The Steal Club - I stole 10 newsletter growth tips

Hey everyone!

Today’s issue is a special one. I scrapped the usual format to go all-in into newsletter growth tips. 

It’s a bit longer than usual, but I believe it’s 100% worth it. Let’s dive in!

Note: Make sure you click "Allow to see all images" to read this email properly. Also, Gmail might cut it short because of the number of images. Just click on "Show all message" when it appears!

Time to read: 5 minutes 40 seconds

Maybe you've been reading a Twitter thread, and before the juicy part comes, the author tells you to keep reading on their website.

You may be scrolling through great Instagram stories when suddenly they cut you off with a link.

Most of the time, you follow that link. The teaser worked.

Here’s an example of this on Twitter by my pal Janis Ozolins👇

Doesn’t get much simpler than that.

All that you need is a nugget that's so good that your audience can't resist diving in for more.

This is also easily replicable on LinkedIn, Instagram…

Check out Janis’s newsletter

It consists on:

• The day before publishing your newsletter, post about it by telling people what they can find inside.
• The day after, send out another post as a recap

Let’s take a look at this example by Justin Welsh, who has +30k email subs.

Interesting about both tweets is that they don't look like simple newsletter promo tweets.

They look like a great single tweet WITH a link attached at the end. That’s what makes them great.

Katelyn Bourgoin also says this is one of the things that helped her newsletter grow +9000 subscribers in 9 weeks.

After seeing this, I tried to steal it for my own use. While the results weren't great, they were decent. My copy could have been stronger, too.

I’m going to be doubling down on this one, that’s for sure!

Check out Justin’s newsletter

Check out Katelyn’s newsletter

The oldest play in the book of growing newsletter subscribers is lead magnets.

The goal is to give away one thing that has a high perceived value, such as an ebook, a template, or a 30-minute video, in return for an email.

I've seen some creators approach it differently on Twitter lately.

They tease the lead magnet with a tweet. Then ask people to comment, like, or RT to send it to them.

This does 3 things:

• It generates good Twitter engagement
• Creates a curiosity gap. "You are giving me THIS AMAZING THING for free?"
• Makes people take action, which increases their likelihood of subscribing.

Next, redirect them to a landing page where they can access whatever you are sharing in exchange for their email.

I did this a month or so ago and 440+ people replied. From those, I managed to ad almost +300 new subscribers in just 2 days!

If you are wondering how did I do it to send 400 DMs in one day…I didn’t. I used Tweet Hunter’s auto DM feature which made my life easier 🤷‍♂️.

It also works for smaller accounts (David has 1,5k followers), so don’t use that as an excuse 👇

Sadly, as far as I know this only works for Twitter, unless you want to be sending those DMs manually or put together some sort of automation on your own.

Social proof is another great way to get people to subscribe to your newsletter. 

Are you getting replies to your emails? Tweets talking about it? Maybe stories sharing it?

Screenshot ALL OF THAT.

Then put it in a nice template and share it again with a link to subscribe to your newsletter.

What others say about it is more powerful that what you can ever say.

I’ve started doing this on Instagram stories and it seems to be working out 👇

If you don’t talk about your newsletter, who will?

That doesn’t mean you need to mention it EVERYWHERE. That will only lead to audience burnout and you becoming an spammer

What you need to do is to be aware of opportunities like these ones 👇

This is the perfect moment to pitch your newsletter. My advice is to have a one-sentence pitch ready to simply copy-paste it there.

No one will say anything at your plug. Instead, people will be thankful since this is what they are asking for!

This is how I gained some of my first subscribers. Even today, every time I see a post like this, I plug The Steal Club.

You can use a call to action to encourage your audience to take action.

People who read your newsletter are in reader mode. You might need to tell them what to do next.

A few CTAs in key locations may be just what you need. See how James Clear does it:

A few more ideas in this amazing thread by Brett Dashevsky, where I stole this 👆 from.

A variation of this is doing it on social media. James Clear is another great example of this. In most of his Instagram posts, he does the following 👇

All you need is to be super clear and direct to what you want people to do.

(Hey, can’t blame me for trying 🤷‍♂️)

Not everything is automations and viral growth hacks.

Doing thins that don’t scale is still one of the most effective ways to grow a newsletter. At the end of the day, your subscribers are people, not numbers.

Check what Justin Moore used to do:

He DMd every new follower he got on social media, thanking them and mentioning that he has a newsletter.

Justin runs one of the most successful cohort courses out there, and his newsletter has grown like crazy, so we can safely say it works.

Check out Justin’s newsletter

If you run a newsletter that posts links to other people's sites all the time, you're missing out on a great opportunity if you aren't properly tagging these links.

In this issue, you will notice that every newsletter link is tagged with an utm tag.

This is because I saw Josh Spector talk about it on Twitter 👇

I would have never thought about this, but it makes a ton of sense.

Check out Josh’s newsletter, For the Interested

Every time one of your posts goes a little bit over what it normally goes (in terms of likes or RTs), plug a link to your newsletter.

This tactic helped me 2x my daily subscriber rate during a very long term. It’s now proven a bit less effective probably because of audience saturation, but it’s still la great tactic.

Again, I use Tweet Hunter to automate it, but it can also be done manually.

This is another obvious but sometimes overlooked growth tactic.

It simply consists on agreeing with other creators on shouting out each other’s newsletters. I’ve done it a few times with people like Kevon Cheung or the Idea Economy newsletter.

In case you don’t know, I run a podcast with my good friend Janis. In the last episode, we talked about our newsletters, how are we growing them, sponsorships, future plans…

You can listen to it here or watch us 👇

And this is it for today’s issue! what do you think of it?

• 👍 Worth it
• 😐 Meh - was ok.
• 👎 Not interesting to me

If you enjoyed it, something that would really help me out would be for you to share it. 

Word of mouth is still the most powerful way to grow! So forward this to a friend or redirect them to The Steal Club.

See you next week!

Alex Llull

Thief Master

The Steal Club