Paywall Podcast - Subscription strategies for news and magazine publishers

Pete Ericson (00:00)
Most publishers think of their email list as a way to drive traffic to their site. Dylan Redicop thinks that's exactly backwards and he has the data to show while your email is the product. Hey, welcome Dylan.

Dylan Redekop (00:18)
Thank you. Thank you, Peter. Yeah, I'm really happy to be here. I'm excited to talk.

Pete Ericson (00:18)
Happy to have you on the pod.

Awesome. Yeah. There's a, so, um, as I've been, uh, uh, checking out your world of creators, content creators, and our world of, uh, more traditional publishers, I would say, uh, there is, there are a lot of differences, but there's a heck of a lot of overlap and that's kind of the overlap is really what I want to dig into.

Dylan Redekop (00:35)
Mm-hmm.

Pete Ericson (01:11)
Dylan is the founder of, you're the founder of growth currency media. You started growth currency as a pandemic project, I believe. And you made this, this interesting commitment to publish a hundred weekly edditions and somehow it turned into a full-time business.

Dylan Redekop (01:16)
Correct.

Pete Ericson (01:30)
You have two podcasts roles. You're the cohost of growth and reverse, ⁓ where you deep dive into how top newsletters grow. You have about 40,000 subscribers and you were also the former host of send and grow, which is spark loops podcast. And yeah, and you're dealing with some bigger publishers like morning brew and the hustle work week, et cetera. ⁓ So that's, you're bringing a lot of experience. I think it's almost a decade or more than a decade.

Dylan Redekop (01:44)
Correct. I was.

Pete Ericson (01:58)
of newsletter expertise in here. And I'm just psyched for our publishers to hear what you have to say, because I'm sure it'll be a little different than, I know it's going to be different from what they've been reading and learning. So, all right, first question, tell me about growth currency. Like you started as a side project, you decided to go for a hundred weekly additions. how did you, how'd you fall into that?

Dylan Redekop (02:21)
Yeah,

well, so I, you funny, I got laid off from my job before COVID hit. So it was it was kind of like I got the pre the pre COVID layoff at the end of 2019. And, and then, you know, I managed to actually get a job that I maintained through COVID. But during that year, I was like, well, you know, if this happens again, especially with what's happening with COVID, I want to make sure I'm like, basically, you know, limiting my downside. And so I thought doing that a good thing to do would be to start

a side business or side project. And everyone was talking about Substack back then in 2020. That was kind of the new hot thing on the market, even though it had been around for a few years. And I was like, well, maybe I should start a Substack newsletter. And I didn't know how to build websites and build newsletter lists, but Substack kind of seemed like a good all in one turnkey platform. So in January of 2021, I launched it. I had been kind of, you know, dabbling with the back end of things for a few months, but decided, you know, I should probably just actually

Pete Ericson (02:53)
Hmm.

Dylan Redekop (03:19)
hit publish. Nobody's reading this anyway. I have like zero subscribers. So what harm is there in doing that? And so, you know, I published the first three or three to five editions to like me, my test email address and my wife's email address and ⁓ had a really great open rate. ⁓ and then, yeah, I started promoting it on Twitter. Twitter was not what it was, not what it is now. ⁓ I mean, it's got a different name now.

Pete Ericson (03:22)
you

Dylan Redekop (03:44)
And there was a real vibrant community of creators and people building things on Twitter back in, you know, the 2020, 2021 days, at least that I was a part of, that I really enjoyed. And so I was promoting what I was building there. And it really, the newsletter had no real, I don't say, I wouldn't say it a real solid premise. I was just like, I need to start this thing and I'm going to write about what I'm interested in. And then people can follow along if they're interested in those things. What to not drone on too long about this.

Pete Ericson (04:03)
Mm.

Dylan Redekop (04:12)
I eventually found my niche as I published more and more. was like, I'm more interested in writing about this topic and that topic. And so that eventually turned into, I was writing about how I was growing my newsletter. So it turned into one of those kind of annoying meta topics or meta projects. That's like a newsletter about growing a newsletter. ⁓ But I mean, I don't regret it at all because it's got me to the point where ⁓ now five years later, I work as a full-time basically contractor or employee or

whatever you want to call it in this industry. And I love it. And every day ⁓ is different and enjoyable and challenging and all that stuff. So ⁓ that's kind of a real short fast forward to where we are now, but that's kind of how I got started.

Pete Ericson (04:54)
Any takeaways for the hundred issue challenge?

Dylan Redekop (04:59)
Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. ⁓ I probably had I not like committed to that. And I was inspired by somebody else's story that I had heard who said basically like, write a weekly newsletter for one year for 52 weeks straight and watch how it changes your life. And I was like, wow, that that's like really motivating, inspiring. And ⁓ I want to see what happens if I do it. And I thought the only downside will be that I have maybe ⁓ spent more time on something that wasn't fruitful.

Pete Ericson (05:15)
you

Dylan Redekop (05:29)
but really there were no downsides in trying this experiment because I would learn, at the very worst I'd learn something and maybe I'd learn that I didn't enjoy doing it. So I knew there was way more upsides and it would present way more opportunity. so sticking with it for a hundred straight weeks, I think I took one in the middle there. I took like one week off during my birthday. I like, I just don't want to celebrate my birthday and not have to worry about sending out a newsletter on that day. So other than that, was...

it was a really good forcing function to me to be committed to something. Cause I'm sure there's people in your audience who like, yeah, I'm going to stick with this thing like new year's resolutions. It's kind of the same idea, right? Like we're going to commit to this thing that is going to change our lives on January 1st. And then, you know, January 22nd rolls around and it's like, you have already forgotten that you had dedicated your life to this new change. And so I thought, I mean, I could have done that with this newsletter, but I really wanted to stick it out. And I was really motivated by

Pete Ericson (06:10)
you

Dylan Redekop (06:24)
Not loving working in the corporate marketing world. I had bounced around from job to job a little bit. And so I was like, I want to see this through and see where it takes me. Cause I see there to be a potential in the future doing this kind of work.

Pete Ericson (06:39)
Yeah, sounds like you've met the future, partially at least. ⁓ Yeah, so let's switch to Spark Loop when you worked there and you were working with some big publishers, Morning Brew, Hustle, I think a lot of people know those names. Was there anything surprising that you learned from being kind of inside that world of large newsletters that you could put your finger on?

Dylan Redekop (06:41)
Yeah, yep, absolutely.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, ⁓

I think the budgets that were put toward paid growth were pretty mind boggling. ⁓ I won't disclose exactly what was spent. to be completely honest, wasn't the account managers for those companies. I was running more the content end for Spark Loop. ⁓ But I spoke with their account managers and stuff like that. So I have an idea of what they were spending. And for those who don't know, Spark Loop at that time and still is, was a platform that was connecting basically newsletters together.

Pete Ericson (07:11)
Hmm.

Dylan Redekop (07:35)
You could pay other newsletters to promote your newsletter and you would just pay for, you know, verified leads or verified subscribers. And so, ⁓ it was kind of like a, when you pay for Facebook lead, ⁓ whether that person actually signs up or stays subscribed, you kind of got to pay for them no matter what. Whereas Spark Loop, you had a window of up to 28 days where if that person unsubscribes, you don't actually have to pay for them. ⁓ so there was some really good.

Pete Ericson (07:54)
Hmm.

Dylan Redekop (08:04)
some really good ways the cap downsides for Spark Loop for people who using Spark Loop that they could grow. Of course, you're going to be paying a little bit more per subscriber, but you're going to get probably a better subscriber, more engaged subscriber, somebody that actually wants to open and read your emails. So all that being said, these businesses, these newsletters, these publishers were spending a good amount of money as Spark Loop is part of their paid growth mix. They weren't all necessarily doing all Spark Loop.

They were doing still meta ads and potentially LinkedIn ads, depending on the demographic and that sort of thing. ⁓ but they were spending a lot of money and they also quite often would have, they would pay out well per verified subscriber, but they did have pretty strict policies on, ⁓ what counted as verified subscriber. They had to open X amount of emails and X amount of time, before they would actually pay out, ⁓ for those referred subscribers. Yeah.

Pete Ericson (09:00)
Interesting. just let's

unpack that a little bit because I don't think our audience is probably most are not familiar with the idea. And this is, this is like a newsletter cross promotions tactic essentially, or is it strictly a paid tactic for similar newsletters?

Dylan Redekop (09:03)
Sure.

It can be.

So you could 100 % organize a cross promotion where you would do it for free with another newsletter. You mentioned my newsletter and yours and I'll mention yours and mine. However, like the platform allowed for that. But really what this was, was a version of Co-Reg as much as they may not necessarily want to call it a Co-Registration thing, where it's like, hey, I just signed up for this newsletter, but here are three or four or five other newsletters you might be interested in as well. So this pop-up comes up after you hit subscribe.

Pete Ericson (09:31)
Mm-hmm.

Dylan Redekop (09:50)
on a newsletter's signup page, which it pops up saying, thanks for subscribing. You might also be interested in XYZ newsletters, subscribe to all, or you can check a box to just subscribe to a couple or one or two of them, or you can just ignore it and say maybe later. And so what Spark Loop did was it provided the software, a plugin that you could add to your landing page that would have that box pop up. And then on the backend, we had a whole partner directory of newsletters you could...

Pete Ericson (09:50)
Hmm.

Dylan Redekop (10:20)
choose to recommend in that spot. And those people like Morning Brew, like Hustle, were paying you ⁓ per subscriber that you sent their way through those recommendations. That was the primary way people were both spending money and making money on the platform.

Pete Ericson (10:22)
Hmm.

Mmm.

Interesting, interesting.

Okay. So pay, yeah, paid newsletter growth. Let's, dig in a little bit into that cross promotion side, because I think I went through that with you. So I signed up for your newsletter, ⁓ growth currency, and then I got, ⁓ some recommended newsletters, which I checked off a few of those and signed up. ⁓

in the sort of traditional publisher space, whether like your local news publisher or magazine publisher, especially in local news, that is something I actually never seen. And maybe there's some, know, my question to you really is, can a traditional publisher apply this same idea? And I think it's great if you could find, I mean, ideally you find two publishers that are not competitors and it's like you pop, you know, pop up, ⁓

Dylan Redekop (11:06)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Pete Ericson (11:24)
Hey, join this join the list and then you join and then well that you might be also interested in this other list But at the same time a lot of publishers might be competitors ⁓ in a space so Let me just give you like one example. So in the magazine kind of the niche

Dylan Redekop (11:35)
Yeah.

Pete Ericson (11:44)
world, there's probably more overlap for this kind of thing. So, but I can think of two fishing publishers that we work with. They both occupy this, they're competitors, right? And it's like, maybe, like, I don't know if this would be a good idea for them. Okay, you know, you get our newsletter, you might as well get them. And if you get over there and you, you, you, let's say you get, you know,

Dylan Redekop (12:05)
Mm-hmm.

Pete Ericson (12:09)
⁓ fishing publication B, recommending fishing publishing a publisher, a w would that be a good idea? Are you looking for, for publications that are a little more, a little further apart? You know what I mean?

Dylan Redekop (12:22)
Yeah, I have some ideas come up. So ⁓ one, if you're a local media publisher, so you're publishing a local newsletter based on your town or your city or what that might be, I wouldn't recommend another publisher doing the same thing at all. You could, but what I would do is I'd focus on local businesses that are trying to also grow their email lists because that way you're like, hey, we've got a local newsletter, we're hyper local, we're also going to promote this bakery down the street that's trying to grow their email list and their clientele.

we're gonna promote ⁓ the local sports ⁓ team or the leisure center or the YMCA. And that way it's all seen as a rising tide lifting all boats as opposed to like, I'm gonna recommend this other local newsletter. So that's one strategy you can go. And you could also even say, hey, we're gonna be driving paid traffic. for local newsletters, a really powerful way to grow is paid traffic. Because you can geographically target people in your city and grow them that way.

Pete Ericson (13:06)
Right, right.

Dylan Redekop (13:21)
And so if you're doing that, you can start charging these businesses a small fee or what have you, similar to what Spark was doing, but just arrange it on your own. As long as you can track the metrics and say, for every subscriber we send you, ⁓ you have to pay us X amount of dollars. Or you could even say, we're gonna be driving, we know we're gonna drive 200 leads a day to this page. How about you pay us X amount of money to have you always be one of the top recommended. ⁓

Pete Ericson (13:47)
Mmm.

Dylan Redekop (13:48)
email lists or newsletters or whatever to join or websites to check out, whatever, you know, they are offer a coupon that they're promoting, whatever that might be. There's a lot of ways you can skin this cat. So I think that would be for local media publishers, the best way to do that. If you're, excuse me, if you're a fishing magazine, for example, ⁓ then what I wouldn't recommend necessarily another fishing magazine, but maybe a hunting magazine, maybe an camping magazine, maybe a, ⁓ you know, any kind of sort of adjacent industry that people

Pete Ericson (13:55)
Right. Right.

Right, right, right.

Dylan Redekop (14:18)
rock climbing, four by four ⁓ outdoor trail running, know, these other things that are all very much ⁓ bow hunting, all that stuff. I'm sure you could find people that would be interested and yet not everybody's going to be interested in everything. But if you had two or three that had some overlap, I think that would be the better way to go.

Pete Ericson (14:27)
Right.

Yeah, that's super interesting. think like fishing is, especially in New England is summer, ⁓ which is where these particular publishers are. This is summer activity and then you get into like fall hunting season. So, you know, going after hunting publication would probably be a natural.

Dylan Redekop (14:42)
Mm-hmm.

Pete Ericson (14:54)
crossover. far as local news, think that jumped into my head is events. like, let's say, yeah, local news publishers like, hey, you join our list. You might also be interested in this events producer, right? Or really large event, you know, the local opera house or whatever it is. It's like, you know, don't miss an event. And so then they could do the same thing. They can kind of cross promote back. ⁓ That's very...

Dylan Redekop (14:54)
Yeah.

Yep, absolutely.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Theater, whatever, yeah.

Yep. Yep. And so you could arrange that as

a, as just a, scratch my back, I scratch yours, or it could be like actual agreed partnership on, you know, dollars. If one doesn't want to necessarily promote or one is driving far more traffic than the other, cause there's, that's often the imbalance when it comes to these cross promotions is in theory, they're great. You promote yours, I promote, or I promote yours, you promote mine, but Hey, I've got 50,000 people on my list and you've got like 2000. So like, there's a bit of a imbalance there. So, there are ways to navigate that, but.

Pete Ericson (15:26)
Yeah.

Mmm.

Dylan Redekop (15:50)
That's often an issue because rarely do people have kind the exact same subscriber count and open rate.

Pete Ericson (15:55)
paid though paying for it would be the way to balance that out right yeah so if you're at the 50 mm right right that makes sense okay cool that's some that's some advanced stuff there love to hear from any anybody listening to this if you're if you're considering doing it or actually doing it

Dylan Redekop (15:59)
Exactly. Yeah. Or doing for a longer period of time. Sorry to interrupt. Yeah. Yeah.

Pete Ericson (16:15)
Okay. That sounds like kind of like your wheelhouse and what you help content producers with. Cause that's a deep rabbit hole, I'm sure. Okay. Okay. So, all let's jump to the next. I got the next question here. I absolutely cannot wait to ask you. We're talking about metrics here, newsletter metrics, right? And most, most of our publishers, you're, you're big on

Dylan Redekop (16:26)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Pete Ericson (16:42)
measuring replies to a newsletter where most of our publishers or traditional publishers are looking at open rates. I cannot tell you how many publishers I've talked to and we're always talking open rates, open, open, open, not even really link clicks. It's like.

open, open, open. And I know that open rates are very variable. The metrics are a little wonky on that. And I don't know enough to dive into that part of it. But what you're suggesting is that replies are the single most important metric when it comes to like newsletter success. ⁓ Some publishers like they'll do no replies. you know, like it's crazy. And ⁓

Dylan Redekop (17:02)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Pete Ericson (17:25)
So why is this? Why do you feel that way?

Dylan Redekop (17:29)
So I think the no replies thing is the phenomenon that you just simply aren't putting it in people's minds that they can reply. A lot of people don't even think to reply to a major media out letter. Like if I got morning bruise email, I probably would not think to hit reply on it. Just as an example of somebody who's publishing daily to a big list. That being said, if there was a call to action in the email saying, hey, hit reply, we'd love to know what you think. You know, our team responds to every reply we get.

Pete Ericson (17:37)
Hmm.

Dylan Redekop (17:57)
or something along those lines, you know, say whatever you're comfortable saying, don't make promises you can't fulfill. But I think the biggest lowest hanging fruit is just asking for a reply. And the reason why I think replies are important is in this day and age of like we talked about open rates being inflated by, you know, Apple mail, privacy policies, all that stuff, and more and more other email clients, you know, kind of opening and scanning emails for you and clicking links, their bots, making sure

things are safe. Replies are really hard to, they're really hard to fake, if you will. I mean, you can get an out of office reply, of course, but really a reply just is, to me, the strongest indication of an engaged reader, even if it's a reply saying, hey, I did not like this edition or this was not a good take. Like all of that feedback, a negative reply is still a reply. And yeah, people have haters, quote unquote, people who will just,

Pete Ericson (18:38)
Mmm.

Right.

Dylan Redekop (18:57)
get upset at something you said or wrote. ⁓ But I also would say, that's a sign that you're at least sparking some emotion. You're getting people to think ⁓ your messages resonating in one or another. Typically, if you anger somebody, you're ⁓ somebody probably is also very much agreeing with your point of view, So ⁓ I just think replies are so powerful. And I still wish I got more replies than I do. And ⁓ it's just it's something that

Pete Ericson (19:05)
Mmm.

Hmm.

Dylan Redekop (19:27)
I think we need to be more cognizant on trying to get and I, the only challenge with replies is always asking for reply can wear out your reader. So you don't necessarily need to get a reply every time. you can publish content that invokes reply. Like I was just saying, if you're like, if you can spark emotion in people or share a heartwarming story or maybe a story that you feel needs to, have more support behind it or people should know about to get more awareness around.

Those kinds of stories as well tend to spark, bring up emotion and spark more replies without you having to say, hey, hit reply, I'd love to hear your thoughts. But even still, I think adding some kind of call to action saying, what do you think about this issue or this challenge or this great news? We'd love to hear from you.

Pete Ericson (20:15)
You know, it's great. You just got me going. ⁓ And I thinking about like, what would be the use cases for it? Of course, the first thing that popped in my head was like a survey. Anytime, you know, if you're looking for feedback from your readership, I mean, just use your newsletter to tell people like, you know, ask one question, have them reply to that one question. I keep it simple, right? The second thing though is like, I just think of more traditional niche like magazine or we call them niche publishers now is, you know, there always were letters to the editor.

Right? Like that was always a big deal in the past, you know, ⁓ where, and they were super interesting to read, right? And the thing that I see now is I see a lot of publishers struggling with comments in there on their websites. You know, some, some have them, some don't. They require effort to moderate. ⁓

Dylan Redekop (20:46)
Yeah.

Pete Ericson (21:06)
If they go really negative, that actually impacts the quality of the article. It's not great. But if you're replying back to an email, ⁓ you can probably collect those comments. with AI, especially today, it'd easy to assemble them into another piece of valuable content for the readership. It's more of curated comments, but it's done via the newsletter.

Dylan Redekop (21:10)
Yeah.

Yep. Yep.

Pete Ericson (21:32)
So that just like, I was just like, oh, boom, wow, okay.

Dylan Redekop (21:33)
Yeah.

Yeah.

One of my favorite newsletters, ⁓ it's a triathlon newsletter and I know the publisher pretty well. He's a one man show and he often, not every single edition, but most editions he'll have a little survey, especially when it's news about Iron Man or the triathlon world if something questionable or polarizing comes into play. And he puts a survey and he gets people basically like, what's your take on this? And I agree, I disagree, his answers are better than that, but just for sake of example, he says,

I agree, I disagree, or I have thoughts, dot, dot. And he just prompts people to ⁓ give their say. And then in his next edition, he'll share those comments. Of course, he'll not call it the reader's name, but he'll share the comments from what people are writing back to him. And so as you do that, people will see, ⁓ my comment is going to get some airplay here. And so that just inspires more people to reply. So when you can show and you can prove that, you you don't just say, reply to all emails, you're actually going to like,

show some of the responses in your newsletter if it fits, right? If the format fits. ⁓ Then that's just another way to see people ⁓ or to basically people have faith in you saying I will reply and I'll also showcase maybe your response in my email. And that could be kind of like the letter to the editor that you just talking about where ⁓ people are writing in their feedback and you can share those either anonymously or if they're willing to have their name, they can maybe check off, yes, you can give my first name or what have you.

Pete Ericson (23:07)
Yeah, I love it. That is great. I would absolutely do that in favor of having public comments on the site. mean, you know, in our, in our space, you know, we have publishers that will only let like paid subscribers post comments or maybe just free registered readers post comments. And that does work. It has sort of gates the comments and makes people behave better. But the fact that, but making it easy where it's like, you're sending a piece of content out, you have an opinion in it, you have content in it, whatever it is. And it's like, and somebody's reading it.

Dylan Redekop (23:09)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Pete Ericson (23:36)
I mean, just to hit reply and write something back, like there's no less friction than that. And then reassembling that to use that as content for, you know, the next article or whatever you decide to put. It's great. I love it. I love it. I love it. OK, nice. ⁓ OK, let's keep let's keep trucking here. ⁓ Let's talk a little bit about lead magnets, because I just lead magnets.

Dylan Redekop (23:41)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah.

Pete Ericson (24:02)
And what I'm kind of exploring is lead magnets for local news may or may not be a thing, but I want to share something that happened with one of our niche publishers. ⁓ You know, with sort of traditional publishing, the content is the of the value all the time. And there's no real need for lead magnets as I thought, but was wrong. ⁓ And I had a conversation with the Moss report.

last week and it's a niche publication and what they did for their registration ⁓ wall was put together a package of like 20 articles. Now they're sort of in the cancer information ⁓ space and ⁓ they have this, if you register with an email and a password you get this like 20 article package of how this can help you going through your experience with fighting cancer.

Dylan Redekop (25:01)
Okay.

Pete Ericson (25:01)
And instead of like just relying on an article that, you know, the article pops and it's like, register, you get this article, you get a few more articles, which it does work like crazy by the way. He told me and, and floored me. said, he said, you know, when I put this package together and I promoted it as, you know, this like heavy, big thing that you get, if you just register for free, which is kind of the definition of a lead magnet, his, his registration rate went up. He said 20 to 30.

Dylan Redekop (25:12)
Mm-hmm.

Pete Ericson (25:31)
percent over a standard free registration, which blew me out the window. You know, I was like, wow, that is unbelievable. so I was thinking, okay, well, you know, if you, if you're covering a niche topic, that makes total sense. Put together a nice, a nice lead magnet, a nice package of content that you have to register for. It's free, you know, but you email address. Then I was thinking, okay.

Dylan Redekop (25:32)
Wow.

Mm.

Pete Ericson (25:56)
How does this apply to local news? Local news does a real, and maybe it doesn't, but local news does a good job of like, you you're producing daily content, right? It's important, especially if it's local and you're local, it's like, this is really important stuff. Do you even need to give away more important, like a bigger bucket of important content, you know, when you already have a big bucket of important content? I don't know, I just want to know if you had any thoughts on.

Dylan Redekop (26:17)
Mm-hmm.

Pete Ericson (26:25)
on sort of the local news angle.

Dylan Redekop (26:28)
Yeah, I struggle with lead magnets for daily current event news focused publishers because really, like you said, kind of the content is the lead magnets. yeah, I want to know about what's going on in my city. So I'm going to subscribe just on that merit alone. That being said, to maybe make it that much more ⁓ beneficial to the new subscriber, ⁓ for lack of a better term, you could offer up like

Pete Ericson (26:34)
Hmm.

Dylan Redekop (26:55)
here is a list of all the upcoming events in your area or things that you can do with kids or for families or you could even, you could get some coupons or discounts or like the old coupon books that people used to give out. You could have like a digital version of that, for example, from a local business so that people are more inclined to subscribe and sign up. And I'm sure local businesses would be happy to offer a 15, 20 % off oil change or

Pete Ericson (26:59)
Hmm.

yeah. Yeah.

Dylan Redekop (27:24)
grocery store, bakery or coffee shop or you you name it, right? I'm sure that wouldn't be too hard to get those from. So ⁓ they might want a limit as to how many they can give away, which can make things a little bit trickier digitally. But that being said, I ⁓ think there is a way to do that and a way you could get people to opt in a little bit faster for your daily newsletter as a local business if you wanna test the waters, you could offer something like that.

Pete Ericson (27:28)
Hmm.

Dylan Redekop (27:52)
But yeah, I think it's a struggle because with lead magnets with local news, like you said, like people are signing up because they want to be informed of what's going on in their space. And so kind of tricking them into getting on the list, I don't think is going to work. At least it would be harder. You could just maybe make a fence setter who's like, yeah, I get the local newspaper. I used to, but I don't know about this. And then if you if you get them on the list with something like I just mentioned, some kind of lead magnet, then they see the value of it. It's like

Pete Ericson (28:07)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dylan Redekop (28:21)
dang, this is like really informative. I'm glad that I actually, you know, took the bait and signed up.

Pete Ericson (28:27)
Yeah, yeah, I agree with you. think local news is already has enough of sort of a powerful arsenal to have content to get to get people on board. And I think what you're describing to is a little more like how to convert from free to paid. Whereas if you're going to you're going to offer like extra content, like if you go to paid, you'll get you know, it's all about building value. You know, it could be ad free. It could be obviously you get access to all the content. Maybe you get an extra newsletter in the afternoon.

Dylan Redekop (28:37)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Pete Ericson (28:54)
which is like, you know, more current than the next morning edition, ⁓ things like that. ⁓ So, okay. So that sort of is a good segue into ⁓ onboarding and sequencing, which I know you're a big fan of. ⁓ So was reading that you had actually ⁓ rebuilt your welcome sequence. were looking at ⁓ subscribers from paid recommendations were kind of different than...

Dylan Redekop (28:54)
Mm-hmm.

Okay. Yeah.

Pete Ericson (29:23)
organic subscribers and I've sort of been scratching my head like, like, hmm, okay, I kind of see that, but I kind of don't. Like, can you walk us through that?

Dylan Redekop (29:26)
Mm-hmm.

Yes,

and this is it's somewhat hypothetical, but also there is some some proof in the data. But ⁓ the hypothetical nature of it is when I use LinkedIn primarily as a way or place to get organic subscribers. So I'm using the social media algorithms used to be Twitter. ⁓ I've dabbled with Instagram and threads and more lately on Substack Notes, which is kind of Substack's version of Twitter. ⁓ And so

Pete Ericson (29:49)
Okay.

Dylan Redekop (30:02)
when somebody sees my content on one of those platforms and is like, hey, this is, you know, informing or informative, educational or entertaining, which I think your newsletter has to be at least one of those three things for people to, you know, be compelled to subscribe. ⁓ Then they sign up through my, they go to my landing page from my link in my bio and they subscribe. I think there's so much more intent behind that subscriber than somebody who is signing up to another.

different newsletter altogether and then my newsletter pops up in this widget and says, hey, you might also like growth currency by Dylan Radikop and they're just sure and they just click OK and subscribe to all the newsletters in that widget, including mine. And then what happens there is they get sent a bunch of welcome emails, including mine and the other ones they just signed up for. And my gut reaction to that is they didn't intend to sign up for my content quite likely.

maybe there's an off chance they had seen my stuff before and they're like, yeah, I know this guy, I to sign up for his newsletter, I'm gonna sign up. ⁓ But most of the time, these are gonna be pretty cold or passive subscribers, I like to call them, who didn't really sign up for your newsletter. And ⁓ myself and Chanel, my co-host on our podcast, we call these people ⁓ basically followers. They're not really subscribers, they're almost more like a social media follower. And so we try to treat them that way.

⁓ with our sign up flow and the first email they get from us is basically like, assuming they had no intention of signing up for his letter. That is honestly how I treat them. I introduced myself and say, hey, great to have you here. You might be wondering essentially why you are on my news, why you're getting this email. Yeah, and because this happened to me, Peter, like I was getting these emails from people and being like, I do not remember signing up for this. But sure enough, I had likely.

Pete Ericson (31:31)
⁓ interesting.

Like, why the heck am I getting this email, right?

Dylan Redekop (31:51)
you know, subscribed in one of these recommendation boxes or something along those lines. And so I just, I really was frustrated by the lack of context as to why I was getting that email. And guess what I did? I either ⁓ immediately unsubscribed, which is actually doing the sender a benefit because then I'm not on their list anymore. I'm not going to waste their open rate and all that. Or I'd market a spam, which is far worse. So you do not want that. So that's why.

I, my spam complaints are super low. ⁓ I almost never get any spam complaints on my newsletter list. Then it's only about 4,500 people. So it's not exactly, you know, massive. ⁓ but I'm proud of that because I do this onboarding, ⁓ properly where I'm telling people how they likely subscribe to my newsletter. I even have a little call out, ⁓ which you can do with liquid code inside of kit and be high of these other newsletter, platforms where you can say insert refers, ⁓ newsletter name.

And so I can even like dynamically insert where they were coming from. So they'd be like, Oh yeah, I did subscribe via so and so's newsletter. And then I have a big opt out button. Like I, I don't want you to be here if you don't want to be here. So here's your chance to like unsubscribe, no harm, no foul. We can go on our merry way. Um, and, but if you do want to stick around, then happy to have you. Here's what my newsletter is about. So that's kind of how I approach it. You could do those in different orders if you wanted to, but I think giving people, um,

basically treating them like you, like they don't, didn't expect to get your email. I think is a really good thing to do from that place of context. So, um, doing that and then giving them a very clear way to opt out in my opinion is also a smart thing to do.

Pete Ericson (33:29)
Yeah, you're meeting them where they are. They're in the, you kind of sound familiar, but I don't know how I got here. And you're reminding them, you're being honest about how they got there. And this would be kind of the scenario if you like a local news and you partnered with the local opera house or something like that. And it's like, I just got on this list, how did I get here? And so tell me what, did you notice a change in engagement with this approach?

Dylan Redekop (33:50)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, because I filter out all of the people who don't want to be there right away. my open rates, though my newsletter is growing, remain pretty consistent. So quite often people find as their newsletter grows, open rates kind of trickle down and down and down a bit. And so I've gotten ⁓ quite a few subscribers via these recommendations. And now should disclose, you mentioned paid recommendations. These are actually free ones. I'm just partnering with a few people through the kit platform and they're just doing free recommendations and we've got an agreement.

I'll put you in mine and you put me in yours. So I've geez, probably over 2,300 subscribers this way. That includes people who have unsubscribed, but just through that alone has driven about 2,300 free paid subscribers. And then I have done a good job at kind of weeding out the people who don't wanna be there with the way I've set this up. And so ⁓ whenever I send out a weekly edition, quite often my unsubscribe rate is, I missed.

you're gonna get unsubscribers kind of no matter what, but it stays below the 0.5 % threshold, which is kind of the higher end. So I'm usually well below that, if not half that. And the open rates aren't being affected as the newsletter grows. So those are kind of the main things that I've seen from doing this.

Pete Ericson (35:11)
That's amazing.

Yeah.

And that, that would also like to tie it back to the more of the traditional publisher. They're dealing with the casual opt-ins. They're dealing with free registrations, which are a little higher level of engagement because you have to cough up a password when you opt in and then they're dealing with ⁓ paid subscribers. Right. So your, campaigns are different. ⁓

That takes me to the next question. It's really cool by the way. never, never thought about that. The whole cross promotion thing is awesome. Um, I think if you're listening to this, I would, I would, whether you're local news or whether you're in the niche space, this would be something to really look at to grow the newsletter. Cause it's growing the newsletter means growing paid subscriptions. Bottom line is just, just the way it works more, you got more, more engagement, more surface area to deal with. Okay. So, um, I have a note here. I don't know where this came from, but the note says,

That you you recently covered this must have been a recent topic of yours how to convert free sub stack subscribers into paid subscribers using a drip sequence Does that ring a bell with you? This could this maybe that maybe I maybe I miss misread this but it was something about converting free to paid in a a but using drip Like a sequence of emails. Is that ringing a bell or no?

Dylan Redekop (36:24)
Hmm.

Yeah.

It's not specifically, and I wouldn't be the best to speak on that since I don't run a paid newsletter. get, Drip Sequence would basically be like, A, you've got to let people know that you've got this free newsletter they signed up for, and then they get dripped out the sequence like, hey, I've also got this paid version. Maybe you want to do a free trial of it. Here's what you get. And you would drip this information out over the sequence of days or weeks. And eventually there would be a main call to action.

Pete Ericson (36:59)
Mm. Mm.

Dylan Redekop (37:08)
Hey, here's your offer to check it out. ⁓ Maybe you want to give them like 10 % offer free month if you sign up for a year or, obviously people will say, ⁓ I mean, your publishers know how the page structure works. So I won't tell, I won't tell them what to do there, but ⁓ you can make that, that offer, whatever your offer might be then ⁓ as the sort of urgency scarcity sort of thing where it's like, you you sign up now or this offers off the table, but that's more what I would suspect that means in terms of drip sequence is you, don't want to just

Pete Ericson (37:22)
Right, right, right.

Dylan Redekop (37:38)
As soon as they subscribe, I've got this free or I've got this paid newsletter sign up. ⁓ cause I don't think, I don't think that would convert as well as warming people up, nurturing them, ⁓ nurture drip. So you can, so these are kind of, ⁓ terms that people are often using an email marketing. So that's probably what I meant if I was writing about that, but I, again, I'm not, I'm not an expert when it comes to that specific thing.

Pete Ericson (37:42)
Right, right.

Yeah.

I'll tell you, let's talk about Drip a little bit because it's an important one. I'll tell you that most publishers that we work, and I've worked with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of publishers, they're sending out like, okay, somebody registers and they get like a welcome email. If they get like another email, that would be like less than 50 % of the folks we work with, right? So dripping out a series of emails is something that some publishers do.

But most do not. ⁓ know, they're, just not, you know, newsletter strategy is, not their wheelhouse typically, unless they have a, they're bigger and have a team. ⁓ Content strategy is their wheelhouse, right? Audience strategy is their wheelhouse. So like the whole drip nurturing thing, I think for a lot of our listeners is new. It's, it's, it's, it's maybe it's something they've heard of, but they've never really like implemented. So.

Dylan Redekop (38:44)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Pete Ericson (38:57)
If there were like a top three hits of what to do with drip newsletters, is there anything or big hit that you would want to share? is there ⁓ like a limit to how many emails you should follow up with? Let's say in this case, it's a free registration, which signals higher level of engagement. And your, know, could be local news, could be niche news. Like how would you approach, like what kind of value would you send that?

Dylan Redekop (39:18)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Pete Ericson (39:26)
particular

reader.

Dylan Redekop (39:28)
⁓ I think there's a few things that come to mind. I, again, I've never done this for somebody, but I think a lot of these things cross over. So ⁓ you want things to be compelling and you want them to be clear and you want to have some credibility. So when you want to convert people, those are things that you really need to be. So you want to be clear about what your offer is, ⁓ whether or not you do that again, right away, you can start mentioning this in a drip sequence, ⁓ but you want to be clear what the offer is.

you want to be compelling is why they should subscribe and you want to be credible. what do compelling and credible have to do with this? So what I would do is I would be getting testimonials or some social proof of people who are paid subscribers, who have written nice things about you, who have maybe shared your your content publicly, who've written nice things about you on your website, in the comments section, whatever that is. If they have not given you permission to share it, blur out their name or whatever you feel comfortable doing.

Ideally you ask for permission to share this content, there's feedback, but that would help with credibility. Like, hey, I've gotten so much value out of this thing. I love every edition or I open every edition that this is the one email I never miss or this is the one, I don't know what other things they'd be sending people, but this is the one. I never miss an article from this publisher. So that helps a lot with credibility. Whenever somebody's doing any kind of like,

product launch on in digital marketing, whether it's a course or a book, any book or a some other valuable resource, even a tool, a social SaaS tool, if you will. ⁓ The biggest push to that is getting people to beta test it. So then give testimonials so that when you do your big launch, you just got a wall of like people raving about you raving about your product and raving about your content. So ⁓ that would be the real compelling aspect and

Pete Ericson (41:20)
Mm. Mm. Mm.

Dylan Redekop (41:26)
⁓ credibility and compelling nature to what you want to do if you're sending out these emails to get people to subscribe is if you don't have that kind of social proof, I would really try to get it. ⁓ And another way you could do that is by talking about how many ⁓ quantities so whether it's how much hours if you're like say you're you're publishing ⁓ something that's more deep dive focused or really deep editorial content, you know, our researchers spend hundreds of hours every week.

Pete Ericson (41:51)
Hmm. Hmm. Yeah.

I

Dylan Redekop (41:56)
getting this information

Pete Ericson (41:56)
like it.

Dylan Redekop (41:57)
for you so that they can see the value in what they're subscribing for and the value that they're exchanging. it's $10 a month, they know that it's gonna cost them way more of their time and effort and even maybe their own dollars to get this information for themselves. So yeah, it's worth that trade off of $10 a month for these researchers spending all this time gathering this information for them. So you can do credibility in different ways. And that's another way you could do it. Or we've published...

Pete Ericson (42:19)
Yeah.

Dylan Redekop (42:25)
a thousand editions of this content or of this article, of this newsletter, whatever that might be, or these videos if you're a YouTuber, all these different ways you can use the amount you've published or the hours you've spent publishing or maybe the hours of work you've done with people if you're more of a freelancer or somebody producing content and you're building newsletter that way. There's just a lot of different ways you can use credibility, but that would be one of the key things that I would,

go for when you're trying to show people the value. I almost use the word convince, but really you don't want to convince them. You just want to show here's the proof of people enjoying and loving our product.

Pete Ericson (43:01)
Yeah.

Yeah. No, I think that's right on. mean, for a local news tie in, will say that publishers that are focused on government and, you know, businesses and, you know, kind of covering the shenanigans that are happening and, you know, really and finding, because there's corruption everywhere, right? They, you know, they're, they're, they're pouring time into

Dylan Redekop (43:16)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Pete Ericson (43:24)
You know, ⁓ going after the facts in these cases. And I can think of a publisher specifically that will sometimes reach out to their, they'll send a newsletter out and they'll say, Hey, we're covering this specific story. Here's what's happened so far. This is why we think it's important. We need 1500 bucks to pay the, the, you know, the journalist to, to, really find the answer. And if you, I can't remember where this data comes from, but if there's, you know, we talk about like news deserts I'm going a little tangent.

here, but it's cheaper to live in a town that has local news than doesn't, right? So like the fact that local news is ⁓ a counter to ⁓ corruption in politics and business, it's exactly what it is. that's, founding fathers said, hey, we need news, right? Like this is the balance between government and citizenship.

Dylan Redekop (43:55)
Yeah.

It's accountability, right?

Pete Ericson (44:23)
Yeah, you need accountability. And

Dylan Redekop (44:24)
Yeah.

Pete Ericson (44:24)
so they looked at the numbers and how expensive things get, how quickly because of all the waste and corruption that happened if it's not covered and then acted on. Anyway, get off my high horse a little bit here. So anyway, thanks for that. Yep. Yep. Yeah. We have a, there's a town south of us called Claremont. can, they're in the news. local newspaper folded a few years ago and guess what happened?

Dylan Redekop (44:36)
Mm-hmm. That's interesting. I'd never thought of that before. That's a really interesting insight for that.

Pete Ericson (44:52)
This past year, they figured out that the high school is five million bucks in debt and it was all misappropriated funds and the school was on the verge of shutdown and still is on the verge of shutdown. It's like, be, nobody's covering. Nobody's looking at it. Yeah. It's unbelievable. Anyway. Okay. A couple more things. We'll wrap it up. AI. Got to talk about AI a little bit. Is it impacting the newsletter space?

Dylan Redekop (45:06)
Unreal. Nobody was holding their feet to the fire. Hmm.

Pete Ericson (45:22)
You think? Not really. ⁓ mean, there's two ways to look at it. There's, use AI to do everything we do today in business. And then there's the other, we use AI to actually produce the content, like without human interference. So what are your thoughts on AI in the newsletter space?

Dylan Redekop (45:35)
Yeah.

Yeah,

it is. Yeah, it's everywhere. Right. ⁓ So I'm glad you brought it up. I think my stance is AI is not bad ⁓ and it can be very helpful. It can be a good tool. I like using AI more as a ⁓ ideation, sparring partner, somebody to poke holes through things to maybe even do some editing to what I've written to tighten things up. Sometimes it can be overly verbose as maybe you've heard over this last hour. ⁓ So I like using AI in that way.

Pete Ericson (46:07)
You

Dylan Redekop (46:10)
⁓ I personally do not believe you should be using AI to create content. So some people say, well, you know, I've got, I've written maybe hundreds of thousands of words on the internet, whether it's social posts, newsletter, editions, articles, whatever have blog posts, whatever, what have you. And so I can feed that all into an AI system that can use my voice and everything like that. And I say, yes, that is true, but AI is not going to say, this is like,

that time when I was 20 years old and I had this experience and it relates to this. Like you can't bring in your own unique perspectives and experiences and opinions and beliefs. AI cannot do that for you. At least I don't think it can. And I don't think you should really rely on it. Because when we start doing that, are just, ⁓ we are really delegating all of our thinking to AI and then what we're not really doing much thinking, we're not doing much creating, we're not being creative.

I think we're doing ourselves a disservice and we're kind of doing our readers probably a disservice by doing that. And I think AI will probably get to the point where nobody's going to really be able to tell who's writing this because right now it's all a big joke. can tell AI content if nobody, if somebody just creates a simple prompt, gets AI to write them a social media post or what have you, or even a newsletter and then publishes it. It's like, we can tell you can tell the AI isms. But I think it'll get to a point where that's going to be a lot harder. But I do think that, ⁓

Pete Ericson (47:15)
you

Yeah.

Dylan Redekop (47:34)
You should not, at least I don't think you should use AI to publish 100 % content. You can use it to help you. I don't think it should be leaned on as a content creation tool.

Pete Ericson (47:42)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like, ⁓ somebody made a comment the other day. I was like, do it in their podcast. was like, ⁓ AI is not like, ⁓ doing the job, but it's like you grew eight arms. Right. And now you're just doing, you're just doing things faster. That's all. All right.

Dylan Redekop (47:54)
Yeah, yeah.

Mm-hmm. I mean, I love it

for like creating podcast show notes. It's really helpful that way. I mean, I still have to review them and make sure I'm like, I don't think we actually talked about this, you know, and say like, don't hallucinate and all this stuff. ⁓ But it's made, it's really made ⁓ summaries so much more useful, like ⁓ when we have our own private community, Chanel and I do. And so when we have guests to come in and do speaking sessions, it's great to throw that transcript. Those are hour plus speaking sessions and we call them creator sessions.

Pete Ericson (48:05)
Yeah.

Right. Right.

Dylan Redekop (48:28)
It's great to throw that transcript into a cloud or chat GBT and say, create some headlines and summaries of what we talked about here and some takeaways. And it's great for that. And it's great for other things as well. I just don't believe or I don't want to ever use it as something that is going to be, ⁓ my content. Right. And I think people want more personality and they want you like you're talking to them in your newsletter, at least when you're writing a, you know, maybe more of a personally branded newsletter as opposed to a, you know, a company facing newsletter.

Even still, think a company facing newsletter would do well having somebody as the face of it, but that's a whole maybe other topic for another day. Yeah.

Pete Ericson (49:06)
Yeah, it's.

I mean, the data is saying that it's easy. People are getting AI responses that are so well written that they're kind of like just glancing at it and saying, oh, wow, that looks really good. And then they're passing that off as the work. if you if you if you actually read this stuff, I do this happens to me every day. I like I get the response. I'm like, it looks really good. But let's really pay attention. Right. Like and you go through the critical angle and you're like, oh, that's quite right. And, know, because it's it's it's you're right. It's hallucinates. Maybe it's not like a big hallucination, but it's like it can't.

Dylan Redekop (49:17)
Mm-hmm.

Pete Ericson (49:37)
make

the connections that your human mind can make, right? And you gotta edit. If you use it, you create the content, use it for editing. Great. But you got to edit the editing. mean, it's absolutely, absolutely critical. So, all right, Dylan, I got one last very difficult question for you. All right. So, what's the biggest mistake that you've made where you learn something?

Dylan Redekop (49:49)
Yeah, I agree.

Pete Ericson (50:03)
really valuable that has sort of carried you through your, you know, publishing career, I would say. So something that something you blew up and you're like, oh my God, this was the worst thing that ever happened. But then over time, you know, you realized you just learned something and you're like, yep, never doing that again. I'm to do it this way, you know, and anything you want to share on that, you can, if you don't, you don't, but I like asking it.

Dylan Redekop (50:17)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, a few things come to mind. When I first started driving a little bit of money revenue side, you know, side gig money, if you will, from the newsletter, it was 100 % sponsorship ad based. So I was using some different platforms to, you know, connect with advertisers who were willing to pay me. I think my first advertised a whole 20 or $25 for like an insertion in my newsletter that had 500 readers. And I was like, this is so cool. I'm actually like,

Pete Ericson (50:40)
Hmm.

Nice.

Dylan Redekop (50:58)
make finally making money with this thing. And yeah,

Pete Ericson (50:58)
Yeah.

Dylan Redekop (51:00)
it wasn't the dollar value that I thought was cool. It was just the fact that somebody actually paid me some money to do it. And then that grew and I was like, you know, I got the taste for it. And I was like, okay, I need to do this more and grow my newsletter list and get more ads and more sponsors and charge more money. I think the problem, the problem I faced with that was ⁓ there's a few things. One was I just relied on

Pete Ericson (51:06)
Hmm.

Dylan Redekop (51:27)
on that as my only revenue stream, ⁓ which is a lot of when you're the sole publisher as I was, you got to create the content, you got to it, you got to publish it, but you also need to find the sponsors and negotiate with the sponsors. then, ideally you're writing the copy because often the copy they send you for the ad or whatever it is, is not great. So like there's all these different parts at play and it was a lot of work. And so I spent a lot more time

working on the newsletter in my spare time because I had a full-time job then I would have liked. And then there was like the heyday of at least the more recent heyday of ads and sponsors where everybody was throwing money at newsletters. I'd say that was circa like 2021 to 2023. And then things kind of dried right up. And ⁓ at least for the smaller newsletter where people were still willing to invest a little bit in advertising in smaller newsletters like mine, that's basically gone and people just want

If they do want to advertise, it's like, no, I'm only paying for clicks or paying for leads that you're driving me or doing an affiliate style sponsorship. So I'll pay you like a small flat fee, but then you're only really going to make money if you drive a sale of our tool or of our course or whatever that might be. So I learned, you know, it wasn't a quick lesson, but I did eventually learn that having more multiple or having more revenue streams, multiple revenue streams.

Pete Ericson (52:29)
Mmm. Mmm.

Right?

Right.

Dylan Redekop (52:55)
for a

publisher is a much better way to go. Paid subscriptions, you know, obviously a very ⁓ solid revenue stream or can be ⁓ selling different products or services or productized services, you know, all these other things can be other ways to go too. But I just leaned in all in on one and made a decent amount of money in the first year and a half. And then ⁓ kind of didn't make very much money after that because I hadn't created any other services or products to really sell. Yeah.

Pete Ericson (53:13)
you

Right? Yeah. Multiple channels. Yeah, that's a good one. I think every business needs to look, be looking at that for sure. No question. Okay. Cool. Great answer. Dylan, thank you so much. ⁓ Where can people find you? Where do you want them to go? What do want them to do?

Dylan Redekop (53:26)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Well, you've got

my website there front and center. So growthcurrency.net is where people can find me, at least or find my newsletter. And ⁓ I'm on LinkedIn as my main ⁓ place where you can kind of interface with me or interact. ⁓ And so that's just my full name. You can link to that one as well in the show notes. ⁓ And then those are really the main areas that hang out. I do, like I said, hang out a bit on Substack, but newsletter and LinkedIn are...

kind of the two main places. And then if you want to check out our podcast as well, it's the Growth in Reverse podcast. And I co-host that with my partner Chanel, where we talk all about newsletter growth and that sort of thing. So it's a lot of fun. been doing that for a year and she's almost a year and a half. Yeah.

Pete Ericson (54:26)
all right sounds great don't

think thanks again for coming on this is great i learned a ton hopefully was fun catch catch you next time

Dylan Redekop (54:32)
Thanks, Peter. It was. Enjoyed it.

You too.