How to Launch Your Newsletter

Lesson 7 of 11: Launch & Grow a Newsletter to Boost Your Writing Career

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Hello writers,

How exciting — we’re getting ready to launch our newsletters!

In this lesson, I’m going to give you four big marketing ideas and then a checklist to help you prepare for your launch. Keep in mind: a launch is not the time for modesty and moderation but to talk about your newsletter at every opportunity. You want to create a moment that starts the momentum for your newsletter, drawing people’s attention and attracting new subscribers. 

If you already have a newsletter and never did a proper launch when you started, you can implement these ideas and “hard launch” at any time. Perhaps you time it up with an anniversary if your newsletter is older than a year. Honestly, though, this can be done at any time. 

Okay, now for our four big launch tactics:

These first two strategies come from Codie Sanchez’s interview on Nick Loper’s Side Hustle Nation podcast. Today, Sanchez has a wildly successful newsletter called Contrarian Thinking, but these are the main two things that led to her first 200-1,000 subscribers. 

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Invite your email contacts

Sanchez is aware that most people find this idea scary. Most people would rather promote their newsletters on social media so it doesn’t feel so personal. However, she recommends contacting everyone you know first. That’s exactly what she did — Sanchez did a mail merge and emailed everyone she’d communicated with in the past. 

In this email, Sanchez said she pitched the idea that her pain point is that nobody teaches people how to make money the right way. Thus, her goal in starting this newsletter was to find people who would share this information, which she would write about in the newsletter. Sanchez estimates this email had had an opt-in rate of about 30-40 percent.