Daniel shares how he is growing his newsletter - The Newsie

Meet Daniel Roman.

Daniel grew up and lives in Ottawa, Canada. He often works remotely which means he can travel a bit more and escape the cold winters.

Learn how Daniel grows his side hustle The Newsie.

I used to work for the Canadian Government, for the Stats Canada. So pretty much this means I helped when it was Census time to collect data to help the government or business build better services.

Now I work for a SaaS company called WooSender where we help businesses scale and book more appointments with SMS, email and AI.

I started The Newsie in the summer of 2023. It is a weekly newsletter about … newsletters. I know - a bit meta.

I started it first as a way to learn why businesses were paying so much to us (at WooSender) to send emails so I went into a rabbit hole of learning all things email marketing.

Then I came across a Youtube video (see below) from Ali Abdaal about newsletters and how everyone needs one. So I decided to focus on the newsletter aspect of email marketing - and launched The Newsie.

To get 100 subscribers it took me a few months of actively promoting The Newsie primarily using X.

You just got to promote it selfishly because no one will do it for you. This is what I did to grow:

Added the newsletter link to my X bio. My current bio below.

I also made sure to add the newsletter link to every post I made on X.

Sometimes when I had time, I would manually send a DM to someone when they followed me on X.

Running a LinkedIn newsletter also helped getting a few more subscribers. It’s LinkedIn’s own type of blog living inside of the LinkedIn platform. When you run a LinkedIn newsletter anytime someone follows you LinkedIn will also offer them your LinkedIn newsletter.

I use the LinkedIn newsletter in a fairly simple way. I share almost everything I write in my regular newsletter into my LinkedIn newsletter. The only difference is that if the reader want’s to continue reading - they need to click the link inde the LinkedIn newsletter that will take them to my newsletter to subscribe for more content. See example below.

I did a bit of paid growth with beehiiv boosts where I would pay other newsletters to suggest my newsletter (pretty wild how you can do this). I would pay $2.50 per subscriber generated and the open rate from those subscribers would be about 40 - 60%.

And finally below you’ll see the stats from my email platfrom (beehiiv) for the last 4 weeks (July 14 - Aug 10 2024).

Going forward my plan is to create a bit more media content on YouTube to push people to the newsletter to grow a bit more. As you know YouTube is quite a big search engine and people are looking at how to do certain things when it comes to newsletters on YouTube. There is a demand. Just need to block some time to create those videos 🙂

If you have any questions about newsletters or just want to say hola, you can reach Daniel on X.