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💡 Want your name here? Scroll to the bottom of this email to find your referral link & start referring people to Ideas to Power Your Future!

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Hiya,

How are you today?

Me? Thanks for asking!

I’m still riding the oxytocin wave that came with the realization I’ve been sending Ideas to Power Your Future for a year now! A whole year! I don’t know when 52 weeks flew by, which tells me that I’m doing what I was meant to do — and having fun in the process.

This is issue #52, so we’re going meta! We’re talking about growth levers, monetization, community, future plans, and more.

I’ll let you in on everything that makes my business tick, with full transparency. If you feel I left something out, know it wasn’t intentional. Hit reply to this email and ask away, I’m happy to answer any questions.

Quick intermezzo: missed my email yesterday? The anniversary/Black Friday discounts are still available (until Saturday). Get 30% OFF everything! The prices will go up in January, so this is the last time you can snag them at these rates:

Happy snagging!

Before we dig in, you may want to read my 6-month recap. I just did and I can’t believe how far I’ve come.

Psst, my subscribers read this before you did. Want to be the first to see analyses and roadmaps like this one? Subscribe to Ideas to Power Your Future and get them in your inbox every Thursday.

Ideas to Power Your Future in numbers

Here’s a fresh screenshot from my ConvertKit account:

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Note: my open rate usually hovers around 49.5% but I sent the anniversary discounts announcement email yesterday, and those opens are still happening.

We are now over 1,100 people in this community and I can’t thank YOU, [FIRST NAME GOES HERE], enough for being a part of it!

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They say the first year and the first 1,000 subscribers are the hardest milestones to reach. Even though I’ve barely reached them both, I know that to be right. Suddenly, a huge pressure seems to have been lifted off my chest. I know from my other business that, when that happens, everything gets easier.

If you read my 6-month analysis, you know that I wasn’t happy with my growth back then. I’m still not 100% happy but I have to note that the growth rate has nearly doubled.

Here’s what the monthly breakdown looks like:

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The outlier here is October: I spent 5 weeks in Greece this fall and I dropped the ball on promoting the newsletter. November, however, is looking mighty perky and we’re only a week in.

This graph is a better illustration of why I’m not obsessing over numbers (too much). The growth trend is clear and I’m confident I can sustain it.

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My goal for the end of 2023 was to get to 2,000 subscribers. I don’t think that will be happening, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be trying to get as close to that figure as possible.

The pebble in my shoe

The number I’m most stressed about is my unsubscribe rate. In my 6-month overview, I told you that 7% seemed absurdly high and I was planning to do something about it.

Well, I did and now it climbed to bloody 17%!!

Why?

A mix of factors:

  • Self-promo emails. Shocking absolutely no one, people hate promotional content. I’ve now added an option to opt out of them and only get the newsletter. If you don’t like them either, click here and I won’t bother you with self-promo content. However, I have to keep sending them — it takes a lot of coffee to fuel this newsletter and, as you may know, coffee is getting more expensive.
  • Acquisition channels. Since May [again, the 6-month recap is here], I’ve added quite a few of them. The most notable is the ConvertKit Creator Network. It’s been going great in terms of acquisition but most people don’t stay on. I know why — more on it later –, but there’s nothing I can do about it.
  • Contrarian takes. This issue about how women buy, for instance, broke all records and got me a whopping 8 unsubscribes. I get it: it’s an uncomfortable topic. But I won’t stop writing about topics like this. I refuse to send you lukewarm, bland, cookie-cutter inspirational content. Ideas to Power Your Future was born to prepare you for the future, to teach you how to grow an audience and how to monetize it without being sleazy — and that’s exactly what I’ll keep doing.

Enough ranting, let’s look at the good things.

What fuels the growth of this newsletter — ranked from best to worst

LinkedIn

One thing has stayed the same since May: my biggest growth lever is LinkedIn. I strongly believe in building an audience on a platform you own, so I doggedly fight against social media algorithms to bring you here.

How I do it:

  • 1 post on Wednesdays, a day before the newsletter goes out, teasing the topic and inviting my audience to subscribe. I always add a testimonial to these posts because social proof makes everything better.
  • 24 hours after the newsletter goes live, I make it public (until then, YOU are the only ones who read it — it’s my way of giving you a tiny edge). I post a summary on LinkedIn and add the link so that people can read the whole thing. There are sign-up forms throughout it, so that brings a few extra subscribers. I’m currently testing a minor change here, publishing each issue on social media after a few days, not the very next day. By the way, you can find the entire Ideas to Power Your Future archive here.
  • There’s a link to subscribe to the newsletter on my profile.
  • When I don’t mention the newsletter explicitly in my posts, I add a link to it in the comment section.

Numbers aside, LinkedIn brings me subscribers who engage a lot: they open my emails, click, and reply. They are the best subscribers I could ask for!

BUT, like any other social media platform, LinkedIn can be moody and fickle. You can’t count on organic reach being steady, it’s bound to disappoint you when you least expect it.

While most of my posts get 3k+ views fairly easily these days, yesterday’s post that teased the topic of this issue barely made it to 500 views after 8 hours.

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That’s why I keep saying you should never rely on a single channel, especially if that channel is social media. I rely on several others too.

The ConvertKit Creator Network

If you’re not on ConvertKit, the Creator Network is a place where you can recommend other creators and they can recommend you back. I love it because of how easy it is: whenever someone subscribes to my newsletter, they get recommended five other newsletters. The recommendation widget looks like this:

It wasn’t always like this, though: until a few weeks (months?) ago, all the boxes were pre-checked, which made users subscribe by accident. They were looking for the “Next” button, but they ended up subscribed to five other newsletters.

This is what drove my unsubscribe rate through the roof! People didn’t know me and they unsubscribed the first chance they got — some straight from the welcome email.

Still, my numbers there look pretty good — I’m especially proud of my conversion rate:

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296 subscribers isn’t bad at all but keep in mind that probably ±50% of them already left. There’s no way to track this easily, so this is just an estimate.

However, it takes me nearly zero effort to maintain the Creator Network, so I won’t give it up, despite the huge unsubscribe rate.

Cross-promos and partnerships

I credit this tactic for at least 15% of my top subscribers.

I find cross-promo partners on LinkedIn or dedicated websites like Lettergrowth. The mechanics are simple: you find a partner with an audience similar to yours. You promote them, they promote you.

Size matters too: you pretty much have to “stay in your lane” and work with newsletters that have a similar number of subscribers. I lucked out and found some popular newsletter operators who were willing to promote IPF, including the amazing Growth in Reverse by Chenell Basilio.

Some of the newsletters you see in the Community Spotlight section are my cross-promo partners, others are people who used the referral link at the bottom of the email, brought their friends/peers on board, and got featured here in exchange. If you want to be featured on Ideas to Power Your Future, this is your quickest way in *wink-wink*.

This brings us to our next point:

Referral program

The referral program brought me 65 subscribers thus far, 50+ of whom come from two people.

I love referrals! When someone vouches for you, it’s about more than the results. The endorsement itself is a sign I’m doing something right. People are willing to lend me some of their clout and I will never take that for granted. It’s one of the things that motivates me to never half-ass an issue of this newsletter.

By the way, have you used yours yet? The quickest way to refer people is to add it to your newsletter or post it on social media.

Podcasts and other speaking gigs

I was on four podcasts this year. I was also the first speaker at Masters of Email Marketing, an excellent opportunity for self-promotion…if you remember to do it *facepalm*.

I forgot (!) to bring up the last slide, the one that had “Thank you + subscribe to my newsletter here”. Yeah, that’s me in a nutshell.

By the end of the year, I’ll speak in four more podcasts (some of them already recorded) and at the Solo Creator Summit in December.

I’m also doing more audio events on LinkedIn, at least once every month with my good friends Hannah Szabo and Michael Scott Overholt.

Speaking is growing on me, which is quite surprising for a self-proclaimed lover of the written word. So if you have a podcast and need a guest who forgets to self-promo and goes on long rants, let me know!

I don’t have numbers to show you here because it’s hard to track who came from what podcast. But I know these things have a snowball effect: one speaking opportunity leads to another, then another, and so on.

Organic traffic

SEO writing runs through my veins. For Ideas to Power Your Future, I stubbornly ignored it because I wanted my writing to be as natural as possible.

But old habits die hard and I guess a bit of optimization is embedded into everything I write. Organic traffic has grown steadily for the past 4 months and now accounts for ±7% of all the traffic to my website. Not great, not terrible, and I’m sure it only keep growing from now on.

Twitter X

I’ve reluctantly started posting on X again. It’s been…silent.

Truth be told, I didn’t put in any real effort. I usually post and ghost. Social media algorithms these days demand their sacrifice in blood time, so you have to spend some time engaging for the needle to move. I didn’t, so the algo gods didn’t favor me.

There is not much to report here, I think my bare minimum activity brought me maybe 5 subscribers.

Let’s talk money! 💰

My monetization strategy is two-fold:

  • I sell products here​
  • I occasionally mention my agency in the newsletter, which gets me leads.

Within a year, these two prongs netted me approximately $18K.

Product sales: (almost) $5,000

I rounded it up because the anniversary sale isn’t over yet and I have a feeling I’ll hit that number.

The biggest revenue driver is the 1:1 strategy session — obviously, because it’s far more expensive than the other products. I launched it in March this year, so it hasn’t been around since the beginning.

My 5-email launch pre-written sequence got the most sales because it’s been around since day 1.

​The Guided Strategy Template is my newest product. It’s been around for two months and it’s my favorite because I built it together with my community. I wrote the play-by-play here.

If you need any of them, use the links below to get them at a 30% discount:

Think $5,000 is too low? You’re right! The explanation:

  • For nearly 5 months, the pre-written email sequence was my only product. $15 sales don’t amount to much.
  • I promote the 1:1 strategy session very rarely because it’s time-consuming. It may last for one hour, but it takes me at least another hour (usually two) to research my clients’ businesses and come up with a plan for them before the “show”. Usually, there’s an additional hour or so post-session too, where I gather some more information to send them. When I’m extra busy, I avoid promoting it.

Agency clients: $13,000 and counting

I rarely speak about my agency here, so here’s a quick overview: my team and I offer copywriting, (SEO) content writing, and social media marketing/management services to SMEs for nearly every industry. I’ve been running this agency since 2015 — it’s my first business and my biggest stream of revenue.

While I never counted on this newsletter to bring me leads for it, it happened. To be more precise:

  • Existing clients saw my emails and increased their monthly orders or added (trend) analyses and other types of more complex content (whitepapers, eBooks, and so on) to their usual orders.
  • “Dormant” clients who worked with my agency in the past but hadn’t placed an order in a while became active again.
  • New clients who became subscribers via LinkedIn (mostly), then emailed me to ask if I could write similar content/copy for them. From social media posts to emails (“Can you write more sequences like the one you sell here?” is a question I get frequently), landing pages, and sales pitches, I’ve got a ton of new leads via this newsletter.

I won’t lie, it’s been a lovely surprise.

The $13K mentioned above is a conservative number. The biggest retainer that came out of this newsletter has been signed recently, but it’s not included here — I only included the invoices that have already been sent. Plus, some of the contracts are for monthly deliverables, so this number will surely increase.

What’s next at Ideas to Power Your Future?

When I started this newsletter, my goal was to turn it into a subscription-only product. I’m very happy when people tell me it would be worth paying for, but I’ve changed my mind. I want IPF to remain free, the (tiny) community I’ve built around it is my biggest win and I don’t want to lose that. I mean I don’t want to lose any of you!

A few things I’m considering launching/doing either by the end of the year or in Q1 2024:

  • Letting YOU decide what topics I write about. I’ll put together a short survey where you can tell me what you want to learn about, what’s useful to you, and how I can help you grow/monetize your business. How does that sound?
  • A live masterclass/workshop on audience growth & monetization. I have a rough outline but it needs some stress testing before it goes live. If it sounds interesting, please use this form to let me know. In return, I promise you will be the first to know when it launches.
  • A website re-design. Much needed, I know!
  • Affiliate marketing. I’ve dabbled in it, but I haven’t taken it too seriously and it might be time to do so.
  • An option to support Ideas to Power Your Future without conditioning access to the emails to it. I’m still not convinced it’s a good idea, but it can stay in the idea hat for now.
  • An update for The Guided Strategy Template, with a couple more sections and a (better) way to track your progress. This idea was suggested by one of the buyers, someone I trust, so it’s pretty high on my list of priorities.
  • More channel diversification. I have a few ideas but I’m not 100% happy with any of them. I’ll keep you posted.

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A few final words

This email is already much longer than I planned, so I’ll let you go with a few words of caution.

First and foremost, this is what moderate success looks like. Forget the outliers and survivorship bias. I’m counting everything above as a success because I’ve been in business long enough to know meteoric rises are rare and rarely sustainable.

Please don’t use this to compare your success to mine. It’s profoundly unfair — to you, if you’re not there yet, or to me if you’re doing much better. Context is king and you’ll never find two people or two businesses who operate within the same context, with the same skillset, and the same constraints.

The one thing you can replicate irrespective of what business you run is diversification. No business brings passive income or passive audience growth. However, when I got too busy to promote this newsletter properly (or too distracted by Greek goodies), the Creator Network, the referral program, and organic traffic picked up some of the slack for me.

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That’s it from me today!

Next Thursday, we’ll be back on our regular topics, exploring tactics and dissecting trends.

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Here to make you think,

Adriana

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Connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter.