5 Ways To Get Your First 1,000 Newsletter Subscribers (From Scratch)

0:00If you're building a newsletter or an email list, here are the most effective ways to get your first 10,000 subscribers. I got this question from Tom and he asked, "What are the best ways to get your first 10,000 subscribers? It seems like that's one of the hardest things to do. You have to really hustle and at that point it's probably too early to go in and do paid ads to get to your first 1K. So, how do

0:22you do that? Um, thanks for the time." Okay, so here is how. First off, my name is Matt. I've grown my own newsletter to over 50,000 subscribers and used that to build a business that does over $300,000 in revenue per month. I've helped clients that are top media companies and creators add over 10 million newsletter subscribers and over a 100 million in sales. And I've been in the same

0:47situation as Tom and you watching this. I started my newsletter from scratch. I had maybe 400 social followers at that time, maybe less. and I had to get my first 10,000 subscribers and build up everything organically. And I'll definitely say in my experience, in the experience of all the people I've worked with, getting the first 1,000 subscribers is the hardest. However, if you can get 1,000 subscribers organically, I guarantee you that you can get to over 10,000 subscribers. And if you can do that, you can build a very large profitable newsletter um business from your newsletter email list if you get to over 10,000 subscribers organically. And the first step is that

1:28first 1K. So, I have a guide below this video that breaks down step by step how you should do that. I recommend you click that, get access to it, but I'm going to break it down step by step for you in this video, too, so you have a video in written version. The first step that's probably almost as important as all the tactical stuff that I'll teach you is how you actually pick a niche, uh, choose an audience and create a category for your newsletter. Now, I don't want to get into all that right now because I want to focus on the tactical things that you need to do to

2:00get your first 10, 100, and 1,000 subscribers in this video, but definitely spend time thinking about what your niche is, who you serve, and what content you're creating for that niche. Because if you get that right, it's going to make growing your newsletter a lot easier. So, you can read about that down below in the guide

2:14that I'll link around this video. Okay. So, after you have that set up, after you have your email service provider set up, those basic things out of the way, then we're actually going to start growing. Okay? And the first thing that I recommend you do is to try and go and get your first 100 subscribers. Okay? Don't focus on a thousand. That's a big number that you don't need to worry about that right. You don't need to worry about that right now. Let's focus on our first 10, our first 100. Let's get to that milestone because the way that you're going to get there is actually different than your first

2:4410,00. But you have to get your first 10 or 100 before you get your first 10,000 subscribers. And so that's what I recommend you focus on first. And so I'll break down kind of step by step how I would do that. And I think a lot of this you can do before you even publish your first newsletter, before you write any emails to your list. You can do a lot of stuff pre-launch. And so I'll get

3:02into the pre-launch strategy right now. The first thing you need to have is a landing page. Just a place where you can collect email addresses. You can do this in about 30 minutes. You need to have a dedicated landing page for your newsletter. You don't want to send people to a website or a link tree of a bunch of distractions. I recommend you create a simple dedicated landing page with Beehive. And if you have a good landing page that's going to convert at least 50% of the visitors into newsletter subscribers. If you send people to a link tree or just your website that has a bunch of things on

3:30it, you're going to convert like 10 to 30% of your traffic into email subscribers. And so you literally need to get double the traffic if you use a link to your website versus a landing page. Okay? So use a landing page. That's going to help you in everything that you do. Then you need to add call

3:44to actions to everywhere that you can. You want to think about all the digital real estate that you own. Do you have a website? Do you have an email signature? Do you have social media accounts, a Slack profile? Are you in other private communities or forum where you can customize your profile? Add a call to action for your newsletter or email list on all of that. your website, email signature, social media bios, private community profiles. Don't worry about

4:08making that call to action perfect. You'll have time to update it later. Just add a call to action for your newsletter everywhere. And I encourage you to just do this for things that you have now. So, don't go and create a new website or new social media accounts to do this. Just add stuff that you already

4:23add to stuff that you already have. You'll have time to create other accounts later when that's actually needed. The next thing you should do is send an announcement to all of your friends and family about the newsletter. And I know that sounds really scary and you might be thinking, "Well, I don't think my friends or my family actually even care about this." And the reality is maybe you're right, but the thing is, you need to have people to write to. You need to have some type of momentum and accountability to actually publish and continue growing your newsletter. And the best way to do that is just to get

4:54between five to 10 friends, family, and colleagues to actually go and subscribe. And you should just ask them via a text message or email. Ideally a text message because you'll get a higher response that way. Okay. I have interviewed hundreds not hundreds rather u 50 plus successful newsletter founders and media founders and almost all of them started their businesses by asking friends and family just to subscribe to their newsletter via text message or in person. So don't skip this step. It's worth your time. It's going to hold you accountable. And what I recommend is you send a one-on-one text message to everybody like this. I don't I wouldn't

5:29do a group chat, okay? That diminishes their value and kind of makes you look like a spammy Just do it oneonone, okay? So send something like this. Hey name, I started a newsletter on this topic and here's the name of it. And then you'll share one sentence about how that helps readers um that who subscriber what people will learn if they subscribe to your newsletter. So one sentence on that. If that sounds interesting, sign up here. And then you share a link to your landing page. Okay, that's it. You also could say something like it goes out one time per week. You can unsubscribe anytime, whatever you

5:59want. So I might say, "Hey Mark, I started a newsletter. It's called Morning Brew and it's about what's happening in the business world. The goal is to help readers become smarter about business and finance in just 5 minutes a day. If that sounds interesting, sign up here." Okay, that's it. The next thing you'll do is an announcement on social media. Even if you don't have any followers, I bet you have a couple dozen Facebook friends, couple Twitter followers, maybe a couple hundred LinkedIn connections or more and you need to announce to people that you've started a newsletter or an email list even if you haven't sent any emails

6:33yet. This only is going to take you about 30 minutes and it could help you add a dozen, 50, even a 100red subscribers. So create a simple announcement post about the newsletter and publish it everywhere that you can. Here are the key details you should include. Tell people you started the newsletter. Okay? Make it feel like a new and announcement because if it feels a new, people are more likely to pay attention to it. If it feels like an announcement, they'll pay more attention. They'll support you by subscribing. Tell them the name of your newsletter, the topic of the newsletter, who it's for, how it helps those

7:03readers, what those readers are going to learn, and then include a call to action to sign up. and make sure that call to action is clear and you link to your landing page in the post or in a reply or a comment to the post so people actually can go sign up. So don't just say I started the newsletter and then people have to figure out how to sign up. Tell them exactly where to sign up and how to do so. Now after you post that, don't just post it and hope people will see it. I want you to do this next step. Go back to all the people that you

7:33just text or emailed about your newsletter, and then ask those friends and family members to like the post, comment on the post, and share it with their friends. If you get just five or 10 people to do this or more, that announcement post is going to reach way more people, and you'll get more subscribers. Okay, here's the next thing I recommend you do to get that first 100 subscribers. You should post a newsletter teaser. I call these pre-all to actions or preCTAs. This takes about 30 minutes to do and it can help you add 50 to 100 subscribers. So, 24 hours before you send your first newsletter or your first

8:12email to your list or if you've already sent some, whatever newsletter you decide to send later, so 24 hours before any newsletter send, you're going to post a teaser about it on social media. And on screen now, I'll put in the teaser that I posted before my very first newsletter. And this helped me get my first 150 subscribers. This is called a pre-newsletter call to action. And it's very simple to create and very effective at converting your social followers into subscribers. Because when you do a teaser, you create FOMO, fear of missing out on that content, urgency to sign up and get access to that content, and curiosity to see what the

8:48newsletter content is about. It's really simple to write because you're just telling people what your newsletter covers and then you're saying, "Hey, if you want to hear about this, sign up and you'll learn it." You're not like having a super aggressive call to action. You're just talking about what you're going to talk about in the newsletter. You should do a pre-all to action every single week between 24 to eight hours

9:09before your newsletter is published. Okay? In the link below, I'm going to link to 20 different pre-called action examples so you can see what they look like and you can swipe them for your purposes. So, that is how you're going to get your first 100 subscribers. Now, how do we go from a 100 subscribers to 1,000 subscribers? The strategy to get there is going to be a little bit different. Okay, here's what I recommend that you do. So, number one is to

9:37repurpose and distribute your content. You can do this in about 30 minutes a day. You should create once and distribute forever. So, what I don't want you to do is start writing a newsletter, publishing that every week, and then that's it. Okay? Because an email newsletter is not discoverable. Very few people are going to forward your emails, share your emails, and discover you that way. You need to be publishing elsewhere to grow. I'm talking about social media, um, publishing blogs so you get discovered from search, YouTube, etc. Okay? Even

10:07private communities, that can work too. And then if you publish there and people like that content, they're going to subscribe to see more content in your newsletter. So every newsletter issue that you publish should be repurposed into at least five or more pieces of social content. For example, you write one newsletter per week. to repurpose that content to Twitter, for example, or LinkedIn, you could create um one long form LinkedIn post or Twitter thread and then three or four um shorter tweets or LinkedIn posts from that same piece of newsletter content. So, all from that one newsletter, you're going to have five different posts and you could post

10:45those across one platform or two platforms. Even if it's the same content, then you now have 10 posts. Okay? So from every newsletter, we're getting between five to 10 different social posts where we can use that to get more audience and more subscribers. Also, after you publish your first newsletter, I recommend that you send an email to all of your contacts. Okay, this is another scary thing, but it's a very effective way to get a a big bump

11:10of hundreds of subscribers very quickly. So, I'm talking every contact in your email address, all of your friends, all your co-workers, all of your LinkedIn connections you can find, everybody in the private communities that you're in. If you send an email like this to them, you're going to get hundreds of subscribers very quickly, and you're really not going to bother anybody, okay? So, don't worry about this. So, I want you to make a list of all of your

11:32contacts, uh, LinkedIn connections, etc. Even if you don't have a large network, that's still going to be 200 to 500 plus people. And then after you do that, I want you to write an email that tells them about your newsletter and why they should subscribe. And I'll put an example on screen now. And if you want

11:48to pause the video, you can read this. This is an example from someone who actually has done this. And now they have tens of thousands of newsletter subscribers. And you can repurpose this email to write your own and send it to your warm contacts. In this email, you're basically going to quickly tell people about um what this is, which is your newsletter. Tell them why they're getting this, which is that you've connected in some way before. And then tell them how your newsletter is going to help them. You don't want to auto add

12:15people to the newsletter. That's rude. You want to make sure that's clear in the email. People need to click a link in the email to actually go to your landing page to subscribe. And then you're just going to send this to all of your contacts. And there's basically two ways to do this. Um, one, you can just send it one at a time. And so you can customize the first name and then just copy and paste the message and just send it over and over again. Or number two is you can use Gmail's BCC feature. This is a way to send to multiple people up to

12:43100 people. Um and they won't see who else it's sent to. They just see it sent to them. Make sure you don't use the CC feature because then everybody else will also see who it's sent to. Always use the BCC feature if you're going to do this. Either way works. Um but a more customized email is going to get you a higher conversion rate. You might do a customized email to like 10 people who you think are a really good fit and then

13:05you do the BCC email to everybody else. Okay, it's that simple. Now, um after you do that, you'll get a lot of signups, but also you should follow up. So, three to five days later, send a simple follow-up and you can just say something like, "Hey, I launched a newsletter. Um I sent you this email last week. Did you see it? If it's not interesting, I won't email you about this. I won't email you about this again." Okay? And so I don't want you to follow up like 10 times, but one time is going to help you get more signups from that initial list. Okay. The next thing

13:32you'll do is to post daily on one social platform and convert your followers into subscribers. This is really the bread and butter of how you're going to go to 100 subscribers to a th000 subscribers and above. And this is going to take some time and effort, but it's worth doing. This is where 90%, let's say 70 to 80% or more of your first 1,000 and 10,000 subscribers is going to come from. And there's really no getting around it. To grow a newsletter, you got to publish content on social media or some type of discovery platform like YouTube. If people like that content, they're going to subscribe. It's that

14:07simple. Newsletter content is rarely discovered, so you have to have social content. And I recommend you do the following. Pick one to two social platforms where you think your audience is. It really doesn't matter um which one as long as you believe your ideal audience is there. For a lot of people who write more text focused content,

14:27it's probably going to be LinkedIn. Twitter's okay. It's not as good as it used to be or X. Um but I'm I'm a big fan of LinkedIn, Instagram or YouTube. I think those are really the best platforms to publish content. Now, you need to pick a posting schedule and you need to stick to that posting schedule for a minimum of 30 days. At first, your

14:48focus should be on posting consistently. You don't need to worry about engagement at first. Don't worry about views, likes, whatever. Post consistently for 30 plus days, and your content is going to get better. And then, as your content gets better, you will then get engagement, likes, views, shares, etc. Make consistently posting easier by repurposing your newsletter content. as we covered before in this video. So if you're going for a text focused platform on or even a video focused platform like Instagram, I would recommend five post per week. So one post every weekday. If you're doing a video platform like YouTube, you're probably going to do let's say between one to three videos

15:29per week, but pick a schedule and then stick to that for at least 30 days and just focus on consistently publishing. Now, step number three is to actually include a call to action in your content so you get email subscribers from social media and from video platforms like YouTube. And there's really five different types of call to actions that you can use. So, you can have what I call an incontent call to action or an aftercontent call to action. So, maybe at the end of a LinkedIn post, you talk about your newsletter or lead magnet and you tell people where they can uh find the link to sign up for that. or in the

16:03middle of the post or in the first 30% of a YouTube video, something like that. Then we have your profile, banner, and bio. Okay? So, it's incredibly important that we optimize your social profiles for email subscribers. So, link to your landing page, not a link tree. Show people why your content is valuable and make sure people are aware of your newsletter or lead magnet in their in your social profile so they actually click the link in that profile to go and subscribe. We also have pre-newsletter

16:31call to actions that I covered before. So, we tease the newsletter before it comes out. So, people feel like they're missing out on the content if they don't subscribe. So, you do those once a week. You can also do post newsletter call to action. So, you can say, "Hey, I just published this newsletter about this topic. Here's why it's awesome. If you missed it, use the link in my profile to sign up and I'll send it to you." Okay, that's incredibly powerful, too. Not as good as a precal to action, but post call to actions work, too. Again, the link to all the preCTA examples and

16:58postCT examples are below this video. I also recommend that you do warm DMs. So, DM all of your new followers and connections on social media. Now, this takes time, but if you're trying to get to that first 10,000, like I said before, you got to hustle to get there. And this is going to be an incredibly powerful way to convert your followers into subscribers. And you're basically sending all of them the exact same message. Okay? So, after someone follows

17:22you, send them a simple DM like this. Hey, name and make sure you customize the name so they know it's not automated. Thank you for following me. If you're looking for more content on how to whatever the thing you teach is, so how to blink, um, I have a newsletter and I post my best content and most insightful stuff in that newsletter. Here's the link to

17:42sign up and then you share the link. Okay, you can customize that for your needs, but it should probably be a message like that. And probably about 50% of the people who actually follow you and that you DM will actually sign up. And that's a much higher conversion percentage than not DMing them at all. So, it's incredibly powerful way to get your followers to subscribe. Okay. The next thing I would do is focus on building relationships of other people in your niche. Okay. When you're building a newsletter and also other people who are in your audience, like when you're building a newsletter, this is not just an email list. There are

18:15real people behind those email addresses and those people can become your friends, your customers, your mentors, your supporters. take the time to build one-on-one relationships with the people on that list because when you build those relationships, that leads to your content getting shared, business opportunities, podcast interviews, cross promotions, introductions, referrals, and more. So, when you're just getting started, respond to everybody who replies to your newsletter, comments on your social post, DMs you, etc. And I also encourage you to go out and pick between five to 20 people who are also in your niche whose content that you like and engage with their content on a weekly basis. Okay? So maybe put them in

18:53a spreadsheet, share comments on their post, send them the occasional um send them the occasional complimentary uh DM or if they if you get their newsletter, reply to their newsletter and tell them what you liked about it. So just be helpful for free and down the line they will share your content and you will get opportunities from those connections that you make. Okay? Super powerful to do that. Okay. The final thing that I recommend you do is to beg for feedback because you don't really know that your content is good until you get people to respond to it. Until you get people to tell you that they love it, they thought

19:30it was valuable. Because if you're getting if you're publishing content and you're getting views, that's great. But you really need to hear from people to find content market fit. The best way to do that is to ask for feedback and then implement that feedback from your readers. So in the beginning, your core newsletter KPIs, key performance indicators should be poll responses and email replies. Every newsletter that you send should have a poll. I'll put up an example of a poll on the screen now. And every newsletter should ask readers to

20:01reply and to share feedback with you. You need to know what people want and what they don't want. You need to hear about the topics they care about, the format, the style, the tone, the design of your newsletter, etc. If you just look at the open rate and the clickthrough rate of your email, that's not enough data to determine if people actually like your content. Okay? And if less than a thousand subscribers, your open rate clickthrough rate is probably going to be really good anyways because you just don't have a lot of subscribers. You might already have 50% open rate, 20% clickthrough rate. That's not that helpful right now. Focus on

20:30getting feedback from real people. Okay? You're only going to know your newsletter is actually good when people take time out of their day to tell you that it is. So getting to 10,000 subscribers is not easy. It's probably the hardest part of this entire process. I think going from 10K to 50K for me was way easier. But if you stay consistent and you use the tactics that I showed you and the ones that are linked below this video, you will get there way faster than most people. And if you can get to 1K, you can get to 10K. And if you can get the 10K, you can build a

21:00very large business from your email list over time. All right, I hope that helps.