The beautiful thing about being a creator is that you have various channels to showcase your creativity. The ugly part? Sometimes you may feel stuck.

You can start a newsletter today and soon feel like your subscribers are not growing or that you are stuck at a certain number with the same group of people viewing your content.

While it’s good to be patient with your growth, there are situations where you’d have to go out of your way to promote your work. Because if you don’t, it may never reach the audience you want.

So what do you do?

In this guide, we share 5 effective tips to promote your newsletter and grow your subscriber list so you can get fresh eyes on your content.

1. Collaborate with other creators

Collaboration is an often underutilized method of reaching any goal in the creator economy. People collaborate for various reasons, from wanting to boost their visibility to building their network and leveraging each other’s audience, there are numerous reasons to collaborate.

Benjamin Dada,  IT Professional, and Media Entrepreneur, says “Collaborations provide access to another creator’s audience. It creates a synergy where both collaborators bring their audiences together leading to a more significant impact.”

But for collaboration to work, you must know who is ideal for you. It’s important to have a checklist or personal brand guide that helps you know what type of creator collaboration will benefit you.

Next, figure out what type of collaboration you both can do to promote your skills. Since you want to promote your newsletter, you can consider writing something of interest to your collaborator and asking them to share their opinion about it.

For example, if you have a newsletter where you talk about your experiences in content marketing and how people can get into content marketing, you can collaborate with another creator in a similar niche to contribute to the newsletter. This way, your subscribers get a fresh opinion about the same topic.

Another advantage of collaboration is that it introduces you to a new audience. This means that when a creator collaborates with you on your newsletter, they get to share it with their audience.

Without this collaboration, you’ll ordinarily not have access to their audience or community. But by simply requesting their opinion on a topic and asking them to share their experience, you get to promote your newsletter to a new audience.

Through this, more people can hear about your newsletter, read about it, and even subscribe to it.

2. Talk about it on social media

Another way to promote your newsletter aside from collaboration is to talk about it on social media. Social media is everyone’s hang-out spot. From Instagram to X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, Pinterest, Facebook, and Snapchat, these are all various platforms with diverse audiences seeking to consume content daily.

One way to feed them is by talking about your newsletter. Typically, newsletters are for your close-circle audience. They can pass as your community who you’ve taken off social media unto your email list and it feels more personal.

So, the content you share with them, wouldn’t be the same you share online with your general audience.

But there’s still a way.

You can share snippets from your newsletter. It could be your thought processes, how your list reacted to the content you shared or your inspiration for the content.

You can also talk about how writing to your list makes you feel. For some people, it makes them feel like they are talking to friends they’ve known the longest but have never met, or the partner in another country they desperately want to see.

The aim is to talk about your newsletter in such a way that anyone who isn’t on your list is missing out because you intentionally write for them.

By talking about it on social media, you can promote your newsletter and use the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) strategy to get more people to subscribe to your list and enjoy your content.

SEE: 6 Ways to Monetize Your Newsletter in 2024

3. Offer lead magnets

This typically involves giving out a free product and telling people to subscribe to your list to download it.

It is an effective promotional strategy as over 53% of marketers spend half or more of their entire budget on lead-generation efforts.

The best way to approach this is to ask your audience what they would like to learn from you. Whether it’s a topic you talk about often, a template you use, or even how you edit your pictures. Find out what your audience wants from you and use that to create a lead magnet.

Lead magnets can be ebooks, mini-courses, white papers, reports, case studies, discounts/offers, or even a trial subscription. The idea is that you offer something of value, your audience likes it so much and is willing to give their emails to get it.

For example, let’s say after asking your audience, you discover that they want to learn “How to Write Articles that Rank on Social Media.”

This is an exhaustive topic as you can’t teach it all in one lead magnet. So what you do is take out a part of the topic and make that a lead magnet. It can be a checklist for ranking on search engines or explaining one point on how to make articles rank.

With lead magnets, the goal is to show them the “what” and sell the “how.” Since you’re trying to promote your newsletter in this case, you can show them the “what” involved in making articles rank on search engines and tell them that being on your newsletter list grants them access to learn the “how.”

Generally, lead magnets can take various forms. But the most effective lead magnets;

• are free
• promote your business
• are of high value.

SEE: How to Easily Create a Lead Magnet That Converts

4. Repurpose newsletter content for social media

This simply involves turning your newsletter content into content for social media. So if you shared a hack that helped you get more work done in less time on your newsletter, you can turn that into carousels for LinkedIn and Instagram, a short video for TikTok/YouTube shorts/Instagram reels, slides for IG stories, and a full post for Facebook.

When you share the content, direct your readers to subscribe to your newsletter for more of such content.

Before you ask, yes, your newsletter content should be exclusive to your subscribers. But you can still take a page out of it to promote on social media and get more people to join your list.

The goal of repurposing is to increase the visibility and value of your content across all platforms.

Here are some tips for repurposing your newsletter content.

• Know what content formats perform better on each platform and re-create your content into such format. 
• Write with the platform in mind. Do not copy and paste content from one platform to the other. 
• Ensure the core message of your content is not lost during repurposing. In a bid to write for a purpose, you do not want to lose the core message you’re offering. 
• Don’t be scared to repost your old content. Your audience does not have the time to go to your old post. 
• Don’t make your old content useless or obsolete. If it performed better before, it can do much better again. Edit it if you have to and post it again. 

5. Run ads on other newsletters/publications

Finally, promoting your newsletter also involves running ads on other newsletters or publications to attract new audiences. For example, you can reach out to creators whose newsletters have high open rates and tell them to promote your newsletter.

But to get the most out of this, you need to tell people what they stand to gain from your newsletter. Meaning, your copy has to say the entirety of your newsletter in few but convincing words.

For example, instead of writing “Subscribe to my newsletter to learn more about content marketing,” you can say “Subscribe to my newsletter where I share my experiences getting into content marketing, tips that can help you get started, and common mistakes to avoid.“

Notice how the latter offers more clarity on what the reader stands to gain? “Learn more about content marketing” is generic and vague and anyone can learn more about it online.

But by saying you’ll include your experiences, people are hooked because everyone likes to read stories from others.

Blogs and magazines are not left out, as they are also suitable publications where you can run ads to attract more subscribers. The goal is to go to where your target audience will likely hang out, and interact with them.

Begin Your Newsletter Promotion Today

For most of these tips, you’ll spend little or no money to advertise your newsletters. But you’ll likely get the results you seek. So go ahead to choose which tips will work for you and be consistent with them. The journey is a marathon, not a sprint.

When you create a lead magnet or any other digital product, host it on Selar to make it easily accessible for everyone without getting involved.

You can begin by creating a free account.