Part 2 - Organic Awareness

The first layer of growth comes from free organic content.

I recommend posting on X and LinkedIn at least - obviously depending on your niche and where your audience hang out.

What you post on your socials will depend a lot on your brand and personality. However I want to give you a base level of foundational posts that you can regularly publish about your newsletter.

These work well for me to drive newsletter subscriptions.

Research posts

As you compile your newsletter post material that you are researching about.

In the last Part I showed you how to build a curation pipeline. You’ll be looking at potentially hundreds of posts from your niche each day.

If one or two of the best resources make it into your newsletter you’ll likely still have 5-10 items of interest. No need to waste them! Publish them with some commentary to social.

WiP Posts

Work in progress posts are a good way to tease the next issue. It could be as simple as photographing you screen with the newsletter preview on it and saying “tomorrow’s issue ready, make sure you are subscribed to get it tomorrow”.

You can also do a video recording of the screen, scrolling through the newsletter. Looks like this:

The aim here is to tease the content so people will sub to get full access.

Breakout threads

I like to convert all of my newsletters into an X thread.

Here’s an example that’s currently live:

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It takes one newsletter issue and chunks into pieces for a thread. Click through to see the full thread as it’s hard to preview here.

With the call to action being to come to the full issue in the newsletter archive. Once on that page there is a pop up to get them to subscribe. More subscribers.

This type of post works well if you have a longer form newsletter as there’s more “meat” to repurpose into a thread.

Here’s a prompt to start the repurposing process:

Act as social media marketer

Convert this newsletter into a Twitter Thread

start with a powerful hook post to secure interest. Mention that it is a thread so that people know to click through. 

Break the content of the newsletter into individual short tweets. 

Do not use emojis or hashtags.

If I plug in the last Part of this guide I generate:

Not bad a basic outline - use that to write up the thread in no time at all.

Don’t want to use X? No problem - just convert this into a longer form thread.

You can also do these are long form posts for any social network. Just drop in “ "make this a post for [platform name] to convert:

As always manually write and edit to your requirements. AI is for legwork, not brainwork.

Short video

Nice simple addition is to do the same content as a short video rather than text.

I covered this in detail in these previous guides.

All three of the posts types above can also be videos:

• research post → green screen talking about a resource

• work in progress post → screenshot newsletter and overlay yourself talking about what’s in the issue

• breakout thread → screen record the newsletter itself and talk through. For longer newsletters this could be a longer Youtube not a short form.

Here’s an example of the latter:

Basically anything that can be a text post can also be a video - converting the content automatically gives you double the amount of post.

Google Traffic

All of the above is about organic social traffic which is where I suggest you start.

It’s fast and gets traffic rolling in.

However, don’t neglect SEO (search engine optimisation) or “getting to the top of Google”.

This is a form of organic (free) traffic that takes a lot longer to kick in but when it does can bring you a huge amount of consistent subscribers.

Whatever your newsletter platform you need to make sure that you are set up for SEO sooner rather than later.

There are generally a few “technical” steps that need to be completed before Google starts to show your content. Getting all your ducks in a row early on means Google will start the process of sending you traffic earlier.

If you are on beehiiv then start with this video: beehiiv SEO.

If you are on another platform Google “your newsletter platform name + SEO” and there will be guides.

Whichever platform you are on make sure to set up with Google Search Console. It’s a free tool that tells you what exact searches people are entering in order to find your content.

Getting this sorted early on is extra work but means Google will start paying attention to your content earlier.

Need specific help? Ask in the community with specifics of your newsletter tool and I can assist!

Pulling it together

We in play the newsletter and organic content components of our newsletter now.

This is sufficient for most people. Doing this alone will allow your newsletter to slowly grow from this solid foundation.

In the next Parts we’re going to look at how to accelerate growth using more advanced techniques.

Here’s a reminder of what we’re covering this week:

• Part 1: The newsletter is not the business.

• Part 2: Organic awareness.

• Part 3: Hyper-growth.

• Part 4: Get paid to advertise.

• Part 5: Turning the revenue taps on.