In this live webinar, Andrew Warner (Bootstrap Giants) and TG (Beehive) walk participants through the anatomy of a million‑dollar newsletter. They cover the core creation pillars, growth tactics such as converting social attention, lead magnets, referrals, repurposing, and partnerships, and monetization models including sponsorships, paid subscriptions, and upsells. The session dives into practical tactics: using A/B testing to refine headlines and writing style, choosing an appropriate publishing cadence (starting monthly and scaling up), adopting proven newsletter formats (James Clear’s 3‑2‑1, Tim Ferriss’s 5‑Bullet Fridays, etc.) and building reusable templates in Beehive. They stress starting with curation to develop rhythm and audience insight before moving to original content. TG highlights Beehive’s features—audio conversion, referral program, onboarding automations, and template duplication—to streamline production. The webinar concludes with live Q&A, community engagement tips, and contact information for follow‑up resources (slides, recordings, free Beehive access).
Chapters
So first I'll, I'll just welcome everyone. My name is Andrew Warner. I'm, uh, the CEO of Bootstrap Giants. It's an email newsletter that is now becoming more than an email newsletter. The vision behind this was Jesse Pujji, the creator of GatewayX collection of companies, said, you know, I'm building all these businesses. I'm learning so much along the way. I love teaching. I wanna find a way to teach. And so he started with a simple email newsletter where he shared a few things that he was reading that he thought were interesting. He shared screenshots of tweets that he found were interesting. And a thought every single week that was so short for most people that would've been a tweet. He started really simply like that. The interesting thing is that Jesse Pujji, one of his companies is a company called Growth Assistant, where anyone can hire outsourced growth assistants at a really inexpensive rate. They're overseas, they work your time, but they're inexpensive so much that it's kind of an impulse purchase for a lot of people. And so he would talk about what he was learning as he was building that company and others, and suddenly people were signing up. To hire growth assistants from his companies. And the thing that I think he realized is it's not that hard to do a newsletter. It helps you think about your day and your life in a way that's helpful for you. It helps an audience understand how they could think about their life and their business and their families in a way that they hadn't realized. And by the way, it's good for business. And so he kept at it and kept building the newsletter, and then he recruited me to come and partner with him on it and turn it into a real business. And so that's what we've done. We moved over to Beehive because the first thing we needed to do was build the audience and under— and the second thing was understand them. And Beehive is so good at that. And I'd like you all to see that we are serving our audience in a way that feels natural. We are understanding how to grow it in a way that allows us to grow without being, you know, too pushy, you know, too schlocky. We're proud of the way that we built on Beehive, and the reason we wanna do this was. To learn for ourselves how to do this. And I should say, everyone who's in here, you're welcome to use all these ideas on any platform you want. Heck, if you want to go do this and build a newsletter on Gmail, God love you. I think you're making a mistake, but great. If you want to use Beehive, we are giving you free access to Beehive so that you can try everything that we're doing in what I think is the best platform. And of course, since, uh, Jesse, uh, keeps getting requests for growth assistance because of this newsletter and because of these sessions, I I will, if you're registered to be here, we'll absolutely get you some kind of a discount on growth assistance too. But my vision here is to focus on how you can start a newsletter and build it up. And there's no better person to do that than TG because he is watching the fastest growing newsletters on Beehive. He is seeing from the inside what their numbers are. He has my account access so that he can see what we're doing and he's helping us. He sees how others are growing. I said, please teach me and bring my audience in so that they could see the same results that Jesse Pujji did when he got to, um, To bootstrap giants. So, all right, TG, I really appreciate you doing here. I know you spent hours and hours putting this together. The slides are— everything you guys do is so beautifully designed. Whenever you're ready, let's keep it casual. Share your screen. We'll walk through this and whatever system you're all on while he's doing this and setting up his screen, I'll say whatever system you're all on, I'm going to do my best to contact you and to respond to your questions. So keep those questions coming. I know there are a lot of hearts that you can post on some of these networks. Keep the hearts coming. I love the hearts. Um, let me know if you're having any trouble sharing your screen. And, uh, Ben is saying louder, please. How many people think that I need to be louder? If you think I need to be louder, give me the word louder, please, in the chat. I want to know that I should be increasing my volume.
Andrew, it's one quick question. It's actually asking me I need to restart really quick and hop back in just to share my screen. So just give me one sec.
I'll be right back. Yeah, absolutely. Take your time. I'll be right here. All right. I'm hearing sounds good from Chris. Thank you, Chris. So while TG comes on, I've got a, a quick story to tell you. Graduated from college, I started an email newsletter company. I go to my professor who taught me entrepreneurship and I said, I'm doing the thing you taught us. I'm starting an email newsletter company. It's gonna be great. He goes, email newsletter, that's too small. I didn't teach you so that you can go and start an email newsletter company. I got such a chip on my shoulder that I wanted to teach Professor Nathan a lesson. I went out there and I grew my newsletter. I bought ads. I talked about it. I did all kinds of things to grow my email newsletter as much as I could. Eventually I got that email newsletter business to 20 million subscribers. This was back in the early days when it was easy to get to millions of subscribers, easier, I should say. And so I got to 20 million subscribers and then I got my Uh, finances audited by Ernst& Young, just so I can say this is honestly true. It happened. Professor Nathan was wrong. And the reason I'm bringing this up is Professor Nathan made a mistake and didn't realize that email newsletters can be huge. They were then, they are now. The only thing that's changed is every year there are more ways to monetize it. Every year there are more ways to turn it into a business. And so I'm really excited for all of us to build on top of this, especially you, Dennis Schmidt, because you're somebody who's following up so much with us. All right. And with that, let's talk about the road to creating a million-dollar newsletter. What are we going to be covering here today, GG?
Man, I'm excited. This is going to be a fun one, guys. So yeah, let's, let's dive in. What are we actually going to cover today? So everyone can see my screen. Okay. Andrew, it's all good.
It's all good. And again, everyone just give us a thumbs up or let us know what you're thinking. I appreciate all of you who are there. And I especially appreciate those of you who are participating by chatting. And, uh, telling your friends to come. Yeah, I see it.
Great. Well, what are we going to discuss? So 5 core things, the anatomy of a million-dollar newsletter. So what does a million-dollar newsletter look like? We've got some great samples to share with you guys. Uh, number 2, the power of a newsletter HQ. 3, 5 growth strategies, and then 5 monetization strategies. Obviously we got a lot to cover in an hour. We're going to do our best and kind of run through each of these and then hopefully leave some time for Q&A at the end.
All right.
Perfect. Cool. Well, we'll just kind of go through, Andrew, and then we can kind of discuss, obviously throw in any insights as we kind of go. And, um, I'm excited to kind of dive into the first element of this, which is the anatomy of a million-dollar newsletter. So obviously we have an opportunity at Beehive to look at a lot of different newsletters. Um, the most successful newsletters, um, have systems, um, around 4 core pillars in my mind. The first being a creation pillar. So newsletters are solving a very clear pain in a unique voice consistently over a long period of time. And usually across multiple channels. They have a growth pillar, which I see as an always-on multi-prong growth strategy. And we're going to share some of those growth strategies today that we're seeing that are working really well. And then as well, monetization. So thinking beyond sponsorships, there's a lot of ways to monetize. Um, so we want to dive in there and then also ownership. So a long-term focus on creating an asset they own versus renting. And this is kind of where that owned audience mindset kind of comes in. Uh, so we're going to focus on growth and monetization mainly. Um, but those are at least the 4 core pillars that I see a lot of, uh, the most successful newsletters kind of leveraging.
All right.
Perfect. So like I said, there's a lot of ways to get there. And let's dive into some actual examples and use cases. So the first one that I pulled up that I thought was kind of a unique example is a company called The Boring Marketer. And this is run by Greg Eisenberg as well as James Dickerson. And they started this and it's essentially a productized service agency, which is fueled by a newsletter. So they leverage social to drive newsletter subs. And then they're selling done-for-you services on the backend. But I thought this was a really cool example because it's typically not what you think of maybe when you think of a newsletter-fueled business. But they do a tremendous job of kind of taking that newsletter to a service model that I'm kind of seeing trending right now, especially with if you're, if you do sell services.
Yeah, I love Greg's business because essentially what he's doing is he picks a topic that he finds to be interesting. In this case, it's boring marketing. And I love that he made that. He made boring into something that is, it, it's, it's an eye-catching topic and an eye-catching name for business. Yeah. But he's done this also with, uh, AI when that was hot, and he's done it with other topics. He'll find a topic, then he'll throw some messages out on Twitter about it and he'll say, who else cares about this thing? Who else believes that AI is the future? Who else believes that marketing can be boring? Join my newsletter. He then from there gets people to join a community and then he has a productized service. And in this case, he's doing the marketing for people. And I think this is a great example. of how you can build a multimillion dollar business on the back of a newsletter by teaching and sharing what you've learned, sharing what you believe in. In his case, it's marketing doesn't have to be reinventing the, the Red Bull ad every time. And as a result, getting people to pay you to do the work. And eventually, obviously what Greg's doing now, he's got a team of people who are doing the work. All right. What else do you have? Gimme another example.
Yeah, no, definitely. So the next example's gonna be more of a media publication, maybe more traditional newsletter when you think of newsletters, but this is Rowan. And he runs therundown.ai, one of the more successful AI newsletters. And he's aggregating some of the best and most, the hottest topics in AI. But he's also monetizing with what I mentioned before, the multi-pronged approach. So from courses to tools to job boards to sponsorships, he's done a really good job in a fairly short amount of time to build up a very substantial and well-known and well-respected media publication in the AI space.
So honestly, when I saw him, I saw him grow. I'm subscribed. I see him running ads with these big companies in there, and honestly, I felt a little bit deflated because I thought, oh shoot, man, this guy's got AI, a hot topic. Of course he's gonna grow. I don't have a hot topic. Then Jesse starts sharing his numbers for his newsletter and I realize bootstrapping has been around since forever. My grandfather in Iran used to basically sell rugs in a bootstrap business. It's been around forever. It's a twist that Jesse had on the business and it's already doing $40,000 a month. So I love that Rowan picked out this cool new topic and I'm on the lookout for what the next big topic is. But you know what, damn it, even the older topics still do really well. So I'm glad that you're showing it as a possibility of where latching onto something that's new and innovative is a good, is a good way. What else you got? I don't wanna keep slowing you down.
No worries. This is great. I think one thing I wanted to point out too, you know, obviously some of you guys are just starting, so def— Definitely don't get discouraged. I mean, they have 600,000 subs. They've been growing, you know, substantially over the last year and a half, 2 years. But the previous example, um, with, uh, The Boring Marketer, they have 20,000 subs and they're able to create a 7-figure business. So it doesn't take a ton of subscribers either. Um, it just is also how you monetize that audience as well. Awesome.
Good point.
So the next slide, actually, we're going to share, um, one of our own, Tyler Denk, founder and CEO of Beehive. And he runs a very interesting kind of founder-led newsletter called Big Desk Energy. Um, and he started this about 6 months ago. Um, he's been able to go from 0 to about 30,000 subs. And it's, I think, a very unique kind of perspective in kind of the startup world where he's just kind of sharing what are we doing? Um, how are we doing it? Um, and he's monetizing through sponsorships, but also through a unique kind of method around events and masterminds around kind of what he loves around travel, Latin America. Um, so he does these mastermind retreats in Costa Rica. So kind of a cool, different angle.
Yep. And I see that, uh, Guernsey is asking, is saying the monetization parts, what he came here for. Don't worry, we got you covered here. All right. What's next?
Cool. Next is going to be Omid, another kind of, I wanted to kind of COVID 4 different examples, but Omid kind of is more in the affiliate course space. Um, which some of you guys may be interested in. He runs a newsletter called Marketer Milk, um, which has been around for a little bit, but he's actually one of Beehive's top affiliate partners. And I wanted to mention him because that's a very easy way from a monetization method for, for people to get started. Um, because you don't need your own product, um, or services. That's how, you know, I got started very early on with a few of my own personal products. You probably as well, Andrew, but it's also a great strategy to kind of lean into. Yeah.
Hell, Google started that way. They wanted to run ads and they became Amazon affiliates and all they did was run Amazon affiliates in the beginning. So yeah, it makes total sense that Omen's doing that.
Yeah, definitely.
I mean, and we'll get more monetization later on, everyone.
Exactly. Yeah, no, we got, we got a ton of good examples when it comes to monetization. So, um, one thing I wanted to kind of bring up is, you know, all of these newsletters, especially the 4 I just shared, they kind of have this, uh, common commonality between them around just building a newsletter and making that kind of the HQ of what they're doing. Um, you know, there's so many different creator-led businesses out there, but many of the most successful ones in any online business, you could argue, um, having a newsletter as kind of your HQ, um, is really, really important. Um, and we have a few reasons to kind of dive in on why that is. Um, number one, you're creating a direct one-to-one relationship and it's some, you know, that direct connection and intimacy with your subscribers. Um, 2, you've, it combats, um, rising ad costs. It's much more affordable in many cases. And I'm going to share some examples, especially with the Boring Marketer. And, you know, you can imagine acquiring subs for, you know, $1 to $2 and then selling $8,000 recurring SEO packages, how profitable that can be. Constant medium. You own, you know, your email newsletter list, especially when there's huge shifts on social media where you have a lot less control. It lets you stay nimble. You can easily import and export your audience as needed. You know, if you aren't happy with your ESP, if you're not happy with Beehive, you know, if it's not providing the value, you can easily export your subscriber list and go, go another place if that's your desire. And then also engagement, higher engagement rates as emails land directly in the inbox of your subscribers. And then one big one that's becoming more and more important is first-party data. So not only are you able to survey and gain valuable insights You know, through how your subscribers are acting, you know, as far as open rates, click rates, and other metrics, but you're able to understand your audience better and then personalize that messaging as well. Perfect. Cool. So let's get in. We got newsletter growth. We've kind of earmarked 5 strategies. Sorry, excuse me. Um, we, hey, let me grab a drink here.
Take your time while you do that. I'm gonna, I'm gonna say a word about, uh, making email your HQ. In the past, we used to make our websites into our headquarters. Everything would be, hey, come to our website. Then we went to social and maybe our Instagram was our headquarters or our Twitter was, and that's where we sent people. The problem with the website, our website as being the headquarters, is people don't remember to come back to our site. And so there's no, there's no repeat business, no repeat action. Problem with doing it on social, we all know they change their algorithms, they fall outta favor, and we lose the audience. The beauty of email is things come and go, but as long as you've got the email list, you have access to that audience and you can keep reaching out to them. And so what he's saying is everything you do, just remember, instead of saying my website is, or my Linktree is, say, here's my email. And that's something that maybe you've noticed that we did a little too much on Jesse's account. I'm the person responsible for saying, let's have automation. Say after each good tweet, come back and sign up to the newsletter. But man, does it work? And it's the way that you probably have met us. And if you're honest with me, John Harmer, which I'm glad that you're here, and Dale Mueller and Dennis Schmidt and anyone else, I think you'll say that that's how you found us through the newsletter. And if not, let me know in the chat. Okay. Welcome back.
Yeah, absolutely. So newsletter growth, that's a great segue into kind of the first of the 5 kind of strategies we have here. And there's many more. We kind of earmarked these as kind of maybe the most important, at least trending growth strategies that we're seeing working really well. So the first one is converting social attention. So let's dive in there. I wanted to pull up this great— it's actually an Instagram post from Arnold Schwarzenegger, who's actually on Beehive. And he created a really fun newsletter called Arnold Pump Club. And he does a really good job of taking social content and then inserting CTAs that all push back to his newsletter. So kind of touching on that newsletter is your HQ. He kind of really leans into that across all of his social channels. And this is a good example of him, you know, creating a fun Instagram reel or video. And then, you know, one of his first comments is pushing people to his newsletter, the Arnold Pump Club. Cool. Next is probably one of Andrew's favorites too. I know you brought this one up when we originally talked. But essentially, this is leveraging, let's say, lead magnets on social. Um, and then rewarding engagement and delivering kind of content via, um, a comment strategy. Um, so Typefully in this example, you know, is calling to, uh, has a CTA to leave a fire emoji. Um, and then anyone who does that, you know, then gets delivered, um, you know, that, uh, uh, resource. Um, so that's a great way to not only create engagement, but then reward and deliver to a segment of people who are really interested.
This is a huge one. When I started promoting my book, my publisher started doing this. They said, you know, Andrew, I think we can sum up some of the ideas in a book in an, in just a simple one-pager with the big tips. This is my book, Stop Asking Questions. How to interview. He took a collection of them and he just made it into a checklist. And he went out on my Twitter account and he said, if you want the checklist to running a great interview, just comment. I forget the word. It was something like interview and I'll send it to you. And as soon as you comment the word interview, my account automatically sent over a DM, a direct message with a link to a page where you can give your email address and get the checklist. And at first I thought, this is stupid. It's not gonna work. Come on. Boy, did it work. It got lots of people to comment, which then told the algorithm this is really popular. And I thought people would then be upset that the DM didn't include the checklist right away. Nobody got upset. Instead, what they did was they clicked the link. Joined my email list and then got the checklist. And as a result, many of them became customers. And I think this is one of the best ways to grow an email newsletter. If you're following Jesse's account or my account, you should be prepared to see more of this because it works beautifully well. Yeah. And here are the tools that do it.
Exactly. Yeah. No, I thought I had one more example, but, um, yeah, that, that's a great strategy. You get the social bump and then you also can drive people and get the email subs as well. Um, so a few tools, you know, you have Typefully, works great on Twitter. Taplio for LinkedIn, um, and then ManyChat as well for Instagram. So, um, those are at least 3 good resources if you want to implement and kind of roll a strategy like that out on social.
Yep. Pick one of those tools, use this technique, super effective. If you haven't tried it, Karen, go get it right now. Alex, go get one of those tools right now and email me if you need help, andrew@bootstrapgiants.com. Super helpful. That's the— if you could walk away with one tip, I promise you, if you do this twice, you will start to see your email grow and you're going to do this more than twice afterwards and your email will really take off.
Awesome. Next is going to be repurposing. So I kind of have 4 kind of areas of repurposing. We have open loops, referrals, lead magnets, and audio. Um, those are 4 that I see working really, really well right now. Um, so what is open loop? What is an open loop? What does that mean? So in this case, Tyler Denk is, um, you He sends a newsletter out for Big Desk Energy every Tuesday. So every Monday, what he, what is he doing? He's actually going on social, being very active and previewing what's going to come in the newsletter tomorrow. And this is a great way because every week he's growing, he's building his audience. So there's new people constantly being exposed to what he's doing. And this is a great way to drive engagement, get people excited and get people to subscribe to his newsletter before It goes out the following day. So I really love this strategy as well. Michael Girdley does this as well. Another example of someone just kind of open looping or previewing or kind of teasing out what's to come in the newsletter tomorrow. So great strategy to kind of do or just work into your kind of creation flow just the day before you have a newsletter go live. Jesse does this as well. Um, this is more Jesse kind of following up, I think. Um, you know, not only are you open looping, but then you can, you know, add it as a CTA to the bottom of some of the content you just posted. So Jesse does this really well for Bootstrap Giants on Twitter, um, which Jesse mentioned earlier as well.
Yep. And we're going to be doing that even further. We now have old articles that we're turning into PDFs that we will give away to anyone who joins our newsletter. And I think that's, that's magical. And I know it feels a little aggressive and maybe we need to dial that back. Maybe if you're in the audience, let me know. Um, but if, but if it's aggressive, it's frankly because it's working and it's a good way for us to have met many of you.
Absolutely.
Cool.
The next strategy, uh, which I really love, which is a great one, and this is built natively into Beehive with the Beehive referral program. Um, so this is called one referral, um, a one referral strategy. Um, so. Here you can see Milk Road did this really well initially, um, with their newsletter. Um, and what I like to do is just kind of set one referral to unlock, let's say a lead magnet, a guide, a checklist, or some sort of resource. And you'd be surprised how that can drive just a ton of organic growth. For example, for Milk Road, they were able to drive over 50,000 to 60,000 subs, um, to their newsletter completely free, completely organically by their current subscribers, just sharing it with someone else to unlock that guide. Um, so Milk Road does this really well. And then also Ben's Bytes, which is a, another AI, um, uh, newsletter as well.
Tons of AI newsletters, a lot of them doing well. Give me a tip for this. So this is something that made me want to sign up for Beehive. I think I have an idea. Tell me if this makes sense.
Okay.
The offer on the very bottom of all of our newsletters is share this newsletter with a friend. And if you do, I'll give you a recording of how I make a sales call So you can watch it with the methodology that I'm using. Is that enough of, do you think, of a draw, or should I have a bigger incentive for people to share and get their friends to sign up to my newsletter?
I like that. That could be a great one. I think you need to know your audience best. I think that's where kind of some of like the Beehive surveys come in, you know, polling your audience as well. Yeah. But, um, you know, making it as value as po— valuable as possible and something that is unique, um, they can't really get anywhere else. So that what you had mentioned is a great example. Um, you can also test a few different examples or, you know, different resources. Um, but yeah, the whole goal is, you know, what's going to, what's going to incentivize somebody to actually share this, you know, with a friend to unlock that.
Okay.
All right.
And everyone, I'm watching the chat. Keep bringing me your ideas. Let me know if you need us to pause or spend more time on this. Some of what I'm coming out with and interrupting with is based on what you had all brought up. And I know you're watching on multiple platforms. So I'll monitor as many as possible.
Cool. Happy to dive in deeper on any of these. So you guys let us know as well. Um, yeah, lead magnets, you know, this ties into the one referral reward. This also ties into the social strategy. So, you know, having something valuable that you can package up. Um, 2 examples that work really well here, Ship 30 for 30, um, run by Dickie Bush, um, is a great example. Um, they have a essentially an email course for all of their products. They, within Ship 30 for 30, they actually have a variety of different businesses. And when I actually looked inside all of them, they use kind of the same playbook. And they have essentially a 5 to 7 day email course that is, you know, associated with kind of what, you know, in this case, a writing course. And, you know, for their other businesses, it's relevant. But that's a great way to get people in. Um, is through some sort of free course, um, an email drip. Um, and then Boring Marketer, they have more of a traditional kind of guide and PDF that gets them into their newsletter, but they're delivering kind of, um, you know, a guide around SEO and what they call SEO 2.0 with a mix of AI, et cetera. Um, and that does really, really well and gives a reason to give, gives a reason for people to opt in, especially when you're pushing them from social.
So one thing that we're doing, we just had, uh, someone internally turn one of our articles into a PDF. It's an article that did especially well for us with our audience, which is how to run a 30-minute sales call. And it was breaking down minute by minute what to do. We took that, we basically hit the print to PDF feature, made a few edits in a simple free PDF app and designed a cover for it in Canva. And now what we're doing is creating a landing page that says, get the, find out how to close a sale within 30 minutes. And, uh, and anyone who signs up gets that instantly and also joins our email list. It's too early, obviously, for me to say what the numbers look like, but you'll start to see that, um, uh, if you're following us online. It's because I've been urged to create a lead magnet, but I've also been told, stop overthinking it, test it. If this thing works, First of all, you can create other email newsletters and turn them into guides. And second, if one topic takes off, then go deeper and make it into a more in-depth PDF. And that's the approach that we're taking.
I love that. Yeah. And one cool thing to mention, I actually had a chance to connect with, um, James at Boring Marketing, um, a few days ago. And he had mentioned, um, this 7-day like SEO crash course and resource they give away for their lead magnet has directly attributed over $200,000 of revenue in services. Um, so just that automated email sequence drives that much revenue, uh, so far that they've tracked. Um, so I thought that was really cool and a cool insight to share.
Priya is asking, what is exactly a lead magnet? A lead magnet is some kind of giveaway that you have on your website for people who join your email newsletter, for people who add their email address to the form. And you've seen this a lot. The most basic lead magnet is a checklist. Here are the things you need to do to do the stuff that you want. He mentioned Rowan, TJ, uh, TG did earlier. Uh, Rowan has an AI newsletter. In the beginning of, uh, AI and ChatGPT and the others, prompts were really popular. He put together a list of prompts and he categorized them. And I remember emailing him personally saying, how do I get this? When of course it was on his website. And the reason that I emailed him was I just wanted the prompts. It was a really good lead magnet. We see, uh, Guernsey in the audience who's saying that, uh, Guernsey, I'm assuming it's a you, it's a he. He has an accounting and finance newsletter. And so he has a collection of guides to discuss how to collect cash for your business, uh, timely in a timely manner. And that's one of his lead magnets. If you don't have one, think about it. And again, my, my email address is andrew@bootstrapgiants.com. I want to be able to help you out with this. So if you want to just think through what a lead magnet could look like in your business.
Yeah.
I'm happy to do that. And of course, if you want the recording, email me too, and I'll, I'll get it for you.
Yeah, definitely encourage you guys as well to subscribe to some of the newsletters we've mentioned as, as examples so far. Um, you can get an idea of, cool, how are they setting up their, their onboarding flows? What kind of lead magnets? What do they look like? Some ideas for lead magnets here, you know, we mentioned course guides are really popular, checklists. Typically from what I've seen, I don't know if you agree, Andrew, but like You know, keeping it simple and short, usually those have always performed better for me. Um, and they're easier to create than doing big, long, really robust lead magnets. Um, so it's kind of funny to kind of see the performance difference, but yeah, it makes it easier to create too. Just kind of keep it simple. Don't overdo it. Checklists work really great, really easy digestible resources.
Yeah. And if you want in the chat to just tell me what you're all working on, um, maybe we can come up with some good lead magnet ideas or checklist ideas for your business.
Yeah, absolutely.
Right. Cool.
Another way to repurpose is going to be audio podcasts. So this is actually a new feature that Beehive released just, I think, a couple weeks ago. But you can see here on the left-hand side, let's say you write a newsletter. You can actually just toggle this feature on, and we've integrated with ElevenLabs, and you select a voice. And then when you publish that newsletter, you automatically are going to have essentially an audio podcast version of your newsletter, um, you know, at the top of the post version, um, online. Um, so very cool feature. Definitely encourage you guys to play with that and try that out. But repurposing in general, taking your written content, I think written content is one of the best lead dominoes, um, that then you can take and then, you know, use that as a script to do a video, turn it into audio podcasts, et cetera. Um, so that was just one This is one example, but the bigger idea is, you know, repurposing it maybe into other formats as well.
You know, I hadn't done this. I did see someone add one of these play buttons to the top of their newsletter, and I was so excited about it that I reached out to them and they said, it's just a new feature in Beehive. We didn't invent anything. It's essentially an, it sounds like a voice actor reading the newsletter to me. And it's kind of fun that it turns it into a podcast. I didn't add it to our newsletter because I frankly, I don't see the business benefit of it. I guess maybe what, what the benefit is if people don't want to consume the audio, I mean the text version, then they could listen and we've, we've captured someone's attention when we might've lost it otherwise. I guess that's it, right?
Yeah. Different format, different way for people to digest your content. Um, I was curious as well when we first launched it and there's a few, uh, newsletters I follow and it is kind of nice. You know, I see it pop up on my phone. I can just push play and, you know, I was ended up, I was on a walk and I just kept walking. I listened to their whole newsletter. Um, on audio version, um, which was kind of cool, but, um, it is a little bit different. I think everyone digests info differently.
All right. I like that. Uh, Karen, um, said, I recently started a podcast to help actors succeed inspired by Interview Your Heroes, my book. Thank you. Um, and she's got a newsletter where she, and I'll say it, she's using Substack for the newsletter. I have opinions on that, but I'll keep them to myself for now. Um, And I think if you're looking to create a lead magnet to convert the people who are listening to your podcast or watching it on YouTube into email subscribers, one thing you could do is a list of, of opportunities for voice actors. So if you're a voice actor and you're looking to create a business on your own because the, the work is drying out or you want to maybe enhance your, your cash flow, here's a checklist of all the different places that you can, that you can generate revenue. Or here are the places of all, here are a checklist of all the different places where you can list yourself as a voice I see Raul saying, uh, any lead magnet ideas for a newsletter that covers insights from growth stage founders and investors, including deep dive interviews with founders? Do you have something for Raul Berry? What's a good lead magnet for Raul?
Ooh, that could be interesting. I think like if you're doing these type of interviews and that's the type of content, I know Andrew, you're probably a perfect example, all the stuff you've done at MixerG. Um, but maybe aggregation of learnings could be good. Um, that could be really interesting whether, cool, here's the top tools people use. Here's, here's the top learnings. I've interviewed over 100 people and here's how they do X. Um, I've seen though that, that, that kind of angle do really well. Compile all that knowledge you've captured, um, and maybe make it a little bit more digestible for people.
I've definitely seen that. You just take one idea from each interview and now you've got insight from all these different people. And back when Tim Ferriss was a little more open with doing interviews, I would see him in these compilations a lot, but frankly, Uh, there are other names out there today who you can use on yours. All right. What's next?
Next is partnerships. So this is one I really enjoy, um, you know, obviously running the partner program at Beehive. Um, but this is a great growth strategy, um, just to get in front of new audiences. So, um, when I think of partnerships, I think of Dream 100 partners. Um, this concept of building out a list of your dream partners. So what is a dream partner? Um, it's anyone who has access to your ideal customers, but isn't a direct competitor. Um, so the way I kind of look at this is I kind of created this concept called yacht hopping. Um, I don't know if I've mentioned this to you, Andrew, explained it, but essentially like, you know, think of each partner to build a yacht on your own is going to take time. Think of that as your business. Um, you can do it, but it's going to take many years, but in the meantime, there's Businesses that have already created yachts that have spent the time that have access to your ideal audience. So the whole goal is how can you bring value, find the yacht owner, then partner with them, get on their yacht and have them introduce you to the party and present that value to that audience. So that's kind of at its core what partnerships are. And I kind of look at it, I kind of batch these into like, you kind of scale up to a yacht so you can start with a canoe. Then maybe you move to a boat, then you move to a yacht. Um, so there's different ways to kind of approach it as you kind of build out kind of this strategy.
So let me ask you about partnerships. Yep. When I asked, uh, Cody Sanchez's, um, I, I don't know what the woman's title was, but someone who had helped manage her email newsletter, I said, what's growing Cody Sanchez's email newsletter? Because God knows I see her on YouTube, on Instagram, on everything else. So I know she's got some techniques. Said, well, in the early days, the best thing that we had was we found newsletters that were similar to ours and we would go to them and say, we'd like to recommend you to our audience. Would you also recommend us? And those types of swaps worked incredibly effectively, she said.
Yep.
So I started doing that too. I'd reach out to newsletters. I asked Tyler, the founder of Beehive, would he do one of those? 'Cause we, we love, uh, big desk energy. And he said, yeah, let's give it a shot. And some people are asking, what's the benefit of, uh, using Beehive or Substack or ConvertKit? The thing that you can't do on those platforms is use growth tools like this.
Yeah.
With Beehive, I went in, I clicked a button and I got a link that I could give to Tyler. He put it in his email newsletter. Anyone who clicked the link automatically subscribed, didn't have to enter their email address and so on. There's a level of trust and smoothness. So that's one form of partnership, TG. Gimme another form of partnership and I promise I'm not gonna keep slowing it down, but I wanna dive deep where it matters. What other partnerships can I, can I get?
No, I love it.
Yeah.
And I'll jump ahead, or let me just do one slide, then I'll jump into different ideas here. So I did put together Yeah, I did put together this resource, which I'll share with you guys. It's kind of my template, um, that I use to create my Dream 100 partners, um, and then analyze them based on their size and then organize them by priority of how to reach out to them. So I'll definitely include this, could be very helpful if you want to explore this idea, but to your point, Andrew, how to partner, this is what we want to kind of get into. So there's a lot of different ways. What you mentioned is kind of almost like an email swap.
Um, yeah.
Think about, there's, there's tons of ways you can partner with people. I think the first ask is really important. Start kind of small to build that relationship with that potential partner. So guest posts and guest post swaps, um, are a great one. Uh, just because it is like a somewhat low, low friction way to, if you're writing a piece of content for them, they don't really have to do anything. Um, and if it's valuable, they're gonna post it on their website.
And you know what, I think the guest post. Sorry, I think of guest posts as being one of these old blogger ideas, but I can totally see that because God knows when you're doing an email newsletter, there's some weeks you just don't have it. And if somebody with some substance, but not a big list says, can I write your newsletter this week? And all I'm asking for is a link back to anyone who wants to go get to know me. I'm open to it as long as the content is really good. All right. So guest posts, what else do you have?
Yeah. And guest posts pair nicely with social. So a lot of guest posts we even do with Beehive, which we're doing, we do many of these a week with. You know, many partners, but the natural next thing after they post or post it on their blog, et cetera, is to share it on social. Um, so you also can kind of do some sort of social engagement as well. So, you know, whether that's sharing on Twitter, you know, um, you get, you can get more uses out of that guest post because if it goes on their blog, they're more likely to also share it on other mediums as well.
Mm-hmm.
Um, you know, apart from that, podcast interviews are great if they have a podcast. Workshops, you know, this is very dynamic, but this is what we're doing right now. Yeah. So, you know, Beehive and Bootstrap Giants have come together, you know, and, you know, we're hopefully bringing value via, you know, how to grow and monetize your newsletter. And, you know, this is a good example of a workshop or webinar. Um, so there's a lot of different things. You know, we've also done event speaking. Um, you can also do lead magnet swaps, um, and, or, you know, do interview, you know, provide value to communities and courses as well.
If you do a podcast, I've obviously done thousands of podcasts and people have come with lots of different levels of preparation. One of the things that I found is if a guest asks me, Andrew, can I give people this resource on this landing page for you? Would that be okay with you? I often say yes if the resource is good. And I think that that's a smart way to come at a podcaster. So you get to do a podcast interview with someone, maybe your website, let's take ours for example, it's Bootstrap Giants. You might say, would you mind at some point in here, I have a checklist of things that bootstrappers can do to grow. Do you mind if I give it out? All I have to do is tell all the, all your audience has to do is go to bootstrapgiants.com/ and then you put the podcast, uh, name in there. Say sure. And now you've turned someone who's just a passive listener into a subscriber who builds a relationship with you. The beauty of podcasting is that there's a connection with you when you're on someone's podcast.
That's the whole—
The sucky part is they forget you as soon as the podcast is over. This is a good way to stay connected. All right. Anyone who wants these slides, we've gotta find a way to make them available to people. I'll tell you what, all you have to do is email me. Do it right now so you don't forget. It'll start a conversation and just say slides. My email address is andrew@bootstrappedgiants.com, and I'll send this over to you. And of course, I'll also include, um, access to Beehive for free, courtesy of Beehive for a limited time. Don't try to get like a multi-billion dollar, uh, newsletter business on this trying to use the free account. It's a way to get you started with Beehive, and I want you to test it out and for yourself. Um, even if you have a different platform you like, I think you'll like a lot about this. And definitely if you don't, I wanna make sure that I get it to you. So, andrew@bootstrappedgiants.com. Uh, looking forward to hearing from you. All right. What else?
Great. Our 5th growth strategy's gonna be paid acquisition. Um, and I wanted to mention this because when we look at the most successful newsletters, especially those who have reached 7 figures plus. You know, they have a, they have an element of, you know, paid acquisition and acquiring newsletter subs. So some of you may or may not be at that level yet. But I wanted to touch on these because it's a great way to also drive subscribers into your ecosystem and newsletter, and then you can start nurturing and bringing them value. So Meta ads specifically, there's a lot of places to run paid media, but usually have performed the best. I got a lot of this these, um, you know, ad swipes here, um, from Matt McGarry, who, um, runs Newsletter Operator and Growletter. Um, and they exclusively do newsletter ads, um, for, or grow newsletters with ads like this, um, on Meta. So, you know, from the Milk Road to the Hustle to Bay Area Times, um, here's some examples of some of the ads they're running.
We're going to do this next. I'm really intimidated by buying ads to a newsletter, you know, to pay ads for something that's free. I think we have a technique for this. Check in with me guys, and I'll, I'll show you some of the numbers as we're figuring it out. But truthfully, I've never done this in this way, and I'll let you follow along with us. I'm curious about how it works.
Awesome. And then the next, obviously you have paid media, let's say on Meta and other channels, but then you also have, you know, our own internal growth tools within Beehive, one of which is paid recommendations or what we call boosts. So this is a really great way that's just natively built in the platform, makes it really easy where you can actually You know, you know, say you want to pay for subscribers, select how much you want to pay. It will then go into kind of our marketplace and then someone can actually, um, you know, accept that and then have that integrated into their newsletter to drive subscribers to your newsletter, which is really, really cool.
Yep. And we'll talk later on about how you can use this as a revenue generator. We've been using it. Um, and by the way, you. I think this is a Beehive exclusive that it's Boost, but there are other platforms. I don't think they work as well that you can use if you're, if you happen to be using something else. But the big point is when someone joins another newsletter, you can also say, join my newsletter and pay that first newsletter for that referral. All right. Monetization, 5 strategies.
Let's dive in. Uh, so this is a fun one. I think, you know, from monetization side, I'm going to talk, we're going to touch again on 5 core Strategies, um, productized services or offering services, sponsorships, physical products, masterminds, and then paid communities. Um, so those are the 5. And then also to kind of, you know, tease you guys a little, we do have an additional guide that touches on 15 more ideas that we're going to send to everyone, you know, as long as you guys stay to the end. Um, so that is a guide we're going to share, um, just because there's so many to cover. Um, but, you know, with our time together, we'll touch on 5 of the 20.
Awesome.
Um, so the first one, productized services. Um, again, I mentioned the boring marketer, um, at the beginning. Um, I think services are, are very, um, maybe not, you know, everyone's first thought when they think of monetizing a newsletter. Um, there's so many different ways, but it's a very lucrative way, especially like what I mentioned before, if you can acquire subs, you know, for $1 to $2 a sub, and now you're pushing them to, you know, higher ticket service offerings. like The Boring Marketer does, it can be very profitable. Um, as well as Newsletter Operator, you know, they run a newsletter all about how to monetize and grow your newsletter. Um, that's growing substantially. And then they offer agency services on the backend. So I thought this was just a unique one to kind of mention because it's not really the first thing people think of when monetizing a newsletter. Perfect.
You know what? I would have thought about it. I wouldn't have realized how big it can get. And the beauty of this business I'm realizing is You do the work yourself at first, and then you systemize it and you hire others to do it. Mm-hmm. And it becomes a real agency with real revenue and real profits. Um, so yeah, I think it's a fantastic way when someone has a newsletter to, to do, to do that. Sorry if I'm pausing for a second, it's because I'm feeling a moment of overwhelm. My inbox was at zero. I looked superhuman, zero email this morning. Now I'm seeing, and I do appreciate it, I promise I will get to everyone. Lawrence Rochelle emailed me. Nawaz emailed me. Karen. Yeah. Sam emailed me slides, just one word. I love that Sam just did nothing but the word slides. We know what we're talking about. Ann did, Bradley did, Shelley did, M. Taylor did, Robert Merrill. I've definitely, um, got my work cut out for me, uh, but I will send this out. If you are listening, if you need something that we've said here, the slides, access to Beehive, some of the techniques that, that TG's going to show you later for monetization, do this. I want this. Here's my secret for why I want to connect with you. When you're building an email newsletter to have other friends in the business who go, I came up with this interesting idea, or here's a technique that's working for me, especially newer people with smaller audiences, you tend to be more creative and you jog me out of my, my rut. And so I want to connect with you and I want us to have an email conversation that will maybe a month from now you'll come back and go, I tried this technique that worked, or here, this other thing that you've taught that I actually thought of another way to do it. So please, Andrew@bootstrapgiants.com. I want to build my own little Like friendship collection with you, Sam, with you, Brad, of people who are building newsletters together because this is such an exciting business. There's, I love, I podcasted forever. TJ, there's nobody who hit my podcast after being emotionally touched who goes, this was so touching. It was moving. They have to finish their run or mowing the lawn or taking the kids to school in the car and remember that this was moving and then go figure out how to get to my email and then send me a message. Nothing like this. You send out an email newsletter.
Yeah.
Like I did the other day, boom, you're overwhelmed with people who are like, I felt this way, or I wanna do this thing. It's super, super effective. So that's why I'm, uh, apologizing to you, TG, for interrupting, but I'm also doing this as a, as a note to the audience. Be like Sam, be like Brad, be like all these other people. Contact me, andrew@bootstrapgiants.com. Tell me what resource from this you'd like to have. And, um, and let's keep connecting and building on what we're learning today. All right, TG, what else? What's next?
Yeah, I wanna be conscious of the time. I know we got 15 minutes left. I wanted to leave some time for Q&A, so we've got still 4 monetization strategies to get through, then we can get to Q&A. Are we tight on time or do we have a little bit extra that kind of—
I think we have a little bit extra and I will promise I will hold myself back and not talk too much for the, for the remaining, but—
Awesome. I just wanted to, yeah, just check that.
I can't cut too much back.
Okay. No worries. Um, next is gonna be sponsorship. So this is probably the first thing people kind of default to. It's, it's probably the most traditional way to monetize a newsletter. Typically, you're either monetizing through what they call CPM or cost per thousand. Beehive monetizes and the Beehive ad network actually monetizes via cost per click. So I kind of outlined 3 different kinds of tiers, you know, based on your newsletter. If it's a little bit more general, all the way up to a very, maybe super niche, more hyper-personalized newsletter, you're going to be able to charge a lot more when it comes to a cost per click. And what that looks like is, you know, those are going to be those integrated ads you might see or sponsored by ads. Um, so the Beehive ad network is growing substantially. Um, and you can kind of see some of the numbers of the network here on the left. Um, but this is also a great way, um, you know, to monetize your newsletter if you want to do run sponsorships.
So you don't have to go out and sell ads, which I love to do, but you don't have to do it. It's your first ads could be part of the network.
Exactly. Yeah, that saves a ton of time.
Okay. Yep. Cool.
Next is going to be physical products, which is a little bit different. You know, I wanted to pull up Sam Ryan here. He has a really cool newsletter. He's an artist and you could be selling any sort of physical product, but, you know, he does a great job at, you know, social-first content sharing, you know, artwork on what he's creating. And then also documenting the process. So the newsletter again is a great way to kind of just share the journey. Um, and then, you know, he has soft CTAs, you know, in every email that where you can actually, cool, you can buy the original, you can buy prints, um, et cetera. And he's been able to create a pretty substantial living on just, you know, selling art through his newsletter. Um, and pretty simple model.
Yep.
Cool. We touched on this a little bit before, but obviously events and masterminds, um, could be a great avenue as well. Um, if that's something you want to kind of explore, you know, Tyler Dank and the Big Desk Energy. Uh, newsletter is a great, um, use case for this. A lot of other people do, um, events as well and masterminds and, um, the newsletter as kind of a funnel, you know, is a great way to get people, um, to, to that, uh, uh, to those events.
So that, that's a very intimidating thing to say, go to your audience and say, I'm doing this big event. I think it's worth doing if you've got an audience of people who can pay, charge, have an in-person event. If for some reason you can't, one technique that's worked for me is tagging onto a bigger event. So when I've seen that a lot of my audience would come to South by Southwest, I did a smaller event at South by Southwest, side event. People were willing to pay. Uh, Tim Ferriss, Gary Vaynerchuk, Ze Frank all spoke at the event today. They're huge megastars. Back then they spoke for me for free. And the reason that I'm saying that is because you could just get a few people who are really articulate and that access or the interaction at the event is enough to bring, uh, a paid audience. And I think it's a fantastic way to both earn money and connect with your audience.
Absolutely. Next we got paid communities. So 2 examples, uh, Michael Huck, uh, from Huck's Newsletter. Um, he has a great newsletter that funnels into a community. And then The Rundown, which we mentioned before, they actually have AI University, which is a monthly subscription and community. I think they host it in Circle. Um, but also another great example of, you know, newsletter to a recurring community kind of offer as well, which I think works really well depending on your niche. Cool. Um, awesome. Well, excited to get into Q&A. Obviously we've partnered with Bootstrap Giants and, you know, we want to make sure, help you guys get off the ground with your newsletter. So we are offering anyone a 30-day trial plus 20% off for 3 months, you know, as exclusive Bootstrap Giant partners. Um, so here's some of that info and I know Andrew's going to share, um, any links and, and access to, to this discount as well. Yep.
So if you've asked me, I will get it for you. Um, let me take some of the questions. A few people were talking about, um, virtual summits and what those are. So a virtual summit is essentially where you get 2 or 3 or 5 speakers, kind of like TG here. Maybe we would do a full session where we said we're doing a half-day breakdown about how to build an email newsletter. We get TG, we get 4 other people who've built their newsletters. We all email our list and say, come watch us live. And then we all have access to the, to follow up and add the attendees to our email newsletter. It's incredibly effective. Um, so Karen is saying that, uh, Karen wants to know what my thoughts are on Substack versus ConvertKit and Beehive. I think the problem with Substack is it's basically meant for paid newsletters. I don't think that paid newsletters are as big as Substack thinks they are. For many people, they're just not right. For a few select group of people who maybe used to have an audience in a newsletter or in a newspaper or something else, fantastic. Your audience will pay for you. Most of us just need to grow our audience. And the beauty of Beehive, unlike the other platforms, is it says, I know it, you need to grow your audience. I'll give you all the techniques and all the tools possible. And if someone invents a new tool, we'll find a way to integrate it so that you can use their tool or to create a similar tool so that it's in here. I think the biggest pressure is, uh, actually the number one that is, what do I write about and stay consistent? The number 2 one is, how do I get more people to, to read? And, uh, frankly, if you can get more people to read your stuff, it'll be enough of an impetus for you to, to write more. So that's, that's helpful.
Mm-hmm.
Griffin is asking, where can I get a recording of this? Uh, go to, just email me, andrew@bootstrapgiants.com. A little personal note, I'm gonna take my kids To, uh, to a water park right after we're done with this. I will email everyone whatever I've got now, and the rest I'll have to follow up and get more for you. But if you email me, andrew@bootstrapgiants.com, not only will you get it, but if you think of something else that you need over the weekend, then you can email me and I can try to get you that too.
All right.
What kind of company should I register for a solo newsletter creator? Uh, Nawaz is asking. Nawaz, don't sweat that. Just go and create the newsletter. It's not a company until there's revenue.
Yeah.
Unless you're looking to like slander people and you need that kind of protection.
Yeah.
And even then, just really start the newsletter. Keep it simple. Uh, Griffin is asking a question that I'm gonna ask you, TG.
Okay.
What are good niches to start a newsletter in?
Wow. Yeah, that's a good question. Um, you know, obviously I, I lean towards like, obviously your interest, you know, what do you know, um, that you can share value on and talk to? Um, I'd start there. Um, otherwise, you know, you know, I think leaning towards your interests, obviously, and there's a lot of different angles. You know, Rowan, you know, just loves technology and AI. Um, you know, Greg Eisenberg just loves kind of, you know, doing startups and, you know, service businesses and agencies. Um, so, you know, for me, I have a newsletter around productized services and agencies as well. So I, I talk about that. So I'd probably just lean double-click into, you know, what's interesting to you and, and what are you maybe obsessed with?
Nawaz is saying he's got a newsletter, it's on Beehive, and I think as a joke he's saying with 18 people reading, exclamation point. Nawaz, let me give you, uh, I've got a bunch of tips that I can share with you, but I think the simplest and first one is one that I got from a guy who sold shoes online, multi-million dollars in shoes. And it, and I asked him how he got started and he said, you know, in the beginning I got no customers and I forget who it was. I think it was his dad who goes, Did you even ask your friends if they would buy? And he said, no. He goes, well, if you're not asking your friends if they would buy, then why go ask strangers if it's not good enough for them? And if you don't have the guts to go ask people who care and love, love you, then why are you going out and asking strangers? And so he went out to his friends, he went out to people who he knew, he sold them the shoes. He got a sense of what it's like to sell us, to sell a shoe. He saw that he wasn't a fraud for selling it and he felt good about it and he was able to grow from there. And Waz, I'm going to challenge you right now to email 20 people or DM, actually, I don't want DM. 20 people email them and say, I started an email newsletter. Andrew Warner, the big mouth who will not even let TG, his guest on his own workshop, talk. The big mouth challenged me. I wanna see if I could do this. And I'm gonna say this, this is not a prize that's worth fighting for, but it's a prize that we'll remember. If you can get 25, let's say, let's go to 25. If you email 25 people, feel free to BCC me on them. To, to do this, I will send you a Starbucks $5 coffee just so that the two of us have a personal connection and we know that you took this challenge and you did it. All right. So let's do that. Start with the people you know and see if you could get them in there. Noah says challenge accepted. Noah Kagan has a multimillion dollar email newsletter.
Yep.
He, in the early days, on the bottom, on the SIG file of all the emails that he sent out would say, essentially sign up to my newsletter.
Yeah. All right.
Nawaz, andrew@bootstrapgiants.com. All right. Griffin saying with zero subscribers, what's the best strategy to get to from, uh, get off the ground to zero? Do the same thing, Griffin, that I just challenged Nawaz. If you email me right now, Griffin, I will give you the exact same challenge. I'm not gonna be a Starbucks guy here, so I'm not gonna continue with this beyond these two. But if you email me, andrew@bootstrapgiants.com, I will, um, I, I will understand that we've got this challenge with you too, Griffin. Um, any other questions? Hit the chat. Let us know. I would actually like to do, let's say a 2-minute show and tell with you telling me what I should be showing and telling. Are you good with that? I'll just share my screen and we'll look around here at Beehive.
Yeah, that'd be great.
Okay. I think you need to stop sharing your screen. I will share my screen. We'll see if it works for me, because I know we had an issue before.
Okay.
Here's what I see when I log into, into Beehive. Look at this. I didn't even add every single person who joined the, this workshop, but look at how doing a workshop like this means everyone who's joining has an opportunity to join my email list. And so that gave us our biggest jump doing this workshop. I wanna show you a couple of things that I find to be really helpful. This is one of the things that I signed up for, a magic link. If we are working with someone and maybe they're inviting me to do a podcast, maybe they're asking me to do whatever. Maybe they just want to link to me from a conference email newsletter, whatever the hell. Sorry, whatever the heck. All I do is I say, what's your platform that you're working on? And they might say, well, I'm somebody who's ancient. I have AWeber, which kind of sucks. Go, no problem. I do this. I select that. I copy this to my clipboard and I say, great, would you mind linking to this instead of linking to my homepage? Go, sure. Now, every time somebody clicks on that, they join my email newsletter. So they might say, Andrew Warner from Bootstrap Giants is going to be speaking. Here's a link to his site, or here's a link to his product, they get the link and they go over to my newsletter. Don't worry, it doesn't immediately log them in. There's a simple one-click thing that they, that they click. So this is the kind of thing that I'm going for, this beauty. I'm going to show you something else. Uh, boosts. We have not yet done boosts. As someone who are, who's paying, oh, where's the boost? These are the applications of, how do I find it? Um, I know we've made offers to earn money from people's boosts. Is that here?
Um, go to monetize.
Oh, got it. Okay. Got it. Got it. Got it. Got it. Okay. So we're gonna go to boost here.
Boost. Yeah.
Essentially what we're doing is we're saying, how much money can we earn here? So, so far we've earned $41, $42, 22, 21 people subscribed to other newsletters that we recommended and we got $42 from that. And that's every time someone joins our email newsletter, right, TG? After they're done. Exactly. Yeah. We pop up a thing that says we Hand-curated these newsletters. If you wanna join them, uh, join them. And we're very selective about the ones that we've joined. And frankly, they're selective of us. They have to say, yes, we want it. We wanna work with you. Um, anything else that you guys are seeing that you want me to, that you want me to bring up? TG, I can't see the chat, so if you see anything, feel free to let me know.
Yeah, no worries. Um, I would love for you to show maybe just quickly the editor as well.
I think that could be kind of cool to— Ooh. Okay. All right.
Kind of give people a sneak peek.
Smart man. This is something I did not know until TG and I became friends. He goes, Andrew, I say, where's this? Where's that? He goes, Andrew, do you know about slash? I go, no, I don't know what slash is. I hit the slash command. Look at these freaking things that I could put in there. Now, if you're just doing an email newsletter, you want to make it, you want to make it look good. I don't mean to shout, but I don't have any artistic designs. I know how to do headers, but I love that I could add things like block quote is very important to me because I think it breaks up the text to make it look like a block quote. Um, where's the thing that I really want to show? I don't want to get into all this advertisement. If you're working with their ad network, you could do it. If you've got the boost and you want to do that, you can do that. And so you're, you're basically earning money. I don't care so much about this other stuff like YouTube. Where's the thing that I wanted to show, which is the, the, uh, audio?
Um, so you can—
oh, here it is.
Type audio in as well.
Yeah, right. You can just type audio and now you've turned the newsletter, if I understand it right, into a podcast that people can listen to.
So, so that's actually different. So that audio is to upload an audio. So if you click audio really quick. Um, this is where you can actually upload maybe any audio file you have. But if you go to website, um, on the far right.
On the far right.
Yep. And then scroll down. Um, that's where you can toggle on the audio version.
Ah, got it. And I could do that and I select my voice that I want.
Exactly. Yep. Okay. And then that will automatically, whenever you end up creating, let's say you have 200, 300, 500 words in your newsletter, um, it will turn that into, um, an audio version for you.
And all of this could be, I type in my thing, this is my newsletter, uh, it's on. All of these could also be turned into a post. I can also do what I usually do, to be honest with you. I do, uh, hide from the feed so people can't see it. Um, and then you got your SEO. So if you really want traffic from all this, you can do that too. Um, what I haven't yet tried yet is, uh, A/B testing here because we're just getting going with With Beehive, but we switched over because we need a lot of these features. Not the A/B, the A/B testing, I just kind of took for granted that it's there. The features that I need are the ones that I was showing earlier for growth.
All right, I'm gonna stop the share just so I can get back into that. Yeah, the A/B testing works great.
Yeah. Yeah, A/B testing is critical, I think. Uh, it's not so much like it's gonna make or break a newsletter, though I've clearly seen it add 10 to 20 percentage points more views on a newsletter. That's, you pick 2 different headings and you end up with more views. I think it's critical because it teaches me, it teaches our writers, The style of writing that the audience responds to. And so if we're just writing without testing, there's, there's no way to see if the, if our writing is, uh, if it's, if it's the way that people want to read us, if it's a topic that they wanna read us. Okay. Do daily newsletters typically share, uh, 5 a week? I'm guessing Arman is asking, are they posting 5 times a week? What do you think of that?
Yeah, I think like the frequency, especially if you're just starting out, um, a daily newsletter is a lot to bite off. So definitely don't recommend that for most. Um, you know, I think starting even, you know, if it's monthly, starting with less of a frequency and then increasing the frequency as you build the writing habit. Um, but to answer the question, like newsletters are all over the board. We have daily newsletters. I think Rohan definitely sends probably closer to daily, um, where let's say other newsletters might just be on a weekly cadence. You know, Tyler from Big Desk Energy, he's sending every Tuesday. Um, so it's, it's also about finding a cadence and frequency that really works for you.
Uh, Karen's asking, can you share some ideas on what to include in a newsletter? I'm just getting started. I followed Ali Abdaal's newsletter snippets. I know there's James Clear's 3-2-1, et cetera. What are some good, uh, formats that will get people writing?
Yeah, I think the formats are definitely to plug into that helps the creation process. You got even Tim Ferriss's 5 Bullet Fridays. Um, you know, those are the other ones you mentioned were great examples. Um, so I think creating a format, um, and also the kind of content you want to create, you know, is it going to be kind of more story-based? Are you going to be kind of aggregating? Um, are you doing interviews? You know, do you want to, you know, create your new— you can essentially— what's cool in Beehive as well is you can create kind of a template, um, and structure, and then you can duplicate that every time you go to create a new one. Um, and then kind of work within that and, and create content around kind of that structure as well.
I think starting off with curation is fantastic. You're just getting going. You don't have the, the stamina to write on a regular basis. Picking out content that is related to what you care about and even summarizing it or saying why it matters in a single sentence is a good way for you to see what you care about and see what the audience cares about. And build that rhythm. And then from there, start to go beyond. All right. Um, we're basically at the end. I know we're about 3 minutes over. I really appreciate all of you for being here. TG, before I tell people how they can follow up with us, is there, is there a last word you want to leave it with?
No, really appreciate you guys. Also here to help. Um, if you need anything, I'll just— tg@beehive.com. Happy to help. Um, and definitely, I mean, Andrew is, is Is amazing. And what they're building at Bootstrap Giants is really cool. So to follow along at Bootstrap Giants, subscribe, and you can kind of see him implement a lot of these cool things we talked about today in real time, which I think is really cool.
Thank you. All right. Fight Fan Weekly, thanks so much for chatting. I really always appreciate when people chat in. It's such a good way to connect with someone, to go from being an audience member to being someone who's interacting with the, with me. And then eventually we'll follow up, we'll talk. And I guarantee you there's someone who's listening to us today who a year from now, 5 years from now will say, I saw you, I liked it, I tried it. It's fantastic. This is what it did for my business. And I will have this touchpoint with you, Dennis Smith, Nawaz, for you, especially since you and I are gonna have coffee together virtually. And John, thank you all. Uh, Nawaz is ending with big fan of Jesse Pujji, my business partner. I appreciate that. You might want to flatter me at the end. I'm the one who's doing the coffee. I'm just, uh, I'm just being honest. No, thanks, Sarah. This is awesome. Here, guys, this is my personal email address. I think in the future I need to create like an alias or second email address so I don't flood my own personal account. But, um, I don't have a better, faster way to do this. So I will say, if you want the slides, if you want a recording, if you want anything, be like Raul, like Sarah, like Tamiz, like so many other people who've been emailing me. Please be patient. I will get this to you. Uh, my email address is andrew@bootstrapgiants.com. Again, to get free access to Beehive, to get the slides from this presentation, and to get the recording once Toinette, our editor, finishes editing it, contact me, andrew@bootstrapgiants.com. But I'm going to go to a water park right now. And so I'll get you what I can now and we'll get the rest afterwards. Keep building this. This is worth it. Thanks, TG.
Thank you guys.
Thanks. Bye everyone.
