FACT: The Daily Carnage didn’t exist one year ago today. Now? We’ve gained over 11,000 subscribers. Who wants to hear the story of how we did it? ::raises hand::
Buckle up because it’s a wild ride full of twists, turns, and even some drama. Okay, there wasn’t any drama. Here’s the skinny:
We had gotten tired of constantly fighting with social media algorithms to get our content noticed, so we switched directions. Email is the one place where you’re not controlled by an algorithm, so it made sense to focus on building an email list.
Small problem: We knew if we were going to build a huge list, we couldn’t do it with the blog at the centerpiece of our content strategy. There’s already a ton of marketing content out there. Rather than add to the noise, we decided to take the best content, and summarize it.
Our goal was to give our subscribers as much value as we could possibly fit in the email itself. Then, if they needed more info, they could click a link to the original source.
So, we started doing just that, and it worked…slowly.
Once we realized that people were starting to like our little newsletter, we got serious about marketing it. We chose a handful of tactics to build the size of our list:
- Social media promotion. Okay, we weren’t completely done with social media. We still share the newsletter every day with our followers.
- Facebook ads. We love using FB ads for our client projects so we had to use them for ourselves.
- Link building. With the Daily Carnage being our “Pillar Content,” we focused on finding publications who had featured similar newsletters.
- LinkedIn posts. From our personal LI accounts, we write text posts that talk about the Carnage and tag people whose content we’ve featured. Example.
- Word of mouth. An added benefit of truly trying to create valuable content is people love to talk about it!
Runningoutofwords. Get the full story and all of our subscriber-acquisition tactics below ↓
