Building a Newsletter People Will Actually Read (and Recommend) with Louis Nicholls

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[00:00:59] <teaser sequence>

Joe Casabona: Five years ago, email was dead. Now, it’s not only growing, it’s the lifeblood of a creator economy. As a creator or small business owner, without a good, helpful, and nurtured email list, you’re leaving money on the table. And to tell you why Louis Nicholls from SparkLoop is here this week. We talk all about what makes a good newsletter, what mistakes to avoid, and how to come up with good content as well as how to make money from that content.

It’s a packed episode and totally worth your time, especially if you’re an independent creator. I came away from this conversation my mind blown and lots of plans for how to rework my newsletter. So be sure to sign up. You’ll get a call to action later on.

But for now, if you want to learn more about Louis and get all of the things that we talked about, head over to streamlined.fm/262. You’ll also find this episode’s sponsors over there: NitroPack, Tailor Brands, TextExpander, and Nexcess. So be sure to thank all of them. Again, that link is streamlined.fm/262. But for now, let’s get into the intro and then the interview.

[00:02:20] <intro music>

Joe Casabona: Hey everybody, and welcome to How I Built It, the podcast that helps small business owners create engaging content that drives sales. Each week I talk about how you can build good content faster to increase revenue, and establish yourself as an authority. I’m your host Joe Casabona. Now let’s get to it.

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As a thank you for signing up, you will get a free content planner that I use personally with YouTube and podcasting. That is built-in Airtable. You’ll get that completely for free if you head over to streamlined.fm/airtable. Become a more efficient creator with free weekly tips delivered directly to your inbox every Wednesday morning at 7 a.m. eastern over at streamlined.fm/airtable.

[00:03:41] <podcast begins>

Joe Casabona: Hey everybody! We are here with Louis Nicholls. He is the co-founder of SparkLoop. I’m really excited to talk to Louis because I recently upgraded to Convert Kit Pro or Convert Kit Creator Pro—I should have probably looked up the package name before I said it—mostly because it comes with SparkLoop, which is a built-in referral program for your email newsletter.

Growing my newsletter is something I’ve been trying to do for a long time. And I’m really excited about the prospects of this. I’m also rolling out a new one. Maybe by the time this episode comes out, it will be out. But that’s enough about me and the context. Let’s bring in our guest. Louis, how are you today?

Louis Nicholls: Hey, thanks for having me. I am doing pretty well. It’s Tuesday already, but it feels like a Thursday.

Joe Casabona: Yes. I agree. I’ve had a very productive couple of weeks, which is rare for me, especially with three small children running around at home. Well, one is just laying around right now. So it’s felt really good to be… I’m going to spin that as four days worth of productive in two days.

So I’m really excited to dive in here. I heard about SparkLoop, I want to say, through Brennan Dunn, former guest of the podcast. I saw it in his Create&Sell newsletter, which I’ve accumulated some amount of money from the referrals I’ve made, which is super exciting. But then I’ve also seen it in other places, and then I saw it again… ConvertKit have that integration. Can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what SparkLoop does?

Louis Nicholls: I can, indeed. So I am one of the two co-founders of SparkLoop. My background is in marketing and just generally building and selling tech startups. I’ve done a couple of different businesses. I came together with my current co-founder about two years ago, yeah, that’s about right, two years ago to start SparkLoop.

We, as you said, are a newsletter referral tool. So we make it very, very easy to give each of your newsletter subscribers a link that they can share with their friends. When their friends go through that link and sign up, you get a point. And the more points you get, the more rewards you win. And you can be entered into giveaways and do all kinds of fun stuff like that. So it’s just a nice way to boost organic growth.

If you think about it, every time you send out an email, there’s hopefully hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even millions of people on that list who could share or could not share. And giving them a little incentive, a little nudge to go and do that is a very worthwhile thing to do.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, it’s super effective. I subscribe to Mailbrew and I’ve promoted their newsletter in part because of the really good… I mean, that’s like a must-read every morning for me. But I promote it more because of the referral program.

The same thing with Brennan Dunn’s newsletter. There’s a ton of value. And then I’m incentivized to share that value. So it’s not like I’m just sharing it for the rewards. But the rewards are that nudge to be like, “All right, yeah, I’ll tweet this.”

Louis Nicholls: Yeah, exactly. It’s referrals, not just the newsletters but anywhere in general, people are not going to be out there referring stuff that they don’t believe in, that they can’t get behind, that they wouldn’t want to have associated with them, that they don’t think is a value to the people they’re sharing it with, in most cases.

But even then, like even if there is something that you kind of think, “Well, this is really cool,” how often do you actually go out and take the time, take those couple of seconds that it takes to stop what you were doing before and go and share that publicly? It’s nowhere near as much as you might be willing to do if someone just asked you. And having that nudge, especially with the little cherry on top of the reward really makes it a lot easier and a lot more powerful.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. And something that I’ve seen kind of before this is like, “You like this? Forward it to somebody.” I was never super keen on that because they could unsubscribe me for one. But also I feel like if you’re getting that personalized content or I have to pick one person to share it with, I’m not going to forward it in mass to a bunch of people.

Louis Nicholls: Yeah, definitely. That is the thing about forwarding is it tends to be like a one-to-one thing, and it’s a real hard sell. You’re really pushing that into their inbox. I mean, even for us across all of the newsletters, the creators, the brands that we work with, you can’t forward your referral link. You can forward the email and get people to sign up through the referral link.

We have a little box that you can put people’s email addresses in and send them a signup link. It’s a fraction of… I think it’s less than 1% likely of the total number of referrals that actually happen. Just because sharing in groups, sharing online, sharing where you have a larger presence of people who are kind of stumbling over it naturally, and maybe browsing for content anyway, it just works way better. The email inbox for most people is a to-do list, and they don’t really appreciate having suggestions pop up in their to-do list.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s exactly right. In fact, all of my newsletters, except for the ones that I signed up for kind of pre-getting Feedbin, but all of my newsletters basically go to Feedbin now. Again, except for Morning Brew and Brennan’s because that email address is tied to the referral program, and I don’t want to lose them. But yeah, you’re absolutely right. If I want to read something, I’m sending it in one place and I don’t want to cluttering up my inbox.

So we first met when I got SparkLoop. I don’t know if you’re still doing this. I don’t want to put you on blast or anything. But I got a Calendly link saying, “Hey, you want to do an onboarding call or a Q&A thing?” And you offered a lot of really good advice there that I suspect is out in your own channels. And we’ll link to SparkLoop and everything we talked about over at streamlined.fm/262. So you can find a bunch of links there.

But one thing that I kind of sat back and waited on for implementing SparkLoop for my own newsletter is my weekly newsletter is very generic. It’s like, “Here’s some stuff I’m working on. Here’s all the content I wrote. Here’s a recommendation.” I don’t feel like I’d have a really good call to action for “Hey, do you know somebody who can’t just visit my blog and see what I’ve written?”

So I’ve rolled out a newsletter at podcastliftoff.com/tips. I think I also have getpodcasts.tips—but I got to double-check that—where it’s a twice weekly newsletter, shorter form, but it’s a lot more targeted. It’s tips for growing your podcast and episode ideas. How important is that kind of niche down newsletter? Because you want to provide value. And I don’t think that my normal mailing list weekly roundup newsletter is a ton of value.

Louis Nicholls: That’s a really interesting one. So personal newsletters are slightly more difficult to do referrals on because the value prop is basically getting more of an insight to you as a person. And that’s only valuable to people who already know you, in most cases. So people who are on those lists tend to really like it and the engagement tends to be higher. There’s a lot of value for them. But it’s not objective value. It’s subjective value that only would be interesting to someone who knows you.

So referral programs often is not the best fit for that, if you’re really writing about yourself. It just doesn’t tend to be such a good fit. Because again those people who don’t know you, the value doesn’t exist for them in the same way the people who know you. It exists for those people.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t run a referral program to the existing audience on that list, though. It just means that the thing that you ask them to share with their friends, the thing that those friends are going to be asked to sign up for probably shouldn’t be an email signup form saying, “Hey, follow along with the stuff that I… you know, this person that you don’t know doing in my day to day life.” So you might want to use a lead magnet, you might want to use something a little bit more concrete to give them to share, that will get those referrals through the door.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. And I think a lot of small business owners listening to this podcast, a lot of the content lately has been focused on independent creators, speakers, authors, educators, podcasters. One of the biggest mistakes that I made with my newsletter was first of all not building it fast enough.

Like for the first two years of my podcast, the call to action was, “Like us Apple, whatever, or whatever it was called back then. Like us on iTunes.” And not like, “Join my mailing list.” And even since I don’t think I segmented properly. Now the only newsletter I’m sending out at this moment as we record is the weekly personal newsletter, which as you said, only really works for people who are interested in me.

So those are the mistakes I’ve made. How can independent creators, small business owners avoid those mistakes when they’re starting a newsletter? And when is a good time to introduce a referral program into that newsletter?

Louis Nicholls: Two big questions. So first one, how to avoid those mistakes. I don’t know if it is a mistake, firstly. That’s your personal newsletter. What do you want to write about? I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think you can add in different newsletters. There’s no reason you can’t ask them if they also want to get an email from you on a specific topic that maybe ends up growing a lot faster because it’s easier to grow something that’s more specific as a more concrete and obvious perceived value to it for people who aren’t signed up yet.

I mean, it’s not like personal newsletters are bad. It’s just slightly more difficult to grow. So it’s sort of slightly more difficult to pitch products and to get sponsors and to sell from them as well.

I say that, you have to take it with a pinch of salt though, because it’s the classic marketers answer. It always depends. Because, again, some of the best newsletters that use SparkLoop, they have quite personal newsletters. They’ve written from one person and they are unlike the interesting things that that person has found that week.

Like James Clear or J. Klaus, for example, those would be two pretty good examples. Trevor McKendrick. Its collections of things that they found. It’s interesting things that they’re thinking about. So I guess there’s no one size fits all answer there. I guess it depends on how personal the content is maybe.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s true. I’m more familiar with James Clear’s trajectory than J. Klaus’ though I’ve been following him more lately. James did have a fairly specific lead and that got people interested in him. I assumed more people would just be interested in me and the things I was doing. Which I mean, I have like 1,000 people on my newsletter. I want to grow that to 3,000 this year. So I don’t know if that’s an insane goal.

Louis Nicholls: No, not at all. That’s definitely not an insane goal. That’s something that I think… I don’t know if we’ve reached that point in the recording yet. But if there is one thing that I would be able to leave people with as a takeaway is that your email growth goals are way, way, way smaller and less ambitious than they should be. They should be a lot more ambitious.

That would be the thing I think that I would say, like just looking across all of the different creators we’ve worked with, the publishers, what distinguishes the ones who are really successful from the ones who aren’t. Yes, there’s a lot of different things and it comes down to quality of content, consistency, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But there’s a definite, definite correlation between mindset of someone who is professional and someone who really takes growth seriously and expects to grow the newsletter really quickly. And people who are in that kind of like more traditional sort of like blogging mindset of “Oh, I’ve got a newsletter. I have a pop up on my website.” Some people will trickle that in every now and again. And it’s going to be five years to get to 2,000, 3,000 subscribers, but that’s just the game.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that is really interesting. Because I think all the things you said are the things that people kind of go to first. Those are the things that are easy to mimic. You go to a website, you see a pop-up with a lead magnet, and you’re like, “Oh, all right, I can do that. I can give you a list of my five favorite blog posts, or whatever.” And there’s a lead magnet.

But as I can attest to, that is not always the best way to grow. I have found a lot more success with a lead magnet I have called the Smash framework. It’s 5 Ways to Make Money Podcasting that I put at both the bottom of my podcasts specific blog posts as well as it’s like a pre-roll ad at the beginning of my Make Money Podcasting podcast. So that’s targeted to people who are there and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, that’s definitely something I want to learn more about.

Louis Nicholls: Definitely. And people love concrete value. We’ve seen this over the last couple of years as the newsletter trend has really taken off. People love receiving newsletters as much, if not more than they did three, five, definitely 10 years ago. There hasn’t been a dip there.

What there has been is there’s now a resistance to putting in your email address for the value proposition of I am going to send you emails at some point in the future and hopefully you’ll like them. And if not, well, you got to remember to unsubscribe. People do not like joining newsletters. People like being on newsletters. So you’ve got to find something better to give them, in most cases, to get them into the list in the first place. It’s got to be something that helps them overcome that hurdle.

Now, there are exceptions to that, like Morning Brew and The Hustle I think as well on the skim. That sort of generic newsletter where there is nothing that they could offer that would get you into the email list. There’s no lead magnet for “I’m going to send you news.” I don’t think I’m going to send you a roundup of the best news from the last year. That makes no sense. So what works for them, and this is true for nearly everything that Morning Brew does, what works for them probably isn’t going to work for you.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s a really good point. I do constantly think about that. Because they have the Morning Brew and they’ve got the Money Scoop and Crypto Roundup or whatever. They got like 400 different newsletters. But I think about that a lot because I guess I just like news. That’s the trigger for me to go in and open up Feedbin and read their newsletter. Plus, I love their games. I’m really good at spotting the fake headline.

Louis Nicholls: It’s a really interesting point. Most creators, at least most newsletter creators, you aren’t aiming to replicate what Morning Brew is doing. Morning Brew is creating a habit. Each newsletter by itself is not particularly valuable. It’s the habit that they’re creating that’s valuable for you. It’s the long-term effect. It’s going to be a little bit of fun, a little bit of learning, a little bit of just feeling kind of good about yourself and being part of the in-crowd feeling like you know what’s going on. But it’s that five-minute daily habit that they’re creating.

Most publishers, most creators who aren’t in the new space, we aren’t trying to create a habit. We’re trying to deliver kind of direct value in an email. Maybe it is a couple of times a week. Maybe it’s once a week. Maybe it’s even every two weeks or every month in the worst case. But what we’re trying to do in most cases is very different to what more of a traditional publishing company is trying to do, which is to create that habit.

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Joe Casabona: I think about maybe the newsletters I pay for. One is the Dispatch, the other is Very Serious, so that we can have kind of good balance, politically, at least in the US. Those are both kind of left and right or center or right and left or center respectively. And I pay those and those are delivered to my inbox. I think they have good coverage.

But again, the free ones I am on like Corey Haines’ newsletter, I’m on Arielle Nissenblatt’s EarBuds Collective newsletter, which is podcasts in a specific topic, subject area. And right, those are delivering some amount of value to me. I’m seeing what other podcasts are out there, how I can network with other podcasters. I’m learning interesting marketing things.

So when it comes to that, I think maybe our path here could be, as we talked about in the pre-show, you have a ton of stuff on what to offer for your referral program and the value proposition there. So we can direct people to your blog. I’ll have some of those specific links in the show notes.

But I think for a lot of people, trying to figure out what to write for the newsletter. Probably something that people think is, What can I write for my newsletter that I haven’t already written on my blog? That was something that I was stuck on for a while. Why would I put this in my newsletter when it’s already public?

And then we can kind of move that into, how does one make money from their newsletter? Because ConvertKit Pro is not cheap. But I obviously see the value in paying for it. The same thing with SparkLoop or pretty much any ESP that’s worth their salt. They’re going to cost money. So what’s the value proposition there?

I know I just threw a lot at you. Let’s talk about, first, what do we write about in it? How do we provide value for our newsletter? How do we get inspiration for our newsletter?

Louis Nicholls: I think that’s a great question. And I think it’s something that a lot of people don’t think about enough when they start off. They start off with “I’m going to write this newsletter.” And then the second question they ask is, “How do I get people to sign up and read it and like it?” Which is completely the wrong way around of doing these things.

You need to start off with the person at the end of it first. I’m a big proponent of, yes, sure, have a newsletter signup form from day one where you’re capturing emails, but I definitely don’t make that the focus to begin with. I would start off by talking to people by being online on Twitter and different places where you can have conversations with the people where you can get to understand your audience, what they’re looking for, what value you can provide them with.

Creating online to begin to build a little bit of a profile for you. Or maybe you’re writing on a blog, maybe you’re writing even on like LinkedIn or Medium or one of these places. Maybe you don’t tweet threads rather than that. Putting the ideas out so you can get immediate feedback from a lot of people and seeing who it’s resonating with and learning from them and getting the comments.

The downside of a newsletter is, and a blog to some extent, is that the volume and the quality, and the quantity of feedback that you get is very low compared to basically any other channel. Maybe not the quality. I’m sure YouTube has much problems with the quality.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. No one calls me names in my newsletter.

Louis Nicholls: Not yet. I’ve signed up. It’s going to happen next week. Just you wait.

Joe Casabona: Perfect.

Louis Nicholls: I mean, start off in a place where you can have a conversation. The time that you want to launch the newsletter in my opinion, is when you’re relatively sure that if I go and post this in the places that I hang out and tell the people who I’ve been talking to about this topic, I’m going to get 50 or 100 people signing up from that initial round of just telling people about it for sure. Like, no question I’d have 100 people on my list.

Like if you’ve written three or four newsletter posts and sent them out to people, and you haven’t gotten like 50 to 100 people signed up at that point… I mean, there are exceptions. Again, if you’re writing in like a super niche space, like, I don’t know, CBD oil for nuclear physicists or something like that, of course, you’re not going to get to 100-

Joe Casabona: Underwater basket weaving is the one that I think a lot of computer science nerds use.

Louis Nicholls: So that kind of thing. Of course, in that case, there’s going to be exceptions. But in general, even with a pretty specific niche, you should absolutely be confident that the conversations you’ve had, the reputation you’ve built, the places you’ve been to hang out on that you’re going to get 50 to 100 people signing up.

And then the content I think really comes from that. I think the things that newsletter creators specifically can learn from other types of media is just go and leverage everybody else. If it’s YouTube videos, if you are creating Tik Tok content or really any kind of content, you will naturally reach out to others for co-promotional stuff, right? Co-marketing, co-creation. If you’re doing a podcast, one of the things you do when you get started very often is you’ll have guests on or you’ll collaborate and you’ll mention people and give them a shout-out.

A newsletter creators, for some reason, don’t really follow that trend. They copy it. And they over-index and like, “Oh, it’s going to be super valuable. It has to be secret inside of the newsletter. We can’t just be writing the same stuff. That’s already out there.”

Really the call to action is give them the stuff for free. Put it everywhere that you can possibly where people who might be interested are willing to read it and consume it, repurpose, tweak it, do it in different formats, and then include a link to sign up to continue to get that stuff in an easy format in your inbox, which is the place where you read stuff in the morning so you don’t have to go and find it again.

That’s where I would definitely be beginning. I would not be trying to think about the content in that sense. I would be talking to people and really just understanding. In the same way that if you’re building a software product or something like that, you want to be talking to people from day one.

Joe Casabona: Wow. That’s such great advice. I’ve taken Build Your Newsletter courses and I’ve seen conventional wisdom that’s like, “Just email your family and friends and ask them to sign up.” And I’m like, “That feels like I’m doing it to pump the numbers.” My mom loves me, but she’s never going to buy podcast coaching from me for like a million reasons.

Louis Nicholls: Definitely. It also has other downsides in that you get people who then don’t open and then quit the unsubscribe and your reputation. Like your domain authority or sending authority. Thanks. And your open rates are not a true reflection of how well things are going. It’s useless.

Joe Casabona: That’s exactly right. Maybe that was good advice 15 years ago, or whatever, when social media wasn’t as big a thing and you were really just trying to build a list and get some feedback. And maybe your friends aren’t interested. And maybe it is the personal newsletter.

But what you say, post around, talk on social media, that was really the inspiration for this new podcast tips newsletter. I was tweeting, “What’s the hardest thing about podcasting to you? Finish this sentence. I would be a more consistent podcaster if…” And people would say things and I’m like, “Great, I’m writing these down. I’m going to package them up.” I haven’t launched yet, because I want to have 30 tips to start. So that gives me like some large enough 15 weeks of content. It’s an evergreen newsletter. So I love that.

And then I’m going to skip collaborate. I want to go back to this. But give the people stuff for free and continue to get this stuff in an easy format. I think a lot of creators, myself included, for a while, think I blogged it so people saw it. And that’s not the case.

Louis Nicholls: No, that’s absolutely not the case. I mean, there’s a reason that people… it’s much easier for them to consume content in their inboxes. It’s there. The tab doesn’t get closed as much. They get a notification about it, they can read it on their phone, whenever they’re… I don’t know what they’re doing. They’re waiting for a minute, having a coffee, in the bathroom, doesn’t really matter. They can read it whenever they have that 30 seconds.

I’m a big proponent of getting it in the inbox, which is great. But also completely in the opposite direction, you can’t just leave it in on the blog or in the inbox. It has to be repurposed in as many places as you can online and in as many different formats as feasible. I mean, if it’s a personal newsletter, then it doesn’t really need to be because it’s only for people who follow you personally anyway.

But if it’s a more of business-related newsletter or something that has value to people who don’t necessarily know you, well, you should be putting that in every place where those people hang out in a format that they will like.

Joe Casabona: And then that’s also less work for you. Again, I have this new podcast. It’s weekly because, I don’t know, I’ve decided that I only do weekly podcasts. And lately I’ve been struggling and I’m like, “I have a couple of years worth of blog posts. I can repurpose and read those. And then you know what, I can break those into smaller tips and those can be podcast tips. I can break the posts into Twitter threads or I can at least have a catalytic question and then promote a specific post at the end.”

So, huge fan of repurposing. It’s a great way to stay consistent. Maybe it’s a hard thing to hear, but people aren’t just refreshing your blog every day. They don’t have the tab open and they are like, “Oh, did Joe post today?”

When I email people every week, the blog post because I usually do like a blog post, podcast episode, a YouTube video, the blog post usually gets the most clicks. People are interested. “Oh, this article that Joe wrote about yacht rock, real post I published yesterday, sounds interesting.” So I think that’s really good advice.

Louis Nicholls: And if there are people who are refreshing your blog every day, then you should reach out to those people as soon as possible and find out exactly why they are refreshing your blog every day and what it is about them or what it is about what you’re writing that makes them really interested because those are good people to have in your sphere. And you would like to work out how to get a lot more of them. Those are super, super valuable people to have.

Joe Casabona: See now I just got an idea for a WordPress plugin where every time a blog is refreshed within a certain period, you increase the calendar? And if they do it 10 times that a pop-up comes up, hey, why do you like this so much? So look for that over on shop.casabona.org.

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Joe Casabona: You mentioned collaboration. This is an idea that I just came across myself earlier this week. And you’re right. I tell my podcast students all the time, the best way to grow your podcast is to get on other people’s podcasts. But I never once thought the best way for me to grow my newsletter is to get on other people’s newsletters or collaborate in some way.

So what does that look like? Am I just asking people to promote it? Or am I writing a piece for their newsletter? How have you seen that collaboration work?

Louis Nicholls: Yeah, totally. I think there are probably about three ways to do this. The easy one is what’s kind of trendily called permissionless co-marketing, which is just mentioned people in the blog. Use them as case studies. I actually have it in my writing checklist that I have myself, which is go through and then at the end I will look through and say, “Okay, well, where can I insert useful contextual links to other people and other brands as examples that they’ll create value in the article, but also it’s going to shine them in a positive light? And mention that.

And then when I repurpose that, I’ll share it and I’ll tag them on social media, I’ll tag them on Twitter, and so on. And then we haven’t done an official collaboration together, but more often than not, if it’s good, they’re likely to share or give it a like or maybe even sign up themselves and check it out. Over time, just as part of your process, it does help you to grow.

The other way of doing it is just to bring people in and either interview them or just let them write the email. It’s actually great for you as a creative because it’s really good to have people come in and take the work off your plate and write something interesting. That actually saves you time, a lot of time.

So having them come in and write something even if their audience maybe isn’t much bigger than yours, maybe they’re like one rung above you, one rung below, somewhere in that range, like the two to four rungs on that kind of, I don’t know, internet famous ladder. That’s a really good way of getting good content, getting them to promote it, and also saving yourself some time.

And then I guess what you were originally thinking of which I think is super, super valuable, and it’s very similar to podcasts is, well, why not cross-promote with other newsletters? Why not even sponsor other newsletters in some cases? So you can do newsletter takeovers.

And one of the easiest ways to start with this is to… sorry, I’m going to do a quick aside. It’s really difficult to build your audience and podcasts have bad discoverability. Newsletters have even worse discoverability because there isn’t even like a place where you download the newsletters.

Joe Casabona: There’s not like the Apple podcasts in newsletters.

Louis Nicholls: Yeah, exactly. You can’t search for the same guest who you’ve had on your podcast, and find all the newsletters the same way that you can do for a podcast. So it’s even more difficult. I think by far the best place to start there is once you have 100, 200 subscribers or even up into like the tens of thousands, every now and again send them an email and say, “Hey, what other newsletters are you reading?” And you’ll get some good answers. And then you want to reach out to those people and do a cross-promotion with them because they likely have a very similar audience.

And the nice thing about newsletters is newsletter readers tend to read quite a lot of newsletters on average. So even if you have let’s say 500 subscribers and the newsletter that you’re thinking of doing cross-promotion with only has 500 subscribers. Reaching out and doing a cross-promotion with them can drive 100, 200 subscribers in some cases to your audience. You can literally almost, in some cases, double your list overnight by doing that kind of thing.

It’s really powerful because it’s such a good fit. Even though the potential size of that market is super small, so many of them are going to be a good fit and convert. That is really worth doing especially in the early stages.

And I would be trying to build that in… If not every week, I would be trying to do that at least one or two times a month. Because when you’re at 100 or 200 subscribers, you only have to do that maybe 10 times and you’re up at 1,000. At 1000, you only have to do it another five times and you’re up at 5000.

Joe Casabona: Wow, that’s really, really good advice. I definitely took some personal notes of who am I going to let write my newsletter one week, who am I going to collaborate with like that. And then sponsoring. You’re putting out a little bit of money there. But I mean, assuming you’re looking at similar size creators, it’s probably not going to cost a ton of money for you to sponsor a newsletter.

Louis Nicholls: True. That’s true. And especially you can do something a little bit reciprocal. So you can say, “I’ll give you a shout out to my newsletter, you’ll give me a shout out from yours and I’ll pay something,” for example.

I’m going to do a quick free plug if this is okay. We actually have a free tool at SparkLoop which is called Magic. It’s at SparkLoop.app/magic. It’s basically a free tool for doing newsletter cross-promotions and sponsorships. It doesn’t help you find other sponsors or newsletters yet.

But what it does is you can create a link, you give that to the newsletter that you’re sponsoring, they include that link inside of their newsletter sent, and people who click on the link from their audience from inside of the newsletter will be added automatically into your email list with just one click. So it’s completely frictionless. On average, it almost doubles the number of new subscribers you get from a sponsorship or from a cross-promotion.

Joe Casabona: That’s incredible. Because you want to reduce that amount of friction just all the time, right? I want to sign up for a newsletter and they’re like, “What’s your phone number?” I’m like, “I’m out. There’s no reason you would ever need my phone number.” I love this. I have it up. I will 100% be signing up for this after our interview. Because again, like I said, my goal for this year is to triple my newsletter subscribers, right? This is going to be the main way that I drive my income in the coming years. So I’m making a very concerted effort.

So we talked a little bit about what do we write, how do we collaborate, how can we make money with our newsletter. I think a lot of people know that there’s the direct sell, probably what a lot of creators are doing. But can we sell too much? Are there other ways that we’re not thinking about?

Louis Nicholls: I mean, it’s super audience-dependent. So if you have more of a consumer audience, then it’s going to be slightly more difficult to sell things directly unless you have a physical product or a course or some kind.

My take on this is that, in general, at the beginning, it’s always better where possible to try and have high ticket items. Again, obviously, I’m thinking this is more for a b2b audience where maybe you’re doing services, or maybe you’re teaching them a specific skill either as a course or as a one-on-one lesson or as a cohort-based thing, as an eBook. However it is delivered, you’ve got something like that going on.

I think that for me is by far the best because it’s also a proxy for the value that you’re creating for them. It’s easier to be aligned with them when you’re providing them value for free if, you know, the way that you’re monetizing your audience is also kind of them paying you directly.

On the other side, I’m not at all against advertising. I think it’s slightly more difficult to do it in the very early stages unless you have a very, very focused niche list. And you also need to have a little bit of trust and authority. So that’s probably not something that you’re realistically going to be seeing like… You’re not going to be making six figures from advertising until you get to at least 10,000 subscribers. Realistically, probably quite a bit more than that unless you have a very specific niche.

Whereas I know a lot of creators who have an audience have way less than 5,000 subscribers, in some cases, less than 1,000 and are happily monetizing to over six figures a year all that from direct stuff that they’re selling. Now, I like the mix of both. I don’t like having the… You know, why not have advertising or affiliate revenue where it makes sense on the low end for the people who are free, and to have something that’s more high ticket like a cause or services business or something on the high end?

What I tend to avoid in the middle, which I think doesn’t make much sense for most people, is some kind of recurring subscription of some kind. Like a paid newsletter or something like that for you know, 5, 10, 20 bucks a month. It’s not that there is anything inherently wrong with them. It’s just they are by far the most difficult way to monetize if you can monetize in any other way in 99% of the cases.

Joe Casabona: Got you. That’s really interesting. Because I was thinking of focusing my general nurture sequence on my membership, which it’s a bunch of courses so you could make that a high ticket item. But you see the rise of like Substack and even ConvertKit offers the paid subscribers but you think about that and…

I’ll use Josh Barro again because at the beginning of the year, he left his job at KCRW to start his own paid subscription newsletter. But his audience was huge. He talked about how he was up to like 1,000 people in the first week. So like 1,000 people paying 100 bucks a year, you know, you do the math. So you do need to have that huge audience. So as you scale and as you grow, that’s probably a better route to take.

But I like the idea of a high ticket item or services. You’re telling people what they need to do. And then people are like, “I don’t want to do that. Can you just do that for me?”

Louis Nicholls: I just think the membership route is difficult because it just doesn’t make sense. It’s not aligned with the value that you’re going to be providing in most cases. Exceptions are around like news, newsletters, and communities that the value is just in like being part of the community and you want to be there long term, right? Sure, I get that. That’s nice. That’s great.

In most cases, if you’re teaching someone how to podcast, I think, if you’re teaching someone how to do sales, which is what I used to do in my old course business, if you’re teaching someone a specific marketing skill or even how to grow a newsletter, if they still are paying the same thing for that same kind of content after two years, you’ve done a really bad job of teaching them how to grow a newsletter.

You do not want that person to be on a recurring subscription. You may have like higher tiers and other things that they go on to buy when they reached like the next level of how to grow the newsletter. Like, how do I hire someone underneath me to work on this newsletter and stuff like that. But that doesn’t need to be a recurring subscription. Like just give them the course. And when they’re ready, then they’ll move on to the expensive thing, and then the next thing, and so on.

I think that I know a lot of creators who are what we would call in that… What’s the word? Sort of like middle class of the creative economy who are all in the subscription phase where they’re making 10 bucks a month or more, like 50 to $75 a year per subscriber.

Joe Casabona: You’re talking to one right now. That’s exactly where I am at.

Louis Nicholls: The way I describe it, let me know if you feel this way.

Joe Casabona: I will not be offended or anything. This is great. This is why I started this podcast so I could get advice.

Louis Nicholls: The way that I describe it from how other people have talked to me about this is that it seems to me like this is a golden hamster wheel. It seems interesting. You get on, it’s like, “Oh, cool, I’m going to make five bucks or 10 bucks a month from them every month just carrying on. They’re probably going to keep doing that. And I’ll get more and more people in and it’s going to keep growing and growing. Slowly, but it will keep growing.”

And then at a certain point, you’re like, “Well, how do I get off this hamster wheel and still have some money? I can’t. I promised to keep providing them with value every month for this $5. How do I get someone else in to help me create this content? Well, maybe they only want to learn from me. Have I done a good enough job at that, which is a separate issue that maybe we can talk about at some point. I don’t really have a good answer to that yet. I’ve seen some people do interesting things.

But I think that subscription revenue can be a blessing and a curse. And I think it’s most of the people who I see doing subscription revenue right now probably would be a lot happier and make a lot more money and have a lot more sustainable businesses if they stopped with the subscription and split it into kind of one time payments, high ticket items, plus advertising and then affiliates. Maybe that kind of like sponsor me, support me with $5 a month here kind of thing on the low end.

Joe Casabona: That’s really interesting. So I’m going to link, in the show notes, to an interview I did with John Warrillow last year. He kind of said the exact opposite that you’re saying right now: that subscription businesses are super important. Now, it probably depends on your business. But if we’re talking to creators, I’m inclined with the last couple of years of my own experience to think that you’re right.

You do see huge creators, you know, Pat Flynn, the folks at Relay FM, and other places launching subscription business, but again, they have really big audiences. Those people are willing to pay five bucks a month to never hear ads in most cases.

But for example, with Creator Crew Pro, perhaps that should be better positioned as a short term membership, where it’s more of an incubator where I teach you something very specific over the course of several months; And then you churn out but I’m not going to be upset about it. Whereas the people who are members of this podcast are happy to keep paying five bucks a month to hear three extended episodes. That is a hamster wheel.

I talked about how when you’re going to launch a membership it should be low effort, high reward for the people. It doesn’t cost me any extra to remove the ads because they’re inserted later. Spoiler alert, I guess. It doesn’t cost me anything as long as the guest is cool with it to talk to them for an extra 10 minutes about some other things.

So I think you’re absolutely right. Trying to find that balance of well, what’s free content? What’s member content? How do I continuously add value for my members is a stressful thing for creators.

Louis Nicholls: For sure. I just want to clarify that real quick. I don’t want to come off saying that seeming like I hate subscription revenue. I don’t. I run a software as a service business. It is subscription revenue. I love the subscription and the recurring element of it. I just think it’s very, very difficult for the average creator to make the same amount of money kind of sustainably in long term with subscriptions as it would be with mainly one-off kind of paid items.

Joe Casabona: That’s exactly right. The heavy caveat here is creators. I mean, look at Netflix. Netflix hemorrhages money every year to build their library of good content. So I guess if you have VC funding for your little creator business… That sounds pejorative. If you have VC money for your creative business, have that. Launch the membership and hemorrhage money to make that content. But most of us are bootstrapped and we’ve got to do what makes the most sense for us. Maybe charge those one-offs and bundle it together later. Do what works best for your audience, I guess, is what we’re saying here.

Louis Nicholls: Yeah, totally. Just do what’s easiest, the most direct route to providing value. If you’re stuck in with a subscription revenue, then that’s fine. I know people who have again those kind of political takes newsletters. There’s no easy way to get people to pay upfront for that, because the value is happening over time and it will continue to happen. So you kind of got to go subscription plus hopefully advertising on that route, maybe events and stuff like that, maybe some affiliate.

But in that case, well, that’s just the way you have to do it. You don’t have any choice. I wouldn’t blindly follow that just because Substack says, “Don’t do advertising. Advertising doesn’t work. And you should be doing paid subscriptions.” I mean, the reason Substack says do paid subscriptions is because they get to take 10% of your paid subscription rates. Take anything of your advertising.

Joe Casabona: It’s like how headliner says that audiograms increase engagement by 60% or something like that. Headliner makes audiograms. It behooves them to find that. Where in my personal experience audiograms are not worth the effort.

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Joe Casabona: So to recap, because we talked about a lot there, making money is audience dependent in general for creators, high ticket items, maybe services or teaching a specific skill because your newsletter is a proxy for the value you’re creating. Advertising might work if you have a big audience and recurring subscription is going to be really difficult for creators because you still need that big audience. But then you’re on the, like you said, the golden hamster wheel. As a creator, you need to continuously… at least feel like you need to continuously add value to make sure that people don’t churn out too much.

Louis Nicholls: I think that’s a great summary. I think it’s an interesting time to be a creator. But I think we’ve got it quite figured out on the monetization side of things. If you factor in that you also have to grow the list as well, you have to write the content and create everything. I love high ticket items. And the one I love at the moment most is probably live workshops.

You have to do a bit of preparation, but people seem to value them. They seem to have a really high willingness to pay for live stuff versus more on-demand content. And you get that feedback. You get to watch people when you’re teaching stuff and see where they check out, where they stop watching, where they’re confused. You get to see what questions they ask. And then you can turn that into whatever you want, whether it’s a book, a course, whatever.

Joe Casabona: That is a really great point. Because again, I offer a lot of pre-recorded courses, and most of them are good. But a live workshop would allow people to get something maybe super actionable. I don’t have to worry about the completion rate as long as they show up and we can work through it together. Which is I guess the next successor of that would be like a cohort-based course where people are showing up and… That’s like a series of live workshops. And that could be a really high ticket item.

Louis Nicholls: Yeah, definitely. I mean, that’s the way that I do things. My process is if I’m doing a course, and I have done six course launches in the past, it’s to jump in and say, “Well, I’m going to do a live… Probably I’m going to do some live coaching calls first, then I’m going to do a live workshop.”

And that’s easy for me to do. It’s low risk. It’s low friction. It gets me to assess the demand. I can see exactly where I’ve missed out bits and where I’m talking about rubbish that people don’t care about. That’s not why they’re there. I can hear their questions. Then I can pack that up into a cohort-based course where I can charge a lot more for it because it’s live. And I get that detailed one-on-one feedback and I can make adjustments as I go.

And after I’ve done that once, maybe twice, well, then I can turn that into the package to kind of done for you, view it on demand. Nicely put together, polished video course, for example, it takes me a couple of weeks to do and cost me a lot more in terms of time, and energy, and money to put together.

Joe Casabona: Maybe we’ll talk about courses in Build Something More. But that’s really something to consider. A lot of people will develop the course, go into a whole for six weeks and create that course for six months and then come out and be like, “It’s done,” and then nobody buys it. They’re like, “Well, I just wasted six months.” That’s a really good path.

We have been talking for almost an hour at this point, which has been a lot of fun. I do want to be cognizant of your time. So as we wrap up here, you’ve given us so much good advice, but I do need to ask, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Louis Nicholls: Any trade secrets. I was thinking about this before. All of the trade secrets that I have that I think are useful are just annoyingly things that people tweet out on Twitter with no context, and they’re just true. So you can take for example… maybe the one that I’m going to go with… and I’m kind of changing on the fly at the moment here. I’m going to come back to the point about professionalism when it comes to email growth.

I think one of the most underrated aspects of good at growing your email audience or growing your newsletter list is having a really solid understanding and a professional attitude towards in effect paid growth. So it doesn’t need to be referral programs. That can be any kind of paid channel, any kind of way of growing your newsletter.

But having a really solid understanding of saying, “Hey, I don’t need to wait around and get subscribers for free. I am going to create a business and create something of value where I can spend exactly $2 or exactly $3 or exactly $5 on acquiring a new subscriber because I understand that I’m going to make that back from now on average within three to six months, for example.” Having that mindset I think is super important.

And you would not believe the number of creators I talk to who have, for example, a course or a book or some sort of service, and the average value of an email subscriber on that list is above $20. And the amount that they have is expensive to get that new subscriber is about $1.50. It just did not make sense.

If this were any other business, if this were eCommerce, if this were a software as a service business, you would never catch a good sophisticated marketer for one of those businesses saying, Well, the average customer brings in $20 within the first six months, but we’re only going to spend $1.50 to acquire them. It would never happen.

But for some reason, it happens with newsletters because we have it kind of built into our minds from the way that newsletters started and developed as with this kind of hobbyist scene in the late 90s. You shouldn’t be paying for new subscribers. It shouldn’t cost $1 or $1.50 or $2 to acquire a new subscriber. Intrinsically you just kind of think, well, you have that negative gut reaction and think, “Oh, $2 just for someone on my email list? That just seems crazy.”

And you just kind of break that switch and go, “No, I’m going to make $15, $20, $50 from this person. We’ve mentioned a couple of people in this newsletter who I know for a fact make north of $40 or $50 per subscriber. So it’s not that every subscriber purchases, but that on average, when you break that down, it turns out to be more than $50. And to say that I’m going to drop $10 on a new subscriber, I’m going to drop $15 on new subscribers because it’s going to be worth it.

I think that my tip would be to really take another good look, an objective look at how valuable a subscriber is and get a lot more serious and aggressive about building that list.

Joe Casabona: I love that. That’s definitely a speech I needed to hear too. Because it’s something that I’m worried about. If I spend this money, will I get this? But if I spend $1 getting somebody and then they join even my $50 a year membership where it is pretty low effort for me because it’s just more of this podcast, that’s super worth it. Because now it’s like 50 bucks a year as long as they’re happy with the show. So like they’ve paid for themselves for 50 years. They’ve paid 50 times over whatever. So that’s really interesting.

Maybe it’s a little bit like how when news websites went paywall. Because when that first started, I was like, “Oh, so you are the news? Like you’re going to charge for informing the public? I thought you were the fourth estate?” But now I’m not like an angsty early 20-year-old. So I understand that things cost money. But this was so awesome. Louis, thanks so much for spending time with us today. If people want to learn more about you, where can they find you?

Louis Nicholls: I think the best place to find me is probably on Twitter over at @LouisNicholls_. I won’t spell it out for you. I’m sure it might be included in the show notes or it won’t be too difficult to find. Probably the best place there. And otherwise, you can check me out at Louisnicholls.com or at sparkloop.app. It’s where you can find us and our product.

Joe Casabona: Fantastic. I will link to all of that and more. It’s going to be a show notes rich episode because I’m going to share a bunch of the newsletters that we talked about here for you to sign up if you’d like. They will all be over at streamlined.fm/262. My newsletter will be there too if you want to get podcast tips.

Louis thanks so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.

Louis Nicholls: Thanks for having me. It’s been great.

Joe Casabona: If you want to catch an ad free extended version of our conversation where Louis and I talk a little bit about… I forgot what we said we’re going to talk about already. Super professional here. Was it-

Louis Nicholls: Topless. It was the same stuff with topless.

Joe Casabona: The same stuff with topless. …You can become a member of the Creator Crew. You can sign up over at streamlined.fm/262. Just go there, say hi to the sponsors, join the membership, find Louis. It’ll be great. But thanks so much for listening. And until next time, get out there and build something.