Within the past week, I hit a major benchmark — surpassing 500 newsletter subscribers!! Which is what inspired me to sit down and write this post about the benefits of having a newsletter and how to set smart, reasonable goals.
A regular newsletter is one of the most basic (and potentially impactful) marketing tools an entrepreneur has in their arsenal. It’s also an underestimated, underutilized asset for a lot of creative solopreneurs.
When I published my first novel back in 2018 and started doing book signing events, I hadn’t considered the importance of a newsletter. I had a blog and social media pages, but I was still figuring out the best ways to communicate with my early audience.
I made a habit of talking to other authors and paying attention to the creative ways they displayed their books, merchandise, and promotional materials. Having a newsletter sign-up sheet at events was one of the first lessons I picked up.
However, even after starting my newsletter, it took me some time to start understanding the value and opportunities… and even longer to begin understanding how to set reasonable goals for my newsletter.
You can see the clipboard for newsletter signups clearly visible in the middle of my display (I covered the email addresses with one of my art postcards to protect personal information).
One of my recent blog posts discussed the importance of prioritizing quality over quantity when it comes to blogging.
Writing meaningful content targeting a specific audience pays off. Don’t just take my word for it; look at the change in traffic from the first four years of my blog serving as more of a personal portfolio vs. the last four years when I became much more strategic with my posts.
It took me a few years to realize that this strategy applies to newsletter marketing, too. For a long time, I was focused on the wrong key performance indicator (KPI). I was preoccupied trying to get as many signups as I could… without paying attention to whether the people signing up were genuinely interested in the content I was producing.
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