📈 How to Grow Your Newsletter With Free Google Traffic

Welcome to BetterLetter 📧

Isaac flew into NYC (and I took the 45-min train ride into the city) for the Newsletter Conference last week!

It was a blast to connect with our clients and newsletter operators from around the world in person for the first time! I’ll share takeaways from the day soon.

In today’s email, you’ll learn:

• 🥇 How to get on page 1 of google results (so you can grow your newsletter for free)

• 📈 3 simple tweaks to your landing page to improve your conversion rate

Helpful Links 🔗 

• 💰️ The power of information asymmetries and how to profit from them (link)

• 📊 Reddit pages are ranking way higher in Google search results right now (link)

• 🫰 A systematic way to decide how to price your products/services (link)

• 📊 Beehiiv launched multiple subscription tiers (link)

• 👀 ICYMI: Steal 2 ad copy frameworks we use to grow our clients’ newsletters (link)

• 🐝 The best ESP in the game: Get 20% off of your beehiiv subscription for 3 months (link)*

• ♻️ Get paid to make money: Get a $100 bonus if you make $100 in paid referrals within 2 months when you sign up for Sparkloop (link)*

_{*This is an affiliate link}

Let’s dive in.

A Semi-Automated Way to Get Free, Organic Subscribers to Your Newsletter 📈 

Paid Reddit ads are generally a tough nut to crack, but there’s plenty of opportunity for free, organic growth.

Especially with how Google is now favoring Reddit posts and threads.

So how do you grow your newsletter for free with Reddit..without wasting time?

Enter f5Bot 🤖 

f5Bot is simple, free tool that tells you when specific keywords or phrases are used on Reddit.

(It also works on Hacker News and Lobsters, but for our purposes, we’ll only talk about Reddit)

Here’s how it works:

1. Create free account

2. Tell it which keywords and phrases you want to be notified about

3. Tell it if you want to ignore any words, subreddits or phrases (these are referred to as flags)

   

4. Wait for an email to come through telling you that your newsletter topic is being discussed.

5. Jump into the conversation, be helpful and recommend your newsletter*

*Common Sense Practices 🤔 

• DON’T recommend your newsletter in a spammy way (without context, in threads where it’s not that relevant, etc.). It’s lame, unhelpful and people hate it. You’ll get booted.

• DO offer actual value in your comment beyond just plugging your newsletter.

• DO recommend your newsletter when you genuinely think it will help people, NOT just because you want more subscribers.

  • The best litmus test for this is: Imagine your friend (instead of you) ran a newsletter about your topic that you think is good, would you specifically recommend his newsletter in this situation purely to be helpful? If so, go for it. If not, don’t comment.

For example, let’s say you run a newsletter about flight deals, so you input

1. Keywords: flight discounts, flight deals, cheap international flights, cheap flight hacks

2. Flags: only-reddit (tells it you only want results from reddit), no-url=/r/boeing/ (tells it you don’t want any notifications from this subreddit that has been getting a lot of noise from the issues with Boeing leadership)

That’s it.

It’s super simple

You might answer the few people’s specific question on that thread but more importantly, you just leap-frogged a bunch of blog posts to page 1 of Google because it's on Reddit.

Here’s how it would flow in action 🛩️ 

With the above keywords, you’d immediately get an email as soon as someone asks:

“How do you find the best flight deals?”

Then, you’d be able to chime in and share the link to your newsletter.

Boom, you’re done.

You invested ~2 minutes and helped a few people out immediately.

There’s only 21 comments on this post, but the best part?

You’re now on page 1 of Google search.

3 Ways to Improve Your Landing Page Conversion Rate 📈 

Poor landing pages lead to wasted money.

If your landing page isn’t converting at least 50% of visitors into subscribers, you likely have a lot of room for improvement.

If you’re paying to send traffic to a landing page and your conversion rate (CVR) is less than 50%, you’re pouring water into a leaky bucket.

Or to use a more vivid metaphor, it’s like lighting money on fire.

Let’s say it costs you $1 to get someone to land on your landing page with FB ads.

• If 50% convert into subscribers, your CPA is $2.

• If you improve your CVR to 60%, your CPA drops to $1.66.

• If you improve your CVR to 70%, your CPA drops to $1.42.

Those differences equate to A LOT of money when you run ads at scale.

The good news is, landing pages aren’t complicated. And a few tweaks can be the difference between a 40% CVR and a 60% CVR or higher.

Here are 3 simple ways to improve your landing page conversion rate:

1. Value prop ⭐️ 

2. One decision ☝️ 

3. Sell before the landing page 👀 

1) Value Prop ⭐️ 

The first thing people's eyes should see is your value proposition.

• It should be distilled into 7 words or fewer

• It should be the biggest font on the page

• It should answer the subscriber’s main question: What’s in it for me?

Here’s a newsletter with a clear, simple value proposition:

Grow your net worth

A few other questions to help you distill your value prop:

• What’s the valuable thing your subscribers will get by subscribing to your newsletter?

• What’s the tangible end result your subscribers get?

• What’s the problem you solve for your subscribers?

→ Make your value prop simple, clear and the first thing people see

2) One decision ☝️ 

People should only be faced with one decision when they are on your landing page:

subscribe or close out the window

If you ever took a Psych 101 course, you know about the famous jam study..

The experiment took place in a grocery store:

• Group A was presented with 24 different flavors of jams

• Group B was presented with 6 flavors

Guess what happened?

• 4% of group A bought jam.

• 31% of Group B bought jam.

Group A experienced what’s called choice overload. Too many choices.

Group B experienced good choice architecture. Fewer, higher quality choices.

Your landing page should NOT look like a normal website with 10 different menu items or links to click:

It SHOULD only have one button to click.

→ When it comes to landing pages, don't give people any other links to click or pages to visit.

3) Sell before the landing page 👀 

Especially when you’re growing your newsletter via paid ads or organic social content, you should sell people on subscribing…

…BEFORE they get to your landing page.

The landing page actually shouldn't need to do any heavy lifting.

The goal with most landing pages is to make it easy for people to execute a decision they have already made when they saw your ad or post.

→ Your ad or social media post should take people 99% of the way there. The landing page should reinforce the decision they already want to make.

👉️ Here’s a summary of the takeaways:

• Grow your newsletter organically:

  • Use f5bot to monitor keywords related to your newsletter content on Reddit

    • Add actual value (no spam)

    • Plug your newsletter

• Improve your landing page conversion rate:

  • Your value prop should be the largest font, communicated in 7 words or fewer

  • Remove any other links people can click on (make their choices: subscribe or leave)

  • Convince people to subscribe before they get to your landing page. Your landing page should make it easy to execute a decision they’ve already made.

There you have it.

Go get to work 🫡 

Until next time,

Isaac + Kieran ✌️

P.S. When you’re ready to grow your newsletter…

Let us do it for you. We help creators, brands and ministries grow their newsletters so they can drive more sales and donations. If you want us to grow your newsletter for you and are ready to invest at least $2k/month on ads, book a call with us here.