Newsletter Growth Masterplan using AI

I’ve covered bits and pieces from this topic before but want to pull everything together in one place for you.

We’ll cover:

• Part 1: The newsletter is not the business.

• Part 2: Organic awareness.

• Part 3: Hyper-growth.

• Part 4: Get paid to advertise.

• Part 5: Turning the revenue taps on.

We’ll start today with some basics on how we deploy a newsletter as part of our business.

But first!

Let’s get started:

The newsletter is not the business

Huh what?

Aren’t we talking about newsletter businesses today?

No!

I’ve done that before. In fact it’s one of my most popular playbooks. Here’s a link if you want to grab a copy : start a newsletter business with AI.

When your newsletter is your business you rely on a few income sources:

• sponsorship

• advertising

• premium subscriptions

These are all great but rely on you having a pretty serious sized newsletter for it to really work.

We’re talking 100,000+ high quality subscribers to really reap the benefits of this model. At this sort of volume things like sponsorship and advertising really start to scale.

For most of us a newsletter will instead be part of our wider business.

We’ll have a newsletter with 1,000 or 10,000 subscribers and use that to drive our actual business.

This business could be selling products, providing services, raising investment or any other business model.

This means the newsletter is a component of the business.

Not the entire business.

It’s a subtle but extremely important distinction.

First, the newsletter!

To successfully grow a newsletter you first need a good newsletter!

Otherwise all these strategies are for nowt - people won’t read your newsletter, they won’t recommend it to others and they won’t (ultimately) buy from you.

For this reason I don’t recommend writing your newsletter with AI.

Shocker right?

Truth is there are already too many low quality newsletters written with AI out there. Adding to that pool is a losing strategy.

Instead focus on something only you can create. You can absolutely use AI to aid your writing process- just don’t use it to produce wholesale. Use AI as your legs, not your brain.

Go for daily

My recommendation is a daily newsletter. Start with this in mind and work backwards.

What daily publication could you send out that would be valuable to your audience and future customers?

This is why news round-up newsletters work very well - there’s always something new to talk about!

In the world of AI for example the Neuron and Rundown put out daily updates. This is valuable because the world of AI moves so quickly!

Why daily? Because it vastly increases the throughput of of our newsletter.

Let’s say we have 50,000 subscribers and a 43% open rate (as I do…I’ll use my figures for simplicity).

50,000 subs at 43% open means 21,500 impressions per issue.

That’s 21,500 chances to:

• make a sale

• show advertisements / sponsorships

• offer premium upgrade

If we put out this newsletter once a week that gives us 52 × 21500 impressions for a total of 1.2m impressions.

But if we publish 5 times a week (Monday through Friday) we’re looking at 6 million impressions.

Taking very very rough figures of $20 per thousand impressions (about standard for newsletter advertising) we’re looking at $24,000 for weekly or $120,000 for daily (5 times a week).

Big difference.

And that’s just the advertising, not including your own sales and premium upgrades.

Publishing daily acts as a force multiplier - in one fell swoop we just increased revenues by 500%.

Too much work!

But daily issues are too much work I hear you say.

Sure, it’s more work than weekly. That’s a given. But the rewards are well worth it.

Your job is work out what can be produced on a daily basis and work backwards from there.

The newsletter itself does not need to be long. Check out Josh Spector’s fantastic For The Interested as an example. There’s a lot of work behind the curation - but the issues themselves are light.

Let’s use a prompt to help us brainstorm what daily value we can drop in our audience’s inbox:

Act as a newsletter consultant

I wish to create a daily newsletter for my audience

My niche is [AI for entrepreneurs]

My audience's main problem is [starting their own business]

Research the top daily newsletters in this niche, summarise their value

And use this to generate 10 ideas for a daily newsletter I could produce

Replace the [ ] parts with your niche and audience’s problem.

Here’s an example output:

Some are obvious - like “news digest”. Others are less so - case studies or AI for productivity. Your list will obviously be different depending on your niche.

Remember the main goal here is to find something that i) is valuable on a daily basis to your readers and ii) can be produced on a daily basis by you / your team.

Starting with this strict remit in mind will focus your efforts.

Premium Prompt - Personal Recommendations

Pulling it together

We’ve covered the basics of what sort of newsletter will work best for this growth method and business model.

Next up we’ll start talking about how to kickstart the growth of our newsletter.

Here’s a reminder of what we’re covering this week:

• Part 1: The newsletter is not the business.

• Part 2: Organic awareness.

• Part 3: Hyper-growth.

• Part 4: Get paid to advertise.

• Part 5: Turning the revenue taps on.

Keep prompting,

Kyle

I recommend posting on X and LinkedIn at least - obviously depending on your niche and where your audience hang out.

What you post on your socials will depend a lot on your brand and personality. However I want to give you a base level of foundational posts that you can regularly publish about your newsletter.

These work well for me to drive newsletter subscriptions.

Research posts

As you compile your newsletter post material that you are researching about.

In the last Part I showed you how to build a curation pipeline. You’ll be looking at potentially hundreds of posts from your niche each day.

If one or two of the best resources make it into your newsletter you’ll likely still have 5-10 items of interest. No need to waste them! Publish them with some commentary to social.

WiP Posts

Work in progress posts are a good way to tease the next issue. It could be as simple as photographing you screen with the newsletter preview on it and saying “tomorrow’s issue ready, make sure you are subscribed to get it tomorrow”.

You can also do a video recording of the screen, scrolling through the newsletter. Looks like this:

The aim here is to tease the content so people will sub to get full access.

Breakout threads

I like to convert all of my newsletters into an X thread.

Here’s an example that’s currently live:

It takes one newsletter issue and chunks into pieces for a thread. Click through to see the full thread as it’s hard to preview here.

With the call to action being to come to the full issue in the newsletter archive. Once on that page there is a pop up to get them to subscribe. More subscribers.

This type of post works well if you have a longer form newsletter as there’s more “meat” to repurpose into a thread.

Here’s a prompt to start the repurposing process:

Act as social media marketer

Convert this newsletter into a Twitter Thread

start with a powerful hook post to secure interest. Mention that it is a thread so that people know to click through. 

Break the content of the newsletter into individual short tweets. 

Do not use emojis or hashtags. 

If I plug in the last Part of this guide I generate:

Not bad a basic outline - use that to write up the thread in no time at all.

Don’t want to use X? No problem - just convert this into a longer form thread.

You can also do these are long form posts for any social network. Just drop in “ "make this a post for [platform name] to convert:

As always manually write and edit to your requirements. AI is for legwork, not brainwork.

Short video

Nice simple addition is to do the same content as a short video rather than text.

I covered this in detail in these previous guides.

All three of the posts types above can also be videos:

• research post → green screen talking about a resource

• work in progress post → screenshot newsletter and overlay yourself talking about what’s in the issue

• breakout thread → screen record the newsletter itself and talk through. For longer newsletters this could be a longer Youtube not a short form.

Here’s an example of the latter:

Basically anything that can be a text post can also be a video - converting the content automatically gives you double the amount of post.

Premium Prompt - Google Traffic

Pulling it together

We in play the newsletter and organic content components of our newsletter now.

This is sufficient for most people. Doing this alone will allow your newsletter to slowly grow from this solid foundation.

In the next Parts we’re going to look at how to accelerate growth using more advanced techniques.

Here’s a reminder of what we’re covering this week:

• Part 1: The newsletter is not the business.

• Part 2: Organic awareness.

• Part 3: Hyper-growth.

• Part 4: Get paid to advertise.

• Part 5: Turning the revenue taps on.

Keep prompting,

Kyle

Whilst also:

• building a social following

• consistently going “viral”

• generating revenue

This is one of the most successful marketing pillars I use for my newsletter. This Part will give you the skinny.

Let’s get started:

Hyper-Growth

Once you have your basic newsletter up and running and a solid base of organic activity I recommend you overlay DM Giveaways.

DM Giveaways are the “free” strategy I use to add around 500-1000 newsletter subscribers per week.

It’s my primary pillar, alongside Advertising which I’ll cover in the next Part.

I’ve written a lot more extensively about this marketing tactic in these previous issues.

Today I want to give a quick run-down of how this should be an essential pillar in your newsletter growth. Check those full guides for deployment details.

How’s it work?

From a subscribers POV here’s the process.

First they see a post like this:

They respond to it. In this case with the word “weekend”.

They get sent a DM like this:

That DM in turns sends them to a Gumroad page like this:

By claiming their free ($0) download they are added to the newsletter. Nice!

Why does this work?

This works because DM Giveaways have natural virality on platforms like X, Instagram and Facebook.

We’re giving something away for free but need them to comment to get the message.

Because of this commenting the post is seen as popular. And it’s shown to more people.

My giveaways normally hit 20-30,000 views or if they really kick off 50-100k views.

From that a % will follow, like the post and comment.

That gains me followers (on X) and spreads the post even more.

The people who do this are sent a DM with a link to claim their freebie.

A % will click that link and claim the freebie. In doing so they also get signed up for my newsletter (with consent as this is specified on the download page).

And finally they are offered a paid “upgrade” version. A % of people will also take this offer - normally a trickle of cash at $50-100 per day.

So we get newsletter subscribers, X followers and revenue. Solid work!

What do I need to deploy this?

The first thing you need is something valuable to give away.

I personally have 25+ “lead magnets” - items of value that people want to access.

You need to come up with your own lead magnets. It’ll depend entirely on what your niche is and what your audience finds valuable.

Second you need a DM Giveaway system. I personally use Hypefury. This will automate the DM giveaway so you aren’t sending messages manually!

Third you need somewhere to host and giveaway your lead magnet. I use Gumroad. It’s free and does the job.

Fourth you need to connect your Gumroad account to your newsletter software. I use Zapier for this personally.

Next steps

Go and grab the full guide here: DM Giveaway guide.

And if you are struggling to work out what your lead magnet should be - come ask in the free community here: free community space.

Premium Prompt - Need a Boost?

Pulling it together

In the next Part we’ll cover another super powerful method: running direct subscriber ads and immediately making all your investment back.

Here’s a reminder of what we’re covering this week:

• Part 1: The newsletter is not the business.

• Part 2: Organic awareness.

• Part 3: Hyper-growth.

• Part 4: Get paid to advertise.

• Part 5: Turning the revenue taps on.

Keep prompting,

Kyle

Using paid advertising.

Getting paid back immediately plus a little profit.

Which basically allows me to scale my newsletter for free.

Let’s get started:

Get Paid To Advertise

I talked about this strategy in an X thread a few weeks ago. Here it is if you missed it:

Imagine you could generate limitless subscriber traffic.

And get paid back for each new subscriber you get. Hella powerful.

The basic set up is this:

• beehiiv Boosts

• low cost Facebook advertising.

What are beehiiv Boosts?

beehiiv Boosts is a super powerful feature if you run your newsletter using beehiiv.

Basically every time someone signs up for my newsletter they get a "hey I think you’d also be interested in these newsletters” widget.

If they also subscribe to the suggested newsletters I get paid.

Per newsletter they sign up to around $1.5-2.0.

And 5 are shown - meaning a potential ~$10.

This is shown to all the people joining my list.

I get a couple hundred sign ups per day - so those ~200 subs means a revenue potential of $2000/day.

Do they all sign up? No. Do all the signups get verified? No.

But it doesn’t matter - the revenue from these sign ups is sufficient to cover or exceed the second component: my low cost Facebook Advertising.

Note: don’t use beehiiv? You can do this with Sparkloop Upscribe instead.

Facebook advertising for newsletters

Next to the DM Giveaway strategy I covered in the last Part paid advertising is my largest growth channel.

I pay around £0.45 for a subscriber from the US, UK or Europe.

They have an average 43% open rate. And are a purchasing audience.

I tested 6+ platforms and hundreds of campaign types and found this works the best. These bullet points right here are worth thousands if you apply it:

• Meta (FB/IG ads) beats out other channels

• Campaign type = Subscribe (set up custom conversions in beehiiv)

• Straight to beehiiv custom subscribe page

• Creative = pattern breaks like Apple Notes, mock up SMS conversations. Super simple images, no video.

• Call to action = subscribe. No lead magnets.

Your exact paid ad strategy will depend on your niche but this has worked wonders for me and others I’ve showed it to. Those who implemented it!

The exact ads are less important than the wider set up.

The whole goal here is to put in $1 in advertising and get out $1 in boost revenue. Do that and you’ve unlocked limitless growth for the newsletter.

Then any revenue you generate off the back of the newsletter is pure profit - your acquisition costs have been liquidated already by boosts. That’s the play.

Next steps

Get on beehiiv if you aren’t already.

It’s free up until 2500 subscribers and they’ve (this week) introduced guaranteed ad placements on paid plans. Very cool. This is my referral link. Or Google beehiiv and it’ll pop up.

You can likely do this without beehiiv - just use Sparkloop Upscribe instead. But I don’t have experience of this so can’t promise it works!

I can give full ads advice and strategy to paid members of my community only (time limitations sorry!) but feel free to drop in your ad creative for suggestions over in the free community space. Comment on this Part’s post for ease please.

Premium Prompt - Tracking

Pulling it together

Using the previous Parts we have the foundation for a zero-cost, growing newsletter.

Just these strategies will launch your growth into the stratosphere for zero cost.

In the next Part we’ll look at how we now monetise the whole newsletter. Why? So that we can reinvest and accelerate growth even further.

Here’s a reminder of what we’re covering this week:

• Part 1: The newsletter is not the business.

• Part 2: Organic awareness.

• Part 3: Hyper-growth.

• Part 4: Get paid to advertise.

• Part 5: Turning the revenue taps on.

Keep prompting,

Kyle

Cash gives you options.

It lets you focus more of your time into growing your newsletter.

It also opens up more options for acquiring subscribers by increasing your spend.

Most of all though it moves you out of scarcity and into abundance. Once there is cash coming in you can reinvest it into the newsletter, your team and your systems.

In this Part we’ll look at some monetisation routes that will help cashflow which (promise me this!) you’ll feed back into growing the newsletter more.

Let’s get started:

Turning the Revenue Taps On

I’m assuming you are using beehiiv because I don’t shut up about it.

Reading back through this it reads a little bit like an ad for beehiiv. Honestly it’s just one of my favourite tools and it keeps getting better and better.

They aren’t sponsoring this (you can if you want Tyler) but I do have an affiliate link if you do sign up. It’s here if want to use it: feed me honey.

But if you are not on beehiiv that’s all good. Most of these methods can be replicated - it’s just more complex and will require additional (paid) tools. I’ll flag up the additional tools as we go along.

I’ll cover monetisation techniques ranging from small to larger newsletters. The exact size depends on your niche. For example if your newsletter is small but in a highly specialised high value niche like luxury watches then you can get away with a smaller list. Use your judgement.

Level 1 - Boosts

First up make sure you turn beehiiv Boosts.

Here’s mine from yesterday:

That’s $65.15 just dripping into my account. Neither a particularly good or bad day - just the most recent I screen-shotted.

Why is this the first level? Because it’s so easy to turn on - it’s a couple of button presses and hey presto that’s a revenue stream in play.

I personally have the $99/month beehiiv Scale plan - but that cost is about 1.5 days of Boosts. No brainer.

Don’t have beehiiv? You can hook something similar up with Sparkloop Upscribe. It’s more setup but will do the same job.

Level 2 - Premium Subs

Next us is creating a Premium version of your newsletter.

This is the next step because it doesn’t really matter how many subs you have. If you are providing enough value and building real connections with your lists then there will always be people who will support you.

Let’s say you have 1000 on your list and 5% or 50 people go premium.

At $5 a month each that’s a nice $250 recurring a month coming to you.

Not going to retire on that sure but it stacks. Same 5% on a 10,000 list and you are looking at $2500 revenue.

The best part is that this revenue (unlike the next levels) is entirely based on your content. Not on the size of your list.

Level 3 - Ads

I would have had this as a later level but recent news has put it here. Literally happened this week so I’ve had to rewrite as we go!

Basically beehiiv now guarantees ad placements for anyone on a paid plan. Details here. Previously it was up to the advertisers to chose your newsletter.

Now you get 1 guaranteed a month regardless. That one ad a month could recoup your beehiiv payment (if Boosts hasn’t already lol).

Ads on beehiiv are done on pay per click basis. You get paid for clicks, not the size of your list.

Generally the clicks are $1-2.

Because of this you generally need a larger list for it to ad up.

At 10,000 subscribers, 50% open rate and 1% click rate we’d get 50 clicks for $50-100. As you get larger (or have a higher click rate) that payment obviously goes up.

But because of this maths generally it’s not worth running pay per click advertising until you have a decent subscriber base. Always run the numbers to gauge whether it’s worthwhile.

Don’t have beehiiv? Try Paved for similar ad insertion technology. They do require higher subscriber count and don’t have any guaranteed placements.

Level 4 - Sponsorship

Sponsorship is similar and has blurred lines with advertising. When talking sponsorship I’ll be mainly talking about deals you cut with companies to feature them in your newsletter. This is a little different to the algorithmic ad networks like beehiiv Ads and Paved but it’s a little grey!

For sponsorships I recommend starting on Passionfroot.

Here is my Passionfroot for reference : Prompt Entrepreneur and a screenshot:

Passionfroot lets you set up a tidy profile page for sponsorship opportunities. It acts as a shopfront where you can take payment and fill your calendar. It’s a slick tool.

One of the best things if you are just getting started is that you can send out 5 requests a week to sponsors in their network. I got my first 2 placements (for $1000) from this. Very valuable for starting out.

Sponsorship for newsletters varies depending on niche. Generally though you are looking at CPMs of around $20.

CPM is “Cost per Thousand”. To calculate it you need to work out how many people will see the sponsorship.

Let’s say you have a newsletter of 20,000 with a 50% open rate. That gives you 10,000 impressions per issue.

The Cost per Thousand is $20 and 10 thousand people will see the issue.

$20 × 10 = $200 for the ad placement using this CPM method.

This is (by the way!) why you should do daily newsletters - the maths stacks up for you much better if you are sending more often (and maintaining quality).

$200 per issue over 30 issues (a month) = $6000/month.

Double that subscriber base to 20,000 and we go to $12,000/month. Triple to 30,000 for $18,000/month. And so on.

Reinvest

These 4 methods can all generate income for you personally.

Initially though I recommend reinvesting into growing your list more.

The reason for this is that by increasing your list size all of the above revenue methods will increase. It’s a compounding effect:

• Boosts will generate more cash.

• You’ll get more premium subscribers.

• You’ll get more ad clicks.

• And you’ll be able to secure larger sponsors.

It’s a flywheel effect where reinvestment grows all of these channels. Further increasing revenue.

So set a size target and keep reinvesting as you grow towards it!

Premium Prompt - Funneling

Pulling it together

Over this guide we’ve looked at the Playbook I’ve used to grow this newsletter from 0 to 50,000+ subscribers in 6 months.

Is it easy? Hell no!

But for those who do the work the rewards are great.

You have now the steps required to get this done. What’s worked for me best after trying so so so many growth strategies.

Here’s a reminder of what we’re covering this week:

• Part 1: The newsletter is not the business.

• Part 2: Organic awareness.

• Part 3: Hyper-growth.

• Part 4: Get paid to advertise.

• Part 5: Turning the revenue taps on.

Keep prompting,

Kyle