How To Get Your First 1,000 Newsletter Subscribers (Starting From Scratch)

0:00The worst advice to start growing your newsletter is to ask your friends and family to subscribe. I know that a lot of gurus are preaching this, but hey, what a joke. It really sounds like good advice on paper because it's free, it's fast, and your partner is definitely going to say yes, but it's also the fastest way to build a list full of freebie seekers because friends and family are not going to buy from you unless they're super super

0:25nice. And that's why your first 1,000 email subscribers shouldn't be people who know you. They should be strangers who are interested in what you have to offer. And there are three ways that are working right now. And especially the last method I share with you will help you add dozens, if not hundreds, of subscribers in just 24 to 48 hours. So, there is one thing that you need to do before even trying to get people onto your newsletter. And that thing is building a lead magnet. I know you heard about it a thousand times, but most people create garbage lead magnets, and then they wonder why nobody's actually

0:59signing up to their email list. Here are a few examples of garbage lead magnets. Get my free toolkit, all right, as if you actually needed more tools, or get my free worksheet because, yeah, I know that you crave working more, or get my 145-page ebook you'll never finish and let it rot in your downloads folder, right? And I would recommend you create what I call a sexy solution. So, what is this? It's basically a lead magnet that sounds new, that tackles a painful problem, and provides a fairly quick fix. Think 15 minutes or less. The reason is because

1:36pain motivates people. And humans are so impatient these days that you need to prove them as fast as possible that your bag full of tricks actually work. And you get a bonus point if you make it sound new because novelty releases dopamine. So, a few ways to think about a sexy solution could be a cheat sheet, or a prompt, or a template. So, now you could try to come up with this for yourself, or you can simply use the prompt I'll share in the description. It's free, and you'll walk away with a sexy solution in less than 10 minutes. Okay, so the next step is to

2:08create what I call the ugliest landing page ever. And please, don't overthink it. I wanted to use the simplest template in your auto-responder, and just write two lines. So, the first line is going to be your sexy solution. So, as an example, the one meal that will help you lower your blood sugar almost instantly, right? So, that's the sexy solution, and then you're simply going to add a second line, which is going to be your download now button. That's it. And I know that you are tempted to add more, but resist that pull chip, because your lead magnet should actually do all the heavy lifting. So, now that you've got your

2:45lead magnet and your landing page ready, now what you need is traffic. You need to get people to visit that page and actually download your lead magnet. So, the first way to add more subscribers to your newsletter is the organic way, which means that you're going to earn these people without paying a cent. But be no fool, because you'll pay for it with your time. And here's what it

3:06actually looks like. So, first of all, you pick one platform, let's say Substack, LinkedIn, whatever feels easier to you, and wherever also your future email subscribers already hangs out. And then, you post there three or four times a week, or if you're crazy like me, you post daily for the next 6 months. And every single thing

3:23you post links back to your lead magnet. So, the people who liked what you posted can join your newsletter. That's the whole method, right? Obviously, I can't go into all details about each platform, because each platform has its own rules. On my YouTube channel, you'll find a lot of advice and a lot of tips about how to specifically grow on Substack, if that's your thing. So, the organic method definitely works. It's something that

3:46I'm doing myself. It just takes time. When you're just getting started, you You not have this time. That's why you might want to consider the next method because it's fast. The way is paid ads. So, you pay Meta or Google to show a little ad that links to your lead magnet, right? So, it's I know it really sounds simple, but it's actually not, right? Because the setup is a real pain in the back. So, first of all, you have to set up pixels, you know, which is a little piece of tracking code that you have to put on your website. Then you have to abide by the rules that

4:17constantly change. And then you have to find a way through the ugly ads managers, right? Because just take a look at how the Google ads manager actually looks like. Like it it just looks like a NASA dashboard to me. Then you have to find out the right targeting. So, now can you actually make ads work? Sure, plenty of people actually do. I just don't like checking spreadsheets and finding my way through an ugly interface. Now, there is a third solution if you want hundreds of subscribers fast. And it's the one that I would personally use, and it's called sponsorships. So, what a sponsorship is is that you pay another creator a C in

4:48exchange of him promoting your newsletter. Here's an example of one of my sponsorships. And the reason I'd pick this over the other two is because it's fast and allows you to reach the right readers. They already typed their email into a box to get a newsletter, and then they kept there. So, you're not sitting there hoping these people are going to read newsletters. You know that they open,

5:10they read, and they click. So, here's how I get started. What I do first is I find 10 creators who have a newsletter in the same space. Then I'd head over to Google or some deep or do some deep research with Claude or ChatGPT and search for newsletter for or about XYZ that accepts

5:30sponsorships. So, as an example, if I'd help diabetics type 2, I'd simply search newsletter for diabetics type 2. And that's some of the newsletters that you're going to find will already have that option to sponsor their newsletter, right? And those are the easy ones because the price is probably already sitting right there. For the rest, subscribe to their email list and then drop them a short email asking if they sell ad slots in their newsletters and if yes, how much it

5:56costs. So, now let me give you the actual numbers because I've been doing this for a while. I spent over $10,000 on newsletter sponsorship over over the past 2 years and these resulted in over 2,000 new subscribers joining my newsletter. So, the average price of a sponsorship is $150. Some of them were as low as $40

6:18and some of them as expensive as $1,000. And here is the part that surprises most people. Most of these sponsorships paid for themselves. So, as an example, I run a sponsorship for $40 that brought in $294 in sales. Another for $50 brought in over $3,000 in sales. And another one that I run 100

6:38for $100 that brought in $388 in sales. So, I just want to be upfront with you here that not every sponsorship prints money like that, but the winners make more than simply covering the losers. And the other thing you get here is speed because you'll see sign-ups the same day the sponsorship goes out. And this to me is way more gratifying, especially when you're just getting started, right? Because you actually start validating and actually know that now when you send a newsletter, it will actually hit an inbox of readers. So, compare this to the 3 to 6 months of posting every single week or every single day on platforms like Substack,

7:12YouTube, whatever. Anyhow, if this way of adding more email subscribers sounds interesting to you, then you might want to check out what's in the description.