49:2 Newsletter success: Learn from the best

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Lee:

Welcome to the Trailblazer FM podcast. This is your host, Lee. And on today's show, we have the one, the only, Mr. Shiven Dhania, the author of The Misfits Newsletter. How are you today, sir?

Shiven:

Awesome. So, Lee, it's so cool to be on your podcast. I've been watching your podcast a lot the past two days. It's so good.

Lee:

Oh, wow. So a fan after two days. That's pretty impressive. I'll drink to that. Nice one. Well, mate, welcome to the show. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself? Where are you from? Maybe what your favorite color is. Maybe something that people don't know about you.

Shiven:

Cool. I'm Shiven, as you said, and I also go by the name of a newsletter nerd. I don't like to call myself a nerd, but people call me that. Cool. I started as a content writer one and a half years ago for a crypto media agency. Things started going awesome since then, and I started a newsletter around six months ago. I recently landed one of the biggest media companies of India. It's called Yourstory.com. It's like the Indian version of TechCrunch or Wall Street Journal. Tech startups. I did the marketing for them, for their flagship event. They made a million dollars from their sales. It's been an awesome experience. That was my recent journey.

Lee:

Your recent biggest win. That's amazing. Then from there, that's become the platform for your agency, which you're developing at the moment.

Shiven:

Recently, we approached... Me and my co founder, there's this guy called Sushant, we approached this one New York Times best selling author. She lives in Hawaii. I don't know if I should say the name. Let's just say she's a New York Times best selling author, and we just landed her as the client.

Lee:

Amazing. That's incredible. All through newsletters. Now, well, let's focus on that then for the rest of this podcast because I am really interested. And for me, I have a list, which is great. It's a list that I've developed maybe over the last eight years of this show. I used to send out newsletters. I used to send out emails fairly regularly. But for myself, and I think for a lot of people who probably listen, we're bombarded quite a lot by newsletters all the time. So we become a little bit desensitized to them. And because we ignore them in our own inbox, the importance of newsletters in our mind reduces to that extent. So we think, Well, I'm not going to focus on newsletters. People don't read them because I don't read them, which is I imagine, not necessarily true. So if we set that as the scene for most people listening, or at least it is my own experience, your challenge for this episode is going to be to help me see the light and help turn that around. So let's start off with our first question, which is, what are the biggest challenges that creators face when trying to start, even just start a newsletter?

Shiven:

Okay. Writing the newsletter is the easiest part. People ask me how to write a newsletter. It's just writing. It's not that tough. The challenge is the distribution. How do you grow your newsletter? Because in social media, people discover you through your content, but your newsletters will not reach your audience until they subscribe. The only way to build your newsletters either is through performance marketing like Google ads, Facebook ads. I don't like that way. For me, it's to build an awesome personal brand on either Twitter or LinkedIn. When you build a personal brand, you post some amazing posts, let's say, Twitter threads or LinkedIn posts, and people like your posts. Then you say, Oh, by the way, if you like the post and you want stuff like that on your inbox, just subscribe my newsletter. That way you can leverage social media to build your newsletter. This is the biggest challenge, the distribution side actually. A recent example, do you know this influencer called Chenell Basilio?

Lee:

No, I could pretend I do, but I'll be honest, no.

Shiven:

She's not exactly an influencer, but she's a newsletter creator. What she did is she started her newsletter, I don't know, like one year ago. Let's each month ago, like six months ago, I guess, and she grew to 10,000 subscribers in the first three months. And how did she do that? She just reverse engineered other newsletters and she.

Lee:

Just.

Shiven:

Tells the story about other creators in her newsletter. And what she does is that after every newsletter post, she creates Twitter threads around those newsletter posts. And let's say she wrote a newsletter about how Justin Welch became a millionaire and she built Twitter thread around that how Justin Welch become a millionaire, five steps. Then she tags Justin Welch. When Justin Welch reads that, he retweets those Twitter threads into his account and he has 100,000 subscribers. Just through that one retweet, she gains 1,000 to 2,000 newsletter subscribers. That's how you do it. You can leverage other people's account to build your own newsletter. That's the biggest thing in this area.

Lee:

That's amazing. Essentially, our biggest challenge as a creator... Now, like I said, I've got a list, it's not huge. For me, it would be growth. But you're saying here the biggest challenge is the distribution. You've also pretty much thrown two or three really hot tips straight away into how to get that distribution. Now, I'm thinking here, we're busy agency owners. The idea, though, of spending hours, well, maybe it's not hours, but spending time on social media trying to reply to every single tweet when someone engages to say, Oh, by the way, I've got a newsletter, or trying to come up with campaigns via Twitter just fills me with dread. I think I'm going to be there all day. Are there any other ways that we can build our audience or am I overthinking it? Is it quite simple what you're describing? I don't know. It sounds like work in my head.

Shiven:

Yeah, it is work. Building a newsletter is one of the most difficult things you will ever do in your social life.

Lee:

Damn it. You're not meant to say that.

Shiven:

I thought it was easy. But it's going to be the most valuable thing you're ever going to build.

Lee:

Talk to me about that, then. Why is newsletters the most valuable thing?

Shiven:

Awesome. So I personally... Not me, but many people believe that social medias are a big scam for creators. Let me tell you a little story about this company which was built like 100 miles away from my city. This company was called WittyFeed. I guess you may have heard about it. It was a big meme marketing company. It used to send these huge memes around the current affairs and all those things. They amassed 120 million monthly Facebook views. It was the second biggest company in the world in its niche. Only Bust Feed was on top of it. They were having 100 employees, $10 million revenue. The founders woke up one morning in 2018 and their entire business went down. It just crashed. Just because Facebook decided to de platform them, delist from their platform. Tens of millions of dollars got lost and they got bankrupted. Why did that happen? Because social platforms can just ban you without any reason. They gave a very shitty reason. Facebook just said that, Oh, because American... You remember that Cambridge Analytica whole controversy? Yeah, I remember that. Facebook... People believed that because there are many American readers of WittyFeed, so they are indirectly influencing their voters' behavior.

Shiven:

That was the reason they gave to just delist them from the platform. Those three founders, they spent their entire money to feed those hundred employees for six months salary because of the contract. The founders become bankrupt and it didn't end well. Imagine if they had a newsletter where they could send out weekly emails. They would take a hit, of course, but they would not be out of business now. Or they could just build a Twitter. As soon as the Facebook got delisted, they could just build a Twitter and they could just send their email subscribers to their Twitter. They could just use their email to build a following and build a business again. News people cannot delist you from your emails.

Lee:

Because it's your data, you own it. If you're on social media, it's their platform. You are at the mercy of whomever you're using. Even if you got a million subscribers, it could be taken away tomorrow.

Shiven:

And WittyFeed is a very big example. Most probably you're not going to get delisted, but the social media platforms will control how much reach do you get, like how many people will watch you. So for example, let's say that Trailblazer is posting one tweet every...

Lee:

I've got a really good example for you, mate, actually. Sorry. So what's happened is, so over the last few years, I've put loads and loads of work into creating the Facebook group for Trailblazer, and we grew to 4,000 strong, which was great. But Facebook slowly changed their algorithm over time for the groups, which meant that posts were not getting any visibility. So before long, we were finding that within the group, people were not seeing what other people were posting. Therefore, people weren't getting feedback on their posts. And before long, it just became a graveyard. It was awful. And I eventually, because I was so exhausted trying to keep posting and posting to keep things going, I actually decided to close the group. We eventually removed all 4,000 members and deleted the group permanently because we recognized that even though we built something really good and really big, it was on somebody else's platform, somebody else controlled the reach. And if they decided to change something at any time, I'd have to put in so much extra work just to try and push it back up. I was even hoping they were just going to say, Oh, yeah, here you are.

Lee:

If you pay this group owner subscription, we'll give you more reach again or something, but they didn't. So it's like, What do I do? So now my only platform is this podcast and my list, which I don't look after, which I'm now starting to see from what you've just said, is highly valuable for me to promote this show and to get other people involved in the show. And I've definitely neglected that because of my experience as well on Facebook thinking, oh, that was just so much work. But yeah, I hope that's a similar example of we built something really big and then Facebook just gradually took it away to the extent where we were like, Yeah, we can't build that community on that platform, if that makes sense.

Shiven:

Exactly. Such a strong example, man. So things like this happen to a lot of people. When I started as a normal copywriter, I used to do this social media copies. 60 % of my clients, they complained that due to some recent algorithm change, they're not getting that reach that they used to get a month ago and stuff like that. That's when I actually realized the power of newsletters. Because if you have, let's say, 50,000 email subscribers and you post an email, 50,000 of them are going to receive them. You're going to stay on in their inbox. You're not going away. They are going to see your post every single day. If you post every single day.

Lee:

They're going to archive you at least or delete you, but they're at least going to see your name. Oh, yeah, Lee still exists, or the Trailblazer podcast still exists. I don't think I'd want to hit people every day, though. I think that would be too much.

Shiven:

Some media companies do that.

Lee:

Yeah, I do. I've got one company that does send me a regular daily. Actually, they've been very successful and I've gone completely blank, but they send me a daily news brief and is it TLDR, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that is one newsletter that I do open every single day.

Shiven:

Yeah, in fact, do you know about the Morning Brew?

Lee:

Yes, Morning Brew.

Shiven:

They're a Daily newsletter and they are making $90 to $100 million a year just through their newsletters.

Lee:

I don't get Morning Brew, but I used to. But it was TLDR, I think, is the one I kept because that's the one that gives me tech news predominantly. T hat's the one I open nearly every day. T hen I do have so many other newsletters, but I often just select all because I know they're all newsletters and I just hit archive. I don't even open them most of the time. Or one thing I have done recently is I've used an app called Leave Me alone, which I've unsubscribed from loads of newsletters. But I guess that leads to two other areas then about that I'd like to ask you about. We'll do two questions, so I'll save the next question. I'm not going to tell you what it is, but I've got two questions coming in. Question number one, then is how do we create a valuable newsletter, something that people want to open? For me, TLDR News is valuable because it saves me time and gives me the tech news quickly. There is intrinsic value in there, I'm going to stay connected. There's value, I understand that. What's the process for us as creators to create something that people want to open?

Shiven:

What most people do wrong is that they just start newsletters for the sake of starting newsletters and they would just post random shit on it. For example, they would just tweet something and they would say, Oh, this tweet is getting a lot of traction. Let's build a newsletter on it. They build a newsletter and that's nothing but that 30 word tweet rephrased into 100, let's say, 1,000 word newsletter. People are not going to read that stuff. Basically, if you want to build a great newsletters, it's down to basic copywriting principles like find a pain point. For example, TLDR newsletters, it's in the name that people don't have time to watch big news. Too long, didn't read. Yeah, exactly. It's in the name. People don't have time and they're solving that pain point. There's this guy, Sam Parr, do you watch My First Million, this great podcast?

Lee:

It's another one that I'm going to have to. Clearly, I don't get out much because you've sent several people I've not heard of so far.

Shiven:

No, I said I'm a nerd on content. I just watch it. I love it. There's this guy, Sam Parr, and he built this thing called the hustle. It's a newsletter that gives you business and tech news every single day. It's a daily newsletter and they've scaled it to $15 million per year revenue. What they do is that exactly the same thing that DLDR is doing.

Lee:

Wait, is this the person who charges subscription for it as well? Or is this somebody else? Yeah. I think I have then heard. Yeah, carry on. This is good.

Shiven:

This Sam Barr guy, he's one of my role models. If you listen to his podcast, he's just a killer. Just basic copywriting principles. Find a pain point and then solve it. The only three content that will work is education, inspiration, or entertainment. If you can't educate, inspire, or entertain, people will forget you. You will be irrelevant. Or either you can become an intersection of those three. If you know Kiran Drew, he was a dentist and he became an influencer. He cracks so many jokes. He inspires you to create content and he educate you how to do that. That's why that man is getting so much growth.

Lee:

That was awesome. That's going to be a sound bite, I'm sure, that we're going to have to use on our social posts when we promote this episode. Well, then I said there was two questions. The second question, then, is relationship. One of the things that I found really good when Facebook was working as a group was that we were able to develop some extremely good relationships with our audience. I was being able to interact with people and people were able to interact with themselves. So how can we use, as creators, how can we use newsletters to build relationships with our audience? Because in my mind, it's like I'm just broadcasting a message in an email. What can we do to develop relationships? Either one to one connections or at least a feeling of they know me. I don't know. I'll let you go for it.

Shiven:

A few minutes ago, you mentioned that you don't open any newsletters. I would argue that even that is a very good position to be in because... Let me tell you a story. There's a friend of mine, she subscribed to this copywriting influencer called Alex Cattoni. Do you know about her? She's an influencer. She talks about copy writing. Awesome. My friend subscribed her and she didn't open any of her emails. She would just wake up and she would see Alex Cattoni. Subject line of that email would be, five steps to become a copywriter, and she would not open that email. Three days ago, she would again wake up with Alex Cattoni in her inbox and the subject line would be like, Never do these mistakes as a copywriter. S he would not even open that email. This happened for 2-3 weeks, and she didn't open one email. But then my friend thought that, Hey, I should become a copywriter. I want a paid course. Who should be a good coach? The obvious answer in her mind was Alex Cattoni because in her mind, copywriting and Alex became one because every.

Lee:

Morning she would. Even though she wasn't opening them, you're totally right because I do. I do this when I'm in my inbox, I see them all. I'm like, okay, that's that person, that's that person. That's their message. That's their message. I'm connecting them with those things. I'm not unsubscribing. I'm just selecting and archiving because I'm not psychologically or energetically in the space to consume that particular content or that particular subject. But I'm not going to unsubscribe necessarily because it's still nice to feel like I'm connected.

Shiven:

Exactly. She just went to Alex's page and she bought the course. Alex got a purchase without even a single email opened. So for me, the goal of newsletters is to stay on top of the minds of the users, not to be read, but to be seen. That's the goal of newsletters. Just like you said, how to build relationships. You win the battle of newsletters, like half the battle of newsletters just through your subject lines. So there's a statistic that says that 90 % of the people, 90 % of your newsletters subscribers will only read your subject lines. If you're spending half an hour on newsletter content, spend another half an hour just in your subject line. That's where you're going to build relationships. Then, of course, as you said, webinars, one to one calls, that's the other half of that project.

Lee:

I suppose in the content as well. I'd heard somewhere that you try and encourage people to reply to your newsletters with some form of call to action. Would you recommend that? First of all, wow, you blew my mind on the subject line. I'm like, oh, that's the least thing I spend time on. And sometimes they've been shockingly bad, my subject headings. So I need to sort that out. But yeah, the idea as well is I would still love to hear back from my community. And is the newsletter a good way of getting them to do that?

Shiven:

Yeah. Actually, I would like to continue that point. That's very important. There was this case study of one company who was to send their email newsletters, and their subject line was... There was a relationship consultant services. They sent a newsletter that says that their company name, and then it was written that bring your relationship to a good point, something like that. They were not getting many clicks. People were just not taking them seriously. They just added one letter that built their entire business. Just one letter that increased their sales for 65 %. That letter was just letter S. Instead of saying that, bring your relationship, they said, bring out your relationship. When you say that, help yourself, it's like you're trying to teach someone and no one wants a teacher. But when you say, bring your life to good, it's like we will do that for you. Are you getting it?

Lee:

What? We will do that for her, or we will do that with you, you mean?

Shiven:

Yeah. If I say that brings your relationship to a good life, so of course, I'm talking about that I will bring... That the company brings your relationship to a good point. But when I say bring your relationship, it's like I'm commanding to you something.

Lee:

Oh, right. I see what you mean.

Shiven:

They just added one letter. They just added S and their sales shot up to 65%.

Lee:

That's insane. I've been not really looking after a newsletter very well for eight years and I feel challenged very much by that. So for people who are just starting out, I feel like I am basically just starting out as well because I've not looked after it. What advice would you have for us if we're starting out? Because that example you gave, I assume that newsletter was something that's gone on for a few years. There is a large team behind that. They're able to experiment and look at statistics and all of that good stuff. But for most of us, we're either got a small list like myself or we're just starting out completely from fresh. What advice would you give new creators launching with their newsletter?

Shiven:

Definitely. In this question, there are two kinds of people. One is people like me who do not have social presence on every platform. I'm just growing on LinkedIn right now. I have like 1,000 or 2,000 followers. I don't know how many. But I'm growing my channel, my personal brand there. I've just recently started on Twitter as well.

Lee:

That's where we connected.

Shiven:

That's where we connected on Twitter. People like me, what we do is that, as I said, this influencer, this writer, Channel Basilio, she's just reverse engineer other creators, and that's how she gets traction. So if you are new and you have not established your authority, if you are not a millionaire, you cannot teach how to be rich. So just live your life, have a lot of experiences, learn a lot from these books, and document your learnings. Gary Vee says that don't create, just document. So documenting your learnings is the biggest trend right now in the newsletters. People would just say that, Hey, I read four books a month. If you don't have time, you can subscribe to my newsletter and I will send you a newsletter post summarizing every book. Now, then there are people like you who already have a content distribution system, like you have a podcast. I was so surprised that you don't have a newsletter because when I saw your website, you have 48 seasons. How big.

Lee:

Is that book? We have 450 episodes at the moment and 300 YouTube videos. I should be ashamed of myself.

Shiven:

If you have 300 YouTube videos and you build out one newsletter post of every video and you post a newsletter like biweekly, twice every week, you have three years of content right now.

Lee:

I know it's insane, actually.

Shiven:

That's the thing. You already have a lot of content. As I said, these are two people, creators and non creators. Non creators need to document and creators need to repurpose their content into newsletters.

Lee:

So if you already have content, repurpose. If you don't have content, whilst you're at least developing content in your voice, at least document, like Gary Vee says, a document you're learning. And no matter what you're doing, it needs to educate, entertain, and inspire. I love that. Educate, entertain, and inspire. I guess I'm going to throw another one, words into your mouth, and I assume you would say as well that consistency is important and keep doing it regardless. Because I've learned by giving up on it multiple times that gets me nowhere. I might as well have never started. I just keep giving up. I'll do a flurry of newsletters for a few weeks and then it drops off my list again of importance. Actually, let's talk about that then. As we come into land then, can we try and educate me as to the importance of me maintaining a newsletter? What are some of the key benefits to my audience and to me as a podcast creator and as a businessman for having a newsletter because I so often... You said it right at the beginning that it's one of the most powerful things that you can do for your business.

Lee:

And it made me think this, it made me think, I often need to understand why something's important before I will put all of my energy into it. And because in my head right at the very beginning, I said, Oh, I just see newsletters all the time and I just archive them. In my head, I've demoted them. So can you give me a pep talk, just like Rocky Balboa or something? Give me a pep talk and tell me all the important reasons why I should be putting my efforts into my newsletter, which will hopefully also inspire our audience today.

Shiven:

Awesome. I told you one story about my friend who just bought a course because Alex showed up to her inbox every single day. That's one of the biggest reasons that you will stay on top of your viewer's head all the time. Also, newsletters help you build an authority. On Twitter, on Instagram, all those things, they're short form content. Short form content are for... You cannot educate people on a very deep level through short form content. Newsletters are a long form content. When someone reads your newsletters, there will be zero doubt in their mind about your skills or your authority. Because let's say that I write a newsletter about five mistakes you do as a copywriter, and my viewer will read that newsletter. Let's say that they take 4 to 5 minutes in reading that letter. So for five minutes, I held their attention in my hands. Those five minutes are very valuable in today's world of, let's say, the dopamine filled world. Five minutes can build yourself. Those five minutes will help you build yourself in your viewer's mind the way no social media platform will ever do, except YouTube podcast, because those are also long form content.

Shiven:

So if anyone is hearing your podcast up to this point, you have built that authority.

Lee:

Hey, folks on YouTube, for people listening, I'm waving at the camera and you can actually watch this entire podcast episode on YouTube. There will be a link in the show notes. Exactly. Carry on, mate.

Shiven:

Awesome. A lot of podcasters, there's one client of mine, he's also a podcaster. W hat he does is that he builds newsletter around his podcast episodes, which I told you about. So what he would do is, let's say he recorded a podcast and the topic is how to start a digital agency. Now he would post a newsletter named How to build a Digital Agency. And that newsletter would be around 4 to 500 words. It would just spark the curiosity of your reader's mind. And at the end, at the bottom of the newsletter, there would be a link to your podcast, and that's where you would draw traffic to your podcast. So it's also like a feedback loop that you're sending traffic from social media to newsletters and from newsletters to the social media. So you're trying to push yourself from all the sides. So newsletters act as one of the biggest, let's say, content stream, traffic stream.

Lee:

So here, I think what I'm hearing then from this entire episode, the importance to me as an agency owner, as a podcast producer, content creator, as somebody who wants to drive listenership to the show, as somebody who wants to fill in a room full of agency owners at an event because I do a yearly or bi yearly event, or also get people onto my course which might help them, etc. For me, the importance then of having a newsletter is ensuring that the brand is front and center of mind, getting myself associated with key messages about building your agency and all of the things that I'm able to advise people on. It's a great way to continue to develop relationships when people read. It's a great way to build my authority. It also means that I'm no longer beholden to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or any other platform because this is my database, this is my data, this is my newsletter. People can unsubscribe as when they wish, and that's totally fine. It's not a big issue. The important thing is this is a platform that I will forever own as opposed to other people. These are all important things.

Lee:

No matter what the trends are on the internet, be it that you now have to do dances on TikTok, or be it that you have to do YouTube Shorts, or be it that you suddenly now have to be writing long form content on LinkedIn, or whatever those trends, the one thing that never changes is that people have email that they will receive it. They often will see those key subject lines which will keep you in their mind against those key areas that you offer help and support on. Those are really key ways to stay in people's minds and to essentially at some point drive traffic or develop new business opportunities.

Shiven:

Wow. Were you writing that down? No.

Lee:

Well, I'm recording it, aren't I?

Shiven:

You memorized the whole stuff. It's so cool how you summarize it.

Lee:

Thank you. Well, the reason I do that, mate, to be honest, is if I don't say it out loud in a short form tweet, as it were, or I think that was more like a Twitter thread, I'll forget the lessons that I learned. Very often on these podcasts, I'll do a recap. That was pretty much the recap of the entire episode, I hope. But from everything you've said, it's really challenged me, and I really appreciate everything you said, it's really challenged me to see newsletters in a different way. Even as a consumer of newsletters, I very often have just poo pooed the idea and unsubscribed, etc. But I know there are people that come into my inbox all the time and I never ever open their emails, but I am getting an idea of who they are over time just from those subject letters. There's one guy, for example, that I always used to think was a bit of an idiot, maybe about a few years ago, but I never really unsubscribed from his newsletters. Those newsletters still keep coming into this day. I've seen a marked shift in the subject headers, which start to suggest to me that that person, I'm not going to mention any names, but that person may have grown up a little bit.

Lee:

Things like family and friendships are now more important to them in their life. It's given me a better idea of who that person is without me even opening those emails. I'm more likely to open an email from him or even connect with him again as and when we have conversations just from that. So that challenged me as well. Well, mate, that's pretty much it. I guess let's wrap up the show with, first of all, a big thank you. And secondly, what's the best way for people to connect with you? And then we shall wave goodbye.

Shiven:

So I'm available right now on two platforms, LinkedIn and Twitter. I just started Twitter, I've got 44 followers, but I'm pretty active on that. You can reach out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn anyways. I'm active on both. Folks, we will.

Lee:

Make sure that we put the links to both LinkedIn and Twitter in the show notes as well as to the Misfits page. That's your newsletter so you can subscribe to that. Also, we will carefully re listen to this episode and we will try and find as many links as we possibly can to the different areas that were mentioned as well so that you can go consume that. If you're watching on YouTube, please don't forget to like and subscribe. If you're listening and you would prefer to watch, then just check out the show notes and there'll be a link to this YouTube video as well. Mate, thank you so much for your time. Take care. Have a great day and hopefully speak soon. Thank you.

Shiven:

You were an awesome podcast. Just like you said, I was not expecting the level of memory and the way you just summarised everything. Oh, you. Thank you.

Lee:

You're welcome back anytime.

Shiven:

Have a love, too.

Lee:

Take care, mate. Bye bye.

Shiven:

Okay, awesome.