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Daniel shares how he is growing his newsletter - The Newsie

Author

Jakob Jelling
August 14, 2024

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.

Photo of a young man with dark hair looking directly into the camera. He is wearing a white t-shirt. Blurry background with frames on a wall.

Daniel Roman - Founder of The Newsie

The story told by Daniel Roman

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.

But what about The Newsie?

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

Screenshort of a webpage in mainly blue and white colors. The primary text says: "The Newsie. Join 300+ creators for a weekly Saturday email packed with free resources to gain more subscribers. Subscribe for free and level up your newsletter!"

The Newsie homepage

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.

The first 100 subscribers

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.

Screenshot of a bio page on the social media X. Mainly text but also head shot of a young man and illustration of an astronaut. The primary text says: "Daniel. Helping business, creators, & coaches scaling their business with email copywriting. Practicing copywriting via my tweets."

My bio on X

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.

A screenshot from a web page. In the top left a blue square with the letters "in" inside. Otherwise mostly text on white background. The primary text says: "Do you run a newsletter? Remember to do this if you run a newsletter ... continue below ... First stop. Bookmars of the week. Mike breaks down how to brand your newsletter. How to sell your products without being sleazy with your newsletter. Jamie shares the difference between a newsletter expert and a minimalist newsletter expert. Kately Bourgoin share how she gets people to read her newsletter."

Example of my LinkedIn newsletter

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).

A graphs showing active subscribers over a period of time. Also show a few metrics; Active Subscribers, Open Rate, and Click Rate

My newsletter stats for the last 4 weeks

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.

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