0–20k subscribers in a year content strategy [TL;DR Strategies]

What’s this?

I’m love to share about growth strategies but hate to waste your time with yet another article. So here is me summarizing a brilliant article I’ve came across in 1 minute .

@lukechesser

Who’s behind it?

Harry Dry is the creator behind Marketing Examples, a blog/newsletter site where he presents case studies on various topics related to marketing.

What are the results?

• 20,000 email subscribers in one year.
• No ads, no audience, no connections.
• All done by tailoring your content to the different audience accordingly

Here is Harry’s subscribers by source

• Twitter — 5.8k
• Product Hunt — 2k
• Reddit — 1.8k
• Indie Hackers — 1.6k
• Facebook — 700
• LinkedIn — 500
• Slack Groups — 250
• Hacker News — 800
• Other link sharing sites — 450

Total: 13,900. The rest are organic traffic and word of mouth.

Strategies

1) Know where are your audiences at

• find all the different places where your target audience hangs out
• Harry’s target audience: marketers
• Hangout places online: Facebook Groups, Slack Groups, Subreddits, LinkedIn, Growth Hackers, Indie Hackers, Twitter …

2) Add Value

• Adding value isn’t dumping links.
• People are busy. Wow them on whatever platform they’re at
• take the time to become a genuine member of each community, not self-promoting all the time

3) Tailor your content to each platform

• there is no “one-size-fits-all” formula.
• Eg: Twitter is not Facebook
• tailor your content to fit each platform. Below are a few examples:

Long-form sharing

• Twitter, Reddit and Indie Hackers
• Here is an example from Harry

Visual

• attention spans are shorter on FB and Slack groups
• break articles into visual tips
• Subtly branding each one. Upfront value. No hard sell

Direct Links

• Hacker News, Designer News, Growth Hackers, Zest.is.

Tailored title

• Hacker News → How Nike sold its first shoes
• Growth Hackers → 5 marketing lessons from how Nike sold its first 50000 shoes

4) Call-to-Action to share content / subscribe

• share the whole article
• politely ask if the reader would like to join my email list / share the content

Examples

• “Thanks for reading. Hope you found it somewhat useful. Any specific questions lmk. Now, this is where it gets meta. Maybe I can tempt you with my marketing newsletter. I write a weekly email full of practical marketing tips like this :) “
• “If you enjoyed this, and you’re feeling generous perhaps like or retweet the thread on Twitter”

And here is me learning from Harry:

Thanks for reading! More real-life examples and TL;DR case studies at GrowthHunt.