500 newsletters later--what we've learnt from 17 months of YAP-ping

Newsletters take a lot of work, they’re a risky investment and highly susceptible to flopping (trust us on this one!). It’s tough to put all kinds of time and resources into something you don’t even know will work. But it’s even tougher to pull it off when you’re figuring it out on the fly.

Last week we published our 500th newsletter. So to learn how it's done, I naturally turned to Charlotte Ellis, our editor at YAP. We chatted about the ins and outs of becoming a newsletter craftswoman, how newsletters support businesses (just as YAP supports The Attention Seeker (TAS)), and what it took to bring 14,000 subscribers to YAP in less than a year and a half.

Sup Charlotte! I’ll just ask super broadly, why does YAP exist?

We talk a lot about audience building at TAS, and the idea being that you build your audience in stages (for more on this, check out The 5 Stages of Attention). Once you get to a point where you've got a pretty decent audience on social media and your business rate of growth is slowing, the next stage is to have an owned audience you can speak to anytime you want without the algorithm, like through a newsletter.

The idea also came about when there was a real possibility of a TikTok ban, we had a big audience on there and started wondering how to reach people with those limitations. When you have someone's email, you can reach them directly whenever you want. So that was the idea behind YAP as part of a bigger strategy for TAS: to build an owned audience, grow the brand, and eventually monetise the newsletter as a new arm of the business.

When you started, what kind of experience did you bring into the editor role?

I think what I brought to it was just a willingness to try things quickly. I have experience in editing content as a copywriter, and I have a good bit of experience from previous roles in picking up things that were either very new or very chaotic, and creating systems to make them run smoothly. So I brought experience in those ways, but as far as running a newsletter, none whatsoever!
 

What's it been like navigating the format of the newsletter and understanding what people want to read?

At the beginning, the content was a lot around the TAS team and what was happening with the business. We were thinking because lots of people follow us on social media, they’d want to read the newsletter to feel more connected to us. But we quickly realised people actually don’t care about that, because it doesn’t add value to them.

What people really wanted was to tap into our knowledge of how to succeed on social media, what's happening in marketing, and the fact we have our finger on the pulse from spending so much time online. That's the value we offer to our readers.

Has the newsletter’s growth been fairly organic?

Not as much as we originally thought. We thought we’d be able to move a lot of our audience from our socials and our original LinkedIn newsletter, which was also called Your ATTN Please. There were several thousand people on that subscriber list, and we thought a lot of them would hop over to the new newsletter. And some did, but not as many as we thought.

So most of our growth has been through paid ads, which is pretty common in the newsletter world. It's harder and harder to get people to sign up for a newsletter through social media, and unlike social media, you can't discover a newsletter organically. The only way people learn about it is either through word of mouth or seeing an ad, so that growth’s a lot harder.

We produce a marketing newsletter, but as you said, we’re also trying to advance the TAS brand. How do you strike that balance, making something that serves TAS’ goals, but is still fun and beneficial for readers?

We are part of TAS, but I also look at our newsletter as its own entity. I'll get requests from the team about TAS-related things to advertise in YAP and I always just try to think of it really objectively, making sure we’re promoting something that provides value for our audience and matches their interests.

The last thing I want is for our audience to feel like we're spamming them with things that aren't relevant to them. So I think of it from the perspective of what we can offer our audience, keeping in mind who they are and what they want from us.

What are some of the key learnings you've picked up in starting a newsletter from scratch?

Daily newsletters are very difficult. I wouldn't suggest that anyone try to do one unless they're going to go all in. It's not something people should go into thinking they’re going to monetise it, and it's going to be a great business within a year or two. It takes a really long time to build trust with your audience and if your content quality is crap, no one's going to read it.

If you want to earn people's attention in their inbox, your content has to bring something that no one else is bringing. You can't just create another newsletter. You have to have high quality content that's super valuable to people. And so that's what we try to do every day.

-Devin Pike, Copywriter