✈️ 10 Powerful Tools to Boost Your Newsletter

Welcome to First Class Founders, your favorite destination to learn the best growth tactics for founders & creators one week at a time.

Here's what we've got for you on today's flight:

• 🔁 Idea → Topic → Title

• 📰 Newsletter Growth Tools

• 📈 Why Growth Rate > List Size

• 💻 Newsletter Content Organizer

• 📢 Newsletter Cross Promotions Calendar

Get ready — we're about to take-off!

✈️ Episode Itinerary

Three months ago, I decided to launch the First Class Founders newsletter.

Yes, this newsletter... the one you're reading right now.

Problem is, I had no subscribers, and, essentially, no idea what to do or, even, where to begin!

Today, my newsletter has nearly 2,000 subscribers. It has an open rate of 40% and close to a 10% click-through rate.

How did I achieve this? What did I do that was so effective? What's my secret sauce?

Get ready to take notes because I plan to reveal all this to you today!

Quick disclaimer: Twitter recently announced changes to their API pricing plans which impacted many indie developers building awesome tools for Twitter. This is a fast-developing situation so you'll need to check the websites for each tool to see how they're handling this.

Having said that, grab your headphones and listen in!

10 Powerful Tools to Boost Your Newsletter Growth

Inside today's episode, you'll learn:

• Why Great Content is Not Enough (3:41)

• How to Grow via Recommendation Swaps (5:42)

• When Swapping Recs: Growth Rate > List Size (7:00)

• Recommendation Engines: ConvertKit, Sparkloop, Substack (7:10)

• Using Auto-DMs on Twitter to Grow Your Newsletter (18:22)

• How to Manage Your Twitter DM Inbox Using Inboxs (19:42)

• Summary of Newsletter Tools (21:16)

🥨 Growth Snack of the Week:

In-flight service time! Here, I share bite-sized growth snacks (read: hacks) building my audience for First Class Founders.

Snacks are meant to be tried and shared. If you do try them, please tag me on Twitter and let me know what you think!

Diving Into Newsletters

Since today's episode is on the tools that I use for my newsletter, we're diving deeper into the nitty gritty side of running this newsletter.

More specifically, I'll share with you my exact spreadsheet I use to keep track of my content ideas.

All right then, let's get down to business!

Newsletter Content Engine

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how I repurpose ideas to never run out of content.

Let's quickly review my content flow:

It all starts with a Twitter thread, which gets repurposed into small tweets and a LinkedIn carousel.

The thread is made into a podcast episode, which gets sliced up into smaller clips to post on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

Full disclosure: I have not started posting clips yet but it's on my list for this year!

Then, I expand on an idea from the podcast episode into a "Growth Snack of the Week" segment on then newsletter (like this).

Each "Growth Snack of the Week" segment is broken down into smaller tweets and expanded into a full Twitter thread, which completes my content workflow.

During this entire process, if I come up with ideas, I'll jot those down for future threads.

Again, feel free to check out this past edition of the newsletter if you need a quick refresher on my content workflow.

Content Spreadsheet Tracker

Here's the Google Sheets spreadsheet.

I know. Notion fans will roll their eyes.

But, I have a confession to make: I'm terrible with Notion.

So, I just simplified everything for myself by using plain ol' Google Sheets.

Plus, my team uses this spreadsheet too so I wanted to make it as universal as possible.

Okay, let's dig into the the spreadsheet.

You'll see two tabs: Schedule & Newsletter Cross Promos.

Schedule tab shows you my entire Podcast content calendar. Pretty neat, right?

I use this tab to keep track of the status of each episode so if you scan your eyes across the top, you'll see all the individual steps I take on each episode.

On a higher level, there's scripting, recording, editing, uploading for each episode. The tracker moves from left to right. So scripting comes before recording, which comes before editing, and so on.

I won't bore you by explaining what each row means but I do want to point out one row in particular: row Q.

Today's episode is number 27 so if you scan across to row Q, that's referring to this newsletter you're reading right now:

Yes, that's what today's newsletter is all about. When I was working on episode 27, I thought it'd be fun to share this spreadsheet and explain how each week's newsletter is created. And, here we are.

You may have noticed the top left labeled 'Idea → Topic → Title' above.

This is worth digging into.

Anytime I have an idea for a longer form piece of content, I write it down.

Over time, the idea becomes a topic, which ultimately gets transformed into a working episode title. All three phases (Idea / Topic / Title) can be seen from this example. The top two are finalized working titles for the podcast episodes.

The next few are more or less ideas with some topics.

For the guest episodes, I refine them later after my conversation with the guest as I never know what ideas come out from the conversations.

Now, this tracker is what I use for my podcast, but you can create something similar for your newsletter.

One small caveat: For the purposes of sharing this spreadsheet with you all, I made a copy of it. So any changes made to this tentative schedule will not be reflected on the spreadsheet I created for you today.

Tracking Newsletter Cross Promotions

Now, let's take a look that other tab labeled "Newsletter Cross Promos."

Ever wonder how I keep track of all the "Passenger of the Week" newsletter cross promotions?

Well, it's from this exact spreadsheet tab.

If you scroll to today's date, you'll see Money Abroad:

This is how I keep my cross promotions organized!

Do you have a newsletter with a similar audience of founders & creators with 2k+ subs and want to cross promote with me?

Just hit reply and let me know.

I'll leave you today with one pro tip.

For the link, make sure you add tracking codes so that your fellow newsletter operator will see where that boost in traffic is coming from!

This is what I add to the end of every link:

?utm_source=FirstClassFounders&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=crosspromo

That's it! Try this out yourself and let me know on Twitter what you think! (And don't forget to share this snack with your friends!)

Hope you enjoyed this week's Growth Snack! 😋

🎛 Metrics Dashboard

I'm building First Class Founders in public. Each week, I share my numbers exclusively through subscribers of this newsletter only.

→ Want to get in front of my audience of founders & creators?

Podcast:

• 90-Day Downloads: 7,326

• 30-Day Downloads: 2,222

• 7-Day Downloads: 540

👍🏻 Recommendation: Thinking of starting a podcast? I recommend Buzzsprout.

Newsletter:

• Subscribers: 1,905

• Open Rate: 40.0%

• Click Rate: 7.5%

👍🏻 Recommendation: I love Beehiiv for my newsletter. If you sign up using my affiliate link, you'll get a full year of First Class Founders Membership ($99 value), free.

💺 Passenger of the Week

Get smarter with your expat money 💰 Our friends are publishing a weekly newsletter, Money Abroad, an excellent resource for expats to learn about building wealth living abroad.

Here's the pitch:

"Money Abroad shares fresh tips about money & wealth that you can learn in under 10 minutes. Plus, it’s free"

✈️ When You're Ready

Here are 3 ways I can help you:

1. Join First Class Founders Membership:

• Listen to full, uncut, extended guest interviews that never aired publicly

• Gain access to a members-only private podcast feed without any interruptions

• Unlock new episodes one full week before being released to the public

2. Get In Front Of My Audience:

• 15k+ Twitter followers

• 12k+ podcast subscribers

• 1,900+ newsletter subscribers

3. Work With Me 1-on-1:

• 30m - Broad strategies on a particular topic.

• 60m - Dig deeper into specific tactics on a topic.

💬 Final Word

Thank you for being a loyal reader of First Class Founders!

You have no idea how much that means to me. 🤗

If you ever want to chat, just hit reply!

I love hearing from you.

See you next week!

Yong-Soo Chung — Serial Entrepreneur, Podcaster