Week 2: Getting to Grips With The Basics

I did it. I sent the first email from all three platforms. My experiment is full steam ahead.

But before I pat myself on the back too much, I have a confession. Last week I said my focus for this week would be getting new subscribers. Well, I’ve been pretty crap at it.

In my defence, I’ve spent a lot of time getting content up on all three platforms. Plus, I’ve had actual paid work to do because I still have to pay my bills and these newsletters aren’t earning me anything yet.

So you might be disappointed to know, I haven’t made it to a million subscribers and I haven’t made six figures overnight.

I’ve also been pretty crap at tracking my time so I’ve had to guess a bit at how long I’ve spent on the project. I’m working on getting better so hopefully I’ll be more accurate going forward.

Anyway, enough of all the stuff I’m rubbish at and let me tell you what I have been doing.

The first emails went out

Last Friday, I sent my first update. According to Beehiiv’s figures, I had a 61.54% open rate. It’s showing 10 people as not having opened the email, but one of those people replied to me, so I’m not reading too much into this. I had seven replies in total and only two people said my email went to junk, so that’s quite promising.

Below is a screenshot of my Dashboard. As you can see, I’m now up to 30 subscribers so only 3 new subs since last week (must try harder).

New Brew Thursday (on Substack)

After I sent last week’s update, I spent the rest of the day working on New Brew Thursday (NBT). I wrote my monthly update for the main website (which I copied to the Substack page), and then I wrote the Substack update to go out to my subscribers (of which I now have 14).

This took a few hours, but it wasn’t actually much extra work than I usually do for NBT. I’ve been writing monthly updates for the main website since June and I’ve been doing a newsletter on LinkedIn for even longer. The Substack email is replacing the LinkedIn newsletter from this month.

I’ve also been using the notes feature on Substack which I really like. I think Substack was definitely the right platform for the NBT publication.

The Freelance Fairytale (on Ghost)

Monday morning was dedicated to The Freelance Fairytale Newsletter (TFF). I only launched this publication last week so I didn’t have any existing subscribers - I now have 10 so that’s a start.

I set the email to also show as a post on the site, with only part of it accessible to non-subscribers. To read the whole post, you have to subscribe.

My aim is to put one open post on there each week and then one member’s only post (which will also go out as an email).

So, once I’d written and sent that first email, I added another post. I will admit I cheated a bit and stole the content for it from my LinkedIn newsletter of the same name (which I’ll be getting rid of after this month).

More content

As I’ve already mentioned, I’m going to be adding content to all three platforms in between newsletters.

With NBT, I tend to just add content as I have it. I’ve got a beer battle to write up for last night and we’re visiting two taprooms in Manchester this weekend so I’ll write posts about those next week. That means quite a bit of work next week, but then I probably won’t have anything else to add until my monthly round-up at the end of January.

With TFF, I’m aiming for two pieces of content per week. One web-only post that’s open to everyone and one member-only post that will also go out as an email. To begin with, the web-only post will probably be a rewrite of my old LinkedIn newsletters to save me time. Until I start making money from these publications, I need to be as efficient as possible.

With this Beehiiv newsletter, I’ll be focusing on the weekly updates, but I will also be adding additional content to the site when I think there’s something worth going into detail about.

With that in mind, I spent most of yesterday afternoon writing a piece about pricing structures.

That took me around five to six hours (mainly because I was faffing around with tables and working out sums).

Finally, I spent this morning writing this update, which took about an hour to write and proofread.

So in total since my last update, I’ve spent around sixteen hours working on content for the three publications.

As I get more familiar with the platforms and get into a routine, I don’t think this will be as high every week. But writing content, promoting the content, and sending out weekly email newsletters does require an investment of time if you want to do a good job of it.

Anyway, that’s all from me for this week. If you’re finding these emails useful/interesting, hit reply and let me know.

I’ll be back in your inbox next Friday with another update.

Quick sales pitch

I’m not earning anything from this experiment yet, so here’s a quick reminder of my paid services.