Hi Andrew! Thanks for leaving a comment with this link for me. I'm not sure I have great answers because I've never had a post get a TON of views outside subscribers. I do add a subscribe button high up in the post on the url so if it gets shared people can subscribe easily. I've tried to make my about page clear and concise. Does that help?
Hey Andrew. Coming over here from the Office Hours discussion thread, as you requested:
Any article with lots of views...are those views still going up, bit by bit? Are you monitoring them day by day, week by week? If they're still rising, those people are still coming in to read the Web version - so you could go and edit those Web versions and try to make them a bit more "if you're reading this, please sign up, folks!"...
And I'd say one way of doing that is to just spend a paragraph or two at the start of a few newsletters explaining what you just said to us all here, insterad of using a button or something that soundsmore formal & professional. Be transparent and a bit vulnerable - saying that you'd love to get more people to sign up, but it's just not happening yet, and are you, dear reader, up for doing it, because it'd mean the world? That kind of thing.
It's really hard and a bit squirmy for us to let our guards down and ask like that (which is why signup buttons are so reassuring to use) but when you really just use a paragraph or two at the top of a newsletter to step out and ask them 'face to face', it really pays off, I reckon?
Further to this: I'm getting most of my free signups outside of my newsletter - either as mentions in other people's newsletters or on websites (any organic word of mouth is worth wayyyyy more than anything I could do myself) - and also using Twitter threads, which has turned into a big earner for me. I take a newsletter, boil the most interesting bits of it down into a storified thread of tweets, and include a call to signup in there somewhere. Been doing that since the middle of 2021, and in November I had one of them go viral, which led to 700 signups to my free list: https://twitter.com/Mikeachim/status/1466763517487370246
So - attempting to sum up this long rambling answer into something short and sweet (sorry): I don't think you have to rely on optimising your in-article signups. You *can* - and I'd be fascinated to learn more about what works there - but I think it's more fruitful to just make your newsletters really great & build enough loyalty for everyone to want to sign up, experiment with a few interesting ideas in encouraging people to sign up - but invest most of your marketing-free-signups time into doing things *outside* the newsletter.
On average, I think I get one or two new signups for each time I send out a newsletter, plus a few more randomly timed signups. I've noticed a slight improvement by including "calls to action" at the start and in the middle of my articles. At the start of each newsletter - in the web version, I say "Welcome to The Turnstone. Here, I share my perspective on science, society and the environment. I send my articles out every Sunday - if you’d like them emailed to you directly, you can sign up to my mailing list." And then I put a subscribe button. I also try and put a subscribe button somewhere in the middle of the article. At the end, I encourage people to share the article.
I add that text after I send out my newsletter, because people who receive it are already subscribers unless it's been forwarded. I sometimes say "if you’re not already a subscriber, you can sign up to my mailing list." and put a button in, but sometimes I forget to do that.
That's what I've been working on, anyway. I'm no expert, my growth has been pretty slow, but I have definitely noted an improvement with consistent effort.
People have access to all the common words and ideas anywhere on the Internet. Why should they give you a space in their inbox? I make it my job to think of answers to this question and so should everyone that wants to make a successful newsletter. The answer can relate to subject matter, or writing style, or exclusivity of the content, or any combination of these and other things.
Getting 100 signups from 10000 views should be absolutely doable, I think. If that doesn't happen, you should question the authenticity of those 10000 views. Were they real people, or was the metric falsified by something? If real, then what about the post didn't work? Did they read all the way through, or were they put off early on by poor readability?
Hi Andrew! Thanks for leaving a comment with this link for me. I'm not sure I have great answers because I've never had a post get a TON of views outside subscribers. I do add a subscribe button high up in the post on the url so if it gets shared people can subscribe easily. I've tried to make my about page clear and concise. Does that help?
Hey Andrew. Coming over here from the Office Hours discussion thread, as you requested:
Any article with lots of views...are those views still going up, bit by bit? Are you monitoring them day by day, week by week? If they're still rising, those people are still coming in to read the Web version - so you could go and edit those Web versions and try to make them a bit more "if you're reading this, please sign up, folks!"...
And I'd say one way of doing that is to just spend a paragraph or two at the start of a few newsletters explaining what you just said to us all here, insterad of using a button or something that soundsmore formal & professional. Be transparent and a bit vulnerable - saying that you'd love to get more people to sign up, but it's just not happening yet, and are you, dear reader, up for doing it, because it'd mean the world? That kind of thing.
It's really hard and a bit squirmy for us to let our guards down and ask like that (which is why signup buttons are so reassuring to use) but when you really just use a paragraph or two at the top of a newsletter to step out and ask them 'face to face', it really pays off, I reckon?
Further to this: I'm getting most of my free signups outside of my newsletter - either as mentions in other people's newsletters or on websites (any organic word of mouth is worth wayyyyy more than anything I could do myself) - and also using Twitter threads, which has turned into a big earner for me. I take a newsletter, boil the most interesting bits of it down into a storified thread of tweets, and include a call to signup in there somewhere. Been doing that since the middle of 2021, and in November I had one of them go viral, which led to 700 signups to my free list: https://twitter.com/Mikeachim/status/1466763517487370246
So - attempting to sum up this long rambling answer into something short and sweet (sorry): I don't think you have to rely on optimising your in-article signups. You *can* - and I'd be fascinated to learn more about what works there - but I think it's more fruitful to just make your newsletters really great & build enough loyalty for everyone to want to sign up, experiment with a few interesting ideas in encouraging people to sign up - but invest most of your marketing-free-signups time into doing things *outside* the newsletter.
(That was not short and sweet, Mike.)
On average, I think I get one or two new signups for each time I send out a newsletter, plus a few more randomly timed signups. I've noticed a slight improvement by including "calls to action" at the start and in the middle of my articles. At the start of each newsletter - in the web version, I say "Welcome to The Turnstone. Here, I share my perspective on science, society and the environment. I send my articles out every Sunday - if you’d like them emailed to you directly, you can sign up to my mailing list." And then I put a subscribe button. I also try and put a subscribe button somewhere in the middle of the article. At the end, I encourage people to share the article.
I add that text after I send out my newsletter, because people who receive it are already subscribers unless it's been forwarded. I sometimes say "if you’re not already a subscriber, you can sign up to my mailing list." and put a button in, but sometimes I forget to do that.
That's what I've been working on, anyway. I'm no expert, my growth has been pretty slow, but I have definitely noted an improvement with consistent effort.
People have access to all the common words and ideas anywhere on the Internet. Why should they give you a space in their inbox? I make it my job to think of answers to this question and so should everyone that wants to make a successful newsletter. The answer can relate to subject matter, or writing style, or exclusivity of the content, or any combination of these and other things.
Getting 100 signups from 10000 views should be absolutely doable, I think. If that doesn't happen, you should question the authenticity of those 10000 views. Were they real people, or was the metric falsified by something? If real, then what about the post didn't work? Did they read all the way through, or were they put off early on by poor readability?