Learn. Share. Evolve…

0:00:03 It’s time for some list-building tactics that actually work.
0:00:08 With all the upheaval in the search results and the fickle nature of social media, you
0:00:11 know you need to build your email list, but how do you actually do it?
0:00:15 Today we’re taking the guesswork out of it and breaking down some tried-and-true tactics
0:00:19 with a longtime Side Hustle Show listener who’s been studying the biggest newsletters
0:00:23 and creators in the world to figure out what’s working today.
0:00:28 From growthinreverse.com and the Growth in Reverse podcast, Chanel Basilio.
0:00:29 Welcome to the Side Hustle Show.
0:00:31 Thanks for having me, Nick.
0:00:31 I’m excited to be here.
0:00:32 Well, me as well.
0:00:37 We’ve got lots of tactics to get into, and the first one is a really cool one that you shared.
0:00:39 It was called the One Click Unlock.
0:00:40 Tell us about this.
0:00:41 Sure.
0:00:46 So this comes from Justin Moore, who runs a newsletter called Creator Wizard.
0:00:47 He’s got an interesting name.
0:00:52 His whole ethos is helping creators and influencers get more sponsorships.
0:00:55 So he helps them make more money through their brand deals and that kind of thing.
0:00:59 His whole newsletter, the entire thing, everything he sends each week is about sponsorship
0:01:00 opportunities.
0:01:03 So he’s essentially giving you free money, if you will.
0:01:05 So he’ll give you the brand name.
0:01:06 We could plug Justin.
0:01:09 His little sponsor audit tool is really cool.
0:01:09 We can plug that.
0:01:11 We can link that up in the show notes, too.
0:01:12 That’s really good.
0:01:12 Yeah.
0:01:13 He’s got a great business.
0:01:16 But he essentially gives you away free sponsorship opportunities.
0:01:19 But this One Click Unlock is essentially his referral program.
0:01:25 But it’s a little bit deeper than that because in each email, you’ll see this like box and
0:01:27 it’s grayed out and it has like a lock on it.
0:01:31 And it says refer one person to get the secret sponsorship research.
0:01:36 And so if you refer one person every week in that email, you won’t see that box anymore.
0:01:39 You’ll see the contact info for those brands.
0:01:43 You’ll see the person’s name, some recent brand deals they might have done.
0:01:46 So he’s essentially giving you just extra information on top of it.
0:01:48 But at the same time, he’s getting more referrals.
0:01:52 So someone is just sharing his newsletter with other people.
0:01:55 And he said he’s gotten about 5,000 subscribers just from this one thing.
0:02:01 And that’s kind of a lot when you’re thinking it’s just like one extra referral per person.
0:02:08 Yeah, it’s 5,000 incremental subscribers for a low barrier to like high value, low barrier
0:02:08 to entry.
0:02:08 Oh, sure.
0:02:11 I got I know somebody else who might benefit from this.
0:02:11 Yeah.
0:02:17 Do you know how he like mechanically how he’s getting that done with some conditional content
0:02:18 or like it sounds technical?
0:02:21 He uses kit for email and he sets it up.
0:02:23 There’s like a liquid code I think he can do.
0:02:25 So you can set up a tag essentially.
0:02:28 And if this person has referred one person, they get tagged.
0:02:30 And then every email, it’ll show a box.
0:02:33 So I think you can actually do this with kits like snippets too.
0:02:38 Not sure on that one, but I know you can do it with liquid and chat GPT can help you write
0:02:38 that anymore.
0:02:40 You don’t even have to know how to code or anything.
0:02:45 But it essentially says like if they referred one person, show this extra piece of content.
0:02:51 So it’s kind of interesting to set up in the beginning, but I think it’s well worth it if
0:02:53 you’re going to end up with 5,000 extra subscribers.
0:02:54 Yeah, no kidding.
0:02:54 Yeah.
0:02:56 We set it up once and then it just kind of runs.
0:02:59 And it’s it sounds like it’s kind of a constant reminder.
0:03:03 Like if it’s in every message or every week, you kind of see it like, OK, I should probably
0:03:04 probably do this.
0:03:07 Does he have multiple tiers or that’s just like tier one?
0:03:10 He does have multiple tiers, but that’s the tier one.
0:03:13 The other ones are like a 30 minute coaching call with someone on his team.
0:03:17 And then you can go all the way up to like getting his thousand dollar course for free once you
0:03:19 get like 100 or so subscribers.
0:03:20 So that’s a lot.
0:03:21 OK.
0:03:25 But yeah, but this is just like constant FOMO, like every week you’re seeing this and
0:03:27 you’re like, well, he gave me this one piece.
0:03:31 All I have to do is refer one person and I get the contact info for this people and like how
0:03:33 to reach out to them and make sense.
0:03:34 OK.
0:03:34 Yeah.
0:03:38 Versus having it as paid newsletter tier.
0:03:41 We see some people kind of, oh, that’s going to be behind the paywall.
0:03:44 The free sample is here, but that if you want the rest of the goods, you got to pay.
0:03:47 But that’s that’s a really unique way to do it.
0:03:51 Like low, low lift, make it so stupid, simple, easy.
0:03:54 Where it’s like, yeah, OK, I can find one person.
0:03:55 I don’t know if ConvertKit.
0:03:59 Well, they bought Spark Loop, so they may have this built in at some point or like on the,
0:04:01 you know, the pro pricing tier.
0:04:05 Our buddy Pete McPherson has built a new tool called List Gadget.
0:04:10 That’s on my to do list to start messing around with because he’s got this kind of referral
0:04:15 mechanism built in where you can send you build a leaderboard and do polls, like do all
0:04:18 sorts of cool stuff with with List Gadget.
0:04:20 So that’s on my list to to play around with.
0:04:21 I don’t know that one.
0:04:22 I’ll have to check it out.
0:04:23 It’s a good guy, though.
0:04:24 So I’ll check it out.
0:04:24 Yeah.
0:04:32 He’s partnered with with Liz from from Liz Wilcox from Survivor fame, but to help get
0:04:32 that out into the world.
0:04:37 OK, that is a really cool one where just about anybody could add to your list.
0:04:38 It kind of answers the question.
0:04:40 Well, how can I turn one subscriber into two?
0:04:43 How can I make it easy and beneficial for everybody to do that?
0:04:47 And hopefully the people you subscribe or people you refer, they refer the next person.
0:04:49 It kind of becomes this this virtuous cycle there.
0:04:50 Yeah, totally.
0:04:51 I think it’s pretty simple.
0:04:55 Like anyone if you’re creating some piece of content, like just think about what that next
0:04:59 step that somebody would need or like the next piece of advice or content that they would
0:05:01 be looking for and just give it to them.
0:05:07 Yeah, obviously, the famous examples would be, you know, the morning brews and the hustles
0:05:09 of the world with like the subscriber referral program.
0:05:13 But how do you take a page out of that playbook and make it applicable to your to your niche
0:05:15 and to your subscribers and make it a win for them?
0:05:16 That’s a really cool one.
0:05:16 Yeah.
0:05:17 What’s next?
0:05:20 The next one I think we should talk about is just recommendations.
0:05:26 So a lot of people are using recommendations at this point, Kit, Substack, Beehive, those
0:05:29 platforms all have their own built-in referral recommendation platform.
0:05:32 So essentially, we can recommend each other through Kit.
0:05:36 So if someone signs up, they get a box afterwards that says like, hey, thanks for joining.
0:05:39 Here are three other newsletters I really recommend you check out.
0:05:43 Now, people can like or not like those.
0:05:47 And I’ve heard from a lot of smaller creators that they’re like, well, you know, I just don’t
0:05:51 have the big lists that people want to partner with and that kind of thing.
0:05:55 But I think if you can almost build relationships with those people and not just look at it like
0:06:00 a checkbox, like the one guy that I followed and wrote a deep dive on, his name was CJ Gustafson.
0:06:06 And he would actually just ask these creators to get on a phone call, like not expecting them
0:06:09 to recommend him afterwards, but he would talk to them for 20, 30 minutes, you know, just talk
0:06:12 about like the industry and like newsletters and stuff.
0:06:15 And then at the end, he’d be like, hey, do you want to like recommend each other on Substack?
0:06:16 Like, I’ll just go add you right now.
0:06:21 And he said the conversion rate was practically 100% because you’ve just you just built this
0:06:22 relationship with people.
0:06:23 Yeah.
0:06:24 And nobody wants to tell you no to your face.
0:06:26 Yeah.
0:06:30 But if it makes sense for your audience and like, I don’t know, as long as they have the
0:06:33 people that you would want on your email list, I think it makes total sense.
0:06:36 So I have a couple of questions for this because I saw this.
0:06:40 You were implementing this on the growth in reverse and it was you’re recommending
0:06:42 Jay Klaus and somebody else.
0:06:46 It was like, OK, this is kind of a natural if you like this.
0:06:47 You might also like this.
0:06:49 It’s like almost like, would you like fries with that?
0:06:51 It’s like a natural thing.
0:06:53 But my couple of questions.
0:06:58 One is, does it interrupt the kind of logical flow?
0:07:01 Like you have somebody who is, you know, hot to take action.
0:07:02 They just entered in their email.
0:07:03 They’re feeling excited about that decision.
0:07:09 And instead of taking them immediately to the thank you page or the confirmation page or the
0:07:13 logical next step, there’s like this intermediate thing that hits them in the face and like, well,
0:07:18 who’s who’s this Jay Klaus guy or like, you know, we almost what is it?
0:07:20 It’s like checked by default.
0:07:25 Have you seen any data on that or like the impact on kind of what the next step you want subscribers
0:07:26 to take as?
0:07:26 Yeah.
0:07:29 And that’s a great call out because it’s not perfect for every situation.
0:07:32 And I have it turned off on some forms.
0:07:34 Like I don’t have it on every single one.
0:07:34 OK.
0:07:38 And that’s the beauty of it is, well, at least with Kit, you can turn it off on specific forms.
0:07:40 Like it doesn’t show up every single time someone subscribes.
0:07:40 Yeah.
0:07:45 But yeah, I only recommend people I know the content’s great because it is.
0:07:49 It’s like taking a piece of the trust you’ve just built and giving it to someone else.
0:07:52 But on the same token, you’re getting that back when they’re recommending you.
0:07:53 Sure.
0:07:54 So a couple of pointers.
0:07:58 If someone subscribes through recommendations, you want to make sure that you have them getting
0:08:00 a separate message in your welcome email.
0:08:06 So if Jay sends me a subscriber, I want to make sure people have a different welcome email
0:08:07 than just the typical one.
0:08:09 So I’ll say, hey, you might not realize who I am.
0:08:11 Jay Klaus recommended me.
0:08:14 If you want to unsubscribe, go ahead and do that right here and put it like towards the
0:08:14 top.
0:08:18 So that because naturally some of those people are going to be lower quality.
0:08:21 Maybe they didn’t recognize what they were doing by subscribing to the rest of those.
0:08:23 So yeah, you do want to be careful with those.
0:08:27 But I think it’s a good way to kind of, I don’t know, get a couple more people on your
0:08:27 list.
0:08:30 I’ve seen good success and have had some really good ones come.
0:08:32 Yeah, that was that was the second question.
0:08:36 Like, what’s the subscriber quality like if they didn’t opt in specifically for you?
0:08:38 It was just kind of like an afterthought.
0:08:42 And then you start showing up in their inbox every day or every week.
0:08:44 Like, why am I getting this again?
0:08:45 But yeah, calling that out.
0:08:48 So I said, because I started noticing some of these, it was like, you know, from the work
0:08:52 at home woman or something like there was some other recommendations that started coming
0:08:52 through.
0:08:58 And it’s like, oh, yeah, if I’m just dumping these into some generic onboarding, like, I
0:09:00 think the default was like nothing, like no welcome sequence at all.
0:09:02 I was like, well, let me let me fix that.
0:09:06 Is there a way to customize that based?
0:09:10 I couldn’t figure out how to individualize it based on the source.
0:09:11 It was just like, hey, I’m so flattered.
0:09:13 Another creator recommended me.
0:09:14 That’s why you’re getting this message.
0:09:16 You know, here’s a little bit about sign hustle nation.
0:09:19 Yeah, you definitely want to make sure you’re setting this up.
0:09:21 In the beginning, it was trickier with Kit.
0:09:24 As they like initially launched it, it was like, what’s happening?
0:09:28 But now they’ve kind of like refined the process and you can set up a separate welcome sequence.
0:09:33 I think it’s a different tag or form that they’re subscribed to and you can send them down a different
0:09:35 path with automations and that kind of thing.
0:09:39 Again, something to set up, but once you do, it’s kind of like plug and play.
0:09:43 Yes, these are lower quality subscribers because some people don’t understand what they’re doing.
0:09:47 However, I have seen a lot of really good subscribers come from this.
0:09:48 So I think it’s worth it.
0:09:53 I know for myself, I’ve added probably 10,000 or so subscribers from recommendations.
0:09:56 So, yeah, it’s worked out really well.
0:09:58 Now, all of those haven’t stuck around, but yes.
0:09:59 That’s great.
0:10:01 I remember joking with Nathan Berry when they announced this.
0:10:03 It was like, you know, everything old is new again, right?
0:10:07 So you see like these co-registration forms, like from 20 years ago on the internet.
0:10:08 That was the first part.
0:10:12 The second part was like, how genius is this for a company that charges you based on the
0:10:13 number of subscribers you have?
0:10:15 Like, oh, if we could lift everybody up.
0:10:16 Oh, sure.
0:10:19 You know, we’re doing great by the creator, you know, the creator economy we’re supporting.
0:10:22 Oh, but meanwhile, like, oh, there’s a little ulterior motive here.
0:10:26 It’s a cool tool and it’s good for them too.
0:10:30 Yeah, that’s a fun one to crack jokes on.
0:10:32 But yeah, it’s good and bad on either side.
0:10:38 More with Chanel in just a moment, including how one creator earned $1.2 million from a
0:10:43 simple Google Doc and a genius strategy for getting paid to write content for other companies.
0:10:45 Coming up right after this.
0:10:51 For such an important channel like Found, the software powering this important channel was
0:10:53 super outdated and clunky.
0:10:57 We wanted to make it delightful and make it very easy for businesses to connect with their
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0:12:35 It is on my local business listings on directories throughout the internet.
0:12:41 Like what’s the process to now have that ring open phone system versus the current system?
0:12:41 Totally.
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0:12:46 This process is called phone number porting.
0:12:48 We port numbers from all kinds of carriers.
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0:13:19 But another cool feature is what Darina called AI call tagging, basically allowing you to quickly
0:13:25 filter for the calls that were sales objections or customer complaints or requests for a discount.
0:13:30 So you can review those and see what worked, what didn’t, and train team members on the
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0:15:19 I’ve got one that I’ll add to the mix that has added probably 5,000 to 7,000 subscribers
0:15:21 over the course of the last several years.
0:15:26 And that is a Facebook group to email list integration.
0:15:28 And I’m using a tool called Group Leads for it.
0:15:35 It’s like this really low-cost browser extension that you can ask people questions when they
0:15:36 join your group.
0:15:40 I think I ask questions like, what’s your biggest side hustle struggle?
0:15:42 Or what side hustles are you working on right now?
0:15:43 Or have you started anything yet?
0:15:48 Some kind of those types of generic fact-finding questions that can help guide future content.
0:15:53 And then I’ll say, hey, if you want our best side hustle tips, enter your email here.
0:15:55 And a lot of people do that.
0:15:58 And then Group Leads sends it directly into Kit.
0:16:01 And it gets, again, a specific welcome sequence.
0:16:02 Some people are already on the email list.
0:16:04 And so it sends them a different message.
0:16:05 Hey, great to see you again.
0:16:07 Thanks for joining the Facebook group.
0:16:09 For other people, it’s like, hey, you know, welcome to Side Insultation.
0:16:11 Hey, the Facebook group is just the tip of the iceberg.
0:16:13 Here’s all the other stuff we got.
0:16:16 And so that’s been a really, really powerful kind of incremental addition.
0:16:21 Because what we found, you know, early on, the Facebook group was very much like podcast
0:16:24 listeners, like, you know, the core of the audience.
0:16:29 But over time, it started, you know, Facebook started recommending that group to people it
0:16:32 thought were interested in Side Hustles and started to grow a lot organically.
0:16:35 It’s like, oh, I need to do a better job of capturing those people.
0:16:36 I love this one.
0:16:37 It’s like, it’s so obvious.
0:16:43 And I have been the person to go, not recently, but over years ago, to go to Facebook, search
0:16:46 for a specific topic, and then join a group or find other people there.
0:16:48 So I think that’s, it’s awesome.
0:16:49 It’s such a good one.
0:16:51 This has been like top of the funnel.
0:16:54 Like we had Abby Ashley on the show with her like virtual assistant training business.
0:16:58 She runs one of the biggest virtual assistant groups on Facebook.
0:17:02 And that was like a top of the funnel entry point, you know, enter your email and we’ll
0:17:06 send you the free masterclass on how to get started, how to find your first clients and
0:17:07 really, really effective.
0:17:12 And I think we’ve seen people do it in like microgreens farming.
0:17:18 And there was another one, some guy was like doing a, like a pet waste removal, like training
0:17:18 type of thing.
0:17:21 It’s like, you know, no matter your niche, there’s a group about it.
0:17:26 And if there’s not a group, you should start one because it’s a, it’s a powerful, powerful
0:17:27 place where a lot of people are still spending some time.
0:17:29 Oh, amazing.
0:17:30 I love that one.
0:17:32 I wish I could figure out a way to make that happen for me.
0:17:33 Maybe I will.
0:17:33 Newsletters.
0:17:34 Yeah.
0:17:36 The email growth hacker newsletter email.
0:17:36 Yeah.
0:17:38 There’s gotta be something like that.
0:17:38 Gotta be.
0:17:39 I love it.
0:17:39 All right.
0:17:39 What else you got?
0:17:40 All right.
0:17:41 I think the next one.
0:17:46 So Ali Richards has been somebody I just keep being excited about because he does all these
0:17:52 cool things, but he started a business called Story Learning and he was helping people learn
0:17:54 different languages, like moving abroad.
0:17:56 You’re going to teach English as a second language, that kind of thing.
0:17:58 He turned that into a $10 million business.
0:18:03 And he now is like, I want to do something different and I want to start a personal brand.
0:18:08 So he was like, okay, how can I get people on my email list for this personal brand?
0:18:11 He couldn’t just like promote it to his language learning list.
0:18:12 It’s not the same audience.
0:18:17 So he decided he was going to put everything he learned from building that business into
0:18:18 a Google Doc.
0:18:20 And it ended up being 118 pages long.
0:18:23 And so he’s like, okay, cool.
0:18:24 Google Doc, 118 pages.
0:18:26 He’s just giving it all away.
0:18:30 So anyone looking to create like an online course business or anything like that, they would
0:18:31 be super interested in this.
0:18:36 And so he shared that and he just started promoting it in other newsletters.
0:18:38 So he would buy sponsorship placements and that kind of thing.
0:18:44 But from my end in the newsletter space, I saw every person who wrote a newsletter about
0:18:46 newsletters was sharing this thing like wildfire.
0:18:50 Like every day I’d open an email and be like, check out the Google Doc from Ollie Richards.
0:18:51 And I’m like, oh my gosh.
0:18:57 And the cool part was like, yeah, he asked for email if you went to his website to sign up and
0:18:57 get it.
0:18:59 But most people were just sharing this Google Doc around.
0:19:01 And he’s like, that’s awesome.
0:19:03 Like, I don’t need to capture every single email.
0:19:03 Yeah.
0:19:05 Like no opt-in required.
0:19:05 Totally.
0:19:06 Okay.
0:19:10 And so he ended up getting like 18,000 subscribers from this thing.
0:19:14 And they’re high quality, like super high quality.
0:19:17 Even though it wasn’t a requirement and people just consumed it.
0:19:21 And they were like, well, if he’s given this much away for free, if he’s giving me 118 pages
0:19:23 for free, what’s he sending out an email?
0:19:24 Right.
0:19:29 And so throughout the Google Doc, of course, there were like ways to opt into the email
0:19:31 list if you hadn’t been on there already.
0:19:37 But in the last two-ish years from starting this Google Doc, he’s earned $1.2 million from
0:19:41 he runs like these pretty cheap workshops, like $100 to $400.
0:19:45 And then on the back end of that, he’ll have like coaching as well.
0:19:46 I just thought this was fascinating.
0:19:52 Like 18,000 subscribers from a Google Doc, just sharing your information and your expertise.
0:19:56 Do you think it worked just because of the novelty factor?
0:19:57 Whereas like, who does that?
0:19:58 Nobody.
0:19:59 It’s like.
0:19:59 Totally.
0:20:04 He said the only money he spent on it was $10 on Fiverr to get a cover for it made.
0:20:05 Yeah.
0:20:08 And arguably, like if you look at the cover, you’d be like, you probably could have done
0:20:08 that yourself, but.
0:20:10 Okay.
0:20:14 And then getting the flywheel spinning by buying some placements or buying some swaps or
0:20:15 newsletter ads in other newsletters.
0:20:16 Yeah.
0:20:18 And so he had these workshops on the back end.
0:20:23 So if somebody bought through the workshop, he threw all that money back into buying more.
0:20:28 So he used Sparkloop, which is kind of like a paid recommendations, as well as newsletter
0:20:30 ads, just in a typical email issue.
0:20:32 So he created like this little flywheel.
0:20:36 Like if any money he made, he went back into ads and it just kept growing the email list.
0:20:37 Okay.
0:20:40 I’ve got another one that kind of piggybacks on that.
0:20:47 And I call it the permafree on Amazon strategy or permafree on Kindle strategy, where there’s
0:20:48 a, I’ve got a book.
0:20:51 It’s sidehustlenation.com slash book permafree.
0:20:56 I think might have to be a United States only, but this was last updated 2019.
0:21:02 So it’s due for a refresh, but this is three different side hustle frameworks, right?
0:21:06 You could sell a product business, start a service business, or have like a content type
0:21:07 of business, right?
0:21:09 And this gives a bunch of examples of that.
0:21:13 And it’s kind of like, if somebody’s searching on Amazon for side hustle, the goal would be,
0:21:14 Hey, you go find this book.
0:21:19 And in the book, as I have in probably all my books is some sort of lead magnet.
0:21:24 I forget what it is specifically for this one, but over the course of 10, 10 plus years
0:21:29 publishing on Amazon, you know, it’s thousands of subscribers who either buy the book and then
0:21:31 get the upgrade, which you see in almost any nonfiction book.
0:21:33 It’s like, Hey, you want the toolkit, the resources?
0:21:38 I’ll go over here and download that or get the, get the free video companion series, like
0:21:39 super, super common strategy.
0:21:43 What poured fuel on the fire was reducing the friction and just like making it permafree.
0:21:47 And what, I don’t know if this is still the case on Amazon, but you had to list it on another
0:21:50 marketplace and then email them to request a price match.
0:21:56 And so you had to upload it somewhere else for free as it’s like 0.00 was like not a, not a
0:22:00 price that was allowed in their system, but through customer support, they would allow you to do it.
0:22:03 And, um, and that’s been a powerful lead gen for me.
0:22:04 Wow.
0:22:09 So the other platforms you uploaded it for free, like everrand.com or whatever that’s called.
0:22:10 Yeah.
0:22:15 Maybe smash words or iBooks or someplace, uh, someplace else, uh, or maybe it was like
0:22:17 the Google play store.
0:22:22 There was some, and then you’d just like screenshot that or, you know, save the URL and then say, Hey,
0:22:23 could you price match this?
0:22:24 It’s free over here, you know?
0:22:26 And then as long as you don’t touch it.
0:22:31 And that’s like one of the hesitations in, in updating it, you know, I’d love to keep all of the
0:22:36 reviews for the book and just push a new version out underneath that, uh, same listing.
0:22:40 But, but then you have to go through that, you know, repricing process again, and there’s
0:22:44 no guarantee they’ll do it, but it didn’t for the, for the first few iterations.
0:22:45 Oh, wow.
0:22:46 That’s pretty cool.
0:22:46 Yeah.
0:22:47 I like that one.
0:22:51 I pulled it from the, from the fiction world where it’s like, you know, the, the first book
0:22:52 in the series is free.
0:22:53 Hopefully it’s good enough to get you hooked.
0:22:58 And then you go on and buy the rest of the series or you opt in for, you know, a special
0:23:02 bonus or get notified when the next book of the series comes out and taking a page out
0:23:03 of the fiction author playbook.
0:23:04 Oh, I love that.
0:23:06 I might have to try something like that.
0:23:06 Yeah.
0:23:12 Especially if you’ve got years and years of content that could be repackaged into 118 page
0:23:17 Google document, or it could be repackaged into a Kindle book with, with probably a similar
0:23:17 strategy.
0:23:18 I like it.
0:23:19 It’s a good one.
0:23:19 All right.
0:23:19 All right.
0:23:21 Let’s go to CJ Gustafson.
0:23:24 This is my favorite ones recently of the last like four months.
0:23:25 I can’t stop thinking about it.
0:23:28 So he writes a newsletter called Mostly Metrics.
0:23:30 He’s a CFO, like financial nerdy guy.
0:23:32 His content is awesome though.
0:23:34 He includes like gifts and just like a ton of personality.
0:23:40 But what he did was he was trying to look for sponsorships, but he started out, he would
0:23:42 go to these software companies in the financial space.
0:23:44 So like a Brex or that kind of thing.
0:23:49 And he was like, Hey, do you guys like, you don’t have any content around this one topic,
0:23:52 like would love to share a piece with your audience.
0:23:57 And so it started off free, but he got a guest post on Brex.com, which I mean, the traffic
0:23:59 from that alone is probably amazing.
0:24:05 The backlink for SEO purposes, which RIP, but anyway, so it lives there in perpetuity,
0:24:09 but it also gets, they started sharing these out to their email list.
0:24:12 So these companies are like dying for content.
0:24:17 They want someone else who’s not their content person to share some exciting news about their
0:24:19 organization or why the product’s so good.
0:24:24 And so CJ coming in as an outsider sharing about their product was just like a no brainer.
0:24:30 So now he gets paid like six to 12 K for a package of like three to four of these posts.
0:24:30 Okay.
0:24:31 She’s getting paid to write them.
0:24:32 Getting paid now.
0:24:32 Yeah.
0:24:33 Wow.
0:24:37 Most commonly is, is, uh, you see the inbound, how much is it going to cost for a link?
0:24:38 That’s great.
0:24:38 Okay.
0:24:39 Totally.
0:24:41 So he’s getting paid for these.
0:24:45 He doesn’t have to write an extra word because they’re actually just taking a piece he’s already
0:24:47 written and sent to his email list.
0:24:50 So it’s just like an aggregation play.
0:24:50 He’s getting paid.
0:24:55 He doesn’t have to write a word and he’s getting subscribers from this because at the bottom
0:25:00 of the email or the piece, it says this originally appeared on mostlymetrics.com.
0:25:02 And so people click through, they subscribe.
0:25:07 And then the best part of this whole thing is he has a paid newsletter and some of those people
0:25:09 subscribe and become paying clients.
0:25:11 So he’s like getting paid twice for some of these.
0:25:12 Okay.
0:25:18 So it is kind of like a, a customer use case scenario that you’re pitching to that company.
0:25:20 Have I, did I hear that right?
0:25:24 I think that’s how it started out, but now he’s just writing content for CFOs and he talks
0:25:28 about Brex sometimes, like he’ll link to it, like, Hey, you can use Brex for this one thing,
0:25:31 but it’s not, it’s no longer just like a review of the company.
0:25:37 Like it’s just him, a random CFO talking about this company or certain topics that their
0:25:38 readers are interested in.
0:25:40 I don’t know.
0:25:41 He’s just like killing it with this.
0:25:44 It’s almost like creating a separate blog for these organizations.
0:25:45 Okay.
0:25:51 So they have some hunger for content that wasn’t produced by their internal team, or maybe it,
0:25:52 maybe it saves them money.
0:25:53 It’s like, sure, we’ll pay you 500 bucks.
0:25:55 It’s cheaper than paying somebody in house to create this.
0:26:01 And they get the content that was already repurposed.
0:26:05 So he reaches a new audience and then a certain percentage of those people, you know, are in,
0:26:06 are in his world now.
0:26:07 And they come back to the email list.
0:26:09 They come back to the paid subscriber tier.
0:26:09 Yeah.
0:26:15 I mean, you think of even like Kit, they have creator series where a lot of their content is
0:26:19 just like pulled from these stories about different creators because I mean, people who are reading
0:26:23 their email list don’t want to hear from their, their creator person.
0:26:25 Just like, Hey, Kit’s great.
0:26:25 This is awesome.
0:26:29 It’s more like, Hey, Jay Klaus has this newsletter and here’s how he grew it on Kit.
0:26:31 And then like shares valuable information.
0:26:32 So I don’t know.
0:26:34 I’ve seen other people do something similar.
0:26:37 Caitlin Burgoyne does like webinars.
0:26:39 So she’ll do a training for companies.
0:26:42 And so that software company has an audience.
0:26:47 They’re showcasing her as like an expert on this thing and their audience is getting value
0:26:48 from her.
0:26:50 So it’s like making them look like an awesome company.
0:26:56 Yeah, that’s a whole, whole nother strategy that we could probably talk about is this virtual
0:27:02 workshops, targeting the companies that you have a good feeling like your, your avatar,
0:27:07 your target customer, your target client is already paying attention to doing business with
0:27:11 and didn’t even have to like webinars have been maybe given a bad taste in people’s mouth.
0:27:12 Like, well, I know there’s a pitch coming.
0:27:14 There doesn’t even have to be a pitch here.
0:27:16 If the goal is just to grow your audience, grow your email list.
0:27:18 We had Dustin Lean on the show.
0:27:21 And this was like one of my favorite strategies of all time.
0:27:22 He was targeting.
0:27:27 He was like, had such a niche service, like email copywriting for direct to consumer brands
0:27:28 or something like that.
0:27:33 And so he would go to Shopify, go to Klaviyo or go to companies that, you know, his target
0:27:36 customers were already doing business with.
0:27:41 And they kind of like, hey, I’d love to host this free educational workshop on how to rewrite
0:27:45 your cart abandonment sequence, like something really, really specific and niche.
0:27:49 And it’s like, I’m going to teach you the DIY version, but a lot of the attendees are busy
0:27:50 CEOs or marketing directors.
0:27:52 Like, can we just pay you to do this?
0:27:57 Like, there was no specific pitch or ask or, you know, sign up here to book a consultation
0:27:57 call.
0:28:02 Just, you know, by virtue of skipping the line, like they’ve kind of vouched for you as the
0:28:06 expert, just it was a really cool shortcut strategy to get in front of a segment, large
0:28:08 groups of your target customer in a hurry.
0:28:09 Yeah.
0:28:13 And all right, let’s give people like a normal example, because these are all business ones.
0:28:16 So I’m just thinking you were mentioning the microgreens farmer guy, right?
0:28:19 So he could go to a company like Bootstrap Farmer.
0:28:23 They sell these seed trays that you actually can grow microgreens in.
0:28:29 He can go to them and say like, hey, I want to share my 10 biggest mistakes of growing
0:28:30 microgreens or something for beginners.
0:28:34 And like at the bottom, they sign up for his email list.
0:28:37 And so it doesn’t have to be like a business oriented thing.
0:28:39 It could be, I don’t know, growing microgreens.
0:28:41 Like how much more B2C does that get?
0:28:42 Yeah, that’s great.
0:28:45 But like kind of that same question, well, who are my target customers already doing business
0:28:46 with?
0:28:48 Who would benefit from my newsletter?
0:28:52 And where can I get in front of, you know, big chunks of them all at once?
0:28:58 And it’s really interesting when both the virtual workshops and the paid guest post getting paid
0:29:01 to create content for other other companies.
0:29:06 I’m just like, my mind is spinning on, well, who else could I go and pitch this to?
0:29:12 One that is in a similar vein is this is from from years ago would be like the virtual summit
0:29:17 strategy, which full caveat, like this is a ton of work to put together, pre record a bunch
0:29:22 of videos and I’m going to drip them out over this like live three day virtual event.
0:29:25 And the goal is everybody you recorded videos with promotes it to their audience.
0:29:27 It’s the three day brand building summit.
0:29:30 It’s a three day build your freelance business summit.
0:29:32 And super, super effective.
0:29:37 If you can get this where, I mean, we talked to Chandler Bolt, like booked some obscene, like
0:29:41 probably a million dollars in sales, like from, you know, the self-publishing summit back
0:29:41 in the day.
0:29:47 But one thing that you can do is, is reach out to companies that might also want to
0:29:51 reach this audience is somebody had the example of like the freelancer summit, like grow your
0:29:52 freelancing business.
0:29:55 Hey, FreshBooks, would you mind sponsoring our event?
0:29:57 You can be the title sponsor.
0:29:59 I don’t even know if they charged for it.
0:30:03 Maybe they could have, but the price of admission was invite your email list, invite your whole
0:30:04 customer base to it.
0:30:07 And all of a sudden, boom, 20,000 registrations.
0:30:08 It was like, oh, this is great.
0:30:12 So I’m trying to sell sponsorships or even free sponsorships to the virtual summit.
0:30:17 So done right can be absolutely effective, but you’re going to be dedicating some time to
0:30:18 pulling this off.
0:30:21 This reminds me of what I just went through with the 30 days of growth.
0:30:24 It was like not a summit, but similar.
0:30:28 It’s still coordinating with 30 different people, but you didn’t have to do like a live video
0:30:29 or anything.
0:30:30 So that was interesting.
0:30:31 That was a, that was a good one.
0:30:35 I think that’s actually something that can be replicated for quite a few people and netted
0:30:39 out like 1,750 new subscribers for me in the last 30 days.
0:30:40 So I’ll take that.
0:30:40 Yeah.
0:30:43 And you called it like a, you called it like a pop-up newsletter.
0:30:44 Pop-up newsletter.
0:30:44 Yeah.
0:30:49 It’s similar to a summit in certain ways, but essentially I went out, found 30 different
0:30:50 creators, including Nick.
0:30:56 And I was like, Hey, you want to share one growth tactic you’ve used to grow your email list?
0:30:57 A lot of them I already knew ahead of time.
0:31:01 Like I had figured out like what they had done and I was like, do you want to share this one
0:31:01 tactic?
0:31:05 And then, so everybody got one of those tips every day for 30 days and now it’s over.
0:31:09 So it’s not like I have to keep writing this daily newsletter every day, but it’s a heck
0:31:13 of a lead magnet I have now of like, here’s 30, 30 tips to grow your newsletter.
0:31:14 Yeah.
0:31:14 Yeah.
0:31:14 Yeah.
0:31:19 And everybody who is featured shares it with their audience as a little snippet, as a little
0:31:19 blurb.
0:31:21 Hey, make sure you go check out the 30 days of growth.
0:31:21 Okay.
0:31:22 Yeah.
0:31:27 And I did have some software tools giving away free licenses, but I did not do the smart
0:31:29 thing of being like, can you share this with your email list?
0:31:30 I should have done that.
0:31:32 That was the missed opportunity there.
0:31:39 It’s taking the, you know, the old vertical roundup style post and just making it horizontal.
0:31:44 We’re going to drip this out instead of say, you know, 30 creators on their number one marketing
0:31:44 tip.
0:31:45 Okay.
0:31:49 We can have that same content and that same amount of outreach and back and forth, but
0:31:53 just structured in a different way and kind of have a similar promotion engine where everybody
0:31:55 kind of bands together to share it.
0:31:55 Yeah.
0:31:56 I like that.
0:31:56 Totally.
0:32:00 That vertical thing used to work really well, but I think it’s a little tired now.
0:32:00 Yeah.
0:32:05 More with Chanel in just a moment, including the simple LinkedIn posts that generated 650
0:32:10 new subscribers in just two posts and why bundle sales might be your secret weapon for
0:32:12 growing your list right after this.
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0:34:26 These are awesome.
0:34:27 I’ve taken a ton of notes.
0:34:29 I’ve got some good ideas from this.
0:34:30 What else?
0:34:31 Anything else on the list?
0:34:32 Yeah, I like the one.
0:34:35 It’s a little more simple instead of like 30 days of content.
0:34:42 So Tom Orbach, who runs marketingideas.com, marketing ideas newsletter, but he knows his marketing
0:34:42 stuff.
0:34:44 So on LinkedIn, he just wrote, drop your website URL below.
0:34:47 I’ll reply with a specific growth hack for your company.
0:34:48 First come, first serve.
0:34:53 And then within this, so he’s giving people like custom, like ideas for growth for their
0:34:54 companies.
0:34:58 And then underneath each one that he replies to, he’ll give them the idea.
0:35:03 And then he’ll say, if you enjoyed this, I share a bunch of tips like this over at marketingideas.com.
0:35:07 He said that LinkedIn post got him 250 new subscribers.
0:35:10 And when he did it on Substack, it got him 400 subscribers.
0:35:15 So yeah, 650 just from two posts and sharing some time.
0:35:19 The brilliance of this, though, is like he can take some of these ideas and expand on them
0:35:20 in his newsletter.
0:35:23 So it’s like not even just a one-time use case.
0:35:28 Yeah, it feels like I’m giving my time, but I’m also getting future content out of this deal.
0:35:28 Yeah.
0:35:33 And he said a lot of the people who joined the newsletter actually weren’t even commenting.
0:35:36 They just saw all of the value he was providing and were like, okay, I’m going to sign up
0:35:39 for this guy’s newsletter because he clearly knows what he’s talking about.
0:35:44 What do you think, like, if you don’t have much of a following on LinkedIn, if you don’t
0:35:48 have much of a following on Substack or X and you post the stuff, hey, you know, first
0:35:49 10 people, it’s like crickets.
0:35:53 You’re like, well, now this is awkward because now nobody even commented.
0:35:53 Yeah.
0:35:58 Well, you could always delete it if you don’t get comments within the first 30 minutes or
0:35:58 something.
0:36:00 But I mean, you could also like seed it with a friend.
0:36:03 I could be like, hey, Nick, can you go comment on this thing so I can at least
0:36:04 at least start sharing.
0:36:07 And then as people see the comments, they’ll probably share their own URL.
0:36:07 Okay.
0:36:08 So what would you call this one?
0:36:12 Kind of like almost a social proof giveaway type of thing?
0:36:14 Like, you know, office hours type of thing?
0:36:14 Yeah.
0:36:16 You could do it as an ask me anything too.
0:36:19 And this works for practically any industry.
0:36:24 So if we continue with the microgreens examples, like give me your biggest issue with microgreens
0:36:29 or what’s a recent issue you’ve encountered, like maybe they were overwatered or something.
0:36:32 It might not work on LinkedIn, but somewhere else, like a forum or something.
0:36:32 Yeah.
0:36:36 And if the first one doesn’t work, don’t get discouraged.
0:36:41 I remember this was from talking with Dickie Bush years ago when he was first getting started
0:36:41 on Twitter.
0:36:43 And he put something out.
0:36:44 It was like, I wrote a thread.
0:36:45 I forget his cadence.
0:36:47 It was either every day or every week.
0:36:52 And nine of those over the course of the year, nine of those ended up going viral and getting
0:36:58 him in his 100,000 subscribers or whatever his number was that turned into a ship 30 for
0:36:58 30.
0:37:01 Like this whole business built on the back of building that following.
0:37:04 But it was like, most of them didn’t do anything.
0:37:05 Most of them didn’t hit.
0:37:09 And his line was like, it’s the ultimate, you know, idea proving ground.
0:37:12 Because it’s like, if it doesn’t resonate in the first little bit, like the algorithm
0:37:13 is just going to bury it.
0:37:15 You’re like, well, now, you know, back to the drawing board.
0:37:17 That wasn’t the right, that wasn’t the right hook.
0:37:18 That wasn’t the right idea.
0:37:20 And you kind of refine this process.
0:37:24 I don’t know if the hit rate improved over time, but it’s almost this numbers game of,
0:37:29 you know, don’t get discouraged if your first two posts don’t deliver the results you want.
0:37:34 Like it’s kind of a game of iteration and trying to find the right thing that does hit
0:37:35 and that does take off.
0:37:35 Yeah.
0:37:38 I think he posted online like every day for nine months.
0:37:42 He got to like 2,000 followers after nine months.
0:37:43 Like most people would have quit.
0:37:43 Yeah.
0:37:44 It’s kind of discouraging.
0:37:48 But then you see his trajectory now and you’re like, whoa, it’s so cool that he didn’t quit.
0:37:49 Yeah.
0:37:53 It’s hard to stick with it in those early days, sometimes early years.
0:37:59 You’re like, one of the, it’s hard when the, you know, step one, create good content.
0:38:01 Step two, you know, hopefully go viral.
0:38:07 It’s like that wild card of it is, is a little bit challenging, but maybe you can seed it.
0:38:11 If you have a handful of connections, maybe they, you ask them to be the first commenters
0:38:16 or to, to reshare it and hopefully give the algorithm a little bit of a nudge.
0:38:21 Like even Sam Parr from The Hustle, he had the trends community on Facebook.
0:38:24 He actually said that in the beginning he was seeding posts.
0:38:28 So he would write up a whole piece for people and share it to them in their DMs.
0:38:32 And so like, even if someone like Sam Parr had to do that in the beginning, it’s okay if you
0:38:32 do that.
0:38:33 Yeah.
0:38:33 Yeah.
0:38:33 Yeah.
0:38:38 For, for growth in reverse, anything else that you found, like in the early days to
0:38:42 try and get, you know, get those first a thousand or 10,000 subscribers?
0:38:44 It was a lot of Twitter threads.
0:38:49 And also I think the content was just so unique that people were like, I’m going to share this
0:38:50 with other people.
0:38:50 Okay.
0:38:51 That’s a huge unlock.
0:38:56 And it’s, it’s probably the underlying piece of all of these is like, if you have really good
0:39:00 stuff, it’s just going to make everything we just talked about work so much better because
0:39:01 people are going to want to recommend you.
0:39:02 They’re going to want to share your content.
0:39:04 They’re going to want to pay you to promote it.
0:39:04 Yeah.
0:39:08 What you’ve become known for, what growth in reverse has become known for is like these
0:39:16 really in-depth, deep dive case studies that say, okay, look at Sahil Bloom now and then
0:39:17 let’s, let’s rewind.
0:39:23 Let’s go back five years and see what that trajectory looked like and the specific tactics that, that
0:39:24 worked and didn’t work.
0:39:25 And you’re right.
0:39:26 It’s, it’s unique content.
0:39:27 It’s something you won’t find anywhere else.
0:39:29 And it was, it was effective.
0:39:32 So the question is, could I reverse engineer something similar for my own?
0:39:38 If you’re, if you’re listening in and, and I don’t know if there’s any shortcuts here,
0:39:43 but you’re doing that kind of analysis that, that people aren’t going to find anywhere else
0:39:44 makes it compelling.
0:39:44 Yeah.
0:39:49 Or like you just go out and find the most unique stories about side hustles and share them.
0:39:54 Like you’re not the one actually doing the side hustle necessarily, but you’re sharing all
0:39:56 of those tips and things that you’ve learned from doing your own.
0:39:58 Again, it’s just like a different way to do unique content.
0:40:00 Yeah, that’s a good, that’s a good point.
0:40:03 And those are the, the episodes where you hang up and you’re like, and I got to go tell the
0:40:05 neighbors, you’re not going to believe who I talked to today.
0:40:09 You know, could you believe she makes money organizing people’s photos in the, in their
0:40:09 attic?
0:40:09 Right.
0:40:11 Oh, that’s a hundred dollar an hour job.
0:40:11 Cool.
0:40:12 I didn’t know that.
0:40:12 So good.
0:40:16 I have another one that has added probably several thousand subscribers over the course of
0:40:17 the last three or four years.
0:40:20 And that is participating in bundle sales.
0:40:27 And so this is going to be more of a, of a B to C or maybe like B to small B type of type
0:40:32 of play where a bundle sale organizer, like ultimate bundles is one BC stack is the one that I’m
0:40:33 referring to.
0:40:36 I’ve been a participant in many times, but there’s a few different companies that put these together.
0:40:43 So that may be a side hustle on its own being the host, the organizer, the aggregator, cause
0:40:48 you can, there’s some benefits to being that central hub as well, but as a contributor, how
0:40:54 it works is everybody kind of donates a product to this bundle and say, Hey, for a limited time
0:40:59 for one week, only you’re going to get access to 30, 40, 50 of these digital products on a
0:41:00 specific niche.
0:41:05 Maybe it’s how to grow your traffic and you get it for your $49, whatever it is, you know,
0:41:08 low price, a sticker price on all these resources are $5,000.
0:41:11 It’s like, okay, that might be inflated, but it’s still a good deal.
0:41:13 And you know, you never know.
0:41:17 It’s, it only takes one good idea to make back the $49 and then some, so like I’m a fan of
0:41:22 these as a, as a consumer and I’m a fan of these as a contributor because how it works
0:41:28 is all of these contributors, the 30, 40, 50 people who contributed products, plus the bundle
0:41:29 sale has recruited additional affiliates.
0:41:31 So their audience might find value in this.
0:41:33 They all promote it to their audience.
0:41:39 And when people go to go and claim those products, they go register with Teachable or
0:41:43 they go order the thing through your Thrivecart link or however it is, or they sign up on your
0:41:44 email.
0:41:47 And so they have to enter their email to go and claim the product.
0:41:49 And now they’re a part of your ecosystem.
0:41:55 So it’s a way to gather subscribers from a ton of different places all at once.
0:41:58 And it’s been a really effective one over the last few years.
0:41:59 That’s so interesting.
0:42:02 Are those like high quality email subscribers too?
0:42:03 Yeah, I was kind of surprised.
0:42:09 So the unsubscribe rate, the open rate has been pretty similar to the broader list.
0:42:14 And I guess I expected it to be a little lower, but people tend to stick around about the same
0:42:15 rate as everybody else.
0:42:16 That’s interesting.
0:42:19 So you get the entire list, even if they don’t like download your thing necessarily?
0:42:20 No, only if they claim your thing.
0:42:21 Oh, okay.
0:42:24 Yeah, so you got to come up with a compelling product.
0:42:25 Interesting.
0:42:28 Yeah, I’ve never done one of those, but I’ve seen them all over the place.
0:42:30 Yeah, it’s a very interesting one.
0:42:35 And kind of financially, how it works, like if anybody is curious, like somebody buys the
0:42:42 stack, the individual creators get $0, unless you referred them as an affiliate, then you get
0:42:45 your 40% affiliate commission or whatever it is.
0:42:50 But the play is access to this broader audience, and hopefully some people come back and claim
0:42:52 your product and become a part of your world.
0:42:57 And a lot of people will throw on order bumps and upsells and stuff, you know, to the back
0:42:59 end of their cart to try and recoup some of that.
0:43:02 But it’s more of a marketing play than a money making play.
0:43:04 Yeah, you’ve been doing that for years now, right?
0:43:05 Yeah, it’s pretty effective.
0:43:12 And it’s like, otherwise, I’d be very content to just kind of sit and do my normal thing and
0:43:14 like be in maintenance mode and record some episodes.
0:43:16 It’s like, oh, there’s this deadline coming up.
0:43:19 I got to come up with a product that would hopefully be compelling.
0:43:22 Like the podcast growth playbook came out of that.
0:43:24 The little Get Gigs mini course came out of that.
0:43:31 There was like an easy traffic makeover course that came out of that where it’s like, okay,
0:43:35 I got to come up with something that would be beneficial, that would be on brand, that would
0:43:37 be like comfortable with this price tag.
0:43:39 And here’s a good excuse to launch it.
0:43:41 I like that one.
0:43:41 Cool.
0:43:41 All right.
0:43:42 What else?
0:43:48 I think a broader category of things that I like to recommend to people are like collaborations.
0:43:50 Now, this could look like a cross promotion.
0:43:53 So like, I will shout Nick out in my newsletter.
0:43:54 He does the same on his end.
0:43:56 But that’s like the basic one.
0:43:58 There’s a guy named Alex Garcia.
0:44:01 He runs a newsletter called marketingexamined.com.
0:44:07 And he did a cross promotion with Pat Walls, who has Starter Story, which is a great one.
0:44:08 If you haven’t talked to Pat, you probably should.
0:44:10 He’s got a ton of great case studies as well.
0:44:13 But they did a cross promotion.
0:44:16 So Pat had this YouTube channel that he was starting to build.
0:44:20 I think at the time he probably had like 10 or 15,000 followers or subscribers on YouTube.
0:44:24 And Alex was like, okay, well, I have 30,000 email subscribers.
0:44:26 Like, let’s just swap things.
0:44:31 So Pat came out, filmed the video of Alex, like talking about his business and his newsletter.
0:44:35 And Alex just shouted him out as like a full page cross promotion, essentially.
0:44:35 Okay, okay.
0:44:37 Like sharing Pat’s stuff.
0:44:40 And so it looked similar on like the outside.
0:44:45 But now Pat’s channel has like, I think he has like over 500,000 subscribers on YouTube.
0:44:50 And so like that video has gotten shared all over the place.
0:44:57 About three or four months after, I believe, Alex shared that he had gotten like 5,000 to 10,000 subscribers from that video.
0:45:04 I don’t know how many Pat got, but that’s a really, that’s a lot of subscribers from one collaboration.
0:45:07 Yeah, I mean, you see this on YouTube all the time.
0:45:10 And just even in the whole channels that my kids watch.
0:45:13 Dude Perfect is collaborating with Mark Rober to build battle robots.
0:45:17 You know, but it makes sense because it kind of lifts a rising tide, lifts all boats.
0:45:18 It gets exposure to a different audience.
0:45:19 Yeah.
0:45:21 And so you don’t have to have these huge audiences.
0:45:22 That’s just like an outlier example.
0:45:25 But you can write a guest post together.
0:45:29 Like go to the writer of a newsletter and like you guys co-write a piece.
0:45:31 I’ve seen this happen all over Substack.
0:45:36 The beauty of Substack is like people can click right through and subscribe very easily.
0:45:45 Even if you don’t have Substack though, you can do something like this and just like co-write a guest post or actually write a guest post for their audience that they don’t have to write anything for.
0:45:48 Summits are kind of a version of collaborations.
0:45:50 Even that bundle is probably something similar.
0:45:50 Yeah.
0:45:52 But you can do this on social media as well.
0:45:56 So it’s not like it has to live in one channel or the other.
0:45:56 Right.
0:45:59 And it’s trying to find people of a similar size maybe when you’re starting out.
0:46:03 This was a similar strategy on podcast shout outs.
0:46:07 I mean, years ago it was, you know, Instagram takeovers, Instagram shout outs.
0:46:08 Like it’s nothing new here.
0:46:15 And could you get included in somebody else’s newsletter as a recommended resource in exchange for shouting them out?
0:46:19 It’s like similar idea here and it can work really no matter what scale.
0:46:23 If you’re starting out, it’s like, okay, maybe it’s five to 10 subscribers instead of five to 10,000.
0:46:25 But the principles are still the same.
0:46:25 Yeah.
0:46:26 There’s a woman on Substack.
0:46:28 Her name is Maya Voye.
0:46:30 She’s in the product space.
0:46:32 So she writes about like product marketing, product strategy.
0:46:37 And she went out to some of the other bigger people with Substacks and started doing this.
0:46:41 Like she would co-write pieces with them or she would write a piece for them.
0:46:43 And when I found her, she had like 3,000 subscribers.
0:46:46 And now at this point, I think she’s pushing like 20K.
0:46:48 And this was like eight months ago, maybe.
0:46:55 So like it happens pretty quick if your content’s good and you’re able to collaborate with some of these people.
0:46:57 And she didn’t have an audience at that point.
0:46:59 And she was partnering with people.
0:47:02 One guy, Akash Gupta, had like 140,000 subscribers.
0:47:07 So like because she was giving him such a valuable piece of content, he was like, yeah, I’ll share it.
0:47:07 Yeah.
0:47:13 Step one, make sure your content is good before you ask anybody to vouch for you to share it.
0:47:15 But there’s like a diverging path, right?
0:47:19 Like I can focus heads down just doing my thing and hope somebody notices.
0:47:27 It’s like you got to kind of be vocal and be proactive about promoting this stuff or going after these collaborations and promo swaps.
0:47:31 Otherwise, like the odds of somebody just finding it on their own are so low.
0:47:32 Yeah.
0:47:38 It’s very low, especially if it’s like a new venture or you’ve never been online before doing something like this.
0:47:48 You had an interesting one to move on to the next one from Cody Sanchez, where she was apparently actually buying up newsletters for contrarian thinking early on.
0:47:50 It’s like, how can I shortcut this even faster?
0:47:53 Oh, this guy already has 13,000 subscribers.
0:47:55 I’ll just go buy the newsletter.
0:47:56 It was like, you don’t want to run it anymore.
0:47:58 Like, is this how it happened?
0:48:00 Yeah, this is actually funny.
0:48:06 I was doing research and I came across this one podcast episode and I had not heard her talk about this.
0:48:09 And I think I listened to like 25 other podcast episodes.
0:48:10 Yes, I go deep.
0:48:13 And so I listened to this and she said she bought a newsletter.
0:48:19 And so typically when you buy a newsletter, you might send an email and say like, hey, we just acquired blah, blah, blah newsletter.
0:48:21 You’re now going to be on this list.
0:48:24 And you just like import all those people, delete the old list and move on.
0:48:33 But what Cody did was she actually positioned contrarian thinking as a guest post author or a sponsor for weeks, if not months.
0:48:35 She didn’t go too far into detail.
0:48:39 And I don’t know which newsletter she bought because she has never talked about this again.
0:48:39 Okay.
0:48:46 But she did do this from her words and she would build this audience on the same time.
0:48:51 So she would just send out these emails, keep writing the content like nothing ever happened.
0:48:56 And then she would turn around when she figured out like, oh, I probably got all the subscribers I’m going to get from this.
0:48:59 She would turn around and sell that back to someone else.
0:49:02 So she nowhere in this actually lost money.
0:49:06 She probably made money because she was still growing the newsletter at this point.
0:49:09 And so talk about like leverage.
0:49:10 Yeah, very savvy.
0:49:15 Yeah, I’m going to buy this asset, milk it as much as I can, but still continue its founding mission.
0:49:18 And then, you know, flip it to the next person.
0:49:20 Yeah, she’s like so on brand for her.
0:49:32 One thing that she mentioned in our earlier interview was a lot of manual outreach for the first thousand to ten thousand people where it was, would you mind shouting this out?
0:49:43 You know, to reaching out to friends who already had email lists, doing a ton of guest podcasting, podcast guesting rather, where it was sharing this idea about buying businesses versus building businesses.
0:49:53 Like, okay, that’s a unique angle and building the newsletter that way by borrowing other people’s audiences, either through email promo swaps or email shout outs or through podcast guesting.
0:49:55 Yeah, she’s a hustler for sure.
0:50:03 I created a visual actually showing all of the podcasts she was on and like her growth of her newsletter.
0:50:04 And it was like so in line.
0:50:05 It’s just amazing.
0:50:08 I’ll share that with you with you if you want to put in the show notes.
0:50:08 Okay.
0:50:09 Yeah, it was pretty insane.
0:50:10 All right.
0:50:15 Well, I could say I knew her before she was super, super famous, only medium famous early on.
0:50:18 Yeah, I remember listening to your episode with her for that research.
0:50:18 Yes.
0:50:20 You know, millions of followers ago.
0:50:20 Yeah.
0:50:22 What are we doing wrong, Nick?
0:50:23 Yeah, who knows?
0:50:23 Who knows?
0:50:25 This was depressing.
0:50:31 Like, I remember specifically showing up at FinCon 2021 in Austin.
0:50:33 And in my mind, this was like the year of TikTok.
0:50:36 So many young creators were there.
0:50:38 Oh, I started six months ago.
0:50:39 I’ve got a quarter million followers.
0:50:42 And it was just like, huh, this is a different path.
0:50:43 Like, this is unique.
0:50:44 This is interesting.
0:50:50 And one of the episodes that we recorded around that time or maybe a little bit before was with
0:50:51 Tori Dunlap.
0:50:57 And it was one video, she said, one video went super viral.
0:51:01 And her funnel was like, take your money personality quiz.
0:51:02 I don’t know if it’s changed since then.
0:51:07 And one video was like, we had 100,000 subscribers in a week.
0:51:12 So maybe you can’t control going viral, but you can control what Tori did, was having the
0:51:18 ecosystem and like the lead capture funnel and process in place for when that viral moment
0:51:18 happens.
0:51:21 And so that was kind of what impressed me from our call.
0:51:21 Yeah.
0:51:23 I think she still has that quiz.
0:51:24 It’s actually, she does.
0:51:25 I just went to it.
0:51:30 1.16 million people have taken that quiz and all of them enter their email address.
0:51:31 So that’s wild.
0:51:31 Yeah.
0:51:34 So if you’re going to play the short form game, make sure you got something to lead
0:51:35 people back to.
0:51:37 That’s my, that’s my, that’s my takeaway.
0:51:40 Tori’s got an incredible business too.
0:51:42 Well, this has been awesome.
0:51:45 I don’t know how many we can count these up, but probably 10 or 12 different ideas here.
0:51:47 Anything else before we wrap?
0:51:48 No, I think that’s, that’s it.
0:51:50 I mean, I have a million of them on my site.
0:51:54 So if you want more, if anybody really wants more than that, you can go find it.
0:51:55 Absolutely.
0:51:57 Well, yeah, there’s growthinreverse.com.
0:51:59 There’s the Growth In Reverse podcast.
0:52:01 What’s next for you?
0:52:02 Where are you taking this thing?
0:52:07 Going to put out a course slash vault of these ideas here soon with some videos and step-by-step
0:52:11 of how to do each one, because people are telling me there’s too many question marks.
0:52:12 So I’m like, okay, fine, I’ll help.
0:52:13 Yeah.
0:52:16 It’s almost like a choose your own adventure kind of thing, or you need, you need the quiz
0:52:18 funnel to be like, well, which one works for me?
0:52:18 Totally.
0:52:19 I should put a quiz on there.
0:52:20 That’s a good idea.
0:52:25 So I think that’s the next thing, but I’m still just trying to wrap my head around 30
0:52:26 days of growth.
0:52:28 Well, stay tuned for the Growth In Reverse course.
0:52:30 We’ll be happy to link that up when it is live.
0:52:32 Growthinreverse.com.
0:52:34 In the meantime, Chanel, this has been great.
0:52:35 Thank you so much for stopping by.
0:52:39 Let’s wrap this thing up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation.
0:52:40 Just try stuff.
0:52:41 Experiment.
0:52:42 Start somewhere.
0:52:46 We have all had those failed posts, like Nick was talking about with Dickie Bush.
0:52:50 Some things will get zero views, but some things might get 10 views, and those 10 people might
0:52:52 end up becoming raving fans of your newsletter.
0:52:55 So don’t look at the small numbers and think you’re failing.
0:52:56 Just keep going.
0:52:57 Yeah.
0:53:02 So we’ll always remember this talk from Cliff Ravenscraft at Podcast Movement, I want to
0:53:03 say 2016.
0:53:06 And a question from the audience comes in, well, I’ve been doing this for,
0:53:09 five months, and I only have 200 subscribers.
0:53:11 And he’s like, time out.
0:53:14 I want you to remove the word only from your vocabulary.
0:53:15 Look around this room.
0:53:21 There’s not 200 people in this room, but you’re still thinking like you have some unique advantages
0:53:21 here.
0:53:22 You know them by name.
0:53:26 You can know their exact pains and problems, something that a Tim Ferriss can’t do.
0:53:27 You’ve got a unique advantage here.
0:53:28 Don’t say only, right?
0:53:32 You’ve got 200 people paying attention to you, investing their time and energy, putting you
0:53:33 in their earbuds.
0:53:36 You’re doing something right if you’ve got 200 people to pay attention to.
0:53:40 So yeah, don’t sweat the small numbers and experiment with some different of these growth
0:53:41 tactics along the way.
0:53:45 Now, I wouldn’t be doing my job as a host in an episode about list building if I didn’t
0:53:49 have a listener bonus, a content upgrade for you.
0:53:54 So I built a list building cheat sheet with a couple dozen different ways to grow your email
0:53:54 list.
0:53:58 So you can pick and choose the tactics that appeal most to you along with some tools and
0:54:00 additional resources to help you do it.
0:54:03 You can grab that for free in the show notes for this episode.
0:54:05 Just follow the link in the episode description.
0:54:06 I’ll get you right over there.
0:54:08 Big thanks to Chanel for sharing her insight.
0:54:12 Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone.
0:54:17 The latest offers and deals from those sponsors are at SideHustleNation.com slash deals.
0:54:20 Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show.
0:54:21 That is it for me.
0:54:23 Thank you so much for tuning in.
0:54:26 If you’re finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share with a friend.
0:54:30 So fire off that text message for somebody who needs a little kickstart in their list building
0:54:30 efforts.
0:54:33 Until next time, let’s go out there and make something happen.
0:54:36 And I’ll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show.