Newsletter und Blogging: Entwickle und monetarisiere 2025 einen Newsletter und Blog

1. Why Blogging & Newsletters Matter in 2025: 185 billion. That's how many emails are sent every day. That's also how many chances you have to get in front of the right people directly in their inbox, where they actually pay attention. My name is Adam Taylor, and building email lists and newsletters is one of the best decisions I've ever made for my business. It's how I went from chasing leads to having clients chase me and from being dependent on algorithms to owning my audience. In this course, I'm going to teach you exactly how to do the same. Let me show you. We'll start with the absolute fundamentals, defining your niche, finding your ideal reader, and crafting an offer that people actually care about. Then we'll talk about how to structure and write content that stands out in crowded inboxes. I'll show you how to make people look forward to every single one of your emails, even if you don't think that you're a great writer. I'll also walk you through using platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Threads, Substack, and SEO blogs to drive consistent traffic. We'll also talk about virality referrals and lead magnets to make sure that your audience keeps growing on Autopilot. Finally, the juicy part, how to monetize your newsletter. I'll break down every monetization strategy so you can see what works for you. From selling your own digital or physical products through a well structured funnel to sponsorships where brands will pay you to access your audience, to affiliate marketing where you can recommend tools and products that you already love and get paid for it, and to paid subscriptions where readers pay to access your content altogether. After teaching thousands of students, both in person and online, I can confidently say that this is the most comprehensive newsletter course that you'll find on Skillshare. You'll get hours of high production lectures, actionable templates, ready to use scripts and step by step walk throughs. Plus, me and my team will be in the Q&A section 247 to answer anything that you need. I've seen newsletters change my clients' lives forever. It's time for you to change yours. So take action and join this course right now. 2. What Even is a Newsletter?: This course, I'm going to take you through the process of building a newsletter that is set up for success. Then we'll talk about marketing and positioning to get that newsletter as much traffic as possible. Finally, the juiciest of them all, how to monetize your newsletter. Spoiler alert, there are a lot of ways to do this. But before we can do any of this, we have to answer the burning question. What actually is a newsletter? Well, a newsletter is really an email list but with a more consistent schedule. Basically, a newsletter is something that a certain demographic signs up to to read more about someone's particular expertise or opinion on a certain topic. Whatever your demographic is, will sign up for the sole purpose of receiving value. Now, we'll be talking a lot about value, but for now, keep in mind that value comes in two forms entertainment and education. To give this definition an example, someone could create a newsletter around Argentinian cooking and every week, they'll be sending out a new recipe. Now, people who are fond of Argentinian food may opt in because they want to hear about this person's takes and recipes. Because they're either a renowned Argentine chef, they make it really easy to read or their approach to cooking is simply fresh and relatable. You see the idea. People like a subject. They want to hear more about that subject, so they go to someone who speaks about that subject and it's worth listening to. You might be thinking, Wow, this sounds a lot like social media, you'd be absolutely right because newsletters are just text based content that are sent through email. The beauty is that first, you stop relying on other platforms algorithms. And you're able to independently contact and reach out to your subscribers. Also, to this day, email is still the most effective form of divulging your content. It has by far the highest engagement rates as almost everyone subscribed to your newsletter will be reading a substantial amount of that newsletter. This is very different from things like YouTube and Instagram. Not only that, but this content can be repurposed in countless different ways on social media or even a blog post, which takes me to my next point. You may be sitting there thinking know a lot about medieval architecture in Post Scopta India. I could easily write a weekly newsletter about this, but how will people ever find it? Well, there are two main ways virality and social media. There's also a third one where you could literally just reach out to strangers, but that one's for the pros. We'll talk about that one in the extra section. Vity means that your newsletter grows by word of mouth. Basically, people who love your topic and love what you have to say about it will share it with other people who also have the same love for the topic. This again goes back to how important value is. If your newsletter is full of value, then your readers will naturally want to tell others about it. Almost exactly what you're going to be doing with this course. Now, another way of growing your newsletter is including it as a part of your social media strategy. The most natural way to do this is through LinkedIn, X, and now MetasNw Threads. That's because these platforms are already text based. Not only are you targeting people who already prefer to have text over videos or images, but you'll also be sharing the exact type of content that they'll find in your newsletter. Basically, the bridge is much easier. You can also find people through SEO who find your blog by typing in certain keywords on Google. Again, these people will be reading an article from your blog, which may be the exact article that you shared in your newsletter at some. Your job is to just let them know if they want more of that super duper ultra extremely valuable thing that they just read, then all they have to do is sign up to your newsletter. You can also get people from YouTube to your newsletter and I actually super recommend this, especially if you use some lead magnet and we'll be talking a lot about those. Now you're thinking, what am I going to do with the millions of people who are going to sign up to my newsletter? How will I even make money from? Truth is, you don't really need that many people at all to start efficiently monetizing your newsletter. There are three main ways to make money from a newsletter. First, selling your own products or services to your audience. Second, selling someone else's products or services to your audience. That's sponsorships and affiliate marketing. Lastly, having people pay for your newsletter, and those are memberships. We'll talk a lot of detail about each of these. But essentially, you're able to make decent amount of money with almost no audience with each of these, but particularly with that first method of selling your own products or services to your audience. You hopefully see the three elements at play here, constructing a valuable newsletter, creating a system where people can easily opt in and monetizing this audience that you're building. Now, word of caution here. We're going to cover a lot of methods surrounding all of these topics. The most important thing to build a successful newsletter or audience is to stay consistent. Consistency compounds and perfection is the enemy of good. These are two aphorisms that actually make a lot of sense in this context. Even while you're taking the score, you're going to want to start posting and start committing to a manageable posting schedule that you'll feel silly not committing to. You don't have to have the perfect funnel and monetization system right away. You just need to start. You'll find that you'll figure out a lot by taking action. Your audience will tell you what they want more of and your writing style will come naturally over time. With that being said, it's time to decide what we're actually going to be writing in our newsletter. So I'll see you inside. 3. Find Your Ideal Newsletter/Blog Niche: Probably heard that niching down is crucial and imperative. Why? Well, Nich down tends to be more polarizing. Some people really gravitate to you and your content while for other people, it becomes irrelevant. This might seem like something undesirable because we want more subscribers and we want more people to be interested in us. But this is a trap that many, many people fall into because while we do want more leads, we mainly want more quality leads. We want to be putting out a message which really applies to a percentage of the population, which by contrast, will really not apply to the rest. Let me give you my go to example. If you market yourself as an agent for one arm jugglers, then you're going to do really well in that market. Trust me, think about it. If people see that you only do that, then they'll recognize you as an absolute expert. I know that you understand their struggles profoundly because that's the world that you're familiar with. It's silly, but it makes sense. Most people won't care, but the people that do will have an extremely high likelihood of becoming your subscribers. So by now, it should be clear Niching down is good. Don't try to be too greedy. Instead, appeal to a specific segment of the population. But how do we pick that segment? Well, before we dive into the how, let's quickly break down what A Niche actually is. A Niche is basically a specialized segment of the market that's focused on a particular topic or interest. It's where your unique expertise, market demand, and your passions all intersect. And finding this sweet spot is both an art and a science. First step is to look inward. What are your strengths? What specific knowledge or skills do you have that people actually want to read about? Don't be afraid to get specific because generalists are everywhere. So being a specialist will make you stand out. Next, consider your passions. If you're genuinely interested in your niche, then you'll be able to write consistently without burning out. Plus, that passion will come through in your writing, which will really help you connect with your readers. Finally, look outward. If there's no demand for what you're writing, then it's not a niche. It's a hobby. So do some market research. Are there enough people that are interested in your topic? What's the competition looking like? Sometimes the best opportunities are in underserved sub niches within a larger market. Here are some quick strategies to help find your niche. First, identify problems because every successful newsletter solves a problem. So check forums, social media groups, and review sites to see what problems your audience faces. Second, keyword research. You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner and Uber suggests to see what people are searching. By doing that, you can look for patterns and gaps in the market. Next, competitor analysis. Study other newsletters in your space. What are they doing well and what are they missing? You can then find a gap and own it. Next, we have trend analysis. You can use Google Trends to assess the popularity of topics within your niche. Some niches are evergreen, while others are seasonal, but both can work. Next, don't guess. Go out and actually ask your potential audience about what they need, do surveys or just direct conversations. And lastly, validate your idea. Before going all in, test your niche with a minimum viable version of your newsletter. This could be a few test issues or a limited launch just so you can get feedback. Now, that's a quick survey of what works, but let me drive home a few key points. Remember what we said in the last lesson. People want value. And value is solving one's problem, it could be a knowledge problem or it could be a boredom problem. A knowledge problem is solved with education while a boredom problem is solved with entertainment. So the easiest way to find a problem that you can solve is to think, What problems have I solved for myself? It's quite likely that you have something that you're really an expert in. And don't shy away from a niche because you feel like it's too specific. Nowadays, people find success by being an expert in a niche within a niche within a the truth is, if that's what you're going for, then you're going to have an uncopyable niche. You will very quickly become the go to expert in your field because you're basically the only one talking about it. For instance, I've been on Utomi for years, and I've learned a lot about course creation. And if I were to start a brand new newsletter, I could either start it about course creation where there are infinite creators, or I could start it about course creation on Utomi and how to grow your account on Utomi. I target my newsletter specifically to Utomi instructors. There, I'm basically one of the only people talking about it. I know by experience that people very quickly want to listen to my uomi advice because of this. Find a niche where you've solved a problem for yourself already. Only then should you start doing market research, searching trends, et cetera. Now, remember, choosing a niche isn't a lifetime sentence. You're not binding yourself in anyway. Don't be a victim of analysis paralysis and have this process stop you from taking action. So just go ahead and pick something and start. Markets evolve, and so do your skills and interest. Your niche today might not be your niche five years from now, and that's perfectly fine. The key is to start with a clear focus, build authority, and pivot if needed. So to wrap up Niching down is the key to stand out in today's world where there are plenty of newsletters, especially on basic topics. It's all about connecting what you're great at and passionate about with the people who actually want to read about this. And when you get that right, you become the go to person within your space. And the next lesson will dive into defining your ideal reader profile. Because once you know your niche, you need to know exactly who you're writing. 4. Discover Who Will Be Thrilled to Read Your Content: Lesson, we're going to talk about identifying your ideal customer profile or ICP, but for newsletters. Understanding your ICP is pivotal because it influences virtually every decision that you're going to make. From the type of content that you create to the way that you promote your newsletter and even the tone and style of your writing, why is it important to find your ICP? Well, your ICP is the foundation on which you build your entire newsletter. If you don't know who you're writing for, how will you know what to write? Or what tone to say then, or how would you possibly even sell to these people if you don't know who they are? Even what I'm saying to you right now revolves around my ICP. I know that if you're watching this, you most likely want to start a newsletter or maybe help clients start theirs, or you just want to learn about how to make money. The way, you're here to know what a newsletter is and how to create, grow and monetize one. Everything that I'm saying is tailored exactly to that. I'm not going to spend time telling you about the history of newsletters or even the newsletters that I find the most fun. Those things actually fall under the niche of newsletter. You can see how without understanding my ICP and focusing solely on the niche, I could be wasting countless hours on creating content that you don't care about. Understanding my ICP allows me to create content that you love. Pretty meta. By defining exactly who your ideal readers are, you can tailor your newsletter to their specific needs, interests, and preferences. This will make it more engaging and most importantly, valuable. Remember, we want value and that means solving problems. Specifically, in the world of newsletters, knowing your ICP is essential for growing your subscribers. Whether you're using social media, SEO or partnerships to get new subscribers, you need to know exactly who you're targeting and what they care about. Think about it. How will you possibly rank highly in Google searches if you have no idea what people are searching and you don't write your newsletter according to that demographic? Back to the example of this course. I know a lot of you will be landing here because you searched newsletter business on Utomi, so I better make my content relevant to that. As we've discussed in previous lessons, understanding your ICP will help you shape your newsletter content to meet the specific pain points, needs and desires of your audience. Emphasis on pain points, problem and value. Those are buzzwords that you should always be coming back to. This alignment leads to higher engagement rates, more word of mouth referrals, remember, virality and better retention. Basically, if you have a grasp on who your ICP is and what you're going to offer them, then you're not going to fall into one of the most common traps in content creation. People write first and then try to find an audience. However, the process should be the opposite. Understand an audience and their problems first and then create content that solves their problems. As we talked about before, the easiest way for you to do this is to target people who are like you. If you write to solve a problem that you've already solved for people like yourself, then you'll understand your audience so much better. Again, it's what is going on here. I also wanted to learn how to grow a successful audience email list or newsletter. I solve that problem for myself and now I can help others do the same. This helps even if you already have some subscribers. Defining your ICP will help you craft even more compelling content and attract more engaged readers. If you're strategic about your ICP, it can significantly impact your growth. Sometimes the difference between a newsletter that takes off and one that doesn't is about finding a demographic that isn't overwhelmed with content and it's actually eager to hear from someone who understands their interests. Now that we understand why it matters, let's actually break down how you can find your ideal newsletter reader. First, analyze your existing audience. If you have one so look at your current subscribers, especially those who engage with your emails or share your content. If you don't have a newsletter yet, you can look at your social media audience. If you don't have that either, then you can look at other people that you've helped in the past. And if you don't have that either, then you can go back to what we mentioned before. Target people like you who have the same problem that you've solved for yourself. What common characteristics do they have? What topics get the most responses or clicks? When talking to these people, what are the pain points that they usually mention? That's really going to help you craft messaging that will resonate with them. Next, you're going to want to conduct market research. So engage in both qualitative and quantitative research to understand your potential read. Do this with surveys and interviews. This is going to be asking your audience directly about the problems that they face. What content do they want to see and what problems do they need solved? Now, this is actually invaluable. By having conversations of this sort, you can see what people actually want. There's no guesswork. By asking the right questions, you'll get those very words that will signal that you understand their pain points. A question that I really like to ask is, if you were to search this on Google or YouTube, what would you type? It makes you understand in a nutshell what their pain point actually is. If you have no idea about where to find people, then a way that I've had a lot of success with is going to Facebook groups within my niche and reaching out to people there. But a quick disclaimer here, always lead with value and try to form connections. Don't just spam them with questions. Now, another approach is the MVP approach. As we discussed in the last lesson, testing a minimum viable version of your newsletter can really help you in validating your assumptions about your ICP. Now, number three, create detailed reader personas. From your data collected, draft detailed personas that represent your ideal readers. Here, you're going to want to include all of the demographic details, age, location, occupation, and behaviors, motivations, and interests. Some people even go as far as naming these personas and giving them backstories. I'm not sure how helpful that is, but it might be worth trying. Next, you want to stay updated on trends in your niche. So what's gaining traction and what are people searching for? Tools like Google Trends can help you assess the popularity of the core topics within your newsletter. Now, lastly, you want to leverage competitor insights. All this means is essentially just studying newsletters that are similar to yours. Who are they targeting and what's their tone, style, or content focus? They're successful, then there's a good chance that their audience could also be your audience. Honestly, this is one of the most effective strategies that you can use. I see so many aspiring creators that are fixated on the idea of being unique, but that's not always the best idea when you're first starting out. At first, just copy what's working. Now, once you've built an audience, you can then start innovating and creating your own spin. Like Salvador Dali said, good artists copy while great artists steel. Important disclaimer here. I'm not saying make content in a very generic niche. I'm just saying that you don't have to reinvent the wheel in terms of what articles to write or how often to write them, et cetera. You can copy those from successful newsletters who are targeting similar audiences. Now, to put this in perspective, what are the ICPs of some famous newsletters that are out there? First, we have Morning Brew. They target young professionals who want to stay informed about business and tech in a quick and engaging format. Next, we have international intrigue. They focus on global news with a personal touch, appealing to readers who want a more nuanced perspective. Lastly, we have the hustle. They aim at entrepreneurs and startup enthusiasts and they blend news with practical insights. Now it's your turn to define your own ICP. First, gather data. Look at your current audience, if any, and conduct research to understand your potential readers. Next, identify patterns. Spot common characteristics, interests, or problems that your potential readers face. Third, craft a persona. Draft a flexible but detailed persona of your ideal reader, and lastly, validate your persona. Test your assumptions by engaging with readers and collecting feedback as you grow. Remember, your ICP can and will change over time. Don't get stuck in trying to make it perfect. Just define it well enough to get started and refine it as you go. Now, let's just quickly recap what we've covered. Identifying your ideal newsletter reader isn't just an exercise. It's the foundation of your newsletters success. When you know exactly who you're writing for, you can create content that resonates, builds loyalty, and grows your subscriber lists. The next lesson, we're going to look at the most exciting part, what your newsletter is actually going to look like. This will be building the foundation of how you'll be monetizing your newsletter in the very near future. 5. Monetize Your Newsletter & Blog: So far we've found our newsletter niche, the topic that we're going to be writing and sharing value about. We've identified our ideal reader profile, the people who will be eager to read our newsletter and will keep coming back. Now it's time to decide on our newsletter offer. This is basically how we're going to monetize our newsletter. We're going to talk about this in quite a bit of detail later on, but it's important to have our foundations from the beginning. The absolute first thing that you need to decide goes back to what we first discussed. In our newsletter, we're going to be providing value. That means we're going to solve a problem. There are two types of problems that we can solve with content information problems or boredom problems. If you solve information problems, you provide educational content. If you solve boom problems, then you provide entertaining content. You could also solve problems physically through products. But even in that case, you'll still be providing educational content about the products themselves, even though you could be making revenue from affiliate marketing or whatever. The first thing that you need to decide is whether you educate or entertain. Because of newsletters being text based, most of the time you're going to be educating. But there's definitely space for entertaining within newsletters. You can just see the fact that almost every large video game company sends out a newsletter. Since most of you will be doing this and it's what I've done myself as well, for the most part, I'll be assuming that you're going to be working with educational content. But most of the things will still apply for entertainment. Just bear that in mind. That's your first decision. Your second decision is to decide whether your newsletter will be a part of your business or it will be your business. Let me explain. Newsletters can be quite effectively embedded as a part of a business's funnel. For example, let's say that you have a business where you coach people on how to compose music for an orchestra. You may post content on other platforms about it and when people are convinced that you can solve their problem, then they'll sign up for your paid program. In this model, your newsletter will be embedded into your funnel as another source of traffic where you post your content. This case, the beauty is that your emails will have a much higher engagement rate than any of your content that you'll post on social media. The way that this would work in this case is that people would find you through social media or SEO or whatever, and then they would sign up to your newsletter. There you suddenly stop relying on people and you build an asset where you own the lead instead of depending on these platforms. Then you'd be constantly providing value that's similar to your other social media platforms through your newsletter. Eventually, when people are overwhelmed with the amount of absolute value that you share, they'll sign up for your orchestra composing course. Say that this is the route that I recommend the most to have a product or service that you sell and have your newsletter market that thing. This is due to a variety of reasons. First, you get 100% of the profits when you sell your product or service. Secondly, and most importantly, you can compound and grow your own business through this method. When people buy your own product or service and they have a really good experience with it, then you can share it in your newsletter in an elegant way. This leads more people to sign up and more positive reviews and the snowball just keeps on growing. You can't quite do that with other ways of monetizing your newsletter. Now, you may be thinking that you don't have anything to set at the moment. And let me tell you, that's okay. But when you think about your newsletter, you should still be considering whether you're going to be selling some type of digital or physical product. If you're going the educational route and you're sharing your expertise on something, then it might make a lot of sense to sell some course, eBook or coaching. Even if you don't have something like that now, you should consider starting something like that as your audience grows. You could even start with something like weekly calls with nothing pre recorded. As you get experience delivering your course, you can then turn it into something that's recorded. My point here is that it's going to take a lot of effort to build an audience of newsletter subscribers with the strategies that we'll be discussing. You might as well squeeze the juices out of the audience by leveraging and scaling your own business. Now, if you don't want to go through the hassle of creating your own products or services, whether digital or physical, worry not. You can also monetize your newsletter in a bunch of other ways. Those ways are memberships, sponsorships and affiliate marketing. Memberships are straightforward. It's where people pay a monthly fee to be subscribed and have access to your email list. This is what newspapers have done for decades, but a lot of independent journalists or writers are doing this with the help of platforms like Substack, and we'll talk about that later on. Thing here is that your newsletter has to provide a certain amount of value and in a certain way for it to justify people buying it. In the context of news, it might make sense because you're paying for someone to distill the entire political ecosystem in an email that quickly summarizes it all with takes that you're interested in. However, if you're talking about other things, then it might be unlikely that many people will sign up for a membership. But it can be done. Sponsorships are basically what you see on YouTube videos all the time. It's where someone pays you to tell your audience that they should buy their product. It's basically someone renting your audience to sell their product. Now, these can definitely work really well in two scenarios. Number one, you have a really large audience, number two, you have the exact target audience of this sponsor. Now finally, we have affiliate links. Affiliate links is when you have links in your newsletter that takes someone to a product or service. When they buy, you get a commission. This is different from a sponsorship and that they don't pay you upfront and they don't come looking for you either. Instead, you go out of your way to become an affiliate for them. Again, if the products that you're recommending are actually an effective way of solving your audience's problems, then these can work really well. Although not every company has an affiliate program, but some companies make this super easy. For example, Amazon is one of those and will cover exactly how you can do that in a later lesson. That way, you can get affiliate links for a lot of Amazon's catalog. Understanding how you'll monetize your newsletter can help in creating content because it's another layer of understanding the tone and who you're targeting. If you're selling your own services, then you might want to share a lot of success stories with your audience. While if you're a tech reviewer, then people will trust your testimony on certain products and they'll buy them when you endorse them. Different approaches and a lot for you to think. But again, remember, you don't have to have it all figured out from the beginning. Just pick one and run with it and you can pivot in the future, perhaps most importantly, you don't have to pick just one. As your brand evolves, you can mix and match these in ways that make sense. Again, we'll be breaking down each way in detail in future lessons, but it's worth you having a good sense of this as you start. Now, in the next lesson, we'll talk about multi level offers. This lesson is taken from one of my marketing courses, but the concepts still apply if you're taking the route of using your newsletter as part of your business. So keep that in mind. 6. Create a Multilevel Offer for Your Content: So far, we've spoken about niching down, defining your order, and finding the specific customer that's right for your offer. These are all super powerful concepts that you need before getting started with any landing page. It's basic, it's the foundation. So what we're going to talk about now is something that's going to take your landing page conversion to the next level. Sure, we'll be talking about visual strategies and technical aspects of a landing page or funnel. This concept is something that guarantees that you're going to be squeezing the most out of each lead that visits your page. And what I'm talking about is having a multi level offer. What this is in simple terms is having a product or service at different price points. You might have one for free, one low ticket one for 999, one mid level one, which is in the hundreds and one high ticket offer, which is in the thousands. And you might have all sorts of reactions to this. Maybe it doesn't fit your product or service, or maybe you think that no one will pay thousands for your offer. But I urge you to look around at people who are making good money online. You'll see a plethora of entrepreneurs and creators that are structuring their businesses this way. If you take any online business Guru, for example, you'll see that they have a YouTube channel where they're giving away all this value for free. Then they probably have a cheap product, say, an eBook or a short course or something like that. That takes you to that next step of trust and compliance with this business entrepreneur or creator, where you not only invest a little more time in them, but also a little bit of money. Now, once you purchase this, they'll also have access to your email. And you'll notice how you'll start receiving sporadic yet strategic emails referencing some other more expensive offer that they provide. So this low ticket offer is sometimes replaced for a lead magnet, where you get that free ebook or course, but they get your email in return. And we'll cover that in a future lesson. So first, you watch their free stuff. Then you buy their small product, and then you're marketed for their mid ticket product. And there's two main scenarios in which you purchase this product or service. Number one, it's because you found a lot of value in that first one and you want more. This one is the ideal scenario. Or, number two, you didn't even really consume that first thing or you didn't find much value in it. But all the marketing strategies and success stories, et cetera, are making you feel like you need to buy this next one. Hopefully, you see the mechanisms at play here. You progressively become more invested in this brand, which makes you more willing to buy whatever product or service that they're selling. I do this myself, and you might be surprised to learn that you're in a part of my multi level offer right now, whether you like it or not. It's so metal, right? Basically, I posted this course on you to me and gave some lessons away for free as preview lessons on the course landing page. That's the first level. The second level is the low to mid ticket of purchasing this course. And congratulations. That's where you are. And then there are other levels where me and my agency can help you do all of the things that you learn in our courses. Hopefully, you start to see the immense potential that these offers have. In future lessons, I'll teach you how to integrate all of this into your landing page and funnel. But for now, let's break down each layer so you can see how you can implement this multi level offer into your business. First, here's a classic model in the online education industry. So that's whether you're a coach, an agency or an educator. It's having three offers, a do it yourself offer, a done with you offer, and a done for you offer. The do it yourself is either those free or Lotka offers, which usually consists of those E books, lead magnets, courses, those things. This is where you undoubtedly give value for. I recommend giving as much as possible. In this level, your prospects can learn your concepts, methods, et cetera, and really become familiarized with you and your brand. But they have to figure out how it applies to their life on their own. There's no direct feedback or support unless it's a great online course like this one. The Don with you offer is coaching, consulting, one on one, et cetera. It's basically the natural follow up where your client has access to your methods, but they also have your direct feedback and help that's tailored to their specific circumstance. Naturally, the price of this is significantly higher as you're now investing your time in giving your client much more valuable advice that is concrete and specific to them in their situation. This is what most people are selling in some capacity nowadays. If someone has expertise, then they'll probably find a way to deliver a done with you offer at some point. Or at least they should. And lastly, there's the done for you offer. This doesn't necessarily apply to all businesses, of course, but depending on what methods or discipline you teach, there might be some way that you can get your clients to pay you to do it all for them. For example, if you teach some sort of business model, then you could sell a service where you build the business for someone and sell it to. There's plenty of job shipping gurus that do something like this. If you've ever heard of an agency, that's also done for you. You pay a good price for someone to take care of a specific aspect of your business. So whether that's copyrighting, pay traffic, stuff like that. But what if you're not in the online education business? How does this concept of multi level offers apply to other business models? Let's take an ecommerce store, for example. Imagine you're selling skincare products. You can still apply the multi level offer strategy by creating a journey for your customers. For instance, you could offer a low cost facial cleanser that serves as an introduction to your brand. So once they've made that first purchase, you'll have their contact information, and you can follow up about a mid tier product like a skin care bundle that offers a toner, moisturizer, and serum. Something like that that complements their initial purchase, but also offers more value. And finally, for those who are really invested in your brand, you can offer a high ticket product like a personal skincare regimen, or even a subscription box that delivers curated products to the door every month. This provides ongoing value. Product based business, like software or tech, you might want to start off with a premium this is where users will get access to some basic features for free, and they can pay for the more premium model, which gives them access to even more features. Take, for example, a product management tool. The basic version could include core functionalities like task management and calendar integration. Then you can offer them a paid feature with enhanced features, such as advanced reporting, team collaboration tools, and integrations with other software as they start to see the value in your product. For your most dedicated users, you could offer an enterprise level solution. So that can include personalized support, advanced features like AI driven analytics, or maybe it's a team version that they can use for their entire organization. No matter what industry you're in, the principle remains the same. Start by giving value at a lower commitment level. Build trust and gradually guide your customers to your higher ticket offer. This not only increases the lifetime value of each customer, but it deepens their relationship with your brand. Of course, this is only the conceptual aspect of this. In future lessons, we'll move on to taking your customers through this journey from one level of your offer to another. 7. Writing 101: Create Elite Articles & Posts: Alright, at this point, you know what you're going to be writing about, you know who you're going to be writing for, and you have a general sense of how that is going to turn into good old Benjamins. Now in this lesson, I'm going to give you a crash course into content slash copywriting. So you can take your juicy, valuable expertise and turn them into magnetic newsletters. But first, a thought. And just a thought, this might be the kind of lesson that you might want to come back to as you're writing each one of your first newsletter articles. Okay, now, my first point is drafts. Please don't expect to sit down with some divine inspiration and then write for a few minutes and expect to have a world class article. I'm not sure how much writing you've done before, but that's how you get the infamous writer's block. When you sit down to write your article, the first thing that I recommend is for you to put all your thoughts on some blank document, so you can use that as out. Going to be much, much, much easier to write if you know where you're going. I personally like separating the writing into two processes, thinking on one side and then writing on the other cause I find it super hard to think about content and then think about writing and putting it all together in a concise way at the same time. So my first point about this is to outline. Now, once you have your outline, still don't expect for everything to come out seamlessly eloquent and perfect. Next step is to simply just write until your first draft is done. You might have seen a pretty viral master class ad where Neil Gaiman puts this way better than I could. So yeah, your first draft just has to exist. It's the editing of your first draft that's going to make this look beautiful and look like you knew what you were doing from the get go. Now, of course, this is what works for me, and it's what I recommend to you, but you're going to learn and you're going to experiment more as you continue to write. Some people like to edit as they go, I'm one of them, and others like to have a full page and then refine it until it's perfect. Either way, if you have any sort of writer's blog, don't think, write, and then you can edit afterwards. Now on to point number two, value. Okay, I know we've talked about value a couple times already, but I need this to burn into your mind for the rest of existence. Value is the single most important thing. And again, value is solving a problem either in the form of knowledge or boredom. So as we know, you either entertain or educate. And really, even your education should be entertaining, given that we live in an attention economy, and we'll speak more of that in a second. Point here is that as you edit and read through your newsletter, you should be asking yourself, is this adding value? It's really easy to become attached to your words and your writing. But put yourself in the shoes of your target audience and think, Do I care about this? Does this add to my experience? And does this make me love this newsletter? The key here is to just be brutally honest. If the answer is no to any of these, then you have to do some editing. Now, my third point ties right into this, and it's conciseness. Here's the thing. Everything on the Internet is fighting for your attention and time. You go on YouTube and you're bombarded with titles and thumbnails that are all designed to trigger your deepest instinctual reactions to make you click on them. Or you search something simple on Google, where you're seeing articles and sites that have optimized each and every one of their keywords to show up there, so you'll click. And in all of those, you have apps. Each and every one of these things are competing for your attention. So how do you win in such a competitive landscape? Well, you get to the gold and you do it quickly. Okay, you need to imagine that every single word that you write in your newsletter is costing you money. Assume that nobody cares about you, because as hard as it sounds, frankly, they don't easy for us to romanticize our business and our newsletter because we're thinking about it all the time, but other people just aren't, what would you write if you could only include the best of the best? This is where everything that we've talked about in the lesson so far comes together. You want to first write a draft. You then want to edit, and you want to remove Everything that doesn't add value. Thus, making your writing concise. You want to write in a niche where you'll have personal experience and you'll have an audience that will resonate with you. So the value that you give will be most appreciated, and you can be pumping out content in a nonstop fashion. This is genuinely what people who are killing it with content are doing. Give as much value as possible for free in the smallest amount of time. Like, look at Mr. Beast. Look at Alex Sermosi. There's no fluff there. So essentially, what this means is you should forget all conventionalism and formalism that you've learned no need for intros, no need for outtros. Now, this goes against what most of us have learned in school, but you don't have to write any sentences that are going to be prior to what you're actually going to tell them. And you probably don't need to write anything after what you told them, either. The beauty with something like a newsletter is to build a connection with your audience. So you want to sprinkle your personality throughout it so people like you and connect with you. But there are ways to do that without sacrificing value or conciseness. You can do so by telling stories that illustrate your point, for instance, or quick jokes that enhance entertainment value. As remember, even if it is super educational, people will still click away if they're bored to the other millions of things that are fighting for their attention. Now we're on to our fourth point, which is structuring your newsletter. Now, when it comes to structure, you want to keep it simple, clear, and engaging. People are bombarded with emails. So your goal in your newsletter is to make it easy to digest while still packing a punch. Now, how do you do that? Well, here's a structure that works like a charm. First, we got to look at the subject line. We'll cover these in the next lesson, but Bt people provoke them and get them in a click. Next, we have our opening hook. And for this, I recommend leading with a provocative sentence. This is something that we'll talk about in the subject line lesson, but often framing things in the negative is much more effective. For instance, instead of saying something like, this is how you lose weight, you'd say, This is how you stop being fat. Now, you might not want to say exactly that, but the point is that you want to tease what you're going to be talking about in a provocative way that gets them to keep reading. Next, we have our main content, and here, this is going to be about delivering the value. Whether it's solving a knowledge problem, which is education or solving a boredom problem, which is entertainment, make sure that every single word counts. If you're educating, then break down your ideas into simple and digestible points. If you're entertaining, then tell a quick story or share something relatable. Next, we have our call to action. Every single newsletter should have a purpose. What do you want your readers to do next? Click a link, sign up for something or share your newsletter. Be clear and direct, but just keep it in one sentence. Now, for our fifth piece here, which is kind of just a PS, include something that inspires curiosity and gives your audience a different way to interact and engage. Think of this as if your CTA didn't appeal to your audience, then here, you have this thing that you're insinuating that they can read or watch in a lighthearted way. For instance, how I feel about morning routines. And here, you're going to be slightly teasing some controversial take and inspiring curiosity. Now, you're going to want to keep your newsletters visually appealing. So what I mean by this is to use short paragraphs, bullet points, and bold text to emphasize key ideas. Nobody wants to just read a wall of text. Now, the sixth and last point is newsletter frequency. When I talk about any form of content, one of the most common questions that I get is, how often do I post? My answer? Well, it depends, but more often than you think. Now, one to two times a week is the sweet spot for most newsletters. It's frequent enough to stay top of mine, but not so frequent where you overwhelm your audience or burn yourself out by writing too much. But if your content is quick, valuable and entertaining, then doing these daily can work wonders. Just make sure that you're consistently delivering value because otherwise, people will unsubscribe faster than you can say unsubscribe. This actually works really great for some brands, especially if you're keeping it valuable and concise. For example, one of my clients actually had a daily newsletter for his dating business. Shared some kind of dating anecdote, hot take, or advice, but they kept it short. Now, you can use monthly newsletters if your content is more in depth and it takes time to create. But remember, with these, you're going to risk your audience forgetting about you, especially if you're not engaging with them on some other platform. But it could be the case that your audience expects longer, more detailed work from you, and that's fine. On YouTube channels that post every now and then, where either they'll post and there'll be very long form content, or whatever they're doing, they're working on a project that took a lot of time to create. For example, one of my favorite YouTubers, Mark Rober. He'll only post a couple times a year, but he's one of the most subscribed YouTube channels with 65 million subscribers. So this same concept applies here. You just have to see if it makes sense for you. Now we're moving on to the golden rule. The more valuable and concise that your newsletter is, the more that you can send it out without knowing people. If your readers are consistently getting value from your emails and they could read them in a second, then they'll actually look forward to hearing from you. Whether it's daily, weekly, or monthly, make sure that you're actually sticking to a schedule so your readers can know when they should expect something from you. This is key because it builds trust and it keeps your audience engaged. Now, to wrap it up, value and conciseness are the name of the game. People's inboxes are crowded, so the quicker that you get to the point and deliver value, the more successful your newsletter will be. And the next lesson we'll dive into how to draft attention grabbing subject lines to get your emails opened. I'll see you there. 8. Why Your Subject Lines Suck: Everyone is tired of you and your subject lines. Alright, that's a little dramatic, but I wanted to get your attention for this one. Let's talk about funneling for a second. Imagine you have the ultimate cold email. It's amazing and it converts great. 25% of the people who read the email schedule the call with you. I kid you not. That would be worth an invaluable amount for just about any company out there. Now, let's say you followed every other lesson in this course seamlessly, and you have a list of prospects that match your ideal client profile. But now let's say your emails only opened by about 1% of people. Out of 100, no one would end up scheduling call. And out of 1,000, probably only four people would end up scheduling that's what the ultimate cold email and perfect list. Hopefully, you see my point. Subject lines are crucial. It's the first step of the funneling process, and we want to make sure we have as many people from the list following every step of that funnel as possible. Basically, the more people that open the email, the higher chance of success. We want volume, and we can get that through solid, catchy and sticky subject lines. So what exactly makes a good subject line? Well, honestly, there's so many copywriting principles that can be pertinent here. I'm going to go over some of the most important ones for you right now. So let's go back to the beginning of this lesson. Everyone is tired of you and your subject lines. You felt attacked, thought I was funny, or wondered why you even bought this course in the first place. That line probably elicited some emotion within you. And that's exactly what we want. Copywriting is about getting those emotional reactions that get you to stick around for just a bit longer. And that's the goal of a subject line for it to elicit a response within you that sparks just enough curiosity for you to click that email. So what are these principles that I've been hinting at? Well, the beginning of the lesson embodies one of the principles of copywriting, which can be particularly useful. And that's framing something in the negative. So, for example, instead of saying something like five ways to get fit and healthy in the gym, we can reframe it in the negative and say five ways to stop being so fat. The first one we're used to, it's expected. It's how most of the world makes statements and even how most of the marketing world operates. It's a promise about something that's desired. However, the second one is triggering. It makes you see yourself in a light that you don't appreciate and want to change. I might even make you dislike whoever's saying that, but that's fine, because it elicits an emotional reaction and keeps your attention. The only goal is to get them to that next. We'll deal with everything there. And naturally, there are degrees to this. Depending on your audience and your message, you'll be able to take this to something a bit more extreme. But keep in mind, it's a fine line. If you go too aggressive, then the dislike might trump the curiosity and they won't end up opening your email. Here are some examples with varying degrees of aggression. Why your sales strategy isn't working. The real reason your business isn't growing. Stop losing customers like a dumbass. You're wasting money on nonsense. Are you making these mistakes on your ads? The next copywriting concept is something that you've probably already fell for, and you wouldn't believe what it is. Okay, I'm having a little too much fun. But the concept is sparking curiosity. Our goal is to get people to click and open the email, then sparking curiosity is one of the most effective things that we can do to get to that goal. But there are countless ways we can do this. So there are many ways we can do this, but the most obvious one is referring to something in the email, the content of the email in some appealing way. Things like you won't believe what we discovered. Statements like this make you curious as to what that discovery is. And if you believe that it's relevant to you, you're likely going to be opening that email. In this example, there's some sort of secret that no one else knows that you'll be a part of it if you open this little magic email. And this concept can be squeezed out more by emphasizing that secretive element. You can say something like what they don't tell you about running ads in 2024. Or if you want to combine it with that previous concept, you can say why your competitors are laughing. These kinds of subject lines make you want to figure out what all this fuss is about. And another way of doing this is by apparently giving something out for free. As you're going to see in our following lessons, one of my most successful subject lines was name, you're invited. People love stuff for free. And even though we're getting increasingly skeptical about people giving stuff away online for free, it's an email. It takes very little effort on their end to just click it. So there's no risk, and it's easy for them to do. Of course, make sure your content is at least somewhat congruit with that subject line. In my case, I invited my prospects to a 15 minute demo call. Lines. I was actually captivated by a subject line the other day myself. The subject line read all expensive paid Bali trip. I knew deep down I was falling for something, but I couldn't resist it. I had to open it. Of course, it ended up being this great case study of a woman's client who by following her method, was able to pay for her entire Bali trip with very few hours of work. Anyways, by the time I read through the email, which I did in its entirety, I completely forgot about that subject line. But of course, it was all congruit and I wasn't promised anything that I didn't get in that email. Alright, this is going to be your last chance to get this next concept because I'm going to get rid of this lesson soon. See what I did there? Anyways, you next concept is something everyone that's heard the word copywriting probably knows about, and that's urgency. No one likes missing out on great deals, offers or once in a lifetime opportunities. So if this is done right, it can be a very powerful tool. But of course, we all know about it. So it has to be done right, so it's not corny or cringe. And the easiest way to go about this is if the sense of urgency is coming from a real place. Instead of thinking, Oh, I'm going to use that copywriting technique that was taught to me in that course. Simply think, W is a good time in my sequence to highlight that this is urgent? Maybe you're actually running an offer or you only take on so many clients at once, so you only have one or two spots left. As you'll see in my next lessons, what I found the most success with was mentioning urgency in my last email when the sequence was about to be over and they were going to receive no more emails from me. So here are some examples of subject lines that inspire urgency just to get your brain juices flowing. Last Chance. Only a few hours left. Your invitation expires in 37 minutes. This is available to the first 50 respondents. Last call. Are you joining me? In parentheses to Spots Love. Do you have more time to waste? Name. All right. So we covered three colossal concepts and copywriting in this lesson. Framing in the negative, sparking curiosity and inspiring urgency. Sprinkling these concepts congruently in your subject lines will guarantee that you'll have more people opening your emails. And this is going to radically increase your chances of your lead going from a complete stranger to a client of yours. And remember that it's crucial to get these right because it's the first step of the 9. Case Study 1: Mozi Money Minute: So in these next two lessons, we're going to be going over two newsletters that I think are phenomenal. And the reason this is is because each one of these knows exactly who their specific target audience is. And because of this, they create a newsletter that speaks exactly to their target audiences needs, and therefore, it's perfect. Now, in this lesson, we're going to be going over Alex Hermosi's Mozi Money Minute. Now, if you don't already know, Alex Hermosi built his personal brand around business. He speaks about business, and he's built his entire brand around giving so much value away for free. His newsletter, Mosi Mine is an extension of this. He's constantly giving away so much value about business that is valuable to rising entrepreneurs and small business owners. But it doesn't just stop there because his expertise goes way further than just small business owners. And this is illustrated by the first newsletter we're going to be looking at from his. And the subject line to this one is what business are you really in? So if we're looking at his newsletter, right away, what we see is it's super simplistic. So right here from top to bottom, we see that each line is only about a sentence, and then it's a break. So it's super easy on the eyes and it's super digestible. One of the reasons or the entire reason why it's called Msy Money Minute is because as we can see here, as promised, money in under a minute. These newsletters are super digestible and they're supposed to be made to be read in under a minute because his target audience is busy business owners that don't have time to go through something that has so much content. So they're going to be getting in so many emails in their inboxes. So this newsletter should just be something that they're looking forward to that is going to be quick value to them. So let's look at the format of his newsletter. So his newsletters always start with words that he likes. Well, first line is always words I like, and it's going to be some little excerpt that is kind of going to give you an idea about what this newsletter is about. What he says here is what got you 0-1000000 isn't what's going to get you 10-30 million. Then he states a problem that many people and his target audience face. They're entrepreneurs, and he says, entrepreneurs get comfortable solving problems that they know how to solve. Then they wonder why they plateau. And then directly following this problem statement, he gives the solution. He gives why this is the case. He says, You're probably in a completely different business than you think. And then he's going to go ahead and explain this. Again, let me show you this is already in just a few sentence in his newsletter. So he identifies some big problem that many people in his niche face, and he's already getting into solving this within 5 seconds. So he gives a personal excerpt to you. He says, When I got into gyms, I thought I was in the fitness business, but I wasn't was in the marketing and sales business. And then he gives another example. When I got into supplements, I thought I was in the product business, but I wasn't was in the brand media and distribution business. And lastly, when I got into software, I thought I was in the marketing and sales business, but I wasn't. I was in the product business. So as you can see, there's a few things that he does here. First, he relates to his audience with three different things that he personally experienced. And then, secondly, by relating to his audience with these three separate experiences, it also asserts his expertise because he's saying that he was in the gym market, he was in the supplement market, and he was in the software market. And if this is something that his audience is receiving, then they know that he was successful and is currently successful all three of these fields. So this is further just kind of exemplifying his expertise. So he talks about his experience, and then he's going to zoom out into real world. Yet, again, this is a format that he follows in almost all of his newsletters. So he says, every industry has a big hairy problem. This is the thing that determines success. Then he gives an example for someone else that he knows. And he says that a gym owner friend started a cleaning business thinking it was like gyms, which is marketing and sales. And then it turns out cleaning is a recruiting and training business. And then once he flipped this mindset, he went from 40 k to 150 k in monthly revenue within so now after giving all of these examples, he's now going to give some actionable advice to his audience as to how they can fix this problem. So in this, he gives three potential solutions to his audience. Ask successful people in your industry, what's the hardest part of your business? Then look at the big companies in your space. What are they exceptional at? Then identify your constraint. So what's keeping you from doubling your revenue? Says, The moment that you identify what business you're really in, then everything changes. So then he just ends it off by saying, You stop wasting time on distractions, what I call the woman in the red dress, and you focus on breaking through the concrete wall in front of you. And then as he finishes all his newsletters, he says, as promised, money in under a minute. And then after giving this value, he then proceeds into his call to action. So he says, If you want to help identifying the real business you're in, so first, he talked about what this ailment was within this niche. So sometimes entrepreneurs don't understand the business that they're actually in. Then he gave this value, his personal experience with this, and then some actionable steps that his audience can take. So now after all of this, his call to action is going to be back in relation to what this newsletter was talking about. So he says that if you want to help identify the real business you're in, we just open spots for our next scaling workshop in Vegas. Now, this is his offer in his newsletters, this scaling workshop. So, the call to action right here is to just book a call. And it's super simple. As I said before, what I really love about this is how straightforward this Msy minute newsletter is. It's super simple. It's as promised, money under a minute. You can read this super quickly, and it's super digestible, and there's so much value packed in to such a small newsletter. Now we're going to look at one more of his newsletters to kind of solidify what he's going. This one is titled The competitor callback. So as we can see, it starts with the way he started the previous one and as he starts all of his with words he likes. So this one says, curiosity is stronger than desire when it comes to getting someone's attention. So again, what this does is kind of summarize what it is that he's going to be talking about in this newsletter. But secondly, what it does is kind of piques his reader's curiosity as to what it is to come, no pun intended in terms of this. So usually these opening statements, whether they'd be adages, phrases or whatever, they have some kind of mystery interpretation to them to where you're like, hm, what does he mean when he says this? Then he goes ahead and gets right into the content, and he says, I'm about to share the single most effective voicemail script I've ever found. And it's only 17 words long. After thousands of voicemails left over 15 years, nothing else comes close to its callback rate. I getting into the content, he's already said two sentences, and it's very straightforward as to what we can expect in this newsletter, and following this, we get right into the meat of it and he says, Here's the exact script. So we're not bustling around any weeds here and we're getting right to the chase. So, he gives this script, which is, in fact, only 17 words long. He gives a little example to kind of help his readers kind of imagine how it is going to be in action. And then he says, That's it. No explanation, no urgency, no value prop. So notice his language here. So he knows exactly who his readers are, and therefore, his language is tailored to that. He's not overly formal and he's casual. He knows exactly who he's talking to, so he doesn't have to put too much effort in making things fancy. He knows that he can get right to the point. Then he follows this and says why it works. He gives four reasons as to why his readers should understand the strengths that come from this voicemail. Then lastly, he follows this with some key pointers as to how they can actually implement this themselves. He makes sure to give some tips as to how they should actually go about using this so they know exactly how it is that they can get the most out of it. He says, name their direct competitor, keep your tone casual and matter of fact, and don't add anything else to the message and then be ready with your actual pitch when they call back. Then he finishes it all off under as promised, money under a minute. So although it was a different newsletter topic, he still prefaced this one and saying, If you want to help identifying the real business you're in, we just open spots for our next scaling workshop in Vegas. And then if we go back, we see him offer a different value preposition and saying, What more field tested sales tactics. We just open our spots for a next scaling workshop in Vegas. So although he's prefacing his ultimate call to action in different ways, at the end of the day, it all ends into the same thing in his scaling workshop. This just goes to show how much value that is going to be within his scaling workshop to his viewers. They see that every newsletter topic being something different, all is going to lead into this scaling workshop where he says to them that this is what I'm going to be covering. So although every single time they get so much value from these different topics, they know that in this scaling workshop, they're going to get all of this in just one or two days from him. Then lastly, we have this little PS message from him, and he says, You sales teams face when they realize 17 words just got more callbacks than their two minute voicemail scripts. Let's go ahead and click on this, and we have a little hosme. It says, You're not the only one cursed with knowledge. So as you can see, Al Chamozi isn't too serious in his newsletters. He's able to kind of poke fun and he's able to have some fun in writing this. And also, he doesn't have to be too formal. He's casual in his writing, and he knows who he's speaking to. So this influences a lot of the decisions that he makes within these newsletters. Are the things that I want you to take away from this. It's the fact that you don't have to have some kind of essay of a newsletter every single time to actually deliver value to your readers. And there's something to say about the format here, because as you can see, there's nothing here that's going to be too pretty where you're looking at it, like, Wow. He did a great job in making this look nice. But what you can't say is that it's hard to read, although it doesn't have any flashy kind of images or any kind of, like, dynamic stuff within it, it still is super easy to look at and super easy to kind of go from topic to topic and not lose where you're at and still get all the information from. Lastly, as I said before, it's important to truly understand your target audience because it's going to influence exactly the style in the way you're writing to them. Because here, if he were to write super formal and all of these newsletters, then they probably wouldn't connect and they wouldn't ultimately lead into his call to action converting very well. He knows who his target audience is and he writes to them knowing that. All right. Well, that's it for this lesson, and the next one, we're going to be going over a different newsletter and a different niche, international int. 10. Case Study 2: International Intrigue: Alright, so in the last lesson, we went over Alex Homose's Mosey Money minute. Now in this lesson, we're going to be looking at a completely different newsletter, and this one is going to be International intrigue. So International intrigue is a newsletter about global affairs. Their goal is to make complex international news accessible for a broad audience. So just from this description, we can kind of get an idea about what their target audience is. It's going to be a range of people that go from not very informed to probably quite informed about international affairs and kind of world politics. So it's these people that want to learn about what's going on in the world that don't want to spend too much time kind of sifting through all the news articles out there. Because International Intrigue is designed to be read in about 5 minutes. So let's go ahead and get right into it and I can show you what it's about. So here we go. Here is the beginning of the newsletter, and this one was subjected credit scores. So the first thing that we see is that they have a little bit of a breakdown right here in the beginning. They say, in today's edition, and they give one, two, and three. Give China's new social credit rules. The next section is going to be the Intrigue Jobs Board, and then lastly, they end with Art of the Day. What they usually do is in their first two sections, they're going to talk about this world politics. Then lastly, they're always going to have something of the day. It can be art of the day, it can be words of the day, they even have TV so, typically, international Intrigue is always going to start off with a message from one of their co founders that summarizes what this newsletter is going to be about. And all of their co founders are former diplomats. So this kind of gives you an idea of their expertise and experience in this. So here we have one of their co founders, John Fowler, giving a personal excerpt about the subject that they're going to be talking about. So he says, during my time in China, two issues consumed my work hours more than any others, the South China Sea and the social credit system. He follows this by giving a personal excerpt that you can see isn't going to be very formal or serious. And then as we continue, we see a kind of similar thing. He says, China's social credit system is a confusing beast. So as you can see, not the most formal. So then they go on to talk about this social credit system. And then we can go ahead and move down into the headline section. So this one is going to be more of kind of broad things that are happening in the world today. And in each one of these headline sections, they also have these hyperlinks that you can go ahead and click them and read more about what it is that they are talking about in each one of these headlines. So then they're going to move into what this newsletter is about in their top story and the focus of it. And they're going to go in depth into what it is this is. So in this section, they're talking about China's new social credit rules. So you can go ahead and read into this, and it's very succinct and very straightforward and easy for their readers to kind of comprehend. The language here isn't going to be too high level, and it's going to be something that could be understood by a broad audience. Again, this is, like I said before and who their target audience is. It is going to be a broad audience that is going to be interested in this world politics. So we can also look at the format of this. As you can see, each one of these paragraphs is no longer than two sentences. Each one of them is broken up, so they're very easy on the eyes and easy to read and digestible. So we can go ahead and scroll through this and we see bullet points, we see numbers, and it's all fractioned up, very easy to get down, and it's not going to be something that you're going to look at and be kind of overwhelmed and just not wanting to read at all. So after this, we have intrigues take. So they're going to give you here in this section about what's happening, and they try to keep it as unbiased as possible, and they're just trying to give you the facts. And then intrigues take, here, they're kind of trying to explain it to their audience, so they can kind of take these facts and process them into kind of a cohesive story that they can understand. Then as we scroll down, we have their meanwhile elsewhere section. So this is going to be something that's going to be in all of their newsletters, and it's just little kind of things that they have about news across the globe. So they'll have a little image here, and they'll have numbers associated with different parts of the world, different specific parts. And then below it, they're going to go ahead and give some kind of updates about what's happening. And just things that are going to be interesting to their readers. And as before, as we saw in the top headlines, we also have hyperlinks that are going to take us to the specific kind of articles to learn more. Now, next, we're going to go ahead and go into this is usually their promotion section. So here, they're not promoting any sponsors, but instead, they're talking about their own event. So they said Intrigue is hosting an event in DC Friday, April 11. So you can go ahead and register now. This is their call to action. And then below here, we have Intrigue Jobs Board, so this is just positions that they're offering within their company. And then lastly, we have their Art of the day. So as you can see, this is something that is kind of very light hearted and a short section. So as you can see, it's just not too much going on here. They're not going too deep into this because as I said, they're going to have always something of the day, and it's kind of just a nice little fun fact for their audience. And if you notice, what they do across this newsletter is called the Readers Intriguers. So this is a nice little thing about just building a community around their readers. And then, lastly, we have a daily poll. So as you can tell by the this is something that they do every single day to kind of engage their readers and give them something to kind of play along with. So right here, it says, Do you ever wish your country implemented a version of China's social credit system? And then you can give an answer here, and then in the next day, you'll then see, as you see here, yesterday's poll results. Then below the poll results, they'll also give excerpts from their readers that decided to write in along with their answers. Now let's go ahead and look at another newsletter from International Intrigue just so we can solidify the vibe and angle that international intrigue is going for. Now we're in this one and this one was subjected, all that glitters. And as we can see here, they have a partnership here. So this one's in partnership with foreign affairs, and as you click on it, it'll take you to their page. Again, we're going to start in the same way as before. In today's edition, it's going to give you the three sections. So three golden tales. Number two is diplomats on the move, and lastly, their day. TV of the day in this edition. So again, they're starting this one by calling their readers intriguers. So this is a nice touch that they add because everyone loves to be a part of something. They love being part of communities. This is something that is just inherent within humans. So kind of giving a name to their community is something that I think definitely helps them out. So in reading this, they're going to be talking about gold in this edition of International Tree. So we can go ahead and move down into the headlines. So same as it was before, we're going to have a couple of different headlines about things that are just going on in the world, and they're not necessarily going to be in relation to what this kind of overall theme of today's topic is going to be. So we're going to go ahead and move on. And here, because they're going to be working with this foreign affairs newsletter, they have this kind of promotion going on where I bet in foreign affairs, also are going to be promoting international intrigue. So this is kind of them just cross promoting and they're both going to be benefiting from this. So this is something that we also talk about in this course. If you can find someone that works in an adjacent niche to you, this is something that can be a great kind of strategy for you both because you're both going to be benefiting from each other's audiences. So as we move on from this, we're going to get into the top story, which is about. So they usually have some kind of image that is going to kind of depict what it is they're going to be discussing about. And then you can go ahead and scroll. And same thing as before, we can notice that this is all in a very digestible kind of format where there's never too much text in one little block. It's always going to be separated. We have little bullet points, and the language here isn't going to be very difficult or hard to understand. So let's go ahead and keep going down. And yet again, as we saw before, all of these facts that they just listed is then going to be followed by intrigues Take. So going to be their kind of interpretation of what they think their readers should do with all of this information and what it kind of means for the future. And yet again, we have this same section, which is meanwhile elsewhere, where they're going to pick five different places around the world, and they're going to give some kind of updates about their news and their government and the politics that are going on. And then as we move on from this, we have from our sponsors. So before in the last section in the last edition that I showed you, here in this section, they had something about a event that they were running. Now, here, instead of that, they're having word from their sponsors. So this is something that they are getting paid to put into their newsletter. As you can see, it's something that is a very small section. It's not taking up too much of this space, and it's very straightforward to the point and what it is that they're promoting about what it is that the sponsor is going to be offering their readers. And then it's followed by a little bit of extra intrigue, so extra information that they choose to include for their readers. And then we have TV of the day. As you can see, these little day things are usually just little random tidbits. Here, it's talking about a Russian language tutor once told us that to level up, you've got to turn on Russian radio or television in the background as you go about your day. But how we hear you ask? We were delighted to learn that recently about an online service called TV Garden, which somehow streams channels from all over the world on a single website. You just pick a country and you go down your preferred rabbit hole. So again, these are little tidbits that are going to be interesting and kind of fun for their readers that they know that they're going to enjoy. And then as before, we have our daily polls, which are going to be great for engaging their audience because who doesn't love answering a poll and sharing their own opinion about something. Just as before, we see yesterday's poll in which do you think there's a real chance that Trump will bomb Iran? We can see that the intrigue readers were quite split about this. We see from International Intrigue, which was different than Alex homose's Msy Minute, there's a few things to notice here and this one is much longer, but just like Mozi minute, it retains the same aspects of readability. Everything is kind of broken up in a way that when you're looking at it, it's not overwhelming. But here with International Intrigue and all this extra information that we don't see in Mosey Minute, we can see that there are a few ways that we want to kind of break up and organize our newsletter if it's going to be something that is going to be offering a lot of information. So we see here that they break it up into three separate parts, so their readers know what they're getting into and kind of how much is left as to when this is going to end. I think the thing that they do that is great is when they present facts, they do just that. They have a section where they just lay out the facts without any kind of opinion associated with then they have a separate part here and intrigues take, where they evaluate these and they tell their readers how they should look at this and what's serious, what isn't, what's concerning, or what's just fog. Another thing in international intrigue is that they use colors and they use images quite well. So they always have this little image here. They have emojis that are kind of plastered in to give it a little bit more life. Their headlines are always a specific blue, and the sections are all just kind of broken up in a nice easily digestible way. So there you have it. Here were two newsletters that you should use to influence how you're going to be creating yours. 11. Walkthrough: Build a Newsletter With Beehiiv: Alright, so as you can see, by the lesson title and what's on the screen right now, we are going to be going over Beehive Newsletter software. So beehive is a great place that you can go ahead and host your newsletter on. So if you have nothing started right now, beehive is a very easy place where you can go ahead and get your newsletter running. Alright, but let's go ahead and get right into it. Now, your first step is going to be going over to app.beehive.com. Now, I want to walk you through this process from the very beginning. Now, once you're going to get over to app beehive.com, you can just create a free account, and it's going to take you to a screen that looks a little bit like this after you answer a few of their questions. Now, the newsletter that I'm creating for us is going to be tailored tech tips. So once you create your account, beehive wastes no time. First off, what we have right here in our resources is we already have a homepage and a sign up page. So let's go ahead and copy that and paste it in as we can see, we already have a basic newsletter subscription sign up here with our account and beehive. Now, coming back in, if someone is going to subscribe to us, what we need to have is some newsletter articles to be able to send to them. So to do that, what we're going to do is come over here and click Start Writing. Now, within Beehive, they give us a few options. We can either start from a blank draft. So let's go ahead and click this and take a look at its UI. Right now, as you can see, it's a very basic kind of thing that we have here, but we have a title right here. We can put in a subtitle, and then right here, we have the body that we're able to go ahead and type in right here. But now, let's go ahead and go back into our templates. So now we are here in a template, and what we can look at is some QuickStart templates. So these are going to be based on the niche that you selected in creating your account. So I'm going to go ahead and click on this tech roundup because my newsletter is going to be tailored tech tips. So as we can see here, we have this basic template that it gave us. And honestly, just looking at this, it already looks quite great and quite professional. Right now, there isn't too much here, but if we wanted to have a kind of longer newsletter, it gives us this kind of template to be able to do so here. So as you can see, as you can see, there's going to be a couple different elements that we're able to use within this. So first, we see this template, which has a lot of things here. We have little separations that I want to bring your attention to. We have emojis, we have hyperlinks that we're able to put in. These ones are going to be good for either providing more context around something that you are talking about. So you can link in an article that has a little bit more context on the topic that you're discussing, or you can go ahead and hyperlink in some affiliate links for some products that you're discussing. So we also have some bullets here that we have. We can change the text color as we can see here. We can create boxes. Now, how do we do all of this? So, to be able to insert things like this, we can go anywhere. Let's actually go ahead and go back to our normal draft, where we have a blank slate to work with. So I'm going to go ahead and delete this post, and then I'm going to go into a blank draft to show you what we can do. So right here, say that we have a title. Let's say email market it. Now, all we have to do is either hit Backslash, and then we are given all of these things that we can go ahead and work with. So I can go ahead and put a content break. So as you can see, we have that from before. And these ones are honestly little elements that I love because they're super simple, but they make our newsletter look much more put together and organized and just professional. Now, instead of hitting the slash, what we can do is also just click this plus button. And yet again, we're given all of these options. So we can put a button, let's say, subscribe. We can put in a file attachment, so we can go ahead and drag this in. Now, this Builder, there's so much to it, and I can really dedicate so much time to this. But what is going to be more worth your time is going to be looking over the software as a whole. So as you can see here, we're able to write our newsletter. So let's go ahead and click Next, assuming that we already wrote some stuff. Now what we're able to do is select our email audience or our web audience. For the most part, with your newsletter, you're going to have your email audience that you're going to be sending it to. Right now, we have all free subscribers because as I'll show you later, we're also able to have a paid newsletter in the software. But right now we have all free subscribers that we're going to be sending this to, and then we can click Next. And then we're going to be able to do some kind of design and edits to how this is going to be presented in the email. So we have our subject line here. We have preview text that you know how it looks like in your inbox, where we're going to have that small text that's going to be under our subject line. And then we can add some extra kind of sharable options within our newsletter. So, now let's go ahead and click next. Now, with the web posts, if this is going to be something that you're going to be doing, you can go ahead and put in a thumbnail for each one of your posts. And then down here into the SEO settings, which is going to be and then down here to our SEO settings, which, again, this is going to be part of our web posting. This is where you're going to be putting in your keywords, your description, everything like this. And we can go ahead and click Review, and then we can go ahead and schedule when this is going to be sent out. So now let's go ahead and go back to our dashboard. So right now, what I just did, there was no subscribers for me to send it to. So what if we are kind of moving over to Beehive and we already have an existing audience, no matter where that came from? What we're able to do is import the list, so we can just go ahead and do an import of people's emails and their names associated with that and go ahead and have our starter kind of subscriber base right here on Beehive without having to send anyone that link where they have to sign up with their email. We can just directly import them in. So now go ahead and back out, and let's look at a little bit more things that we have here. So first thing that we see on our dashboard is that there are going to be some statistics that we have. So we have our active subscribers. So this is going to be people that are going to be subscribed and active to your newsletter. We have our open rate. So what percentage of the people that saw our email opened it, and then we have our click through rate. So next, let's go ahead and look at our audience. So next, let's go ahead and look at our audience tab. So we have subscribers right here. So as I showed you before, if you have a list already, you can go ahead and import it we have segments, so you can go ahead and create segments of your subscribers. So if you want to send specific things to a specific segment, you can do that. We have automations. These ones are going to be a little bit more complicated. And for the most part, if you're just going to be running your basic newsletter, this isn't going to be something that you're going to have to pay too much attention to. You can go ahead and look at it. Let's go ahead and name this automation test. And I can show you there's not too much to go in here, so it's not the most complicated thing, but for the most part, you're not going to be needing this if you're going to be just starting out. So let's go ahead now and exit back into this, and we're going to look next at our pols. So what you can do is create polls here and then integrate them within your newsletters. So just like I showed you in the prior lesson where we had pools by International Intrigue within their newsletters, we can do something similar here within beehive. And then similar to pools, we also have surveys. And then, lastly, we also have subscribed forms here. So these are essentially going to be forms that you're going to be creating here within beehive to then post on your other kind of socials or websites where people can then within your website, go ahead and sign up directly to your newsletter without having to leave it or go to the external link to then go sign up for this. Next, we have their Grow section. So the Growth section includes a couple different things here. So with your referral program, this is going to be a referral program for your audience. So you can go ahead and start some referral kind of goal, where you're going to have some referral links that you can send out to your subscribers to get other people in, and then you can set some kind of rewards for them. Now, next, we have recommendations, and this one is just going to be you shouting out other newsletters on beehive. And then we have magic links. Now, the magic link is going to work similar to your sign up link, except with a magic link, if this is going to be sent somewhere where the individual clicking it, where their email can automatically be pulled from the platform that they are selecting this link from, then they can automatically be signed up without having to manually insert their email themselves. It's going to be an automatic process. So these ones are pretty cool. And honestly, these ones are going to be a little bit more complimented to implement. But if you want to go ahead and look further into this, then I would say it might be worth it. And lastly, within the growth section, we also have boosts. So boosts are essentially ways that you can go ahead and advertise your own newsletter to other people within Beehive. So what you do is what this is describing here. You're going to set the price that you're willing to pay to acquire a new subscriber, and then you're going to determine your budget. And then other people on Beehive are then going to apply to basically ask you, can I put your newsletter in my newsletter and then get money from your referrals? It's kind of like a referral program. But because this is going to be something that you're going to be spending money on, you want to make sure that when people within Beehive are going to be applying to boost your newsletter, you want to make sure that their audience is similar enough to your audience where it is likely that those people that their audience are going to sign up to yours because you don't want to waste money when you don't need. You also want to make sure that their audience is big enough. Now onto the more fun part when we have monetization. What's nice about beehive in their advertisement section is that they have partners that essentially are going to go through all the newsletters on their platform and then offer them some advertisements. Right here, if you have a set up newsletter and you actually have subscribers, then you might see some available opportunities for companies within your niche that you're working with offering you to say, Hey, I'm going to give you some money for you to sponsor me within your newsletter. Then the next part, we have Boss, as I already covered here in the growth section. Now, lastly, within monetize, we have paid subscriptions. So this is going to be something that you have to upgrade for, but Beehive makes having a paid newsletter super easy, and it makes the transition between your free and paid readers very simple and kind of smooth. And also, what's great about their paid newsletter function is that you get to keep 100% of the money that people invest into paying for your newsletter. So if you make your newsletter $5 a month, then you will be getting $5 a month, and they're not going to take a cut of that at all. Now, lastly, for those design gurus out there, we have our website Builder. So this is going to be where people are going to be going to sign up for your newsletter and where your past newsletters can also be found if you choose to show that. Now, again, as it was the case in making that other newsletter post where I showed you all the functionality that they have, this is going to be a similar thing where we have so much here that we can go ahead and edit and change and choose to our liking and kind of make it our own brand here. But as you can see, as I showed you before, if we go ahead and copy this, even though we just created our account, this is actually a functioning website that anyone can go ahead and enter their email and subscribe to our newsletter, and then they're going to be here under our subscribers, under audience. Now, lastly, we have our analyzed section. So this one is just going to be giving us all the numbers that we want to see in regards to our newsletter readers. So if you have any links in, we'll be able to see that if we have any unique opens. So this is going to be opens of your newsletter from new subscribers. We have emails delivered post sent all the stats that are going to be super important for you optimizing your newsletter as time goes on. Similarly here, we have our Post report, which is going to be things that are going to be more detailed in relation to your post and then ClickSRport. Of course, this one can be something that is going to be helpful if say you have an affiliate program that you are trying to grow within your newsletter, then this one will be a very valuable section. So as you can see, beehive has so much to this software, and it honestly makes going ahead and starting your newsletter super easy and super lacking of friction. So if you've yet to take any action in actually starting your newsletter, then I'm here to tell you that now is the time to do so. If you haven't come over to app do beehive.com and actually create an account and you can actually take action that is going to give you this small step into making your newsletter an actual live thing. It's super simple and super fast. You can just come over here, put in a quick logo. Don't focus too much on the nitty gritty of all the design because when you haven't started, what you really want to do, what's really most important is just taking any action. It doesn't have to be the highest quality action. It just has to be action. So you can go ahead and change that little page and then come over here, start writing. Go ahead and choose a different default template and then you can create your first post really within 30 minutes. Once that's done, you can go ahead and grab your link and then send it to all of your family and friends for them to actually sign up and there you have it. You have your newsletter started. 12. The Ultimate Way to Grow Your Newsletter: Finally know what we're writing about, and we have a plan to go about doing so. Now it's time to start driving traffic to our newsletter. So the first piece of the pie is virality. For a product at business or newsletter to be viral, it essentially means that on average every user or reader brings more than one additional person. Or if you want to be fancy, it's viral coefficient should be greater than one. That leads to exponential growth, and it's one of the best systems of marketing that you can have if you implement it correctly. I also decided to talk about this before all the other systems because it's one of the core axioms of business. Something so good that people want to share it with their friends. And remember, we're picking very specific and specialized niches. So if what you're doing is good, it's likely that your readers will share. For instance, let's go back to our initial example. Imagine you're the only person that's writing about how to be a successful one arm juggler. If your content is actually valuable, a one arm juggler may consume it, love it, and share it with their local one arm juggling club. So, of course, the foundational premise here is to lead with value. Hey, I know I've been a chump about this, but I need you to have it as your mantra. This will probably be one of the last times I talk about it. Now, all niches have virality potential. There are some niches and activities that are social in nature where people want to share their findings with their friends. Now, others not so much. So, again, it's important to know what your niche and ICP are in order to use the right strategy. For instance, if you have a really good morning brief and you think of yourself as a well read person, then it's likely that you'll share this morning brief with other of your well read friends. On the other hand, if your niche is something like dating advice or weight loss, then it may be less likely for people to share your newsletter. Because it might be the case that they're ashamed to admit that they're following this sort of content. So you need to figure out whether this will be a main traffic fuel for your newsletter in the first place. Now, while value is the foundation for virality, your content has to make people want to share it. There are other strategies that we can use. One of the best strategies to increase virality is to make sharing as easy as possible. People are naturally lazy. Even if they love your content, they won't go out of their way to share it unless it's stupidly simple. So make sure that you add clear call to actions, CTAs that encourage your readers to share. Example, you could say something like, Enjoyed this, forward it to a friend who needs to hear this today. Or even better, give them a referral link right there in the email with a button that says share and earn rewards. This leads us to one of the best systems to create virality referral programs. You may have heard of Morning Brew's referral system. It's basically the go of newsletter referral programs. So here's how it. Every single subscriber gets a unique referral link. And the more that they get people to sign up, the more rewards they unlock, free exclusive newsletters, eBooks, swag, or shout outs. And trust me when I say, people will go wild trying to hit those referral milestones because let's be real. Who doesn't love free stuff. But you don't need to overcomplicate this. Even a simple system can work wonders. Example, you could reward readers who refer just one or two people with bonus content that only referrals can get access to. Now, this could be extra articles, videos, or some sort of lead magnet. And I'll have lessons where we'll go deep into that later. Also, you could give a shout out in your next newsletter to readers who refer the most people. Some people just love seeing their names on things. Just think about the people who donate millions to have their name on a building street or whatever. Other option is that you could create a community around your newsletter, like a private discord or a Facebook group. And obviously, only subscribers who refer someone can join. What's great about this is that it creates a sense of exclusivity and makes people want in. And don't underestimate communities like this. Depending on the niche, it might be exactly what people are looking for. Now, another great way to drive orality is through sharable content formats. Some formats just beg to be shared. Lists, quick tips, and actionable advice tend to get forwarded like crazy because they're easy to digest and valuable right away. Stories, personal anecdotes, and relatable experiences also have viral potential because people naturally want to share things that made them laugh, cry, or say, Oh, my God. That's so me. And visual content like infographics, memes, or charts can spread quite efficiently if they resonate with the right crowd. And even though newsletters are text based, you can still include sharable visuals that readers can screenshot and post on their social media. Lastly, let's talk about timing and trends. Now, jumping on trending topics is a surefire way to get your newsletter shared. When people are already buzzing about something, whether it's AI, a major sports event or the latest productivity hack, they're most likely to share content that adds to the conversation. So just be strategic. Don't jump on every trend because then you'll just look like you're trying too hard. Instead, you can ask yourself these few questions. Does this trend align with my niche? Can I offer a unique or expert perspective on it, and will my audience care about this? And when you hit that sweet spot valuable, timely and aligned with your niche, you increase your chances of people forwarding your newsletter to their friends, colleagues, and that one random cousin who's always looking for that next big thing. Whenever you see a new trend, just make it a habit to just think for a minute if you could give it a spin for your niche. If you don't see something that matches just about perfectly, then it's probably not worth it. But when you do, it could help your newsletter tremendously. So now let's recap. Vality is one of the most powerful ways to grow your newsletter because it creates exponential growth where each reader brings in more than one additional person. But for this to happen, your content has to be so valuable that people want to share it. And since we're focusing on specific niches, that should happen naturally if you deliver great content consistently. Not every niche has the same viral potential. So it's important to know your ICP and niche to determine if this will be a key growth channel for you. So if your niche is more private, then virality might not be your main driver, but you can still encourage sharing within trusted circles. And beyond value, make sharing effort lists with clear CTAs, like forward this to a friend or referral programs like morning Bruise where readers unlock rewards for sharing. And simple systems can work, too, like exclusive content or shoutout for top referrals. Also, structure your content in sharable formats, like quick tips, relatable stories, and visuals that people want to screenshot. Finally, leverage trends to boost sharing, but only if they align with your niche and let you provide a unique perspective. So essentially, just focus on what resonates with your audience, and you'll maximize the chances of your newsletter spreading like wildfire. Next up, we'll explore how to use social media to drive traffic to your newsletter reliably and systematically. 13. LinkedIn: The Easiest Social Media Platform for Newsletter Growth?: It's time to get into how to grow your newsletter through social media. Now, we're going to cover a lot of different ways to do this. And the truth is, you by no means need to use all of them. You really just need to figure out one or two that work consistently, and you'll have an evergreen pipeline of free das. So the first we're going to cover is LinkedN. LinkedIn is great for newsletters, because it's a text based platform, and in a way, there's a low barrier to entry. The nice thing about LinkedIn is that you can post your article directly on the platform as his. Instead of having to create content specific for the platform, as you'd have to with video based platforms, you can reuse your articles directly on LinkedIn. This is actually what Gary V does. And if you don't know Gary Vee, he's known for divulging business content. He speaks about business investments, et cetera. He's amassed a pretty decent following. If you go on his site, you'll see that one of the very first things there, if you scroll a little is his newsletter. This emphasizes how valuable a newsletter is because once again, it allows you to take ownership of the attention you get and become independent of platforms. If someone like Gary Vee is doing it, then we probably should, too. Okay, but we're here to talk about Linkedn. The thing that this man and people of this calibers are mastered at is repurposing content and repeating the same things in different formats. For example, Gary Vee just takes the articles from his newsletter and posts them directly on LinkedIn as they are. Take a look at this article about live shopping. It's basically just his newsletter entry from that. If we click on H LinktnPfile, what do we see? One of the main CTAs is View M Newsletter. Now, this CTA takes you to his LinkedIn newsletter, LinkedIn 360. So Gary Vee keeps his newsletter within LinkedIn itself. And of course, this has both pros and cons. The pros are there's less friction, which means a higher percentage of people will subscribe because they don't have to lead the platform. So the element of virality that we discussed is enhanced. Instead of having to rely on people to share the newsletter, if a post does well, then the platform will do all the work in sharing. LinkedIn is the only platform where this is the case, and that's because it's text based and lump form when compared to other text based platforms. Think of threads or X, where they're both text based, but they're short. The cons are that he doesn't quite have that platform independence that we've been discussing. Either way, he gets to repurpose his content and grow his newsletter on LinkedIn. Alright, now let's look at another goat. Alex Hermosi. If you don't know him, it's a similar kind of profile to Gary V. He posts content about growing your business and basically talks anything business related. But Hermosi's approach is slightly different. So let's break it down. Mozi uses text based platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter to test and validate ideas. He personally does all of his tweets in LinktnPost, and he usually keeps them really short and gets to the point. So given he posts on LinkedIn way more often than he sends out newsletters, LinkedIn serves him as a filter to see what content is really resonating with his audience. So this goes back to the very core principles that we discussed. You have to have a proper sense of your ICP and you have to constantly validate and evaluate the sense. Oh, when the time comes for him to write his newsletter, he has plenty of points, and he can see which ones did better than others and what he can use. So this lets him know what he should be making longer form content on at all times. Now, the value proposition for his newsletter is slightly different than his social media because he tends to post data that he's gathered from running his business. And every now and then in his LinknPost, he'll have a CTA to access his newsletter. Also, you'll notice his profile doesn't have a CTA like Gary Vis to go visit his newsletter, because instead, it's his what do you see when you click on this site? Immediately, a free lead magnet in exchange for your email. And I think we know what you'll be receiving in your inbox. So there are a bunch of strategies that you can use when using LinkedIn to grow your newsletter. And now let's recap what we talked about so it's clear. You can post your newsletter articles as articles, but then LinkedIn itself. You can then either direct that audience to sign up for your newsletter, more friction and more ownership, or you can direct them to sign up for your newsletter on LinkedIn, which is less friction and less ownership. Can use LinkedIn to make smaller posts to validate your ideas. And the ones that work best, you can then develop into full fledged articles or mix and match different ones that worked well. The beauty about this one is that in the process, you'll be growing your audience, which can then be directed to your newsletter. Now here's the absolute beauty about Linktn. Let's say you take your time to make a valuable and detailed post about someone with a larger audience. You may be highlighted something you love about their content, something you learn from them or something like that. And you tag them. If that person interacts with your post in some capacity, there's a pretty high likelihood that your post will benefit from that person's audience. Okay, let me tell you why. First, because of virality notions. You're speaking about someone who is better known, so it might be interesting to more people. Second, because of the algorithm. I believe if Linktn sees people with a larger following interact with your post, it then has a higher chances of being shown to others. But third and most important, because if they do interact, LinkedIn directly shows that to part of their audience. Now, this happens in two ways. One, this post can appear on the feet of the people who follow that person depending on how closely they follow. Two, one of the main things that you can brows through on a person's profile is their comments. So if people are browsing through someone's comments, they will see they commented on your post. Okay, now, you might think that this is silly or that not a lot of people do that, but let me show you. We spoke about Alex Hermosi. So this example is perfect. This guy, Jonathan, made a post about how he used to work with Alex Trmosi at SmothyKin. He tagged Hermosi and Hermosi commented, and the post received way more engagement than any of his other posts. Now, let's break down the post slightly. He didn't just say, I used to work with this stude. Instead, he said that. Cool, fun fact that hooks you. And then he shared a specific thing that he appreciates about Hermose' philosophy. It's something he resonates with, and then he gives his own take on it. And he shares Hemos video. That's also nice because you're showing the other person to your audience and it builds good faith. So here, this is what the formula would be. First, you want to hook with the tag, and then you want to highlight what you value about them or their philosophy or their content. Next, give your own take. And then you want to follow this with sharing something of theirs. And then finally, you want to put a CTA if it's appropriate. And notice that we just broke down a super brief post. However, this same formula could be used for an entire article for your newsletter. You could dedicate an entire article to highlighting something about someone's journey that either inspired you or taught you something. Great. Now, of course, this really depends on your niche, but the possibilities are endless. Now, if your niche revolves around some sort of cooking, then you can make a whole post about how this person's recipe is never miss. You can then mention your favorite and then share a video of theirs where they show themselves doing it, and you can end with your variation. So, LinkedIn is one of the most organic ways that you can grow your newsletter. It's a text based platform that allows for long form text. So you could quite literally just post your entire newsletter articles there. And, of course, there's a bunch of other pros that we examined. Now let's move on to other ways of growing your newsletter. 14. Blogs Are Not Dead in 2025!: Signed off last lesson saying that LinkedIn is one of the most organic ways to grow your newsletter as it's text base and allows for longer form. Now, in this lesson, we're going to talk about blocks. I know the word makes it sound like we're in 2012, but bear with me. I actually think that this is one of the most organic ways to tap into the sort of niche that I've taught you how to find. Because again, we're supposed to be filling a gap in the market with our newsletter and our business, no matter how small. Now, what that means is that there are people that are searching for solutions to that exact problem on Google. Remember my favorite interview question when interviewing people who match your ICP? Well, if you weren't paying attention, it was, what would you search on Google or YouTube if you had to solve this problem? Well, that's the beauty of blogs. If you do it right, you'll be getting all the traffic from SEL. When I say blogs, I don't mean anything cringeworthy. I'll show you how to build one in a bit, but it's simply a site where you can post your articles, optimize them for certain keywords, and then just enjoy the traffic. So the beauty of blogs is one of two. If they're your main traffic source, the good thing is that your SEO research will tell you exactly what's right about, which is whatever is related to your niche that there's a gap in the market for it. Alternatively, if you're already working on your newsletter regardless, then you can just repost your articles as they are on your blog and then do some minor tweaks to optimize for keywords. Just briefly, if you're not familiar, SEO stands for search engine optimization. Basically where you use certain softwares to determine what topics and keywords people are searching for, but there simply just hasn't been much written on it yet. It's basically a supply and demand thing. Ideally, you find a topic where there is extremely high demand, but no supply. There you win because you got to the gold first. However, those are extremely rare, but we don't care. We care about topics that are more specific to our expertise in niche. These are topics that will resonate with our audience deeply and will position us as an expert in the smaller. Even if it's a niche within a niche within a niche. So the way that I recommend you do this is with SEMRush. It's one of the best tools out there for SEO research. If you've never used it before, don't worry. It's pretty intuitive once you know what to look for. Now, let me just break down what you need to know. SEMRush is a platform that's designed to help you find the topics and keywords people are searching for on Google. Just think of it as a cheat sheet that shows you what your potential readers are already looking. Now, here's why this is so powerful. Instead of guessing what to write about, you know exactly what people need. And you can focus on topics with high demand but low competition, meaning that you have better chances of ranking highly on Google. Now, this is key if you want to get traffic with SEO, because in almost 70% of searches, people click on one of the top three results. So how do you actually use SEMRush? Well, we'll break it down in detail in another lesson, but here are the basics. We have the keyword research tool, and this is where you'll spend most of your time. You can start by typing a broad keyword related to your. Example, if your newsletter is about productivity, then type something like time management or productivity hacks. SEM Rush will show you a list of related keywords along with a couple of other things. First is search volume, and this is how many people search for this keyword each month. The next is keyword difficulty. This is how hard it is to rank on the first page of Google for that keyword. Another one we have is competition level. That's basically just how many other websites are targeting this keyword. Ideally, you want keywords with high search volume and low to medium difficulty. This means that there's demand, but there's not too much competition. You have a good shot at ranking high. Next, we have the keyword magic tool. Now, this tool gives you a ton of variations on your main keyword. For example, if you search productivity hacks, the keyword magic tool might show you productivity hacks for students, productivity hacks for entrepreneurs, morning productivity hacks, stuff like this. Now, these long tail keywords, which are just more specific phrases are often easier to rank for and they attract more targeted readers, which is exactly what you want for your newsletter. The third tool is the topic research tool. Now, this tool is perfect if you're unsure what you're going to write about. You just type in a general topic and then SEMRush will generate a list of related subtopics, headlines and questions that people are asking. Now, for example, if you type in remote work productivity, then you might see subtopics like how to stay productive while working from home, best productivity hacks for working at home, and avoiding burnout in remote work. Now, these are all potential articles that could bring traffic to your blog and new subscribers to your newsletter. And next, we have the competitor analysis tool. Now, this is where things get fun. SCM Rush basically lets you spy on your competitors to see what keywords they're ranking for and which articles are bringing them the most traffic. Now, if you see a competitor ranking for productivity hacks for students, but their article is basic or outdated, then you can write a better, more in depth version and steal their traffic. All you have to do is plug their website into SEM Rush's domain overview tool, and you'll see their top performing pages and keywords. Now for the last tool that we're going to talk about in this lesson, it's their content Gap analysis tool. This feature helps you find topics that your competitors aren't covering your golden opportunities. Enter a few competitor websites, and SEMRush will show you what keywords they're ranking for, but you're not. Even better, it shows keywords that have demand, but low competition. So you can fill that gap with your content. So how do you actually use these keywords to rank hi? Well, use the keyword with the highest potential as the main focus of your article. Then you can sprinkle related keywords throughout the article naturally and answer the exact question that people are searching for. This makes your content more relevant and it increases your chances of ranking on Google. Don't overthink SEO too much. Your first and primary goal is to provide value to your readers. SEO is just a way to help people find that value. Let's say your newsletter is about fitness or busy professionals. You use SEM Rush to search homewouts and discover that 15 minute homeworkouts for busy professionals has decent search volume and low competition. Boom, your next article. Then you can write a newsletter breaking down a quick 15 minute routine, post it to your blog, and then optimize it for that keyword. Now, anyone searching for that exact solution might find your blog. How do you actually use these keywords to rank highly? Here's the breakdown of where and how to include your keywords to maximize your chances of ranking on Google. Alright, first, we have our title tag, which is your page title. This little tag is one of the most important places to include your primary keywords because it's the first thing that both Google and users see. So your title, for example, could be 15 minute homeworkouts for busy professionals Get Fit Fast. Next, we have our meta description. This is a short description that appears under your page title in the search results. It should also include your primary keywords and be compelling enough to get users to click. For example, looking for quick and effective workouts. Discover 15 minute homewouts designed for busy professionals, simple, fast, and no equipment needed. Next we have our URL slug. The URL should be short, clean, and include your keyword. For example, it could be youblog.com slash 15 minute Homework outs. Next, we have our headings. You're going to want to use your primary keyword in your main heading, which is H one and then include variations in your subheadings, H two, H three. This structure makes your articles easy to read and it signals to Google what your content is about. Example, your H one could be 15 minute home workouts for busy professionals. Your H two could be why 15 minute workouts work, and your H three can be best exercises for quick home workouts. Now the first 100 words of your article. Google places an extra weight on keywords that appear in your early content. Make sure that your primary keyword is mentioned naturally within the first hundred words. For example, finding time to exercise can be challenging. But 50 minute home workouts are perfect for busy professionals. These quick routines help you stay fit without sacrificing hours at the gym. Okay, now on to the body of the article. Here you're going to want to sprinkle your primary keyword and related keywords throughout the article. But again, I say, do not overdo it. You really want to aim for a natural flow. Use related keywords like quick home workouts, no equipment workouts, and fast fitness routines to help Google understand the context. Another thing to mention here is image all text. Every image on your blog should have a descriptive all text that includes keywords where appropriate. This helps with both SEO and accessibility. For example, your all text could say man performing push ups during a 15 minute homewout. Next, we have internal and external links. You should link other articles to your blog to keep readers both engaged and to help search engines call your site. Now, another tactic you could do is include external links to authoritative websites. So this is like scientific studies or reputable fitness blogs, and this basically helps boost your credibility. So the search engines see this and reward you for it. Now for one that you're quite familiar with at this point, a call to action or a CTA. So at the end of your article, include a CTA encouraging readers to subscribe to your newsletter. This is great because it converts organic traffic into long term subscribers. Example of this could be want more fitness routines, subscribe to our newsletter and get new workout routines delivered to your inbox every single week. Now, last but not least, we have mobile optimization. You want to make sure that your blog is mobile friendly. Google prioritizes mobile optimized sites. So make sure that your blog looks great and loads quickly on all devices. This is all well and good, but this course isn't about building the best blog possible. It's about going a newsletter. So how do we convert all of this traffic into newsletter subscribers? Well, we have a few things to cover. First, CTAs. Make sure to have CTAs in every article that direct people to signing up to your newsletter. Second, the homepage. Your homepage should be something super concise and simple where basically the only thing to do there is sign up for your newsletter. Also, on that page, the value proposition should be crystal clear. For instance, on Alex mose's newsletter landing page, embedded among the info that you have to fill in, you have the value proposition. Promise, I only send my most valuable tactics. Otherwise, I won't send anything. Now, the third is lead magnets. Again, we'll talk about this in detail, but you can embed them all throughout your page. For instance, when someone goes to click Away, you can have a message pop up telling them that you can get your free guide. You can also add that without the lead magnet, but the conversion is going to be a little lower. You can also add the lead magnet to your landing page because this is probably going to increase conversion. All right. We covered a lot here. But blogs are one of the most efficient ways that you can grow your newsletter, because you can make sure to cover gaps in the market directly and drive traffic that way. All right. I'll see you in the next lesson. 15. Build a Keyword-Optimized Blog: This lesson, I want to walk you through the process of creating a blog, and we can have articles that are going to be posted there that are going to be the same things from our newsletter, and then we can also on our blog, have an option for people to sign up to our newsletter. Now, as you can see, we are here in Squarespace. I recommend, for the most part, using a website like Squarespace or WIC really just a Noe code website builder, just so you can get started really quickly. So let's go ahead and get started and actually creating this blog. So like I told you, we have so many templates at our disposal here. So what I want to select first is going to be a blog. So we can go through and look at whatever template kind of matches our kind of vibe and what we want to go for. So, I already looked through these earlier, and one that I personally liked was Fillmore, right here, because it was very simple and it had everything that we needed for the most part. So as you can see, as I selected this, we can change the color presets here to be whatever we want. I'm going to go ahead and stick with this default sample color right here, and I'm going to click Start with this design. Okay, so now I'm going to act like This is my blog on tech tips. So I'm going to go ahead and change this site title, and I'm going to type in Tailored tech tips. And then I'm going to go ahead and get rid of this login button, and I'll keep these social links. So I would actually go ahead and link everything that would be related to my blog here. And we can go ahead and get rid of this navigation bar right here because we don't need all that because we're going to keep everything in one page. So now we have all of the navigation pages taken off to it just being our blog. Now, what I would also add is probably one section above all of our blog articles. That is just going to describe what it is that I do on this blog. I can go ahead and just select edit here, and then I can go ahead and come here and click Add section. And then I'll make sure I have this about section selected. And then I can just do a simple simple kind of description one like here. I can go ahead and grab this to make it either bigger or smaller. Okay, so now that we have this section here, the first thing that I'm going to want to do here is go ahead and edit this picture here to make it something more related to Tech. So I can go ahead here and come click Replace, and then I can browse stock images, and then I'll just type in here Tech and we can scroll through and see if there's anything that we like. Personally, I think this first one here of the globe from NASA works pretty well. So I'm going to have this one upload, and in just a few seconds, we see this coming to life. I'm now going to make this a little bit smaller, so there is no text overlap here because as we can see, this black text on this black image doesn't work well. And then I can go ahead and drag this. So now we have this little intro section, and now I'm going to just go ahead and do a quick little intro about what Tailored Tech tips is about. Okay, so I just went ahead and added these two little parts right here. Tech made simple innovation made useful. And then from smart tools to time saving hacks, Taylor Tech Tips helps you stay ahead one tip at a time. So let's go ahead and readjust these right now. And now we can go ahead and move on to our blog section here. So this is going to be where all of our articles are going to be available. So right now, as you can see, there's about, let's say, 14 here. So I can go ahead and click this section and click Edit. We get to see a few things here. We can adjust the layout. Right now, it's a basic grid blog, but as you can see, as I go down here, I can go ahead and adjust how they are presented on the page. So that is the side by side. This one is a single column. So you can see this one scrolls for a while because there are a lot of blog posts here. We can do the masonry blog. So as you can see with these ones, it seems like they are posted in a similar way as the first one. We see that there is a little bit of an error here in the formatting. But let's go ahead and look at the next one, which is going to be alternating side by side blog. So I'm just going to go ahead and stick with the basic grid blog. I think this one works the best. But also what I can do on this is increase the column numbers. So instead of having to scroll so much, you can now have all of this in a more condensed format where everything is going to be seen. So this is going to be kind of useful as you're going to be growing your blog. So instead of having to have people scroll down for a very long time on your website, you can increase these columns that are going to make them more accessible and more easy to see. So I'm going to go ahead and keep with this kind of layout that we have here. So now we have our introsection, which is going to be kind of introducing people to what we are about. Then following this, we're going to have all of our blogs. And lastly, we are going to have a call to action to signing up to our newsletter. So you can see how all of this kind of comes together. So depending on the software or however it is that you're going to be running your newsletter, you can have this call to action in a few different ways. Firstly, you can have it here within Squarespace. And once they put their email here and they click Sign Up, it's going to be collected within Squarespace that you can then import to whatever software that you're using to send out your newsletter. Now, alternatively, if you're using a software like Beehive, as we discussed earlier in this course, you can just go ahead and get a code embed directly from Beehive and then put it here directly into your blog, and then they can sign up here, and then you don't have to do any extra work from taking them from Squarespace and then importing them into Beehive. Okay. So right now, everything is looking pretty good. I'm going to go ahead and remove this bottom section. And what we're going to do is edit our posts right here. So I'm going to click Save and I'm going to click Manage Posts next. So now we get to see that there is a blog section within Squarespace. So right now we have all of these blogs in here. So I want to go ahead and select all but three of them. So I'm going to unselect these top three, and I'm just going to click Delete. So in terms of actually adding blogs here, as you can see, it's pretty simple. We have this blog section that we're in, and we can just click this plus Br. And then we can go ahead and write our blog directly within Squarespace. So whenever they click on it on our main page, it's going to take them directly here to this blog that we created. So let's go ahead and put in an example article that we would write on Tailored Tech Tips blog. So let's actually take this process of how we'd actually go about doing this if I were having this blog myself. So my first step is going to be going into SEMRush, how we discussed last lesson, right? So I'm going to go ahead and go into SEMRush right now. Okay, so now we are here within SEMRush. And what I want to do is go over here into the keyword magic tool. So my keyword is going to be tech, and now I'm going to go ahead and select this low hanging fruit and seeing what we have here to write about. So as we can see here, we're getting these first one is going to be college games here. So Georgia Tech versus Georgia. And this is all stuff that we do not want here. So I'm going to go ahead and make this a little bit more specific and put in technology. And now we're looking here, and I'm still not seeing any kind of keywords that are going to be standing out to me, it's like this being a potential blog writing opportunity. So let's go ahead and do technology. Alright, so as we can see right here, we have AI and autonomous vehicle technology. So this one, the volume here is quite low. So I probably would want to find something that is going to be a little bit higher value, but our difficulty rating isn't terrible. So I'm going to go ahead and use this keyword, and I'll select it. And we can think about how we can go about writing something like this. So now that we're here in the topic, what we can do is go ahead and scroll down and we can look at this SRP analysis, and we can see what has been written about this. So right now we have this featured snippet and we can click it and we can look at what it's talking about. So now, because I'm not educated in what this is, what I'm going to be talking about in this blog, what I would do is go ahead and look at these links. As I showed you before, you can just click these little buttons here to then take you to the related articles, and I would just go ahead and read to get my knowledge up about these specific things. And then once I feel like I have a relatively good grasp on what this content is about, then I can think about how I want to frame it in my own kind of angle to give my own value about the specific topic. Okay, so now that I decided that this is going to be what I'm going to have a blog on on this AI and autonomous vehicle technology, I can now go back to my square space, and I can go ahead and create my title using this keyword here. So we're going to do something similar to what this blog is doing and doing this play on words, but we're also going to have this specific keyword in the play as well. So I can go ahead and put say how AI is driving the future of autonomical technology. Okay, so here we go. This is our title, how AI is driving the future of autonomous vehicle technology. So as you can see, this uses the keyword that we were focused on here, AI and autonomous vehicle technology. Now here we see AI autonomous vehicle technology. But since we're not writing just for robots and this SEO, we're writing for people. We have this kind of intriguing title here that is also a play on words. We're seeing how AI is driving the future of autonomous vehicle technology. So this driving is a little play on words. So then I'd follow a similar strategy in actually creating the content of this to merge in the keywords into what I'm going to be writing about. But for now, to keep this in time sake, we are going to go ahead and stick with this right here. It's just going to be the title, and I'm going to click Publish here. So now that we have this published, we see it here in our blog overview section. So from this point, what I want to do is add in a picture, so this is going to be something that would be visible on our homepage. So click here, click Settings, and then we can click Search for Images. Same thing as before, I'm going to go over to stock images. And here, I'll type in car. And I can go ahead and just select this first one right here. It looks like a futuristic car here, so I think it works pretty well. Now I'll click Save. And then what we are going to do is go back to our website homepage. So now we are going to scroll down. And as you can see, we have our title right here. So if I were to have some text, then we would be seeing it below here as you see these as well. But automatically, within Squarespace, we have these read more buttons that they're able to then click, and it's going to take them directly to this article. So now I actually want to go back and do a little bit more of tweaking. And now that we see how this is kind of formatted along with the others, there's one thing that I would probably also keep in mind is that we want to have something that's going to be consistent. And right now, as we see this, it doesn't look very good among these other two now, given these ones are not going to be articles that I created, I would get rid of all of these. But just looking at this one standing alone right here, this is not going to be enough space to kind of showcase off this title in a way that's going to look nice. So from this point, what I would do is come up here to edit, and then I'll select this section. I'll click Edit. And then I would go back around and play with the layout. Maybe I would go ahead and do this alternating side by side. So we have a lot more space here where our kind of title doesn't look like it's crammed up and it's just not looking good. But now that we have this one blog here, I'm going to go ahead and get rid of these three that I did not create, and we're going to delete all of them. So now we just have this one blog, and then it leads directly into signing up for our newsletter. So I'm going to go ahead and click Edit here. We're going to change this to tailored Tech Tips newsletter. And then we can keep this section the same. And just as I did before, I'm going to go ahead and change this background image to something that is going to be a little bit more relevant. So I can cohere, click Replace. I can look for stock images and even stock backgrounds, and we can just scroll through until we find something that is to our liking. So here we go. We have this new background, and now what I can also do is look at this mobile view. So we want to make sure that everything is looking good and well for its specific kind of view. So here with our mobile view, what I would probably want to do with this text is for sure, make it a little bit smaller and make it fit the screen a little bit less cramped as it is right now. So I can go ahead and put this up here. Maybe I'd want to put it down a little bit. I can make the text. I can keep it sure on this one, and then I probably would want to add a little bit more space to give some breathing room in this section, something like this, and then I can drag this down. Something like this gives it just a little bit more breathing room. If this was something that I was actually going to go ahead and publish, then I'd probably put in a little bit more effort here into making it look just a little bit more pretty. But as we can scroll down, we can see our blog right here. One of our articles, and then it goes directly into our newsletter sign up. This mobile view, I think, for the most part, looks all right. So I can go ahead and click Save. So now we have our website pretty much complete. So we can go ahead and click Save now and then exit. Now from this point, what I can do is go ahead and click this preview button. To kind of see it in a full screen format as people would on a desktop. So I think this is very minimal, and it's simple. So you don't really have to put in too much effort in making your blog look very fancy. A minimal look can go a long way. Now, if this was actually going to be my blog, I probably would put a little bit more effort to making things look just a little bit better with some tweaks, probably maybe better imagery or better copy here. But this was really just to show you how quick and easy it is for you to go ahead and set up your own blog in just a few minutes. Again, if you're going to be writing your newsletters and you're going to be sending them out to your audience, there's no reason as to why you wouldn't have your own blog that is going to be compiling all your newsletters so you can get more audience and more attention to your content. So once you have everything all good and if you're using swearspace, then you can go ahead and come over here into your setup guide. And then you can get a custom domain if you don't already have one. For me, example, I would probably put Taylor techtips.com, and just a wild guess, I assume that nobody has that claimed. And then from this point, you can go ahead and just click publish your site. I'm going through square space as you guys would if you just created your own account minutes ago. So in publishing the site, you would have to upgrade to do so. And it's nothing that's too expensive here to actually have your site in own domain. I think it's about $16 right now. But there you have it. This is just how easy it is to go ahead and create your own plog. 16. Use SEMRush to Find Top Keywords: Now it's time to discuss how we can get our newsletters and blogs to be seen organically through search engines. Now, the process that makes our content discoverable is called SEO. Now, we went over this in the course. SEO stands for search engine optimization, and one of the key ways that we can do this is going to be with our keywords and the types of articles that we are going to be writing. Now, SEMRush is probably the best software out there that has everything that we need to do when it comes to optimizing for SEO in our newsletters. And now we are in the software. So as you can see, right here at the top, it's smrush.com. Now, if I'm being frank, I could honestly probably create an entire course that is solely dedicated to SMR. We have so many tools here that do a whole lot of different things. Now, one thing that I definitely recommend to you when you're coming into SEMRush is having a blog or a newsletter website that's already created. Now, so much of the benefit that we get from using SEMRush is going to be coming from actually going ahead and putting in our own domain here, our own website. Because what it does is it analyzes it with everything that has to do with SEO. As you can see right here, these are all going to be relevant kind of subjects that are going to kind of help us in improving our own website SEO ranking. So SEO is a huge umbrella. There is so much to cover here in terms of optimizing for SEO. So what I want to do in this lesson is kind of give you a quick overview that covers the most important parts for you. Now, starting with this analysis, the first thing of SEMRush that you should definitely go ahead and do if you have a website or if you don't have a website is go ahead and go over to the keyword research section. So let's go ahead and go into the keyword overview. So as you can see we don't have to actually put in our domain to search in for any keywords. We can right here below, put in our website if we want, and then it'll tell us kind of how our keywords that we're entering are going to relate to our website in terms of difficulty and stats like this. Now, these keywords are the top of the iceberg when it comes to SEO, because keywords kind of lay the foundation. It's the easiest thing for you to go ahead and implement that can also have the biggest impact on your ranking. So let's go ahead and put in AI as a keyword. So as we can see with AI, we have a very high search volume. This is 1 million within the US alone, but the keyword difficulty is 100%. So this is the hardest kind of keyword that we could potentially rank for. So what we want to use SEMRush for is to kind of take this broad keyword of AI and give us some ideas, as you can see here, for some more specific things that aren't going to be as difficult to go ahead and enter. So let's go ahead and look at keyword variations here. We're going to view all of these keywords. So now we're here in this view of looking of all these keywords that are related to AI, and we see a bunch of different metrics here that I'm now going to explain. First, we have intent. Now, on SEMRush, there is four different intent categories. Now, as we can see here, these four are listed right here. There's informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional. So transactional is basically going to be those searches that people are going to be putting in with the intent of buying. Now, commercial is going to be the kind of a step before transactional, where they want to kind of go ahead and learn about the things or services that they hope to buy, maybe at a future date, but that exact search that they're putting in, which is a commercial search intent is not going to be something that will lead directly to a purchase as transactional now, navigational is essentially going to be a search that helps an individual get to a website. So this can be Subaru website, for example. And lastly, we have informational, which is just going to be how individuals are going to get more information on a topic. So this can be just a very broad question of what's a good place to eat. So this can be a very broad search, something like what's a good car. Now that we have these intents down, let's go ahead and come back here. And next we're going to look at volume. So volume is essentially as we see here, it's the average number of monthly searches for a keyword over the past year. So looking at this top keyword right here, character AI, we see that there's been an average of about 3,350,000 times that character AI has been searched every single month within the past year. Next, we have KD, which stands for keyword difficulty. So this one is pretty straightforward. The higher the number, the harder it is for you to rank highly within this specific topic. So right now, looking at volume and KD keyword difficulty, what we want to look for is something that has a very high volume, but also a low keyword difficulty. So it's not going to be as difficult for us to rank highly for these. So looking at this, we have this volume now put from highest to lowest. So this is a good way for you to have this structured because as I said before, we want to find things that have very high search volume. Then what I would do is probably just go ahead and look through this keyword difficulty and scroll down and find ones that look viable that we could possibly create content on that can then boost us in that specific topic. I can go ahead and scroll down here and I can see different keyword difficulties with their respective volume. Now what I can also do is come up here and select this filter, which is low hanging fruit, and these ones are usually just trending opportunities that are probably going to be good for you to go ahead and get in because they're not going to be too difficult to go ahead and capitalize on. Now, in the realm of AI, what tends to have pretty good keyword difficulty with respective high volume is usually specific AI generators. So as we can see here, we have a few. We have MUA. We have novel AI, brainy, we have runway down here, and these ones are all going to be specific softwares. So if I had a newsletter that was specifically going to be dedicated to AI and tech in general, what I could do is create newsletter topics on each one of these AI softwares and then have them on my blog and create more in depth articles on them. And this will likely have me ranked very high when people search these things. So once you have these decided and you've gotten some insight from here, next, what I would recommend you to do is come up here to the competitive research tab and then come here into Keyword Gap. Now, the way that we use keyword Gap is going to be putting in our website versus our competitors website. And we can go ahead and add up to four of our competitors, and we can see where they are ranking on specific keywords where we aren't. So those are going to be some spaces that we need to go ahead and fill, hence the name of the section, Keyword G. So once you do this and you have a good set of keywords that you want to go ahead and create some content on, the next tool that I want to show you is going to be down here, we're going to go over into content marketing, and then we're going to go with SEO writing Assistant. So we can go ahead and select Analyze my text. Then once you have your keywords and you've decided that you're going to be making an article around a specific set of keywords, you can then put in that article 0R newsletter or blog post into here, and then it's going to tell you how well you rank for SEO. I'm going to go ahead and put Runway AI. Then I can just go ahead and click Get recommendations. On this point, I can go ahead and type in a few kind of sentences that are going to be summarizing what I'm going to be speaking about, and then I can go ahead and click Compose. And then SEMRush is going to kind of expand it into something that is going to be very SEO optimized. Now, the next thing to discuss when it comes to SEO is going to be backlinks. So backlinks is obviously as it sounds, it's going to be on the back end of our website. Binks and SEO work in two separate ways. First, you're going to have backlinks that are going to be on your website that are going to be linking to websites outside of your website. So this, for example, can be you talking about some product and you have an affiliate link attached to a word as a hyperlink. And then people can select it, and then they're going to be taken off of your page. So here, in this context, what we want to make sure of and what we want to make sure that is okay, so our SEO is not going to be harmed by this is that we want to make sure all of the links that we have within our website are not broken and they in fact work. So if we have any broken links within our website, then this is going to harm our SEO ranking. The search engines know this. They know if we have broken or correct links within our website. Now, another way to increase your ranking based on these back links is for you to go ahead and link reputable sources. So say that you have a newsletter that is talking about politics. You want to make sure that when you're going to be discussing things, if you can link to some reputable news organization in context of whatever it is that you are discussing to maybe give some more information about a specific part of your newsletter, then you should go ahead and do that because this will give you a little bit more credibility when these SEO engines are going to be scraping your website. On the other side of a coin of a back link is going to be when other websites are going to be linking to your website. So again, in these cases, we want to make sure that all of those links that are going to be linking to your website are going to be correct and not broken links. Depending on when people are referencing your website or newsletter or blog, these are going to be a little bit harder to kind of track and kind of maintain because sometimes you don't have control over the people that are going to be talking about your website. But if you can control this, then you want to make sure that these are all going to be good links and nothing is going to be broken. Now, do this, to check this here, we have a couple ways to do this. Here in Link Building, we have Blink analytics. So of course, here, what you're going to have to do is go ahead and put in your own website. Let's go ahead and check this world wildlife.org, and we can go ahead and see what it is that is here. So the backlinks from May 2024 to April 2025 here. We can see that across time, they have decreased significantly. Now, I can't say the exact reason for this as to why this happened, but one thing that I can say is that looking here at their authority score, you can see that although they've had this decrease, it doesn't seem to have impacted their authority score, so kind of how they rank in terms of their backlinks in SEO. So their authority score has remained consistent. So the decrease in backlinks hasn't been a problem. So this goes to show that the more back links that you have on your website doesn't necessarily mean the higher you're going to rank in SEO. So if this is something that you're concerned about, I wouldn't be too stressed out about for me, I would just recommend that all the links that you have that are going to be in your control to make sure that all of them are going to be not broken and they're all going to be functional. So now, lastly, what I want to show you and bring your attention to is to go ahead and put your domain within this domain overview. Right now, we see that it's stuck with this world wildlife.org, and we get to see so much information here. Now, typically, if your website isn't going to be as large as this one, it's immediately going to give you some tips that you can go ahead and implement to increase your SEO score. And these ones are always going to be good things for you to actually keep in mind and take action on because oftentimes they are going to be simple little tweaks that you can make to your website that are going to pay off in big dividends. Now, speaking of paying off in these dividends, we can also see the effects of all of our changes right here within SEMRush. So right here with worldwildlife.org, we can look at this organic traffic in comparison to this paid traffic. So it doesn't matter if you're only going to be working with paid traffic or if you're only going to be working with organic traffic. What we can see regardless is the number of traffic that is going to be given to our website. So how many people are going to be visiting our website at any given date and time. So over time, as you make these small tweaks and adjustments, you can come back and you can look at this traffic data and you can see what's working and what's not and what's working, you can double down on and what isn't can just forget. Now, like I told you in the beginning of this lesson, SEMRush has so much stuff that we can go over and we can analyze. Now, what I did in this lesson was give you a quick overview. That is going to be able to get you started with the most important things that are going to give you, honestly, the most improvements to your page. Alright, so that's it for SEMRush. Now, this might be something that is going to be a few steps ahead of where you're currently at, but I don't want this to be something that you forget about because SEO is going to be a pivotal part in your newsletter or your blog or whatever content that you are going to be posting. Do not ignore SEO because it can really pay you dividends and it can give you crazy gains. 17. The #1 Platform You've Never Heard Of: This point, we've covered the most organic platforms and means to grow your newsletter audience. That's because everything we covered are text based platforms where people are looking for and expecting to read, and in some cases, even long form. Well, I left one till the end, and that's Substack. Okay, now, I know I've said this before, but Substack might be the most organic way to grow your newsletter. Why? It's because Substack is basically a social media platform for newsletters. That means that people who download it have an extremely high intent to read and subscribe to long form texts in the form of newsletters. Not only that, there's an entire ecosystem of recommendations, collaboration. So people who are looking for a new newsletter might check yours out and end up subscribing if they like it. Okay, so that sounds great in, but what actually is Substack? Well, as I've made it sound like, Substack is a platform designed specifically for newsletters. It allows you to easily create, distribute and monetize your content without needing to mess around with complicated text setups. But here's why Substack is such an organic way to grow your newsletter. It's incredibly easy to set up. No need for coding or website design. Just create your account and start writing. Also, there's a built in audience. As I briefly mentioned, Substack has its own ecosystem of readers who actively browse and subscribe to newsletters. This gives you the chance to get discovered organically. Meaning, if you figure out their algorithm and you know how to rank highly there, you basically have a shortcut to go your newsletter with super high intent users. Another great thing about Substack is their monetization options. You can offer both free and paid subscription. So this gives you a built in way to monetize your newsletter if that's the approach you're taking. And lastly, we have platform independence. So although your newsletter is hosted on Substack, you still own your email. Means that you can take your subscribers with you if you ever decide to move on to a different platform. So Substack gives us the benefits of all the other platforms, plus a much higher intent, plus the independence that's built within it. And Substack doesn't hide your emails, readers from you or anything like that. It's beautiful. In short, Substack handles all the tech stuff, so you can focus on writing great content and growing your audience. So I'm going to have a more in depth walk through lesson on how we can actually go ahead and set up our newsletter on Substack. But for now, I'm going to give you a quick little overview if you want to go ahead and do it. The first step is actually going to be creating your account. And to do that, you just go to substack.com and you sign up and create your profile there. Then you're going to choose your niche. So you want to make sure that your newsletters name and description clearly communicate what your newsletter is about and who it's for. See? This is, again, why taking time and deciding our niche in ICP makes sense. Next, you're going to set up your welcome email. So this is the first email that new subscribers receive, so make sure that it sets the tone and delivers value right away. And next, you're going to start writing. So you can use Substacks Editor to write and publish your first post, and keep it simple. Focus on delivering value and building a connection with your readers as we discussed. After that, you're going to decide on monetization. So you can keep your newsletter free or offer a paid subscription or use some kind of combination of both. I recommend starting with a free newsletter to build your audience, and then you can introduce some paid options once you have a solid subscriber base. Of course, this is going to vary from niche to niche, but for the most part, this is what I recommend. Okay, now that you're set up, let's talk about how to actually grow your newsletter. One of the best things about Substack is that it has built in features that help you get discovered. Now, the first of a few is Substack directory. So your newsletter gets listed in Substack directory, where readers can browse and discover these new newsletters based on their interests. Another one is recommendations, and this is where the magic happens. Other writers on Substack can recommend your newsletter to their audience. And, trust me, this can lead to a huge influx of subscribers. And I'll tell you more on how to get recommendations in a second. Next, we have Substack network effects. Because Substack is already designed for newsletters, readers are already in the mindset of subscribing when they're browsing the platform. This means that they're much more likely to subscribe than any person that's just casually scrolling through social media. Okay, now, back to the recommendations. SubstacksRcommendation system is one of the most powerful tools that you can use to grow your newsletter. So here's how it works. When another writer recommends your newsletter, their audience sees a suggestion to subscribe. And this taps into the concept of social proof. People are more likely to subscribe if someone they trust recommends you. So how do you get other writers to recommend? Well, it's simple. You have to build relationships. So you can subscribe to newsletters in your niche and engage with their content by leaving thoughtful comments. You can also share their content with your audience and tag them when you do. Or you can also just reach out directly and offer to collaborate. For example, you can do a newsletter swap where you promote each other's newsletters. Now, let's stop and speak about this for a second. I personally consume content in the form of newsletters. I like to read. I like it. That's me. And if I ever subscribe to a new newsletter, it's because someone with a judgment that I trust recommended it to me or because a newsletter that I really enjoy recommended so what am I saying here? Who you recommend is an extension of your credibility. Meaning if people are used to great content from you, recommending a terrible newsletter could really hurt your image. On the other hand, if you recommend a great newsletter, your audience will probably be delighted. So as tempting as it is, it might not be the best idea to just collaborate with anyone who's open to it. Keep in mind that branding is association. So you want to associate your brand with positive high quality things. And that means that, in my opinion, only recommend other newsletters if you truly think that they're great and your audience will love them. And in many cases, it's easy. You're targeting other people like if you like it and you think your audience will like it for the same reasons, then share it. That way, this cross promotion can become quite effective. Now, the same goes for promoting products, but we'll talk about that in another lesson. Okay, now, as I mentioned before, Substack lets you offer both free and paid content. This is great because you can use your free content to attract new readers while reserving your best content for paying subscribers. Okay, so for your free content, going to want to use this to showcase your expertise, build trust, and attract new subscribers. So think of it as the preview that gets people hooked. Now, for your paid content, you want to offer exclusive insights, deep dives or behind the scenes content that people can't get anywhere else. The key is to make your paid content so valuable that people feel like they're missing out if they don't subscribe. So your profile is often the first thing that potential subscribers see. So you want to make sure that it's optimized to convert them into readers. So how do we do that? Well, first, you want to use a clear and compelling bio that explains what your newsletter is about and who it's. Here is where you want to use the sort of messaging that you've gathered by understanding your ICP. You want people who match your target audience to be like, Wow. This is exactly what I was looking for. So you want to make sure that you clearly highlight the benefits of subscribing. So what value will the reader get? And include a call to action that encourages people to subscribe. For example, get actionable productivity tips delivered to your inbox every week. Subscribe for now Substack newsletters can also show up in search engine results. So don't ignore SEO here. So make sure that you're using keywords related to your niche and your newsletter titles, headlines, and content. And make sure that each post is well structured with clear headings and subheadings. And you also should not forget to include those same keywords in your Substack profile and newsletter description. Now, we'll dive deeper into monetization strategies later, but here's a quick overview of how you can make money with Substat. With the paid subscriptions, this is a premium version of your newsletter that subscribers can access for a monthly or annual fee. Now, we also have sponsorships, so you can partner with brands that want to reach your audience. And we've mentioned this before. You mentioned their products or services in your newsletter, and you get paid for it. Next, another familiar one, affiliate marketing. This is where you recommend products that you genuinely believe in and then earn a commission when your readers make a purchase. An emphasis on what I said before. If you're just starting out, focus on building your audience first. And once you have a solid subscriber base, you can then introduce paid options without alienating your readers. Now, to wrap up, here are a few advanced strategies to help accelerate your growth. First, we have our newsletter swaps. So this is going to be partnering with other writers in your niche and promoting each other's newsletters. Next, we have guest posts. So you write guest posts for other newsletters or blogs to reach new audiences. This is basically like the cross promotion, but better. You're building good faith with other newsletter owners by providing them free value. And you're getting a chance to give high intent related audiences a little tease of your content. And if done right, this can convert quite well, because the other audience is already reading newsletters and interested in your niche. Next, you want to leverage your existing network. So don't be afraid to ask your friends, colleagues, and social media followers to subscribe. We also have lead magnets. So you can offer a free bonus, like an eBook, checklist or exclusive article in exchange for subscribing. And lastly, we have cross promoting on other platforms. So if you're already creating content on platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, or YouTube, then you can use those channels to drive traffic to your Substat. Substack is a platform that's tailored specifically for newsletters. I know of plenty of people that were able to change their lives by monetizing through Substat. So, it makes sense for yours, and you should definitely take advantage of a 18. Substack 101: Leverage This Platform: Okay, now, welcome to our walk through of Substack software. So I just told you all about Substack and how we can leverage it to our advantage for our newsletters. Now it's time to actually get into the nitty gritty of the software and actually see it in action. So now we are here in the dashboard, and your first step in creating an account if you haven't already, you're just going to go to substack.com, and then you're going to create an account, and everything is going to be free, and it's only going to be a few minutes to actually get to this point. So as we go through this, one thing that you're probably going to be thinking if you watched all the lessons up to this point is that this is going to be a similar kind of software to what we had in Beehive. Now on the back end of actually creating our articles and sending out these newsletters, this is going to be quite a similar software. But what Beehive lacks is the social aspect of Substack. So what do I mean by this? Well, now that we're here, I haven't done anything besides create my account. So if you've done the same thing, then we are at the same point. And if I go here and I go to home, then we're going to be taken to the home of Substack, and this is going to be like the social media aspect of the platform. So this is where kind of all of the newsletters are going to be posting, and this is where everyone is going to be discovering each other and where you can really put yourself out there. Now, in terms of this aspect of Substack, it's going to be quite easy to kind of know what you're doing here. Here, you can type in anything and you can create your post. And you can send it in. This is going to be the strategies that we talked about in the last lesson and going this. But now, actually being able to post something here, it's all super simple. Now, what I want to do in this lesson to kind of help you out a little bit more is to actually take you through the different aspects of this software on the spend part. So once we come here on our dashboard, there's going to be a couple things I want to bring your attention to, especially in comparing it to beehive, what we went over before. So, first off, what we have right here is turning on a paid newsletter. So we're going to have our free newsletter that we can send out to anyone, and then we're also going to be having our paid one that we can kind of separate. And to be able to set this up, all you have to do is connect to Stripe, and then this is where all of the payments are going to be taken. Now on Substack, they're going to take about 10% of what your readers pay for your newsletter. So this differs to Beehive where you would get all of the money paid, except on Beehive, you have to pay a subscription to use the software. So at the end of the day, depending on how big your audience is, Substack is great for when you're just starting out from zero because you don't have to pay anything. So what you can do is you can add subscribers by email here on Substack. So basically, you can go ahead and type in as many emails as you want, and they're going to be added to your subscriber list for you to then send out your articles. Okay, but how is the actual UI for actually creating a newsletter post? Well, let's go over and select this and we can click Create our First Post. So when it comes to customization and kind of templates, Substack doesn't offer us too much. This is about the extent that we have in this. So everything here is honestly, although it doesn't offer us too much on the template side, the benefit of this is that everything is very straightforward. We have a couple options here with the buttons, we have a couple with more. Again, I love myself some dividers, we have a few other things that we can add here, but because we don't have too many options, all of it is very simple and straightforward for us to use. So as I'm going over this, you can see the few things that we have here. You can insert a quote box here, so a block quote, and it'll have this line right here that can signify that this is in fact a quote. We have a video here, so what we can do is insert a video into the newsletter. Ah, we have images. We have audio that we can embed into our newsletter. And as you can see, there's here, we have a code embed. We have strike through, italicize, bold, all the basic stuff there. Okay, so as we can see, this layout here is going to be familiar and you kind of know what you're doing here and you know the capabilities that you have in editing all this. So let's go ahead and put in a title here, tailored tech tips. Our subtitle will be first edition. And let's go ahead and get rid of all of this so we can go ahead and actually post this. So right here, I have just a little test post. And what we can do is go ahead and click Continue. Then with our first option here, we have our audience. So this audience is going to be everyone. So this is going to include your paid members and anyone else that's subscribed to your newsletter that you've either input or that they've subscribed themselves. So I'll show you where we can see all of our subscribers after we do this. And then here, we're also able to allow comments. We can add some tags in here, so some keywords, and this is also something that I would definitely recommend. So it can be exposed, and it can be seen by a lot of people on the dashboard side, on the social side of Substag. And then lastly, we also have our delivery options. So this is either going to be sending to everyone right now, or we can schedule a time to actually send this out. So this is going to be good if you want to create multiple newsletter articles in advance. So you have one day in the weekend that you're going to go ahead and write a bunch. You can then go ahead and schedule these all out as you choose. And as you see, as I selected this day right here, you can then click here and send to everyone in seven days. And once you click that, it's going to be good to go. Okay, but now let's go ahead and go back here to our dashboard. So now we are in the home tab. Let's move over to the Post tab. So right now, we see that I have one of my draft because I didn't actually send it out. Now, if I were to have scheduled it, we'd be able to see it here, and then of course, we have the ones that are already visible on my profile right here. So next we have our subscriber tab. So here, just as we saw in Beehive, we're going to have a chart here and being able to see the kind of trend of our subscriber count. So to add a subscriber, it's super simple. We're just going to come over here to this button. And then we can go ahead and type in whatever email that we want to be in here, and then they will be a part of our subscriber list. And also, what we are able to do here is we can put in a CSV file here that is going to be a collection of all of our readers, say, from a different platform or from, say, ads that we've compiled. Next, we have our Stats page. So this is just going to be a bunch of statistics about all of your readers. So this one is going to be interesting as you continue to build your newsletter, and you can see stuff that you can then take action on in your data. We have two things here, podcast and chat. So if you have a podcast that you want to then host on Substack, you can do that here, and then here we have a chat. This can be a subscriber chat as you see, this can be you communicating with all of your subscribers about your niche or about anything else that you want. As you can see, we have an option here to make it either open to everyone or just keep it paid only. So next, we have the recommendations. So recommendations are just going to be who you recommend on Substack. So these are going to be other profiles, other newsletters that you personally recommend that you want your readers to see. Lastly, we have our settings. Now, usually, I probably wouldn't put really any focus in going through the settings part of any software when I'm doing a walk through for you guys. But in this case, on Substack, there's actually a lot of information and a lot of things that we want to be able to tweak that we can only do within the settings tab. So, the first thing that I would do is a category. You want to make sure that you have your niche listed right here so people can more easily discover you on Substack. Again, this is all about just leveraging the organic capabilities. Again, this is all just about again, this is all just about leveraging the organic capabilities of the reach that Substack has. Next thing that I want to show you here are the payments. So, in case that you want to have a paid newsletter, you have to make sure that you're going to be connecting with Stripe to actually get these payouts here. Next, with that, we have these paid newsletter amounts. So you can set it between a monthly amount. You can set it between a yearly amount, and you can set a founder pledge amount. So this is kind of just like a premium offer. If anyone wants to buy it to say that they were here when it started, they can invest a little bit of extra money in doing so. Now, next is one of the more important parts, and that's going to be our website here. So let's go ahead and click this tailored tech tips.slopstac.com. So right now, if anyone were to come to my website, this is what they would see here. As you can see, there's nothing here that differentiates it. It's all very basic as I just created this account. Now, if we want to go back here, we can then go to the website theme editor, and we have a few options to change some stuff around. We can change the typography, we can change the colors. We have a logo here that you definitely want to include, and then we have a homepage editor. So we can change the header style here, and we can change the body kind of layout right here. So we have a grid for our posts, or we would have a list. So this is going to be all of the articles or all of the newsletters that we post. They are going to be listed here. But as you can see, there's really not that much more to edit. So we have these two things that we can kind of change around, but for the most part, everything here is going to look the same. So we have our welcome page, and we also have our post, how it looks like when people go to our posts on our Substack. Then another thing that we can do is also look at the mobile layout of this. Now, let's go ahead and go back. Next thing that I want to show you is going to be our welcome email. So that means when somebody signs up for your Substack, you can be able to send them a welcome email. So, right here, we have this welcome email to new subscribers. So this is here, like the basic thing that we have. So it says, welcome to Taylor Tech Tips Substack. Welcome. Thank you for signing up. You'll start receiving new posts right here in your inbox. So I think it's a good idea for you to go ahead and tweak this and make the language more targeted to your target audience, just so it doesn't feel like they're receiving some kind of automatic message that nobody really wants to receive. It should sound like you are talking directly to them. So now let's go ahead and go back. And you can do the same thing here with your imported subscribers. So it doesn't just have to be new subscribers that sign up via your Substack, but you can have a welcome email that is sent out to these imported subscribers that you go ahead and put in yourself. And when it comes to the rest of the settings, there are going to be a couple, few things that you might want to pay attention to. So, for instance, this can be your notifications. So what is going to be now, in the rest of settings, there might be some stuff that is going to be pertaining to you and maybe not. But I always think it's a good idea to go ahead and check this because it'll also give you a better understanding of the software as a whole. Okay, so now you have a pretty good grasp about what Substack is on this back end. Now, if we want to go ahead and go back into the home, we can see at the top here that they have different niches, and I always think it's a good idea for you to go ahead and become a custom with your niche here, within Substack, and honestly, just within whatever platform that you're going to be using to hopefully grow your newsletter. And when you do, you can get a good idea about what people are doing, what the successful people within your niche are kind of doing and posting within Substack. And you can copy that, and you can put your own spin. But remember, the main thing that you want to be doing here is be giving as much value as possible within your posts because the more value you give in these posts of yours, the more likely it is that the people reading them will want to go ahead and subscribe to your newsletter. Alright, well, that's it for Substack. Next, we're going to go ahead and get into X and Threat. 19. Text Based Platforms to Show Your Content: Now it's time to get into how to grow your newsletter with Twitter or X and meta threats. So these are two text based platforms that are perfect for building an audience for your newsletter. Now, X is a beast for growing your newsletter, and the reason is simple. Short form content that can go viral quickly. But the key is knowing how to use it strategically. First, let's talk about repurposing content. If you're already writing newsletter articles, then you can easily break them down into bite size tweets or threats. Way, you're leveraging content that you've already created without having to reinvent the wheel. For example, if your newsletter is about productivity, then you can pull out the three best tips and put them into a tweet. If it's about investing, then you can put the key takeaways from your latest analysis in the thread. And, of course, end with a call to action. PS weekly breakdowns in my newsletter. You can put the link or just say Lincoln Bio. But here's where X shines. It's in testing and validating ideas. We sort of covered this with Linktn as well. Just think of X as a low stakes testing ground. You can post different takes, angles, and topics to see what resonates with your audience. Now, those posts that get the most engagement are your green light to expand whatever it was you're talking about into a full blown newsletter article. Now, this is a strategy used by Alex Tremozi as we saw in the Linkn lesson. He tweets constantly using short, punchy tweets to see what sticks. Then when it's time to write his newsletter, he knows exactly what his audience wants more of. Now, let's talk about engagement hacks. Twitter is built for conversations, so you should be interacting with people in your niche. So don't just post and Ghost. Instead, here are a few ideas. You should be commenting on popular posts from influencers within your niche, especially the ones that align with your newsletter topics. Also reply to comments on your tweets to build relationships with your potential subscribers, and you can re tweet popular post with your own take so you can position yourself as someone who's worth falling. Here's where things get interesting. Tagging bigger accounts. Similar to Linktn, if you mention or tag influencers in your post, then you have a higher chance of getting seen by their audience. For example, you could tweet something like this. I learned more about building an online business at Alex Tremozi than I did from my business degree. His take on customer acquisition is a mustard. Here's what I learned. If the person you mentioned likes or retweets your post, then you instantly get exposed to their audience. This is even more pertinent than on LinkedIn. Because if they retweet it, you literally will be shown to their audience. The thing is, if you do it well, it's a win win. You're helping to position this person as an expert. They'll want to retweet your post and share the fact that other people are learning. So essentially, they earn social proof while you earn exposure. Of course, you have to aim for someone who may benefit from the social proof. If you're explaining what you learned from Elon Musk's latest interview, then that probably won't get you too far with him. Now, if you do manage to get shared, since you've already positioned yourself as an expert and somebody who delivers value, then a good percentage of them may check out your profile and even subscribe to your newsletter. Just remember that Twitter or X is FASTPC. Posting consistently and even daily will help you stay top of mind and keep that momentum. Just keep it short, punchy, and valuable. Now let's talk about Meda's Threats. FES is basically Instagram's version of Twitter but with a few key differences. It's more casual and conversational, so you can show a little bit more personality. Since it's connected to Instagram, you can leverage your existing Instagram audience if you have one. The algorithm is still evolving, so it's easier to get organic reach than it is with some of these more established platforms. How do you use threads to grow your newsletter? Again, start by repurposing your content. If you're already writing your newsletter articles, then break them down into short digestible and engaging posts. Because threads is more conversational, don't be afraid to loosen up your tone and show a little bit more of your personality. Here's a simple format that works well. First, start with a hook that grabs attention. Something like three productivity hacks that I wish I learned five years ago. Next, deliver quick and actionable tips. And lastly, end with a CTA. If you found this helpful, then you'd love my weekly newsletter. Subscribe here. Now, since Threads is a little bit more visual than Twitter, then adding an image or graphic can help boost engagement. If your newsletter covers more visual topics like design, cooking or fitness, Threads might be the perfect platform to showcase your expertise and attract subscribers. Also, engagement matters, just like on Twitter, don't just post and disappear. Respond to comments, engage with other people's posts, and don't be afraid to jump into trending conversations within your because, frankly, the more that you engage, the more the algorithm favors you. And remember that Threads is still relatively new, so you have a little bit less competition than on Twitter. This means that it's easier to stand out and build an audience, especially if you're posting consistently valuable content. Now, the beauty of Twitter and Threads is that you can use roughly the same strategy on both platforms. In fact, you can often just take the same exact content and then slightly tweak it to match each platform slide. Let's recap. First, repurpose your content. So break down your newsletter articles into bite size posts or threads. Next, test and validate your ideas. Use short post to see what resonates and then expand on those in your newsletter. Next, engage with your audience. Comment, reply, and start conversation so you can build relationships and increase your visibility. Leverage accounts bigger than yours. You want to tag bigger accounts, but not too big to increase your reach and attract new subscribers. Lastly, double up. If you're posting on one, you may as well essentially repurpose the same thing and post it on the other. All right. I'll see you in the next lesson. 20. Attract Your Ideal Readers With YouTube Videos: Up until now, we've basically just discussed text based platforms. Why? Because everyone consumes social media differently. Some people like video, some people like short form. Some people love to read snippets, and some people love to read books. And getting people from text based platforms to our newsletter has the least friction because we already know that they consume media that way, and they're simply opting in to consume more of that. Little friction. Now, the reason that we're not really going to cover short form is because there's a lot of friction deliver a lead magnet to people who consume your short form quite easily. But at that point, it's probably just better to sell them something else through the platform itself. It's going to be much easier to convert a lead through DMs than to take them to your newsletter, nurture them, et cetera. And if you want to monetize the newsletter itself through affiliate marketing or memberships, then I think you're probably better off monetizing your short form traffic in a different way. So, short form is a non, in my opinion, for newsletter marketing. Now, notice that I'm saying short form and not video. And that's because I do still believe that YouTube is an incredibly effective way to build your brand, even for newsletters. The thing with long form content is that it's way less about volume than it is about connection. Long form content builds connection, and you can create true fans. There was a really good article in 2008 called 1,000 True Fans. It's sort of anticipated what we're seeing today. Businesses with really small audiences that are absolutely killing it. The concept still stands. You just need a few people who love everything you do in order to be successful. YouTube is the single best way to build that core audience. That's because it creates parasocial relationships. That's where one side becomes emotionally invested in the other person as if they had a relationship, while the other person doesn't even know that they exist. It's what you see when celebrity groupies say that they're in love with whatever singer. When people consume your long form content, they get to see your personality. They see you as if it were in real time and they can connect. Now, there's a lot of psychological dimensions to this that we do not have time to explore. But one of the maxims of sales is that people often buy emotionally and not logically. So they buy from someone that they like, for example. Another notion we've seen is branding is association. So people craft positive associations with your brand over time. Another element at play is that as they consume your content, they slowly position you as an authority and an expert in the given field. The more that you prove your expertise, the more that's accentuated. So there's a lot of benefits to YouTube. You get it. And there isn't necessarily as much friction as with short form. Cool. So how do you take advantage of it? Well, the first thing is niche. The same concepts that we went through and how to find a niche for newsletter apply here. Don't try to shift anything to just get more views. Trust me, I've run a bunch of YouTube channels for me and my clients, and chasing views is. Unless you're an entertainer, YouTube is for connection. With this, I mean, don't be afraid to make videos that are a niche within a niche within a niche. If you're providing value and that's what you're an expert in, people with that problem will find you and love you for it. Okay, so once you realize that your videos don't need to chase views, here's what you need to understand. What videos to post, title, thumbnails, how often to post, and converting to your newsletter. Okay, it may sound like a lot, but let me break it down. In terms of what videos to post, we're going to use the exact same strategies that we used for our blog posts. We won't be relying on our creativity to decide these videos. We'll be looking at the data. As always, we're trying to fill a gap in the market. So what you're going to do is go on VDIQ. Now, vidIQ is a software which lets you find video topics and ideas the same way the SEMRush allows us to find blog post ideas. And we'll cover VDIQ more in the next lesson. But what you need to know for now is that if you want to leverage YouTube correctly, then you'll have to go in here and get your hands dirty. You need to find around 100 video ideas that are a good VDIQ score. A good score, again, means that there's high demand, but not too much supply, which means that there's a gap in the market that you can then fill. It means that people are searching for a specific keyword, but you wouldn't have too much trouble ranking highly on that keyword. So in terms of what a good score is, I'd say anything over 60 is good. So that's how you find out what to post. And not only that, but because we're relying on search based traffic, this process also tells us exactly what our title should be. Now, in terms of thumbnails, since you're building your brand, I recommend having your face and all of the thumbnails. And the easiest way to see what works is by A copying and B testing. There's a feature within YouTube itself that allows you to post multiple thumbnails for each video, and YouTube will test to see what works. And when you're copying, you should look at top players like Mr. Beast, but you should also copy people within your niche. Now, to find thumbnails for videos that are similar to yours, you can use view Stats. There, you can just type certain keywords, and videos with relevant thumbnails will come up. Now, how often to post? Okay. If you want to maximize YouTube, then I recommend that you post a lot, at least at first. The beauty of this approach is that once you post a video, it becomes an asset. That's because you're not relying on all your traffic coming from browsing, but from searching, and searches are recurring in that they happen every month. However, when you're first starting your channel, you're trimming the algorithm to know who to target. That way, YouTube rewards consistency as it'll be able to tell what your channel is about and who it should be shown. So if you've never posted on YouTube before, I recommend that you don't post until you have eight or nine videos that are recorded, edited, and actually ready to post. Then you can post those every day or every other day for about a week or two, and suddenly your channel will look like a normal channel and YouTube will be able to start getting a sense of your audience. Lastly, how do we relate all of this back to our newsletter? Luckily, this is super simple. The easiest way is just to have some sort of lead magnet that solves the same problem that they clicked on the video and offer that in exchange for their email. You can also ask people to subscribe to your newsletter, but that isn't as clear as a value proposition, and people are desensitized to these sorts of CTAs. They've heard them 1 million times. So if you want to have the absolute highest conversion rate, I recommend creating a killer lead magnet. And we'll talk about those in the next lessons. And one last magget that I recommend for your videos themselves is to use the same principle that we used for writing. Value, conciseness, and getting to the point. Don't spend minutes telling them what you're going to tell them. You can spend about 8 seconds hooking them and telling them what the video will be about, and then get to it. Actually, forget about manners, forget about intros, get to it. People are there to solve their problem. They don't care about you and they don't care about being greeted. It sounds a bit harsh, but it's to get my point across. Anyways, that's how to leverage long form content, which I think should be the core of any branding or organic traffic strategy. And the next lessons we'll cover VDIQ in detail and how to create those lead magnets. 21. Use VidIQ to Always Know What Videos to Make: Is somewhere within your funnel or marketing strategy, then there's one software that you cannot ignore, and that's VDIQ. Posting on YouTube and not using VDIQ is honestly like playing darts with a blindfold on. If you don't have much experience with YouTube and the strategy that entails, vidIQ is what it's going to give you that significant advantage. But let's go ahead and get right into it and hop into the software, so I can show you how you can leverage it to upgrade your YouTube game. So the first step is you're going to want to come to app.vidiq.com, as you see up here. And you can create your account in just a few seconds, and then you're going to be led to this homepage. Now, if you already have a YouTube channel that you're posting on and there's a lot of content to kind of analyze, then I would 100% recommend that you go ahead and connect your channel because a lot of the benefits that we get from VDIQ come from it being able to see our page. But I'm going to assume that we have nothing. There's no YouTube channel, and we want to start from jumps here using the software. So there's a couple of things that we can go ahead and look at here on the platform that's going to help us in YouTube. The most basic functionality of VDIQ is their ability to find trending keywords. This is kind of what they built up their software around. And since then, they've expanded it. As you can see, we're able to create thumbnails, find trending videos, and generate video content. And we're going to go through all of this. So you'll have a good grasp of the software by the end of this lesson. So let's go ahead and start here with the fine trending keywords. So again, here, if you have a channel to connect, then you should go ahead and do that. So it already has some information and you don't have to start from zero. But as we see here, we have some trending keywords from just this month. We can change it to this week, we can change it to today. And if we click View All rising keywords, we get to see an expansion of this. So before we saw the search volume and volume change, but here in expanding it, we also get to see the competition. So obviously, a low competition is going to be better than something that's very high because it's going to be easier for the content that you're making to rank highly within these searches. Now, let's go ahead and go back here, and we can search up some specific keywords related to your niche. So let's say that we are going to be working within the AI realm. So I'm going to just go ahead and do the most broad search possible and just put AI. So as we can see, we see that the search volume here is going to be very high. So this one is going to be a given given the thing that I put in which just AI, and there's so much on AI nowadays. And kind of with this, we also see that the competition is very high. 95.36, you really can't get much higher than that. But the reason I do this is because when I put in this kind of broad keyword, what we're able to do is see related keywords. So I have it here. And I can also click up here, and we get to see all of these keywords that are now stemming from my original keyword of AI. And we can just go ahead and search through this and we can find things that seem like they're good opportunities to make videos on. So looking at this list, what we're able to do is also filter it based on these search categories. So number of words, the overall score. This is VDIQ score. So it takes in things like the search volume. It takes into account the competition. So this is what this overall score means. And let's go ahead and filter this from high to low. And we can see How AI is the highest rated overall score within this kind of AI realm. So one thing that we notice from these top scores is that Hollow AI mid journey, I see runway here, and these ones are all specific AI softwares. And as we can see, they have pretty significant search volume, and the competition to them is all relatively low. So all of this takes into account into creating their high overall score. I had a personal brand that was based around AI, then it would be probably a pretty good idea for me to go ahead and make videos on all of these softwares that are kind of just walk throughs. And from this, what we can do is also click here, and we get to see more information that is related to this keyword. So we have a full overview here. An extension of this is as we see that this is a very high overall score, we want to know how are we going to make videos regarding this and how can we kind of take advantage of this high overall score and low competition? Well, what this does in VDIQ what it gives us is these questions. So as you can see here, we see what is most popular in using this halo AI as a keyword in our search. So we see that this highest overall search right here, this question is how to use Halo AI. So we might want to go ahead and click on this, and now we are brought to this specific overview of how to use AI, and we can go ahead and make our video starting from this. So this is going to take me into the next part of it IQ that I want to show you. So I'm going to go ahead and copy this, and we are going to come back here to this homepage, and we're going to generate a video idea. So here, right here, just on the Some page, I'm going to go ahead and post this, how to use Halo AI, and we're going to hit search. So now, with their feature, what we're able to see is a title, a description, tags, a kind of generated thumbnail here. These ones aren't the best, typically, but they're kind of good for inspiration. And we also get to see a hook and an outline for this video all based on this one little statement of just five words, how to use Halo AI. So from just a couple minutes of looking at the keyword search within VDIQ, we're then able to grab this one that ranked pretty well. Bring it into this function within VDIQ and then it goes ahead and makes us this entire outline for our YouTube video. And, of course, we're able to go ahead and adjust things within here. So let's look at this title right here. Halo AI Made Easy. I can go ahead and refine and I can just change it as I please. So we see right now that it's a 55 score. So let's go ahead and click Make Longer. We see that this one has a higher score, a 63. We can go ahead and click this and click Apply. We can also refine and say, let's go ahead change tone. And say educational. And we see this one here, Halo AI explains simply. So we can go ahead and apply this one. And we can do the same thing at each one of these steps. So we can refine the description. We can go ahead and add some tags, and we can see the thumbnails, the hook, outline, and we're able to edit all of this within IDIQ. Okay, now let's go ahead and move on. Now the next thing I want to show you is out. So outliers are essentially videos that we can see that are posted by channels, and for whatever reason, they serve as an outlier on that YouTube channel is in that they perform way better than everything else on that page. So we see this 82 X right here that I hate the Render Pack collection 750 powers more. We see this 82 X represents that it performed 82 times better than the average video posted on this page. And we can go ahead and search in any topic queue. So let's go ahead and put in fitness and see what we here we see outliers here that they have performed over 100 times better than the averages on each one of these pages. So it's always a good idea for you to go ahead and search in these outliers to see these videos and see kind of a pattern if something there is that you can discern about why these performed so much better than everything else on their page. And then you can take those learnings and apply it to your own channel. There's especially a lot of functionality that comes in this when you do connect your YouTube channel. So this is all going to be very specific to your own experiences and your own kind of brand and your YouTube channel. So this is something that I would recommend that you do, and you can go ahead and walk around this kind of software and see how it can benefit you and see the tips that it gives you because a lot of the time, what it is going to be telling you is going to be stuff that is very valuable and actionable for you to go ahead and implement on your page to make your YouTube that much more efficient. But the main thing that I would take away from VID IQ is these trending keywords. This keyword search is honestly invaluable because it really lets you get a step ahead of everyone else within your niche that isn't using tools like this because you're able to see data that nobody else can kind of conceive. This is data that only people can know about if they're actively looking for it on platforms like this. If people are just going to be posting kind of whatever they want, then they're going to be way disadvantaged compared to you using a tool like this that enables you to see so Alright, so my actionable step for you after this lesson is you should go ahead and create this vidIQ account and then put in a keyword of your niche. Honestly, you could just put in your niche itself and then go through, go down this rabbit hole of keywords within here and find yourself the next video that you should create. And once you do, once you find that exact keyword that you want, then you can come back here and you can put it in here and to generate a video idea, and this can give you some inspiration and some guidance as to where you should go with your video. 22. What Really is a Lead Magnet?: In this lesson, we're going to get into the first type of lead magnet that we are going to cover. And that is an eBook lead magnet. So, as we've talked about before, eBooks are most useful when you want to give value upfront. So whether you want to give your prospects a guide or a walk through on how to solve a specific problem or pain point of your target audience, this is really going to be most useful to do that. And this doesn't have to be a difficult process at all. It can really be super simple for you to do in an evening. In fact, let me show you how easy it can be. So let's hop into Canva right now, and I'll show you this process. All right. So now we are on Canva, and the first step that you're going to want to do is to just search up here in the content and just type in EBook. So I actually just added multiple pages to my search because if you put EBook and Canva, then you'll often just get the covers of the EBoks. So here we have a bunch of different templates that we can go and look into. And on Canva, what you can do is just hover over them and they'll give you some preview about how it looks. So you're going to want to keep this in mind in building and choosing your own because we don't want to have anything that is too heavy on any specific kind of content. For example, you don't want to have an eBook that is filled with just pictures because then it's going to be kind of difficult to communicate any kind of value to your prospects. On the other hand, you don't want it to be all text, because if it's all text and it's not very engaging, then your prospects probably aren't going to go the entire way through the eBook. And therefore, they're not going to get that much value from it. So, as you can see, there's a bunch of different templates that we have here, and a lot of them look pretty good. They're all very visually appealing. And that's also something that I quite like about Canva. It's the fact that a lot of their stuff, a lot of their templates are actually quite useful. So I'd say what I just mentioned is going to be a prime thing in picking a template. You're really not going to want to have it be heavily based on one form or the other, in terms of having images or text. You want to have a good balance of both. So I'd say to look through a bunch of these and see what kind of template or for fits exactly what it is that you're going to be selling or communicating to your prospects. I actually have an eBook already that I think is quite great in communicating and implementing a lot of these principles that I've been telling you, not only in this course, but also in previous lessons. Alright, so now we're here in this example eBook. And as you can see in the bottom here, it's 16 pages. Remember, the key to these eBooks is going to be communicating as much value as you can to your prospects. And although that's the case, we still don't want to do something that's going to be going overboard. Don't want to have an eBook that is, say, 100 pages because then it's not going to be something that's going to be very digestible for your prospects to go and look over and get a lot of value pretty quickly. So as you can see, this one is 16 pages, and I think something around this length is going to be the ideal length for you to give your prospects. But now actually starting with the content itself, and the first thing we see is the title page. And here, there's not too much to mention and point out, but there are a couple key things here. So the first thing is that the cover to your eBook should contain both some visual kind of stimulation and text. So obviously you should have your title, whatever it is that you are giving to your audience. This is an online course automation walk through. As you can see at the top, business walk through online course automation. And below it, we have a picture that accompanies it. So in terms of the formatting of all of this, if you choose a good template, you shouldn't have to think that much about it. It should all fit in quite well. Okay, so now moving on to the next page, and this one is a welcome page. So with this part, you're going to want to do a couple key things. And, of course, this is all going to be depending on how you're giving this eBook out. But in this case, I know with this person that was giving out this E, they were giving it to people that didn't really know who he was. So in this case, what he decided to do because his prospects didn't really know him or his brand, he decided to say a little bit about himself and why they should trust him. He gave social proof. You see that done in a few ways on this first page. First, you see that he had built multiple five figure online course brands. And a lot of this is talking about that, talking about that and his prior success and why they should trust him. Accompanied by that, he also has a visual representation social proof. So not only is this building further trust between him and his prospects, but it's also getting them excited as to what he's going to be giving them. Because the purpose of this lead magnet is not solely just getting their email from giving this to them, but it's also for building a relationship and continuing that relationship. So we want to make sure that we get them excited in this beginning, so they actually consume the entire thing hopefully take action to get their own results. So when we circle back to them, whether that be through email communication or any other sort, they'll have a positive experience with us and be more likely to then go to that next stage, whatever it may be, either enrolling in our low ticket offer or maybe some premium high ticket program. So let's move on to the next page. This one, yet again, there's not too much to mention here, but it's going to be an essential aspect of your eBook. That's simply a table of contents. Although the table of contents itself is going to be something that's obvious that we're going to be adding to our eBook, it's also a helpful device that we can use in structuring our information and the things that we are going to be sharing because we want this all to flow and make sense from one page to the next. We never want to lose our potential customers along the way. So just thinking about that table of contents even before you create the eBook is probably going to be a helpful strategy for you and just making this easy for you. Alright, so we've covered this now on to the next page. Which is going to be the Chapter one cover. Yet again, another key thing here, like we talked about in the welcome page, is just getting our prospects excited about what we are going to be giving them. And that's exactly what he does here. He talks about basically why his model is going to be very easy and very great opportunity for his prospects to bounce on. Then following that, he has some action steps. So what is it that they're going to be doing in this part of the process? Super simple and clear. What they're going to be doing is going to be picking a profitable and scalable niche. Also, they're going to find a profitable course topic within their niche. So we're only in page four of the 16 page eBook. And he's telling me here I'm going to be able to pick a profitable and scalable niche and find a course topic within this niche that I could then build myself. So if this for me who just got the EBok I would be quite excited to see what he has to say next. So let us do that and continue. So now we're here still in Chapter one. And we have already something that is quite valuable right in front of us. He's communicating here that in this site, um, they have this thing called Utomi Marketplace Insights. And there we're able to see what course topics are going to be profitable for us. And he also tells us how we can interpret these tools into getting the best results. Right here in the bottom, we see what we want the demand and supply to be. Want it to be a high or low or high average. And then we see the percentile, we want over 85th conversion rate less than 5%. And we can see screenshots of this right here where we get to see all of this. Where this in the bottom here is the conversion rate. This is the conversion rate. This is the percentile. And here we can see the student demand. So just on page five, we already have this value that's being given to us, and it's super straightforward and super digestible. Here with the visual representation and these quick little bullet points, we're able to get so much value and understanding of what it is that this means. And I'm not going to go through all of the lessons of this eBook because that might take a while, but I just want you to know the principles that you should really be taking and creating your own. So now we're on this next page, page six, and it's talking about picking your niche. So here you can see that it is a little bit more text heavy, but that also makes a little bit more sense because it's not something that you could just take from that Utomi marketplace insights like he showed above. And this is something where it seems like the person is going to have to make a more accurate decision themselves. So he's doing that, and then he's also below that, he's showing us ideal niche examples. So he's supplementing their knowledge with actionable examples that they could look into themselves. So, we're going to move on from here. And this one is quite crazy. It's 100 course topics researched by him with optimal statistics and the niches as he previously mentioned. So what he did here is he took these example niches. And broke them all up and created an entire table of a bunch of course topics under these niches. Yet again, giving so much value. This makes it super clear that this is something that he actually put time and effort into. So when his prospects see this, it communicates two things. Number one, it communicates his expertise and being able to compile all this. And number two, it communicates his dedication to this. And that dedication can go both ways. It could be a dedication to this thing that he is talking about in this business model, but it also is a dedication to giving value to his people. So far, this page is the least visually engaging out of all of them, but that is completely fine because it makes up with it by giving so much value. So let's move on and see the next page. And that's in a bed Chapter two, creating courses. And here you see the same things that I've been reiterating, and it's staying visually engaging. He has an image here. He has a nice looking page and some text that isn't going to be too overbearing. So next page we're going to be moving into. This one, he talks about finding instructors. Yet, again, the same things apply. He has an image and he has text that's clear what this is about, but it's not too text heavy where people are just going to kind of look over and just see that it's like a word salad and not read it. Okay, now moving on to the next page. And this one is going to be a kind of step by step demonstration. And this is a great tool that he used here because he's breaking down this kind of complex business model and something that's super simple and digestible for his prospects. Not only is he just telling them what to do, but he's also adding some visual representation of what it is they're doing. So here he's talking about finding instructors and he's talking about using the platform upwork. So in this page, what he included was screenshots of upwork and what they can do on it and what they should select on it to then find these instructors for the courses that they're going to be making. And in step two of this, he shows example descriptions that they can put for their job postings. He's really just grabbing their hand and taking them through this entire process. This is probably something that took him quite a while to figure out, and he's just handing this out completely for free. Now moving on to the next page, and that's going to be pitching instructors. And this one, yet again, you can see, it's a quite text heavy page. And that is okay, because this one he's really just talking about sales in general. So that's going to be such a huge kind of umbrella topic, and there's so much to talk about in that. But he's trying to keep it as su sync as possible, and I think he did a quite effective job how to do this and communicating this to his prospects in order for them to get these instructors to teach the courses. So now we're moving on to the final chapter in this E book, which is driving sales. And I don't want to be redundant. You know what I've said before about the formatting of all this. So as we can see, these look good. They have visual representations. They have text, and they have a bunch of value. So now on to the final page of all of this, that's page 16. It's his conclusion page. And this conclusion page is where you're going to want to include a call to action to your prospects because in almost anything that you're going to be communicating or giving value to in an eBook, it all requires action to some extent. And you want these prospects to get value from you. So you want to tell them to take action and tell them the best way is to do that. Hopefully, you've outlined. I mean, that is what your eBook is all about, how they can probably take action and whatever it is that you're communicating to them. So here on this conclusion page, you can really either number one, just tell them take action or number two, tell them that first place to start. But let me just read you what he said so you can get a good idea of this. He says, Now you have all the knowledge you need to go and take action, and that's all that's left. Taking action. Think about it. If a course makes you on average $200, which is a conservative estimate, you're 50 courses away from making ten K a month. So this is him again, just getting them excited to take action, making it clear and making it super easy for them to go ahead and do it. He then says, You could get there uploading one course a week for a year. And that's without calculating this model is completely exponential. So this is just another way of reframing why they should take action right now and the fact that it's just super easy and not something that is going to be difficult or time consuming for them. Then he finishes it out with saying, Get started, I publishing your first course today, and you'll think yourself very soon. I guarantee it. I really wish you all the best and I hope to hear all about your successes. I think this was a pretty great and effective eBook. You can take the lessons from this and go ahead and make your own. Yet again, you can do this in Canva in just one evening. Alright. That's enough of this. Now on to the next one. 23. The Most Effective Lead Magnet: Previous lesson, we touched on what a lead magnet is. Now in the following lessons, I'm going to take you through the different types of lead magnets, so you can choose one that's specific to your business and your needs. So in this video, we're going to cover how to build a video training lead magnet. Remember, this is a type of lead magnet that works best if you're selling a longer course or coaching of some sort. This training is a great chance to build credibility in your audience's mind and give them a sense of the vast value that you have to offer if they work with you. The template I'm going to go off of to teach you here is the PLF method. PLF stands for product launch formula, and it was developed by Jeff Walker. The idea is simple. Before launching a product, we're going to want to tease it and tease it and tease it until people can't wait to buy it. Since Walker, people have taken this idea to the extreme. As we were discussing in the previous lesson, people are now building personal brands around this notion of providing value for free in a way that when they finally release a paid product, people trust it enough to buy it. So how does this apply to your offer specifically? Well, here's what you're going to do. Ideally, we're going to want to record these lessons from scratch. But if you have some from an old course, we could potentially reuse those. What you should do is take three concepts from your course, coaching, or method, or whatever your offer is. Then you're going to build a lesson around a story. Now, this is important. Let me tell you why. I used to do sales on stage. I'd go up, do my entire spill about a product, then ask people to buy it at the end. I was good. I was really good. So much so that other companies hired me to do this for them. But one day, I had to sell a product that I wasn't confident about. And it was dog food. Five years earlier, my dog Pockets, my best friend, passed away because of eating hyper processed dog food, which was just terrible for him. But this company's very mission was to make the healthiest dog food possible. So they took me to their factories, and they showed me all of their research all to convince me that this dog food was, in fact, healthy. And they did convince me. In fact, that if Pockets had eaten this food, then he wouldn't have passed away. So I stepped on stage the next week and I told my story about pockets. And I'd never sold so many products. Now, everything I just told you is a lie. You're probably super hooked. The moral of the story is that humans like stories. Stories hook, stories sell, and stories are exactly what you need at this stage of the relationship with your audience. Stories are a chance to connect with your audience, to show a genuine side of view. Please don't lie for comedic effect, like I just did. And it attaches an emotional aspect to what they're learning. This is the exact reason why testimonials and success stories are so strong. So take three concepts that you teach and remember a time in your life where those concepts came particularly in handy. Then just build three lessons around those. Now we're going to give these lessons away for free, spread out over a week. But before you do that, you might want to include Jeff Walker's first step to PLF, and that is sending out a survey to your audience to know exactly what it is that they want to be learning. Even if you don't end up teaching exactly what they voted for, it'll feel like they have a say in what you're putting out. This might not necessarily apply to the lead magnet, though. Now, there's two schools of thought about when to send out that first lesson. You can either send it right as they subscribe or the next day. The thinking here being that you're building up anticipation. Personally, I don't think that works anymore nowadays, so I just send it out right away. Alright. So the first lesson should be about ten to 15 minutes long, and it should be giving out as much value as possible. It should solve a subproblem of the problem that your full product or service solves. Something that gives them a quick aha moment. Ideally, something that's actionable. The first video, you don't necessarily want to tease the full product or course too much, but you can definitely start to mention it. Two days after should be your second video. Your second video should be the same idea. Pick another concept and tell another story. This time, you can afford to make a little longer video here because the people that are going to be watching your second video are likely to be more engaged. Now on this video, you want to start seriously mentioning the fact that your new course or mentoring program is going to be opening up at the end of the week. Again, the idea here is to be teasing and teasing and teasing to build up anticipation. Ideally, you should have people emailing you about when the course or coaching is coming out so they can start to buy it. All right. Once that's done, it's time for the last one. In my experience, it's good to give a lot of value in as little time as possible. Best case scenario is you make a five minute lesson where you spend two to 3 minutes teaching and the rest just talking about your course or mentorship. You're going to want to list all the benefits of your product and clarify exactly how it's going to solve your audience's problem. You're going to want to finish with a pretty clear CTA, a call to action unless you want to wait a couple more days to release it to build up anticipation. This one is also a valid option. After completing these lessons, you've now done two important things. First, you've provided your audience with real value and you've laid the groundwork to sell your product or service. And second, you've shown your knowledge and you've connected with your audience and showed them that you're not just there to take their money, but you actually genuinely want to help them. Key here is not just in giving information, but creating a relationship and trust. The more you give them something actionable and helpful upfront, the more likely it is that they're going to invest in your full offer later. So to wrap up, building a video training as your lead magnet is an excellent strategy to showcase your expertise and prime your audience for your bigger offer. By following the steps of the PLF method and using stories to create an emotional connection and giving real value across your three lessons, you set yourself up for a successful launch. So keep the content engaging, solve problems, and end with a really strong call to action. I'll see you in the next lessons where we'll talk about other lead magnets. 24. The Easiest Lead Magnet to Build: You've gone around the Internet for long enough, then you've probably heard of, consumed, or even interacted with a lead magnet in some capacity. And we've talked about this in past lessons. But in this lesson, we're going to talk about what a lead magnet is and how and when we can use them in our landing page. So a lead magnet is basically a free product that you get in exchange for your contact information where the lead magnet is going to be received. So say you're signing up for a free you'd give your email and you'd receive that book in your email. It makes sense, because a lead, as we know, is someone that meets your ICP. And lede magnet attracts these leads or potential customers. And there are a few layers as to why you'd want to have Elite Magnet The main one is natural. You build an email list and you get contacts for people that you can then reach out in the future with updates, offers or anything else that you're trying to sell. Basically, by giving value for free and upfront, we're able to build an audience that we can then market to in the future. And another level to lid magnet is that it builds trust and compliance with your prospects. As we've spoken about before, the first layer of a funnel might be free content, something that you provide over YouTube, for example. Perhaps you do tutorials of some sort. It would be quite a big jump from consuming your free content to then purchasing your high ticket offer. So a lead magnet can act as a bridge as a layer to the funnel that gets you one step closer to that sale. And that's, of course, because instead of giving you money, they're giving you something as simple as the contact information. Finally, and perhaps the most important part of the lead magnet is the notion of reciprocity. This is something that most Uber successful online businesses are doing. And it's the concept of giving a lot of value, information or knowledge upfront without asking for anything in return. And this does so much for your brand. First, it shows your prospects the value that interacting with your brand has. If this is free stuff and it's so valuable, imagine how valuable the paid stuff will. Second, it's also a great chance to establish your expertise. Here is basically where you flex your knowledge and show that you know what you're talking about. Your prospects will see that they're in good hands and there'll be a higher likelihood of them purchasing your product. And lastly, if your lead magnet is actually good and valuable, then it can create so much goodwill with your prospects. If you position it in a way where your prospects get immediate value or results, then they're going to want to pay it back or say thank you in some kind of way. And that can come in the form of purchases or reviews, testimonials or anything else of the sort. Basically, this can all just build a lot of positive momentum for your br. Now, there are a bunch of different lead magnets, and finding the right one for your business is going to be important. So let's cover a few of the types of lead magnets so you can make the right choice. One of the OG lead magnets is a guide or an eBook of some sort. This is actually one that I use as part of my funnel, where I provide a 16 page outline that basically guides you on how you can build your own Utomi brand. This sort of lead magnet works great if you're teaching something that's actionable. Like a method or a program. And I've also consumed guides as lead magnets in the real estate as well as fitness spaces, for example. Remember, the idea with a guide, as well as with most lead magnets is to provide as much value as possible. So don't necessarily hesitate to give away super valuable secrets that your audience might find useful. Of course, it's fine to keep some stuff behind wraps, although you don't have to. What's crucial here is really just giving away as much value as possible. You need to give too much or too little away, then I'd for sure lean towards giving away too much. At the end of the day, your upsells will have a different form of value for your audience. So if you're selling coaching, then you can help them with implementing those concepts that are in the guide. Or you can give them specific tailored advice that they couldn't get with just the guide. Basically, with every level of your offer, your audience is looking for a new different kind of value. And for the lead magnet, in this case, it's content and knowledge. So don't hold back. Great case study of this is Alex Hermosi's brand. Hermosi has built a brand that generates over $200 million a year, and everything you see on him online is him giving away some kind of value or knowledge completely for free. He's basically just a huge machine of goodwill and credibility. So businesses pay him for his help and scaling, and he then shares all the knowledge that he gets from helping these businesses scale and puts that online. Other businesses see that he has this tremendous amount of expertise that he has a bunch of clients and that he's also consistent with the results he gets. Means that some businesses are going to apply the knowledge that they get from his free content, but also a lot of businesses are going to look to hire him for his expertise that he's shown off. This means that some businesses will apply his lessons that he teaches and his free content. But many, many others will seek to hire his services as they're so familiar with his expertise. This is all to say that if you're building a guide, don't be afraid to spill all the knowledge that you have on the matter. Of course, it should be in a concise and seamless way, but we'll talk about that in upcoming lesson. Other form of lead magnet, which is probably the most effective in most scenarios is some form of video training. It can either be a short video course, a webinar, or even a single video that solves a problem for your audience. Remember, we already went through this entire process of finding our offer and our audience's pain points. So we already know the problems that they want us to solve for. So the process of deciding on what your lead magnet should be should consist of deciding how to solve your audience's problem in the right medium. A classic way I've used many times for course launches is a three video video course. Basically, your audience signs up for a free course. And for the next week or so, you send out three videos which are part of a longer course. By the end of this, they should have gotten enough value and be confident enough in your skills that they want to buy that full course. And another OG lead magnet is a webinar. Back in the day, people would fake webinars with all sorts of tactics to make it look like they were live and not pre recorded. I don't recommend. Actual live webinars are still a pretty interesting strategy. But I'd reserve that for the more advanced marketers and those of you who already have a pretty big audience. I've also seen one off videos work. If they're specific in solving a problem. Case studies can be a good example. If you're teasing a specific case study in a video that is going to be interesting for your audience, then you could have a full breakdown of that case study on your landing page. Finally, another lead magnet that I've seen people have a lot of success with are questionnaires, tests, quizzes, stuff of that sort. These ones can work really well in certain niches. For instance, anything medically related where you can get a diagnosis after answering a few questions can be really valuable. I know Michael Bruce, whose brand is sleep doctor, has a test that you can fill out to find out your chronosyte. Once you fill out the test, you give your email and you get your results there. These can also be a really good way to rate your skills at some activity. Let's say you sell some kind of copywriting course. You could have a test that has some copywriting exercises that would rate them on a scale of one to ten. This one's pretty effective because first, it makes you seem like the teacher or expert who's rating their ability. And second, if their rating is lower than they expected, then it might give them that extra push to buy your course. I've also seen these types of lead magnets used for matchmaking purposes. Something that's really good about this is that you only ask for their contact information after they already completed the survey test or questionnaire. Because after filling out all that information, it's pretty unlikely that they won't share their contact information with you so they can see their results. Anyway, this was a crash course on lead magnets, so you can pick the one that's right for your business. And future lessons we'll go over each type of lead magnet specifically and show you how to create it. 25. The Most Underrated Lead Magnet: At this point, you already understand the value of a lead magnet, and we already know that lead magnets can take multiple different forms. So in this lesson, I want to take you through a specific kind of lead magnet that I personally find as being quite interesting and a fun one that you can choose and add to your own landing page. And you've probably experienced this yourself. So many of us have taken these buzz feed quizzes to get to know a little bit more about ourselves. And do these quizzes actually tell us anything? Maybe they do, maybe they don't. But the point is, regardless of that outcome, all of us want to take them. So I want to show you an AI software that can help you create one of these quizzes personalized for your landing page. And a particular reason as to why this can be quite an attractive option is that it takes mere minutes to set up and create. So let me walk you through this software and show you exactly how you can do it yourself. Step number one, you're going to want to go to a software that can allow you to do this. And in this lesson, I'm going to be showing you lead quizzes.com. So first step when you're here is you're going to click Try it free. So now that we're at this page, what you're going to want to do is input all your information and your website URL. So what this software does is it goes and looks at your website, all the information and sees what it's about to then help create that tailored quiz specifically for you. So now that we're here, you're going to want to click Generate now with the AI Content Builder. Yet, again, we're going to input our website URL. And then enter a short description about what it is that you do and what your page is all about. Alright, so I have all the information we need right here. So I put in the link of the website that we built earlier in this course, and that's founders focus. And I continued under that persona of that website that we built in saying that I am a business coach specializing in helping small to medium sized business owners streamline their operations and increase their profitability. So this is exactly what I do to give the quiz information about me and my offer. So then I wanted to go into what I want the quiz to entail. So I said, I want to create an interactive quiz that assesses a business owner's current operational effectiveness and their potential for growth. The quiz should include questions about business planning, financial management, team leadership, and innovation. These are things that I work with that I specialize in helping business owners improve upon. Furthermore, each question should help identify the strengths and weaknesses in their current business model. Then I'm going into what I want this quiz to eventually lead into. And I say that the goal is to assess where they need the most assistance and to get on a 30 minute free consultation call with me. The quiz should be engaging, visually appealing, and easy to complete, encouraging participants to leave their contact information for a follow up consultation. Alright, so now let's click Generate quiz and see what we get back with. Alright, so now the first prompt it gives us is to select a title for our quiz. So let's go ahead and do that. Okay, so out of these ones that it gave me, I'm going to choose streamline and succeed, measure your business' efficiency. So now we're going to go ahead and generate questions. And now it's provided us with a bunch of questions. And one thing that I really do like about the software is that you're always able to generate more. So, if you don't like what it gives you at first, you're always able to get more and find those questions that you believe are going to be extremely appealing to your target audience. Since I'm not actually going to be using this quiz, I'm not going to go ahead and go way too much into analyzing what questions are best, but I will show you about how they look like. So you have here this first one, for example, how often do you review your business plan to align it with your current goals and market conditions? So if I just click this drop down, we get to see what kind of questions it gives or what kind of responses it gives. You're able to select either once a year, every quarter when there's a significant change in the market or I don't have a formal business plan. And just like with these questions, right here, as you're able to see, you can edit them to change them. Maybe you don't like the wording or you want to use some kind of specific language in the questions, and you're able to do that same thing with these potential responses. And as you can see, with each question, it's something different. So this next one, what's your approach to financial management in your business? You can click this drop down and here are a bunch of responses that it gives us. I have a dedicated financial team that manages it. I use software to manage finances myself. I consult with a financial advisor periodically. You get to see that these are all pretty good questions given the prompt that I gave it. And the responses are also on that same level. They're very specific and it makes that person that's taking the quiz on your landing page feel as if that, you know, you created this yourself, and it's very specific, and it feels like you're about to give them some really valuable information, or really valuable feedback. So I'm just going to go ahead and select these top five, and then we're going to move on. Now we're going to go to Select type. So in this software, it gives us two different options to select our content type. The first one is outcome logic. For this outcome logic, what the quiz is basically going to do is look at their answers, and it's going to associate an outcome with. So for our example, this outcome would be that they need help in their business, or they have a lot to improve on. Therefore, they should hop on a 30 minute consultation call with me, and we can talk about improving and what they can do better in their business. And the second type of logic here is scoring logic. So basically, this would be assigning a score to every kind of answer that they and at the end of the result at the end of the quiz, it's going to give them this score. So let's say that they were about 50% across the board, that none of their answers were exceptional and none of their answers were that they really needed help or they were at rock bottom. So they got a 50% back on this quiz. And that is going to be associated with, okay, like, this is your result. So I think that you should hop on a 30 minute call with me and we can discuss how we can improve this. So what I'm going to do is select outcome logic, and that outcome is basically going to no matter who takes the test and what answers that they put, I'm going to have it recommend that they get on a 30 minute consultation call. So, we're going to go to quiz Biz. Alright. So now we're actually at this page where we're able to edit our quiz completely. For example, lets us alter the start screen for the quiz. So what we can do is drag this cover page and put it right here at the start screen. And what we're able to do is then add a title, add a description, and then add a button label right here. So, for example, with the title, we can just have it set as what our quiz name is. I'm just going to type in measure your business proficiency. And then I'm going to add a short description just kind of grabbing their attention. So what I just typed in here is, see where you're at and running your business. Will you get a perfect or is there room for improvement? So this is basically just short text that gets them a little excited in taking this quiz because they want to know, do they have things to improve on, or are they going to be perfect as everyone wants to be? And then the button, I just click Start now. So this is super basic, super simple. We're also able to add an image or video to the start screen. I'm not going to do that, but that can be an option for you to make it look a little bit more visually appealing. So I'm going to click Save. So next, I want to show you how we can build this results screen. So I'm going to go here and drag Results Builder and put it there. So, if I actually were to do this with this business, you want to have the right language because you don't want to turn everyone off and getting these results. So you want to phrase it in a way that can make them more excited and a little bit more willing to take the words and your consideration into account. So instead of saying you suck, schedule a call with me now, I'm going to frame it a little bit nicer than that. And don't get me wrong. There is space for provocative language when marketing. But in these results of this quiz, I'm going to choose not to use those. So I have my results title typed out right here. And what I said is that you're doing fine, but you could be doing way better. Now, since this is just an example, I'm not going to go ahead and create this entire description because these descriptions should be a little bit more tailored to whatever it is that their responses were just so that they can feel like that this was actually something that you put a lot of thought into and something that really demonstrates your expertise in this field. So when you're building your own quiz, you could have a title that is akin to mine in saying that you're doing fine, but you could be doing way better because this is a blanket statement. But when going into the description, make it a little bit more specific because this result title basically sets us up to do whatever it is that next bigger action is. In my case, it's going to be scheduling a call with me. So this is going to be good because I'm not going to be going on them a little too hard, but I am identifying that there is room for improvement, and therefore, I'm implying that I'm going to be the one to be providing that expertise and that guidance to help them improve. So let me actually show you how you can tie an answer to a specific result. So, this result description is, I'm going to say test one, save. Can create results, and you can also add a different result here on this result screen. So I'm going to name this one test two and save. That's two and save. And we can go right here into the mapping on each content, and we can say what each answer associates with. So with once a year, if they say that they only go over their current goals once a year, we can say that you're doing fine, but you could be doing way better. And as you can see, you can put all of them to just one result if you want. Or you can switch it up. You can go to that result screen, create another one and associate these answers with different results. And basically, what it does is it's going to be counting up their responses. And if they have a certain amount of responses that is the majority for one result, that is the result that they're going to be taken to. And there's so much to this. As I showed you, you can have all these different results, but then you can also do logic branching. And this is going to be a lesson that I can really dedicate an entire video to. So if this is something that you're interested, you can look into it. But if I went over this, this lesson would be way too long. So other things that we can also add to this result screen are our calendar calendar. And if you don't know what calendly is, it's basically an appointment booking software. So if this were me, what I would be doing, if I just had this one result that you're doing fine, but you could be doing way better, I would then add this calendly widget associated with that result. And basically, what that would do is it gives people, our visitors, the people taking these quiz, an option to then schedule a call with me after, like I said I wanted to do in the beginning. Also, you have another option here in the URL redirect. So if you want to send them to a specific part of your website, for example, you can also do that. The next part of this that I want to show you is a quick thing, but it's going to be something that you're going to want to spend a little bit of time on, and that's going to be the design. So like I said, this starting screen doesn't look very sexy. It's not the nicest looking thing. So if I were to actually go ahead and be using this lead magnet, I would spiff it up a little bit, make it look a little bit more visually appealing for my visitors. So you have a lot of options to change it up. You can change the font. You can change the colors. You can even upload an image like I showed earlier and then play with the opacity of this image. And then also you have themes here. So you could basically select a theme from one of theirs, and that alone makes it look ten times better. So say we're going to stick with this one that I chose this theme. It's a quick way to make it look good without putting in too much effort and time. Then we can go to Configure, basically make the title of it, make the description, and add all these other things if we want to do or not. And then from this point, we're going to want to go over to share. So depending on how you want to provide this lead magnet to your landing page visitors, you have a lot of options. So if you want to just have it in your landing page, you could use an inline Embed Code. So basically, with whatever website building software that you use, you can just go to the HTML code element, put that on your page, and then paste in this inline embed code. And this quiz will pop up right there on your landing page for them to take. But if you're doing this in some way where you're getting their email and then sending them this quiz, then you could also just get a URL right here. The content URL, it's going to lead directly to this quiz for them to take. So once you get all that you just click Publish, and now it's all published. So it's going to be ready for anyone to use. So let me just quickly show you how this would look. I just copied this link, open this. I'm going to paste it here, and here we go. Here's our quiz. I'm going to click Start now. And as you can see, it looks pretty nice. Once a year, submit, submit, submit, submit. Now, finally, I'm going to submit that last one. You're doing fine, but you could be doing way better. And yet again, if I added this calendar inline widget, basically, what I would be able to do on this page, it would show my title. You're doing fine, but you could be doing way better. A description. Hopefully, it's going to be specific to this quiz. And then below it, it will show the calendar Leap, basically, the website scheduler. So, ideally, in that description that is going to be tailored to their response, it's going to also have a call to action to schedule that meeting with me, that 30 minute consultation call, which they can see is the clear next step in helping them improve their business. So there you have it. You saw for yourself. That was super easy and something that can be done super quickly in just an evening. Maybe you don't want to use this as your sole lead magnet. But as you saw, this was super easy to do, and it probably will have some kind of value for you and your business to use, even if you want to just use it in some email marketing. So there you have it. That's how you make your quiz in under an hour. Go ahead, try it for yourself and increase your conversion. 26. Use Your Newsletter to Sell Your Own Stuff: All right, it's time to cover how to actually make money with our newsletters. At the beginning of the course, we discussed a few ways. And you might remember that I recommended that you monetize your newsletter by including it as a part of your funnel. Now, in this lesson, we're going to break down exactly what that means and what ways that you can do that. But first, let's have a crash course on what a funnel or a sales funnel is. I have an entire course about sales funnels if you want to learn. For now, what you need to know is that a funnel is something that every single person who has something to sell has. Whether you like it or not, if you sell something, you have a process from taking people who don't know about your product to purchasing it. No matter what the system is, terrible or great, it exists. So you'll notice the first interesting thing is that a funnel orbits around one key thing. The thing that you have to sell or in other words, your offer. In the first lessons, we discussed in detail how to find your newsletter offer and how to have a multi level offer. Now, your offer in this context means, what are you actually selling? Now, you may have something to sell already or you may not. Either way, directing people from your newsletter to purchasing that thing is the best way to leverage your audience. We talked about it briefly, but it's because of two reasons. First is that you take 100% of the profits. There's no need to share it. And second, it's an asset that builds on itself. As you get testimonials, reviews, et cetera, your offer becomes more valuable and you can scale it. Okay, so the first case here is if your offer is a digital product. If you have enough of an expertise to write a newsletter about a subject, you have enough of an expertise to create a course on Remember, our newsletter revolves around solving a problem that a certain demographic has. Creating a course is simply another way of solving that problem. Now there are quite a few advantages of solving a problem in course format. It gives you information organized in order and from a source that you trust. We have an abundance of information, so there's a lot of value in synthesizing it and giving someone exactly what they need to solve their problem. Guessed it. It's sort of what we're doing in this course. And when I say a course, there are many formats that are within that term. For instance, you could create a program that has a video course but also has live calls every week. And for that, you could charge quite a bit more. Or you could have the course delivered exclusively through live calls. And there are many options, and we don't need to unpack each of them. So if you have a digital product that solves the same problem that your demographic has, your newsletter is a beautiful way to drive traffic to. The way that your funnel could look like if you did something is like this. Now, the top of the funnel would be wherever people discover your newsletter. This could be any of the methods that we touched on in the previous module, blog, YouTube, referrals, whatever. So the top of your funnel is where they have the least commitment, investment and compliance with your brand. They're just consuming free content and they're giving nothing in exchange. Now, your newsletter is one level below that, where they're giving away their personal information and they're receiving your messages directly in their inbox. As they continue to read your newsletter and perhaps consume some of your other content, they're becoming more familiar with your brand. And if you're continuing to provide value and solve their problems, then you're solidifying yourself as an expert in their mind. So in your newsletter, you can provide value while sporadically referencing your course. For example, one of my clients sends daily super short emails as a part of his newsletter. His demographic is men who struggle with dating, so he sends a quick email with a story, a tip or something like that. He keeps them fun and light hearted, and a large portion of his audience looks forward to. End of the email, he always signs out with a CTA to book a call with him or his team to tell them about his course. And that's literally the funnel that we just described. Strangers are recommended his video on YouTube. They then opt in for his lead magnet in exchange for their email. Those emails showcases knowledge and oftentimes testimonials in the form of stories from other customers. And that's part of the beauty of selling your own product. You can deliver value and provide social proof from your clients at the same time. Readers then receive daily short emails that have a CTA to get on a call, as I mentioned. And he sells like crazy. So one of the main takeaways and appeals of selling a digital product like a course, book or program is this. You can tell stories about people who have solved their problem with your solutions. And this is entertaining because humans love stories. But it also provides value because you're not going to be shying away from sharing the details of how they did this. This helps your audience continue to position you as someone who has the solution. Alright. That's how you incorporate your newsletter as a part of your funnel for a digital product. But what if it's a physical product? Well, the core strategy remains the same. Provide value, build trust, and nurture your audience until they're ready to buy. But the way that you present your product is different. Unlike a digital product where you can share a story about someone's transformation, a physical product requires a bit more of a subtle approach. There's often more friction here because for physical products, there's usually other more mainstream options. Also, people are used to being constantly sold physical so instead of directly selling in every email, your focus should be on giving upfront value and letting your product fit naturally into the conversation. Alright, let's break this down. Well, your newsletter should be value first. The product mentions come later. If you're selling a course, you can go straight into the success stories and transformation based storytelling. But with a physical product, people often need more education, awareness, and familiarity before they're ready to buy. So your main focus should be these three things. Educating your audience about the bigger problem that your product solves, providing insights, tips, and expert advice around your niche and building trust. So when they're ready, your product is the natural choice. Newsletter should not be a sales pitch. It should feel like a valuable resource your audience looks forward to. For example, if you sell ergonomic chairs, then your newsletter should not be filled with by now. Instead, your emails would cover three ways to instantly reduce back pain at your desk. Why sitting too long is killing your productivity. How to fix your posture without expensive treatment. Then those emails, your chair is mentioned briefly, maybe as a part of the solution, but the focus is always on the value first. That way, when someone is finally ready to buy, your product is the obvious choice because they already trust your insights. Also, one of the best things here is to be radically objective. If you've ever seen how Logan Paul speaks of his drink prime, then you might feel almost repelled. He's so clearly biased and completely uninterested in providing true testimony about his product. On the other hand, if you've seen someone like Brian Johnson, then you might have had the opposite effect. Brian Johnson provides all of his findings for free, and he gives plenty of alternatives for other products and how to find and source whatever you may need. Among these alternatives, he mentions his, which clearly arise from trying to solve a problem in the so when mentioning your product, keep it objective. Don't just say it's perfect and nothing else has to be considered. Explain exactly how it compares with the competition, what the pros and cons of each alternative are, et cetera. Now, how is the funnel going to look like for a physical product? Well, step one is going to be the top of the funnel, and this is bringing in new readers. So people are going to discover your newsletter via SEO, social media, paid ads, or referrals. You then offer a lead magnet to capture their email. So for example, get our free guide, ten hacks for healthier Workstation. This gets them into your email list without friction. Step two is now at the middle of the funnel where you want to educate and build trust. This is going to consist of sending consistently valuable emails without aggressively selling. Here, you want to focus on solving pain points and offering practical tips and briefly mention your product only when it fits in naturally. If you sell blueight blocking glasses, then you might want to send out an email on the hidden dangers of too much screen time. Then you can casually mention your glasses as a helpful tool. Now we're on to step three, which is the bottom of the funnel and this is going to be converting subscribers into buyers. After multiple emails of valuable content, introduce soft CTAs. For example, by the way, we designed an ergonomic chair that fixes these exact issues. Check it out here. Or we're running a small discount for our subscribers. Grab yours before it's gone. Exclusive offers and urgencies work well, but not every email should be sales focused. Now I want to go a little bit further into how we can seamlessly integrate our product into our emails without making it feel like an ad. First, we have the expert insight approach. That's going to be teaching them something valuable before mentioning your product. So if you sell Cold Brew coffee makers, an email would be why Cold Brew is 70% less acidic than regular coffee and why that matters. And you educate them on why Cold Brew is better for digestion, and then briefly mention, that's why we created our Cold Brew maker to make this process easier at home. Next, we have the case study approach. So if possible, share a story about how the product has solved someone else's problems. For example, how one CEO fixed his back pain after years of sitting wrong. You explain how a customer changed their workstation habits and casually mentioned that they started using your ergonomic chair in the process. Next, we have the behind the scenes approach. Here, you want to show the process behind your product's creation to make it feel more personal. For example, why redesigned our blue light glasses and the way that we did it? Instead of hard selling, you're educating your audience on the design process, and this can make them appreciate your product's quality and purpose just that bit more. Lastly, we have the personal experience approach. This is going to be you sharing your own journey related to the product. So if you sell high quality kitchen knives, then you could say something like this. I use cheap knives for over ten years. Here's why I finally switched. And you go on to explain why cheap knives don't last and naturally mention why your product is different. So the customer journey is similar for a physical product, but it's not exactly the same. Now, we have to be wary of people losing trust in us because there is something being sold. And depending on your industry or niche, this can happen quite easily. If they sense any sort of trickiness in order to sell, then your readers can easily become suspicious of your testimony and expertise. Make sure that you're staying impartial objective, and you're really committed to providing your readers value, not just selling. 27. Become an Amazon Affiliate in Minutes: And this son, I want to show you just how easy it is for you to sign up through Amazon's affiliate program, so you can put affiliate links within your newsletters or blogs. Now, looking at the length of this video is exactly how long it can take you to actually go ahead and do this yourself. So it's a super easy process, and the first step to it is going to be coming to Google and searching Amazon affiliate program. And the first thing that we're going to want to do is come here to this Amazon Associates Link, and we're going to go ahead and click it. We are going to be brought to this page. Now, depending on where you are in the world, if you want to be doing a Amazon affiliate program within the US, so having affiliate links to US Amazon products, then you have to make sure that you are going to be at the right location at the right link. So if you are in the UK, then you want to make sure that you're doing this within the UK Amazon or if you're in India, you want to do it through Indian Amazon. Basically, that's just one thing that you're going to have to look out for. And if you don't know what you want to do, for the most part, I would say just default to Amazon US because that's going to be the one with the widest reach. So, once we are here, we're going to go ahead and click Sign Up. Now, for the first step of this, it's basically going to be saying to whom should we issue these payments. So if you already have an Amazon account, then it's going to list everyone on your account with all of the shipping addresses associated with them. So the name and shipping address. Now, if you don't, you could go ahead and come here and you can insert all of this information yourself. What Amazon is going to be doing is going to be issuing a check to whoever you put right here. So you want to make sure that the name is going to be your name because obviously, if it's a check, then for you to be able to cash this check, it has to be your exact name. And you want to make sure that this address is also your address because again, this is going to be a check. So it's going to be mailed to someone, and you want to make sure that this is going to be coming to you, so you're going to be able to cash this check. So go ahead and insert all this information, and it should take just a few minutes. So go ahead and insert all this information, and once you're done, we're going to go ahead and click next. Okay, now we're in the next step of this. So this is going to be basically asking to verify some website or mobile app that is going to be associated with you, so Amazon can kind of verify that you are going to be using this affiliate program in a correct place. So for your website, you can go ahead and put the website that's associated with your blog or your newsletter. But also it could be something as simple as a social media link. So it can be a link to your Instagram or it could be a link to your YouTube channel. Now, for us, I'm going to go ahead and put in the blog that we created with beehive, our tailored tech tips beehive.com. And then all I have to do is click Add, and then that's all you need. Here in this section, you just have to put at least one thing. So at least one website or mobile app, and then we can go ahead and click Next. Now it's going to ask us what our preferred Associates store ID is going to be. So this is going to be what is going to be listed in the affiliate link that we are going to be putting out there and that people are going to be clicking. So it's not too important as to what we're putting here, but you can put it basically just the name of your business or something that's going to be recognizable. Again, it's not going to be something that many people are really going to be paying attention to, but I'm going to go ahead and just put tailored tech tips. And then here, you can just go ahead and do what it says. Tell us about the content that you create and you can describe your newsletter or your blog or whatever. So I'm just going to go ahead and say, I have a newsletter that discusses the latest AI and Tech News. So then, which best describes your content? And I could just click Blog, select How did you hear from us, and then anything. Word of mouth. And then go ahead and do this cap show. And we're going to go ahead and click Finish. So it's going to say, congratulations. And essentially what it's telling us here is that we're going to have access to the affiliate program, but in the meantime, Amazon Associates are going to kind of verify our profile, but we're able to go ahead and start going with this. So I'm going to do this right here, click later and entering our payment and tax information. And then it's going to take us now to the dashboard of our affiliate program. So as you see right here, if this is going to be something that you're going to be implementing right as you create it, you are going to have to fill in your tax information for this to be something that's eligible for. You can see right here, we have a kind of dashboard of how much money we've been making with our affiliate links. So hopefully, as your newsletter grows, you're going to be seeing this graph go up up and up. So once you have this affiliate account created and it's associated with your primary Amazon account that you use, it's immediately going to be integrated with this thing called Sit Stripe. And to see Sit Stripe in action, we're going to have to actually move on to Amazon. As you can see, now that we're here on Amazon, we see Sit Stripe right here. So this is basically what is going to give us the links for everything that we are going to be promoting in our newsletter. So let's go to an example product. So now that we're here in this Amazon Echo Dot, we get to see right here. We have to see an important information, which is going to be our commission rate. So when somebody buys this, which is a $50 product, we can expect a 4% commission back, which is roughly going to be about $2 for each purchase that's going to be made of this Amazon Alexa. Now, how do we actually get the link to put into our newsletter? Well, it's super simple. All we have to do is come up here, click Get Link. Make sure our store ID is correct, as I see right here, tailored tech tips, and then all we have to do is copy this link and we could do a short link or it could be a full link, but as you can see, as I scroll down here, these full links are pretty long. So there's really not going to be much benefit for you to do a full link unless you have some specific one yourself. For the most part, I'll always just go ahead and do this short link, and then we can copy it and then put it anywhere. And then I'm going to go ahead and open a new tab here. I can paste this in. As you can see, this link is going to take us directly to this page. Obviously, because it's our affiliate program, we're not going to be able to get an affiliate commission from this, but if this was bought from someone else's, then you would get this affiliate. So there you have it. That's how simple and easy it is to set up your own Amazon affiliate program. And when you're going to be talking about any products on your newsletter, there's really no point to not have this affiliate program, because even if you're not going to be focused on hard selling these products, if you are going to mention something, there's no reason why you shouldn't just go ahead and put a hyperlink so whenever you mention it, you can just highlight that little part. Say you're talking about an Amazon Alexa because of some AI tools or some kind of experience that you had. You could just go ahead and hyperlink that thing. So when people see that, they can just click it, and then it'll automatically have that affiliate link, and it wasn't any hard sell or anything that was annoying. Right now, what you're doing is profiting off of the convenience because you just linked it right there, and all they had to do was click on text or whatever in your newsletter to then go straight to the product to buy it, you then just get that easy couple dollar commission from it. 28. Get Sponsored by Other Companies & Get Paid for No Work: All right, so we've covered how to use your newsletter to sell your own products. Whether that's a digital product, like a course or a coaching program or a physical product like a consumer good. But what if you don't have a product of your own? Or maybe you do have a product, but you're looking for additional revenue streams. Well, that's where sponsorships come in. Sponsorships are one of the most easiest ways to start monetizing your newsletter, especially when you have a growing audience. Instead of relying on selling something yourself, brands pay you to get in front of your readers. In the best part, it doesn't cost your audience anything yet you still get paid. Let's break down exactly how this works and how you can land your first sponsorships. So what is a newsletter sponsorship? Like RCover a sponsorship is where a brand pays you to promote their product or service inside of your newsletter. It's basically an ad, but the key is to try to make it seamless, valuable, and natural, not spamming. Now, there are three sponsorship types which are the most common. The first is dedicated sponsorships. This is where a brand pays to be the sole sponsor of an email. So their message is the only promotional content within that email. The second is sponsored sections, and this is where a short ad or a mention is going to be placed inside your regular newsletter. And lastly, we have multiple sponsors. So more than one company pays to be featured in a single newsletter, which is common in larger publications. So for example, if you run a productivity focus newsletter, task management app might sponsor you and pay you for a short blurb in your emails. Or if you write about investing, then a financial newsletter platform might want exposure to your audience, and the bigger your audience, the more that you can charge. But even with a small but engaged subscriber base, you can start landing a bunch of sponsors. Now, the real question, how much can you actually make with these sponsorships? Now, all of this is going to vary based on niche audience size and engagement, but here's a rough industry standard. So you could get $10-30 per 1,000 subscribers per email for a general newsletter. Now, for niche highly targeted newsletters, you could get $50-100 per 1,000 subscribers per email. So if you have 5,000 engaged subscribers, you could then charge 50 to $150 per sponsorship. Now, if you have 10,000 engaged subscribers, then you could charge between $100 to $300 per sponsorship. And if you have 50,000 plus subscribers, you could be making $500-2 thousand per. And again, that's per email. So if you send multiple newsletters a week, you can scale this up very quickly. Now, if you build a large audience and a lucrative niche, say, finance, tech, B to B, or SAS, sponsorships can become a full time income on their own. Now the big question, how do you actually get brands to pay? Well, there are two main ways. Option one is that you reach out to the brand directly. This is going to be the proactive approach. If you have an engaged audience, then don't wait for the sponsors to come to you. Pitch them yourself. So find companies that are already advertising in other newsletters, podcasts or blogs in your niche. So you can also look for brands that are targeting your ideal readers. So tools, products or services that solve their problems. Or you can send a cold email. So this is going to be introducing your newsletter and audience and ask if they'd be interested in the sponsorship. Oh, here's an example outreach email that you could send to a sponsor. For the subject of the email, you could say, want to reach, insert your niche enthusiasts. Now for the email content, you could say something like this. Hi, brand. I run a newsletter called Newsletter Name that reaches blank, highly engaged niche enthusiast every week or month. I noticed you're targeting your niche customers and thought that you might be interested in reaching my audience. Our readers describe your ICP and are highly engaged with topic. Would you be open to a quick chat about sponsoring an issue? I'd love to explore how we can feature your brand in front of an audience that aligns with your ideal customers. Looking forward to hear your thoughts. Now, the key here is to position it as a win win. You have an audience that they want and you can help them get more exposure in sales. Okay. Now, that was the first option. Now we're going to move on to option two, which is get listed on sponsorship marketplaces, which is the passive approach. If you don't want to manually reach out, then you can list your newsletter on platforms that connect creators with sponsors. There are many platforms that are great for this. The first one is SWAPSTAC. This one just connects newsletters with brands that are looking to sponsor. The second is paved and this one is a marketplace for newsletter and podcast sponsorships. The next one is affluence, which is influencer and creator sponsorships. Lastly, we have LetterwL, which is specifically for newsletter sponsorships. Brands browse these platforms and they find newsletters that they want to work with, and then they reach out directly. If you want sponsors to come to you, then you should get listed here as soon as possible. Now we need to cover how you actually want to structure these sponsorships in your newsletter. Because sponsorship should feel natural and valuable, not like intrusive ads. Here's a simple format that works well. So within your newsletter, you'd have a sponsored section. For example, you could add those Imogs and then have sponsored in All Caps. Following this, you would say the productivity tool that saves you hours each week. Then here you want to be honest. Like we said before, this sponsorship is going to be an extension of your image, you want to actually believe in what you're sponsoring. You could say, I've been testing out insert sponsored product here, and it's honestly a game changer for me. If you're looking to solve a problem here. This tool helps you keep benefit. Then you can have a little part that says, check it out here. Then there you can either put the normal link to the product or you can have your own affiliate link. This keeps it short, engaging and valuable, not just a boring ad. Again, I want to emphasize what we discussed in the previous lesson. Keep it objective and genuine. One of the biggest assets that you can build in a newsletter is trust and expertise. People go to you because they trust your judgment and they know that you're an expert. Now, if you become a sell out and just start sponsoring anyone who'll pay you, then it's going to eventually tarnish your reputation. Just imagine a couple of really engaged readers who take your advice, buy a terrible product, and end up not trusting you. Another way to make sponsorships work is to blend them into your content. For example, if you write about time management, then you can naturally introduce a task management tool sponsor as a part of your insights. This makes it feel organic rather than forced. Now obviously, you want to know how to increase what you charge for sponsorships. Of course, I'm here to give you some insights on that too. First, what's obvioust and most straightforward is to grow your reader count. More readers equals more value to your sponsors. Next, you want to boost your engagement rates. If your open and click through rates are high, then sponsors will pay you more. Also, make sure that you're tracking these because you won't be able to show how high they are if you're not tracking. Of course, if you're using Milhap as I showed you, then you'll be able to track these easily. Next, offer multiple placements. A sponsor could be in one email, a monthly package or a dedicated Send. Lastly, you can bundle sponsorships with other content. So if you have a blog, YouTube channel or social media, then you can bundle these for more value. Now, you don't need a massive audience. You just need the right audience. A smaller, highly targeted newsletter in a high value niche can charge more than a general newsletter with thousands of disengaged readers. So now to recap, sponsorship lets you get paid without selling your own product. Brands pay you to access your audience. You can start with a small engaged list. As little as 5,000 subscribers can bring in consistent sponsorships. Charge ten to $100 per 1,000 subscribers per email depending on your niche and engagement. You can find sponsors by reaching out directly or listing on sponsorship platforms like Swap Stack and make sponsorships feel natural by integrating them smoothly in your newsletter. No intrusive ads. Lastly, increase revenue by growing your list, boosting your engagements, and bundling sponsorships with other content. If done right, sponsorships can turn your newsletter into a serious revenue stream, whether as a main monetization strategy or secondary income source alongside selling your own products.