your job is to (A) write persuasive emails (B) consistently (C) while growing your list.
Today I’ll focus on list growth.
This took me a while to figure out but the techniques below work and I’ll list them by how easy they are to pull off.
- Organic
Twitter has worked best for me.
I use hypefury to schedule my posts in advance and automatically plug a link to my newsletter as a comment underneath.
The more you post, the more subscribers you get.
- Trade
Use Lettergrowth to cross-promote your newsletter with others. Find ones related to your niche with a similar sized audience. Negotiate how you’ll get this done. They promote your newsletter to their audience and you promote theirs to yours.
I’ve used this in one of my side businesses and worked well.
There are two ways to go about it. Either run paid traffic directly to your newsletter offer OR pay per subscribers. Depends on how good your marketing chops are.
I find Twitter, FB & IG ads to be quite cheap these days. If you’re good then you should get subscribers in the $1-2 range. A lot of businesses are too scared to advertise now and that’s an opportunity to take advantage off.
The other way is to use Sparkloop and pay other newsletter owners everytime they refer someone to your list and that person joins. This is much easier but you can expect to pay an average of $3-4 per subscriber.
- Paid with a twist
The combination of paid traffic and the reverse use of Sparkloop is the sweet spot.
- You run paid traffic to get subscribers
- You automatically refer them to other newsletters via Sparkloop when they sign up to yours.
- Those other newsletters send you money in exchange for referrals and reduce your ad spend by 60-80%.
Additional tips
- Target only newsletters in same niche
- Only refer to ones in Western Countries (US, Australia, Canada, UK etc..)
- Have a fast landing page. Speed matters.
- Don’t overwhelm subscribers. Don’t offer promote more than 2-3 outside newsletters.
