How to Grow Your Newsletter: Collaboration, Collaboration, Collaboration

Lesson 8 of 11: Launch & Grow a Newsletter to Boost Your Writing Career

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Welcome back, writers!

Oh my gosh, we’ve made so much progress already this month. We’ve done the Who, What, Where, When, and Why of our newsletters, and now we’re in the nitty-gritty of How — namely, how to grow your newsletter. 

For starters, good content is essential for growth. It’s hard to polish a turd, as they say, and I would say, it’s even harder to promote a turd. However, great content — the kind readers choose to share of their own volition — becomes a valuable marketing tool of its own. 

In podcasting, many marketing experts recommend spending the same amount of time promoting each episode as you do making it, and I think that 1:1 rule is relevant with newsletters, as well. 

If you consider this advice and decide you don’t have as much time for promotion as you do for writing your newsletter, perhaps instead of skimping on marketing, you should reduce your cadence and publish more infrequently. If you are writing your newsletter for more intrinsic benefits like improving your writing practice, you can disregard the 1:1 rule. But either way, I recommend implementing the following growth strategies.

Community and collaboration

After good content, the name of the game for growing your newsletter is community and collaboration. The majority of successful newsletter creators are part of some kind of community. Whether you create your own community or join somebody else's community, you need to be a part of a community that can help drive your growth. (WOD101 is actually an excellent place to find that newsletter community — I encourage you to follow everyone you discover through this course.)

I think 90 percent of writers should be hosting on Substack and that’s because they have so many growth-focused features that make community and collaboration easy. (More about that in Lesson 5: Where to Host Your Newsletter, if you missed it.) 

Much of the advice in today’s lesson is geared specifically toward Substack writers. However, it can be adapted and implemented for non-Substack hosting with tools like SparkLoop. If you’re not a Substacker, the next lesson will include more growth strategies for newsletter writers who don’t host on Substack.

Swap recommendations with other writers

Substack’s recommendations feature is fantastic. Two thousand (!!!) of my Podcast Bestie subscribers have come from recommendations, which translates to about half of my audience.

You can explicitly coordinate recommendation swaps with writer pals — in which case, you would reach out and agree to recommend each other — but you also just start recommending other writers in your niche to get the ball rolling. According to Substack, writers who make a recommendation are three times as likely to be recommended in return.