Transcription
My newsletter just passed 31,000 subscribers. But when I started back in 2023, I had no clue about what I was doing. I wrote whenever I felt inspired, changed topic every few weeks, and treated my newsletter a bit like a side project.
2 years later, it became one of my most powerful assets, not just for content, but for my business overall. It generates leads and revenue. So, in this video, I will share the nine rules I wish I knew when I started back in 2023. They are the foundations that make a newsletter worth reading, sharing, and staying subscribed to.
Rule number one, positioning is everything. When I first launched, I made the same mistake as everyone. I thought writing about marketing was enough. The truth is that it's not specific enough. There are thousands of newsletters about marketing. What matters is positioning. Your newsletter needs a clear identity like a product. Who is it for? What transformation does it help people achieve? What can they expect every week? For example, mine became about content-first businesses. So basically, how founders can turn content into revenue. Once I defined that, people instantly knew whether it was for them or not. So positioning creates clarity. Clarity then builds trust, and trust builds subscribers who stay.
Rule number two, you need to make your newsletters scannable. People don't read newsletters the same way they read books. They scan first. They decide in two seconds, like on social media, if they will stay or click away. So your job is to make your newsletter scannable. Use titles, subtitles, subheaders, bullet points, bold sentences, visuals, and quotes. Structure it like a great blog post, not like a wall of text that you can find in a book. One of my favorite tactics is the pattern interrupt. Every few lines, I drop something visual like an infographic, a quote, or a bold question. It resets the reader's attention, and so what happened is that they stay engaged across the entire newsletter. Here is an example. When I redesigned my newsletter to make it more visual with infographics, I got more subscribers, more readers, and more views. Design will help you with retention.
Before I move on to rule three, I need to tell you something. One of the key growth factors on my Substack is how I publish Substack Notes that generate subscribers. For example, this Substack Note generated 279 subscribers for free, thanks to the Substack Note system. So, if you want to grow your Substack with Substack Notes, check out this free guide that I've made, which is my complete Substack Notes guide.
All right, rule three, find your unique selling point. You need to ask yourself, what makes my newsletter impossible to copy? For me, as I said just before, it was infographics. I wanted to make sure that I create dense visuals, almost like mini frameworks, so people are looking forward every week to discover what are those visual frameworks. I also post them on LinkedIn, and people save them. So this creates a growth loop for my newsletter that became my signature style. For you, it might be storytelling, some specific research, humor, interviews. It can be anything that sets you apart. Your USP is not about being the smartest. It's about being different enough so people look forward to receive your newsletter, and so they remember you.
Rule number four, you need to offer a welcome gift. The fastest way I grew was not sending more and more newsletters. It was using a welcome gift to attract my audience into my newsletter. So what happened is that I used it on LinkedIn and on other platforms to promote my newsletter. So when you join my newsletter, you also get my welcome gift. For example, I created this content strategy guide that generated a lot of subscribers. So, you should not think of a boring lead magnet like a list of books or something like this. It's something you give right after people subscribe, but it needs to be something that will really have an impact on their day-to-day. So, what you should do is identify a problem they have and find a quick way to fix this problem. And so use this as a guide or as a video or something else, and use it as a welcome gift, and then you send it when people subscribe to your newsletter. People love it because it makes the newsletter sound specific, and it's quick to consume, and it's results-oriented. And the moment they sign up, they immediately get something from you in their inbox. So that's a good way to have a fast reward for them.
Rule number five, you need to tell your story. You might think people subscribe only for information, but they also stay for who is behind the scenes, for the connection you are building with them. Every few editions, I like to share a story, something that is not too personal, that is also linked to my professional experience, but that is behind the scenes. For example, I once wrote about the week I almost quit my business and how that failure led me to rebuild my system of offers. It became one of my best-performing newsletters because what happened is that stories create a context and an emotional resonance. So you introduce the information with this emotional context. The stories will also humanize your brand and remind people that your lessons come from real experience. It's not something that you've learned on the internet. So if you can blend story plus insight, your newsletter becomes unforgettable.
Rule number six, you need to build a business model around your newsletter. This one took me the longest to learn. Most creators treat their newsletter like a hobby or a side business. But if you want consistency, if you want to build a real business asset, you need to see your newsletter as a business model on its own. Here is how I break it down. First, there are the costs: the time invested, the tools, the design, the editing, or the help that I get on the writing. Then there is the revenue: the sponsorships, the digital products, the consulting, and the courses that come from all the clicks on the CTAs that I put in my newsletter. So then, what you do is that you track both the cost and the revenue. When you do this, you can make better decisions, like, should I spend $300 a month on design if it has an impact on the revenue by $1,000, for example? Also, if I invest $10,000 to add 10,000 more subscribers, how much can I sell the sponsorship? Or how many more additional clicks will I get on my offers? You see, when you build it as a business with its own business model, everything makes sense financially, and you know where to put your resources and where to invest your efforts. And that's how I turned my newsletter from a kind of hobby side hustle into a real profit center for my business. Of course, you don't have to monetize immediately. You can build it step by step, but when it's the right time, it's worth thinking about the business model of your newsletter.
Rule number seven, and it's specifically true for Substack, it's the titles and thumbnails that need to create and trigger curiosity. So, there is positioning. As I said, it helps people to know you, understand what you are doing. There are also the visuals that retain their attention, and so they read more of the newsletter. But there is something that comes before. It's the curiosity that makes people click on the newsletter because if they don't even click on your newsletter, whether it's in their email inbox or on the Substack app, you will never get a real position. So that's why I like to say that titles and thumbnails are underrated on Substack. It's not just copywriting. It's about creating a concept for each newsletter, a bit like how you do it on YouTube, and turn this concept into a thumbnail and title. And within this packaging, you need to have what we call a curiosity gap. You need to show that you know something that your audience doesn't know. For example, instead of "How I Got 10,000 Subscribers," I would write, "I Wrote 57 Emails Before Hitting 10,000 Subscribers. Here Is What Happened." It's the same topic, but no, there is tension thanks to the story with a problem. So, it sounds a bit long to write 57 emails and an end situation, which are the 10,000 subscribers. You need to think like a YouTuber. Each edition needs a hook concept that makes people stop scrolling in the inbox or on Substack and then make them click. Also, you can try to spark emotions with your thumbnail, such as surprise, curiosity, or familiarity. Or you can also start from negative emotions like fear of loss, loss aversion, or FOMO, for example. But don't do that too much. And of course, you should not create clickbait. When you promise something on your thumbnail and title, you need to deliver it within the newsletter.
Number eight, you need to repurpose everything. This rule alone saved me hours every week. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. You just have to repurpose smartly. My system looks like this. Every week, I turn my best social posts into a newsletter. Then I break that same newsletter down into three, five LinkedIn posts. And when the newsletter performs really well, I turn it into a YouTube script and a few carousels as well. That's repurposing. Repurposing will multiply your reach, but also it will make you save time because you are not reinventing the wheel. You are reusing the same main idea that has been proven to work, and you are using more formats to distribute it. So repurposing multiplies your reach. It also keeps your ideas alive, makes them longer, and also it builds consistency with the repetition. The truth is that most people stop their newsletter because they don't have enough ideas every week. But the truth is that they should put repurposing at the core of their content creation system.
The last rule, it's not what you might think, is that you should sell with your newsletter. I talked about the newsletter as a business model. I talked about the costs, but I didn't insist enough on the revenue side. The truth is that if you don't have a return on investment thanks to your newsletter, you will stop it. So, it's not about generating revenue the first 3 months or the first 6 months, but after 6 months, you need to have a strategy to monetize your newsletter. So, here is how I do it. I use my newsletter to sell my services and offers. Every few editions, I insert a banner or a CTA for one of my offers. Something like, "Want to build your own content system? Join my community, the Content First Ecosystem," with a banner. The goal is not to pressure my audience to buy right now. It's to remind the readers that there is a next step they can take if they want to go deeper and if they want to apply what I'm teaching them. And sometimes, of course, I dedicate an entire edition to a launch. I present a new course. I present a new bootcamp, etc. Of course, I try to not do it in a spammy way. The way I do it, especially on Substack, will be to share the story why I created it, the context behind it, and so on. I also insist on who it is for and what problem it solves. The truth is that in newsletters, selling through storytelling converts far better than pure promotion because your readers already trust you from reading your newsletter. You've been helping them with your newsletter. It's just time to tell them what this product is about, not force them to buy.
All right. Of course, your newsletter should respect those rules, but the most important is the discipline to send the newsletter every week on the same day at the same time for the next 6 months, and always come up with a better newsletter than the previous week. Don't forget, you can download for free my Substack Notes complete guide that shows how I get subscribers from my Substack Notes that just take me a few minutes to write. Click in the link below and make sure to download the guide.