How I grew Marketing Powerups to 4.1K subscribers in a year
How I grew Marketing Powerups to 4.1K subscribers in a year
Marketing Powerup #55: I share the 5 things I did to grow this newsletter from 0 to 4.1K subscribers in one year.
Hello, and welcome to Marketing Powerups! 👋🏽
Today's powerups include:
Get private feedback to improve your presentations.
Insights from analyzing over 250K search keywords.
5 things I did to grow Marketing Powerups.
Ready? Let's go! ⭐️
🎖 Studio-quality remote video recording
A bad Internet connection is the enemy of high-quality remote video recording.
The result is a choppy video that looks unprofessional and will leave prospects and customers unimpressed!!!
The solution? Record each participant locally on their computers. So, even if anyone has an unstable connection, you can still get studio-quality recordings.
That’s exactly what Riverside.fm (the sponsor of this newsletter) does, which is what I use for all of my Marketing Powerups episodes.
Content creators like Gary Vee, Tim Ferriss, and Guy Raz trust it for studio-quality remote video recording.
→ Get 2 hours of video recording for free using Riverside.fm now.
⭐️ How I grew Marketing Powerups
Last week, the
newsletter turned one year old! 🎂🎉 Thank you so much for subscribing and supporting it. It means a lot!It took me almost three years to get 1,000 subscribers with my last newsletter. As of last week, Marketing Powerups has 4,147 subscribers with over 50% average open rate.
Let me break down five things I did to grow Marketing Powerups:
1. Optimized the newsletter landing page. 📊
My newsletter page converts about 40% to 50%. How?
By adding social proof! I have 3 types — quotes from well-known marketers, video testimonials, and logos of companies my subscribers are from.
So far, 30% of my subscribers come from the newsletter page.
2. Paid for engaged subscribers via SparkLoop. 💰
That bump in email subscribers around May resulted from starting a paid acquisition campaign via SparkLoop.
What's cool with SparkLoop is that I only pay for email subscribers who open at least two of my welcome sequence emails.
It's how I've maintained my above-average open rate of 50.61%.
3. Got referrals and recommendations from other newsletters. 🤝
I've got 878 email subscribers (almost 21% of my list) from Substack's recommendations feature and ConvertKit's creator network.
I don't have a quick "hack" to get that. It's just building relationships with other marketers over many years.
4. Offered lead magnets and resources. 🧲
Each of my Marketing Powerups show episodes includes a downloadable cheatsheet.
I've also created a SaaS onboarding email swipe file that folks can download.
So far, about 15% of my list has come from the cheatsheets and downloadable resources.
5. Created valuable content. 🏆
On average, my newsletter has a 5% to 6% clickthrough rate.
Those clicks go to the free powerups cheatsheet I give my email subscribers for free, a handful of links to helpful articles and tools, and my sponsors.
I published 54 Marketing Powerups issues over the last 12 months. The top five based on likes are as follows:
Ignite your brand with the power of storytelling with
and .3 copywriting exercises to write copy that sells, with
.How to build a customer-led growth squad with
and Claire Suellentrop.The media-led content strategy with
.Walt Disney’s approach to content marketing with
.
Free powerups cheatsheet 🔖
I want to share a powerups cheatsheet from the archives featuring Camille Trent’s newsjacking technique for rapid email list growth.
Camille Trent, Director of Content and Community at PeerSignal, successfully harnessed the power of newsjacking to double the company's email list from 6,000 to 12,000 in 45 days.
→ Download and make a copy of it here (a direct link with no email required).
In Marketing Powerups episode #24, Camille further explains the newsjacking strategy for rapid email list growth.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcast and Spotify now, or watch it on YouTube.
✨ Mini powerups
Fun-sized tools, links, and blurbs to boost your marketing.
🎁 Get real-time presentation feedback (tool): Getting feedback is a gift that can help you identify opportunities to improve your skills. Poised is an AI-powered tool that can help you communicate more effectively in meetings, presentations, and customer calls with private feedback.
🔎 The state of content SERPs (analysis): Glen Allsopp, an SEO consultant who has worked with Ahrefs, ConvertKit, and other multi-billion dollar brands, analyzed over 250K keywords. He digs into the data to answer questions like, “Do sites owned by large media companies attain more first-place rankings than independent websites?”
🎨 SXO: Why merging SEO with UX matters more than ever (article): I’ve never heard of the term Search Experience Optimization (or SXO for short) until I read this article from Sara Carmona, an international SEO expert. She argues that SXO will be more important than ever with the rise of generative AI in search.
That’s all for now, friends!
Have a powered-up day,
Ramli John
Connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter
P.S. If you found this helpful, would you share the love by tapping the heart below? ❤️
It’ll help me know what’s resonating with you and get more people to know about my newsletter. Thanks!
Thanks for sharing some behind the scenes 🎬 always love reading your newsletter.
The landing page thing is particularly interesting to me. What tools did you use to build yours? I've been noticing a trend for people making separate landing pages outside of Substack to get people to subscribe and it seems worth it 🤔
Makes me wonder if Substack will ever incorporate more features like social proof or custom code blocks into their core landing page builder. For me, I miss the days of Myspace so more customizability the better 🙌 if I could add a custom cursor I absolutely would 😂
woohoo! congrats Ramli :)