Here's What's Working To Grow My Local Business Newsletter

Today, I want to write about what’s working to grow my local business newsletter, but this is going to be a different take than you’re probably used to.

Rather than talk about what’s driving the most volume, I want to talk about the things that have the highest hit-rate driving the right kinds of readers.

I’ve written before about what makes a valuable audience, and why size is the least important of the three variables.

As a quick refresher, the main components of audience value are:

• Size: How many people do you reach?

• Trust: Do they take action based on what you say?

• Money to Spend: How much do they have?

You need two of the three to have a valuable audience, and of them all, money to spend is the one that has the biggest impact on everything else (from the advertisers you can work with, to the price of the products you can build and sell).

For my local newsletter, I decided to build slower, with a higher-value audience of founders, business owners, executives, and investors here in Austin.

They are, by definition, hard to reach. 

Here’s what’s working to reach them…

Two Frameworks For Thinking About Growth

Real quick, before we get into the actual tactics, here are two frameworks I’ve been thinking about when it comes to growth.

The first is a kind of growth timeline. These are the typical stages of growth that I see people move through.

Broadly, they break down into:

1. Organic: Basically either talking about yourself in public, or getting other people to talk about you

2. Paid: Ads, influencer marketing, paid referral programs, and anything else where success is measured against your target CPA

3. Audience: When your readers become a significant source of new readers either because of incentives you create or love for the brand you built

Each has sub-stages. For example, early organic growth might be telling your friends/colleagues about your newsletter, whereas later on, you might publish to social media or focus on PR.

It doesn’t make sense to reverse that order because the first one will give you insights you need to be successful at the second, but not vice-versa

For example, friends will ask you follow-up questions about the newsletter that will help you refine speak more clearly when it comes time to post on social, but not vice versa.

Similarly, with paid growth, it often makes sense to start with Facebook ads before advertising elsewhere because their audience targeting is top-notch and for very little money, you can learn a lot about what targeting and copy should work well elsewhere.

I think a lot of people these days blow right by organic without really maximizing it. Partly because there’s pressure to grow fast. And partly because tools like SparkLoop make it easier to jump straight into paid growth.

I don’t know that there’s anything wrong with that. BUT… If you have the time to max out organic, I think you learn a lot that can make your paid growth more efficient later.

You also build a stronger relationship with your readers because you really need to understand them in order to grow organically.

I plan to spend the first 1-2 years strictly organic. As Adam Ryan points out in this interview, it was once common to push organic until you hit 10k subs (and if you did that in 12 months, you had a real firecracker on your hands).

Okay, so that’s the growth timeline…

The second framework is a matrix that compares reach vs targeting. And by targeting, I mean the likelihood that you’re going to reach the exact right kind of reader for your list:

Something like “Telling People 1-1” might have low reach, but a very high targeting score, because you have a lot of control over who you talk to.

On the other hand, something like social media posting may have higher reach, and lower targeting (because you have less control over who sees your posts).

All of this is meant to be a quick, dirty way of thinking about what to focus on.

My Four Most Effective Growth Tactics

Here’s what’s worked best for my local newsletter so far (from lowest to highest in order of reach):

1. Attending Live Events

2. Direct Outreach to People Mentioned In The Newsletter

3. Organic LinkedIn Posts

4. Shout-Outs From Other Local Community Builders

Okay, let’s take a closer look at each…

1. Attending Live Events

I write a local newsletter, so local events are an important part of it. I try to get out to 1-3 per week, to see friends, and also to get a feel for which events & organizers I should highlight in the email.

Important: I never mention the newsletter unless people ask what I do. Even then, I keep it very short (“I write a newsletter for business owners in Austin.”).

If we’re having a good chat, 80-90% of the time they ask more, and eventually either connect on LinkedIn or look it up and subscribe.

2. Direct Outreach to People Mentioned In The Newsletter

One of the big lessons I learned working with Sam Parr for years is the power of names. People love to see theirs in print (here’s a great story on that).

Every week, I mention the names of 15-20 local founders in the newsletter and publish events they’re hosting, insights they share online, or news from their business.

If I mention someone, I make it a point to reach out to them via LinkedIn or email and let them know. Only perhaps 10-20% sign up based on that. But it’s a great way to connect with people, and has helped me meet a lot of event organizers here in town.

3. Organic Social Media Posts

Over the first few months, I tested a lot of platforms. Once a week, I re-posted the event roundup from the newsletter to Twitter, LinkedIn, my local Reddit page, and some local Facebook groups.

The bulk of time spent on this drove no results, but it was important because it helped me figure out where my readers hung out online, and where I should double down.

For me, the answer seems to be LinkedIn, where I get way more engagement despite having a tiny audience (.

4. Shout Outs From Local Community Builders

The main focus of the newsletter is to try an help readers get connected here in Austin. So recently, I started doing little 250-word pieces spotlighting different community-builders here in town.

Usually hosts of the events I like the most.

Sometimes, when they see the piece, they re-share it and that’s cool because a lot of them have bigger local audiences than I do.

Final Thoughts On Growth

It’s still slow, but accelerating, and I’m happy with the things I’m learning right now.

Growth and self-promotion have never really come naturally to me, and I know that to be successful here, I have to get way more comfortable with both.

I think that’s one of the reasons I had to quit my job in order to make this business happen. Without that step, I never would have had the pressure to actually grow an audience and publish regularly.