BrandCycle is teaming up with beehiiv to help creators like you realize just how powerful email marketing can be for affiliate success. beehiiv is an industry leader and innovator in building creator-focused newsletter tools.
Thinking about sharing long-form content through a newsletter for your followers, but aren’t sure where to begin? In this post, we talk about the benefits of email newsletters and how they can grow your audience, help you share content, and diversify your revenue. Read on for simple tips and practical strategies to build a new revenue stream.
Your First Newsletter: A Quick-Start Guide for Influencers
Wondering where to begin? Here are our recommendations to get your newsletter off the ground and start building your email list:
- Find your hook. Anchor your content on a niche topic you and your audience loves—whether that’s millennial style or real estate investing tips—and provide unique and valuable content. Create value first, and then you can find monetization via affiliate links, sponsorships or paid subscriptions later.
- Select a simple layout. Pick an email template that gives you a visually-appealing and easily scannable format for your newsletter.
- Promote it far and wide. Share your newsletter link with followers on your Instagram stories, within your TikTok bio and through any other social platform to start owning the relationship with the audiences you’ve worked so hard to reach. Embed a signup form on your blog, in your link in bio, or anywhere else your community looks for recommendations from you.
- Be consistent. Similar to sharing on Instagram and Facebook, consistency is key. Choose a day and time that works for you and stick to a schedule. A weekly newsletter is a good place to start, allowing your content to become a consistent part of your audience’s routine.
- Feature exclusive access. Offer a special discount or exclusive content to encourage your readers to sign up and open your emails.
- Use polls and surveys. These are good ways to engage your audience and to gather info about what content they care about. Use this information to write your next newsletter or for your social posts. Utilize built-in features to map poll and survey responses directly to emails so you can build segments and have data-driven insights to what your audience likes, wants to see more of, and what they’d pay for.
Newsletters: Your Most Valuable Owned Channel
Newsletters allow you to truly own your audience. Facebook communities, Instagram followers, and other social audiences are owned by the platforms, even if they’re your followers. You have limited control over reaching your audience and are unable to transfer your audience to another platform, which is a major risk.
Social algorithms, and policies change, but your email list is yours. With an email list, you own your audience, not rent it; which allows you to stay in touch with your followers no matter what.
Additionally, newsletters provide:
- High engagement. Your newsletter subscribers have opted-in to receive your content meaning they like what you have to say and want to hear from you. This makes for a highly engaged audience and a higher chance your content is seen.
- Direct access. An email list, unlike platform followers, is portable. In the event of a policy change or platform shutdown, you will always have access to your email subscribers.
- Content control. Use newsletters to create rich content. Dive deeper into topics that matter to you and your community without being restricted by characters or seconds.
- Audience insights. Gather feedback from your audience, and then adjust your social posts and future newsletters to reflect what the audience wants to see.
- User-submitted content. Include a request for user-submitted photos within your newsletter or product or service testimonials. Use this content to further enhance your brand.
How to Grow Your Community and Income with Newsletters
When it comes to earning income online from an owned audience, here’s no greater tool than newsletters. Here are a few strategies to monetize your newsletter to generate more income.
- Add affiliate links to your newsletter content to monetize interest from your product recommendations. Newsletter creators such as TheDealGuy.com, do this well. The Deal Guy sends out a consistent and engaging “Deal of the Week” newsletter that focuses on timely affiliate linked-sales from Amazon, Costco, The Home Depot and other brands.
- Offer the majority of your content for free but include a paid newsletter option as the exclusive source for premium, exclusive content and deals.
- Add your newsletter to your sponsorship package. Include a banner or sponsor segment in your newsletter and increase the price of this package offering.
- Use beehiiv’s integrated referral and sharing tools to boost subscriber growth. Boosts from beehiiv allow you and the beehiiv community to promote each other’s newsletters in a cost effective way – no coding required.
Launch Your Newsletter Today
- Sign up and send your first newsletter in less than 10 minutes:
- Sign up free at beehiiv.com.
- Customize your layout by picking a template for both your newsletter and site — no coding required!
- Watch this 3-minute video to learn the basics and how to customize.
- Promote on socials: Read beehiiv’s guide about amplifying your newsletter launches.
- Stay informed and learn from the pros at blog.beehiiv.com.
If you’re a creator looking to broaden your audience while growing revenue and your brand, newsletters are a must. Stay tuned for more opportunities to learn about how to take your creator newsletter strategy to the next level!
