Local Newsletter Mastery: From Zero to Community Hero

1. Intro: Hello, and welcome to a local newsletter Mastery. My name is Flavio, and I am here to guide you through this business model of having a local based business where you can monetize with ad revenue, selling your own products or services and many other things in the community. So it's a great business model doesn't require a lot of upfront costs. Re no upfront cost if you do it right. And um I'm just excited about this business model. I've been very successful with it in a very short amount of time, and I just want to show you the same as well. So let's get going and talk a little bit about this business model here. So what are the basics of what a local newsletter looks like? Basically, it is something that you can send out either daily, a couple of times a week, perhaps once a week. Out to your subscribers of a local community. So perhaps you live in Orlando or Chicago or wherever, you would send out a newsletter about topics that have to do with the local area, so sports and weather and live music, other events, news, things like that. So however you want to craft that, you can also specialize and be just local music or whatever. Um, so the really good opportunity here, you know, who can benefit from this is basically anyone who, if you have products or services to sell. So, for instance, I have a insurance agency by day. I run an insurance agency, and for me, it works out because building a really big brand or business like this and subscriber base, that means that I can kind of double dip and post my services of my agency there to get the word out, right? So I have a built in audience that I'm building. And it's a lot easier to build an audience on a fun newsletter or a local newsletter with different things than it is if I tried to build a huge audience for people interested in insurance. You know, it's not going to happen. So you can sell your own services and things like that. You can also have other people sell their products and services, which would be ad revenue, and we'll cover that in this course. So basically, they pay you in order to be listed in your newsletter somehow or on your website or both and that's really what you can do with that. And my journey into this has been really great. I heard a podcast somewhere about it, and I just decided to run with it and just do a local newsletter for my community, and it's been a lot of fun so far and been able to get ad revenue from it and really scale really, really fast, you know, to the tune of over 1,000 followers on Facebook for the page. For the brand and only in about five or six weeks and still growing and the subscriber base also growing like wildfire as well. So it's a really great opportunity for ya. 2. Why Local newsletters?: Alright, now let's start talking about laying the foundation of the newsletter. Before we do, we have to understand some things, and that is number one, why a local newsletter to begin with, right? Why do they matter? There's some reasons, so let's talk about some of them. But basically, the spread of information and the decline of local newspapers. So there is way, way less people reading local newsletters than ever before, right? So, back in the day, everyone read local papers. It was the main way to get information out to folks before Internet and social media. These days, that is way down. So it's a good way to spread information because you're landing in people's inboxes. Most people would prefer to get their information on the Internet, whether it's on their computer or on their phone and things like that. You also have community connection, so you're serving as a really big pivotal piece, a heartbeat of a community sharing what you want through your lens, through your filter as you see your community, or just simply what you want to share. As an example for me in my newsletter, I don't share things like heavy crime or anything like that. Uh, shootings or trials going on or anything else negative. I think the news already does a great job of that, so I'd rather not. Plus, I think that's the bad part about the news, right? You turn on the news and that's all you see. I'd rather not have that. So in my case, and I make it clear in my communication that we just share good news. I want to share good positive business news of new openings, which we'll touch on in a bit or want to talk about, you know, other things happening in the community that people don't exactly always cover. But I want to be the one to cover that. Um, also gives people a sense of belonging. Once you have a good brand, if you create some merch for it, things like shirts and mugs and other products, you know, people are going to want to buy that and just kind of a sense of belonging around that brand or community, really. Um, also, you can help local businesses, right? So you can highlight different deals that any local businesses have going on, any opening. So that's good business news to share, right? If you're in your community, there's a new restaurant, a new chain, a new local place that's opening or something like that, you want to share something like that, for sure, get the word out. People are going to feel excited that they are getting that information rather quickly and through your channel and your newsletter. Um, want to highlight deals of local businesses. You know, if you see it on Facebook or wherever you decide to build your brand, we'll get into social media later on. But wherever you decide to build your brand, if you see it, share it, mention it, you know, get some excitement around it, that also will end up being really good way for local businesses to know who you are. And then perhaps if they like that exposure, they're going to want to come to you for different, um, you know, sponsorships, ads or things like that, which brings us to our next point. You can generate revenue for yourself, as well as others through sponsorships, ads, partnerships. So these are all ways that, you know, local newsletters can have an impact in your local community. So it's a really great business model that really helps locals as well as yourself at the same time. Let's go ahead and dive into our next topic. See you on the next one when we talk about, refining your niche. 3. Finding Your Niche: All right. Now we're going to talk about finding your niche with your local newsletter. So that might require a little bit of thought once you get going, but not too much. You just want to craft kind of what you want to cover and whatnot. So the first thing you want to do is you want to understand your community, right? So you want to look at local Facebook groups. What are they talking about? What are they sharing? What places do people like in your area? And a lot of this, if you've lived in that community for a long time, you'll probably already know, right? Um, which local personalities or celebrities do people follow and listen to? Perhaps, there might be local celebrities where you live. And if there aren't, then we're talking about people like local meteorologist or local on air DJ or, you know, news anchors and other prominent people like that that are on TV and radio in your area. Have a big following that you want to leverage, and they also put out a lot of content that you want to leverage. So we'll talk more about that later on when we get into Facebook, which is the example I'm going to use in building a brand with this. But you definitely want to leverage those. You want to know your tourist attractions, businesses, and things like that. So just to give a couple of examples, if you live in a city or town such as Orlando, for instance, which is big, but also has tons to offer, right? They have sports. They have Disney. They have a lot of local events all the time and things like that. There's a lot of endless things you can be writing about and putting out there. If you live in a smaller town, say, a suburb of Chicago or something, you can post about that town and what they have to offer. But then also sprinkle in some Chicago stuff since it's a nearby city. So hopefully that helps with kind of zeroing in on, you know, where and what you would talk about in your community. Um, so basically, after looking at Facebook groups and understanding your local area, what can you offer that you don't see a lot of out there, right? So if you basically, I'll give you an example. In my community, there is already a local newsletter, if you will, that specializes in just live music. That's all they do, right? So they do live music every week. They put out what the listings are, where they are, who's playing where all the local places. So they're already a big authority in that. So there's really not too much need for when I started my local newsletter to just be the live music place because they already have a stronghold on that. Instead, mine is curation where I have a whole different events and news and I do a little bit of live music and I actually utilize them and give them credit for those listings. That way, I don't have to reinvent the wheel. That's part of the research of knowing what's out there already that you can either leverage or that you don't want to replicate. Um, also, what's the common thread that the community enjoys or looks for, right? So for instance, if you're in Austin, Texas, from what I understand, I've never been there, but from what I understand, they're very big into local music, right? So that's kind of a vibe that perhaps you would want to get into and similar things. If you're in Vegas, they do a lot of events there. So perhaps you want to cover a lot of those things. So it really depends on where you are and what that common thread of that community is. So then you want to carve out your space. You're not trying to be like the local news. You want to be different. And again, topics like music, events, businesses, perhaps sports, maybe you want to be a sports only if you're in a big enough city that has a lot of sports like Chicago, New York, things like that, then perhaps you can be just sports newsletter, a little more niche like that. So it really depends where you live. It's going to depend heavily on what it is that you can or should talk about in your newsletter. All right, so that does it for this one. Let's go ahead and move on to the next area. 4. Setting Up Your Newsletter: Alright, next, we're going to talk about setting up your newsletter and some of those basics. So you already have your area mapped out. You know what topics you want to cover in your newsletter and kind of the way you want to take the niche and the brand of it. So now we got to talk about kind of setting it up. So really, all you need for this business model, which is pretty cool is you need an email sending tool for this business, an ability to take revenue payments. That's really it. You need to be able to collect email addresses, send out emails to those email addresses, and somehow to collect payments if you're going to have ads and sponsorships, which obviously I highly recommend so you can monetize your newsletter. But really, that's it, and that's two things you can even get free to begin with out there. So platforms that I like for you to begin your newsletter, beehive. Beehive is my favorite by far for this business model. It's set up for a newsletter business. You can invite other people to be editors or writers. You can create landing pages, even if you're not a designer and have full, you know, control of the colors of it and elements on it and things like that, and the analytics are great and whatnot. And the best part about it is that for the first 2,500, um, subscribers email subscribers is free. So there's no cost for the first 2,500. So that gives you the ability to try out this business model and see if you like it and Excel at it and for free. So until you get the 2,500, you don't have to pay a dime for that program. Another option is ConvertKit. If you want more automation sequence power and you want landing pages other than the landing page, of course, for your newsletter, then ConvertKit might be the answer, but honestly, it might be a little bit too much firepower for this type of business model. Convert Kit is aimed at creators and people who have a lot of digital marketing going on and they want to do sequences and challenges and things like that. For this business model, I really don't believe you need all that, but it's certainly a great option to use if you wanted to have some more automation options and things like that as well. Another option is Substack. So Substack is one of the leaders in the newsletter space out there. I know a lot of people knock it, but at the end of the day, it's a free platform to use, and they do have majority market share out there. Newsletters, if you want a free option, then that's a really, really great option for you Substack. I will say, if you're in a popular city, you know, like Las Vegas, New York, Chicago, Boston, any of the major cities out there, and that's what your newsletter is going to Substack might not be band because there is discoverability on that platform where people can find you and because it's a popular city, you might get some organic subscribers that way as well. So that might not be a bad one to look into. But on these options here, I personally would recommend Beehive because of the simplicity of it and it's already set up to be a newsletter platform. That's what it is, not an email service provider. It is a newsletter platform, and it gives you a lot of customization. And again, their free plan is up to 2,500 for free. So I definitely recommend it. The other parts to set up a logo name newsletter, come up with some sort of name. So if you're, you know, again, if you're in whatever city, maybe it's the Orlando buzz or something or, you know, whatever. Then come up with a logo for it and then a couple of colors for it, so you can kind of be uniform with your newsletter that you send out as well as your logo and landing page and everything like that. So take the time to build a great brand and put it out there. If you're not that good at design, it's okay to use something like fiber or upwork. Fiber is a great platform to get little things done like this, especially when you're starting out a new business model. It doesn't need to be perfect. You can always update the logo later on. Um, but you can go on Fiber and pay anywhere 10-25 bucks to get a decent logo done on there that you can use. So I would highly recommend that. If you're not a designer by trade and can't create a great logo, like me, I can't. The majority of times when I need a logo for a new business I set up, I typically will go to somewhere like Fiber, upwork or whatever and get a logo, and then I can always refine it and improve it later, but at least I have something that is really professional and great that I can take out there. Um, so that's basically it. So the only stuff you need to do. And again, this course is going to be set up to be kind of a step by step fashion, so you can do that now as well. And later on, we'll be covering some stuff of Beehive. And in the end of this course, I have links to all these different tools so that you can try them as well. So if you skip over there, you can link over to these different tools to try them out and whatnot. But like I said, beehive gets my recommendation, for sure. So that does it with setting up our newsletter. Let's go ahead and move on to the next one. 5. Landing Pages and Forms: Okay. Now that you've began potentially setting up your newsletter with Beehive or whatever else you chose, let's talk a little bit about how you should craft that landing page or subscription forms once you get going. So first off, you want to remember that the only purpose of your newsletters landing page is to get an email. That's it. So in other words, don't be trying to put too many goals on that landing page. So this is kind of Marketing one oh one, but basically, you want to have whatever the end result is be the only result that you want to get. So on that landing page, the main action that they should take on there should only be putting in their email. That's it. You don't want them to be able to click to other things. There should not be a menu at the top where they can click to other stuff or whatever. It should be just boom or bust. Either A, you got to go on there and put in your email or you're going to end up closing the whole tab or browser, basically. That should be the only purpose. You need a distraction free page with one goal, and that is the email like we talked about. For that to happen, you need good colors. The brand logo goes back to our previous lesson where we're talking about getting all set up and being able to use fib or other professionals if you're not good at design. So you need good colors, brand, all that to be cohesive. You also want some good headline why they should join. So if you're not great at writing headlines and copy and things like that, I urge you to use AI. As I record this right now, AI has obviously been a really big deal over the past 12 months and it's going to continue to grow. And trust me, you're not cheating when you use it to get ideas. You're just using to get ideas, you're not utilizing it fully. You're just trying to get some idea. Basically, you create a landing page and let's say your newsletter is the Orlando buzz, you would put in a cool prompt in like, hey, I've run a local newsletter called the Orlando buzz that goes over a lot of local events and other local news for folks in Orlando and I have a landing page and I need a few options for a good headline. That's it. Something like that, it's going to spit out a couple of good headlines for you as to why they should join. Then you want a good image on there, perhaps in addition to your logo. And you want to just ask for the email because it's a local newsletter, you're not marketing to them in a digital marketing kind of way. So you really just need their email. No need for the name, but you can ask for the first name if you want. First name and email on the form is the most I would do. I personally just do email. I want the least amount of friction for someone to be able to give me their email address. So I just ask for the email, not a name to try to get people to sign up. All right? That's it now. For landing pages and subscription forms, I'll see you on the next lesson. 6. Organic Signups: All right. Now that you have your newsletter set up, you have a good landing page. Just talk about getting some organic sign ups. We will talk about ads later on as well and also more and more ways, but at a basic level, just want to cover getting sign ups to your new landing page that you've got. So the first thing you want to do is you want to list that landing page on all your socials and everywhere else online that you can, right? So once you create a social profile for this brand listed everywhere. If you are going to make this newsletter public as far as your name attached to it, then that means also share it everywhere that you know and email signatures. You can even get business cards made out and give it to people, right? So there's really no limit to how you can get the word out there to everybody, organically, you know, without any ads. So you can definitely do that, you know, every social profile has the link that you can put there, so you want to do that. Uh, you want to update your metadata so that way, Google can even index you and get you some organic sign ups. This is why I love Beehive because it does have the ability to do your metadata. For every newsletter issue you send out, you can either A use theirs that they already, you know, fill in according to your post that you're doing or you can even customize it. So I do like that there's a lot of metadata that you can fill in so that it has a very good SEO organically out of the box. Um, Substack also has very good SEO, has a lot of customization for that as well for what you want your metadata to be. So both of those platforms offer that really good. And so what I want to do is we talked about setting up your newsletter, talked about coming up with a landing page and everything. So we're going to look at some landing pages in general, may or may not be local newsletters, but just, you know, any good landing pages as far as for newsletters that kind of drive sign ups. So we're going to look at some examples of that. But yeah, let's jump to that. 7. Landing Page Examples: Alright, as promised, let's look at a few landing pages, just to get the gist of what it might look like for you. And more importantly, some elements. So don't pay attention to what the landing pages are for. I want you to kind of see different, you know, colors and branding and what we talked about that Isha I only have one goal. So this first one is naptown Scoop. This one is a local newsletter, but this is going to be the only example that's local newsletter because I don't know quite how to find these and I don't know how popular they are. There are a lot of local websites like visit orlando.com and, you know, places like that that they're not really a newsletter. They might have a newsletter as a I guess side thing to it, but it's not really what it is. But for just a newsletter only, I just don't know of many out there, how to find those quite yet. But I am going to give you this example here. This is naptown Scoop. It's for Annapolis, Maryland. And if you notice, a couple of things cool logo and color that stays throughout the whole landing page. Local news with personality, kind of pretty cool because basically it's just telling you, Hey, we're not like the regular traditional stuffy news and all that. We're local news with personality. Then if you want to see what they mean by that on the next line, we tell you the news like a friend because we are your friend. Let us email you all the Annapolis news and events every weekday morning for free. So in this case, they do it every day, but you don't have to do it every day. You can do it every week. You can do it a couple of times a week, whatever works for you. And then if you notice there's some things flashing through the screen there of some um basically reviews, testimonials, and I can't scroll any lower or anything like that. If you notice this aligns to what I said that the only goal on this page is to sign up to enter the email right there. Otherwise, there is nothing else to do on here. If you're going to use beehive and some of those platforms, by default, there's a little link that says, read it first or whatever, and it allows them to look at the past issues. I turn that off because, again, I don't want people to poke around and all that and change their minds. I want only one goal and that is for them to enter their email. My page is similar to this and the fact that it's just an email, sign up and nothing else. So let's move on and look at another one. So this is not a local newsletter, but rather digital marketing side hustles and whatnot. This is by a friend of mine, minimalist Hustler, Jamie, and he does a great job with it. And this has also been shared a lot, his landing page. I want to go over a couple of things on here that he does very similar to the other one, but also a little bit different. Um, and that is still has a heading there, sign up to the daily newsletter and then a little bit of what to expect. But something that he does pretty cool on here is join 5,000 plus. So now adding some social credibility to say, Hey, 5,000 plus other people also entered their email to get this. So you probably should, too, right? So obviously, when you have five people, not that great to do it. But once you get into the hundreds and all that, start utilizing that to your advantage. You know, join 500 other local whatever, come up with a name for them that are enjoying this weekly newsletter of fun and local events or whatever, right? So 5,000 plus is there. And then also online hustlers. So he called out who they are, right? So for you, you might join 2000 plus, whatever, right? I don't know, whatever name you come up with for people in your town or something like that. And you go ahead and put in what's in it for them. This is simple to the point and it calls out who it's for and also calls out how many people are already on it. This is my landing page for my Info creator brand and as you can see, same thing, very simple. There's nothing else I can click on this. The only thing to do is to go ahead and sign up by putting my email in there. It's very clear what it is. Newsletters, courses, and books, convert your expertise into compelling books, courses, and newsletters. So Again, the whole goal is that if you notice the colors are pretty cool. It's cohesive, just two brand colors that kind of match each other. This headline matches with this blue, and then you have the yellow as a compliment to it as well. So that's a few ideas for some directions to go through your landing page, and again, we already covered that in the PowerPoint, but wanted to give you a screen share here of some examples that you can do. That's about all for this. Let's move on. 8. Starting a Facebook Page: Next, we are talking about starting a Facebook page. So for local based businesses, I still believe Facebook is the best solution out there, followed by Instagram. Instagram is obviously owned by Facebook, so that doesn't surprise me too much that those are the best local platforms. So you can get away with doing local stuff on other platforms as well. I'm not saying that you can't, but I still believe that Facebook has the most diverse user group out there, younger folks, older folks, middle aged, people that are into all kinds of different things, and their ads platform is still the most robust ads platform out there, perhaps next to Google. But as far as social media platforms, it's the most robust that has the most data out there. And very specific and everything. So obviously, when it comes to local, I believe Facebook is the best way. Their advertisements, their tools, and the fact that you have Facebook groups and all that. So I just think it's great. And if you're doing a local based newsletter, I think you need a wide array of audience because everyone is going to be into that in town, not just young people. Again, unless you niche down and do something that's specific to a certain demographic. So again, the ability to target is great. You can also join groups so that you can get a whole bunch of people, you know, to get visibility to your page. And we're going to cover Facebook and a lot of tools and tricks and things that you can do with it. But again, I believe Facebook is the best way to do it. So I'm going to do next is we're going to build an optimized page together. I'm going to walk you through. If that's basic for you and you know how to build a nice Facebook page, you can skip that section, but if not, if you want to build a really great optimized page and know how to do it, we're going to do that and then I'll also go into some ways to grow it both organically and with ads and everything like that to help you out on your local business Facebook page. So, let's go ahead and build a sample page together. 9. Setting Up Facebook Page: Alright, so we're going to go ahead and build a Facebook page together. So obviously, just log into your Facebook, your regular profile. You're going to click these dots up here and we're going to click page under the Create. And once we get here, you're going to do your page name. We're going to go with the example I've been saying. I've been drawn to Orlando for some reason, so we're just going to call this Orlando Buzz. Category required. So we're going to say can do like news and media or just media news company. Let's see. What do we see for media? I can do a news and media website, that'll be fine. Bio, fun, weekly newsletter. Okay, we can always update that later on. We're going to go ahead and create the page. Next, you're going to go ahead and put in your website. So if you've already gotten your domain for it, you can put it or your link if you sign up for any of the programs we said, you get a link to it. So we're just going to assume you do have that and we'll say Orlando buzz, um.bive.com. Okay. We'll say that's your domain. So now we're going to go ahead and you don't need phone number. You can put your email, right? So if it's like info at Orlando buzz.com, whatever it is, or Orlando buzz or Orlando buzz@gmail.com, whatever you create. But like always open. Going to go ahead and hit next. This is where you're going to add a profile picture. So once you get your logo made up, you would add profile picture. You can add a cover. You can always do that afterwards as well for these purposes. Since I don't have that add action button. This is where you can add a main button on the page so that people can do. So it's pretty cool. There's a whole bunch of them. Obviously, for this, I probably would do, like, a signup right here, signup. So basically, you would do signup is the one that I would do. Not let me get to the bottom for some reason, so I'm just going to tab down. There we go. And I would hit next. Then it's going to ask me, what are we signing up for? Basically, the website might be something like Orlando buzz.beehive.com and I think subscribe or something like that. That would be the action. As soon as somebody clicks on Signup on the page, it would go to that. We're going to go ahead and hit next. I'm not going to connect Whatsapp, I'll skip that. We're not going to invite friends. Page notifications. Sure, let's go ahead and do that. And then here we are. We're on the page. And so the main thing that you want to do is obviously you want to get that logo going and a cover photo. I will get one up there through this course so that we can have it on there. But like I said, basically, you want to create it yourself if you're a graphic designer, you can use Canva, you know, similar programs like that where there was already templates and things like that. Also, you can go to Fiber like we talked about before. Um, so that's it. So we got the main bones of this page. So now the main thing you want to do is to make sure that everything is filled in, right? You've got your website, your email, all that sort of stuff, and you're good to go. You've got all that. But that's it. It's super easy to set up. Obviously, there's a whole bunch more you can set up in the setting, so you can just kind of play around with it in terms of what you want or don't want on the page to be visible and things like that. And later on in the course, we're going to talk about ways that you can create some ads. I'm going to share some tips on growing this page. But as far as setting up your Facebook page, that's it. That's all you have to do. If you create an Instagram account as well, you can go to the professional dashboard, and then you can come down and hit Linked Accounts, and this is where you can link your Instagram page. So right here, you'd go ahead and hit Connect account and then Instagram would open up to, which one you want to go ahead and link up to it. So I'm not going to do that in this course, but you can definitely do that. Oh, the other thing you want to do is in the general settings, you do want to hit Edit over here and set a username. Otherwise, your page is going to have this long jumbled numbers and stuff like that as the username. So you would want to hit Edit. And you want to go and hit what the user name is. Basically, it's going to be afterfacebook.com backslashTT. That way, it's also easy to remember the site. So in this case, maybe we would do Orlando Buzz. I'm sure it's taken. Yeah, I thought so. So Orlando Buzz, um, letter or something like that for newsletter. You know, I don't know. So you would do something like that. But, you do want to do a username there as well. And that's about it for this one about setting up your Facebook page pretty easy unless you are not big into Facebook, then hopefully that helped you. So that's it for this lesson. Let's move on. 10. Growing Your Facebook Page from Zero: All right. So as promised, we're going to go a little bit deeper into Facebook. So we basically showed you how to set up a page, and now we're going to go over growing it from zero because if I don't put this in the course, many people will say, Well, if I have zero followers, how the heck can I get any traction? I'm going to talk to you a little bit about how you can increase some followers and likes on your page so you can get it going and what my strategy is. And it's not the only way, it's just one way that I start pages from nothing. Um, you'll notice here that I did go ahead and get us a logo and cover image as promised. So that way, we do have a more legit looking page going on now. That was thanks to the help of AI, so nice and quick to get a quick logo and cover photo using Dolly from ChatPT. So anyway, let's go ahead and move on. So if I have a page like this with zero followers, there's a few things that I do to go ahead and grow the page. Number one, with the use of memes or any photos of local places and local things that are highly sharable, that's one way you can do it. In other words, you might do something like posting a photo that you can create that shows a prominent restaurant in the area. This one of my favorite ones. So if you're in Orlando, I can't really think of anything over there right now. I don't know. I but some sort of restaurant there, maybe Bubba Gump or something, maybe a picture of that place. And what you do is you can edit it right in C but you can have a text on it that says, What's your favorite restaurant in Orlando? And that's it. That's the only question and thing about the post. And then you go ahead and so you post that, and then you go ahead and boost it, right? So a lot of people don't like boosting, but in that scenario where you're just trying to get engagement, trying to get some people to like your page and everything like that. It's a good idea to do. So let's pretend that this is an image, so you would just say, What's your favorite restaurant in Orlando? Okay. It's not an image. We're going to pretend that it is. And you'll go ahead and hit Post and put that out there. But again, it would just be a picture of a local restaurant, wherever you're at, in your town or city, a local restaurant. Then you're going to go ahead and boost it, okay? Now, the nice thing about it about this is that when a lot of people like this post and they will the cool thing is if you click this, let's pretend that that says I don't know, ten different likes or whatever. It's clickable. You click it, and then what happens is there's going to be a button over here that says invites and you want to click that. You can invite them all to like your page. That's one way to get a whole bunch of people to like your page right off the bat, this doesn't have to be expensive. If I was to do this and want to grow this, I would create that image and I would boost it for probably I mean, obviously, the more money you have, the quicker and more results. Even if you don't have a lot of money and don't want to spend a lot of money on this, perhaps it's just some side project you want to get some traction on. Even if you did three to five bucks a day for a couple days, few days, you'd get some traction on this. I've done that before at five bucks a day for three days, so spend $15 and I've gotten as much as a couple hundred people liking that post and sharing it and stuff. Then I just click sit there and click that whole list of people that liked it for them to invite them to like my page and then I'll get a whole bunch of likes that way. So that's a process that I can repeat over and over. And the cool thing about that is I'm also adding content to the page as well. So now the page is looking more and more established because there's posts on there. Not only is there posts, there's posts that have a whole bunch of engagement and everything like that. So that's a win win. The other thing you can do once you do a little bit of that and have it going is you can create an ad for likes. Now, I know a lot of people out there, the gurus will say, don't pay for followers. Well, this is different. You're not paying for fake followers or anything. These are real people that are deciding to click the button or tap their phone to follow your page, right? So you would click on get more page likes. And then, again, you can ask AI to help you out with something nifty. We're just going to mess around with this for a second, but you can say, you know, do you live in Orlando? If so, don't miss our weekly, I don't know, newsletter. About all things Orlando right into your inbox free, something like that, right? And maybe we want to add some emojis and stuff like that, right? So we want to play around with that. But something to that effect, right? And then you would just put a call to action, click below or follow us or something like that, right? And then for here, button label, we're going to like page. So that's fine. Um and then you're going to go ahead and do you know, who's to your audience and all that. But here's where you can choose how much and everything like that. So you're going to do all that, and that's it. So it's pretty simple to do, you know, and then you would go ahead and run this and be able to tweak it and whatnot. But that's what you're going to do with your ads to kind of get it going. Now I'm going to go ahead and get out of here for a second. Yep, we're not saving it. Again, if you don't know a bunch about Facebook ads, that should be enough to get you going and utilizing this. The other way to get some followers, if you notice here on the front page, I haven't followed anything. Facebook is just kind of recommending popular pages and posts to me. But what you would want to do is you would want to follow any stuff in Orlando. So local restaurants, local businesses, local celebs, on air DJs, all that. And again, I don't know specifically anybody there. I don't live in Orlando, but it wouldn't be that difficult to find it. You know, A, if you live there, you should already know a lot of it, and if not, then I would just simply search Orlando stuff. And what do you want to do? So we'll just do it now. So Orlando. So basically, I want to look for pages. Okay. So here we go. So basically, I can follow Fox 35, Orlando. I can look for, let's see, Orlando weekly, some sort of newspaper or things, similar to what we do. I can follow the police department, but that's not the kind of news I'm looking for anyway. Marguerite Ville and Orlando is fine. Gatorland obviously there's a lot of things there. Solar bears, the hockey team, sure, we'll take that. So all these different things, hard rock cafe, we'll follow that. So if you start to do that, what's going to happen is now you have a feed as you can see, it's changed. It's hard rock cafe, Fox 35, so now my feed is being more relevant to me. And so one way that you can grow is to start commenting on these things. So for instance, that can get you some exposure if you go ahead and comment. In other words, second game of the season coming. You know, if you want to comment something there or something, um you know, if you wanted to comment on here, the cool thing about commenting is this, see this savanna person here, see how it says. They put that there, and there's a little follow button. So it would be the same for you as well. So if you comment on this stuff, by default, it's going to be a little hyperlink next to you for people to follow you. But more importantly, people might say, Oh, Orlando buzz, what's this about? They're going to go ahead and click through and be able to see information about you, have your call to action to sign up. It creates a funnel. Basically, the more active you are with commenting on things that are relevant to, in this case, Orlando, you're going to get seen a lot and everything. So if you really had the time to invest, that's what you would do. You want to do all of them, really, but there's a couple ways you can grow. It's either A with time or with money or both. So time would be doing things like this, following a whole bunch of things in the local community, you know, engaging with them, tagging them, commenting on them, and all that, so you can get noticed. And then also paying with some ads like I already showed you with boosting some different sharable images, as well as for likes. In ideal world, you want to do both of them to really grow an engaged audience because if you do ads only, they're not as engaged as when you engage with them, which makes sense. That's how we are in real life, too, right? When you engage with people, they're more likely to engage back in a genuine way. So these are all some tips and ways that you can grow your Facebook page from zero to a raving audience that is all about your page. Hopefully that helps, we'll be seeing more and more on this page as we go on with the training, but that's the majority of what you need to do to start the page from nothing. 11. Getting Local Content With Facebook Page: All right, so now in this lesson, we've got our sample page here. We've got the feed, if you recall, from a previous lesson with Facebook when we began the page, I said a good practice is to follow a lot of local things in your community so that way you can see a customized feed like this with things about that community. Now let me just add a couple more here. I mean, we probably should add Disney since we are in Orlando. You know, why not? Um, perhaps we can. Well, of course, we're going to get a whole lot of information here on Disney. So we've got to click on Pages. Walt Disney World, there we go, and then Disney Parks. You can follow that. Then, that should be enough for now. Basically, when you have your feed like this, this can give you endless content. All you got to do is scroll through here, much like you would be in a consumer anyway. You're going to scroll through here and you can look for different things. For instance, right here in the first one, this is from a local news source anyway. Disney's Blizzard Beach announces a reopening date just in time for the holidays. Cool. I can click that. I would read the article, see how relevant it is and everything like that, and then that's something that I can share in my newsletter, and it's also something I can share here on this page. I can either a share it and start interacting with this or I can go ahead and click this, read the article, and then share the article myself. It's not like I'm stealing it because it's still from Fox 35, they're going to get credit obviously for doing the article. The other thing is, if you see something like this, um you have a couple of options. You might say, this is pretty cool. Let me share this to my audience. A better thing to do would be to click the image, save it and share it yourself and then just give credit to them. Then you can have your own spin on this and say, cool, I don't know, cool snowman here and Disney, then you can put Via or credit Disney Parks and you tag them. The nice thing about that is they might interact with you because now you've tagged them and stuff like that. It's better than just sharing this. Um, so that's another tip right there in terms of getting it gave you an extra piece of content as well, right? Now, you got to share this image as if it's originally from you, but with giving credit, not stealing it. Or you can share that in the newsletter itself, photo of the week or something like that, right? And we'll get more to that in a second. So that's basically it. You want to scroll through. You want to find different things that you can either A, add to your newsletter or B here to your page. And again, sometimes it might be just sharing, I might be commenting on them. But if we're talking about getting things to your page, then perhaps it's, um, you know, by you just sharing here on your page originally. All right. So now, the other here's a cool Gator story or whatever happens a lot in Florida, I guess. So there's a lot of different things you can share here. But you get the idea you were scrolled through, you look for what's relevant in your community and be able to share things either to your page or to your newsletter. Um, something else I said I was going to get to in a second. Something else you can do for fun as well is create a hash tag, especially if you're going to be on Instagram. Create a hash tag, maybe this one is hashtag Orlando buzz or something like that, right? And you want to do posts like, share your cool Orlando photos that you've taken recently or something like that. All right, something like that. You get the point. You would do that. I like to do this and make it like this. At color. Share your cool Orlando picks. Let's see. Let's just finish out that. This week. All right, something like that. Then when you share things like this, people love to share their images. What I do with something like this is then when I have a whole bunch of comments, you'll get ten, 15, 20 comments of people sharing their photos that they've taken recently. What I do with those is any of them that I really stick out to me and I like it. I'll click them, save it. Again, I will share it on the page as something totally new, a post like this. And credit that person. People like that because now they're being recognized and called out and shouted out on a public page and then they end up sharing that to their people and stuff like that. That creates what they call user generated content, UGC. Basically, I didn't have to do anything to go out and take that photo, somebody else got to take that photo. I still get to use it. Then what I do is the best one that I like. You can share that in your newsletter as the photo of the week, whatever. It's endless, the amount of things you can do with that. But I certainly would recommend doing something like that so you can have a community element that people like participating and putting in their pictures and things like that, especially somewhere like Orlando where a lot of people vacation, so you can have a lot of people vacationing and take cool pictures that they are dying to share with everyone. So I highly recommend that. So basically, here's some of the basics on how to get a whole bunch of content just right in your Facebook page, you know, when you do it right. Again, this is just a sample one, so I would obviously follow way more, Orlando stuff so I can get way more content here. Local restaurants are great to engage with. They're always looking for ways to get more people in the door, especially local restaurants, stay away from chains, but local restaurants, they definitely will engage with you a lot. So those are good to follow and everything. So hopefully this helps, but this is just some ideas to get content right here on your Facebook page. All right. Let's move on to the next lesson. 12. Curating Local News: All right, so now I want to talk about how I get local news and everything, which is, you know, nothing groundbreaking. There's a lot of different things you can do. One thing I recommend is you can set up a Google news alert for whatever town you're in. So in this case, we're doing Orlando. So basically, I would do Orlando and some sort of keyword that I want to, you know, keep track of. And in that way, Google will send you email alerts whenever there's a story or something new based on that. So that's one way. Another way is you can have these bookmarks on computer and go to the local news. So this one is click orlando.com, and basically, you can look at some of them. So this is what I was saying. So Orlando Man killed in motorcycle crash. Me personally, I don't publish things like that. You can. But, you know, you want to be able to find any cool news that maybe is not on, you know, all over the news and all that, you know, but maybe something like this is cool, right? So states where the most workers are quiting their jobs, where does Florida rank. Let's say Florida's near the top or they're near the bottom, they do well, like one extreme or the other. That'd be something good to share in the newsletter, right? So you can say, um People in Florida just simply don't quit and then you want to have a link to that. You don't have to say the whole thing on it because you want people to click. So you would say some sort of headline like that. Basically, you would say, again, to the effect of, or maybe is Florida too fast to quit? And then people like, What heck, does that even mean? But when they click the hyperlink, they can see the article to know what you're talking about. That's how you want to do the news and headlines and things like that because you do want people to click and interact. You don't want to put the whole article like that. You want people to click. And then you go to this one, WFTV nine. So you can take a look. In Florida, obviously, you have a lot about hurricanes to be able to track and put on. But you get the point there's a whole lot of different things that you can look for gas price drop. There you go. That might be something to put in there, right? So, you know, Florida seeing prices drop for the second week. Click here to see the average price or something like that, right? So you can kind of play off that. Here's this one, Orlando Weekly. This is probably a better site. If I was doing Orlando, this looks like there's a whole bunch of different things, arts and culture, food and drink, music. So this is already sort of like what we're doing. This is sort of like a newsletter of the city. So here you can find a whole bunch of really cool news, I bet, that is, you know, yeah, you can definitely find a lot here. So Spirit Airlines cancels at least 45 flights into and out of Orlando. That might be something you want to share. You know, basically, again, I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud here, but basically anything that you think would be relevant, people in your community would care about, but this certainly would be a good website for this. And then Visit Orlando, you can find here. Again, Visit Orlando is good because this is also non murder and crime type stuff. So this is more like fun type stuff and things going on. So this might be really good things to share with your audience as well. So that's kind of how I curate news. And again, just the point about the headlines, you don't want to put too much in the newsletter. You want people to click and engage, so you wouldn't want to put, in other words, put this one here, let's see, new high speed rail, culinary recognition, and Luxury Hotel highlights. Okay, so that's a whole bunch of stuff. That probably is a newsletter issue. But to go back here to this point though, um, you know, any of these headlines here, I wouldn't exactly want to put too much. You just want to be able to get people to click. And some of the articles they probably already do. And you can utilize CHAT APT to help you with that, too, right? Like, tell them you have an article about whatever, give you a good headline or teaser to have people click on that. But this is kind of how I curate local news. I go to different local websites or TV stations, things like that. In addition to what I see on Facebook, based on what we talked about, going through your feed and seeing a lot of things that way. But that's more for content for the Facebook page that I try to get that way. This, I actually go to different websites and try to look at local happenings and what's happening in terms of news. We'll cover events next, but in terms of news, this is what I'll try to do is do it this way. Hope that helps. Let's move on to the next one. 13. Curating Local Events: Okay. All right. So now, the other thing that I do is look for events in addition to the news, which we've already covered the news. So a couple ways you can do that. Number one, you can just Google, as you can see, just Google to Orlando events, and Google has a whole bunch of them and I can filter this week, this weekend, next week, and then you can just even expand that and see more events. So this is one way that you can do it. And then if you click any of these, obviously, you can get more information like this as far as the link and stuff like that. So if you want to link to the source of where people can get more info or tickets, then you can do that. Um, another way is you go over to Facebook and you click on events right here. We're going to say, yes, leave the page. And same thing as Google, you can look for events here. There's typically more events on Facebook than there is there, um, you know, but yeah, so that's exactly what you would want to do. So these events are going to populate based on what you, um, you know, what you're following and all that. Be DeFeed has all this stuff about Florida, then that's why it's here. All you got to do is this and then if you want to, I can click on this share. If I'm going to go, I don't know why that's in Chicago, Illinois. But if I was going to go with that one, then you would just copy Link or I can even share it to the feed directly. That way in the newsletter, as I list all the events, I can go ahead and do that. Those are two ways that you can get events and really probably won't need too many more ways past that. Um, so Google, you can see it there. And then also on Facebook, you click events. You can see them there as well. Make sure to put in your area, your town, then you'll be able to see a whole bunch of events. So there's not too much more for events. That's kind of what I do to curate the events between those two sources, I get plenty and plenty of events every single week. The other way is obviously in your feed, you will see some different businesses posting events as well, and then you can just kind of save those and everything like that, too. Um, those are the two main ways. So any questions on that? Let me know. Let's move on to the next. 14. Grow Subscribers Organically: Alright, so now let's talk about some ways that you can grow your newsletter and page organically. Now, if you are probably wondering, like, you know, Hey, I know you're covering a lot of Facebook on this, but I want to do Instagram or I want to do my newsletter mainly on X or wherever. The good news is a lot of this applies to really any platform. As far as, you know, everything we've covered so far. This one would probably be a little bit more specific to Facebook, but some of the strategy is still the same. So this is all about ways you can make sure you optimize growing your newsletter organically, okay? So the first way is, obviously, we said to make sure that you have your link, so people always know where to go to subscribe and go to your website. Also, if we're on Facebook, you can have the action button over here. You can't see it now because we're in this admin, but if I can we do it? Yeah. So view as. So if this is what it looks like to other people, there's going to be a sign up link. They can click Sign Up right there, so that's one way to do it. Now, another way that I want to cover. So obviously, assuming your profile is optimized and you have it everywhere you should, another great way of doing it is when you post something, now, we haven't posted anything yet on this page, but I'm going to go ahead and do that just because I mean, nobody's following this anyway. So if we post something, the other nice thing to do, and again, this goes for all platforms. If you are used to Instagram, you know that first comment is a big deal. Like, you know, it used to be more of a big deal, but comment as a first comment, so you can do that, as well. So if you did something like that, you can do something like, don't forget, you know, like, don't forget to subscribe or something like that to our newsletter. You know, or if it's related to that post, you can say, you know, for more events like this or more information like this, don't miss our newsletter, and then you would put the link right here, right? So that's one that we call that plug. So you're plugging your service, in this case, the newsletter on post. So that way, when people see this post, they interact with it, they comment, they're going to also see that. And normally, it's going to be at the top, and it's going to say author, meaning that the original post is one that posted that. So that's one way is you can plug your own post that you do and everything. Another way is you can plug other people's, right? You want to be careful about that not to come off as spammy. But if you see a post by someone saying, you know, Hey, we are looking for the, you know, if a page is saying, What's your favorite, whatever in uh, Orlando, you can post your opinion and then also say for more great, you know, I don't know, ideas like this, subscribe to our newsletter here or whatever. And a better way of doing that would be, we're going to go over to groups. And we're going to search Orlando, so we can get them specific to what we're looking for. And this is a really great thing to do. So if you'll notice, I can get a lot of exposure in these groups. So this is my major, major hack for growing a newsletter or Facebook page organically, and that is joining all these groups. So, for instance, small Business Orlando's 11,000 members, you would click Join and join that. Orlando events, 28,000 members, and it's a public group. So if it's public, that means that anytime you post in there, everybody can see that. So it's pretty cool. You get a lot of exposure that way. If it's private, it's fine. It just means that it only shows up on people's feeds if they're in the group. This one, 176,000, it's all about Universal Orlando. So great example there. Universal Orlando, let's say someone posts in that group and says, Hey, we're looking to visit Florida real soon, going to go to Universal. We've never been. What are your top tips? Be a helpful member and engage in that and say, Hey, here's my couple of tips that I would say, and then you can also maybe link to a piece of content you have on your site about that or a past newsletter where you covered that. Or you can just simply answer them and then say, Hey, for more cool tips about Universal and Disney and all things Orlando, also join our newsletter, right, our weekly newsletter or daily or whatever you decide to do. So you got tons upon tons of groups here, and these are all exposure and audience that you can tap into. Also, another nice strategy is if you join one of these groups, right? So basically, let's look for regular plain old, I don't know. A regular group that's general about Orlando. So basically, I don't know, any of these will do, but basically Orlando online classifieds or I don't know, anything that's like Orlando, the best of Orlando. Any of these would work. But basically, you go into a group, local group, and you go in there and you can post something, you're basically trying to farm engagement. So basically, you would post something like, Hey, what's your favorite restaurant in Orlando for Calamari or for burgers, right? Um, Something like that. The more specific you are, the better, but, you know, just come up with something like that or what's the next business or restaurant you'd love to see come to Orlando. People love to voice their opinions on that. So you'll see tons of likes and comments on that. But more importantly, they're going to see who asked the question. People in a group are going to look at that. And let's see if I can join one of these public ones. We're just going to go into, this is public. So basically, what I mean by that is if you go in here in your post, I don't know the quality of this group, but, you know, if you go in here and you were to post something, it seems like it's pretty spammy with a lot of ads and stuff. But if you were to post something like that and here and ask the question, the cool thing is, people will see who posted it, right? Like, I can see this remax person posted it. It seems like he's the only one posting in here. But you can see, um, who posted it. You'll get a lot of exposure that way because then people are going to do this and be like, Oh, who is this, and they can click through and they're going to be like, Oh, Orlando buzz. That's cool. That's something I want to subscribe to. It serves as a mini funnel, if you will, but the more active you are, the more that funnel is going to work, right? So let's go back to Orlando but you get the point. You definitely want to engage a lot with local Facebook groups. It's going to help you grow immensely. And again, free. You don't need to pay anything because there's already, as you can see, 28,000, 30,000, 18,000, 42,000 176,000 members in all these different groups. So you're getting free exposure whenever you post or engage in there and everything like that, and then people are going to just naturally look at your page and then they're going to follow if they're interested or you can direct them to follow. Hey, click through to our profile and to our page and you can see the link to get our newsletter. So you got to be active. You got to sell yourself and all that in these groups. And if you can do that, you'll definitely get a lot of organic followers and whatnot. So hopefully that was helpful on growing your newsletter organically on social media. Again, if you're on other platforms, it's the same thing. If you're on Instagram, you're going to follow a lot of relevant ones. The only difference is there's not groups on Instagram, but you'll follow a lot of relevant ones and you're going to comment on their stuff and you're going to direct people to your profile into your newsletter, and you're going to have the Lincoln Bio, um you know, it allows you to have linked in the In fact, Instagram, you can have multiple ones now. So you want to do that and get it out there. So it's the same no matter what. But again, a local newsletter, I still believe Facebook is the best place to grow it because of all these local resources, including groups that exist on here that don't exist on other platforms. So I highly recommend making Facebook your kind of central focus when growing your newsletter and then expands to other platforms. I think Instagram would be the great second platform after that. Um, so that is all. Hopefully, that was a help on how to grow your newsletter organically using Facebook without any ad spend at all. Thanks, and let's move on to the next lesson. 15. Paid facebook ads: Okay, so next we're going to cover growing your page and newsletter with paid ads. So we covered how to do it organically with some ways, including groups and everything. So with ads, you're going to click on AdSensor. And again, I'm going to make this easy. There's way more intricate ways you can do ads, including going to Ads Manager, but AdSensor is the easier one to do, and you're going to just hit Create AD. And then you're going to do Create New AD And now it's even going to spell out some different reasons or ways you can do ads, right? So you can do, you know, it has an automatic feature. You can get more calls, more website visitors. So the first one I'm going to cover is to get more people onto your landing page. So we're going to do get website visitors. So I'm going to click that. And again, you can utilize Chachi PT to get something cool for it and all that, but we're going to go ahead and hold on, so I'm going to go ahead and put something there pretty cool, and that way will be good. All right, so perhaps something like this. So I did up a little bit here. So basically, do you live or love visiting Orlando, then don't miss any info on local happenings. Restaurant Steals, news and More fun. Joined Orlando Buzz, totally free for weekly news and happenings into your inbox. Click Below. So there's a call to action. You're calling out who it's for, right? People who love Orlando and what it is the second line restaurant Steals news and More fun. And then you have we can use this cover image. If this was real, I probably would rock this, or you can click on Select Media and upload your own, or you can even use stock images here on Facebook. Um but this one I probably would do, actually. The cover photo works out fine because it's very cool image. So I would probably do that. Label, you can choose all these. Signup obviously makes the most sense for this, and then you put the website there. And then you go ahead and choose the audience details, right? So, if you don't know much about Facebook, you can just play around with the ages here. So perhaps you might want like 22 year olds and above or whatever you want. You have to name it there. You can pick the locations that's set to United States. We would actually add Orlando, obviously, um and then or you can pick all of Florida, which I probably would do. You know, so Orlando and we can say a much bigger radius here, you know, 46 mile radius. So if you wanted to target people who kind of live there in the area that might be most interested, I probably would start with this, and then to expand out, you can do all of Florida or something like that. So you would create your audience, and then you would go ahead and just hit Create. You can do more detailed targeting if you wanted to. Again, depends on your niche that you came up with. If you're targeting specific people or topics, then you can. But if not, if it's just a general newsletter that's specific to the area, then I would leave that off. That's what I've done and have gotten really great results. That's it. And then after you do the audience, which I'm not going to go ahead and do, but once you do the audience, you can do this continuous ad and say how much you want per day. Um or whatever, and that's it, and then just let it rock, let it run. I would start at a smaller amount, you know, five bucks a day. Once you see you're getting plenty of conversions and people signing up, you can always scale that up to ten, 15, $20 a day if you wish. So this I would definitely recommend to get you a whole bunch of subscribers. The other thing that you can do as far as an ad goes, if you want more page likes in the beginning Um, here you go. I know we covered this about starting in Facebook page, but here you go. This would be perfect, as well. I would obviously change the messaging, and instead, I would say, you know, follow us or click below to like us. But same thing can use that same image and everything like that, same audience. And this would be a um campaign to get more followers on your page. So if you're starting the page from nothing, a good strategy might be to mix it up. Whatever your budget is, let's say you can only do about ten bucks a day, you know, then maybe do five bucks to try to get subscribers, five bucks to try to get likes, and then you can change that as time goes on, depending on what's more important to you. But that's basically, yeah, if you want to do some ads, you don't need to get more intricate than this for this business model. You don't have to have a whole bunch of different sets going at once and everything. The only thing you want to do is just test here and there, what works for an image and all that. But if you're great at Facebook ads, fine. You can get more intricate. If you're not very experienced with it, this is the extent of what you need to do is just run something quick and easy like this to try to get some subscribers to your landing page. So hopefully this was helpful, but that's how you do some ads to get some subscribers or likes on your page or both. 16. Referral program: Alright, so continuing on with growing your subscriber base. One thing you can do is a referral program. I'm inside the dashboard of my old newsletter right now for one of my accounts. So basically, this is what Beehive looks like. In this course, there is going to be a bonus lecture at some point, just kind of going over Beehive in detail, since that is the platform I mostly recommend. So let me get to it, though. So right here, we're going to talk about a referral program. So inside a Beehive, there's already a referral program. So if you go to Grow and then you click on Referral Program, it looks like this. There's milestones, rewards, et cetera. So on the rewards, this is where you add a reward. And what a referral program is basically, yeah, I should probably back up. So referral program is basically when people share your newsletter and somebody else successfully subscribes to it, they get a referral for that, right? Credit, if you will. And after so many referrals, they get some sort of prize from you. So for a local newsletter, what would work well would be like some sort of merchandise. Like for five referrals, you get a coffee mug, and you can easily do that in Prinzify or print fold or something, just give them a coffee mug. You know, for ten referrals, you'll get this or 15, whatever it is you come up with. So this is kind of a ladder of what I had. So if you get four referrals, you got five retweets from my Twitter account, right. If you got eight referrals, you get three months free in the discord community. None of these things exist anymore, but this is what I used to have with this old newsletter. And then if you got 12 referrals, you'd get a coffee mug with my brand on it, which at the time was Wi Fi Money letter. So this is kind of what it would look like. And obviously, you can customize it to how you want. You would just go into rewards. You would add the reward and all that, and what you know, the info and image and also edit, not edit, but you would actually put in the order that you wanted to go in, right? So you would do all that and then fulfillment shows here if anyone has, you know, successfully gotten that reward, and then basically the status of you fulfilling it, you can mark off manually that you did. And then there's some analytics here that show, obviously, nobody ever did any of mine, so that's probably why it's a former newsletter of mine, but anyway, there is nothing there. Um, but you can do this in other programs. The other nice thing about this is that this winds up being at the bottom. You can put it in the footer, so that way everyone gets a unique link to them. It's kind of like affiliate links. So that way, when they share your newsletter or they share that link for somebody to sign up, they get credit. But it's at the bottom of all the emails that go out. Um, so it's a really cool thing to do. This is another organic way to grow. It's really big in the newsletter, business. So I definitely would recommend having some sort of referral program that motivates people to organically share your newsletter. Alright? So that's all we're going to cover for referral program. Let's move on. 17. Sponsored Ads: All right, so next, I want to talk about sponsorships. So this is just something that I did real quick to just kind of show you a quick newsletter. And this is Beehive again. But again, this can be any platform that you're using. And there's a couple of ways you can do sponsorship. So sponsorships is basically someone paying you money for them to be listed somehow on your newsletter or website or both, right? So one way you can do this is at the very top, you can do something like this issue is brought to you by uh, whatever, right? So you can put something here, and then you would hyperlink to their main thing that they want. So that's one sponsor you can do and you can even charge varying levels. So maybe that one because it's at the top, that one has to pay more to be listed there. Then you have your introduction and stuff, you have local news going on. Then you'd have somewhere in the middle, you put a sponsored, right? And it's labeled as sponsored, so people know. And then basically, so I did Mickey Mouse, a local realtor in Orlando, um, so this right here would be a good example of a local ad that I would do if Mickey Mouse was coming to me and wanting to put an ad in here, right? So basically, Mickey Mouse is not just the name you grew up with, but as a top realtor, they know it's enchanted nook and cranny. So obviously, I use Chat GPT for this. I would recommend doing that as well. Basically, you can just punch in saying, Hey, I have a newsletter about Orlando and I have a local realtor, Mickey Mouse, who wants to advertise in it. Give me a nice. Utilizing emojis and bold that I can put in the newsletter. That's it. And then it gives you something cool like this, and then you can edit and all that. But basically, you would put this in here, and this is their sponsored ad they're paying for. And then down here is perhaps local music, restaurant deals, whatever, right? So Disney Corner, whatever you come up with as part of your newsletter. And then at the bottom, I also have to advertise in this newsletter, click here, and then they click and they go to wherever you're hosting something, wherever you're hosting the ability for people to buy your ads. We haven't talked about that yet, but for tools, you can just use Pay HIP, which I like using totally free to use. They take a 5% cut on their free plan. You can use Gum Road, although they take a 10% cut, I you can also use stripe directly or PayPal as well. PayPal is only 3% fee. So you can use any of those platforms. It really depends what you want to do, but they're all free to use. You can just literally set up, you know, some sort of description of, you know, advertise on Orlando buzz for a week, two weeks, whatever you want to do a month, whatever package you want to sell, and then come up at a price that people will pay for that. Maybe you want to start it low when you have a low amount of readers, and then you want to go increasing that as you have more and more value to bring to advertisers. So that's something that you could do as well. I probably would recommend either just using PayPal, stripe or pay HIP would be my options that I would suggest to look at. And that's really it when it comes to the sponsored. I'm going to cover a little bit of how to look for people to do sponsor. But as far as the idea of doing sponsored, in your newsletter, this is what you would do. You can do other ways as well, but this is the main ways that I see most effective. You can have at the top, a text only, you know, this issue is brought to you by whatever. And then also within the middle of it somewhere, you can have it label as sponsored and put down some sort of whatever advertisement for whoever paid you. So that's what I recommend would be something like this for sponsored ads, very simple to the point. And then I'll also cover in a different lesson how to find sponsored people and things like that. All right, so that is it for now. 18. Finding ad sponsors: All right, so next we're going to talk about finding people to advertise in your newsletters. We talked about what sponsored might look like and kind of the concept behind it. So finding people, there's a couple of ways. Number one, one way that I like is if you go to groups, we talked about groups before and growing your newsletter itself in your page. But if you go to groups and you see people asking not asking, I'm sorry, if you see people posting about their business, right? L Hey, every Wednesday, come check us out for this special or whatever, especially restaurants, they post a lot in those local groups and other services like maybe a massage place, a spa that might say, Hey, we're doing a special or whatever. Any of those people, if they're already advertising, they're trying to get the word out there, right? So that's obviously a prime, um prospect for us. So I would just cold message those people, just message them and say, Hey, I saw your advertisement or I saw your post about you promoting whatever. We have low prices right now to get the ball rolling on sponsored ads in our newsletter that goes out to everyone in Orlando in the area or to our list, anyway, not everyone. Um, you know, and also we'll post you on our Facebook page. You know, click here to find out more. You know, so these cold messages like this to people, it'll work if you send enough of them because, again, they're trying to get their word out there. They are in the advertising mindset. They're trying to get their special out there or whatever. So that's one way, go to groups and see local businesses that are already putting their info out there and trying to promote themselves because obviously they're already trying to promote themselves. Another way is for you to simply put a link an additional link in your profile that goes to wherever you add places that people can purchase. I use Pay HIP, so I recommend it because you can also put a little description and image and all that. So that way, people can purchase it right there and get info. Gum Road will do that as well. So any of those which ways will do that. For you. So putting it right here so that people can click it on their own is another way. And finally, also just posting about it on your page as well. So I've done that before. Just post about it, just stating that, Hey, we're looking for sponsors. You don't have to say if you want to advertise you can say we're looking for sponsors for our newsletter. Click here to find out more so you can post about it, and then you can even run add to it, right? So you can run an ad like we did for getting likes or getting subscribers. This time, you can target just local businesses. So you can go to your ad center, you can do new ad website visitors, just like we did for getting subscribers. The only difference is in the targeting just target local businesses in Orlando, and then you can target them with, Hey, if you're a local business in Orlando, here's a quick and easy, inexpensive way to advertise to Orlando right through the Orlando Bz newsletter, something like that and then get people to be clicking on that so they can check it out. That's how you can get people on Auto. That's worked well for me, too. I've gotten people to just click it and go ahead and purchase it on their own. And then when they purchase it, you should do it so that they get an email to them saying, Hey, thanks for purchasing some ad space, go ahead and send an email to blah blah blah, have an email setup with an image as well as a write up that you want for your ad, something like that. So that's what I would recommend as far as finding people. So basically find people in groups that already are promoting their specials or services or products or restaurants or whatever and message them. That's number one. Number two, find people, um, you know, make sure your profile, your page also has it listed and post about it, okay, and also run ads. That's four ways right there. You can find people to run ads in your newsletter. Hopefully that helps. Any other questions at all, let me know. 19. Other ways to monetize: Okay, so now we're going to talk about other ways to monetize your newsletter other than just add sponsors. So one way is, and many of you know that I've done print on demand a lot over the last three to four years, as well as other things, but this is a great way. Utilizing print on demand because if the example through this course has been Orlando and basically pick any other large city in America or suburb of a large city, people are going to want merchandise and things of that city, right? So basically, if you're in Orlando, you can be doing a tote bag and pillows and mugs and all the common things that people like, right? Water bottles. Let's stay hydrated. And whether it's a residents or people that are visiting there, they're going to want to buy this stuff. So Printfy is a website that I like. It's easy to use, and they even have images you can use there. You don't have to be a designer whatsoever. They even have AI there now that can allow you to help make you some designs and whatnot. So I would highly recommend utilizing that. That way, while you don't have sponsors in the beginning, let's say, it takes a little bit of time to get it, you can still monetize from day one. You can basically have in your newsletter, let's see where we were talking about um, right here in the sponsored. Instead, you can have sponsored and you can say, looking for any cool beach towels while you visit Florida. Click here to check some out by whatever, and then click make it a brand name, maybe by the same name, maybe a different name. But click to see here by some towels by Orlando Buzz or by whatever other name you come up with. That's a good way to create, um, you know, be your own ad sponsor, basically, for your own products. Or perhaps if you want to offer some sort of service to people, then you can also advertise that in there. So again, being your own sponsor, but you're still monetizing from day one. So let's say you want to get into web design would be a good example. Um, you can put that in there or social media marketing. You can put yourself in there and the sponsored and say, you know, Hey, local businesses looking to refresh your website or get a website going for your thing, you know, contact so and so. And again, it's going to be your business name, totally different from Orlando Buzz. So it makes it seem like it's a different sponsor altogether, but it's just basically a different business of yours. So basically, at that point, you're growing a really big newsletter, and even if you only advertised yourself normally, you're growing a newsletter and you're going to grow your service based business as well because you're giving yourself all that free exposure. You know, to your own newsletter. So that's another way as well. You can be the premier ad sponsor of your own newsletter, so you can grow your service based business, or perhaps grow in merchandise as well. Always have the link at the bottom. So, you know, we can create an Orlando buzz brand on Printify and then we can have always a link at the bottom or the footer that says, Hey, looking for Orlando merchandise, click here. That way, it's always always going out to people. Um, the cool thing about Princify too is, I don't know if they have it on here or not. But the cool thing about Princify is that now you can create a pop up shop. You don't need Etsy, you don't need Shopify. You just create some products and it gives you a personalized website link an area where you can put a logo in a shopping cart. Basically a pop up website shop, you don't even need any other software or anything like that. I would definitely recommend looking into Princify and doing that. Um, so just wanted to share some other ideas that you can use to make money with your newsletter other than just ad sponsors. So you can do it with ad sponsors. You can do it with selling products such as print on demand and creating merchandise and things that have stuff from your city, your logo, things like that. Or again, you can also sell your services, create some sort of service based business if you don't already have it, um um yeah, so those are some ways you can make money with your newsletter, pretty much right off to get go. So that is it for now. 20. Conclusion: All right, so that completes the course. I hope you have found a ton of value, but more importantly, step by step value to go ahead and start this business model all on your own as well, utilizing the information in this course. So I highly recommend that you can skip around, go back and find the areas that you need in order to build this on your own. I want to put it all together for you in a very easy fashion. You basically want to come up with a name, a logo, format, perhaps a niche, and a platform that you're going to use. Again, I suggest beehive, but there are others out there. You can grow. Then you want to grow your social channel. Again, I suggest Facebook because it's the most optimized for local things, but it can be something else. Instagram would be a good pick as well. And also, you want to grow subs at that point, whether it's organically, adds, all the ways we talked about in the course. Next, you want to put out content, whether it's every week, daily, a couple of times a week, whatever you come up with monthly, whatever, as long as all your subscribers can expect to know when it's going to come out. And also you want to now start to look for sponsors or advertise your own products if you don't get sponsors yet. So you can create merchandise, like we talked about or other products. Um, that's it. Then basically, you want to repeat. Just keep on doing that. Other than number one, you don't need to repeat that one once you come up with it, but you do need to continue to grow subs as well as your Facebook platform or whatever platform you choose, and you want to keep on putting out content and keep looking for sponsors. But if you do this within 30 days, there's no reason why you can't already make at least a sale, whether it's sponsor or your own products and perhaps you'll make more sales than that. That is it. I hope you've enjoyed this course, and depending where you're watching this here at the end of the course is also where there are links to different uh, tools and resources that I've recommended throughout this course, you can find it here. And again, I appreciate you checking out this course, and I really want to hear success stories of you utilizing this course and growing your own local newsletter, business or empire. So that's it, don't forget to follow me on social so that way you can update me. And that is all. Thank you again, and that is it for this course.