Newsletter & Email Growth: Growth In Reverse

VIDEO - RAW - Dylan
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Sam Vander Wielen: [00:00:00] and so they're not even having to leave Instagram because once I got them to stop leaving Instagram we got so many more email subscribers.

And this has led to like thousands of people signing up. I was shocked.

Eddie Shleyner: they've certainly done a lot for me. It's just this instant credibility, that people see. So it, I, I give it a lot of credit.

Olly Richards: you could 10x your ad spend. Get 10x more leads in. Mm-hmm. But can you 10x the time that you are available for coaching?

Probably not. The approach instead is to say, well, so now you are, you are able to pay for all of your ads, or even making a bit of a profit. You can raise the prices of your coaching and everything that you do in your coaching is now profit

Nathan May: I think you are being financially irresponsible if you do not have a newsletter.

every time I hit publish, I have a chance to potentially get on a sales call with somebody and I write one thing and it reaches every single person that I would potentially want to work with.

Katelyn Bourgoin: It makes it easier for us to promote our own products. And because we send them to this thank you page, after they complete their poll, we can promote something else. Our own stuff, a continuation of our sponsor stuff. So it gives us a second ad spot that [00:01:00] isn't directly in the newsletter.

Justin Moore: I did this thread a long time ago where it was like, here's how it got to 3000, uh, subscribers on my newsletter, and that this was one of the tactics that, most people commented on was like, oh wow.

This is a good idea. I'm gonna try this. I honestly can't even remember the other nine. But that one is the one that I remember because it led to a lot of great conversations.

Dylan Redekop: Welcome to another edition of the Growth and Reverse podcast. My name is Dylan.

Chenell Basilio: And I'm Chenell.

Dylan Redekop: We are going to dive into, we thought, Hey, you know what? This podcast has been going on for about a year and, I thought it would be a good opportunity to once celebrate yay clapping sounds. We made it through a year of publishing this podcast. how has it, how has it been one year publishing like Has been , a big takeaway or maybe a, an experience you wanna share?

Chenell Basilio: Coming up with podcast topics is hard. That's my experience.

Dylan Redekop: Yeah,

so planning is, is key.

Chenell Basilio: planning is key. I love having people on the show. I think it's always interesting to like pull insights out of [00:02:00] other people's stories. but people also enjoy when it's just us and that. Challenging to figure out, like, what are we gonna talk about today?

So, but overall, the podcast has been super interesting, insightful, a breadth of content that we can repurpose and share so I like it.

Dylan Redekop: It's been fun. I've really enjoyed it and I thought to celebrate what we could do is we've had, over a dozen guests on the podcast. I think it was closer to 16 ish podcast guests. I might be a little bit off on that, but I thought we would go through and review some of the best, newsletter tips that we. Heard or that, that guests shared on, on our podcasts, um, throughout the year. So I've got, I've picked about six clips and what we're gonna do is we are gonna go, we're gonna play the clips, so you guys can hear them. We'll obviously, include links in the show notes to each of these clips so you can go check them out if you wanna watch the whole, the whole episode or just that clip. And then, um, we're gonna react to them. We're gonna give our thoughts and feedback on, on the advices that that was shared. How does that sound to you?

Chenell Basilio: Good and fun. Fact, I have not [00:03:00] listened to any of these again, so this is gonna be new for me.

Dylan Redekop: Oh, excellent. Okay, so let's dive into the first clip. This is from our very first guest, and his name is Eddie Shleyner, and he writes the newsletter and the website. Very good copy. So let's dive into Eddie's advice that, that we, that we heard him share very profoundly

Chenell Basilio: I'm wondering like, so for just the testimonials on the newsletter, are you like reaching out to people specifically or is there like an automated, like after they've been on your email list for two months, you ask them for a testimonial or something, or you just get those inbound?

Eddie Shleyner: In the very beginning. the first year that I was sending out the newsletter, that was like the focus of the newsletter was to collect testimonials, so, okay. I would, I think that there was a link in there that said, leave a, leave a review, get a back link. And that was kind of my offer to, to folks because I would say, Hey, you know, I'll link back to your LinkedIn or your, or your website if you, if you leave a [00:04:00] testimonial about the, about the blog.

So, and you worked well? It, it definitely worked for, for subscribers. Definitely worked for subscribers. Okay. And then, you know, anybody else on the, on the homepage like this quote unquote, like featured, like testimonials and those are, those are folks that I've worked with in the past, that maybe have garnered audiences of their own or you know, they just, they just have a presence in, in the industry and so I just ask them, uh, very directly, sometimes more than once, probably gotta ask, you gotta ask,

Dylan Redekop: how much do you think those testimonials have, , played a part in, in your growth and in, in growing the newsletter? And getting, even getting clients too.

Eddie Shleyner: Sure. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to quantify it, but I, I think they're, they've certainly done a lot for me. I mean, it's, uh, it's just this instant credibility, that people see. And then, you know, I'm sure most subscribers will read something, that I've written before, subscribing to the newsletter.

But, with this kind of testimonial wall, so to speak, there's this abundant, you know, credibility associated with the, with the newsletter, I guess.

[00:05:00] So, um, yeah, it's kind of like going, it is like going to Amazon, seeing a product that has, you know, hundreds of, of five star reviews. Right. It's just this kind of like length imply strength, heuristic at, at work. So it, I, I give it a lot of credit.

Dylan Redekop: Okay. So Eddie's advice, what do you, what do you think of that?

Chenell Basilio: Yeah, I mean this is a, essentially his wall of testimonials, right? And this is, he says that this was a big, important piece of getting people to subscribe and he really credits the testimonials to, growing his newsletter faster and even bringing in more clients and that kind of thing. So it's just, uh, social proof really helps.

Dylan Redekop: Yeah, you called this, you did the 30 days of growth earlier this year, and you called this one the Social Proof Avalanche,

which which was really clever because as you're just basically scrolling through his website, you'll just see, you know. Cascading social proof, uh, as you scroll

Chenell Basilio: and if, if you want to see what we're talking about, just go to very good copy.com and just start scrolling and it like never ends and you can load more. It's so [00:06:00] long he needs a load more button. So

Dylan Redekop: Yeah.

Chenell Basilio: gets, gives you any indication into how much, uh, social proof he has on there.

Dylan Redekop: It's great and in, I can't remember in the clip if he says or not, but he's almost kind of like embarrassed or shamed at the amount of social proof he has. But I really

think it's been a real huge credibility boost. So one, one thing we say when we talk about onboarding flow and like landing pages, you want your landing page or your signup page, which in this case this would be like Eddie's homepage.

You want it to be, clear, compelling, and credible. Right?

And one way to make it. way more credible is to have actually people saying good things about you, and good things about your newsletter. So I thought this was a really smart way to do it. And he also, one thing he did that I liked, that I thought was smart is he incentivized people to leave a testimonial and not in like a, I'll pay you basically for this, but like, Hey, if you say something nice about the newsletter, if you genuinely enjoy it. Leave a review and I will back link to your website or your newsletter, or your channel, whatever it might be, your social media platform. So, , I thought that was a really interesting way that he [00:07:00] used some incentive to get people to actually say nice things. And even if it's not a massive incentive, it it's a lot more, it's a lot more than just saying, Hey, leave a nice review for me.

Thanks.

Chenell Basilio: The other thing I'm realizing as we're talking through this is having this much social proof on your homepage is just like. A reminder to yourself of the cool things you do. So every time he goes to his homepage, he can probably just scroll down and be like, oh yeah, people think I do good work. And like it's just a little boost on one of those days where you kind of need, uh, a little extra pushing.

Dylan Redekop: When the imposter syndrome, you haven't had your your meds yet and your imposter syndrome is like you go to your homepage, that's your medication. Oh yeah. maybe I'm maybe I'm actually good at what I do, or people actually enjoy what I'm creating. So yeah,

that's I think very important. Okay, why don't we dive into the next one then?

Um, this one is from a more recent guest, uh, really smart creator named Sam Vander Wielen. And, um, I had the pleasure of meeting her at Craft and Commerce for the first time this past June. You've met her before, correct?

Oh, no, you

Chenell Basilio: I had not been here [00:08:00] before. That was my first time too,

Dylan Redekop: Okay. So,

Chenell Basilio: both from the Philly area, so we have commonalities, but no, we had never met in person.

Dylan Redekop: right. That's what it was. So let's go check out what Sam has to say

Dylan Redekop: so you said before when we were talking about all signs pointing to your email list, so how does that work with social media? Because it's notoriously hard to drive newsletter subscribers from places like Instagram. So how do you, how does that flow work for you?

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah, so the way this this started was that people would post reels about their podcasts, like just showing a little audio clip or, you know, uh, whatever.

And then they would just say like. Comment here to get the episode. And, and that's kind of what we did all for like a long time and people would just send a link to the episode. So I thought, again, all relative to the email list and I was like, but this is a free episode that they can get on Apple, Spotify, wherever they go, listen to podcasts.

But how am I going to get this person? On my email list. So we started doing something where we use ManyChat on Instagram, and we started saying like, comment, we made it a funny word. First of all, this was the biggest [00:09:00] thing that changed and drove so much more traffic to my podcast. Instead of me saying like, comment 2 58 for episode 2 58, we started saying like, if the episode was about, like if it was related, I'd be like, comment peach, you know, and they would comment peach, we made it a funny word or a funny emoji, and this has worked much better.

And then. It dms, the person, the link to the episode and then immediately follows up and says, Hey, by the way, did you know that I have a weekly free newsletter called Sam Sidebar that 50,000 creators get every single week to learn how to blah, blah, blah. If you want in, click here. They click, it says, great.

What's your name? You say, Dylan. Great Dylan, what's your email? You put that in and because it's synced with kit, it just automatically is inputting them into Kit, and so they're not even having to leave Instagram because once I got them to stop leaving Instagram we got so many more email subscribers.

And then the second strategy I'm doing with podcasts is that I've grouped them into little like playlists around a topic. And so like I had a bunch of episodes [00:10:00] about money and taxes, so I created like a CEO's guide to Money playlist, and I say like, do you want this playlist comment money? They comment money.

It's like, great, what's your name? What's your email? Great. Here's the link. So we're only actually giving them the link to the playlist after they've signed up for my email address. And this has led to like thousands of people signing up. I was shocked.

Chenell Basilio: Oh, I love this.

Dylan Redekop: And this is free. It's so funny. Like organic content too, right?

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah, because literally for years it was just like, comment 258 to listen, and then that was it. We just like drop it off and I was like, why aren't we following up with people? And so like, yeah. Now about anything. Anything I do now there's a, I build it into the mini chat sequence that if we give them something right away.

We immediately follow up with like a, by the way, you should sign up for this thing, or put it behind something like, like the playlist for example. The thing is to like give the person the thing right away in the dms, don't, don't make them go to their email. Mm-hmm. So I'm still delivering the value right there.

And they like, they immediately get the link to the episode or the link to the playlist, but now they've automatically, you know, through Tech [00:11:00] Magic, they've gone onto my email list. So it's just so much better.

Dylan Redekop: Okay. So what do you think about Sam's advice here about using Instagram and ManyChat and all that?

Chenell Basilio: Oh man, it gets me so fired up. I wanna use Instagram again. I like, forgot she said this and then I was like, ah.

Yeah,

Dylan Redekop: You said right at, at the end of that clip, you're like, oh, I gotta use this for my deep dives.

Chenell Basilio: I totally did and then here I am

Dylan Redekop: Here we are. Have you been using it Yeah.

Chenell Basilio: Nope. I know you love this one 'cause you're all excited about ManyChat and the automations and stuff too.

Dylan Redekop: It's a lot of fun. It's, it is fun just to like build it and figure out. How the whole sequence works, including it with kit, building out even mini, um, sequences within kit for each of these. It can be a little bit time intensive, but I think it's worth it. You've gotta start pushing that snowball down the hill, though.

I find you really need some momentum with this because if you're just doing the sporadically, it's probably not gonna work. You need to start showing up in people's Instagram feeds and then. Continue to show up in their Instagram feed. So I really think this one is where consistency matters and Sam has the capacity to do that because I believe she's got a team [00:12:00] helping her a little bit.

So my point is, love how this can be scaled and really leverages a channel that is. Typically harder to convert people to subscribe into your newsletter. And it does so by keeping them on that channel, they don't have to like click through. They don't have to go to your landing page and then sign up there and then, you know, all that stuff. You ask for their email address in the chat, and thanks to the integration with ManyChat, it brings it right in. They don't

have to leave. So I think it's really, really friction free and, really interesting,

Chenell Basilio: totally. And you can integrate with TikTok too. I just looked, um, my brain's on TikTok because of, uh, talking to Millie Tamati

recently. Um.

Dylan Redekop: Plug that episode right now. Go check out Milly, our chat with Milli was

really good.

Chenell Basilio: it was really good. No, I love this one. And this actually came, we stopped recording the episode and then she started talking and we were like, wait, we have to record again.

'cause it was just like gold, like nugget upon nugget and we're like, okay, wait record again. Just put this in the middle. [00:13:00] For those of you who like a little behind the scenes things, uh, this was actually at the very end and we put it in the middle.

Dylan Redekop: we're like, wait. wait, wait, wait.

We need to record this.

Yeah. No, it was so good. Um.

Chenell Basilio: it was good.

Dylan Redekop: think it was because we were talking about how we were gonna promote this episode. She's like, what? What are you guys gonna do? We're kinda like, I don't know. And she was like, this is what I do. And we're like, whoa.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold on.

Yeah, Yeah. That

Chenell Basilio: and if you're on Instagram, you should follow us and we'll put our links in the description. I am horrible at Instagram, and so my posts typically get like 10 likes, and so when I shared a clip from this episode and tagged Sam in it and she like added it to her, I don't know what it's

Dylan Redekop: She collaborated. She was a collaborator with you? Yep.

Chenell Basilio: Yeah, so that one episode got way more likes and I'm like, oh yeah, this works when you actually do it.

Dylan Redekop: Well, I was so inspired that I tried this with a few of our episodes, so if

Chenell Basilio: You did.

Dylan Redekop: follow me on Instagram, go to, um, I'm just at Growth Currency, so the name of my newsletter, and then you can see one of my pin clips [00:14:00] is I.

think Sam's episode. So it's like full meta inception, like I use Sam's episode where she's talking about the strategy to and use the strategy.

So you can see how it works if you want to go in there and, um, reply. I think I used the word peach just 'cause that's what she used in the clip. I thought that was clever. I replied with the word peach and you can see how the whole thing works, at least from a user's perspective.

Chenell Basilio: Love it.

Dylan Redekop: Love it.

Shall we move on to our next clip?

Clip number three. Okay, so clip number three. is from Olly Richards, who has, he's hung out with us inside of GIR Pro, um, our private community. He's, expounded his, um, his knowledge there and shared that with us. And then he also, uh, we invited him on the podcast.

So he came on the podcast and, shared more of his knowledge.

He had already reached over $10 million with his main business called Story Learning, which was an online learning platform. But he wanted to build on that with a creator style business. And so. He created this, 118 page Google Doc that again, Chenell, you've written about. We've discussed it ad nauseum probably on this podcast that people [00:15:00] might be sick of hearing, but it was still a really fascinating case study.

So we had him on the podcast to talk about that, and we kind of get into talking about some other flywheels here. So why don't we take a look and watch the clip now and, reconvene.

Something that you mentioned that I haven't forgotten since you spoke to us in the pro community, and that was about what you called, I think, a self-liquidating flywheel. With your seven figure marketing stack, it would, it just like kind of blew my mind a little bit. So could you maybe talk about a little bit how you're using some of this, the funds from this, the seven figure marketing stack to help fund your paid growth,

Olly Richards: that particular marketing course?

That was the first course i, I made. So this is, this is a fairly standard model in. The coaching industry, and the way it works is you go out and you buy ads and you mostly run lead gen ads. Um, you could have a cheap product, but you know, le lead gen ads are fairly common. Now, obviously, you've, you've then paid for those leads, right?

You might be paying two, five, $10. So the question is, well, how do I add cost? I, I can't just. Don't wanna just lose that money, make that money back so I can go and then buy [00:16:00] more ads and increase my audience even more. So, the kind of the, the really simple model to say, well, okay, I'm gonna get, I'm getting these, I'm going out and I'm advertising, I'm offering a lead magnet, I'm getting leads to come in, and then I could just sell my coaching and that way I'll make the money back.

And if you're selling high ticket stuff, that's super easy to do with paid ads, right? You might, you might spend, um, $5 on a lead, $250 on a customer, but. Then you make 5,000 back on, on, on the backend for, for example, just plucking numbers out, out of thin air. But the problem with that is that you are now to, to continue to spend on advertising your, your personal time is now being used, right?

So you can, you pay to get leads in, you are setting coaching to those leads. So the growth of the business is dependent on your time. So you could 10x your ad spend, even if you're really profitable, you could 10x your ad spend. Get 10x more leads in. Mm-hmm. But can you 10x the time that you are available for coaching?

Probably not. And so the, the approach instead is to say, well, let's use digital products to recoup that ad spend. So you go and you spend $5 on a lead. That [00:17:00] lead comes in, you then offer a $50 workshop or a hundred dollars workshop. And what you're aiming for is to get to a point where. The digital products that you sell cover all of your ad costs.

So now you are, you are able to pay for all of your ads, your at break even, or even making a bit of a profit. The advantage of that is now you've got a lot more leads coming in. You can raise the prices of your coaching because you have more demand and everything that you do in your coaching is now profit and you don't have to spend any of that to cover the ag.

And so that's the model that I use in, in my business brand.

Dylan Redekop: so you think Ollie self-liquidating flywheel.

Chenell Basilio: Yeah, I mean, it's just smart business. I mean, being able to recoup your ad costs right away without having to wait months or whatever. Is just smart. And if you can do that with a digital product, like you said, it's scalable and the flywheel just keeps spinning.

Dylan Redekop: Yeah. I really love this because it seems obvious and to him, he's like, oh yeah, this is a common thing in the coaching industry. But like, I'd probably seen it and just didn't know that that's what people were doing. And. [00:18:00] So to have him, you know, kind of like basically pull back the curtain of what all of these digital marketing experts have been doing or are doing.

I thought, hey, if this is, like, I've been in this world for a while, but I hadn't really seen anybody explain it this clearly. So if I didn't know about it, I thought this would be an interesting one that maybe a lot of other people hadn't heard about either. So I thought it was really smart because I love how you essentially can scale this up. Not exponentially, but I mean, really to the point where I love how he says you're getting more leads. And so you can now, the demand increases, your supply stays the same, so you can just increase your price, right? Of course, you have to deliver on that. But that being said, you don't have to give away your, your time for, you know, pennies, pennies on the dollar.

You can really scale up to where it's worthwhile for you to take those clients and take those calls or offer the service that you're offering.

Chenell Basilio: Yeah, you have mentioned this one multiple times in the last couple months, so I knew this would be on the list.

Dylan Redekop: kind of obsessed with it.

Chenell Basilio: [00:19:00] Yes.

Dylan Redekop: it's so good. Okay. Why don't we go to, our next clip here. This is with, um, Nathan May who. I think in the, he's fairly well known in the newsletter industry, but he's probably not very well known outside of the newsletter industry, in the creator realm and that sort of thing. So we had Nathan on the podcast, a few months ago. He basically makes a, well, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna say, uh, the f very first thing that we talk about in this episode or in this clip kind of gives it away. So let's just dive in.

Chenell Basilio: Let's do it.

Dylan Redekop: Did you say you're running $1 million ARR with a thousand person list?

Nathan May: Yeah. So we went from zero to million. Go on, say more. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was cool. So, so we went from zero to a million a r in about, uh, 10 and a half months. Little close to 11 months, uh, last year. So we hit it in, uh, I don't know, November, December of 2024.

Um, and basically I had a bunch of stuff I had to figure out when enter this market. 'cause like, uh, everybody else who does [00:20:00] newsletter ads like. They either came from the industry or they had like a huge following. And so I was like, like, what do, what, what do I do? Like, that's a lot to, to go up against. I think two or three things worked really well.

One on one was this newsletter, so I, I didn't know it was gonna be a good idea, but now I think it's a very good idea. So I, I think like any founder, if you run a B 2D company, so you sell, you sell a service, right? That could be an agency, that could be, you could be a lawyer, you could be, you know, whatever, mortgage guy.

Any, any kind of like service or B2B SaaS. , I think you are being financially irresponsible if you do not have a newsletter. And so what I did, which I didn't know before, is I thought, alright, I wanna do a newsletter and well, who, who do I really need to work with at, at each of these newsletter companies?

There are maybe like two people I need, like the CO or the founder. I need the, the head of growth or, or the VP of marketing. That's it. And so like, if maybe there's like 300 newsletter companies that I wanna work. Oh, so 300 times two, 600. Okay. Can I get 600 people that, that's like an Excel list. Like I can go one by one by one.

I can meet those people at [00:21:00] conferences, I can email them, I can LinkedIn message them. Like it, it takes this giant like nebulous world. It's like, oh my God. Like how do I, do I run ads? Do I call the email? Like, there's all these people I could reach. I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You just need the 600.

Can you just get 200? Of the 600 I, I can do that. And so that's what I, I started doing and I basically, I would go and I think this also is important. I, I made it, uh, a private newsletter, so, so you had to be, uh, it's kind of cute. You, you had to be like, like invited, you know, like invite you to the newsletter and, um.

I would LinkedIn message people, uh, and I have a bunch of screenshots at this and stuff. Like for instance, I, I, my LinkedIn message, Sean Griffey, uh, who, who was the, one of the three co-founders of Industry Dive, you know, big, big deal, big guy. And, um, I just go, Hey, I run a private newsletter for newsletter operators who are doing 7, 8, 9 figures.

You know, it's generally for CEOs and their heads of growth, a couple people like X and Y and Z Read X and Y and Z were mutual connections that we had. Or a lot of times I'll do, um, competitors of the person that I'm messaging, so it's like, oh, they see their peers. Are reading this newsletter. [00:22:00] Okay, now I've now elevated the status of the newsletter.

Would you mind if I add you? And then I, I manually add them. They give me their email and then I, I don't put them, give them some landing page where it's like, oh, here you, you go do it, right? Mm-hmm. White glove. I do it for them and I add them. Yeah. That's been a great tactic.

Chenell Basilio: Well, and then when you send out the newsletter, you actually at the top say, welcome to blah, blah, blah.

And like there's four or five really big names that have joined in the last week, and it just like solidifies. The reason I'm reading this newsletter, I'm like, oh yeah, so is Tyler Dank and you know, Nathan Barry or whoever reading this newsletter. And I think that's such a smart move too.

Nathan May: Yeah, I, uh, I, I feel, I think I stole that from something I can't remember.

Uh, but I, I like that part of song and, and like for somebody who's like listening to this, like I don't have like, uh, my newsletter is like super ugly. Like there's no, there's no design. It's like, it's literally just like an email. From me. Like, but, but I think that's by, I, that's a good thing. Like, like, like if you like, sell like a high ticket or like [00:23:00] healthy product or service, like people wanna hear from you.

And so if you were gonna go do this, I think everybody who has an existing company should go do this. Because, because No, nobody does it, by the way. So I, I, I should, so this is important to note. Why is this better than like cold mailing people? Well, well, number one, Sean Griffey's not gonna get on a sales call with me.

Like, so that's not, Sean doesn't know me. It's like, who's Nathan? I don't, I don't care about this. Right? So the barrier to entry for a newsletter is significantly for people who do get on sales calls with me. Typically, if you're a B2B business owner. You have like, all right, you get on call with somebody, let's say they don't close, you know, you, you're not gonna have a chance to get on another call with that person for maybe another quarter.

So, so, so maybe there's like four times per year you could potentially close somebody, right? For, for your product or your service. Um, so newsletter, right? And then, so you have this huge list now, and, and then if I wanna reach out to people, I have to individually reach out to all them. Well, so a newsletter kind of solves all that, right?

Like the, the friction is. Extremely low. Anybody would join. And now I'm building trust and I, every time I hit publish, I have a chance to potentially get on a sales call with somebody and I write one thing [00:24:00] and it reaches every single person that I would potentially want to work with. That's like, I think why it's so valuable.

Chenell Basilio: Well, and the content is like. Case studies of what you've done or like these badass stories from people you're working with. And so you're like, you're showcasing your clients, which is amazing. I'm sure they love that. You're also showcasing the value you, you provide and like what you can do, and then you're just kind of putting it all together in a newsletter and delivering it nicely to them.

Nathan May: Yeah, I wouldn't, um, I wouldn't delegate.

Chenell Basilio: man, this is like firing me up.

Dylan Redekop: the private newsletter strategy?

Chenell Basilio: So many good things in here.

Dylan Redekop: Yeah. This is a

Chenell Basilio: I wanted to double click on

Dylan Redekop: I didn't know where to like end it 'cause he just kept kind of going with like great advice.

Chenell Basilio: I, I wanna double click on this thing that he said in the beginning, which was. When he came into the scene, everyone else in the space that was doing the same kind of work was either had extreme experience like working at the hustle of maybe Matt McGarry or they had an audience already, and he's like, I don't have either of those, like, you know, notable [00:25:00] experience or this audience.

So he's like, how can I stand out? And I think. That piece right there. Even if you're not running an agency, even if you're not running a newsletter, it's like, how can you stand out? How can you differentiate yourself from everyone else on in the space? And so I think that was a big piece of this too.

Dylan Redekop: How did he do it?

Chenell Basilio: He decided that he was gonna go hyper-specific and find the people he needed to talk to and put them in his email list and say, Hey, do you wanna join my newsletter? Invite only. And then he was just sharing these incredible case studies. Like as he was working with cus or with clients, he would share those, but they didn't have to have like notable names or anything.

He could just be like, Hey, I helped this one brand, you know, 1800% increase in sales or

Dylan Redekop: Yeah. So you do need, you

do need something right to, to showcase, right? It's a kinda a chicken and egg thing, but once you have that thing, that's when you can really start taking off and showing what you're doing for other people and building it up. But we had a, I won't give away any names, but there was a member of the Growth Reverse Pro community who had a, was on a call with last week and [00:26:00] they're targeting a very specific. Sort of similar to Nathan, similar avatar, higher up business person. you know, They're, they're struggling. Like, should we do paid ads? Should we do this and that? And I said, well, have you heard of this private newsletter strategy might be worth exploring. I, I mentioned this episode, um, to him and so he, he was gonna check it out because it was. I basically said, you know, they're trying to sell a certain service. And I said, if you are needing to get X amount of clients, then why don't you just make this like, almost like a cold call list, but do what Nathan did and just reach out to these people individually and say, why don't, do you wanna join our newsletter?

We, we help people like you. I just thought it was like it's reverse engineering, sort of what you, the end result and the people you want to contact, you're basically cold calling them like Nathan said, without like this cold call that is really kind of salesy that people will ignore.

Chenell Basilio: Yeah, a hundred percent. I think we all just inherently try to overcomplicate the end result. Like if you need three clients, you shouldn't be trying to grow on Instagram.

Dylan Redekop: No,

Chenell Basilio: go find your people on LinkedIn or wherever they are, DM [00:27:00] them. You don't even have to post content and just like start a conversation. So I think we always overcomplicate this, and this is a good example of making it more simple.

Dylan Redekop: Yeah, if you have a business and you're trying to get clients and you have a newsletter, the name of the game is not grow to 150,000 subscribers. The name of the game is to get 150 subscribers of your key, um, your ideal client, right? And you can make a lot of money on a very small list. I think we've got somebody else in our community who does the same thing. Uh, she has like. Under a thousand maybe people on our list and makes, um, over six figures. So I think the, the point of this was to just really highlight, the focused, uh, effort in getting the right people reading your stuff.

Chenell Basilio: Yeah. Love it.

Dylan Redekop: All right. Let's move on to our fifth and penultimate tip. Do you know penultimate means second last?

Chenell Basilio: I did not know that I was gonna Google it. I figured it was like a Canadian term, [00:28:00] which is

Dylan Redekop: No, I think, I think it's pretty global. Oh yeah, that's true. Yeah. So this

Chenell Basilio: I, that, that word sounds like a, it's like the ultimate, like top best. That's what I hear when I

Dylan Redekop: I know that

Chenell Basilio: clearly that is not.

Dylan Redekop: I used to think that, but I'm like, no, that would be the ultimate by definition. So I was like, what is the pen? And I Googled it one day and I'm like, oh, I've been using it wrong. Uh, so this is with Katelyn Bourgoin. We will let you, we'll let Katelyn take it away about, , how she's driving awareness to, um, more products.

Katelyn Bourgoin: So like what I was thinking about is we were talking about should we add a second newsletter? It may end up being a weekly thing. At this point, it's biweekly, so two a month, but it's called Fri-Yay. The idea is it's the only newsletter that rewards you for getting smarter. It's super short. Each issue is little quick tactical buyer psychology based lesson with an example.

But then it doesn't give away everything like our current issues. We're gonna talk to you about scarcity, or we're gonna talk to you about framing, so you know what the example is in this. We [00:29:00] share the example, we show kind of the use case, and then we do a little poll using kits, polling feature, where we ask, you know, do you know what this specific buyer psychology technique is?

And they give them three options and they click on it. When they submit their answer, they're actually entering a contest to win a prize. Sometimes it's gonna be a cash prize, sometimes it might be something from our sponsor. So it's like, you know, an annual subscription to their software, a ticket to their conference, whatever the thing is.

That makes sense. What I love about this is a couple of things. It is so short that super bite-sized people open and consume it right away. It makes it easier for us to promote our own products. So this allows us to choose our topics so that we can frame them around the products that we wanna promote that are our own.

And because we send them to this thank you page, after they complete their poll, we can promote something else. So we can promote our own stuff, we can promote a continuation of our sponsor stuff. So it gives us a second ad spot that isn't directly in the newsletter. So we ran our first one last week. The open rate was super high.

The [00:30:00] click rate was super high. We're gonna run our next one next week. It's harder for us to do, um, production wise than our standard newsletter in some ways, but I hope that the long-term value will be there.

Chenell Basilio: this one's smart. I mean, there's no if and or but, or bound around it. She's just a insanely deep thinker and strategist about this stuff, so. I don't know. I just, I love the idea that it's like a win-win win. Like the sponsor gets a better placement. The reader is learning something and you're getting data and helping them.

So I think it's like more of a shareable kind of newsletter now instead of just like a, here's this thing, you

Dylan Redekop: Mm-hmm.

Chenell Basilio: Like it adds another layer to it.

Dylan Redekop: totally, the second newsletter, yes. I love the idea that it's kinda like a synthesized version of kind of their, their weekly and. I just think it's so smart that you're one, you're incentivizing people with something that's costing you $0 essentially. In this case, she did a cash prize, so you know, by rights that would cost her actually the money the first time they did the poll. But really, you're incentivizing people to enter to win [00:31:00] a digital product that you've made once and now you know, to give that away cost you nothing, right? So it's costing nothing to incentivize the clicks People are clicking through and. They're landing

Chenell Basilio: Learning about this product.

Dylan Redekop: learning about the product. 'cause they land on basically a sale, like the sales page, as like a thank you page.

But it's really a sales page that showcases the product that like, oh man, even if I don't win this, I'm really interested in it. And maybe the next time I click on this poll and don't win, I'll be, I'll be even more curious to buy it. So I think this is, this is one of the favorite, one of my favorite tips, at least from the last year. I thought it was really clever.

Chenell Basilio: Yeah, I like it.

Dylan Redekop: All right. Let's go to the ultimate and final clip,

Chenell Basilio: Not the penultimate.

Dylan Redekop: the Ultimate. and Final Clip. And this was one of our, one of our first episodes as well, with a guest at least. So now we're going with Justin Moore, who some of you may know as Creator Wizard. Sponsorship coach. Uh, very smart guy when it comes to all things, you know, brand partner, sponsorships, so for [00:32:00] video and newsletter content. So let's take a look and see what Justin has to say.

Chenell Basilio: You were doing some what I call the unscalable things in the deep dive. I wrote like one-on-one dms, like every time someone followed you on social. Did that work really well or was that just like you trying stuff?

Justin Moore: Dude the one, the one-on-ones worked super well, like the DMing people?

'cause I, I would, did it not only on. It was Twitter back then, but on XI, that worked really well. But also Instagram and TikTok, I did it everywhere. Anytime anyone followed me anywhere, I would DM them and, and I, well, first I had a criteria, so I would look at their profile to see, does it say like YouTuber in their bio or creator or I, I look at their content and it seems like they're like an aspiring creator, and I would say maybe about 50% of the people that followed me fit that.

Criteria. And so every day I would, I would spend, you know, 30 minutes. An hour basically like just going through and DMing people and the success rate was super high of people opting into the newsletter. And so in the early days, that was a really effective tactic.

Chenell Basilio: Do you still talk to any of those people that you DMed?

Justin Moore: Yeah, I mean that, the [00:33:00] other thing about that is that it opens up conversations. 'cause the other thing too is I was personalizing the messages. I had like a template of course, but like I would. I would insert the person's name thi this, so this would be really funny, is that a lot of times people wouldn't have their first name in their bio.

And so I would click through to their YouTube channel and I would just like scrub through like 15 seconds of it and they'd be like, Hey, it's, you know, Jonathan or whatever, Hey, it's Christie or whatever. And I would like get their name from watching a little bit of their content. And I would say that in the message and people would being like, oh wow.

How'd you know my name? I like don't have it on my. Profile anywhere. And so people I think would be genuinely surprised that I like took the effort to just like find out what their name was. That's fascinating. Yeah. What do you think had the most impact of the, of the methods you tried? I really do think that one-on-one outreach was super effective.

Not, and yeah, actually some people screenshotted it. Talked about it actually on X, which was interesting, which led to a little bit of like, conversation, uh, around that tactic. So if I had to look back on, I, I did this thread a long time [00:34:00] ago where it was like, here's how it got to 3000, uh, subscribers on my newsletter, which felt like a lot of the time, and that this was one of the tactics that most, most people commented on was like, oh wow.

This is a good idea. I'm gonna try this. And so like, I honestly can't even remember the other nine. But that one is the one that I remember because it led to a lot of great conversations.

Dylan Redekop: All right, Justin Moore?

Chenell Basilio: Yeah, I mean, this is just one of those. Small things that you can't see other people doing. 'cause it's literally in the dms, which are not public. But it can be so impactful. And I love that he even highlighted like, yeah, I was building relationships. Like this is opening a conversation for us to work together more or just like be friends in the creator space.

So I, I like this one.

Dylan Redekop: Yeah, I, I wanted to highlight it because we've talked a bit about scalable things that people are doing that people can do, and this one is very. It's very grassroots. This is like when you're starting out and you're trying to get like this, forget your a thousand true fans, just trying to get like a hundred true fans even. And so people who are following you, how common is it for you [00:35:00] to get an auto DM from somebody that's like, eh, this like zero effort kind of put into this. They're just like auto DMing me or no DM at all? Right. so the fact that Justin was reaching out to people using, taking the time if he figured it was worth a worthwhile, um. Subscriber, he was taking the time to, um, find out their name, reach out to them and just say, Hey, thanks for following by the way, I've got, you know, this newsletter that might help you. So I think this is the reason why I also like sharing this is 'cause anybody can do this. Like anyone, you, if you have a social media account and people are subscribe or following you, you can do this. So i. Think it is something that more people probably could benefit from. And you don't have to spend hours and hours and hours every day or every week doing it. But if you. if you take a few minutes every day to reach out to at least one person who's newly followed you, you're gonna see a return on that, and you'll agree to build that relationship and trust as well.

Chenell Basilio: Yeah, I think that. This is just, I just wanna highlight and [00:36:00] underscore the fact, like you, you mentioned this, but reiterate. 'cause I've had these auto dms come at me. This is almost the equivalent in my mind of an AI comment because it's, there's no customization. Like I might be a horrible follower for you and you don't want me on your newsletter.

And so I love that he was just saying like, I didn't do this for everyone, but I did it for the people that I knew would be. From my email list and would be a good subscriber. So just highlighting that piece of this, because I don't wanna see a bunch of people start being like, oh, there's this tool that I use because I've seen that done and it's not very good.

Dylan Redekop: If you have to use a tool for this, then don't do it.

I think that would be, that would be my best advice here. This should be pretty organic. Justin did say yes, he's like copy and pasting part of the message. 'cause of course, why would you rewrite the whole thing? Make it somewhat authentic obviously include the person's name if you can find it. And maybe a good, uh, rule of thumb. And he was talking about Twitter, where nobody, not everyone had their actual first names, but with, [00:37:00] um, LinkedIn, pretty much everyone has their first names, right?

So if you're using LinkedIn and you're sending dms on LinkedIn, then um, that's kind of almost like. Really low hanging fruit to like reach out to people. You can see what they do if they're like an ideal subscriber. So this strategy would be even quicker and easier to do on LinkedIn if you're, if you're growing an audience there.

Chenell Basilio: Nice. I like it. Um.

Dylan Redekop: Do you have any favorites, any standouts? Or are there any that we didn't discuss here that you remember from the year that you wanna just like quickly, opine on?

Chenell Basilio: Oh, no pressure. No, I think, honestly I feel like I just need to go back and listen to all of our episodes. 'cause there's so much gold in here and like, I think I forget this on a weekly basis that I'm like, oh, there's like really good nuggets in here that, some of these things I need to like, expand on and put in the growth fault.

But yeah,

it's just, people are interesting. Everyone does this differently and the key here is. Experimenting and trying different things is going to far outweigh just trying to like plug and play somebody else's journey onto your, [00:38:00] growth story, right? Like one thing for Kate, like the Fri-Yay email for Katelyn might work for her, but for you it may not work and maybe it's too much or like you can't execute it well.

So don't do that. But like it works for her and that's okay, but you don't have to do everything that other people are doing. So I think experimenting with this stuff is really key.

Dylan Redekop: I think also if you can figure out the way you are actually driving business with your newsletter, that will help. From these, you know, six clips, just as an example, that'll help you decide which one of these might be worth your while. Because if you are doing something similar to Nathan, where you're running a high revenue consulting, not consulting, but like services business, then you would probably lean more towards that strategy.

Then maybe say, you know, Caitlin's strategy where she's selling digital products and that sort of thing. So. If you can kind of reverse engineer how you're driving business, that should help you sort of figure out which one of these strategies might work better for you. Or maybe you can mix and match and do something new.

And if you do let us know. We'd love to hear about

Chenell Basilio: Yeah, ex. Exactly. No, this is good. [00:39:00] This was fun. thanks for putting these clips together.

Dylan Redekop: No problem. And so what are we, we've been doing this for a year now, Chenell, and so what is, what does the beginning of the next year of the Growth Reverse podcast look like?

Chenell Basilio: Ooh, well I think I think we're gonna take the month of December off and kind of chill and work on revamping, uh, growth and reverse pro and just like. Spend quiet time of stuff, like instead of trying to like do podcasts and all this, this kind of thing.

Um, but definitely wanna come back and do it. so I think just a little holiday break and then we'll be, be back in early 2026 with some more episodes.

Dylan Redekop: Yeah. So if you are sitting there religiously, uh, every Wednesday morning waiting for our podcast to drop, which I'm sure you all are, especially Elizabeth shout out to Elizabeth who will hear this, hear this episode when it's live. We won't be around for the upcoming few Wednesdays in December.

Thanks for hanging out with us over the last year. It's [00:40:00] been a lot of fun. Just, uh, you know, personally, I've really enjoyed doing this and, and it's been great getting to know these guests and doing this with Chenell, so thank you.

Chenell Basilio: I'm excited to come back even better with this, so it'll be good.

Dylan Redekop: Yeah. All right. Well, Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. Happy every holiday you can name and, um, we'll see you. We'll see you on the flip side.

Chenell Basilio: All right. See you.