The Steal Club - Go behind-the-scenes of The Steal Club

Hey everyone!

This is The Steal Club, where we learn how the best creators use content to grow their audiences and businesses.

And how you can do the same by stealing their tactics, tips, and strategies.

This issue is a bit special as this is the 50th! 

I can't believe we made it this far. A big part is thanks to each of you who read this newsletter weekly.

The biggest gift you can give a creator is to pay attention to their work. And that's what I feel most of you do here.

So thank you. I really mean it.

Now let's dive into this week's issue! This one should be great, as it's a behind-the-scenes look at how this newsletter works.

Time to read: 4 min 45 seconds

-----------------------

First, some numbers

• The Steal Club's first issue was published on May 12, 2021
• The Steal Club has 3,768 subscribers (at the time of writing this)
• It has a 59% open rate and a 6,21% click rate
• It has generated $1643,74 directly (75% of it comes in the last 2 months)
• It’s hard to calculate how much revenue it has generated indirectly, but it has brought me a few freelance clients with an estimated value of +8,000$ plus sales of my own digital products worth around $1,500.

Why do I publish the Steal Club?

The Steal Club was born as a way to keep my audience “safe.”

Having followers on Twitter or Instagram is great, but that can be taken away with just one decision over at Twitter HQ.

I don’t want to face that risk.

The Steal Club is now slowly evolving (or that’s my hope) into a place where creators, makers, freelancers, and solopreneurs come to learn how to make better content to grow their audience and business.

It’s a place where I can be totally transparent with what’s happening and play around and do fun content experiments.

In all honesty, it’s also a great place to make some extra income and soft-promote what I do as a freelance (content writing and content strategy consulting).

So it’s a marketing channel, a content channel, a portfolio, and a community, all in one.

Idea to MVP in 30 days with no-code

• Learn the fundamentals of no-code: Navigate the world of no-code, one of the fastest-growing ecosystems in tech and conquer tricky concepts like API’s, databases and design whilst learning the most versatile stack of no-code tools which you can use to build 90% of your ideas.

• Go from idea to launch in 30 days: With 1-1 coaching, interactive workshops and a supportive community, develop a lean mindset and the technical knowhow to rapidly test + launch ideas.
• Experience the power of community: Get the support you need to launch your project, hone your skills and build in public through our positive-sum community.

How has the Steal Club changed over time?

The Steal Club started out as a bi-weekly (as in once every two weeks) publication where I profiled creators to break down how they were building their audiences and businesses.

These issues were super in-depth case studies of each creator and often took a long time to put together (around 6-8h). 

It quickly became obvious that it would be hard to maintain that rhythm.

Even more when I decided to move to a weekly cadence.

After that, I played a lot with the newsletter format.

I wrote issues that were like mini-guides, while other times, I was just taking a few pieces of content and doing an analysis.

That was until I landed in our semi-structured format, where I shared one lesson, one growth tip, and one content template.

Of course, I break that format every now and then and do something like this issue, but having that structure as the starting point has proven super useful to speed up content creation.

What does my process for creating content look like?

My current newsletter structure has four separate sections:

• A lesson from my journey
• A growth tip
• A content template
• 3-4 relevant links

The lesson is what takes longer to put together. 

I have a bunch of stories/ideas outlined that I repurpose for my newsletter in a 150-200 word article.

That takes around 1h.

The rest of the newsletter is more curated, meaning I take stuff I see from around social media and do my analysis of it.

The process is quite simple:

• Every time I see something that could be “steal club worthy,” I bookmark it
• When I sit down to write every issue, I just go through my bookmarks and pick what resonates to write the growth tip and the content template.

Generally, every issue takes around 2-3h hours to be ready to send.

What tools do I use to create The Steal Club?

For content creation

• I do my content research on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and other newsletters (Free)
• I use Notion to organize and draft every issue (Paid)
• I use Grammarly for grammar correction (Paid)

For everything related to sending emails

• I use MailerLite as my ESP (Paid)
• I use Feedletter to get audience feedback (Paid)

For marketing and promotion

• I use carrd for the website (Paid)

Others

• I use Tally Forms to manage sponsorship requests (Free)

The total cost of running The Steal Club as it is is $41,5/mo.

This is only for the apps that I only dedicate to the TSC. I also use apps like Notion or Grammarly for other projects, so I’m not counting that here.

How does the Steal Club get subscribers?

These are the strategies I’ve used to attract more subscribers, from more useful to least useful:

• Cross-promotion with other creators in similar niches
• This one tweet (drove around +300 subs in one day). I guess it could be considered a lead magnet.
• Organic shoutouts from other creators, either on their newsletters or Twitter
• “Scheduled promotion” on my social media (I make a post a few hours before publishing, at least once a week)
• “Plugs” when a piece of content reaches X number of likes (this is proven to be less effective lately btw)
• Paid ads on other newsletters

I’m not doing much to retain subscribers actively. I believe in people staying because the content is good and valuable to them.

How does the Steal Club make money?

As of today, the only direct way The Steal Club is making money is with sponsorships.

As I said above, 75% of that sponsorship income has come from the last 2 months, when I got serious about that as an income source.

We offer three kinds of sponsorships:

• “Premium” ad at the top of the newsletter for 250$
• “Middle of the newsletter” ad at 150$
• Sponsored link at the end of the newsletter at 25$

I also receive some requests from my services or for one-off consulting from some subscribers, but that doesn't happen that often.

I also occasionally use The Steal Club to promote some of my digital products.

Future plans

Here’s what’s coming:

• We are now at almost 4k subscribers. My goal is to get to 8k by the end of the year.
• I’m currently working with Dylan Bridger on a new welcome sequence and some email marketing stuff.
• I’m working on a side project to see if I can generate some recurring revenue. It has to do with content templates; hopefully, it will be ready by late September!
• I'm also thinking of switching up the email frequency, but only for certain subscribers (I'll use some segmentation, but more on that in the future)

My crazy dream for the Steal Club would be for it to become a platform where creators come to learn from other creators.

From the strategies and tactics that worked before, so they don’t have to start from scratch.

And this is it! Let me know what you think about this week's issue:

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

If you were forwarded this email, you can subscribe here.

See you next week!

Alex Llull

Thief Master

The Steal Club

Subscribe this newsletter | Sponsor this newsletter