0-19k email subs. How I promote my content.
May 2019. I wrote my first marketing article. A year later my email list hit 19,000.
No ads. No connections. No existing audience.
The site grew because I learnt how to push my content round the internet.
Here's my process
First, I found all the different places where marketers hang out.
Then, I asked myself, “how can I add value directly to these platforms?”
Adding value isn't dumping links. People are busy. Wow them on the platform they're already using. Or get ignored.
There's no “one-size-fits-all” formula. Twitter is not Facebook. I tailor my content to fit each platform.
The specifics
Twitter, Reddit and Indie Hackers are places where long-form sharing works.
My strategy is simple. I share my whole article. Then, I politely ask if the reader would like to join my email list.
Facebook and Slack groups are a different ball game. Attention spans are shorter. Self-promoters get lynched.
I break my articles into visual tips. Subtly branding each one. Upfront value. No hard sell.
Then, there's a bunch of sites where I share direct links: Hacker News, Designer News, Growth Hackers, Zest.
Same principle applies. Tailor content to fit the platform.
The whole process takes me 8 hours. 4 hours posting. 4 hours replying.
The snowball effect
How other people share your content is just as important as how you share it.
You don't want people sharing different things on different platforms. You want everyone sharing the same thing on the same platform.
One share on 50 platforms gets ignored. 50 retweets turn into 500.
I direct everyone who likes my article to the same Twitter thread.
Putting it all together
- Create value on other platforms.
- Transfer this value to your own platform.
- Store value with your email list.
Email subscribers are gold bars in the bank.
New media rise and fall. Email isn’t going anywhere. It’s been around longer. It will survive longer. Medium can't suddenly paywall it. It's the best place to build an audience online.
Here are the results of a year sharing content online.
It's not rocket science:
The platforms where I add the most value upfront are the platforms that generate the most new subscribers.
People are busy. Don't redirect them. Wow them.
One last thing
The best self-promoters aren't self-promoters. They take the time to become a genuine member of each community.
Share others' content. Write detailed comments. Make friends.
Give more than you take. It's a positive-sum game. Indie Hackers 4 Ever.
Thanks for reading. Keeping with the spirits of the post if you found this useful, maybe I can tempt you with my marketing newsletter.
Any questions, hmu in the comments ;)
Google Whisk - Generate images using images as prompts, not text prompts
After 19,314 lines of code, i'm shutting down my project
Need feedback for my product.
40 open-source gems to replace your SaaS subscriptions 🔥 🚀
We are live on Product Hunt
Congrats on the milestone! 😊
I'm wondering how to apply the same strategies as you on a product that is not as content-oriented as Marketing Examples. Say you've got a SaaS, what kind of content would you share? Tutorials maybe?
You want to build a media company for your niche
Two examples:
1/ Look at Ahrefs. SEO SaaS. And they want to be the king of the SEO content. The place to go to learn SEO.
Huge YouTube channel. Huge blog. Engaged Twitter. Giving general SEO tips. It's not all about their product. It's about being the best “teacher” of SEO in the world.
2/ I also absolutely LOVE what Veed are doing on YouTube. They're a video editing tool.
People YouTube “how to edit zoom video recordings” and boom they've got the video made. And obviously it involves using Veeds product. Perks of having a free product.
Ahrefs is higher level. Veed more about hitting search queries. Both work.
I’ve been studying ahref’s content for a while now and they absolutely knock it out of the park. Not only is every bit of content relevant to almost their entire audience, but it’s also all heavily optimised for search engine traffic whilst also being easily readable
yeah. Great shout. This is so rare!
i go all in on PEOPLE. And the search engines think my content is too short.
Why not kick off an educational project like a newsletter?
Tutorials are great but they can be a bit bland. What you could do is hybrid between tutorial and case study. You could show how successful customers use your product to achieve the result they want.
Powerful material. I've responded in a similar manner, a twitter thread xD
but really, it gave me several "aha!" moments where I recognised myself and I took some particular actions that will apply in the next period. Many thanks!
enjoyed this. cheers!
almost 5k impressions for the first try. not bad
The amount of effort you put into this post is crazy itself!
cheers - there's so much content out there. effort is my way of standing out.
I'm the kid who does extra homework
Well done Harry, just received your newletter and wanted to show you my support!
Happy that you teamed up again with EmailOctopus!
Keep up the good job!
Cheers Matteo. Appreciated. And, great to be back with EmailOctopus. To be honest I never left. Just nice of them to sponsor again.
Hats off Harry, your newsletter and website explain communication, growth and human psychology better than any marketing class. You 100% deserve your success.
Do you do it full-time? If yes, how do you monetise it?
Just re-read this and it's still gold. Thanks @harrydry.
Congrats on this monumental achievement! I have grown my own newsletter to a happy 500+ subs in 4-months and one thing that works amazingly is a summary + CTA for next action. Check it out: yath.substack.com
Congratulation :)
Please can you DM on my twitter https://twitter.com/Frontendor_
Brilliant. You saved me hours of work here. Coming up with a strategy like this is in my todo list for this week. I already have a basic strategy but this is miles better.
Learnt a shit ton just now! Shared it!
I really like this article and included in my Tonians newsletter.
Emails are gold. The thing that differentiates the post from other marketing fluffs is its emphasis on bringing values to the community. It's clear that Harry studies the audiences on each channel and tailors the content that are valuable to them.
I just read this post and thought, "Wow, that's pretty solid advice. This guy knows his stuff." Then clicked on your profile and realized I'm already following you. Then clicked on your website and realized I already have it bookmarked from long ago.
Now I'm just sitting here wondering how I managed to forget literally all of it. 😂
I am in the process of "restarting" my own personal brand and have been a bit stuck on how best to promote content. This post is great!
This post is an example of how you promote your newsletter. But what did you publish copy-and-paste? I don't want to be picky but I appreciate transparency.
Sorry, don't quite understand the question?
Yes, this was also my newsletter edition. And yes, a lot of the text was copy and pasted.
I share my articles in full on on different platforms. That's the content marketing approach :)
I love the way you create your images and diagrams. What tools do you use?
Cheers Ben - I use Sketch but Figma's just as good. Would also recommend Steve Schoger's design tips
Firstly, congratulations on the success in building up your newsletter. I'm at the very beginning of trying to do the same (have yet to publish my first blog post/article...in the works), and it feels quite daunting.
I've seen a similar formula from others, and this seems to be pretty consistently successful, which is awesome. Certainly a key point is adding value to the community and not just trying to take.
One question -- are you pointing to your newsletter sign-up and to a Twitter thread at the bottom of your articles? Or are you pointing to Twitter in the article and to your newsletter in the post where you share the link? I want to be sure to not have too many CTAs in one place, but this seemed like a good way to build audience on both platforms.
Cheers Matt. I have both. But agree with your sentiment here.
Asking people to do two things results in them doing none. So I say OR not AND. But one clear CTA might work better :)
Thanks, Harry. Great insight in the post, very useful as I try to make sense of how to build an audience flywheel.
You are the king and you have been followed / subscribed.
Just one thing. This form needs return-on-enter support: https://cl.ly/7dbe0d24b559
ahhhh! nice idea. I'm not too good at coding but will try and work it out this afternoon. thank you Alexandre. Appreciated.
100%!
Great post Harry! Has this been your full-time job? How much time each day did you invest in this great work? Cheers!
left my job after about 3 months in ... so yep. full time since then.
probably 7 solid hours a day on this. and thank you
Thanks, that's very useful to know
Great content, I can see why the email list has grown so rapidly 🥇You just got yourself one more. 🎉
Cheers Reece - Appreciate it.
Man! This post is full of value! Thank you
Cheers Vladimir :)
Harry! You're always putting out great stuff. Thanks for sharing this.
Learning a ton from this one.
Cheers Gabriel. Appreciate it.
what a great article Harry! I've been following you since the beginning and man, I like so much what you do!
I don't you if you got inspired by garyvee, but I see a lot of similarities! Well done
excellent approach to growth hacking - just be genuine! You can count me in as a subscriber :D
cheers Arj
Loved your twitter thread! This is awesome and inspiring. I remember the day you started Marketing Examples ;) Crazy how much it has grown!
Cheers Gene! i do too! Originally it was an idea to promote a book i never ended up writing haha
"maybe I can tempt you with my marketing newsletter."
you won me
although I just went to subscribe and I get the error "Email already signed up"
looks like I must have unsubscribed some time ago, can you fix this so I can sign up?
haha! Cheers Filipp. Any chance you could share your email so I could investigate? Emails might be in spam somewhere.
Or if private, perhaps email me harry@marketingexamples.com with the email. Thank you. And glad you enjoyed the piece.
Nice post. What tool do you use to create those image illustrations? Those images look really great.
thank you. I use Sketch. Got a load of components flying around :)
With such excellent posts, consistently great, providing so much value this is well deserved for MarketExamples. Look forward for more!
Cheers Wit. I look forward to writing more
Really useful post. I already feel like a learnt a lot from it. Will try this strategy for my travel blog. thaaanks!
Good luck
Great advice for building an audience! Thanks for sharing!
thanks Carlysle. Pleausure
Another awesome and informative post @harrydry
Cheers Gordon. Appreciated
I've never come across such an organized post. Do you have any tool where you manage all your social platforms into one and change words and push from there?
i don't. all done by moi!
problem is, every platform's a bit different. i tailor everything. for example, reddit doesn't allow images. So everything's ends up being tweaked ...
Automating would be cool. But I just feel it might lose a bit of the pizzazz .
Sounds awesome.
Can you share how much time does it take per week on average to mail that quality?
honestly AGES ....
Now I've got a bit more of an audience I get quite a few replies everywhere. Tailoring for different platforms is 4 hours. Sharing is about 4 hours. But more recently longer. Cause better reaction!
hey harry it would be great if you shared your workflow and perhaps i could note down some points to create a small program in my free time to help shave off a few minutes related to your workflow? maybe from 4hrs to 3 or 3 and a half hrs? If you think it is something that you might find valuable, please dm me on insta @unitcodes (I would love to learn a lot from you as well) .
[I am pretty much on a tight schedule myself with day job(not so good time management skills either), but I can work on a side little project if i get to know how multiple social media handling takes place for creators such as you. It would be fun!]
How do you get time to work? Marketing Examples looks like a full-time job :D
And I can confirm, you do give more than you take, it's never spammy, always actionable even for a noob.
Do you think you'll turn it into a podcast?
hahaha - It is a full time job. I work full time on it.
And thank you.
I want to make every example a YouTube video. On my list
Great work and thanks for sharing!
Cheers Ben
This is such a great post and advice on building an audience.
Signing up!
@harrydry - Curious to know which tools you used to build your website?
It looks neat!
I used Sketch to design it.
And it's built in Pug (basically html) and lots of Javascript. But that's definatelt not “the best” way. I've been trying to rebuild it in Next / React but taking a while. Bit of a coding noob.
Cheers Naveen. Glad you enjoyed it. Appreciated :)
Great work (and nice inclusion of the CTA at the end 😄)
haha! Cheers Paul. Show > tell.
Thanks for this post Harry! I've been using your tips to build my audience from the ground up. If I manage to help at least a small fraction of people you've been helping, I'll be extremely satisfied
Cheers Leo. Helping people is a good feeling.
Good luck with your audience. It takes a while. There's no shortcuts. Wish you luck.
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80% creating. 20% promoting.
and thank you!
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sure
excercising is a way of restarting my brain.
before each working session i try and do a few minutes of focusing.
Twitter to work is a pattern that results with me going back to twitter ...
Sitting still focusing then starting work and i can keep it up work
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