How to Get Your First 5,000 Readers and Engage With Your Audience

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Now that you’ve launched your newsletters and started publishing, you’re probably starting to ask two big questions: How do I grow my audience and get my first 1,000 or 5,000 readers? And how do I get more readers to engage with my content? 

So let’s dive into those two areas of opportunity and see if we can find a few ideas that will work for you.

Growing your audience

In all the years I’ve worked in the newsletter space, I’ve yet to meet a single writer or organization that’s satisfied with the size of their audience. Everyone wants to get more readers.

I’ll give you the good news: The absolute best way to grow your audience is by creating great content for your newsletter. Not every newsletter you publish is going to be a huge hit, but if you consistently publish excellent work, over time, you’re going to create stories that get read and shared, which in turn help you grow your audience.

I’ll say it again: There is no tactic, no growth hack, no paid acquisition strategy that is as effective as creating great content for your newsletter.

Of course, there are also a few strategies that can help you accelerate your growth to make sure that more people see your great work. These strategies have worked well already for other indie newsletter writers — particularly as you think about getting your first 5,000 readers.

Handle the growth basics

I touched on these three ideas in the second post in this series, but just to recap: These tactics are usually where people get their first 100 subscribers from:

• Publishing and sharing your newsletter to your network — This usually involves emailing contacts and friends to let them know that you’ve launched your newsletter, or sending DMs via LinkedIn or Twitter inviting them to sign up. It’s a fairly manual process — but it does work. (One indie writer told me he DMed every person he knew on LinkedIn with the same two-sentence message, asking if they’d sign up and share some feedback with him. He got several hundred sign-ups from those messages.) You could also look to a tool like GMass to help you send emails to contacts in bulk.
• Promote your newsletter to your social media channels — Don’t be afraid to announce the newsletter on social media. Lean into the strengths of these channels: Text and carousels on Linkedin, Stories on Instagram, and threads on Twitter.
• Put your sign-up link in your social bios — You can use a tool like Linktree to create a link in bio to spotlight your newsletter. Make sure you include a clear CTA, like “Sign up for my newsletter,” to drive readers back to your sign-up page.

Build your landing page

When you first launched your newsletter, I encouraged you to build out a launch post explaining what your newsletter is and who it’s for. As you continue to grow your newsletter, you may find that directing people back to that original launch post doesn’t make sense — it talks all about how your newsletter is brand new, but now you’re outside of those first few weeks, and it might sound a little dated. I’d encourage you to publish a new version of the page.

I’d try a few things with this updated landing page:

• Put the call to action in the headline — When I shared some advice in an earlier post about launching your newsletter, I mentioned a hypothetical newsletter about my neighborhood, which I called The Midtown East Report. If I wrote that newsletter, I’d want to be very clear about the value of my work, and also encourage readers to subscribe. So a great headline for this landing page might read, “Get the latest Midtown news, restaurant reviews, and more with The Midtown East Report.” Keep things direct, simple, and clear with the headline.
• Highlight some of the great stories you’ve published already — What are a few of your favorite newsletter posts so far? You might want to link to some in the body of the post to give readers the chance to sample your best work.
• Create an easy-to-remember URL for the post — Make it something that you’ll be able to remember and share. For instance, if I was running that Midtown East newsletter, I might publish this post at a URL like midtowneastreport.com/subscribe. (Some newsletter platforms, like Beehiiv, will automatically create this URL for you.)

Write opening and closing CTAs

Calls to action, or CTAs, are any sort of sentences or nudges you use to get readers to do something — to subscribe to your newsletter, to pay to support your work, or to attend an event. And if you’ve been studying other indie newsletters, you may have noticed that many writers open or close their posts with a CTA to readers. There’s a simple reason why: They’re great ways to get readers to take action and subscribe!

With an opening CTA, I might start with a sentence that explains what this newsletter is, and then link to the subscribe page for your newsletter. For The Midtown East Report, I’d write something like:

“Welcome to the Midtown East Report, your guide to what’s happening on the east side of town. Subscribe today and get our latest stories in your inbox!”

And then I’d link to my subscribe page: midtowneastreport.com/subscribe.

If one of my readers shares one of my posts with a friend, that friend might not know what my newsletter is all about. But if I have that opening CTA at the top of the post, I can quickly bring them up to speed, and hopefully convert them to my newsletter, too!

Then I’d end my newsletter with a closing CTA. I love when writers try what I’ve been calling “the Table of Contents” approach to these closing CTAs. Think about the stuff you always want readers to do once they’ve finished a story, and include those at the bottom of a post as a bulleted list. For instance, I might try these bullets at the bottom of a post for my hypothetical local newsletter:

• Not yet a subscriber to The Midtown East Report newsletter? Sign up today — it’s free!

• Have a tip or story idea you want to share? Email me — I’d love to hear from you!

• Want to get an event listed in our monthly community calendar? Submit it here!

• Looking for restaurant reviews and photos from the neighborhood? Follow us on Instagram!

Any reader who finishes my newsletter will have a few next steps to take that will deepen their relationship with me and my work.

Hone your message to readers

Those opening and closing CTAs are very effective, but if a reader sees the same ones every single time, they’ll start to tune them out. So try to mix in different messages, and make sure you focus on explaining the value of your newsletter. Don’t just tell them what your newsletter is, but why it matters, why it will create some sort of impact for them, or why they should take the next step and subscribe.

Why might someone subscribe? A few ideas:

• It creates value for them — Your newsletter saves them time, makes them money, or helps them do better work.
• It impacts their life in a positive way — Your newsletter makes them smarter, helps them make decisions, solves a problem they have, or gives them resources to improve their life.
• It strikes an emotional chord — Your newsletter makes them happier or helps them better understand themselves.
• They want to follow your work — Your readers like you, and choose to subscribe to stay connected to the work you’re doing

Spend a few minutes thinking about your why — and it’s entirely possible that your why may involve a combination of these ideas.

Remember when I encouraged you to write down everything you knew about your audience? You might want to go back to that document and add another section, this time all about the reasons why someone might want to subscribe. I love to ask readers why they’ve subscribed to my newsletter — I always learn a lot about how to market my newsletter based on their feedback. (More on that tactic in a bit!)

Once you’ve thought about the why, try to write out a few alternate calls to actions that you could use in those opening or closing CTAs. Here are two formats I like to try:

• Ask a question, then give them the call to action — For instance, for the newsletter about my neighborhood, I might try, “Wondering what’s new in Midtown East? Sign up for my newsletter to get the latest news about what’s happening on the east side.”
• Introduce a problem readers have, then position your newsletter as an answer — For that same newsletter, I might write, “There’s so much happening in our neighborhood, from new developments to new restaurants. It can be tough to keep track of everything! So sign up for my newsletter, and I’ll help you stay on top of all the latest local news.”

Keep trying new CTAs. The best indie newsletters are always varying their CTAs, maybe a few times per month — using new language, or even changing the length of those CTAs — to convert readers to their newsletter. I wouldn’t be too concerned about optimizing for the perfect message — the more important thing is to vary the messaging so readers won’t scroll past your CTA.

Cross-promotion with other newsletters

Some newsletter platforms, like Beehiiv, have recommendation tools built in. When someone signs up for your newsletter, you can recommend another newsletter on their platform, and vice versa. These recommendations can drive significant sign-ups for your newsletter — they’re a free source of growth, and readers recommended by another newsletter tend to be highly engaged. Many indie writers I talk to say they get hundreds, or even thousands, of new sign-ups per year from intra-newsletter recommendations. 

I’d recommend personally reaching out to other newsletters you like and seeing if you can set up a swap — you’ll promote their newsletter, and they’ll promote yours. If you do this, try to find newsletters with a similar audience or size to yours. (Yes, it’d be great if the team at Morning Brew promoted your newsletter; no, they’re probably not going to do so for a newsletter that only has a few hundred subscribers.)

As you publish more, and other writers discover your newsletter, you may start to see recommendations coming in from writers who you don’t have a personal relationship with. That’s a good thing — it means your newsletter is valuable enough that others are organically finding your newsletter and actively looking to recommend it to their readers!

If you’re not on a platform with built-in recommendations, you could always use a tool like SparkLoop’s Upscribe widget to recommend other newsletters, regardless of the other newsletter’s ESP. (A bonus of Upscribe: You can choose to promote newsletters from their Partner network, and actually get paid — often anywhere from $1 to $4 — for every sign-up you drive for someone else’s newsletter.)

Another option: Using magic links, which allow anyone to sign up from a newsletter with just one click. Think about how you can pair these with original content — for instance, doing an interview with another writer for their newsletter, then including a magic link so readers can sign up for your newsletter with a single click. Beehiiv has their own magic link tool that works with platforms like AWeber, ConvertKit, and Mailchimp. SparkLoop also has one that works with many popular email platforms.

Create your “forward to a friend” email

It’s great to ask readers to share your newsletter with a friend or colleague. But they’re busy people, and if they have to do a lot of extra work to share your newsletter, they might not follow through — even if they really like your work!

So I like to make things as easy as possible and build that email for them. Here’s a wonderful tool from Parcel that allows you to pre-write that email. Insert the subject line (using one of the CTAs you worked on above), add a few sentences about your newsletter in the body section, and then add the link back to your landing page. Finally, copy the link. 

The next time you publish an intro or closing CTA, add in a sentence encouraging readers to share your work — “Love this newsletter? Click here to share it with a friend who might love it, too!” — and then paste in that link. When readers click on it, it’ll automatically open up their email tool, and all they’ll need to do is type in their friend’s email address and hit send.

Try contests or giveaways

Contests tend to drive significant engagement with readers. I love how a local newsletter like The Ottawan uses their annual Best Of contest to drive readers to vote for their favorite local business, and then asks readers to sign up for their newsletter at the end of the submission form. The great thing about a contest like this: Many of the businesses nominated for Best Of share the voting form with their fans and patrons, which exposes new readers to The Ottawan.

Or take a look at how The Charlotte Ledger does their annual 40 Over 40 contest. When readers nominate someone, they’re asked to sign up for the newsletter, too, and stories about the winners tend to get shared widely. (Most companies have an internal newsletter, and an announcement about an employee winning an award is perfect content for one of those emails.) Those stories also drive sign-ups, since the Ledger does a good job with top and bottom CTAs on those posts.

Giveaways can be a useful source of sign-ups, but be careful about how you run them. Larger, more established newsletters tend to give away massive prizes — like trips to tropical destinations — in exchange for an email address. Those drive lots of sign-ups (everyone wants a free trip to Fiji!), but minimal long-term engagement.

Instead, think about smaller giveaways tied to the content you create. I love how Wesley Verhoeve does this in his photography newsletter, Process. He’ll give away something small — a few rolls of black and white film, or a set of photography-themed socks — to readers, as long as they’ve signed up for his newsletter. It’s less a way to drive massive growth, and more about converting readers who haven’t yet subscribed to the newsletter.

Another bonus of contests: Many of these giveaways are sponsored — advertisers pay to promote their products in your newsletter, and also provide the giveaway materials for free. Done right, an advertiser is effectively paying you to grow your list!

“Power comment” on posts from public figures and in major groups

This is something that was hugely helpful for my own newsletter (which is all about newsletters) when I was first getting started. There are a few Facebook Groups and Slack rooms where email folks spend a lot of time, and I’d make sure to pop in, replying to others and answering questions. I even wrote a few articles about issues that many members were having, and would drop in the link to a tutorial or guide as a reply to their public posts. At the end of the article, I’d include a CTA for my newsletter. Those posts helped me position myself as someone with expertise in this space, and helped grow my newsletter audience, too.

Try a similar strategy, either in groups where your audience hangs out, or on posts from public figures. Engagement there might give your list a boost.

Experiment with paid acquisition

At this stage, when you’re still small, I wouldn’t encourage you to spend a lot of money to acquire email addresses. If you have the budget for it, you can run some small tests on various channels to see how effective each is at driving sign-ups.

A good starting place would be to advertise in other newsletters. Many newsletters have low-cost classified ads, allowing you to promote your newsletter for $150 or less. SparkLoop has their Partner network, where you can set a rate for every new subscriber added and encourage other newsletters to promote your newsletter. Or you could look to ad networks, like Paved or Swapstack, to identify places to promote your newsletter.

If you’re looking to promote your newsletter on social media platforms, start with Facebook. You can do some basic targeting there to make sure you’re reaching your intended audience. I’d also recommend checking out their Ad Library — you can use it to search for any brand and see how they’re promoting their newsletter on Facebook. It’s a great way to find inspiration for both marketing copy and images that you may want to try with your newsletter.

Adjust your content and promotion calendar

Now that you’re publishing, start to dig into the data from your email platform. What types of posts are your audience reading? Sharing? Commenting on? Use that data to understand which content formats to lean into, and which formats you might want to try next. Here’s a content calendar planning document I created — I recommend going through that worksheet every quarter to identify new ideas for content to try!

Remember: There’s a direct relationship between the content you create and your newsletter’s growth. Planning for and creating great content is the most important part of your growth strategy.

And as you do that, keep thinking about what you want to promote on each of your social media profiles. Remember: Your content does a lot of the work for you, so you don’t have to constantly be telling readers to subscribe. Focus on getting your fans and followers back to your newsletter and then using CTAs there to convert readers to subscribers.

Engaging with readers

The special thing about writing a newsletter is that there are all sorts of ways to engage directly with your readers. The inbox is like a digital living room — readers are letting you into their space, and it’s up to you to share stories and engage with them. The best indie writers use their newsletters to start a two-way conversation between them and their audience. 

Here are a few tips you can learn from other great writers to engage directly with your readers.

Ask for replies

Make sure your readers know that it’s OK to engage with you and that you actually want to hear from them! I love to give readers little prompts at the end of the newsletter — a question you’d love them to answer in the comments or by writing back to you via email. The more specific the question, the better. For instance, in my real-life newsletter (which happens to be all about newsletters), whenever someone signs up, I send them a welcome email asking them, “What is the biggest challenge you’re facing with your newsletter?” Everyone has something they’re struggling with, and so that leads to a ton of replies. (One in five readers writes back that welcome email, which is a fantastic response rate.) 

Another example: At BuzzFeed, my team asked readers of our Books newsletter, “What’s one book you read recently that you couldn’t put down?”, and hundreds of readers wrote back. (We later turned some of their answers, with their permission, into a crowdsourced list on our website.) The easier is it to reply, and the more specific the question, the more engagement you’ll see.

There are two ways you might want to ask for a reply:

• Ask your audience for feedback — Ask readers to tell you what they think about your newsletter. Did they like a particular story? Are they enjoying their paid subscription? Ask them to write back to you and tell you how they feel.
• Ask them a question and then use their answer in your newsletter — Use their questions as the starting point for an advice column, or like we did at BuzzFeed, crowdsource some of their answers and turn it into a post in your newsletter. (Just make sure you get their permission first to use their name and answer!)

Write back to your audience

It’s not enough to merely ask for replies — it’s also worth spending the time to write back to your readers! I understand that you can’t spend all day hanging out in your inbox or in the comments section, but try to genuinely engage when you can. Take time to craft personal replies, to ask more questions, or to say thank you. You’d be shocked at how loyal readers can be if you take the time to engage directly with them.

Plus, if you roll out paid offerings — like a subscription, a membership, or digital courses — you’ll find that readers who are having issues will write directly to you. (There’s no customer service team behind you when you’re running an indie newsletter — you’re the team!) If you’re ignoring those replies, you might be ignoring your own paying customers.

Survey your audience

I mentioned earlier that it’s great to ask readers what they love about your newsletter. Often they understand things about your newsletter that you might not even realize.

One of the best ways to learn a lot quickly is through a survey. Anytime I run a survey about a newsletter, I always start with three types of questions:

• Something numeric — On a scale of 1 to 4, how useful/valuable/important is this newsletter to you? (I like 1 to 4, because it means readers have to tell you if they feel more positive or negative about your newsletter. If you use a scale of 1 to 5, and a reader answers with “3,” what did you really learn?)
• Something about the job of the newsletter — What does this newsletter do for you? What is the unique value of this email for you?
• Something open-ended — What could we do to make this newsletter better for you?

You might want to ask other questions, too, and that’s fine! What else might you ask about?

• Topics readers want to see more of.
• Testimonials you can share on your landing page or on social media.
• What other newsletters or websites they might be reading.
• How much a reader would be willing to pay for a paid offering.

Use this as an opportunity to learn more about what readers want and to help you understand what kinds of stories/content to focus on in the months ahead. Make sure you promote the survey in posts in your newsletter and on your social media profiles — you might need to promote it a few times to get enough readers to complete the survey. 

Then dig through the results, and really pay attention to what readers are telling you. From a survey, I’m looking for two things:

1. Am I delivering the right type of content to my readers? — Your survey might reveal that your audience wants to read different types of stories, or that you should redesign your newsletter to make it easier for them to find the content they want.
2. Am I marketing my newsletter in the right way? — You may find that you’re promoting your newsletter one way, but that’s not the thing readers like most about your newsletter. This survey might help you identify other ways to pitch your newsletter to a prospective reader.

Here’s an example of that: When I launched my own newsletter, I wasn’t entirely sure what readers were looking for. So as part of my welcome series, I asked readers what they relied on Not a Newsletter for.

The no. 1 answer? 83 percent of readers said they used it for “ideas and inspiration.” Based on that feedback, I adjusted the headline on my sign-up page to read: “Looking for ideas to help you get the most out of your newsletter strategy?” And that copy has worked so well: 67 percent of people who come to the landing page sign up for my newsletter.

You don’t need to be a genius marketer to come up with the right CTAs — you just need to be willing to listen to your audience.

What’s next?

As your audience grows, you’re going to want to start thinking about making money from your newsletter.

But how do you know when it’s time to start monetizing? And what are the different ways newsletters like yours monetize? Let’s talk through some options.

How to Start Monetizing Your Indie Newsletter

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