One of the top ways to grow your newsletter is to advertise on other people’s newsletters.
It makes perfect sense. People who subscribe to one newsletter are far more likely to subscribe to others. They’re already convinced. They already know and trust the value that newsletters provide.
It’s one tactic that Josh and the team at Exploding Topics have used to grow their newsletter from 0 to 65k subscribers in 12 months.
Josh opened Google, sifted through hundreds of search results, and made an excel spreadsheet of newsletters that had an audience overlap with his. He contacted them with a trade offer — Exploding Topics would advertise their newsletter for free if they advertised his.
And it mostly worked!
Other publishers agreed on the win-win scenario and sometimes he’d get 700 new subscribers with a single trade.
But other times it failed.
He’d trade with a publisher who had ‘good’ open rates, send them 800 clicks, and only receive 11 subscribers in return. Not everyone self-reports their stats honestly. It’s one of the major headaches of advertising in emails.
Like Josh, you can deal with the cumbersome trades and all the admin tasks that come with them. After all, it’s the best (only) way to advertise on other newsletters without throwing down a few hundred dollars on traditional email sponsorships, right?
Why traditional email sponsorship is a major risk if you want to get newsletter subscribers
Traditional email sponsorship is similar to placing an ad in a magazine. You pay a set fee to place an ad on an email newsletter that gets sent to the entire subscriber base. Everyone who reads the newsletter sees your ad.
Here’s the problem: While you might find publications that have a similar audience/topic to you, it’s rare that every single person subscribed will find your newsletter ad relevant to their interests.
In the worst case, readers don’t find the ad relevant at all.
For example. we’ve seen a sponsorship of $1,080 result in only one signup… when it goes wrong it really goes wrong.
Like with ad trades you still go through the time-consuming ad approval process, negotiate the fee, and trust the sponsorships will return results.
4 reasons why we don’t recommend traditional newsletter sponsorship to promote your own newsletter:
- The cost per sign up is almost always too high to be profitable (click here to calculate how much one subscriber is worth to your newsletter)
- There’s little to no benefit to doing a paid sponsorship vs an ad swap
- You still need to spend time emailing publishers
- You have to trust that you will get results. If an ad doesn’t work, or a newsletter’s open rate/CTR is bad that day, there’s no going refund option.
How and when traditional sponsorships are awesome
Thinking “why should advertisers ever bother to pay to be on MY newsletter”? Sponsored content is powerful if an advertiser is selling a high-value product or relies on brand awareness to beat the competition. For example, if you get an average of $100 profit per sign up, it makes sense to pay $50 to it. You still make $50 profit.
What if advertising on email newsletters was as easy as social media ads?
Promo Alert: This is where we talk about Paved’s own Ad Network. Not because this is the Paved blog (okay… there is that) but because there’s no other way to do this (unless you have a ton of cash to throw at enterprise-level operations catering to premium brands only).
On the Ad Network, you can advertise on hundreds on newsletters, with one ad. As a subscriber opens an email, we check if they match your targeting criteria. If they do, they see the ad. And if they click the ad, you pay a small fee.
It basically works like social media ads:
- •You set a target audience using demographics and interests
- •Create your ad copy and upload an image
- •Choose your daily budget and bid
- •Pay per click (not per newsletter)
No finding or interacting with individual publishers. Ever.
Target people, not subscriber bases
The Ad Network uses programmatic technology (aka targeting via online data). So instead of appearing in front of an entire subscriber base, you only appear in front of people who are “from English Speaking Countries” and are interested in “programming” and/or “front-end development” and/or “Javascript”.
Cheaper than Facebook ads
This can be as cheap or expensive as you want it to be. We ran a test in June 2020 specifically to get more newsletter subscribers and bid $0.50 per click. For just $50, we got 100 clicks. It was roughly 2x cheaper than Facebook ads on a per-click comparison. Read the full article here.
Guaranteed results: A Case Study
We tested out the Ad Network for 3 of our publishers to see how many clicks we could get for them at a low price. The results were pretty impressive considering the reach we got for just $0.50 a click.
Growing your newsletter needs to be efficient and cost-effective
Even more so if this is your side hustle.
Subscribers that cost money need to bring in money. And that means your newsletter either needs to run on an advertisement, donation, or premium subscription basis.
If a subscriber costs you $0.50, you want to be sure that you will earn that amount back over the next few months. You can use this ROI calculator to find out how much a subscriber is worth to you.
Subscribers that cost time, need to give you freedom in return. For most, that means a flourishing side hustle that brings in money (see above paragraph) and refills your energy or zest for life.
Advertising on other people’s newsletters and swapping ad space are both excellent ways to grow your newsletter. It’s worked for plenty of publishers. Get started by contacting other publishers in your niche or checking out the Ad Network.
