[00:00:00] Matt Ragland: Everything you need to know about starting writing and growing an email newsletter is in this video, Tim and I, and the HeyCreator team have worked with dozens of creators with hundreds of thousands, even into the millions of newsletter subscribers. These are popular newsletters that you have definitely heard of read and subscribe to.
And today we’re going step by step. This is the ultimate guide to launching your email newsletter. Tim, it’s crazy to me how many people are still sleeping on newsletters.
[00:00:26] Tim Forkin: I mean, I was sleeping on newsletters before I started working with you. I didn’t know anything about newsletters. I checked my email just to get coupons for things, or I might’ve been subscribed to a newsletter and even know it.
And I think we’re at a point now, I agree, like we’re at a point now where creators need to start understanding that owning a newsletter, writing a newsletter, sending consistently is the main thing. We’ve already done an episode on like the common misconceptions and what creators are getting wrong about newsletters, but now it’s time to talk about like, you need to be doing one.
Here’s how you do
[00:00:58] Matt Ragland: it. Yeah, let’s talk about how to get it right. And I’ve been working on newsletters for a decade now. My very first newsletter was on MailChimp, and then AWeber, and then a little tool called ConvertKit was started in 2015. And I’ve been a ConvertKit fanboy. Employee and now evangelist ambassador, I guess, is the official term.
There you go. Uh, ever since then. Yeah, no, that’s, and that is, that is true. I’m on the expert page and the ambassador page. So really went, really went two for two there. So what we’re going to talk about today are like, All these different ways that you can set up your newsletter for success. And I’m talking about like from the beginning, from even before you like actually have a newsletter, how can you set up your social profiles, your website, other types of public posts, like your, your. Your YouTube channel, your podcast show notes. How do you set all this up to have a successful, engaging, profitable newsletter?
[00:02:00] Tim Forkin: Yeah, we’ll call it like step by step guide to launching your newsletter and. And what’s the first step? Let’s go right into it.
[00:02:07] Matt Ragland: What’s the first step? The very first step is that I want you to sign up for ConvertKit.
I mean, there are other tools out there that will not be named. They’re like Voldemort. I will not name them, but we are ConvertKit evangelists. So go sign up for ConvertKit, set up your account. It doesn’t. Take long. It doesn’t take much. And then the first thing that I would do actually is set up a landing page.
So you’re going to go to the ConvertKit. You’re going to go to your ConvertKit account, click on grow and then click on landing pages, new landing page. Go in there. There are a few that I highly recommend, but just pick the one that looks the best to you. Add in your name, add in, like what is the promise that people will get when they read your newsletter?
And you, you can set a custom link if you want. Like, I don’t wanna get too in the weeds on this, but basically you’re gonna sign up for ConvertKit and you’re going to create a landing page that you can link to on all of your social profiles. Embed on your website if you want, or you know, you can completely host it on ConvertKit as well.
So that’s, that’s step number one.
[00:03:12] Tim Forkin: Yeah, I think I was a Canyon guy. I think that was the landing page, the ConvertKit landing page that I use. And yeah, it’s a hundred percent right. Simple. Sure. I want to like bring up something that I learned about tweet size landing page. Like, can you only just write what people need to know?
Nothing else. Right. My name is Tim. I create content about. Uh, content. I create content.
[00:03:38] Matt Ragland: Well, short form video. Uh, that was, that was one before. We’ll put links to our main pages, like us personally, in the show notes. But my, my favorite landing page in ConvertKit right now is Pierce. I really like Pierce, big fan.
I’ve also used Stark and Park. Um, those are two different things. Abby is great. And so is Hudson. Those are probably like, you’ll go into convert kit. And I think they have like 30 landing pages now. To me, there are like half a dozen, six to eight that are really good for like these, like simple tweet size newsletters, avoid the temptation of like picking a template that has a lot of text on it.
Cause then you’re going to feel tempted to fill in all that text. And you’d be like, well, I don’t know what to say here. Pick one that has a very small amount of content. Fill that out with your name, your promise to your reader, and then, like, set it to publish and start collecting emails.
[00:04:39] Tim Forkin: Yeah, for the longest time I used the ConvertKit one.
I actually like have the link on my own site right now. And another option that you can just have is like a small, like home base for all of your internet stuff. Right. So still make the newsletter capture form. Like the main thing, my website right now is like, my name is Tim. I work here. I do this here are links to give me money.
But above all of that, the most important thing is sign up to my newsletter. Right. I want to emphasize that one more time. Just like the newsletter is the main thing that you point people to. Even if you just have, like for me, I have Tim Forkin. com, but that is a front to get people on the newsletter.
It’s the main thing that I want them to do when they show up.
[00:05:17] Matt Ragland: Yeah. And that kind of goes to the second part of this, which is you have to optimize your social media profiles, your website, other places where you post content publicly. All of those, like the main point for the love of God. Please stop using Linktree pages.
I cannot stand them because I don’t care if people are going from my Twitter to my YouTube, to my Instagram, to my LinkedIn. I mean, it’s nice if they follow me in all those places, but do you know where else you can tell people where you’re at socially is in the welcome email after they’ve already signed up.
And you know, the other thing is that. Maybe it’s just because I’m old. I’m a geriatric millennial, 40 years old, but I can’t recall like a time when I went on someone’s link tree page is like, Oh, thank goodness. I can just click here and go follow them on Instagram. What I’m normally doing is like, if I’m on, whenever I’m on Instagram again, I be like, Oh, well I’m going to go follow Tim there now too, but I want to get that.
Email subscriber. What is, what is the framework that you use? Just, it’s not always be closing the ABCs from, you know, from that Alec Baldwin movie,
[00:06:33] Tim Forkin: what is it instead? When I recently made a video on my YouTube channel about, uh, why having a newsletter is like the first best step as a creator or like at least collecting emails, the framework I used was the ABCDEF framework, which is kind of long and very cringy once you let me say it, which is, I’m, I’m, I’m Always be collecting dem emails, fool.
Always be collecting dem emails, fool. Yup. And if you think of it that way, if you just think like, I think I had a tweet about this, like your first year of creating content should be sign up to my newsletter, post something cool anywhere, get people on your newsletter. Um, and we’ve already, we’ve already made a video about how important it is to grow that list and what that can do for your business.
And as we go into the practical steps of like, You know, you should be collecting email subscribers. Here’s how you do it. And how you do it is having that link everywhere underneath your best performing tweets and your YouTube bio, um, and or YouTube descriptions, and just have it everywhere consistently.
Like put it under the cool thing that you’re doing.
[00:07:35] Matt Ragland: I’m gonna bring up two authors that do this really well and have hundreds of thousands. Millions of email subscribers that drive their book sales. But yeah, I say this in the context of an author, but like Sahil Bloom is another one who is getting close to a million email subscribers if he’s not already there, maybe he’s at like 700, 000.
Uh, Ryan Holiday is another one that has over a million subscribers across all of his different like email newsletters that he operates. It’s not just for authors. This is something that will drive sales and drive attention or get sponsorships. Anything else that you want to do as a creator with a business can be helped by an email newsletter.
But the two authors that I wanted to bring up were James Clear and Susan Cain. And if you go follow them on, uh, if you go follow them on Twitter, if you go follow them on, uh, LinkedIn or Instagram, that is the link that That is their link in bio. It’s not going to their, as the last time I checked, it’s not going to their homepage.
It’s not going to like buy my books. It’s not going to book me for speaking. It goes to their email landing page. And the other part of optimizing this is when you send them to your email landing page, we already kind of referenced this. Make that page all about the email subscriber. Okay. Don’t also have like, it’s again, don’t make this like a big link page.
Make it here’s the email form sign up for that You can tell them about all the other things that you do in the welcome email That’s where you send send them to like hey, I also post on Instagram. Hey, I’m also like write more professional things on LinkedIn I suppose All of that can happen in the welcome email.
Don’t risk losing them to some other algorithm. Like, I even know, like, when I click on, like, TikTok links sometimes, I may not even get to their actual, like, video or profile. Like, there could be, like, other things that pop up right away. I’m like, oh, that looks more interesting. And then I’m, I’m gone. Don’t lose me.
Don’t lose subscribers with outbound links.
[00:09:40] Tim Forkin: I know TikTok does this. I, I just happened to me on YouTube yesterday where it’s like, I clicked a link and it was like, are you sure you want to click this link? And that’s just a step like that. There are increased barriers to getting that subscriber now, right?
That, that one page, if you click the wrong button and maybe you forget to go back, if it wasn’t that big of a deal for you, like you could lose that subscriber. Right? So if you are able to get people onto the page, which. If you have posted enough places and you’ve created enough valuable content, then you should be getting people who are interested in subscribing.
When you do that, you, you can’t lose them exactly. I’ll echo what you said.
[00:10:14] Matt Ragland: So the next thing that I want to talk about is how to engage those subscribers once they’ve signed up to your email list. Now there’s kind of like a, like in between step for this and it’s, how are you going to incentivize subscribe people to sign up and become subscribers?
Cause the other thing that I don’t want you to do is write like. Sign up to my weekly newsletter on like topic one, topic two, topic three. That might be interesting enough, especially if you’re already an interesting person in these other channels, like that famous person.
[00:10:46] Tim Forkin: Let’s be clear. Like you have to have a big following.
[00:10:49] Matt Ragland: Yeah. If you have a big following and we wanted to like help you create a newsletter landing page and you’re like, I’m trying to, who can you think of right now? Like if you’re Alex Hormozy, And you like put a landing page up and you’re like, subscribe for my weekly thoughts on sales and marketing. That’s super basic.
I wouldn’t like that as like someone who would be advising him as if I could advise Alex Hormozi on how to get email subscribers. But people would sign up for that because he’s Alex Hormozi. If I went on there and I said like, Hey, subscribe, maybe I’m not a good example. I’ve got, I’ve got some clout. Let me do mine.
Let me do mine. Like
[00:11:28] Tim Forkin: mine. The best one that I could put together. It’d be like, sign up to my newsletter where I show you how to easily create content that you love to make that gets you results for your business. Right? Like that’s specific.
[00:11:39] Matt Ragland: Yeah. And that’s a very clear, specific promise that you can make to people’s.
They’re like, okay, I know. This is, would solve a problem for me because you do. And we’ve talked about this a lot on the pod. Like you want to be able to plant your flag. You have to be able to say, this is what I do. This is how I can help you. And putting that statement, putting that promise on your landing page is how you will start to convince people.
But there’s another element of this. If there’s anything, and maybe Tim, you have this, if there’s anything that you can also give away as it’s called a lead magnet, and that could be a PDF, that’s a template, that’s a checklist. It could be any number of things. Like I have one right now. I actually have two right now.
One is a like course launch checklist, you know, just make sure you’re doing all these things before you launch your course, and the other one is. Is a course vision quiz. So it’s like you fill all this out and it’ll tell you in narrative form, this is who my ideal customer is. This is the reason that I can help them.
This is the promise that I have for this course. This is why I’m uniquely qualified to teach it. And this is the financial benefit that this course can have for me and my business. So those are two things that I offer. Well, there’s a third one also, but like, do you have any lead magnets that you, that you offer?
I don’t, but like,
[00:12:56] Tim Forkin: I had a reminder today to like, to make one, just because like, uh, there I’m a video editor, like I produce everything that we’re watching or doing right now. And there’s a tool I just discovered that I’m going to gatekeep for now. I’ll talk about maybe in a later episode, but as significantly made my editing process faster, right.
And I could like. Maybe either work out something with this company to get a discount code, or my main idea is like, Hey, here’s how you use this tool that will make your editing much faster. I think I’m gonna start planning my flag more on easy content production. Like you’re a beginner. These are the things that you can do to easily be everywhere with your content.
And I found a tool that does that. Right. And so here’s a, I’ll offer like a five minute tutorial. That I can use as a lead magnet. It was like, don’t even worry about video editing. This thing can help. Yep.
[00:13:48] Matt Ragland: Another idea that I had is I’m glad, like another thing that you brought up as a video tutorial, that’s also something that you can give away five to 10 minutes, but another thing that I know you do that I think would be really valuable to people who are looking for easy content solutions.
Are like the templates and the workflows that you set up in, uh, Adobe premiere. And what’s the, what’s the sound? Do you use Adobe for sound editing? Also, what’s the name of it? Audition audition. So like, I know that you have workflows and templates set up in premier and audition, and you say like, Hey, let me show you how to create your own templated system to save you a lot of time when you’re creating videos or you’re editing podcasts.
[00:14:28] Tim Forkin: Yeah. And let’s like zoom out for a second. I’m like. You, we’ve said this before, like you, as the, as a creator have, can you do these things about content creation, which is what we’re talking about now with my stuff, but like fashion or real estate, those are the two examples I always use. Like you can be doing anything and like the stuff that’s easy to you, isn’t easy to everyone else.
Can you package up a very simple version of something that you can teach someone, make that be strong enough, get people on your email list by receiving it.
[00:14:57] Matt Ragland: Yeah, I love that example. And it’s really clear what the promise is. And like, I could see you saying, Hey, you know, cut your editing time in half with this workflow, but let’s zoom out a little bit more.
Let’s like, take it, take it, take the focus off of our stuff, even though like they’re good examples. And. Let me know if you have any examples, you brought up fashion, you brought up real estate. What are some examples that creators in those niches could have for some type of incentive?
[00:15:24] Tim Forkin: Yeah. And as I say, these like, think about it for your niche as well.
Like, obviously not everyone listens is going to be in content creation or fashion or real estate. So start thinking about like the ways you can do this for your stuff. Right. So if I was a fashion creator, which I wish I was, I wish I had awesome fashion. I think I’m actually like decently well dressed.
You’re a pretty fashionable guy. There we go. I appreciate it. If I was a fashion creator, I would create something around, like, best outfits for fall colors. Or, like, how to wear neutral tones. Or sizing guide. Or like, silhouette guide. Or just different things with fashion that Someone might be having a problem with
[00:16:01] Matt Ragland: a specific example that I can think of from fashion is Cassandra Satie, who is the founder of Next Level Wardrobe so you can go to nextlevelwardrobe.com and at the bottom, she has a newsletter call out and the incentive is a complimentary guide. So you can think about guides or tutorials, but she has three professional pieces for a timeless closet. And so it’s those three things that you can get. They’re always going to be in fashion. They’re always going to work.
They’re very flexible for any type of like social situation. So that’s a really specific fashion oriented lead magnet that Cassandra offers.
[00:16:40] Tim Forkin: And if I was a real estate creator, it’d be something along the lines of 10 strategies to win in a multiple offer situation or scouting out. The best investment properties, just a guide to something in real estate that is unique to your expertise.
And it’s also something that people are looking for that you can help them with, and you can make it once and just automatically attach it to that welcome email and people forever. We’ll get that as you, as you go up and for real estate, maybe you need to change a little bit. The market is different.
Same thing with fashion. Maybe things go in and out of style, but I like that example you gave of like, these are timeless fashion looks because I’m, you can sign up whenever, and these are still going to be in style unless aliens come out and change our whole wardrobe. Don’t see that happening.
[00:17:24] Matt Ragland: Okay.
There’s another type of incentive that you can offer. So what we’ve talked about are more like digital single transaction type of offers. Okay. PDFs, templates, workflows, single video tutorials, guides, all of those are valuable and useful and you should think about ways that you can offer them. But the other one is the free email course.
So I actually have one right now which is like It’s the seven day creator blueprint. And so it’s seven emails sent over seven days. And it teaches you different elements of like the creator stack, the creator blueprint. And these are things that I’ve learned over my career, things that I’ve worked on myself and for clients.
But it’s a seven day free email series. I think five days is probably the minimum. 10, 10 can work, uh, you could even go all the way up to 30. One of, actually one of my biggest lead magnets is a 30 day, uh, journaling prompt series. Now those are all pretty short emails, but both of those have done really well for me.
The free email course has been a big driver of subscribers for me over the past five or six years.
[00:18:30] Tim Forkin: I love free email courses that are very specific to a thing that I need, right? I signed up for, or I already was a subscriber for Cole Schafer’s newsletter. And he did one about like writing advice, like timeless writing advice.
And not only did he, he already had my subscription, but he could have gotten my subscription. I was like, this is so good. I have a friend who’s becoming a writer. Let me send him this link. So he, I. Gave Cole another subscriber because like it was so shareable. Like I need someone else in my life to also see how good these lessons are and how helpful they are.
So think about that as well. Like the shareability, the shareability of your incentive, like not only are you going to keep on the list just because it’s good in itself, but you’re getting someone on the list because it’s so helpful that they just can’t help, but share it.
[00:19:23] Matt Ragland: Yeah. And another thing to point out with this, and we’ll talk a little bit more about monetization and revenue, uh, in, in a little bit, but you can also offer paid versions of these email courses.
Now, usually you do need to have a little bit more or like a sizable enough following on social or YouTube to like. Have someone give you money before, like, if you’re pretty new to all this, pretty new in the newsletter game, I wouldn’t do like a paid email course just yet. There are going to be other episodes where we talk about the value letter and different types of offers that you can give, but you can do a paid email course.
In fact, one that I took and liked was Sam Parr’s CopyThat, and you know, you talking about, uh, Cole’s Cole’s course and, or, Cole’s newsletter and what a great, uh, copywriter he is. Uh, Sam has this, it starts as a free email course, and then it upsells you into the paid email course, which is like copywriting as a practice.
And I think he actually calls it, uh, copy, copywork where you’re actually rewriting, like just literally copying. Effective writing from other people, it kind of get, get you in a rhythm. You start to understand good writing because you are actually doing the writing, but that’s another example. Like you can offer a paid version of an email course as well.
So we’re mostly just talking about, we’re only talking about like the free incentive right now, but. Whether it’s a like single transaction, digital offer, like a video, a template, a PDF, a checklist, or a five to seven to 10, uh, email course, then that’s, those are both like really effective ways to incentivize people to sign up for your newsletter.
[00:21:00] Tim Forkin: So we’ve talked about everything up until the point in which someone is subscribed and into your newsletter, right? They’ve, they’ve done everything, they’ve given you an email, they’ve gone through your incentive, they’re in, right? So now, we gotta talk about the different types of newsletters that we’re gonna send, and, I’ll break the fourth wall.
Matt and I came up with this 30 seconds before we hit the red button. We have a framework. At
[00:21:22] Matt Ragland: least three minutes. At least three minutes. I’ll
[00:21:25] Tim Forkin: give it 90 seconds. So we, we came up with this before we hit the button and the framework is the three L’s. Three L’s. To make your newsletter a W. To
[00:21:34] Matt Ragland: get that W.
Yeah. E to W. A little, a little too niche, but if you get it, good for you.
[00:21:41] Tim Forkin: All right. So three L’s. What’s the first one?
[00:21:43] Matt Ragland: The first one is links. This is often easiest place to start a newsletter is by having a link dump, a curated set of links, recommendations often should be related to your niche because this goes back to like People aren’t going to care random links that you find on the internet unless they already care about you.
If you already have a platform, if you’re already kind of famous, even internet famous. But, like, Shaan Puri, MyFirstMillion, also, like, very famous on, famous in the Twitterverse, and sold, sold a couple of companies. He has, like, his, like, 3, 4, 5 links. He has five tweets that he likes, but people care about that because he’s Shaan.
If I started sharing five links, people would be like, what, why are you doing this? So like that’s, that is something that you can do, the link dump, but it has to be contextual. My friend, uh, Hans Lorei does a really good job with this. He doesn’t always send link emails, but when he does, they’re related to design, to real estate.
These are things that Hans talks about. Every single week in his newsletter. So when he has a link dump related to design Interiors and real estate people pay attention and they love them.
[00:23:05] Tim Forkin: Yeah, you’re playing curator. You’re playing quarterback. You’re playing point guard. You’re you’re Organizing everything in a way that gets someone to an outcome without you necessarily creating the content that gets them to the outcome, right?
Right, we can think of countless examples of these These types of newsletters that have gotten really big. But like you said, Matt, they’re often by successful authors, successful creators, successful people in their niche, right? I’m just imagining, let’s go back to the fashion example for a second. I’m imagining like the biggest well dressed.
Model on on instagram, right who has a newsletter and is like posting links to outfits of other famous people that she loved this week You know, yeah,
[00:23:44] Matt Ragland: or like a fashion designer like, uh, Todd snyder if todd snyder like had had a link dump for like things that he thought were really interesting and compelling Whatever they were People would find that interesting, but I guarantee you that people would actually find it more interesting as like, Hey, here are other designers that I like, here’s something new that I didn’t expect to see.
It kind of surprised me. I think people would still like that more, but like, yeah, that’s a specific design, that’s a specific, uh, example from the fashion designer space.
[00:24:14] Tim Forkin: Yep. You can, you can think about it with music. I’m thinking about with business content, I’m thinking about it with sports. Um, there’s, there’s examples of these newsletters that already exist everywhere.
Right. Right. And the common through line with all those, not only are these like already is kind of successful creators. If you’re not a big, famous creator and you really want to do that, this curation style, you really got to have like dialed in very great taste. Right. And taste is very hard to develop in your taste is unique.
And it’s, it’s a lot of like. Like extra exterior work to get people into this curated newsletter feed. So, so that’s the first one.
[00:24:51] Matt Ragland: Yeah. And this kind of goes into the second one also, because each of these, you don’t have to make your entire newsletter about like this particular type. These are types of emails that you can send.
Now you can make the entire, like five bullet Friday from Tim Ferriss is a good example of like, it’s literally five bullet Friday. Each of those bullets is a link. But again, Tim was already bestselling author, Tim, Tim was already like host of the Tim Ferriss show podcast, you know, number one on iTunes, uh, Tim Ferriss when he started five bullet Friday.
But what you can do is use a little bit of that strategy. And this is actually the, I have like a combination of these first two L’s, uh, where I have the letter, the letter is the second one. And that’s more personal. It can also be like related to your niche, to your topic. But it’s like, here’s what I’m seeing.
You could also think of as like very observational. Here’s what I’m seeing. Here’s what I’m learning. Here’s what is interesting to me. But it is more in a letter format than saying like, Hey, here are five, five bullet points, five links that I can share with you. So I’m putting my perspective into it. And the way that I combine those things in my, like.
What’s the personal weekend wrap newsletter? Is that I have the letter aspect? And then the last two or three, the last little section of is like, Hey, here are two or three things that I found, uh, compelling and wanted to link you to as well. So I’m building that taste maker. While like the majority of the email is focused on more like a personal letter observation, uh, learnings that I’ve had.
[00:26:30] Tim Forkin: Yeah. I think the letter is the most common way to have like a strong newsletter. Um, I, there’s so many that I, that I subscribe to. I’m thinking of Ethan Strauss right now. His newsletter is just so good and so relevant to me. Like it’s sports, business, media, things that I really care for outside of this whole creator world.
And we’ll even connect it in a little bit, but it’s to the point where like, I not necessarily like a line, but I just want to get Ethan’s take so badly. Like I will drop everything to read it and it’s his perspective. It’s what, here’s what happened to Ethan. Here’s stories he tells from writing and about the NBA players.
Here’s his thoughts on current events in the sports and media and business world. Like he has a take, right? So a letter, the second L letter can be like, take, story, Experience and you always kind of want to wrap it up with like a takeaway. So take and take away. Um, there’s really no point in a letter at that point.
You’re just doing like pen mail at here’s what happened
[00:27:32] Matt Ragland: to me. We’ve used the phrase promise a couple of times already. First, when talking about like with your landing page, what’s the promise that people are going to get in your newsletter? Another way to think about this is in the letter, the actual news letter that that you write.
What is the promise of what people are going to learn? And you could all say like, there’s the letter and then like, what’s the lesson? What is that takeaway that you said? Making sure that that’s really clear. So it’s not just saying like, you don’t want it to be like personal journal kind of stuff.
That’s what I meant. It’s like, what are. What are you, and you’ve actually helped me with this. I’ve made a couple of YouTube videos recently that are like, hey, this feels more like a letter to yourself or like a personal journal more so than like a specific actionable takeaway. So still keep those things in mind.
I wouldn’t like allow that to let you get stuck. Like if you have to fire off a couple of these just to like keep the ball rolling and keep momentum going, then that’s totally fine. But really be thinking about as I’m writing my letter, my newsletter letter. What is the lesson? What is the takeaway that people will have when they read it?
[00:28:37] Tim Forkin: Yeah, you either want to start with that, like, start with the end in mind. Start with, like, I want to write something that helps people with this. And here’s a story I can tell or an experience I’ve had or, or my take on the current events surrounding this, right? So that’s the letter part of it. And you, you mentioned the third L of type of newsletter and that’s lesson, right?
So we’re talking how to’s, ultimate guides, manifestos. You come into this knowing This is like a step by step thing, almost like a traditional like blog post or how we think about YouTube videos now where it’s like either this showed up in my inbox or I clicked on this and by the end of it, all of my energy will have been focused on solving this problem.
Right? So the lesson is really just, um, I have a problem. I want to solve it. And if you can create these lesson oriented newsletters, like I just did one about. Getting more from your content. Here’s how you write something once and beat everywhere with it. Here’s step by step exactly how to do it. That is a how to guide manifesto to content repurposing.
Right. So I can keep going on this, but tell me what you think about lessons.
[00:29:40] Matt Ragland: Yeah, I agree. I mean, this is a lesson oriented podcast, so like these principles apply to other types of content besides just newsletters, but we’re focusing on newsletters today. Most of the newsletters that I wrote. The first three years that I was growing my, my newsletter were all very lesson oriented.
So it was like how to make, make use of the time that you have, how to time block your calendar, how to organize and track your goals, how to like use a task manager, how to like, how to, how to, how to, how to like, these are all like, let me show you the lessons that you can apply. To your own life, to your own workflow, to your own creator business.
So lessons are very, are very popular. Also the other way that you can kind of think about this, and we do this with clients at Automatic Evergreen, which is our newsletter ghostwriting agency. We will talk to someone and like. Because I want to like be conscious of our clients, anonymity, like just using myself as an example, I’d be like, okay, Matt, well, the lessons that you teach people in your PR in your past productivity content, that is still very newsletter worthy.
Is like on week one, we’re going to show lessons about how to plan. And on week two of each month, we’re going to talk about time management. Week three is all about like note taking and personal knowledge management. And week four is about like personal, personal habits, monthly review. There are a couple of things that we can rotate through there, but they’re all very lesson oriented.
I’m not writing any letters in there. Like I’m actually like completely out of it. The team writes the newsletters based on content I have. It’s lesson oriented, and we’ll talk about this next. Most, if not all, uh, lead to some kind of offer, which we’ll talk about next, but that’s where you start thinking about like, okay, am I basically doing how to guides?
Those are very effective and can also be very good revenue drivers as well.
[00:31:33] Tim Forkin: Yeah. One more point on that. These how to lesson guide pillar pieces of content are evergreen. So if you make a YouTube video or a newsletter about it, you can always, unless the content goes out of date or goes out of style, if we’re using that fashion example, one more time, if it isn’t true anymore, you can.
Then that’s not evergreen, but these are often the most evergreen things you can do. So that’s, that’s the first point. And the second point is like, you want to build a library of these things. It’s by far the easiest content ideas you’ll ever come up with. If I’m thinking about basketball right now, I I’m going to make this as broad as possible so everyone can understand it.
I could do how to shoot a basketball, how to pass a basketball, where to stand on the floor, how to pick your favorite team, how to find the right shoes, every, every small or big. Basketball thing I could possibly think of is a newsletter that we’re talking about here. Like you can do a newsletter, how to do anything in your niche.
They will always play. They will always hit, they’ll always be read by the people who are in that exact spot who need that exact thing at this exact moment. Honestly, this is why we are making this video right now is, is we know that people understand that newsletters are a thing here’s exactly how to go do it.
[00:32:46] Matt Ragland: Yeah, exactly. And the other thing is like. Even if it goes out of style a little bit, you can always re record, you can always re write, and especially in the context of a newsletter, this is something that you could turn into another automated series. Like, I wrote so many newsletters about productivity that were how to guides, that were newsletters at first, that then I, like, remixed them and put them back together into, like, I have.
Five different five email courses on productivity and they all drive to different offers that I have related to that topic. So I have a time management course, I have a goal setting course, I have a note taking course and they’re all pitched at the end of these how to emails that I literally go in and look at them.
Two, maybe three times a year, just to make sure that something isn’t different. And if it is different, especially in a newsletter, like if you were recording YouTube video, you kind of have to redo the whole thing. But for a newsletter, it might just be like a couple of lines that you have to change or an image that you might need to update that can be done in less than an hour, if not less than 30 minutes.
And then it’s good to go for months at a time.
[00:33:56] Tim Forkin: Yep. To recap the three types. Links, letters, and lessons. We’re trademarking that. The three L’s to make your newsletter a W.
[00:34:05] Matt Ragland: A W. There we go. Final stage of how to set up and launch and then eventually monetize a newsletter. And that is the offers that you have.
I want you to think about this really early on as a creator. It doesn’t mean that you have to sell anything right away. It doesn’t mean that you have to be in a rush, but one of the mistakes that I made as a creator was waiting too long to pitch or validate a product to offer just to see like, Hey, did this hit or did it not hit?
Is this something that probably at a pretty low cost, I can just say like, Hey, are people willing to give me money for this type of idea? Having an offer that you can share in your newsletter, whether it’s a live workshop, whether it’s a paid email course. Whether it is like, I just paid 12 for an ebook from, from Jason Levin.
Shout out to Jason. Is it memes make millions. I just paid 12 bucks for that. I saw it in his newsletter. I like Jason’s writing and, uh, the, the memes that he shares. And like, I wonder how he does this. I’m going to get the book. So there are, you need to be thinking about the offers that you can make related to your niche.
And often the way that I think about this, and we’ll talk about it in a, in a. future episode that we’re currently planning is what, and Tim, I’ll ask, I’ll ask you this. I already gave Jason’s example, but think about what you offered in the free email course or the lead magnet. How can you expand upon that to create like your first version of a paid product of an offer that people can give you money for?
[00:35:42] Tim Forkin: Yeah, for my example, uh, it’d be just a straight up full video editing course, which I already have. So, uh, that’s, that’s a good reminder to like, put that in there. Um, and I want to highlight something you said as well. You said, I saw music millions, like promoted in Jason’s newsletter. I subscribed to Jason too.
He didn’t promote music millions. It just like was in the footer or like he offhand mentioned, like I wrote a book. So, right. Pointing to offers doesn’t have to be carving out a week. I mean, it should be for big launches, but it doesn’t have to be carving out a week for everything to be focused on this one launch.
I think Justin Welsh does this incredibly well, and I’ve do it in my own newsletter as well. The super signature. Yeah. The super signature. P. S. When you’re ready. Here’s a few ways I can help for me. It’s all right. Creator stuff. You can book a call with me. If you want, you can email me about special projects.
Those are the things like they’ll always be in there now. And it has changed over time, but it’s just a reminder. And you’ll know, you’ll notice that when your audience gets to the point in which they’re ready. They have no problem buying from you in the newsletter because you’ve, you’ve given them value.
You’ve used those three L’s to make a newsletter at W and they love you. Trust you want to buy from you. And like, it becomes very clear. You can help them passively with that super signature. I have a great word or like, Matt, do you want to go a bit more on like the actual like launch, like, Using your newsletter after a long enough time to actually do like a full launch.
[00:37:13] Matt Ragland: This is a whole other episode that we’re going to record, but like simply put, you can start to develop a wait list for like the bigger launch that you want to do. Let’s say for a course or like a group coaching program, like start setting people up and some of this is getting in the weeds a little bit with ConvertKit specifically because of things that you can do with automations and tagging.
But you basically give people either through a landing page or what’s called ConvertKit, a link trigger, an opportunity to raise their hand digitally and be like, Hey, I’m interested in this thing that you’re doing. And you do that for like two or three weeks, at least, uh, it could be up to two to three months or more of giving people the opportunity to be like, I’m interested in this thing.
And then sending them like a couple, uh, like a couple of excite emails is what we call them and be like, Hey, I’m going to do this group coaching thing. Or like the course is coming out. Or like our friend, Jay Clouse just released, uh, his like. Creator, his creator HQ template. Telling people like this is what’s coming.
This is how it’s going to help you. This is the problems that it solves. And then like, you have a launch event, you have a kickoff event. It could be a lie. It could be a live call that you’re like teaching people stuff and getting them all excited. And then you start to send, like, I would, we usually do it.
Five, start on Wednesday and then five or six emails all the way through until the following Monday and then we close the sale on Monday. Now that might sound like a lot of emails and if you’re brand new and you’ve just started your newsletter, it probably is. Not because you’re sending too many emails about the sale.
That’s important to know it’s only too many emails because you haven’t sent a whole lot of emails specifically yet about what you’re selling or just to people in general, like your newsletter hasn’t built up enough trust yet. That said. You can still do like the super signature, the PS strategy. Like you can still do that.
I’m talking about like great big mega launch that you’re telling everybody about and sending multiple emails just about the sale. That’s a whole other thing that we’ll tackle, but it’s made so much more effective by having a consistent newsletter that people can connect with. People can engage with, and people start to build trust and build your brand through a newsletter.
[00:39:29] Tim Forkin: Yeah. I’ll say definitively like You really aren’t at the point to do a big launch like that, unless you’re six months in at least, or you have probably good, you have an audience size. That’s big enough, maybe five, 10, 000 subscribers. Like if you’re able to get that in the first six months, then you, you have the validation that you can go launch something like this, but most people don’t, most creators don’t.
And I’d say like six months, you’ve been, if you’ve been emailing every week, that’s probably enough time.
[00:39:53] Matt Ragland: Yeah. And I would even say, and again, we’ll talk about this more in a future episode. The best way to monetize early on. Is either through really small, cheap, uh, products that still have like a very clear deliverable and outcomes to say something less than a hundred dollars, maybe even less than 50 that anybody could buy at any time, or we’re going like extremely high up market, like direct coaching consulting, because I’m telling you, like, It’s easier to make 5, 000, or 10, 000, let’s use the five example.
It’s easier to make 5, 000 finding one person that will pay you 5,000 for coaching, consulting, or service work, than it is to find 100 people that will pay you 50. Especially if like, think about it. If you only have a hundred email subscribers and there’s nothing wrong with that. I’ve had a hundred email subscribers.
Everybody starts at the bottom out of those hundred. You are not going to find 50 that are going to buy anything from you, even if it’s like a dollar. Uh, but you, there’s a chance that you’re going to be able to find one person out of that hundred that will pay you up to 5, 000. If you’re showing your expertise, if you’re showing up, if you’re giving them like helpful.
Helpful content through the newsletter every week. That’s very possible. And then you start to like sell that 50 product and bring those two together in the middle.
[00:41:13] Tim Forkin: All right. So let’s recap it all. Step one, optimize social, always collect emails, right?
[00:41:18] Matt Ragland: Yep.
[00:41:18] Tim Forkin: Foo.
[00:41:19] Matt Ragland: Number two, make sure that you have, this is kind of like one a and one B actually like make sure you have the newsletter landing page set up so that you can optimize your social and public posts for new subscribers
[00:41:30] Tim Forkin: after that.
Landing page, website, everything all dialed in there, a clear form and page to get people to give you their email address and exchange. Tweet sized, tweet sized, clear promise. Small landing page. And then an incentive, hopefully a lead magnet or some sort of thing that when they sign up for your newsletter, they get this.
Very clear. Very helpful. Free email course is another option. Now we’re into the actual newsletter, right? There’s different types of newsletters you can send. We’ve mentioned the three L’s links, letters, and lessons, different ways that you can communicate your value to your audience.
[00:42:02] Matt Ragland: Yeah. And the final part is the offer.
So this could be a PS offer at the bottom of the email where the PS is saying like, Hey, when you’re ready. Here’s how I can help you. It could also be building to a larger launch, or maybe it’s a specific like type of validation of a product. You could also start including sponsors. Like that could be part of your offer strategy as well.
But all of these things are made possible through a newsletter. You will build. Stronger relationships with your readers. You will convert more of them to customers. And you can do all of this through the power of an email newsletter. So don’t sleep on newsletters.
[00:42:38] Tim Forkin: I don’t know about you, Matt, but in my biased opinion, we’ve explained this very well.
But if you still have any questions about this, Please comment, send us an email. Uh, we would love to help with anything in regards to like what we talked about in this episode.
[00:42:51] Matt Ragland: Yeah. We’ve said it several times and not to humble brag, but this is something we’re very good at, at HeyCreator and at Good People Digital, which is where we do all of our service work.
And so if you hear this and you think like, Hey, I’m not a writer, I’m not like. The type of person who is going to set up a newsletter. There are a lot of moving parts. Cause that’s the other thing about this. Like we gave you a very like complete step by step overview of this, but there are so many like little moving pieces in any kind of email tool, like setting up the incentive, doing all the design for it.
This is something that we are really good at. And we work with dozens of clients with at any given time. So if you’re interested in working with the HeyCreator, Good People, Digital team. Please reach out to us. There’s going to be a link to book a call in the description in the show notes. So make sure that you check that out and we hope to
hear from you soon.
