Building an audience for a newsletter

Posted December 14, 2021 in
Content Content

Aurelie Giard

Making serverless cloud technology more accessible

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Hi everyone,
I am looking for advice and experience sharing in growing an audience for a newsletter. 

I launched last November https://www.itbusinesscrush.fr/ with the intent of creating content for IT leaders who want to help their company grow the business. I write in French to tap into my existing Linkedin network and test the concept. 

My goals are as follow:
  • Know more about my core audience of IT leaders, and possibly create new relationships beyond my existing network,
  • Create unique content that I can translate and reuse for my future blog (on serverlesscrush.com),
  • Work with software vendors on some content (videos, mini-demos). Those vendors are my potential paying clients.
  • QUALITY is essential, meaning that I prefer fewer people but better qualified.
For the moment, I communicate on LinkedIn, but I am a little bit concerned by audience fatigue.
I am also reaching out to my network with personalized emails - taking the pretext of holiday wishes. 
I created a YouTube channel to host the videos, and I am considering Twitter as well, at least for the English version (French are not very active on Twitter). 

Any suggestions or comments would be more than welcome!

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Connor DeLaney
Nicole Cimo-Holmon Ramona Sukhraj Jennifer Barrell Jolie Higazi  how would you approach this with Aurelie? Also, anyone you are working with doing a newsletter?
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Jolie Higazi
Hey  Aurelie Giard  - Great goals! Are you already actively publishing educational content on your site on a regular basis (at least 2-3 times/week)? If not, start there. You'll likely need to attract people to your site content before you're likely to get them to sign up for a newsletter. Once you have regular publishing and folks coming to your website because of SEO and your social media sharing, then you can capitalize on that traffic by building out all types of newsletters and Choose-your-own-adventure emails where you're able to set up ways for them to self-select what content they're most interested in receiving from you.  
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Aurelie Giard
Hi  Jolie Higazi  , thank you for your answer! What you describe is feasible with my current means since I already have a good stock of content to translate and publish. Is self-selection mandatory? I subscribed to several newsletters where the content seems to be the same for everyone. At least I never made any choices, and I am happy with them. 
Jolie Higazi
Hey  Aurelie Giard  - Definitely not mandatory, that's just a way to level up your content down the road when you're ready (or when it's appropriate) to provide an even more personalized content for your readers. Cheers! 
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Tiffany
Jolie has answered well. 1) Have your goal in mind first then I would work on 2) how you will get subscribers and traffic: from social media and website. As you have a website then that is where you can drive people to and build trust and credibility then get sign-ups from there as well as directly from social. Optimise your profiles with a sign up. 3) Direct them to your lead magnet I.e. checklist of 10 things It pros need to know in 2022 or something else. Set automation to send them the lead magnet that they subscribed to your newsletter for. 4) Then segment your audience based on the content that will benefit them most. 5) Create a welcome sequence of emails for their interest and your goal. I haven't explained super clearly so if you have questions let me know. 
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Aurelie Giard
Thank you very much @Tiffany for your detailed answer. At point 3: do you mean that I should set up lead magnets as a way to attract subscribers? I am not sure I understand. I conceptualize the newsletter as a way to have content delivered in my inbox without the hassle of checking websites and doing my own curation. The lead magnet is usually a more important piece that I choose to download for a specific need, independently of subscribing to a newsletter. Is it a misconception on my side?

I'd love to set up a self-selection process, as a means to know more about my readers' centers of interest. It's more sophisticated, and definitely, something that I put on my to-do. 
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Tiffany
Aurelie Giard  Apologies I think I may have misunderstood. So this is more like a feed/content creation email to curate content. I thought you meant you were building a newsletter and trying to get signups. In the case of the later usually the challenge is getting people to subscribe with an incentive. Apologies for the delayed response. 

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