The Easiest Way to Build a Local Newsletter
A how-to YouTube video (transcript) by Chris Koerner that demonstrates end-to-end steps to launch a local email newsletter from zero: choosing a target city, creating brand and site, using Beehive to host and design the newsletter, running Meta/Facebook ads to buy subscribers, wiring leads into Beehive via Zapier, and sending the first welcome email. The presenter emphasizes starting small (weekly), prioritizing subscriber acquisition over perfect design, simple monetization via CPM sponsorships, and practical growth tactics (boosts, recommendations, referrals, paid subs, merch).
Chapters
All right, everyone is talking about the newsletter business, specifically the local newsletter business. And guess what? Last time I checked, there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of cities, states, towns, geographies all around the world. So I'm going to use ChatGPT to auto generate a random city in the United States, and I'm going to build a local newsletter for that city, all within the course of this video. I'm going to take you all the way from I know nothing about what a local newsletter is to. I have my first local newsletter subscribers. You don't need an audience. You don't need that much money. You don't need any skills outside of what you're going to find in this video. So come right here, hold my hand and I'll show you exactly how to do this over the next this many minutes. First of all, why do we want to start a local newsletter? Because this is one of the most approachable businesses in the world. What's the hardest part about starting a business? Acquiring customers. In this case, your customers are your newsletter subscribers. Well, guess what? In the local newsletter business, it's very straightforward. You just post meta ads, Instagram and Facebook. You post ads, you get subscribers, you send them emails, and then you find sponsors from those same subscribers that will pay you money to put their ads or their affiliate links in your newsletter. That's the name of the game. I've done it. My friends have done it. It's very straightforward. Let's do this. Okay, Now, I live in the Dallas Fort Worth area, but I want to start a local newsletter anywhere. Anywhere there's at least call it 50,000 people. You can do it with less, but let's say 50. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to open ChatGPT and I'm going to say, give me the name. Give me the name of a city in the US that has 50k to 100k people. Any state, totally random. Preferably somewhere I'm unfamiliar with and have never spoken about. Gallup, New Mexico. Okay, I'm laughing because New Mexico in my family. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to everyone in New Mexico. It's just not our favorite state. We've seen all 50 states in 60 days. It was not our favorite. I won't go into the reasons here, but I just think it's hilarious that ChatGPT gave me a city in New Mexico to do this. So I've driven through Gallup. Let's do this. Let's do this. How many people give Me fun facts about Gallup. Demographic data, jobs growth, culture, unique quirks, etc. Okay, okay, first of all, ChatGPT, you're an idiot. I said between 50,000 and a hundred thousand people. I said over 50k people stay in New Mexico. Okay, so ChatGPT did not understand the assignment. Okay, Roswell, New Mexico. 48k. Still not over 50, but we'll roll with it. You can do some fun alien branding with Roswell. So we're rolling with Roswell. Rolling with Roswell. That could be a good name. Okay, I just want to know a little bit about Roswell. 53% white, 22% other. Okay, 23% poverty rate. Household income is modest. Okay, guys, if we can make a local newsletter work in Roswell, New Mexico, we can make it work anywhere. Job growth isn't great. Economic prospects, not great. Median household income, not great. But we're going to do it because I want to paint a realistic picture for you. So where are we going next? Obviously, we're going to Beehive. I've used beehive for two years. I freaking love beehive. I'm trying to convince them to let me invest in them. So we're going to pretend like I've never used Beehive before. We're going to say, start your free trial. We're going to say, I don't have a newsletter yet. Okay, we're not going to use ChatGPT for the branding and the naming of this because that's lame. We're going to think of it ourselves. So let's just keep it basic and say Roswell Dispatch. Okay, but is the domain name available? Okay, so we're going to name, right here, Roswell Dispatch. What's the newsletter about? We're going to say cities. How often do you plan to publish? Let's just say weekly. Now, here's a little tip. The more you publish, the more you can charge. But the more you publish, the harder it is to maintain. It's more work. Right. If you publish five times a week, Monday through Friday, you can charge five, five times as much for ads because we're charging for ads on a CPM basis. CPM equals cost per mil. Equals cost per thousand eyeballs. Okay, let's say we have 10,000 subscribers. That's not eyeballs, that's subscribers. I send out the email. I have a 50% open rate. 5,000 opens, pairs of eyeballs. Okay, Cost per thousand. So that's five. Right. And for newsletters, it's all over the board. You can charge between twenty and a hundred dollars CPM cost per milliliter cost per eyeballs. Let's say it's fifty. Okay? So that's $50 times five, as in 5,000 eyeballs. 50% open rate on 10,000 emails, that's $250. So every time I hit send on an email that's going out to 5,000 people, I can make $250. That's before affiliate links, that's before merch, that's before events. That's before vertically integrating and starting another business that your newsletter promotes. We're not going to get into all that. We're trying to keep it simple. Chris, focus. All right? That's on me. If we're only putting ads in the dang newsletter, which is the most straightforward way of monetizing a newsletter, and if we use Beehive, Beehive can do all that for us. I'll get into that in a minute. Then we're just going to look at the CPM. So 10,000 subscribers, $250. We send that once a week, we make 250 a week. We send that five times a week, we make $1,250 a week, which is awesome. Who wouldn't want to make more money? But you still have to sell those sponsors. You got to find the sponsors, you got to manage the sponsors and you got to send five times as many emails so we can get there. The worst thing you want to do is start out super gung ho saying, I'm going to email seven times a week or five times a week or whatever. And then you lose steam. And then you drop to three to one. And then it's like, it's really just the mental aspect of that. Your subscribers don't really care that you dropped your frequency, but you care. And it feels kind of demoralizing. So we want to start small and pick up some quick wins along the way. And we can add a few more sends per week as we go, should we choose to do so. So for now, let's say weekly. Where do we hear about us? We're going to say influencer. That's me. We're going to start our 30 day free trial now. Here's what I could do right now. I could walk you through all the settings, how to set up your social profile, how to make a great logo or profile picture. Those are advanced forms of procrastination. Okay, we want to get subs subscribers, we need fuel, we need gas in our tank. And a newsletter is not a newsletter without subscribers. So all this Stuff is secondary. It's fluff. These are boxes that we often check to make ourselves feel good, like we're making progr. But as far as I'm concerned, we haven't made any progress until we have subscribers, so we're going to skip all this crap now. Reason number 82 that I love Beehive is the website, the monetization, everything. It's all fully integrated. So we do need some sort of a website to get started. Because many people will read our newsletter on a website not within their email. They're going to want to share it to others. We want the search engines to pick us up. We want ChatGPT to pick us up. We need SEO search engine optimization to get cranking on this stuff. So we do want to publish this stuff to a website also. You know, like all those link in bio services that you see influencers have. This is now integrated within Beehive. You can do that as well, which is awesome. We're going to go for a news site because this will be more similar to a news site than a blog. They've got a bunch of cool templates here. I'm not going to be too picky with it. I really like this one. That looks clean, it looks fun. It's not too cluttered. We're going to go with standard, which is kind of a boring name for such a beautiful template. I like it. I like it. You know what, these colors are kind of like southwestern vibey. I'm thinking like Breaking Bad. I'm thinking Better Call Saul. I'm thinking New Mexico already. So I'm not going to change any of the colors. I could, with a couple clicks, I could generate other color palettes with AI, but I'm just going to stick with what works. Remember, advanced forms of procrastination. We don't want to do that. We don't want friction topography. I'm going to keep it. Boom. Boom. Publish now. Heck yes, we're going to publish now. Do Boom now. We have a website. Okay. We don't have any posts to sync yet, but those will come in time. You got the subscribe field. All right there, Roswell Dispatch. You can edit this stuff. Bump, bump, bump. But we're not going to worry about it. We're just going to click next Publish to live site. Okay, we're live. That's our domain name. Boom. Okay, we got a website. Now let's design the newsletter. Okay. Once again, I'm not a design guy. I wish I were. I'm going to pick a template that One looks cool. I like how readable it is. I like the different colors. That one looks pretty cool. But let's not overthink it. Let's go with Community Pulse. And this is kind of a community newsletter because it's people that live in Roswell, bless their hearts. Now on Beehive, you've got write mode, where you're literally editing it. You're changing the text, Boom, control Z, we'll put that back. And then you have design mode, where you're changing the formatting, the design, you're moving blocks and moving sections around, changing colors, et cetera. You're usually going to live in write mode because the template is probably going to be the same week to week. So I'm just going to click finish. Check the box. We don't worry about settings right now. You can book a time with a Beehive expert. I finished the steps. Okay, Now I have 0 subscribers, 0% open rate, ET cetera. All right, now that we're all set up, the responsible thing to do would be to write our first newsletter, right? But I never said I was responsible. What I do is I sell it before I have it. I want to find customers. I want to find subscribers first, and then we'll send something to them again. That's usually kind of like the scary hairy thing that we have to go through when starting a business is how to find subscribers. So let's do it first. Let's get the obt, the one big thing, out of the way first. So I'm going to do this from scratch. No cheating. I will not use my influence or my audience to find these subscribers. And I'll show you exactly how I'm going to do that. I'm going to go to Google and I'm going to go to the Meta Ads Manager. Cool. Go to Ads Manager. We're going to go to campaigns, and we're going to click create this big green button right here. Okay? We want leads, we want emails. So you could do awareness, traffic, engagement. There's not a specific right or wrong way to do this. But in my experience, when looking for newsletter subscribers, I want to go through leads. Okay? Now remember, in any lead generation, in any form of marketing, there's going to be a push pull between friction and effectiveness and a third variable, the quality of the leads. So if I throw up a landing page that's beautiful. There's only one thing to click. There's no friction. It's super easy. I only need your email. Don't give me your name. I don't need your number, just your email. I'm gonna get so many leads. Let's call it a 10% conversion rate. For every 10 people that hit that landing page, I'm gonna get one email. Awesome. Now, when I start adding, what's your phone number, what's your name? What's your budget? That 10% conversion rate is gonna drop to 5, 4, 3, 2, 1% conversion rate. Oh, bummer. Why would I add that? Because those leads are gonna be way more qualified, way higher intent. That's the trade off. Now, I wish I could tell you, well, you always want to go with lowest friction, yada yada, or you always want to go with more friction to get higher intent. It depends. It depends on the industry. It depends on your goals. It depends on the price point of whatever it is you're selling. It depends on, do you have a local newsletter or a tech newsletter? You got to test, test everything except drugs. Okay, so I'm going to go for super ultra low friction because I want momentum, right? Focus is overrated. Momentum is underrated. We want to do everything possible to get this ball rolling and to keep it rolling because objects in motion stay in motion. So I don't care if these are lower intent leads, I just want leads. Emails, subscribers, going to go to continue. Okay, what's my budget now? I'm hoping I can get these emails for like two bucks a piece. Now let's break down the math of that. Remember when I was talking about how much money you can make from a local newsletter? Let's say we send five emails per week and we have 10,000 subscribers at a 50% open rate. Same example as before. Okay, that means I can make $250 per cent or $1,250 per week, four weeks in a month, that's $5,000 a month. So $5,000 a month from 10,000 emails. Okay, that's at a $50 cpm cost per mil. So in other words, every email I acquire is worth 50 cents a month. 10,000 emails get me $5,000 a month. Lots of ifs. We still have to find the sponsors. We have to close the sponsors, collect money, yada, yada, yada. I don't want to oversimplify this, but let's just say one email address is worth 50 cents a month. And let's say, and this is like an industry standard, each email stays subscribed to you for two years. Okay, 50 cents a month times 24 months is $12. So with that in mind, if I spend $1 to acquire an email address. Then I'm receiving a 12x ROAS 12 times return on ad spend. I put a dollar into the money machine. I get $12 back now, not right away. I get $12 back over the course of two years. So you have to manage that cash flow. But these numbers are all very realistic for the newsletter industry. So $2 should be pretty conservative for a local newsletter. Local newsletters are great because the cost per email subscriber is very low. Because it's so specific, it's so relevant. You can target people only in Roswell or people from Roswell or people about to visit Roswell, or people that are most likely to read their news from an email. Right? People 25 to 45 years old. We can do all that now. I don't want to do a hundred dollars a day forever, but I want to do a hundred dollars a day for day one because I want to see traction fast. Right, because your first emails might cost you five to $15, which is going to be demoralizing. But just be patient, have faith, be willing to wait it out because that will drop over time. Right? We need the algorithm to learn what an email subscriber looks like. So I'm going to put 100, but this is only going to be for a day. Then I'm going to drop it down to about 20 bucks. I'm not going to deal with AB testing. I'm going to keep this very simple. We don't have any special ad categories. We're not selling financial products or services, jobs, housing, gambling, etc. So we'll just skip that. Go to next. Okay, I'm going to call this ad set. Now remember, there's three tiers to Facebook ads. Campaign, ad set, ads. Now, under campaign, you're telling meta your goal. You're telling it big picture stuff, right? The meta meta stuff, if you will. What's my budget, what types of leads do I want, etc. You come a tier down to the ad set level. This is where you tell meta who I'm targeting, what are my settings for these ads, where are the ads going to appear, how much money do I want to spend per ad, not just for the whole campaign. What time of day or night or week are these ads going to run? And then on the lowest level, this is the most granular level, the ad level. This is the actual ad with the creative. The picture or the video or the text, the headline, the description, everything. This is what people actually see. So the campaign is the game plan. The ad set is the players and the positions, quarterback, linebackers, etc. And the AD is the play that you're running on the field with those players. Now, what kind of a conversion do I want? Do I want to send people to my website? No, because it's not optimized yet. I want people to call me. Nope, not on a newsletter. We just want instant form leads and meta's telling me, hey, you could spend less money per lead if you did website. I know, I know, meta. But I'm optimizing for momentum right now. Now, you do have to have a Facebook page for the newsletter. So in this case, I need to go create a Facebook page because that's going to be tied to this ad. Now, I could post ads from any number of Facebook pages that I already own or manage, the Kerner office, the Kerner office, highlights archive, et cetera. But that's not relevant. Like, my conversion rate won't be nearly as good because they're going to see in the description and in the Creative Roswell Dispatch local newsletter and then it's going to be from the Kerner office. But who's that? Right? So I'm going to go ahead and create a Facebook page. I'm going to go to my personal Facebook account. Okay. These are all the pages I manage. I'm going to click create new profile or page, public page. Next, get started. Roswell Dispatch. I'm going to call it Media News Company. I'm not even going to add a bio because guess what? People aren't going to click into the page and like make sure that I'm a real thing or a real person before they subscribe. It's not that deep. They're not sending me thousands of dollars. It's just a newsletter. So I'm not going to, I'm not going to overthink this. Now I will ask ChatGPT to make me a profile picture for my Facebook page because I don't want it to look empty. That will prevent people from subscribing. I want there to be something there, a placeholder. So I asked ChatGPT create a simple logo. Create a dimple logo for my Facebook page called Roswell Dispatch, a local email newsletter for Roswell, New Mexico residents. Now, the reason I told it this was a logo specifically for my Facebook page is because I wanted to make sure the dimensions were would work for Facebook. Now while I wait for that logo to generate, because it is taking forever, I'm going to go back to Beehive and I'm going to make a poll Polls are maybe my favorite thing about Beehive. I'm just going to call it what do you want to know? Okay, what kind of stuff should I write about in this newsletter? Best places to visit, best local deals, local news, opinion pieces, stories from residents. Now I don't have to pick one. I could take the top three most popular poll responses and do all three of those in every newsletter. And I could order them by most, second most, and then third most popular in the email. There's no reason you shouldn't be constantly soliciting feedback from your subscribers to improve the quality of your email. Everyone has access to the polling feature. Very few people actually use it. Okay, save. I'll show you how to insert that into the newsletter. ChatGPT is still taking forever. I'm just going to go to Google. Type in Roswell, New Mexico logo. I'm going to take this one. Boom. I put in the website. I'm going to say it's always open. Go to next profile picture. Let's get a cover photo. Sure. That looks awesome. Cool. Does the profile picture fit? Nope. Don't care. Chad, GBD failed me. Took too long. But we're moving on. Don't need a phone number. Don't need to invite friends. Don't want notifications done. That's how easy it is to create a Facebook page. Now we're going to go back to Ads Manager. I'm going to refresh. There it is. Roswell Dispatch. Boom. View the terms. I agreed to the terms. Cool. Now dynamic creative. What this means is Facebook. If I check this box, Facebook will change my creative, my pictures or videos based on what it thinks is best optimized. I don't really trust this yet. I've seen some bugs. I'm not going to check it. It can work. I'm just not going to use it. I'm going to set an end date to these ads for tomorrow because I'm spending a hundred dollars a day. I don't want to forget audience. This is very important. Advantage plus basically means it's going to use AI to find out who your audience is. And it knows that the word Roswell is in my Facebook page. It can kind of presume I'm showing this to people in Roswell. But my gut tells me that if I don't rely on AI, I will save some money in the testing phase. It's going to get there eventually. I want it to get there now. I'm impatient. So I'm going to show you how to target your ads. I'm Going to go to United States. I'm going to do Roswell, New Mexico. Boom, there it is. Include Roswell, New Mexico. That's it. Now, I could choose the age, the gender, et cetera, but I don't want to do that. I'm going to trust Meta to do that. Right. But I want to tell it the geography of where to show these ads. And then this box is important. I will leave this box checked. Reach more people likely to respond. So maybe they use a VPN to mask their location. And they're always reading Roswell news, but Facebook doesn't think they're in Roswell. Well, it'll show them the ad anyway. Maybe they're about to move to Roswell because Facebook knows it's searching for, you know, best restaurants in Roswell. It's going to show it to them, even though they're not within that radius. I've had a lot of good luck with checking that box. Now, placements. This is what type of devices to show the ads on. Do I want them to be shown on Facebook and Instagram? Just one or the other or audience network. That's basically Facebook showing Facebook ads all over the Internet, not just on the meta platforms. I'm just going to say you run wild, Facebook. Right? Show these ads wherever you think they'll be successful. Now, I'm going to keep this very simple. I'm going to use my iPhone to take a quick video and then I'm going to edit it in the Instagram app. It's called Edits, but it's owned by Instagram. You don't need any editing skills, I promise you. I'm just going to make one ad. In my experience, really short video ads just crush. But before I do that, what do I want my ad to say? What is a good local newsletter ad? Well, let me show you. I'm going to go to Google. I'm going to type in meta ads library. Meta will show you every single ad that they're running in the world. Okay, go there. Click all ads. I'm going to type in the word newsletter. Okay, hit enter. Now, how do you know which ad is good, which ad isn't? Well, I'm going to find the ads that have been running the longest. I'm going to click filters, and I'm going to say only active. And I'm going to set the date back in September. This shows me ads that are active today that started running before September 1st. Why is that important? Because Facebook ads go stale quickly, right? Sometimes within a month or within a week. And so if an ad is just crushing, then the owner is leaving the ad up for months at a time. You're not going to leave up an ad that doesn't perform well. You just won't. And so this is telling me that these ads probably not, definitely, probably perform well. Now, since I'm committed to making a video ad, I'm going to find other video ads, media type videos. Boom. So I'm only looking for ads in the United States that are active right now that started running on or before September 1st that have the word newsletter that are a video. Okay. Okay, how about this? KCRW. If it's happening in SoCal, you'll hear about it first from sold out concerts, yada yada. The free KCRW local newsletter bundle keeps you ahead of the crowd. This has been running for three months. It's a video ad. It's a local newsletter video ad. So I'm gonna see what it looks like. Okay, so it's just static text with a generic image behind it. We can do better than that. I want to find a talking head video. If you've been on the hunt for real straight leg jeans that don't taper into. So we have a lot of exciting new releases for you this week. For starters, I'm wearing our brand new jacket. Okay, so I didn't see anything that I love, so I'm just gonna wing it. I'm gonna play on the FOMO angle. Got my phone out here. I'm just gonna take it live. Did you know that there's more to Roswell than just silly alien memes? Believe it or not, there's a lot of cool stuff happening in Roswell every week, and you have no idea about it. Why? Because you don't subscribe to the 100% free Roswell Dispatch email newsletter. Find the link below. You're gonna love it. All right, that was 16 seconds, which is pretty perfect. There it is. I'm going to show you my screen. I'm going to the free Instagram edits app. I'm going to click plus gallery. There's the video. Add it. You always want captions because many, if not most people watch ads with their audio off. So I'm going to click CC for captions. That's all you got to do. Okay, so I added captions. Now I'm gonna add some intriguing text to the first few seconds. It's a different form of a hook. So we're gonna click text. I want it to stand out. First of all, I'm gonna Split this. Because there's like a half second before I start talking. That's just wasted time. So you split the video and then delete it. And then I'm gonna drag this over so it starts with the video. Did you know that there's more to Roswell than just silly alien memes? Believe it or not, there's a lot of cool stuff happening in Roswell every week, and you have no idea about it. Why? Because you don't subscribe to the 100 free Roswell Dispatch email newsletter. Find the link below. You're going to love it. I'm going to take away. You're going to love it because this is fluff. I want it to end abruptly. Newsletter. Find the link below. Right there. Find the link below. Hit the video, click split, delete. Email newsletter. Find the link below. Did you know that there's more? And then I'm going to take that out. Dispatch email newsletter. Find the link below. I'm going to edit that last caption to say, find the link below. That's it. I cut myself off in the last word. Below that. There's more to Roswell than just silly alien meme. But it doesn't matter. All right, done. We're done. That. You know that took three minutes to edit that. We're going to click export. Boom. We're going to click download. Finish downloading. I'm going to airdrop it to my computer. So we're going to back to the ads manager. We're going to go single image or video setup, Creative video ad. Click that. We're going to go click upload. There it is. We'll click next. Now here's the part that trips me up. I always forget, what's the primary text? What's the headline? What's the description? What goes there? What's the best strategy? Okay, so here's what we're going to do. This is where ChatGPT does a great job. All right, I have a local email newsletter for Roswell, New Mexico residents. I'm using Facebook ads to find subs. Give me three headlines, primary text, and descriptions to promote this with Facebook ads via a B test. Keep them short and simple. Using best practices for finding local newsletter subs, new events and deals in town news, etc. Boom. Now we're just going to tediously copy that. Copy, copy, go. Primary text. Okay, here's what I did. All I did was I pasted all three of the primary text, the headline and the description. And then Facebook said, hey, our AI thinks that you could improve those with these. And you know what? I'm going to keep these because Facebook knows better than anyone what type of text I should have to get. Email. Local newsletter subscribers. So I'll roll with its suggestions. It may use them, it may not. It's certainly going to test them all. And then the call to action is going to be subscribe. So we'll leave all these boxes checked and then click Next. Leave those checked. Click. Done. Cool. There's my ad. There's what it's going to look like. I'm not going to do testing. We're going to keep it simple here. Now, we do need to create a form. All right, we want more volume. Remember what I was saying about more volume, more intent, etc. We want more volume. We'll click next. Stay up to date. Now, this is the headline of the form. I don't want their name. I just want their email. That's it. Where can we send this free newsletter? That's it. Next. All right. Now, Facebook wants to see a privacy policy. I can add one to the website. I don't want to wait. Right. It's dumb. So I'm just going to find a random privacy policy from the Internet and link that, because the amount of people that will actually click and read that is exactly zero. So after I get their email, I'm going to go ahead and forward them to my website to the Roswell Dispatch. So I'll go over here. I'll copy the domain name. Go back here. Link. View website. Okay. Create form. All right. This is the most plain, boring, ugly form you've ever seen. So if this works, anything will work. Now, tracking. If we were sending people to our website to get their emails, we would want to set up tracking. Beehive allows you to do that very seamlessly. But we're not going to worry about it right now. We're going to hit publish. And guys, like, we're already published. So let's say we want to see how these are looking. We're going to check the box and it's going to take a little bit to get approved in draft processing, etc. Now, while we wait for these first subscribers to come in, we are going to go ahead and write our freaking newsletter. Let's go back to ChatGPT. I'm going to ask it. What are some of the coolest places and restaurants in Roswell? Now, while I do some research on what to write about in this newsletter, I'm going to go look at my friend's newsletter. He is in Annapolis, Maryland. It's called the Naptown Scoop and it's an awesome newsletter. Of course it's, it's hosted on Beehive and I just want to look at some of his recent additions. What do they look like? First of all, he's got a sponsor up here, which means he's making money. We've got some news here. Another ad, announcements from local businesses. Now we do want a welcome newsletter. This is going to be the first thing that people see when they subscribe to us. So I'm going to have ChatGPT write it for us. So to add that, we're going to go back to Beehive. We're going to click on settings, we're going to go to emails. Welcome email. Configure welcome email now. Hey there. Thanks for hopping in. You're just showing the only yada yada yada. Here's what you hear from us every week. I don't know why it's all lowercase. I think I told Chat GPT to write about to write like that. I can't remember Subject line. Hey, preview text, welcome authority. It doesn't matter. Click save. Now everyone that joins the Roswell Dispatch is going to get that welcome email. And yes, I can make the design super pretty, but I'm not going to worry about it right now. Make sure it's turned on. We don't want double opt in. That means they have to confirm their email address after subscribing. Reply to email address. We want to make this personal. So my name will be the sender name for these emails. And boom, we've got a local newsletter. Now let's write our first post. I'm gonna go start writing. We're gonna go back to the Community Pulse template that we chose. I don't like images at the top of my emails unless it's an ad that I'm being paid for. We're gonna say here's what's happening this week. I mean all of you design freaks, you're gonna be cringing at this email. Cause it's not gonna be good. But that's not the point. That's not the point of this video. We're just trying to get started. Okay? Now let's just pretend this is the email we're going to send for now I'm going to show you some cool ways that you can grow your newsletter within Beehive without even having to use Facebook ads. You can use recommendations where you can recommend other newsletters and in exchange they will recommend you. So basically, after someone subscribes to you. You will say, hey, check out these newsletters. Other people will do that to you as well. It's like a marketplace or a network of newsletters helping other newsletters, which is awesome. You can do boost where let's say there's an Albuquerque newsletter, okay? And after someone subscribes to the Albuquerque newsletter, it says, hey, do you want to also subscribe to the Roswell Dispatch? And if they click yes, then the owner of the Albuquerque newsletter will be paid and you will pay them. It's a way of acquiring newsletter subscribers that doesn't rely on Facebook ads. And it's basically just like recommendations, except it's pay to play referral program, right? You can have a little widget at the bottom of your email that says, hey, if you refer five people to the Roswell Dispatch, I'll send you a bumper sticker or I'll give you a coupon code to Mary's Diner. Referral programs are huge. My tip here, have your lowest threshold be one email referred, right? Not five, but one, because that's attainable to everyone. And maybe they get a free PDF download of like the best things to do in the spring in Roswell. Then you've got magic links. With a magic link, someone can subscribe to your newsletter just by clicking it, not clicking it, and typing in their email, but just by clicking it. I don't know how it works. It's magic, but it's awesome. And then if you want to monetize, you can use their ad network, where basically companies go to beehive and say, hey, we love local newsletters. We've got a presence in Roswell. Find us someone with a local newsletter in Roswell and they can put our ad in there. And for everyone that clicks it or for everyone that sees it, we'll pay them X dollars or cents. Then they've got boost, which is basically like you putting in an ad for someone else's newsletter inside your newsletter edition and vice versa, them doing it for you. So this person is paying $4 per new subscriber. Pretty significant. And then paid subscriptions. Maybe people want exclusive access to events or something that free subscribers on the Roswell Dispatch don't get. Well, you can charge five bucks a month, three bucks a month, ten bucks a month for people to subscribe to your newsletter, at least a paid version of it. You can convert everyone to paid or at least attempt to, or you could continue to have a free newsletter and a paid newsletter side by side. And then with products, you can create and sell physical products like that are fulfilled from a third party. If you want to sell Roswell Dispatch T shirts, you can use Beehive and other third party print on demand businesses to sell those super cool stuff. And then don't forget to use the survey feature, where after someone subscribes to you, they will get a survey saying like, hey, how long have you lived in Roswell? Hey, what kind of a job do you have? What industry do you work in? In my experience, over 50% of people fill those surveys out because they're hot to trot, they're excited to be joining it, and they're willing to put in a little more work right in that moment. If you send them the survey even an hour later, they're gone. Out of sight, out of mind. So you really want to capture that right when they subscribe for the first time. Okay, now I kind of did something a little more advanced with these meta ads. The easier way to grow is just to do it through all through Beehive through their boost or recommendations or referral feature. But I want to show you everything. I want you to have all the tools. So if you are using instant forms on Facebook ads, you need to connect those to Beehive. And I'm going to show you how to do that really quickly. You're going to go to Zapier.com, which is a piece of software that is perfect for connecting other pieces of software. We're going to click Create Zap. Create Zap right here. Now, I can describe with AI what I'm trying to do and it will build it for me. But I want to show you how the sausage is actually made. So we're going to do Trigger. So we're going to go Facebook lead ads, trigger event, new lead. I already have my Facebook account connected. You just do that with a couple clicks. Page Roswell Dispatch form Roswell, the only form I have. Super easy test the trigger. Boom, done. This is an example. Wait, do I already have a newsletter subscriber? There's no way I already have a subscriber. What the crap? I don't know if this is like test data. It's showing me I already have a subscriber. And if that's true, I'm freaking amped right now. So let's go back to Facebook. We're going to go to the Facebook leads center. That's where these email addresses are going to go after people subscribe. We're going to go to the Meta business suite and you can just Google that. Click all tools. I'm Going to search leads Lead center. Now, remember, these people are not subscribing because they follow me or they know the Kerner office or like. No, this is not connected at all to my content or influencer stuff. Guys, we freaking. We legitimately have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. We have eight freaking leads already. I'm shocked. Like, it usually takes hours for Facebook to even approve your ad. I'm completely floored right now. Not only is my ad approved, but I already have eight subscribers. Look at this. You can see lead added 659. Look at my watch. 7:02. I'm getting a lead every minute. I'm completely floored right now. These are not test data leads. These are real. Okay, so this is. This is awesome. So now this is Zapier showing me recent leads that I've got in. And look, Suzanne Gonzalez. These all match. See? Hector. Hector 77. Go back to Zapier. Hector 77 right there. Boom. I can't believe this. I just started a newsletter. Like, this was supposed to be for demonstration only. Okay, I don't even know. I don't even know what to do here. Okay, sorry. The trigger is the lead coming in, right? Every Zap on Zapier, every automation needs a trigger and an action, right? What triggers the automation? And then what action should the automation take once the trigger is hit? So the action is add the subscriber to Beehive. Okay, New lead, Beehive action event. Add a subscriber. Create a subscriber. Right there. Boom. Account. I need to connect a new account. So it needs my Beehive API key. So I'm going to go to Beehive. Okay, I'm not just, like acting here. I'm not just saying this for the purposes of this video. I have run dozens, hundreds of different Facebook ad campaigns over the last decade. Plus, I've never seen an ad approve this fast. And leads come in this fast. I mean, it was within 10 minutes. I'm legitimately floored that that happened. I've never started a local newsletter. Like, I've interviewed several people that have. I have a bunch of other newsletters. RV park, investing, business ideas. I've. I've had half a dozen newsletters. Never a local newsletter. I'm completely shocked at how easy that was. The ad that I made wasn't even based on another winning ad. Remember, I didn't even find anything that good. I don't know how long this edited video is, but I've only been filming this for an hour and 22 minutes. So within an hour and 22 minutes, I have completely launched a local newsletter and have subscribers. And I don't know yet what I paid to acquire each subscriber, but I'm guessing it's going to be very, very good. Okay, my identity was verified. I'm going to create an API key. Boom. Copy it. Go back to Zapier. There's my API key. Boom. Save the key. Share my screen again. Okay, so Zapier has my API key. Continue publications. Roswell Dispatch Email right there. Boom. You just click that email. Done. Don't worry about this. Send welcome email. Yes, UTM source. This basically tracks where it came from. So I'm just going to put Facebook ad that way I know within Beehive where that email subscriber came from. Double opt in setting off. Don't worry about any of this stuff. I don't even need to do that. Test step. Publish. Now. Here's the cool part. I'm going to rename it with just a couple clicks, I'm going to put all the leads that I've already received from this ad into Beehive. This is going to tell me right here. I'm okay. Eight leads. That's what I just counted. Awesome. I'm going to check all of them. Select all. Next send data exit transfer. Let's go to Beehive to make sure that they're in here. Look at that. Eight subscribers. Now I'm going to make a segment because I want to know which one of these came from Facebook ad. I'm going to create a new segment. Click dynamic. That means it will auto update as new people come into that segment. Click condition attribute UTM source. Remember I made it fbad Facebook ad Save segment. Boom. It's processing eight people. Eight people in the segment. The open rate is zero percent because I haven't sent them anything yet. So now I'm going to send them in a freaking email. I'm going to do this actually. I'm going to go to emails. Oh, I have 10 subscribers now. Holy crap. Now we want to send them that welcome email. I'm just smiling. I'm just sitting here smiling because I just started a business. No revenue, but this is a business now. I don't think that the welcome email has pushed yet because these are brand new subscribers and I just set all this up. So I'm going to manually push it to him. So to do that I'm going to go to Automations new automation. I'm showing you how to use basically everything in Beehive right Now also, I'm a huge Beehive fan. I've used them for two years. Please use my affiliate link. That would be a huge benefit to me. You get 30% off for three months. I think a significant discount. I get a little kickback. It's a win win. This isn't something that I'm just like shilling because they paid me. Like I love Beehive genuinely. And you would be idiotic to start a local newsletter on any other platform. That's a really mean way of saying that. I apologize. It would not be wise of you. I'll say it that way. All right, so the trigger, this is kind of like zapier. We need a trigger for this. Automation is manual. I want to manually send people the welcome email. Click activate. Done. Boom. Save. Now what is the action? Action Send email, Configure step, create new email. And I'm just going to do blank draft. I got another subscriber. I'm going to go to emails, I'm going to view the welcome email, I'm going to click edit and then I'm going to click write and I'm gonna copy it. Okay, so I'm copying the welcome email. Then I'm gonna go back to the automation. We'll click blank draft. Boom. We'll make it purple because why not? Okay, so I'm gonna click activate. Now this is an automation, but in this case it's only gonna run if I manually add subscribers to it. Okay, so we're a little redundant. We have the automated welcome email. That will work great for subscribers coming in from now on. But for subscribers that have already come in, the welcome email didn't trigger because we hadn't set it up yet. So we're going to go to segments. We're going to click these three dots and click recalculate. That's going to refresh it. This will go from 8 to 11. Awesome. Then we're going to click into the segment and we're going to click this drop down arrow and we're going to say add to automations. We're going to click welcome email. Enroll. So now all 11 people. Oh look, an open rate was already 10% because the most recent person that joined opened the welcome email. It only showed us 10% because it was only one out of 10 people. But now we're going to see this open rate start to go up. So let's go check in on Facebook. We're going to refresh and then look at that. Eight leads, $9. Okay, first of all, I'M going to pause this ad because it's working right, guys? Okay, $15 per meta lead. No audience plant. We didn't do funny stuff with the timing of this. This was all filmed in one sitting. The lighting's the same. My wife's cooking meatballs out there. It's 7:17. We started this. We've been recording for an hour, 31 minutes, and we've got subscribers. It still says 8, not 11, because it takes a little while to update. But we spent a dollar per sub and we just started. Guess what that means. Over time, this will get even more and more optimized and we'll be acquiring subs subscribers for 40 to 50 cents. That means we'll be paid back in full in the first month. Okay, in the first month. Because remember, $0.50 per subscriber per month. If we're selling sponsorships, et cetera. How do you find sponsors? Well, guess what? The people in your newsletter are business owners. 10% of all human beings are business owners, okay? So your sponsors are your subscribers. So one day you just send an email to all your subscribers and say, hey, who wants to put an ad in here? You get some responses, you get them on the phone and you sell the first out of 50 bucks, 100 bucks, 200 bucks. Until people start saying, no. Guys, I'm freaking amped. This video was a banger. We started a local newsletter. What can I say? If you live in Roswell or you live anywhere and you want this business, this local newsletter for free. Subscribe to my newsletter, tkopod.com, go to tkopod.com, subscribe to my free Beehive newsletter about business ideas, business. And I will hold a drawing and I will give away this setup, everything, 100% for free. Because I want you to own a business, to start a business. So check out Beehive. They're a great partner. It's a great business. Please use my referral link and share this with a friend because you probably know people that would like to start a local newsletter. You're the bomb. Hope you enjoyed this. We'll see you next time on the Kerner Office.
